The Stranding (7 page)

Maybe half an hour passed, maybe longer. He stopped playing.

‘I met an interesting man today,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.’

He looked at her, played a few notes quietly.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Yes, it does. I hardly ever meet anyone. I should’ve asked him out.’

‘Was he from ’round here?’ Jordi asked.

‘Doubt it. There’s no one interesting around here. Probably on his way through.’

‘City slicker?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You don’t need a city slicker.’ His smile was sudden and wry. ‘Anyway, you’ve got me.’

‘God help me.’

They laughed.

‘What’d he look like?’

Callista was surprised he’d asked. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Just wondering.’

‘Do you think you might have seen him?’

‘Dunno, do I . . . if you don’t tell me.’

‘He was a big guy. Broad shoulders. Smooth face. Walks like a cat.’

Jordi laughed. ‘How does a cat walk?’

‘I don’t know. Smooth, but stealthy, like they’re on guard, like they’re watching out for something.’

‘There’s been a big guy coming to the servo.’ Jordi stood up and tossed another log on the fire, poked at it with a stick. ‘Drives a silver Volvo. Station wagon. Nobody knows anything about him. But he’s been a couple of times now. Quiet guy. Hardly says a thing.’

‘It might be someone just staying down here.’

‘Maybe staying at the Point.’

Callista was annoyed at Jordi for getting her hopes up. ‘You don’t have enough to think about,’ she said. ‘What are the chances it’d be the guy Beryl sold the house to?’

‘Pretty good, I reckon. He was wearing cams the other day. Looked to me like he’d been shopping at Beryl’s. Why would you do that unless you were living ’round here?’

‘Do what?’

‘Shop at Beryl’s. She sells nothing but rubbish.’

‘Since when did you care about clothes?’

‘Was he wearing cams today? At the market?’

‘He was, actually. I watched him for a while. He was hiding in my stall. Hiding from Helen Beck.’

‘I’d hide from her too.’ Jordi flashed a quick grin. ‘Maybe he’s not such an idiot after all.’

‘He knocked over half my stall trying to escape from her.’

Jordi laughed. ‘I like him already.’

Callista sat quiet for a moment, staring into the fire.

‘I liked him,’ she said. ‘I want to see him again . . . What if it is him? The guy you’ve seen at the servo?’

Jordi’s beard spread with his smile. ‘Then you’ve gotta think about how to play it. He’ll show again. But you have to take it slow. You can’t drag a big fish in on a small line. You have to wear him down, so he swims right in to you without knowing.’

Callista looked at him. ‘For once that might be good advice.’

Jordi smiled again. ‘Just think of the death adder. You need patience for an ambush.’

Callista drove down the mountain, dipping and winding in the shadows of the forest. Down low the vegetation was different again—greener with a thick understorey, and tall eucalypts strung with streamers of bark. The driveway to her parents’ house was marked by a cut-off wine barrel full of yellow and purple pansies. She stopped to open the gate and collect the mail.

The driveway was long, and ran through a gully and along a creek before swinging uphill to where the house was nestled in an unexpected splurge of lawn. Her father insisted the green grass was his bushfire insurance. But with the bush hulking right down to the chook pen just behind the house, Callista wondered why he bothered. The house was made of rough wood and corrugated iron, and in a fire it’d go up like a pile of twigs.

She clambered out of the Kombi and slammed the door. There were no cars around, but somebody must be home because all the windows were hooked open. She walked through the cool shadows of the house, tossing the mail onto the table as she passed through the kitchen. Her mother, Cynthia, was out the back digging in the vegie garden, her face shaded beneath a wide straw hat. The slow way she straightened, with her hand propped in the small of her back, reminded Callista that her mother was getting older. These days she couldn’t help noticing the deepening creases in her mother’s face and the loose skin beginning to fold around her neck.

‘Callie, I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Are you serious, Mum? The Kombi isn’t exactly a stealth machine.’

Cynthia dug her shovel into the dirt and stepped stiffly over the clods of earth. ‘I’m turning this patch over and mulching it ready for autumn,’ she said, waving an arm over the lumpy brown soil. ‘We had tomato worm in this section last year, so I’m letting it lie fallow for a season. But the weeds just keep popping up.’

‘Just spray them,’ Callista said.

‘Poisons! Didn’t we teach you anything?’ She slung a kind arm around Callista’s neck and hugged her. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m good. Being industrious. You’d like that. I’m doing lots of painting.’

Cynthia raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re inspired?’

‘Just market stuff. But I’ll be able to pay you back soon.’

‘No hurry. Let’s get a cup of tea.’

They sat on the back deck, looking up beyond the chook pen into the forest. The chooks were out pecking and scraping in the garden with their scaly oversize feet. Cynthia poured the tea. It annoyed Callista that she didn’t use a strainer, but the tea always tasted fine once you sieved out the bits between your teeth. Her parents had been using this teapot for as long as she could remember.

Callista knew well her parents’ beginnings—history was an important thing in their family. It was how you learned not to make the mistakes of the past, and how to walk a better path. Her parents had been big on that: finding ways to erase the wrongdoings of previous generations. Sometimes it was as if they were taking the troubles of the entire world on their shoulders.

Her father had grown up at the Point, going to school in Merrigan and learning in the traditional country way. He went on to study accounting by correspondence so he could have the career his father never had. But there weren’t many opportunities locally. He left in his early twenties and moved to a commune just out of Melbourne—turned vegetarian, grew his hair, tended vegetables, did odd jobs on the commune. He liked the cooperative way, working with people towards greater causes, a less intrusive way of living. It was a relief for him to be among people that challenged the old ways, people with new ways of thinking—conservation, living lightly, equality for all.

He met Cynthia in Tasmania, at a demonstration against the flooding of Lake Pedder, and they bonded over a campfire, united by passion and common thinking. When they got married, they did it in the bush, with a small group of friends from the commune, no family. Cynthia was already pregnant with Callista. By then, they’d become convinced the only way to make a difference was at home in your own community. So, after a year, they came to Merrigan and bought a cheap block of land. Cleared country was worth something, but no one wanted bush. They bought the place on the mountain for a song—which was lucky, because that was all they had. Then they got on having their family, living what they believed, touching the earth lightly.

Cynthia passed a mug of tea to Callista. ‘How’s Jordi?’ she asked.

‘He’s going okay.’

‘Do you think so? I often wonder if he’s anorexic, he’s so thin.’

‘He’s just wiry,’ Callista said. But Cynthia’s crumpled brow worried her. Perhaps Jordi was too thin.

‘He’s had such a hard time,’ Cynthia said. She sagged sadly in her chair. ‘I’ve never found it easy to talk to him. It’s hard for a mother sometimes, sitting on the outside watching your kids suffer, but not knowing how to find a way in.’

She sat silent for a long time, staring into the bush. Then she turned to Callista.

‘He’d talk to you,’ she said. ‘He trusts you.’

‘I can’t force him to talk about it, Mum.’

Cynthia said nothing.

‘A positive break might help him,’ Callista said. ‘When’s Dad going to start including him in the business?’

Cynthia sighed. ‘When Jordi starts showing an interest.’

‘Jordi would never ask Dad for support. You know it.’

‘And your father won’t try to push it on him unless he seems interested.’

‘So that’s a dead-end idea of mine then.’

‘Maybe not. I’ll talk to your father about it.’

Cynthia topped up their cups of tea.

‘Did you hear about Beryl selling the house?’ Callista asked.

Cynthia set down the teapot. ‘Is that so?’

‘You hadn’t heard?’

‘No.’

‘Everyone in town is talking about it. Everyone’s furious.’

‘It’s what they’d expect of Beryl, isn’t it? Has she made any grand donations to the church?’

‘Of course not. She’ll keep all the money for herself.’

Cynthia sat back in her chair and sipped her tea.

‘Aren’t you angry?’ Callista asked.

‘What’s the point?’

‘The injustice infuriates me.’

‘Everyone will learn to live with it in time.’

Callista poured the dregs of her tea on the ground. ‘I wish you weren’t such a pacifist, Mum. It’s no wonder you and Dad never get ahead.’ She shook her mug violently to dislodge the last of the tea-leaves. ‘And I wish you’d get a tea strainer.’

Cynthia smiled serenely. ‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

In the morning, Callista got on with her work. Mrs Jensen’s palings were working out well. Joe Denton from the hardware had let her cut them up with the bandsaw at the store, and she had painted them up and banged them together into frames at home. It all helped to save her a few precious dollars here and there. And she was whizzing off paintings like crazy. There was nothing to it. In fact, it was a bit embarrassing. There was more work in making the frames.

Ridiculously, she was excited about crossing tracks with Lex again. As she worked on the verandah in the dewy damp of morning, she kept thinking about his big shoulders and light-footed walk. There was something about him she liked. There was humour in him, she was sure, yet he seemed so flagged by sadness.

She reckoned there was a good chance he’d come back to collect that painting he’d paid for, and she had to be ready for him next time. What she needed was a way to break through that careful blankness and get his attention. Humming, she propped a board on her easel and started squeezing bright colours onto her palette. Surely the best way for her to reach him was through a painting, something loud and different, something that would leap out at him when he stopped by her stand again.

She began with a slap of blue summer sky and the brilliant yellow-white of sand. Still humming, she stepped back, paintbrush waving like a long finger. She was thinking ahead. Couldn’t help herself. Once she got to know him a bit she’d take him to Long Beach. It was her favourite—wild, desolate, remote, windswept. Not a beach for the fainthearted. That’s why she liked it. The loneliness. The wind blasting the sand along and the waves raking angrily at the shore. No one there. The blissful emptiness.

She drifted across to the gully where two restless flycatchers were flitting and skittering high in the trees. It must have been their scissor-grinding call that had distracted her, and the cheeky way they swung their tails about. Callista sighed. Tangents. She was always being kidnapped by them. She looked back to the painting and the idea came to her.

Quickly, she mixed blue-black and whisked the outline of a sooty oystercatcher in flight—solid, chunky, very definite. She painted the bold orange-red eye and the long shanks of its legs tucked backwards beneath its body. The beak she painted agape, like the bird was in mid-call as it flew low over the waves. Time drifted away while she concentrated on bringing the painting to life. More effort than her usual market pieces.

Standing back, she examined the painting, and liked it. It was hardly a masterpiece, dashed off like that in an hour or so, but it was fitting. She liked those thick-kneed legs. The oystercatcher’s clunky shape cut through the stereotypic beach colours like a loud clap. If Lex didn’t notice it, he’d be half-asleep. Well, no match for an artist anyway.

She left it to dry on the easel and went inside to wash the breakfast dishes.

Six

In town, having a coffee at Sue’s, Lex opened the paper to catch up on the news. It had become a bit of a habit to drop in for a cuppa when he came in to collect the newspapers every few days. Today, whaling was all over the headlines again—it had become a regular issue lately. At home, he’d been reading some of Vic Wallace’s old books, and it was an interesting contrast—reading about historic whaling at home and then, in the newspapers, reading about modern whaling and the upcoming annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission.

One of Vic Wallace’s books was called Killers of Eden. When Lex had first taken it from the shelf, he’d thought it was a murder-mystery, but it was about shore-based whaling in Twofold Bay out from Eden in the late 1800s. The story was about a pod of killer whales that assisted the local whalers over the years. He had been particularly interested in the old black and white photo of George Davidson, the most famous of the Twofold Bay whalers. He looked like a dour and hard old man, tough as nails, as if nothing could scare him. But his wife’s face was a tired mask of resignation. The book made the lives of whalers seem heroic, but the wife’s face showed there was a cost. It was a hard life, and not a pretty one.

Lex had lingered over a photo of an old whale boat. It was little more than a wooden tub manned by six oarsmen and seemed a meagre weapon against a whale. Yet, according to the book, the whalers slaughtered plenty in a good year, and the killer whales helped them. Old Tom was the best known of the killers. He and his pod assisted the whalers by leading them to a group of whales and then preventing the whales from escaping out to sea. Once the whalers had harpooned and lanced a whale, the killers ate the tongue. Lex had never considered the size of a whale’s tongue before, but apparently it was a gourmet meal for a killer.

In another of Vic’s books, Lex had read about the Faeroe Islanders of the northern Atlantic. These people held an annual event in which whales were herded into a bay and killed. Sometimes more than a hundred whales were killed at a time, and the photos were disturbing—dozens of row boats in the small bay with speared whales rolling in the water, others trying to escape and hundreds of spectators lining the shores watching the slaughter. These people traditionally killed whales for food and Lex thought he should have found that acceptable. But it made him think of modern whaling, and of the Japanese making excuses to take whales for their so-called research.