The Drowner Page 13

  In Salisbury they had bought two Shona sculptures of emerald soapstone, heavy and cool, really far too cumbersome to lug across the world. The sculptor, a bright-eyed young man who spoke some English, told Angelica her statue was called The Impala Child. Will’s, he explained with much flickering of his fingers, was Woman Turning into a Bird. Soon she lay along the seat with an arm around each sculpture, trying to absorb their green, marine cold into her body, alternating her burning forehead against their sheen.

  Blackwater fever had taken firm hold by the time they crossed the Odzi River into Umtali.

  In the Africans’ wards each patient has his or her ‘bottler’ by the bed, a relative who sits there simulating the sound of water with his thumbs on a little hollow-boxed water-piano.

  The liquid sounds of Africa flow into the Europeans’ ward, and to her the mingled burbling of the bottlers sounds like gadflies and creates dream-memories of warm days in the meadows.

  The whole Umtali district is crisscrossed by the upper tributaries of the Odzi—the Odzani, Umtali, Sabukra, Dora and M’pudzi rivers—and the river people cannot sleep without the patter and gurgle of running water. Not just any water but their own familiar stream. So each bottler plays a special rhythm.

  In the hospital at Umtali, assisted by the bottlers’ sounds, she, too, sleeps. Almost in a daze himself, Will stays by her bed watching her tossing in waves of delirium, wiping her face, cleaning her mess, fanning her with a damp raffia fan to the thrumming of the water-pianos. As days pass it dawns on him that the African bottlers are speaking in water. Speaking in the many sounds of water to the patients and each other.

  He supposes they speak about the white woman with blackwater fever. Perhaps it’s because they make it clear to him with their trickling and pattering sounds that water is the mistress of smooth flowing language, of continued and continuing language, of language that softens harsh problems and gives a uniform substance to the differing rhythms of life, that he feels almost fatalistically calm.

  They are playing in the river after a late Sunday lunch. It’s really only a stream at the bottom of the meadow behind their summer cottage. Silly, dank King Neptune hair of duckweed and reeds trails over his face and ears. She and Kate are climbing him, squealing, standing on his knees, using his thighs as a ladder, sliding down his sleek back, balancing on his shoulders. He easily throws them off and ducks them. Rubs his scratchy face of weeds and whiskers over them.

  He’s chuckling, too, as he holds her squirming beneath the surface. But King Neptune goes too far. She’s panicking and spluttering. She’s only a child pressed into the river ooze by his big hands.

  All around them is that soft, gurgling buzz, like the patter of rain on newspaper. Unlike the noise of any other fly: the appreciative sound of the gadfly’s love.

  Especially its desire for florid, full-blooded victims. Its dirty grey-brown body lands on his bare back and creeps up to the creases of his juicy neck and stabs deep. Even though she’s under water and he’s holding her there, she wants to warn him, to shout, but of course she can only babble. The gadfly is swelling with blood as her father fades and shrivels, and it stays there, so engrossed in its feast of blood it doesn’t see the hand raised to swat it.

  Whose hand? It can’t be hers, she’s drowning. Kate’s?

  Strange that she feels the sting of the slap.

  ‘She’s back again,’ a distant voice says, coming closer. Will’s tired, red but younger eyes looking into hers.

  ENTROPY

  THEY CROSSED THE INDIAN OCEAN with the Roaring Forties in their ears and coat collars. Three weeks from Africa, four months since England, they sailed into the Southern Ocean. Only Antarctica lay further south. This alone is enough to make Will feel accomplished and adventurous, and when the Oceana steams into Albany, a little mail-packet port on the rim of King George’s Sound, a wide sandy bay on the southern coast of Western Australia, the optimism of pioneers and explorers floods his soul.

  On deck, he takes her arm and leans into the breeze. Salt mist drifts in their faces and dusts their lips. Smells of coal and kelp, whale oil and eucalyptus waft on the air. He feels ready for anything. Since Africa slipped over the horizon her fever attacks have not recurred. Their arrival at last in this newest of places, her pink colour in the sharp air, fills him with hope.

  Mistaking their steamer for a whaler, a school of pale sharks pilots them through a swell into the harbour. Standing at the rail, Will can feel through her layers of clothing the buoyancy of her breast against his side.

  ‘All this ozone! At least my lungs feel well here,’ she says.

  He leans into her breast and wills this healthier person to prevail. He’s tense with excitement and the grandeur of opportunity. He winks at her.

  ‘Your lovely lungs.’

  Her thinner body rocks slightly back and forth from him to the rail. As she gazes towards the land she’s touching him, not touching, then touching again. Soon, unable to tell if they are touching or not, he welcomes her hair flying against his cheek.

  ‘Very scenic,’ she says. ‘I feel things have changed, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As usual every wave below them is apparently distinct but intrinsic to the limitless whole. But now there is a green and white shoreline for the waves to bounce against, a stretch of land to bring visual relief, a border to control and balance the infinite.

  He takes it she means a change for the better.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he says again.

  There had been moments in the past three weeks when standing alone at the ship’s rail looking out on the hills and valleys of unending water he had allowed enticing fears to suggest themselves.

  Calenture, it was called: the impulse, well known to sailors, to jump into the sea. It had not been excessively hot, he hadn’t felt feverish, but he’d found himself every day imagining the sea was a limitless green field and to leap into it a seductive and refreshing idea. Rather, he’d found himself imagining what it was like to imagine this were so. To pretend he had the impulse. But it amounted to the same thing.

  He indulged many morbid thoughts. The most desolating sight on the planet: a rapidly diminishing ship’s stern. Then the intolerable loneliness of treading water, the terror of limitless depth, the intense concentration of self in the middle of the cold and choking immensity. The sinking down.

  Why indulge them? Why retreat to an eleven-year-old’s self-pity? Perhaps because one night, after a week at sea, she’d said, turning her face to the bulkhead again: ‘I’m afraid I’m in hibernation. I want to shelter from the physical for a time.’ And added, ‘It’s no fault of yours.’

  He’d simply touched her bare hip. Trailed his fingers affectionately along the curve. He felt stupid now and began to murmur, ‘But I’m not …’ The thing was, she was still sleeping naked, sprawled on the lower bunk with only a thin sheet twisted around her legs.

  Simply patted her.

  ‘I’m not ready to be touched.’

  A congested sound came from him. He wanted to hush her before she went too far. He heard himself say some odd words: ‘I’m not impatient.’ After all, he was a mature twenty-three.

  Wasn’t water supposed to calm, to soothe, to release inhibitions? But the sea had doused her fervour along with her fever. She slept night and day while he sat on deck reading Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life and paced and drank. At dusk she would surface, blinking into the haze off the high swells and, after a turn around the deck before supper, they would stand together at the rail watching the unfamiliar sight of the red sun sliding into the sea.

  ‘The male sun sinks into the female sea,’ she said, one pink and greenish evening in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  He thought about this.

  ‘Sometimes it looks like a whale, sometimes a swan,’ she said. ‘But definitely male.’

  ‘I can’t see it as a swan. A whale or a turtle maybe. Males are more turtles than swans.’

  H
e pulled his neck into his jacket and made a turtle face. Although he was hurt he was generally behaving with the genial, middle-aged dignity of a labrador pushed from the hearth.

  That night in their cabin her hand touched his wrist and she said quietly, ‘It’s just that I don’t want to be acted upon.’

  ‘Upon? You mean with.’

  After a while she said, ‘I could still touch you.’

  He didn’t act. He waited. He obeyed. She solemnly undid some of his buttons. So he undressed. He may have wondered why she sprinkled him first with eau de Cologne, then talcum, before giving him a light massage, but she couldn’t tell him he smelled of dried shark to her.

  Under the perfume and powder he was all knots and tension in the neck and legs and shoulders. She was still clothed, of course, without the strength to press or knead him firmly, but she made an effort to relax his thighs, trying to use her diminished weight to stretch and open the pelvis–thigh connection, and even rocking for greater effect.

  He lay naked and still, with his eyes closed, willing her to at least drop her hair on him, but she did not.

  When he opened his eyes, hers were closed. Her face was angled away toward the porthole. She was an expressionless profile, present but barely there. In the rolling and creaking of the ship she was just a bunched backhand butterflying of the fingers, acting quickly upon him, and as he came he felt self-conscious and shamed.

  If it’s momentarily disconcerting that no one is at the wharf at Albany to meet them, the day is sharp and bright and he’s keen to stay cheerful for both their sakes.

  He stays cheerful when they discover that the boat train for Perth, the capital, doesn’t leave until next morning, and that they will need a hotel room for the night. (Engineer-in-Chief O’Connor’s new steamship harbour at Fremantle, a more convenient twelve miles from the capital, is still under construction.) Finding neither porter nor cab, Will pays the harbourmaster to store their luggage in his shed and they set out, following the harbourmaster’s laconic directions, to walk the half-mile uphill into town.

  The road of crushed rocks and seashells, smeared frequently with some flattened furry or scaly animal, sways under their sea-legs. A crow pecking at a wallaby corpse starts to flap away as they pass, but decides against it. While their shoes slide uncomfortably on the shells, a clump of barefoot children, rushing past them down to the harbour with fishing rods and bounding dogs, scamper heedlessly over the jagged surface.

  As they grow warmer with the climb they attract sticky bush-flies, and they keep swiping at the cloud settling, scattering and immediately resettling on each other’s damp shoulder blades. Thus they stumble over the limestone threshold of the first hotel on the road, impressing themselves on the publican and drinkers as a hot, overdressed and quaintly flapping young English couple.

  The red-faced publican is loath to leave his seamen cronies to attend to them. ‘Emma will look after you,’ he grunts, whisky in hand, and to sly, off-stage laughter a deeply sighing chambermaid, as if granting them a great personal favour, shows them to a room.

  The bed is rumpled. At his frown, the girl says, ‘The sheets will be clean enough. The last man only slept in it one night.’

  So their first night in this most remote part of the world passes with Angelica lying fully dressed and covered by her cloak on top of the bedclothes while Will tosses fitfully under the covers on the sagging mattress. Remote but strangely familiar, this little port, as below them in the street men laugh and shout in several British accents and sing and vomit into the night.

  Whenever he glimpses her pale motionless profile she seems to be awake, but he can’t be sure. All night she lies prone and pale as a statue. Once, woken by a shambling fight on the crunching seashells of the street, he thinks he sees a small smile on her lips and takes it for amusement at their situation, or even a good dream, but it might have been moonlight.

  It’s still early morning when they board a train on the new Great Southern Railway. The bare clay and yellow sand and splintered tree stumps of the railway cuttings are still raw scars in the thick bush. Through high eucalyptus forests echoing with the carolling and screeching of birds, past an occasional small, lush dairy farm or orchard, they travel the two hundred and fifty miles north and west.

  After travelling a hundred miles, Will thinks the Chief has exaggerated. He has never seen such high, thick timber. Desert? This temperate, well-watered place of olive-green?

  A bungalow has been provided by the Department of Public Works in South Perth, across the Swan River from the city. A long white sand-spit, crowded by day with resting seagulls and shags, pelicans and black swans, spears past their front gate into the river. Stands of bamboo and paperbark trees separate their low-lying back garden from ten or twelve acres of Chinese market gardens and, beyond, the city’s zoological gardens.

  The lions wake them each morning. The house is airy and spacious, with a wide verandah to catch the sea breeze. At dawn its thin lattice shakes with the lions’ roars, their moaning rhythm reverberating over the cabbage and beetroot beds and through the bamboo and paperbark trees and into their dreams.

  ‘Who’d have thought we’d have our own piece of Africa?’ he says on the first morning. He looks anxiously for her reaction. His own scalp is still tingling but she seems calm enough.

  ‘Now we don’t need an alarm clock,’ she says.

  Woken daily by the lions, he forms the habit of a dawn walk along the sandy shore. The river before him is really more than a river. Between their bungalow and the town a mile north it’s an oval lake. Beyond the sand-spit it turns west into a wide estuary five or six miles across, winds placidly for twelve miles, creating bay after bay as it goes, before suddenly contracting into a narrow, swirling sea-mouth at the Indian Ocean. Throughout its whole length and width at this hour, almost to the horizon, its silken grey surface is intermittently ruffled and shirred by schooling fish.

  Most mornings as he strolls around the rushes and paperbark trees of the bank, thin Aboriginal boys are wading in the river, fishing with boomerangs and spears. Hundreds of swans are fishing, too, and with their dark, wet sheen and thin angularity—and with their necks looping from the surface like sinuous arms—they seem closely related to the dark, darting boys.

  Although it’s still officially spring the weather is becoming warmer each day. Spring slides imperceptibly into hot summer. One warm morning he wades into the shallows, drawn by water so smooth his impulse is to knife into it, to break the glassy skin with the precision of the swans and the Aboriginal boys, without sound or splash.

  The river flowing around his thighs is colder than he expected. But he dives in and thrashes about until that moment of ecstasy when the blood recovers from the shock and the water temperature miraculously rises around him. Little blowfish dart about his toes. Velvety brown jellyfish bob by The water is brackish with ocean salt and thick with life. Algaes, planktons, minute weed-shreds. He will gradually learn the names of the river fish—tailor, mullet, whiting, flounder, kingfish and cobbler—but this morning the only one he recognises is a stranded octopus carried in from the sea and left in a rock pool by the night’s high tide.

  He returns home wet-haired, bare-chested, his shirt bundled in his hands, charged with a skittish, boyish energy from his swim. Angelica is eating marmalade toast. She notices his flushed face and the sun’s rays coming through the lattice accentuating the pallor of his skin and the blue veins of his chest. A joke plays around his eyes. Around the ribs and shoulders—everywhere but his teasing eyes—he looks sixteen to her.

  ‘Home is the hunter,’ he says, and shakes the shirt over the breakfast table.

  The octopus slides in stages from the shirt, gravity finally defeating its hold, and plops on to the cruet. It entwines the cruet, absorbs it, abandons it. It’s the size of a dinner plate and missing a tentacle. The other arms sidle tentatively over the cutlery, grip things, release them. In the absence of a crevice to hide in, it finally draws up defensively
against her tea saucer.

  He expects a squeal, at least a catch of breath.

  She puts down her toast. What is this bony youth about, standing there grinning and shivering, with the sun patching his milky-blue chest and his hair dripping down?

  She reaches out and allows a line of suckers to fasten on her hand. The other tentacles also enfold her wrist as she hoists up the creature like a Gorgon’s head over the table. She looks at Will curiously—she has never noticed his chest so thin or the veins so close to the surface before—and walks from the room wearing the octopus glove.

  Through the lattice he watches her quick progress across the verandah, across the front garden, the road, the sandy river bank. She kicks off her shoes, wades into the shallows and pushes her arm into the river, swirls it about, and after a moment she straightens and walks back to the house.

  He used to tell himself it was just her nature and upbringing. Her blood. Her profession. That she could jump so quickly from one role to another. From humorous to solemn. After all, she is an actress. In the middle of lovemaking he would be looking at her expression, waiting for her features to be transformed. Not knowing whether he was kissing Portia or flower seller, tragic heroine or strumpet. He doesn’t know any more what the real her is. Much of the time she is simply expressionless. Has she changed entirely or has another Angelica become dominant lately?

  After all, she is an actress. His old impressed-but-mystified feeling has become plain confusion.

  After the octopus joke, travelling on the paddlewheel ferry to the city, to the Department of Public Works, he sits on deck recalling her in the days when they made love, or even kissed on the mouth. Whatever role she was playing, she always closed her eyes. Even when she massaged him. What he had put down to swooning now seems a dogged refusal to face up to love.