by Susan Duncan
I throw Pia the rope. She catches it first go, ties us onto the railing. I leap into a cute little fibreglass dinghy smaller than most bathtubs. I have just enough time to grab the pontoon before it sinks under me. I hang from my elbows, in water from the chest down. Under me, the boat is submerged, stern first. Only the tip of the bow is above water. There are not many things sadder than a sunken boat.
'What d'you do that for?' Pia asks unsympathetically.
'With hindsight, that probably wasn't the smartest boat to jump into,' I say. 'Haven't seen it here much, although I did the same thing yesterday and it seemed quite solid.'
Pia is laughing so hard she can't speak.
'Can you give me a hand out of here?' I ask, treading water. 'It's actually not that comfortable.'
'What we need,' she says, still giggling, 'is a big Maori to come along and lift you onto the pontoon.'
And with that, a big Maori appears out of nowhere, reaches under my arms, hoists me like I'm a featherweight instead of a sodden, spreading woman in her middle-age, and plonks me on the pontoon. Without a word, he turns and walks away.
'Who's that?' Pia asks, wide-eyed with disbelief . . . and a glimmer of admiration.
'I'm fine, thank you. And I've got no idea who he is. The only Maori I know around here is Big Jack, and it's not him.'
Then Brad with the six-pack body arrives and helps us resurrect the dinghy.
'Owe you a beer,' I say, gratefully.
'Nah. You owe the bloke whose boat you've sunk a slab,' he responds, walking off.
'Guess we have to go home so I can change into dry clothes,' I say. Then the two of us start to laugh again. 'Didn't even lose a shoe,' I giggle. 'And, look, the change in my pocket is still there.'
'Thought you said you'd worked out boats.'
'I have, I have! It's just that every so often something comes out of the blue and slugs you. Keeps you honest, though. Even the good life has an occasional sting.'
On the verandah, Bob looks me up and down. 'You're wet?' he says, unable to work out what's going on.
'That's what happens when you sink a boat.'
His face goes white but he doesn't panic. Sinking boats are part of the way of life around Pittwater. They drop to the bottom in storms, when the bilge pump packs up, when you've tied too tightly to a pole in a rising tide. Which is what happened the night we went to dinner at Marg's in Little Lovett Bay. It was the first anniversary of Barbara's death. Bob spent hours on the phone to his kids, talking them through a day that will always be raw. By the evening, he was worn out but he tucked his own sorrow in a corner.
'You look forward,' he always says. 'You have to look forward.'
Halfway through dinner, a neighbour called to say a boat had sunk at the end of the wharf. We all ran out onto the deck. Below us, the Tin Can lay with her nose pointed to the sky and her stern embedded in the sandy bottom of the bay. Yellow life jackets, red fuel tanks, hoses and boat paraphernalia floated around her.
Bob's grief ambushed him then, and there was nothing he could do about it. He walked slowly and silently along the jetty to where his boat lay like the dead, and sat with his legs over the edge, tears streaming down his face.
'Bit upset over a boat, isn't he?' asked Marg, puzzled because she knows Bob as a practical, unemotional man.
'Got nothing to do with the boat,' I replied.
And we left him for a while, until he washed his face in water as salty as his tears and called Toby to ask when he and his partner Dave could bring the Laurel Mae to crane the Tin Can from the seabed and float it again. The engine never recovered but the local kids scavenged all the bits and pieces that drifted in on the tide and brought them back to Bob.
'What d'you want to sink our boat for?' Bob asks me, still trying to intuit what's happened.
'Not our boat. Someone else's. Tell you when I've got some dry clothes on.'
'How big was the engine?'
'Five horsepower.'
And he sighs with relief. No major damage bill in the offing.
***
An hour later, Bob drops Pia and me back at Church Point.
'Feel up to an Esther visit?' I ask when we're in the car. 'Really want to know what you make of it all.'
'Love to see the old girl,' Pia says.
'Remember when we thought she and your dad might make a couple?'
'You thought that, not me. My dad never had time for frivolous women. Don't think he looked at another woman after my mother died, you know.'
'Wonder why?'
'Guess no-one ever measured up to her.'
'Did he ever go a bit silly? I mean towards the end?'
'No. Although he forgot to eat, which is why my brother and I insisted he move to a retirement home. But it was more like a club than an old people's facility – sherries in the library at six every evening. He quite enjoyed it.'
'He wasn't there that long. Few months or something, wasn't it?'
'Yeah. The thought of what it was costing probably got to him. Think he made up his mind he'd reached his use-by date and bowed out before he ran through his money. Noble, really. And brave. He was a tough old bugger. Drove me mad occasionally but I miss him.'
I pull into the driveway in front of Esther's unit and let Pia out. Heather from Scotland Island, who works in the nursing home opposite my mother's, is having a ciggie in her break.
'Tell Esther I'll see her in a minute. Just want to say hello to Heather.'
Heather waves and grins, stubs out her cigarette and puts the butt in a little tin. 'Your mother against smoking?' she asks me.
'No. Ran a country pub for a long time. Learned to live with it. And Dad reached for a cigarette before he opened his eyes in the morning.'
'Well, someone's complained about us,' Heather says. 'This is my last smoko here.'
'Lot of folks with nothing better to do, maybe. Don't think it's because anyone's worried about your health.'
Heather laughs. 'No, mate, you're right there. By the way, your mum doesn't get off that sofa very often. Sleeps all day with the telly blaring.'
'Yeah. She's a bit of a worry at the moment. Not settling as easily as we'd hoped.'
'I'll keep an eye on her,' Heather says, turning back to the nursing home. 'Let you know if it gets worse.'
I relieve Pia, who's already looking a bit hunted. My mother wants her to choose a painting before she leaves. One of her own efforts from the days when she took art classes and had everything she ever painted, even the exercises, expensively framed.
'I'm into Aboriginal art, right now,' Pia says, kindly, 'so it's very sweet of you, Esther, and ordinarily I'd be thrilled. But it just won't fit with everything else.'
'Well, if you change your mind . . .'
***
'What do you think?' I ask Pia over a coffee in Mona Vale. With a tuna and rocket sandwich, which we've halved. Her idea, not mine.
'Well, the noise must be terrible,' she says. 'Apparently she's sleeping on the sofa and she can still hear what's going on.'
'So you think it's true?'
'Well, it is to her. And I must say, she sounds pretty convincing.'
I sigh. Time. Maybe all she needs is time.
That night, the phone rings. The owner of the sunken bathtub is from Frog Hollow. He's rented a house with a slipway for a few months to fix his yacht. Plans to sail around the world. Doesn't everyone?
'Thanks for leaving the note,' he says. 'I'll get a quote to fix the engine and get back to you.'
A couple of days later, he brings around the bill. It's incredibly reasonable.
'Could have done a swifty,' Bob says to him.
'No, mate, I work as an insurance assessor. See so much of that it turns your stomach.'
***
Simon, a young bloke with corn-silk hair, a blindingly beautiful smile and a farwaway look in his eyes, house-sits while Bob and I make a quick trip to Melbourne. He's a naval architect and, like the fella whose boat I sank, dreams of making th
e great global circumnavigation and then designing the ultimate pleasure cruising yacht.
He's always in demand as a house-sitter. He has charmed us all and he is meticulous, responsible, good with animals. He listens to Pittwater stories he must have heard over and over as though it's the first time. Maybe because he lived with his granny when he was a student. 'She's worked out the internet,' he boasted one day. 'Knows what's happening all over the world! Even though she doesn't leave home much anymore.'
He's the only person who handles Caro's dog, Louie, with ease. She's a pound dog. Nervous, a mad barker and a serious watchdog. But she loves Simon. Rolls on her back for a tummy scratch when he walks past, tongue lolling, her eyes following him like she's got an attack of the besots. I knew he'd handle huge, lumbering, slobbery, increasingly feeble old Wally sensibly and kindly in our absence.
'Hope that dog dies while we're away,' Bob says as we set off.
'Why?' I ask, shocked.
'So I don't have to dig the hole.'
Wally waits until we get home, then within an hour quietly sinks to the ground in the back courtyard and refuses to move. Panting.
'Better get Ray,' says Bob. 'Looks like he's in pain.' He goes to the shed. Picks up a shovel, wanders beyond the chook pen.
Ray shakes his head. 'Spleen's ruptured,' he says after feeling Wally all over.
'That's what happened to my old dog, Sweetie,' I say. So Ray knows I understand what comes next.
Bob digs a hole deep enough to defeat goannas. We lower Wally into it, wrapped in his favourite orange chenille bedspread.
'Don't know how I'm going to tell my mother,' I say. 'It'll break her heart.'
Bob shovels earth. There's nothing to say. Life's a cycle. Everything that is born must die. Once I fought that truth, now I accept it. But it still hurts.
My mother has her own way of handling Wally's death. 'He'll never be dead to me,' she says without a quiver in her voice. 'He'll be over there all the time, on holidays. Getting younger every day.'
A while later she tells me she talks to Wally every night. 'Not much, just a bit of news I think he'd be interested in. Funny thing is, I don't feel frightened at night anymore. I can sense he's protecting me.'
'He probably is,' I reply. But my stomach flip-flops. Fear? She's never mentioned fear. Then I push aside my thoughtlessness, like I always do.
***
A couple of neighbours from my mother's village are having coffee in Mona Vale at the table next to mine.
'How's it going?' I ask. They are a few years younger than my mother. One plays golf twice a week, the other looks after her grandchildren and walks everywhere, even to do her shopping. They are sharp, smart, vibrant women who pay attention to their hair and clothes. They have to, my mother tells me, because if you get sloppy for a minute, people think you are losing your marbles. The aged, it turns out, are an unforgiving lot.
'We're good,' they reply, smiling. And we launch into village gossip. The new owners, the new manager, the new units being built. They are against it all – almost out of habit, I think. Why do we all fight change?
'How do you reckon my mother is settling in?' I ask.
'Best thing you could do for her is burn that sofa,' they reply, but not unkindly. 'She needs to move around more.'
And while I may say things about my mother that are neither compassionate nor, occasionally, strictly accurate, I leap to my mother's defence: 'Once she was the doer at the heart of everything,' I reply. And I remember, with a shock, that it's true. I seem to have erased the memories of her running theatre groups for migrant children, carting bus loads of us around the countryside to play tennis. I've almost forgotten her famous picnics when she prepared food so exotically beautiful that everyone gathered around the boot of the car to admire it before we all devoured it. And what about the days when she played tennis five days a week? Ran a catering business? Why is memory so selective when it comes to family, and when did it all change? When my father died? When my brother died? When she started taking so many pills that they had to be bundled together in weekly packs, then set out in kaleidoscopic little groups to be taken four times a day? When she turned seventy, and then eighty? Why do I forgive every slowing moment in my own aging process and get impatient with hers? Perhaps it's fear. That's all I can think of. Fear that one day she'll slow to a complete stop and she will be gone. And it will be my turn to move into God's waiting room.
'She wants to watch her medication a bit more closely, too,' says one of the women. 'Found some pills dropped on the floor and she was taking one very volatile tablet after food when it is supposed to be taken two hours before food. Gives some people hallucinations when they don't follow directions.'
My mind swirls. I barely listen to the chat of these good women. Hallucinations. Not orgies, not senility, not dementia. Just little ol' hallucinations.
I call in on my mother on the way home. 'Let's go through your pills,' I say, 'to make sure you're taking them the right way.'
Orgies are never mentioned again.
***
Now I see my mother every week, I notice small changes. Unsteadiness. Sitting down when she is on her way to the kitchen to make tea. Three attempts to get off the sofa instead of one. Eating half a sandwich when once she would have devoured two. Her hand shaking when she picks up a cup. And doing everything so, so slowly until it is unbearable to watch and I cannot resist reaching over impatiently and taking away her task. Even though I want to kick myself each time I do it.
'If we don't keep moving,' I tell her when we're off to a doctor's appointment, 'we'll never get there.' She looks surprised, doesn't realise she's stopped walking in the middle of a busy road to talk. She hurries, taking even tinier steps, almost going up and down on the same spot. I mentally tell myself to park on the same side of the road as the surgery in future. It's another lowering of the bar, though, and I hate the thought of it. Is that what happens as we age? The bar gets lower and lower until it – and we – hit the ground?
'Sit,' I tell her in the waiting room of the scrappy surgery with the fake Persian carpet. 'Over there.' I point out a chair nearest the doctor's office.
'Woof!' my mother responds.
The elderly woman next to her turns to face my mother. 'Will she ask you to fetch next?' she says.
'No, she only ever tells me to stay!'
'I've got a daughter like yours,' the woman continues. 'My other daughter, though, is really lovely!'
'Mine's never been any better,' my mother replies. But the words are without sting. We catch each other's eye. And laugh. Our love for each other is, truly, unassailable.
11
TOWARDS THE END OF a winter so warm we wonder if the world's turned upside down, members of Jeanne's Garden History Society group wander around the house and yard like inquisitive beetles in canary-yellow plastic ponchos. The weather bureau has promised rain, but only a few drops fall from the sky. Not enough to wet the ground. She has brought a cake, of course. I made one – naturally.
I apologise for the ragged state of the garden: 'If we expose even a small group of plants by weeding around them, it's as though we're giving the wallabies a written invitation to dinner. The bracken is like a shield, protecting vulnerable shrubs and flowers.'
'Why would you even want a garden here?' replies a tall bloke with an English accent. 'The water is your garden at the front, and the bush at the back. You've got a lawn, that's enough.'
I look across at Bob, who's holding his tea and smiling like he's listening to a personal symphony.
'Where are the two blokes who reckon Hardy Wilson never came near this house?' I ask Jeanne. She's cutting more cake. Bob grabs the teapot to refill it. It's the large Brown Betty from Barbara's pottery collection. Does twenty cups at a time. I won't touch it in case I break it.
'They accepted the invitation but didn't turn up,' Jeanne replies. 'Must have had a better offer on the day.'
'Bugger. I'm really curious about the architect of
the house. I mean, if it wasn't Hardy Wilson, then who was it?'
Two gardeners launch into a discussion about Wilson's architectural style. I realise I know almost nothing about him beyond Barbara's notes.
A couple of days later, I tell Bob I'm going to the Mitchell Library to do some research.
'Why?' he asks.
'Because I'd really like to know more about Hardy Wilson. It's embarrassing to live here and not be able to answer questions. And maybe I'll find some information that links him to the house. Those two heritage blokes were pretty adamant Hardy Wilson didn't design Tarrangaua. I'd like to get to the truth, really. It's a little bit of Australian history. Not that important, but if it's not sorted now, it'll be even harder in another fifty years. Maybe it's the journalist in me. I'm setting myself an assignment. I've always loved the thrill of the chase.'
Bob is silent for a moment or two before asking softly, 'Are you bored?'
'Bored? No! Never! Not for a moment. I love our life. Curious, mostly. Restless, maybe, to be doing more. But not bored. It's a terrible concept, bored. A waste.'
But really, at the crux is a lifetime of seeing words flung around carelessly for effect or gain and regardless of fact. And knowing the damage done can be irreparable.
'Barbara tried to find the house plans in the Mitchell Library and came up blank,' he says. 'Architects rarely kept plans in the 1920s, and they only made one or two copies because they were so expensive. The whole search might be a waste of time. Although she did find a plan for a septic tank that stated quite clearly it was designed for Dorothea Mackellar at Lovett Bay by Wilson, Neave and Berry.'
'I thought she only researched Mackellar. Has there always been some doubt about the architect?'
'Not so much doubt as lack of proof.'
'The septic tank is a good start. Maybe she missed something,' I say. 'Always liked libraries. Silent places that make you feel that all you have to do to discover the secrets of the universe is pull down a gilt-edged tome and flick through the pages.'
***
The city is chaotic, road rage epidemic. People keep honking. Have I turned into one of those drivers who hunch over the wheel and motor along at forty kilometres an hour? I check the speedo. Forty kilometres. Oh bugger, when did that happen?