I look through the camera, watch for Callie. The fog shifts along the waterline, bits of it lifting. I wait for the steel-grey legs of the horse, like the colour of the ocean, the white of its body, the colour of the air, but they still don’t appear. She doesn’t usually take this long. I get down from the ledge and look up the beach to see if she’s coming.
Callie walks along the sand on foot, she looks small in her meadow-green bathers. She doesn’t hurry. There is no sign of the horse. The plastic rain scarf has fallen down around her neck, her hair is wet and sticking up. She doesn’t have my coat.
She shouts something, but she’s out of earshot, her words get swallowed in the sound of the waves.
“Where’s the horse?” I ask when she gets close.
“I took him swimming but I couldn’t turn him ’round,” she says. She clasps her hands close to her chest. “He kept going straight out, head up like he was bolting. I had to get off and let him go.”
She has goose bumps on her shoulders—she doesn’t usually feel the cold. I don’t ask her where my coat is.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” she says.
I’ve never seen a horse get the better of her, not on dry land. She says swimming a horse a hundred yards is worth a mile’s gallop.
“He’ll probably come back in,” I say. I look out to sea. A grey lump lolls on the waves not far out and we watch as the horse washes up and lands on the beach. His head lies flat on the sand, set straight from the end of his neck, his legs stick out like fence posts.
“I wonder where he thought he was going,” I say as we go down.
Callie walks close to me for warmth. I’d give her my coat if I hadn’t already. The horse still has his bridle on; the reins didn’t break, they loop on the beach. The waves lap at his belly, leave lips of froth as they recede. A dog keeps rushing down and barking, running backwards up the sand. The horse has seaweed in his tail.
A car stops along the foreshore road and an elderly couple get out. I shrug my shoulders at them, pretend it’s a mystery.
“We should call someone,” I say to Callie.
“He’ll be covered by the high tide,” she says.
She goes down and kneels by the horse’s head. Seawater runs to her knees and into the dents they make in the sand. For a moment I think she’s about to do something like close his eyes but she undoes the throatlatch and eases the bridle over his ears. The cheek strap pulls at his eye as the buckle slides down his face. I don’t help her. She unclips the cavesson noseband, tries to lift his head to get the other side free. Dead horses are heavy, especially their heads. His mouth is closed around the bit. There’s a screech of metal as it snatches against his teeth when she removes it. The couple watch us from back inside their car. Callie holds up the bridle, sorting out the reins.
“It’ll be fine with some Murphy’s Oil,” she says.
We walk in silence up the beach, past the stone erosion wall, towards Callie’s two-horse trailer. My coat, washed up with a bundle of seaweed, lies on the sand. I pick it up and untangle it, wring it out. I pretend not to notice the couple in their Plymouth as we pass.
Callie drives home in her green bathers. The plastic scarf lies down around her neck; her hair stands up at angles. I put my hand on her leg. Her body is warming up even though the car is cold. The salty bridle sits on the seat between us, my wet leather coat on the floor. The trailer behind us rattles and bounces without the weight of the horse.
“Was it scary?” I ask her.
“I’m not scared of the water,” she says.
“I mean when you couldn’t control him.”
She grips the steering wheel tight so her knuckles look bony; her thigh is tense under my fingers. She only looks at the road. “He wasn’t going to be an important horse,” she says.
My mother was married with a garland of cream gardenias threaded across her brow. I saw a faded photo. She was standing alone, by a fountain in the snow. She married him in Vienna. She was nineteen and he was thirty-six. He had travelled the world. She said he was almost handsome then, before his eye was done in. She was with her family, they came to hear her sing. He promised he’d only take her for two years. She didn’t know it took three months to get there.
He went on ahead, said he wanted to find her the perfect place. Then he wrote her with instructions to follow. He told her it was beautiful, the climate was warm, there were kangaroos. She was pregnant but he didn’t know. It was 1935.
Twelve weeks on a steamer via the Cape of Good Hope. She had me on board the boat, halfway there, a chair and towels on the deck, she said, somewhere off Mauritius. She waited a month in Melbourne, went by train to Echuca, then overland in the heat and dust and blistering of lips, on horse, then camel, then bullock-drawn carriages, a buggy, then a dray. The roads were too rough for the cars they had then; my mother didn’t drive.
I imagine her seeing it, weary in the afternoon as she came upon the place, me feeding on her. Her chafing breast gone dry in the travelling. Two rows of rooms on a rise in the middle of the scrub, the roof thatched above rough mud bricks and sandstone, a few slat-ribbed cattle per square mile. A marginal spread of spinifex and sand, measured in days’ ride or miles square, too many acres to count.
Almost a year since she’d seen him, she stared into the red of the desert’s distance until it bloomed an orange dusk bearing far-off men on rough, brumby horses. A round-faced, hooded-eyed man on a buckskin, the feckless Scot she’d followed. Watching him appear, a little too pink for this part of the world, not enough chin. The stockmen riding in with him looked more the part. Broad-brimmed hats shading sharp, weathered faces, the tan of their skin drawn tight.
She said the place was nothing like he’d promised. She said he didn’t take me from her, didn’t want to hold me in his arms.