There were discontinuities, regions of time when the work was mechanical and there was no sense of fatigue. Then, suddenly, it took her full, begrudging strength to budge a sack. She had to heft it. Drag it by the ears. Shove it, roll it, flip it end over end. Then her exertions were puny, her heroics laughable.
What was she expecting to do? Who was there to witness her travail?
Where was Jerry?
Rain came intermittently, sweeping down and then, apparently, gone. Hands clawed. Legs shook. Once the moon came out, riding high in the northern sky, and threw a black shadow of the house on the river’s ambiguity. She thought of the strange aquarelles on the walls inside the house and wondered if she had dreamed them.
… Mrs Zebrowski? A call for you up at the kiosk … Down … down … taking the hairpin bends in low, sliding close to the crumbling verge, juddering over cattle grids, down into nightfall and the Fassifern Valley, beating a course home over sickening swells …
Something pale kept recurring on the margin of her visual field, though for a while she could not attend to its meaning. It happened when she shone the torch beam along her route to the levee. When she tucked the torch in her belt to give both hands to another bag, and dragged it in pitch darkness along the trail, that pale something fell out of memory … Until she was back, pulling the torch from her belt, shining it at the trail. At the levee.
And there it was again. What she was seeing was sand.
Laurie went down to the levee, along the trail she now knew by heart, and shone the torch onto the surface of the river. In the torchlight the water was turbulent, twisting and folding like a Leonardo study, but sepia, opaque. The current was flowing strongly again, racing for the sea, but the level had fallen dramatically, leaving an expanse of shelving sand. Wide enough to beach a boat.
She checked the levee. Three extra courses, half a fourth. A solid bulwark against the king tide. Laurie had the luxury of hours now, before the morning high, to reinforce her wall. Thinking of rest, of safety, of peaceful amplitudes of time, made her muscles go pleasantly weak. She was spent. She needed to sit. To eat.
To sleep.
Reinforcing the levee would keep. She’d go to the car and eat a bar of peanut brittle. A beef and horseradish sandwich. Sit awhile. If only she’d had the sense to bring a thermos of tea.
Then, flashing her torch in front of her, off to the side she noticed a gleam. A hint of wetness where everything should have been high and dry.
She trained the beam on it. It was just to the landward side of the wall, near the corner. Even as she watched, the sandbags there were subsiding, caving in.
In her panic to get to them, shore them up, she barked her shins on something hard and sharp amongst the junk. The torchlight showed her what she had already understood. The sandy earth was bubbling. Overflow from the swamp had made the water table rise so much that it had turned the ground to slurry.
Laurie’s heart swelled with pity for herself. To the sound of her own whimpering and snivelling, she did what she could to bolster the corner with more bags. But the pile slumped before her eyes like an indolent child.
Soon the tide would be coming in again. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster, until it was racing for this weak point, breaching all her fortifications, going for the stumps.
The house itself.
Laurie crawled out to firmer ground and stood in the open rain, letting it course over her head, her filthy clothes. Her hands hung heavy and empty at the ends of her useless arms.
Somewhere in the cavernous night behind her was the car. She found its door in the darkness. A door to an interior. Trapped smells, upholstered seats, dim overhead light, should she want it. Knobs and switches obedient to her will.
It was very still, inside the car, the sounds of wind and rain and river muted. Wet through and no longer warmed by work, she began to shiver. She pulled a towel from her bag and wrapped it around her shoulders.
For company, she turned the radio on. The midnight-to-dawn jazz program, barely audible through the interference, was interrupted by the whoop whoop whoop of a cyclone warning. Category 3, the voice announced with urgent calm, expected to cross the coast to the south of Double Island Point. An inventory of towns evacuated and roads closed. Updates from the Weather Bureau.
There were blisters on her palms. They’d begun to sting. She fingered the lump on her forehead.
Jazz again. Dave Brubeck, perhaps. Masking other wider, deeper sounds. She turned the radio off.
The river was rising. She could see it in the darkness. She could hear it. Sometimes, shivering, she fancied she could see a boat out there, coming towards her. Sometimes she thought she heard on the wind a distant cry.
… ‘Avast, me hearties!’ Jerry bawled in the rain. The tent had gone wild. They were tripping over things and each other in the darkness, falling about laughing …
Something woke her. The wind had picked up again and was roaring in the trees. There was a different quality to the darkness in front of her, an unfamiliar gape.
The boatshed was gone. The black current was very close. And by the angle of it and its smooth, powerful flow, Laurie knew it had taken a fresh course, several metres further north. Beneath the house.
She rubbed away the breath-fog on the windscreen. The house was a shadowy bulk against the flying clouds, distinguishable from the dark mass of the surrounding trees by its geometrical lines. She saw this bulk shift a little. Tilt. Sag. Settle into a new position.
And then, silently, it seemed – for the wind was howling and the distant ocean roared – it sank below the clouds, below the trees. Down into the river’s great, receiving darkness.
The old corduroy road to the stockyards was a rushing stream, but there was nowhere else to go. She was completely cut off. The ferry would have stopped running long before nightfall. The road to Irwin’s Creek would be washed out. As for the ocean shore, it would be wild, impassable even to four-wheel-drives.
Trees leant in low over the road, heavy with rain, swiping the car, slapping across the windscreen. This is for keeps. What had she meant by it, that child? To speak of her full heart? Cheat time? Or had she really been trying to buy something back? Something already lost?
She had the radio on again, and now, broken up by interference, the intimate tones of the announcer was giving her news of a pile-up on the Bruce Highway.
One dead, she thought she heard him say. Three injured.
‘The driver of one – burst of static – pulled alive from the wreck but died at the Nambour Hospital two hours later.’
What had he said? A man in his fifties? Ah no. That couldn’t be right. She’d just imagined that. She fumbled at the knob as she drove, trying to pick up a better signal. Then she lost it completely. The trees tipped sideways and her vision blurred.
Nothing but static and country music. Ah, the ABC again. No more news. Just jazz, seedy New York nightclubs. Now lost in a raging storm of interference.
She switched the radio off.
Before her the dense trees parted, stood back. Even in the darkness there was a sense of spaciousness contained. The tall trees groaned around.
With no track to follow, the car turned in a wide arc, bumping over fallen branches, and came to a standstill. Laurie turned the key and the purr of the motor died. In the silence she heard the place she’d come to, its topography drawn by sounds – the near rain, the wind in the treetops, the ocean beyond. It was as if the simplification of night had reduced existence to its elements. Air. Water. Unending motion.
A man in his fifties. She’d surely imagined that.
Even with the towel around her shoulders she was cold. Her hand reached for the radio again and when she found a signal she kept it on, as if by its feeble light and intermittent human voice it could warm her. The blisters on her palms were throbbing. Jerry gone, she thought, and the roof of the annexe still not fixed, and the guttering full of leaves. Without warning her bowels loosened so that she had to le
ave the shelter of the car and crouch in the wet darkness.
Whoop whoop whoop. The cyclone had veered off course, crossed the coast a hundred miles to the north and weakened into a rain depression. Music now. Fats Waller, marred by crackling. Cole Porter coming through. Playful, plaintive, yearning, drowsy …
… Miranda was at the piano again, when Laurie wanted a go. Shove over, she said, cramming her bottom onto the stool, bumping her sister off with her hip –
She was woken by the sound of someone pronouncing her name.
… Laurie Zebrowski … believed … by floodwaters on the northern shore of the Broody River … knowing her whereabouts …
Her heart hammered, her hand reached out … There was no means of reply.
They’re not connected, she told herself. The crash and this. She was conflating them in her mind.
A weak, wavering torchlight was approaching through the darkness. Laurie sat up and rubbed the fog from the windscreen. It was still coming. She fumbled at the dashboard and switched on the headlights. Caught in their beams was a raincoated figure, raising an arm to shield his eyes from the glare. A few stars were out in the sky above him.
Laurie pushed open the door and stumbled into an awkward, clammy embrace.
‘Thought I’d find you here,’ said Tony.
Laurie was dumb. Waiting for the words: Jerry’s dead.
They didn’t come.
‘You’re okay?’ He pulled back and peered at her face, though against the headlights he couldn’t have seen much. ‘They’re all in a panic about you.’
‘Mum said Miranda’s –’ Laurie began.
He was nodding. ‘She’s back.’
‘The house –’
‘I know. I know everything. I went there first. I know.’
And then she hoarsely wept, pulling off her glasses and burying her face in the upraised crook of her arm. Knowing he knew nothing. Not able to ask.
‘I know everything,’ he said, and chafed her back.
They took refuge in the car, throwing Laurie’s provisions and Miranda’s medication in the back to give him room, and now and then they slept. The wind had dropped and the rain fell lightly.
‘We should be able to get out in the morning,’ Tony said, out of her unquiet dream. ‘The creeks come up quickly, but they drop quickly too.’
Then he seemed to sleep.
Sleep came and took her, too, though it seemed to her that sleep was treachery.
… ‘Jerry,’ she said inside her raincoat hood, turning to him with something to say …
Sometimes when she woke she looked across at Tony’s huddled form and wondered how he came to be here. At last, when he seemed to stir, she asked.
‘Hitched a ride with SES. They had to take a boat across to a farm upriver. An asthmatic kid. I walked the rest of the way.’
‘Was it a long way?’
‘I hardly know. It seemed so. Hours, anyway. We crossed late afternoon.’
‘What about the creeks?’
‘Just swamp overflows this far south. The ones to worry about are further up. Would have been here earlier, but there was a prang on the highway. Bad one.’
There it was. It was real. Her heart began a slow, sickening thud in her chest. It was so jarring, so thick and out of step, that she wondered passingly if she might die.
But Tony’s mention of it was casual. He didn’t seem disturbed.
‘Do you know what happened?’ Her tongue was a wad of paper.
‘A semi jack-knifed. Other than that, no. It was chaotic. Total confusion.’
Total confusion.
Confusion was an indeterminate state, from which perfectly ordinary conditions might emerge. Conditions in which Jerry lived, in which his ute and a string of other cars were directed around the pile-up, crawling in first gear; in which, free of the jam at last, he drove north through the night and the lessening rain, his head grazing the roof, his knees cradling the wheel, taking the turn-off to Irwin’s Creek; there waiting for the floodwaters to subside, for the time to come when he could start up, turn south, and, sliding a little on the greasy road …
Laurie looked at Tony in the darkness. ‘What happened to the appointment?’
Tony gave a short laugh. ‘Cyclone warnings tend to put things into perspective. And what Miranda told us –’ He lapsed into silence.
After a time he spoke again. His voice was thin.
‘Laurie,’ he said, ‘I think I shook her off.’
She couldn’t follow him, but something undefended in his tone made her wary.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, not wanting to hear.
‘When we were in the river. She was holding onto me, pulling me down. I think I shook her off.’
A chill visited Laurie’s heart. ‘What do you mean?’ she repeated. Though she knew.
Tony said nothing.
‘Tony,’ she said softly, ‘you saved her.’
Sorrows accrue. This one drifted down like a leaf.
In her ear Laurie heard George’s son, calling through the rain: There’s more where that come from, he called.
At first it was Tony who made her heart ache. The grown men gripping his shoulder, while all the time he knew that his first, his overriding, impulse had been to save himself. But then she thought of Miranda, striking out bravely, keeping her dimpled chin above water while the too-big red corduroy pants dragged her down. Reaching out, confident of help.
Had blackness, sweeping over her like a wing, erased all trace of that rebuff? Had oblivion preserved her against the truth? Or did some bone knowledge persist in her, confiding, You are alone.
In the darkness the trees could not be seen, but they could be heard as rumours in the rain.
They waited for dawn in the car. They were awake now, knowing it was coming. Once Laurie fancied she saw a flicker between the boundary trees, at the point where the corduroy road led off through the swamp. She tensed, willing the flicker to reappear, waiting for bouncing headlights, dimmed by the advancing dawn, to approach through the gauzy rain –
It was strange, but she could only recall him in bits. Temple scar, pterygium. Yuk yuk chuckle. He was too close, too constant to see whole.
Jerry, you are my given, my premise. My life’s argument hangs on you.
She waited while the light drew trees from obscurity like shy performers from the wings. Giving him time. And then they all stood there, in full assembly, softened by misty rain.
‘Reckon we could get through now,’ Tony said. His eyes were bloodshot in the morning light.
Every muscle in her body was sore and stiff. She closed her eyes and rolled her head. Flexed and eased her fingers. Her glance fell on a pair of Jerry’s sunglasses. They’d been jolted by the rough going to the edge of the dashboard. She moved them back to a secure position against the windscreen. Then she turned the key in the ignition, pressed her foot down on the clutch, feeling the soreness in her thighs, and shifted the gear stick into first.
There must still have been a big swell, because she could hear it far off, booming on the bar.
The car took a wide arc and found the entrance to the corduroy road. They would follow it back to where it joined the main track, turn west, continue until they reached the Broody River Conservancy sign, and then turn north, onto Irwin’s Creek Road.
A small car, passing through trees.
EPILOGUE
2005
Laurie is sitting in a camping chair, her feet in the cool sand, in the presence of the sea. From where she sits it is hidden by dunes and trees, but she knows it’s there by the way it lights the drab tassels of the casuarinas from below, and also by the mind-invading din of the surf, crumpling and booming without end. She is not lonely, having grown used to her own company.
Besides, in the tent behind her a small boy is sleeping. She has just looked in at him. He is on his back, his arms thrown up beside his downy head, his hands lightly curled. The yellow light inside the tent has dulled the sleep-flush on
his cheek. By some sweet chance – a happy fall of the genetic dice – he has reproduced the Slavic shape of Jerry’s skull.
This morning, before sunrise, Laurie went down to the beach alone. The setting moon was nearly full. In the half-light a pioneer wave, harbinger of tomorrow’s king tide, swept up and sank back slowly, boiling in the crab holes as it retreated. Cool on her feet though it was, stroking arch and heel and toes with silk, she was not deceived. In the darkness of night they will come in multitudes, ravening up, tearing away lengths of spinifex, eating out the toeholds of trees, making cliffs where yesterday there’d been a plane of smiling sand.
It’s the afternoon, and the others are all down by the sea, grinding their feet into the wet sand in search of eugaries. Jerry’s bait net has been hung out to dry over the branch of a she-oak. The lead sinkers scallop its hem as if they’d been threaded there with an eye to beauty.
The net is, of course, a thing of utility and it has earlier done its work, snaring a small haul of pilchards, pulled silver and flickering up out of the sea, their gasps as they die wholly inaudible to human ears. Bigger fish will be caught with them – tailor, bream, flathead – and when the family feast on them they’ll have the savour of self-sufficiency, as well as of the sea.
She’s sitting on a canvas chair in the shifting shade of a casuarina, with her finger marking the place in her book, listening for the sound of her grandson stirring through the booming of the sea.
Jerry’s net hangs on a branch.
Down on the beach, the others are straying about like atoms in a gas.
These are all elements in a composition that is, for the moment, complete.
The casting of a bait net is a pretty thing to watch – the misty flare from the brown arm extended. Like a gracious gesture, amplified.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS
The novel begins with the words ‘The mouth of the Broody River never stayed the same.’ They sum up the theme of change through time, which runs throughout. What is the connection between the river and time?
The River House Page 34