The Cloud Forest

by JH Fletcher

  Not that it seemed to matter. She looked at him, seemingly unsurprised by his sudden appearance. She smiled as though she were truly pleased to see him, and he felt his breath catch in his throat.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said. ‘But what about you? You’re the one who’s been sick.’

  He assured her that he was well, very well. And he was, especially now.

  They walked slowly down the road together, Charlie taking his pace from hers, while she seemed to have all the time in the world to get where she was going, if she was going anywhere at all. He dared to wonder whether there could possibly be any chance that she had not been going anywhere, that her purpose in walking along the deserted and dusty street had been simply to meet him. At once, vehemently and superstitiously, he rejected the thought as something beyond rational hope, too precious and wonderful to be possible.

  ‘Someone told me you came to Australia from France,’ she said.

  ‘That is right.’ Again his nerves-choked tongue stiffened his response. The thought that she might have cared enough to talk about him at all was itself overwhelming.

  ‘In some ways that makes us alike,’ she said and again smiled, as though pleased that it should be so.

  There was no way he could see that. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re both new here.’

  She explained that, having been away for a year, she had come back a different person from the woman who had left. ‘Looking back, I realise now how little I knew about anything. Now it’s different. It’s hard to come to terms with a place like Broome,’ she told him, ‘when you’ve had a chance to see what the rest of the world has to offer. That’s why we’re alike: because we see everything here from the outside.’

  Perhaps it was so, but he still found it hard to believe that she might think they were alike in any way at all.

  ‘I like it here,’ he told her.

  ‘So do I. But that doesn’t mean I want to stay here for the rest of my life. You don’t, do you? Tell me you don’t!’

  Charlie had thought seriously of doing just that, but now he didn’t hesitate. ‘Not here, no. I’ll be moving on, when I’m ready.’

  ‘I knew it, the moment I saw you,’ she said with satisfaction. And tucked her arm into his, careless of grease, as though, through knowing him, she might indeed be able to revisit the world that had obviously enchanted her so much. ‘Tell me about France.’

  He smiled; she sounded like a child, asking for a story before bed. ‘Tell you what about it?’

  She laughed out loud, on tiptoe with excitement. ‘Tell me everything. I want to know everything!’

  So he told her about the little town on the edge of the northern sea and the people who lived there. He described the bright-sailed fishing boats, the grey winter breakers that came roaring in time of storm.

  She hugged his arm, smiling up at him with her sun-warm face. ‘And you? What did you do?’

  ‘I was a kid. Then I went to work on a fishing boat.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’

  He looked down at her. ‘I knocked down a man who was a friend of my stepfather. An important man, a banker. I threw him in the harbour.’

  Her eyes were as round as plates. ‘Why?’

  He hesitated. ‘He made me angry.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  Again she hugged his arm; he could feel her curiosity vibrating in the warm air of this tropical town a world away from the harbour where all this had happened. He remembered the satisfying thump of his fist on Marcel Chantemps’s chin, the pleasure of watching the banker flailing frantically to keep afloat in the filthy water of the harbour.

  ‘He put his hand on me and I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Put his hand …’ She frowned, then her face cleared as she understood what he was telling her. ‘Oh, I see. And that was why you came to Australia?’

  ‘It was that or prison,’ he explained. ‘He was a very influential man. And my stepfather was on his side.’

  God rot him, he thought.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Wendy told him. ‘I like a man who can stand up for himself.’

  ‘I can do that, all right.’

  A smile flickered. ‘So I’ve heard.’

  So she, too, had heard about the business with Gareth Chisholm. Well, she didn’t seem to think any the less of him because of it.

  They reached the end of the street and paused.

  ‘Are you going anywhere?’

  ‘To visit a friend.’

  Who lived, it appeared, on the other side of town.

  ‘You’re out of your way.’

  ‘I took a wrong turning.’ This from someone who had lived in Broome most of her life.

  ‘Sometimes I go for a walk on Cable Beach,’ he told her.

  Her eyes met his. ‘It’s beautiful down there. The white sand and red cliffs …’

  ‘I thought I might go there tomorrow, after work,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be dark, so we wouldn’t be able to see the colours. But you can still hear the sea. I like that. And there’s usually no one else there.’

  They separated, she to walk to her friend’s house, he to go home. He offered to walk her there, but she said better not.

  ‘Enjoy your walk tomorrow,’ she told him. ‘If you decide to go.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I’ve made up my mind about that.’

  He walked back, his feet two inches clear of the ground.

  5

  The next day was a nervous time. Would she come or not? His mood swung frantically, from euphoria to despair. Of course she would; of course she wouldn’t. The fact was he didn’t know her well enough to have any idea what she would do.

  Come evening, he didn’t hang about. As soon as the boat was tied up, the catch unloaded, he was gone. Ito and Nakamura, who had wives back in Japan but their own arrangements here in Broome, watched him with an indulgent eye.

  ‘Charlie got a girlfriend,’ said Ito, speaking to Nakamura in English to make sure Charlie understood. ‘Charlie in love with her, I think.’

  ‘In love with something about her,’ Nakamura said, and proceeded to detail the bits and pieces he had in mind. ‘Her tits he love. Her —’

  Charlie told him to shut it.

  Nakamura put on a look of utter amazement. ‘You say you don’ love her —’

  ‘Leave it alone, all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, I leave it alone. Promise you, I no touch.’

  ‘Leave it to Charlie to touch,’ Ito said.

  ‘Maybe he don’ like to do that,’ Nakamura said sadly.

  Ito shook his head. ‘Poor girl.’

  They were having a fine time at his expense; he could still hear them chortling when he was halfway down the street. Not that it mattered. He might be laughing himself, in the morning.

  Mrs Ransom watched him gobble his tea. ‘You’re going out.’

  ‘I thought I might take a walk. Watch the sunset.’

  They both knew it was not the sunset that was making him eat so fast.

  ‘Going to Cable Beach?’

  ‘They say that’s the best place.’

  ‘You be careful,’ she warned him, but smiled indulgently as she said it.

  It was the last thing he felt like being.

  He left the house with the sun well down towards the horizon. By the time he reached the beach, it had gone. Sky and sea were a mass of reds and blues, vivid as battle flags, with a wide band of gold along the horizon. The beach itself seemed on fire, the white sand flaming with rose and purple tints. He checked in both directions but could see no one. A bit of a blow; he had hoped, so much, that she would come. Well, there was no help for it. He trudged disconsolately along the beach. He seemed to be walking through an artist’s universe, the reds and blues and golds enclosing him in a sphere of multicoloured light. Eventually, when he thought he’d walked far enough, he sat down on the sand, his face towards the sea. Stealthily, in a silence made more profound by the rhythmic sibilance of the tiny waves, the colours
deepened. Time itself seemed to resonate as the colour and silence enfolded him. Breath-held minutes and then, as softly as they had come, the colours began to fade. The light seeped slowly from the sky. Now the sea was purple, deepening to black far out, but here, on the beach, the golden glow still lingered. Instinct nudged him and he turned from his rapt contemplation of the darkening sea and saw, heading towards him along the sand, a figure dressed in what the evening light had turned into a garment of purest gold.

  His breath caught in his throat; he stood up but otherwise did not move as the figure drew steadily nearer, the light lingering on the dress even after the beach itself had turned to dusk, as though the residue of the day, captive and compliant, were now advancing towards him through the gathering shadows.

  She reached him and took his hands in hers. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’

  Charlie said nothing, knowing he was the luckiest man in Broome.

  ‘Something came up at home …’

  Something in her tone of voice alerted him. ‘Something to do with me?’

  It seemed presumptious even to suggest such a thing, but he knew.

  She gave him a fragile smile. ‘Someone saw us last night. My father says it’ll give me a bad name.’

  ‘Because I’m a diver,’ Charlie said bitterly.

  ‘Because you’re a man.’

  ‘I can’t do anything about either of them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to.’ She saw the look on his face. His hands were still clasped in her own; now she shook them. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I came.’

  Yes, she was here. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘So am I.’

  They turned to walk together by the sea that was now almost invisible.

  ‘Was he very angry?’

  ‘He’ll get used to it.’

  Down the beach and back, while she told him about her trip, first to Perth and then by train across the Nullarbor to Melbourne, where she had stayed with her cousin’s family.

  ‘I was there nearly a year,’ she said.

  He did not ask why she had gone, nor did she tell him.

  ‘What made you come back?’

  ‘Things didn’t work out.’

  They turned back the way they had come. They were both silent but companionably so and not because they had run out of things to say. On the contrary; it seemed to Charlie that, even in silence, they continued to communicate with each other. At last they reached the end of the beach. She told him she must go home. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him and kissed her.

  He had not known he was going to do it but, now that he had, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

  She kissed him back and he was filled with a fierce joy.

  ‘I’ll walk home with you.’

  This time she did not object. They reached her house and stood in the entrance to the drive and it was her turn to kiss him, reaching up and putting her arms about his neck. He wondered whether it was a gesture of defiance to the father who might be watching, then decided he didn’t care what the reason might be.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll make sure I’m not late this time.’

  So it went: evening walks on Cable Beach, prospecting for shells on Riddle Beach. Sometimes they fished for whiting off Meatworks Beach, or walked around the edges of the town where the Islander people had their houses, admiring the gardens filled with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, Chinese cabbage. Everywhere there were pawpaw and mango trees.

  ‘We get masses of fruit in season,’ she told him.

  ‘We’ll pick them together,’ he said.

  ‘If we’re still here.’

  We: they had come to take it for granted by now.

  Everywhere they went, they talked and talked to each other, sharing their pasts and minds, exploring what they thought about things, as later they explored their shared bodies.

  One night she took him home for tea. Her parents were stiff but polite.

  ‘You are French, I believe,’ her mother said.

  ‘My father was Australian. From Queensland. He was killed in the war.’

  They had not known of the Australian connection and might have thawed a little had Mr Michaels not asked what his father had done in civilian life.

  ‘He was with a circus. He was an acrobat.’

  Not at all the answer the Michaels had been hoping for.

  When he left, Wendy walked with him to the gate. ‘They like you.’ But the tone of her voice gave the lie to that.

  ‘No, they don’t. They don’t think I’m good enough for you.’

  She didn’t deny it. ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘Not if it doesn’t bother you.’

  ‘Wait here,’ she said, and ran back to the house. In minutes she had returned, a coat over her arm. ‘In case it gets cold later.’

  ‘Later? Where are we going?’

  ‘Cable Beach.’

  Where, upon the sand, white sand whiter still in the glare of an almost full moon, beneath the cliffs that in daylight would smoulder as red as fire but now were black, Charlie kissed her mouth, her throat, eventually — after some persuasion — her breasts. He tried to take things further but that she would not permit. Frustrated, groaning, sweating, he nevertheless thought his heart would fly out of his body, so intense were his feelings for her.

  He was eighteen years old, had neither money nor prospects, family nor name. He was probably the last person in Australia the Michaels would choose for their daughter; it was ridiculous that they could even think of marriage, let alone speak of it, yet he did speak of it.

  ‘I want to marry you,’ he said.

  She looked up at him. In the moonlight her hair, spread about her face, was as white as the sand upon which they were lying. She lifted her hand to caress the side of his face. ‘You are the best thing that has happened to me in the whole of my life,’ she told him. ‘But my father won’t let us. We’re not twenty-one.’

  He knew she was not rejecting him; it made him masterful. ‘Then we’ll wait. Or, better still, we’ll go away together.’

  ‘Go away where?’

  He had never given it a thought, yet the answer came to him as smoothly as though it had been there all the time.

  ‘To the Cloud Forest.’

  ‘Where?’

  He explained, telling the story as he had heard it from Wally Bart.

  A small line creased the skin between her eyebrows. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it before?’

  ‘It is the only thing I have never shared with you.’ Even now he could not say why he hadn’t. Perhaps he had doubted how she would react to a man crazy enough to come halfway round the world in pursuit of a dream. He tried to tell her so. ‘It’s idiotic …’

  Wendy would have none of it. ‘What’s idiotic about it?’

  ‘What’s the use of dreams?’ How dismissive he was of the things that mattered most to him.

  She shook her head. ‘I like a man to have dreams. They’re important. I like a man who knows his own mind too.’ Again her hand gently caressed his face. ‘That’s why I like you.’

  ‘I don’t want to wait until we’re twenty-one.’

  She considered that prospect gravely. ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Shall we do it then? Shall we leave here?’

  ‘What will we do for money?’ One of them had to be practical, after all.

  ‘I’ll find something.’

  Dreams, once more, but he was unapologetic. Nothing was impossible. He would push the world over, single-handed, if that was what it took.

  It was March, the summer’s heat and humidity dying at last. They agreed they would give it a few more weeks, take off after Wendy, too, had had her eighteenth birthday, on 16 April. It would give Charlie a chance to put away a few quid, while Wendy had a couple of hundred pounds of her own. Not much, but enough to tide them over until they found something.

  6

  The days passed slowl
y for both of them. Wendy got on well with her parents, mostly; keeping from them anything as important as this weighed heavily on her, yet she could see no alternative.

  She had told Charlie that her parents liked him, but that had been a lie. As a man they might like him or not but her father would never accept Charlie Mandale, a diver and half French, with neither status nor money to his name, as a member of his family.

  He might try to buy Charlie off or drive him out of town altogether. It wouldn’t be hard; a word to Digby Hackett and Charlie would be out of a job. She was still only seventeen. He could do what he liked. He could even lock her up. No one would interfere.

  She’d as soon jump off the roof.

  No, she had no choice. Mum was the word, at least for the time being.

  I’ll tell them before we go, she promised herself. I’ll not be able to live with myself if I don’t do that. But not yet.

  7

  Charlie was counting the days and trying to keep his mounting excitement to himself. Nakamura and Ito knew something was on the go, and with whom — three-quarters of the town knew that — but it would become their business only when Charlie told them, and he did not.

  ‘Be very careful,’ Ito warned him, echoing Mrs Ransom. ‘Rich man make bad enemy.’

  He was right, but Charlie didn’t care. He and Wendy were in love: it didn’t matter what anybody else thought.

  One morning in early March — a squally day, all the luggers stuck in harbour — he stood with Wendy on the jetty and watched as boxes of apples and peaches were brought ashore from the State boat. Each month it brought supplies, stopping off at all the coastal settlements on its way up the coast from Perth. The boat was Broome’s only lifeline with the outside world, and the next time it left they would be on it. They still hadn’t made up their minds what they were going to do after that but stubbornly, foolishly, Charlie refused to let it worry him. The world was theirs, and all lovers’; they would get by.

  Another week. The boat had long gone. They started visiting places for the last time, saying goodbye. Riddle Beach, Gantheume Point …

  ‘Not Cable Beach, though,’ said Wendy, and Charlie agreed. Their farewells to Cable Beach they would leave for the last night of all.