‘All right, Doug,’ she said in her quiet voice. The frying-pan and the egg flip were still in her hands. ‘All right. Just one thing. Never.’ It seemed for a moment that she had finished speaking. But then the rest of the sentence came. ‘Do anything like that ever again.’
Laurie’s throat tightened. Like what? Hugging her? Snuggling up to her cheek? No. It wasn’t that. It was Tony. It was what he did to Tony.
In the long hours of the morning, when everyone else was about their business in the laundry and the yard, Laurie went seeking the cool of the house. The bedroom was shaded by an overhanging tree and the light inside was dim. Outside, the sun was winking on the river. Laurie slid her bare feet over the lino, feeling with her soles the uneven floorboards beneath. She sat on the bed and bounced to hear the creaking of the springs. The sheets smelt of her parents’ sleep.
She could see herself in the tall mirror of the wardrobe – her seersucker playsuit, grubby knees and sandfly bites. Behind her was the brightness of the doorway and the rest of the world.
She turned the teardrop latch on the door.
When Tony found her, she was sitting on the floor with tortoise-shell combs and hatpins stuck in her flossy hair, bright pink circles on her cheeks and things strewn around her – thin rolls of auburn hair, a bunch of wax cherries with wire stems, a small gold case with a mirror inside and a pad of pale powder, tiny nets as fine as cobweb.
‘Whaterya doing?’ he scolded. ‘That’s Gran’ma Morgan’s stuff! You better clean it up before Mum catches ya.’
‘I will,’ she said sulkily. She pulled the combs and pins out of her hair, returned everything to the wardrobe and rubbed the rouge from her cheeks.
‘Who’s Gran’ma Morgan?’ she said as she closed the wardrobe door. But Tony was back with his Tarzan’s Grip and balsa wood on the verandah.
Later that morning the scene on the sandbar seemed to be forgotten. Daddy called Tony ‘Mate’ and ruffled his hair and showed him how to tie a whiting hook on a line.
‘Yeah … Yeah …’ said Tony, interested.
ii
Laurie pressed her cheek to her water-wings, breathing in their vanilla newness, and gave herself dreamily up to their glamour – the bosomy give of them, their gorgeous poppy-red. Tony was assembling a model aeroplane on the verandah floor near his bed.
‘The river said “galoot”,’ Laurie remarked.
‘Huh?’
‘The river said “galoot”.’
Tony gave no answer. Down near the tank, the old pump came to life.
Behind the drag of the morning shimmered the Christmas just gone. Laurie lost herself in the memory of it – the way the tinsel whispered Christmas! Christmas! in the breeze, the scent of she-oak, and Santa Claus coming like a dream in the night … It had been as if the presents in the tree were all gifts of river light, hinting at tomorrow. She gazed at the river, hanging her chin on the sill, and wondered at the breadth of it, and a thought came to trouble her. Her fingers kneaded the petal-skin of her water-wings.
‘How d’you fink Santa –’
‘Think.’
‘How d’you think Santa Claus would of got here?’
Tony ignored her. The tip of his tongue showed as he ran a fine line of glue along a join. The pump, which had been tonking steadily, coughed and gave out.
‘D’you fi– think he would of come in a boat? Or would he of come over on the ferry? And if he came on the ferry, it only comes over in the daytime, so …’
‘He’s not real.’
‘What?’
‘He’s not real. Santa Claus isn’t real. He’s just pretend.’
Laurie looked at Tony fixedly. And then out at the river, which was suddenly vast. It was as if she had turned around and seen that everyone had rowed away to the other side and left her behind. She spoke distantly.
‘He’s not pretend. He’s real. I don’t believe you.’ She could hear her mother calling to her father downstairs as they went about their chores. She’d be hanging out the nappies, and Miranda would be playing with the clothes pegs on the grass. She didn’t look at Tony. ‘You’re fibbing,’ she said. But even as she spoke, the sharp grief she had felt at his words was ebbing away, becoming dry land. What was left was a sadness, not just for herself, but, it seemed, for all the world.
Tony shrugged. ‘Believe what you like.’
She felt a pulse of loyalty, then, to the fallen idea – a notion that it was shameful to let it go so easily. She slid down off her bed. Downstairs, the pump gave a feeble throb, and was silent.
‘I’m going to ask.’
Tony looked anxious. ‘No, don’t,’ he said.
‘I am.’
She ran off through the kitchen, down the stairs and around the side of the house to the tank, where her father was staring at the pump, muttering.
‘Daddy, is Santa real?’
He looked up for a moment and then went on with his work. ‘Course he is, Tiddler.’
‘But Tony says he isn’t!’
Laurie’s father looked at the bush. Then he called to her mother, over at the line. ‘Rosie? You can handle this one.’ And he turned away.
iii
‘Say, Mum,’ Tony called, twiddling the knob of the kitchen door as he waited.
There was a sound of stirring from the bedroom, then: ‘Yes?’ They were having a snooze, Mummy and Daddy, lying there on the bed in their underclothes, too hot to pull up a sheet. Miranda was kicking the rattles strung across her cot.
‘We’re going for a walk.’
Muffled discussion, then: ‘Where to?’
‘The old landing.’
‘Well, watch you don’t fall in,’ their father called. ‘Laurie? That means you. You hear me?’
‘Yes.’ Laurie, hanging onto the banister with both hands, was hopping down one step and back.
‘Wear your hats.’ Mummy again. ‘That sun’s scorching. And zinc on noses and insect repellent too. Tony? Have you put zinc on Laurie’s nose?’
‘Yeah,’ called Tony, and to match the facts to the answer he motioned Laurie quietly back to their verandah bedroom, where the pot of zinc and the bottle of citronella oil stood among the clutter on the dressing table. He stood on tiptoe to see into the crazed mirror and applied the zinc to his nose and cheeks. It made a blaze on his dark skin, a cross of white war paint.
Then he turned to Laurie to prepare her likewise. She presented her face to him, keeping still as he worked, and he pulled a long face in unconscious sympathy. Tony’s eyes were dark and shiny and shaded by sooty lashes. They made Laurie think of glossy, black-brown loquat seeds.
He wiped his fingers on the seat of his pants and unscrewed the top of the citronella bottle. They smeared the pungent oil on their arms and legs. It stung on Laurie’s bites, which were raised and red and crusted with dried weep. She wondered if it stung on Tony’s crisscross welts as well.
‘Watch out ya don’t get it in your eyes,’ Tony said in an undertone. ‘I’m not having you tagging along if you’re gunna be whingeing all the way.’
‘I won’t,’ Laurie whispered back. Her eye was suddenly itchy and she rubbed it carefully with the clean inside of her wrist.
Tony clamped a hat on Laurie’s head and another on his own as they tiptoed through the house and down the steps.
They passed the little boatshed with a longing look. It had a mini tramway running down to the water, and inside was a cradle-thing on a trolley, and a winch, and oars on the rafters and ropes and other, unnamed, things hanging on nails. The sand floor was soft underfoot, and daylight came through nail holes in the roof.
But they were forbidden to play there. They were going to the landing.
The track wound along the riverbank through the paperbarks. It ran level and even, dappled by shade, smoothed by the tramp of other feet and cooled by the seep of moisture from the nearby swamp. Wiry grasses grew among the tree roots, and the scrambling snake vine, showing its big buttercup-yellow flowers to the patches
of sunshine, raised its tendrils from the ground as if about to strike. No birds were singing, but every now and then cicadas screamed in their ears.
‘Now you gotta do what I say, Laurie,’ Tony instructed. ‘You stay behind me.’
‘Why?’ A skip had got into her feet, but then she saw that Tony’s pace was no-nonsense, and she matched her step to his.
‘Didn’t you hear? You might fall off the landing and get drowned. Or …’
‘What?’
‘Could be crocodiles. So.’
Tony halted to peel off a strip of soft bark and, stuffing his hat down the front of his shirt, wound the bark around his head like a bandage. His dark hair stuck out the top cannibal-fashion.
‘I’m a war-wounded,’ he said. With his stand-up hair and his war paint, he looked wild.
‘I am too,’ said Laurie, casting around at the tree trunks for some bark for herself.
‘I copped a bullet in the head when I was saving my mate. Who had his legs blowed off.’
Laurie thought of the one-legged man who sat on the stool in the Finney’s lift with his fingers in the steel grate, singing his directions on two sad notes: ‘Manchester-furnishings-to-the-right-children’s-wear-footwear-to-the-left, ladies’-lonjeray …’
‘I’ve got a VC.’ Tony spoke into his chest as he adjusted his bandage, which would not stay tied.
‘Me too,’ said Laurie. She pulled at a likely strip of bark, but it came away in stringy pieces.
‘The bullet went in one side of my head and came out the other,’ Tony explained matter-of-factly. He had given up on the bandage and was flapping it at the trees as they passed.
Laurie stopped to examine a Christmas beetle. It crawled stupidly on the sand, shiny green-gold and brighter than a bottletop. She wagged her head experimentally. More green in one light, more gold in another. Tony picked it up and sat it on his arm, where it clung with all six stumpy legs.
‘Now I’ve got second sight,’ he said. ‘Because of the holes in my head.’
‘What’s second sight?’ Laurie nudged the beetle with her finger.
‘It’s like X-ray vision. When you can see things no one else can see.’
Laurie considered. ‘I can do that too,’ she said.
She took the beetle and placed it on a leaf. It lifted the hard shiny cases that hid its small wings and, after a moment’s hesitation, voomed away.
The old landing was a place that drew them in a way they couldn’t explain. It was in a small cove just before the start of the mangroves and almost hidden from passers-by on river and shore. A little sandy beach curved beneath a paperbark that hung out over the river. Where the beach ended in a grassy bank, a few rotting piles crusted with oysters and tubeworms stepped with shivery reflections into the river, and some remaining planks formed a convenient platform for dropping a hand-line at high tide. The trace of other lives made Laurie thoughtful.
‘Who’s Gran’ma Morgan?’ she asked. Nan and Dossie were her grandmas. People only had two.
Tony found a stick and hurled it into the river. He followed it with another. ‘Tell ya one day,’ he said. ‘When yer bigger.’
‘When I’m five?’
A breath of breeze came off the river and cooled them.
From here they had a view of the Island, a knuckle of land that had got cut off from the shore. You could only reach it when the tide was very, very low. Even then, making the crossing was scary, because the bottom sand was mixed with mangrove mud and there was the danger of hidden razor clams that could slice through the sole of your foot clean up to the bone. The Island was big enough to grow an old, gnarled she-oak and some boobialla bushes, and once they had landed there and eaten sandwiches on a log.
Away to the east, the surf roared softly on the bar.
‘When I grow up,’ Tony began, frowning as he broke up a third stick and tossed the pieces into the water, ‘I reckon I’ll be a captain of a clipper ship …’ The pieces circled in an eddy until they were caught up by the current.
Tony did not often speak to her this way. Laurie looked for words to hang onto the closeness.
‘Like Cap’n Hook?’ she tried.
‘They get to sail around the world. And they can read where they are in the stars and splice ropes and do clove hitches and sheepshanks.’
Laurie sat on her hands, swinging her legs and thinking over these feats.
Tony heaved his stick by its thin end as far out into the current as he could. ‘Never staying here,’ he sang. His voice was distant. And then, as a whisper, ‘Not on your life.’
He had come adrift. To Laurie’s dismay, his confidences had carried him, not closer, but farther off.
Behind the old landing, through the low, scrubby patch of tea-tree and mosquito bush, and across the swamp where the trees grew tall, was a place known as the yards. Laurie had only been there once, but she still remembered it – a grassy clearing deep in the bush, shaded by enormous forest red gums.
Thinking of the yards brought her hopping to her feet. ‘Hey, Tony! What say we go to the yards?’ And there they were like a picture in her mind. Mighty trees and silence. ‘Hey, Tony? What say?’ She sprang at some low-hanging paperbark leaves.
Tony looked around for something else to throw, not answering. Then, finding nothing, he shrugged. ‘Might as well.’ Jumping down off the jetty, he led the way past the crab pots under the tree and away from the glinting river. ‘First we gotta find the corduroy road, but.’
They pushed through low scrub, flushing little brown honey eaters that scattered, scolding musically, and followed the leads of wallaby trails until they came across the rotting logs of the old corduroy road. Here the going was easier, and it was clear from the scat that the wallabies found it so too. The ground was squishy in places, where the paperbarks and sword grass grew close to the track. But then big trees took over, and their branches met overhead. Here and there a rusty-gum stood among the others, its bark coming off in strips and showing the amber trunk beneath. The air was warm and spicy and full of the hum of insects.
They passed a spool of barbed wire, abandoned at the edge of the road. It reminded Laurie of pictures she had seen of battlefields, where the barbed wire was cast about loose and vicious, just in order to tear at flesh. The barbs were for hurting. It was indecent, that twist of menace in the scrub – a betrayal of the unspoken understanding that grown-ups, as a class, would uphold kindliness.
Tony, however, was not dismayed. He had found himself a hiking stick and was whacking at the occasional weedy-looking bushes, but his shoulders were loose and his voice easy. And along the way he talked to her almost as he would to a comrade, about the cattle that had run here once, long ago.
‘Where did they go?’ Laurie asked. ‘Why didn’t they stay?’
‘Didn’t work, did it? Ticks and that. Maybe crocodiles.’
When they came to the yards they stopped talking. It was then they noticed the hush – that the bush closing behind them had shut out the murmur of the distant sea. They looked about, feeling shy, as if they had entered a grand but private place. The great grandfather trees formed a kind of circle around a grassed arena. They cast a patchy shade, and sticks lay about higgledy-piggledy beneath them.
‘Make good kindling, those sticks, eh!’ Laurie said. ‘Kindling’ was one of those words that mean business and she was proud to own it. ‘If you could get ’em home.’ She put her hands on her hips and assessed her surroundings knowingly.
It was a grassy place, broad and sunny. A few old posts, weathered back to the grain by rain and sun, marked out the shape of some plan that had long ago been given up. Most of the posts were gone or lay bedded in the grass. Only a few were still standing, dozy old stumps that leant at odd angles, sprouting wispy grass.
‘This’d be ironbark,’ Tony said, slapping his hand against an ancient post with a satin sheen and cracks for lizards to hide in. His voice had deepened with the knowledge. ‘And that woulda been the dip, I reckon.’
But Laurie had seen her chance to beat him to a log and was all cackles and sharp elbows. The log was a stage, a steed, a circus prop, all around it gone to lights, and she a nimbling dancer upon it. She was about to caper and crow when suddenly Tony was right there at her side. A backhander caught her hard across the chest, and she lay sprawled among the sticks.
Tears were just welling up when she saw that Tony’s eyes were fixed on a spot on the other side. ‘Snake,’ he hissed urgently. Something tightened in Laurie’s chest.
When he was game to venture round there, stick raised, Tony found that the snake had gone.
‘Brown,’ he announced with authority, his hand extended to keep Laurie behind him, and she accepted his word. ‘King brown.’ But she saw that his hand was trembling.
The heart went out of their exploring after that. They tried to get back the feeling they had had before – of being present in some ceremonial place. The snake was gone, and the trees were still grandfatherly against the deep-blue sky, but when Laurie pulled a stalk of paspalum to chew she found that her knees were wobbly and she wanted to sit down. She went to lean on a nearby post but shrank back, her heart knocking. Who knew what it was hiding? Her ribs were sore where she had fallen against something hard in the grass. Her arms and legs were scratched, and sticky little bush flies had begun to find the blood. She reached out and clung for a moment to Tony’s arm.
All around, the bush was still.
On the way home they were silent and watchful. The sticks along the track seemed to be waiting to spring to life, the tickle of grass on their legs made them jump. Laurie could feel the eyes of lurking things on her back, but she could not turn around in case that made them real. They were in the swamp, where the water was dark and stagnant. Lying without moving. Watching her. They were all around her, those watchful eyes. Eyes that looked beneath her ribs and saw her skittish heart. X-ray eyes.
It was hot and very still. The cicadas began to scream so loudly that their ears rang. Laurie’s scratches stung. Around them the trees closed in, drab and sombre, except for strange, luminous streaks on the edge of their vision, where the rusty-gums glowed in the bush like just-ajar doors onto fire-lit rooms.
The River House Page 2