In 1955, Penny’s father, Syd, proposed to her mother, Marie, on Brisbane’s Victoria Bridge. The sun was at last giving up its hold on another insufferably humid summer day and in the wet subtropical air Marie’s new blue crepe de chine dress was sticking to her back. When she refused him, Syd turned around, climbed to the very top of the elaborately curved iron guard rails, and jumped into the Brisbane River.
Penny’s mother watched the whole thing, her comprehension a beat behind what her eyes were telling her. She saw him climbing but, as in many other moments in life, she failed to predict one of the many infinite and impossible responses from another living being’s veiled heart. Only when she heard the terrible sound of Syd’s body hitting the water did she run for help.
Soon, boats were scouring the river and Marie was wringing her hands. How could she have known that the skinny youth with a crooked eye tooth held in his heart such outsized passions? Marie kept her own heart under lock and key, only rarely looking up to see the wash of marbled clouds over fathomless skies, causing her to puzzle afresh about why she stood on the earth at this particular spot at this particular time. Marie knew nothing good ever came of clouds momentarily parting or of trying to predict an outcome.
‘What’s his address, love?’ said the policeman standing by her side with a notebook.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Marie did not like this turn of events and she knew her face was gathering itself in, even more so than usual. Marie did not like anyone knowing anything about her.
‘There, there,’ said the policeman, misreading her. ‘It’s not your fault, dear.’ He made a move as if to comfort her and Marie pulled away.
As if it were her fault! What an idiotic man. Marie hated Australians for their stupidity and their smug complacency, and standing on the bridge on a ridiculously hot February evening she hated them all over again. She hated Brisbane with its small-town manners and its small-town bigwigs, and she hated the humid days and humid nights and the night cart and the nightman, the tin can resting on one shoulder, a man who spent his life emptying toilets of excrement, reeking and foul, crawling with maggots, abuzz with flies. It was like Africa! It was unimaginably awful, an uncivilised shanty town in which she was stranded without hope of return. She hated the wooden houses squatting on poles, the tin roofs, the chicken coops at the back of houses, the rows of outboxes in the awful treeless clipped backyards and the slimy frog who lived in the tin toilet. She hated the cheery signs by the side of the road reading Stay Alive in ’55 because every time she saw one a voice in her head instinctively replied, I’d rather be dead. She hated the witless policeman standing in front of her in an excited swoon of self-importance (how people who slept safe in their own beds loved catastrophe: death! suicide! drama!). She hated everything about the particular spot of the world she stood in, this land where nothing happened. Now something had happened but Marie still hated everything: everything, that was, except for poor, drowned Syd McAlister and his last violent, non-complacent act of defiant life.
But Syd wasn’t drowned, obviously, since he went on to become Penny’s father. When he hit the water he sank fast, but he must have chanced upon a deep part of the river. He felt the shock of the impact, but no worse than a bad belly flop, a painful stinging up through his legs and, strangely, all around his chin. His jaw must have slammed up against the top of his skull and for a moment he wondered if he had broken his teeth. He was thinking this as he rose, alive, to the surface, his tongue sliding fast around his mouth, numbering the molars and incisors still miraculously fixed in his head, thinking of being alive and breathing and still in love. He was thinking about Marie’s dark, lovely face, as fine-boned as his mother’s best teacups. He was thinking of those teacups, fine china, Royal Doulton, stacked in the mirrored china cabinet, the best china and the best china cabinet from his father’s illustrious shop, McAlisters Department Store, the best shop in Fortitude Valley. The bones of Marie’s French face were like those fine china teacups, her skin burnished, darkly golden, unlike any other girl’s, her eyes such a deep shade of brown they might be black. Teacups and bones, dark eyes, Marie and breath, swimming, swimming, the Churchie under-seventeen freestyle and breaststroke champion. Syd McAlister, exhilarated, with a full set of teeth, happier and more powerful than any other death-defying twenty-three-year-old in Brisbane. Marie Arene, Marie Arene, Marie Arene, the strange lovely notes of her name falling like a song upon his tongue.
He kept swimming. It seemed to him that his entire life had been aimed at this one moment, and that everything inside him had risen to this one exquisite point. He knew himself to be unlike timid men, destined to live their lives within the boundaries of propriety. His was to be a life ablaze, a life risked, gambled on the outcome of love. The tide was coming in, sweeping in from Moreton Bay, but Syd pushed against it. He swam hard, past a barge, past the cliffs at Kangaroo Point, and up and under the giant span of the Story Bridge. He was invincible, powering past the docks with its ships, past safe men just coming on nightshift, their lunchboxes packed for smoko. He swam on and on, marvelling at how love had not killed him and how impending death had not killed love. He swam around the bend in the river, Marie Arene, Marie Arene, till at last he came upon the baths at Mowbray Park. It was growing dark and the water was murky because there had been a lot of rain. He battled his way past logs and branches, over the pebbled rim of the baths, and it was only as he was climbing up the stone steps to the river bank that he realised he was buggered. He looked down at his body in the twilight and saw that dark bruises were forming on his chest. His shirt! He had lost his best shirt, without knowing it, and saw for the first time that he was wearing only trousers, socks and one shoe.
He shook himself down, and headed up the hill across the park. The Moreton Bay figs formed an archway, dim and shivering, as he crossed the footpath. A sort of porous membrane between life and death had opened, between the natural and the supernatural, between the material world and the unseen world, which he had experienced only once before. He was unclear what this new unseen world revealed; only that its perceptive reach had been uncovered, and that he was imbued with the same reverential ringing feeling that had filled him when his father died, long after the nurses had given him up for dead, long after Dr Gregg said that his father could no longer hear them. ‘Hearing is the last of the senses to go,’ Dr Gregg said. ‘I fear Alan is no longer with us.’ Not long after this, Syd’s father had squeezed his hand. At the point of death—after struggling for some hours, the rattle in his throat sounding exactly like something Syd had heard before in dreams, a rattle that really was a death rattle—his father squeezed his hand. The colour drained from him at the moment of his extinction, his flesh no longer animated by moving blood but turned to wax. Syd walked from the room, the permeable membrane rent, to find the world as he had never known it: tender, perishing, awash with souls.
Syd felt the same way as he climbed from the river. He was alive, walking, in love with Marie Arene, a resurrected man. When he got to his front door, a policeman opened it. His mother, Min, stood behind the policeman who had just finished telling her that Syd had drowned.
‘Hello, Mum,’ Syd said.
His mother fainted.