The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  ‘Well, Snow Harris said we didn’t have a dad and then he said everyone knew he was a Yankee.’

  A red spot appeared on her mother’s cheek. And something about the pale freckles on her arms and her slight stoop and that red spot on her cheek made Laurie feel an ache of tenderness for her.

  ‘That’s nonsense, Laurie,’ she said tightly. ‘You must take no notice when people say foolish things. Now. Let’s get these peas finished. So we can have some peas and quiet, hey?’

  ‘I’m saying it coulda been that whack across the face.’ Doug was sitting on the bed peeling off his socks. He didn’t look at Rosie as he said this, but coming to the doorway Laurie could see her mother’s face showing pale and mask-like in the mirror. Laurie hung back, out of the light.

  Rosie was working cold cream over the bones of her face, her head tilted back. Her mouth, a round O like a clown’s in a sideshow alley stall, slowly closed into a line.

  ‘See what I’m saying?’ Doug said into the silence.

  When Rosie spoke, her teeth showed yellow against the stark white of the cold cream.

  ‘There was no injury,’ she said coldly.

  Doug balled his socks and lobbed them into the dirty-clothes basket.

  ‘Well, all I’m saying is –’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ Rosie said.

  ‘Can I see? Let me see.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘I wanna see. Please.’

  Tony lifted the lid, tucking it into his stomach to get it open. He breathed heavily, and compressed his lips, and looked at Laurie with a stern, remote expression. The box gave off a dry, raisiny smell. Laurie peered in.

  The box held several objects that Laurie recognised as army memorabilia: a rising-sun badge, two metal discs on leather thongs, some patches of fabric, a couple of strange coins, a small booklet, and some medals, one of which was a gold star hanging from a piece of striped ribbon.

  ‘Is that a Victoria Cross?’ Laurie asked, picking up the star. It could be, she thought, because there were stars in the Southern Cross – on the flag and in the sky too.

  Tony was about to say something, and then stopped. His mouth stayed briefly open. Then – ‘Yeah. No. That’s what I thought, too,’ he said, as he took the star from her and returned it to the box.

  There was a photo at the bottom, but Tony snapped the lid shut before she could see.

  ‘Why can’t I see?’ asked Laurie.

  ‘You’re too nosy.’ Tony turned his back on her and, using a partly opened drawer as a toehold to give himself extra height, reached up and pushed the box up onto the top shelf of his wardrobe. When he looked around again he saw her still there.

  ‘Get lost, Laurie!’ And so saying he gave her a shove and slammed the door.

  She’d seen things like these before, in Daddy’s desk drawer, where he kept an old silver-inlaid cigarette box and a stone spearhead. There were even some small brass cartridge cases that whistled mournfully when you blew into them. And up on the mantelpiece was a high-prowed outrigger canoe with a crew of tiny men in headdresses, all made of cloves packed tightly together and giving off a spicy, medicinal scent. Things from the War. It seemed strange to her that Tony should have his own little hoard, and that it should be secret.

  He was out at Cubs on the drizzly afternoon that Laurie went trespassing. Miranda, taking advantage of a break in the rain, was on her tricycle, flogging it along the gravel path, bearing down grimly on one pedal at a time. Laurie could hear her loud grunts, and the crunch of the gravel as it yielded. Rosie was lying down with a headache and the blind drawn. Doug was – somewhere. Down the back, perhaps, hacking at the Rangoon creeper that each year claimed the old chook run, or repairing the flitch-wood fence, or sawing dead branches off the mandarin tree and daubing the wounds with limewash.

  Tony’s room was a corner of the verandah closed off with wooden slatted blinds that rattled when the wind blew hard. The bathroom was right through the wall, and if you lay on Tony’s bed you could hear the lavatory flushing and the gurgle of water in the pipes and the private sounds that people make when they’re in the bathroom alone.

  Laurie had ventured here before to handle in seclusion the exotica of boyhood. There were broken things, half-finished things, collections of things – a cardboard periscope, a shanghai, a magnifying glass, a piece of offcut with Tony’s initials burnt into it, a bag of marbles, which Tony was now and then seen to joggle with miserly fondness and then empty out, spilling cat’s eyes, aggies, bombies onto the bed. Laurie knew she trod clumsily here, like an Englishman among the tribes. But she understood, as he, the Englishman, would have too, that the meaning of these things was hidden in the otherness of someone else’s mind.

  The wardrobe was a tall, walnut veneer affair that scraped the ceiling. Woollen jackets and raincoats were stored there, as well as Tony’s things. When she climbed inside to try to reach the shelf that ran across the top, smelling mothballs and perished rubber, she could do no more than tip the underside of the shelf with her outstretched fingers. The chair would give her most of the height she needed, but as she was moving it a tube of Tarzan’s Grip hit the floor with a whack. She stiffened, but there was no sound of stirring from her mother’s room. With the chair in position, she climbed up, all the while conscious of the back of her neck, as if the nerves there might serve as eyes.

  The daylight showed through the blinds in dull metallic bars. Just along the verandah, the downpipe dripped tiredly, and from the back came the tuneless sound of tinking and tonking. Miranda had abandoned the tricycle and was at the piano again. Laurie could hear her singing a little ditty in a sweet falsetto as she fingered the keys. Time had not stopped, exactly, but it seemed to have gathered around the moment, as if something of the past and what was to come had assembled there.

  Laurie was still too low to see anything much on the shelf, just the impression of a pile of junk – old jumpers, comics, pieces of a balsawood aeroplane. The box she was looking for must have been pushed towards the back. She felt with her fingers as far as she could reach, but they came upon nothing likely except the broken frame of a kite. For a moment she let her arms fall to her sides, discouraged. A silverfish swam in a zigzag down the wall. Then she spied the badminton racquet behind the raincoats, and with that she probed about above her head until it met something solidly resistant. Biting her lip, she levered the object towards the front of the shelf and, discarding the racquet, gingerly manoeuvred it into her hands.

  It was a pleasing box to hold, neatly made of a dark wood that would once have been polished, with dovetail joints and a snugly fitting, bevel-edged lid. On the lid was a faded label in an oval shape, with a border of what looked like gilded rope enclosing something in reds and blues. When Laurie worked the lid open, holding it against her stomach as Tony had done, a raisiny smell rose up to her.

  There were the badge, the discs, the medals, the little book, the coins. And under them all, at the very bottom, a photograph. It was a studio portrait of a dark-haired man in uniform, the cheeks carefully tinted with delicate pink, the black-lashed eyes with chocolate brown and the uniform with soft khaki. The slouch hat gave him a rakish air despite the moody gaze.

  Laurie examined the photograph with a frown. Then she returned it to the box, taking superstitious care with its placement, and edged the box up onto the shelf, using the handle of the racquet to push it as far back as she could.

  She had seen that face before.

  Thoughtfully, Laurie replaced the chair and closed the wardrobe door. She tiptoed along the verandah and down the creaking hall to the living room, where the dusk of evening had come early.

  In the bay window, under the dusty rose curtains, there was a lidded seat in which blankets were stored, and along with them a few oddments, including old photo albums. It displeased her mother to have the arrangement of the cushions there disturbed, so Laurie was careful to be quiet as she raised the heavy cedar lid. Out came camphor fumes and a musty
whiff of old papers. She pushed the blankets aside, lifted out a big, tattered album – taking care to gather together all the pages, for they had slipped away from their cord binding – and sat on the floor with it.

  Loose photos sifted down onto her lap, and she examined them first, the parade of stiff, old-fashioned figures and fat babies in lace bonnets. There were shiny old cars, too, with canvas tops, and men in wide-bottomed trousers standing with one proud foot on the running-board, and a solemn family group ranged ordinally against a potted palm. Then she opened the album.

  It was a traditional type of album: photos fixed in place with embossed corner mounts on sooty-toned leaves as thick as blotting-paper – suggestive of the past as a dark, absorbing sky, the images showing like cracks in the firmament of time that for a moment long ago had let the bright light through. Some of the photos were tiny snapshots, arranged diagonally on the page. Laurie squinted at them. They were of houses, and women in picture hats, and young people linking arms in front of mountaintop vistas. Here and there she recognised her grandmother, or an uncle, or her mother, looking dreamy. On another page was a larger shot of her fresh-faced father in tennis whites under some monkey-nut palms, with his arm around the waist of a girl with shingled hair. Not her mother. These pictures made her feel she had come adrift, though this could have been the effect of the shadows collecting in the room and the low sky outside.

  There were men in uniform, her father mostly, posing before beds of gerberas and on front stairs. And some tiny shots of soldiers against bleak backgrounds of barracks or Nissen huts in flat, treeless landscapes, and one of some men with bare, white behinds in the act of jumping into a water-hole. The gathering effect of all these photos was a pang almost of homesickness, but for a time rather than a place, a time that she seemed to remember, though she hadn’t been born.

  Then she came upon an empty page – empty, that is, except for four corner mounts where a large photo had been removed. Laurie considered the dusky space thoughtfully. It would exactly fit the photo in Tony’s box. And opposite, among a collection of other army shots, was a photo of three grinning soldiers standing with hands on hips – her father in the middle, a tall, thin, hook-nosed fellow on the left, and, on the right …

  ‘What are you up to, Laurie?’

  Laurie jumped. Her mother was standing in the doorway in rumpled shorts and blouse, raking her hair back off her forehead.

  ‘Just looking at photos,’ said Laurie, caught cross-legged, pins-and-needles in her foot.

  Her mother dropped her hand. The hair on top of her head was left standing on end. She crossed the room, her bare feet showing pale in the grey light, and stood over her daughter. In Laurie’s foreshortened view, her mother’s face was strange and sphinx-like, looking down at her.

  ‘You have no business getting into these things, Laurie,’ she said, her voice low. She gave Laurie’s shoulder a tap. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made!’ And indeed it was surprising how far across the floor the photos had spread. ‘No! Leave them!’ she said sharply as Laurie scrambled about on spider’s legs, trying to gather the loose photos together. ‘Oh for goodness sake! Go. Go!’

  Tears sprang stinging to Laurie’s eyes as she got to her feet and stumbled to the door. Hurt tugged at the corners of her mouth. She threw an injured glance back into the room. Her mother was squatting amid the litter of photos, tidying them mechanically. Some of them had caught the light from the window and were agleam. Laurie saw her mother lift her head, and the window light was white on the sliver of forehead, cheekbone and chin that was all she could see of her face.

  ‘There are photos enough in the sideboard,’ she called, wearily. ‘Laurie? You hear me? The albums are in the sideboard.’ Her hands returned to sorting. ‘There are enough photos there to keep you amused for –’ She broke off with a ragged sigh. ‘Hours on end,’ she finished. Speaking to herself.

  iii

  June 1953

  Myopia … ophthalmologist … retinal detachment … astigmatism … By these words was Laurie singled out, raised up and made glamorous. She was favoured by morning or afternoon absences from school; she was admitted to inner rooms where pinpoint lights entered her eyeballs and cool instruments made readings.

  She walked out of the classroom in her pleated skirt and beret, taking her mother’s gloved hand, down the stairs and across the empty schoolyard to the gate, where the hoop pines waited. As they passed the other classrooms she could hear the sound of sing-song recitation and teachers scolding. And then she was out in the large world, sitting in the front seat of the car with the winter sun coming in. Her mother had kicked off her high heels and drove in her stockinged feet. She drove with concentration, checking the rear-vision mirror, thrusting her arm out stiffly to signal a stop or right turn, talking herself through changes of gear and, without taking her eyes off the road, giving Laurie small, encouraging smiles.

  They drove to a terrace above the city, where enormous fig trees lifted the pavement, and were shown by a receptionist in rubber-soled shoes into a room whose door closed softly …

  What all these absences, shinings, measurings and calculatings produced was a pair of spectacles, precisely correcting the quirks of Laurie’s sight. A countable asset, as good as a gold tooth, they told her, with elegant green frames and flashing lenses. Tony and Miranda tried them on and reeled about like drunks. Not Laurie. Those glasses were the means by which a shortcoming in her powers, a second-rateness, was magicked away. The world at large was no longer foggy. Now her relation to it shifted. Now she was sharp-eyed.

  Sharp-eyed enough to see into the silence.

  It was compensation enough – almost enough – for the bleak knowledge that from now on her face would seem to glare, willy-nilly, whatever her thoughts.

  CHAPTER 3

  Currents

  August 1953

  ‘On top of old …’

  ‘Holden,’ said Tony neutrally, glancing up, and then returned his gaze to the Digit puzzle in his hand, where his fingers were deftly at work.

  ‘Smokey …’ sang the others raggedly.

  Tony had been keeping a tally of the Holdens they passed since they’d left the suburbs of Brisbane behind. Most of the cars seemed to be Holdens, including their own. Tony reckoned they deserved something better. A Vauxhall at least, or a Rover.

  Laurie tipped her glasses down experimentally, and then poked them back with a forefinger. For miles they’d travelled under blue skies, the shadows of forest trees falling across a road flecked by sunlight, and to her eye the flecks were as separate as sixpences. Resting her chin on the back of the seat in front of her, she could watch them ride up giddily over the bonnet of their car. Sixpences of light.

  It was the same everywhere she looked. At home in the Wiley Street house she’d got used to the sharp edges of even distant things, but as they drove north the clarity of familiar old landmarks had made the experience new again. It had taken her by surprise when the shapes of the Glasshouse Mountains rose up so crisp against the August sky; when, as they slowed for a bridge, the trees stood all decked out in individual leaves; when all about her were particularities where before there had been abstractions of colour and tone.

  Then smoke dimmed the sun. They were off the highway now, and cars – of any make – were few. They’d stopped singing. The roadside vegetation was smudged with blue, and then with dingy yellow. Laurie tricked Miranda into swapping places and leant out the window, ignoring Miranda’s heels thumping her back. Her hair whipped about her face in the gush of smoky air. Everything was hazier still and her eyes stung. She sank back into the seat. The car was travelling between walls of sugar cane whose tawny tops rustled drily above as they passed. Murky smoke hung over them, discolouring the sun, and the atmosphere they breathed was bitter with it, and cloyed with caramel.

  ‘Look!’ yelled Miranda, scrambling over Laurie to get at the window. ‘I can see fire! I can see fire!’

  They had rounded a corner and come upon a
burnt-out paddock, and through the rows of blackened canes they could glimpse the leap of hungry orange flames, and above them the billowing up of fresh, dark smoke. Burnt flakes began to drift down all about them.

  Still leaning over Laurie to get at the window, her knee digging into Laurie’s thigh, Miranda was formulating a question. ‘Would you r-a-t-h-e-r,’ she asked in a thoughtful drawl, ‘be burned up in a fire … or … hmm. Let’s see.’ Laurie pushed her off and she settled back into her seat. Then she shot forward with sudden inspiration. ‘Be buried in a coffin for the rest of your life?’

  ‘If you were buried in a coffin you’d be dead pretty quick,’ said Tony drily.

  ‘But if you had air? A tube like a snorkel to the outside …?’

  ‘Miranda,’ said Tony, ‘you’re a daffy duck.’

  In the front seat, Dad had been explaining something to Mum about the special properties of bagasse, but now both their heads turned towards the fire. Then Dad’s eyes went back to the road, which was narrow and had long blind curves and rail crossings for the cane trains, and he went on explaining, using a persuasive tone and the words ‘slurry’ and ‘lamina’, steering with one hand when the other was needed to help him express what he had to say. Mum kept looking at the drama of the fire, suddenly close, with ropes of dirty smoke writhing out of the cane, but she nodded her head as he talked.

  Bagasse was one of their private family words that other people didn’t understand. It was woven through the seasons of Laurie’s childhood as inseparably and atmospherically as the sinuous Broody River. It had the odour of molasses and the mustiness of Grandma Dossie’s sideboard drawers, for she heard it as an echo from a past beyond her own, from the vague, faraway cane farm of her father’s boyhood.

  Doug worked at Selkirk Constructions as a civil engineer, a title that suggested to Laurie’s mind an unlikely meeting of good manners and grimy overalls – though her father always came home from work with clean fingernails and no more obvious derangement of his clothing than a slight loosening of his blue-striped tie. But Laurie knew that Doug’s heart was elsewhere, was given, with fervour and fidelity, to bagasse.