Water Under Water

by Peter Rix

  Your trip? No, not really, Jim said.

  It does, I know. My granddad understood, but he was the only one.

  You’re close, then?

  Me and Pop, yeah. We always have been. He’s not into money or big houses or anything like that. My parents asked him to persuade me not to do Indigenous medicine. There’s no money in it, or any … like, status, or something.

  Prestige? Jim suggested.

  Right. They’re in business, you know, so having a doctor in the family, that’s …

  Don’t be too hard on them, Jim said. All parents want to be proud of their children. It’s not easy.

  Below them, the coastal plain sagged into a monotony of paperbark scrub and seeping marshes, the long, boring stretches of highway broken every so often by short wake-up climbs through timbered ridges pointing like fingers towards the coast. Jim checked the time then took the cruise control up a few kph. He had always counted the Hexham Bridge over the Hunter as the first genuine achievement of a trip north. He’d made it in one hour fifty-five. Not bad for an after-lunch start. Then it was the Karuah Bridge, and his passenger asked for a stop. He’d probably been busting but was too embarrassed to say. Campbell wandered back from under the old steel structure, climbed in and apologised for blurting out about his family.

  No problem, Jim told him. You and your grandfather, you know, sometimes it can be easier for him than your father.

  Campbell considered this for a moment. I guess so, he said. But he is different. I don’t know why, but it’s true. Do you have kids?

  A boy, two boys. One about your age, one older.

  Do they …?

  Get on with their grandfathers? One died when they were very young, but yes, with my father, he’s dead now too, but they did. The younger one a lot. He used to take him fishing. Tom loved it, all day stuck in an old tinny on Pittwater. My father had more patience than me, for sure, but that’s grandfathers, I think.

  Campbell nodded. With my Pop, I can talk to him, and he makes things easy, clear, you know? Like if he was here now, he’d find a way to explain how it was for me on that trip.

  Well, Jim said, good on him.

  Campbell settled back in his seat. The turn-off to that holiday ranch was along here somewhere. Those bloody chooks. Tom trotted out that story for years, every chance he got. I still love you, Dad. Jim laughed along with the rest, but unless you were there week in, week out, some new drama every day, you couldn’t know what it was like. They’d get the whispers from neighbours, friends – We just thought you should know – Tom and Virginia behind the bus shelter, Tom slipping into the local pub to raid the cigarette machine for change, Tom with his pockets stuffed with bags of lollies nicked from the corner store. Or, he’d boast about some exploit himself. Had it really happened, or was it just another Tom the Hero flight of fancy, an episode from that other world he inhabited?

  Tom, just last year at a surf-club barbecue, stepping between two brawling drunks. Stand back, everyone. Leave it to me. I’m a karate person!

  The way I heard it, Fran said, laughing, he stopped the fight pronto and the whole place fell about in a heap.

  Did you also hear that one of them was waving a pool cue about, Fran? One day, Tom’s going to push it too far, and it’ll be just the time I’m not there to drag him out.

  Campbell stirred, opened his eyes. Oh, sorry, I must have … And slipped back to sleep.

  They were stuck behind another transport – overtaking lane in two kilometres. Stop. Revive. Survive. Jim had drummed it into James. Two kilometres to the tourist-route turn-off. Fran could drive him crazy with her persistence. Come on, Jimmy, call in on Andy Mayfield. At least then you’ll know.

  He shook his head. Know what? Anyway, what chance he’s still living on the lake? It could be a complete waste of time.

  She was right, though. He did want to know how it had all turned out for Andy. Always had. Was it really possible to drop everything and everyone like that and just escape? But just call in? He’d meant to, many times as they headed north when the boys were young. The longer he left it, the more impossible it became. It was Tom, of course. Not just Andy’s outburst on the phone, but the timing of Andy’s heading north, the life he described in his letter, the odd bit of news he’d heard from others of the old days – all of it was a reminder. But he did want to know.

  Fran kept stuff. Jim threw out everything that did not have a specific purpose, but she was a real hoarder. Nineteen years. One morning, she’d dug out the envelope with Andy’s old letter from Sutton’s Lake. It was the day she’d persuaded him to go on the river trip. He’d been up before dawn; a cup of tea on the deck to watch the sun haul itself out of the Pacific. He came back inside for a refill and found Fran sitting at the kitchen table in the gloom, the crinkled pages spread out before her.

  We had so much back then, you and I, she said quietly. Look at us now, Jimmy. I know you don’t see it, but Andy envied you back then. Now he wouldn’t believe we’re the same people.

  Envied me? You’re joking.

  He felt more than heard the dull crump of the shore break below them. They’d moved back down to the beaches after James had finished school. Jim had wanted to be close to the water again. Fran had gone along with it. The only time you and Tom really get close is in the water, she said. So, who knows?

  For years, an attack like that would have set them off, from him to her and back again. But these days neither had the stomach for it. Jim picked up one of the pages.

  How did we get like this? Fran said, watching him.

  You know as well as I do.

  That had been the way of it for some time – never quite an argument, more a careful avoiding of the raw edges to a wound that refused to heal. She took the sheet from him, gathered up the others and folded them carefully into the envelope. She studied the scrawled address.

  I do miss Andy, too, she said. In a strange way. He somehow made anything seem possible, didn’t he? Remember the first time I met him? That dawn picnic at the lighthouse, with … I don’t remember her name.

  He stared at her. Barrenjoey? That must be nearly thirty years ago, he said. She had ancient history off like it was yesterday. I guess so, he said. Vaguely.

  They’d driven out to Barrenjoey headland in the dark. Andy had wanted to see the sunrise from the top.

  You two raced each other from the beach up the path, Fran reminded him.

  He had to smile. Andy had started too fast then run out of puff halfway. They’d set themselves up close to the edge. Andy had a thermos of coffee, and bread and cheese.

  The ocean from up there, Fran said. Remember?

  That came back to him, the water off the headland from the cliffs, great, iron-grey troughs between the swells, slick and heavy before the nor’easter like some overworked oil painting. It was warm when the sun came up. The other girl pulled the picnic stuff out while he and Andy jibed in a rematch of the run up the hill. Fran and Jim had only been out twice. She was different. He’d always found himself with girls who laughed at his jokes and assessed the terrain: is this one husband material? She had no interest in those games. Already, he felt more comfortable with her than with any of them.

  You boys had one of your famous debates, she said now.

  He and Andy were always at it, twisting around each other’s words, tangles of thought like the discarded clumps of fishing line on the beach. Andy’s girl tried to join in then drifted off. Fran settled herself on the grass. Was she really asleep?

  Andy raved on about how we can never escape each other, Fran said, how each moment of contact between two people is a spider-web strand that attaches to both of them. I’ve never forgotten it; all these tiny little threads holding us in position and we never even think about it. I remember someone was flying a kite down on the beach. Like that, you said, but Andy said you can let go of the kite, you can cut the string, but the connections between us will always be there … something like that.

  You were a new audi
ence, Jim said. He’d have loved that.

  Maybe, Fran admitted. Maybe it was just being up there so early. Andy said that we’d all let each other down sooner or later, fall out of each other’s lives, but there’d still be these tiny tugs and pulls, this way, that way. Invisible but always there. We can’t lose them even if we want to.

  Jim had the scene before him now. He’d countered that if that was right, then it was a responsibility that someone like Andy could never live up to. Andy laughed then dropped the subject. He could have gone on with it, Jim knew, run him ragged like he usually did, but instead he gave one of his sly winks and glanced over to where Fran had wedged herself in between a couple of rocks, eyes closed.

  Well done, young Campion, he said grudgingly. You’re still one letter short of a champion, but I do believe you’ve finally got something right.

  Fran wandered from the kitchen out onto the deck. I was thinking we should do it again, Jimmy. Drive out there and watch the sunrise. Just you and me.

  He knew what she meant. Something crucial was slipping further away from them every day. He’d expected it would get better between them as Tom got older, more independent, but the opposite seemed true.

  I’m not sure you can get up there now, he said. They automated the lighthouse years ago, maybe closed the track, too.

  We have to do something, she said quietly.

  We are, Jim tried to reassure her. We’re doing all right. It’s just … we have everything else.

  No, she said in her soft pre-dawn voice. We’re not. We don’t.

  She wandered over to the pots where she grew her herbs – Vietnamese mint, basil, a rosemary bush – rubbing leaves between her fingers, taking them up to her nose. It was automatic for him to look out, down, reflections on the ocean surface, the silver slash of the reef break.

  Andy was wrong about one thing, she said. We don’t have to let each other down. It’s not inevitable. We make choices.

  Which is when she persuaded him to go to the river with Tom’s group. She’d been suggesting for years he get involved with the Independence Group, but now it felt like an ultimatum. He fetched his diary from the study.

  I would, Fran. I’ve never done any rafting. It sounds like fun. But I’m up to here with the Queensland project, and there’s a management-committee meeting that Friday morning …

  She shook her head in frustration.

  Look, he said. How about I follow them up the coast around lunchtime on the Friday? I can stay somewhere halfway that night and be up there for most of the weekend. Me and Tom paddling a raft – maybe we’ll even get it going in the right direction. I’ll drive him and a couple of the others back late Sunday. A real father-and-son expedition.

  She kissed him. It was almost like the kisses she used to give him.

  Tom will be over the moon, she said. His favourite father on the river trip!

  She was quick to lock in his commitment, too. Another vehicle will help with the rafting, she added. And then, thoughtfully, You could call in on Andy at Sutton’s Lake on your way through. It’d be a nice way to break the journey. You’ve been promising to do that forever. You need to.

  Jim knew the last thing she wanted was Andy back in their lives, in his life. It was more that Fran was picking up on Andy’s idea, tugging at the strings from decades before, as if by splicing past with present she could reconnect their lives. Jim’s and Tom’s. Jim’s and hers. If Andy was the catalyst, so be it.

  It was the time before sunrise when land and sea exchange equilibrium temperatures. In the surf, it would feel warmer now than in the chill dawn air. He was studying the night sea when he felt her eyes on him.

  Fran, it’s like Tom’s from a different planet and I’m trying to make contact, but every time I get close –

  He’s not from a different place, Jimmy. He’s from you and me.

  You say that because you want to believe it.

  No, she said, because it’s true. And because it’s too hard to love you when you can’t love him.

  That’s not fair, Fran.

  Of course it’s not bloody fair. I’m not some fucking angel, Jim. I’m hurting, too.

  The sudden outbursts always seemed to release her. They moved back inside to sit at the old kitchen table Fran had inherited from her grandparents. It bore the marks and scratches of countless dinners to celebrate birthdays, the end of exams, or just to hold the family together. They argued there, too, and shed tears. And so often after a fight with Jim or a Tom-crisis, Fran would suddenly declare the table top to be a ‘disaster’ and insist on working late into the night with sandpaper and beeswax until the oak surface and her hope were restored. She said now, The other night, James and I sat here talking about that lunch with young Maisie.

  Tom especially loved being at that table with his favourite people. One way or another, he was always the centre of attention. At that table, he’d farted loudly just as they sat down to Sunday lunch with Maisie, his brother’s first girlfriend. Fifteen-year-old James blushed furiously and later screamed, Why were you born? I wish you were dead! It took a long time for him to bring friends home again, but for penance he became Tom’s protector and never forgave himself the outburst.

  Jim rose to turn on the lights.

  Leave them off, Jimmy. I don’t think I can …

  She lowered her head onto her arms. She was crying, soundlessly. All kinds of things could do it; the faint whiff of furniture polish and old oak. He stood behind the chair, rubbing her neck.

  I’m trying. I really am, he said.

  She reached for him. They stayed in the dark like that, her head on the table, her hands holding on to his arm, tightly, as if she could squeeze out of him what had poisoned their love.

  Call in on Andy, she whispered.

  Nine

  The special class at Tom’s high school was included in all activities, more or less. One year, Tom persuaded his father to take a morning off work to come and watch him in his race at the annual swimming carnival. The school had apparently allocated senior students to do the meet and greet.

  Good morning. I believe you are Tom’s father. Welcome to our swimming carnival.

  Yes, I’m Jim Campion. Pleased to be here.

  His minder showed him up to the rows of bench seats overlooking the swimming pool. They were the only ones in their row, a contrast to the packed-house Stambridge swimming carnivals at one of the city’s major aquatic complexes. He hadn’t missed one of those through James’s time at school. They were held in the evenings, so they were easier to get to after work, but it was true, too, that he’d never been able to steel himself to attend Tom’s school events.

  Tom’s a terrific swimmer, Fran had chided him. You taught him yourself.

  He’d shot back, Exactly! That’s exactly it, don’t you see?

  This next race is the third one, the boy said, which means you have only missed two races.

  Right, thanks.

  An announcement over the PA demanded the immediate appearance of several competitors. A break in the schedule.

  Tom told me you grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches, Mr Campion.

  I’m sure he’s given you the full family history, Jim agreed.

  Which suburb were you born in, Mr Campion?

  Which suburb? I grew up in Newport. You know the area, do you?

  So you grew up in Newport? Out on the peninsula, with Pittwater on the western side and a patrolled surf beach to the east. It was like the young fellow was reciting it. Many middle-class families live in the area, he continued without pause. The peninsula boasts some of the most prestigious properties in Sydney, notably at exclusive Palm Beach, the summer playground of the rich and famous.

  Well, my family wasn’t either of those, Jim said. Do you come from there yourself?

  Oh, I know the peninsula. I know the area very well. Newport, the home of former world surfing champion Tom Carroll. Hang ten! I’d like to go there one day and do some surfing. I’d certainly like that.
/>   You’d like …? I didn’t catch your name, Jim said.

  No, Mr Campion. You didn’t catch my name because I didn’t say my name. We must say our name when we introduce ourselves. Saying my name is what I forgot on this occasion.

  So, what is your name?

  My name is Newton.

  And, Newton, I gather you are in Tom’s class?

  Newton’s answer was lost in the scream.

  That’s Amit!

  Jim ran down the steps to the pool deck. Amit was with Mrs Fraser, the teacher for the school’s special-needs students.

  Everything is fine now, she said. Tom had a little altercation, and Amit got a fright.

  Amit was still hopping from foot to foot, wringing his hands. Tom blew water at them out of his mouth, he wailed. They said they would drown Tom. They pushed Tom under the water and kept him there. They must not drown people?

  No, Amit, they must not drown people.

  Tom must not spurt water?

  No, he certainly should not.

  Jim left Amit to Mrs Fraser and found Tom, pale and shaking, in a corner of the boys’ change room.

  They held me under the water, Dad.

  Come on, mate, it’s cold in here, Jim consoled him. Put the towel around you. Let’s go sit on the bench.

  They climbed the stand and sat watching the races.

  Do you want to tell me about it?

  I was only playing a trick, Dad. I hid some water in my mouth to spurt at them like James and me do lots of times. Those boys chased me and threw me into the other pool. They pushed me under the water, and they put their feet on top of my head. I couldn’t get up to the top. I was scared.

  Tom doubled over, head on knees. Newton tried to be helpful. I find it very frightening with my head under the water, he said.

  You’re scared of everything, Newton, Tom said loudly. I don’t care about underwater and I bet I’m a faster swimmer than those shitfaces.

  That set off the crying again. I can’t swim in my race now, he cried. I had my big day planned with my dad and now they’ve blown it away.