The Following (29 page)

When Max got back he’d get himself briefed and take over. Tiger would go back to correcting the grammar and deleting clichés from combine harvester test drives painfully scripted by dyslectic, self-made men.

Sylvia went up to the cottage to see Sonia. Jake and Judith waited to be told it was all right to follow. They had not seen Sonia in the five months since her diagnosis; they’d been out to sea saving Pacific islands’ fisheries. Now they brought her smoked roe from the co-op at Narooma just to add to the depletion. From the look of Harry’s daily, hourly schedules printed on mimeographed sheets and scattered through the house, and from the sight of the many pill trays with their calendar lids and hefty contents, Sonia would have no chance of swallowing anything else for a while.

Nick followed Jake and Judith outside.

‘Harry’s wound up like a spring,’ said Jake.

‘Apparently there’s a daily enema,’ said Judith. ‘It’s hyper-dramatic.’

Nick leafed through the Crater Bay users’ manual, trying not to listen. ‘Here’s how to change oil in five different motors,’ he said. ‘How to service the septic pumps, weed the vegies, spread shit on paddocks and gravel dips.’

When Sylvia came back into the kitchen after checking on Sonia, Harry sent her a look of such blinding optimism that she dreaded opening her mouth.

‘How did you find her?’

‘Harry, Sonia wants to go home.’

‘Jesus, she does say that, but let’s give the magic bombs a chance.’

‘There’s the question of pain.’

Harry thrust out a leaflet. ‘You have to go through it, that’s the point of the treatment.’

‘I know what it says, Harry. But you can’t wish it on her at this stage.’

‘She took the whole dose last night and again this morning, and kept most of it down.’

‘Harry, I want you to stop what you’re doing, my dear, and get the car ready. Sonia needs to be in her own bed now, closer to John Saul.’

Dr Saul was the man who’d packed what Sonia needed for her sojourn at Crater Bay and made promises too final to mention by an ethical medico, left emphatically unsaid for when they returned to Sydney.

‘Don’t “my dear” me, my dear,’ said Harry, his very cheeks slapping the insides of his mouth as he suppressed his fury.

‘We should get started. Sit in the back with everything she needs and I’ll drive. Tiger will finish getting the place ready for Petra and Arch. It’ll take him another day. It’s not worth facing the wrath of the righteous otherwise.’

Jake proposed that Nick stay and help Tiger.

‘Sure thing,’ said Nick, looking down at his feet. He would not have made any such suggestion himself, but when Jake asked for something, it hardly mattered what, Nick agreed.

‘It’ll take the rest of the day to get up to Sydney,’ said Sylvia. ‘We’d be better off with an ambulance, frankly.’

Harry addressed her with his thunderous eyes, but said nothing, nothing.

Jake and Judith’s help was not needed, they might even get in the way, but nobody was going to tell them that. Jake said he’d drive Sylvia’s car separately so they could travel in convoy. The yacht was secure in Eden.

‘I’ll share the driving,’ said Judith. Five hours was the estimated travel time, there’d be many stops.

They heard a noise from the kitchen corner where Harry stood, a sound like moisture being sucked from a bilge.

‘I’m being railroaded,’ said Harry. ‘I’m being asked to give her up, hand her over, to say goodbye. Can’t you see I’m not ready? Can’t we just stay here for bloody ever?’

Sylvia handed him a box of tissues, Kleenex the fall-back palliative of the helping professions. Harry looked down into their snowy crevasses.

‘The bloody lot of you,’ he said, blew his nose and began sweeping pills back into plastic jars.

Sylvia turned to Jake and Judith, and nodded to signal that Sonia was ready for them. They set off up the path to see her.

Sylvia and Tiger walked to the headland following the track under the bough shelter. Cows over the years had changed the shape of the hill, moulding a terrace. The Boden milking sheds were a piece of old history, shards of concrete and the body of a rusted Ford Model T bedded into the hillside with spotted gums and burrawangs growing from the chassis.

‘There’s never been such a dreadful end to a Crater Bay summer,’ said Sylvia.

‘Not in a long time,’ said Tiger.

‘Sonia is ready to go but Harry’s not ready for her to go. By go I mean –’

‘I know what you mean by go, Sylvie.’

‘I’ve never known a mature man to need so much shepherding,’ she said.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Tiger. ‘I’ll finish up here, sort things out at Tussockdale, then come up to Sydney on Wednesday or Thursday to do what I can, even if it’s just to get Harry over to the pub.’

‘I can’t even think past today,’ said Sylvia.

But that was not true. For there came a withdrawn look to her eye, a set to her jaw, a concise angle to her profile, and when it did, Tiger knew that nothing would change her mind on a matter, although somehow she was always the last to know she’d already decided an issue so resolutely as to be called stubborn.

That time she’d gone to England with the boys and Tiger had stayed behind, he’d never said what it was that he’d really wanted to do instead. He’d waited for Sylvia to bend to his point of view. She had, in her way, bent, to the extent of allowing him the benefit of discovering what he wanted. In those six months without her and the boys, he’d gone through whatever it was that cursed him. It had felt like being strained to the bone, dying into himself, yet he was now the selfsame person, with the selfsame emotional compass, only slightly truer. He’d been in his late forties then. At his fiftieth birthday Sylvia had told him, somewhat mysteriously, that he was at last the man she’d been waiting for.

He turned to her now. ‘Be with Sonia till she dies. However long that is.’

The idea just seemed to alight on Sylvia when it had been there all along. It was how things were with her.

‘I will have to be, won’t I. There’s another few people who’ll want to be part of it, there’ll be more in Sydney than Harry would like. It’ll be non-stop getting them around her routines. I’m sorry, Tiger, darling. You must think I’m not thinking of you, but I am, I do.’

They heard a noisy engine kick over and saw a figure down by the house standing back from a motor mower.

‘What the hell?’ said Tiger.

‘Nick’s agreed to stay and help finish up. Jake put it to him.’

‘Well, then, it’s slave labour.’ Tiger rubbed his hands together theatrically.

Sylvia kept looking back towards the house to see if Jake and Judith were finished with Sonia.

‘I do rather surprise myself ordering Harry about,’ she said. ‘Even just daring to, I suppose, is something.’

‘You’ve got him, but you don’t know it. Chalk it up on the wall.’

Time under pressure had a trick of expanding its smallest moments, as in an accident when a victim flies through the air experiencing time for minutes on end. They found themselves ambling, stretching out the moments before rejoining the others.

‘Last night on the boat, wasn’t it good?’ said Sylvia. ‘I’m so glad we stayed. The tide moving under the keel, that sort of thing. Jake’s aged into a look, a sort of elemental seafarer sea-creature salt-air rightness. You almost expect to find mussel shells growing in his beard, like a god.’

‘He plays on it.’

‘I think you are still ever-so-slightly sweet on Judith,’ said Sylvia, bumping Tiger’s hip. ‘So you put Jake down.’

‘We should get a boat,’ said Tiger.

They found themselves standing under the domed ceiling of the bough shelter, a couple between whom words of truth were to be spoken or nothing was to be said at all. Sylvia’s head fitted the shape of Tiger’s shoulder, and there was no division, no doubt between them – only the ghost of oblivion haunting.

Tiger waited for something to be said, such as, ‘A boat? Are you out of your mind?’ But Sylvia did not say anything.

Tiger said, ‘I hope I’m the first to go out of the two of us. I couldn’t bear doing the admin on my own.’

‘It’s the logic of one being left,’ said Sylvia. ‘I do feel what you’re feeling, Tiges, darling – it shows. Pretending that Sonia’s dying isn’t just blind terrifying. Dreaming of sailing away from it all.’

‘I’d love to be at Tussockdale right now,’ said Tiger, ‘settled back in. We’d be sitting on the verandah with the old enamel teapot, drinking a gallon of tea.’

‘Till the sun goes down,’ said Sylvia.

But Tussockdale after their summers at Crater Bay was often a shock on return, not the way Tiger pictured it at all – hard to adapt to – brassy ridges under a powdery-white sky, waterless creeks full of hot stones and snakes and lizards, rough-barked eucalypts looking sombre, hostile and strange in the February heat. Tiger wasn’t ready for Tussockdale just yet, and every year he felt something the same after coming up from the coast, having to learn all over again what made the hard place ingrained.

He’d go to work re-establishing authority over Gary and Sandra Brill, the caretakers, who would have done little over the summer except watch satellite TV and make themselves physically sour from the experience, like children eating too much cake. Sylvia would go round the vegie garden calculating what could have been saved, had just a little more attention been given to what she had asked. Gary would have lost some sheep and blamed someone else for the neglect. They’d be wandering the state forest, growing out their wool in tatters until they reappeared in six months’ time, straggling along a fence line like a breed of goats. This year, with David and Leaf and the grandchildren taking over the house, and the stress of the fires, it was likely a feud with the Brills would need mending and Sylvia would not be there to mediate. The fire they’d had, David had fought with Leaf at his side while Gary drove the water truck. There was no doubt a problem, something like this – Gary leering at Leaf? – while she worked herself ragged, Gary belittling her from behind within David’s hearing.

Tiger and Sylvia were never in good moods with each other after getting back to Tussockdale, invariably spoke hardly a word to each other for days until calmed by a supper of the last fish fillets or the last tub of oysters brought home packed in ice. They never tasted as good as they did by the sea.

So worst-case Februaries were nothing new. There had been that one above the rest, twenty years ago when Sylvia went to England to stay with the Willeses at Henley, along with the boys, and gave seminars at Wolfson College on the sociology of hate and its persistence through the mask of ordinary experience.

The boys were fourteen and sixteen at the time. Tiger was booked to follow in a month but did not come, sending a telegram explaining himself after cancelling his flights. Sylvia hadn’t placed any long-distance call to plead with him, as he’d expected, waiting by the phone – her forbearance eloquent, as he should have known. She’d finally sent a card agreeing he was best where he was. The hiatus stretched to an estrangement, teaching a lesson in paying attention to what ultimately might become nothing, could so easily become nothing.

‘Which is what?’ Tiger had asked when they were all back together, when the events of the year receded in levels of radiation.

‘Our marriage,’ said Sylvia.

Tiger in his letters had argued a totally cowardly, unfatherly, unhusbandly collapse over the idea of sitting on a plane for twenty-four hours watching the wings bend and flex, the engines wobble on their mountings high above the space-viewed earth. For close to six months David and George went to grammar school at Henley, played rugby, rowed, made lifelong friends, met girls, did better than all right and wrote happy footnotes to Sylvia’s mail without Tiger’s wretchedness blocking them. Tiger spent those single man’s long months with Gary Brill, wandering the Tussockdale gullies hoeing out noxious weeds, setting up crude firearm traps called ‘wombamatics’, slaughtering protected fauna and engaging in the rituals of underhand Dividing Range land management that Gary drew him into. He’d sunk to a desolated version of himself, eating baked beans and sardines from the tin, drinking cask wine from teacups, and it was strange: the warning signs were back, but the knowledge wasn’t helping Tiger and the timing could not be worse. He only had what he’d already been through to bolster himself.

Sylvia turned sidelong, tucked her knees up and leaned on Tiger’s back as they sat for another rare minute on the bench under the bough shelter.

‘You’re too tired to drive,’ said Tiger.

‘Judith will drive the first bit.’

‘She drives like a maniac.’

‘She won’t dare, not with Sonia in the car.’

Tiger stared out to sea. The horizon played an optical trick, curving up higher than the land. The pull of saltwater that had set his mind wandering these past weeks had been eased by their night on
Workers Comp
. As soon as he’d arrived back at Crater Bay, smelling the wind, watching the clouds scud over, a feeling renewed itself. Land biting into sea and vice versa. He wasn’t there, he was here. What blocked him in one place was the essence of the other.

The patch where
Thursday
had churned her propellers the day he was born was out there winking in the afternoon light. Jake had located a mark, a GPS fix, the layer of years dimming till maybe there was a rum bottle down there, a skull and crossbones ring, a saucepan, a spoon or a Neptune crown dropped overboard from
Thursday
as she did her tight, fast, tilted steaming turn, the jolly jack tars hurrahing at the rails, and Tiger greeting the green light of earth, an earthling bawling.

The sea was unchanging in its fluid mechanics. Within its sphere it incessantly indulged its mood for flow, collision, tide and resolution. It could never be finally known. It was not an element but a universe. When everyone left tomorrow, Tiger would pray for a kind wind, rig up the sailing dinghy and set off into the channel, tacking circles, and then if he could get the spinnaker handled properly he’d try for a billowy downwind leg. He might need Nick for that.

W
HEN
J
AKE AND
J
UDITH RETURNED
to the house after their time with Sonia, Judith startled Nick: