Salvation Creek

by Susan Duncan

  At the front of the deck, the top rail has been carefully scooped in the exact centre and a little shelf added. The indentation in the wood, Gordon explains, is to rest your elbow. The shelf is to stand your wineglass. He points me to a lovely hand-hewn wooden bench and takes the canvas chair for himself. We settle at a slightly unstable, weathered grey table, handmade from a slice of a tree trunk.

  'Did you build all this?'

  He ignores me. The table is laid with plain white bowls and little white cups and saucers. There are broken pieces of very dark chocolate in one bowl. A mixture of dried fruit and nuts in another. Sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds half-fill the remaining two bowls. There is raw sugar. No milk. It is all set out in a precise, beautiful, geometric design.

  'I've got a couple of requests,' he begins formally.

  'Sure.'

  'My son likes the rug. Can I take it?'

  I haven't even noticed it so I spin around and check out the floor. The rug seems to be a piece of manufactured carpet. Once it was called Berber, but I have no idea how it's currently marketed.

  'Sure, take it.That's ok.'

  'And the curtains. He can use those too.'

  Made from flecked calico that Gordon has sewn himself.

  'Fine.'

  I loathe curtains anyway and wonder why he needs them here.

  I look back at Gordon, wondering what's coming next, and I have a niggling sense of déjà vu. Then I remember. A bad tempered old bastard disembarking from a water taxi in the weeks before Christmas. He'd staggered with his shopping bags and I'd reached to help him. Trying to take them to pass to him when he was solidly on the ferry wharf steps.

  'Get away,' he ordered, his elbow pushing me aside.

  I'd held my hands up in mock surrender and let him be. Shocked. Rudeness is not often encountered in an environment where everyone eventually has a turn at needing support.

  It was Annette's shift driving the water taxi.

  'What's his problem?'

  She laughed. 'That's just Gordon.'

  Today, though, he's polite. He is on a mission to sell me his furniture and as many works of art as possible. There isn't much space, it turns out, in his retirement home at Avalon.

  'Coffee?'

  'Yes. Lovely.'

  'Good.'

  He pushes himself up from the chair, moves into the kitchen unsteadily, his shoulders tipping a little off kilter. There is, after all, a frailty that cannot be disguised under the Jimmy Dean clothes.

  Alone, I look at his stifled view of Lovett Bay. Gordon has created a textured, layered site. The shining green water is used as a backdrop for wispy conifers, spindly acacias, prostrate grevilleas and sapling gums, self-sown after the bushfires. Hue upon hue of peaceful green. The greenery is beautiful but I love to look at water and want to see more of it. A couple of saplings might have to go.

  My mobile phone blurts, breaking the peace.

  'How's it going?'

  The lover. On a Saturday. Historic.

  'Great! It's going to be fantastic.' I oversell, rushing for impact, waiting for the phone to go dead before I finish. But he hangs on the line.

  'It's a lot of money . . . maybe too much?'

  I hold back a surge of red anger. Advice after the event. The genius of hindsight. And what does he know about this area anyway? Not a bloody thing!

  'Maybe. But who gives a rat's? Anyway, locals always think strangers are wood ducks.'

  He laughs. 'What's a fucking wood duck?'

  'Someone who pays too much.'

  'Ok. I'll call ya.'

  And he is gone.

  Gordon returns with a pot of dense black coffee. We sip it. I wonder if he heard me, if he knows what a wood duck is. The acid hits my stomach and sets off waves of nausea. I reach for a seed.

  'Just a couple of other things.'

  'Uh-huh.'

  He hesitates.

  'Spit it out, Gordon. I'm unshockable.'

  'It's the shelving in the sitting room. It's an original design. I'd like to take it.'

  I wander inside, holding my demitasse. The shelving is a series of boxes, all different sizes, and crammed with sentimental treasures.

  A little cup. A postcard. A few bits of glassware. Some photographs. Stuff that only has meaning to him.

  'Take it.'

  I am tired again. I want to go home and lie down. But he hasn't finished.

  'The table is for sale.' A stiff, knotted finger points at an exquisite blonde wood table.

  'Gordon, I love the table.You built it, did you? But I have one.' My own battered table has a history, moments snagged in my mind by a burn, a stain, a mark. I will not trade it in for a part of Gordon's history.

  'Perhaps, Gordon,' I say, thinking that it might be time for him to make an offer instead of a request, 'you could leave a very small piece of you here.'

  'Such as . . .?'

  'Nothing much. An old, signed postcard. A small piece of art.'

  He looks at me silently for a moment and then nods.

  'Then there's the fridge,' he continues.

  'No, Gordon, the fridge stays. It fits the space in the kitchen. You can have mine, if you want it.'

  He changes tack, aware of my rising discomfort. 'Are you frightened of snakes?' he asks.

  'Snakes? Oh, snakes are ok.'

  But it's a lie. Some stupid shred of pride that will not let me admit fear. In fact, snakes terrify me. Send me into hyperventilating panic.Turn my legs to lead,my head to the floury mush of an overripe rock melon. Growing up in Bonegilla migrant camp, I'd seen a lot. Red-bellied blacks, mostly. Some browns. As a child I'd quickly learned that screaming snake! would instantly snap a parent out of inattention. I overused the technique, of course. Once, baled up by a swaying black snake, eyes glittering, tongue flicking, I screamed and screamed and no-one came.

  My father finally walked over. Tired of the racket. I stood rigid, too terrified to move,my screams more and more strangled. It was the first and only time I saw my father, a huge, towering, shuffling man, run. He grabbed a spade, flew in and whacked the snake's head off. The glossy black body wriggled frantically for a long time, going nowhere while its dismembered head lay immobile alongside.

  We lived in Block 23, then, in a corrugated iron house amongst many others. Our home, with two bedrooms, a sitting room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom, was comparatively luxurious because my father was a ranking public servant, in charge of supplies for the thousands of post-war immigrants who tumbled out of box cars on dark nights. The migrants, from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania – names that sounded thrilling and exotic to my young ears – were housed in long huts, single room by single room, wooden stairs at each front door. When I was given my first bicycle, just before my seventh birthday, I crashed that red, blue and white Malvern Star into every set of steps as I circled the huts, struggling to stay upright, reaching tippy toe for pedals my parents told me I would grow into in a flash.

  'A big one, ja, that snake?' said Nicky, running to help my father. A woolly bear of a man from Yugoslavia, he gathered me up and stilled my tears and fear. Nicky looked after our garden and, in return, tilled some land to grow the kind of vegetables he was used to – capsicum, eggplant, broad beans. Not the kind of food my father ordered for the giant messes where everyone ate. Food so unappealingly stodgy and English that one day the Italians rioted in despair.

  Often, Nicky earned extra income by babysitting my brother and me. We would laugh and dance and sing, bumping into old leather chairs strewn with gaily coloured tapestry cushions made by women in the camp. Long before my parents returned from their party, my father always beatifically drunk, I would collapse and sleep exhausted on Nicky's lap.My mother told me years later that his wife and children had been killed in the war. It explained the silent tears that sometimes ran down his cracked cheeks; tears of laughter, I'd thought, when they'd been pure grief.

  I loved Nicky. All day, before the routine of school stole my freedom, he'd trundle me to
and fro in his wheelbarrow. I tasted my first capsicum under his shiny-eyed coaxing, crisp and strange to a meat and potatoes kid. Juicy as an apple.To be with him, I'd jiggle my cot to the bedroom window when I was supposed to be down for an afternoon nap, strip off my clothes and climb out, falling the last couple of feet. I would run helter-skelter in search of Nicky, grazing shins, knees, elbows and chin. Scabs everywhere. Freckles bigger than sixpences on a face that burned to a crisp right through summer. I hated the hats my mother shoved on my head and chucked them away the moment I was out of sight.

  'Mrs Duncan, here is your daughter. But we don't know where her clothes are,' was a common lament.

  In that tight migrant community where people were bound together by the uncertainty of beginning again in a strange, new land, I was safe even if I didn't always find Nicky. We moved when I was nine years old, to a country town near Melbourne, where my parents bought the pub.

  My fear of snakes stems from those early country days, but I don't want to tell Gordon I loathe them, so I lie.

  'Glad you like 'em,' Gordon says.

  'Why?'

  He beckons and I follow, this time going out the back where he's a built a simple, raised brick barbecue. He lifts the tin lid. Coiled thickly, a diamond python sleeps.

  'Lives here,' Gordon says. 'That's Siphon Python.'

  'Right.'

  'Wouldn't like to have him moved along.'

  'Of course not.'

  Gordon gazes fondly at the black snake with creamy dots that form diamonds along its sides. 'Quite beautiful, aren't they?' he says.

  'Tell me about your work, Gordon.' I barely restrain myself from running back inside.

  Gordon, who was labelled a dope at school, was actually brilliant.

  He just had a mind that went in a different direction to most other people's. During his career, which spanned more than sixty years, he became one of Australia's leading industrial designers. His most widely recognised achievement, though, was to design a new currency for Australia when we shifted from an imperial to a decimal system in 1966. His notes were bold and colourful, full of Australian imagery. Heroes, wildlife, the merino sheep that built Australia's early fortunes. Wonderful, wonderful designs. His banknotes were reproduced on tea towels and bath towels, money boxes, key rings, placemats and posters. And not a single royalty went into his bank account.

  By the time we sit down and talk on his deck, he is riddled with bitterness. Bitter he never received the financial recognition he felt he deserved in Australia. Bitter about losing his original house in the 1994 fires. Bitter about not having enough insurance. But he is bitter most of all, I suspect, about going through the dastardly business of growing old and being forced to face it. His mind is a beehive of ideas his body can't follow through.

  He uses salvaged wood, bits of rope and twine, wine bottle corks, broken glass – stuff gleaned from other people's rubbish – to create his designs. He sees beauty in practicality. Form follows function. But don't call it art. He is emphatic his role is designer, not artist. He makes swirling silver jewellery, heavy to hold, light to behold. I am told, much later, that people rarely bought jewellery twice from Gordon because he made them feel gypped. He would do the deal and, only on delivery, declare that a chain, a leather strap or some other integral part of the piece was not included in the price. The big commissions have long dried up, though. His attempt to fire up enthusiasm to reprint his biography, A Designer's Life, is unsuccessful. More or less wiped out by the bushfires in 1994, he has nowhere to turn for the cash he needs to ease the difficulty and expense of offshore living.

  What saves him from being just another disappointed, twisted old man is his humour. No, not humour. His sense of the absurd. Around the barbecue, permanently fixed, the three sawn logs have been transformed into rude, larrikin faces with lolling tongues. They are Gordon's permanent guests. A perfect social solution. Over the next few weeks I learn that he feuded with almost everyone at some time. There's a bright red rooster painted on a mustard door leading to the bathroom. It's a little like Gordon, square-shouldered and strutty, and it brings life to a dead spot in the house. Chooks are great company. Was this his dinner guest each night?

  What he struggles to show me that morning, are the hours of concentration, the hours of work, the intensity of purpose of every single detail in the house. But I failed to understand that until much later, when I thoughtlessly ripped out so much of his heart.

  11

  TWO WEEKS AFTER COFFEE with Gordon, the same boys, Andrew, Chris and Paul, the same barge of five months ago, arrive to help me move house. Again.

  The boys know what to do so I don't have to be there. Don't want to be there. My mood is pessimistic. Every hazy plan I come up with to change the house is touched by a cold finger of uncertainty.

  If I look at my past form, there is no reason to expect life here will be any different. I want to change badly. I want to get fit and healthy, find my old energy. But I've tried so many times now, and I've fallen back into old patterns. Can I begin the slow, hard grind of change again? Can I do it alone? Can location help?

  My last night on Scotland Island, I sleep less than I am awake covered by a blanket of wet sea mist that seeps under doors and through gaps in the wooden walls. In the morning, cardboard cartons are limp, as though they, too, lack the energy to begin again.This time, the move is timed for a 2 pm high tide. I plan to meet the boys at the new house in the late afternoon.

  When I leave for work at 6.30 am, an early freezing westerly scoots down McCarrs Creek to bang at the doors, blowing hard. I put on an old grey tweed coat that I joke will outlive me. But the cold is on the inside as well. I feel ill. I don't know why. I blame it on apprehension. I hope the wind drops by the time the barge arrives.

  Gordon has locked the house and the boys call me, stranded. Already on my way home, I divert to the retirement village to pick up the keys. I suspect it is a final gesture of defiance from Gordon but when I walk into the hotel-like reception area, past stooped old women glued to walking frames,my anger dissolves. 'This will be the end of him,' I think.

  In fact, Gordon has reached the end. He is just waiting for it to find him. Less than two years later, he is dead, but not before I invite him back to see how I've changed his house. He is gracious enough to say: 'It's what I would have done if I'd had the money.' I think, in his shoes, I might have cried. Not long after his death, months only, I flick through a glossy magazine. Gordon's tractor stools, those with cowhide seats, are offered for sale. Three thousand dollars each. The resurrection of the sixties arrives too late to save him.

  The water taxi drops me at the ferry wharf. Everything is unloaded and the garden looks like a refugee camp. Inside the house, there's a moss green wall with a huge, empty white space with pencil marks all over it. It's the unpainted gap left by Gordon's shelves. It makes the house feel like it's been abandoned and looted.

  The boys bring in the furniture and stand holding it, wondering where it should go. Sofas are too big, the table too long. I ask them to rip out the bright green built-in sofa to make more space and it leaves a gaping hole in the plaster.

  They see my growing distress and make suggestions. 'Angle the sofas like this. They'll fit,' Paul says.

  They rush around, lifting, adjusting, until I have a room that functions. Table, chairs, sofas, coffee table. Anything that won't squeeze into this tiny space is stacked under the house in Gordon's old workshop, which I'd missed in my first, off-hand inspection.

  'This is a bloody disaster,' I moan.

  The boys console me.

  'Look at this.' Paul leads me onto the front deck and points through to a cleft in the hills on the other side of the bay. 'What a view of the waterfall. Magical.'

  I see the rocks but if there is water, it can only be a trickle.

  'And what about this?' Pulling me to the back deck and into a little trellised space where Gordon has built a bench. 'You get winter sun here. What a place to lie and look at the
bush.'

  I lie on the bench. It is Gordon's length and a few inches too short for me. Paul shrugs his shoulders and gives up.

  Another bloody brilliant mistake. The biggest yet.

  I sit on a box labelled 'Mexican necessities' and wonder what on earth it means. I find the most pressing necessity – a bottle of red and a corkscrew. I hold it up to the boys enquiringly. They shake their heads, grab a beer instead.

  'Gotta go before the tide's too low to get the barge out,' Andrew says.

  'Ok, guys. Thanks a lot. For everything.'

  They give me a hug and a kiss. 'It'll be right. You'll be right.'

  I walk down to the barge with them, reluctant to be left alone. A black head in the water comes closer and closer.

  'Bosun!'

  A wet, happy Bosun emerges from the water, shaking a spray that lights up like a giant halo in the sunlight.

  'Where have you come from?' I ask him, bending to rub his nose.

  'Christ. We left him on the island!'

  Andrew looks winded. He runs his hands over the dog, making sure he's intact after his marathon swim across the bays.

  'Not even puffing, Bosun?' he says with relief, when he's sure the dog is fine.

  This time, the dog is first on the barge, tail wagging.

  'What's a barge without a dog?' I think, watching the tinny steer the barge into deeper green water. I think of Sweetie, her box of ashes. It's time to lay her to rest no matter what my future holds. She loved the water. Maybe, just maybe, a silent farewell and overboard.

  Inside again, I reach for the wine. Drink myself into a crying jag, make up the bed, talk out loud to no-one. When the bottle is nearly empty, I shake the last drop into my glass and wander onto the front deck. The moon is high behind the house, lighting the bay, turning the mangroves along the shore into writhing bogeymen. It's low tide and there is a huge new beach where I'm used to seeing water. It's dry enough to cross to the southern shore without getting wet. I remember too late the real estate agent trick of only showing Pittwater properties at high tide.