10

AIREY’S INLET

Outside Sarah’s car window, the sea along the Great Ocean Road is a wild thing. It intrudes somehow on sky and earth, taking over as the rightful owner of the continent. Even in summer, it doesn’t kowtow to flesh-covered beaches. It presides, calling out its challenge. I am back in the chunky station wagon with Sarah’s tonic driving. Mary is sitting in front. They’re not talking. They’ve called me on this Sunday morning, proposed the trip, and are both on my doorstep ten minutes later. Suddenly, I am in the car and that’s it. We’re gone – Melbourne peeling away behind us.

Sarah’s eyes have a dark sparkle as if she were going to rob a bank. Her black jeans and pullover confirm this with a cat-burglar look. Mary, sitting shrouded in the front seat, waves demurely. She could be the Queen of England wearing a burqa. I clamber in the back and they both put up high fives, which I meet inexpertly. Then we’re off. I may be wrong but something seems to have changed between them. Even if they don’t talk, as on the road back from the airport, their silence is chummier. I can’t quite fathom what it is, but it’s there. I relax in the back in my wellington boots and look at the inside of Sarah’s car. The colour of the seats is a peaty brown, there are a few copies of The Age on the floor. An antique Melways is thrust in the distended kangaroo pouch at the back of Mary’s seat, which has obviously held more than its fair share of thermoses, bottles of wine and books. I concentrate on any information, however minor, as if I were suddenly in a foreign country all over again. The yawning ashtray is pristine.

The wind is up, a lion rampaging through the clouds. We are slightly rocked with it. It’s tougher than Sarah’s tough driving. Even though my boss, Kim, is also wildly assured with the clutch and the wheel, the ride with her is merely a rugged experience. This is a getaway car. Excitement climbs into your throat. Any passenger of Sarah’s is taken away, kidnapped from thoughts and desires. Mary puts the Easybeats on: ‘Friday on my Mind.’ Suddenly, in spite of it being already Sunday, there is a big smile hanging in the air. Neither of the two in the front seat dispense sympathetic looks in my direction. Something tight and comradely seizes us. We are all making a getaway from a heist, and there is no time for small talk.

After two hours of road that melts into the clouds, we get to Airey’s Inlet, past Anglesea, and wilder, smaller. Sarah slows down, stops and parks. Mary kills the music. We all sit there. A liquid silence, a negative of the sea outside, flows into our bloodstreams. When we get out, the wind pounces on us and bites at our clothes. We clamber down to the sand and start walking alongside the waves.

Mary has her job now. Money is coming in and the Monthly people are a decent lot. Layout, she tells us, is her thing. It’s a hovering, before she knows where to put the image on the page, and then a snap decision slays it or brings it to life. For her, it has a kind of Zen magic. I think of how, strangely, people let fall important chunks of their lives on a beach. The wind tears the insubstantial clutter away – the Ikea furniture, the telephone bill, the sneaking fear of failure at work. What does it matter? yells the sea.

A sudden squall billows Mary’s veil and, at one point, nearly rips it off her face. I see her hand leap up to batten it down – a drowning hand, clutching at survival. Her burqa returns to the forefront of my mind. It was beginning to weld onto Mary, to be part of her laugh, her gestures, the blue swish of her walk. I was no longer curious as to her reasons for wearing it – too busy liking her as a person. Maybe every woman should try out the burqa, as a more subtle way of connecting.

Keeping a tight hold on herself, Sarah stares straight ahead. I am sure she’s noticed Mary’s desperate tug at her veil. Sarah never slackens her interest in her daughter’s burqa – it’s there, taut, awake, and yet almost humble. Mary moves on unconcernedly, detached from her hand’s movement and the quiet frenzy that betrayed her. The newfound camaraderie of mother and daughter seems to have settled into its groove, giving them more room for the unspoken. My dull ache pushes through the wind and the dancing sea, bonding me to these two women as our steps blend into a synchronised crunch. Pain, says the sand, they know about pain. They rally around it. The grandmother brought them both up that way – echoing an Irish pain as old as hunger.

‘How is your mother, your grandmother?’ I ask.

The mother and daughter share a glance. Then Sarah smiles into the wind, tossing her chin towards the sky.

‘She could be in that last dash of vigour before death, in remission, or on the rosy road to healthy old age.’

Mary chuckles.

‘I think she’s much better. She’s back on an ascetic bender.’

Something about Helen’s state seems very humorous to them. Maybe this is what is relaxing them – some responsibility lightened, some dread loosened. Helen’s grip on them smacks of Greek tragedy – a curse, a belief, maybe some kind of unconscious pact with a nature that seems impervious to both rebellion and docility. The fact she raised them both, in a way, makes them partly sisters. A burden skips a generation, is dumped uniformly on them both, without being sorted out. Mary takes a deep gulp of sea air; her shoulders lift. Suddenly I wish I could have a glimpse of her young face relaxing.

‘I dreamed of Dad last night,’ she says, almost offhandedly. ‘He looked well – in the dream.’

I have no idea whether the man is alive or dead. He’s terra incognita. Sarah walks on pensively, then turns her head towards me.

For a moment she stutters like a telegraph, then I realise her words are being snatched by a fiercer gust of wind.

‘Three summers ago, Mary’s father, my ex, drove through the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, right up to Marree, at the end of the road, and disappeared. They found his car there. He and I were divorced two years before that.’

Mary chucks her head back.

‘It was hard for you too, Mum – at the time.’

Because she rarely calls her that, the word seems surprisingly tender.

Sarah stares on straight ahead and her next words come out as if they were walking out of her mouth on their own.

‘I don’t know why I’ve never been able to speak about it. I just don’t. Feel guilty, I suppose. But he and I had such a quarrel just before he left.’

For a while, there is only the scrunch of our steps. The sound is like a climax pressing on – the echo of a train in the distance that won’t diminish. Mary’s reaction is tight-lipped.

‘You never told me that.’

They are on either side of me. I feel my presence becoming more of a buffer by the second. Then she adds:

‘You’d been divorced for two whole years.’

Sarah walks on for a while, before saying:

‘Yeah, right.’

The wind is raging now, but it could be my imagination. I feel them taking turns to look at me, as if I could do something, as if the chosen witness had a transparent, immanent, beneficial power, a bit like a scent, escaping her control, of which she is the simple vehicle. But, again, in spite of searching my mind, no consolations come to me … I look at the clouds – heavy caravels sailing out above the sea. Clouds always seem to have a destination. I knew a man who liked gazing at clouds in the last months of his life. He died suddenly at ninety. One morning, in perfect health, he said, ‘I’m going to die today,’ and carried on with his usual business – in the evening it was a done thing. I keep walking towards the clouds. I don’t look at Sarah and Mary and I don’t think of last night or of Monday morning either. Each step removes me bodily from their tight-lipped silence and from Jack.

Then we reach a nook in the beach, and a busted wall of fallen boulders, as if Edna Walling had pushed them over. A little café is sitting on the other side of a lane. A man on a bicycle comes sailing up; he’s wearing a cap, pinstriped pants and a paper-white T-shirt. He waves at us triumphantly. He reminds me of a character in one of Jirí Menzel’s films. Dignified, ridiculous, tender, the sheer force of his pedalling hauls us into good humour. He disappears down the street, his arm raised vertically in the air, a pennant of sweetness and trust in the day.

Without conferring, we walk into the café and order coffee and cakes. There are gluten-free hazelnut and persimmon, almond and strawberry, lemon and fig, walnut and broccoli, you name it. A whimsical scale of little cakes – cakes for Noddy and Big Ears, or Harpo and Groucho, cakes for lost souls, cakes for you and me, whoever we are. I can see Mary’s smile somehow, through the blue, through the revelations on the beach, through the wind and the clouds, through the desert into which her father has vanished.

We sit at a tiny round table, our knees nearly touching but not quite, as if about to consult an ouija board. A boy of about eleven comes to take our orders, then hands over the cakes in dignified silence. His shirt is coming out of his pants, his nails are black and his breath has the faint acidity of autumn apples drying in an attic. A Collingwood cap on his head, he stares at Mary’s burqa with the angelic cheek of a Little Lord Fauntleroy. He makes us our coffees with barista expertise and, full of Jeeves-like condescension, sets them out in front of us, then shimmers off into the kitchen – with one last gawk at Mary’s blue veils.

The first time we were all together in a café comes back to me. We are now alone in a corner of the room near the sea-light behind the window; it feels as if time travel has landed us here instead of ordinary hours and days. There is no one at the counter, but just as I register that, a tall, slim woman with a smooth beach of a brow comes out from behind a curtain. You know she’s Lord Fauntleroy’s mother as soon as you clap eyes on her. Her gaunt beauty is not so spectacular as his, but she’s a looker. She smiles and starts cleaning the coffee machine. Her movements have a hypnotic effect on me and I have to drag my eyes away. We are tucked in a corner by the bay window. It would be easy for us to talk to each other even though she can probably hear us, but we don’t say anything. A fly is buzzing near the glass. The noise of a tap comes on and off, on and off.

Sarah’s last quarrel with Mary’s father is there, hanging. I wait for Mary to say something, but she doesn’t. Her hand is slowly stirring as I sip my coffee and fiddle with my cake. I think of horses drinking from a river, to take my mind off things. Horses sip, too; you can’t hear the water coming through their big teeth. Anything I’d say at this point would be meddling. The tables are formica and the chairs have sixties metallic frames and plastic cushiony seats. There’s a pale wooden tallboy with jams and chutneys and plates in their slots and cups hanging from their hooks. In the corner, a standard lamp has a dowdy hat as a lampshade. The whole atmosphere seems to be one of waiting.

I glance at the owner. Her hands wipe the machine with a perfunctory gusto, but her personality must change in contact with water because she rinses the cloth with more than thorough gentleness. One feels her smile before one starts noticing it. There is something sad and understanding in her eyes. Like many people in this line of business, she’s probably intuitive about people. An infinitesimal nod of her head seems to say, Don’t worry, there are some things you can do nothing about.

Just at that minute Sarah chooses to sigh and, taking a swig of coffee, looks straight at her blue daughter.

‘We were getting back together, Mary. And we … ah …’

Mary puts her spoon down in the saucer and cuts into her mother’s phrase like a cricketer hitting a ball through the covers:

‘ … And … you quarrelled again?’

Sarah throws a glance at me before answering.

‘Yes, we were quarrelling again about my work. I was finishing a sculpture and I wanted him to help me move it but your father wouldn’t.’

A shadow passes in her green eyes and I wait for her next intake of air.

‘What he wanted was for us to go to the desert together. I had this exhibition on, you see. Really all I asked was for him to wait for a week and help out. But he wouldn’t. He said he needed me to choose him – just this once.’

She looks down at her hands.

‘And I didn’t.’

The woman behind the counter is staring at her; we are all staring at her.