Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  ‘How much of this claptrap do we have to listen to?’

  ‘It’s not claptrap, Dad.’

  Charlie forms a gun with his fingers and makes as though to shoot himself in the head.

  ‘Whining about nothing. There are people in the world with no food or water. Why isn’t she singing about that?’

  ‘How about something less controversial?’ Charlie says, pressing the stop button.

  ‘Only if it’s by a woman,’ Dad says. ‘No good has ever been done by a man, Charlie.’

  ‘Nobody said that, Dad.’

  ‘That’s what your sister thinks. Isn’t it?’ We lock eyes in the rear-vision mirror once more. ‘Thinks it’s beneath her to be a mother.’

  ‘I absolutely don’t,’ I say. He’s in pain, lashing out. I should let this go.

  ‘It was enough for your mother, nothing to scoff at. It’s dignified work to take care of your home, husband, raise a family.’

  I focus on the road, keep my mouth shut though there are a thousand things I want to say, though I feel stung and enraged.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve ever heard her say otherwise, Dad. Hey, do you remember my friend Jason from –’

  ‘Well, why do you want to be a lawyer then? What are you trying to prove? Mark earns a good salary. You’ll make his life harder by being at university now you have kids to look after. Who’ll be doing that? I suppose you expect him to. As well as his job. So you can go off and do what you want. Which, by the way –’ he flicks his hand angrily in my direction – ‘plenty of lawyers in the world without you.’

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Charlie glares at Dad now. ‘You’re talking like a guy from the fifties.’

  ‘The fifties weren’t so terrible,’ Dad says.

  ‘You know what I mean. Abby’s a great mother. What’s your beef with her working? Sounds like your baggage, Dad, not hers.’

  ‘I’m well aware that women work. Skye worked. Donna works. But I don’t see why your sister, why young women now, are so hell-bent on creating division, making a big statement about it. It doesn’t need to be so bloody . . . pious.’ He sits forward so his head is closer to mine. ‘You should think twice about this, Abigail. You have a good husband and those kids deserve a mother. You don’t need to show off.’

  ‘Jesus, Dad,’ Charlie says. ‘Harsh.’

  ‘And wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s not showing off. It’s studying, to pursue a profession. Not grounds for personal insult. I’m not going back to uni to further the cause of women, though it’d be fine if I was. I want to be a lawyer because I care that people who are vulnerable, poor, wrongly accused, have an advocate, Dad. You might not have noticed, but I’m good at helping people. I’ve had a lot of practice.’ I look at Charlie. ‘I meant –’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I get it.’

  ‘So you’ll turn your back on Mark and your kids? Leave them to fend for themselves so you can help some strangers, puff yourself up?’

  ‘That is not what I’m doing.’ Breathe in, out. ‘Why does this annoy you so much anyway? Mark’s proud of me. Why can’t you be?’

  He pauses. ‘Mark’s a good man. You did well there. I was impressed with the piece he did on the National Hotel commission. Very thorough. He’d make a good lawyer.’

  Charlie offers me an expression that combines sympathy with the unspoken advice to drop the topic.

  ‘Some people want to be mothers, you know,’ Dad says, sitting back in his seat with a thump. ‘They get a bit crazy if they can’t.’

  I wonder if Charlie hears this the same way I do. Is Dad telling us something about Skye?

  ‘June had a baby but it died,’ he says. ‘She never got to see it, doesn’t know if it was a boy or girl.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I say. And absolutely not where I thought this was going. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Things were different then,’ he says. ‘None of this giving birth in a bathtub. When she came to on the hospital bed she wasn’t pregnant anymore and they’d taken the baby away. Doctor told her it had been born dead and it would upset her to see it.’ He pauses. ‘She mentioned it over the years, wished she at least knew where they’d buried it. She worried about whether they’d baptised it . . . And then Hal running off on her.’ He becomes brisk and admonishing without warning. ‘You two should have shown her a little more understanding.’

  ‘How could we have been sympathetic about something we didn’t know?’ I ask.

  He huffs. ‘When did you become so argumentative?’

  We sit in silence after that. Charlie never does put on another tape; he and Dad fall asleep instead. I drive the long bleached bitumen road, wide open land spreading out on either side of it, passing wheat-coloured fields speckled with eucalypts, granite boulders, depleted dams and glassy-eyed Hereford cattle, in lots divided by strings of barbed-wire fencing: a landscape low and predictable. Small insects slam against my windscreen. Squashed cane toads spot the road. The road lies like a ribbon on the earth, heat rising from its mirage of an end, making it appear that just up ahead everything solid becomes quivering gas.

  There are no houses here, no signs, no overhead cables or telephone poles. This is the land my mother spent her life trying to escape and for which my father pined. From the moment Dad bought the farm he was happy and energetic, as he’d been when Mum was alive.

  When construction on the house began we went out to help, without giving any thought of what that entailed. Mark’s not much of a handyman, and I spent my time making sure the kids didn’t stand on nails or fall into trenches, so it was more of a show-and-tell event. We followed Dad around the site as he pointed out where the bathroom would be, the kitchen and doors, and described the merits of the septic system and generator he’d chosen. He tried to interest Sarah in the local topography – the mountains in the near east are shaped a lot like people’s heads – the Dreamtime story about the lizard and the lake, and his latest readings about raising cattle and poultry. We’d eaten dinner around an open fire, slept in tents. We visited once after that.

  Mum wouldn’t have liked the farm one bit. She’d wanted us to be in Brisbane, so we could go to decent schools and she could enjoy the bustle and social life of a city. My parents were forever ‘going out’ or ‘having guests in’. I can only imagine how desperately lonely she would’ve been if Dad had insisted they live in the country.

  I come up behind a truck with cartoon drawings of dope leaves and Varga girls decorating its mudflaps. Its fat wheels send out a spray of pebbles. I hold my left hand against the windscreen to stop the rocks shattering the glass. I recall my mother doing this from the passenger’s seat when Dad was driving, her long fingers decorated with gold rings, some with diamonds, some with gems of blue or green, the one-off ruby engagement ring she loved the most, the one that’s wrapped in tissues in my coin purse.

  Mum said she was glad she had a daughter to leave her rings to, but they never came to me. At first because I was too young, and then later, when I tentatively asked for them, because my father simply said no. He didn’t want to give over any part of my mother to me, to anyone.

  I knew how special the ruby ring was, not in a dollar sense, because the ruby wasn’t that big and the gold band was thin, but in sentimental value. Mum was impressed Dad had chosen it without help from her, and had chosen so well. She’d admired his initiative, a quality she said many men lacked. When he’d decided to propose to her, Dad had taken an opportunity (how, who knew, for the story was hers to tell) to remove a ring from Mum’s jewellery box, place it on a piece of paper, carefully draw a circle around the inside of the ring – not once but several times, for good measure – and then find a ring that was the perfect size, with a gemstone in her favourite colour, made in Paris, the city of her dreams. He’d applied calm, manly logic to the task of buying women’s jewellery then had the word ‘love’ inscribed in cursive where the gold touched her skin. ‘How,’ our mother would say, arm stretched in front of her, her eyes on
the ruby ring, ‘could I have said no?’ Her wedding ring, while larger and more traditional, seemed almost an afterthought.

  I grip the wheel tightly as I overtake the truck. The driver waves and honks.

  And then I hold the car steady on an endless straight. I know the road will get more complicated later on, but for now only my arm muscles are tested. My mind is free to wander, which, today, is not good. But, lacking the energy to stop it, I stare at the road and give in to memory.

  The end of my first day in grade one. I’d walked out of the classroom into a mass of mothers waiting for their sons and daughters. There was my mother: standing to one side of the other women, wearing cat-eye sunglasses, dark hair in a perfect dome, a patent-leather purse hanging off her angled forearm, a dress of blue shot silk. My mother, who never left the house without ‘eyes on and a perfect lip’, as advised by Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette. My mother, who bought expensive overseas fashion magazines. My mother, who asked my father to haul her sewing machine onto the dining-room table almost nightly, so that I became accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of whirring machinery and shaking wood. On my first day of school, and each day thereafter, she picked me up dressed like Elizabeth Taylor in a crowd of Julie Andrews, and her loveliness filled me with pride.

  Even on our twice-yearly obligatory family stays at our grandparents’ farm near Kingaroy – which we knew she loathed – my mother dressed like a Vogue cover girl. I’m sure I disappointed her as a daughter. I liked to play outside and didn’t care much what I wore back then. She persisted with me, gently. I’d sit on her lap, both of us facing forward, her arms wrapped around me to show me how to thread a needle, sew a button. I had no interest in sewing but enjoyed the warmth of her enveloping me, her powdered cheek an inch from mine, the waxy smell of her lipstick.

  The last time we went to Nan and Pop’s farm before Mum died, I found the courage to swim in the murky dam at the bottom of the hill. I dropped my dress in the grass and ran across the dried-earth rim that led to the water, wearing only my undies, trying not to think about what might be underfoot. I squelched in mud then dove into the warm water and swam, blissful, to the middle of the dam. Afterwards, I pulled my dress on and ran to the house to boast, but everyone had gone to see the new calves except for Mum. Before I could explain myself she bundled me off to the bathroom, asking why I insisted on ruining the pretty things she made me.

  Once I’d washed, and my grandparents, Dad and Charlie had returned from the calving pens, we ate warm scones in the crowded kitchen while Pop’s cattle dog, Girl, sat by the open back door, watching me with anxious eyes. Charlie and I weren’t allowed to feed Girl but my grandparents – ancient, cranky – were so dismissive of her, yapping instructions at her all day, that I took it as my mission to sneak rewards to her. I went out to the shady porch and sat beside her, whispering advice, counselling her to run away while we slept, to head north, being sure to stay clear of the elephantine trucks that stormed the road throughout the night.

  But the next morning she stared at me vacantly, as if we’d never spoken.

  I thought it would be nice for Girl to swim in the dam, too, so that afternoon I’d tried to coax her in. But she wouldn’t get in the water no matter how many times I called, and Dad came down and told me to stop yelling at the dog.

  ‘You’re turning her into a nervous wreck. Don’t ask her to do something she’s been forbidden to. She knows better.’ He took a half-dozen steps away before remembering I was now also forbidden to swim in the dam. ‘And get yourself up to the house quick smart.’

  After dinner, when Nan sent me to the kitchen to fetch her a glass of sherry, I caught Mum feeding Girl pieces of ham. I smiled, and Mum put a manicured finger to her red lips.

  I pull the car onto the weedy verge to empty my bladder. I squat down and urinate, Dad and Charlie both still out like lights. Twenty feet away, a wallaby stands, balanced on its thick tail, watching and chewing.

  I dig in my handbag for tissues to use in lieu of toilet paper. My fingertips feel the bulge of the ring in my coin purse. How could he have given it away? I drop my wet tissues onto the dirt, stand and pull up my undies. Neither Dad nor Charlie wakes when I open the car door and start the engine.

  I stare at my father. His head is drooping to one side, spit drying white in the corner of his mouth. I love him. He enrages me. I am gutted at the grief we’ve caused him. I want to wake him and tell him I am sorry and cry. And shout at him, too, for the years of pain he’s caused. Cry and shout.

  On the day Mum died, Charlie and I left her side only to use the toilet or eat in the hospital canteen. I wanted to help make my mother better but there was so much going on that made no sense. None of the nurses would give me a proper explanation about what went through the tubes and into her arms. None of them was sure if Mum could hear me when I asked her if she’d like me to tidy her hair. I tried to decipher the words on the chart that hung on the bar at the foot of her bed. I refolded her nightgowns.

  Throughout her illness, Dad had whispered conversations with neighbours, drove us to and from the hospital, and moved around the house like a zombie. The day before she died he went to Kenmore High and taught his history and English classes. If I’d been in Dad’s shoes – an adult – I would’ve fought like a beast to save her, berated the doctor or demanded new techniques or fought for the attention of an outside specialist – something. But when it most mattered to speak up, Dad was quiet, still. And after a while I became quiet, too, because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Not far outside Brisbane’s city limits, bushland gives way to sprawling trucking yards and rubbish tips before it turns to outer suburbia. Here, the land begins to hold more houses, all dropped on sharply defined plots, houses hunched low, neat and apologetic with boundary walls only four bricks high, plants cut back hard and ringed by small rocks so as not to take space they don’t deserve. Then come corner shops, schools and public swimming pools. Then suburbs with hills and valleys where wooden Queenslanders rise up on stilts like flamingos, with air flowing all around them, and lush gardens allowed to unfurl, their arms draped across fences and raised up to the sky. Telegraph poles, light poles and traffic lights stick up from the ground haphazardly, like tree trunks after a bushfire. In the distance, a clump of skyscrapers marks the city centre.

  And the heat. Always, everywhere, the relentless garish heat.

  I drive alongside the Brisbane River. Near the city it’s brown and indecisive, lumbering out to sea with thin swirling gyres covering its surface, as though the skin is reacting to some twitchy internal doubts. It’s tricky to tell which way the water is flowing. Dredging barges work the river, making it deep for cargo ships and for mining sand and gravel. I pass one bridge after another: the Story Bridge, the Captain Cook Bridge, the William Jolly Bridge. As we approach the Arnott’s factory I roll down the window to breathe in sweet, biscuit-scented air.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wednesday 11 December 1974

  Charlie

  Abby and Mark’s house sits in a cul-de-sac in a suburb where the streets twist and bend as though designed by someone who’d dropped a bowl of spaghetti on the floor and thought, ‘Yes, that is how people can best get from A to B.’ Streets have been added on as the council cut lines around weirdly shaped parcels of bushland and sold them to developers; there doesn’t seem to have been much consideration given to how this mess would be navigated by residents. It’s kind of funny.

  To drive into her carport, Abby makes a tight left turn off Woondarra Street, then holds left to veer into the cul-de-sac off Jamison and whips the car up a steep driveway, hitting the brakes the instant she’s at the top to avoid slamming into the brick retaining wall. The driveway was Mark’s handiwork, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he’d make a situation that’s already difficult even harder.

  ‘Another triumph for Evel Knievel,’ I say as Abby pulls to a stop. ‘Fans are on their feet, the cheers are deafening.’


  ‘How about thanking me for driving for five and a half hours?’

  ‘I told you I’d drive. Say the word, I said.’

  She glares at me. ‘Are you insane?’ Which, sure.

  ‘Dad then,’ I say.

  ‘I do quite enough driving,’ he says. I hadn’t realised he was awake.

  Dad and I stand in the carport and stretch towards the low ceiling, both of us moaning and cracking as though we’d spent a week in a box. Abby moves straight to the task of unloading. She places bags, cartons, Dad’s suitcase in a line on the concrete floor and calls out, ‘We’re here.’

  Woof scrambles down to the car first and jumps up to greet Abby. He shrinks down under Dad’s too-hard pat.

  Sarah comes clomping out of the house to greet us, long hair swinging loose, wearing a t-shirt, undies, knee-high white socks and Abby’s clogs. Abby bends down and hugs her, and by the time she gets up, Mark’s standing before her, arms out for his own hug.

  ‘Hi. Why is Sarah wearing her pyjama top?’ She wraps her arms around his waist.

  ‘We missed you.’ Mark kisses her. He slaps my back. ‘Welcome home. I’m keen to hear about life in paradise.’ Then he looks to Dad. ‘John, how are you holding up? I wish we could’ve met her.’

  Dad gives a small nod of acknowledgement, turns his attention to Sarah. ‘Who is this young lady? And what have you done with my granddaughter?’

  ‘Ha, ha.’ Sarah reaches for his hand.

  ‘And where are your sister and brother?’

  She seems disappointed by his ignorance. ‘They’re asleep, of course. Little kids sleep all the time.’

  ‘How was the drive?’ Mark asks Abby.

  ‘Long. And it’s leaking oil again. But, hon, why is she in her pyjamas? It’s two o’clock.’

  ‘She’s in a t-shirt,’ he says, pulling my backpack onto his shoulder. ‘A shirt is a shirt. John, go on inside and pour yourself a drink. Charlie and I’ve got this.’

  ‘It’s says Time for Bed on the front.’