A Woman of the Inner Sea (26 page)

Gus talked to her about magnetos. He held spark plugs up toward an utterly shrouded moon, and blew at their apertures, cleaning them with the flame of a Bic lighter. He promised to open and clean the carburetor.

—No sense in your standing there in the water, love.

But she kept standing there, turning numb, hearing the beasts pace and shift behind her. Their habits would have brought imperfection into the Wagga man’s
tableau vivant
. The six medallions of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Australia could be made to stand still indefinitely, secure in their bush heraldry. But Chifley would have needed to lope aside for contemplation, and Menzies must work the earth, forwarding and backing over its surface.

And in the significant waters, flowing so coldly around her, in a scene where the only decent light was Gus’s torch, she saw without warning and with a casual but exact sharpness, down to the last nuance of their hair, their scent, the faint and particular musk of their womanhoods, the women with whom she had shared the last Sunday she ever spent aboard Kozinski Constructions’ yacht, the
Vistula
. She saw as well the young Mrs. Kozinski, not transmogrified yet by the raw protein of Jack Murchison’s kitchen, not even seriously threatened with change.

In thin torchlight reflected by the inside of the signwriter’s hood, she felt her shoulders itch, a different sting from the normal rankling of her scar tissue. It was a shadow not of the sun’s assault on her, but of the way it had more jovially nipped those children, bit Siobhan and Bernard lightly through the fabric of their shirts.

Before they’d left the house for the
Vistula
Paul had been cautious in describing the coming day. He said the guests would be a consultant and three building union officials. They were going to bring along what he wrote off as
their party girlfriends
. It seemed to Kate a ridiculous phrase, and she threatened to stay home. But he pleaded. He wanted to see the children.

A competent sailor, Paul took the helm, and the young deckhand the Kozinskis used for weekends worked the shrouds, and they tacked their way up lovely Pittwater, the Palm Beach houses flashing light from their picture windows across plum-blue water. On their left, the great cliffs of West Head, thickly dressed with Australia’s eccentric botany, a hanging garden from before
the flood. No more beautiful place: that was established between Kate and Paul Kozinski, and was a proposition subscribed to without prejudice by all O’Briens and all Kozinskis at once.

The unionists were apparently some powerful triumvirate from what Paul called with reverence
the peak council
of all builders’ federations council. One small and very muscular. The other two large and strong yet flaccid. Their skins were pale with what the young Mrs. Kozinski took to be the pallor of conspiracy. They might have argued with some justice it arose from a working-class raising in Newtown or Alexandria.

In the flood by the signwriter’s truck, with water in her boots, Kate could still imagine their pallor, and the traceries of minute purple veins they showed either side of their noses.

They were jovial enough. They had a nice little patter going with Paul. He was a capitalist bastard they got on well enough with.

All of them drank steadily as if they knew that was what they were here for. Their three girls sat in bikinis on the coaming of the forward cabin, the one in which old Mr. Kozinski and Paul sometimes said they’d be happy to live while sailing the Pacific. None of the women were shy, but the young Mrs. Kate Kozinski noticed that they didn’t know each other at all. They were trying out each other’s unfamiliar names, whereas the men standing around Paul at the helm closely knew each other’s names and were onto other matters: reflections and anecdotes.

These women who had never before spent any time with each other all smoked hard, just as the men around the helm drank hard. When the young Mrs. Kozinski went forward to socialize with them, she could smell the cigarette chemicals which their hair had filtered out of the air.

Even with her boots full of the serious waters of the Myambagh flood, she remembered the names of two of these women. She handled both names as if they were flat stones. She saw both sides of the stones. Denise and Chantelle. The name of the third would not come to Kate on this spirit-laden water.

For some parts of their conversations, they dropped their voices. For others they were boisterous. Their main talk with Kate Kozinski was about how they liked the boat. She saw that they all seemed to shave their pubic hair, for some of the shaven spikiness of it was in each case visible above the line of their bikini bottoms.

Extraordinary that she should now have such a sharp memory of three women with shaven pubes, two of them called Denise and Chantelle. Extraordinary that the day of the women on the
Vistula
, along with the memory of Mrs. Kozinski screaming at gravesides, was all she had brought with her on the road.

All three women made a casual loud fuss of the children. The children had tested the fuming, near-naked, loud and discreet girls with a couple of their best tricks. Siobhan stood on her hands on the roof of the forward cabin, extending her legs in the air, so that the V of her body could have served as a navigational directive to her father at the wheel. Bernard Kozinski showed how fast he could do half a lap of the deck, pounding forward on his flat feet to the bows, then aft to level with his father, who applauded him from the helm.

The girls twisted on their thighs and yelled at the children, Clever boy! and, I wish I could do that!

The children could tell all this was just politeness, a break in the women’s absorption in each other. And so both went down into the cockpit instead, to get an occasional flurry of notice there, to listen to the men’s stern, barking chatter.

And again this choice made by the children showed that the women on the forward coaming wanted to give most of their attention to getting to know each other, whereas the men already did and had therefore space to devote to handstanders like Siobhan.

Paul and the deckhand hauled the
Vistula
around West Head and anchored in a limpid bay called Jerusalem. They let down the platform aft. From it it was possible to go swimming. The prospect prompted the three women to put their shirts back on.

—Aren’t there sharks? they asked at various stages. Paul assured them as he assured all visitors. No one had ever been taken by a shark in Pittwater or in this part of the Hawkesbury. Look, his own children were already in swimming. What long clean strokes Siobhan made. She knew the water was sharkless. Bernard swam more hectically, bobbing upright every twenty frantic strokes to take breath, but getting a smile on his face, tickled pink to find the kindly air was there, and utterly unafraid of predators.

The woman called Chantelle hugged her shirt to her.

—They’re so lucky. Living near the water. Makes all the difference to kids.

Paul came down to the galley, where Mrs. Kate Kozinski had now begun shelling prawns and sundering chicken for lunch.

—You know, you don’t have to be anything more than polite to them, he told her as if he was worried Kate and the women might become friends. They aren’t lost cousins.

She got a little peevish and argued that anyone who came on the boat, anyone it was worth spending Sunday with, deserved a basic courtesy. She asked if the women knew each other, it didn’t seem they did?

—I don’t know, he said. I only asked them along to keep the boys happy.

She was going to ask what that meant but he smiled excessively, the disarming Slav, and thundered up the companionway again.

When lunch was ready and she went on deck to tell them, Paul had already gone. She could see that he was rowing the three union men and their girlfriends ashore to a little beach beneath the nearly vertical façade of bush and sandstone. Everyone had then vanished into the bush except Paul and the deckhand, who sat on the beach like servants, chatting. Of the unionists and the others there was no sign now. Both the children sat listlessly in the cockpit.

—He didn’t let us go with him, Siobhan complained to Kate.

Kate said it didn’t matter. You come swimming with me. So she stepped with them onto the grating which had been lowered from the stern, and all three of them took to the water. Habitués, both children. The union officials and the shaven-groin women did not have that competence.

Soon they all descended from the bush: the three unionists, their girlfriends. Dropping down through the ancient flora, amongst the banksias, olive green and black and gray, knobbly and bristling with black cones. From her buoyant place amongst the swimming children, Kate saw them on the beach, saw Paul and the deckhand rise to greet them. While her husband and the deckhand were rowing the guests back to her, she took her mouthful of the deep, brown, brackish, clay-laden estuary water, retained it in her mouth for long enough to give a sense of its full character, and then released it.

The night of the
Vistula
day, once the children were asleep, she told Paul that she would not go on any more cruises like that. Not
with Siobhan and Bernard, and not without them either. They were procured tarts, she said. Chantelle and Denise and the one whose name, by the time she drank from Myambagh’s flood, she could not have recalled.

She remembered this argument not in the painstaking way in which she had remembered the women and her mouthful of brackish water. She remembered it only in general terms. It was the standard argument between them.

Paul: Kozinski Constructions was the basis of their lives, above all of her leisure to be the supreme mother. Yes, you could call the women whores if you wanted. That
was
why she’d heard one of them say, as they made themselves up and combed their hair in the bedroom behind the galley, that she had always worked for Kozinski Constructions. But did Kate think the world was an idyll? Did she think her children could be protected for good from the commerce of the flesh and the allied commerce of bricks and cement? She kept her children hostage in an unreal world, and for one day, without knowing anything about it, without suffering any harm, they had inhabited the true world. So if the union officials had had small erotic adventures up on the sandstone ledges, that sort of goodwill went into Kozinski projects and paid for Mrs. Kate Kozinski’s great motherhood project, which was strangling her children to death!

This was the question, then in Palm Beach and tonight on the Eglington Highway: Had she been the one who took her children’s air from them? In Myambagh she had been growing out of that idea, not fast enough but fueled at least by all Jack Murchison’s old-fashioned food.

Waiting for Gus to vivify the signwriter’s engine, she lowered her hand and stirred the cold waters of Jelly’s dissolution.

Kate, arguing on the
Vistula
evening: She believed the Kozinskis liked doing business the way they did it. Would not have wanted to operate under any other system. The snaky corruption of the old world dancing along nicely with the hairy-arsed corruption of the new! She wasn’t afraid of the realities of life in the construction business. She believed Siobhan and Bernard should be exempt though from being patronized by women bought by the hour to perform favors for building trade unionists in Jerusalem Bay.

(Becoming heated)

The next time he wanted to award union officials a boatload of women, he ought to provide one for himself!

But again, calf deep in floodwater, stirring it with her hand, she remembered the women and the estuarine water far more intimately than she remembered the fight with Paul. Maybe he was right: he always counted for less.

She did remember one point she had made: that old Mr. Kozinski wouldn’t have put his own wife aboard a boat where the frank exchange of bodies was the order of the day. Old Mr. Kozinski might be corrupt, but he knew the protocols, the decorousness necessary for doing business that way. Paul was too Australian and did not have any grasp of the etiquette of tainted business.

Gus seemed to be enjoying himself within the limits of this astounding night. He said he was now ready to start the engine by any means necessary, but would she look under the rear bumper bar to see if the signwriter had taped a spare key there. And yes, wading out of the water to the high and dry rump of the vehicle, she ran her hand along the underside of the blade of bumper bar and the key
was
there.

Carrying it thickly in cold fingers, Kate got into the cabin and turned on the ignition as instructed by Gus. There was a throaty shudder from the engine. Hearing it, Gus laughed. He knew that after a few more convulsions, the engine would start outright. And so it happened. Gus shut the hood, the triumphant slam of a man used to having his way with machinery. With him urging her with hand motions and taking care of where the beasts were at this stage of their inquiries into the earth, she backed out of the flood.

She got down then from the driver’s seat to see to the loading of the beasts. Gus fed Menzies into the back of the truck in that peculiar way, lengthwise, since there was barely room for him to stand. Menzies reclined on his backward-bending, tucked-under, sticklike legs. He had been trained to do this by the dimensions of so many of the vehicles which had come Gus’s way. Chifley, similarly well trained, stood sagely amongst the paint pots. He had entered a new phase of meditation. He sunk himself for the journey by truck in a style of thought for which no movement was necessary.