by Lisa Gorton
‘He’s terribly upset by it, I think,’ Treen said.
Carol made a face. ‘I don’t need to tell you what they’re saying about him and that poor boy.’
‘Oh!’ Treen clattered her glass down. ‘I knew Hughey’s father was saying some things but I thought…Well, that’s his grief, isn’t it.’
‘That’s what I say! That poor boy…’ Carol leant in. ‘Michael never accepted his homosexuality. And Rosemary always yes this and yes that. Never stood up to Michael. I’m telling you, the day they packed that little boy off to boarding school. Crying her eyes out, she was.’ Carol straightened her back and looked past them. ‘No, that poor boy’s father can throw the dirt around all he likes. Sooner or later he’s going to have to take a good hard look at himself.’
Treen said: ‘I haven’t told Mum and Dad yet.’
‘Well, you’re going to have to, dear. The funeral’s Friday. They won’t want to miss that. Now, go on you lot…’ Carol shooed at Miranda with her fingers. ‘Off you go, go for a walk. You don’t want to sit around talking with a pair of old ladies.’
At once Miranda stood up and waited, eyes downcast, behind her chair. Will stood beside her shifting his weight from foot to foot.
‘Go on then!’ said Carol.
Kit stood up. Treen’s face took on a fixed expression, as though she had only that moment taken account of being left alone with Carol. She said brightly, ‘Carol and I might just have a quick look in the shops.’
Fatalistically Kit followed them across the road and down a concrete ramp cut into the side of the dune. As they stepped down it, stone walls on either side rose to close in the view. Only straight ahead, a square of sea dazzled. The moment they stepped out onto the esplanade a child howled—the sound of a siren stuck on its first note. The child, in flowery bucket hat, matching rashie and shorts, was a scrap of face, an open mouth. In one hand she held an empty cone while at her feet a blob of rainbow icecream flattened into psychedelic swirls. A mother, almost in tears herself, said: ‘I told you, Mimi.’
Miranda said: ‘She shouldn’t be feeding her that crap anyway.’
Once on the sand they spread out. At this hour the beach was almost deserted. Only some toddlers squatted at the water’s edge, squeezing wet sand through their fists to make ornate dribble castles.
Miranda walked with the severe alertness of someone who expects to be looked at—conscious of her hair, hanging over her shoulders to the small of her back. The boy, Will, a half step behind, fidgeted even as he walked, punching the side of one clenched fist into the flat of his palm. Kit, who took his fidgeting as an agitation of nerves, fixed her eyes on it. She knew almost nothing of these two. What brought home her sense of isolation, though, was thinking how little they knew of her. For them, she had stepped out from Treen’s background. Feeling what difficulties that opened up, Kit for the first time realised how her mother, by being known, gave her a start with people. She was her mother’s child: if she was always painfully conscious of how often she disappointed, still there was nothing she had to live down.
Will, feeling her eyes on him, glanced sullenly and dropped his hands by his side. At once, the fidgeting settled into another part of his body. What had looked like nerves was his body’s hunger for movement. He started practising cricket shots. Without a word, Miranda struck out for the rocks at the base of the cliff.
Low tide, and the level wet sand looked lacquered. The sun’s reflection under Kit’s right foot flickered as she stepped across it. Always glittering from her eyes, the sea itself was impossible to bring in focus: looking at it was like looking for something that had been there a half-second earlier. She tried not to step on the bubbling air holes of buried crabs, tried not to think of them under there, their pale quick folding legs which looked as though they should make a metallic sound.
They were walking under the children’s playground. Dimly voices came down to Kit. The beach ended here, under this cliff of pinkish eroded stone. At high tide the rocks would be covered. Seaweed, drying in the sun, gave off a sweet salt smell like the smell of beer at the end of a party. Messy, exposed, the whole rock shelf had the look of a room where a party had been. At the edge of it waves broke, throwing up white foam that fell back in slow motion. Further out waves, terraced one behind another, rose more than head-high.
That sea noise Kit could not get used to: a feeling as though she was walking into strong wind. The other two went stepping easily ahead of Kit. If they had not been so casual it would have looked like dancing, their quick-stepping lightness over the rocks. They would talk to each other, Kit thought. They would touch each other if I weren’t here.
They had stopped. Propped on a high rock, they stood waiting for her. Picturing how she would look to them, Kit was conscious of glare, the sky immense overhead. They had not thought she would be so slow but she could not go faster. She had to keep looking down, watching where she stepped. The rocks, mostly worn smooth, were sometimes pockmarked like acne under a microscope. At her feet waves poured narrowly in through a cleft in the rock, in which seaweed rose up and stretched flat with the water running out. How deep would the water get at high tide here?
‘Aren’t you hot in those?’ Miranda said, not unkindly, looking at Kit’s jeans. Leaping down from the rock she took Kit’s arm. ‘Do you need to shave your legs or something?’
Kit said, ‘My mum won’t let me. She says I have to get them waxed.’
The boy twitched his eyes away. Out at sea, a freighter slid across the horizon. This one had its own crane. The ship was so heavy-loaded, so out-of-scale, it made the sky look like a sliding backdrop.
Miranda said, ‘The chemist is the only place. Mum says I have to wait till I’m sixteen.’ She stretched out one leg and looked down its length. ‘It’s not too bad. With blond hair.’
‘Your hair’s brown. You dye it.’
‘They’re called highlights.’
‘They’re called highlights,’ he repeated, with a mincing twist of his head.
‘You are such an idiot.’ She turned on Kit a proprietorial smile. ‘He is such an idiot.’
Miranda stepped out to where waves flashed up white ragged foam. She stood staring out at the horizon: her pose said that she had forgotten them. Stopped at the top of his rock, dead still for once, Will stared at her. Kit glanced up at him expecting to see admiration, hunger; but his expression was surprisingly hard to read. His eyebrows, thick and dark on his pale fine face, were what she noticed. It was the face of someone thinking hard, warily and without pleasure: thinking something through.
He caught sight of Kit watching him. She saw his eyebrows draw together, his expression simplify into contempt.
‘You don’t say much.’
‘Will!’ Miranda swung around with a scandalised cry.
‘Well, she doesn’t. This whole time, all she’s said is that she needs to get her legs waxed.’
Miranda, stopping, lightly slapped his arm: ‘You could say something.’
‘Me? What am I supposed to say?’
Miranda turned on Kit an exhausted smile, and started walking. Will prized a barnacle off the rock and pitched it into the rock pool at their feet. Its glassy surface absorbed the disturbance with a sort of shudder rather than a ripple. Kit, realising that Will was waiting for her to go ahead, started awkwardly into movement, skidding down a rock. Laboriously, head bowed, she kept on. Where her shadow fell on the rock pool she could see down into it, its sides clotted with some seaweed that looked like strings of miniature cucumbers. The silence sunk in that pool was permanent. Across its floor of sand and rock, ripples of light flowed. A longing for silence, cool water, opened in her. She thought: if they weren’t here I’d put my whole face into that pool. Green-angled light, green silent sway—she let her mind sink into it while she stumbled away over the rocks.
Will said: ‘Tide’s coming in.’ He caught up with Miranda, put his arm around her shoulder. He was only just tall enough to do it. From the back it
was almost funny, how the two of them had to walk in step. The two of them, she thought: what was it that made them so impossible to her? How they were in their bodies, their unthinking ease. Kit wondered what it would feel like to be Miranda and look in the mirror. She imagined not pride, exactly, but a sort of pleased calm vigilance—a check to see that all was as it should be, the way a pilot might check over the controls of the plane.
Miranda had been right about her jeans. At each step her thighs chafed. Sweat pooled behind her knees, making her jeans stick there. In thought, putting on a baby voice, she quoted herself back to herself: ‘My mum won’t let me’. Tomorrow: with a flash of defiance she decided that she would get to the pharmacy tomorrow, buy herself a razor.
They came around the headland onto a ragged-looking beach strewn with seaweed so rubbery Kit mistook it for ripped wetsuits discarded on the sand, salt-crazed black-brown. That beach was sunstruck glare, hours between tides. Wooden steps led from the beach up to a carpark—a rough-edged spill of bitumen. At the back of it, a sand path cut across the cliff. They were turning back. At the turn they stopped. Here the ground was scuffed bare: a sand patch edged with a wooden fence: a viewing spot. The top strut of the fence was worn smooth where walkers, resting their elbows on it, had stopped to look at the sea.
Far out, light reverberated off its struck metal. Closer in, a fishing boat bucked in waves otherwise barely noticeable. The broken-topped posts of an old pier rose out of the water. Alongside them a new pier, concrete, made a straight line over sea and land together. Half past one, and the pier’s shadow was slipping out from under the pier. Looking at it, Kit pictured stingrays like shadows adrift. At the end of the pier men were fishing. Patience had settled their bodies into crooked shapes; from this distance they had the stunted look of tea-tree bent from the wind.
Will turned to Miranda. ‘You coming down the back beach this arvo?’
Miranda shrugged. ‘I have to work.’
‘Yeah, checkout chick.’
‘Shut up! At least I have a job.’
‘I work. I worked yesterday.’
‘For your brother.’
‘It’s still work. You try lifting hay bales all day.’ He swung his arms back. ‘My shoulders are killing me.’
Miranda lifted her hair into a ponytail and let it drop. She turned to Kit. ‘God, you must hate it here. Mum says your dad’s in London.’
‘Just…His parents live there.’
‘I’m going to London,’ said Miranda. ‘As soon as I’ve finished school. That’s what I’m saving for. All my friends here, they’re like, “You should buy a car.” That’s all they think about.’
‘We’re just sick of driving you.’
Teased, even so blandly, Miranda lifted her chin. Her face switched off. Impossible to tell whether that look comprehended distances or emptiness.
Will said: ‘Your mum said Hughey was gay.’
‘Yeah. That’s why he killed himself.’
‘Hughey’s car crashed.’
Miranda smiled at the sea. ‘On a straight road.’
Will’s body straightened as if on a string. ‘You can’t say that.’ He pushed back off the barrier. Kit saw his pinched face large against the scene. ‘You don’t say stuff like that. Unless you actually know.’
Miranda stood very still. The wind, catching at the ends of her hair, exaggerated her resemblance to a ship’s figurehead; she had a figurehead’s sly smile. For a moment Kit wondered whether she had heard him. Serenely she shrugged.
‘Fine. It was an accident.’
‘It was.’
Will picked up a banksia cone and pelted it at some seagulls waiting for fish scraps at the end of the pier, tilting their eyes at each other like businessmen waiting for their morning coffee. The banksia cone arced slowly, dropped onto the pier. Wild again, the seagulls scattered up with rawking cries. Their wings caught the light, flashed white. Will watched them until they had settled back. Dropping his head, scuffing again at the grass, irresolutely he said, ‘You just don’t say it.’ Miranda kept still, said nothing.
‘I’m going.’
‘Bye.’ Miranda answered without looking around.
Kit echoed Miranda, slightly late. He had already turned. He started jogging away up the road, his thongs slapping on the bitumen. Miranda, her face set in a half-smile, might have been counting to a hundred. Her concentration was hypnotic. Kit’s eyes looked where she looked: saw, without seeing, the horizon’s long curve. Another freighter was sliding through the view. What was strange was how nothing seemed to propel it. But the freighter was part of that immense structure of trains, warehouses, trucks, timetables and invoices…In thought Kit saw again those rusty packing crates, stacked in a warehouse’s concrete acres, which her train had passed.
Miranda said: ‘Shall we go back?’
Chapter Eleven
Stepping down the hill with a basket on one arm, Carol answered Kit’s smile with a freezing nod. Two steps farther on, she swung back. ‘Kit! Sorry, love. I was in my own world.’ Automatically she looked Kit up and down. Confronted with Carol’s certainties (unmoving hair, bright lipstick, starched white linen blouse) Kit was uneasily conscious of the surface of her face. In the pharmacy she had tested foundation, peering into a mirror the size of a credit card, wearing an expression of fake judiciousness while she smoothed the stuff on. Now Carol was looking at her crookedly—had she left a smear? Some foundation had got on her lips but she had covered that, she thought, with one of the lipstick testers, a sticky gum-pink gloss. She raised the pharmacy plastic bag in her hand.
‘Treen’s at the helpline. I’m getting a prescription for Audrey.’
‘How is Grandma?’
‘Tired, mostly.’
‘You’ll be wanting a lift, then?’
‘Just that Treen got the bike out for me.’
‘Oh, good on you. Bit of exercise. Tell you what: you and Miranda should grab a coffee. She’s working today, up at the deli. She’d be glad of some company. She’s on her break at twelve. ’
‘Treen said, before lunch.’
‘No, you enjoy yourself. I’ll take that. I go right past.’
Carol was reaching for the bag. Kit felt herself blush under her foundation mask. ‘This is Audrey’s,’ she said, pulling out the prescription, leaving her shaver in the plastic bag.
‘That’s alright then,’ said Carol, suddenly grudging, as though Kit had asked the favour. ‘I’ll take it there for you now.’
Kit had left her grandfather taking a bucket of scraps out to the chooks in his dressing-gown and slippers. She pictured the front rooms’ amber-coloured curtains, a single fly brokenly whirring on the window ledge, and Carol at the front door dropping the brass knocker, sending reverberations through the house.
‘I’ll tell Miranda to expect you. Tea shop okay?’
Kit watched Carol across the road before turning, herself, towards the sea, walking at first with false resolution—the consciousness of Carol watching her, though when she glanced back the street was deserted. An hour to wait.
She was outside a jewellery store. Its glass diamonds and goldplated chains, set out on dusty purple velvet, added to her sense of the town as a stage set. The wind had more reality than these narrow, bright shopfronts, huddled under awnings. Their deliberate quaintness emphasised the street’s exposure and vacancy—the sea opening out where the other side of the hill should have been.
Across the road, two people came out of the Green and Gold newsagency: the woman walking as if breasting waves; the husband, a step behind, carrying a plastic bag full of newspapers. They vanished into the bakery’s shopfront of black reflective glass.
The wind nagged at cellophane packets piled in a toy-sized barrow outside the sweet shop. Kit bent to the barrow and turned the sweets over. Fudge, jelly-babies, liquorice straps: the dried-up sweets prompted in her a queasy feeling of nostalgia. Looking up, she glimpsed a tight-faced woman watching her from the dimness inside the shop.
Kit could not see someone think her a shoplifter without registering that possibility in herself; without knowing her face to be pinched and furtive. She thought: that shopkeeper would have smiled at Miranda. She walked downhill. The fish and chip shop on the corner and then the town stopped. Out there, past where the road turned, was a disused rail line, grey weeds flourishing among the sleepers. Kit crossed the tracks. After the rail line, the ground dropped steeply. Stopping, glancing back, she saw the town stacked behind her, roof by roof up the hill.
And here was the sea. Raising both hands to shade her eyes, she saw that it was, after all, tame: a bay, its edge of unwashed sand lumpy with footsteps and plastic drink bottles. Only the light had made it vast. All that Kit saw (white crests torn out of the waves, a sailing boat swung into the wind, sail hollowly clapping) was painted over blankness. She did not know this place. An hour to wait…
Dirty sand, a smell of oil and seaweed, everything crowded and vacant: this was every loose-end hour. She had no place, did not exist in it. The shaver in her bag, the stuff on her face—and after that, what? Her despair extended to everything she looked at: useless, immense, a painted scene.
‘Did you get your sweeties?’ Scott was, that moment, an upright shadow stepping out of the glare, taking on colour and dimension only when he stepped close. ‘I saw you mooning over the barley sugars.’ His talk was full of these odd phrases that he spoke lightly, mockingly.
‘The shopkeeper thought I was stealing.’
He laughed, throwing his head back. His Adam’s apple flashed in the sun. ‘You can’t think how profound you looked just now, staring at the bay.’
‘I’m meeting Miranda at twelve.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour to kill,’ he said in a high voice. ‘Here, let me look at you.’ He stepped in front of her, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head; they looked odd on his baldness. ‘How like your mother you are.’
He was close enough for Kit to see how the wind had raised water in his eyes, in any case the kind of pale blue that looks blind. He smiled abruptly and stepped back, putting his sunglasses on.