The Following (25 page)

Harry and Sonia had come to stay in the guest cottage two months after a visit to the Gawler Foundation. They’d changed their diet and learned meditation but miracles bypassed them. It was resolved that they would have the cottage for as long as they liked, for as long as was needed – past Christmas to Australia Day and longer if wanted. That was established between Harry and Sonia, and Tiger and Sylvia, whose children and grandchildren had diverted to Whistling Corner agreeably enough. Tiger’s cousin, Petra Sleight, and her husband, Arch, were due to take over at Crater Bay on the twenty-seventh, as arranged each year. If the stay was extended, Tiger would have it out with Petra.

B
IRDSONG GREETED THE MORNING
. ‘P
EACE
, perfect peace,’ said Sonia. The air was rinsed clean. Sunlight sparkled on water. The fires were beaten.

Sylvia brought in bush flowers, tidied the room, helped Sonia into fresh pyjamas after her shower and settled her into the big double bed. Tiger came in to see what he could do. There was nothing he could do, he said, where the comforts of women were concerned. As he turned to go Sonia rose from the bedclothes in a jolt of emotional energy, called him back, looped her arms around his neck and said, ‘You are a love, you know that.’

Harry could be heard from the house talking on the phone. ‘Why not?’ was his bullfrog refrain. It was unthinkable to Harry that an end was coming. Sonia’s conversations about funeral arrangements and matters left undone were conducted in a tone hardly different from how she planned garden beds and vegetable plantings. It was all so ordinary. That’s what sustained her. That’s what beat Harry.

He was a former state representative rugby player who’d maintained a bulk of around 110 kilos into his late fifties. A big eater and drinker, his anguish only seemed to double his intake. You wouldn’t want to meet him in a dim laneway on a dark night, even now. He might just take issue with your right to exist, especially now. His father had been a Belfast policeman who migrated to Armidale when Harry was seven, his mother a herring-gutter’s daughter from the Glasgow side. Traces of an Orangeman’s accent still came out in Harry when riled. The ghost of old rancours came to his aid through a caustic DNA. There was no milk of human kindness in it. But that was only the voice.

Harry spent the mornings talking to a clinic in Colorado about vitamin supplements, regimes of care coming by air-express across the Pacific at the last minute. ‘Something has to be done,’ he’d told the doctors when they told him nothing could be done. Sonia wanted Harry to sit quietly, to wait with her at this time, to be happy as best he could and not go about raging.

‘Happy?’ he said. A bleak smile was his answer. Sonia’s illness was an argument he would win by action and logic, according to a well-drawn plan. He’d always been a bluff, honest man, making honesty a virtue, now he was losing her. Every word Sonia spoke had the importance of words cut in stone. Nothing would ever be forgotten.

Towering as Harry’s emotions were, matched in all ways by his damaging physique and black-browed stare of challenge, he had something behind all that, or above it – a fine intelligence. His sobs of disappointment rang with understanding. The pair of them, Harry and Sonia, were breaking their hearts.

Sylvia said she wanted to say something to Harry, that his rages weren’t helping Sonia. Tiger said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and took Harry aside, urging him to come fishing, saying they could take a whole day on the water if they liked. Harry glared at him: those times were over. How could Tiger think he’d want to leave Sonia’s side, even for an hour?

‘Sonia’s not in her right mind. Sylvia’s spooked you. They seem to think there’s all the time in the world. Where’d women get that idea from? They dreamed it up.’

It was the last week of January, near the end of the school holidays, the time for packing and leaving.

Tiger Yeomans walked the bush tracks down to the beach. Wrens were in the banksias. His feelings were swamped by memories of counting the days before being condemned to return to school. They’d come every year since childhood. First with both parents and then alone with his father. His mother left at the divorce, the year Tiger failed his Jervis Bay exams. Sapper Boden disowned his own daughter in a judgemental fit – divorce, no, there was no choice in a bond, you died in harness, ‘It was all her confounding fault.’ He welcomed his son-in-law and grandson to make Crater Bay their dismal playground. The breach with Joan was healed, but in the will Sapper’s legacy leapfrogged his daughter’s generation and Crater Bay passed to Tiger and his cousin, Petra.

Tiger and a few others had their tinnies hauled up on the shell middens lumping the shoreline. Towards high water they made forays with lines and nets. As the tide flooded they came back with outboards racing and fish tubs kicking with flathead. In Tiger’s childhood it was canoes made from the belly tanks of mothballed bombers, now it was fibreglass mouldings and plastic extrusions. The bay’s tidal shallows warned off heavier boats crowding the reefs farther out, where the summer’s fad was ‘nuclear chicken’ – an expensive tackle spruiked on fishing shows, featuring impregnated plastic baits and hair-thin strands of line cast ahead of the angler. Tiger would have none of it, using a handline, mostly. It was time at his disposal that caught him the fish, not tackle. On that same principle he’d lived his life.

A wide expanse of bay drained at low tide, leaving visiting boats stranded, craft tilted on mud while families scoured the flats with plastic buckets collecting pippies. Crater Bay visitors rarely came any farther ashore than the Sapper Boden MC Memorial Toilet Block and Bush Track leading up to the public road at the top of the ridge. Tiger could feel the splashing kids’ mournfulness under their shrieks and yells. Next week they’d be roasting in February classrooms. The boy who mooched to the side and jabbed a stick in the sand with repetitive meaninglessness was the one Tiger always noticed. When the tide turned, families motored out through the low heads and were gone.

Tiger made out the din of snapper crunching shellfish as, something he’d heard himself instead of lifting it from
Early Days at Crater Bay
, penned by Sapper Boden and published by the Far South Coast Historical Society. The Sapper had written in there that ‘a veritable fishbowl Crater Bay was in former times’. Harry and Max had known that when they listened, and Tiger knew they knew. It gave him the disadvantage he so peculiarly needed, a mantle of cultivated failure against which his friends’ careers could be played out.

Tiger launched a kayak before sunrise, returning with breakfast most days. From the oyster lease to the western mangroves, the bay was a marine reserve. Tiger had the watery world to himself those mornings, gliding over the surface, looking down into the black frames where they best belonged, among deep glades of marine life autonomous in the bay.

Years ago they’d started as friends connected by residential college life, sporting clubs and the temporary relationships of a formative, carefree existence. Tiger and Max met first. It wasn’t doubted they’d be friends for life. Three of them were brilliant: Harry, Sonia and Sylvia won university medals but intellectual life was taken lightly. As president of the SRC, Max the country boy, the world his oyster, spent more time on junkets and study tours than was wise – Red China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, where the matching toasts were maotai, slivovitz, vodka, rum. If he’d had girlfriends whose affections were state-sponsored – what the hell. Back home he’d scored in debates where charm and footwork prevailed, but as a would-be scholar Max was never going to land better than a third. Come the homemade revolution, he was manhandled by pimpled Maoists in the Students’ Union and locked in a cupboard. Police were called to the university grounds, an unprecedented request, and Max made a speech thanking them. ‘Piss-up Petersen Kowtows to Cops,’ read the
Honi Soit
headline, finishing Max for student politics.

The party liked the look of him. Worker politics was in his family, the pub-owning Petersens.

With his third a badge of honour he’d started as a cadet journalist with the
Sydney Morning Herald
, rising to racing and industrial reporter, state parliamentary roundsman, habitué of Trades Hall where his instincts lay (were further aroused, more like) and he made a mark. A tradition of chili-hot curry lunches at the Malaya Restaurant in George Street saw promising young men of the journalistic persuasion drink a baker’s dozen of red ned with the formerly and would-be glorious of the party’s history-makers throughout the length of many a thirsty afternoon.

Max moved to rural papers but kept his party connections strong – strengthened them as a loner in National Party territory, in fact – Moree, Warren, Dubbo, Wagga Wagga, Orange – it
was
something in the blood. The rumour followed him – that he was Marcus Friendly’s natural son. Max always denied it. But how else explain the gifts showered on Max by that crippled old dog, Tim Atkinson, who was Friendly’s devoted apologist? First a motor car, then a foot in the door of PR. Expanding into magazines, later radio, Max made a fortune.

Tiger, from a Manuka office, for two decades edited Max’s brace of glossy giveaways for a lump sum per month –
Southern Beef
,
Feed Quarterly
,
Australasian Irrigator
and
Exhibition Poultry Breeder
. Max found the advertising, the ‘payola’, Tiger called it, biting the hand that fed him with so many words they provided antidote to not being taken over-seriously. Eventually Max sold up to a bunch who made him richer, settling on Tiger a worthy golden handshake. In parliament Max gave his occupation as publican – Petersen family pubs in the north-west, where he’d grown up, and the Parslow Arms on the river mouth near Crater Bay, justifying the swagger. When the oyster farm came up Max bought it.

Over the years the friendship circle was parlayed, deepened and celebrated over bags of oysters and laundry tubs of beer and wine between Max and Wendy, Harry and Sonia, Jake and Judith Try, with their attentive hosts, Tiger and Sylvia Yeomans, drawing the circle in.

C
RATER
B
AY SUMMERS AS RITUAL
, as escape, changed less than most routines, except those summers did grow hotter, more blustery, almost a white heat scabbing the skin and disallowing the friends’ children the honey tans deepening to chocolate black that they’d had in their own childhoods. Now, with their children’s children running not quite free, what sort of world was bequeathed? If only a balance point, a cresting, a breaking could be held. But the pattern was of giving, of almost breaking, and Sylvia wearing herself out. Sonia called Sylvia ‘Mother Teresa’, and Sylvia said, ‘All right,’ she would shrink to earn the name, to a small brown knob of a woman always on the go, in a striped wimple with a face creased by railway tracks.

Sylvia told Tiger that without him she would be nothing – that all the hours she spent with Sonia were possible because he was behind her. As to the likelihood of her collapsing, she said, ‘You’d love that darling, then I’m helpless in your arms.’

Tiger got on with trying to move the wheel of a monkey wrench with the ball of his thumb while hanging upside down over a Finsbury Pump, where he forgot what he was thinking, indeed that he was thinking at all.

No subject was taboo between the two women. They talked about the routine of the women of the burial society – washing her, wrapping her in burial cloths, placing her in the coffin stripped of jewellery, adornment. Sylvia promised to join the women in getting Sonia prepared. She would see her through. Each time she said goodnight she read Sonia the traveller’s prayer – ‘they came to a goodly camp’ and ‘preserve us from bandits and wild animals along the way’. Harry listened from the doorway, his chest heaving, wiping his dripping nose with the back of his hand. They had an agreement, a pledge. Sylvia bore witness to its vow, namely, that their wedding rings would go into the grave with them, worn on the ring finger in the dark earth imperishably.

F
OR MONTHS IT HAD BEEN
a calendar flipping over, now it was a clock. Only disbelief in the possibility of an end allowed Harry to go on. Harry and Sonia chose the photographs for the ceremony, selected the music, the musicians, the names of eulogists, arranged adjoining burial plots. With the obedience of a ventriloquist’s dummy Harry found the power of speech to express his agreement: Sonia’s body would be prepared for burial according to established rites, Sylvia to sort them out. After that, non-denominational. Sonia’s upbringing in a Jewish household had hardly touched Harry, despite her sisters in Canberra producing a yarmulke for him to wear at Friday night dinners where Sonia watched the candles from between her fingers like a bashful child, daring a splinter of some sort of glory. Harry said that a man these days was always giving his wife over to the ministrations of women, and these rituals at his sister-in-law’s house were hardly an exception. He could still not quite comprehend the colossal act of love on Sonia’s part to accept their burial together and not be taken where the rest of her family was, the Jewish section of a vast urban necropolis.

The chosen plot was in Windy Point Cemetery, a rural coastal graveyard south of Crater Bay, hard up against the sea and romantically wild. Sonia was to await Harry within sound of a thumping surf cleaving the crumbling coastline like an axe. Two plots were secured by Max against the reluctance of those who kept Windy Point for the few. One of the keepers was Tiger Yeomans, who argued that such old friends were family, while resenting the arrangement in a part of himself he did not show. Were his friends to crowd him even in death? It was perhaps the unworthiest thought he’d ever had, with only the virtue of being kept in, even from Sylvia.

Sylvia sat with Sonia after their times of meditation, whispering old gossip, Sylvia stroking Sonia’s bare, bristly head, wearing Sonia’s wig and looking at herself in the mirror, the foxie dog, Dart, grinning from the duvet. You could believe in eternity the way they found time for this tomfoolery. It was eternity’s gift, you might think, just the two of them – laughing – far out to the edge of the stars they would sit (if they could), no time greater than now. There was a lighthouse down past Windy Point, and Sonia looked in that direction with an expression of resignation, even of yearning. Long flash, group of two, eight seconds of darkness. Long flash, group of two, eight seconds of darkness.