The Break (21 page)

So Rosie drove through town at the surf speed of twenty kays an hour, getting a glimpse of whatever it was out there that drew them all like a gentle rip, and when the view became too distant and glittery, she turned back to the road and concentrated on Liza and Ferg, and Sam.

In the last week Liza had relented on her anger, mainly because she couldn't summon it anymore. And because she finally recognised Ferg's distress. She'd seen him in the bathroom one morning, razor in hand, slack against the basin. She saw him come out again, still unshaven. Liza felt something go in her then, and had reached for his hand as he walked past. He'd looked at her, surprised, and Liza knew that they needed each other — Christ, now more than they ever had, ever would. They needed each other as Liza and Ferg, and as Sam's parents; they needed each other as the two young people who'd come together those years back, grinning embarrassedly and tenderly and dying to tumble into bed together, finding any opportunity. How they'd changed, she thought sadly. How very different they were now.

She was on her own, lying in an old deckchair in the garden, when Rosie arrived. The house was behind Liza, it was wide and open and Rosie could see down the corridor, could see the suggestions of rooms, but knew the doors to those rooms would be closed against emptiness.

Liza didn't get up, and she didn't look surprised to see Rosie, just said, ‘Thanks for coming. There's a chair …' and pointed to one on the verandah.

Rosie carried it over and sat down facing the garden. They both sat together and looked into the garden for some time. Rosie didn't want to start a conversation, though it would hardly be that, she thought, and instead she reached hesitantly for her bag. From it she took a small drawstring bag of sand and shells she'd collected from Hut's. She'd made the little cloth bag by hand the night before, and fingered it now, listening to the sounds the shells made as she turned it over and over in her hand.

‘Oh, is that from …'

Rosie nodded, and caught Liza's eyes for the first time.

‘I hope it's okay,' she said, taking a breath. ‘If you don't want it I understand.'

Liza looked at the bag without touching it, didn't say anything.

‘Ferg would like it,' she said finally, and looked over at Rosie, as if to reassure her. ‘He'd like it,' she nodded. ‘Thanks.'

There was a pause before Liza pointed behind Mrs Perry's, at the sudden wall of green rearing up behind her house, and said, almost as if she were confessing something, as if she'd been saving up the memory for this, for now, for some time, ‘I was in there when it happened; I was in the forest. There was a terrible windstorm, a terrible
churning
in the sky.' She stopped for a moment, surprised. Took a breath, made herself continue. ‘By the time I came out, I knew there was something … happening.'

Rosie stayed silent. She waited for Liza to go on.

Liza kept her eyes on the green, kept the words coming. ‘I was so scared. I stood close to the trunk of a huge old tree. It's strange, no one else has mentioned it, that blow, as if maybe it didn't happen anywhere else. I must have been the only one in that bit of forest that day. Imagine Sam,' — she turned her face to Rosie, stricken, and caught on her words — ‘how scared …'

Liza's hand reached for Rosie's, and Rosie tried not to but cried as Liza wept, choking, sitting in her chair. Rosie looked at the hand in her own, and wondered how she had ended up here, in this garden, with Liza Crowe, and how it was still so new but somehow it wasn't; it felt normal, as normal as anything could feel. Then she took Liza's hand with both of her own and leaned forward, as if to say something, and waited as Ferg came over to the sound of Liza breaking,
finally, and they sat together, in the garden, gathered round the small bag of sand and shells and what might have been the essence of their boy, some part, some spark of him, in the centre, in their centre, as it always would be.

Liza stayed in the garden after everyone had gone. She felt nearly still inside, for the first time in a long time. Beside her, the marri, too, was calm. It ticked and scratched with shifts in the wind. When the wind grew to anything more than a breeze, Liza's heart stumbled with the leaves that came down, until it lessened, softened, abated.

The marri was solid, but it was also vulnerable to that wind, to its every fluctuation, its every breath, its vacuums, its silences. It received whatever the days and nights brought.

Liza felt like a piece of something in the wind; as if the wind of that day had picked her up, caught her. She felt like a creature that had been shunted and spun into new surroundings, new conditions, a new existence. There was only so much that could be controlled, Liza told herself; after that you had to find other ways to get through.

Liza stayed a long time in the garden, until the sun retracted to another place and darkness lowered itself like usual, like sleep.

After that came the next day. The next day, and the day after that. With the usual sun, wind, swell, but days with gaps, with gaping holes like when you walked from old-growth into clearfelled forest, into that stick-dry, sandy wasteland left.

The sun glared through those holes. Nights were one big gap. Liza went outside most evenings, waiting for the stars to come out, and would try to remember what Sam had told her about constellations and galaxies. About shooting stars and Jupiter's moons. Sometimes the marri creaked and murmured
and hissed so much she turned to it, thinking it could tell her something, that it would, somehow, let her know.

Mike would come out with his pouch of tobacco and sit with her sometimes. He never talked, just sat and rolled a crinkly cigarette. Liza would take the pouch and roll herself one, too. Her fingers shook as she rolled the paper around the brown threads of tobacco. Mike never commented on this; it made every sense in the world to him.

He had taken over the tree work from Ferg for the time being, taking the truck out and preparing areas for the next planting.

Liza and Ferg were glad Mike was with them, for that reason alone, but they didn't know how Mike was travelling with it, with the giving and helping and being around —
for once
, Ferg thought, but the bitterness in him had ebbed. Some days Mike's was the only face he could bring himself to look at.

Ferg was coping better than she was, Liza knew that. He went to counselling and tried to sort it out in his own mind, he let himself cry and talk, gave himself a break from work. Ferg tried to coax her, to help her, and Liza appreciated that, loved him for it, but she just couldn't do too much of it yet. She still couldn't talk about it much, but didn't think she'd ever be able to, really. When she managed to say things about it, out loud, she felt like an actor saying someone else's words. But Liza thought about Sam all the time, every minute, and talked to him, silently, every day. And while she couldn't bring herself to go into Sam's room, she sometimes heard Ferg go in, heard the computer start up with its familiar sound.

Mike only had another eight weeks on the methadone before he was on his own. He didn't tell Liza and Ferg, but Grant the surfing nurse was really pleased about it, said that he'd only treated two others who'd actually got off the program. Mike didn't tell him he'd had a few goes before this one, didn't want to ruin a good story. And hearing it made him feel pretty good, in a sad sort of way. Maybe a beer to celebrate his screwy victory.

At the pub, he soaked up the condensation from his glass with a Guinness coaster, and tore another into small bits.

He'd never got around to installing the latest version of Netscape on Sam's Mac; he'd always been too busy, too preoccupied with his own crap. It was all the kid wanted of him, and he'd never delivered. The shame was like a rash that he couldn't get rid of. He'd never forgive himself.

There were a couple of old blokes at the bar. He wondered how long they'd been resting up against that bar at the end of the day, how long they'd been coming. Did they have anyone waiting for them at home, or just a silent, empty house? How lucky he was, Mike thought, that Ferg and Liza and Pip had made room for him at the farm, had welcomed him back. He could have been one of these guys without them.

Mike was sweating from the trek through the bush.

Catching his breath, he crouched uncomfortably in front of the stone. A gang of twenty-eights pulled in at the local marri hangout, squawking flashily to each other.

Jack Garnet Crowe
1903–1987
Loving husband of Pip,
father of Fergus and Michael

It was too late, he knew that. Too late for Jack, and for him.

Mike yanked out a tuft of grass now, spraying dark-smelling soil over his father's plaque. The twenty-eights rose as a crowd and then settled again, bending the bough under their weight. He brushed the dark earth back, pressed it back into the ground where it belonged.

He followed the track further down after that, right down to the river, the way Sam used to go. Margaret River. All that water, going in the same direction, day after day, century after century. Lifetime after lifetime.

It took him a few hours, ducking and jumping and crawling, but he followed the path to the mouth of the river. In winter, the river would once again flow right across the sand here into the ocean, and course into adjoining oceans, and rivers, and clouds, and bellies, and soil.

Me and Mum
, Mike thought.
We've gotta get it together and make a plan. Otherwise Ferg and Lize, they're gunna implode. And that can't happen. For Sam's sake, I'm not letting that happen. We're the last ones, me and Mum, the only ones who can bring them through this.

In the wind, near where the river and the ocean met, Mike felt his bones rub together like sticks for a fire. He heard the sea strike the land over and over. He heard the twigs of shrubs play rough-and-tumble with the wind.

Rosie went over the back of the Greys Bay hill. A crowd of terns spun on her approach, a golden kite flew into the weather above a dune, hovering, the occasional pull of its wings keeping it there. Rosie was alone on that beach, and Cray was in the house on the back of that hill — probably with his feet up on the wooden balcony. Around her was the circle that the water made with the land, the sky, with Greys Bay.

With the sky paling towards night, Rosie went down and stood in the shallows and tried to steady herself against the ebb and flow of the water, tried to stay in one spot without having to shift her stance. She saw sand move away, then gush forward, felt the shape of it change under the balls of her feet. Grains of it, of land, came towards her, went again, became sea, went with the water.

Rosie wavered, like the water did; and just as it seemed never to waver, she sometimes felt absolutely sure — of her decisions, of things she'd left behind, of new ways offered her. And here at her feet, the water pulled in every direction at once, but it was always one thing: it was whole.

Rosie turned back towards the hill, towards hers and Cray's. She felt her feet subside slightly into the sand with each step. She paused at the bottom of the hill, tilted her face to the shacks and houses where evening lights were just beginning to glow.

 

 

 

The fig tree has grown gnarly over the years, since a young farmer first watered in its roots. But it fruits every summer, transforms from leafless winter sticks to a shady, heavy worker, wine-purple bulbs burgeoning. And if a hand does not reach up to gently test the darkening crop, or misses one in the picking, the fruit will drop to the ground.

Splitting open, a damaged fig reveals white maggoty seeds, oozing towards the soil. After the honeyeaters have had their share, the seeds end up in other backyards — under a washing line or hard up against a fence, and may or may not mature.

Here, in this rural garden, overlooking a sprawling, tired house, the greenest new leaves once again poke from leathery branches. An old woman hunches over small plants nearby, and a younger woman props herself against a marri's rough trunk. Tucked in the hollow arm of the marri is a boy's astronomy chart, rolled up safe and dry in a plastic bag.

If you stood beneath the marri tree you'd see it all. You'd see two men coming and going, stopping under the sky on clear nights. You'd see them working in silence in the plantation during the day. You'd see the years scudding across the sky as light, then dark, and all the shades in between.

The events described in this book are a fictional reimagining of the Gracetown cliff collapse, which occurred at Huzza's Beach on 27 September 1996, and took the lives of nine people. While some of the events in the novel have some correlation to actual events, none of the characters in
The Break
are in any way based on the real people who were touched by this tragedy and are not intended to bear any resemblance to any living party.

To date, the Gracetown cliff collapse is Western Australia's worst natural disaster.

With each new book I embrace the word ‘collaboration' with new gusto. There have been so many people who have contributed to this book, whether directly or indirectly.

The early drafts of
The Break
were written when I was a master's candidate at UWA in the mid-1990s. I thank Van Ikin for his gentle, expert guidance and kindness. Brenda Walker, Gail Jones and Dennis Haskell too offered support, advice and a writerly environment — thank you. I am also extremely grateful to the UWA Scholarships Office for its financial support over those two years.

The new-millennium drafts of this book were developed with the care and hard work of two wonderful editors: Amanda Curtin and Georgia Richter. Amanda did her best to logically position my jam doughnuts and Georgia swept up the sugar that was flung about in the process. They were unrelenting in their attention to detail and their determination to grasp the ungraspable. Thank you both so much.