A River Town (36 page)

Down again towards the paperback swamps which lay between Dulcangui and the ocean. Bandy let Lucy lead the grey and came back to help control Pee Dee. Pee Dee fussy on the stony down-slope. Mamie climbed up beside Kitty and took a hand at the reins. You could hear the bottles jiggling in their baskets. Before they got to the bottom, two in the hamper on Joe O’Neill’s cart exploded.

Meanwhile, Lucy and Johnny, who had abandoned poor Joe for the greater excitement of the vanguard, between them led the grey down onto the corduroy road across the swamp to the sea. In the grey’s saddle, Annie still sat. Entering into a fair imitation of her kingdom.

The picnic place finally chosen was on a sward above the surf at the bottom of the Little Nobby. They could look out over the sea and then across a small saltwater creek to the twelve miles of Front Beach, and Mamie was enthused by this vigorous bright sight and was soon knee-deep in the creek with the children. Johnny, shirt off, began splashing round as he did in the river, but his strokes were interrupted by the shallowness of the creek and the playful current. Tim waded in too, his trousers rolled up. Standing still you could see mullet swim by. Annie, Johnny, Lucy kept trying to catch them in their hands.

Ashore Kitty lay on her back on a rug and under a parasol, pointing the unborn Shea child straight at the arc of blue sky. Near her, Joe O’Neill began smoking reflectively and plunking his banjo. The tune “Bold Phelim Brady” was raggedly released into the air. His boots were still on. Perhaps he had an inlander’s fear of the water. When Tim waded ashore, Joe and he began opening beer with flourishes. After the rough trip, the stuff fizzed out of the necks of the bottles.

“Porter, Mrs. Shea?” asked Joe, putting a long glass of frothy stout in Kitty’s outreaching hand.

“Oh, dear,” sighed Kitty. “As lovely as you’ll get.”

Meanwhile Bandy took the saddle off his grey’s back. Steam rose gently from the crushed, damp hair. Tim was surprised to see Bandy take his shirt and pants off too, so that now he wore only a singlet and his long, white linen breeches. The singlet was low-cut and revealed in part a smooth, brown, hairless chest. Arms not like the arms of men from Europe. Both smaller and yet more sinewy. He jumped on the grey’s back and urged it gently into the creek. It went placidly, standing to its belly in the water, seeming content amongst the little waves. Bandy turning to throw a salute to the shallows where Mamie and the children were prancing and yelling and trying to grab mullet.

Lucy now with her skirts tucked in her knickers looked more a child and less of a witness than he’d ever seen. Though sometimes she would cup up a palm full of saltwater and study it.

Having crossed the creek, Bandy put the grey into a gallop on the firm sand below the tidemark along Front Beach. All this looked splendid to Tim, half-naked Bandy leaned down to the grey mane, the lovely mare shattering its own reflection in the wet sand, and thundering away.

Whereas Pee Dee was up along the slope, turned out of the traces and eating grass as if he’d never go back to work again.

“You bugger, you’re for the knackers,” Tim casually called to Pee Dee, who disdained to stop devouring the hillside.

At last, for love’s sake, Joe O’Neill took his big boots off and rolled his trousers and went and stood in the rim of the creek. Kitty must have been able to see this from her lying position. “Look out for them sharks, Joe,” she murmured.

They ate a drowsy lunch—sardines and cornbeef, beer and ginger beer. Chewing heartily, Mamie looked across to the larger headland, smooth and green and momentous. It took up a whole quarter of the sky.

“We’ll be climbing that big feller there?”

He could see the children’s eyes flick towards the Big Nobby. Not a question that it invited you!

“You and Joe can go up there after lunch,” said Tim. It was the
right sort of physical feature for courting. It demanded that hands be reached to each other. But he didn’t want mad Johnny up there.

“What can you see from the top?”

“The whole coastline of New South Wales,” said Kitty dreamily. “At a total sweep. And the air. A lens, you see. The air like a bloody telescope.”

“Can we go, papa?” asked Johnny bolt upright like a jack rabbit, on his knees. More than ready for high places again, the little ruffian.

“I’ll take you over the creek to the beach,” said Tim. “Mr. Habash might take his grey again and you can ride. But not gallop, son, not gallop. I know you.”

“But can’t the children come?” asked Mamie. It was as if she did not want to be left alone with Joe. “We can all keep an eye. You’ll be good won’t you, Lucy?”

Lucy looked up at her levelly. “I learned my lesson,” said Lucy in a way which implied canings and made everyone laugh.

Something entirely convincing about Lucy swayed Tim, as did the size of the day. He remembered too the gradual, accommodating lines of the Big Nobby.

“Then I’ll go too,” said Tim. “I’ll keep an eagle eye out. And you, Bandy. You come too if you would, and watch these little blackguards.”

He felt sorry for Joe, the corner of whose mouth conveyed disappointment. Mamie was a bugger of a tease.

“But first the tea,” said Bandy. He had made a fire a little way down on the creek. He now went and fetched the excellent tea he had brewed. Mamie stood up and asked to see into the billy he was carrying.

“There’s tree leaves in that tea,” she complained.

“That’s gum leaves,” said Tim. “Australians make their tea with gum leaves thrown in. When there’s a tree handy.”

So, it struck him now: Bandy was by habit an Australian.

They drank plenty of this tea to ready themselves for their thirsty climb. When they were finished, Tim wanting to get up there and down and have it over, they left Kitty lying on a blanket in scant shadow, with her parasol leaned across her face to give
double shade. A strong sea breeze cooled her and played with the tassels of the parasol.

On the flanks on the great whale-like Big Nobby, whorls of tussocky grass made the climb easy. You stepped from one knot of grass to another. Step by step, like climbing a pyramid. Johnny kept racing ahead and looking down like a gazelle from some nest of grass. But Lucy mounted the headland beside Tim, whose hand was held by Annie. So they rose up the green slope quite easily, Joe O’Neill chattering away, to the domed top of the thing.

Bandy seemed to take care to be up there first, not it appeared for rivalry’s sake but as if he too wanted to prevent any madness in Johnny. As Tim and Annie rose higher on the great headland, they began to pick up the welcome southerly on their brows. Tim finished the climb with Annie on his back, since the child did not believe in wearing herself out. All the others were waiting on top for them, looking south, Mamie exclaiming at what could be seen. Joe had a wrestle-hold on Johnny, and Johnny struggled in it, laughing. Lucy stood soberly there like one of the adult party.

Arriving and dropping Annie so that she could take up her normal august posture, Tim saw Back Beach and its wild surf stretching away to Point Plummer, Racecourse Beach, etc, etc. You could have seen Port Macquarie except that the day’s haze blurred the scene about twenty miles south.

“Now you don’t see a sight like that,” said Mamie, “anywhere on the Cork or Kerry coast.”

“Because it’s always wrapped in mist there,” murmured Joe.

From here it could be seen that the headland on which they stood had two tops, this one and another further to the south. In between, a green saddle with grass and little thickets of native shrubs. Beneath the saddle a partially seen great rock wall fell into the sea, which grew plum-coloured in the shadow of the black stone. You could hear and partly see the ocean raging down there, making caves. Of course there was no way, having got here, the party would choose not to walk on into the saddle towards the other, lower dome. Finding a way past the spiky banksias, and so to the Big Nobby’s second summit. From there they would, of course, be able to look from safety directly down into the turmoil of rock and sea below.

“No shy-acking then, Johnny,” Tim called out. He didn’t utter any warnings to Lucy. For she seemed a changed child. She knew about witnessing angels.

As they walked down into the saddle, dragging their feet through clumps of button grass, the Big Nobby maintained its gradual character. Not like cliffs elsewhere—not a case of grass running sharply to the definite and dramatic precipice, and then the sudden fall. You knew that somewhere to their left the black cliff began. But here, because of the headland’s gentle angle and its thick grass tufts, each one a rung of its massive ladder, there was no sense that you could topple and roll.

“Prickly, prickly,” said Annie as they reached the thickets, flapping her long-fingered hands at him, pleading to be picked up. She had those delicate fingers utterly unlike Kitty’s. They came from his sister Helen, who’d married the newspaper editor in Brooklyn.

He lifted her and followed the path the others had taken. These strange, olive green banksia bushes with their black cones. Splits in the cones like eyes and mouths. “Look,” said Tim, holding one of the cones. “The Banksia Man. He’s an evil little fellow.”

Annie threw herself about in his arms with fake shudders.

They came back up out of the banksias to Big Nobby’s grassy southern crest. Ah yes, you could see down to where the grasses grew steeper and the rock layers began and the hungry surf worked away. A number of birds wheeled around the semi-circle of this rock wall. It seemed to Tim to be the mad energy of the waves that kept them up, since none of them flapped their wings. A little way up from the wall above the sea, a sea-eagle considered a dive. A sharp, pearly, commanding shape with black wingtips.

“That one there’s a sea-eagle,” he told the others. “When they dive, they bloody dive.”

“This is the place,” said Mamie. “You could have a tea-house up here.”

“A pub perhaps,” amended Joe O’Neill, who was sure to crack more ale once they got down. Lucy stood beside Joe and on the other side of him, still quiet from respect for this soon-to-be uncle, Johnny. Good. They were still. They watched the sea-eagle. Its
circles had them hypnotised. It had authority over the air. It put the frenzied children in their place.

“Will you carry me down like you carried me up, papa?” asked Annie ceremoniously, at his side.

“To walk will be good for your little legs.”

“I don’t think that’s true. My little legs don’t agree.”

He heard Mamie laughing. The sea-eagle banked and Tim took a new sense of it, that it was no mere natural wonder of some kind. A sudden gust came up to them as if the bird had manufactured it for them with its banked wings. Tim felt the stirred air all around him. The damned wheeling thing had command of the day. Its very ease, he felt at once, was a frightful temptation and the young should not be exposed …

He heard Mamie shriek, and Habash cry, “Stop this!”

Somehow the bird had by its malign circling and its sending a breeze engendered something unspoken but at once mutual between Lucy and Johnny. In all their campaigns, had they ever exchanged a word? If they had, no one had heard it. They planned it as if by fishing in each other’s mind.

This
was their venture now. They were running down the incline of the headland, their hands clasped. Johnny could be heard laughing in between Joe’s shouting, but Lucy was silent. It was such an inviting slope, and from some angles you found it hard to imagine or give credence to the drop, the indented face below, the Nobby’s true, black sting. So piteously confident were they of their impunity, that seeing them you were possessed by an absolute panic of pity. Pity could be heard in the way everybody howled.

Now they all followed—Bandy, Joe, Mamie. Then himself, dropping Annie’s hand, since she could be trusted. All the party running with their heels thrust forward to avail themselves of the holding power of the grass. All yelling direly. Pleas not to be remembered afterwards word by word. Simply a general, frantic, fatherly pleading of the two little buggers running hand in hand. Ahead the feverish sapphire sea, and a sky of acid blue. Tim feeling his ankle yell at this strange usage as he ran madly towards the gulf. The younger men and the one young woman still ahead of him, all helplessly shrieking.
Nooooooooooo!
So steep now where the
children were, and Johnny leaning back, Tim saw with hope, but Lucy thrusting skinny shoulders forward. Welcoming the fall. And still hands locked. Soon they would go flying over together. This beat the stern of
Terara
. This beat the Angelus tower. This so clearly a venue worthy of their shared will that he cursed himself for allowing anyone but Mamie and Joe to approach this climb.

But when the result seemed obvious, Johnny simply sat on a tussock. The grasp was as easily broken as that. Lucy sailed out alone. Shrilling but not with terror. And vocal now she had taken to the air. So close to the fall of the cliff was everyone that they saw only the first liberated segment of her fall. Tim continued down the awful grade and yanked Johnny upright by his collar. Johnny’s face was ghastly.
He
had been playing. Had expected her to sit too after the joke had been played out.
Look, we are reformed! You only thought we were playing the old games!

Nonetheless, Tim couldn’t stop himself striking the boy on the head in a kind of horror and gratefulness. Bandy was working energetically around the rim, the only one not screaming and exclaiming. He wanted a better view. To see if Lucy was frolicking or fluttering in and out on the waves in that chaos down there. Everyone, whimpering and pleading, worked their way around the edge as Bandy had, so that they could see into the cauldron.

“There is nothing,” Bandy yelled against the wind. “Nothing to be seen.” The hugh masses of white there contained none of Lucy’s whiteness or white fabric. She had been swallowed.

Above them, Annie—who had had the best view—was wailing for him to come back.

It was Bandy’s idea to rush down the hill and alert Crescent Head’s four families of fishermen. Tim followed, arriving back down to the bottom with stark-eyed Johnny and with Annie just in time to see Bandy and two fishermen put out in a rowboat from the creek.