The Break (13 page)

A couple of weeks passed, days like waves rolling over them. One afternoon, as Rosie came in the front door, Cray was hanging up the phone.

‘Who was that?'

‘Uhh, aah … how was your day, first?' He cornered her for a cuddle. ‘You smell of pub.'

She laughed, untying her apron and pulling the waiter's friend from her pocket. Rosie concentrated. ‘My day. It was fine. The till fills up fast in that joint. You should see some of the guys in there, Cray. Nothing else to do after work but go to the pub. I suppose at least there's someone to talk to there, even if it is just someone behind the bar. Anyway, what about you, who was that on the phone?'

‘Do you want to go for a walk?'

‘Cray!'

‘I'll tell you on our walk, come on.'

Even a tiny place like Greys Bay had to have a park for kids to play on, but Rosie was surprised. ‘Not very
country
, is it, an oval with a cricket pitch? More like something you'd find in a suburb, or somewhere.'

‘Well … it's got ocean views and roo poo on it, if that makes you feel any better.'

Behind them, the hill reached towards the fading day sky. Low scrub twitched and flitted with dusk birds and patterned the hill grey, green, yellow. Cray and Rosie followed rabbit paths up the slope, scratched their legs on saltbush, passed gaps in the bush where heads of startled but still kangaroos
looked over, finally reached the top.

Standing at Greys Bay's highest point, they saw the view open out to the continuing stretch of coastline running south, huge ocean moving with whitewater against limestone rocks and shelf. The cold wind hit their hair, their eyes. No one was down there, not a soul.

Rosie turned to Cray, with the wind in her clothes.

He shouted through the starting drizzle, ‘When the wind's down, you can surf that wave.' He pointed to a heaving mass, the white whipping the water to cloudy turquoise. Tiny pins of rain began to hit their faces.

‘Christ, look at the sky! We'd better go back.'

‘But your news …'

‘I'll tell you when we're home.'

When they stepped back, on to the town side of the hill, out of the wet, salty wind, warm stillness filled their ears, and Rosie's cheeks glowed. They ran for it, up the steep grey bitumen that skirted the houses, till they met the street that stole away towards their own place.

Rosie and Cray watched the sky through the sliding doors. Inside it seemed stuffy, after all that air. But the violet sky would move on soon enough, and the turquoise lagoon of Hut's Beach once again reflect up at them.

‘It was a guy called Gus, on the phone before. He runs a board-shaping place out the back of Margies.'

Rosie turned to look at him. ‘Are you getting a new board made?'

‘No. Well, I might.' He laughed. ‘But I rang him to see about … work.'

The horizon and the sun reached for each other, the slow release of post-storm colours.

‘
Work
.'

‘Yeah. Shaping boards.' Cray ran his hand through the air, his arm cutting a smooth line before the evening water. He looked over at her, grinned. ‘What do you reckon?'

Rosie was still slightly over-oxygenated, she thought. She tried to remember back to when they decided to move away, to how impossible everything had felt then, with their jobs, how stuck they felt, how funnelled. She nearly caught it, that desperation, it dipped towards her and then away like a cautious bird, but it was enough to remember the rest.

‘They're going to think I'm strange with this skirt on,' she said to Cray in front of the mirror. ‘I know Dad won't like it.'

‘Won't he? Why not?'

‘Not Country Road enough.' All the colours, she thought. A bit hippie-looking. And it reached right down to her ankles.

Cray was gone, though. ‘A quick surf before they arrive,' he said.

‘Don't be long! Can you get back before they get here? Cray? It's
important
!'

The flywire door creaked, and she heard Cray's knee cracking all the way up the driveway.

Rosie looked back in the mirror. Her throat felt laced up like a school shoe.

Rosie concentrated on making the tea not too strong.

‘What a super skirt, love,' her mum beamed, unpacking a bag of fruit and biscuits and magazines, putting them neatly on the counter.

Rosie looked at her mum.

‘It's lovely, lovely and colourful. Young people only seem to wear black these days.'

‘Yes, very nice, Rosie,' her dad said.

‘Where's Ray?' her mum asked.

‘Oh … he's probably just getting out of the water, he'll be back in a minute, he's looking forward to seeing you guys.'

They looked around. Her dad tried not to appear impressed by the view but Rosie saw how his eyes hung on it, and how they swung around the room over the furniture, the
TV, the dust, the multiple
Tracks
magazines, the coffee mugs (shit, she hadn't noticed those when she was cleaning).

‘Good view, though those sliding doors could do with a bit of a clean,' he said.

She glanced at them. He was right, but was that all he could say?

‘And has Ray found some work yet?' he added.

Rosie's mum looked across at her.
Don't mind him,
she winked.
Your dad worries.

‘Well, yeah, I have, and Cray's been talking to someone about work.'

They sat up slightly in their chairs, then. Tried to avoid looking at each other in surprise. Failed.

Don't ask, don't ask where.

‘Where?'

‘Sugar?'

‘What?'

‘Do you want sugar today, Dad, or did you bring your sweeteners with you?'

‘Oh, no, I didn't. Yes, half a teaspoon please, dear,' he said, sending another look to her mum, who tried to shake her head without moving it.

Rosie carried the cups over, and when she'd sat down, she looked at them and said, ‘Cray might be starting work at a local surfboard shaping business, designing boards, and I'm working at the hotel.' And waited for the silence.

They waded through it.

‘Well …' her dad started, ‘are you enjoying it?'

What?
Had he popped a valium or something? Not:
Where's that going to get you?

He relaxed his forehead at her look, nodded at her to go ahead.

‘Yep. It's not bad,' she said guardedly.

‘Well, that's good,' he said. And he settled back to drink his tea.

Rosie and her mum stared at each other. Rosie got the Tim Tams quick smart. Cray came in dripping, enthusiastic, noisy, and the three of them exchanged kisses and handshakes as Rosie looked down at the patterns on her skirt.

It was hard to see the original words under the scrawly work of the vandal. Liza studied the poster, finally making out the original: RAID (Residents Against Inappropriate Development). It was an action response group (sounded like a kid's toy, Liza thought, complete with battlezone vaporiser) and there was an emergency meeting to be held that night at the recreation centre. The rec centre was where all the town's events took place, from footy matches and theatre productions to underage gigs for the town's kids. As she walked down the highway, Liza saw the flyers stuck up on the windows of the burger joint, the hotel, the hardware store and the crystal shop, all of them defaced to re-read: RAVE (Residents Against Valuable Employment). Liza laughed briefly; it irritated her that this was clever and funny, and momentarily she felt like ripping it down.

She wandered down to the arcade to pick up the things she'd come for. She needed to replenish their house supplies, since she'd been putting a lot of things into Mike's cottage over the last few weeks — soap, loo paper, shampoo, that sort of thing. And she wanted to get a new pillow for him, since the other one was lumpy, not that he'd complained. She bought a stack of five plain soaps in addition to the fruit flavours she chose for their own shower. Ferg would mutter at the appearance of an effusive orange cake, but she and Sam loved them, reckoned that tangerine and grapefruit were the truest-smelling, came out of the shower and cracked each other up with fruity jokes.

That night Liza wondered what to wear, knew there'd be a lot of the town's hippie community attending (certainly more than the town's farming community), and she worried that she'd look straight,
motherly
, in her gear. Standing in front of the wardrobe, she chastised herself for wasting energy on that stuff — hadn't she got over it years ago? Crossly, she yanked on her most misshapen farm gear, and tried to ignore Ferg when he raised his eyebrows in surprise at her. Before he changed her mind, Liza said, ‘Right, where's Sam? Let's go,' and headed out the front door. Behind her, Ferg grabbed the car keys and slammed the door.

Liza rolled and unrolled the sleeves of her shirt, looked over at Sam and Ferg and then around the hall. There were about a hundred seats set up, and people were flowing in, some heading straight for the front rows, others seeing friends and piling into spare seats around them. Two chairs were set up on the stage next to a big silver seventies microphone. As seats filled up, Liza began to notice who wasn't there. The hotel proprietors, she mused. Members of council. Predictable.

After a minute Ferg leaned over and mumbled, ‘Uh, what does RAID stand for again, Lize?'

Cray caned the Woody along Rockcliffe Road. They weren't going to miss this, he thought, it was an opportunity to get into the community side of things, to do something useful. He was aware of how much he and Rosie had kept to themselves since moving down, didn't want it to become too much of a habit. Rosie didn't agree, he knew, though she was the one who found out about this whole development thing in the first place, but there was a limit to the kind of solitude she talked about. And
sometimes he wasn't completely convinced by Rosie's
What I really want
statements. He flicked on the high beams, lighting up the road in advance, and felt for Rosie's hand.

‘Have you heard both sides of the story here, Liza?'

Liza and Sam turned to look at Ferg.

‘What exactly is the other side, Ferg?'

Ferg looked at Sam to the left and Liza to the right of him, and drew a breath. ‘Yes,' he began wearily, ‘there usually are two sides to most stories, guys. But I can see you've made your minds up.' He looked at Liza, shook his head. ‘Try to teach Sam the broader view next time, Liza, so he can decide for himself.'

‘Oh, really …'

‘I did decide for myself, Dad!'

Ferg nodded. ‘Yeah. Okay.'

Liza hung a look on him before the three leaned back into their plastic chairs.

Sam shut his eyes for a moment against the talking and moving around him, tried to bring a constellation into his mind's eye. Just black and the perfection of those clustered bluewhite places.

Across the hall, Liza saw the couple from the bank that day, sitting a few rows over from them. They were talking, looking relaxed, laughing occasionally. Liza looked away, looked past Ferg at Sam, and though she felt a small, empty balloon in her gut, she winked at him. Between them, Ferg drummed his fingers across his knee.

Rosie strolled up the main street; she had fifteen minutes to kill before her shift started. The main drag, she thought, grinning, was a classic mix of daggy country-town shopping and alternative gift shops and cafes, punctuated by the heavy roar of road trains carrying everything from massive tree-trunks to tankers of fuel. Heading south, up the slow hill, she looked across the road at the draper's, the oldest shop in town and not known particularly for its movement with the times. Decades-old mannequins posed naked and limbless in the window. Rosie had ventured in once or twice. Marketing tricks certainly weren't employed to get people in. The dusty gloomy place had racks jam-packed so tightly with haberdashery, underwear, leisurewear, sports gear and workwear that you could hardly part it to look. Or it was stacked on shelves reaching right up to the ceiling so you needed to get one of the grey-skirted ladies to climb up a ladder to retrieve your size.

Further up the road was the local Retravision store, which, unlike its city counterparts, sold
underpants
. And garden hose attachments, packets of screws and nuts, gas cylinders, TVs, letterboxes. Out the front of the shop, in bargain bins, were packets of pegs (500s), sets of tea towels, and the loose, unpackaged undies. You could
touch
them, pale blue daisies or racing cars, take your pick.

Then, of course, there was the Rainbow Shop, which sold wind chimes and aromatherapy stuff, gypsy girl clothes, jewellery from Thailand and funky rugs. Incense burned as you entered, and Bob Marley sang mantras from the stereo. The dressing room was a cubicle constructed from hanging
sarongs, and in it were handwritten signs mentioning shop-lifting and threatening
karma
.

Free time up, Rosie walked into the hotel, swapping hellos with regulars and staff, tying her apron around her hips. Phil and Tony leaned against the bar, hands on weeping glasses, staring at nothing. They moved a little when she stood behind the taps to survey the afternoon business. A few touros having coffee, the Rainbow Shop woman having an early beer with the bloke from the gourmet cheese factory, Cole and Corynne and Rebecca winding down from their lunch shift, about to approach Rosie for a freebie.

Phil's stubby was empty. ‘Staying for another, Phil?'

‘Yeah, why not.' He laughed, the grubby sound soon turning into his wheezing Craven cough, sending his colour up a few notches.

Tony chuckled. ‘Gotta kill them cancer sticks, Phil,' he said, flipping the top on his own Benson and Hedges Special Filters.

After serving them, Rosie went outside into the sun, to collect a few glasses from the early-afternooners. People relaxed around the wooden tables, sunnies taming the brightness of the day.