The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  It was Estelle who pulled the plug on him, and Dan and Nick and Lily, in order to embark on the ‘personal journey’ she’d apparently promised herself before she turned fifty, and as soon as the children reached twenty-one. She also made it clear that her journey was not a trip that stopped at his station.

  Maritally jettisoned, he would have been more devastated if it hadn’t been for the equine epidemic. Oddly, the horse flu got him through; he was so overworked he didn’t have the time to languish. And eventually, as the disease finally ebbed, it dawned on him that he was single again, no longer required to be a dutiful and faithful husband – maybe there was a bright side to this – and in the usual dark three a.m. cave of despair there appeared a chink of light. He’d soon be seeing Sophie again.

  Now on this first day of the New Year, as the piquant smoke of beef marinade drifted across the terrace and out to sea, here was Mike waving barbecue tongs and slyly muttering, ‘I did my Viagra research up at the Gold Coast. At good old Madame Peaches.’ Almost simultaneously, two electric flashes struck Russell. So, not with Sophie. And then, Mike visits prostitutes.

  Russell made the appropriate responses, the whistle, the raised eyebrow, but his beer suddenly tasted metallic: flat, warm, like sucking cutlery, and he poured himself a shiraz. My God, Mike was winking at him. Mike was grinning. Mike did a little disco jig so his chest jiggled in his T-shirt, and he snapped the barbecue tongs over his head as if they were crab nippers or castanets. His oldest friend had turned into a sleazy, alcoholic shithead.

  He kept his voice flat. ‘You go there often? To brothels?’ Five or six times a year, he gathered. Mike and three cronies disappeared on rollicking all-boys sporting holidays to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast. To Test matches, football finals, race meetings, fishing trips – and brothels. Much avid organising was involved. The Veterans’ Sporting Club, they called themselves. The VSC.

  ‘You’re now in the company of the president of the VSC,’ Mike announced. He’d come to life all of a sudden. The sunlight brought out his new high colour, the pouchy eyes and broken veins. Russell thought he saw a hint of jaundice in Mike’s eyes, but they wouldn’t meet his. Mike snippety-snapped the meat tongs again and attempted more weak humour.

  ‘Order, order! The meeting will come to order!’ This rare garrulous outburst was like being earbashed by a drunken stranger in a pub.

  At this point Russell recognised something of powerful and limitless potential. Also something that would never occur. Despite its possible rewards – their marriage instantly ending and Sophie flying into his sympathetic arms – the idea of him spilling the beans, or even indirectly allowing the beans to be spilt, was beyond the pale. The Old Mates Rule. Mike knew that. It went without saying. And if he did do so, Sophie would despise the messenger. And he’d despise himself.

  Russell hated Mike at that moment. Even with a mouthful of wine, he still tasted knives and forks on his tongue.

  Mike gave the barbecue a moment’s attention, put down the tongs and yelled out to Sophie, ‘Steak’s ready!’ Then to Russell, he said. ‘Thanks again for last night, by the way. Missing the party and all.’

  Russell sucked in some sea air. ‘No trouble.’ Much of New Year’s Eve had passed in a reeking stall in the stable of Mike’s hinterland property at Clunes. Not that he regretted it. Here Sophie Hodder kept her four horses – three geldings and a 22-year-old bay mare. In the late afternoon the mare had lain down, writhing and kicking and snapping at the dirt, and refused to stand. No local vets were available on this major party evening and Sophie had phoned him in tears. The horse was in a bad way. It was seven o’clock by then, and he was still an hour south on the Pacific Highway. He hadn’t even begun his holiday. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he’d said.

  She was wide-eyed and agitated when he arrived. Western-clad, kneeling by the horizontal mare, jumping up, pacing and waving her arms, she came across like a feisty rancher’s daughter in a cowboy movie. He was always deliberately calm and calming on the job, to animals and to people. He patted her shoulder. ‘I remember seeing you try out this old girl,’ he said.

  Seven or eight years ago he’d been there at her request to check out the mare’s condition; she was thinking of buying her. He’d watched them walking the riding arena, the clearest memory. The metronomic gait of the horse, and Sophie’s body flowing into the rising trot. Black hair swinging below her helmet, strands gathered in a child’s ponytail. The jounce of her breasts increasing in the canter; the rise and fall of her tightly jodphured seat. The hypnotic sexual tempo of her ups and downs.

  ‘So, should I buy her?’ she’d asked him.

  He even recalled the pale-blue polo shirt, her exercise-blush from cheek to neck, and the frown of concentration that completed her intensely female look. Her vividness made him feel countrified and khaki-coloured by comparison. He could have eaten her up, boots and all.

  ‘You look good together,’ he’d said.

  Mike had remained in the car throughout, reading the sports pages like a bored father.

  This time she was in grass-stained jeans, from kneeling. ‘Help me get her on her feet,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk her.’ In the fig trees around the paddock, squealing fruit bats were rousing themselves and flapping heavily over their heads. The patient had colic.

  ‘Horses are drama queens,’ he said.

  By ten-thirty he’d led the mare into the stable stall and with mineral oil and a stomach tube induced her to defecate freely, whereupon she snorted, stamped, tossed her head, and soon recovered. He was still holding the mare’s head-collar and both of them were shit-soiled when Sophie leaned in and kissed him. She had straw in her hair. Just a quick kiss of gratitude, but firmly on the lips.

  In those first hours of the New Year, even after the long drive to Wategos and several drinks, Russell found it hard to sleep. All along the coast, snatches of laughter and party music carried on the breeze.

  Eventually the voices and music faded, and doors slammed, and cars drove away. Once, his body jumped to footsteps on the stairs. At first light he would get his old malibu from the garage and hit the water. But until dawn he lay alert, listening to the mixed rhythm of the surf and Mike’s proprietorial snores rumbling from the master bedroom.

  *

  The Hodders served a simple New Year’s lunch on the terrace. Steak, Moroccan salad, local fruits – tamarillos, guavas, papayas, mangoes – and cheeses to suit the wines. Summery Australia stretched ahead like a double-page spread in a travel magazine. The south-easterly tempered the heat of the sun, and in the small waves off the Cape schools of surfers and dolphins gently surged and mingled. Like the Paramount Pictures trademark, or the volcano it had once been, Mt Warning rose dramatically from the lavender clouds over the range.

  Positioned on the edge of the terrace so he wouldn’t miss a ball or a single run, Mike’s widescreen TV displayed the murmuring green vista of a cricket match. Russell wondered if Mike was using the cricket to avoid conversation. This was ridiculous. After lunch he said to his old surf companion, ‘The wind’s changed. Get your board. They’re pumping.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ said Mike.

  By mid-afternoon the breeze had dropped altogether and Russell and Sophie strolled down to the beach for a swim. Mike declined in favour of the cricket and a chilled bottle of pinot grigio.

  And so passed the first day of the new year. As night fell, Mike was dozing in his study in front of a Korea-Estonia soccer match. Their swimming costumes long since dried on their bodies, Russell and Sophie were drinking on the terrace and in no hurry to end the evening.

  To avoid the moths and Christmas beetles, Sophie turned off the terrace lights and they sat in the dark. To Russell, in a rare daze of fatigue, confidence and good humour, this was surprisingly thrilling, reminiscent of childhood Murder in the Dark and Spin the Bottle. In this pleasant state he discovered that without any conscious effort they were sitting confidentially together, their knees and foreheads almost br
ushing.

  Somehow their bare knees soon did connect, and remained firmly pressed together. The warmth this created seemed important and correct for such a pair of rapidly conjoining souls. Neither their intent expressions nor their conversation changed when he put his hands on Sophie’s cool upper arms and squeezed them for a few seconds. Though the smallest alarm bell sounded with the touch of her smooth biceps, it was stilled by a blood-tingling new sensation, like the continuation of an actual dream: a glorious lack of restraint.

  Below them the tide sparkled like soda. ‘I’m allowed to be drunk,’ Russell said, looking down at the beach. ‘Firstly, I’m on holidays. Secondly, I’m not driving. And thirdly, I’m watching stingrays hunting in the moonlight.’

  It was true. In the moonlit shallows, working gracefully in unison, a school of rays was rounding up silver pilchards. The rays were ushering the tiny swarming fish into shore, enveloping and cornering them, and in their skittering panic the pilchards trailed strings of phosphorescence.

  As much about the change in circumstances as the glistening hunt below, he asked Sophie, ‘Is this happening, or am I imagining it?’

  ‘Something’s happening,’ she said.

  Their foreheads lightly touched. Although it may have been melodramatic and dated of him to ask so solemnly, ‘Can we kiss now?’, after ten years of infatuation and frustration it seemed chivalrous and fitting. So he did, and there was no hesitation from Sophie. Still sitting, bare knees pressing against bare knees, they held each other and kissed for a long moment.

  The sensation of kissing her seemed so unique that new words were needed for the open moist warmth of her mouth, her lips’ softness, the willingness of her embrace. When they eventually drew apart, it was with shock at themselves and the world’s sudden echoing silence.

  The television was off in the study and the stillness was abruptly broken by the clattering rumble of the refrigerator’s ice server. It thundered like an avalanche. Ice cubes tumbled endlessly into what must have been the world’s deepest glass. Finally the rumbling stopped. The door from the terrace to the kitchen was open and Mike was standing by the refrigerator, wearing only purple boxer shorts in a dice pattern and staring out into the dark.

  *

  Russell lay in the spare bedroom recalling the rapture of the kiss on the terrace – he still couldn’t believe it had actually happened – and the shock of being caught out. His pulse pounding in his ears, he relived the kiss over and over again. He felt both marvellously elated, and nauseous with disloyalty. What had happened to his principles?

  But had the kiss really been spotted? Mike hadn’t said anything. Perhaps the timing had just favoured them by a second or two. It had probably been too dark anyway. Did Mike see them, and then purposely make that din with the ice cubes? Or, dulled by booze and sleep, had he blearily padded into the kitchen, filled his glass with ice, then randomly gazed out to sea?

  Fortunately they’d been too stunned to panic. In any case, it would have been crazy to jump up guiltily from the embrace. Hopeful of that one or two extra seconds, they’d remained where they were, slanting marginally away from each other now, giving the impression of being a couple merely engrossed in conversation. To a witness it would clearly appear to be a serious tete-a-tete, maybe over-familiar, but less intimate than being caught kissing the host’s wife.

  Russell could almost convince himself there was nothing to worry about. Mike had stood there, his stomach overlapping the dice-patterned boxers, filled a glass with ice, uttered nothing, and exited the room. So after a short interval, as if at a given signal, he and Sophie emphatically scraped back their chairs, moved around busily, chatting loudly while clearing plates and carrying glasses to the kitchen sink.

  They stood at the sink, rinsing their wine glasses and looking obliquely at each other. He saw Sophie’s cheeks blooming with the same flush as the day she had cantered her new mare in the arena, the day he had felt sixteen again, hollowed out by excitement and tension, and perilously in love.

  Wily as a spy, he glanced around and stepped forward to risk another kiss. She raised her eyebrows at his nerve, patted at his chest and kissed him again.

  Shortly afterwards, calling ‘Goodnight, goodnight!’ they went upstairs to their separate bedrooms and he lay on top of his bedspread, still in his board shorts, his head swimming.

  The next sound to register was a kookaburra at dawn, and when he struggled to the toilet, headachy and half-asleep, the reflection of the sun was a golden radiance filling the bathroom mirror. Immediately he remembered the kiss and its aftermath, and was both euphoric and anxious all over again.

  It surprised him to see he was still wearing his board shorts from the day before. Convenient, though; he needed to hit the surf immediately to clear his head and provide a breathing space for the events to follow. Time to think things out.

  But her kiss still filled his mind. From the bathroom window the sky was red over the Cape and strings of parrot-coloured cloud streamed across the horizon. A sullen swell was rolling ashore and the dawn seemed charged with pre-storm electricity. The thought of her lying just metres away, warm and sleeping, and the incontrovertible fact of their liaison, made him catch his breath.

  On his way downstairs he heard the TV going in Mike’s study. The sound made him even edgier. But sooner or later he had to face him. He forced himself to look into the room. Mike was slumped in his armchair, a succession of neck, chest and belly rolls flowing down his torso, a kimono hanging open over his boxer shorts, sipping a bloody mary.

  ‘Morning, Mike,’ Russell said. Was it his guilt that put him on the front foot now, made him sound so disapproving? ‘Six o’clock. You’ve put the boat out early.’

  ‘Good morning. And it’s only juice.’ Mike’s hairless, bone-white legs were up on the coffee table. Yesterday’s cricket highlights flashed past on-screen, each highlight – a six over the fence, a shattered wicket, a difficult catch – greeted by a mysteriously loud crowd reaction from spectators’ stands that appeared almost empty. Mike drained the glass and looked up. His red, puffy eyes could be blamed on excessive alcohol. Or, the thought abruptly shocked Russell, on recent weeping.

  ‘I suppose a surf is out of the question? Do us both good,’ Russell said.

  ‘Not today.’

  Russell felt so uneasy he had to ask. ‘Are you okay, man?’

  ‘Hunky-dory, old fruit.’ Still half-gazing at the TV, Mike reached into a kimono pocket and withdrew a small packet. ‘Industrial strength, recommended by this Chinese quack up the coast. I’ve been looking forward to trying them out. I took two, they should be working pretty well by the time she wakes up.’ He made the universal fist and stiff forearm.

  Russell’s eyelid began vigorously fluttering.

  ‘Trouble is, when they dilate your blood vessels they make your eyes bloody red.’

  Russell’s eye-flutter proceeded apace.

  Mike turned towards him now. ‘I’ve got the Veuve in the ice bucket. I usually do some smoked salmon. Caviar. Hard- boiled egg. Little toasty fingers. I go to a bit of trouble for our extravaganzas. Sophie likes a long decadent breakfast beforehand.’

  Russell began heading out the door. A tin-coloured sea loomed all around and the mountains were indiscernible in the clouds.

  Mike called after him, raising his voice over the television. ‘Listen, could you do us a favour and stay out there in the water for a couple of hours?’

  Hello! I finally managed to grab a computer after waiting for Linda from Adelaide to take a toilet break from tracing ancient relatives on Ancestry.com and boring Brad from Brisbane to check his share portfolio!

  Unlike me, the other passengers are experienced cruisers and know all the lurks – like hogging the wi-fi at every opportunity. (Our phones don’t work at sea – I don’t know why.) I’ll try to email you my news whenever I manage to snatch one of the two computers in the Horizon Lounge.

  Maybe it’s the group effect aboard ship or perhaps people a
re happy to find a stranger of a certain age to talk to, but everyone unloads their life stories on you in the Club Bar. When they see you’re a woman travelling alone it just pours out of them.

  Fortunately, they’re not interested in hearing anything from a sixtyish school teacher on her long-service leave from Rosemount High – and on her first-ever cruise. That suits me! There’s an upside to the invisible years! They just want to talk about themselves and boast about all the other cruises they’ve been on. ‘Oh, is this only your first? This time last year we did the Adriatic.’

  I must say I was surprised at the number of old-timers and invalids boarding the SeaDream in Costa Rica. Walking sticks and wheelchairs. Snowy-headed men with big ears and wrinkles. Bent old ladies. Leathery old geezers limping from strokes. All day they play bridge and check the stock market and look up dead family.

  How was Costa Rica? Apart from hot, very pretty in a hilly tropical way. In our twenty-four hours in San Jose we visited a waterfall and a mountain and an eco-zoo of butterflies and jaguars and a couple of ocelots. All just smallish cats lying in the sun and not at all menacing. The jaguars were particularly disappointing. I expected something at least slightly savage looking. Then we were ushered into a cage where hundreds of butterflies alighted on me. Strangely off-putting, I must say.

  The Costa Rican tour guide, a huge woman in khaki, called the toilet ‘the happy place’. Well, after a couple of hours of bottled water and the local coffee there were a lot of people lined up waiting to be happy, I can tell you. Vultures soared above us at all times. From our ages they must’ve thought they were on to something.

  *

  Here are some fellow passengers I’ve met so far. The couples start with Leon, a Dutch ex-stockbroker, and his wife Dawn. He’s got Parkinson’s and was interned by the Japanese in Java during the war. Then there’s Charles and Yuko, a Melbourne lawyer and his Japanese wife. And Runo and Karen, a wealthy-looking Estonian businessman and a New Age American woman from Taos with long plaits and Indian jewellery. She’s a vegan iridologist, you’ll be surprised to hear. They meet once a year for a month’s cruise together, than go back to their normal lives of being complete opposites.