The Break (18 page)

After a little while, after his Mac had made the whirring sounds of shutdown, Sam went to bed. At least tomorrow wasn't going to be a totally boring school day — they were going to the surfing carnival in the afternoon, and a couple of the guys from his class were competing. They were the same guys who always got picked for interschool sports, all-round legends.

The house was quiet, apart from someone moving about in the kitchen. Mike hadn't been around much in the last
couple of days, and at dinner his dad had hardly said a thing.

Dejected, Sam pushed himself deep into his bedclothes, and drifted away to a dreamless night.

That morning, Sam flew out of the kitchen, bleary-eyed, barely having touched his toast.
Can't be late, Mum!

That morning, Ferg felt dreadful. He'd been up so late, wandering, suffering in a way that is only possible to do at night. Eventually, he'd conked out on the sofa, pulling all Liza's cushions on top of himself to keep warm.

Leaning against the kitchen benchtop, he dropped two teabags into his huge mug, and flicked the switch on the kettle. And closed his eyes again.

That morning, Mike stood under the shower for a long time. He went through much of the bar of soap Liza had left in there and even cracked the shampoo. Once dry, his skin pulled inwards, pulled tight, as though even it was shocked by this new order. Then he sat on his bed again, unsure of what to do next.

That morning, when she got back from the school run, Liza peered into her crusty old gardening gloves, blew fiercely, then quickly pulled her face away in case a spider (redback, white-tipped, ordinary garden variety) should come bowling out. She was looking forward to a day of getting stuck into it, a productive day, hopefully, at the end of which she could look over the orchard and see her effort, feel her body's weariness, her skin beating from the sun.

That morning, Pip sat by the plum tree with a Joanna Trollope in her hands, looking over at Liza occasionally. She was more than a little unsettled by the goings-on around the place recently. You could use a knife, she thought unhappily. Ferg had hardly been at home and, when he was, he'd swear at the smallest things. He didn't talk to Liza, ignored the fact that she was cooking specially for him: lamb roast, cannelloni with ricotta, pear crumble. He stayed up late, staring furiously at the TV, and she heard him go to work at five-thirty most mornings. As soon as he'd left the house Pip would sneak into the kitchen for her first cup of tea. She'd been awake for an hour by then. Mike was a different kettle of fish, unpredictable, fickle. Especially, of course, when he'd got caught up in drugs and all sorts. They were grinding years for all of them. Jack took it so hard, tried so hard to pull Mike out of it. But it got messy, and Jack stopped talking to her about it altogether. Went quiet. And then he was dead. What would he have thought of this? What would he say to the son who pulled himself away from his family till they barely knew him? Whose marriage split up without any of them knowing there was even a problem? And to the other son, who bitterly went about his dead father's business, who loved his wife and his boy but found angry solace in his work? Pip looked at Liza, skin shining with heat. She was a loyal woman, Pip thought. She'd had some tough times, she could be difficult, but she wasn't going anywhere in all this. That, Pip and Jack had always known.

It was relationships, the quality of them, that mattered. That was all that mattered.

The long morning stretched ahead.

The classmates slopped with the ocean on neon boards, a huge waterbed that wouldn't settle. The sounds of the sea were in their ears. The carnival was a perfect chance to bring their passion into the school day, and they caught waves and watched for swell out the back, the odd jibe thrown over the shoulder just as they took off. Beneath their fingers were lumps of sand-freckled wax that their toes dug into when they crouched and stood up. Their wrinkled fingertips were a surfer's universal clock.

One of the girls was on a nice right when the earth swelled and burst on shore. She must have heard something — a cracking? a cry? — for she looked over to where her friends and teachers sat, but there was only a puff of white dust where they'd been, and she scanned the coast either side, in case she'd become disorientated, but there was nothing, no one. She turned back to the others, questioning.

The phone was ringing. Rosie, home from an afternoon shift at the hotel, heard it from the driveway as she pulled in. She heard it as she quickly crunched over the gravel from the car; as she tried to slot the key in the front door (
upside down!, c'mon
); as she came into the house.

No one was out there, despite the lines of swell coming in. Perfect conditions, she thought vaguely.

That phone call had a persistence about it. It rang and rang and the noise filled the house, and as Rosie finally reached it, and spoke, and heard, the ringing grew all around, grew to a colossal stillness, and then came a distant chorus of sirens bawling.

In town, someone ran to the row of three phone boxes outside the tourist bureau, while Commodore and LandCruiser and Kingswood engines shuddered into strange life. People stood in the middle of the street, as if awaiting an announcement, a car with a loudspeaker,
something
.

Silence settled heavily as limestone dust rose and hung, suspended over the beach, over that sheltered bay.

At the end of the afternoon, when the sky had the colours of orchard fruit in it, and Pip had gone inside to watch
The Price is Right
, Liza pulled a handful of new raspberries from protesting brambles, and walked down to the river. To hear its clean splashy sounds, to get close to Sam's spot (Sam hadn't been dropped home from school yet, she noticed, probably devising science fiction plots with Jarrad), and to just enjoy her own company, her own hard day, for a few moments. Ferg would be back from the trees in an hour or so.

At a narrow section in the river she slipped her way over rocks and branches to the thick natural forest of the other side, one of the few belts of original Margaret River forest remaining. The sun had already retracted from deep in there, and Liza felt the strength of the giants around her, as evening came down, a show about to begin.

Liza went right in, to feel the last of it, the last of that place on that day in September. She pushed through ferns and the thorny tentacles of bush creepers into the greying heart of the place. In the west, treetops scuffled with the wind.

If she'd been at the ocean, Liza would have seen it like the wind coming in from the horizon, turning the glassy water choppy and dark. Here, in the forest, she could hear the wind long before she could see it. It sheeted over the most distant trees, coming like a thundercloud on a blue day.

The sound of a big wind gaining across the green, coming towards her. A fire, of wind.

It came until she thought it couldn't be any bigger, that sound. Leaves and branches started up around Liza like crazed conductors, gathering force until, eyes down in fear, she pressed herself against the nearest trunk, some kind of shelter against the tree-spears crashing down around her. Widow-makers, Jack used to call them, she remembered now wildly. Foresters found pinned like ants to the ground, axe a few metres away.

It came heaving across the canopy, until Liza thought it couldn't come anymore. That sound, that wind. That breath.

 

 

 

Sudden energy invades the marri like a current. Its canopy swings and swipes, spraying leaves and conkers, hard nubs of its bloody sap, over the empty house. Then it stops, just like that.

Not far away, in the forest beside the river, a woman stands frozen beside a tree, her heart full of fear.

Liza ran. Ran and ran. At the bottom of the loose-stoned driveway, she bent double and sucked air across her stick-dry throat.

Behind her, across the river, the forest was still, as if nothing had happened just a few moments ago, as if a spiral of wind had never even tousled the leaves of the trees there, as if branches had not speared down around her amid a wind that gathered force like a cyclone.

As if this were the eye.

Liza peered through the bush at the highway, waiting for Jarrad's mum's car, or Ferg in the truck, or someone. Instead, she heard the guts of an urgent vehicle as it changed down for more speed up the long sloping hill past their place. It passed her like the movement of clouds in a storm sky.

A siren smudged past. The doctor's car. The volunteer SES truck, with all the guys in it.

Liza shrank back, turned to the farmhouse.

Rosie ran down the long hill towards the Edge Point carpark in lunging strides, sandals nearly flying off. Her breath came up at her in primitive sounds with each thump of her feet on the road.

Greeting her was the ocean's lapping rhythm. She leaned hard against the Koppers logs, scanned Hut's Beach below. Nothing. She looked for it, but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Just the limestone cliff walls and sand, and water. She headed down the steps, small birds swooping in front of her, saltbush reaching for her legs. Ten metres down, she saw a huddle of jumbled colours, people close together. And something in that view had changed — as if the sky itself could change — a whole part of the limestone cliff had collapsed on to the beach, given up, given itself up to the repeating water. A mass of cream rock lay heavy where the entrance to the local cave was.

Was
.

Toy people were crawling on top of the pile, pulling the pieces away. Others were sitting further away, arms clutched about their knees.

A woman came scrambling up the impossible path, calling out to God. She made it to the top, to Rosie standing with nothing, no way of helping.

The measured wailing crept closer, it couldn't be far away now. Together they turned and looked over at the town, to the winding road over the tiny bridge, and waited.

He still had sight of the sea, cool-burning in him. But it had gone blue-black like the turning sky at night, just as the stars come over that impossible horizon. And the stars were here, he saw their clear brightness, their endless possibilities and promises and connections. A whole sky of stars, there were so many, everyone could have a whole skyful to themselves and there would still be plenty left for others, because the sky never ended, it had no edges, it was wider than anything comprehensible, wider than Sam and Margaret River and Western Australia, wider than your imagination, wider than existence itself.

Sam saw them, could almost reach out and touch them: the marri, the falcon and the fish, the river and the rockpools and sand dunes, the wind, and his family who moved among them all, took comfort from them, together, now, together in his perfect, dusty vision.

By the time Liza and Ferg got there, by the time Cray had driven past on the way home from work and seen the commotion, by the time the first news crew had arrived from the network in Colburn, most of what would happen had already happened.

A local bloke took his bulldozer out there, scooping up the slumped cliff that the town knew so well. This was where they walked with their kids after school, boards and towels and bathers in tow. Where the young ones stood wobbly on foamies before they graduated to fibreglass on the rivermouth, before they could even imagine the churning water of Edge Point, Surge Point. Where families parked their bums between swims, cooled by the shadow of the cave.

Which now buried some of them. Under a limey, dusty, suffocating mantle.

Eventually, floodlights, silvery-white and dazzling, were attached to the wreckage, glaring on the moving hardhats and orange boilersuits of the rescue crew.

Rosie and Cray were filling dozens of mugs and cups and bowls with tea in the carpark on a flimsy card table they'd set up, with a few other helpers. A woman spooned sugar into each mug. She put the sugarbowl down after a while, hands splayed on the tabletop, quietly gasping. Someone put an arm around her shoulder.

The generators below hammered. At least a hundred people were gathered in the carpark now; more paced the road, tried to avoid the fleet of ambulances, tried to keep upright. There was calling out, people were comforted, others
faded. Cray moved about with the hot drinks. Rosie picked up two mugs and walked towards Liza and her husband.

She stood next to them until they noticed her. Liza was shuddering, but smiled quickly, bluely, when she saw Rosie. She took the mugs, passed one to Ferg, whispering to him. He didn't make eye contact with either of them. His eyes had the looseness of no focus, but he kept them turned to the cliff site, to the activity.

Rosie wanted to grab Liza's arm and ask,
Where's Sam?
, as if it mightn't be a possibility. As if he might be at home, or at a friend's place, or somewhere else. As it was, it was difficult to tell whether people were there for their own or for others; if their oldest friend's husband had been found, dusty and misshapen, among the rocks, and ferried to a sirenless ambulance, or if they were waiting to see the face, the favourite jacket, the honey hair of someone who hadn't come home yet.

The tonelessness of Ferg's face was Rosie's answer.

She turned her head back to the hill of houses and bush behind them, the mixture of fibro shacks and holiday homes, wooden cottages and oddly designed mansions, each empty, evening verandahs unattended, all with their lights on and front doors swinging open.

‘I didn't sign the letter from the school,' Liza said suddenly. ‘I found it in the kitchen this afternoon, so Sam can't be here. We didn't sign it — we didn't give our permission. He isn't here. He'll be with Jarrad.' She clicked her tongue, turned to Rosie. ‘Those two, you know.'