Gatherers and Hunters (16 page)

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He had a dream. He was on an expedition with someone – ‘her' – into the Dead Centre, the heart of Australia, with its red soil and, because it must have been a year of good rainfall, incredibly green growth on the smallish trees and shrubs. The shrubs were flowering: golden. The pair of them were rejoicing in the space and open vastness of the landscape, there was a long purple ridge of mountains in the distance and, closer to hand, a sitting-down place, with a pool and white-trunked shade, a billabong. That was when he noticed the survey pegs. He looked further, with increasing concern. The whole landscape had been divided and turned into small allotments, already signs appeared, with
FOR SALE
and
FIRST OWNER'S BARGAIN
and
GET IN NOW WHILE PRICES ARE LOW
. Everywhere he looked, there were already glittering Toyotas and besuited salesmen with sheaves of papers, maps and plans, and a Home Unit developer selling apartments off the plan. An old Aboriginal man who had been sitting down beside them on the shady sand was grinning and showed them the hundred dollar note he had received, but already the bulldozers were roaring in.

Charlie woke in a sweat, and found himself lying in full sunlight from the window of his new bedroom.

The dream made no sense. Yes it did. It was almost as if Miriam had been with him, but the sense remained that he had made a decision without her; that he had plunged into this new property without proper consideration or time to weigh up the balances. He had been somehow involved in the destruction of the virgin landscape of his dream, something Miriam would never have countenanced.

But it was more than that. Charlie was in the kitchenette, again at the hot water jug, when the connection struck. Last week he had been driving back and forth across that flat stretch north of Caloundra, between the shoreline of sand dunes and along the old wallum heath towards Alexander Headland and the cemented and bitumenised carparks of the ugly builders' paradises – Woolworths, Harvey Norman, the rest. They had been shoved willy-nilly upon what he still remembered as the wildflower plains of his youth. Where there were now oily aisles of glinting cars there had once been Christmas bells; and the other tiny wildflowers had grown there, where it now was simply waste. Hundreds of brick-veneer cottages squatted over what once had been a natural garden of native shrubs and grasses, and none of them had retained the old plants. Instead there were hibiscus from Hawaii, pink and red frangipani from other Pacific Islands, jacaranda trees from Mexico, you name it. The Green Finger Nurseries were crammed with exotics, instant lawn and manicured potplants. And Charlie had himself parked in those very lots for his grotty little purchases. Miriam would have had a seizure.

He stopped himself at that.

What he had not yet faced, in his fading recollection of that dream, was that it was not Miriam there, it was Beatrice. The Beatrice who had that time called out to stop the car which Charlie's Dad was driving. Right there on the new bitumen road up to Alexander Headland. Beatrice had clambered over the rough embankment and onto the heathland. ‘Look!' she had called, and pointed to the flowering abundance. Charlie instantly clambered out after her, and began tugging at the Christmas bells. But she had stopped him. ‘No, Charlie. Leave them be. Just look at them, and let others look. If we take them all, there will be nothing left. Perhaps next year they will already have gone.' Charlie had retained the flowers he had picked, though, and they took them home and put them in a glass milk bottle on the window above the sink, where they lived for only a few days.

Neither of them had fully realised just what a devastation lay in store on that seemingly endless heathland plain.

As he sipped the bitter coffee, standing up to look out the windows (when you sat you could not see above the high ledge; one of the drawbacks of the older style units), he almost marvelled at the vividness of that recall, and realised that this area hoarded, still, those memories that had long been submerged in the wider, wilder worlds of his later life, of their later life, Miriam and himself.

Try as he would, he could not install Miriam into this place. Well, wasn't that the intention? New start? New surroundings.

The grief returned, but not so vocal. There were no ­hopeless tears. Only the hollowness and the complete purposelessness of things. He found he had been staring out at the same view, from the same angle, for ages now.

Beatrice must be an old woman. Impossible to imagine what would have happened to her, how she would have turned out. He did not even know if she were alive or dead. Down below the built-up artifice of the Westaway Towers' gardens, with their Japanese design – square grassy patches, the reed and lily pond, the ordered stepping stones – an older Caloundra still sprawled, down to the rutted and potholed plaza in front of the old hotel. It was all being bulldozed and reorganised now, but wasn't that where they all went on New Year's Eve that time, for the fireworks and the loud amplified band from Brisbane and the sweaty night air and the post-midnight surf, all of them reckless with the New Year and the future? For most of them the future was another year at school, or forty-nine weeks in the office or the shop (was it still two weeks or three they were allowed off?) and perhaps the big night at the Cloudland Ballroom sometime in July or August. Yes, they were all innocent. The boys with their warm beer bottles in the car boot, the girls egging them on, puffing at Ardath cigarettes and letting their shoulder-straps dangle.

That first sight of Beatrice when she bent over to adjust her sandals and her soft breasts curved outward from the delicate secrecy of her armpit, cupped in by the slipping rim of her bathers.

For the first time in ages Charlie found himself smiling.

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Already certain patterns were being formulated, almost without his conscious control or direction. He found himself walking the half kilometre along the ridge to the little newsagency at the top of Bulcock Street for the the
Australian
. He had not descended to the
Courier Mail
yet, but that would come.

Then, after a few more weeks, he discovered a small café where he could skim through the paper and have a coffee – long black, not cappuccino. That had been Miriam's morning drink She could spend all morning in a café in Brunswick Street or Lygon, over endless coffees and just the first three or four pages of the
Age
. Charlie had imagined her in Paris or Venice similarly occupied, and Miriam would have known how to soak up the ambience as well as the necessary caffeine. Charlie had always been impatient, a list in his pocket and things that had to be done.

All the things that didn't have to be done.

After his coffee and sometimes even a clunky Florentine, he would stroll down to the front, the Stillwater of the Passage. The line of Norfolk Island pines was still there, out of his childhood, but now streetscaped with a concrete and porphyry walkway right along the front where the channel cut close into the banks (his uncle had once shown him a groper's hole along there) and up behind the little changing room and lifesavers' hut (almost unchanged) to lead higher along to the point, which had now been turned into picnic areas, parking places with little loops of grass around each tree and brick toilets and another changing shed with an outside shower. Beyond that he remembered the sand-duney hillocks with their thin casuarina groves and banksia scrub. From Pen Y Sarn they had trekked through that wasteland to reach the foreshore and the turn that led to the surfing beach. It was now all graded and turned into family playgrounds with shade trees predominating above wooden benches and tables. Attractive in its way. Civilised.

Charlie sometimes would take another rest on one of the benches, leaving the paper on the table and perhaps wandering over to the fence that protected the open beach from small children.

It was a bit of a hike uphill from that point, so Charlie more often walked out onto the sand and stood mesmerised by the endlessly recurring surf. And each time, he thought: perhaps I should have bought somewhere where the surf itself would be close enough to look at from the balcony. But then he thought: storms, erosion, salt spray and that sticky moistness. And he knew that the slow momentum of the incoming waves would be capable of holding him in a thoughtless drugged stupor, perhaps for hours. Surf was like that.

The surf he remembered from the old holiday years had been something to challenge and stimulate, something you plunged into and caught in an exciting roller. Charlie had been a relentless body surfer.

There were other patterns that began to help fill his day. He had never been a man for breakfast, but now he purchased packets of cereal and mixed them with yoghurt and cut up fresh soft fruit from the greengrocer down past the newsagent.

He began to take a kip after lunch. Memories of those after-lunch rests at Pen Y Sarn were replaced by a simple need, an early exhaustion. Sometimes he lay on his back for almost two hours.

Back then, when their parents closed the door of the main bedroom, the young people would play euchre or dominoes. Charlie had learned his first chess moves. Hot sweltering afternoons before the sea breeze came up with its always welcome agitation and relief. There were occasions he had lain on the side sleepout upon the small chaise-longue that seemed like a reminder of Victorian times.

There was the time Beatrice had snuggled in beside him on that narrow horsehair shelf; they had read Boofhead comics and giggled together, imagining an American world of College Students and baseball and gossipy afternoons over milkshakes. Beatrice fitted under one arm, into his shoulder and he had felt her warm body, enticingly soft against his damp shirt. She had wiggled in her bottom to secure a more stable position. He had crossed his legs to make more space, and to hide his excitement.

The high bedroom in his Westaway flat occupied a north-westerly position but any passing breeze seemed to circulate the air and Charlie, so far, had not considered air conditioning. The subtropical warmth was too full of old associations and it seemed to lave him gently. He remembered days of uncomfortable heat and oppression, when they would get in their togs and bring out the hose in the backyard near the outside dunny, just to cool off. After lunch was not a good time for the surf, and his mother always warned them not to swim after a meal. Was that instruction really valid? He had never thought to question it.

But as he shambled out of the back bedroom he found himself doing the same thing, making coffee – it was something which had become a pattern of his marriage and all the times he and Miriam had been together – and in retrospect, that seemed endless and endlessly linked up together. Three weeks, four weeks, sometimes a month: their separations defined them, but their linkings were less spectacular yet more genuinely constant. They simply slipped into old patterns. Like this business of making yet another coffee, and such a pedestrian coffee, Bushells Espresso, straight out of the jar. When he had been to the small supermarket last week Charlie had quite instinctively picked up the 250 gram jar, though the taste of the thing had never delighted him. It was a taste like old cinders, he had once said. But Miriam had brought over to him the new, unopened bottle, and had shoved it right under his nose, after she ripped off the foil. ‘Smell this. Aaah!' she had said, and the promise did seem, for a moment, about to be fulfilled. Smell is always more pertinent than flavour, he had said then, and she had laughed, ‘Not more pertinent, more perfidious. Fortunately!'

The coffee tasted bitter, but he did not add sugar, though there had been a time in his life when three spoonfuls had been adequate.

But the long hours until dinner had to be filled. He decided to take the car out in the afternoons, and make a series of sorties, not too far, but to reacquaint himself with his neighbourhood. Mornings were fine for his walk. He could afford to be a little self indulgent later in the day. He would plan out a series of excursions: Montville, Buderim, Noosa if he felt inclined.

Sitting with maps and a Gregory's, Charlie felt a return of that sense of purpose, and he carefully worked out kilometres, times and potential traffic flows. At this stage he had nothing like a picnic set (there had been three wicker baskets, and an Esky, gone, gone). For his first expedition (not tomorrow, the next day) he would buy something on the spot. Already he was thinking Buderim; the ginger factory there would have some sort of café and no doubt any number of ginger confections. Would he indulge himself in a bottle of ginger in some sort of syrup? Miriam had preferred candied ginger, but he recalled the time when they drove from Caloundra up to Buderim on the back of his cousin's old Willies Knight utility, that had boiled on the way – the radiator and the occupants. But the new ginger factory then was a discovery for them and they returned with three bottles, heavy with syrup. He had broken into the first one on the way back, and Jane complained that her hands were dirty with grease from the back of the ute so Charlie had fed the pieces into her mouth. Beatrice was next.

Yes, Buderim.

The car had not been serviced since whenever. Charlie that afternoon looked into the Yellow Pages and selected a garage at random. In the old days at Caloundra every service station was also a garage. No self-serve then.

The next week, the next two weeks or more had been planned out.

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The following morning Charlie was up early, as if there were an important business appointment lined up. Huh! He laughed at that, as if Miriam in another room would call out, ‘And what is it this time?'

But now he was up there was nothing for it. He showered, shaved and completed his toiletries. The bathroom still had that look of foreignness about it. This was the one room where the old widow still kept a ghost hovering. At first it had been almost amusing, when Charlie stripped and he danced and flaunted himself for the benefit of the ghost, or of the old lady. He imagined her still with a sparkle, why not? All the recent Guides praised octogenarian sex, didn't they?