Settlers' Creek (10 page)

The Toyota, temperamental rattletrap dinosaur, doesn’t like steep descents any more than labouring up hills. By the time Box rolls down off the steep winding road over the hills from the city into Regent’s Bay he can smell the rubbery stink of flayed brake linings. And there is something else too: burning oil, maybe leaking onto the hot engine housing. Or possibly a worse problem than that. The temperature gauge is into the red. Halfway down the hill he had switched to using the gears to slow the ute down, but judging by the noise coming from the gearbox it’s a close run thing as to which technique, brake or gears, is causing the most damage.

But now, at least he’s made it onto the flat. He’s here. The bay. Home.

When he was growing up here, the road over to the city had been unsealed. Back in the day — that’s what Pop used to say, ‘Back in the day, son’ — the trip used to take an hour and ten. Box still remembered the sound of
stones flicking up against the chassis of his grandfather’s Bedford truck and the sliding sideways drift around the bends on the thick banks of shingle. He could visualise the improbable roller-coaster steepness of the hill with a child’s eye: the Grand Canyon drops down into the gullies. The rare trips with his grandfather over to the city had been expeditions, adventures.

Not that the dangers had existed only in his mind. The Frosts’ son, who had been a few years older than Box, had been killed at sixteen, in winter, while crossing the hills on his motorbike. And there was the time when Don Cooper had spent a night suspended by his seat-belt in his upturned car at the bottom of a gully with the heady smell of spilled petrol clouding his brain. It was a thin line between tragedy and a comic story to tell to your mates in the pub on a Friday night.

When he was growing up, Box’s world had been neatly divided between locals and other people. There were sometimes families who came to the bay in the summer. Mostly they were from the city, out for a weekend drive, followed by a picnic. They stopped at the bay’s one pub for a beer, a shandy for the wife, lemonade and raspberry fizzy drink for the bored children. Box, the kid standing on the sidelines, had eyed these people curiously. To him, growing up in Regent’s Bay, they’d been as exotic as Oompa Loompas.

The school Box went to until he was thirteen had only three teachers, and even then a lot of the kids who went there bussed in from outside the bay. They were from farms and the small clusters of homes dotted up and down the south side of the harbour.

He drove past what used to be the Harbidges’ dairy. A
few years ago it had been converted into a café: all polished wooden floor and baby-iron on the front of the counter. The new owners had set up a sandstone fountain in front of the place, where there used to be a cracked concrete pad and a bicycle stand. The statue was of an ample woman with disproportionately large thighs, kneeling in the pool of water with her head back and her arms wide to the sky. Her large porous breasts hung free, water trickled from her navel. The whole thing was just short of being life size.

Box wondered what his grandfather would have made of the statue. Not much, he imagined. The old bloke would’ve had something to say, slow and laconic, probably featuring the words ‘piss’ and ‘funny place’.

Box smiled to himself and drove slowly on.

Most of the market gardens and the orchards, similar to the one where he’d grown up, had gone. The Turners’ land was now a tract of houses. It was the same story with most of the Masons’ land, higher up the hill. All over the bay, fields and paddocks, which used to have nothing in them but sheep and the odd tatty-leaved cabbage tree, had also been roaded. Retaining walls were put in. In the late seventies and early eighties, people hadn’t been slow to wake up to how much their land was suddenly worth. Locals had either sold to developers or had subdivided their land themselves. Money was made. Anywhere in the bay with a view, which was pretty much everywhere, could be, and had been, carved up and sold off.

By then the road over to the city had been sealed, the worst corners smoothed out. In the winter the council trucks spread grit on the shady corners where the sunshine didn’t melt the black ice until afternoon. The people buying the new sections, building their dream homes
with views of the water, didn’t mind the commute to work. The new houses were crowded in, all up and down the hill above the main road and, down on the harbour side, set among what was left of the bush, harbour views from every room. The bay had now became just another suburb.

Further up the road, past the café, Box drew alongside a group of half a dozen women walking briskly along the footpath, arms swinging. They were all in their mid-thirties, wearing Puma and Adidas tracksuits and coloured cross-trainers. And make-up, Box noticed. These were what passed for locals these days. Not that he had anything against them. Most of the newcomers were well off — lawyers and bankers and architects. You had to be something like that to afford to live over here. Professional couples. Big income, two-children families. Audis and late-model Subarus dropped the kids off at the school in the morning. Every time he came back here Box saw them angle-parked outside the café, and up their stamped-concrete drives.

These people didn’t want half an acre around their house. Low maintenance was the thing. They believed they had a big section if they owned a patch of ready-lawn with a few hebes planted hard up against the fence. It was ironic, but when Box was growing up here, people thought they were living in each other’s pockets if, on a still night, you could hear your neighbour shouting at his wife.

Down at the jetty, he parked on the shingle by the leaning rock wall. He got out and walked along the sea-worn wooden boards. The jetty was still the same as when he
was a kid, though boards were replaced at the end of every winter. And of course the harbour was the same. The tide was almost all the way out, the whole head of the harbour an expanse of grey mud all the way around to Warren’s Beach. The narrow jetty where he was standing pointed up the harbour from the rocky knuckles of the headland like a prosthetic finger. Half a dozen small yachts lay on their sides in the squelch, waiting for the high tide to refloat them.

The jetty was at least a hundred metres long. When Box got to the end, he stopped and stood looking down the harbour. There were steep hills on both sides. What he was looking at was the remains of a large volcano. Time had taken the burnt scowl off the face of the landscape. Like layers of powdered make-up, wind-blown soil had been laid down over the cooked rock, and the crater had been breached and flooded by the ocean to form the long harbour. The hills were no longer raw and sharp edged against the sky. In fact, as he stood at the end of the jetty, the hills were laid out all around him like a photographer’s tawny blanket, artfully rumpled. Only around the remnants of the caldera’s rim did dark ramparts of volcanic rock protrude above the soil.

The wind stroking Box’s face was coming off the water, pushing up from the top of the harbour, where there was a narrow strip of horizon between two headlands. It smelled of mud and salt, mixed with the whiff of dry grass off the hills. Someone had an open fire going somewhere. The smoke and the mud smells blended together in his nostrils.

He closed his eyes and let his other senses reach out. He heard the soft lover’s slap of the water as the tide pushed back over the mudflats towards the rocks. The scream of an angry gull. And from behind him the sound, pushing
into the wind, of excited children coming from the school — morning playtime.

As boys, Box and his brother Paul had regularly set out from this jetty at either end of a flounder net. Feet sinking deep into the sucking mud they’d moved through waist-deep water, towards Sandy Beach, about two hundred metres away. You had to judge the tide. It came in fast. Leave it too late and you’d sometimes find yourself swimming. Not that Box had minded swimming. But misjudging the tide always caused Paul to scowl and grump. Three years older than Box, and always so damn cautious, Paul was inevitably stern faced when confronted with anything that he couldn’t predict or control.

With his eyes still closed, Box could see Paul. He was holding the wooden pole attached to his end of the net. Only the top half of his brother’s body visible above the mud-grey water, stirred up by their feet. Box had the other pole. In the bay there wasn’t really a deep or a shallow end, just level mud. But because Box was younger and shorter, however deeply Paul was immersed, Box was that much deeper. Not that he cared. The opposite. Box had always loved being part of things. Part of the fishing, sure, but more than that. He loved to feel the push of the tide against his body and the small teasing slaps of the waves on his chest. Box didn’t even care if it started to rain. You were wet anyway. If, as they waded through the water, the wind started to scud the clouds over the sky, it was no skin off his nose. Even if they were late starting and the tide was a little high and they had to swim a bit. For the sake of a feed of flounder, Box would have gone out in a storm. It was only Paul who got all sullen if the weather changed. It was his brother who always studied the tide charts in
the back of their grandfather’s newspaper.

But that was Paul. He was what his grandmother used to call a worrywort. He worried about the early frosts that might ruin the tomatoes his grandfather still grew out in the open. Paul worried about the storms that sometimes flooded the creek running through their land. Or the wind that might topple over trees. Paul fretted over any long period of unbroken sunshine that had the bay’s sheep farmers and market gardeners alike grumbling together outside the pub.

Box had never understood his brother’s preoccupation with the weather. You woke up in the morning and it was either sunny or rainy, frosty or warm. End of story. He guessed that’s why Paul was always going to be the one who took over the family land when Pop and Dee retired. To live off the land you had to have one eye on the weather and the other on the soil. Paul had been a natural.

Box still had his eyes closed. He was holding tight to the image of being with Paul. They were wading ashore at Sandy Beach with a net full of half a dozen good-sized flounder, heavy and flapping between them.

He opened his eyes. The day was unchanged. Over in Sandy Bay there were three kayaks pulled up to above the high-tide mark and tethered to a tree. There were no people to be seen. Box took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He’d better get a move on. He’d told Dee he’d be there before 10.30. He was procrastinating again, dreading going there, hating the idea of seeing her. The phone call yesterday had been bad enough. Hearing Dee crumble at the other end of the line like that had damn near killed him.

He couldn’t put it off for ever. Box turned and walked back down the long jetty.

The ute juddered over the cattle-stop so hard that Box wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d looked in the rear-view mirror and seen half the engine lying back there on the ground.

But all he saw was the permanently open gate and the letterbox, freshly painted since his last visit. Fire-engine red. No doubt Dee had slapped on some ancient paint that she’d rummaged out from the back of the tractor shed. Below the letterbox on a piece of rough-cut board was carved the name of the Saxtons’ land: Whitecliffs.

It was typical of Dee that she kept the letterbox painted. His grandmother had always insisted on showing a respectable face to the passing world. But as Box drove up the unsealed drive the appearance of ongoing maintenance proved only as thick as the letterbox’s new layer of Dulux. The poplars growing down the side of the drive were well overgrown. In several places their branches dragged and slapped along the side of the ute. Tufted grass grew to
knee height at the edges of the rutted driveway. There were several new potholes. And a hell of a lot of old ones.

His family’s land meandered up from the water in rolling slopes. The joke had always been that all the Saxtons had one leg longer than the other so that they could walk evenly over Whitecliffs. On the left-hand side of the drive was the orchard — apples and pears mostly, but also pockets of apricots and nectarines. There were even mandarins and grapefruit over by the potting shed, which grew in the bay’s ocean-warmed microclimate but would have been ruined by the frost in most other places this far south. The trees hadn’t been properly pruned in years, not since Pop died. They needed to be cut back hard, even to be thinned out in places. Box drove past trees growing into each other in tangled cat’s cradles.

Along with all the other churning emotions he was brewing, Box began to feel a familiar bilious guilt. God knows, he came over here as often as he could. Lately, though, since his life went to hell in a handcart, that hadn’t been more than once a month. Okay, if even that. He pushed the feeling down. He was doing his best, had been doing his best for years now, though lately it felt like he was trying to build a dam with a spoon. He pulled his eyes away from the needy orchard and took a deep breath, tried to smooth out the worry lines on his forehead and felt his cap move against the red-grey fuzz on his scalp.

The last time he’d been over here he’d brought Mark. What had it been, five or six weeks ago now? The boy had helped him with the ongoing task of chainsawing up the big blue gum that had blown over, down by the glasshouses, three winters ago. Box had let Mark use the chainsaw for the first time. He’d shown the boy how to stand with the
saw well out from his body and how to position his feet so that if he stumbled there wouldn’t be any danger. You had to push down through the wood with a firm even pressure. Later Box had taught him how to oil the chain.

Together they’d used the wheelbarrow to cart the eucalyptus wood up to the space under the veranda at the back of the house, where they’d stacked it in a neat fragrant pile. It had taken the best part of a Sunday morning for them to cut up and shift just a small fraction of the giant gum. There was enough wood in that old mother to keep Dee’s open fire burning for years.

That day the boy had been quiet. Quieter than normal? It was hard to say. Mark had never been a talker, not around his parents anyway, probably more with his friends. But then again the noise of the chainsaw didn’t allow for much conversation. It was the truth that as they worked together, Mark hadn’t seemed surly or brooding. The boy had taken Box’s instructions well. Sometimes he didn’t, but on that day he’d listened to everything Box had said and then worked in the way Box explained, safely and efficiently, using the strength that he’d only recently grown into. There’d been some gentle banter between them as they used the wheelbarrow to cart the wood. Box strained his brain trying to remember exactly what the joke had been but couldn’t recall.

Now, as the ute followed the curve of the rain-rutted drive around the top of the orchard, the house came into view. It sat on a rise in the land, the gully and the creek behind. The house was square and bulky and solid. It had been crafted over a hundred years ago out of hardwood and stone from the local quarry. To Box the house always looked like something uncovered by the slow erosion of
the soil and not something built here. The thick walls were the pale red of some clay, roughcast, and dimpled to the touch, coarse as a cat’s tongue.

The mid-morning sun had topped the overgrown poplars and the light was striking the house. Even in autumn the sun wasn’t low enough in the sky for the light to penetrate into the rooms beneath the wide veranda roof. The veranda ran around three sides. You could stand out there even on a rainy day and look over the lawns, down to the lower parts of the land with the glasshouses and the tall furnace chimney and, beyond that, to the harbour.

Dee must have heard the ute because she came to the front door, wiping her hands on a tea towel. She wore the same brown jersey, baggy and stretched and shapeless, that she’d worn in the cool months for so long that to Box it seemed as much a part of her as her long grey ponytail or the archipelago of sunspots across the backs of her hands.

He pulled up in front of the concrete steps and turned off the engine. He hadn’t even got his feet on the ground before Dee was upon him, wrapping her arms around him. He could feel the damp tea towel against the skin at the back of his neck. Of course, she was crying.

‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, oh Box!’

He put his hands around her and felt the jersey against his palms. The wool was so worn that the natural lanolin smell was long gone. It had been replaced with the earthy sweat and cooking odour of Dee herself. It was a joke between Box and Liz that the ghost of every pear and apple Dee had ever stewed haunted that jersey.

‘Why? Why would he go and do such a stupid, stupid thing? Silly, silly boy. Why, Box?’

‘I don’t know, Dee.’

‘Silly, silly boy.’

Dee took a deep sobbing breath in through her nose. She was still holding him tightly. Tight enough for him to feel her lungs fill. At long last she stepped back. She looked up into his face, still touching him, both her hands just above his elbows. Her tears made swollen creeks out of the deep lines at the edges of her eyes. She shook her head.

‘It’s a stupid question, but how are you?’

‘Fine, all things considered.’

Dee squinted up at him and frowned. ‘No, you’re not, Box.’

‘Dee …’

‘Come inside. We can’t stand out here all day.’

He let her lead him up the steps by the elbow as if he was a knee-skinned five-year-old. The name Whitecliffs was stamped into a brass plate by the door — house and land, indivisible. They went through the heavy wooden door, below the arch of red and blue stained glass, and into the perpetually dim interior.

The front door opened into a wide but cluttered hallway. Things hadn’t changed much since he and Paul were boys. Box was led past the familiar hat stand festooned with generations of coats and oilskins and hats. Some hadn’t been worn in a lifetime, even by Pop. There was the frozen grandfather clock, and a bookshelf chocker with a haphazard array of once-popular fiction, cookbooks and encyclopaedias, plus thirty years’ worth of
National Geographic
in stacks of yellow spines.

The idea of getting rid of something she owned, anything, was as foreign to Dee as speaking Japanese or buying fruit from a supermarket.

Box’s grandfather had waged a largely silent campaign
of resistance against Dee’s accumulation. She would come back from some fair or garage sale with her car stuffed to the gunwales with second-hand books, lampshades, board games, videos, furniture — anything that, as she said, ‘might come in handy one day’. None of it was ever new or expensive.

Six months or a year later, Pop would surreptitiously send as much as he safely could on its way. If he was going to the city he’d load up the farm truck with one smuggled item at a time to be dropped off at the City Mission or the Salvation Army. Mostly, Dee didn’t even notice. Box remembered one day when he’d seen Pop leave the house with the red and white legs of a golliwog dangling from the pocket of his oilskin coat. Pop had seen him looking and given him a wink.

But now, without Pop around, ten years’ worth of Dee’s magpieing meant things were simply pushed together to make way for the new. The latest bargains were placed on top of the old, like layers at a site yet to be uncovered by archaeologists.

Dee led Box through the clutter and into the kitchen at the side of the house. There was no veranda on this side and the sunlight was just beginning to come in through the window, spilling yellow across the washed dishes next to the sink and onto the polished rough-cut rimu floorboards, making them glow the colour of manuka honey. She finally released her grip on his arm.

‘I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

‘Thanks, Dee.’

‘What happened to your hand?’

‘Nothing,’ he lied, flexing it. ‘I slipped at work. It’ll heal.’ Box watched her scoop coal-black tea leaves from a
painted tin that she took down from the shelf: six bitter-smelling spoonfuls dumped unceremoniously into the teapot. She poured in the already boiled water, then turned the pot three times on the bench.

The sweet smell of cooked fruit filled the kitchen. Autumn was bottling and stewing time; the season when, for every year of his childhood, aromatic mists had filled the kitchen for weeks on end, sugar-plump drops of moisture dripping down the inside of the windowpanes. Although there was now no one to feed except herself, Dee still spent weeks, all through April and May, picking the ripe fruit from the orchard and cooking and bottling it. Sitting at the kitchen table Box could see through the partially open door to the pantry. There was shelf upon shelf of glass jars with screw-on metal tops, the almost luminous fruit inside suspended in its own sweet fluids. The jars went three deep from ceiling to floor. It was the same with the purpose-built shelving Pop had built into the old packing shed — row after row of bottled fruit. Dee even had her own machine for putting the fruit in tins. By the end of the season nothing was left on the trees. Dee’s motto was a bit like that of the Marines: no fruit was left behind.

She poured the tea, filtering out the stray leaves through a strainer balanced over the mouth of each cup.

‘You haven’t started taking milk, have you?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Here you are.’

‘Ta.’

He watched her pour the milk into her own cup from a jug she took from the fridge. She traded preserved fruit for milk with a family who lived down the road and who
had a few cows. The milk came in a metal bucket with a wooden lid. It was unpasteurised full cream and after it had sat in the fridge overnight you could stand a spoon upright in the stuff. Small lumps of white fat floated on the surface of Dee’s tea. She took a sip and sighed sadly.

‘I just don’t understand it, Box. He seemed fine when I saw him.’

‘Even Liz and I didn’t think anything was wrong. Not that wrong.’

‘Why did he do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I saw him only a week ago.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s been at least a month since we came over.’

‘No, after that. He visited me, just for a couple of hours.’

‘When?’

‘I lose track. Near the beginning of last week, I think — Monday or Tuesday.’

‘He never said. How did he seem?’

‘Quiet. He wandered around by himself for a while out by the glasshouses. When he came back I made him some lunch, just a ham sandwich. I’ve been trying to remember everything that we talked about. He mentioned the girl that he’d been seeing.’

‘Saskia.’

‘She’d called it off.’

‘He didn’t want to talk about it with us.’

‘Do you think that’s why he did it, because they’d broken up?’

‘I don’t know, maybe, but not just that. It can’t have been.’

‘I can’t help thinking that if only I’d been a bit more helpful …’ Her eyes welled up. She wiped them on the
sleeve of her jersey.

‘Don’t, Dee. Thinking like that will make you go crazy.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault. So what did you tell him?’

‘Ohhh, that there were more fish in the sea: nothing very wise or profound. I did say to him that I’d been seeing a boy too, when I was much younger; Nicholas Turner. He was a friend of my brother, Brian. That’s how we met. A very nice boy, very polite and handsome. At the time, I fancied that I loved him.’

‘I’ve never heard this story.’

She looked down into her tea, where the clumps of clotted milk were still floating like small lost icebergs. ‘It’s not something I think about very much. It was a long time ago. I was only seventeen.’

‘So why didn’t you marry this Nicholas?’

‘One day he was riding his bicycle in town and he got his wheel caught in the tram tracks. He pitched off and was run over by a car. My father took the phone call.’

‘So he died?’

‘No. But he was badly injured, his head mostly, I think. I visited his family’s house after he got out of hospital. It was a big place near the park. His father was on the city council. I remember that I was very nervous about going to the house. It wasn’t as if we were engaged or anything like that, not officially. His mother looked dreadfully tired. She took me up the big staircase to Nicholas’s bedroom. The room was dim, just a crack let in the light between the curtains. When I got close to the bed I could see how his head rolled strangely on the pillow, and I remember the top of his pyjamas was wet from where he’d dribbled
out the corner of his mouth. He couldn’t talk anymore or, I think, even get out of bed. I didn’t stay more than a couple of minutes. I only went the once.’

Now it was Box’s turn to inspect the dark liquid inside his cup. ‘Sorry.’

‘No, it was less than a month after that that I met your grandfather at a dance. We were married six months later and that’s when I moved over here, to the bay. I guess that’s why I told Mark that story: even though things may look bleak for a while they normally work out for the best.’