Sheerwater

by Leah Swann

  Ava banged the doorframe, waited, and then ran over the frosty lawn and scooped the spaniel into her arms. When the sun rose her footprints would glow green in the white frost before vanishing. How she’d miss the solemn presence of this great ghost gum with the chimes hanging from its silver limbs and the sandpit of happy memories below. Would the gum tree miss the boys’ laughter, their singing and squabbling, their quiet industry as they built small cities and roads from sand and twigs? No, stop it, don’t get sentimental. Trust in herself was what she needed now. She heard Lawrence’s voice in her ear as though he were there, watching and whispering. She heard his words daily, hourly, a refrain she wished she could drive from her mind.

  Stepping backwards, she almost tripped over a Tonka truck, rust-bitten and beloved, next to a spade and a bucket. She shifted Winks to her left arm and picked up the truck. She could make room. She couldn’t leave it behind when the boys so loved the stories she’d told about the slater and the snail who secretly rode in the truck at night. She held it for an indecisive moment before letting it fall and watching it wobble sideways before righting itself, its peeling paint not yellow in the predawn but the violet of shadows. There was no room. When they got to Sheerwater she would buy them a new truck. Hell, one each. Why not? She knew how to give good gifts to her children, didn’t she?

  She hurried back to the car and thrust the floppy-eared dog into Max’s lap like a living soft toy. ‘Hold Winks,’ she said. Aware of Max watching her, reading her, she slowed her movements as she walked around the car to check on Teddy in his child seat and found the seatbelt already clasped over his tummy and his toy bunny Neddles tucked in his arms. Under his little legs were photo albums stacked in a cardboard box. They took up space, they were heavy, and they were precious. She’d compiled these hard copies since childhood and they were to her a kind of proof of existence, a proof of life, a proof that she mattered somehow.

  ‘You don’t need to check that I did him up,’ said Max. ‘I always do what you say, Mum.’

  On top of the albums lay a few loose kitchen implements: a spatula, a cake server given by an unknown great-aunt on Ava’s wedding day, a mortar and pestle for grinding nuts and grains and spices. She moved them out of kicking distance of Teddy’s feisty little feet and said to Max: ‘I know, darling. You’re amazing.’

  ‘Mum . . .’ and there was a note of reproach in his voice.

  ‘What is it, Maxy?’ Breakfast? The Tonka truck? When he was younger he sometimes took it to bed with him. Who goes to bed with a hunk of metal? She used to laugh about it with Lawrence. Well, she wasn’t going back to retrieve it. No turning back, no looking over her shoulder – she was no Lot’s wife – she was as resolved as a foreclosing bank manager. She’d thought everything through, or hoped she had. She’d resigned as a swimming coach and had a coastguard job lined up. She couldn’t wait – out of the swimming pool and back into the sea! She’d organised for her mail to be forwarded to the post office in Sheerwater. Only her mail – she wanted nothing addressed to Lawrence. She’d been very clear on that.

  ‘You forgot these,’ Max said, opening a hand containing the red feather earrings he’d made for her.

  Ava reached across and lifted the feathers up from his palms. ‘Oh, Max!’ she said. ‘What would I do without you? I’d’ve been sad if I’d left them behind.’

  She pushed the hooks through her lobes and the feathers swished against her neck.

  ‘They’re your good-luck earrings,’ he said.

  Teddy tugged at one of them, and she gently disengaged his hand and kissed his downy brow. ‘Yep, they are. And you’re my good-luck boys!’

  Ava latched the side door – though really there was no need now – and unlocked the big garage door. The sliding upward groan was one of the many sounds of the house: the squeak of the front window closing, the fast gush made by rain overflowing from the guttering in the east corner, the creak of the loose floorboard in the corridor before the bedroom. Sounds they’d soon forget.

  She got into the car and reversed through the open rectangle and out into Wallace Street, checking her mirrors for parked cars that didn’t belong to her neighbours. She saw none. Pearly clouds emerged from the darkness and the first rays silvered the suburban rooftops.

  She shifted the gearstick into drive and accelerated away from the house, turning left – right – left, powering up to the highway, checking the rearview mirror again and again, knowing the safe husk of night was about to crack.

  Not until the city was almost an hour behind her and she was losing herself to Radiohead on the stereo did Ava loosen her grip on the steering wheel. Blue sky shimmered over the featureless terrain between towns. Her phone pinged and she ignored it. She’d told no-one where she was going. A decision she’d made last autumn after a fight and followed with care, item by item. She wouldn’t stop to answer anyone.

  Find a job. Tick.

  Rent a house. Sell the furniture. Redirect the mail . . . Freedom, so close to joy, was breaking in her like a wave. On a globe where almost every inch was mapped and monitored, this was a continent where you could still get lost. The rich red dust of those vast inland plains occupied some psychic space she was barely aware of and yet grateful for as she drove south towards the Victorian coast, towards Sheerwater – what a name – where a wild sea waited to take her into its salty depths. There in all that sweet fresh space, the endless fields of water, she’d end the marriage persisting in her soul, the marriage she carted like an invisible caravan or a long, unwanted tail. She’d sever it. She’d wash herself free. She’d teach Teddy and Max to surf, to dive, to spear fish. They’d grow strong in the water, just as she had, the gentle resistance that shapes you and forms you and sharpens your will.

  They stopped to play in a park for an hour and the boys circled the trees, stamping and growling and shouting like the wild things of the famous picture book, stretching into themselves, until she called them and they piled back into the car and drove on, Winks snoring like a train continuously arriving.

  The road behind them was empty and that was good. She adjusted the mirror. She caught Max’s eyes, so round and always settling upon her.

  ‘When’s Dad going to come?’

  ‘Some day I’m sure he’ll visit us.’

  ‘I miss him.’

  How was it that Max always located and articulated the restless inner discomfort she was feeling? It was as though he was a human barometer taking measure of her emotions, her moral capacity, reflecting her every aspect back to herself.

  ‘Do you, darling?’

  ‘I love Dad, that’s why.’

  Ava clicked on the indicator and moved into the middle lane. Lawrence. The boys loved Lawrence. Of course they did. She kept avoiding this difficult fact. She could practically see her thoughts sidestepping the clear and present reality of his existence. Her first impression of her husband at that New Year’s Eve party was of a beautiful yet wounded creature, but now she was so saturated in Lawrence that she doubted her every idea about him. She had gazed through the strata of Lawrence, walked his landscape, and understood less about him the longer she knew him.

  ‘Mum, Mum.’

  A logging truck to her right honked. She was sailing between lanes, she wasn’t concentrating, she was too fixed on the little face in the rearview mirror. She glanced up at the red face of the truckie and mouthed, sorry.

  He gave her the finger and accelerated past her, and quantities of logs rumbled, a decapitated forest. ‘Arsehole,’ she muttered. She was so sick of arseholes. You put a foot out of place and they’re honking you and raging at you and implying you can’t drive and that you don’t deserve the space. She roared up the inside lane and overtook him. I may be small but I am faster than you.

  ‘Mum?’ Max said again.

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Dad says you tell lies.’

  Heat flooded her face and her scalp and raced down the back of her neck. Her mind filled with words about Lawrence unsaya
ble to Max. She clenched the steering wheel and counted her breath. In for four, out for five. In for six, out for seven.

  ‘We tell each other the truth, you and me,’ she said. ‘You can trust that.’

  Could she teach Max how to tell the difference between truth and what only seems true? Or could it only be learned as life trims your edges? She grimaced. She hated to think that Max and Teddy had to learn that love does not protect you.

  ‘You’ll love Sheerwater,’ she said. ‘It’s a town near Peterborough, on the Great Ocean Road.’

  ‘What’s the Great Ocean Road?’

  ‘The most beautiful road in the world! It was built by men with no jobs back in the Depression, and it goes around the edge of this corner of Australia. The Southern Ocean has giant waves splashing the golden cliffs, over and over, making the sandstone into different shapes. It’s wild and magical!’

  ‘Like what shapes?’

  ‘You know – the rocks called the Twelve Apostles. Remember I spoke to you about them? Tall golden rocks that tower above the sea. There’s only seven or eight left now. And London Bridge. The sea put two arches in a long piece of cliff so it looked like a bridge. You could walk across it.’

  ‘I want to go on the London Bridge!’ Teddy cried.

  ‘We can’t walk across it now, though. Because – guess what? Just like in the song, London Bridge fell down! Remember the song? London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.’

  ‘Did it fall on anyone?’

  ‘My fair baby,’ sang Teddy.

  ‘No it didn’t. But a man and a woman were on it when it was breaking.’

  Max gasped. ‘What happened?’

  Ava knew from the tone of Max’s voice that he was caught too deeply in the story. Why had she even mentioned it? So often this happened between them: she’d be talking freely about something or other – he was so engaging, so interested in everything – and then she would find his curiosity had taken it too far. Somehow she was always exposing him to the adult world too early, and now he was picturing people walking over rocks while they were breaking and falling. It might not matter as much to suggest to another child that sometimes you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet, but Max was sensitive and often too literal. He was still building himself and shouldn’t be thinking about how things fall apart.

  ‘Mum? What happened?’

  He would not be put off. She sighed. ‘So. The bridge was shaking. I seem to remember hearing the people thought maybe the shaking was normal. They got to the end and the whole bridge collapsed behind them. They found themselves on a tall, tiny island in the sea.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Max, with another indrawn breath. ‘How did they ever get off? Did they jump in the water?’

  ‘Nup. Way too high.’

  ‘Did they ring someone?’

  ‘It was before mobile phones. Someone must have seen them and got to a telephone and rung emergency services—’

  ‘The SES!’

  ‘And a helicopter came.’

  ‘Was it you who saved them?’

  ‘No, it happened before I had that job.’

  ‘If you were on there could you have dived in? If you were stuck?’

  ‘Too dangerous. There are rocks you can’t see under the water. And you know how the water gets harder the higher you are.’

  ‘But if you had to.’

  ‘I’d give it a go, if I had to.’

  Max sighed. To distract him, Ava asked if he was hungry and he replied yes he was, he really wanted one of those crunchy green apples.

  There were no apples left. They were past Geelong now and galahs passed ahead, their feathered breasts the same ripe pink as watermelon. The cold air smelled clean and fresh through the open windows. Ava and the boys sang songs. The satnav took her off the freeway and through the green sloping fields of Barrabool, where wire fences kept the cows from wandering onto the road. The black cows floated through their green setting like barges.

  Ava imagined this land would once have been bush and long grasses, a different world, and she felt the hard twinge of burden that her country’s genocidal history laid on everyone.

  Ava looked for a place that might sell apples. The Southern Ocean was not far now. She was looking forward to the first glimpse of that sea of shipwrecks and stolen lives, overlooked by sandstone cliffs like colossal slabs of boiled honeycomb with edges that snapped too easily underfoot, a secretive coast unwilling to reveal itself and so only the fierce white water revealed it, gnawing rock into tunnels and overhangs and arches. Ava couldn’t wait. Freedom! She was so cramped inside, so cramped all over; she’d been living the smallest version of herself for so long.

  She pulled in at the next servo to refill the car and take the boys to the bathroom. In the shop she bought mints and dubious fruit and a sausage roll for each of them. Teddy spat his out and said it tasted like pigs’ bottoms. Ava had no idea whether he picked up these phrases at kindergarten or whether he invented them. Max was still hungry, so she bought him a cheese roll. He was a prodigious eater and she could feel the growth in him, the bones lengthening, muscle thickening.

  When they headed back to the car, the boys wanted to play in the tiny playground.

  ‘Not now,’ Ava said. They’d already stopped once. She wanted to keep up the momentum that had started her day but Teddy was already running towards the climbing frame, his volition outpacing hers, kicking off his shoes and running over the gravel. Max ran after him.

  ‘Put your shoes back on, there might be broken glass!’ she called, aware that she was overriding the intuition telling her to get back in the car, keep going, don’t stop, aware that it was fearful, irrational, even superstitious.

  ‘Teddy!’ she shouted, when she saw what was happening. ‘Stop that!’

  Teddy was throwing pebbles at Max who was shielding his face with his hands, dodging and ducking as hard showers shot into him.

  ‘Right, that’s it! In the car! Max, you too. Grab Winks, would you?’ Ava ran to Teddy and turned him around, steering him away from the playground. His little shoulders pushed back against her hands, his feet reached back to kick her shins. She forcibly guided him back to his seat grateful to get moving again, grateful to get behind that wheel and add to the miles between her and Lawrence, each somehow opening a new spaciousness in her soul.

  After another half-hour she saw a sign: SHEERWATER, 29 KILOMETRES. Her heart gave a joyous bounce. She turned up the music.

  A new start. She’d do it all better this time. Not be so naive. Not be such a dummy. Barely thirty, she felt as wise and worn as a woman of fifty. She’d study again. Pick up her arts degree. There was so much ahead of her!

  Apart from the occasional passing truck, the traffic was light – it was a Saturday. A car was tailgating her. Was she going too slowly? She glanced down at the speedometer: it read 115 kilometres per hour. She was breaking the speed limit herself. Back off, she thought, touching on her brake lights with some irritation.

  Stands of trees thickened a little. Ava glimpsed a tall kangaroo, magnificent and watchful, balancing on the strong silver rudder of her tail, her front paws resting on her chest in an attitude of tragedy. Magpies jostled on the wires, handsome as boys in suits. As she drove closer to the Great Ocean Road, Ava caught a distant glimpse of the sea and felt it hurtle towards her, full of uproar and unrest, its barbarous waves shining like agate, dark and cold, and somehow all that tumult was calming to her, as though by looking at it she could put her inner tumult to rest.

  3

  At the Sheerwater police station, Ava was wedged on a bench between a wall and an old woman who smelled of fried onions and wet wool. The place was packed. Outside were news crews with roving cameras.

  The cops had sat Ava down and told her to wait.

  ‘We’re putting up roadblocks. There’s one at Apollo Bay, one at Beech Forest, and one before Port Campbell. The SES are doing a search of the local area,’ said a woman who introduced herself as Officer Spit
eri.

  Ava was handed paper and a pen and told to write detailed descriptions of her sons – height, weight, face shape, hair colour, eye colour and what they were wearing: t-shirts, jumpers, shoes, socks. ‘Every detail helps. Colours. Brands. People notice the oddest things. Were they wearing Thomas the Tank Engine socks? Write it down.’

  Ava’s hands were shaking and the biro wobbled on the page. Teddy was wearing his tracksuit pants. Or was he wearing his jeans? No, tracksuit pants. The act of committing words to paper was breaking her memory. Were his socks patterned or plain? Shoelaces or velcro straps? Her grip on the biro made her fingers hurt and that reminded her . . . Teddy’s velcro straps. Yes, she was sure about that.

  She wrote everything she could remember and handed the paper back to Spiteri. Ava looked at the flimsy piece of paper in the officer’s hand. Max, reduced to his height and weight (four foot six, thirty kilos); Teddy, reduced to monkey-patterned socks.

  She was told again she had to wait. Wait! For her missing sons. Wait? She kept running to the toilet, her bowels streaming, even her head sweating. Every time she went back up to the crowded reception desk to ask if there was any news, a police officer would tell her to take a seat. They were, they said, doing all we can. They were leaving no stone unturned. She harassed them like someone crazed.

  ‘We’ve put a KALOF out,’ Spiteri said to her, walking back over from the front desk, her blue shirt bulging over her trousers.

  ‘KALOF?’

  ‘Keep a lookout for. Any vehicle with a nine-year-old boy and a four-year-old boy. We’ve got officers in the region looking at maps to determine how far they may have got. There are four-wheel-drive tracks near where your car was parked – did you notice a four-wheel drive on the road before you stopped?’

  Ava shook her head. All she could remember of the other cars was that tailgater in the black car. She wished now she’d let him pass and he’d got to the accident first. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to stop.

  And she could barely picture other cars at the scene – just the fire truck arriving, and the ambulance. Apart from that, all she remembered from her panicked dash back to her own car were the faces of firefighters, the police, the bearded bikies staring as she raced past. She remembered the sea and the wind. She remembered breath popping in the boy’s chest, the veined eyes of the pilot, the frightened squeal of the girl in plaits. Where were those people now? In hospital? She bent over, her stomach convulsing. She was going to be sick.