Deeper Water

by Jessie Cole

  If I closed my eyes I could see the hard line of Hamish’s jaw and feel the sweep of my fingers along it. I breathed out in a sigh, and in the next breath the curve of Anja’s hip appeared in my mind’s eye, and the slide of my hand against it. I didn’t try to quell my thoughts like I had before. I didn’t try to brush the images away, but let them drift, eyes still closed, fingers bending and shaping the clay beneath my hands in whatever way seemed best. Before long I imagined other people I knew—Billy—the brown hardness of his forearms, sprinkled with dark hair. But in the end it all came back to him—Hamish, with his pale skin and luminous eyes. I got to imagining what his hands might feel like on me if I was the clay, if he could mould me with his touch. I felt a shuddering within, dark and liquid, and it made me want to switch off the light. It was as though I’d happened upon a secret, ripe for the telling, but precious too, and I didn’t want anyone else to see. I thought of all the secret places I knew—Anja’s hut, the hollowed-out tree, and the abandoned shack way out in the paddocks.

  The memory of that shack began to swell in my mind. Tumbledown walls, rusted roof. All alone in the middle of nowhere. A furtive place, where all my secret thoughts could be housed. Somewhere inside myself I opened a door and stepped into a new place. Where clay could become skin, and skin become clay. I turned off the light and crept into bed, careful not to wake my mother. Once I was there, tucked up in my covers, I conjured the shack and let my thoughts roam.

  When I awoke it was with a dull headache, as though all those secret thoughts had pressed heavily against my skull while I slept. It was cool in the early morning, the thick weight of the summer humidity not yet hanging in the air. I slid on a skirt and a floppy jumper and went to watch the sun rise. The grass was damp beneath my feet, the dew quickly soaking my bandage. Though the skin felt stretched tight across my forehead, my foot was stronger, my limp less pronounced. I always marvelled at my body’s capacity to right itself. It was as my mum had said—It will all be better in the morning.

  Far off in the distance, the rim of the sun was just showing above the mountains, and where I was standing was gradually bathed in light. I could see Bessie a little way off, munching the grass. The calf tottered nearby, stumbling against its mother’s legs. It seemed a long time since Hamish had washed off the bridge, but when I looked at the calf, still all wobbly and new, I realised it had been less than a week. I looked across the hillsides rising in front of me, wondering where he was right at that minute. I couldn’t see Frank’s house from mine, but I knew, as the crow flies, it was just over the way. Cross a couple of creeks, head through some camphors, and in no time at all I could be there.

  I let the chickens out and gathered the eggs, scooping up the bottom of my jumper and holding them gently in the pocket of fabric. They were warm, only just laid. I took one and rolled it against my closed eyes.

  Sometimes when I woke with a throbbing head I wandered to the creek and tried to wash all the heaviness away. It wasn’t a sure-fire cure, but from time to time it worked. That morning, the warm egg pressed against my eye, it seemed worth a try. I set off carefully, mindful of my foot, but once I’d meandered down the paddocks, across those open spaces, I was feeling pretty sure. The stretch of creek I’d chosen was a little way down from the secret tree. A deep spot, just before a bend and some rapids. The water had cleared, but the shadows of dawn made it seem dark and bottomless. I sat on the grass on the bank, arranging the eggs in a neat pile then taking off my jumper and nestling it around them. A Mema nest. It made me smile. Unwinding my bandage, I bent my ankle from side to side, testing it. It was still a little sore, but no longer swollen. I held my bung foot in my hand, looking it over. Sophie’s Band-Aids were still stuck on and I didn’t touch them. I’d be lucky if they stayed on in the water.

  My foot was a deformity, I suppose, but I was used to it. It didn’t seem like anything other than another part of me. No different from my knobbly little elbows, or the deep recess of my belly button. A feature on the landscape of my body. I knew that in other places things like that—misshapen feet, or any other slight deviation from the norm—could leave you marked. But my mother had always told me I was blessed, and I had the gap between my teeth to prove it. Sitting there, I wondered how it might be to have been born in a different place. It was hard to imagine being somewhere without this sky and these hills and this flowing body of water. Without my house and family, without Bessie, her baby, the chickens and Thor. Even Isis and Old Dog stayed with us, buried beneath the soil. I lay back against the grass, looking at the morning sky. I didn’t know if I’d exist without all these things around me. And if I did, who would I be?

  Standing back up, I stripped off and slipped into the creek, plunging down deep. The water was cold and fresh against my skin, jolting me out of my thoughts. I lingered there a while, floating, until my skin began to tingle and prick, and it seemed as good a time as ever to go and face the day. Clambering onto the bank, I wrung the water from my hair, drying off in the soft morning sun. I shivered a little, but already the heat was rising. I liked watching the goosebumps that spread across my arms and legs dissolve into the day. When I was dry enough I stepped back into my clothes, clean and revived, my headache banished.

  Staring across the hills, I saw a figure walking. It was him, Hamish, striding towards the bridge. I blinked, not trusting my eyes. I know at times I’m a whimsical girl, dreaming about odd things until to me they seem real. I’d longed to see him, imagining myself crossing those same hills towards Frank Brown’s old farmstead, but I hadn’t moved an inch. I hadn’t let myself. And now there he was, walking right towards me. My breath held in my chest, wedged there, until he was close enough that I knew it wasn’t just my fancy. I couldn’t help but take it as a sign. I had yearned and he had come. Wasn’t there some meaning in that?

  Hamish had something in his arms, something big and black. He stopped on the other side of the bridge and I could sense his hesitation. We’d ridden across it in a flash on our bikes a few days before, not stopping to inspect the broken, teetering railing, not reflecting on what Hamish had nearly lost in that wild rush of water. I imagined he was seeing it all again. He lifted his gaze and I knew he had felt me there watching.

  He didn’t hesitate then, but strode across. My breath rushed from my lungs, and I sucked in another, holding it firmly. Stepping forward, I moved through the air towards him, forgetting my eggs all wrapped in their jumper-nest, forgetting my rolled-up bandage. Forgetting everything. My head was buzzing with a strange noise, my heart thudding in my chest. I felt a stranger to myself, a ghost-walker.

  As I got closer, I saw he held a dog. A gangly half-grown pup.

  ‘Morning swim?’ he called out, taking in my dripping hair.

  I nodded, focusing on the puppy. When he got near, I saw it was squirming, wanting to get down.

  ‘You got a dog?’ I asked, surprised by the evenness of my voice. I reached out a hand to pat the dog’s head. The pup had big floppy ears, fleshy and soft as velvet. ‘He’s lovely.’

  ‘It’s a she,’ Hamish said, wrestling with her wriggling form. ‘If I put her down she’ll run away. I don’t have a lead.’ He crouched down and put the puppy on the grass, holding onto her back. I squatted down too, my ankle protesting beneath me. After yesterday—losing Old Dog—it was startling to see a puppy so full of life. Vital, its coat black and shimmery.

  ‘I got her for you, Mema.’

  I suppose I should have known it was a gift, soon as I saw it in his arms, but I hadn’t. I didn’t say anything, no words would come. Reaching out, I rubbed the puppy’s ears. She turned her nose towards my hand, licking my fingers. It made me think of Old Dog’s scrappy fur, coarse and a little matted.

  ‘To replace the old dog.’

  I exhaled then, thinking of her buried under the dirt. Dying was natural, but that didn’t make it easier to bear.

  Hamish looked stricken. ‘I guess that’s a bad way of putting it.’ I could see him striving to
choose the right words, struggling through sentences in his head. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I know you can’t replace something like a dog. I just …’

  I smiled across at him ’cause I knew what he was trying for. I wasn’t so daft that I couldn’t recognise a heartfelt gift. He pushed the dog’s bottom down and she sat, head tilted sideways, looking up at me with her soulful puppy gaze. And behind her, he looked at me too, eyes clear and blue.

  ‘What do you think?’ He sounded uncertain. ‘Is she alright?’

  Even though we’d always had animals dumped at our door, I couldn’t help feeling that this was different. That it mattered to Hamish in some particular way. My mind was ricocheting with thoughts, still buzzing with that sound. I was searching for the meaning. A life for a life?

  ‘Do you want her?’ he asked. ‘’Cause Frank said he’ll take her if you don’t.’

  I looked at him then. ‘I want her.’ My words rushed out, low and slippery.

  The pup wasn’t going to sit still for much longer. She was twitching all over, ready to take flight.

  ‘I think she’ll stick near us, if you let her go,’ I said, stroking her fur. Puppies were scatty, but there was no traffic here to run her over, no holes for her to slip into.

  Hamish lifted his hands off the pup’s back and she bolted off, sniffing around us and then snuffling along the creek bank.

  ‘She’s part beagle.’ He was watching the pup. ‘They’re sniffer dogs.’

  The dog was exploring, but she was keeping an eye on us, not going too far.

  ‘Frank gave me a list of all the local breeders,’ he said. ‘I rang around until I found her. We picked her up this morning. She’s house-trained, you know. She’s already a few months old.’ He wiped his doggy hands on the grass.

  ‘Did you buy her?’

  I don’t know why it mattered but it did.

  He smiled. ‘Finally got into my bank account.’ It felt odd to think of him forking out the cash. ‘She’s part golden retriever too. Though you can’t really see that.’

  I shook my head—there was nothing golden about her. ‘I’ve only ever had mongrels. You have to guess what they are.’

  ‘You like her?’ They were simple words, but they seemed to hold so much.

  Within me was all confusion. I nodded, but just having Hamish close made my insides raucous. All the words in my head tumbled together, coherence lost in a pulsing chaos. I felt my stomach turn, my fingers tremble.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ he said then, standing up. I stood up too. ‘I’ve got to get into work. Meeting with some guys from the council.’

  ‘How’s it been going in the truck?’ My words sounded clunky. Since he’d been gone I’d worried about the driving.

  Hamish glanced across at me, shaking his head. ‘That first afternoon in town I just got in the back. Frank must have thought I was a freak, but he didn’t say a word.’ Hamish could smile at himself. I liked that about him. ‘The next morning I got into the cab. It was the same, couldn’t breathe, sweating like a pig, but I held on tight and eventually it passed. When we picked up Anja it was better, bit more of a distraction.’

  I felt myself stiffen at the mention of her name. An image of them at the Savoy flashed through my mind. At the back of my neck I felt hackles rise. I was an animal, caught in some uncontrolled biological response. Though I tried to stay still, my shoulders shuddered.

  ‘She’s an odd one.’ He looked at the ground. It was hard to know exactly what he meant. I imagined all Anja’s tricks—the ways she played at being a woman. The bright stripe of her lipstick, the long sweep of her bare legs. I wanted to tell him to be careful of her, but I didn’t know how.

  ‘Well, I better go,’ he said, whistling for the dog. She came bouncing over, ears flopping in the air. ‘You grab her otherwise she’ll follow me.’

  I picked her up. Half-grown she was pretty heavy. She scrabbled around in my arms, but after a second she stilled. Hamish reached out and gave her one last scratch behind the ears, then he stepped away from me, holding up a hand.

  ‘Let me know what you name her,’ he called, throwing out a promise of tomorrow.

  17.

  Mum wasn’t too impressed about the puppy, even when I explained her pedigree. I knew she could see how much it pleased me, how every time I looked at it I thought of him, and how he’d thought of me. I saw the puppy as a sign of affection, and shafts of hope began to rise inside me. Would you buy a pup for someone you didn’t care about? I named her Blossom, for all the new things that were bursting inside me, but my mum refused to call her anything but ‘that pup’.

  On the first day she dug up the garden, eating the hearts right out of some of Mum’s most precious plants. Her bromeliads. The house was tense, my mum bristling with annoyance. I tied Blossom up and she was chastened. After that she stayed by me, looking at my face to try to ascertain the rules. There weren’t many I could teach her, besides don’t eat the plants. In my house it had always been a case of anything goes.

  Anja didn’t come all that day and I wondered where she was. I wasn’t game to head back up the hill and face her father, look into his half-crazed eyes and see the kiss reflected back at me. I missed her. She’d known all my unknowns—there hadn’t been anything to hide. I thought back on all we’d shared, tried to find those hints of sex, but, in truth, the boundaries between us had always been lax.

  When we were very small we’d found a log, half submerged in the creek. Wedged under the stones by one of the floods, it lay there on an angle gathering moss, only the tip of it protruding. We always swam nude and I don’t know which one of us discovered it first, but we came to know that if we rubbed ourselves against it, there was a kind of pleasure. It was impossible to do together, so we’d take turns, one of us treading water while the other rubbed herself against the log. It wasn’t a secret, we spoke of it openly—‘You want to go rub the log?’ Too young to know that such things should be concealed. And in any case, when we looked about at the adult lives around us—all the frolicking nakedness, the hopping from bed to bed—how could we have known about such a thing as a private realm.

  We didn’t see the log as a means to an end. We didn’t rub ourselves raw trying to get somewhere, we just liked the feel of it, comforting and sublime. The log washed away one flood, as unexpectedly as it’d come. We’d sat on the bank staring at the place it had been, wondering where it would end up, wondering if anyone would love it the way we had. The mossy log, svelte and lean. We mourned its sudden disappearance, but we soon forgot, moving on to some other curiosity. But maybe it had been there all the time, this shared thing. In the scheme of things it was hard to fathom.

  All the next day I waited for Hamish to reappear, knowing that he would. There was a hum inside me, a kind of twanging. He had given me a pup and wasn’t that something? When my mum was finished in the shed I took her place, tying the pup to a post outside so she wouldn’t get under my feet while I made my mugs. Feeling the clay between my hands, I dreamed of him some more. I didn’t see Mum watching me, standing in the doorway, her frown growing deeper by the moment. When I finally noticed her, she couldn’t hide her dismay, and the secret sound inside me quietened a notch.

  ‘Mema, it’s no good.’ Her eyes were fierce and sad.

  ‘What?’ I asked, though I knew she saw everything. I knew she always had.

  ‘He’s not for you, love,’ she said, and I was struck ’cause she never called me that. ‘He’s just going to disappear. He’s been itching for it from the start.’

  I think I knew she was right, but the shafts of hope inside me burned bright.

  ‘Mema, I know he seems all smooth and shiny, and you’ve been starved of some real company.’ She paused a second, watching my face. ‘And don’t think I’ve missed how much charm he’s thrown your way. I’ve seen him looking at you through those long lashes. But try to pin him down, even for a second, and he’ll just wriggle free.’

  I could see there was no joy for he
r in speaking these words. That she’d rather not be standing there breaking my heart.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ I said, but my hands were shaking.

  ‘I can smell it a mile off, Mema. Call it my area of expertise.’

  ‘But what about the pup?’

  ‘Everyone has moments of kindness,’ she said. ‘The trick is telling which ones matter.’

  I thought about the clearness of Hamish’s eyes. That first moment I truly saw them, pushing on the flank of my silly birthing cow.

  I nodded, trying to dim that clamour inside me, trying to cover my shards of hope.

  ‘Okay, Mum.’ Fear was welling in my belly. I’d let go of the reins and my horse had galloped away. My imagination had jumped the fences—long gone—I didn’t even know where to look.

  ‘I know it hurts, Baby-girl,’ she said softly. ‘But I’m telling you, it can hurt a whole lot more.’

  I thought of all the men my mum had known. All the times she’d believed. She stood there in the open doorway watching me, and I wished her gone, and all this bad history gone too, swept up under the rug.

  ‘They’re not all like that,’ I said, soft but defiant. ‘They can’t all be.’

  She spread her arms wide, like she was holding the whole world, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t have to say a word. I looked out of the shed to my horizons, taking in the lie of the land—the gentle undulations of those rolling endless hills—and I nodded then, tucking my feelings away.

  I was still tinkering at the wheel when Sophie came to visit in the afternoon, carrying a baby on each hip. It looked like they’d all just woken up, even Rory was quiet.