The Reef (2 page)

She turned and saw she was being propelled forward by a strange man dressed all in black rubber from his head to his big flippers. Only his frightened white face showed. He was saying something. All she could hear was the ocean surging against the rocks. Then hands pulled her out onto the rocks and the strange sea man clambered after her, stumbling in his big, flippered feet.

‘We got her!' And she was lifted and the man who had been standing on the rocks began carrying her back to the beach in staggering slipping haste.

Jennifer struggled, the enormity of what had happened slowly dawning. ‘Where's my daddy? Where's Teddy? I want Teddy!'

There were people all around now but the man wouldn't let her go as he clutched her face to his shirt, shouting towards the beach, ‘Is he all right? Where's the boy?' And then her father was lying in the sand, sodden without his hat or his sandals. But he turned and sat up, coughing and rubbing his face. The stranger lowered her to the sand and she ran to her father.

‘Daddy . . .'

He clutched her, making strange crying noises Jennifer had never heard before.

She rubbed her hand over his wet hair. ‘Don't cry, Daddy.' He held on to her, clinging to her as
people stood around staring at them. Awkwardly, she turned around, calling, ‘Teddy . . . Teddy . . . where's Teddy?'

People were grabbing at her again, pulling her away from her father, helping him to stand, leading him away from the beach. Jennifer wrenched her hand from the stranger's grasp and ran back towards the rocks calling, ‘Teddy . . . Where are you, Teddy?'

They caught and forcibly carried her away as she kicked her legs and began howling, ‘I want Teddy.'

‘It's her brother,' she heard someone say.

And then there was a siren and more people and she was put in a car.

They were in a doctor's room. Jennifer was sitting on the edge of a flat hard bed, a lady dabbing at scratches along her legs. She had tears running down her cheeks and Jennifer wondered why she was crying. It was
her
scratched legs that stung.

She was led outside and was shocked to see her mother slumped in a chair, her arms wrapped around her body, her head bowed, her shoulders heaving from the sobs that racked her body. Her father was standing beside her, a blanket over his damp shoulders. His face looked grey and ill. Jennifer ran to him but he moved her away. ‘Go to your mother.'

Jennifer was frightened to see her mother like this. ‘Is Mummy sick?'

Her mother reached out, her eyes squeezed shut, an arm blindly pawing the air as if to retrieve the hour before when her family was intact. ‘Jennifer . . .' Her voice was harsh, hoarse, and Jennifer took a step backwards, fearful she had done something wrong.

‘The mother's had an injection, better give a sedative to the father. The people next door have offered to keep the girl till . . . they find him,' someone said.

A great pain shot through Jennifer, burning the soles of her feet as it roared all the way up her small body to the top of her head, and she heard again the raging cry of the ocean on the rocks. She knew Teddy was still out there, wrenched from her. ‘Teddy!' she screamed.

They held her flailing limbs as she fought to get away. ‘I want to go . . . I want to go with Teddy.' The thought he was in that beautiful blue world beneath the sea broke her heart. They'd always done everything together.

The nurse knelt beside her. ‘Your brother, Teddy, he's gone to heaven, sweetie. He's with the angels . . .' she said, her face still wet from crying.

Jennifer stared at the woman, her shouts subsiding and replaced with a hard disdainful expression. ‘Teddy isn't with the angels. He's with the fish.'

She was bustled away. They went back home. Days blurred. Her mother stayed in bed and if she was awake she cried or lay there staring at the wall, saying nothing. Her father was a shadow.

Aunty Vi, Christina's sister-in-law, who had arrived from Sydney, cooked and cleaned, and strangers came and went. Her father stayed out on the farm from daylight until after dark, when he ate and slept in the sleep-out on the verandah. But Jennifer knew he wasn't working on the farm. She saw him wandering aimlessly, or just sitting, or leaning on a fence.

Eventually Aunty Vi's husband Don, Christina's brother, joined them and talked to her father.

Then they were alone. Just the three of them. Her mother moved around the house and yard doing what she'd always done. But her steps were slow, her movements lethargic, her face drawn and sad. She rarely looked anyone in the eye, avoiding contact. Especially with her father. She brushed Jennifer's hair, put meals on the table and washed clothes, but she didn't read her a story and didn't tuck her into bed. Jennifer quietly slipped between the sheets and hugged Teddy's favourite knitted turtle and pushed her face into the pillows so no one heard her sobs of loneliness.

One afternoon she came unexpectedly into the kitchen and found her father standing by the stove, his hat on the floor, his arms hanging by his sides, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. Her mother was pummelling him, swinging her clenched fists at his chest as he stood and made no move to avoid her wild attack. There was a look
of pain on his face, but it was not from the blows flung by his desperate wife.

Christina was shrieking, ‘Damn you to hell! You killed him! You killed him! You took my boy from me. I hate you, hate you, hate you . . .'

Jennifer wanted to stop her mother hitting her father like that, but she turned and ran and ran until her legs wouldn't hold her up any more. Then she lay on the ground and hit the earth like she'd seen her mother flail at her father. She wanted her brother Teddy back. She wanted everything to be as it had been before.

That night her father came and sat in the dark on the edge of her bed. He smoothed her hair and brushed his hand along her cheek. ‘Don't cry, Jen . . . if I could change it all I would. I will never forgive myself. But you mustn't be so sad. You will grow up and be a beautiful princess and live in a castle and be happy.'

‘With Teddy?' she sniffed.

‘No, Jennifer, you won't see Teddy for a long, long time.'

‘Will you and Mummy come to my castle?'

‘No. I'm going away, Jen . . . I mightn't see you for a long time. So you must be a good girl . . .' His voice made a funny noise in his throat and he stopped speaking.

They stayed silent in the quiet dark for a few minutes. ‘Are you going to see Teddy?' whispered Jennifer. She knew there was something secret, to be kept from her mother, in this talk.

Her father squeezed her hand, lightly touched
her hair, then bent and kissed her cheek. ‘Sweet dreams, little princess.'

She didn't see her father again. She was never completely sure what happened. When she was a teenager she found a tightly folded newspaper article in the back of her mother's photo album that she kept in a drawer in her bedroom. It was not a big article, but it recounted the facts in a dry and impersonal voice. A small aluminium dinghy had been found floating, abandoned off a beach. A fisherman was missing. Conditions had been calm that night. Police were investigating as the man's clothes were found neatly folded on the shore. There was no evidence of foul play. Eighteen months before, the man's son had drowned off the same beach.

She replaced the newspaper cutting, instinctively knowing she could not discuss this with her mother. Christina refused to talk about her father or her brother. If Jennifer mentioned them, her mother's face tightened in pain and she turned away. But Jennifer longed to talk about her brother and her father. It made them seem close and she was frightened she might forget them if she didn't. So she chatted to her brother as if he were playing beside her, and put her father first in her prayers.

Christina had agonised over selling the farm after what became known as ‘the accident' but, after
struggling for a year with neighbours' help to run it, she could see it was not going to be a viable financial proposition. The place was lonely, filled with family memories. She had only Jennifer as company. The local men who helped out were tired, preoccupied with tractor breakdowns, lack of rain or cattle feed. Their wives had full and busy lives. Christina didn't drive and a trip to town on the bus or a lift with neighbours was a rare treat. Conversation with her daughter centred around Jennifer's interests. During the day the radio programs only made Christina realise how out of touch she was. Evenings passed in the company of American TV sitcoms.

Jennifer would always recall that year on the farm after the accident as one of freedom. Her mother told her she'd have to entertain herself. So the little girl's world expanded into one of selfdiscovery and adventure. There was no Daddy or big brother to protect her, but neither was there anyone to divert her attention to activities they thought she should be doing. Instead, her eyes and enquiring mind found all manner of fascinating things: plants, small creatures, birds and the unexplored bush ‘out there'. She would squat, oblivious to anything around her, unaware of time passing, as she watched a procession of ants carry their load home to the nest, a caterpillar scallop the edge of a leaf in silent bites, or a bird feed her young.

It was a time that opened her eyes to a different world. A world that existed within hers, yet
was separate. The world of nature; of plants and animals, their dependence on their environment, their survival tactics, their devotion to protecting and propagating their species. Gradually she didn't feel so alone. As well as the cattle, the dogs, the big paddocks and the distant dam, there was another world teeming with life at her back door.

It was on one of her expeditions where she walked or sat with eyes focused on the ground that she found the shell. A bandicoot had dug a hole around the roots of a tree and she glimpsed something pale stuck in the soil. She pulled out what she thought was a rock but as she turned it over in her hand she saw the unmistakable shape of a shell. It was so embedded in the rock that it was part of the limestone. She traced the ridges of the shell with a fingertip, and there in the heat of the paddock, beneath a chortling magpie in a gum tree, she heard, faintly, then in an engulfing wave, the sound of the sea. She closed her eyes, clenching the fossil in her fist as she remembered the smell of salt air, the clean breeze on her cheek and the rhythm of the ocean came back to her. She took the shell home, washed it and put it in the shoe box that held her special treasures.

When Jennifer drifted out of the house and was gone for hours her mother thought she was wasting time and shirking chores and schoolwork. When she came back and was asked what she'd been doing, she answered vaguely, ‘Nuffing.'

She was forbidden from going near the dam, though it was so low and muddy it would not have
reached her shoulders. She heard in her mother's voice and saw in her eyes an implied fear and danger associated with any stretch of water.

And then one night as Jennifer stood at the sink doing the washing up, her mother came and picked up a tea towel and began to dry the dishes, which were normally left to drain.

‘I have something to tell you.' She pushed a fistful of cloth into a glass and twisted it. ‘Ever since . . . the accident . . . it's been very hard to run this farm on my own.'

‘I help! And Mr Allen next door comes in and does things for you, Mum.'

‘I know. But it's not enough. I have to think about the future. So, Jennifer, I've sold this place –'

‘But this is
our
farm.
Our
home . . .' Tears welled in her eyes and she turned a stricken face to her mother, her hands grasping a plate in the soapy water.

Her mother kept her eyes down, concentrating on polishing the glass. ‘It's for the best,' she said meekly. She knew this would shock her daughter. This farm was all she'd ever known.

‘Where will we go?' Jennifer burst into tears.

Her mother put the glass and tea towel to one side and smoothed a strand of pale blonde hair back from her young daughter's teary cheek. ‘Come and sit down. I'll make you a glass of Milo. We're moving into town. You'll like it. You'll have friends close by, be able to go to the pictures, walk to school.'

‘I don't want to leave here.'

‘Well, we're going and that's all there is to it.'
Christina was finding the whole idea difficult enough and she'd hoped Jennifer would see this as a big adventure. ‘I have to think about our future. Your father left us without anything to fall back on, the farm isn't doing well . . .'

‘Dad loved our farm. He wouldn't take me away.'

‘Well he's not here, is he.' Her mother's patience snapped. ‘I have to go out and get a job, for God's sake! A paying job. Heaven knows what. I'll probably end up cleaning people's houses or work in a shop. Just to put you through school.'

‘I don't want to go to school. I want to stay here!' Jennifer ran to her room and slammed the door shut.

‘Don't make this more difficult than it is,' Christina called after her.

The subject wasn't discussed again. Numbly, Jennifer watched as her mother packed up their possessions and walked around with the auctioneer, who was selling off items not included in the sale of the farm. She remained withdrawn and sad as events began to move more quickly. It wasn't until their neighbour Mr Allen appeared with his truck and tied her father's dogs in the back that Jennifer let out an anguished cry and ran at him and pulled his shirt sleeve, jumping up to reach the dogs.

‘No, Mr Allen. Bluey and Charlie have to stay with us. They're Daddy's.'

‘Jenny, love, you can't take dogs to live in town. Not where your mum is going. Besides, they're working dogs. They need lots of space. Mrs A and I will look after them real good.' Jennifer looked wildly around at the piles of boxes filled with clothes and kitchen utensils, the empty shed, the farm equipment and household items spread around to be auctioned. It seemed to the young girl that her whole life was being packed up, taken away, given away or sold.