by Tim Buckley
And so we crafted plans and projects and expeditions for ourselves. They were great adventures that took us to exotic, far-flung places and every new venture came with its own paraphernalia and its own flat-pack of components for assembly. And when it was replaced by the next, all of that was just consigned to the garage or the spare room or the outhouses – discarded but within reach, “just in case…”. Even after Cara, the flow was slowed but never staunched, and Cara brought with her new waves of stuff that we could never throw away. Of course we couldn’t. I didn’t dare to think about how much junk we had accumulated.
“You go on up and make a start,” I say. “I’ll make some more coffee.”
41
It was a couple of days before I felt ready to go back to the lighthouse and face having to tell Nathan what was going on. I might have hidden a while longer at the hotel at Cape Leeuwin were it not for the fact that I couldn’t really afford it. It was something I hadn’t felt for a while but years of not being able to afford very much made it surprisingly easy to readjust. First things first, though, I had to find a place to live. I’d checked the classified ads in the local papers for flats or maybe a small house, but everything was a lot more than my Brian-style budget allowed me for rent and everything involved signing a twelve-month lease. I didn’t know where I’d be in twelve weeks, never mind a year down the track. I’d heard that the boom in Perth was driving up property prices in the city and that people were moving out to the hinterlands in search of a bargain. Inevitably, that was affecting the surrounding towns and prices were rising even as far as Clovelly. I tried to think of ways to avoid spending a fortune but I couldn’t even begin to think about moving back to a spare room at the vineyard, even though I knew it made no sense to spend money we didn’t have on rent while Emily rattled round the farmhouse on her own. I got that morning’s copy of the paper over breakfast at the hotel but there was still nothing in my price range.
Nathan, as usual, wasn’t surprised when I told him that I’d left Emily. I couldn’t remember that last time he’d been surprised by anything I’d told him, he always seemed to be three or four steps ahead of me.
“It hasn’t really been working out, has it, mate?” he said with a shrug, handing me a coffee in the makeshift kitchen at the site. “I’m no expert in romance, but even I can see it hasn’t been working out. But look, you don’t know how you’ll feel in a few weeks or months, you guys might patch it up and try again. You just never know.”
I didn’t tell him the details nor did he ask, and I didn’t tell him that Emily had taken the money out of the project account. I just told him it had been a clerical error and the bank had rectified it. I did, however, have to tell him that the well of endless funds was getting dry and at that piece of news he did raise his eyebrows for just a second.
“Tell me to mind my own business, mate,” he said, carefully, “but how bad is it?”
“Honestly? It’s not great. Can we cut any more out of the budget, do you think?”
He raised his eyebrows again and blew out his cheeks.
“Well, we’ve cut back a lot as it is and we’ve already ordered most of the stuff we need to finish the job. What’s left to spend is pretty much already spent. The only thing we can do now is try to do it quicker, maybe. Maybe spend a bit less on labour?” He shook his head. “I don’t know though. We’re pushing them hard as it is, not much more blood to get out of that stone, I’d say.”
“Have a think about it,” I said, finishing my coffee. “I have to go into town, I’ll come back out in the morning, OK?”
“Sure. Where are you staying?”
“I’m looking for a place to rent, actually. A flat maybe. But I haven’t been able to find anything yet, not in my price range anyway.”
“I can imagine, prices just keep going up. Listen, you know you’re always welcome at our place, yeah?”
“Thanks, Nathan, I really appreciate it. But I need my own space right now, you know what it’s like.”
He nodded.
“I get that,” he said. “But don’t be stuck, all right?”
I didn’t really have to go into town. It was the day that Emily was due to go to the wine board and I wanted to pick up some stuff from the house when I knew she wouldn’t be in. I wasn’t sure she’d go to the meeting, to be honest. It was a long time since she’d submitted the application and a lot had happened in the meantime. I didn’t know if she had the energy or the enthusiasm for it anymore, but I figured I’d drive past the house and see if she was there.
Part of me was hoping that she’d get the grant. If we were going to sell the place, it would need a bit of work to get it ready to go on the market. Plus the kudos of a wine board certification couldn’t hurt. On the other hand, Emily wouldn’t be eager to sell at the best of times; to sell after winning the board’s approval for all the work she had done would be an even tougher ask. But I was getting ahead of myself, she’d only been called in for a meeting. Just because they hadn’t dismissed the idea out of hand didn’t mean they would make the grant. It struck me how my whole world had turned on its head in a few short days. If someone had asked me the week before how I felt about Emily’s wines getting a state certification, I’d have been on top of the world. Now, I was just thinking about it in a cold state of calculation.
Her car wasn’t outside the house and there was no sign of life so I pulled into the yard and made my way into the house. I pulled a bag from under our bed and threw a few things into it, running shoes and a few shirts and pairs of shorts. Then I went down to my office and took my notepad off the desk. I was about to run back out the front door and make my getaway but I looked back up the stairs, to the door of Cara’s room. I had nothing of hers and if I wasn’t going to be here, surrounded by her, then I needed something to have with me. I dropped the bag and ran back up the stairs, into her room. I knew what I was looking for. It was a photo of Cara, sitting in her buggy, head back, a delighted, excited smile beaming out from under gently cascading curls. She’s pointing ahead with the index finger on her right hand, so small it barely peeps out from the end of her sleeve.
I remember the day. We used to take her down to the beach on Sunday evenings in the summer. It was too hot during the day but we wanted her to get some sea air so we’d wait until the heat was gone out of the sun, pack some sandwiches into a bag with a flask of coffee, and head into the village. We’d park on the seafront across from The Pantry and walk along the promenade. We’d stop at one of the benches by the edge of the beach and sit there for a while, munching sandwiches and watching the windsurfers and kitesurfers zipping over the water. The sky would change colour as the sun set and the stars would slowly emerge from the gathering darkness. Cara would sit forward in her buggy as we searched out the surfers, tapping her little legs and shrieking with delight when she saw another one. She would clap with uncontrollable excitement when they jumped or twirled or crashed into the waves, turning to us with wide eyes and an exaggerated shrug of her shoulders.
“All gone!” she’d squeal. “Suffer all gone!!”
We’d been watching something on television at the time – I don’t remember what – but the lead character had a catchphrase that had worked its way into our vocabulary.
“Allons-y!!” he would say with a flourish, whirling his arm to point the way then rushing off to catch the bad guys or to solve the next great mystery. So whenever we were heading off somewhere with Cara, we’d load her into the buggy and set off with a great flourish of our own.
“Allons-y, Cara!” we’d cry out. “Allons-y!!”
“Azzazzee, Papa!!!” she’d cry back with the uninhibited, unaffected joy of a child, swinging her arm to point the way. “Azzazzee!!”
The photograph was on the shelf over her bed, in a seashell frame. I took it down and stared at it for a moment. I could still hear her voice, could still feel the excitement that came with everything sh
e did, with all of the little things that she loved doing. It wasn’t even the things that she loved, it was doing them with us. It was being together, the three of us, doing anything, because anything was the best thing when she had all of our attention. I took a deep breath then ran back down the stairs and, grabbing the bag, out the front door.
I was putting the bag in the back of the jeep when I saw it. The back wall of the machinery shed bounds the little courtyard where we parked the cars, across from the front door of the house. It’s a clean white canvas, a graffiti artist’s dream, and it turned out one of them had found it.
“GO HOME BASTARDS!” it screamed, the words daubed sloppily in red paint that had dribbled then dried.
I groaned and fell back against the jeep, my head in my hands. When was this going to end? And where? How much more did we have to take? I stared at it for an age, then finally pulled out my phone to call Willis. I was dialling his number but I stopped short and put the phone back in my pocket. Who knew how long it would take him or his people to get out there and I just wanted to get the hell away. Of course, I couldn’t leave it for Emily to find and so I went to the sheds to find paint and a roller and a ladder and, after taking a picture to send to Willis, I started covering over the vitriol. It wasn’t a lot and it didn’t cover a huge space so it only took me twenty minutes to hide it away behind a new coat of white paint. The graffiti was gone but the bitter taste lingered. I put everything back in the shed and got in the jeep to go but I couldn’t bring myself to start the engine. I just sat there, my forehead resting on the steering wheel. Eventually I sat up, rubbed my tired eyes and headed back to the hotel.
***
The next morning, I went into Clovelly to use Bobby’s Wi-Fi at The Pantry. I think, too, that I wanted to talk to Bobby. I wanted to ask somebody else if I’d just done something stupid by leaving Emily. I wanted to make sure too that I hadn’t done something mean or cruel by walking out. Nathan wasn’t really a friend like that, not the kind of mate with whom I could have that conversation. Bobby, though, was the closest to a close friend that I had and I needed her to tell me that I hadn’t done the wrong thing. The café was busy when I got there, school had just emptied its lunchtime cargo of kids and there was a long queue at the counter. Bobby looked over as I came in and winked at me, waving at me to take a seat. A few moments later she arrived over with a coffee.
“Cheers, Bob,” I said, “you’re a star. I don’t think I could face queuing up with that lot today.”
“Strewth, you sound a bit grim! Let me just get them all sorted and I’ll join you.”
I checked my laptop for any comments about Cara on the website and on social media, then I looked at my emails and my stomach sank when I saw a note from the bank. That was never going to be good news. It was a routine notification that one of our investment accounts had been closed after a transfer to our current account had taken the balance to zero. It wasn’t bad news really, it wasn’t news at all, but it brought our predicament into sharp relief to see in black and white that our accounts were starting to dry up. I was going to have to tell Emily, if only to stop her blowing any more money on futile schemes.
The crowd of schoolkids thinned out and Bobby left Gemma in charge at the counter.
“So what’s up, Wilde?” she said, taking a seat beside me and taking a drink from her cappuccino that left some froth on the end of her nose.
“Emily and I have broken up,” I said. “And you have froth on your nose.”
She stared at me, waiting for more.
“What?! You’re joking?”
“No,” I said, touching the end of my own nose. “Right there.”
She rubbed the froth off her nose and punched my arm.
“Back up, Wilde,” she said. “You and Emily? For real?”
I nodded.
“At least you had the grace to act surprised,” I said, “Nathan sounded like the whole world had been expecting it. And then, to top off a great week, I was over at the vineyard yesterday and someone’s scrawled graffiti on the wall of the machinery shed. ‘BASTARDS GO HOME’ it says in big red letters. Eloquent bunch, the vandals round here.”
“Aw shit,” she groaned, and shook her head. “People can be such wankers, eh? What did you do?”
“I sent a photo to Willis and painted over it as best I could. You can still make out the paint but you can’t read it, I don’t think. I’m not expecting Willis to spend much time finding who did it, to be honest. Not that it would take a detective genius to figure out it was Gretz or one of his goons.”
I told her about his little cameo at the lighthouse.
“Biggest mistake of my life,” I said, “was not letting Mitch kick his stupid, fat head in.”
“I’m sorry, Wilde, really I am. This must be tough. Look, why don’t you come over tonight, Karl’s going out with a few of his friends so we can thrash it all out over a few bottles, OK?”
“That is exactly what I need, Bobby, exactly what I need.”
***
The revelation that we were hurtling headlong towards broke had been a sobering one. What we had left was going to last us maybe a couple of years, but that was about it. We were going to have to sell the assets we had to get us through the short term and I was going to have to find a way to earn a living for the longer term. Emily would have to find a job too, but I couldn’t see her having too much difficulty finding work in the wine trade. I was assuming, of course, that she would stay here – she might not. She might go home or back to Europe. It made me feel a little bit sick to think that I might not be a part of those plans nor she a part of mine. It hadn’t really crossed my mind up to that point but the thought that we might go in very different directions made our break-up seem suddenly very real.
Nathan called while I was struggling to make the numbers add up on Brian’s old budget spreadsheet. I’d been fighting with it for an hour and I’d managed to delete the whole thing twice so my mood was not bright.
“I might have some good news for you, Wilde,” he said. “My cousin got a job out on the rigs, he flew out last week. He’s looking to rent out his apartment for six months. It’s just a one-bed, but it’s in a nice spot, down by Archer’s Cove, third floor with a view of the ocean, modern, well kitted out. His dad is looking after the whole thing, you want me to tell him you’d be interested?”
“Yeah, for sure, Nate, that’d be perfect. And tell him I can come see it straightaway, I need to get myself sorted as soon as I possibly can.”
Straightaway, it turned out, was that afternoon and we did the deal there and then. I was getting desperate and might have taken anything if the price was right, but this was actually a beautiful apartment. We haggled briefly for the sake of it but I think he was delighted to get a friend of a friend who’d look after the place and I was just relieved to get a decent place on a short lease without paying the earth. He gave me the keys and I went to check out of the hotel and pick up the few bits and pieces that I’d taken from the house. I got back to the apartment, unpacked and set the little photograph of Cara on the bedside locker. Archer’s Cove was at the end of a dirt track a couple of kilometres off the main road, about fifteen or twenty minutes out of Clovelly. There was nothing else there, just the apartment block with maybe ten or so apartments and an ice cream hut on the path that led down to the little beach. The beach was rocky which, along with the relative isolation of the place, kept the crowds away and so it just ticked all the boxes for me.
It was gone half past seven by the time I’d finished moving myself in and I had to take a quick shower and get out to Bobby’s. It was still close to eight thirty by the time I got there, having stopped at the bottle store to pick up a few supplies.
“Sorry I’m late, Bob,” I said, taking off my shoes in the hallway and taking the wine into the kitchen. “All in a good cause though, Nathan found me a place to live!”
She frowned, then the penny dropped.
“So you’ve moved out?” she said, handing me a corkscrew.
I nodded.
“Shit,” she said, shaking her head. “Why didn’t you just come and stay here? It’s not like we don’t have the room!”
“Thanks, Bobby,” I said. “But you don’t want to be under the same roof as me right now!”
“You might be right!” she conceded, with a grin. “So? What happened?”
I handed her a glass with a shrug and we took the wine out to the stoop. All of a sudden I didn’t know where to start. Not because I didn’t know how to tell her, rather because I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I needed to unload some of the debris that had been hurtling around inside my head like shrapnel after an explosion. I needed to talk to someone just to make sure I wasn’t off living in some la-la land of my own concoction. I needed someone to listen and to tell me if I’d done the right thing or at least a reasonable thing? I had told myself that Bobby was that person but, standing there and about to spill my guts, I wasn’t so sure. It’s not like we’d been lifelong friends or even each other’s best friend. She was the best friend I had there, but did that make it OK to tell her all of our darkest secrets, mine and Emily’s? Suddenly, I didn’t think it did.
I wanted to tell Bobby that we’d always been an odd pair, Emily and I, that we’re very different people but we worked and so I didn’t really think about it. And it had been hard, sometimes. It was hard when Emily took on the vineyard and it took up most of her time, took up most of her. It was hard when Cara was born and Emily battled to get to grips with being a mother. It was hard but we’d made it work, somehow.