The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Sorry, babe. I took Ayeshia for a walk to the lake and this gentleman saved us from a diamond python.’

  I’m not sure I like younger people nowadays referring me to as a gentleman or sir. It’s all to do with age. Until I was fifty I wasn’t sir. I was mate. On that subject, I was surprised now at Pete’s age. He had twenty or twenty-five years on China. There was grey in the red beard. We shook hands. He applied pressure. Not a particularly friendly handshake.

  ‘Pythons are fucking harmless,’ Pete scoffed. ‘Unless you’re a rat or a rabbit. Or the family cat. Jesus, I thought everyone knew that.’

  ‘I know, babe. I was joking. The snake crawled into our basket so I scared it up that tree.’

  He glared at the tree for a long moment, went to his truck, and returned with a poster and a staple gun. He nailed the poster to the tree: a skull and crossbones and a scarlet slogan. Stop the Camphor Menace.

  ‘I’ll come back later for that one,’ he said.

  ‘China says the tree-poisoning keeps you pretty busy,’ I said to him. ‘How do you go about it?’

  He frowned at me, then her, and didn’t speak for some seconds. Then he focused his eyes on me. A fierce faded blue. He blinked.

  ‘To answer your question, it depends on the site, tree size, access and your personal herbicide preference. There’s various methods – cut stump, stem injection, basal bark or foliar spray techniques. All legal herbicides available to any weekend gardener. Glyphosate 360, picloram 100, triclopyr 300. Just doing my bit to disrupt plant cell growth. Someone has to, when the government does bugger all.

  He turned abruptly from me to China. ‘Fun’s over. Time to go. I’m fucking hungry.’ He stomped ahead to the truck.

  The sun was above the far cane fields. Still about an hour from setting. As she packed up the baby and the basket, China murmured, ‘He likes to eat early, drink a bit and hit the sack.’

  Then she said, ‘You were wondering about my scar?’

  Of course I had been, amongst other things. Like life in Sugarcane Road. But I muttered, ‘Not at all. I’m sorry I’ve kept you.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, and touched my arm. ‘Actually, it wasn’t him that time. It was one of my exes.’

  At one time I saw Anthony only as a potential portrait subject, his looks and manner interestingly weird to a painter. Back then his skin was so white and translucent you could see the veins fanning out from his temples into his rusty curls. The vulnerability of those electric-blue wires was remarked upon by total strangers. Old ladies on the bus tut-tutted about him. Sometimes his skull looked like a physiology poster. At the same time, the eggshell frailty of an orphanage or illness seemed to cling to his body. When he had his shirt off for the bath or the beach – for the few seconds before he was wrapped protectively in pyjamas or long-sleeved, sun-safe swimwear – there were those eerie neon veins again, beaming out from inside his chest.

  I’d tried to paint him six or seven times, but never with any success. I find children difficult in any case. They come out either sentimentally cherubic or Hollywood demonic. In Anthony’s case, especially in oils, he looked like a gnome or a changeling, with a wily fairytale face. And of course I couldn’t resist the veins – maybe I overdid the cobalt. Not surprisingly, the paintings met with strong disapproval from Liz, Anthony’s mother, who’d probably had Renoir and innocence and velvet suits in mind, and she destroyed them before I could reuse the canvases.

  Even in real life Anthony didn’t seem like a normal West Australian boy to me back in the eighties. Not either tanned or sunburnt, not freckled or peeling, more like a vitamin- and protein-deprived Irish waif from yesteryear. Just off the boat, as they used to say. But he wasn’t sick or poor, just pallid and thin. And he was actually a fifth-generation Australian, a McMahon, and only half-orphaned, and when a temperamental Irish flush masked his veins, and his curls were unravelling in the summer humidity, he was the image of our father.

  Christ, our lunch today in Fremantle reminded me of Anthony’s tenth birthday party, not a day I particularly wanted to remember, and a cricket game in a Peppermint Grove park of buffalo grass sloping down to the river, a match the birthday boy had insisted on, where he’d just been clean-bowled for the third time in a row.

  It was torture to watch. Anthony was trying out his new Slazenger cricket set, my present to him. A cricket bat, ball, pads, gloves, stumps and bails that came in a nifty PVC bag with the Slazenger panther emblem leaping in full horizontal stretch the length of the bag.

  It was bloody expensive, much more than I’d normally spend, but I wanted to give him something sporty and manly, something we could occasionally do together and maybe shift the gender balance a little. Make him not so milky pale and veiny. Anthony was always surrounded by women and I felt vaguely guilty for not having paid him more attention when I was living it up. Painting pretty hard, yes, but also playing hard. The usual recreational activities. Anyway, if Anthony’s flushed cheeks and boisterous eagerness to test the cricket set were anything to go by, he loved the gift.

  Over and again he was clean-bowled but refused to leave the crease. Even as he flailed around, his glowering, determined face – our father again – seemed to say, ‘Are you all mad? Why should I go out? What idiot would swap batting for bowling or, even more ludicrously, fielding? Batting is the whole point, isn’t it?’ It was his birthday and his new cricket set and he was the most important person here, especially today of all days.

  Not surprisingly, the twenty or so other kids, the party guests fielding in the park that January afternoon, soon lost concentration and patience. The birthday boy had been allowed to bat first. Uncle Jason was bowling underarm, we’d substituted a tennis ball for the hard cricket ball, and Jason had bowled him out three times already.

  All over the park, young fielders were flopping down on the ground and sucking twigs and peppermint leaves and peering longingly towards the river and the party table that Anthony’s mother and aunts were setting up under the peppermint trees.

  The kids had given up on having a turn with the bat and now they wanted to swim or eat: at this rate there’d soon be an uprising. Oblivious to the general restiveness, the three Kennedy sisters were drinking their customary spritzers and laughing while they blew up balloons and tied them to the trees, special balloons that said Happy 10th Birthday Anthony!

  I was wicketkeeping. I wanted him to succeed, and I wanted the cricket set to be an appreciated gift, so I gave him a bit of leeway. But eventually I said, ‘You’re really out, my man. Give someone else a turn.’

  He swung at another slow underarm ball from Jason, and missed again. I trudged uphill after the ball while he thumped the grass in frustration. He still didn’t give up the bat.

  Unusually for a Perth summer afternoon the sea breeze hadn’t yet arrived and the day gave off a sullen chalky glare that stung the eyes. In the river below us, other shrieking children were bombing and diving off the jetty – non-party guests having a much better time – and becalmed yachts lolled in a deep-water bay as smooth as oily glass. Ageless Impressionist subject matter. You’ve also spotted the summer scene in a hundred atmospheric newspaper photographs: skinny show-off boys caught midair, urchins spreadeagled between jetty and water.

  Even at my age I envied them. Already my shirt was sticking to me from all that trudging after the missed balls. The buffalo grass had an annoying way of gripping the ball and stopping it from rolling back down to me.

  ‘Don’t be a bad sport,’ I told him. I was feeling disheartened as well as hot. Birthday Boy was ruining the party mood. As I threw the ball back to Jason, I told him, ‘Don’t bowl any more until the spoilsport walks.’

  Jason looked for direction to the women with the spritzers and balloons. In the shade of the peppermint trees the Kennedy sisters had taken off their sunhats, revealing three different hues of red hair in gradations from vivid orange peel to mercuric sulphide pigment to dark rust. They all had cigarettes going too, which interfered w
ith their balloon-blowing efforts, and every now and then one of the women would gasp and giggle and her half-inflated balloon would escape, spinning, blurting and farting crazily over their heads.

  Liz, the dark-rusty one, my stepmother, glanced at us. ‘I hope you’ve got sunscreen on, Ant,’ she said.

  Jason looked back at me uncertainly. ‘Show him again how to hold the bat.’

  Jesus, Jason was being avuncular. He was twenty-eight, married to the youngest Kennedy sister, Jeanette, and in our occasional dealings the five years he had over me seemed to give him the advantage. But in the matter of Anthony, I felt I had the upper hand. Jason was only Anthony’s uncle by marriage, and even less related to me, not my family at all. Anyway, I had deaths on my side. Two deaths gave me the edge.

  ‘Here we go again,’ I said. I gripped Anthony’s narrow shoulders and spun him side-on to the bowler. The panther emblem was stamped on the bat as well. I twisted the bat handle around in his hands.

  ‘This is your last ball,’ I said. ‘Keep a straight bat. See that panther on the bat? It should face your right leg. Defend your wicket. Take it easy. Don’t swing like a dunny door.’

  He squirmed free of my hands and shuffled back to his incorrect stance. If he swung the bat from there he’d not only miss the ball again but knock his wicket over. He eyes had an oddly familiar shine. My father’s old Dewar’s glint, his Johnnie Walker midnight-aggressive glint. ‘Go shit-fuck-shit away!’ Anthony growled. ‘I don’t have to take any notice of you!’

  My God, he needed a smack. ‘That’s not even proper swearing, Paleface,’ I said as I walked off.

  *

  When I arrived at the restaurant, an outdoor seafood place in the Fremantle fishing harbour, he was already seated. An unusual choice for Anthony, I thought: not fashionable but overly marine-themed, with a table of bluff Yorkshire accents and porky pink skins on one side of us, a tidy arrangement of Japanese on the other. There was the usual network of wires strung above the tables to discourage seagulls and several pleading Please Don’t Feed the Birds signs. Of course the tourists were ignoring these deterrents and hurling their chips into the harbour, where diving and wheeling gulls enjoyed uninterrupted and raucous access.

  I’d suggested the lunch at my stepmother’s behest. ‘What’s he doing with his life?’ Liz moaned. ‘Can you find out and give him some advice, put him right?’ According to her, Anthony had abruptly left Alison and their two children, tossed in his partnership with Fairhall Burns Corrie, turned vegetarian, and was ‘living with some hippie witch in a mud hut up in the hills’.

  I imagine she thought I was more in tune with arty, low-life ways. Painting and bohemia and all that. Anthony’s spinning-out sounded like an early midlife crisis to me, a middle-class cliché, but at this stage Liz was phoning me in tears every day with news of Anthony’s latest New Age transgression.

  ‘He’s killing me. I don’t understand him any more. He’s acting all superior to everyone, angry and touchy-feely at the same time. The hippie witch must have some eerie power over him.’

  I heard deep raspy breaths; she was drawing heavily on a cigarette and even over the phone she sounded old and needy. I pictured the almost-empty bottle of chardonnay close by.

  ‘What’s all this guru stuff, anyway?’ she went on. ‘Numerology, astrology, holistic blah-blah, tantric mumbo jumbo. A 37-year-old lawyer doesn’t need all this hoo-ha. I certainly don’t need all this hoo-ha! Bruce would be rolling in his grave. What are we going to do?’

  We? I didn’t need any hoo-ha either. But I felt sorry for Liz. She was no evil storybook stepmother. Sally and I had hardly begrudged her marrying our father. She hadn’t pinched him from Monica, our mother: Bruce had been a widower, after all. And for a few years after Mum died we were sort of numb, and kept to ourselves while Dad grieved alone and left us to our own devices. Then, as a widowed parent herself – after his death five years later – she’d always been amiably haphazard and not the least bit maternal.

  I think that’s why we didn’t overly resent her when we were younger; she wasn’t vying for our love. Sally and I had each other and it suited us that she was affectionately distant, not in competition with our mother over anything, and allowed our sad reverence for her to remain undisturbed.

  Her focus was completely on Bruce, her husband whether alive or dead. As soon as Anthony was seven, she’d sent him off to boarding school, to Aquinas. She’d married late, at forty, the eldest Kennedy sister and the last to go, and for the fact of being married at all she was grateful to Bruce every day. If he was no longer there, she wanted to be alone with his memory – his memory and the remains of his wine cellar.

  But we? What could I do? Anthony was a grown man and, by Perth’s standards, already a successful one: a commercial lawyer, yachtsman, weekend tennis player, and the owner of two storeys of heritage sandstone, a pool, a tennis court behind a disciplined plumbago hedge and, from the second-floor bedrooms at least, three river glimpses and a misty view of the Darling Range. He was responsible for his own actions.

  Anyway, maybe he was doing the right thing. I was sorry for his kids, but Alison was a provincial Anglophile snob with a cleanliness obsession. The sort who washed my beer glass the minute I set it down, who made me feel unkempt and grubby in her company. Maybe Anthony had seen the light.

  How would I describe our half-brother relationship? We were like longtime acquaintances. Beyond our father we had little in common. Our political views collided. Anthony was conservative and well-off, and I was neither. He was a law graduate and I was basically self-educated. There was a fourteen-year age difference and no physical resemblance. Whenever we met up, at Christmas or other family gatherings, we didn’t converse so much as banter and nod agreeably and top up each other’s drinks.

  ‘How’s the art world?’ he’d ask. ‘Selling any?’ He came to my exhibitions because he liked the business-social aspect, plus the chance to mingle safely with a few raffish characters.

  Always we acted as brothers. But we were acting. We weren’t exactly brothers, and we weren’t exactly friends. We were something in between.

  But this was an intriguing twist, being called on for advice. Until recently the role of the family bohemian, the black sheep, had been mine.

  *

  Even his handshake was different now, loose and metallic. All those silver rings on his fingers. Another in his left ear. Silver bracelets on each wrist, a necklace of little beads and seeds and stones, and another thin chain with some sort of gemstone pendant banging portentously against his sternum.

  I’d never seen an ornamented Anthony before – the Old Aquinian cufflinks used to be his limit. Add the rumpled natural fibres, a collarless shirt, rubbery sandals (no leather in evidence), floppy drawstring trousers like pyjama pants that didn’t reach his ankles, and he’d gone the whole hog, sartorially. Guru-wear, his mother called it. It looked more like grandpa-wear to me – if your grandpa was institutionalised and had got into Grandma’s jewellery box.

  I’d dressed up in a shirt with a collar and, for the first time, I felt like the conservative brother. ‘So, what’s happening, Ant?’ I said as I sat down. The what’s happening came out more abruptly than I’d intended. I meant it more as How’s it going, bro? But it came out like What the Christ are you doing with your life?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  To be honest, he looked well. He’d lost the extra weight he’d stacked on, and those childhood veins had long since vanished into ruddy cheeks and freckled temples.

  ‘What’s doing?’ What are you up to?’

  His frown at least was familiar. His cutlery caught a sunray as he was arranging his knife and fork at right angles to the table edge.

  ‘I heard you’d gone vegetarian. So you eat fish then?’

  Yes, he ate fish. Apparently his new lifestyle didn’t preclude alcohol either, or his liking for good wines, and once the bottle he’d ordered arrived he began to open up.

  ‘Look, I’ve em
barked on a new journey.’ His fingers were still fiddling with the tableware. ‘Everything in my life has been leading me to this point.’

  ‘Doesn’t it always?’ I said. But I was trying to be understanding. ‘Tell me about your life changes. Who’s the girlfriend? Do I know her?’ There was a fair chance I did. My gravelly three acres of banksias and grass trees were also up in the hills. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’

  Part calming-Jesus, part-lawyer, he raised an admonishing hand. ‘Let me show you something.’ He held up the wine bottle, pointed to its label, read out its name: Torbreck Roussanne Marsanne. Barossa Valley. Its design featured two concentric circles. He tapped them with a be-ringed finger. His expression, both legal and wisdom-of-the-ages, declared I rest my case.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The label says it all. It’s a personal message to me. It tells me I’m doing the right thing.’

  ‘Really?’ I toyed with the idea of the Torbreck wine people not only knowing of his existence but basing their graphic designs and marketing strategies around his changing emotions. ‘I thought the label was saying “Please buy this wine”.’

  Anthony sighed and cast his eyes around the restaurant. ‘The thing is, I can get confirmation anywhere,’ he said. ‘OK, see those napkin rings on the buffet over there?’ Two silver circles stood side by side, intersecting slightly. ‘They’re speaking to me. They’re confirming the rightness of my journey.’

  ‘Do the circles represent you and the new woman?’

  He sighed. ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me her name?’

  ‘Does it matter? Sarita. Maya. Parissa. She goes by several names. She’s the essential, fundamental woman.’

  Fundamental woman. I got the picture.