The Break (16 page)

It wasn't what she'd had in mind six months back when they moved down. The money didn't matter, but it didn't help either. The job was fun but endlessly repetitive. She didn't want to go back to Perth. She didn't want to see another soul for the rest of her life, but that afternoon she waited and waited for Cray to come home.

‘It's a different situation now, Rosie,' Cray said. ‘Things have changed. It'd be different.'

‘Would it?'

He sighed. ‘I don't know. You don't know.'

‘Just a bit of freelance stuff. To stop my brain becoming slush while I pour beers.' She looked at him, knew what he was about to say, nodded wryly at him.

‘
Becoming
?'

‘Predictable, Cray. It'll probably accelerate the process,
anyway.' Rosie felt slightly sick. Cray reeked of resin, and that didn't help.

‘Don't forget,' he looked at her knowingly, and then duly recited: ‘If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse, you may be dead.'

‘Aah, that's right.' She lay back on the bed. It was one of their favourite sayings, got them out of all sorts of otherwise humiliating situations.

‘And I can always change. Again.' She rolled her eyes.

He turned the silver ring on her finger. ‘You've forgotten the best thing.' He paused, giving her time to guess. ‘You don't have to
tell
anyone. No one to inform. That's your kinda privacy.'

She grinned guiltily at him. ‘Living in the country, hey? You gotta love it.'

While they were waiting for everyone to squeeze out through the rec centre doors (Ferg refused to get up immediately and queue ‘like sheep at the gate'), Liza heard a voice behind her say, ‘What was that you were saying about sharks?' She turned to see Rosie trying to put words to her outrage. ‘You were right, the council's just … just …'

‘Off, like an esky of week-old mulies,' Cray helped.

‘And a local guy behind it — what's wrong with him? It's bloody terrible.'

Liza, so pleased at the friendliness, shook her head in shared disappointment. ‘Yeah, you'd hardly think that they actually live here. It's just money to them at the end of the day, I suppose.'

‘Oh, Liza, this is Cray,' said Rosie, then turning her eyes to Ferg.

Ferg reached out his hand to them. ‘Ferg, and this is Sam.'

Sam piped up: ‘It's only going to be for rich people.'

‘Tourists,' Ferg said.

‘Terrorists,' Liza snarled. ‘Well, the poor darlings do need their weekend mansions, don't they?'

Cray didn't say anything, felt uncomfortable getting into the locals–tourists debate when he wasn't sure which category he and Rosie were considered to be in.

‘It's depressing,' Liza said, trying to speak more gently. ‘It feels out of our hands, despite these meetings and everything. It's one thing to chop up the land into squares so people can have their ocean views, but building shopping centres and hotels there — it's hideous.'

Everyone nodded at that. The hall was nearly empty.

Someone was unscrewing the microphone stand.

Sam said, ‘But Mum, they won't do it if everyone's saying not to. Not if we're all saying no.'

‘It'd be so nice if it worked that way, Sam,' Liza said.

Sam didn't say anything to that, but didn't look convinced either. Liza watched as he exchanged a smile with Rosie.

The microphone man began loudly stacking up the orange chairs.

‘Looks like we're getting the wind-up,' said Rosie.

Liza wanted to say, ‘Coming to the next one?' but wasn't sure, thought it would sound too much, and she didn't know why she was so keen anyway. She pulled her woolly cardigan on over her jumper.

Cray took a step back. ‘Yeah, we'd better go and start warming up the Woody. Usually takes longer than the drive itself.'

The others laughed. Cold air gusted in through the doors.

‘See you next Thursday, then, I guess,' Rosie said to them, to Liza.

‘Yeah,' enthused Sam. ‘We'll be here, won't we, Mum?'

All the way home Sam was thinking, thinking. He wanted to
do
something. He thought it sucked that everyone felt it was hopeless, wanted to show them that it wasn't,
it wasn't
. So he set about it when they got home, using his computer, of course. He imported graphics from the net and used the coolest fonts and printed his work out in super-wide landscape format for extra effect. Then he used some old textas he found jammed underneath his
Pocket Guide to Astronomy
and after about an hour he walked into the kitchen and pretended nothing unusual was going on as he stuck it on the fridge under the pineapple and
I Love Margaret River
magnets.

Liza and Ferg and Pip stared at him, stared at the fridge. When he stood back, they read:

DON'T JUST SIT THERE!

If you love our coastline help protect it.

Recreation Centre meetings every Thursday, 7.30 pm

Show your face or be in disgrace.

© This poster was designed by Sam Crowe for the Margaret River Coast Protection Society

Sam particularly liked the last couple of lines. He liked the new organisation he'd invented. Founding member: Sam Crowe. And his parents' faces when they were reading it. He walked out of the kitchen, cool as a snowdog. Tomorrow, he'd take it to school and ask to put it on the noticeboard. The librarian might let him put one up in the library, too.

Rosie slumped into the passenger seat of the Woody, smile slipping off, as they left the carpark.

‘What's the matter?'

She didn't want to talk, she didn't know what she thought, she didn't know what she wanted to say.

‘Rosie?' Cray turned on to the highway, rolled down the main street past the night-lit shops.

‘Nothing, nothing, just ignore me. I'm being silly.' She wished she'd just kept the smile on, kept any loose inadequacies strapped down.

Cray had his suspicions about what this was. Rosie had a crazy habit of comparing herself to others with unhealthy frequency. If she liked someone — like Liza, say — she'd decide that she needed to be more like them. Cray anticipated a day or two of Rosie-reassuring. ‘Rosie.'

She shook her head at the window. Just this non-discussion was making the whole thing bigger. She should have learned by now to keep the small things in a bit longer, fight them herself, see if they passed or grew.

‘It's nothing! It was just a moment of, oh, I don't know … just …'

‘What?'

‘I just get sick of myself, that's all. I wish I wasn't … I really like her — Liza. That's all. It's not a big deal — well, it wasn't a big deal — so just ignore me, alright? Please?'

Cray turned into Calgan Road. The forest was darkness either side.

She turned back to him. ‘They were nice, weren't they?'

‘Yeah.' Cray looked across at her. He tried not to be too
enthusiastic. ‘Sam
should
be able to believe that if a community says “no”, they get “no”, because that's how a community works, because that's what's bloody right.'

Rosie wished she'd been thinking about that, rather than indulging in self-centredness. She leaned her head on Cray's arm. ‘You're right.' The lights of the Kingswood cut a clear path ahead, threw yellow into the forest. Cray took his arm off the wheel, and curled it around her neck.

Rosie looked out at the whipped-up ocean and wondered if the house could cope with the wet buffeting, if its weather-board planks would swell and split and give up.

She recognised a couple of stationwagons idling at the Edge Point carpark, passengers assessing surfability. If she went to the Greys Bay general store now — or anytime — she'd be served by the people who lived behind the shop in an unlikely brick extension, and she would wait alongside one of the store regulars, maybe Dave or Morgs, shaking a choc-milk languidly before wandering outside to sit in the weak sun, and try to warm like a lizard. The cold of the ocean stayed with you for hours after a surf in winter, Cray told her, it got into your bones and made your blood sluggish.

But she didn't go to the store, couldn't think of anything worse right now. She felt low. Probably just the weather, she thought, watching the wind chimes slap and twist and arc at each other on the balcony. Their first winter in Margies was nearly over, but it had seemed to last so much longer than winter in Perth.

She pressed in her folks' phone number, the soft squares of rubber giving way under her fingertip.

‘Hey, Dad. You don't normally answer the phone.'

‘Rosie! Your old Dad does surprising things every now and then.'

‘I know, sorry. And you're not
that
old — not yet.'

‘Jeez, thanks! Apparently seventy is when the rot really starts to set in. Anyway, enough! How're things with you?'

‘Fine.' Rosie could never bring herself to say
Shit, horrible,
I want to come home
, and anyway, she wasn't even sure that that
was
how she felt. She didn't want to go home, she knew what that was like. ‘The weather's a bit of a challenge at the moment,' she said.

‘Get the heater going, then, love, and put an extra jumper on.' He relayed to her mum: ‘She's feeling cold down there, dear.'

A muffled tutting came through, and Rosie heard them conferring, but her dad must've had his hand over the receiver, as she'd seen him do so many times before, because she couldn't make any of it out.

‘Rosie,' he came back on the line rather loudly, ‘Mum says to tell you to use a couple of door sausages to keep the draughts out.'

Rosie laughed out loud at that. Her oldies really were more like grandparents than parents. ‘How is Mum, Dad?'

‘She's fine. She wants to talk to you. She's telling me to hurry up. How's Cray?'

After a brief run-down, and before passing the phone over, her dad said, ‘You guys must almost be considered locals down there, now. Your Mum and I think it's great, what you and Cray have done, Rosie, really — brave …' There was a slight pause. ‘Greys Bay's a beautiful place.'

Huh?
Cray
, not Ray? And
brave
?

‘Oh … thanks, Dad. I think you need to be here for a few generations before you're a local, but that's …'

‘Well, I won't be here in a few generations to tell you then.' He laughed gently.

‘Oh, Dad!'

‘Here's Mum. We'll see you soon, dear.'

Rosie glazed her way through the conversation with her mum, tried not to be distracted by what her dad had said.
You stay down there
… To have it confirmed like that, out loud.
Even after she'd hung up she sat near the phone. Through the glass doors, the ocean had no patterns, no neat lines, no easy shape. It heaved and cut and crashed into the land.

Mike rolled the stuff around in his mouth, to check the consistency. He'd need a beer next to get the syrupy stuff off his teeth and tongue. After giving him his dose, Grant the surfing nurse completed the paperwork. A nurse he'd not seen before was restocking a trolley with vials and bottles and swabs and syringes, picking and choosing from the cabinets, unlocking the next and locking the last with the bunch of keys that jingled across her hip. Nice hip it was too, Mike thought, as he took note of those keys and the general contents of each cabinet. Those cabinets were like lolly counters at the deli after school, or the chemist you considered ramraiding in the dead of night.

He squinted at Grant. ‘You sure this stuff isn't diluted?'

Grant looked up at Mike, bemused. ‘Mike, don't be ridiculous. We're not your supplier. This is a hospital, remember.'

‘Well, it tastes watered down, and I was having withdrawals at lunchtime from the last lot.' Mike heard the wheedling sounds of a spoilt five-year-old, or a paranoid user, in his voice.

‘
Watered down!
' Grant nearly laughed.

Another nurse came in then. She looked older, like she was in charge. ‘Sorry, couldn't help but overhearing. We'll have to up your dose then, won't we? Which means you'll have to come down all that way again, milligram by milligram, and each time you do that you're less likely ever to get off the stuff.'

Mike wanted to tell her to piss off; who was she, anyway?

‘We
want
you to get better, Mike,' Grant said.

As she walked away he heard the older nurse say, ‘My brother's still on it. Twenty years on methadone and still going strong.'

Mike walked over to the bottleshop. It was Margies' only drive-through, but you could wait there in your car as long as you liked, you'd still have to get out and get your booze from the shop. Sometimes they might carry a carton to your car boot if you were looking feeble.

Beer, vodka: which was cheaper, which could he get more drinks from? He concentrated on the alcohol because his mind was trying to stray to substances other than fluid. He even swung his eyes over the casks of moselle and
summer wine
. The idea that wine came from fruit was one he'd always struggled with. He'd never eaten fruit when he was a kid (nor as an adult, now he thought about it), despite the orchard. And yet he drank the stuff at every possible opportunity.

The orchard. Shit. Shit, the orchard. Mum. Pip. He was meant to have pruned … Why was it taking him so long to get his shit together? He wasn't working — there hadn't exactly been a rush for his services since he'd moved down — so he had the time. But still he couldn't seem …

After that he couldn't look at the wine. He bought the cheapest vodka and went back to his car, trying to ignore the neon sunset and the kookaburras, the odd carload of crazy punters driving home from the beach, salty and smiling, with kids piled, blue-lipped, in the back. And the trees, everywhere he looked, and definitely where he didn't, trees together like some feral family, surrounding him, closing in.