by Susan Duncan
‘You’ll be fine,’ Tony yells one day, even though the surf looks treacherous. It’s raining and he is impatient to get to shelter. He is way ahead, already past the green rocks and safely on the beach.
‘Ok,’ we shout.
But I pause. Some instinct holds me back. Pia, who is also wary, stands next to me.
‘Do we go?’ she asks.
‘Nuh. Not yet.’
A moment later a huge, rogue wave comes out of nowhere and crashes at our feet. If we’d stepped from the track, it would have snatched and dragged us along the rocks to the ocean. Damaging us badly or even killing us. But it didn’t.
Pia and I look at each other and laugh. ‘Jesus!’
‘Not meant to cark it yet,’ Pia says. And we laugh and laugh.
When we reach Tony a few minutes later, the cigarette in his hand is shaking. ‘Ker-rist,’ he says.
‘Tone, you nearly lost your shack sheilas!’
Our laughter calms him.
‘I don’t suppose,’ he says, ‘that you feel like a drink?’
‘Do we ever!’
And we follow him up the hill to the shabby shack with its peeling paint, crooked windows and holey flyscreen door. We’re still laughing as we shoo a herd of feral but friendly deer away and search for the door key. Joyful, I suppose, with relief.
Tony’s routine when we arrive at the shack is always the same. He immediately lights the old kerosene fridge that takes about six hours to work up a decent chill. Then he shoves ice trays in the freezer so he’ll have cubes for his late morning gin and tonic (‘with lime, dear, not lemon, if you don’t mind’), and assembles the bar (rum, gin, whisky, wine).
His shack, with its 1950s kerosene heater and ragged linoleum floor, is fitted out with flotsam and jetsam thrown out by other households. Multicoloured crockery, mismatched cutlery, a wobbly kitchen table and a laminex-topped dining table that resides in a spot that looks out on a glorious view of the surging surf. It’s like the tatty holiday shacks of my childhood where the roof leaked and the boards rattled when the wind blew, and where you were allowed to run riot and if anything got damaged no-one yelled.
At Little Gairie Beach, Pia and I sleep in an alcove separated from the living room by long strands of beads hanging in the doorway. It has two bunk beds, one above the other, covered with brightly coloured, crocheted Afghan blankets. Tony sleeps in the kitchen-cum-sitting room on a blinding orange divan, also a refugee from the fifties. Every night he coughs in violent, racking spasms. When they finally abate and we call out to make sure he is still alive, he’s immediately cranky.
‘Whadya wake me for?’ he grumbles.
In the mornings, we urge him to quit smoking.
‘Why?’
‘Because you cough all night!’
‘What rot!’ he says.
In less than a year, the landlord turfs us out of the three level home we share so happily because she wants to move in. So we set off again, this time to a big white house on a main road that overlooks a park. Here, there are no places to escape from each other and bathrooms are communal. For me, the move is disturbing, almost disorienting. A reminder that I have no roots. No place where I belong. I am still floating aimlessly and it’s scarier than ever.
The affair has long passed the point of being thrilling. Putting yourself last in the queue for attention creates anger and resentment. Too often, now, the euphoria couples with depression. What good, after all, can come from any course that is taken without care for the damage it may do to others? Yet every time I feel I can no longer continue, the dark spectre of loneliness smothers my shaky shreds of courage and I stay on and on.
Pia, who knows about the affair, watches the highs and lows with disbelief. ‘Have you always been like this in a relationship?’ she asks one night as we dine together. I pick listlessly at food, my stomach roiling with anxiety, the greatest appetite depressant in the world.
‘Never,’ I reply.
And because it is the truth, I excuse the madness by telling myself this is a grand passion, the one we all seek, believe we are entitled to, dream about.
Much later, a woman tells me: ‘I had an affair outside my marriage and sometimes I wished my husband and children dead so I could be free. It was madness. And yet the thought was there. Lust is not rational.’ Nor can it satisfy beyond the moment.
I begin going out with other men but it feels like an even bigger duplicity and I badly hurt an old friend whom I allow to misinterpret the time we spend together. To blur the edges of a useless, careless life, I party harder.
When I’m offered a job two years after my bid at ‘retirement’, I grab it like it will save me and give me stability, as it did for more than twenty-five years. The work is the stuff of dreams. Travel editor for a national women’s magazine. I sail on the luxurious Queen Elizabeth 2 and watch rich, lonely old women in couture ball gowns snapping at each other jealously over the attentions of the paid gentlemen who are there to be dancing partners. Do we ever lose the desire for romance, I wonder? No matter how foolish it sometimes makes us look?
I snorkel amongst the teeming coral reefs of Fiji with the son of Jacques Cousteau, touching a turtle for a cosmic moment before it shrugs me aside and wings on its way. I sleep on the ground at Palm Valley in Finke Gorge National Park and wake drenched with dew to find a kangaroo staring intently at me, as though he is deciding whether to tick me off for invading his patch. In the early morning light, the ancient fissured gorge is on fire. It is a privileged job and lifestyle but I move through it all like a sleepwalker. Some inner core is wearing out and I know it.
I have turned myself inside out to be all things to the lover, my mother’s words ringing in my head: ‘No-one will love you unless …’ Words I heard her mother use one cold, rainy day when we warmed ourselves near the wood burning stove in the rammed earth kitchen of my grandparents’ rough slab, bush house. Nan’s kitchen always smelled of wood dust, baking scones, kerosene lamps and tea leaves, which she scattered on the dirt floor when she swept it.
‘Now, Esther Jean,’ Nan said, ‘no-one will love you if you act like that …’
My mother, married with children of her own, fuming because the men were late home and would probably be tipsy when they arrived, turned away before she said something she might regret.
Nan gave my brother and me a Bible one Christmas and told us to read it because it contained a few useful tips on how to lead a good life. Nan always said that as you make your bed, you must sleep on it. For years, I had no idea what she meant.
I drive to the office towards the end of spring. In the traffic, people with mouths turned down or phones crammed to their ears rage silently. Looking at them, I wonder what the hell I think I am doing. I am back on the treadmill with an increasing leaning towards all the gods I know are ultimately unsatisfying. Ambition, success, material gratification. None of that made a squit of difference when the boys died. No need to think it will now.
On the car radio, the news is all bad, as it tends to be. And, to me, irrelevant. I could not listen to the news, not read a newspaper, not watch a television report for a year, I think, and nothing would change, I would not miss anything.
I quiz myself: ‘If I could do whatever I want, what would it be?’
The answer rockets back: ‘Return to Pittwater.’
The idea swirls and eddies. There are many reasons not to go there, all practical. There’s the commute to work by ferry and car. And boats! What do I know about boats? If I buy one, how will it be to set off alone across dark waters when I come home late at night? There’s the relentless schlepping of the groceries. Every package is handled five times before it lands inside the door. Shop to car to dock to boat to dock to house. At the end of a day when you are tired before you begin, it wears down even the most dedicated offshore residents and I am too weary to be thrilled by daily physical challenges.
And there is the lover, who would find it inconvenient. He neither enjoys nor understands the
peace of Pittwater. Racetracks are more appealing to him.
The radio hammers on. Fast paced voices, fast paced news, in a rhythm that describes a fatal accident on the M4 in the same honeyed tones as the weather. New South Head Road is a stalled, sinuous queue of cars shitting exhaust and going nowhere. Doesn’t matter if you’re stuck in a BMW or a dented thirty-year-old Datsun, we’re all marking time in the same foul air. Stuck is stuck.
Will moving unstick the lover? Maybe. Hopefully.
Our Sydney lease is due for renewal and we three women at Virgins’ Perch, as Tony dubbed our home, are wondering whether to continue or go our separate ways. After two years, we have begun to grate on each other at odd moments and as this is not a marriage, we are not compelled to smooth over the rough bits. We are beginning to niggle over whose turn it is to vacuum, unload the dishwasher, sweep the backyard, when once we did it cheerfully because we felt like it.
When I finally get to the office, semi-dazed people are girding for another day of going through the motions. Or that’s how I see it this morning. After a few giddays, I sit at my desk eating toasted banana bread and drinking a bucket of super strong coffee for the kick start. Even my bones feel worn out and brittle these days.
My contact book, filled with phone numbers collected during a lifetime in journalism, lies neatly on the desk. I idly flick the pages until I reach the Rs. The number for the real estate agent at Church Point is still there. Written in a red felt tip pen more than two years earlier. Before I have time to think about it, I punch in the numbers. The phone is picked up by a different agent, a woman I’ve never met.
‘Do you know the area?’ she asks.
‘Yes. A little. I once spent a bit of time at Towlers Bay.’
‘So you know the houses are all water access, that you have to take a ferry or use a boat?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have to ask. Most people have no idea how life is lived here. They lob up all excited to see a waterfront house and then cancel when they find they’ll need a boat to get to it. Wastes a lot of time.’
‘That’s ok. So what have you got?’
‘A fabulous house came on the market this morning. Sounds like it could be what you’re looking for.’
I don’t get excited. They all say that.
‘Waterfront?’
‘Yep.’
‘Deep waterfront?’
‘Yep.’
‘Where?’
‘Scotland Island.’
‘Oh.’
Deep waterfront is good, it means boat access during the lowest tides. But I don’t want to live on Scotland Island. When I looked at houses there on my first attempt at Pittwater living a millennium ago, it seemed as crowded as suburbia. There were holiday shacks made from scraps glued together in the forties and fifties. Fading hippie houses with psychedelic walls and stained loos from the sixties and seventies. Basic family homes from the eighties when land was comparatively cheap because water access only was seen as a handicap, not an asset. There were comfortable family homes and grand and beautiful estates with manicured gardens and saltwater swimming pools but they rarely came on the rental market. Out of my price range anyway.
Back then, I decided great views couldn’t compensate for the crowding and I was looking more for comfort than a community. But that was two years ago.
‘Just come and look,’ says the agent. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t take it!’
It is impossible to guess what I will be seeing. I know, at least, that it isn’t perched at the top of the island. Which is a good thing. At the rate I go through wine, the shorter the lugging distance, the better.
‘I’ll drive up this afternoon. See you around four thirty, ok?’
‘Great.’
But I put down the phone, collect my bag, return to the car and drive immediately to Church Point, leaving work untouched, phone calls unreturned, telling no-one where I have gone. Forty-five minutes later, I stand in the scrappy little Church Point real estate office with its map of Pittwater pinned to the wall, still not quite sure what I am doing but in a rush anyway.
‘I’m Susan. Come to see the house on Scotland Island.’
‘You weren’t supposed to be here until this afternoon!’
‘Yeah, I know. Sorry. Does it matter?’
The real estate agent, casual in jeans and a white T-shirt with a faint coffee stain, flaps around making phone calls, checking the timing is ok with the owners, grabbing the file on the house.
‘Keys?’ I suggest, trying to be helpful.
‘No. Don’t need keys.’
‘Doesn’t the place lock up?’
‘Oh yeah, but people around here don’t bother. If anything goes missing, nearly everyone knows where it is and who’s borrowed it.’
She calls the pink water taxi while I check out properties for sale on the noticeboard. I didn’t use water taxis much when I lived at Towlers Bay. Made the walk to Halls Wharf to catch the ferry. Forgot the car keys once. You only ever do that once. But I always thought the colour of the water taxi boats was silly. Baby pink. For some reason, whenever I saw them dashing around the bays, I wanted to laugh. They looked ridiculously out of place. Girlish instead of tough.
‘Let’s head off!’
‘That’s the house. Over there,’ she says from the end of the Church Point ferry wharf.
It’s a pleasant, low-slung wooden house that seems to overhang the shoreline. So far, so good.
‘Gidday,’ the driver says. ‘Where to?’
‘Mottles’ house, thanks.’
‘Right.’
No street numbers here.
The water taxi drops us at a jetty that leads straight to the front door. Level access, easy schlepping, a prize on Pittwater. It’s the beginning of the seduction.
‘Does the water wash inside at high tide?’ I ask, not altogether jokingly.
The agent grins. ‘You might want to roll up your rugs during a king tide.’
The house has the feel of a sprawling boatshed. It is shacky and casual but properly built. Not tacked together. The kitchen, which has a polished wooden bench with a stove in the corner, is part of a long, T-shaped room that includes a dining, sitting and entrance area. There’s a study space with views to Church Point. The main bedroom, once a separate boatshed, is connected to the house by a back porch or French doors that open onto the front deck. I visualise rolling out of bed on a hot summer night when the heat feels like a fur-lined glove and splashing into the water. The house faces west, so there is afternoon sun. A plus in winter. A negative in summer. It will broil. But there are double doors everywhere so it opens up to let the sea breezes flow through. A positive.
There are angles and corners, lots of conjoining roof lines and an upstairs bedroom that is like a ship’s cabin, high above the sea. On odd walls, the owner has papered beautiful bark drawings. When I meet him briefly a couple of weeks later to haggle over the rent and seal the deal, he tells me he collected them when he sailed in the Solomon Islands.
‘Is everyone around here a sailor?’ I ask him.
He looks at me as though I am dimwitted. ‘Of course. Otherwise we wouldn’t need the water.’
‘Not even to look at?’
‘Well, not for long.’
We settle on a date for me to move in, two weeks later.
‘You won’t regret it,’ says the agent.
Friends have a different view. ‘Don’t!’ they scream. ‘It’s ok for weekends, but don’t live there if you want a life.’
I think of them running in and out of meetings, playing politics, looking harassed and stressed and complaining bitterly about the rat race.
‘The deal is done, the lease signed. Cheques handed over,’ I reply.
They shake their heads in concern, convinced I have been both reckless and stupid. That I will live to regret this latest, mad whim.
They do not see, perhaps, the courage it takes to walk away and embrace change. And yet without change, without taking
risks, where is growth to come from? At this stage of my life, the growth I want has nothing to do with the material. I know that money in the bank may make you feel less vulnerable and open up choices, but it doesn’t guarantee happiness. How I wish I’d known that years ago when chasing the dollar seemed worthy. Or perhaps time alters our perspective and what is compelling at one age becomes worthless at another?
I want to know about the mind and spirit now. I want to understand why some people wake up joyful each day and others struggle out of bed. Why some people see good in the most devastating situations and others see the bad in the best. Why do some people die too young? Why does success fall at someone’s feet while others slog and get nowhere? Are there heroes – or are we all flawed? Is it luck? Is it timing? Why do some people get on a plane that is doomed to crash and others wait for the next flight? My friends might shake their heads but at least I am having a go, giving myself a chance, chasing life instead of hoping it will find me. I guess I am finally taking responsibility for my own happiness and not looking for it through anyone else.
Dismantling my city life is easy. A huge garage sale. Two-thirds of the furniture to auction, including the dreaded ride-on mower that’s been in storage for years. Whatever is left I give to a bloke who says he’s from the Maroubra Boy Scouts, but he’s probably a dealer. He squishes the scrag ends of the sale into a dusty station wagon and drives away looking very pleased with himself.
By Sunday night, the rental house is empty except for Sweetie, a few pieces of furniture such as the bed, and stuff that evokes cherished memories. Pia and Lulu have already moved to separate inner city apartments. They say Scotland Island is too far and too hard. But I suspect they think I’ve lost the plot good and proper this time.
An extract from
The House at Salvation Creek
By Susan Duncan
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