The Stranding

by Karen Viggers

‘I can’t force him to talk about it, Mum.’

  Cynthia said nothing.

  ‘A positive break might help him,’ Callista said. ‘When’s Dad going to start including him in the business?’

  Cynthia sighed. ‘When Jordi starts showing an interest.’

  ‘Jordi would never ask Dad for support. You know it.’

  ‘And your father won’t try to push it on him unless he seems interested.’

  ‘So that’s a dead-end idea of mine then.’

  ‘Maybe not. I’ll talk to your father about it.’

  Cynthia topped up their cups of tea.

  ‘Did you hear about Beryl selling the house?’ Callista asked.

  Cynthia set down the teapot. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You hadn’t heard?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Everyone in town is talking about it. Everyone’s furious.’

  ‘It’s what they’d expect of Beryl, isn’t it? Has she made any grand donations to the church?’

  ‘Of course not. She’ll keep all the money for herself.’

  Cynthia sat back in her chair and sipped her tea.

  ‘Aren’t you angry?’ Callista asked.

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘The injustice infuriates me.’

  ‘Everyone will learn to live with it in time.’

  Callista poured the dregs of her tea on the ground. ‘I wish you weren’t such a pacifist, Mum. It’s no wonder you and Dad never get ahead.’ She shook her mug violently to dislodge the last of the tea-leaves. ‘And I wish you’d get a tea strainer.’

  Cynthia smiled serenely. ‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

  In the morning, Callista got on with her work. Mrs Jensen’s palings were working out well. Joe Denton from the hardware had let her cut them up with the bandsaw at the store, and she had painted them up and banged them together into frames at home. It all helped to save her a few precious dollars here and there. And she was whizzing off paintings like crazy. There was nothing to it. In fact, it was a bit embarrassing. There was more work in making the frames.

  Ridiculously, she was excited about crossing tracks with Lex again. As she worked on the verandah in the dewy damp of morning, she kept thinking about his big shoulders and light-footed walk. There was something about him she liked. There was humour in him, she was sure, yet he seemed so flagged by sadness.

  She reckoned there was a good chance he’d come back to collect that painting he’d paid for, and she had to be ready for him next time. What she needed was a way to break through that careful blankness and get his attention. Humming, she propped a board on her easel and started squeezing bright colours onto her palette. Surely the best way for her to reach him was through a painting, something loud and different, something that would leap out at him when he stopped by her stand again.

  She began with a slap of blue summer sky and the brilliant yellow-white of sand. Still humming, she stepped back, paintbrush waving like a long finger. She was thinking ahead. Couldn’t help herself. Once she got to know him a bit she’d take him to Long Beach. It was her favourite—wild, desolate, remote, windswept. Not a beach for the fainthearted. That’s why she liked it. The loneliness. The wind blasting the sand along and the waves raking angrily at the shore. No one there. The blissful emptiness.

  She drifted across to the gully where two restless flycatchers were flitting and skittering high in the trees. It must have been their scissor-grinding call that had distracted her, and the cheeky way they swung their tails about. Callista sighed. Tangents. She was always being kidnapped by them. She looked back to the painting and the idea came to her.

  Quickly, she mixed blue-black and whisked the outline of a sooty oystercatcher in flight—solid, chunky, very definite. She painted the bold orange-red eye and the long shanks of its legs tucked backwards beneath its body. The beak she painted agape, like the bird was in mid-call as it flew low over the waves. Time drifted away while she concentrated on bringing the painting to life. More effort than her usual market pieces.

  Standing back, she examined the painting, and liked it. It was hardly a masterpiece, dashed off like that in an hour or so, but it was fitting. She liked those thick-kneed legs. The oystercatcher’s clunky shape cut through the stereotypic beach colours like a loud clap. If Lex didn’t notice it, he’d be half-asleep. Well, no match for an artist anyway.

  She left it to dry on the easel and went inside to wash the breakfast dishes.

  Six

  In town, having a coffee at Sue’s, Lex opened the paper to catch up on the news. It had become a bit of a habit to drop in for a cuppa when he came in to collect the newspapers every few days. Today, whaling was all over the headlines again—it had become a regular issue lately. At home, he’d been reading some of Vic Wallace’s old books, and it was an interesting contrast—reading about historic whaling at home and then, in the newspapers, reading about modern whaling and the upcoming annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

  One of Vic Wallace’s books was called Killers of Eden. When Lex had first taken it from the shelf, he’d thought it was a murder-mystery, but it was about shore-based whaling in Twofold Bay out from Eden in the late 1800s. The story was about a pod of killer whales that assisted the local whalers over the years. He had been particularly interested in the old black and white photo of George Davidson, the most famous of the Twofold Bay whalers. He looked like a dour and hard old man, tough as nails, as if nothing could scare him. But his wife’s face was a tired mask of resignation. The book made the lives of whalers seem heroic, but the wife’s face showed there was a cost. It was a hard life, and not a pretty one.

  Lex had lingered over a photo of an old whale boat. It was little more than a wooden tub manned by six oarsmen and seemed a meagre weapon against a whale. Yet, according to the book, the whalers slaughtered plenty in a good year, and the killer whales helped them. Old Tom was the best known of the killers. He and his pod assisted the whalers by leading them to a group of whales and then preventing the whales from escaping out to sea. Once the whalers had harpooned and lanced a whale, the killers ate the tongue. Lex had never considered the size of a whale’s tongue before, but apparently it was a gourmet meal for a killer.

  In another of Vic’s books, Lex had read about the Faeroe Islanders of the northern Atlantic. These people held an annual event in which whales were herded into a bay and killed. Sometimes more than a hundred whales were killed at a time, and the photos were disturbing—dozens of row boats in the small bay with speared whales rolling in the water, others trying to escape and hundreds of spectators lining the shores watching the slaughter. These people traditionally killed whales for food and Lex thought he should have found that acceptable. But it made him think of modern whaling, and of the Japanese making excuses to take whales for their so-called research.

  Twentieth-century whaling had developed the grenade-tipped harpoon, which was designed to explode once it was fired into a whale’s back. The whale was supposed to bleed out internally and die quickly, but the time to death depended on where the harpoon had embedded, and it could still take up to forty-five minutes for a whale to die. This was what Lex disliked about whaling. The killing wasn’t humane. And for some reason, this seemed worse in whales than any other animal. Lex wasn’t sure why he felt this way.

  In the newspapers, there was endless outrage about the Japanese proposal to end the moratorium on commercial whaling. Lex knew, from covering this story on radio in previous years, that the Japanese and other pro-whaling nations would need a two-thirds majority to overturn the moratorium. Over the past few years the Japanese had been buying the votes of other nations, even those that had never attended the meetings before. And each year the vote had been getting closer. As usual, the Japanese were asking to increase their annual research quota of minke whales, and this year they also wanted to add humpbacks.

  Once a week on his radio program, Lex used to chat with a zoologist from the University of Sydney. Not you
r usual kind of academic, this guy had been quite eloquent and had a knack of picking up on issues that concerned the public. Each year, when whaling was in the papers again, they’d talk about whales and the talkback lines would be full of callers. People wanted to vent their anger at the Japanese, and many of them passionately described their encounters with humpbacks migrating along the coast. It seemed everybody who had seen a humpback had been moved by the experience. Everybody, that is, except the Japanese, who still wanted to exercise their right to eat whale meat. Lex discovered, over time, that he was as vehemently anti-whaling as the rest of the Australian public. And so buying the home of an old whaler did not sit well with him and daily he found himself trying to come to terms with it.

  ‘What do you think about whaling?’ he asked, when Sue set his coffee on the table. He pointed to the headline in the paper: Japanese to Take Humpbacks.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘Whale-watching’s an important industry around here.’

  ‘Apparently humpbacks make good steaks.’ Lex snorted.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Sue said. ‘That’d be enough to make me turn vegetarian.’

  She turned away to wipe the table beside him.

  ‘Tell me about the whale-watching,’ Lex said. ‘Who runs the tours around here?’

  ‘Jimmy Wallace.’

  ‘Wallace, did you say? The son of?’

  Sue nodded.

  Lex shook his head. ‘Another Wallace into whales.’

  ‘It’s a bit different,’ Sue said. ‘Jimmy doesn’t kill them.’

  ‘Do you think I should go on a trip?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’ Sue finished wiping the table and was heading back to the kitchen.

  ‘What about my neighbour?’ Lex asked. ‘Do you think she’d be into it?’

  ‘Mrs Brocklehurst?’ Sue shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘I hardly ever see her.’

  ‘No, she keeps pretty much to herself. But you might see her son Frank around. He comes up every week or so to mow the lawns for her.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t scare her off,’ Lex said, half to himself.

  Sue raised her eyebrows. ‘Trying to kill the peacock?’

  Her eyes twinkled and she disappeared into the kitchen. So the locals were talking about him. He ought to have known.

  When Sue came back to set the table she’d just cleaned, he resumed the conversation.

  ‘Why is Mrs Brocklehurst so antisocial?’

  ‘Did I say she was antisocial?’

  ‘Not exactly. But Beryl said she was a bit prickly too.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s a different issue.’ Sue laid out knives, forks and napkins. ‘Mrs B and Beryl don’t see eye to eye.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Sue hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any harm telling you . . . I guess you’ll find out sooner or later anyway . . .’

  Lex nodded to encourage her.

  ‘Mrs B wasn’t very happy about it when Beryl got together with the old man. It wasn’t Beryl’s place elbowing in on Vic like that. It disturbed the natural order of things.’

  Lex wondered about the natural order. Was Sue saying that Mrs B had some right over Vic Wallace? He decided to change the subject. Sue was obviously uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you go to church?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Not me.’

  ‘That’s a relief. I was thinking everyone was into the church around here.’

  Sue gave a small smile.

  ‘Helen Beck’s been on to me at every opportunity. I can’t seem to convince her that my soul’s past saving.’

  Sue’s face widened into a real smile. ‘Either you’re with them or you’re not,’ she said. ‘Town’s pretty much divided down the middle into those who go to church and those who don’t.’

  ‘Her husband’s a strange man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sue was short. ‘But he’s a good butcher.’

  Lex finished his coffee and pushed out his chair, scooping up his newspapers as he stood.

  ‘I should get out of your way,’ he said. ‘Let you clean up. I’ll see you next time.’

  Lex hadn’t been home long when he heard voices outside. It was Sash and Evan, and their mum, and the dog. He didn’t really feel like company, but they were all smiles, with a cake on a plate, and there was no choice other than to invite them in.

  Sash and Evan bounded in and sat on the couch while their mother placed the cake on the coffee table.

  ‘I’m Sally,’ she said, shy and uncertain. She was sweating from the effort of walking.

  ‘Lex.’

  ‘It’s nice to meet you. Sash said you wouldn’t mind visitors. She’s been at me to bake a cake for days. And thank you so much for donating to their library fundraiser. That was so kind of you.’

  Lex arranged a polite smile on his face. His space felt severely invaded with all three of them sitting there looking at him so expectantly. He retreated to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

  ‘We don’t get many invitations to afternoon tea,’ Sally was saying. ‘In fact, we don’t get out that much, what with me being a single mother and all, with two kids.’

  There, the cards were on the table. She looked at him, appallingly hopeful.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ Lex mumbled, dodging her eyes.

  ‘Do you have any juice?’ Sash asked, standing up on the couch then diving down again out of sight as her mother frowned at her.

  ‘There’s plenty of milk,’ Lex said. ‘Would you mind giving me a hand, Sash?’

  Sash skipped into the kitchen and Lex thought of Isabel. He felt his heart twist.

  Together, they poured milk into two plastic cups, which Sash carried carefully to the coffee table. She cantered back to fetch the plates. While Evan studied the whale-boat photos on the wall, Sally rocked herself out of her chair to bend over the cake and slice it with the knife Lex had laid on the table. She passed a plate to Lex, then to Sash and Evan, and sat down breathlessly. With her in it, the room felt small and awkward.

  The children devoured their cake and then bounced out of their chairs to explore the room and the rest of the house.

  ‘Lex,’ called Evan, ‘you’ve got a double bed in your room.’

  As if he didn’t know it.

  ‘Lex.’ This time it was Sash. ‘There’s a peacock in your backyard.’

  ‘Run outside and chase it away,’ he yelled back. ‘It belongs next door.’

  Better the child chase the bird than him, after last time.

  ‘There’s a map of the world in your toilet, Lex.’ Evan again.

  ‘And ten toilet rolls. I counted them. That’s a lot of toilet rolls.’ Sash, sounding very excited.

  Sally smiled apologetically between sips of tea. ‘They’re very young and enthusiastic. I can’t remember when I had that much energy. Can you?’

  Time had never moved so slowly. Sally smiled brightly at him, saying little, while the kids dashed around the house on a discovery mission. Eventually Sash came back and seated herself on his lap, as if she had always sat there. She didn’t seem to notice Lex stiffen with discomfort.

  ‘I like it here,’ she said. ‘It feels nice, and you have good things. Can we come again?’

  ‘It is a nice house,’ Sally said, hitching a ride on Sash’s conversation. ‘How do you feel about living here?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Lex said.

  ‘Oh, don’t you know about all the trouble this house caused?’ Sally looked uneasy. ‘There was quite an uproar over this place when the old man died. He left it to Beryl, but it should have gone to his family. Split the town, it did, Beryl getting the house.’

  Lex was quiet a moment. The real estate agent had told him nothing, and perhaps that was just as well. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, knowing he was sitting on a disputed estate. The atmosphere in the room was awkward: Lex contemplating Sally’s revelation and Sally wishing she hadn’t told him.

  ‘Let’s go for a run on
the beach,’ Lex suggested. Anything to get them out of the house.

  The kids rushed out the door.

  ‘Can Rusty come too?’ Sash looked up at him.

  ‘I assume that’s the dog,’ Lex said.

  As they walked down through the heath, Lex noticed Sally smiling with relief, as if some invisible hurdle of acceptance had been passed.

  He wished she had also noticed that he was cornered.

  •

  Lex wasn’t sure whether she forgot the platter on purpose, but the next day Sally was on his doorstep to collect it. She surprised him in his board shorts, bare-chested with a towel slung across his shoulders, about to head to the beach. There was interest and approval in her eyes, and here he was again, trying to find a way to escape.

  ‘I’m going for a swim,’ he said, handing over the platter and trying to encourage her back out the door.

  She was uncomfortably close and he was uncomfortably exposed. Her eyes were licking at his shoulders and the sprinkle of hairs on his chest.

  ‘I think I’ll come down with you. The kids are at school and I have a bit of spare time on my hands.’

  On the way out the door, Lex grabbed the camouflage pants and a T-shirt from off the floor and slung them over his arm. He would put them on when he got out of the surf to keep those prying eyes away from his skin. He almost expected her to reach for his hand while they were walking down through the heath where New Holland honeyeaters were darting low and skittish among the banksia cones. He opened the towel out and hugged it defensively around his shoulders like a robe.

  ‘Sorry if the kids took over a bit yesterday,’ Sally said. ‘They’re so excited about having someone new living in the street. And you’ve been so kind to them.’

  And now I want to run, Lex thought, but he nodded quietly and upped the pace. He couldn’t wait to escape into the waves. ‘I like kids,’ he said.

  Before Isabel, he hadn’t had time or tolerance for children. But after Isabel was born and then lost, he learned how precious children were. He learned how fragile the thread is that binds them to the earth. How they can stop breathing and disappear like vapour.

  ‘They really miss their father,’ Sally said. ‘It’s hard for them not having a man in their lives.’