The Rip

by Robert Drewe

  ‘No, they named me Janelle.’ When she was small, she explained, her father liked to call her China, as in rhyming slang: China plate – mate, because she always hung around him, his little pal and helper. ‘Then when I was nine he went out for cigarettes, just like in a film, and never came back.’

  Leon K.’s first instinct was to pat her arm or shoulder, at least register his sympathy by meeting her steady gaze with his own. But the overt breast handling – the sudden switching of sides, both nipples simultaneously visible for a moment, then the replacement of the first breast inside the T-shirt and the complete exposure of the second one for Ayeshia’s benefit – hampered any such response. For a while there was a lot of fleshy bustling and bouncing going on, and of course no touch was possible. The breasts dominated the veranda, the way they introduced intimacy, presumed it, and at the same time forbade it. Anyway, she was a stranger. For God’s sake, he’d known her less than an hour. But despite himself he felt a sunburst of lust, instantly overshadowed by guilt. You were supposed to be favourably inclined towards the naturalness of nursing mothers yet always remain sexually detached. But he felt swamped by intense sensations, conflicted on several levels and, basically, like a pimply fourteen-year-old again. Something in his being had shifted. He tried to focus on her scar.

  ‘Dad was good with animals,’ China Mason said, very calmly, as she burped the baby on her shoulder. ‘Kind, not the shooting sort – not even rabbits. He could handle reptiles, no worries. He could get possums out of the ceiling without a scratch on him.’ Ten years later, she went on, she was working behind the bar in a Newcastle hotel when he walked in. ‘That was a shock. He saw me, too, downed his beer and walked out. I didn’t run after him. If that was his attitude, bugger him.’

  ‘Whew!’ Genuinely moved, he was still trying to meet her eyes, and succeeded.

  ‘At least I inherited the animal thing from him,’ said China Mason. ‘The lifelong interest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see you’re wondering about my scar?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he lied.

  ‘Acid,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  His unasked question hung burning in the air. She didn’t elaborate, but finished the breast-feeding then. What passion must she have aroused to cause the acid attack – and what sort of jealous, evil bastard would do that to her? To Leon K., the time it took her to adjust her clothing, burp the baby again and place her in the carry-cot flew by incredibly fast. His brain raced with possible delaying tactics, but he could hardly offer her a drink this early in the morning, or round up more suffering wildlife. ‘Ayeshia doesn’t much resemble me, does she?’ she remarked absently. ‘All that blonde hair. She takes after my ex-partner.’

  Why did he feel elated at that little prefix, the simple ex-? And at her bringing it to his attention? His gratitude extended far beyond her ridding him of the snake. It stretched all the distance over different years and landscapes to the scar on her cheek. She was becoming more attractive and mysterious by the second, the scar adding vulnerability to her sensual intrigue. Not to mention the lyrebird tattoo on her hip and her hair like dark cascading water.

  It dawned on him suddenly that he could easily embarrass her, and himself, with an inappropriate outpouring of enthusiasm. With wild compliments and avid interest. She’d think him mad and creepy. Actually, he did wonder if he’d become completely stir-crazy lately and he was glad it was too early in the day for him to be anything but sober. Really, he should watch himself in company, especially in female company. He walked her sensibly to her van. There was a danger his feelings might show in his tight facial expression; he realised his emotions were in a precarious state but he still had some self-restraint and dignity left, and all he ended up saying to her was, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  She gave him her card. As well as her name and contact number, it said: We volunteers gratefully accept what you think is a reasonable donation towards saving our wildlife. Her eyes widened at the reckless cheque he pressed into her hands, an amount certain to perplex the investigative auditors in days to come. ‘Seriously? Are you sure? Wow! Thank you!’ She sounded like a teenager just handed prized concert tickets. ‘Call us if you have any more creature problems,’ said China Mason, Wildlife Saviour, tooting the horn and waving blithely as she drove off through the tunnel of camphor laurels and down the driveway.

  For perhaps half an hour Leon K. sat in a patch of sun on the veranda steps, considering a cloud of gnats hanging over the pool. Vibrating, thousands of tiny wings beating in unison. Beyond the tiers of camphor laurels and over the cane fields, a thin stripe of sea stretched in a north–south rectangle between the headlands. The vista of parallel pale blues and greens was like the flag of some temperate northern country. Birds called, the filter-box lid tap-tapped, and eventually the hovering gnat mass moved on.

  So he was able to swim again – but with the obstacle removed, there seemed to be less urgency. Eventually he stood anyway, stepped out of his clothes and walked to the pool, swinging his arms to loosen up after the enforced lay-off. He dived in, turned on to his back underwater and began stroking. Striving to appreciate the streaming clouds as usual, the skittering swifts, the pelicans soaring high today over the cane fields, he swam one lap, two … It took three laps before the waves and backwash from his progress agitated the filter box enough for the snake to curl out from the air-space between the filter and the pool’s surface.

  Desperate to escape the pool, a red-bellied black, longer and sleeker than the original – or maybe this one was the original – slid up his torso, rode his panicking body to the edge and escaped into the palms. As China Mason had pointed out, black snakes, though venomous, are relatively timid. A measure of its anxiety was that it bit Leon K.’s neck on its way to freedom.

  He got inside to the telephone, even found her Wildlife Saviours card in his trouser pocket. Her number rang and rang but finally she answered. Water was puddling the carpet and a thin stream of watered blood dripped pink from his neck and down his chest. Already his throat was constricting. Finally she answered.

  ‘What do I do now?’ Leon K. asked her. Repeatedly. ‘What do I do now?’ He pictured her face. His voice was dry and already disappearing, so he had to hurry. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised. ‘I’m not from here.’

  The Obituary of Gina Lavelle

  WHILE CROCODILES LEAPT out of the muddy African river and grabbed river-fording wildebeests by the snout, Clare Wolfe read the morning paper. She set the exercise bike’s controls for thirty minutes on the cardio setting – hills of varying steepness alternating with plateaus and valleys – which was generally the time it took her to read the newspaper end to end. Not sport, finance or the classifieds, but everything else. If she wasn’t diverted while she pedalled, her body announced it was exhausted after only five minutes. But if she was engrossed in something, anything other than the compilation of animal maulings and flamboyant human bloopers on the gym’s TV, her legs and lungs seemed oblivious to the exertion and she could pedal to the time limit.

  Her forty-eighth birthday was approaching and weight-loss hints had been made at home. More than hints – Gavin had been surprisingly hurtful, especially since he’d never looked trimmer himself. She’d decided it was time to join a gym. Secretly. She liked the idea, a few months down the track, of surprising him with a svelte new HealthWorks body.

  The floor exercises and weights were still a novelty and diverting in a heavy, repetitive sort of way, but she found stationary cycling so boring that it had taken her a month even to begin to benefit from this supposedly valuable aerobic exercise. HealthWorks was on the first floor, above a hair-removal clinic, discount book warehouse and Oodles of Noodles, and the exercise bikes and StairMasters were lined up along the plate-glass window overlooking Pier Street. There was a wide view of the river.

  On the first few visits it had been interesting enough while she pedalled to gaze at the Johnson River streaming one way or the other bel
ow her. Although crocodile- and wildebeest-free, it was quite scenic if you disregarded the fort-like public toilet dominating the near bank and focused instead on the far, mangrove-covered shore. For an estuary its currents were also extraordinarily fast-flowing. Only three weeks ago, reddened by ten days of heavy rain from the trailing edge of Cyclone Laura, it had briefly resembled that muddy African river on the TV, and she’d watched fallen trees, a cane chaise longue and a bloated sheep speed past on their way to the river mouth and then, tiny specks, bump over the bar and out into the Pacific.

  But apart from sport-fishing boats and the weekly Seniors’ Coffee Tours on the paddle-steamer Mississippi Gambler, it wasn’t normally a busy river, and the view of distant mangroves and emerging or disappearing sandbanks, a rusted dredge, the usual two or three elderly breakwater fishermen, a scattering of gulls, pelicans and cormorants, and of course the toilet edifice, quickly palled. After only a few minutes of pedalling she was bored and puffing.

  So Clare tried the diversion of the TV on which Darren Ho, the gym proprietor, continually ran his compilations of race-car crashes, skiing accidents, bungee-jump miscalculations, zebra-seeking lionesses, wedding-day mishaps (tipsy mother-of-the-bride falls into cake; nervous groom projectile vomits over priest) and her least favourite – the crocs surging out of the river into the migrating wildebeest herd. For a muscle man with exaggeratedly huge shoulders and pectorals, Darren was quite mild-mannered, although Clare found his shaved legs and armpits almost as disconcerting as his taste in entertainment. There was something about sporting accidents, and harmless animals being torn apart by predators, that sat uneasily with the purpose of the gym. They made her too anxious to keep pedalling. The marriage mishaps were wearing a bit thin, too.

  The street scene below had also failed as an exercise diversion. Apparently, drunken fights and vandalism were rife when the midnight crowds spilled out of the pubs, but not much happened in daytime Pier Street. As she pedalled she’d sometimes guess which passers-by were heading for the full body wax, which ones for a remaindered airport novel or Thai takeaway. From their general age, shape and clothing, however, and their propensity for electric oldster-buggies ostentatiously trailing two or even three Australian flags, not many of them ever seemed candidates for these experiences. In any case, the street scene also only accounted for a few minutes’ pedalling.

  But the newspaper distraction worked well. The minutes and mock-kilometres flew by. Two birds with one stone – she was up to date these days on politics, celebrity misdemeanours, Third World earthquakes, fine dining, the trend towards olive growing, suicide bombing and most of the current wars. On the day in question, however, the paper seemed slimmer, the world a calmer place than usual. Fifteen minutes into her exercise routine and she’d nearly finished reading. Only the obituaries stood between her and the weather, comics and horoscopes. On the page before her was a photograph of a glamorously haughty, early-1960s-era blonde entering a courthouse besieged by press reporters and cameramen. The heading said The Complete Goodtime Girl. Clare began reading the obituary of a woman called Gina Lavelle.

  The name rang no bells. Gina Lavelle, she read, was by turns a Las Vegas showgirl, B-movie actress, gangster’s moll, perjurer, stripper and memoirist. Intrigued, Clare kept reading, and pedalled on. Born Ruby-Ann Dulch to deeply religious Baptist parents in San Marcos, Texas, she was convicted of perjury in 1960 when her boyfriend, the racketeer Giuseppe ‘Joey the Nose’ Goldman, was tried for tax evasion. Her year in gaol was fatal to her nascent Hollywood career.

  Clare looked up from the page for a moment to wipe her damp forehead. On the screen above her a racing car lost a wheel, skittered off the track, bounced, rolled, burst into flames and segued into two lionesses, working ruthlessly in tandem, stalking a zebra foal. Below her, perhaps a hundred metres east down Pier Street, an off-white Toyota Prado was backing into a space by the breakwater. Clare turned back to the obituary. Ruby-Ann ran away from home at fifteen to enter and win a Marilyn Monroe look-alike contest, and became a super-size bra model and Las Vegas showgirl. By the age of eighteen, she had married twice and had two children.

  From the exercise bike she couldn’t see the Prado’s licence plate but it was a common model, as was the colour, and most of them had that type of roof-rack. She kept up her pedalling rate. Little red electronic numbers told her eighty calories and three kilometres had gone. Eighty calories was just a small apple, or half a cappuccino. On-screen, a bungee-jumper’s shocked friends were stammering that they couldn’t understand how the accident had happened when Troy had made the same jump from the top of Victoria Falls three times before, and in the wet season. One thing they agreed on was that he would’ve wanted to go that way. Clare refocused and read: An inveterate attention-seeker, Gina Lavelle came to public notice when her regular nightclub antics earned her a four-page spread in Life magazine. Later, working as a highly paid stripper, she was romantically involved with Albert Anastasia, head of the so-called Murder, Inc.

  On Clare pedalled. The priest on-screen silently mouthed, ‘Do you take this woman …’ and, in anticipation, Clare managed to avert her face as, once more, the young groom, ashen and sickly, vomited over the priest’s robes. As always, the bride’s face was a picture. A hundred calories gone, twenty minutes, four kilometres. Down the end of Pier Street, sitting previously unnoticed on the breakwater, a dark-haired woman slowly stood up just then, brushed back her hair and strolled, smiling, towards the Prado. The southerly breeze gusting across the river ruffled her billowy skirt. Gulls hung in the air above her. Choppy waves snapped against the breakwater. Clare couldn’t make out the woman’s face but her body was slender and Clare somehow knew she was attractive.

  A man got out of the Prado and faced the dark-haired woman, but he made no move towards her. He stayed close to the car, his back to the street, standing perfectly still, as if watching her intently as she approached him, as if (Clare imagined) he was appreciating the sight of her. Drinking her in. When the woman reached him, she moved into his arms and they kissed and held each other for a long moment. His back was still to Clare. Did he have a small bald spot? What sort of jacket was he wearing? Obstacles were in the way – the street verge of oleander bushes with pink flowers, litter bins, telephone poles, gulls hovering low in the wind, pedestrians – and it was hard to make out anything more.

  The man and woman got into the car and the Prado pulled out from the kerb and accelerated away. In Africa, the zebra herd grazed upwind. Camouflaged in the veldt grass, the lionesses crouched low and inched forward on their bellies. In close-up you could see flies crawling on the lions’ faces, in their eyes and lips. They paid no attention.

  The obituary of Gina Lavelle, nee Ruby-Ann Dulch, said her memoir, All Woman, boasted of affairs with more than 2000 men, including several US senators, three FBI investigators, Joe DiMaggio, Howard Hughes, Johnny Weissmuller, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne. Her claims to have been President John F. Kennedy’s lover when he was still a college boy had never been proven. But the way Gina Lavelle stared so languidly from the photograph, Clare could believe anything of her, and nothing.

  She was pedalling faster now, and the machine was vibrating so much the newspaper slid to the floor. She pedalled even faster, traversing a continent, a Grand Canyon, of illuminated rectangular highlands, gorges and buttes. Without lessening speed she reached her preset half-hour and flashing red letters on a dashboard above the handlebars beeped congratulations to her, saying High Five! and Cool Down Now! She pedalled on. The whole electronic landscape fell away behind her, the hills and valleys now flatlined and defeated. But she kept pedalling, even through the growing discomfort in her chest. For the life of her, as long as she could still breathe, Clare Wolfe couldn’t imagine ever stopping.

  Sea Level

  IT WAS BARELY two hours since they’d dropped off their children at school that morning but parents suddenly began arriving to collect them. Jasmine’s mother tore into the classroom, grabbed
Jasmine’s hand and tried to tug her outside. Jasmine was only six and Special Needs and her reaction was especially bewildered and noisy. Jasmine’s mother was wildly floundering somewhere between sign language and spoken words as she panicked Jasmine out the door. Mrs Morris’s expression showed she wished Jasmine’s mother hadn’t been so flushed and dramatic.

  Then Ben’s father burst in, still in his hat and farm boots, sweating anxiously and smelling of fertiliser. He’d left the motor running in the truck. As he shuffled and stamped self-consciously in the doorway, his boots dropped little clumps of red dirt. He looked from Mrs Morris to the other children and back again, apologetically, as if he wished things were different. ‘Come on, mate,’ he said eventually, and snatched his son’s hand.

  Then Lily’s mother arrived, half dressed and hectic, her navel ring and one wing of her butterfly tattoo showing, and started repeating the morning’s radio bulletins in a frenetic way. ‘This is sea level!’ she stated emphatically to no one in particular. Mrs Morris gave Lily’s mother a frown, and made a lip-zipping gesture. In a strangled sort of voice, Mrs Morris announced, ‘Everything’s under control here, Lily’s mother.’ Lily started gathering up her books and pencils, but her mother said, ‘God, don’t worry about those!’ and rushed her off without them.

  Other parents came and left quickly with their children. Between the arrivals and departures, Max noticed, Mrs Morris kept sneaking glances out the window. But apart from all the cars pulling up and speeding off, there was nothing different to see out there. Lots of flat land. The playground. Ocean Beach Road. Some sort of big bird, a pelican, high in the sky. A plume of smoke from a cane fire. Then tall pine trees, the tip of the lighthouse showing above them, the rocky point, a flat ribbon of blue ocean and, far out at sea, one little white boat like a drawing.