Laurie gazed at Jerry’s face in the mirror, her thoughts elsewhere. He was towering over the basin as he plied the electric razor, screwing his mouth first to one side and then the other, two fingers stretching the skin over the bones of cheek and jaw.
‘It’s complicated,’ Laurie was saying into the mirror. ‘I think Tony got some old leftie involved – financially, I mean – and now his family are up in arms. Seems like Tony’s been turning down all offers to buy and some of the others aren’t so sure. I don’t know. The rumour is the Expo lot have decided to bypass them – just squeeze them over onto the edge or something. Some of them are getting nervous that they’ve missed the boat. But it could just be the developers putting the pressure on. Who’s to know? Anyway, they’re appealing against the court’s decision and his lawyers need some kind of recompense. Tony’s got himself into hot water. Legally. Illegally.
‘So. Here’s the thing. Tony’s asked me if he can borrow some money to cover his legal fees.’ She picked a couple of loose hairs off Jerry’s shirt.
‘How much money?’
‘He’s not sure. Could be as much as twenty thousand.’
Jerry stopped shaving to stare at her reflection. ‘Oh for chrissake, Laurie! We haven’t got that kind of money!’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘You’d have to take out a loan.’
‘I said that too.’
‘Without any guarantee of ever getting your money back.’
Laurie assented mutely.
‘And Cora’s going to need financing through the Conservatorium, not to mention physio fees –’
‘Yes.’
‘And we won’t have Vit off our hands for god knows how long –’
It was Friday night. They opened a bottle of red, and – talking – drank the lot. They opened another. They discussed Tony. And Carol. Their peculiar closeness, their egoism à deux. They were unsparing of Carol’s parents – his vanity, her neurosis – yet the old pair were generous (they allowed) to a fault, giving material support to their daughter well beyond the demands of convention, harbouring her, her children and her unworldly husband long past the time when they should have been self-sufficient. They speculated about how the three generations managed to tolerate one another enough to live for years under the same roof despite radical differences in outlook and temperament – ‘If Tony’s too proud to go to the old man for a hand-out when he’s desperate,’ Jerry reasoned, with a note of moral censure in his tone, ‘how come he’s not too proud to live in his house?’ ‘Under it, really,’ corrected Laurie. ‘The flat’s completely self-contained. And they do pay rent –’ ‘Nominal!’ ‘But I suppose it rankles. It would, wouldn’t it? Being dependent.’ They ruminated about families generally, and money, about Carol’s steady job (which, really, kept them all) and Tony’s occasional ventures into paid employment. About his political commitments. His principles. His irresponsibility. About their responsibility. Perhaps there was something they could do. Perhaps they could work something out, come to an arrangement of some kind … Even though their consonants had become a little slipshod and their eyelids drooped, they yawned in concert and felt they understood each other.
There’d been no sound from the kids for some time when they went to bed. They forestalled sleep first with woozy kisses and then with lovemaking uninhibited enough to oblige them to get up afterwards and remake the bed.
Jerry felt along the bones of Laurie’s forearm. ‘You’re not brittle, my Nim,’ he said, and fell asleep.
The phone was ringing. Laurie couldn’t dig herself out of her sleep. Maybe someone would … Then she was standing naked in the hall, receiver to her ear. Dennis came padding in from his mat on the front verandah and stood by.
‘I’m sorry to ring so late,’ came Carol’s voice, ‘but I thought you should know that Tony’s meeting some developers tomorrow at the River House.’ She was speaking rapidly and Laurie saw her slim tense fingers spidered on her forehead.
‘River House?’ echoed Laurie dopily.
‘Laurie, he’s going to sell it.’
Unwelcome wakefulness coursed through Laurie’s body. ‘What’s this?’ she said.
Carol was jabbering on, explaining things. Laurie felt dust in her veins.
‘Tell him not to,’ Laurie said, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. ‘We’ll work something out.’
‘I want him to ask Dad …’
‘I told you that’s not on!’ came Tony’s voice. ‘Your head’s in the clouds, girl –’
‘Go with him, Laurie!’
Go with him? But she was so tired. ‘Why? What can I possibly do?’
‘It’ll give you a chance to talk him out of it. You’ve always …’
‘Look, just – just tell him to put them off. We’ll sort something out …’
‘Laurie?’ It was Tony, brisk, angry. ‘Forget about it. Sorry. Carol shouldn’t have rung. Go to bed.’
Laurie lay awake and stared into the darkness. Should she go? Perhaps –
Tony was yelling from across the bar and she had to get to him; but the boat she was rowing kept filling with water, and Tony’s yells had turned to seagull screams, to shrill insistence, wires of silver strung through blinding –
The phone again. She rolled out of bed and crumpled onto the floor, her head against the mattress, moaning. One beat. Two. She heaved herself to her feet …
‘What ungodly hour is this?’ Jerry muttered.
Dennis had roused himself again and was waiting for her at the phone.
Carol was crying. ‘I’m ashamed, Laurie!’ she wept. ‘I can’t bear to think of Rosie’s face!’
‘I’m not going!’ Laurie announced as she crawled back into bed. ‘It’s all just too bad!’
She turned over, waiting for sleep to come. The whole thing had given her a wry neck.
‘Maybe I should go,’ she said.
‘Get some sleep,’ Jerry growled.
Laurie closed her eyes.
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I’m staying here.’
Laurie woke with a start. She shook Jerry’s shoulder gently. ‘I’m going to go,’ she said.
Jerry groaned. ‘Willis Island’s looking pretty attractive,’ he mumbled, and rolled over onto his stomach, clamping his pillow over his head.
The sun was hitting the windscreen on Tony’s side and shattering into Laurie’s skull. It forced her to turn, despite the stiffness in her neck, and look out the window at her side – at the buffer zone of berms and swales planted with the acacias, the dawn breaking onto housing estates, the flipping power poles.
‘Jerry and I went through it all. We can take out a loan for, say, I don’t know, ten thousand, or fifteen, and then there’s Miranda. She must be getting a fair bit from her paintings, and she doesn’t have the usual expenses of paying rent or owning a house, and she’s probably got some of Nan’s money left too. Nan and Grandfather’s. She makes up the shortfall.’
She could see from the corner of her eye that Tony was shaking his head.
‘I don’t want charity. I very much regret asking –’
‘No no! It’s not a matter of charity.’ Her head thumped. She wished she could rally her thoughts. ‘We get something out of it too. We get equity in the River House! It’s a very neat solution! We get the place valued and have a conveyancer draw it all up so that –’
‘Laurie. Do you know how much land is locked up there? It’s over a hundred acres. This is a huge deal. We stand to make –’
Laurie turned and looked at her brother. Rays of sunlight needled her eyeballs.
‘A huge deal?’
He glanced at her and smiled.
‘You’re looking at me as if I’d grown a second head,’ he said evenly.
‘They’re not words I ever expected to hear come out of your mouth.’
‘I’m aware of the way capitalism works.’ He glanced at her. ‘Do you want some music?’ he asked, his hand on the tape deck.
She
shook her head and his hand returned to the wheel.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t suddenly swung over to the other side. I’ve been weighing things up. For a start, it bothers me rather that all that land is sitting there idle, as a private estate, producing nothing for the general good. It’s a bit, well, decadent, don’t you think?’
Laurie turned away from the sun. From the scattered shards of her understanding of her brother. ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’
‘Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. But, okay, I have to admit socialist scruples aren’t the main consideration.’
‘It’s your legal fees.’
‘It’s my legal fees and my debts – they’re considerable, Laurie, there’s no getting away from it – and my obligation to see through what I’ve started.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Cosme.’
‘Oh.’ There was the ocean, already blue. They were bypassing all the coastal towns, running almost straight, almost level through undulating coastal heath, the tyres humming on the wide, smooth surface. It was amazing how far they’d come in such a short time. Of course they’d beaten most of the traffic and could take their pick of several lanes. How royally blue the ocean was! Of all their schemes how belittling!
‘With the money we’d get, we’d be able to do some pretty adventurous things. We wouldn’t be so bloody vulnerable any more.’
‘Utopia,’ Laurie muttered.
‘What? Oh well, Laurie, that’s a convenient way of dismissing ideas without thinking about them. I’m used to copping a lot of slagging. From the left as well as the right. When you see what we do with Cosme, you won’t be so inclined to sneer.’
‘And Mum?’
‘Yes, well. That’s the big –’
‘She’s going to be very hurt.’
‘I hope she’ll get over it when she gets her share of the proceeds. See, my idea is to split it four ways. Equally. Say we get two million. That’s five hundred thousand each. Mum, you, Miranda and us. With that money, we could get absolutely top-class neurologists onto Miranda’s case.’
Laurie was silent.
He prodded her mischievously. ‘You’d be rich, sis!’
Five hundred thousand. That would pay off the mortgage, cover the physio for Cora’s leg, get Vit launched on some sort of career, she could quit teaching –
But then the prospect of losing the River House hit her again, and sickened her. The River House had always been there, and she’d thought it would go on being there, as a matter of course, all her life and beyond. She’d been wrong. Her life, it now seemed, had consisted of a slow but inexorable withdrawal of things she’d taken as given. A softening, and loosening, and coming away, of what she’d thought of as enduring.
They were approaching Broody Heads.
‘Let’s drive up the top to get a view of the whole place,’ Tony proposed, dropping into low gear for the climb.
From the heights they could see the course of the Broody River, visible as a belt of deeper green skirting Mount Baroodi, looping through the lowlands and then opening out to a broad stream under the sun. Banks of new buildings on viridian strips lined the southern shore and the complex of the lakes and canals. Below them the river, starting to take on its vivid daytime colours, its lapis lazulis and limy greens, funnelled between long rock walls into the crawling sea.
The far shore was still wild, the bush a grey drop sheet spreading away to the north. And there, close to where the channel now ran deep and green, was a small house on stumps, its windows catching the morning sun.
They met two representatives of Primax Resort Development in Teebah. In the chill and hum of an air-conditioned office, pleasantries were exchanged and an agreement reached to travel together in Tony’s car to survey the real estate in question. The senior of the two was a woman – short, past middle age and weary-eyed. She gave her name as Renée and handed them each her card. She’d flown up that morning from down south, she explained. Malcolm, her offsider, greeted them warmly, smoothing back his rough-cut hair and shaking their hands with both of his so that they could not fail to notice the large, silver-set onyx on his ring finger.
The tide was out when they made the crossing, so the drop down to the ferry and the ascent on the other side were steeper than usual. With the extra bodies on board the car was riding low, and the exhaust scraped on the ramp. The two representatives of Primax Resort Development made no comment. Laurie was in the back with Malcolm, so she could see Renée’s head turning as Tony pointed to this and that. Her hair, professionally Titian, was grey at the roots.
‘So this road goes north to Irwin’s Creek?’
‘Yes. Well, nor-nor-west.’
‘When does it hit bitumen?’
‘A few kays this side of the township. Then it’s another, oh, twelve kays west to the highway.’
‘And that’s the only other access to the property?’
‘That’s right. But nobody ever comes to our place that way. It’s mainly a forestry road now. Fishermen use it, though, to get to the northern ocean beach. There’s a track branching off to the right that skirts our land.’
Renée looked sharply at Tony. ‘So the ferry just serves fishermen? And forestry workers?’ She sounded surprised.
‘No, not just them. There are other properties upstream, and side roads run in from Irwin’s Creek Road to them.’
By now they’d left Irwin’s Creek Road behind and were winding east along the old sand track through eucalypt forest. The rusty-gums had retired into the shadows. Last time Laurie was here they were stepping forward, their trunks and limbs fiery gold and their crowns clotted with blossom. Scribbly gums, too, had stood naked, with leaf shadows on their peach-pale skin.
Tony talked as they went, drawing their attention to the different types of vegetation, explaining a little of the history. The rhythm of the car made Laurie drowsy.
‘This is all that remains of an old landing,’ Tony said, as they stopped near a few worm-eaten piles teetering in the river. The old leaning paperbark was still there, but the Island had completely gone. ‘We think the mailboat used to call in here with provisions.’
Further on, they turned off onto the corduroy road that crossed the swamp to the old stockyards. Somewhere here was a spool of barbed wire, rusting to nothing among the reeds. Laurie recalled how it had shocked her. She remembered the feeling of betrayal, the child’s dimly sensed awareness that the barbs were material evidence of malice, not by one faltering adult, but by a whole system of industry: the dreaming up and working out and agreeing on and getting done.
When they got to the stockyards Tony turned the engine off so that they could listen to the silence.
‘Eucalyptus tereticornis,’ he said, and by their noble presence it was understood he meant the trees.
‘We’ve speculated that this may have been the site of a bora ring, haven’t we, Laurie?’ He turned to smile at her inclusively. ‘Before dispossession.’
There was a pause. ‘Well,’ said Malcolm, looking out the window, ‘it’s turning out quite warm after all.’ And that was all he or Renée said for some time.
Coming back, they could smell the river before they saw it. See its light on the leaves. Then glimpses of the river itself, at this angle milky blue through the trees.
Another sidetrack took them through wallum heath to a grassy paddock. Ranks of paperbarks, becoming pencil sketches where salt had once intruded or a fire passed, stood back and gave the place over to the sun and cicadas.
‘This was infested with groundsel back in the fifties, but we cleared it all out with the sweat of our brow.’ He was backing the car, turning around. ‘To the house? Where we can look at the map?’
To the house, they agreed.
Firetail finches rose in flurries as they passed. Brown honeyeaters issued their silvery warnings, claiming against all comers the blue-leaved branches of the stunted scribbly gums. With each tree noticed, with each twittering
bird, the desert of the future grew more parched. Laurie longed to close her eyes, but she felt, at the same time, an obligation to keep them open, to imprint on her memory a detailed inventory of this quicksilver place.
‘Is that a crane?’ asked Malcolm, squinting into the swamp at a tall, motionless bird.
‘A heron, I think,’ Tony replied. ‘Would you say, Laurie? She’s our biologist. There are stories that there were brolgas here in the fifties.’
‘Do you have koalas?’ inquired Renée.
‘Koalas, swamp wallabies, bandicoots, sugar gliders …’ Tony assented. ‘It’s an ideal place for an eco-resort.’
They had passed into the cool patch now, where the trees grew tall and the track beneath the tyres was damp and spongy and dappled with leafy light. And then they were out in the open, with the river broad and shining to their right, and the yard and shed and boathouse swinging into view, the lemon tree, and, perched on creosoted stumps above a bank newly reinforced with sandbags, its weatherboards patched and variously painted – the River House.
Refreshed with glasses of tank water (scrutinised for wrigglers), they all gathered at the verandah windows overlooking the river, which swept by deeper, greener and closer than it had in days gone by. Laurie drank thirstily.
‘Why the sandbags?’ Malcolm asked.
‘The main channel’s shifted over here since they put in training walls, so we lost a bit of bank. But it’s stabilised now. The sandbags are precautionary.’
Pleasure craft were busy on the river. Tinnies whined through the maze of navigation beacons, launches with overweening bows ploughed the deeper channels and skiffs, catching the breezes on the reach, went skimming on a zigzag course as far upstream as Teebah. Overhead, pelicans circled, achieving grace with height.
Renée surveyed it all, the river light draining the colour from her face and throwing into relief the bags under her eyes. ‘So that’s Baroodibah over there?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Tony, ‘that’s Baroodibah. It’s a far cry from the sleepy little place it used to be.’
The River House Page 30