Across the Water

by Ingrid Alexandra

  I elbow my way through the cluster of locals, who all give me lingering, curious looks, and into the main bar that fronts the pub. The television is on, a technicolour glow in the corner of the room, and a newsreader is talking about fires sweeping the coast.

  ‘Ugh,’ I groan when the announcement is over. Apparently, there’s only one road in and out of town and it’s blocked. I text Adam.

  Heard about the fires? The road to town has been blocked, might still be blocked tonight. I hope not!!!

  ‘What are you after?’ A voice startles me, making me remember where I am.

  I look up, flustered, and into a pair of vivid blue eyes. ‘Oh, I wasn’t going to …’ I pause. The young guy behind the bar watches me expectantly, something familiar about his stance, those eyes. He looks like he’s smirking.

  ‘Let me guess. A sauv blanc? Or, wait. Maybe a pinot?’ His voice is more gravely than I’d expect from someone of his age, inflected with a broad Australian accent. He reminds me of an Australian actor I can’t recall the name of in a film I saw on the plane trip over.

  ‘I, uh …’ I shake my head. Wine. Yes, I could definitely do with a glass. I check my watch. It’s after midday; that’s okay, isn’t it? ‘Pinot grigio, thanks,’ I say, remembering Dee’s tip.

  He’s still smirking. What secret am I not in on?

  ‘Sorry I scared you,’ he says as he pours my glass just a touch fuller than it needs to be.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The other day, by the creek. I think I gave you a bit of a fright.’

  I stare and he smirks and then it dawns on me. I feel my cheeks grow warm. ‘That was you? You … you’re, uh …’ My brain screams ‘much better looking than I thought’ but thankfully it doesn’t slip out. ‘You’ve shaved.’

  ‘It’s been known to happen, on occasion. Six fifty, thanks.’

  I wrinkle my nose and hand him my card, but he shakes his head.

  ‘Sorry. Card reader’s buggered. Cash only I’m afraid.’

  ‘God, this place,’ I mutter, scrounging for change in the rarely-used side pocket of my handbag and finding a couple of unexpected twenty-dollar notes and some loose change. I must have withdrawn money on our first night when we visited the pub and forgotten about it.

  He chuckles. ‘Not all people take to it. You’re not from around here, are you?’ He hands me the glass and I sip gratefully, relishing the cool liquid as it slips down my throat.

  I laugh. ‘No. God, no.’ Then, feeling bad, I add lamely, ‘It is quite lovely, though.’

  His eyes meet mine and his eyebrows twitch. ‘Right.’

  A customer gestures for his attention, and I pretend to take an interest in the flickering television until he returns, as I somehow knew he would, to my side of the bar.

  ‘You shouldn’t go that way, you know.’

  ‘What way?’

  He grins and I find myself irritated. ‘Are you deliberately talking in riddles?’

  He laughs easily, unfazed. And I realise that’s what he wants – to rile me up. It occurs to me then that I’m being flirted with. I glance down at my ring, place my hand on my glass so the diamond shows.

  Pub Guy’s eyes catch mine, flick to the diamond and back, and his grin widens.

  ‘You shouldn’t go over the creek that way. Over that bridge, the way you go.’

  I purse my lips. ‘And why not? There’s no other way across.’

  ‘Untrue. You can take the boat. The one you’ve got sitting there, waiting to be used.’

  Unsettled, I take a deep swallow of wine and pull my coat close to my chest.

  ‘I haven’t been spying on you,’ he says in a gentler voice. ‘It’s hard to miss when someone’s over there, what with the other houses abandoned and not much else going on. I’m on Cockle Street, the house on the north end.’

  ‘Oh! You’re—’ I bite my lip, embarrassed. Funny, I never noticed he had a beard when I’d watched him lifting weights, although I suppose it’s the furthest house from where we are, and he’s mainly been faced away from me. ‘Yes, well. I suppose you’re right. Hard to miss,’ I allow. Knowing where he lives, I can hardly fault him for noticing me. It’s not like I haven’t noticed him.

  He catches me inspecting his tanned arms and smirks. ‘Been here a while. Came on holiday from Melbourne once and just never went back. I come and go – caught the travelling bug a while back – but I always end up right back here.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, unable to imagine wanting to swap metropolitan Melbourne for this place.

  His expression turns serious. ‘Just be careful crossing the creek, especially coming home at night after a few.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The bridge isn’t exactly new, as you’ve probably noticed. And if the tide’s in the wrong place, it can get deep.’

  ‘How deep?’

  Pub Guy stretches his arm over his head. ‘Pretty deep. And when the tide goes out, the pull’s pretty strong. Could end up dragged from your place to the open sea in ten minutes flat. Had a couple of tourists drown after getting swept off that bridge last year.’

  I shiver. ‘Gosh, that’s horrible. Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘Another thing, we’ve got a king tide coming in tonight.’

  ‘King tide?’

  ‘Yep. The water can come right up to the fence at my place. One year it was so high the Haddads’s downstairs flooded.’

  ‘Oh, gosh. Is … is it safe to cross by boat? When there’s a king tide, I mean?’

  Pub Guy eyes me over the rim of the glass he’s polishing. ‘If you’ve got a strong motor.’

  I take out my phone and text Adam.

  Maybe you shouldn’t come back tonight, even if the road is reopened. There’s going to be something called a king tide and it might be dangerous to cross the creek.

  My phone pings almost immediately.

  Oh no!! First fires and now this! That bloody place!!!

  And even though my heart aches at the thought of a night apart, I smile because it echoes my earlier thoughts exactly. I love the way our minds sync; it reminds me of how effortless it was from the start.

  I finish my drink and glance involuntarily at the rows of bottles in the bar fridge.

  ‘Another?’ Pub Guy asks.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘All right. But after that, you’d better head off.’

  I frown. ‘Excuse me?’

  He gives me a slow, lazy smile. ‘Tide’s coming in.’

  Chapter 12

  Dee

  March, 2017

  Thursday, 5:16pm

  There’s blood on my baby’s mouth.

  A whimper sputters out as I lift her from the cot and cradle her in my arms. What have I done? I’ve left her to cry and now she’s hurt. How could I be so selfish, so reckless? She’s only three weeks old. I can’t leave her on her own. Not even for a minute.

  I grab a baby wipe and press it to her tiny mouth. A smear of blood comes away and beneath it is a small scratch. I sob with relief. I know straight away that it was made by her tiny, too-long nails that I can never cut because she screams and clenches her fists.

  I kiss her sweet brow and stroke her hair and murmur softly to her. ‘I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.’ I know it’s only a scratch, and she’s fine, but every minor injury to her perfect little body breaks my heart. How is it possible to love someone with all your body and soul and yet for part of you to wish they didn’t exist at the same time?

  I’m feeling a bit wild at the moment, if I’m honest. I feel like I’m doing everything wrong; I can’t even cut the child’s nails. Rob isn’t as involved as I thought he’d be. It’s not his fault; two weeks paternity leave is a shitty, near-useless amount of time. You’ve barely absorbed the fact that you have a baby and then the father is forced to leave his family, and the mother’s one source of support is taken away for most of the day. The nights are the worst. Even though I haven’t slept, when I see daylight creeping through the curtains I’m fi
lled with relief. I survived another night.

  She has colic, so screams almost constantly unless she’s asleep. Today I just needed a minute – one minute! – to breathe because I was so worked up I was afraid of what I might do. I’ve joined a support forum on Facebook – I couldn’t think what else to do, I’d never even heard of colic before – and it’s supposed to last twelve weeks. Three fucking months! I don’t know if I’ll survive another month of this. And then what if it doesn’t stop? Some of the mothers on this forum are saying they have twelve-month-olds who still scream day in and day out and don’t sleep. A few of the women in the forum are suicidal. I would be too if I’d had to put up with this shit for a year.

  I get up with Ruby in the night because she’s breastfeeding and I don’t want Rob to drive when he’s had no sleep but I can’t seem to express enough milk in time before she needs another feed so Rob isn’t bottle feeding that often. It feels like that’s all I do. Feed Ruby and milk myself and sleep when she sleeps. It’s simultaneously the most stressful and the most boring thing I’ve ever had to do.

  I should call the postpartum depression hotline. That’s what Rob says. But what’s the point? There’s nothing anyone can do. Can they change the past, rewrite history? I have Ruby now; that’s it, there’s no way out. Well, there is one.

  But I can’t choose the coward’s way. Because I deserve this. I did everything wrong, right from the beginning, and I deserve to face the consequences. I should have been honest, should have come clean while I had the chance. He might have forgiven me. I might not have had to live in constant fear of being found out.

  ***

  6:03pm

  Ruby is finally starting to show signs of falling asleep, so I fetch a blanket from the pile of clean laundry and place it over her, rocking her gently as I head to the kitchen. I put the kettle on for some chamomile and anise tea, which is good for lactation, apparently. The kettle is starting to bubble when I check the time. After six.

  Fuck it, I think, and pour a dash of red into a wine glass. I throw it back. Pour another. I return to the living room and sit on the edge of the sofa and stare out of the window at the starlight reflected on the water.

  If I’d been more like Rob – less complicated, more open – things might have been different. But it’s like there’s something missing inside me, and I’m always looking for the next thing to fill it. The next high, the next distraction. Why can’t I just be satisfied, sit still and feel content for once?

  There’s a saying I can’t seem to get out of my head; you can live your life two ways: as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is a miracle. Rob’s the second category, for sure – a firm believer that everything is magical, has a meaning, was ‘meant to be’. I fall more into the former category. And perhaps that’s been my downfall. I don’t want to be the one to shatter Rob’s shiny world view, but I fear it might already be too late.

  Rob was wonderful during my pregnancy. He truly saw it as miraculous. I was the centre of attention at all times and I didn’t even have to do anything. I just had to exist. If I could forget for a moment, I could revel in it. The very fact that I was carrying his child (a concept that was surreal to me at all times, without exception), the fact that his seed had been planted in my womb, I could see it in his eyes, the pride that my body was changing because there was something of him inside me.

  People are funny like that. We get this biological ego boost when all our bits work, a confirmation of our cohesion with the Way of All Things. And similarly, when our bits don’t work, we feel we’ve failed somehow. As if we ever had any control over it, any say at all.

  Sometimes, despite myself, I saw it Rob’s way. It wasn’t just that he gazed at me like I was the goddess of fertility, that he marvelled at my burgeoning belly and blue-veined breasts. I was beautiful pregnant. Everyone said so and I could see it myself. It had never occurred to me there would be beauty in it at all, let alone that I could feel so beautiful, so womanly, with a tiny human growing inside me. I’d only ever thought of the pain, the discomfort, the ‘ickiness’ of it all. So I, too, marvelled at the changes in me with a distant fascination.

  But it wasn’t just that. It was when I was alone with her – the her she became when we found out the sex at the twenty-week ultrasound – and I felt her move, when there was silence. It was just her and me and one night, when I was emotional, when I’d been screaming and crying and throwing things and was calm again, exhausted, and I felt her – I spoke to her. I’ll take care of you, I told her. And while the feeling was fleeting, I meant it. And I could feel her reaching out – an arm or a leg I wasn’t sure – this entity, this creature that had been created out of his cells merging with my cells and, of their own accord, morphing into a third being. And I could see. I could see how Rob would think it was a miracle.

  That I could share those feelings with him, that sense of magic and wonder, felt like a betrayal. Not the worst of my transgressions against him, but a betrayal nonetheless. Another thing I’d robbed him of, something that – with another woman, in other circumstances – would have been a natural, beautiful, shared thing. But knowing the risk, of what might be coming at the other end of it all, I could never quite relax.

  Maybe Rob’s right about more than I’ve given him credit for. Maybe I do tend to self-sabotage. Maybe it is – maybe it always has been – about my mother’s boyfriend interfering with me when I was young. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it, apart from him. It had happened to so many others, the other girls and women I worked with at the strip club, and I figured it was normal. I knew there was this thing inside me – this pain, this self-hate almost, like I was worthless, unclean – but they all had it too. They all told their stories in their dismissive ways, cigarettes held aloft, wine glasses in hand. Snorting lines. Drinking themselves senseless. Numbing. Pretending. Play acting at being powerful when they were just lost little girls.

  My drug of choice came in human form. Older ones, of course, with a little grey in their beard, a fan of lines around their eyes. Rough hands. Hard eyes. But, really, I was an equal rights offender. Any man, any time.

  It was just the once. Only the once. We’d been ‘trying’ – or Rob thought we had. I thought he’d lay off the idea if we found out we couldn’t. I was sure we couldn’t, somehow.

  It was during that time – the invasive tests, the jabs and probes – that I realised there was more than one way for a woman to be objectified. In my experience, it came in the most obvious form. There were those who sought a fuck and those who sought a wife, someone to bear his children, someone to give him the title of loving husband, doting father. Either way, her worth was in her pussy.

  When we went for tests, I felt like a sow being inspected for the quality of my meat. ‘You’re young and healthy, they’d say. ‘A prime specimen for breeding’ was what I heard. And it made me sick. I didn’t feel that differently from when I was up on stage, my leg around a pole. Somehow, I felt worse. I can’t explain why, but I did.

  So I looked for escape. Fell into old habits. Rob was away on business. And he was back from his travels – he was always traveling; the men in this town never stand still – deeply tanned from Vietnam or Bali or Samoa or wherever. And in a moment of weakness, I was tempted.

  And now, here I am, standing barefoot in my living room with unwashed hair, three-day-old clothes, a glass of wine in one hand and a baby in my arms.

  ***

  Mercifully, she’s asleep now. I stroke the little hand that’s curled up beside her soft cheek and can’t help but smile. It helps that she’s so beautiful. I know everyone thinks their babies are beautiful, and I’m starting to agree. I see babies differently now, I can admit that. But Ruby really is gorgeous, unlike the strange, skinny creature she was when she came out. Her eyelashes are long and dark, her eyes huge and the deepest blue. She has a little button nose and perfect, cupid’s bow lips. She’s perfect.

  And I know that, whatever comes, it isn’t just about me
anymore. I have to try to do what’s right. For her.

  Chapter 13

  Liz

  June 2017

  Wednesday, 5:45pm

  They didn’t clear the road in time. I come away from my conversation with Adam feeling discombobulated, unsettled. We agreed earlier that it was best he stayed in town. No sense traveling back to find some hotel up this way only to drive back to Sydney in the morning.

  Still. Not ideal, really. Particularly considering the price of Sydney hotels.

  Adam sounded out of breath on the phone and my mind went to default, picturing another woman in the hotel room with him, and then the old mantra – he’s not like the others, this is not the same. But the things I’ve seen, and muscle memory, make me respond as I once would have (though – gradually – that’s changing) and that old, heavy brick lodges itself in my gut. On the phone, my voice shook and it was made worse by the plovers squawking in the background, so loudly I could barely hear him.

  ‘Sorry, darling. These damn birds,’ he’d laughed as he reassured me he’d be back tomorrow, he’d get an early start and leave in the afternoon so he could be home before dark. And I had a sudden stab of nostalgia for the life we’d left behind, so acute it hurt my chest.

  It won’t be long now, I tell myself as I wonder how I’ll survive the night.

  ***

  9:59pm

  The power is off. It’s been off since just after I microwaved a lonely bowl of leftover chicken korma. That’s lucky, I suppose. The sky has since erupted, at one point sending sheets of rain past the windows so thick I couldn’t see out, and while the fires must almost certainly be out as a result, the power still hasn’t returned. We’re probably not much of a priority, being way out here in the middle of nowhere.