Riptides

by Kirsten Alexander

  ‘Abby.’ Mark puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘Relax. It’s all good.’

  Ignoring Mark’s offer, Dad carries his suitcase and pillow out of the carport across the wooden-sleeper pathway to the front door, with Sarah clop-clopping behind him. Mark and Abby follow behind me till we’re all standing around a pile of belongings in the hallway.

  ‘I’ve set up the camp bed in the spare room,’ Mark says. ‘You and Charlie can sleep in there, if that’s okay with you, John. Real bed’s yours.’

  Dad and I haven’t shared a room since Christmas before last, and I’m sure he’d prefer some space of his own. I would’ve been happy on the couch. It occurs to me that he knew Skye back then, and didn’t say a word, didn’t bring her here.

  ‘So, Miss Sarah,’ Dad says. ‘What’ve you asked Santa to bring you?’

  ‘A unicorn,’ Sarah replies.

  ‘They’re hard to come by, even for Santa Claus.’

  ‘He can get anything.’

  Dad and I look at one another.

  ‘Christmas morning’s going to be interesting,’ I say.

  ‘Show me the tree,’ Dad says to Sarah. ‘I hear you’ve made it extra special this year.’

  Sarah leads the three of us to the sunny living room, Mark and Abby having wandered off somewhere. Dad and I sit on an L-shaped brown couch – ‘New,’ Sarah says, ‘no shoes allowed.’ The couch shares the room with a lacquered pine coffee table, pottery vases and cane baskets all from the same sliver of the colour wheel. Sarah stands beside the tree – a vision of disco glitz – points out various decorations, and moves a couple around. When she’s done with the tree, she clambers onto Dad’s lap with a paper star she’s fancied up with lumpy glue and glitter.

  ‘Fourteen sleeps till Christmas.’ She holds up four fingers.

  ‘You might need a few more fingers,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll want this fellow to join in, for a start.’ He uncurls her thumb.

  It would’ve been a more touching scene if it weren’t for the muffled arguing we could hear coming from the kitchen. I reckon Abby is being snarky on purpose, dreaming up a reason to fight with Mark so she can keep him at arm’s length, make him a minor but distracting villain, in order to not spill the beans. Maybe she doesn’t even see what she’s doing, but to me it’s plain as day. And I think she’s making a mistake. We need him.

  For Sarah’s sake, Dad and I keep up a stream of banter until Dad can tolerate it no longer. He lifts Sarah off his lap and onto the couch, and walks out of the room. I can’t hear what he says but it does the job, because a few minutes later Abby, Mark and Dad are in the room with us, all jutting chins and dark expressions.

  In times of stress – Mum dying, Grandma and Grandpa dying, Abby’s school formal, me getting into trouble (shoplifting, age thirteen; straight Cs, fourteen; smoking at school, fifteen), best-dog-ever Sooty running away – we revert to type. Abby becomes efficient and terse, the controller. Dad becomes morose, cross and, finally, the take-charge guy – which is when he and Abby lock horns. Mark’s all cool facts and debate, except when he’s charming people, in which case he’s slick as a seal. You’ve never met a man who’s calmer under pressure – shame he wasn’t in the car with us. My choice is to loosen things up and take the heat out of the room.

  I ask Abby for a pack of cards.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Mark says.

  ‘I will.’ Abby walks out of the room.

  ‘You’ve gotta make her pull her weight, man,’ I say. ‘The woman doesn’t lift a finger around here.’ Mark and Dad laugh.

  Abby returns with the cards and a plate of crackers, cheese cubes and pickles. On her next entry, she carries a box of wine, cups, and some orange cordial for Sarah.

  ‘Okay.’ I stand in the centre of the room and fan the cards out. ‘Prepare to witness some mind-blowing magic. Young lady,’ I say to Sarah, ‘pick a card, any card.’

  She does, and shows it to me.

  ‘My fault.’ I whisper a few instructions to her. ‘Here we go. Pick a card.’

  She doesn’t show me her card this time, but announces it’s the number five, which is how old she is until February, when she’ll be six, and says I’ve done a good trick.

  ‘Sarah, sweetheart,’ Abby says.

  I hold up my hand. ‘Sarah’s shown she’s beyond card selection. She’s ready to be a magician’s assistant. Wait here. Don’t move.’

  I grab a tea towel from the kitchen and tie it around her waist, explaining that something more than undies and a t-shirt is called for on stage, and a lairy display of Flags of the World around her middle is just the ticket.

  We’re launching into our third attempt, getting Mark to pick out cards, the tension in the room eased, when the twins wake up, screaming. Not sure why kids do that – wake up unhappy with the whole situation of being in a bed. It’s not exactly a hardship. Anyway, you’d think Abby would be pleased to hear them after so long an absence, but she startles at the noise. Maybe she forgot they were in the house. She and Mark both stand up to go to them. I’ve read about this, the uneasy handover of responsibility when a soldier comes back from the front.

  Dad lifts the newspaper off the coffee table. Sarah and I have lost the spotlight. We wander out to the backyard.

  Sarah wants to play in the sprinkler with Woof so I attach the metal ring to the hose, place it on the lawn and turn it up. I sit in the red canvas butterfly chair in the shade of the porch and close my eyes. I hear Sarah squeal with happiness as she leaps in and out of the flying beads of water, calling Woof back each time he wanders away.

  If I could guarantee the month would be like this, I could handle it. I could come to terms with what happened, focus on how it’ll all be when I’m back in Bali. But already I can tell there’ll be ongoing tension between Abby and Mark.

  I open my eyes in response to Sarah’s shout for attention. I give her a wave and shut my lids again. I think about Bali.

  The kids in Kuta aren’t like Abby’s kids. At sunrise, while Ketut and I sit on the sand talking wave strategy, we regularly see kids cleaning up food scraps and offerings left behind after the ceremony the evening before, and sweeping the sand with homemade brooms. If I’d been told to clean a beach before going to school, or at any other time for that matter, I’d have protested so loud and long I would’ve worn my parents down, and I know Sarah would, too. But Balinese kids don’t do that. They muck around, but they get the job done. They mind little brothers and sisters, cook dinner, sell junk to backpackers.

  Sometimes, when they don’t have chores, kids hang around the front of KD, playing with balls they’ve made out of leaves. In fact, given the amount of stuff they have to do, it’s strange how often we see kids hanging out. Whenever I go to Ketut’s house there are kids milling around the front, sitting on the steps. I don’t know why they’re there, but they’re probably asking the same about me. I spend a lot of time at Ketut’s house, which probably annoys his mother, Wayan.

  Whenever I see Wayan I ask her how old she is, and every time she gives me a different answer. For a while I thought we had a game going so I played along, making jokes about whatever number she threw my way. One day, while I sat on a wooden stool at the table in her kitchen, having moved aside bananas, incense sticks and woven leaves to make room for my arms on the cool slab, waiting while Ketut gathered his stuff for our bike ride to Sanur, she stopped chopping chicken, seemed genuinely annoyed at me.

  ‘Same question over and over. Twenty-one, ninety-one, what’s the matter? You thinking about the wrong things. Do some work. Find a wife.’

  ‘What’re you bugging my mother about?’ Ketut asked, reaching across the table to steal a jackfruit. She slapped him away.

  ‘How old is this table? How old is Wayan?’ she said, and resumed her chopping with fresh energy. ‘Go fishing.’

  Ketut laughed and flicked me with the t-shirt he’d slung across his shoulder. ‘Why would she need to know that? She’s been around for one childhood, one marriage, four kids and a
million dinners. Right, ma?’ Ketut kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘Let’s go, Charlie.’

  We walked down the path to where Ketut had left his motorbike, dense low-lying shrubs brushing against our legs. The day was quiet but for the gurgle of chickens and the swoosh of brooms on stone.

  ‘So how old are you?’ I asked Ketut, sitting behind him on the bike.

  ‘Twenty-nine or thirty. Ma says the war ended when I was a baby, but her handle on current affairs is slippery.’ He turned on the rattly engine. ‘I’m healthy and strong, that’s what matters. I’m going to have babies with Made, raise a family and drive tourists around. When my teeth fall out I’ll go fishing all day.’

  We puttered along the skinny road, dodging potholes. The wind pushed back my hair. I remembered that feeling from when I was a kid, in the family car with Abby, coming home from a dinner party we’d been dragged to by Mum and Dad. We’d fallen asleep on the couch under crocheted rugs that smelled like cat to the sound of adults whooping it up, singing to Frank Sinatra records. At the end of the night my dad carried me to the car and placed me on the cold leather bench seat. The man of the house – Mr Wilson, maybe? – carried Abby out, placing her so that each of us had our head near opposite car doors, our legs parallel. As Dad drove, windows open, I’d made a pillow of my hands, watched the back of my parents’ heads and shoulders, listened to them talk in low voices. Mum laughed and put her hand on my Dad’s cheek, and he leaned in to her touch. I’d kneeled, and put my head into the rushing wind. The feeling had been bliss – the freedom of movement, the thrill of being awake so late at night – until hot ash from Mum’s cigarette had hit me on the chin and I’d yelled.

  Ketut and I rode through Pedungan and Sidakarya towards Sanur, heading to the house of Ketut’s friend Nyoman. We cut through rice paddies, past a cow tethered to a tree, then stopped near a stone wall.

  ‘You want to see old, wait till you meet Nyoman’s mother. Older than the island.’ He lifted the bull’s-head doorknocker and let it fall. We waited. Ketut knocked on the door again. ‘I don’t think Nyoman’s home.’

  We walked to the back of the building to see if we could find anyone out there. A string of scrawny dogs trailed us. Roosters scuttled out of our way. We heard no sounds from behind the wall.

  ‘We’ll wait around the front. He’ll come,’ Ketut said.

  We sat on the long, wide stone steps, dips worn into them from years of feet padding to and from the carved wooden door. I rubbed my hands up and down my legs to get rid of the mud, now dry, sprayed on my shins by the bike, noticing how dark my skin had become, and how the bleached and brown leg hairs together formed a salt-and-pepper field on my shins.

  ‘The main thing,’ I said, ‘is that if your age doesn’t matter, if people don’t know how old they are, then everyone quits telling you to grow up.’

  Ketut cocked his head at me. ‘That’s exactly what Ma was telling you to do.’

  ‘Nah, man. She was messing with me. At home my sister and father actually tell me to grow up, as if rushing to old age is somehow life’s goal. I don’t feel that here.’

  ‘So you don’t want to grow up?’

  ‘Sure I do. But in my own time, or Bali time. I’ll be a boring old man when I’m ready. Until then, I’m going to be young and free, ride bikes and surf. And not feel guilty about that.’

  Ketut laughed. ‘Never seen you feel guilty about anything.’

  I gazed across paddies spiked with palm trees, the green of the rice crops and blue of the sky insanely bright. ‘My mother was thirty-two when she died.’

  Ketut faced me, his arm up to block the sun. ‘Sorry to hear that, man. That’s young no matter where you are.’

  We saw a bike in the distance. The driver had one hand on the handlebar and one on the side of a large bundle of fruit he balanced on his head.

  ‘Nyoman,’ Ketut shouted. We stood up and waved.

  ‘Maybe you want to stay the same person you were when your mother died,’ Ketut said. ‘But she probably wouldn’t want that.’

  I told him I’d think about that, knowing I wouldn’t.

  Nyoman stopped in front of us, dropped his bundle to the ground, and rested his bike against a tree. Nyoman and Ketut hugged one another as if it had been years, though I’d seen them together a few weeks before, in Wayan’s kitchen. Then he hugged me, too. We walked up the stairs, Nyoman promising durian and glasses of arak.

  ‘I gather you messed up with the chickens.’ Mark plops himself into the chair beside me. I open my eyes. ‘Ed’s not happy.’

  ‘You know Ed?’

  ‘First I’ve ever heard of him.’ He smiles, hands me a cold can of beer. ‘Think you’re going to get an earful when you go inside though.’

  ‘I’m growing grass on me.’ Sarah, naked and wet, has bits of cut lawn splattered across her torso, arms and legs.

  ‘Good job, Sar,’ he says, as we both crack open our beers.

  She returns to the sprinkler.

  Mark lifts his can to his lips. ‘Might get a pool out here, one of those plastic jobs.’

  ‘Grand idea. You mean for Christmas?’

  ‘I’m not brave enough to throw a wildcard into the Christmas plan.’

  Sarah tires quickly of her play and sits on the concrete in front of us, water darkening the slab. Woof lies like a stringy wet mop beside her.

  ‘No work today? The world’s all good?’ I ask. I could tell him now. Right now. But I scan his face and am suddenly unsure if that’s a good idea. Maybe he wouldn’t think of anything Abby hasn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t feel her obligation to cover for me. I’m not one-hundred-per-cent sure of what he thinks of me. It’s a risk.

  ‘I’ve taken leave until tomorrow,’ Mark says. ‘I won’t abuse the privilege, but after my last story they’d let me write my own ticket. Did Abby tell you I’m being made executive producer next year?’

  I clink cans with him. I try to act interested while Mark talks about his job. And then sport.

  ‘Are you able to keep up with the cricket over there?’ he asks. ‘Rained for weeks before, then they dried the wicket too fast. Even Lillee and Thomson struggled with it. Mostly I reckon we won the first Test because they left Boycott at home.’

  ‘We don’t have a TV.’ I don’t ask if boycott is a person or a style of play.

  ‘You’d have radio though.’

  ‘Sometimes. Most days, the outside world isn’t a pressing concern. Anything else been going on I should know about?’

  He laughs. ‘Skylab came back in February, Nixon resigned in August, and we have the most dazzling cricketing side in decades. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Ringing any bells?’

  ‘Nope. I’m up to speed with music though. Sal’s sister sends us tapes. And I’m keen to see a few movies while I’m here.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, watching as Sarah sits her wet self in the sandpit. ‘You can take Sarah to see Herbie Rides Again so I don’t have to.’

  I have no idea who Herbie is or what he’s riding but I’m up for distractions. I should feel bad all the time, guilt-ridden twenty-four hours a day. But I’m too superficial to sustain that. Or else I have great coping mechanisms. I catch myself laughing at a joke on TV or something one of the kids says, hate myself, and then move on. It’s hard to hold any feeling nonstop, no matter how strong it is. I get waves of fear and guilt. But they pass. And I’m not sure who or what it would help if they didn’t.

  I turn my head at the sound of the sliding door. Abby stands in the opening. She’s wearing a purple dress with gold stitching. ‘Charlie, can I talk to you?’

  ‘What’s up?’ Mark asks.

  ‘Dad stuff,’ she says.

  I follow her into the kitchen, where she beckons me to come deeper into the house. In the hallway, with instantly forgettable landscape paintings either side of her head, she says, ‘Constable Roberts called to say none of us should go anywhere.’

  ‘How’d he get your number?’

  ‘Dad gave it to him. Th
at’s not the point. The point is we can’t leave because Dad’s a suspect and we might be . . . accessories or something.’

  ‘Where were you going to go?’

  ‘You, you idiot. You need to stay in Brisbane until they say you can leave.’

  ‘No way. I have a return ticket. I can’t just cancel it.’

  ‘Did you hear me? Dad’s a suspect. Constable Roberts asked if I thought Dad could’ve been in the car and then walked home. I told him that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, and hugely insensitive.’

  ‘Why would he ask if you thought your father committed a crime?’

  ‘To hear how I’d react, I guess.’

  ‘Abby, this is getting out of control. We have to give them an alternative to Dad, to us.’

  ‘Like who? Mick Fleetwood?’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to find an album and show you. She’s the spitting image of Stevie Nicks.’

  ‘She’s not, but it doesn’t matter.’

  Why do we do this? ‘Whatever. What if we say the car was smashed into the tree when we found it.’

  ‘And we left her there and never said a word until now?’

  ‘Okay, yeah, so, what if we say we drove past and didn’t see it?’

  ‘What? How does that prove anything, or get Dad off the hook? Also, who took her out of the car?’

  ‘Well, we need to think of something to say to the cops. Dad can’t be a suspect.’ I push my greasy hair off my forehead. ‘Where is he anyway?’

  ‘He went for a walk.’ She makes a loud exhale. ‘Charlie, I’m not going to say any more to the police. I’ll . . . stall. And you should stay silent, too. You’ll only make it worse.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Thursday 12 December 1974

  Abby

  Mark is snoring, though it sounds like a purr. I watch him for a while, admiring the smooth skin on his cheek, the line of his nose. Would he leave me if I tell him about this? He’d definitely be angry. He likes Charlie in small doses, but he’s told me a million times to stop mothering him. Even though he knows that’s what I’ve had to do since we were kids. If he knew how far I’d gone this time to protect him – and myself . . .