by Carl Nixon
Of course he knows where the dream comes from. His father built the raft when Andrew was seven, and promised ten dollars the first time Andrew swam out to it. At seven, those forty metres had looked like the Tasman. That summer he practised every day up and down the shore, but as soon as his feet left the bottom he’d panic and turn back. He could swim well enough; that wasn’t his problem. His problem was Terry-Fucking-Mulligan. Terry’s parents used to own the bach three down, the one with the green front door. Terry was twelve and a natural-born asshole. He told Andrew that there was a giant monster that lived in the lake. Always the inventive one, he called it The Creature. Said it was half giant eel, half sea dinosaur left over from when the lake was joined to the ocean. Andrew still remembers the look on Terry’s face when he told him how he’d seen The Creature attacking his uncle. That kid’s eyes bulged. Actually his uncle did get cramp one year and almost drowned, but Terry was just winding him up. Little prick.
On the last day before they were due to go home Andrew had caged his fear and made it halfway to the raft before something brushed his leg under the water — weed or a stick. He froze up, screamed so much that he almost drowned. His father swam out and pulled him back to shore, still hysterical. It was one of the most embarrassing things that had ever happened to him. He can still remember parents and kids from the other baches standing around looking down at him as he lay gasping and sobbing on the shore. He didn’t swim at all for a couple of years and didn’t swim out to the raft until he was fourteen. By that time he was too proud to claim his father’s ten dollars and they both pretended they’d forgotten all about it.
As he smokes, the rain runs in sheets down the outside of the window. He still does not know what the time is. Maybe midnight, one o’clock. He does not think he has been asleep for that long. As his eyes adjust to the darkness he can make out the sagging belly of the wire fence and the pale gouge of the shingle road and the blacker emptiness of the lake beyond. There are five other baches clustered together here in this inlet near the end of the road but the others are, of course, empty. August is exactly the wrong time of year to come to the lake. Why he let Tonia talk him into coming he doesn’t know. She said it would help and he’d almost believed her. There is another flurry of rain and the edges of everything shift and swim. There are, he thinks, no straight lines left in the world any more.
He is startled when car headlights shine through the window, lighting up the room. For a moment he has a Peter Pan shadow. He steps back from the window as a car pulls up behind his and people get out. He cannot tell who they are. Two dark figures hurry across the lawn and the unlocked door bangs open. There are voices in the hallway. And then the lights come on and he is face to face with his father. They both stand frozen.
‘What are you doing here?’
His father grimaces. ‘I could ask you the same thing.’
And then his mother is between them, flustered, and trying to smooth things over. ‘It’s all right, Bill. Calm down. I was going to say something but I didn’t want to upset you … the truth is that …’ She stops, confused.
‘What’s going on? Mum?’
‘Don’t get angry. Both of you. I can explain … oh dear.’
‘This wasn’t my idea, Andrew.’ His father hasn’t moved from the doorway.
‘Just turn around and go then.’
‘Christ, I do own the place!’ Bill barks.
‘Stop it, you two. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come.’
And suddenly Tonia is in the room, pulling a dressing gown over her pyjamas. ‘It was my idea,’ she says lightly. ‘I asked them to come.’ She kisses Shirley on the cheek and hugs his father who stands stiff as an old tree. ‘It’s good to see you, Bill. You’re looking well.’
Bill grimaces again. ‘I look bloody awful.’
Tonia smiles. ‘Either way it’s been too long.’ She turns back to Andrew. ‘Shirley and I decided that we all needed to spend some time together.’
‘It might not have been a good idea,’ says his mother, looking around like a lost child.
‘It was a stupid idea,’ he says too loudly and he sees her stiffen.
‘Don’t talk to your mother like that,’ Bill snaps.
‘Your father didn’t know you were going to be here, dear.’
‘Well, we’re not. We’re leaving.’
His mother is suddenly wide eyed. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I don’t need my wife and my mother sneaking around behind my back. Christ, Tonia, what were you thinking? Help me pack the bags.
‘Pack your own bloody bag. I’m staying.’
He glares at her. ‘Suit yourself.’
He goes into the bedroom and returns with his suitcase. He has not bothered to zip it shut, and clothes dangle from its mouth. The last thing he sees as he leaves is Tonia, Shirley and Bill standing silently, like those buskers he can’t stand who only move when you put money in their hat. He slams the door behind him.
The car wheels spin briefly on the wet grass and then he is reversing quickly around his parents’ car on to the road and driving away.
Tonia is still in bed when she hears Andrew return just after dawn. Shirley and Bill are still asleep. She pulls on shorts and a blue and yellow thermal top, and goes out to where their car is parked by the lake. It has stopped raining, although there is no sign of the sun, and dark clouds hang low over the lake. Andrew has taken his shoes off and is standing knee deep in the water, staring out at a wooden raft moored out from the shore. As soon as she stops moving the sandflies start to swarm around her exposed skin.
‘Going for a swim?’
Andrew does not turn around. ‘I wanted to feel what the water was like.’
‘Well?’
‘Fucking cold.’ There is a pause. ‘I didn’t change my mind, if that’s what you’re thinking. A tree’s washed down and blocked the ford. Must have happened just after they crossed.’
There is another pause during which Tonia can hear the slap of the lake against the stones and the sandflies begin to bite her in earnest. She should have remembered and worn long pants. She slaps at the back of her hand and sees a bloated sandfly smear across her skin. ‘Where’d you sleep?’
‘The back seat. My neck’s killing me.’
‘Serve you right for insisting we buy a Fiat.’
‘They are economical.’
She can’t help smiling and he turns and looks at her for the first time. She sees his raw morning-after eyes. ‘Least it’s not raining now,’ she says.
He glances up at the low ash-coloured sky. ‘It was a stupid thing you and Mum did.’
‘I don’t think …’ she begins.
Andrew raises his voice. ‘No, let me finish. I can make my own decisions about who I do and don’t see.’
‘Christ, he’s your father.’
‘I’m thirty-eight years old. I don’t need a father any more. Especially not him.’
‘Listen to yourself. You’ve got to move on from what happened.’
‘Move on to where? Where am I supposed to be going, Tonia? Tell me? Where is this mythical destination?’
Andrew is yelling now and she feels her stomach bunch in what has become a reflex. Andrew stops and looks back towards the lake. She waits.
He speaks gently. ‘Even when I’m with people, I’m not with them. You know what I mean?’
‘No, but tell me. Please.’
‘It’s like I hear people laughing and saying things that I should be interested in but I’m not. It’s all happening way, way over there.’ He gestures over the black water. ‘And I’m just not part of anything.’
‘Then what are you going to do about it?’
Andrew shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
Now is the time. She will say what she has been planning to say for weeks, what she brought him to the bach to say. ‘I can’t live with “I don’t know” any more.’
He turns to look at her again. ‘What does that mean?’
&nb
sp; ‘Until you sort yourself out I need to be by myself.’
‘By yourself meaning not with me?’
She nods.
‘For how long?
‘As long as it takes.’
‘So our marriage is over — just like that.’
She thinks how small and alone he looks standing in the water. His feet must be numb.
‘Not necessarily. It depends.’
‘On what?
‘On you. Everything depends on you. Andrew, this is best for both of us.’
He kicks angrily at the water and ripples flee from his foot. ‘Don’t pretend you’re thinking about me.’
‘You’re right. I’m not any more. That’s the point.’
And suddenly a bird, a shag perhaps, long and black, is flying low across the water. They both turn their heads to watch its silent progress. It vanishes over the trees and she sighs. ‘Our son died. Liam died.’
‘I know that,’ he says, breathing out on all the words so that his voice is like a sudden breeze between them.
‘Do you? Do you really?’
‘I carried his coffin. I held his cold hand all that first endless night.’
‘Look me in the eye, Andrew, and tell me that you’re not expecting him to come out from that bach any minute in his pyjamas and come running over here.’
Andrew starts to cry. His shoulders hunch but she is unrelenting.
‘Isn’t that what you’re expecting? Isn’t it?’
‘Of course! That’s natural. He’s only just died.’
‘It’s been over a year since Liam died. Fourteen long months. I’ve said my goodbyes. You should too.’
‘You’re trying to forget him!’ he accuses.
She shakes her head. ‘I grieve for him every day but we’ve got to get on with living our lives.’
‘I can still feel his tiny hand in mine. It’s so cold.’
‘Liam is dead. He was four years old and he died. We were unlucky.’
‘It wasn’t luck!’ Andrew looks accusingly back at the bach.
‘Either way, he’s dead. You have to learn what that means.’
Without waiting for a reply, she turns and walks away. When she gets to the porch she looks back. Andrew is still standing in the water, staring out at the raft. He seems to be waiting for something, but for what she cannot imagine.
Andrew is driven inside by the latest downpour. He has heard his father chopping kindling out in the lean-to. His mother and Tonia murmur from the bedroom. He calls the nearest service station, who refer him to the local council. The guy who eventually answers the phone says he might be able to send someone with a winch to look at the ford but he isn’t sure when they’ll be able to get around to clearing it, certainly not today. He pronounces certainly with a drawn-out rolled southern ‘rrr’. They’re flat out with landslides up and down the highway. The man helpfully suggests that the ford might clear itself with the next heavy rain. He takes the number of the bach and promises to get back to them.
Andrew makes himself a cup of tea. The kettle’s insides are thick with minerals.
‘Forecast says it might clear up later today.’
His father has come in from the lean-to. The door is open behind him and the noise of the rain is loud. Andrew watches him out of the corner of his eye without fully turning. His father has a pile of kindling cradled in his arms which he drops noisily by the wood burner. Shards of wood cling to his bush-shirt. Andrew can smell the gum sap from the freshly split wood.
‘If the rain lets up I might go for a walk later on.’ His father’s hair needs cutting where it clumps above his ears. Andrew is aware of him brushing at the bush-shirt with his large builder’s hands, and water and shards of wood falling to the carpet. ‘Maybe up to the big totara. Do you want to come? We could talk.’ He is breathing too hard. He closes the door and takes a pill from a container in his shirt pocket.
‘No. I’ll stay here. The guy from the council might call back about the ford.’
Andrew hears his father begin to stack the wood around the burner, drying it out. He takes his tea and stares out the window and listens to the broken-drum sound of wood on wood. Because of the rain the surface of the lake is even darker than normal. Something to do with the minerals and plant matter washed down from the bush. There is no wind and the water is dead flat. Each raindrop falls heavily, hitting the cast-iron surface and then jumping high. At either end of the narrow stone beach the thick bush crowds down to the lake. Trees lean out on improbable angles, making dark half-tunnels; places where the rain does not fall on the water with the same steady rhythm but dances to its own random beat. Tangled bush-lawyer hang like ropes. Moss and mould and lichen cover the earth and cling to the trunks of the trees.
Behind him his father has stopped stacking the wood. Andrew does not turn around but stares rigidly out at the rain. The bach, the lake, the bush, everything feels saturated with decay; the undoing of the dead and of the only half-dead things. His father goes into his bedroom and closes the door without a word.
Andrew thinks back to a conversation he had with Tonia weeks ago now. Months? He has lost track of the connection between time and events. She was putting away groceries anyway, and he was sitting at the kitchen bench just watching. Of course the house was too still.
Half an hour earlier she had led him by the hand, like a child, from the supermarket and helped him gently into the passenger seat of their car. Things just seem to set him off for no real reason.
‘You should call your father back,’ she had said, opening the fridge and putting away the new butter.
‘I can’t.’
‘This isn’t going to help. You know that, Andrew.’
She was using her gentle but insistent voice. The one that she used when she proposed to him. He remembers her dark hair brushing the back of her neck as she moved around the kitchen. She was wearing a white T-shirt, jeans and summer sandals and looked beautiful. Summer then. At least five months ago.
Fresh tears had blurred the cupboard, blurred Tonia so that she was swimming towards him. She held him again. Back then she always seemed to be holding him, like scaffolding put up to stop a fire-gutted building collapsing entirely.
Even in her arms he couldn’t help but listen. He still spends all his time in their house listening. He is always on the verge of hearing footsteps running over the polished floorboards in the hallway. Or high laughter. The tears of a scraped shin. But no one trips on the steps any more and doors hang on their hinges unslammed. Tonia has tried to talk about moving when the time is right.
In the kitchen she had stepped back, letting him go. ‘It’s as bad for him,’ she said, ‘maybe worse.’
‘It’s not worse!’ He had hated the idea.
‘Okay. Different. But still terrible though.’
‘I don’t know how I feel about him any more.’
‘We agreed that you should spend some time together. Go away to the bach. Fish.’
‘No.’
He pulled her in again. She was small but solid in his arms, and he had wet her shoulder with his tears. He remembers her beginning to kiss his neck and he had pulled away, turned and walked out of the kitchen.
They have not made love since Liam died. She has tried but he has turned aside. The implications are too many, too huge. She amazes him every day with her unbending strength. How does she stay so strong, so whole? How does she seem to be getting better when every day he feels as if he is slipping deeper into something dark that clings and sucks him under? For him there are only bad days and days that are worse.
‘I don’t know what to say to him.’
‘What did you used to talk about?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’
And it is true. He still can’t remember what he used to talk about with his father. He stares hopelessly around the bach as though looking for a clue — the wood stacked neatly by the burner; faded prints on the walls; an ancient bar-heater — and then he sees the old r
ods by the door. He finds an image of himself and his father out on the lake. They were floating in the old aluminium dinghy. It was a sunny day and every now and then one of them reached down to bail water out of the bottom with a yellow detergent bottle cut in half. But in his memory they are not talking. The only sound he can conjure up is the scrape of the plastic bailer on the bottom of the boat and the splash of water being returned to the lake. His father and he are just sitting there.
Just sitting silently out on the lake waiting for the fish to bite.
Tonia and Shirley have gone for a walk around the edge of the lake towards the big totara. They have been talking all morning. About Bill’s health, about Tonia’s work, about Liam. Shirley stops walking, turns to her and asks, ‘How is Andrew? Really. It’s been so long since he’s even called on the phone.’
‘Where to start? He’s angry, confused, belligerent, possibly alcoholic, masochistic, sadistic, depressive, emotionally and sometimes physically violent … I could go on all day.’
Shirley sighs and looks suddenly small and older than sixty-three. Her shoulders and face are too thin. ‘He’s grieving.’
‘That’s what I used to think too, but now I believe he’s doing something else.’
‘What?’
‘He’s like that ford.’ She gestures up the road. ‘All his emotions are dammed up in a great big pool but what we see is only what bursts out under all the pressure.’
‘The ford will clear.’
‘It’s not a perfect analogy,’ Tonia says.
‘Counselling, maybe …’
‘He did go to one session. Told the therapist he was “fine”, “good as gold”, and walked out. At first he was just quiet, still inside, thinking.’
Shirley gives a pale smile. ‘Even as a boy he was a thinker.’