Gatherers and Hunters (13 page)

Sunshine Beach

One

You don't have to take it lying down, he thought to himself. Where is that bit of canniness you prided yourself on, and your wife derided? Old moneybags, old stick-in-the-mud, old party-pooper. He had forgotten how reassuring and lively their backchat had been, how it kept him on his toes – of course he knew it did. Not that it made some of the gibes easier, but he had had his own defences. Or, as Miriam would have said, his own fences.

He had always said to Miriam that it would be him, Charlie, who popped off first. Miriam, with her angina problems and the long business with the osteo, was nevertheless strong as an ox; she had her mother's genes and old Hannah was still bridge champion at ninety-one. Miriam was the sort of person who walked into a room and was instantly at the centre. Charlie had become a sort of shadow, there to make sure or to divert the more obvious bores and the nuisances from his wife's range.

It was curious how the relationship, which began with him arranging trysts with Miriam in France or Greece or Honduras (amazing, the number of conferences and seminars they managed to be at, together, in those first years), ended with each one moving independently to foreign capitals and provinces, but never together. Well, perhaps not so curious. Perhaps it was all too predictable. Charlie remembered a movie he had seen in his early years, where an American JP who had married six couples and then, after performing the ceremonies, discovered her licence of authority was post-dated a week or something. The couples she had joined officially were contacted, a year, or several years, later. The comedy was how each relationship had altered. Charlie remembered only one of them: the twosome who buzzed with words, laughter, wit and repartee as they finalised their hasty marriage. When contacted later, they had hardly a word to say to each other.

There had been rough patches but Miriam and Charlie had eventually found a sort of settlement, in the times when they were together and one of them not on some overseas commitment. They played chess (bridge was never mentioned) and concentrated on the moves and the game, but it was companionship, and they were fairly evenly matched. That made a difference.

They had finally come to their balance, an equipoise that gave Miriam all her rights and her freedoms but which did not commit Charlie to a janitor status. In his own world he still had some standing, some credibility, and had begun to adjust to the easier pace, while taking on some contract work. There had been enough of that to reassure him. They had even talked of a joint trip to Spain, which their old friend Bob continually urged on them. ‘You both used to be at your best when you were haring around together, like naughty schoolkids,' he kept saying.

So that Miriam's death halfway through her Amnesty International Congress in Thessaloniki sent everything flying. It came out of the blue, and it had such a sudden finality Charlie at first could not believe it. The onrush of decisions, arrangements and activity soon overtook his shock and had him busy as he had not been since his retirement, two years before.

Now there would be no shared experiences, no mockery of the pictures in hotel rooms, or the inadequate towels, or the supposedly wonderful coffee.

It was twelve months before all the incredible junk and mess had been cleared, allocated, disposed of, or salvaged. The house had been tidied and repainted. It realised a surprising amount at the auction, though Charlie had been unable to force himself to attend. There had been three moves before, three previous auctions, and each one came back to haunt him. The new one was to be distant, impersonal, and Charlie had resigned himself to whatever he could get. The reserve had been minimal, and that only at the agent's insistence. The property leapt past the reserve at the first bid, he was told.

Short term investment of the proceeds was something within Charlie's old line of business. He was left with time on his hands. After settlement, he looked at the remaining furniture and sent off the lot to a secondhand dealer ‘in deceased estates'. It was one of those decisions he knew he would regret later – but he also knew he would regret even more having to live with the pieces they had purchased together, or had each brought over from previous lives, previous commitments. No. The lot. Cedar and mahogany had lost their tang, they had a way of reinventing past moments, quite precisely, quite ruthlessly.

The glass fronted double bookcase: Charlie had initially bought that as his first real antique and it was laughable to think what he had paid for it, but even at the time he had rejoiced at the bargain and couldn't have cared less about the little old widow who had put it up for sale because she was being moved to a retirement village. All these years later, her anguished face and her stoop, her stuffy living room and the immense clutter of painted plates, anti­macassars, balloon-back chairs and velvet drapes came back, vivid as yesterday. Also the way he beat her down, pointing out the bulk of it, its heavy presence in the room, and the wobbly overmantel, as well as the missing keys that made it useless to lock. ‘You'd be lucky to get a hundred pounds in Big White's Furniture,' he had said. It was now worth five thousand.

Ghosts. No, out with them all. Everywhere he looked, even with so much of the household furniture already sent off to children, in line with Miriam's will, and with all those ‘might come in handy' bits and pieces (from long pieces of timber to what seemed like every piece of electric gadgetry ever invented) at last bequeathed to the Salvos, in each room of the house Charlie still found himself looking into a mirror, not a tunnel, of remembering. And what made it worse, each memory associated with each stick of furniture or property was as if each moment of the past were still now. Everything lived still in a perpetual present tense. He had not realised that furniture had this power.

The afternoon the carrier came to remove the contents, Charlie at last knew this part of his life was ended. He had arranged one week's accommodation in a rather comfortable old hotel in the city, it was the one where he had fairly regularly had a Friday afternoon G & T with some of the remaining work associates from the old days.

He had cleared out the furniture, he had sent to the tip a remarkable volume of paperwork, he had even thrown out all those albums of photographs – though at the last moment he had torn out twenty or thirty pages, sufficient to allow himself some moments of sentimental reverie if the mood should overtake him, though he remained suspicious of himself for this indulgence. He had discarded nearly all his old clothing, suits and vests, some shoes not worn for a decade, those ridiculous T-shirts with their witty forgotten images and sad ­language, and a drawerful of socks, ties and underwear. It was summer, and winter things like woollens and overcoats were useless now. Charlie had thoughts of moving into a warmer part of the country. He already had made enquiries – with stimulating results – about the prices for home units on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. His family had holidayed at Caloundra for five or six years in a row when he was in the first years of adolescence. Strange, how something like that, after all these years – fifty or so – came back, surfaced, and filled him with a sort of old anticipation. It was the old energy and the excitement that, curiously, tingled.

He could remember his father's old car and the crowd of them, all singing the radio commercials of the day and urging Dad to overtake, overtake. His father had been dead forty years.

Perhaps it was the swirl of curious memories that had been stirred up by the shift and displacement of all the old furniture. Caloundra. Those had been glorious times, and the coastline there so impressive, so various: rock cliffs with pandanus palms scrambling among basalt rocks, the beige sandy beaches and all that repetitive and hypnotic surf, the Stillwater of the Passage, where Bribie Island had its northern tip within swimming distance from the mainland (except that the rip was always too dangerous, even when they had been swimming champions). The wildflower plains, always full of Christmas bells in December when they came up. The small village itself, solid and squat and settled, with its permanent residents – fishermen, farmers, retired weather­beaten teachers and clerks. They had called it a Graveyard Town, in those days. Well, here was Charlie at last, ready to be one of the retirees, and it was a strangely consoling thought. He was coming home.

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Beatrice had been really his brother's friend. She was family, in the way that so many people in their wide circle were ‘family'. Her parents had lived next door until Beatrice was seven or eight and then had moved to another suburb, but the parents had remained in touch and Beatrice, once or twice a year, came over. She was familiar company, taken for granted. So that the year Beatrice came up to Caloundra with them for the summer holiday was just an added one to the number. Her father had just died and it was decided that this was the ideal way ‘to take Beatrice out of herself'. They always rented the same large house, Pen Y Sarn, on the headland overlooking the Passage and it had lots of rooms and the big turn-around verandah-sleepout where the boys and their friends could batch down. Beatrice was to share the big inside room with Jane, Charlie's elder sister. Inevitably there were three or four of the three boys' friends included; Charlie's mother wisely recognised that house guests were a great bonus – bickering and sibling rivalry tended to be deflected, chores like washing up and drying could be made group activities, and they could all go off in a gang to the beach or the island or hire a dinghy for the day and go fishing. Even going to the one cinema with its canvas seats was done in a spirit of adventure and complaints were minimal.

The year Beatrice joined them, and a couple of their other friends, Charlie was just fifteen. Jane welcomed another girl in the gang; until that year she had always refused to bring one of her own friends; ‘the boys are too rowdy, no thank you, I wouldn't submit Katrina or Ellice to that!' Jane always joined in everything, though, and didn't put on airs. Beatrice, nearly two years younger than Jane, turned out to be as big a tomboy, except when the two of them got together in their room and talked seriously about fashions and film stars and hair styles. By half way through the summer holidays both Jane and Beatrice had wild salty hair and peeled noses.

That was the year Charlie discovered that girls were special.

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The upstairs pub turned out to be not a good idea. Charlie was bored, restless, and the sad impersonal room was worse than the least appetising pensione in Venice or Bologna. Charlie found himself down in the bar more often than he was used to, but even the bartenders were a different shift and of course none of his old mates appeared, except at 5.30 on Friday, as if they, too, had come straight from work.

He drove out past the old house only once. This is nonsense, he thought. Be resolute.

He amassed a number of glossy brochures, not only of units on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but at Yamba, and Forster, and Gosford and even Sorrento – though the warmth had, metaphorically, seeped into his bones and windswept southern beaches held no attraction. In his mind's eye his toes were making their old explorations through the warm, gritty sand of Caloundra with its inviting texture like decomposed shellgrit and its clean but auburn colour – not like the white bone nakedness of the Gold Coast but heavier and close under the feet, almost friable.

He and Miriam had gone to the beach at Sorrento only once, decades back. A relentless westerly, stinging water and stinging sand too: they had crouched in borrowed windcheaters and Charlie had peeled orange prawns and put them, one by one, into Miriam's mouth until they finally gave up and retired to the glazed windows of the kiosk where he had bought the prawns. They ended up eating greasy potato chips and slurping bad coffee, comparing disaster beaches in Mexico and on the Aegean coast.

All the home units offered appeared to be made almost entirely of glass and rust-resistant but vulnerable looking metals. Charlie suspected aluminium. Inner walls were almost certainly concrete slabs, papered or painted. Jacuzzi abounded. All promised fabulous views, some of them so close to the water it was as if nobody had bothered about possible beach erosion or cyclones. The pile of discards grew, and the latitude inexorably moved northward.

The Gold Coast did tempt. One eighteenth floor unit overlooking the white extended beach (and all the neighbour high rise units across the road and along the strip) boasted it also had fine views back to the ranges, Springbrook and Binna Burra, and the Macpherson range with Mount Warning. Charlie remembered that time he and Miriam discovered the mountain pool up there, deep in the ferny underbrush and with its huge glossy rocks and precipices. There was a waterfall, cold and almost black behind the white froth of its activity. They had swum, naked, and screamed at the chill of the water, then they had picknicked and sunbaked languidly, deliciously free and private but aware that perhaps less than a kilometre away there was the main road and sweating tourists stuck to their fixed maps. It had only taken a little detour and the attraction of a small dirt road which, in a moment of random daring they had turned into and, voila, their own special rockpool and waterfall. That had been in the ecstasy days of their partnership.

It seemed the obvious thing. Charlie booked a flight up to Coolangatta. He would get a hire car and be practical. After all, he might yet decide, for convenience, on an apartment in South Melbourne.

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Beatrice had been, from the outset, the star. She led the rowdy singing around the kitchen sink during chore-time, she whipped up her own special malted-milk drinks from café-style grooved glasses and with long stemmed spoons to scoop up the ice-cream from the bottom. The glasses and the spoons were her gifts to the family, for having her. The malted milks were her own invention. Charlie still remembered (with a certain astonishment) his particular Beatrice-favourite: coca-cola flavoured milkshake. Would that have been ­possible? What were the other Beatrice-flavours? Mango milkshake, which had astounded everybody – such a combination had seemed almost bizarre, mangoes were what you slurped out over the back stairs, dribbling their acid sweetness over your wrists. Today, of course, mango flavoured ice cream was ­everywhere.