In this memory, Robbie Gray was never underwater with them, but was high and distant on the boulder.
Robbie Gray was sitting on the boulder, king of the pool, the sun king. How selfish happiness is, Charlie thought. It might have been hours that he spent tripling and dippling in the pool with Catherine and Cat, with Willy happy as always in his strange solo world, before it occurred to Charlie that Robbie might be lonely up there, and before an even more disturbing thought occurred: that Robbie might be afraid to jump. He remembered that his recklessly happy heart rushed out to Robbie Gray. He wanted to say: Look, just close your eyes and do it. Catherine was scared, and I was scared, but we did it. He wanted to say: Trust me, Robbie, there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing to equal tilting your lance at fear and charging in.
But it was not the sort of thing he felt a yellow wog from China could say to the sun king.
There was a moment when silence fell, except for the scrub turkeys and Willy’s warbling in his private cocoon, and he and Catherine and Cat climbed out, slithering on the rock, and sat with Robbie and didn’t know what to say. Well, Charlie and Catherine didn’t know what to say Cat said: “You’re the rotten egg, you silly drip.”
“I’ve already been swimming this morning,” Robbie said. “Before you came.” Charlie watched Catherine, who had arrived with Robbie, give him a quick sideways look. “While my dad was showing you the barn, Catherine,” he said. He jumped up. “Let’s explore. Let’s climb up the falls.” And he was off, the leader of the pack, though the others followed happily enough. Cat had to scamper back and forth between Willy and the forward scouts. Sometimes they walked up the watercourse itself, stepping across the flat rock platforms; sometimes they had to take the boundary paths, clambering over fallen tree trunks gone soft, watching for the dreaded stinging tree. Robbie Gray was a ferocious climber. He was determined to stay in the lead where indeed, Charlie thought, he rightfully belonged. In particular, he thought that Robbie became upset whenever Cat got ahead of him, and this friction between two such adored beings distressed him terribly Charlie did not think Cat was aware of Robbie’s irritation; she simply darted back and forth, checking on Willy in the rear, barrelling up ahead of all of them and back again, because that’s what her energy made her do. He wondered if she ever slept at night. Or did she go stalking the back alleys with other cats, climbing his mango tree, spying on him as he sat at his little table in the sleepout reading a book? It made a difference to him, knowing that.
Cat is watching, he would think happily, looking out into the night.
When they came to the base of the steepest stretch, where the falls were really falls for a quick short drop of fifty feet, Robbie announced suddenly: “Okay, last one back is a rotten egg,” and swung about and went crashing his way back downstream.
And Charlie would have instantly obeyed except that Cat called out: “Poohey! I’m going to climb the falls first.”
Looking upward, Charlie bit his lip.
“You mind Willy, Charlie,” Cat said. She hoisted herself up to the next rock ledge, lithe as a possum, and grabbed at trees and reached for handles of rock. She got about halfway up, “Okay,” she shouted, panting. “I quit. I’m coming down.”
She planted herself on a ledge to rest, and Catherine, gritting her teeth, called out: “Wait there for me.”
Charlie could see the muscles in Catherine’s arms and legs bleating with fear. When she hoisted herself past the first great ledge and walked her fingers up the rock face feeling for something to grab onto, her straining ankles made him think of desperate flies bucking about on the struts of a funnelweb.
He couldn’t look. He sat on the rock platform and put his hand in the water, against the rock, and prayed to it: Don’t let her fall.
He had not felt frightened for Cat. He knew now that Cat was invulnerable. (In the cutting, it was the train he didn’t trust.) He knew that if Cat lost her footing she would simply sail across space the way glider possums did, she would settle as lightly as a puffball on the next ledge. But he felt himself enter Catherine’s frail and trembling body and could not bear it.
Willy put his arms around Charlie’s neck and cooed in his ear: What’s the time, Mr Wolf? and Charlie pressed his lips against the soft delectable cheek and held Willy like a pillow and prayed Don’t let her fall don’t let her fall please don’t let her fall please don’t. He only looked up when there were loud halloos and there they were, both of them, waving at him from halfway up. “Look, Willy!” he yelped with excitement. “Look up there!” And he and Willy laughed and hugged each other and he covered Willy with kisses and told him over and over again: “I love them, Willy, don’t you? I love them all.” He was awash in love, he floated in it for one entire summer, duckdiving, and surfacing, and submerging himself again and moving languidly through that weightless space where everything connects with everything else.
He could not remember the trip back down to the pool; that is, he could not separate it from the water or the green air or the climbing or the swimming and diving or from other times and other days, except for the clear sharp moment when the three of them and Willy were lying on their stomachs on the great boulder, staring down at Robbie who floated on his back with arms outstretched, king of the pool.
“You’re all rotten eggs,” Robbie said.
Charlie thought of the elegant Grammar School way Robbie had shaken his hand and he wanted to make an offering from out of the rich cloud he moved inside. “Cat and Catherine climbed up the falls,” he called out. “You should’ve climbed up with them, you would’ve won.”
Robbie ignored him. “It’s best in the pool when you’re by yourself,” he said. “You can jump further off the boulder then. I only like to jump off it when I’m here by myself,”
“Eenie meenie minie mo,” Cat called, sliding on her belly on the boulder like a lizard. “Look out, here I come!” She went in like a water snake, and Charlie and Catherine could see her wreathing a slow coil around Robbie and then yanking him down. There was a spluttering thrashing game, and laughter, and they could see Robbie kissing Cat and Cat kissing back.
Charlie, on his stomach on warm rock, wanted to kiss all of them. He most especially wished, however, that Cat was dunking him in the pool and kissing him. Catherine touched his arm, and he turned sideways to look at her. “Cat loves everyone,” she said.
He laughed happily. “Everyone loves Cat.”
She smiled at him and he smiled back. How beautiful she was. He loved her. He would have kissed her if he’d dared.
“I love Cat,” she said. “And so do you.”
“So does Robbie,” he said.
Catherine looked at him without blinking for three seconds, four, five. “Here he loves her,” she said.
Charlie, startled, could not sustain the weight of her gaze. He watched Cat and Robbie in the water. When he turned again, Catherine was still looking at him. She frightened him just a little. With Cat, you knew exactly what to expect. With Catherine, you didn’t quite.
“I love Robbie,” he said.
Catherine raised her eyebrows. She kept looking at him, unblinking. “Not as much as Robbie loves Robbie,” she said.
“Don’t you like him?”
She watched Robbie, expressionless, for several seconds, then she looked at Charlie again. “Not very much,” she said.
In front of the barn there were two fathers and two cars. It was like a game that teachers gave you in school, Charlie thought. Which father belongs with which car? It wasn’t hard to guess. Cat’s father owned the battered red utility truck, a much scarred vehicle. There were a number of places on its body where Cat’s father, after too many beers, had had close encounters with lamp-posts and kerbs and various other immovable objects and with other vehicles. In these places he had daubed applications of lurid pink metal primer, so that the car had a fevered chicken-pox look. Robbie’s father stood beside a sleek black Buick.
As soon as the children came within sight
of the cars, Cat and Robbie, propelled by some unheard starting gun, broke into a run and pelted toward the two fathers. Robbie won by a whisker. “I won!” he announced, and then grandly: “But for the second prize, you can have a ride back in our car, Cat. Dad, can everyone come in ours?”
Robbie’s father frowned a momentary frown, looking askance at the wet swimsuits and at the always-slightly-grubby face of Cat, but graciousness fell so quickly as a veil that Charlie wondered if he had imagined the frown. “Certainly,” Robbie’s father said mellowly. “You won’t object, Reilly, if your youngsters ride in the Buick? I’ll drop them off at your place on the way home.”
Cat’s father turned his head to spit a wad of tobacco. “No skin off my back,” he shrugged. “If they wanna be posh and la-de-dah.”
“I don’t wanna,” said Cat, unhooking the backboard of her father’s Holden and pulling it down. “It’s more fun in the ute. C’mon, Willy.” She hoisted him into the back. She pulled herself up as easily as possums do.
Robbie, only fleetingly thrown off stride, said graciously, “You can still come with us, Charlie, but you’ll have to sit in the middle, that’s all. I always let Catherine have the other window.”
Catherine smiled her demure smile at Robbie. It was a smile that already made Charlie hold his breath. “Thank you, Robbie,” she said, her gaze resting on him until he looked at her and smiled in his gracious way. “But you can let Charlie. Mr Reilly, could I come back in the ute too, please? It’s more fun.”
She took Charlie’s breath away, her sheer delicate savagery, the smile, the look in her eyes; and he couldn’t bear to have Robbie’s feelings hurt. He wanted to offer tribute, he wanted to give himself in homage to Robbie who had shaken his hand and who had spoken to him as though he were another Grammar boy. He also wanted to be with Cat and Catherine and Willy.
Mr Reilly laughed, and Charlie saw his mouthful of yellow and uneven teeth. “Right you are, luv,” he said to Catherine, and picked her up and set her down next to Cat. She might have been a piece of dandelion fluff. “Not as posh as you look, little lady.” He nodded approvingly. Mr Reilly didn’t have much time for posh.
Cat and Catherine sat on the dirty floor with Willy between them, their backs against the driver’s cabin. Charlie wanted to join them, but he also wanted to please Robbie Gray.
“Utes are for girls and little kids,” Robbie said. “The Buick is for boys. We’ll still let you come with us, Charlie.”
We’ll still let you …
“Thank you, Robbie,” Charlie said.
Ah, and he felt important — more than that, he felt like an ambassador at the court of the emperors, sitting next to Robinson Gray who lived on Wilston Heights and went to Grammar. He could not deny that sinking into that pillowed back seat and fingering leather as soft as Willy’s cheek filled him with wonder. He could not deny that he savoured the excitement on his parents’ faces when the black car pulled up at the shop door, and he got out and went inside and said casually: “I got a ride home in Mr Gray’s Buick. He lives on Wilston Heights.” He could not deny the thrill of feeling the power beneath him, of soaring down the hill (it felt like flying), of overtaking and gliding past every other car on Samford Road, on Kelvin Grove Road, on Newmarket Road. Oh, and he had to admit he was quite profoundly grateful that the boys on the corner just happened to be in the shop in full rude domineering flight over his parents when the black car stopped and he got out.
Nevertheless, when Robbie’s father overtook Mr Reilly’s leprous ute and Charlie stuck his head out the window and waved madly to the three in the back — the three who swayed together and laughed together and sang, their hair whipping about their heads like flags in a storm — he knew that was where he really wanted to be. And he knew from the moment he pulled himself back inside the Buick that Robbie Gray would rather have been there too.
It was Cat who made the difference, he thought. He and Catherine and Robbie Gray all wanted Cat to touch them with her wand. He thought Robbie Gray was baffled that the Buick did not exert a stronger magic. Robbie Gray gave him a look whose meaning he could not decipher.
“Very immature, isn’t it?” Robbie Gray said. “The way they behave.”
Charlie swallowed. That was the elegant sort of way Grammar boys talked. He did want to agree with Robbie. Yes, he allowed, it was a bit immature.
At the shop, Robbie Gray shook hands with him. “See you again,” he said.
Something warm and rich stirred within Charlie. “Would you like to come in?” he offered. His mind raced across possible attractions he could offer. “My father can read the I Ching,” he said. “You throw three coins and he can tell you your future.”
Robbie hesitated. Charlie thought Robbie wanted to be liked. It was a miracle, but Robbie wanted to be liked by Charlie. He hesitated for a second, and Charlie always kept that second in his mind.
“Maybe some other time,” Robbie said.
But that second was there like a warm little seedling between them all summer, floating between them in the pool at the falls on weekends, germinating slowly in the car on the long rides home.
It was a pity, Charlie thought, that though it put forth a fragile green shoot, it never did come to bud.
4
Across the railway line there was a footbridge linking Wilston Heights with the humbler side of the tracks and it kept on showing up in Charlie’s nightmares and photographs. Not only Charlie’s. Once, after I got to know Catherine, after I began to follow in her footsteps, moving around the world with my own TV crew, we found ourselves collaborating on a documentary in London. In Willesden and Harlesden, to be precise. There was talk of Mole People, there were rumours of underground coils of settlement, there were whispers about the murky urban ravines along the Bakerloo line.
“There’s the perfect place for the shot,” our cameraman said, pointing to the overhead footbridge with its steps down to the platform at Willesden Junction. “We’ll get an aerial view of the station without comment, the faces on the platform will say it all, and we’ll pan along the cobweb of lines from there.” Catherine nodded, but on the bridge she began to feel dizzy. She hung onto the railing and put her head down on her hands. She told the crew she thought she’d have to go home. “I must have picked up something in Asia,” she said.
Nightmares are infectious, I am certain of this. There are virulent strains which go on the rampage, which move around like the Hong Kong ’flu, which have no regard whatsoever for borders, which enter the genes, which cross generations and visit their harm on the sons of the fathers and the lovers of the sons, which possibly persist even unto the third and fourth generations.
I know the footbridge that is roughly halfway between Wilston and Newmarket stations. I know it because it was part of the riddle that swallowed up Gabriel. On the way out to his mother’s pineapple farm at Samford we used to drive along Newmarket Road. We used to stop at a little grocery store, the kind that hardly exists anymore, and we would buy ice creams and then we would walk along the road to the footbridge and we would climb its zigzag steps and lean over the railings and watch the trains rushing beneath. We would lick our ice creams and talk. It was one of our rituals.
“It was a kind of habit with my father,” Gabriel said. “Whenever he came with us to the farm, he’d drive here with me — just with me, he never brought my mother here — and we’d stand on the bridge and watch the trains. I suppose I do it because it brings back that time before they split up. There was an old Chinese couple running the shop back then. They were always very obsequious toward my father, very pleased to see him, smiles all over.”
Gabriel would lean over and stare at the lines as though they were telegraph wires, as though if he looked at them long enough they would yield up some message. “I suppose we came here because the house Dad lived in when he was a kid was up on the hill there,” he said. “It was strange, though. I thought he was almost frightened of the trains, actually, but it was like an addiction. He’d g
et very agitated, or very excited in a strange sort of way when the trains came through. Did you know people can be addicted to their fears? I read about it somewhere. It’s got something to do with endorphins.
“After we finished our ice creams, we used to cross over and walk up the hill past the old house. In the front yard next door, in a pen where people passing by could look at it, there was a huge tortoise that was supposed to be a hundred years old. ’A hundred and thirty now,’ my father would say. It was supposed to be a hundred when he was a kid.”
“I wonder if it’s still there,” I said. “We should go up and see.”
“I suppose that’s why we came. Me and Dad. Nostalgia.”
But he would frown and stare at the rails as though something about the ritual puzzled him. There was a piece missing and he kept looking for it.
“It was a very strange state he got into. Looking back from here, I’d be tempted to say it was sexual excitement, but I suppose that’s the adult twisting the child’s memories. Reading something into them.”
There was something his father always said to him on the bridge, a rather pompous and formulaic thing it seemed to Gabriel now, part of the ritual of ice-creams-and-bridge. “The law is like railway lines, Gabriel, straight and true. The law protects the truth. What the law decides is truth.”
“I suppose,” Gabriel said, “it’s the kind of thing fathers say to sons, especially when they’ve made up their minds their sons will study law. I suppose it doesn’t mean anything.” But in fact, everything seemed cryptic to him, any platitude could have been a code, any cliché, looked at from the proper angle, might turn into gold.
“Of course,” he said, “it did leave an imprint. Straight and true, I’ve discovered, is exactly what the law is not.” Gabriel was already making a name for himself as a dropout from law, a legal maverick, a brumby, combing the city’s underside, keeping a meticulous file on certain policemen and judges and politicians, hawking his investigative services like a vulgar fishmonger his father said (deep in his disappointed cups, full of grief). Gabriel’s capacity for moral outrage seemed limitless.
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