Blue Skies Read online

  On the ferry we stood side by side looking over the rail at the water, as it churned out from under the boat in a murky froth. The day was warming. A spicy eucalyptus breeze blew in our faces. We smiled happily at each other.

  It wasn’t far. The ferry backed into its place. James knew the island from childhood visits and drove to a beach he remembered as being isolated and endless. It still was. We took the car as far as we could down a dirt track and staggered over sand dunes to the sea.

  ‘When they filmed Dr Zhivago,’ said James, ‘they used millions of tons of salt to make the snow.’

  ‘What about Lawrence of Arabia?’ I asked. ‘I wonder what they used for that.’

  ‘Sand, I suppose,’ said James.

  We had reached the top of the front line of dunes. James put his finger to his lips and fell flat on his face. Wriggling forward on his stomach like an Indian, he peered over the top of the ridge, and turned and beckoned me to join him. We lay side by side looking down and along. The beach raced away into the distance on either side, its farthest limits—if they existed—out of sight, veiled in soft sea mist and flying surf spray.

  ‘Terrific, isn’t it?’ said James.

  ‘Terrific,’ I said.

  We whooped and hollered our way down, sliding knee-deep in sand, and falling and rolling over and over down to the beach. We swam far out beyond the breakers to where the sea was deep and blue, body-surfed back in and fell choking at the water’s edges, noses, eyes and mouths streaming salt foam. We raced each other back up the beach to the soft, dry sand at the top and lay baking in the sun, wet sand sticking to our skins. As we dried out, the sand became dust-fine, leaving us with a light-golden sugar coating, like doughnuts on a bakery shelf. We lay close, pleased with ourselves. I wanted to tell him about my terror on the hill that afternoon. I tried to, and lay very still, expecting him to laugh.

  But he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘Let’s have lunch.’

  ‘It’s too early for lunch,’ I said. ‘We’ll be starving again later on.’

  ‘I packed plenty of things. We’ll have lunch twice. Once now, and then later.’ He went back to the car to get food and some ale from the Esky fridge box. He seemed a long time. I slept. He came back. He had been trying to pick up the latest cricket score on the car radio.

  As we ate, James told me that there had once been an Aboriginal settlement in this place. Aborigines had been rounded up by soldiers and a bricklayer missionary. They were put out here so as not to bother the white settlers as they seeped out across the state forming tiny townships with pretty and exotic names: Flowerdale, Baghdad, Jericho.

  ‘They built houses for them, I think, or huts or something. Bits might well still be standing.’ He tried to work out how long ago it would have been but couldn’t. ‘I’ve a vague idea of where it was, though. We could drive there and see if there are any signs of it left. It might be interesting.’

  The sun was high and beginning to redden our bodies. We left the beach and drove to where James thought the reservation had been. Not far from the track we found an overgrown pile of broken pale-orange bricks. We walked round, tracing with our feet a large rectangle roughly twenty feet in length. A short way behind this, deeper in the bush, there were a few smaller squares, outlined on the ground in the same crude bricks. They were hard to see, half-buried in the soil, worn down on the surface, woven up in wiry growth. Tall trees met overhead and the sun came through in uneven blots. There were more piled heaps of smashed bricks. The fleshy weed with luminous bright pink flowers, called ‘pigface’, rose out of the surrounding earth, crawling over the crumbling mounds and binding the old bricks tightly together. Some other plant grew there. Bright green curly tops poked out of the ground, some in close clumps, some standing alone. Curious, I pulled at one. It came out quite easily. A poor, water-starved turnip hung on the end. I showed it to James. He cut it open. It was fibrous and woody. It kept its sharp turnip smell.

  ‘How about that?’ said James. ‘They must have had some sort of a kitchen garden here and these bloody things just kept going somehow. Just kept on coming up for over a hundred years.’

  That was all we could find—the wild turnips and broken bricks strewn about the ground in lines and piles. It was a silent place, damp and gloomy. A musty dead smell hung thick as mist. I had expected something more dramatic: sun-warmed, ivy-covered grey stones oozing romantic history, a monument to a dead race with a souvenir shop attached. But there was nothing left. Just a small sadness and boredom.

  We left to find another beach on which to have another lunch. We collected some interesting shells but threw them away when we got back to the car. Reaching the ferry in good time, we waited in a lengthening line of day-trippers impatient to return. Beer cans piled up along the roadside.

  We agreed that we had had a good day.

  On Monday morning I phoned the school. The same man answered. Gloria and the boy were absent again. The school had still not heard. Did I, he wondered, know anything, since I kept phoning. I said I didn’t, and hung up.

  Next day I phoned again. No, they were still not there, but one of the teachers, who was friendly with her, planned to drive out after school to see what was happening.

  I took Angelica to her grandmother’s. Her cold was much better. Mother-in-law was so glad that James and I had enjoyed our picnic. She felt he looked the better for it.

  I caught the bus to town, and in the shiny new State Library I took out the one book there was on Tasmanian Aborigines.

  On the bus going home I decided to give up Tuesdays.

  There was nothing to do with them.

  I collected Angelica.

  Next morning I phoned the school. There was no news of Gloria; and the other teacher hadn’t been able to go after all, though she planned to go today if she could get away on time. There was a lot of excitement at the school today, the man confided. Somebody had scrawled something on one of the school fences during the night. Was it obscene? No, he said, he didn’t think so. Someone had written

  THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE

  WISER THAN THE HORSES OF

  INSTRUCTION

  in white painted capitals, and signed it William Blake. The police had been called in and had spent the morning going through the school rolls. The headmaster was of the opinion that it was the work of some disgruntled parent, although he conceded that such fancy phrasing was a bit odd. Unfortunately there was no pupil at the school called Blake and records showed that there never had been. It was a puzzle he said. And a shock. The school have never suffered from any type of vandalism before. I agreed that that sort of thing could be a problem, and wished him luck with it.

  On Thursday I woke early without thinking, and then remembered. James slept. He had taken to coming home in the early hours of the morning—making someone miserable, I supposed with some pleasure. I wondered if Ben expected me to come. But I didn’t want to see him—only his wife. There was no sure way of seeing her alone. I would keep trying to phone her at work to arrange something. I would go out anyway. I got Angelica and myself ready to go. James slept on. He was restless, and I tried to be silent as I moved about the room. As I turned in the doorway, he moaned and waved his arms. I pulled the door shut behind me. As it was early, we went to the beach on the way. The new swing was broken; the seat had parted from the chain on one side, and it dangled earthwards. A ‘Danger Keep Off’ sign was propped against a leg.

  I delivered Angelica and caught the bus to town.

  I went to the museum and the art gallery, turning left from the entrance hall. Long narrow rooms, filled with brightly lit cases of coins and manuscripts, led through to a large central room crammed with stuffed animals. Around the sides was a series of scenes let into the wall. Stuffed native creatures froze warily behind glass windows; a moth-eaten Tasmanian tiger had pride of place, snarling dismally into eternity. On display in a corner was an Aboriginal group—the extinct people— models, not stuffed, an attractive reconstruction, as accurate a
s could be made, of a family group. They stood in a line on a replica beach. Behind their heads, painted sea merged into painted sky. Scattered handfuls of grey sand and bits of broken shells lent authenticity to the floorboards. A stuffed seagull teetered lopsidedly on a papier-mâché rock off to the side. The family smiled and smiled out upon the world. They had good teeth.

  ‘They used to have the bones here. You used to be able to come in and look at ’em.’

  The words came from behind. I turned. It was the old man from the bus.

  ‘The bones?’

  ‘Yeah, bones. Abo bones. Some old woman’s, they was. Dug ’em up just after she died. Put ’em in a glass case, they did. Very interesting it was. Very popular. Particularly with us kids.’ He chuckled and it turned into a cough, ‘They’re still here, you know, or so I’ve heard. Downstairs. In a cardboard box. You can still look at ’em, but youse’ve got to have a reason these days. Be a student down at the varsity or something. People are very interested in them old blacks these days, I’m told. Bit bloody late, innit?’ He laughed again and choked.

  We moved along together, inspecting rows of bottled spiders.

  ‘Come and look through here,’ he said, tugging on my arm.

  I followed the flapping raincoat through an archway. We were in a room full of displays with moving lights. He flapped from one to another, pushing buttons and choking with pleasure as rows of multicoloured bulbs revealed the presence of various minerals scattered across the continent.

  ‘Not bad is it?’ he wheezed. ‘Not bloody bad at all. All that flaming buried treasure. If I was a younger man, I’d be off after it like a shot. Prospectin’, they calls it. Prospectin’. That’s it.’ He looked at me. ‘What are youse doing here? I’m early for me appointment at the hospital. I often come in here. Very interesting it is. Upstairs they’ve got all them convict things. Balls and chains and that. Instruments of torture. Would youse like a cup of tea? There’s a place over the road I generally go to before I goes to the hospital for me treatment.’

  We drank our tea in the back of a sweet shop. The owner had put a few tables in the space between the counters. The air had a hot sticky candy smell and was almost too thick to breathe. My hair started to cling to my head in matted fairy-floss strands.

  I wondered if what the old man had said about the bones was true. He was talking again, saying that he was staying at his sister’s place at present. ‘While this treatment’s going on. Some new thing they dreamed up. Don’t know why I went home in the first place. No sooner got there than they sent me one of their flaming letters saying to come back again.’ He slurped into his tea. Coloured jelly-baby scents blocked each nostril. ‘Sitting drinking tea,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Drinking nothing but flaming tea. Time was when things were different. Proper grog artist, I was. A regular flaming piss artist, that was me all right. Famous for it.’ He gurgled into his tea, struggling for breath and sending up a fine brownish spray.

  I decided to go. I stood up. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye then. Nice to see youse. Might see you again. I often step into the museum when I’m a bit early. Can’t hang about me sister’s place all day, can I? Me flaming cough frightens the bloody budgie.’

  I looked back and waved from the doorway. His hand flapped back through the gloom.

  On the bus I decided that Thursday could go too.

  Angelica showed little pleasure at being collected so soon. She grizzled all day; and in the evening I wheeled her down the bumpy track to the doctor’s surgery.

  ‘It’s just a tooth coming through. Nothing to worry about,’ said the doctor.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I needn’t have come.’

  ‘That’s all right. Don’t hesitate. That’s what we’re here for,’ he said, although there was only one of him. ‘To set mothers’ minds at rest. Especially the young ones. These things come with experience. You’ll find the next one a quite different proposition. Much easier.’ He smiled benignly at the now peaceful Angelica.

  ‘There’s another reason I came as well,’ I said, although there hadn’t been.

  ‘And what would that be, my dear?’

  I told him. That each day took too long. That I couldn’t make time pass at an acceptable speed.

  ‘I think what you are telling me is that you’re depressed?’

  ‘I suppose that’s it.’ He was some kind of northern English immigrant, and it was hard to follow what he said.

  ‘Well, that’s nothing to worry about, that’s natural too. More common than you might think. We can help you there all right.’ He wrote out a prescription and ripped it from his pad. ‘These tablets will make a new woman of you, you’ll see. Above all, don’t worry about things. You’ve a fine baby there to be proud of. Don’t hesitate to come and see me any time. We’re here to look after you, you know. Good evening to you.’

  I took the piece of paper and left. Back home I crumpled it up and pushed it into the jar on the mantelpiece.

  On Friday morning I called the school. From the man’s tone of voice there seemed to be more excitements. Gloria was dead, he said. Suicide, it looked like. The police had been at the school this morning talking to her colleagues. Wondering why. There was no note, it seemed. She had been found by a neighbour lying still and full of broken bones under his water tower. Not quite dead.

  ‘You’re not a relative, are you?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Or a close friend or anything? I don’t want to upset anybody.’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘a private detective.’ I dropped the phone.

  Next day there was a short paragraph in the paper.

  James instructed his mother to say nothing of it, and it wasn’t mentioned between us. I felt relieved but neglected.

  An inquest was held, but in the absence of a note or any evidence of obvious intention, a verdict of death by misadventure was recorded.

  Two days before the funeral Gloria’s widowed mother flew over from the mainland; she wore a petalled hat with feathers on it like the Queen Mother. From the airport at the edge of town she hired a taxi to take her out to Ben’s place and next morning she took the boy back with her to her exclusive Sydney suburb.

  On the day of the funeral it rained. That is as I remember it. There had been no rain that summer, but on this day it came. As it should. James accompanied me to the funeral; he knew his duty when he saw it. The crematorium was a square building, newly made from greasy yellow stone slabs, away from the town and standing alone on a windswept strip of high ground. It was surrounded by green well-tended lawns studded with shiny brass plaques with names and dates on. There were low walls as well, with niches let into them. You could go in one instead of into the lawn, if those who had survived you wished it, or if you had wished it yourself and written it down somewhere.

  In the small shoebox chapel James and I hovered together near the back. There were few people there. The deceased’s ex-colleagues huddled in a professional bunch to one side, avoiding everybody else’s eye. This small congregation of strangers was standing on a carpet of slimy liverish yellow—it matched the building bricks. The coffin was there, centre-front. It was very large. I supposed that there was a lot of room left over inside it.

  At the end of a brief service, the coffin lurched forward and disappeared silently through a hole in the wall—shiny purple curtains jerked together across the gap. For a time nobody moved or understood that it was over. A trickle of thin recorded organ music brought everyone to their senses. They fled the building with decent haste. Men, briefly conscious of accident and mortality, supported their women going down the outside steps. The teachers raised umbrellas stiff with disuse over each other’s heads. The rain came down in neat straight grey lines.

  Ben was outside. He was standing under a strangely Italianate and formal-looking evergreen tree of some kind. He stood hunched over. His hands dug deep in his jacket pockets. He wore a narrow-cut black suit, early Beatles style. The shallow velvet collar was soggy with r
ain. His hair was different, cut short and uneven. Water poured from his patchy head, streaming down his country-and-western singer’s bootlace tie and bouncing back up in decorative fountains as it hit his shabby silver boots. People passed him by in silence, crunching over the gravel, stumbling through the downpour to their cars. James and I faced him arm in arm. James said: ‘Just wait here. I’ll fetch the car over.’ He ran away and was lost in rain. Ben and I stood under the foreign tree and gazed at the crematorium doorway.

  ‘Whatever happened,’ I asked, ‘in the time before it happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ said Ben. ‘Really nothing happened, a whole lot of nothing. She wouldn’t speak to me, not properly. Wouldn’t go out. Wouldn’t go back to work. Wouldn’t say why. She didn’t sleep properly. I thought she should see a doctor. I told her to go, but she wouldn’t. She had bad dreams at night. They were full of snow and nothingness, she said. One morning she told me there wasn’t enough colour left in the world. I said that wasn’t true, not if you looked properly, used your eyes. I told her I had colour running out of my ears most times, enough for both of us. She said my opinions didn’t count. That everyone knew I was crazy.’ He rubbed his rainy knuckles into his eyes. ‘She said I drained all the colour off from her world and put it in my own. That it was all over everyone else’s walls in my pictures. She said I stole bits of her life and sold it to strangers. I tried to tell her she was wrong. That it wasn’t like that really. But she said I didn’t understand. I didn’t. I don’t. She was ill really. People who kill themselves are ill really, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh yes. I should think so.’ But I didn’t know.

  Ben bit his nails. His teeth ground the brittle pieces. I moved a little apart from him. He spat the pieces out and spoke again.

  ‘It was the thing with the police mostly, I suppose. My fault, no question of that. I came back next morning. I thought she’d be at work. I was going to mend the windows, clear up properly, get it all back together. But she was there. She wouldn’t let me touch anything. I said I’d take the car and get glass cut, do some shopping, whatever she wanted me to do. But she wouldn’t let me. Wouldn’t say why. She never went back to work. She seemed scared about it. I thought maybe she was frightened of gossip, believed someone there would have heard what had happened. It made me so angry that she should worry what that load of idiots thought about anything. I shouted at her a lot to tell me why she cared, or if she cared. I drove over there one night and wrote on the fence what I bloody thought of them. Don’t suppose they got the point, though.’