The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  Laurel idly watched her kneeling there in her rolled-up red pants, her little square shoulders silhouetted against the window’s light. The house seemed to have returned to its natural silence, its inwardness, as if they and time did not exist.

  When a watery sun came out they stretched, blinked and wandered outside. It was not long before they found themselves at the old landing. That was exactly how it was – they found themselves there, as if they’d gone to sleep and woken up there, their minds adrift, pitching sticks into the river and watching disconsolately for squid.

  It was surprising how limpid the colours were, though. Pale sapphire, tender green. The gusts of wind were fresh in their faces. The old paperbark hung over the river, the raindrops on the she-oaks sparkled. And over on the Island –

  ‘Tony –’

  Tony was on his stomach, his head hanging over the edge of the landing, trying to prise oysters from the timbers. He didn’t reply.

  ‘Tony,’ Laurie said again. There was a note in her voice that got his attention.

  ‘What?’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘Somebody’s built a cubby on our Island.’

  Miranda slipped down off the post she’d been sitting on and came over to Laurie. ‘Where?’ she asked.

  Tony had roused himself and was sitting up, frowning.

  ‘See?’ Laurie bent her head in the direction of the Island. ‘There. Where we had the picnic that time.’ Her voice was quiet, but there was outrage in her heart.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  The plan was this: they’d go back to the house and fetch the dinghy, towing it from the shore until they reached the cove. That way, Tony would not have to row any distance against the current. Then he would jump aboard, cross to the Island and have a good look around. They spoke of these things gravely, but with a shiver in the spine.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Laurie declared firmly.

  ‘Me too,’ said Miranda.

  Laurie and Miranda found the oars under the house and half-carried, half-dragged them to the shore. Meanwhile, Tony was battling to right the dinghy, which was overturned in the spinifex. Its hull, wet from the rain, was gleaming in the wan sunlight. With straining muscles the three of them heaved the boat over. Feeling warm then, despite the chill, gusty wind, they shed their jumpers and tied them round their waists. They stowed the anchor in the bow and pushed and dragged the boat down the shore, past where the Cockle lay beached, leaving a furrow in the sand. When the dinghy reached the river it slapped gratefully into the water and bobbed there in time with the wash.

  Towing the dinghy was not as easy as they’d supposed. In obedience to the tug of the painter, the bow kept nosing into the beach and lodging there. Tony had to pay the rope out to shove the boat clear. And the incoming tide, which Tony had calculated would help them, had swallowed up the narrow beach upstream. Soon Tony was wading through deepening water with his trousers rolled up above his knees while Laurie and Miranda scrambled through the undergrowth on the shore.

  By the time they’d reached the small promontory that guarded the cove, Tony had had to take to the bank, which dropped sheer away into deep water. The she-oaks grew close together here, and the flood wrack was tangled around their trunks. The going was slow. To make progress they had to clamber over piles of debris and pass the painter to each other around the tree trunks. To cap it off, the rain had started again, coming across mistily from the sea on a light wind.

  But here at last was the little beach and the dinghy edging compliantly into the shore.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Tony. ‘Tide’s stopped running.’ He was clambering on board and positioning the rowlocks.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Laurie reminded him. ‘I saw it first!’

  Tony frowned. ‘All right,’ he said. And she was already climbing in.

  ‘Me too!’ said Miranda anxiously, hopping alongside the boat and getting her trousers wet as she tried to swing her leg up over the gunwale.

  ‘Nope,’ said Tony, pushing her back. ‘You wait here.’

  ‘No fear! I’m coming too!’

  ‘Go and get your Mae West,’ said Laurie. ‘Then you can come.’

  ‘What! All the way back to the house! Not likely!’

  ‘You’ll just have to stay here, well.’

  Miranda gaped at them in disbelief. Then she plumped down on the beach and threw a handful of sand into the water. ‘You two always get to do everything. I just get – abandoned.’ And tears welled up in her eyes. She looked at them through her tears. ‘I’ll swim,’ she said darkly.

  Tony looked out across the channel to the Island. Not much more than a stone’s throw away. The water in the channel lay brimful and still, breathing against the shore. A whimbrel poked about among the mangroves on the Island. Mists of rain.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Tony. ‘Okay, come.’

  It was never clear what happened. They were out on the channel, and the Island was just ahead. Laurie could see crab holes in the bank and the she-oaks stirring. She was shivering and rubbing her arms. Miranda was pulling her jumper on over her head, damp though it was, and smelling like wet dog. The tide must have turned, for the character of the channel changed; the surface was ruffled now, and here and there eddies appeared, as if from an uneasiness deep down. It made it hard to keep the boat on course, and Tony had to stop to glance behind him, resting the oars like spread wings while rows of droplets ran down the shafts from the blades. He must have fumbled, dug the oar too deeply or swiped the air, for with a clunk and a clatter the oar was lost, and as the boat rocked and swung about, the oar spun slowly out of reach.

  It may have been Miranda’s scramble to retrieve the oar with her jumper only half on, or Laurie’s lunge at Miranda, or Tony’s efforts to reach the bow with the remaining oar so that he could paddle; but whatever it was, Tony, who had been on his feet, was suddenly overboard, and, as Laurie and Miranda leant out to catch his hand, Miranda with a silvery little glissando of laughter, the dinghy rose up on its side and tipped them neatly into the river.

  As Laurie lost her balance a thought came into her head, driving out everything else – a detached, faintly regretful thought that it was too cold a day for a ducking. A trivial thought, which returned to her in later hours, days, weeks in just these words: too cold a day for a ducking.

  Afterwards, her memories of those moments were jumbled. There was that first shock, like the grip of cold arms around her chest. Fear taking hold in her bones. Her glasses gone and the rain veiling everything. A sense of Miranda striking out bravely, her red pants trailing.

  The shore lay just beyond reach – a few strokes and she’d be there – but the current and tide carried her swiftly downstream and away. She wheeled her arms as she’d been taught and turned her head to breathe, but when she gulped for air, salt water choked her and burned her throat. Her trousers clutched at her legs, dragging her down. All she could do was fight to keep her head up, letting the current take her where it would. Her shoulders cramped. She whimpered, when she had the breath, out of some half-belief that someone, something, would hear her and take pity. In her ears was a roar like the roar of the surf on the bar. Darkness suggested itself to her, how it could be as soft as clouds. She beat to the surface and broke through. Too cold, she thought. Too cold a day for a ducking.

  Then her feet were touching sand, and, astonishingly, she was walking out. Walking out of the river onto the shore, leaving the river behind. The wind was cold on her then, and her teeth began to chatter. The stretch of shore was utterly strange, as if she had arrived in another land, but at the same time it was familiar. Not only the pattern of creamy sand and grey she-oaks. That piece of driftwood over there, darkened by rain – she knew that piece of driftwood. She looked back. She was on the narrow beach that curved outward a few yards downstream of the house. A sob rose in her chest. She wanted to bawl like a baby.

  She heard Tony before she saw him. He was only a few yards away, running heavy-footed down the beach
in his underpants, his clothes strewn on the sand behind him, and, oddly, he was humming – a high-pitched, singing sound, broken by the jolt of his feet. It was a moment or two before Laurie understood that he was crying. Then he was staggering through the water, waist deep, chest deep, out along the shoal that had formed where the channel veered away from the shore, and it was hard for Laurie to see him.

  He’d vanished into the greyness, and for a long moment Laurie thought he had been swept away again, but then he surfaced, not so far off, dragging something heavy that flashed a signal red.

  When they hauled Miranda up onto the sand, her eyes were rolled back and her face was blue. Hair clogged her mouth. They turned her on her side and water gushed from her mouth and nose. When they turned her back, she lay still.

  Now Tony was on his knees and rocking. Laurie thought for a moment that shock had sent him mad, but then she saw that he was doing something; there was dogged purpose in his rocking. He was pumping with the heels of his hands at Miranda’s bony chest. Her sodden jumper was rucked up, baggy and shapeless, and Laurie could see her singlet clinging to her ribs. How hard he went at it! Hard and rough, his pumping timed by sobs. Don’t hurt her! Laurie shrieked silently, her shoulders locked, hands blinkering her eyes, the idiot voice in her head still repeating, Too cold. Too cold …

  Tony was clearing the hair from Miranda’s mouth, pumping again. His shoulder blades stood out sharply from his back, his face was fishy grey and his elbows shook, and all the while the reedy humming did not cease, almost as if some part of him believed that he could sing the continuance of life. The cold sent such shudders through Laurie that as she watched, the ground tipped sideways.

  Things got dreamy, then. The two figures on the sand before her, one crouched and active, the other laid out and still, got smaller, became a distant spectacle that hardly concerned her at all. Then she was running down the track, and a sound was coming from her mouth too – not a cry, exactly, but a single tone, high, unowned, like the wind in the power lines.

  Miranda was vomiting when Laurie and her parents reached her. Froth poured from her mouth, but her eyes didn’t open and only a kind of twitchy hollowing in her middle showed that some muscle there had remembered the trick of life.

  They took off her clothes and wrapped her in a blanket. Soon it was smeared with pink, foamy vomit. Doug carried her to the car and laid her on the back seat with her head cradled in her mother’s lap.

  Later Laurie could remember little of the drive to the hospital – just an impression of the three of them, Dad, Tony and herself, packed into the front seat, straining forward, and from the back the smell of briny sick.

  They were confined to a small waiting room, distracted by the coming and going of nurses and the bursting open of doors, followed by vast, aching silences. Rain outside, on an ordinary Teebah street. At some stage, in the late afternoon, there was confused discussion that Laurie could not follow, and then she was in the car again, with Dad and Tony, and Mum was staying behind.

  Night had come when they reached the house. The toffee tray was still sticky from another life. They packed all their things by lamplight and loaded them into the car. While she and Tony waited in the car, Dad went to winch the Cockle up into the boatshed and padlock the door. The rain had ceased and the moon was out. It was past midnight. Through the she-oaks the river lay pale and still.

  The headlights circled the yard – picked out the stairs, the tank, the gaping shed – and found the track that led off through the bush.

  In the swamp, veils of tiny, jigging lights appeared like dreams among the trees, sometimes gauzy, sometimes as thin as string. Fireflies, Laurie thought, as she tried to stop the downfall of her lids. They kindled in her an answering cloud of something that once would have been happiness.

  Then they were gone. Everything was simplified by darkness.

  And then she must have slept.

  Doug had made arrangements with George the ferryman to meet them and carry them across, and in the dark he was waiting for them. Night and the trees crowded down to the water’s edge, and nothing but a half-seen trace of faintest light showed that they were crossing.

  The car stalled briefly as it left the ferry and started to climb the bank. Gloop gloop went the wash as the ferry settled back higher in the water. Once, twice. That’s it, said the cold river. I’ve got nothing more to say.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Sleep of Reason

  i

  August–November 1953

  Miranda’s head rolled on the pillow. ‘Stars,’ she rasped, and closed her eyes.

  She slept a lot, leaving them sitting there, listening to the work she made of breathing. Her nostrils flared and her breath came in grunts, each breath hard up against the one before.

  Taking turns, her parents left the room to weep.

  Sometimes she woke and looked at them, unseeing. Against the white pillow, her face was grey. Then for a moment her eyes would focus. ‘Been dreaming,’ she’d pant, and sleep again.

  Now and then her chest jigged, as if a small animal had woken inside the coop of her ribs and was trying to get out – and there would be that wracking cough again. A sigh of vinyl upholstery as everyone half-rose from their seats, and her mother leant across and stroked the fringe from her forehead.

  When the coughing gave out, her head lolled against the pile of pillows and her eyeballs rolled up like a ghoul’s. The hectic colour faded, leaving her face clammy and pale. They were all pale, shades of pastel in a pastel room.

  Once she smiled, opening her eyes a crack and said, clear as a bell, ‘It’s just leaves on the verandah.’

  Her mother leant forward. ‘What was that, dear? What did you say?’

  Miranda, silent, smiled her sly smile.

  At intervals, the rest of them would leave the hospital and cross the street to the Teebah Refreshment Rooms. There they ate toasted ham sandwiches at a small table covered with sticky oilcloth. Everything stuck to it – salt cellar, sugar bowl, fingertips – coming away with a click. The oilcloth, the smell of boiled milk, the street they crossed, the poinciana leaves that lay like confetti in the wet gutters – all this became deeply familiar, as if they’d been coming here for years. As if this would be their life.

  Then they’d return to their bedside watch, to the child coughing, drifting in and out of sleep. Miranda’s phrase kept going through Laurie’s mind. It’s just leaves on the verandah, it went, never making sense.

  It was hard to sit still with nothing to mark the time but the altering angle of the window light and the nurses changing shifts. Laurie invented reasons to get up and move about – needing a drink of water, the lavatory. Once her mother was there too, staring into a mirror where her face showed white and ugly, like a candle melting. Once Laurie went outside and played hopscotch on a chilly bit of pavement behind the hospital. Until she found herself humming, and guiltily stopped. She went inside and walked on penitent feet along the quiet corridor, back to the ward.

  Already it was hard to believe what had happened. Miranda was safe and dry and tucked between hospital sheets. Mummy and Daddy were there. Doctors and nurses were coming and going.

  Everything would be all right.

  At home, visitors came. The men grasped Tony’s shoulder and nodded wordlessly or gave him a respectful sidelong wink. The women brought colouring books and jujubes, tender expressions and hushed advice.

  The pneumonia passed, and now when people came they looked disconcerted to find Miranda down the back yard, swinging from her monkey bar.

  ‘Did your brother really save you?’ asked the kids at school in awed voices.

  ‘I died,’ answered Miranda airily, ‘and Tony resuscitated me.’ And she moved majestically among them.

  Nor was Laurie above raising her social stocks by referring now and then to her sister’s intimacy with the mysteries of dying, and her own role in her rescue. Even Carol and Ursula shone a little in the reflected glory, escorting their friend throug
h flurries of hangers-on and probing sceptics.

  Tony should have been basking in the praise, the notice that grown men took of him, but something was amiss with him; he was awkward, sullen. Laurie guessed that he was having dreams. She was too. In them Miranda rolled in the river’s wash. Among his elders, Tony’s unease – his mumbling, his failure to meet their eyes – was put down to embarrassment.

  Miranda sped to her recovery with gymnastic grace, delivering to her family an account of her experiences under the water that was joyful – even, it sometimes seemed, nostalgic.

  ‘The brain deprived of oxygen,’ Dr Fearnley explained, ‘commonly enters into a phase of euphoria, during which the subject may well see coloured lights. A peculiarly merciful quirk of physiology, I always think. You can thank your lucky stars –’

  Miranda peered into her sister’s face. ‘You’re not Lol any more,’ she observed.

  ‘Huh?’ said Laurie.

  ‘Your new glasses.’ Miranda cocked her head first on one side, then on the other, studying her. ‘You’re someone else.’

  Laurie went to the bathroom mirror to see for herself.

  Of course the new glasses were different from the ones she’d lost, but the rest of her was much the same. The same bush of sun-bleached hair, the same face staring.

  And yet …

  She turned her head this way and that, the light on her glasses blanking out one eye and then the other. Perhaps her cheeks were not as round. Perhaps there was a lengthening about her jaw. Perhaps, under her skin, she was more knowing than she had been before.

  Laurie muttered to herself as she worked. The bookshelf under the window was empty and ready for her specimens. Marine to the left, it would be, and terrestrial to the right. Marine: sea-urchin skeleton, sun-whitened and frail; several bits of mother-of-pearl; sponge, still shedding sand; almost perfect paper nautilus; lace coral; janthina snail, fading from indigo to white; screw wentletrap. Terrestrial: four harlequin bugs; Christmas beetle; rhinoceros beetle; Jezebel and wanderer butterflies; wasps’ nest; python skin.