The Break (15 page)

Back then, she and Jack were sweating it out on the farm — and trying to stay alive in the dark winters. There wasn't a winter past or present in this town that Pip didn't detest with all her soul. They were long, bitter affairs. As a young wife, she did what she could to make the house comfortable, kept it clean and tried to brighten it up with curtains she stitched herself, fabric thrown across the kitchen table. She remembered choosing the material at the draper's, lugging it back and hiding it until the curtains were finished. The day they were done, Jack came in (he'd been nudged flat against a fence by a haughty cow that day, Pip remembered how he
laughed about it) and she had them up, hanging brightly, hems not quite straight, but his eyes lit up and she felt that all the secret curtain-making hours were instantly justified by his pleasure.

She saw the same feeling in Ferg for Liza, though he kept it closer to him. She saw the lack of fulfilment in Mike's life, the lack of joy. Of course, she let them think she didn't have a clue, for it was a child's prerogative to
know
that their parents knew nothing about them.

Pip looked out her window at the shapes of the now-mature avocado and fig trees and remembered how they had begun — seedlings in hessian sacks. She'd never thought they could become trees, offering and denying with perfect reliability every year.

The trick to being a mother, she thought, was what you did with what you knew. Unless someone asked directly, you had to be so careful, you had to tread lightly.

Pip reached for a Turkish Delight, a pink one, and decided to keep out of things. She could only watch her children flounder, as though maybe they were just actors on a screen after all, not real people — her people — just outside, shouting in the car, parked on the farm that she and Jack had built from nothing.

Mike climbed over the fence into the plantation, and caught his t-shirt on the wire.
Your shithouse choices
. He fiddled a moment or two, trying to release his shirt. The moon was big and yellow, and cast tinted light over the place. Mike's fingers moved about hopelessly. In frustration he yanked away from the fence, leaving half his shirt hanging from it, and went towards the trees.

Why not. Why not
, he thought.
Why not!

A dip in the ground surprised him, his body dropping awkwardly down in the darkness.

It's what I am. Addict. Junkie. Stoner. That's who I am. Who I have been and will be, whatever happens. I'm no different now. It'll be years, this, years … it's never gunna be over.

He thought of the pub. He knew he could get it there, knew there'd be a source, there always was, everywhere, you could get it everywhere.

His head was thunder. It chanted,
Why not, why not, why not.

The Tassies stood straight, dwarfing him. Mike looked to his left. His breath was jagged. Trees and trees and trees, rows of them. He looked to the right. Rows and rows and rows of the motherfuckers. He stank of sweat, like he did every night. Stinking, disgusting, pathetic man. A bird flapped secretly above him. Things bustled in the undergrowth.

In a tripping, running panic under a low moon, Mike stumbled all the way up the river to where he knew — roughly — their father's ashes had been buried. It was the first time he'd been there since he moved back to Margaret
River. He'd been there plenty of times before that, even from three hundred kilometres and a million people away, up in Perth.

The moon came through in shafts. He sat on his haunches, like a child, in front of Jack's stone, yearning for a reprieve from his guilt. His litany of failures. But forgiveness needed to be given, and Jack was gone.

Cray woke with the sun rising over the bay and glassy peelers calling to him. His head was foggy from the beers at the pub last night. Greys Bay was quiet, except for the crunch of country roads under early surfers' tyres, and the barking of a dog calling to his owner. There were only three other guys out. Cray could just make out their dark figures straddling boards, rising and falling with the irregular, perfect heaves of the water.

Rosie moved a little, and he got out of bed quietly, pulling on his cold boardies and rash vest. He waxed up his rhino chaser outside, the bubblegum smell of it in his nose. What could be better than this? An unhassled early morning surf in perfect conditions, a couple of hours of ‘work' later on (he almost laughed at the idea of board-shaping as work), Rosie to be with, time for another surf later on. He breathed in the cool blue air as he walked down the sleeping dawn street towards Edge Point.

Rosie woke to the satisfied sounds of Cray brushing sand from his board, and the rather less appealing sound of him blowing sea water from his nose. She staggered out towards the kettle, squinting at him through morning slit-eyes in distaste.

‘God, you're a bit much. Mister Fit and Healthy and
the-world-is-good
.'

He laughed. ‘Yeah, unlike you, despite your tender years. How about we do time trials around the oval and see who comes out best?'

‘I wouldn't want to embarrass you. And just for the
record, let it be known that the
only
time you get up early is when the swell's up. Not for anything else.'

But he was too zen after his surf to bite.

Rosie had the day off. Cray's sandy feet scratched over the lino as he dropped slabs of bread into the toaster. Rosie thought she should do something
outside
in her time off. Sitting around the house reading, well, you could be anywhere: Perth, Margaret River, Costa Rica. There was no point being here, coming down south, if you weren't going to make the most of what it offered. Yes, something outside, she decided. Maybe it would help. She'd heard at the pub about the two teachers who'd lived in the house before she and Cray moved in, two women who'd been posted to the Catholic school in Margaret River, who'd left after a year. They'd rarely left the house except to go to work. Didn't go for walks or for an evening dip in the bay. And it wasn't just because one of them had missed her fiancé in Perth, or because the other had had to endure the deputy head feeling her arse after the children had gone home for the day. It was because they'd hated the place. And Rosie could understand that now: it made you slightly nervous, all the space, the lack of people. But she was determined not to become like them, not let the place push her away. When she'd heard that story, Rosie remembered how cobwebby and dusty the wooden furniture out on the verandah had been when she and Cray moved in, a week after the teachers had gone. She'd swept it clean with a small brush, had carefully unclung the grey webs.

Rosie went for a drive, the radio announcer's familiar voice reassuring, and found a beach where there were no cars parked in the limestone patch. Following the path down to the water, she walked over the dunes, hands on Koppers
logs to steady her, towel slung over her shoulder. She passed through the creamy dune sand to the coarser shell coating on the shore, felt the shiny, broken pieces dig into the soles of her feet.

She saw the dark blue of the coming wind sweep the sea like a vacuum over carpet, felt her hair pull lightly away from her neck, fly with the air.

 

 

 

In the rock of the headland, among the highest bush and the red crusty strata of earth, swings a falcon, tiny legs of a mouse kicking in its mouth.

The falcon powers away to a cliff nest, a few strokes over the plunging and lifting water beneath, where a pink mouth waits wide, and where the sun comes in golden, late in the day.

It has every view of the world, this bird, and takes in the speck of a young woman on the beach below.

The search for sustenance, the ferrying of nourishment, is now an hourly mission. And so the bird flies, back and forth, dipping and rising, across and through a world, until the gangly, surprisingly large eyas can make its own way out over the cliffs, into the stinging spray, leaving the mother alone.

Cray had on his oldest, tattiest King Gee shirt, and his gardening shorts. Worker's green. No sterile business shirt or tie around his neck. (Who
invented
ties? he fumed momentarily.) After all, at this job he'd be working with his hands, with fibreglass and resin. He looked down at his hands. The simplicity of that, of making things. Things for people to use for pleasure, for leisure, to sustain them.

Gus was there, having a coffee with the other, much younger, apprentice when he arrived. Cray was an apprentice too, now, and that was a bit of a worry, he knew, starting from scratch at thirty, but why exactly? As far as he knew, there was no book of rules:
The Way To Go About Life: A Compact Guide
by D. H. Knob-Jockey, PhD. At the end, he'd be lying on his deathbed facing nothingness, and he'd be the only one looking back over this life. No one else would be too concerned about what he'd done or not done. An old codger like any other, he'd have made it through to the end, and how he got there wasn't important, let alone interesting, to anyone else. That's if he made it to codgerdom. He reminded himself of the proverbial bus just around the corner, and slowed his thoughts.

‘Want a brew, Ray?'

‘Yeah, thanks. It's Cray, actually. Uhh … it's a nickname from way back, just stuck.' He struggled to explain without going into it. ‘From when I worked the crayboats.'

‘Righto, mate.' Gus raised an eyebrow in good humour. ‘Whatever you prefer. We're used to funny names round here.'

Cray scanned the workshop, at the boards in the making, at the blanks and the vats of resin, the airbrushes and Gorilla Grip, the belt sanders and foam shavings littering the floor like
fake snow; at the finished products drying on racks, waiting to be tried out. Each board was unique, a creation of surfer-specific engineering. The thickness and curve of the plank, the shape, number and position of the fins, the angle of the nose: these were all custom-designed to aid the individual surfer's ocean needs, depending on where they surfed, their height and weight, their surfing style. You wouldn't make a Malibu-style plank for a hardcore young guy who was out there trying to carve his initials into the water, to feel the adrenalin zip through his system with sharp turns and avalanche drops, just as you wouldn't make a super-lightweight thruster for a middle-aged bloke who only wanted to go out and get wet, relax into the waves, feel the motion of the water under him.

Just being around boards made Cray want to plunge into the cool, spritzy stuff. Natural exfoliant, Rosie always said about the whitewater. More women should try it.

Gus put a mug of coffee next to Cray, and pointed to a blank.

‘There you go, mate,' he said. ‘A clean slate. Let's get into it.'

Ferg hauled himself out of bed and examined his feet with bug-eyes. That bloody brother. Bloody damn selfish bastard. He couldn't stand the thought of seeing him this morning.

He looked over at Liza. She was wide awake, and looking dreadful. Pale. He sighed. A light sou'-easterly was blowing against the flyscreen. The marri creaked its good-morning. Ferg felt like the oldest person in the world, without the wisdom.

The only person he felt like being with was Sam. Sam would already be up, in his room immersed in one of his projects. That boy was the king of projects. Always something on the go, always something to disappear into.

Ferg pulled on yesterday's shorts, with yesterday's undies in, and quietly went down the hall to hang out with the sanest person in the house.

Out in the brisk morning, overlooking the orchard's bare winter branches, Pip dug into the flesh of the grapefruit, careful not to scoop up too much pith. Her mother used to eat the skin of oranges. The memory of it made her cringe, yet it came with an image of her mother: young, smooth-skinned, and with a bold smile. Pip was older now than her mother was when she died. Her mother had raised the four of
them
without batting an eyelid, it seemed. Where had Pip gone so wrong with her boys? The tension since Mike had arrived was wearing. She often felt anxious leaving her room to join them sitting around the kitchen table, or flopping on the sofas. What was she walking into? Why couldn't they
just accept one another and get on with things? There was so much gnashing and wailing these days, rather than just putting your head down and getting on.

Pip rested her teaspoon on the edge of the saucer.

Liza pushed her feet into her uggies and headed out to the cottage. She had in her hand half a loaf of bread she'd grabbed from the kitchen. She wouldn't be a minute, she'd just take him the bread and make sure he was okay.

The old gate door was wide open when Liza got there, and the usual twenty-eights came swooping over when they saw her. She knocked and peered in to see Mike sitting on the side of the bed looking worse than all of them put together.

‘Oh, Lize. Morning.'

‘Moaning.'

She put the bread down on the table. ‘Brought you something for the toaster.'

Mike tried to look interested, tried to push himself from the side of the bed, and didn't manage either.

The twenty-eights squawked raucously from the verandah.

Liza turned to them, started to say something and then stopped herself.

She wondered if they knew each other, those green and yellow birds sitting side by side, pointing her way, beseeching her.

‘Come in for lunch, later. If you feel like it,' she said. ‘I'm making a big pot of vegie soup.'

Mike didn't look up.

Work tomorrow. Rosie was getting bored with cleaning the lines every night, with making takeaway skinny decaffeinated cappuccinos for tourists with nothing better to do than compete for the most annoying coffee requests. (‘Do you have soy milk? I'll have a skinny soy decap then, minus chocolate.' ‘No, we're out of caraway seeds this morning. Will your long black be alright without them?') The novelty of finding a sleeping Crayfish in their bed by the time she got home was wearing off. As were paypackets with a pittance in them, even though she worked split shifts and her days off were rarely back-to-back.