The Stranding

by Karen Viggers

  Lex laughed. ‘That’s a big word for a country chap.’

  ‘I’m full of vocabulary,’ Ben said. ‘Now, let’s drink to the Merrigan Show.’ He looked pleased.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, hauling himself out of the chair and pulling two more beers out of the fridge. ‘Get your boots on. I’m taking you over to meet Trevor Baker next door. Said he’d be practising the wood chop this evening . . . and we’re not talking firewood.’

  Ben led Lex over the boundary fence, dodging a hot-wire at mid-thigh level on the way. From behind one of the sheds they could hear the thunk of axe on wood, a steady rhythmic frenzy. There was a clunk and a loud splitting noise.

  ‘He’s a real gentleman,’ Ben declared as they cornered the shed and saw Trevor Baker snorting a glob of mucus out of his nose.

  ‘Ahh, bugger off, Hackett,’ Baker growled, but his smile was wide in his heavy sweaty face and he engulfed Ben’s hand with a huge hairy paw.

  He was more bear than man—tall, thickset, massive hairy shoulders half-covered by a baggy blue singlet, a stout belly sagging over his trousers. Lex was surprised by his spindly legs and absent bum. He was all front and top heavy.

  ‘This is my new man, Lex Henderson,’ Ben said.

  ‘City name for sure.’ Trevor spat on the ground. ‘But we’ll try not to hold it against you.’

  Lex accepted the extended hand and felt his knuckles crushed. Trevor Baker was the local wood-chopping legend. He had won the event at all the local shows for the past seven years and was the undefeated champion.

  Lex pointed to the shining head of the axe. ‘Looks like you’ve had a bit of experience with that thing.’

  ‘Yeah. Too many years chopping wood for Mum,’ Baker spat again. ‘Hey, Hackett. Give us a hand with this log, will ya? I need one more round before I finish off for the night.’

  The two farmers rolled the log up and heaved it onto the rack.

  ‘Horizontal chop’s my favourite,’ Baker said. ‘Let’s mark her up.’

  He pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket and scratched a few lines on the log. Then he lifted his axe off the ground and ran his thumb along the blade. Taking a measured backward step, he lined himself up at arm’s length from the log, placed the axe head gently on the ground in front of him, stretched and gripped the handle. Then, with a sharp breath, he jerked the axe into a smooth upswing and hacked down into the log, right on one of his chalk marks. Lex and Ben stood swigging beer while Baker puffed, grunted and cracked his axe into the wood. He made quick work of it, chopping the log neatly in two.

  ‘I’ll have my money on you at the Show,’ Ben said, draining his can.

  ‘Dunno, mate,’ Baker said. He hitched his trousers with his thumbs and readjusted his balls. ‘I’m getting older and my handicap’s creeping out. Been winning this thing for too long.’

  ‘Nah. The whole town’s behind you. Merrigan’s off the map if you don’t win it. And Lex here has offered to lead the bull for me this year too.’

  Baker laughed as he packed his axe into a wooden box. ‘You’re a bastard, Hackett.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. I’ve got the old feller quietened down this year. He’ll be a picnic.’

  ‘Let’s get some beer and drink to survival then.’ Trevor hoicked some phlegm and spat again. ‘Hackett told me you met Brownie.’

  On the way home, Lex stopped at the pub to buy a six-pack of beer. The tinnies with Ben had whetted his appetite and he reckoned, despite constant nagging twinges of regret about Callista, he could manage just a drink or two at a time now, without blowing out and drinking the whole lot. As he was paying up, he remembered the fridge at home was empty. If he ducked quickly back into town, he might just make it to the butchery to pick up some sausages before closing time. It’d have to be snags and mash for dinner tonight.

  After Henry’s death, Helen had taken over the business. Everyone had expected her to sell the butchery to Henry’s assistant, Jake Melling, and move back to her family in Eden. But the shop closure had been very temporary. Helen had cropped her hair short, donned an apron and reopened the doors, keeping Jake on part-time to prepare the meat and teach her the trade. According to Sue, the ladies of the church were outraged. Apparently, butchery was men’s work. And so was running a business. Mrs Jensen was telling everyone that Henry would be turning in his grave if he knew what Helen was up to. Sue thought it was a laugh that Mrs Jensen was prattling on in her usual underhand way while Helen simply got on with the job.

  When Lex dashed into the butchery, Helen was just closing the door of the coolroom.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she asked.

  ‘I was hoping to grab a few sausages for dinner. But it looks like you’re all packed away.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a bit difficult to bring anything out now.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Lex said. He’d have to make do with toast and cheese instead. His disappointment must have shown on his face.

  ‘If you’re stuck, there’s a roast cooking at my place. I live just around the corner,’ Helen said.

  ‘Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to impose.’

  Helen stretched a thin smile onto her face. Even the blood-red chillies on her apron failed to detract from her usual paleness.

  ‘You wouldn’t be imposing,’ she said. ‘Henry always liked to ask people around at closing time. I’d be carrying on the tradition.’

  Lex hesitated. He didn’t particularly fancy the idea of making conversation with Helen Beck, but a roast sounded very appealing.

  ‘All right then. I appreciate the hospitality,’ he said.

  It wasn’t the best night for a roast. The kitchen was hot and sticky, and Helen was like a knot of prickles. There was a tight-lipped tension about her, as blunt as her clipped short hair. Lex sat down at the kitchen table and watched her bang the kettle beneath the tap, gush water into its neck and crash it on the stove.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Tea will be fine. Standard white with one.’

  He looked around the kitchen while Helen measured tea-leaves into a silver teapot. The room was dominated by stark white laminex and linoleum; it was soulless, scrubbed bare of character. There was a tidy bowl of fruit on the table and a loudly ticking clock on the wall above the stove. The only suggestion of dinner was the faint fatty sizzle and smell of meat seeping from the oven.

  Helen clattered a teacup and saucer on the table in front of him and poured the tea with an unsteady hand. There was a bang somewhere down the hallway.

  ‘Mum. I’m home.’

  ‘That’s Darren,’ Helen said. ‘He goes up to his grandparents’ place after school.’

  Lex turned and saw the boy staring at him from down the corridor. The kid’s face was anxious, poor thing. His father had only been dead a few weeks.

  ‘Come and meet Mr Henderson,’ Helen said.

  The boy came listlessly into the kitchen and slumped down at the table.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ he said, without interest. Then to his mother, ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Roast tonight.’

  Lex realised Helen was watching him sip his tea, her eyes dark and unreadable. He wished she would talk. It wasn’t up to him to lead the conversation. He was the visitor. He thought of Callista and realised how much he missed her. It was going to be a long dinner.

  ‘How was school?’ Lex asked the kid. Anything to break the silence.

  ‘Good.’

  The boy checked his mother wasn’t looking and picked his nose.

  ‘Got any homework?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Did it at Grandma’s,’ Darren said. ‘Can I watch a video?’

  Helen glared at him. ‘We have a visitor.’

  The kid sighed and hung his head.

  ‘What’s your favourite movie?’ Lex asked.

  ‘Star Wars,’ Darren said.

  Lex raised his eyebrows at the boy and gave him a small smile. ‘What do you reckon about Darth Vader?’

  ‘He’s cool.’
The kid’s face lit up.

  ‘Darren.’ Helen was stern and the kid’s shoulders sagged.

  ‘I’m not allowed to watch it,’ he said. ‘Mum says it’s too violent.’

  Dinner was served at seven sharp. Helen slid the plates onto the table, and Lex was about to pick up his knife and fork when he noticed her staring at him, her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘We have to say grace first,’ Darren said.

  ‘Of course,’ Lex mumbled. ‘I forgot.’

  He bent his head and made sure that he echoed the ‘amen’ at the right time. He was starving and he was dying to tuck into the food even though it was appallingly hot in the kitchen. The meat smelled delicious.

  They ate in silence, knives and forks clicking on their plates. Lex could hear the clock ticking above their heads. It was one of the most uncomfortable meals he could remember. When it was over, he thanked Helen profusely and took his leave. She offered him dessert, and he felt rude turning it down, but the atmosphere in the kitchen was stifling and he couldn’t wait to escape. Helen disappeared into the house after she had seen him out the front door, but Darren followed him to the gate.

  ‘Which do you reckon is the best Star Wars episode?’ the kid whispered.

  ‘I like the one where Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star,’ Lex said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I like the third one. When Annikin turns into Darth Vader. I saw it at my friend’s place. Mum doesn’t know.’

  Lex winked at the boy. ‘I reckon you’ll survive the violence,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  The kid grinned and ran back inside.

  •

  The next morning, having a coffee at Sue’s café, Lex knew he was in trouble. Sue was cross. He listened to her crashing around in the kitchen and thought of his mother on her bad days. He waited for her to come out to refill his coffee, and when she did her body language was stiff and impatient.

  ‘I’m sorry for breathing,’ he said.

  Roughly she sloshed more coffee into his cup and thumped the coffee pot down on the table.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said. ‘You haven’t worked it out yet. Living here isn’t about running and hiding. It isn’t about taking what you want and then slinking around like a skunk hoping nobody notices.’ She whipped a cloth out of her apron pocket and started working hard on the adjacent table, wiping and polishing. ‘This place is about community and respect. We’re all interconnected here. We all rely on each other in some way. You need to make better judgments, Lex, or you won’t get the support you want when you need it.’

  She flicked the crumbs out of the cloth onto the floor and stuffed the cloth back in her pocket before she went on.

  ‘You were more than halfway to making it after you saved Mrs B in the storm. People have been talking favourably about you. I saw them nodding to you at the funeral. That’s acceptance, even if you didn’t know it. But right now you’re heading straight back to where you started. On the outer.’

  She was puffing now, her face was red and her voice excited. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’ve said my piece. I’ve always liked you, Mr Henderson. But this takes the cake.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he said.

  ‘John Watson saw you going home with Helen Beck last night.’

  Lex looked down at his coffee and noticed that Sue had spilled half of it into the saucer while she was topping it up.

  ‘Here, give me that.’ She reached for the cup. ‘I’ll fix it up for you.’

  She came back with a fresh cup.

  ‘Now it’s time to fix yourself up. You keep away from Helen Beck. She doesn’t need your interference. She’s lost and confused enough as it is. You leave her to the church folk. They understand her.’

  Lex defended himself. ‘I didn’t do anything. I accepted a kind offer to dinner and then I went home. Nothing happened.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your explanations,’ Sue said. ‘You keep away from her. There are some things you oughtn’t to meddle with and Helen Beck is one of them. Now take my advice and leave it alone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll take your advice.’

  He finished his coffee and drove home, stung with disbelief. One innocent meal and everybody in Merrigan had him hooked up with Helen Beck. There were still many things he had to learn about living in this place.

  Twenty

  At home, in the late-summer stillness of the gully, Callista painted a fury of colour onto canvas—exploring, experimenting, drawing out flashes of light and insight. Over the past weeks, working through the storm series had evolved into a journey of emotions. What she put into her paintings was more than her observations of mood and light. It was more than her anger and frustration with Lex, more than her grief over their clash in the shattered house. Grief was in fact cumulative, she discovered. One grief opened the vault of past unreconciled grief, and it all wound together into a new and complex thing.

  On top of that, yearning shot itself through everything: yearning for those days of colour when she and Luke had been beautiful, yearning for knowledge of the child that had been lost to her during its short journey of creation, yearning for what she had hoped for with Lex.

  While she painted, Callista learned more about disillusionment. The taste of Lex’s concealment was bitter. She struggled to imagine him as the owner of a wife. Of course he had a history, but know ledge of this could only bring disappointment. With all his past hurts, she could never have him just for herself. Even if she could resurrect the fragments of their relationship, he would always be partly owned by someone else. And that was painful.

  Entangled with this was her disillusionment with herself for not having the courage to be forthright. If only she had been stronger, she could have told Lex who she was. The truth was that without honesty their relationship had been emotionally bankrupt. Together they had been like a shallow and murky lagoon. The storm had broken their banks and what little they’d started with had drained away. They had begun with nothing and ended with nothing.

  The house at the end of the road had been a large part of the problem. It had been their nemesis: Lex’s unwitting purchase of her family history and Callista’s powerlessness to change that. Revisiting the house at the Point had stirred a myriad of memories for her. Grandpa. His life there with Queenie. Running barefoot with Jordi among the heath. Baking cupcakes in the kitchen. Queenie smiling over their curly brown heads. The light shimmering through the windows. Grandpa’s whaling stories. Humpbacks beginning to roll by over the years.

  None of this could be shared with Lex. Not ever. She had tried to show him an alternative viewpoint on whaling. Not because she necessarily believed it herself. But she had to try to persuade him because if he could not accept a different view he could not accept her. Truly, she had failed all round.

  With a canvas on the easel, failure was not something she could contemplate. She pushed thoughts of Lex aside and worked through the moods of the storm, drawing out its texture. Thinking. Painting. Visualising. Working with sensation. Driving through the maze of her emotions.

  It was an obsession. She could think of nothing else. Food became something she indulged in when she felt weak. She drove up the coast and bought canvasses with money borrowed from her mother. When one canvas was too wet to work further, she set it aside and put another on the easel, moved into the next phase of the storm, its next mood.

  She couldn’t remember ever working like this before. It was like a re-creation. Like a reworking of the colours that made up her own complicated personality. And she liked it. Within the mire of all that bruised and boiling sensation, there was the birth of a new rose for her. And its name was confidence.

  But today she was feeling distracted and it was annoying her. Helen Beck had rung a couple of weeks ago and asked her to do a portrait of Henry. It was a commission for the church and there was good money behind it, but Callista couldn’t motivate herself to start it. She was making good progress on h
er storm paintings, but this commission was going to cause her trouble. She had flicked through the photographs Helen had given her and she knew Henry wasn’t going to come easily.

  The problem was his eyes—what was in them, and also what wasn’t. He was supposed to be a devout, passionate man of the church. And yet what Callista saw was a man who was arrogant and intolerant. Compassion was missing, and kindness and humility and tenderness. The underlying issue was that she didn’t like him. Never had. She had avoided him, preferring not to run up against his abrasive personality. Of course she’d known him. You couldn’t grow up in a small town like Merrigan without knowing people. But he had left high school the year she started, so he could slot into the family business. No need to stay at school when he was needed in the shop. And Callista’s family didn’t eat meat or go to church, so they rarely saw him.

  Helen Beck was another matter. Callista had always felt sorry for her, suppressed as she was beneath Henry’s patriarchal glare. They had never been friends, but Callista had watched Helen shrinking during her marriage to Henry. She had watched the fear growing in Helen’s eyes. Often she had wished she could reach out to the poor isolated woman, buried in the church and in Henry’s dominance. But she knew better than to interfere.

  When Helen had come to her with the photos, Callista had wanted to reject the job. Yet how could she, when this poor woman’s entire life had been rejection. So she’d taken the photos and said she’d see what she could do, knowing at the same time that she couldn’t do it. How could she possibly paint Henry in a sympathetic light?

  Several times she’d fanned out the photos of Henry on a table and tried to begin by sketching him, first in pencil and then in charcoal. But the drawings were flat and unrewarding. Her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t get inside him and didn’t want to. And as each day went by with Helen’s down payment sitting on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, Callista’s guilt grew. She would have to do something proactive. She’d have to go and talk to Helen.

  That evening, she drove the Kombi into town, bought a bottle of red wine with twenty dollars of Helen’s money, and knocked on her front door.