The Following (31 page)

‘Pantry?’

‘Small, thick, hard, with a light, no, not a light,’ said Sonia. ‘With a taste of . . . ah,
brittle
.’

‘Try not to talk,’ said Nick.
Jesus, she’s away.
The bedside table was scattered with silver foil pill trays. Endone. Tramadol. If she left some, he’d pocket some.

Sonia told him, each word battling for the creation of the word following, that when she fell over at tennis that time, and Harry drove her home from the hospital with the diagnosis resounding in their ears, that she’d mangled the names for things. And Harry had realised she’d been doing it for months – they’d just made a joke of it. At home, they sat on the balcony drinking champagne laced with crème de cassis, went to bed without eating, cried themselves to sleep.
I don’t want to hear this,
thought Nick, but said, ‘Go on.’

He was rescued by footsteps on the gravel. Sylvia was there to help Sonia dress. Nick told her what Sonia wanted. An afternoon tea.

‘Are you sure?’ said Sylvia, who’d never doubted a word Sonia said.

‘Just a quick cuppa,’ encouraged Sonia, with the trace of a grin.

Sylvia paused a few moments, as if she might say no to the proposition, having said yes to all others, then asked Nick to put the kettle on and tell everyone.

‘Tell them “no trouble”,’ added Sonia. It would be like old times, an afternoon tea on the verandah overlooking Crater Bay, where strong tea and hard biscuits were served when she first came there with Sylvia on her return from Oxford, aged twenty-seven, in time for Sylvia and Tiger’s wedding under the bough shelter.

Tiger and Judith were in the kitchen when Nick came back from the sick room, head up, open-faced. They might say, if they knew, he was armoured with happiness.

They’d been talking about him, and he thought he knew what they said: ‘Why so delirious?’ Tiger seemed to say. Or he might have said ‘Nicholas’, or was it, ‘Daria Willis’ – spoken from the side of the mouth?

Nick told them what Sonia wanted.

‘Nobody’ll ever get away at this rate,’ said Tiger.

‘She wants Ginger Nuts,’ said Nick.

Tiger rang Max, but there was no answer. He left a message: ‘Come on over, the kettle’s on. We’ve got Ginger Nuts.’ What he wanted to say was, ‘We’re saying our goodbyes.’

‘He’s playing silly buggers,’ said Nick, but without conviction. He swerved to his father’s side of a story, having held to his mother’s for so long. Max’s absence had allowed him to play a part. There was a feeling – new to Nick, but with a feeling of ageless knowledge – of giving consolation without always trying for rational understanding.

He walked up the drive to where Harry and Jake were packing the cars.

‘Afternoon tea,’ he said.

‘Afternoon tea?’ said Harry. ‘Is this Sylvia’s idea of a joke? After she rushed me to pack?’ He sent a blaming look at Nick.

‘Aunty Sonni wants it,’ said Nick, meek as a child.

‘Where’s my fucking camera?’ said Harry, diving into the back seat of the car and throwing items of clothing back over his shoulder onto the gravel, where Jake picked them up with the mute dedication of a manservant.

Back in the house, Judith found an old brown oilcloth in a bottom compartment of the hall cupboard and held it down with rocks in the afternoon breeze. She found a cracked brown teapot and tipped a packet of ginger biscuits onto a mud-coloured plate. They weren’t authentic Ginger Nuts – Black and Gold ginger biscuits would have to do.

‘Black and Gold’s Petra’s,’ said Tiger. ‘They say “don’t touch”.’

Judith was away on it. She looked around for anything else brown. It was played on
Workers Comp
– visual puns. They played it when becalmed. Only on the boat it was all mental. They drove themselves mental for days. You imagined a task, named it. Everything you needed had to have a right-angle, or be made of wood, or have a certain colour. Then you had to say what the colour was made from, its organic chemical composition. It was cryptic. For example, a lamb reading yesterday’s newspaper – that one was a classic. Jake had her almost paralysed. They were out taking plankton samples, both of them naked under the boom tent in the motionless heat. In thousands of square miles of open ocean two vessels of dramatically different size managed to steer a collision course towards each other in order to give a clue in a mental game. They didn’t see the live sheep carrier until it was almost on them. ‘Sheep ahoy,’ said Jake, and after it thundered past, smelling of sheep-shit and diesel, leaving them bobbing around in the swell, ‘We almost made the papers.’

Sapper Boden’s cottagey relics were stored in the pantry on oilcloth-lined shelves. There were hurricane lamps, toasting forks, cheese graters like armorial headgear and a set of brown crockery that had possibly originated in a wedding shower circa 1909 but seemed more likely to have been left by the Etruscans. Tiger changed the rocks that Judith had chosen for ones of a deeper brown, with dense brown lichen, like a picture painter’s paint, that he moved from under the verandah, and they matched the plates.

The two of them were on the edge of hysterical strain. It had been heading that way when Nick caught them whispering – yes, his name had been used, his ears had justifiably burned – Judith asking Tiger why he kept putting the knife into Nick.

‘A bottle of beer, peanut butter,’ said Tiger.

‘Chocolate brownies, cocoa, brown bread,’ said Judith.

‘Burnt butter,’ said Tiger.

‘Brown sugar,’ said Judith.

‘Cockroaches,’ said Tiger. ‘Ironbark honey.’

‘Ironbark?’

They smacked each other’s palms like winning doubles players. Tiger enjoyed the visceral level of it – lips peeled back, hips swivelling. Judith being a good sport – ever a good sport – upped the excitement when he did. It was not entirely mental as they stood there in the kitchen with the kettle whistling and the teapot ready to be filled. Judith could feel Tiger getting more excited than the game deserved. When he said ‘honey’ there was a husky edge to the word, a term of endearment, misplaced.

‘Green colouration,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Crème de menthe, lime-chocolate centres, scum on a pond.’

‘
Scum
? Where are you taking this?’

‘You know, at evening, that look. Mud greens and browns on the water.’

Judith leaned back against the kitchen bench. ‘It sounds like a dairy farm.’

‘Scummy farm dam. Air of neglect owed to the penalties of time. Crater Bay,’ said Tiger. ‘What’s the era?’

‘You’ve completely lost me.’

‘When was Sergeant Pepper?’

‘Oh,
then
,’ she said.

‘That day in the boot – in the dicky-seat – of the Triumph, with Jake. What did you wear?’

‘What did I
wear
?’

‘The first day you were here. You wore a shot silk blouse, emerald earrings, green hair ribbons.’

‘Goodness, what next?’ Judith said.

‘Shorty short shorts,’ said Tiger.

Judith stared at him: ‘
What
?’

This was Jake’s refrain, not Tiger’s – Jake’s long-ago chant of flirtatious wordplay that had started them off on their love match – ‘
WHO wears short shorts, YOU wear short shorts
’ – two kids discovering mutual delight, a forgotten hit from the forgotten Royal Teens up against Judith’s beau, as he called her, Commander Mark Herring, with so much fun on offer that they didn’t know how damaging close naughtiness could be till Herring, a decorated naval officer, Commander of HM Submarine
Boundless
.

That was the week Judith learned that a young woman, simply by being herself – her selfish, self-delighted self – could do what the Axis navies and machinations of Cold War service politics hadn’t been able to swing. She blew a man up. How broken Herring was came out in the book of the same name,
Boundless
, published in his advanced age.

Judith felt uneasy with Tiger like this, but reasoned it had always been the same with him: nothing came of his manner except a chill that reminded her that she’d never quite plumbed him. What was he looking for, what did he want? What didn’t he
get
ever, by making her feel uneasy?

Sylvia never saw this side of him. What Sylvia loved, she found.

With a look so narrowly intense and madly grinning, Tiger waited for Judith to laugh with recognition – ‘Come
on
!’ – to laugh at his brilliance, his memory, his vast emotional reach.

All these years and she’d let such instants slide – though not this time, and she needed to ask, ‘Where does this come from, Tiger?’

There was a long pause while he thought about this and held Judith’s eye. ‘Green pickles. Brown trout,’ he said. ‘Fish.’

There was a shadowy shoal of feeling, an accusation without words. Feeling was the justification for everything Tiger did. Feeling never died.

He meant Herring, of course. Could he possibly, mysteriously, oddly, be
angry
?

Judith thought so.

‘Sub-marine,’ said Tiger with particular, almost exhausted emphasis.

The pun was the clincher. Judith turned aside and the word slid between them – shedding its hyphen and silent, smooth, filled with muffled life struggling to escape – and went.

Nick came into the kitchen and looked from one to the other. Judith – wow. Tiger – one day he might have to clock him.

‘Aunty Sonni’s on her way down,’ Nick said, hearing himself using that childhood name quite deliberately, softening his voice. He felt as if he’d aged years in maturity with the gift Sonia gave him, life to the living.

Standing at the top of the path Sonia balanced and swayed but was barely able to take a step. ‘I’m falling,’ she whispered.

Harry caught her up, lifted her, carried her in his arms down to the verandah, step by careful step. He was King Kong holding a wraith of muslin and lipsticked paleness. Oily perspiration hung from a huge forehead plastered with black hair.

When Harry and Sonia settled, the rest gathered around the table.

‘All sit,’ said Sonia, her timing out of sync, as they were all seated by then.

Here was her
tableau vivant
, her creaky, formal demonstration of occasion. You might think she was rather accustomed to presiding as a judge, so the role wouldn’t leave her, even now, and that was what made it happen. But Sonia had always run it, Sonia and Sylvia and the pigtailed white-socked girls of their day gathered under the schoolyard peppermint gums. There Sylvia would be the one going through the rules of hopscotch, rounders, chasings and ‘families’ – and Sonia the one making corrections and emendations to the rules. ‘The laws’, they’d called them with precocious reverence. They’d be kept now to the end.

They dunked their ginger biscuits, creating a soupy sweet sludge, which they slurped while approving that Sonia was getting her appetite back, as she touched her lips to a sodden fragment, and the minutes dragged by in a self-conscious show. No one moment of their entire summer, no one occasion through their years of friendship was more difficult for any of them than doing nothing, sitting still. It was not in any of their capacities unless done consciously. There was a stony feeling of inappropriateness, that feeling of where-to-now that was only relieved when Sonia started talking, her voice broken thin as a sparrow’s into fragmented cheeps.

What she said, they would put together later. Harry had the unthinkable, forehead-knuckling thought of a line in a eulogy. He would recall words almost lost in the effort of saying them. Sonia’s dark living eyes penetrating, searching around the table as she spoke each name and said, or seemed to say, what each of them had given her in her life. That it was in the look, not the words, was something none of them would remember.

When she was done, whipped, Harry placed his hands on the table edge, and stood, scraping his chair back. He almost roared. ‘Go?’

Minutes later they were gone. Eternity towered in a cone of dust set up by the departing cars. You could sample it on your tongue.

It left Nick and Tiger to clean up at Crater Bay, where everything belonged to itself again. The cicadas in the banksias reminded you they were deafening. Now to the water.

T
HE DINGHY HAD ARRIVED AT
Crater Bay one summer on an unregistered trailer backed up to a boat ramp at the shallow end of the bay. The Sarge called for an owner, none came forward.

After months the dinghy was auctioned off with proceeds going to the community hall and picnic area improvement fund. Petra and Arch bought it for their sons. It was believed that Wesley and Booth knew where the dinghy came from. That they were the ones who’d broken into the community hall and set it on fire, not so many years ago. Bourbon was their drink of teenage bravado; they’d chucked their empties into bushes, smashed them on rocks. That Booth had now gone to Bible College on the Sunshine Coast and Wesley was in the army, an NCO, made Tiger wonder. Anything was possible if you lived long enough to see it happen.

His cousin Petra was the first girl Tiger ever kissed. They’d had the morals-free intimacy of teenaged cousins, blistered lips through a summer of head-knocking in the dunes and sore hips from rock’n’roll Friday nights in the Soldiers’ Memorial Hall, where fourteen-year-old Petra begged Tiger, a year older, to throw her over his back to the yells of Johnny O’Keefe at 45rpm. They were then as one but could hardly make eye contact now without differences.

For more than a year the dinghy’s tiller had been lost in marram grass behind the boatshed, giving shelter to spiders and centipedes. Tiger found it by standing on it. Red and white paint was peeled, flaking, and the centreboard, a woodworker’s piece of art, had lost its varnished shine and was splintered and warped. A nest of black ants in the forward bouyancy compartment came out in a file through a crack in the ply while
Red Lemon
plunged along.

Tiger asked for trouble, crouching in the three-metre, wrinkled, damaged, paint-peeling shape. Saltwater splashed to his chin. The sails were stained with mould and mud. The gooseneck fitting was lashed to the mast with strands of candy-striped nylon cord where pop rivets had torn supports free. A gust coming around the headland boofed the craft out from the shallow, sandy shore to a place where the estuary widened, entered the bay and tidal currents spread under.