Skylarking (6 page)

TWELVE

E
VER SINCE OUR MEETINGS WITH
M
C
P
HAIL
, H
ARRIET HAD
come over all dreamy. We were helping in the washhouse one morning, a week or so after the incident with the kangaroo, when she stuck her hands straight into the copper right after it had come off the heat. She yelped and snatched them out as I pulled her towards the laundry trough.

‘Harriet, what were you thinking?' I said as I plunged her pink and steaming hands into cold water.

‘I mustn't have been thinking at all,' she replied as she winced, and the water splashed over her skin.

‘You're ever so distracted.'

‘Am not,' she said swiftly, and I noted her haste.

Harriet was ordered inside to rest and endure a salve applied to her hands, but I stayed in the washhouse, stirring the tubs and wondering what was preoccupying her mind. Perhaps it was a fisherman's hand as it prepared tea in a billy, or sawed the flesh of a kangaroo.

All through the next week she continued to be distracted and refused all my offers to escape to the cove or for a walk, once our chores were done.

After one such rejection, I muttered, ‘Let me know when you do have time for me, Harriet; when you've finished mooning over that stupid fisherman.'

‘Kate!' she snapped, no doubt more afraid of the fact that I'd spoken the thought out loud where any of the children might hear and tattle about a tiff between the two big girls. Especially if they tattled that it involved a fisherman.

The men around us were basically family, and those who lived on the periphery of the lighthouse, at Bennett's River and beyond, were outsiders: fishermen, loners, hermits. There was an unspoken understanding that it would be none of these men who wooed us and asked for our hand.

Even the brittle way in which my mother greeted Albert and me sometimes when we returned from the vegetable garden was enough for me to realise that there was a threat that had arrived with my coming of age. It was to do with my body, my womanhood, the electricity that I sensed every now and then with a sideways glance from Albert, or when lying in a sandy nook with Harriet, our skirts pulled up past our knees. Were all these things the same? Did they threaten the good order of the cape, of me, of the world in the same way?

The following day, as if in penance, Harriet asked me to join her for a picnic at the point.

‘Please, Kate. I even had Mother make us currant buns. I've found lemon cordial and bread and cheese … the sun is out. Will you come?'

‘Well, I suppose we haven't been down there in a while …' I wanted to make her plead. It felt good to have her focus on me so completely again. Her attention made me alive.

‘Come on, I've made sure all the other children are busy – no one will follow us.'

I took her outstretched hand and ran with her, the satchel carrying our picnic lunch bumping between us.

The point was a knobby finger of rock that jutted out into the sea not far from the lighthouse. The cliffs hung over the rocks so that we had to walk a few bays further along the top and then clamber down and rock-hop back to the point. The rocks were jagged in some places, sticking up sharply so that we had to be careful not to twist our ankles as we stepped between them. The landscape changed then and gave way to huge boulders, orange lichen growing over them like onion skin, wedged in place, creating crevices, nooks, shady caves where we could sit and hide and while away an afternoon.

The adventure of the point was that you could only get all the way around when the tide was low; there was a deep gully that led back to a cave, and beyond it a sheer wall of rock. When the tide was in, the gully was awash with foamy water, surging and gurgling, sucking into the space and then rushing back out, fast and furious. If you got caught in it, you didn't stand a chance.

The width of the gully at the spot we crossed was only about four feet; two sure-footed hops across the backs of round rocks. As you approached the gully, if you knew it as we did, you could just make out a couple of indentations on the rock wall on the other side, enough space to get a toe in and be able to push yourself up and over the top, to the great expanse of the point, a long sloping slab of rock, smooth and always warm with the soaked-up sun.

Where the rock sloped into the water, it created a deep green pool. On a good day, when there was enough cloud so that there was no reflection and no wind to rumple the skin of the water, you could see all the way to the sandy bottom. Arrowed fish in triangles darted across the pool, and swathes of kelp swayed in and out with the current. Clustered along the tide line were the fat, black shapes of sea slugs, glistening as they waited for the water to come back up and cover them.

Crusting the sides of the pool, and scratching the backs of our legs as we dangled our feet in the water, were hundreds upon hundreds of barnacles, some striped, some a faded blue. We could lie on that sloping rock, protected in the lee of a ledge for hours upon hours. Counting the beats between sprays as the waves shlocked into the point, following with our fingers the seagulls wheeling and diving above our heads.

On this day, the tide was low, the gully easy, and as Harriet spread out our picnic lunch, I unlaced my boots, relishing the feel of the rock under the soles of my feet.

‘Lemon cordial must be the most delicious drink on this earth, don't you think?' Harriet said as she lifted the canteen to her lips, and wiped the drips from her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Sweet and sour and wonderful.'

I'd lain down with my chin resting on my arms so that the rock didn't chaff against my skin. ‘I dare say there are more delicious drinks, Harriet.'

She was attempting to engage me in one of my favourite games of the imagination. She did not care for them as much as I, but it warmed me that she would throw out a line for me to catch like this.

‘Consider if you will, the sparkling apple wine of the northern mountains of France,' I said, playing along.

‘The northern mountains of France, you say? And who taught you that, you ignorant girl! What about the molten chocolate drink of the Amazon, served with gold leaf and the native berries of the rainforest?'

I flipped over onto my back, feeling the delight in our banter fill my chest until I wanted to shout:
I've missed you, Harriet! I've missed you!
But I didn't, and instead I carried on our game, and we laughed and licked our lips as we described the strange concoctions of our minds.

We wrapped the remains of our picnic in the cloth and roamed along the shadowed cove where a little shaly beach had formed, made by layer upon layer of bleached shells.

I wandered back and forth on the little beach, searching for special shells, slowly pacing each step so that I would not miss a buried treasure. Those shells that caught my eye I stooped to examine, stretching out my finger to unearth the piece, checking to see if it was whole. If it pleased me, I would place it on a flat grey rock that sat up in the centre of the little beach. I liked to find a pattern to my collecting: a colour, a curve, a texture, a size.

While I was engaged in my task, Harriet sat cross-legged on the beach, smoothing a space in the shale in front of her with the side of her hand. She had made a little pile of round white shells, each about the size of a shilling. These were the doors of mollusc shells, a spiral etched on one side of them. She began to make a pattern with them, chatting away to me as she did so; I think we were discussing the wardrobe of Mr Eagleton, who had recently visited to check on the mechanics of the light, when Harriet gave away the deeper contents of her thoughts.

‘Do you suppose it's true what they say about McPhail?' she said, never lifting her eyes from the careful shape she was creating.

‘What who says?' I said, after a pause.

‘I overheard Mother and Father.' She twirled a white shell in her fingers. ‘They said he fell from grace, that he was engaged to marry, that his heart has been broken?'

‘Well, it makes a good story, doesn't it?' I traced back along the ground I hadn't covered yet. ‘I suspect that, as with any good story, there are elements of truth and the rest has been made up to suit the storyteller.'

‘But why would they make up a story like that?' Harriet seemed both perplexed and annoyed that the conversation hadn't been as neat as she anticipated.

I believed what I was saying, that there was a bitter space between the truth and the story that was told. I knew it in the way my parents sometimes answered my questions in a calm and measured manner when I knew full well they had been fighting about the very same thing only moments before. I knew it from how Harriet hedged and sighed her way around the change in herself, the way she'd been snagged on the thought of McPhail and the fact that she couldn't say it out loud.

‘I suppose there was some kind of fall from grace for him to be living out here,' I said. ‘I suppose there was money and women and brushes with danger and death. I suppose there was all of that because that's what happens in life.' I threw a broken shell to the side. ‘At least, that's what I suppose happens. It's hard to tell when one's life has been confined to this cape.'

Harriet said nothing, and I decided to probe a little further into her thoughts.

‘Why do you worry about the truth of McPhail's story, Harriet? It is no business of ours, surely, what lies in his past?'

There was a long silence from Harriet, and I counted the splash of the waves as they broke over the lip of rock:
one, two, three, four.

‘He is our neighbour, of sorts. I only think it's right to know the things that might help us better understand the man – that's all.'

‘Can I speak plainly, Harriet?'

‘You always do.'

I directed my words not at Harriet but out to sea, so that their impact might be tempered by the space between.

‘I think that you have become quite enamoured of the fisherman. I think that maybe you harbour feelings for him that you believe are not ones that you should.'

‘That's not true.' A brittle edge to her voice.

‘Do you love him?'

‘Love him?' Harriet's response came out in a rush. ‘Love him? How could I love him? He is at least fifteen years my senior. A fisherman! He lives in that tiny little hut and kills kangaroos with his bare hands – he is barely above a savage! Love the man – I think not.' Her face had gone a strange shade of pink, and her words fairly flew from her mouth.

‘If you say so,' I said, leaving it, for she had told me all I needed to know, and all I wondered now was why she was refusing to discuss the maelstrom of her true feelings with me.

I stood up then. The sounds of the waves hitting the rock seemed to be coming in a little faster and stronger. The surface of the pool was swirling with whitewater now, and the black sea slugs had all but vanished under the rising water.

‘Harriet, we have to go – the tide.' I scrambled to pack the pile of wrapped picnic things in the satchel, pulling my boots back on and shoving my shells deep into my pocket.

Although she was sulkily quiet after my interrogation, Harriet hastened after me, knowing full well that we would be stuck or face an arduous climb and trek to get back to the station before dark if we failed to cross the gully before the tide covered our path.

I heard the deep sloshing noise of the gully even before I peered over the edge. The surface of our rock was already submerged under two or three inches of water.

‘Quick, Harriet,' I called over my shoulder as I twisted around to shimmy down the rock face.

I propped myself on a ledge that remained clear of the water and waited for a break in the waves. Father had taught me that they usually came in sets, enough of a pattern that I knew I could expect a smaller wave every now and then. Harriet was panting behind me, and I knew that she wouldn't be confident crossing the gully and having to splash on to the slippery rocks.

‘Harriet, I'm going to go in the next break. The pull is strong and you'll need to move fast.' She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. ‘Move down to this ledge when I'm gone and wait for me to tell you when to go.' I reached up and squeezed her hand. ‘You'll be fine.'

The water was sucking out furiously now, and the tops of the rocks were just sticking up, glistening with water. I took a deep breath and leaped over to the first, my boot finding traction as I shifted my weight forwards and stepped on to the next rock. I knew my foot wouldn't hold – it was slipping across the wet surface – and I threw my arms out so that at least I would fall on to the rough rock of the gully's other side and not into the gushing water.

Harriet called my name, and I gritted my teeth as I hit the rock, my palms grazing across the barnacles and a sharp edge knocking my torso.

For a few seconds I was winded, but then I clambered to safety.

‘I'm alright,' I shouted, looking across the gully at Harriet.

All the colour had drained from her face, and she was shaking her head.

‘You can do it, Harriet!' I yelled. Now that I was across, a surge of excitement swept through me; my heart beat faster, and I felt wild with the proximity to danger, the risk. I laughed, and Harriet's eyebrows folded together in fear and frustration.

‘I can't jump as far as you,' she called, the sound hard to make out above the rushing water.

‘You can!'

My eyes flicked down to the mouth of the gully, the narrow opening where the water surged in and out, and I wondered whether a body would fit through that space and, if it did, how quickly it would be dragged under the forest of kelp and whether it would ever be found again.

‘Kate – now?' she asked.

I scanned the gully and out past the break to see what was coming. There was not going to be a better chance.

‘Go!' I shouted.