North of Nowhere, South of Loss

What does Beth reckon, between a nub of carrot and a gluey clump of something best not thought about? She reckons that this, whisper whisper, is the sound of matron’s own stockinged thighs as Matron exits, kitchen-bound.

“Oh Christ, look at Sue,” Peggy hisses. “Gonna cry in her stew.”

A sibilant murmur circles the table like a breeze flattening grass — Sook, sook, sook, sook! — barely audible, crescendo, decrescendo, four-four time, nobody starts it, nobody stops. Stop it! Beth pleads inwardly. Malice, a dew of it, hangs in the air. Sue wants her Daddy. Nudge, nudge. Maybe she does it with her brother.

“Leave her alone,” Beth says.

Peggy makes a sign with her finger. “Well, fuck you, Miss Tooth Fairy Queen.”

“Girls,” Matron says. “Jam pudding and custard for those who leave clean plates.”

January presses hotly and heavily on the wide verandah. Beth, in cotton shortie nightie and nothing else, lies on the damp sheet and stares through the mosquito net at a tarantula. How do they squat on the ceiling like that? If it falls, it will fall on Peggy’s net. Please fall, Beth instructs it. She beams her thoughts along the road of moonlight that runs straight from the louvres to the eight hairy legs.

Night after night, the tarantula will show up in exactly the same spot, but is gone by day. There’s another. It has been camped below the louvres, opposite Corey’s bed, for six nights. Then suddenly both of them will pick new stations. Or maybe they change shifts. Maybe there are hordes of tarantulas waiting their turn in the crawlspace below the verandahs? What do they see from the ceiling? Ten bunks on the east verandah, ten on the west. Do they sidle in through the glass louvres that enclose the verandahs? The louvres are always slanted open to entice sea breezes. Is that how the spiders get in? And where do they hide by day?

No one worries about them. Or perhaps, Beth thinks, no one admits to worrying about them, though everyone takes note of where they are before the lights go out. As long as she can still see, by squinting, the filaments of spiky hair on the spider’s legs, Beth can stop the tide from coming in. She can keep back the wave that has her name on it.

Beyond the spider, beyond the louvres, she can see the tired palms that bead the beaches together, filing south and south and south to Brisbane, reaching frond by frond by a trillion fronds north to Cape York. She can hear the Pacific licking its way across the mangrove swamps and mud flats, though the tide is far out. God, it’s hot! She reaches to her right and yanks at the mosquito net, tucked under the mattress, and lifts it to let in some air. Uhh … bite! Bite, bite, bite. God, they’re fast little blighters, noisy too, that high-pitched hum, it could drive you crazy in five minutes flat. She hastily tucks the net in again and swats at the stings. Greedy bloated little buggers. By moonlight, she examines the splats of blood on forearm and thigh.

“Who’s making all the fucking noise?” complains someone, drowsy.

“Can mosquitoes spread AIDS?” Beth asks.

“Ahh, shuddup ’n go to sleep, why don’t ya?”

But if dentists can … ? Beth wonders. She is fighting sleep, she is fighting the wave coming in.

She fans her limp body with her cotton nightie, lifting it away from herself, flapping air up to the wet crease beneath her breasts. There is no comfort. The tide is coming in now.

Every night the tide comes in. It seems to well up from her ankles. She feels this leaden heaviness in her calves, her thighs, her belly, her chest, it just keeps rising and rising, this terrible sadness, this sobbing, it can’t be stopped, it bubbles up into her throat, it is going to choke her, drown her, she has to stuff the sheet in her mouth to shut it up.

Then she goes under the wave and sleeps.

Black water. Down and down and down.

Beneath the black water, beneath the wave, in a turquoise place, the pink flamingos swim. Their breath is fragrant, like frangipani, and when Beth vacuums the bright pink ribbons of their spit, pouff, tables appear, and waitresses in halter tops and gold lamé shorts. This way, the waitresses say, and Beth follows, though the sandy path between the tables twists and turns. There are detours around branching coral, opal blue. Here and there, clamshells lurk with gaping jaws. At every intersection, the bright angelfish dart and confuse.

“Where is he?” Beth calls, and the waitresses turn back, and beckon, and wink. “Is he waiting for me? Is he still here?”

The waitresses smile. “He is always just out of reach,” they murmur. “See? Can you see?” The waitresses point. And there he is beyond a forest of seaweed, fiery red. He sips a piña colada that wears a little purple paper parasol like a hat, but when she fights her way through the thicket of seaweed, he’s disappeared.

“Terribly sorry,” the waitresses say, winking, “but he’ll be right back. Dental emergency. Floss on, he says, and he’ll join you as soon as he can. He really really likes your work. He really likes you, you know.”

And all the waitresses line up and link arms and kick up their legs in a can-can dance. He really really really really likes you, they sing, but they roll their eyes to show it’s just a sick joke and then she sees that the waitresses are Peggy and Liz and Corey and Matron herself and she throws the piña colada at them and they disappear.

But their laughter stays behind them like the guffaw of a Cheshire cat. Sook, sook, sook, it splutters, hissing about Beth’s ears. We can hear you crying in your sleep.

No, Beth protests. Never! Never ever.

Nevermore, the waitresses sing, offstage. He’s gone for good.

No, Beth argues. That isn’t true.

And see, he’s coming back, he is, she can’t mistake his coat, there it is, yes, white against the brilliant coral, starch against sea-hair flame, but she won’t turn her head, she’s not going to make a fool of herself, she pretends not to see. She wants to be surprised. She wants to feel a light touch on her cheek and then she will turn and then …

And then? And then?

The dream falters. The water turns opaque with thrashing sand. Shark, perhaps? The pink flamingos avert their eyes. There is something they know, it’s no use pretending, the suck of the sobbing wave is pulling across the dimpled ocean floor. But still he taps her lightly on the arm. “It’s all right,” he says. “You’re such a funny little thing, Bethesda.”

And so she turns. But it isn’t him, it’s Giddie.

“Oh Giddie,” she says, resigned. “I might have known.”

“G’day, Beth.” It’s his lopsided grin, all right, and his bear hug, which haven’t changed. It’s the same old dance. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you? the waitresses sing. We’re back again, he’s back again, all together now, the old refrain. “C’mon,” Giddie says, pulling her, and the waitresses twirl. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? “C’mon,” Giddie says, and now they’re swimsliding down and around, it’s a spindrift sundance ragtime jig, it’s the same old tune going nowhere. Shark time, dark time, lip of hell; they are going, going, gone. “C’mon” he says, and it’s the edge of nothing, the funnel, the whirlpool, he’s gone over, he’s pulling her down.

“No!” she screams, struggling. “No! Let me go, Gideon, let me go!”

But he won’t let her go and she’s falling, plummeting, there’s no bottom to this, it’s forever and ever, amen, though she makes a last convulsive grab at the watery sides — Gid-ee-oooooon! — and crash lands on her bed.

She gulps air, trembling, the sheet stuffed into her mouth.

Heedless, the sobbing wave rushes on, noisy, shaming, a disgusting snuffling whimpering sound, the sound of a sook.

No, wait. Wait. It’s not Beth’s wave. It’s not Beth.

She listens.

Sue, she thinks.

She must warn Sue: keep the sheet in your mouth. They don’t forgive, they’re like the fish on the reef. Remember this: the smell of injury brings on a feeding frenzy. They go for blood. You have to keep the sheet in your mouth.

“What are you reading?” he asks, and Beth startles violently. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry. What a jumpy little thing you are, Bethesda.” He sits down beside her on the sea wall, the hum of the esplanade traffic behind them, the tide lapping the wall below their feet. “Is this all you ever do in your lunch hour? Read?”

She says primly: “I’m watching the tide going out.”

He grins, then offers: “I’ve offended you. Would you like me to leave?”

“No,” she says, too quickly. Then, indifferently: “If you want. It doesn’t matter.” She tucks the book into her bag and sets it on the wall between them. “It’s me, I was rude.” She is angry, not with him, but with herself, for the thing that happens in her throat when he says her full name that way. “You gave me a scare. I didn’t think anyone could see me here.” She gestures toward the pandanus clump behind them, the knobbed trunks and spiky leaves rising from a great concrete planter with a brass plate on its rim: Rotary Club, Cairns District. She trails her finger over the engraved letters and says, inconsequentially, “I used to have to be a waitress at the Rotary dinners in Mossman.” She rolls her eyes. “Grown-up men, honestly. They sing the stupidest songs.”

“Oh God, I know. They tried to get me to join. One dinner was enough. They were raffling a frozen chicken and throwing it round the room. Playing catch.”

“In Mossman,” she says, “they had this mock-wedding. Fundraising for a playground or something. You should’ve seen the bride.” She shakes her head, incredulous. “Mario Carlucci. His father’s a cane farmer but Mario’s in the ANZ bank, he’s the manager already, everyone says his father got it for him because the Carluccis have the biggest account. Anyway, Mario, he’s about six-two, and they made this special dress, satin and pearls, with you know …” She gestures with her hands.

“Large mammary inserts,” he says drily.

She laughs. “Yeah.” She looks at him sideways. “You seem like you should be an English teacher, not a dentist.”

“What!” he says in mock outrage, his brows working furiously. “Fie on thee! Out, out, damned spot, you’re fired.”

“You’re funny.”

“You’re pretty funny yourself, Bethesda.” He smiles and she swings her eyes away, nervous. She focuses on the Green Island ferry, in the distance, nosing in toward the wharves.

“Look, Beth,” he says, “I don’t want to pry, but I’ve been making a few inquiries, and from what I hear, that hostel is pretty awful. I wondered if you’d like me to—”

“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t mind it.”

“And another thing. I’ve been looking at your application and your references again. God knows, I don’t want to lose you at the clinic, but you got a Commonwealth Scholarship, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t you take it?”

The ferry is bumping against the pylons now. Men will be wheeling the gangplanks into place. More tourists — people who are free to go anywhere they want, free even to go home again — will disembark and others will board.

“All right,” he says quietly. “I just want you to know, if you need any help … I’m worried about you, that’s all.”

“No one needs to worry about me,” she says politely, swinging her legs back over the sea wall in an arc, away from him. “But Mrs Wilkinson will worry about you if we don’t get back.”

Every Thursday afternoon, last thing, he gives Mrs Wilkinson and Beth their pay envelopes, and every Thursday she saunters along the esplanade, pretending to browse, in the opposite direction from her bus stop until she’s about three or four blocks from the clinic. Then she crosses over and makes for her spot on the sea wall behind the pandanus palms. She takes the pay envelope out of her bag and opens it. Four crisp fifty-dollar bills, brand new, straight from the bank every time, a miracle that makes her hands shake. She puts them back in the envelope, back in her bag, and takes her bank book out. Its balances, marching forward line by line, entry by entry, shimmer. Already she can see the way the page will look tomorrow morning at the teller’s window. She kisses the open book, slips it back in her bag, and hugs the bag to her chest. She can feel a warm buzz against her ribcage.

On Thursday evenings, she feels as though she could walk across the water to the marina. She feels as though she would only need to lift her arms and she would rise, float, up to the decks of the big catamaran, the one that goes to the Outer Reef. And out there on Michaelmas Cay where the seabirds are, where they rise in vast snowy clouds, she would feel the lift of the slipstream, the cushion of air beneath, the upward swoop of it, climbing, climbing, We are climbing Jacob’s ladder …

She is singing the old hymn triumphantly inside her head, or maybe belting it out loud — why not? — because here she is, Sunday night in Mossman again, after the minister and his wife have taken her in. Here’s the small Sunday night congregation, the ceiling fans turning sluggishly, moths thick around the altar lights, everyone fanning themselves with hymnbooks, singing their hearts out, Every rung goes higher, higher, her mother loving every minute of it, one of her mother’s favourite hymns, her mother turning and smiling … Oh no, wait, this isn’t right, she’s mixing things up, she shouldn’t have thought of this. Wrong track.

She swings her legs over the sea wall and crosses the road and runs all the way to the bus stop, her feet thud thud thudding on the pavement, too noisy for thought. Three people waiting, that’s good, and she recognises the woman in the pink cotton dress who always catches her bus. She throws herself into bright conversation. “Thought I’d missed it,” she says. “We had this little kid this afternoon, an extraction, and it turned out he was a bleeder, you have no idea what a—”

“You would’ve missed it, love,” the woman says, “except it’s running late. I think I see it coming now.”

“You should’ve heard this kid’s mother,” Beth babbles. “Poor Dr Foley, I thought she was going to—”

“G’day, Beth.” She hears the voice behind her and comes to a dead stop. She hears the voice but she doesn’t believe it. Old hymns, her mum, now this. Someone taps her on the shoulder. “G’day, Beth.” If I don’t turn, she thinks, he’ll go away. He isn’t really there, he’s inside my head.

The bus is pulling into the curb, and she stares straight forward and gets on. She pays, walks halfway back, and sits down. Someone is following her down the aisle, someone sits down beside her, someone in jeans and white T-shirt and denim jacket, but she won’t look, she stares out the window. Her own reflection stares back at her, resigned.

“G’day, Beth. I reckon you’re pretty mad with me, hey?”

She sighs heavily. “How’d you find me, Gideon?”

“Well, you know, I went to Mossman first, natch. And that’s how I found out about Mum. Geez, Beth. You should’ve let me know.”

“And how was I supposed to do that, Giddie?” — given that she hasn’t seen him for about two years — “How was I supposed to know where you were?”

“I dunno,” he says irritably. “There’s ways. For one, you could’ve told Johnny Coke. It would’ve got to me. There’s links all the way from here to Melbourne, you know. I mean, this is where they bring half the stuff in, for Chrissake, it stands to reason. And the rest of it grows up the Daintree. Think about it, Beth. You’ve always got your head in the bloody clouds.”

She stares out the window, appalled at her own ignorance. She thinks of all these people, hundreds of them, thousands of them maybe, all hooked, all hooked up to each other, a vast network of arteries and veins and capillaries all bleeding each into each.

“Anyway, the minister says he got you fixed up in this hostel in Cairns, and at the hostel this arvo some grouchy old biddy tells me where you work. So. I plan to be waiting for ya when ya knock off, hugs and kisses, surprise surprise, only nobody’s there. Then wham-bam you come racing past me out of nowhere. ‘You mad at me, Beth?”

“Yeah,” she says. “No. I don’t know.” She punches the seat in front of her. “You stole the money out of Mum’s biscuit tin. How could you do that to her, Giddie?”

“I didn’t steal it,” he says, offended. “Geez, Beth! I would’ve paid her back. Geez!” He swivels to look at her better. “You look pretty good. I hardly recognised you, lipstick and all, and your hair like that. Aren’t you gonna give me a hug? Yeah … Hey, that’s more like it.”

She’s smiling in spite of herself. “Mum always said you could wrap the devil round your little finger, Giddie.”

“Yeah,” he grins. “She did, didn’t she? I went to her grave, Beth, the minister told me where it was. Picked some flowers, an’ that.”

She can’t speak, and puts her head fleetingly on his shoulder, then straightens up and looks out the window again. There’s nothing to see but herself, and beyond that the curl of a breaker coming in, a great fizz of crest turning into foam, a monster wave. She has to get home first, she has to get to the hostel before the wave breaks, she has to lock herself into the loo. “Hey,” she says brightly, turning. “So where’ve you been all this time?”

“Oh, up and down the coast, you know. Brisbane mostly, but.”

“Brisbane. ‘You visit Dad?”

“You gotta be kidding,” he says. “Anyway, I think he’s out again. One of me mates got a few weeks in Boggo Road for possession, and he heard Dad got out on good behaviour. That’s a laugh, eh? Went out west, Charleville or somewhere, shearing is what I heard, can you believe? Dad?” He laughs.

“Remember that time he took us fishing on the Daintree?” Beth asks. “You were ten, I think, and I was seven, yes, that’s right. I remember because I had Mrs Kennedy that year, Grade 3, and I wrote a story about it and she read it out to the class and kids told you and you were mad as hell with me. You’d had something on your line and it was pulling like crazy and you wouldn’t let go and you went right over the boat. I was screaming because I thought the crocs would get you.”

Gideon frowns. “I don’t remember that,” he says. “You made that up, Beth. You’re always making stuff up.”

She’s incensed. “Dad yanked you back in the boat and walloped you. And you were so mad, you sneaked out that night and stayed at Wally Rover’s place just to give Dad a scare. So he’d think you’d run away.”

But it’s no use. He can’t remember a thing. Gideon’s memory is like a little heap of expensive white powder. He bends over it and breathes, and pouff, there’s nothing but fog.

She stares at her face in the black window. I remember enough for both of us, she thinks.

“I’ll tell you something I do remember,” he says suddenly. “Remember that time Mum made us matching shorts out of curtains and we had to wear them to school?”

“Yeah, I remember. We wanted to die.” She smiles and slides her arm through his. “I miss you, Giddie.”

“Yeah, me too. Listen, Beth, it’s great that you’ve got this job. You couldn’t lend me a bit of dosh, could ya? Just enough to get me back to Brissy on the train. I’ll pay you back.”

She holds herself very still, then she withdraws her arm. “Sure,” she says. “I suppose. How much?”

“Well, I dunno. Fifty should do it.”

She opens her bag and takes out the envelope. “I’m saving up, Giddie,” she says. “I’m going to go to Brisbane, go to uni and stuff, and be a teacher.”

“Wow,” he says, but he’s looking at the crisp new bills. “You’re doing all right.”

“I bank nearly all of it,” she says. She hands him one of the bills, her eyes following it as though it were a child leaving home. She can feel this pain, this kind of bleating stab, at the edge of one eye. Knife, that’s what it feels like. Switchblade. When he reaches for the money, palm up, she sees the tracks on his forearm, a dot matrix map. “Oh Giddie,” she says in a desperate rush, and it’s like finding blessed safe words to hold all the blood. “I hope you use clean needles.” The words feel bottomless. They hold the sadness neatly and nothing spills out.

“What? Oh, yeah, well mostly. Whenever I can.”

She puts the envelope back into her bag and sets it down between them. The black window stares at her, explaining nothing. Gideon begins to fidget in his seat. His ankles, jazz dancers, jiggle violently against hers. The black window says: Fix it then, Mr Fixit Man. Beth mouths at the window: Don’t. Not that it matters. Not that it matters to her.

At the Blue Marlin Shopping Centre, a couple of blocks before her stop, Giddie bounces up like a rocket. “Hey, this is where I get off. Great seeing you, Beth. Take care of yourself.” He leans down and gives her a kiss on the cheek. He’s blinking furiously and his eyes, clear a few minutes ago, are bloodshot.

“Yeah,” she says. “You too. Take care of yourself, Giddie.” She hangs onto him but he pulls irritably away.

“C’mon, Beth, I’ll miss me stop.”

She watches his jerky progress to the front of the bus, down the steps, out. She presses her nose to the window to wave, but when the bus moves he’s already sprinting across the parking lot, a blur. Unfixed. It isn’t until she gets to her own stop that she realises he’s taken her bag. She remembers now the way he held his left arm, pressed against his denim jacket, as he stumbled down the bus.

She can feel the wave coming in. It’s tidal, a king tide. She stares at the tarantula, the sheet stuffed into her mouth. King tide. There’s a watery halo around the tarantula’s legs. Sobs are leaking into the room.

She sits up, panicked. So much of the sheet is balled up in her mouth she’s afraid she will gag. But it’s Sue again, the next bed to hers. Damn, I warned her, Beth thinks, exasperated.

She lifts her mosquito net, slides out, tiptoes to Sue’s bed, lifts the net and leans in. She puts her lips against Sue’s ear. “For God’s sake, stuff the sheet in your mouth,” she whispers savagely. Her own anxiety is acute. Sue has her hands up over her face, the way Beth’s mother used to when her father was drunk. It is always the worst worst thing. “Stop it” she hisses, furious, grabbing Sue’s wrists. “You’re asking for it, damn it.”

Then she realises Sue’s asleep. Sue is flinching and bucking and moaning and crying in her sleep.

Oh God, she thinks. Any second now, someone’s going to wake and hear this shit. Show blood and you’re dead, that’s the rule. Her mind is racing.

Okay, she thinks. Nothing else for it. Swift and efficient, she slides into Sue’s bed, jabs the mosquito net back under the mattress, grabs the girl in her arms, and muffles Sue’s face between her breasts. “It’s all right,” she murmurs. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s going to be all right.” Sue’s snuffling sobbing breath is warm against her. With her left hand, she strokes Sue’s hair. “Go to sleep now,” she murmurs. “Go to sleep. It’s all right, baby, it’s okay.”

Sue’s body shifts slightly, softening, rearranging itself, moving up against Beth’s like an infant curling into its mother. Her breathing turns quiet. Beth goes on stroking Sue’s hair with one hand, and stuffs the other into her own mouth. At the fleshy place where her thumb joins the palm of her hand, she bites down so hard she tastes blood.

FOR MR VOSS OR OCCUPANT

“Foreclosures,” Mr Watson was in the habit of saying, “are a steal.”

Further wise thoughts would follow: a foreclosure was manna from heaven, a sweetheart deal, a buyer’s dream. He did not, however, run through the litany for this particular client, the young mother whose pubescent daughter had refused to get out of the car, the young single mother it would appear, hubba, hubba maybe he’d try his luck — God, if people knew how much quick hot fucking took place in empty rooms behind For Sale signs! — but no, on second thought, he smelled trouble right off the bat. A bit off, he reckoned; a bit out of it, the way academic types always were. A bit pinko, for sure, the stink of Sydney (Balmain, even Newtown maybe) coming off her like Four-X pong off a pub, a real wolverine in sheep’s clothing, weird clothing, they were all Commies down there, dykes, women’s libbers, worse. Put your thing in the wrong place with her kind, chop chop and goodbye. One way or another, she was bound to get herself into strife in Brisbane, and serve her right.