Limestone Man

by Robert Minhinnick

  He’s even remastered some of those tapes we made, and put them on line. Even how long each track lasts. I’d never heard them properly before. Couldn’t remember the titles.

  But there they were. I could hear myself. Talk about your past coming back to haunt you. Every duff note. Made me wince. But I thought, yeah, don’t knock it. This was our life. So thank you, Gil. Yeah, Gil believes in life. Maybe I’ll ring him to ask about royalties.

  Parry looked at the black beads on Fflint’s shoulders, the pouches under his eyes.

  You keeping well? he asked.

  How’d you think? And added quietly. Don’t know how long Mum’s got. So I take it one day at a time. She’s still clear up top. Like a razor. But who can say? Her friends still come in to sit. Mutual support, like.

  Coming in to sit. Parry recalled the phrase. The last time he’d heard it was during Dora Parry’s swift decline.

  And just the two of you…?

  Just us two. Waste really, a house like this. Needs a family, needs.

  Yeah, said Parry. I know. See you tonight?

  But Fflint wanted to talk.

  D’you remember a twelvemonth back? he asked. We think the weather’s poor now. But a year ago it was beyond.

  I wasn’t here. Over in Oz. But I’ve heard about the snow.

  Yeah, bad, said Fflint. Colder than I’ve ever known it on The Caib. Went out walking. Up till then walking wasn’t my favourite occupation, but I took my new camera. I’d started thinking about photography, starting lessons. Like Gil.

  Who always was good, agreed Parry. Technical genius that boy. Remember he did us those album covers?

  Yeah. Before we’d laid down the songs. Before we’d written the songs. Those notional album covers are online too.

  Be great to have him in the Paradise again, said Parry.

  Perhaps. But you know, now I walk everywhere. Keeping an eye. Keeping an eye.

  So, that first day, I ended up across the dunes at Caib pool. Can’t remember getting there, it’s miles. But suddenly…

  You were there.

  Yeah. I was there. Snow wasn’t too thick. Powdery stuff. But everything was just … magic. So I took pictures of the pool. First shots I ever tried. I could hardly hold the camera, my fingers were so numb.

  And frozen solid that pool was. Blue and silver, like iron. Or dark blue. What’s that word for dark blue?

  Indigo?

  Yeah, indigo. Indigo, that ice. Well, from a distance. Hard like a lid. A lid of ice. But around the edges of the pool that ice was no colour at all. Clean as a front-room mirror it was. So now…

  So now you’re a photographer. That’s great. I wish I was.

  Parry looked at the freezer dew on the milk bottle. Fflint seemed to be wearing a powerful aftershave. He was taller than Parry, standing there on the step of 1, Senhora Street. Parry looked up at his corbel of yellow teeth.

  How long were you in The Works? he asked.

  Thirty-three years, said Fflint. Then I took that chance.

  Fflint had lost his pension when he joined a friend’s pyramid selling scheme.

  We all have to take risks, said Parry. What’s life for?

  Mum still complains about it. Me? I didn’t see how it could fail.

  III

  From the West End of The Caib Parry descended to the beach. He walked past The Chasm and round its boulders. Then passed The Horns and on, further west. To Caib Cliffs and Caib Caves.

  He walked until he was able to take a sandy track that followed the edge of the dunes. He realised the foghorn was sounding. This week it had grown familiar. And before this week? It might have been years since he had last heard that forlorn bellowing.

  Parry pressed on.

  Writer? Never.

  Artist? No, he didn’t have the guts. The smell of paint hadn’t infected him deeply enough. He’d washed away the paint stink too easily.

  But if paint hadn’t marked him for life, what was he?

  Dunesman?

  He said the word aloud.

  Dunes Man?

  Was that all?

  Dunesman.

  Possibly. But no, some kind of shopkeeper was what he was now. In a decaying town. Whose children dreamed of death. As if The Caib was cursed.

  The previous night each working street light had been a twndish of pearls. Now the horizon was a milky wash. To the south the sea was still retreating but its horizon was white in the sand. Headlights went past. Then a figure loomed out of the fret.

  It was a young woman, and Parry noted her Dr Martens, laced in yellow and green. For some reason he thought she might have been a nun.

  He looked back into the mist and found nothing certain. Distances were reduced, directions blurred. Like his own eyesight, he thought grimly.

  This had been excellent until two years previously. But was declining. Parry hated wearing glasses, though it was imperative now. Yet glasses meant reading wasn’t the same. Somehow it felt mechanical. Maybe it was easier not to bother.

  But when had he last read a book? In Australia, he realised. Soon after he’d become ill.

  He remembered sitting behind the sunscreens in the shop, Lulu bringing endless mugs of green tea. For all he remembered, the pages might have been blank.

  He blinked at the fog. Twenty yards away, he reasoned, he would have been invisible to anyone passing. This was how people disappeared. Molecule by molecule. A thinning of the self.

  Yet he was comforted. The salt in the air tasted like his own sweat. He’d come back for this. Exactly this.

  He’d loved the Murray, the olive shoals and shouldering swell of the river as it roiled through Goolwa. But it had proved impossible to stay. And there could be no return.

  IV

  Parry examined his hands. His hair was grey and his skin rough as rocksalt. He was a man abandoned under the limestone sky.

  Because there was nothing else to do, he walked on. Now Parry could see only ten yards ahead. He knew he was taking a risk. The rocks were wet and covered in weed. He inched down an inlet colonised by barnacles, crushing some underfoot.

  In the nearest pool were pieces of driftwood, pale as chicken bones. He edged closer and saw a plastic bag filled with what might have been chicken meat. He moved on.

  As a boy he had been familiar with this place. It was where cuttle-coloured sandwort grew amongst the lagoons.

  But that was a world of summer bathing, October heatwaves. Now, the tide was out. Every surface steamed and spat. Once he had climbed here, scaling the cliffs’ buttresses. Yes, he had known every ledge, every fissure. Known where to step and how to reach.

  Parry understood if there had been light he now would have seen seams of quartz. Creamy veins and purple outcropping. Livid as flesh.

  But the stone was wet, indistinguishable from the pools. This new world, the only world that mattered, was grey, oozing salt. Some of the rock here seemed to have melted: once liquid now solidified. Darker sections might have been lava.

  He reached out a hand. Yes, as he had expected, there it was. A fossil. No, as he had predicted, a fossil where it had always been. A life shadow, a tumour in the stone. White scirrhous in whiter lime.

  Slowly he descended, feeling the calcite under his hands. But not a gleam. Not a flicker shone through that sea mist. Parry felt invisible, Even to himself. How quickly he was disappearing.

  A gang of gulls were screaming at each other. One had scavenged food and the others were harrying it. The victim dropped its prize which was lost in a pool. The chasing birds flew back into the fret.

  Around him seawater stood in hissing pits. There was salt on his eyebrows and in his hair.

  And there Parry paused. Amongst the limestone misshapes of The Caib. A man of salt, ghost in the gwter. His own heartbeat part of the day’s sibilance.

  V

  Parry recalled other expeditions. First The Horns, then the whole ragged coast. Severin used to come sometimes. How old were they then? he wondered. Fourteen? No more tha
n fifteen.

  Parry guessed Sev might have been younger than the rest of the gang. But when he thought about those explorations, Severin was usually implicated. Always the blond kid, freckled like a dogfish. One incident stood out.

  Parry and Severin were wandering around The Horns and the limestone lagoons. It must have been a hot day because both had been swimming.

  They knew this could be dangerous. Some of the rock pools were deeper than suspected. But no, there was no one else around, Parry was sure of that. No trogs, no girls.

  That’s right, he thought. They had been looking at the rocks, wondering about undiscovered fossils.

  Closer to the tide line the boys had come upon several moon jellyfish. These creatures resembled grey breasts, surprisingly large. Within the jellies were organs that might have been brains or hearts. A violet life pulsing. But almost certainly they were dead.

  Let’s look for starfish! It was surely Sev who made the suggestion. It usually was. And Parry was pleased to have a task.

  Yes, the weather had been perfect. Both boys had no trouble matching one another’s finds. There were always starfish in those days, Parry recalled. The usual yellow, but sometimes the rarer red variety, clinging to the rock.

  The yellow were always dead, the others living. And yes, breathing, if you looked hard. If you dared investigate. The starfish were breathing.

  Three, Severin had called. The boys were in the gutters under the cliff. Wading through pools, in earshot but out of sight.

  Three, Parry had responded.

  Four, Sev had shouted. Five.

  Then Parry was underwater, marvelling at the warmth of the pool. He was feeling around the base of a boulder, in the coralweed and sand.

  Where no one else has ever explored, he thought. Where no human hand has reached.

  Then he moved into shadow. The water immediately grew chilly. Yes, he thought now, there’s a geology of water. In fact, there were places under the cliff where the sun has never shone. Then the water darkened and Parry recoiled as if he touched something alive.

  Near here was a fissure in the limestone. Parry imagined it was thirty feet deep, an easy, if vertical, climb. But at the top Parry had always hesitated above the drop.

  It was a simple jump, yet he always performed it with closed eyes. A limestone buttress, with a scattering of ammonites. Nothing to worry about. But every time he closed his eyes he imagined never opening them again.

  Now Parry leaped. And the world was dark. But once again his feet found purchase. Safe, he said to no one. Till the next time.

  When he finally emerged from The Horns, he called out his tally.

  Still three, he shouted. And heard his words echoing.

  Still three. Three, three. You win, win, win.

  But there was no response from Severin.

  Sev, Parry called. Hey Sev. Sev, Sev.

  The Horns were silent. Parry shivered in the chequered sunlight. He tracked back to where Sev had been starfish-hunting.

  You know? he called. I got my hand on a fish. Big as a bass. Huge.

  But Sev wasn’t there. What Parry found were the yellow arms of a starfish. Cut clean off. Four starfish arms. They reminded him of sliced peaches in a tin of fruit salad. When Parry looked further, he discovered two other starfish cut that way.

  Severin always had a penknife with him. He was forever cutting his name into treebark or driftwood. The white SEV his familiar signature.

  But that week in school, it was Sev who confronted Parry.

  Why did you do that? he asked in a classroom.

  Do what?

  Chop up those starfish?

  Parry had laughed outright.

  No, that was you, he said.

  Fuck off, said Severin. You cut them up. With your knife. You’ve always got that knife. Haven’t you?

  So have you, said Parry. You’ve always got a knife. It was you.

  No, you, said Sev.

  You.

  You.

  In the end, they had laughed. Was it shortly afterwards, the boy had disappeared from school?

  Anyway, so what? he remembered Sev now saying. And Parry had concurred.

  Yeah, so what? he said. S’only starfish.

  But Parry always remembered that afternoon. The blood heat of the brine. His hand upon the fish’s body. The black swash of darkness where the lagoon water suddenly chilled. The shadows behind the shadows.

  And yes, Parry could see himself staring down at the bottom of the pool. Transfixed by a starfish.

  Parry imagined summoning the courage to immerse himself. Touching that creature, half hidden in sand. And yes, he could see his own hand. Reaching down through that sour tarn, almost as warm as the brackish Murray, the river where he and Lulu swam in Goolwa.

  His own hand was reaching out, his hand with the knife in it. Stretching, with his old penknife.

  But that wasn’t true, thought Parry. And he shivered in the fret that blew over the gorse. The breeze was more noticeable today, bringing the mist in from the sea.

  Parry looked around. There was no feature he could distinguish, no clear direction. All the world was a milk-in-water whiteness. He pressed on with his impossible thoughts.

  VI

  Jack Parry hung on. His two strokes had occurred when he was seventy-one. Everyone thought they would have killed him. But Jack Parry persisted. Jack Parry had refused the invitation to the dark. That’s how his son saw it. So Jack Parry had lingered in the same room of the same nursing home for eight years.

  Dora Parry had died aged seventy, two years after her husband’s illness. Their house was sold to pay for Jack’s care. He was partially paralysed and required a surgical hoist and two nurses to move him from bed to armchair or his wheelchair.

  If he had used the dining room, Jack would have encountered an immense sea view. There was also a field visible behind the building, where horses were kept. Often, new foals were to be seen there. Jack Parry’s few friends imagined he would enjoy the horses.

  His son had once taken him outside in a wheelchair and they had gone to the fence. One of the foals had approached and pushed its muzzle into Jack’s lap. Parry recalled its nostrils flaring, the hairs red as copper wire. An orange tint in the matted mane.

  But after the first two years, his father had insisted that his meals be taken in his own room. Parry thought the old man might have been afraid of some of the other residents.

  Scared by their impairments. Intimidated by how much they had been reduced. The silent, the tearful, the dribblers. The incomprehensible gibberers.

  These last were known as ‘the shouters’. Jack Parry had once been a shouter himself, his family was told.

  What does he shout? asked his son. He knew the question was wrong. It should have been, who does he shout for? Or, what does he shout about?

  But, as everyone said, at least the other residents could be companions. His father might learn from them. Surely, it could be comfortable there. At least bearable?

  When Dora Parry was alive, she brought in yoghurt pots filled with the soil of their allotment. She also brought a velvet bag of sunflower seeds collected the previous autumn. He could see those seeds to this day. White as a cat’s teeth.

  Go on, she had urged her husband. Dib them in. Right in.

  And, as deeply as he could, he had pressed the seeds into the soil. Dibbed with his left forefinger. Jack Parry’s right arm was paralysed.

  But no matter how much he was coaxed, Jack Parry remained adamant. He was determined to avoid the dining room.

  Maybe it was a mistake to agree, a manager had once confided in Parry. But he seemed so unhappy when he met the others.

  Now, usually we wouldn’t pay attention to that. But the fact is, your father became hysterical. He was sobbing. He wouldn’t stop.

  The other residents certainly scared Parry. Especially the shouters. Yes, he understood why those people shouted. It should have been obvious to all.

  Abandoned, weren’t they?
High and dry. Yes, worse than marooned. Shipwrecked on the shore of their old age. And worse again. Betrayed. That was surely it. Betrayed by life itself.

  Some of the old men and women wailed before drugs or futility knocked them out. But the shouters and the shocked-into-silence shared a secret, Parry knew.

  There was a poem he half remembered. Into the heart a wind that chills. Something like that.

  That’s the challenge, Parry thought. Live with this. If you could. If you dared. Live through this.

  Life was a test. Like something mechanical, you would be tested to breaking point. And everybody broke. The lucky ones were those who shattered outright.

  VII

  Where am I? Parry wondered. The air was cloudy as the seabed. There was a mesh of rain in the air. Within a rock pool at his feet something glinted. It was a crab shell, white as a cranium. Floating on the pool was a yellowing gullwing.

  Lost, he laughed to himself. Lost at home.

  He recalled climbing the cliff above The Horns. Every dint was a tarn rimmed with rock salt. A cup of crystals.

  Hadn’t he and Sev thought they were lost on that occasion? They’d even boasted about it. Fflint had been predictably scornful.

  But everybody was lost. Weren’t they? The secret was not to stay lost.

  Parry stepped over a ditch the departing tide had gouged into the beach. Everything was saturated, the sand, the air, the limestone. All bubbling. All breathing. He pulled his coat closer.

  VIII

  He thought he might have been near ‘The Mine’. This was an iron sphere wedged in a cleft west of The Horns.

  It had been there longer than anyone could recall. Must have been from the war, they thought. But surely a mine, a real mine. Like a huge sea anemone. Raw ingot. Unhealable sore.

  There was a pattern in the iron, a series of ornate vees. These might have formed a word, Parry thought. An eroded inscription that made no sense. VVVVVvvv. He had pondered on the meaning, with Sev or Gil or whoever else was prepared to walk that far.

  Sometimes he had stood on the sphere, trying to dislodge it. The mine was wedged in the crevice. A blister on The Caib. A bloody welt. If the current couldn’t shift it, what use muscle?

  IX

  The air was slurred with sulphurous fret. Parry recalled coalsmoke from steam trains, grey billows and a burning smell.