Stepping down the hill with a basket on one arm, Carol answered Kit’s smile with a freezing nod. Two steps farther on, she swung back. ‘Kit! Sorry, love. I was in my own world.’ Automatically she looked Kit up and down. Confronted with Carol’s certainties (unmoving hair, bright lipstick, starched white linen blouse) Kit was uneasily conscious of the surface of her face. In the pharmacy she had tested foundation, peering into a mirror the size of a credit card, wearing an expression of fake judiciousness while she smoothed the stuff on. Now Carol was looking at her crookedly—had she left a smear? Some foundation had got on her lips but she had covered that, she thought, with one of the lipstick testers, a sticky gum-pink gloss. She raised the pharmacy plastic bag in her hand.
‘Treen’s at the helpline. I’m getting a prescription for Audrey.’
‘How is Grandma?’
‘Tired, mostly.’
‘You’ll be wanting a lift, then?’
‘Just that Treen got the bike out for me.’
‘Oh, good on you. Bit of exercise. Tell you what: you and Miranda should grab a coffee. She’s working today, up at the deli. She’d be glad of some company. She’s on her break at twelve. ’
‘No, you enjoy yourself. I’ll take that. I go right past.’
Carol was reaching for the bag. Kit felt herself blush under her foundation mask. ‘This is Audrey’s,’ she said, pulling out the prescription, leaving her shaver in the plastic bag.
‘That’s alright then,’ said Carol, suddenly grudging, as though Kit had asked the favour. ‘I’ll take it there for you now.’
Kit had left her grandfather taking a bucket of scraps out to the chooks in his dressing-gown and slippers. She pictured the front rooms’ amber-coloured curtains, a single fly brokenly whirring on the window ledge, and Carol at the front door dropping the brass knocker, sending reverberations through the house.
‘I’ll tell Miranda to expect you. Tea shop okay?’
Kit watched Carol across the road before turning, herself, towards the sea, walking at first with false resolution—the consciousness of Carol watching her, though when she glanced back the street was deserted. An hour to wait.
She was outside a jewellery store. Its glass diamonds and goldplated chains, set out on dusty purple velvet, added to her sense of the town as a stage set. The wind had more reality than these narrow, bright shopfronts, huddled under awnings. Their deliberate quaintness emphasised the street’s exposure and vacancy—the sea opening out where the other side of the hill should have been.
Across the road, two people came out of the Green and Gold newsagency: the woman walking as if breasting waves; the husband, a step behind, carrying a plastic bag full of newspapers. They vanished into the bakery’s shopfront of black reflective glass.
The wind nagged at cellophane packets piled in a toy-sized barrow outside the sweet shop. Kit bent to the barrow and turned the sweets over. Fudge, jelly-babies, liquorice straps: the dried-up sweets prompted in her a queasy feeling of nostalgia. Looking up, she glimpsed a tight-faced woman watching her from the dimness inside the shop.
Kit could not see someone think her a shoplifter without registering that possibility in herself; without knowing her face to be pinched and furtive. She thought: that shopkeeper would have smiled at Miranda. She walked downhill. The fish and chip shop on the corner and then the town stopped. Out there, past where the road turned, was a disused rail line, grey weeds flourishing among the sleepers. Kit crossed the tracks. After the rail line, the ground dropped steeply. Stopping, glancing back, she saw the town stacked behind her, roof by roof up the hill.
And here was the sea. Raising both hands to shade her eyes, she saw that it was, after all, tame: a bay, its edge of unwashed sand lumpy with footsteps and plastic drink bottles. Only the light had made it vast. All that Kit saw (white crests torn out of the waves, a sailing boat swung into the wind, sail hollowly clapping) was painted over blankness. She did not know this place. An hour to wait…
Dirty sand, a smell of oil and seaweed, everything crowded and vacant: this was every loose-end hour. She had no place, did not exist in it. The shaver in her bag, the stuff on her face—and after that, what? Her despair extended to everything she looked at: useless, immense, a painted scene.
‘Did you get your sweeties?’ Scott was, that moment, an upright shadow stepping out of the glare, taking on colour and dimension only when he stepped close. ‘I saw you mooning over the barley sugars.’ His talk was full of these odd phrases that he spoke lightly, mockingly.
‘The shopkeeper thought I was stealing.’
He laughed, throwing his head back. His Adam’s apple flashed in the sun. ‘You can’t think how profound you looked just now, staring at the bay.’
‘I’m meeting Miranda at twelve.’
He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour to kill,’ he said in a high voice. ‘Here, let me look at you.’ He stepped in front of her, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head; they looked odd on his baldness. ‘How like your mother you are.’
He was close enough for Kit to see how the wind had raised water in his eyes, in any case the kind of pale blue that looks blind. He smiled abruptly and stepped back, putting his sunglasses on.
‘You’ve no idea how strange it is to see her face sliding in and out of yours the whole time. Is everyone always telling you how alike you are?’
‘Not really.’
‘That’s because they didn’t know her at your age.’
Without answering, she looked across the bay. A sailing boat cut across the water, out where swathes of darker blue slid under the surface, broke against the boat ramp as waves. On the far side a tractor climbed soundlessly up the bleached paddocks.
He said: ‘Aren’t you going to ask about her?’
‘Were you really friends, though?’ She tightened her grip on her arms. ‘She doesn’t talk about you now.’
She never had been so rude. She had hurt him; she heard him draw in breath. She was suddenly conscious of wind, of brightness. Out there, cloud shadows swung over the water. In truth, she had never doubted that he’d known her mother. What she had meant— what she had felt—was that her mother had never been this young. The woman who sat down at the dinner table each night with that fixed tolerant smile: she had never suffered this.
But he said lightly, ‘Oh, now. I know all about her now. I read the magazines. We were friends, though. I went to art school with her. Did she tell you that?’ I’m the reason she went.’
‘You?’ The blankness of her voice nettled him.
‘She copied my application. She had no idea. She liked Drysdale.
Once she got there, of course…’ He shrugged.
‘What?’
Smiling secretively, he said nothing; he put his sunglasses back on and looked pleasantly out at the sea.
‘When she got there—what?’
‘Let’s say she flourished,’ he said, and put his head back, laughing showily. As abruptly, his manner dropped. Forgetting the sea he looked sharply at her. ‘What did Treen say about me?’
‘Nothing much.’ She conceded: ‘Just you knew Mum.’
‘That’s all?’
‘What should she have said?’
‘Oh I don’t know.’ He laughed again, emptily. ‘Treen was always the successful one at school. Your mother and I were the odd ones. Never be too happy at school, that’s my advice.’
Kit thought of her friend Louise standing up in assembly to sing the school hymn. But she frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, your aunt…Her friends are still the same people she was friends with at school. Honestly, she has about a hundred godchildren. She remembers all their birthdays.’
‘So?’
‘Nothing. Just, you should hear them together. They have their nicknames still from school. Triny, they call her. They sound like schoolchildren and then you look at them and they’re people in their forties with wrinkles and potbellies and brats at their knees. Your mother for all her faults always dealt with reality.’
He held his thumb near her face. ‘Speaking of reality, do you mind? You’ve got a great clump of makeup on your forehead.’
She felt the colour flare in her face.
‘No, it’s good,’ he said. ‘It’s just this one bit looks like an enormous wen.’ He laughed. ‘That’s better.’ He flung his arm out: ‘Come on. I’ll show you our old haunts.’
‘Just that I’m meeting Miranda at twelve.’
‘Miranda! Yes, you mustn’t be late for Miranda.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you back in time.’ He swung around and started walking, with quick steps plunging through the heavy sand.
He walked with his chin up, shoulders back. Sweat had run down the back of his neck, darkening his shirt. Seeing him from behind exaggerated the difference between his broad torso and the short legs that with rolling steps, knees working sideways, ankles turned in, propelled him over the sand.
He was not kind, Kit thought. That was the saving thing. There was in his manner something mocking, antagonistic: he placed no obligation, required no gratitude. It was a relief to dislike him a little. The feeling was small-scale, and her own.
As she followed him around the point, the wind swung full face. Impossible to look ahead into it…She was walking between him and the water’s edge, bumping elbows whenever one of the waves came high up the sand; though the wind, so much present, made the touch impersonal: only that they were pitted alike against the weather. Her plastic bag filled with wind, loudly shuddering. With one hand holding her hair back, Kit looked sideways out at tilting, bright water. The wind was tearing white crests from the waves. Closer in, a gull held at a point, wingtips quivering.
The beach was almost deserted. Only far off, where it lifted into the heat, tiny figures flickered in and out of mirage: two people, perhaps, or a person with a dog. Scott was pointing to where a bluestone wall marked the boundary of the sand. On its far side, there started a different world: a crescent of irrigated grass, picnic tables, a climbing frame: a Sunday family world set out as if under glass.
Already, he was heading towards it. At the edge of the park a single pine tree, its top grown away from the wind, was the shape of a stopped wave. He swung over the wall and entered the tree’s bluegreen shade. From within that dimness, he looked back at her. She was at once conscious of glare, wind whipping strands of hair across her eyes. But as soon as she climbed over the wall into the tree’s shade he looked past her, out to sea.
The shade, now that she was in it, was less like darkness than like smouldering light. Everywhere thin shafts seemed to give off smoke in the dusty air. There was no grass; the dirt was soft with dry brown needles. The tree’s branches barely moved in the wind.
‘Do you climb?’ At this, for no reason she could see, he let out another of his disconcertingly high laughs.
She studied the trunk. Its bark, inches thick, made handholds where it cracked. There was a bole, knee-high.
‘The lair…Your mother refused to call it a tree house. Never a cubby.’
‘She came here?’
Kit had suddenly seen what was almost impossible to believe: that the past had existed really. Here, she thought: her mother had stood here. She touched the bark. Here, in this dust-hazed shade. At last, a picture of the child her mother had once been rose whole in Kit’s mind. Pinch-faced, strands of hair hanging over her shoulders, the girl stared down at Kit from the shifting light of the pine tree. Where had that face come from? When I get back, Kit thought, I’ll look at those photographs in the hall again.
Scott had turned his back. He reached his right hand up to the first branch, propped his foot on the tree’s bole. Mooring his left hand to the trunk, he put his weight onto his foot but he slipped. The side of his face, his little paunch, skidded down the trunk. She laughed, and stopped as suddenly. Without looking at her, looking down at his palms, he swore quietly. With a slow deliberateness that was almost frightening, he took of his shoes and set them side-by-side. He took of his sunglasses, too, and rested them across his shoes. His bare, bluish-white short toes looked startlingly nude, like some inner body protruding through his tan.
He was trying again. His foot gripped the bole. That moment, it seemed that he might fail again, splayed there belly and cheek against the trunk, while his left foot scrabbled sideways and would not hold. His intensity embarrassed her: it was so naked. His toe caught on a sharp edge. Grunting, he heaved up and got his chest over the edge of the branch, feet kicking behind him.
There was a wide hollow where he sat. Branches, four or five of them, spread out from it. He had his back against a branch, his legs stretched out in front of him; he was looking up at the high branches. She pulled off her sneakers and set them by his shoes. It was almost awkward, how easily she climbed up toe-holes in the bark. Without looking at her, he drew his knees sideways to make room. All the same, pulling herself up, she bumped against the outside of his thigh and felt, pressed into her arm and shoulder, the heat and dampness of his skin.
The hollow was soft with brown disintegrating pine needles. When she had been on the ground, looking up at him, tree and ground had made the same world. Now, looking down from the tree, the distance seemed much greater. Here the air had a dry smell, faintly resinous. Far off, the sky showed in patches. Resting her back against a branch, she looked up through the tree’s infrastructure. Out there at the canopy’s ragged edges, the needles looked green. Otherwise, they were grey-brown, cobwebby. Only those outermost branches moved in the wind. The light that angled down through the tree’s shade moved with them, revealing reddish colours in the bark.
‘We used to smoke up here.’ He had his eyes closed. His forehead, and the little curls of hair on his chest, glistened with sweat. He opened his eyes for a moment. ‘Do you smoke? Of course you don’t. Disgusting habit.’ He tilted his head back against the trunk. ‘The smell of these leaves always makes me want a cigarette.’
‘Were you caught?’
‘No. Maybe they knew, though. We must have reeked of it.’
‘Mum never smokes now.’
‘She was hopeless at it. She used to hide her cough.’ He sat up. ‘God! How uncomfortable. We used to spend hours up here.’
‘I like it.’ Feeling his eyes on her, Kit looked away into the high branches.
He said: ‘You know, that time I saw you trailing along after Treen you looked so prim. I’m probably the first person you’ve ever met whose father was a tradesman.’ He grinned down at her. ‘I am though, aren’t I? No, I really am: I’m the son of an electrician. He wanted me to take over the business and instead I went to art school. Can you imagine? I’m pushy, that’s what you’re not used to.’
He rested his back on the trunk. He started speaking without looking at her, looking up through the cobwebby dark branches backlit with green. ‘I saw it that day Treen brought you in, you not knowing what to do with your hands. Your mother was the same. In fact, for two people who couldn’t have been more different, your mother and I were strangely alike. The trouble with us was we didn’t know how to be natural. We were always watching other people, trying to figure out how they got along so well.’ He laughed. ‘She figured it out, though, didn’t she. Shacking up with the tutor. No, you’d have to say your mother figured it out.’
Kit said nothing. She sat motionless in the swaying green, conscious of a sharp piece of bark sticking into the back of her thigh, surprised at the same time that she could be conscious of it while she felt so stopped—past all response. She looked along the branch, where at the tip five pine needles splayed, and thought: I’ll remember this. His voice, in the green tree, had the authority of a dream: there was, so long as it lasted, no world outside.
‘It’s ten to twelve.’ He put on a high voice: ‘Mustn’t keep Miranda waiting.’ Twisting onto his belly, he pushed himself off the branch.
On the ground, he put on his sunglasses, flicked the dust off his bare feet and stepped into his shoes before looking up at her. ‘How green you look.’ With the flat palm of his hand, he pushed her foot back and let it swing forward and bump into his hand.
‘Come on.’ He held his arms up to her. Leaning forward, she had just time to think, ‘The branch is too high.’ Scraping the backs of her thighs, she thudded into his chest. When he had recovered his footing, he pushed her back from him with his arms still on her shoulders.
‘Yes, but I did think you’d jump.’
‘Sorry.’
He looked full at Kit. ‘You do look wild.’ He picked a knotted strand of hair off her shoulder and held it out. She looked sideways along its length. ‘Your hair’s like seaweed. I’ll paint you as a creature of the deep.’
Was he serious? He had started fussing with his shirt, brushing scraps of bark off his sleeve. Kit remembered how carelessly the model had tossed the magazine down. He yawned. ‘You’d better run, though. Straight across the park. That’s Main Street there. The tea shop’s half-way up. Here,’ he called, ‘you’re forgetting your shaver.’