Tide (11 page)

MESMERISED

Unsure if it was prayer or performance, the girl was nonetheless mesmerised. It was 1948, and she had just dashed out of the green cooling waters and up to her towel spread out on the sand. It was afternoon – she and her family had only arrived at the beach shack the previous evening after a long, hot, slow drive from the farm. This was the start of the Christmas holidays, and a special holiday this year, because for the first time ever they were down in time to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself on the beach! Every year they planned to, but as Mum always said, the best-laid plans … Every year, harvest went on into the new year, and their Chrissy holidays didn't begin until
after
Christmas. Her older brother Pete, who was really smart and had only one more year to go before he finished high school, said it was a ‘misnomer' to call them Chrissy holidays when for this family they actually began long after Christmas. We can call it Chrissy holidays this year, Pete, she and the others insisted, and he agreed … though she still thought his glasses were an extension of his brain! She – Emmy – was twelve and delighted to be twelve. The moment she paddled into the ocean, the dust and grime of the farm just vanished. She felt good and clean and alive.

The shack was nestled away in the sandhills along with another five shacks built on government land with only a vague sense of permission. Technically, Pete said, they were all squatters. Emmy liked the thought of being squatters – they'd learned about them at school but she wasn't sure there were really any squatters in wheatbelt Western Australia. One year her dad and her uncles had disappeared for a week, only to return and announce that from next year on, they'd all be holidaying together on the coast. Right next to the ocean! Emmy and Peter and their various cousins swimming and mucking around together.

The shacks weren't much – corrugated iron, planks of wood, wheat sacks, lino over sandy floors. Old stoves and makeshift chimneys. Plank beds and tables. And the odd individual touch introduced by mums and daughters to give the shacks ‘character'. That character didn't matter much to Emmy, she just wanted the sea – not to get away from the red dirt of the farm, but to round out her picture of the world as she imagined it and wanted it to be. Red and blue and green. It brought clarity to her image of the farm, to the red dirt, to the golden crops, to the wide blue skies. The sea was the missing part of her picture of the world. She always felt a picture should be complete. The full globe of the world. Land and air and sea.

Not far from where Emmy and her family swam, gun emplacements and a munitions dump – leftovers from the war – glowered and squatted and bristled at the ocean. Barbed wire separated the swimmers from the ordnance, and they rarely thought about any of it. The war hadn't been that long ago, so it all seemed logical and necessary and almost incidental to them. If they did think about the high explosives and guns it was with a sense of reassurance – such weapons helped, to their minds, to keep the Japs out of Australia. And they'd grown up
knowing
that everybody else in the world wanted Australia because it was God's Own Country, and that its small population was not enough on its own to keep others out. If they thought at all about what lay across the barbed wire, they thought ‘vigilance', but mostly the smell of victory was still in the air, and it made them feel as secure as they did in a good season on the farm. Drought and storms pushed to the back of their minds, they dabbled in the silver waters and ate skippy and garfish they caught at dawn and evening from the jetty that poked out into the sea, just deep enough.

For Emmy, todays and tomorrows were
always
better than yesterdays. But she did treasure one particular at-the-beach day from a couple of years ago – it was the day after New Year and it was hot and stormy, and lightning broke out over the sea. She loved electrical storms, though at home they meant fire if they struck when everything was dry. But here, when they rolled over the sea, nothing could catch alight but her imagination. She told one of her cousins that it was Heaven and Hell meeting and arguing, and her cousin told Emmy's mother and Emmy got into trouble for blaspheming. They weren't really a churchgoing family – only at Easter and an odd Sunday here or there – so she couldn't work out what all the fuss was about; what's more, she thought it was the truth about that storm! Only over the sea can Heaven and Hell meet and the world survive the consequences.

But it was
this
day,
this
afternoon, running up to her towel, running up out of the luscious water dripping and laughing to herself about how good life felt, that she altered. She did not know what had altered, but she felt a shift, and she felt that the land and the sky weren't just extensions of herself, but something connected to all people. She thought of the people in the congregation in the church back home. She thought of the stained glass in the little windows and how they'd always reminded her of a bright, brilliant storm. Red, blue, green … She wished her family went more often. She wished she was going to church that very Christmas Day, although until that precise moment she'd always been delighted that was not what her family did. She reassured herself that all nature was her church. God didn't want people closed in, speaking to the floor, the roof, themselves, to no-one in particular. The shack is a better church than that, she thought. She liked the way light found its way through cracks, the way the sea breeze curled up under the roof. That seemed more in agreement with God as she understood him.

And back at her towel, reaching down to pick it up but catching sight of something, someone in the hills, someone bowing down on a blanket and speaking to the hills, she thought of that God. The outdoors God. Whenever the minister did his
performance
, his song and dance in the pulpit, as Grandpa termed it, Emmy thought it a great performance. The best part about church. The man she saw in the hills reminded her of this, though he was so different. But was it a performance or prayer? She was mesmerised.

Adding to her intrigue, the man was black. Black people worked on the farm but she was never allowed near them. Nor in town. Keep to your own people, her parents said. And you're a girl, they added, for no reason at all. She asked Peter at the time why they said that, but he just turned his back on her and walked away. She wondered what a black man was doing on the coast. It was a long way from the farm to the coast. She wasn't sure what she was thinking. And he was dressed in a way she'd never seen before. She wondered if he was wearing a dress. Part of the performance, no doubt.

She stood there, towel half in the sand, poised midair. The man in the hills was crouching and muttering or speaking or praying. She was suddenly certain it was praying. It wasn't a performance – the man seemed alone with himself and nature. And God.

Her skin tingled as it dried in the sun and she became aware of that salty, cracking feeling. Her shins and her forearms and her face glowed white outside her bathing suit, and she felt uncomfortable. Was this why Peter had turned away? She was confused and couldn't make sense of what was happening, but couldn't stop watching. The man was a way off but not too far off. He seemed to be facing nothing in particular – not the sea, not inland to the farm. Maybe just a sand dune. He wasn't aware of her presence. She followed the ripples of sand the breeze had cut like mirages into the dunes, up into the strange wet-looking though dry vegetation that clung to the peaks. That's what holds this whole place together, Pete had told her. She liked Peter. She knew Peter thought she was smart, and she liked that a lot. Emmy knew that she loved what this man was speaking to … what he was
praying
to … and she knew that one day she would know its name.

Sensing the man had finished and was about to roll up his blanket and vanish, Emmy quickly turned away so the moment would never be complete or forgotten. She wasn't sure if this was what her mother called a woman's intuition, but she didn't really think it had anything to do with being a boy or a girl. It's to do with the storms. It's now and it's tomorrow, she said to herself.

Without thinking, Emmy looked straight up into the sun and stared until everything lost colour and the world became black and white. Giddy, she ran back to the water and plunged in. Her younger cousins called out, Emmy! Emmy! And Emmy, seeing the world clearly again in its bright array, and looking further out to sea than she ever had before, began to perform for her cousins, hooting and shouting and splashing, sensing them coming up behind her. And the louder she got and the closer they came, the quieter she went inside. One day I will know its name, she thought amid the noise. One day.

MAGAZINE

That section of the beach and all the area behind, which was sprawling sand dunes and scrub, had been closed off from the public for forty years. Now, looking at the mansions nudging the sea, you'd never guess that it had been a munitions storage area – the Magazine. For a decade after they'd cleared it, it was still yielding unexploded shells that seemed to have crept out of their storage bunkers. Not something you think about, wandering the white sandy beaches of the south-west of Australia. But the war went there too, and the old concrete gun emplacements on the hills are only part of the story.

I was a kid during the war, when the ammo dump was a hive of activity with munitions coming in and out, from ships sailing in from factories and out to feed the battle fronts. There was a long wooden jetty that's gone now. The last stumps of pylons went with storms and barnacles not too long ago. They say a marina is going to be built in the vicinity.

Even during the war, with soldiers patrolling, we'd sneak under the barbed wire and venture a few feet into the forbidden zone. That's a common story, especially after the war, when they'd cleared out most of the dangerous stuff. Kids wanted bragging rights. There were rumours of mines bobbing in the waters, but all my mates' fathers who had boats got in close to the shore, chasing the King George whiting. Sometimes I meet with old mates and we talk it over. The daring, the risks. Truth be told, most never ventured far, never went in deep.

But I
did,
and that's why seven years of my life are unaccounted for, and why my wife filed a missing person's report, and remarried because I'd been declared dead and gone.

How did it come to that? My teachers would often observe that I had an overactive imagination. But that's the easy way out. It is true that I'd sit on the beach, reading my ‘children's version' (illustrated) of Homer's
Odyssey,
and stare out to the islands and across the barbed wire, thinking I was Odysseus and they were the lands I'd visit. That gods and demigods awaited me there. It was all so
real
to me.

Not being able to cross into the forbidden zone without dire consequences
was
a bugbear from childhood. One of those things that needle your sleep and lead to poor choices in your waking life. Something not quite in focus. An irresolvable paradox: I wanted it to be dangerous, but it was just too dangerous to risk all. To cross over entirely. Thinking about it hurt my head. It's why I didn't go on to study after leaving school. Such thinking wasn't healthy for me. I was happier labouring. That, and the fact my father died and my mother relied on me to help get us all through. I couldn't have afforded university. But even later, much later, when I could have done so under a government scheme, I didn't. Yet I've always read, read and read.

The beach is a short drive from Fremantle, and not far from the industrial strip where I ended up working. I was made a production foreman at the fertiliser plant, and later supervised seasonal workers cleaning up railway wagons caked in superphosphate. It sets like rock. Rock phosphate. Have to take to it with shovels and even sledgehammers. I remember when I started off cleaning wagons, my first season – the medical – the doctor telling me I wasn't a great specimen but at least I had well developed thigh-muscles. I'll leave that to your imagination. Something to brag about down at the hotel after work. And a rough hotel it was. A regular soak for a well-known bikie gang clubhoused in the area. And, of course, I married a barmaid who took to my jokes … and, I guess, my thighs.

I've always loved the Sound and surrounding coastline, even with the factories dumping their shit into the once-teeming- with-life ocean. It still looks blue. Just south, I'd walk across the sandbar at low tide to Penguin Island simply for the sake of it. Just for the
hell
of it! And I love the penguins. I gave one pissed young bloke a good thumping when I saw him tormenting a bird in its burrow. I said to him my only regret was that the penguin had to witness such violence. But don't get me wrong, I am not a violent man. That was a one-off, and I didn't do much damage. Not really. Just hurt whatever little pride he had.

Strange working for the factory. The phosphate coming in from Christmas Island, doing the plant's circuits and coming out sacked or wagoned ready to boost the state's wheat cheque. The aeroplane warning lights on the great central smokestack provided endless hours of joy when I worked nightshift: staring out of the office, fixating. And that acrid stench that leaves the throat and nose and mouth burning got kind of addictive. And the malarky between the blokes. The stories I could tell!

Funny what you remember. What you take to fondly. A pod of dolphins arcing alongside the loading jetty. A chemical spill. Seagulls defying pollution, the odds; never giving up. The ships coming in, drawn by tugs, the pilot boat as steady as a life contract. Never had one of those. No real permanence. Always on short-term contracts, even as foreman. Waiting for the job to end. No way to live, said my wife. No way.

But then suddenly I went over the barbed wire and up into the sandhills, into the Magazine. That was seven years before the fence came down. There were patrols and more people than you'd think in the NO GO area, but nonetheless I was in there seven years, and my shrieks and calls were never heard, and no signs of my presence reported in any way. Later, it wasn't a case of ‘that explains those noises' or ‘how on earth was that missed?' Nothing. Just a black hole.