The River House

by Janita Cunnington

  ‘I thought you were having tea, Doug!’

  Doug turned his eyes to his wife, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘The Yanks,’ he mused, nodding. The bottle hovered over his glass, but a fresh thought brought him up short. ‘Now they’re playing a double game. The thing is, Israel got herself embroiled there and the Brits had to go in to calm things down. More power to their arm!’ The bottle returned to his glass, but then he remembered his manners and leant over and filled Grandfather Whittaker’s.

  Israel. Laurie had seen pictures in the National Geographic of plush green orange groves set among stony hills.

  ‘Now, Dossie,’ Rosie said, teapot in hand, ‘you like a drop of milk, don’t you.’

  ‘Israel has planted orange groves in the desert,’ Laurie volunteered.

  Tony held his cricket bat across his knees and ran his hand over the silky wood. He didn’t look up. ‘There’s more to that than they let on,’ he muttered.

  Doug clapped a comradely hand on Jim’s shoulder. ‘Youth, eh, Jim! Eh?’ He gave Jim’s shoulder a pat. ‘They know everything!’ He refilled his glass at last, drank, and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. As if uneasy in his chair, he leant forward again and pointed the forefinger of his beer hand at Tony. ‘I’d just ask you young fellas to bear one thing in mind. When I wasn’t so very much older than you I was off in the jungles of –’

  ‘Okay, everyone!’ came a loud, croaky, no-nonsense voice. And there was Dossie, wheeling her arms to lift herself out of the deep armchair, her cheerfulness as resolute as her perm, her stout legs collecting drifts of wrapping paper. ‘It’s family photo time! Everybody up and line up outside where the light’s good!’ She looked about her. ‘Now, where’s my Brownie?’

  Called back to themselves, the room and the sultry afternoon as if from a trance, people were rising grumblingly to their feet, helping Great-Aunt Margot, looking around for places to leave their drinks.

  ‘How do I look, Doug?’ asked Jim, standing to attention. ‘Have I got m’teeth in?’

  ‘Wait’ll I find Eli,’ piped Miranda. ‘He has to be in it too! He’s part of the family!’

  ‘No, leave him, sweetheart. Come on,’ her mother urged.

  They were all milling towards the doors, brushing themselves down, straightening their clothes. All except Tony. He was sitting on his chair, giving sharp little flicks with his bat.

  Dossie had been a governess before her marriage, and the habits of mustering and jollying had never left her. ‘On your feet, young man,’ she commanded, and gave him an encouraging tap on the back.

  Tony shrugged her off. ‘Leave me alone,’ he growled.

  Everyone stopped. The late-afternoon sun streamed onto the verandah outside as thick as honey, and they all stood there, motionless shadows against its glow.

  Doug was staring at Tony. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘I want to see you out there,’ he said. ‘Now.’ His face was grim.

  Tony rose with an ill grace, and wordlessly they left the room.

  ‘You better knock that chip off your shoulder and learn some manners, my lad …’ Doug could be heard saying. He and Tony were almost out of earshot, so it was a surprise when Tony’s voice carried to them clearly.

  ‘Don’t call me your lad.’ His voice was icy. ‘You’re not my father.’

  Inside the house they stood as still as posts.

  ‘What does he mean?’ Miranda pleaded. ‘Mummy, what does he mean?’

  The electric fan droned in the corner, turning its head, lifting a sheet of tissue paper, letting it fall.

  Sea urchins made holes for themselves in the rock, whether by abrasion or by bitter secretions, nobody knew. But there they were, in their holes, and they fitted them snug as a glove.

  CHAPTER 6

  Catching eggs

  i

  1959

  A letter came in a windowed manila envelope, addressed to Mr and Mrs D. M. Carlyle. Laurie saw it waiting on the sideboard. When Doug got home, he took it with him to read at the dinner table, added his briefcase to the clutter on the dresser and heavily took his seat.

  This was a time when he seemed to Laurie to smell of defeat. There was a stale air about him, as if the freshness had gone out of his thoughts; though it may have been simply that, for economy’s sake or else out of apathy, he’d given up changing his shirts daily and now carried about him traces of yesterday’s moods – his ennui, his travails.

  Doug loosened his tie as he read the letter, and wordlessly passed it on.

  On a sheet of crisp Department of Primary Industries stationery the Officer in Charge informed the Person Concerned that recent surveys conducted by Department officers had identified Baccharis halimifolia, commonly known as groundsel, on Lot 12, Parish of Kabi-Kabi, in the Baroodi Shire, a property registered in the Carlyle name. Baccharis halimifolia was a Declared Weed, and, pursuant to section … (and so forth), they were required to remove it from their property within six months.

  ‘Please be advised,’ it continued,

  that in the event of a failure to comply with this order within that time, a departmental Maintenance Crew will be despatched to the site to effect the eradication, and the aforesaid property owner will be obliged to cover the full costs of the work.

  It was a loaded Ford station wagon that took the highway north, turning off at Mount Baroodi, descending the range. They’d crammed it to the roof with food, clothes and bedding, not knowing what awaited them at the house, so long abandoned. At the rear Doug had packed the tools – machetes, cane knives, a tomahawk, axe, saws, a supply of herbicide, swabs, and raincoats and rubber gloves to use as protective gear. In a corner was Eli, confined to a fishing creel and yowling his misery all the long, slow miles.

  The car was also loaded, on this journey, with knowledge Laurie had never carried with her before, and it altered everything. The excitement that had always accompanied their trips to the River House, the eager watchfulness as each landmark was spied and put behind them, came up against a demurral that ran in Laurie’s mind: Ah, yes, it ran, that sweeping view, that rock-face, now this jangling bridge – they’re here as if to greet us, as if they would cancel the years. But it’s an illusion. Their meaning has shifted and will never be the same again. Never again will they mean immemorial time, as in our childhood they did. Now they are vestiges, nothing more, evidence that those years are gone and past reclaiming.

  Dusk was falling as the ferry left them on the far shore. The car wound through the scrub, each turn declaring another stretch of track for her memory’s silent assent. Then came the smell of the river, close by, and its presence through the trees, changing from glint to shimmer to gleam. And finally the house, smaller than Laurie had remembered, and in want of paint.

  Winter and kangaroos had kept the grass down to a tussocky sward in the yard. The shed stood quietly by, and next to it the remains of the woodpile. The lemon tree bowed down with unpicked fruit. Boatshed, door ajar. Lavatory, likewise. Tank.

  They climbed out, stretching their stiff legs. The air was cold after the car’s warmth. Miranda released Eli from the creel and he shot in a spitting rage around the side of the house.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rosie reassured her. ‘He’ll be back for his tucker.’

  They began to haul the gear from the car, looking up at the house. Mounting the stairs.

  ‘Lock’s been forced,’ Doug reported over his shoulder as the door gave way to his touch.

  A smell, thick and animal, met them at the door and told them that the present occupants were mice. Within was gloom. The last of the day’s light reached the verandah windows that overlooked the river and gave the bubble glass in the corners a faint tinge of colour.

  Doug’s boot struck something solid. He felt around, dumped his load on the table just emerging out of the dusk and lit the hurricane lamp.

  At some time in the past, people had been here, and had made themselves at home. There were cigarette butts in a rusty jam-jar lid. A landing net
stood in the corner.

  ‘Squatters,’ said Doug.

  Rosie swept a floor space clear of dust and wiped the table down so that they could unload. Doug took a torch to check the Cockle.

  ‘Still there,’ he reported. ‘No sign of damage …’

  When all the household goods had been fetched from the car, they collected kindling by torchlight, raked the old bones from the firebox of the stove, made a fire there and grilled their chops. The fat spat and flared in the flames. They ate within the circle of lamplight and the warm glow from the stove, their faces lit and the rest of them in shadow.

  Eli crept in, setting each paw down warily, as if walking among thorns.

  They woke, scratching, to dust and mouse droppings and to fleas becoming dancingly visible in the morning light. A window had been broken, letting the cold August wind whistle through, and there were drifts of leaves in every room.

  Their first job was to drag out the flea-infested coir mattresses and dump them under the house. They’d have to make do – dust off the old stretchers in the shed and, if there weren’t enough for everyone, improvise a bed or two out of blankets laid on the wire-mesh bases.

  Laurie looked into the boatshed. The corrugated-iron door, which had been swinging in the wind when Doug went down, was now chocked open. Inside, the Cockle rested on the cradle where they’d left her. Leaves had collected in her, and a dusting of windblown sand, and mud wasps and spiders had made their homes in her, but she was dry and sound.

  Whoever it was had been in the dinghy, though – that was clear. It had been left up in the spinifex, open to the weather. A pool of blackened rainwater lay in the bottom, full of rotting leaves.

  They should have been outraged. Strangers had moved in, used their things, broken the window, left the place filthy. But they accepted the occupation as they did the trespass of mice. It was natural. A simple corollary of their neglect.

  ‘Plenty of water in the tank, at least,’ Tony reported.

  They set to, cleaning, fixing, tidying, sweeping. There was no end to the dust. It kept coming up out of the cracks between the lino and the walls with every pass of the broom. Fleas leapt to their legs and had them hopping too, until they dowsed the floor with a milky solution of Mortein and shut up the draughty house as best they could to let the poison do its work.

  By evening the place was passably clean, the window had been patched with ply, a good supply of wood had been split for kindling and they ate their stew amid insecticide fumes and comradely silence.

  ‘Here come the menfolk,’ Rosie called from the window, and Laurie heard the growl of the car returning. Most of the groundsel had spread in the once-cleared areas near the old stockyard, Doug and Tony reported as they slung the tools into the back, impatient to get going. Bodies shoved in, doors slammed. Doug ticked off the essentials on his thumb and fingers as he drove. Bucket, 2,4-D, gloves …

  ‘Yep … Yep …’ said Tony.

  The car bumped along the corduroy track to where the great eucalypts stood. Beyond them the groundsel grew in dense, green stands. A brief council was held and the equipment made ready. Then, ‘Okay, stand clear,’ commanded Doug.

  While Doug and Tony went at the old, towering bushes with machetes and axes, Laurie, helped spasmodically by Miranda, attacked the young growth with pruning saws and secateurs. Clad in raincoat, hat and rubber gloves, Rosie followed them through the hacked branches and crushed leaves with a bucket of herbicide and a swabbing stick, dispensing, along with the 2,4-D, a smell of bogus freshness that mimicked the freshness of sea air.

  They worked methodically in a widening circle, entering forests of weed, where the spent blossom-down was thick in the air. Though the morning had been cool, Laurie soon stripped off her jacket. She was dripping with sweat. Her glasses kept sliding down her nose and her palms were so slick it was hard to keep a firm grip on the saw. Blisters were beginning. She stopped to blow on them, eyeing with disbelief the acres still untouched.

  Off among the tall growth Doug straightened, puffed and red-faced, his machete at the ready. ‘How about giving us a hand here, eh?’ he barked at Miranda, who had left her work and was hanging ape-like from the low branch of a paperbark, but then he met a long-range glance from Rosie and did not persist.

  The days that followed were long. They were up early, worked until dark and fell exhausted into bed. Twice Doug crossed to Teebah for ice and fresh supplies, but there were no trips to Broody Heads, no roaming along the estuarine shore. They worked in the scrub, their backs turned to the river.

  Some mornings, when the dew was heavy, the whole place smelt like koala pee – a musky, furtive smell, pungent with eucalyptus, suggestive of obscure lusts that left their odours in the twinkling dew.

  Perhaps because they slept at such close quarters, rose at dawn and ate plain food, because they worked until they were dripping with sweat, with aching muscles and blistered palms, because they came hard up against the tough resistance of rampant, strapping growth that sprang away from the blows of axe or knife, and ate their evening meal scratched and dirty and too tired to talk – perhaps for these reasons they forgot the private injuries they’d nursed for years. Aside from Miranda, who entertained herself with ditties as she worked or wandered off, they rarely spoke, and when they did it was as if they acknowledged that they depended on one another, and their dependence was material.

  At dusk, as they drove back through the swamp, they would see fireflies winking singly or in clouds among the trees.

  For over a week they worked without a break, and at the end of it surveyed the results with satisfaction. Acres that had been choked with groundsel were now cleared, the weed lying in heaps, withering in the sun. Runaway infestations in the scrub had been tracked down and destroyed. Eyes primed for the apple-green, serrated leaf, they could spot the smallest seedling in the densest cover, and it gave them as deep a satisfaction to pluck it out by the roots as it would have to draw a splinter cleanly from the flesh.

  ‘Well done, troops,’ said Doug, his machete gripped at his side like a samurai sword. They stood looking out over an expanse of open paddock, quiet now except for a butcher bird piping high in a gum and the twittering of smaller birds in the surrounding scrub. The place was filled with hazy sunshine, bees droned above the fallen groundsel and the only other hint that the peace here had ever been disturbed was the counterfeit sea-tang of the 2,4-D. ‘We’ll have to have routine sorties to keep on top of it from now on, set aside a couple of days every time we come for mopping up. But for now I’d say we’re due for a break. Furlough time, eh?’

  The Ford nosed in along peaty tracks between low-growing boronia, walls of white-starred bridal bush and pinkish sprays of lemon-scented leptospermum. They’d taken a route that led away from the arena of their labours and into the spring-flushed wallum. Unseen in the scrub, brown honeyeaters hailed their passage with pulses of trilling, like crowds cheering a procession. Double-bar finches sped away through the grass and superb blue wrens chided them sweetly from the bushes. Ranged along the wires of relict fences were companies of rainbow bee-eaters, taking off after invisible insects on amber wings that looked as if the sun shone through them.

  They came to an open, level place where the heath grew low to the ground. Around it the paperbarks stood in ranks, making an amphitheatre of the space. Here and there dwarf banksias raised up flowerheads of lemon, brown and green. Stunted scribbly gums grew here in mallee form, the multiple stems showing red among blue-grey pendent leaves and the masses of white blossom crawling with bees. And there in the sunshine and the honeyed scents they spread their rug and drank their thermos tea.

  Leaf shadows scattered the words on the page. Laurie, reading a book in the scrawny shade of a tea-tree, looked up and saw her family disposed about the scene – Rosie under a big hat with her sketchpad on her knees, Tony dozing on the rug, Miranda mooning about, breaking twigs, Doug reading a week-old paper, sitting half in, half out of the Ford, his forearms resting on his t
highs and his boots planted on the heathy ground. She took off her glasses and they all – trees, shadows, family – became elements equalised by the impartial properties of light.

  Everything will be all right, now, Laurie told herself. Dad and Tony are friends now. They won’t be angry any more.

  That Christmas they went back to the River House. Once, when the fierce heat of the day had passed, they drove out along the corduroy road to check the groundsel and deal with re-growth, but mostly they amused themselves about the house, caught summer whiting from the sandbanks, or took the boat out and got to know the river again. Every few days they took the car over on the ferry and drove to Broody Heads to surf and walk the tracks around the cliffs.

  The river lay in bands of sparkling blues and greens on the day Tony and Laurie took the Cockle over to Baroodibah and hailed the aged bus to the Heads. Laurie felt long-legged and dauntless at her brother’s side, drinking milkshakes in the shade of casuarinas and scuffing along the hot, sandy streets with the din of the surf in their ears. She was almost as tall as Tony now. He was there in the corner of her eye, moving beside her with contained energy, attracting the glances of girls.

  They spent the morning among the crowds on the beach, catching waves and lazing in the sun. Some local lads had big Hawaiian boards like outsized surf mats, which they paddled out to where the breakers formed, and stood upon, and rode acrobatically to shore. All eyes were on them then, and in Tony’s Laurie saw the glint of envy.

  In the afternoon they followed the cliff tracks until they petered out in heath-covered bluffs. Somewhere along these tracks Broody Heads became theirs, as the river’s far shore had always been. Tony became narrow-eyed and knowledgeable, listening in on the comments of tourists and correcting their errors.