Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (10 page)

As he had sat on the cross-pole earlier on this hot Christmas Day, watching his mother and his favourite uncle laughing and diving about from sunlight to shade, making fools of themselves by playing at being brother and sister and enthusiastically photographing the stockman from every possible angle, it had been as though confirmation of his old dread had suddenly speared his heart and caught him gasping and unprepared. He had watched Robert Crofts' light brown hair falling in straight square tufts onto the newly cleared ground and he had felt afraid of life. But this time he knew his fear was real. The old fear had flourished mysteriously alongside unqualified love. This one would not do that. He could not imagine how he might ever manage to scramble back into the protected and secure position he had once occupied, either with his mother or with his sister. It was no longer enough simply for him to be the youngest.

As his father was finishing the stockman's haircut, and before he had time to consider what he was doing, Alistair had jumped down from his perch and said, ‘Do mine too!' It was a brave gesture, the bravest he had ever made, almost a bid for adulthood—for he honestly believed the youngest boys fighting in Springtown tomorrow night would be between eleven and twelve, around his own age, and that there was therefore no reason why he should not be included among them.

But his timing was wrong. He should have put in his bid earlier. The haircut scene was finished. The climax had passed, and he had not been a part of it. They had not been about to re-run it for his sake. The momentum of their enthusiasm was carrying them elsewhere. As she had jumped down and run past him Janet had said, ‘God you're an idiot, Ali,' as if she understood all that had been going on within him, and more: as if she possessed a certain knowledge which shielded her from his need to suffer. His mother had smiled, turning away, and said, ‘Don't be silly, darling. Go and get your things.' It had seemed to him then that she begrudged even this small distraction from her pleasure. And Gil had been too busy rubbing Crofts' prickly scalp to have even heard.

And from his father he had long ago learned that silence was the best response he might hope for. At the level of ordinary communication they had never really existed for each other. There was a wall there so impenetrable that Alistair took its existence as an imposition of nature—the possibility that he might get through it to a more articulate relation with his father had never crossed his mind. His father lived out a series of great silences, punctuated either by inexplicable outbursts of arbitrary anger, or else by brief periods of interest and encouragement. That was the way his father was. Alistair had evolved strategies for dealing with it. It was not, for him, something unnatural . . . They had all gone off to get their things, laughing and shouting, leaving him standing by the anvil. He had watched them going away from him. It was simple: before the arrival of Crofts everything had been all right; since his arrival it had all gone bad. Alistair blamed the stockman exclusively for the loss of his happiness. And, without needing to think about it, he accepted that this is what his father would have done.

•

Now, below them under the water, he swam slowly, circling the thrashing arms and legs, keeping well clear of their dangerous thrusts and grapplings. Momentarily distracted by the explosion of bubbles downstream as his mother dived in, Alistair's attention returned to the straining limbs of the wrestlers. With rising excitement he watched Gil begin to get the upper hand as they slid down the silt bank, scrabbling frantically for a hold while the sand caved in under their weight and drew them deeper.

Gazing through the tiny agitated particles suspended in the sunlit water, Alistair found himself looking directly into the eyes of the stockman as Gil held him under. The seconds passed and he saw the panic contort Crofts' features. He and the stockman gazed at each other through the intervening metres of water. As if he were illicitly observing a private and slightly perverse act Alistair was overcome by an uneasy mixture of guilt and fascination. He was unable to conceal his enjoyment at the sight of Crofts' features twisting convulsively as he fought against the desire to breathe. The hard bones of the stockman's skull where the hair had been freshly shorn away gleamed in the broken shafts of sunlight, and from the shadows of his eye sockets his gaze remained fixed on Alistair. Something physical seemed to pass through the dense medium of the water between them; the boy felt Crofts' hatred touch him. Alistair turned sharply and kicked himself upwards, thrusting with all his strength towards the safety of the sunlight above.

Crofts broke the surface gasping for air. He swam a couple of frantic strokes before realising that Gil had dived away from him. Breathing heavily he let himself go with the current down towards the outlet, and gazed across the agitated surface to where Gil was playing whales, spouting mouthfuls of water into the air and laughing as he celebrated his victory, his mood at once good-natured again. Alistair bobbed in the water beside his uncle. At the far side of the waterhole, on the high basalt-capped cliff behind them, Janet appeared. Crofts watched her as she stood poised on a projecting lip of rock several metres above the creek. She waved casually then dived, her body curving gracefully through the air for a moment before plunging cleanly into the still green depths beneath the scoured base of the cliff. Gil turned and saw her a split-second before she entered the water.

‘See who can swallow dive!' he yelled enthusiastically, daring them all to go one better, caught up completely that instant in the new game. He struck out for the cliff. ‘Race youse all to the top!'

Crofts watched the three of them swimming away from him towards the base of the cliff and he allowed the quickening current to take him towards the outlet of the hole. Here the water flowed silently between huge flood-burnished blocks of white sandstone which lay about in a maze of destruction, like the toppled remains of a monumental civilisation. He began to assist the current, flicking his arms and legs in short jerky movements as he rounded the projecting shoulder of one of the blocks, at once out of sight of the pool. He breathed deeply, expanding his lungs to their fullest and curving his body luxuriously against the calming flow of the water.

Floating slowly on his back between rising walls of fine-grained white sandstone the stockman stared up at the sky. The creek flowing around these fallen masses had sculpted them over the millennia into gloriously sensual troughs and bowls, from the edges of which brilliant green water-weed slewed lazily from side to side in the glassy current. The pale blue and white limbs of the river gums arched over the creek more than fifty metres above its banks, and high in the air beyond them a wedge-tailed eagle passed across the stockman's view. He watched it until it was out of sight, waiting for it to reappear in its circlings, and the water bumped him gently over the polished lip of an embedded boulder and slid him into a steep and narrow conduit.

Ida Rankin was lying at the base of this conduit holding herself in the cascade by hanging on to a branch of flood debris which had been jammed in the rocks and was sticking up in the sheeting water like a periscope. She was enjoying resisting the current, exhilarated by its powerful thrust against her body. No more than a metre below her the cascade broke in an explosive shower of spray against a protruding bar of serrated quartzite that had withstood the erosion better than the softer sandstone in which it was embedded. The air down here was filled with a fine mist that was gently saturating the sun-warmed rocks, so that a thin steam dissolved from them into the still air of the afternoon.

Startled by the stockman's yell Ida looked up to see him sliding helplessly down the chute towards her. She tightened her grip on the branch and instinctively ducked her head to one side as he grabbed at her desperately, covering her hands with his as his body thumped heavily against her. For a moment he clung to her in the rushing water, cupped on either side by the concave walls of the narrow chute, the current forcing their bodies together. Then he let go. As he slid past she grabbed for him uselessly, turning in time to see his outstretched feet strike against the raised bar. Half standing, he tried to turn and gain his balance, crouching unsteadily against the rush of the water. ‘Sorry, Mrs Rankin!' he called, poised precariously in mid-stream. The water shooting over his knees formed a seething wave against his thighs and the sharp serrations of the quartzite were cutting into the soles of his feet, making him grimace with the sudden pain.

She climbed out quickly and reached towards him. ‘Give me your hand.' Steadying herself against the rock face she leaned out over the water to him. ‘Come on!' she shouted sternly when he hesitated. ‘You wouldn't want to go over on your back on that quartz.' He took her hand and stepped shakily across to the wide ledge on which she was standing.

‘Thanks, Mrs Rankin.'

As she pulled him towards her, and then as he stepped in close to her, she felt an irresistible impulse to clasp the stockman's glistening flanks. But she hesitated just a fraction of a second and their awkwardness was at once acute. It was the tone of his voice that made her hesitate. ‘Thanks, Mrs Rankin'—it echoed in her mind, the sounds chiming together. ‘Sorry, Mrs Rankin', ‘Thanks, Mrs Rankin' . . . There had been a slight delay, then she had registered it, that stupid flatness, as if he were referring to an organisation—Thanks, Rotary Club—or to something equally inert!

She realised she was blushing. She moved to the back of the ledge and ran her hand across the rough surface of the rock, aggressively swiping aside a trembling spider and its web. She felt frustrated that reality should be such a difficult business. If there was ever an awkwardness in daydreams, it was only so that a deeper ease might be revealed. She glanced at him wonderingly; was that a possibility?

‘I should have been watching what I was doing,' he said, as if he expected her to reprimand him.

She observed him glumly. She was angry with him, with herself, with the frigidity of the situation. What if she were to say to him, You look like Tarzan but you behave like Pluto. Would it make any sense to him? Or would he just say sorry and try to adjust? She felt cheated. A moment ago she had been feeling quite like a young girl again; the exhilaration of the sudden action had aroused in her a warm sensation of heightened physicalness. Every nerve was tingling and alert—ready for more! She had been on the point of enthusiasm! Her feelings had been completely unreserved towards him. For an instant it had seemed that all the ordinary, difficult preliminaries of getting to know each other on a more intimate level had been dispensed with. She had felt convinced, just for that moment, that they had—with no need for further words—abandoned their more formal relationship and welcomed in its place something much more interesting.

And she had been about to act on that perception when his impersonal tone had checked her. She watched him examining his injured feet and she said nothing, unable to bring herself to offer him her formal sympathies. The muscular embrace of his cool hard body as they had rolled about together in the cascading water was still with her. Her brain danced with contradictions, accusing her of stupidity for all those daydreams—those freely indulged, voyeuristic and sensual imaginings! Nothing definite, to be sure, no conclusive realisations, everything vague and more or less suggestive. But there
had
been real expectations attached to them. There must have been—such imaginings are never an end in themselves.

And what had he been thinking: There goes the boss's wife, ‘Mrs Rankin' . . . ? Quite simply, she admitted the unpleasant conclusion, he had never noticed that she was a young woman. A young woman? Is thirty-three a young woman? She was so accustomed to the company of Ward that she had always taken her youthfulness for granted—in her own mind there had never been a doubt. But was youthfulness the same thing as
being
young? She knew it was not.

‘I was a bit lucky,' he said, looking up suddenly from examining his feet.

‘Yes,' she replied. He was eighteen. Did he see her, then, simply as the more-or-less middle-aged wife of his boss? Nothing beyond that? Her sense of herself rebelled violently against such a possibility. I could beat him in a race to the top of this rock, she thought confidently. The rest is rubbish! Yet the difference in their ages was almost exactly the difference between herself and Ward; it was an almost precise mirroring of her position fifteen years ago. She had not thought of this before, and she wondered if such a coincidence, such a striking symmetry, could possibly be just that and no more. Or were there hidden meanings in such things? She did not enjoy this sort of speculation, however, so dismissed it. Whatever else, she thought, here we are, middle-aged or young, standing together in this warm spray, almost naked, having just a moment ago rolled about in the water hugging each other. The sort of thing lovers dream of doing. Surely we can't stay on this ledge for much longer without having some kind of conversation?

‘What
were
you doing?' But even as she asked she had the hopeless feeling that she was trying to force into the open something that was not really there.

How flat and fed-up she had begun to feel! Fifteen years! And in another fifteen she would be nearing fifty. She experienced a rush of suffocating urgency. How could anything ever really be resolved? The immense, unfulfilled loneliness of her life had come to stand before her, to remind her again of its unimaginable silence. Her sense of isolation was so immense that it would have crushed her long ago if she had not been herself a part of it, if it had not been a part of her, and if she had not sought in it at the deepest level of her consciousness the realisation of something greater than everything else she knew. And it would certainly have crushed her if there had not been in her character that peculiar perversity and tenacity which made her prepared to suffer for intangible and unlikely rewards. All she knew was that her life so far was not enough to satisfy her sense of who she might become.