Beneath the Wild Fig Tree, page 6
Outside, beneath the constellations, I held my gift carefully while she locked the door, and later, lying in bed listening to the keh keh keh of plovers shouting to each other in the dark, I realised that Nan’s home is my sanctuary.
11
Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country (Parsley Bay, Sydney) 2000
Mouheneenner Country (Hobart) 1984
Constitution Dock
My week had involved so much self-initiated overtime that I felt mentally and emotionally drained, collapsing into bed as soon as I got home and getting up early to plough through work while the office was empty. Seeking solitude, that Saturday I went to Parsley Bay on the southeastern side of the harbour, with a packed lunch and our scribblings. I planned to begin collating this memoir.
I startled a water dragon off the warm bush path as I walked down to the cove, and found a spot on the lawn, beneath the trees. This tiny, narrow inlet is separated from the homes of the well-heeled by a sandstone cliff, over which a small stream falls, making its way across the beach and into the harbour. Children splashed, someone was snorkelling, and walkers heading south towards Watsons Bay thumped across the footbridge overhead. On the reef, a child crouched over a rockpool. I stood in sunshine, looking at the tidal pools, then, trying not to startle the white ibis listening for giveaway sounds beneath the wet soil close by, I settled down to read, starting with a letter dated 26 June 1984. It was two in the morning, the river black, the lights along the eastern shore a spangled galaxy. It was in the witching hours that my mother agonised about the island venture, particularly because after returning to campus she’d encountered Steve in a corridor of students. The distance between them felt contrived – they feigned a casual greeting. Later he dropped by her study. He’d heard about the island from Tracey.
… Another coffee back on his couch. Arguments with Wheeler are explosive. With Steve, the more I protest, the more considered he becomes. He told me that ‘everyone’ assumes we’re having an affair!! I was mortified but decided to be frank about my increasingly confused feelings and in the silence that followed, an awareness came that we were in this predicament together.
I know. You’re horrified. Anneke, more than anyone else, you’re the person who’s shaped my life. I haven’t forgotten your difficulties after Dad abandoned us. I can’t repeat the pattern! Steve believes comparing the two situations is ‘unhelpful’ but really, what would he know?
I find my mind ceaselessly grappling with this issue. It’s not been that long since events first conspired to draw us closer – damn fieldwork! Damn yachts! He asked me not to go to the island but it’s a done deal. That said, the finality underlying our parting felt momentous and arriving home late again I was greeted more generously than I deserved.
My spirit of adventure says a muted ‘yes’ to the island but my head and my heart aren’t convinced. I hope you care that I chose this course, because, I know this is silly, but I sort of think that if everyone thinks we’re having an affair, then what’s the point of not?
Promises. That’s what.
And Nicky …
~
Dad’s mates loaded up a rusty ute and we drove our stuff down to Constitution Dock in a light drizzle. The skipper watched the gear build up on the wharf and shook his head.
‘He thinks we’re nuts,’ said Mum. We were watching the activity, neither of us inclined to help.
All those adults in their blue jeans and boots clustered beside the boat and only Freya with her hair twisted up, her big loop earrings and her long red dress standing out from the crowd. Wheeler was lifting boxes, spinning yarns, and winning over the reticent skipper.
He can win over anyone. Mum says it’s the way he treats everyone the same and his charm and generosity. I think it’s also his voice. It’s big and deep in the middle with a warm gravelly edge. Nan says it’s pure Pavarotti but he doesn’t care for opera. He’d rather sing like Johnny Cash.
I went and stood on the edge of the wharf with Kes beside me. I looked at the Rosy Wrasse and then at the weather and hoped for blue skies. She was a ketch-rigged cray boat, wooden and solid and I liked the white paint, the deep red trim, and the fancy transom with a whale’s tail design. The water heaved against the quay. It was a murky green patterned with restless sepia and olive dapples. A fish and chips box floated on the surface and the water smelled of wild ocean doing battle with sewage, oil, and greasy food.
The skipper agreed it was rank. We stood there regarding each other, and then he said, ‘You the kid for Verloren Island?’ And he leaned forward and added, ‘The name’s Bert.’
I stood on one leg with the other hooked behind it and asked whether she was a good boat.
‘My word. Found her abandoned and falling to pieces. Built her up myself with the help of some mates.’
‘Can I get on?’
‘Be my guest.’
We stood on the aft deck in silence. There was a break in the clouds and a huge swathe of light lit up the mountain. Snow was gleaming down its flanks.
Bert wore big boots and a woollen jumper with holes at the elbows. Everyone else was rugged up against the blasts off Antarctica so I could tell he was sizing me up in the clothes department. ‘This isn’t the tropics,’ he said, but I told him that I like the cold.
He squatted down out of the wind, whistling tunelessly while the water tested the sides of the boat and the rigging clattered. He had huge hands stained with oil.
‘I suppose, being such a salty seadog, you’ve got a tattoo?’ I said.
He looked at me, surprised, and so I hastily confided that Dad’s got one, and I slapped my bum to indicate where. He went on whistling. The boat rocked. A gull stood on the wharf, one leg tucked up into its white feathers.
‘Know much about the island?’ he asked, and I told him that I knew it had seals. Then he said, ‘Verloren. They say it means “to be lost” or “drowned” and the fellow who named it came close to getting himself wrecked on a rogue rock called The Dagger. Full of reefs, Verloren is, particularly down the southern end. Plenty of boats have smashed up …’
I said ‘wow’ in a faint voice. He also said the French explorer, Baudin, named the mountain Mount Naturaliste and that ‘she’s a shallow sea, full of shiftin’ shoals.’
I twisted a strand of hair around my finger and gazed at the river. It wasn’t even the open sea, and it was already full of toothy waves. Then Dad came over to talk business. Bert was taking our gear all the way to the island. We’d join the Rosy Wrasse on Flinders Island.
~
When our house was empty and everyone was partying at Sally’s place, a shadowy feeling seeped into me, and I slipped back home. I walked around the outside, stopping at the windows, laying my face on the cold glass, stroking the walls, and staring in at the empty spaces where we’d once lived.
The house had become a stranger and I felt a stranger inside myself too. I sat on a branch of the pepper tree feeling sad. We’d loved our view from Mount Stuart down the built-up foothills and valleys to the river, even though it hid a multiplicity of human sins, like heavy metals and the Anson sailing daily down river to tip jarosite waste over the edge of the continental shelf. Then Sally came looking for me.
She said losing a house is nothing compared to gaining an island, but she doesn’t understand how lonely always moving on actually is. We sat swinging our legs. She was wearing a baggy black jumper over her jeans and a beanie on her head, but she was still cold, so we climbed down. We walked down the damp pavement to her place, where people were crushed up against each other and food, music and voices spun colour through the air. Mum was outside by the bonfire talking to Marti and Janet. Dad was inside, teasing Suzie, the lead singer of The Crazed Desert Gophers, as usual.
It was a good thing Mum couldn’t see.
12
Gadigal Country (Paddington, Sydney) 2000
Peramangk and Kaurna Country (Adelaide Hills) 2000
Time’s Illusions
Back home, I checked my emails, tensing when I noticed one from Arno suggesting that I pick up my belongings, ‘assuming we’re over’.
I flicked it into trash.
At precisely eight o’clock the phone rang. I hesitated, wondering if he was following up. He wasn’t. It was my first ever phone call from Steve, and pleasantries over, he said, ‘I’m getting Freya for you. I want you to treat her with kindness and respect. She’s got something important to tell you.’
I heard his footsteps retreat and a door close. Somewhere near my flat a car backfired.
Freya, when she eventually came to the phone, sounded artificially upbeat. Her small talk was strained. She seemed to be at a loss as to know how to begin.
‘Why did you really call?’
‘Steve thought – we both thought – you should know that I’m having a mastectomy on Tuesday. They’re being non-committal, but they’ve warned me it looks – advanced.’ Her voice caught on the last word.
But she’s only in her fifties! Reality had whisked away its mask and I had glimpsed the abyss.
‘No!’ I whispered, my throat unbearably tight.
We cradled the silence between us, and eyes squeezed closed, I rocked gently.
‘It’s not the end of the world, Nicky.’
I swallowed. ‘It’s a lot to absorb.’ Unanticipated tears welled. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m fine, sweetheart. No need to worry about me. Steve’s being magnificent.’ And her voice shook a little as she talked about the support she’d had from friends.
Eventually, ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Once I’ve absorbed this news.’
I put down the phone and sat quite still for a moment, experiencing the physical sensation of reality’s poles shifting, my world assuming a different dimension. A surge of emotion uprooted me and frightened by a spiralling panic, I phoned Arno – an automatic reaction.
‘My stuff. Can I come around now?’
‘Is this about your stuff or something else?’
‘My mother … Arno, my mother …’
‘I’ll come to you?’
‘Thanks, but I need to do something, I’ll see you at your place.’
With panic coming in rapid waves, I drove across Sydney Harbour Bridge to Manly. He was waiting outside and without a word opened his arms then held me until I’d regained my composure.
On his couch, with the wine he’d poured me clutched in both hands, I told him about Freya, detailing our relationship more comprehensively than ever before. He listened, his arm around my shoulder, and then clarified what a good daughter would do. Course of action confirmed, he said he respected my decision the other day, but thought I needed to work out why I had over-reacted and jumped to conclusions.
‘This is the first time, Nicky, you’ve dropped that cool enigma with me,’ he joked and said he was giving me space to sort myself out.
‘I can’t talk about all that now, Arno.’
‘Sure,’ he said, and gave me a gentle hug.
We didn’t make a move to pack my stuff. It was past midnight. That night, being in his arms gave me courage for the following day.
I booked a flight and informed work. I arrived in Adelaide as Freya came around from the anaesthetic. The hospital was silent and oppressive. A crucifix dominated the wall of her room.
~
‘Hello,’ I whisper.
We hold each other’s gaze.
‘Thank you,’ she smiles. ‘Thank you.’
~
Curled up in the chair in Freya’s bedroom several days later, I have time to regard her as she sleeps. That pale skin. That look of sheer exhaustion. The mauve half-moons beneath her eyes. She has aged so much since I last saw her, more years ago than I care to recall.
The sound of a goat bleating is just perceptible.
‘Giles,’ says Freya. ‘Given to us by a friend. Love him. Wish he’d stop wrecking the garden though.’
There is birdsong, such serenity, but I’m unsettled that Freya lived with those lumps for so long. Later, after she’s slept, I ask her why, and she sighs.
‘I couldn’t help hoping they’d go away if I didn’t believe it was happening to me.’ She raises her chin. ‘Denial, Nicky. I admit it. Complete denial.’
I look down at my feet and my blood-red toenails look brightly back at me. We couldn’t be more different. I’d have acted, pronto.
I feel for the lighter in my pocket; my new friend, bought on impulse at the airport.
‘Big city living – it’s not you, really,’ says Freya, when we are talking about Sydney. ‘And Nicky, I’m so sorry about my part in all that’s gone wrong for you.’
What would you know about anything to do with me? I want to say, but I tap the lighter and remain silent. She puts a hand to her lost breast.
‘Don’t smoke. I worry about you already; not that too.’
I ignore this comment. In her company, I’m struggling to discard past attitudes, to pivot our relationship in a new direction. Unresolved issues, dark and volatile, still lie smouldering between us.
But yesterday she was told the cancer has spread.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I tell her.
Outside I light up and inhale. It’s like I’m sixteen again, when the boyfriend Nan called ‘Bad News’ embodied the abandonment and rebelliousness I was feeling.
~
One evening, in the kitchen, Steve talks about Freya’s cancer, his story expanding on hers. He says she’d gone for a routine mammogram. They suggested an ultrasound as well, ‘just to be sure.’ She considered it over-servicing when they advised her to have a biopsy and so she sought a second opinion, even a third. By the time she submitted to the procedure she was in shock. They both were.
‘The unrelenting torture of waiting. And when we finally heard … You know, Nicky, it only takes a single moment to obliterate the future.’ And he smashes his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘She doesn’t deserve this. Your mother, Nicky, is a wonderful, loving, open-hearted—’ and he stops to gather himself, examining his hands, and for the first time ever, I feel a real warmth for this man I have spent most of my life loathing.
‘We came home, and we sat in the study. Our grief was an almost tangible thing.’
‘She seems so calm.’
‘That’s called courage. In front of you, she’ll be trying not to let it slip.’
We watch a honeyeater feeding from the grevillea beside the window. ‘It’s made her reassess her life. Time has a finite quality now. She says it’s changed her perspective on living, like she’s veered down an unmapped tributary while everyone else floats on by.’ He slowly rubs his hands together as though he wants to comfort them. ‘Those days before the operation – she said she’d rather do the ironing than go to the theatre.’
‘She would?’
His voice raw, he says, ‘For me, it’s as though she’s out there struggling in white water and all I can do is watch helplessly from the banks.’
We stand side by side staring out at the garden. Fast, dark river, I’m thinking. The bird, startled, takes flight. My abandoned journal, my discarded past … when was it that I decided words were too worn to encompass the great tragedies of ordinary lives?
Steve begins to tell me the story of Freya’s cancer again. The words he uses are almost the same, as though through repetition he can weather the situation into a manageable shape. Occasionally I nod, but there’s a small splash of purple in a far corner of the garden and my arm feels gripped by Freya’s hand and my body is tense with the memory of my father being washed downstream away from us. Tears well. My face reddens.
He clears his throat. ‘This whole experience – this is life, isn’t it? Birth and aging, sickness and dying.’
I slip a cautious arm around his waist, but I’m not really there; not really doing that. Instead, I’m remembering the map spread across my desk so long ago, with Wheeler’s handwriting all over it. Maps, words, symbols. But Steve is right. We’ve embarked on a journey with Freya across formidable emotional terrain, without waypoints and our bearings in turmoil.
‘It’s hard coming to terms with suffering and transience. But thank you, Nicky. That hug means an awful lot to me. It will mean even more if you’d go and give one to your mother.’
13
Peramangk and Kaurna Country (Adelaide Hills) 2000
Bass Strait (Verloren Island) 1984
Crossing Water
The next day Freya gets up and joins me in the garden. We have a tray of tea and biscuits that Steve organised before he left to work on his boat.
‘Remember that day we spent on Flinders Island before going to Verloren?’
I tense, instantly that girl again. Between the two of us, the past has always been a taboo topic.
‘Green paddocks, black swans, and rain. That’s about all I remember,’ I reply, unwilling to mention the fight we’d had, my final act of resistance against being banished to the island. They’d left me to sulk and I’d watched through the window as they walked down to the wharf and greeted Bert, on the Rosy Wrasse. A rust-bucket scallop boat was docking.
‘The most exciting event of that whole dreary day was a ute that came down to the wharf while you were with Bert. A man climbed slowly out and stared at the water. He stood there about ten minutes. Then he got slowly back in and slowly drove away.’
‘That’s entertainment on Flinders Island,’ says Freya. ‘Slow time. We could all do with more of that. I remember going to the pub. That’s where we first met that pilot.’
Dorothy, small and slight with chestnut hair and a little triangular gap between her front teeth was the local pilot we’d relied on.
