Sometimes I pour myself a glass of port, emptying the bottle, and my wife puts her Sting CD on, and the girls flounce in and out the door, make toast, do yoga from the pictures in a library book…and the feeling of sadness and slowness in me is weird and familiar. It is as if you’d never noticed how the world almost stands still in an agony of ordinariness. And you have spent the last three days tossing and turning as if your life is a set of white linen sheets twisted around your legs and arms.
My New Year’s resolution back in 1960 was to find a church that I could go to. At fourteen, I would rather have invented my own, but I decided that would have been too time-consuming. I had come to think that perhaps Jesus was a Jewish boy with too much time on his hands.
Our story was like this: my mother married three brothers. First she married Darcey when she was eighteen years old. He died in a plane crash on the west coast when she was twenty-four. Next she married Darcey’s younger brother, Cedric, who was killed by a freak wave, fishing off the rocks at Lufra. Finally, she married Sidney, who died unsensationally of pneumonia. In all those marriages, she produced nine children. I was the youngest. Not quite a change-of-life baby, I still had some obvious handicaps, and my older sister, Dawn, was what in those days was called a mongoloid. I thought it meant she came from another place. Looking back, I think maybe she did.
Dawn was the best friend my mother ever had. Unlike the rest of us, she remained a child, at least until that summer we went to Whitecliffs. Mum dressed Dawn in white bobby socks and lace-up shoes, the compulsory uniform of girls like her in those days. And she and Dawn held hands wherever they went. Although I was younger, and I loved Dawny fiercely, I consciously detached myself from the two of them in public. When we walked down to the fruit or the fish market, I dawdled ten paces behind, pretending to be alone.
Every Saturday Dawn would have to kneel over the bath with her poor flat knees on the cold tiles, and Mum would wash her head, tipping saucepanful after saucepanful of water over Dawn’s thin hair, the latter yelping and pressing an old wet towel against her eyes. The last saucepanful caused the biggest yelp: always a couple of quarts of straight cold water right out of the tank. Then she would have her hair rubbed and put into plastic curlers until she looked as though her face was so tight and shiny it might split down the middle.
Since our father died, we’d lived in a semi-detached house right next door to the Diemen’s Luck Hotel. Dawn and I looked after five orange cats that had been born under the bottle crates at the back of the pub. On weekends we walked miles, collecting soft-drink bottles from the banks of Waterloo Creek. During the week I was in second form at St Brendan’s, and Dawn swept up hair and made cups of cheap coffee at the barber and tobacconist’s down the road from our place.
At sixty-one, our mother was still a dressmaker. She worked from a tiny back room in our home and told me once that she had never had the time to earn a living before her husbands died, partly because of us kids, but mainly because she had spent most of her time apologising to the three brothers for their own bad behaviour. Consequently, she had grown into the habit of being angry most of the time. She said it was the only way she could think.
In my dreams, Waterloo Creek is still the same as it was then. Sometimes it was full of mountains of froth like soapsuds. There were rubbishy gum trees and tea-tree right down to the edge, and a track had been worn down from the top to a place where the rough kids got underneath the bridge to smoke. Sometimes Dawn and I would pause for a while in our search for Cascade bottles, and we would talk about fishing. It had always been our mutual fantasy that one day we would go fishing. Sometimes Dawn was allowed to borrow a fishing magazine from the barber’s shop and we would leaf through the pages, awed by the complicated equipment, tantalised by readers’ stories of the big plump fish they’d caught.
It was the Monday before her big operation that Dawn discovered the sets of tackle in the hardware shop next door to the barber’s. She had been sent in for a bottle of metho for the big window, and had taken a minute or two to visit the fishing gear right in the back corner of the shop. Since we had last been in, the bottom shelf had been filled with beginners’ kits: nets, handreels, knives, sinkers, lures, and even a little book of information. Dawn was so excited, she almost forgot to worry about going into hospital at the end of the week.
Dawn was twenty-four, I guess. The operation was to take away her womb, Mum said. Since she wouldn’t be needing it anyway, and she wasn’t discreet. Which meant that she’d never got over the feeling of being proud of something that if you were normal you were meant to be ashamed of. Anyway, the doctor said it would save Mum a lot of fuss and bother, and you never missed what you never knew you had in the first place.
Dawn mightn’t be herself, Mum tried to warn me. Doctor Connor said she might rebel for a while after the operation. He said it can affect their brains.
From what I could tell, Dawn didn’t have the strength to be rebellious when she came home from the hospital. She seemed bruised and sore and stiff and could feel something missing inside, and spent the first few days wandering around and wondering what it was. Finally, Mum felt so sorry for her she asked Dawn what she would like that would cheer her up.
‘One of them fishing kits for me, and one for Sonny,’ she said, ‘and a holiday at the beach.’
We had never had a holiday before, but Mum had been saving for new carpet to replace the old green Feltex in the lounge room. That afternoon she rang and booked the cottage at Whitecliffs.
We caught the bus to Whitecliffs, and walked from the town. Mum had shown us a black-and-white photo of Cuttleshell in the book, but it wasn’t what we had expected. For one thing, there was another house out the front where the owner and his family lived, and there was a big vacant field between the cottage and the corner of the street.
‘Look at the curtains!’ Mum laughed, when we were close enough to see them. They were mostly hanging in red strips. At one time they had been red and white stripes, but the red parts had perished with sunlight and age. Other than that, I suppose it was just a normal holiday house, with the musty smell of old kapok pillows and thin grey Army Surplus blankets, and the gritty feel of unpolished boards underfoot and the surface stickiness of being near the sea. That night Mum dressed for bed with the light off, and told Dawn to do the same. She could feel someone watching her from the vacant paddock. Also, from that first night, she slept with the big kitchen knife under her pillow.
When Dawn was a kid, she would never do anything that would get her hands dirty. On the beach the next morning, she was terrified of the sand. Still, Mum insisted, and when we walked across the dunes the white-hot sand squeaked underfoot and sent Dawn off, crying in terror. She said later that she thought she could hear voices under the sand. It was on that first day of our holiday that I discovered that Dawn wanted to be saved from Mum, and that I would have to be the one to do it.
It was because Dawn had been so miserable on the beach that I asked the next day if I could take her fishing. For once, Mum was pleased to let us go. She had an old friend, Beryl, whom she’d known since they were girls. Beryl’s husband had died when her two children were only babies, and since then she had devoted her life to the church and the RSL club. Over the years, Mum and Beryl had more or less lost contact, but Beryl lived near Whitecliffs, and Mum had looked her up. For the first time in her life, Dawn was free to fill the day in as she pleased.
We went down to the breakwater. There were two fishing trawlers just in, and there were cranes lifting the big crates of fish onto the wharf. Dawn held my hand and we watched until the boats had been emptied and the decks hosed down. I watched Dawn close her eyes and breathe in the stink of fish and salt and sticky blood. We left the trawlers and followed a ribbon of seaweed along the rocks, stepping over the skeletons of a couple of big fish. We could see where someone had lit a fire on the rocks. We found a spot for ourselves and I showed Dawn how to thread the bait onto the hook. I had only been fishing once before, with my mother’s brother. I tried to cast my line out but it just loped and flopped in the shallows. We persisted with our handlines, but every time we cast them we lost our bait. We had bought it at the service station, where the man told us it was called bluebait. They were tiny fish, blue on top, silver underneath, with flat eyes and delicate, gaping mouths. Dawn liked the smell of them on her fingers.
The tide was on its way out, but we persisted with the handlines and they kept snagging on the rocks. I tried some snail-type things as bait, pushing the muscular part inside the shell onto the hook. The waves bubbled and shoved at our feet. Two white seagulls came from across the bay and slow-motioned over the rock where we had our bait, then a big pacific gull came squarking down, and they disappeared.
‘This is what you do!’ called one of the fishermen from further up the breakwater. He picked up a handreel and swung the line in a circle above his head, letting it spin out into the deep water beyond the rocks. He turned and grinned at us. He had one long tooth sticking up out of his bottom gum, and peppery hair. I decided he could have been thirty or sixty.
‘I’m Dawn,’ my sister laughed, and I could tell straightaway that she had fallen in love.
Turned out his name was Captain Hodge, but Dawn delighted us by calling him Cap’em ’Odge. The captain moved his gear and a battered fishing stool down next to us and showed us how to thread the bait onto our hooks. He told us how he had once got a fishhook in the palm of his hand, and how he had had to push it through to the other side and pull it out with a pair of pliers. I watched Dawn thoughtfully stroking her belly, and knew he had reminded her of the operation. The captain showed Dawn how to cast off with his willow rod, and I watched her standing beside him, her face open and happy under the big straw hat that Mum had made her wear.
Under Captain Hodge’s instruction, I saw my sister become a fisherman. Her broad flat hands, usually so clumsy with fiddly things, spliced and knotted with the precision of a lacemaker. I watched as she bit her lip before taking a wide stance and casting her line out exactly the way the captain had shown her, while mine still lay slack and uninviting in the seaweed at the foot of the breakwater.
‘You’re a natural, for sure,’ the captain said, putting a weathered hand on my sister’s sloping shoulder. It was the first time I had seen someone touch her when it wasn’t in order to boss her around.
‘What’s them humps out there?’ Dawn asked, pointing to a couple of small islands spread out across the bay.
‘They’re the islands called Faith, Hope and Charity,’ the captain explained. ‘If a sailor can find his way between those three reefs, well he’s just about home and hosed.’
Suddenly Dawn was cackling and jumping up and down on the spot. ‘I got one!’ she called out, the rod in her hands whipping and arching.
‘Bring ’er in then,’ the captain said calmly. ‘You’ll be havin’ some Whitecliffs bream for yer dinner tonight!’
‘Take them outside,’ Mum said, when we arrived at the back door with three fat silver fish. ‘You catch ’em, you clean ’em!’
At first Dawn looked disappointed, but outside she brightened up. Cap’em ’Odge had already shown her how to clean and fillet the fish. ‘He said come back tomorrer,’ she whispered, happily scraping the scales onto a piece of newspaper.
That was the first Saturday night that Dawn refused to have her hair put in curlers. She stamped her plump and flat foot (I had never really noticed her feet before) and said that she wanted to wear her hair straight from now on.
‘It’s good for her,’ I reassured my mother the next morning. ‘She likes bringing something home for dinner, and she’s really good at it.’
‘Be that as it may…’ Mum argued.
Dawn was calm and businesslike on the way down to the breakwater the next day.
‘There he is,’ she remarked calmly. ‘He said he would come today.’
That was when I first started to worry. At fourteen, I was old enough to know that blind faith inevitably led to disappointment.
‘He won’t be able to come every day, though, Dawny,’ I cautioned. But she wasn’t listening. Already she had sped up and was intent on getting to the captain first.
That holiday at Whitecliffs was three weeks long. Every day after that first day we went down to the breakwater. It was the first time I had ever seen Dawn keep something a secret from Mum, and the first time Mum had not been intent on finding out.
Every night after tea Dawn and I walked and walked, feeling safe in the dark and cool. I can’t remember what Mum did, but in my memories she is never there, but always at her friend Beryl’s, drinking cheap sherry by the tumblerful, listening to the details of Beryl’s relationship with the parish priest.
Meanwhile, Dawn and I would walk the streets of Whitecliffs. Blue television lights would shrink and swell in lounge rooms with lime-green carpet and orange lamps. Someone would be standing at a kitchen window tilting a glass of water in the light from a bare globe. The front windows of children’s rooms would be dark: those little boys who had sworn and grimaced at us in the daytime, those girls who had sung ‘Puppet on a String’ into the handle of a skipping rope, now breathing inaudibly, their mouths pressed open like moist petals, their hands warm and salt-swelling with sleep. And babies, their curls defined with sweat, their fat bottoms poking up towards nylon mosquito nets, the corners of their pillows wet with milk-sucking dreams.
Oleander bushes in those front yards became black hollows, garden hoses and Aborigine statues took on strange and sinister meanings. We would walk and walk and eventually come to the last house before the paddocks of long grass that gave way to the sand and the sea. Listen! If you stood still you could hear the night-waves making angry sounds on the beach. The drag and then the dump and fizz. And while you stood there, smelling the deadish smell of the sea so close, those paddocks of dry grass that in daytime were merely a hot dry nuisance before you got to the business of the beach became a quiet, watchful place. A place that said Go Back! So you turned back and went into the shop with the purple V sign out the front. Inside V’s there were fluorescent strips that made the things on the shelves look unreal. You chose a Barrett’s Sherbet Fountain or a Big Charlie Bubble Gum and savoured the smell: the holiday smell of lollies under glass. You turned the postcard rack and fiddled with a knob on the pinball machine.
Then it was back out into the dark where more lights had been turned off. Behind those front windows the people of Whitecliffs were conceiving wayward children, soaking dentures, reading folded old letters, biting nails, wetting beds. We walked back and were glad when we were home, because even though it wasn’t home, but a holiday cottage rented from strangers, it had become home. We crawled between heavy cold sheets with our feet sandy, and in the distance could hear the sea keeping its lonely vigil over the sleep-breathing world.
Early one morning we went down to the rocks to meet the captain. He took a kitchen knife from his pocket and prised oysters off the rocks, tipping the pearly shells to let them slide onto our tongues. They were big in our mouths, and every one tasted surprising, stinging the backs of our throats and nostrils with salt. When they had gone down we ground the fragments of shell between our teeth.
‘Holiday-makers like you are the lifeblood of a place like this,’ the captain told us. ‘You lot keep reminding us that we’re still alive. That Brigadoon’s awake for another day, so to speak.’
Our last whole day at Whitecliffs arrived. I got up at six o’clock. It had been raining all night, and it was still semi-dark outside. A rooster in the next street had started its lonely crowing in the drizzle. The shadows of the kitchen chairs were long and warped on the floor. The fridge was humming. Mum’s travel clock ticked. Fat drops were randomly drumming their fingers on the roof. Tonight was the night that Dawn had decided to run away with the captain.
All that day it rained and rained. Mum had gone to bed with a migraine. The rain hit the house in waves. The toilet floor flooded. The towels had fallen off the line onto the grass. It was not until after dinner that the rain stopped. Dawn and I ran outside to look at the light. It was about nine o’clock and the sky was a yellow grey. The gums and the grass were sulphur-green, like when you look through a piece of yellow cellophane.
There is nothing like walking on cool sand in the dark. The beach is blue and the grasses on the dunes are black and scary. A headland could be a dark and endless hole in the universe. The sea humps on wet sand. There is a glow just above the horizon. If your thong falls off you have to get down on your hands and knees and feel for it. A piece of driftwood could be a dead seal. A scrap of seaweed could be the remains of a pelican. A man in dark clothes at the far end of the beach could be the captain, but is not.
Three men brought their runabout in from across the bay. One stood and pissed off the side of the boat. Another finished the dregs of a can of beer and threw it into the water. I stared at them, warning them off, but they came in closer and followed us up the beach, talking about Dawny and laughing. One of them called out, over and over: ‘Fishface! Don’t go, Fishface!’ Dawn was frightened, but she knew not to hurry. We continued along the beach. ‘Fishface!’ the man was still calling.
Early the next morning, Captain Hodge came to the back door. He was dressed tidy and clean. He said he needed me to do something for him.
The ferry left from Constitution Dock at five every Sunday evening. That first Sunday back in Hobart I took Dawny down there. We walked around the wharves, up past a grey navy boat to the end of the wharf where a motley group of people were fishing. A couple of Chinese fathers were there with their sons, and a man with galls on his face like a gumleaf, and an Englishwoman with a coarse accent. Each group had a bucket of blotched fish. Dawn said they were Australian salmon. They writhed in buckets of dirty water. There were smears of scales and wipes of blood on the concrete. A boy sat scaling a fish he had just caught, though it hadn’t yet stopped twitching. We walked past sailing boats, fishing boats, a police boat, all jostling together in noxious fluid. The fish launches had plumes of scum coming out of their rear ends; the navy boat filled our lungs with fumes.
I paid for both of us to have a cruise on the ferry. From the water, Hobart looked like an unreal city, like something you would see in National Geographic. The trees were algae-green and lush, the buildings placed neatly like little toy railway houses. That cruise up the river could almost have been a trip around the world. There were mountains, a castle, gardens, even a desert. Victorian blocks of flats looked like pop-up pictures from a children’s picture-book in front of a prehistoric mountain and an abalone-shell sky. You could see the road out of Hobart disappearing between the hills, like the secret way the children went when they followed the Pied Piper.
‘It’s like a toy town and only half-a-dozen people are allowed to play in it,’ I said to Dawn. The lights came on like fairy-lights and I wondered: are those people sitting at their tables eating marzipan food? Do their children pick up the oak leaves in Salamanca and call them tree stars?
‘I have to tell you something, Dawny,’ I said. She smiled at me, only half-listening. ‘It’s about Captain Hodge.’ Her head jerked up. ‘He asked me to tell you he’s sorry he can’t marry you. He’s got a wife of his own already.’
She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked from side to side with the motion of the boat. ‘Dun’t matter Sonny. Dun’t matter!’ My sister put her arm around me, then, while I cried.
I have sent the three girls to bed, and have opened the window on my wife’s side of the room. Please God let me have some peace and quiet! The air is cool under my bare legs. How long since I lay on a bed next to an open window? We used to leave the windows and even the doors open on hot nights in Waterloo Street. During the night you’d usually wake and close them. By then the street lamps would even be looking cooler. All the lights would be off in all the narrow houses down the street. You could have tiptoed and peeped in at windows, heard people snoring, children whimpering softly, women rolling in dreams of unfamiliar embraces. In the light from the street lamps the gum trees in tiny front yards made shadows on still-warm footpaths. The crickets in side alleys would have been lulled to silence by the dew. Orange toms that had spent the hot part of the night screaming blue murder had minced off somewhere else. A breeze might rattle the three shrubs in front of the Olsons’ and a glass windchime might tinkle on a verandah. If you walked out on the grass in the back yard, your feet would be wet and cold with dew. The moon would no longer be fat and pulsing, but flat and cool, the stars cold enough to peel a finger.
This night is cool and fat and wide. I pull myself down under the blankets. It is a sweet weight on my shoulders and the back of my neck. My face already feels flaccid with sleep.
That holiday at Whitecliffs was the first time we ever saw lights on the water. The harbour was black and oily and the lights smeared and viscous and corrugated. We had never seen anything like it before: purple street lights and white mast beacons and green and red channel-markers all made fluid by the night. But Dawny is gone now. The narrow house where she lived alone for so long in Waterloo Street will be sold.
When I stick my head out the window, I can hear the creek and I can hear a possum in the pear tree. What am I doing in this room with its grey timbers and brown photos and striped curtains? How did my life bring me here? Was I asleep? All I can think of is this…how that summer in 1960 I told Dawn that the captain didn’t want her, and it was a lie.