The Drowner Read online

  Will seems to have been awake and anxious ever since he can remember. Ever since the pre-dawn zoo noises had set his heart thudding weeks ago. He’s drinking too quickly.

  ‘I like the trees and rocks here,’ he says.

  He feels bound to defend the misinterpreted trees. He voices his admiration for the tall, olive-green Swan River mahogany or jarrah, the grey-green tuart, the darker Swan River cypress. He likes the bloodwood or marri, too, and the blue-grey tinged peppermint tree, ‘like a less droopy English willow’.

  He’s expansive and vocal. Just this side of overwrought.

  There are many guests in the club that evening, sunburned and enthusiastic from outback adventures. Lord Percy Douglas, the aristocrat turned explorer and mining entrepreneur. A young American mining engineer, Herbert C. Hoover. The author Rolf Boldrewood. They are introduced. Will downs his whisky and tells the amiable, winking faces how from his verandah the treetops look like an ocean swell rolling and tossing in the sea breeze. His waving arms describe a surf of hissing bamboo, an ocean of eucalypts, voluptuous and edgy.

  ‘In the wind their trunks groan and spasm like women coming,’ he announces to the Strangers’ Room of the Weld Club.

  The room is still. Someone snorts. The Chief clears his throat. He pats his shoulder like an uncle.

  As for rocks, Will says the pale limestone cliffs give this strange, bare coast the look of the moon.

  ‘I’m a moonraker myself,’ he adds. ‘A drowner. The last of the line.’

  She couldn’t describe to him how she felt disassembled. It wasn’t so much being far from home, living on a windy sand-spit by a river in the Antipodes, that was affecting her. It was not, although Will could not believe this, to do with him.

  She felt it when he was present and when, like this evening, he was late returning from the city. In a way the feeling made her oblivious to him. It was a feeling that her soul had left her.

  She was desperate to fill the vacuum. So she was quite calm and firm in her intention as she left the house and pushed through the barrier of dark bamboo and paperbark trees and climbed over the back fence into the darker market gardens.

  Here the wind dropped and her feet sank in sighing heaps of fishy seaweed mulch. Sighting along a gleaming line of cauliflowers, she picked her way to the shed where Li Tun and the other gardeners lived among piles of hessian sacks and wooden crates. By day, when she bought herbs here, the shed just smelled of stale sweat and shallots. Now the smell was sweeter and more acrid, like boiling yams. Li Tun and three older men lay on sacks smoking pipes. A young man was steaming rice in a pot. Something cooking seemed to give off whiffs of semen. A plucked swan, neck lolling, hung from a hook.

  Li Tun, grunting, took it she’d come for more herbs.

  ‘No ginseng,’ he said. He didn’t get up.

  The men stared at her. Their leathered faces were faintly lit from below: a lamp on the floor shadowing their eyesockets. Tight skin shining across their cheekbones and foreheads. Skulls came to mind.

  ‘I want to buy … opium.’

  She took out some money.

  At the dining table she took up a pencil and looked out at the bright lamps of the crabbing parties on the jetty, the distant creeping lanterns of the prawners in the shallows, then back to the paper in front of her. She held the pencil over the paper and began, tentatively, to write.

  It wasn’t her soul back again, but it was a definite light, tingling presence, and through her it began to write with increasing strength.

  Darling, it began.

  Remorseful the next day, he asked her to come outdoors with him. A Saturday picnic. On the ferry she was quiet, but followed him out on deck and allowed the air and the slapping momentum of the paddlewheel to shake out her indoor cobwebs. They sat at the bow and raised their faces into the breezy sunlight.

  He took her up to Mount Eliza from where the city and the river and the smoky eastern ranges all stretched within their frame of view. Picnicking to magpies’ warbling and the gentle thud and scratching of animals moving through the bush, she seemed almost herself.

  The grass beneath them, the smell of the sun on her hair reminded him of the Avon river bank. The willow tree, the chirping insects, the bed of rushes under their bodies. The way she had first kneeled and touched him. Their happy tongues on each other.

  He moved closer and touched the warm hair. Ran his finger up her parting.

  ‘You’re bluer today,’ she said. He took this as good news for his aura. Her eyes were not evasive, her movements no longer skittish. She nibbled an everyday sandwich of potted meat.

  ‘It must be the sky,’ he said, ‘or my headache.’

  From their vantage point it wasn’t hard to imagine the sky leaking over its borders. Its individual particles of pigment gleaming sharply blue. This sky was not a neutral ceiling for the landscape. It was a force. It pressed on the low hills, forcing them to make a horizon with the river.

  ‘Idyllic,’ she said.

  He was so grateful and aroused and hungover he could have made instant love under the peppermint trees, or fallen asleep. He brushed her hip and was startled to feel the sharpness of her pelvic bone.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ he said.

  Her smile was bright and unfamiliar. Her hand on his wrist—the way it entered his sleeve to stroke his veins and hairs—was arousing, but her creeping fingers seemed thinner, bird-like and insistent. When she saw the effect they were having on him she giggled and lightly smacked his wrist.

  This was a new side to her: coquettish.

  But at the moment he would smile at any whim. He watched her carefully. He saw her lift her chin to the sun and toss back her hair like someone being an actress.

  In the sunset Angelica stands naked in water to her thighs. She has discovered a particular cool current streaming here from a tributary in the ranges that she says is fresh enough to bathe in. He sits on the bank and watches the tips of her hair brushing the water as she wades into the river.

  The movements of her body seem to ignore him. At the same time, as if not completely discouraging a voyeur, they subtly acknowledge his presence. This is the relationship of the performer and her audience. When she’s deep enough she faces the shore, still without glancing at him, and swings the heavy fall of hair at him and then lowers it into the water. The last sunrays glance off her shoulders as she bends. Her breasts dip to the surface. The water laps at her sleek pelvis. Then she straightens up, still facing him but not looking at him, and briskly gathers up her hair and squeezes out the water.

  Her waterfall of hair.

  Now she bobs and bends again. She drops her hair in the river with a wide looping movement and then straightens again and flings it in a sweep of sparkling droplets. Her mouth is open, almost smiling, as she tosses back her head. The sun is setting over the river mouth and her white body moves in the eddies of swirling evening fish. The darkening backcloth of Mount Eliza looms behind as she swings her arms before her. She bows her head and catches her cascade of hair and holds it like a first-night bouquet.

  He sits stunned, moved by the performance and by her restive beauty. He had forgotten she was such an actress. Then he claps his hands and turns as if to share the sight of the show with the whispering audience of paperbark trees. The men from the Chinese vegetable gardens are watching avidly from the leaves.

  They are making hissing, clicking sounds, like bamboo stems crisscrossing in the breeze. He calls out, ‘Hey!’ but they are already rustling off into the bushes, hissing through their teeth, clicking their tongues, a couple of them rubbing their crotches and glancing back slyly as they go.

  Before she is out of the river he’s wading in, knee-deep, holding out the towel for her.

  Back home she moves towards him, flirtatious as a new lover. Pungent hints of caged animals and vegetable combustion stream inside on the warm easterly. And with the whiffs of ammonia the indignant squeals of some bothered zoo beast.

  She has prepar
ed a pipe. It has a bamboo stem and she offers it to him with the actressy smile of the picnic.

  ‘Smoke this with me?’

  He’s astonished. She may as well have asked his mother’s son, the boy from the Ebenezer Chapel, to join the pagans. He looks at the pipe, then at her. He nods.

  Lights blink on the dark water. She is in charge, laying cushions on the verandah floor. They lie side by side and share the pipe. Organic and inorganic fantasies seem to pass between them and mingle in the moonlight. From a sandy sunlit hill, a view of apes scuttling in the poppy beds and cabbage rows. For a time—a minute? an hour?—he massages her body. He is magically able to do this from a distance. And to observe the desert and garden zephyrs drifting through the lattice and playing over their bare skin.

  The warm air graces his lingering touches. It buoys him up. It sustains a stroking carnal act of great lassitude. Limitless depth and time.

  He sees, hears, himself murmuring, ‘At last.’

  And, while dreaming he is dreaming, there appears at the jungle verge of these animal, vegetable and mineral dreams a close-at-hand and repeatedly coughing lion. The lion’s skin is made up of a multitude of pale dots. He tries to stir himself but cannot, and waves it away with a languid hand.

  When they eventually wake on the verandah in strong daylight the wind is sharp, the lions have long ceased roaring and Hammond Lloyd is sitting in a deckchair in a white linen suit, drinking a cup of tea and looking down at them.

  He places his cup and saucer on the floor and his jacket falls open, revealing a pistol in a pigskin shoulder-holster. For what seems minutes no one speaks. Someone’s breath is whistling, a mucousy catch in the throat.

  Angelica and Will are drawn up, all goose-fleshed limbs together, on the same small brocaded cushion.

  ‘I am here,’ Ham says eventually, ‘in a play.’

  ‘You have a gun,’ she says.

  ‘A precaution for the wilderness. For the natives and animals.’

  ‘You surprised us.’

  ‘I coughed several times and moved loudly about. But you were not in this world.’

  ‘Well,’ she says crossly, and her breasts quiver as she waves in the direction of the sand-spit. ‘You will have to move about in the wilderness while we dress.’

  He gets up slowly. ‘When you are ready, I have things to say.’

  Will is numb. He has a headache and his mouth is dry.

  As they gather up their clothes Ham is sighting along his pistol barrel at a swan.

  It seems Western Australian gold had inspired not only the investors of London but the London stage as well. After commissioning the noted colonial photographer Axel Boehm to photograph goldmines and miners, mining camps and goldfields scenery, and paying him one hundred pounds for a selection of negatives, the theatrical impresario Sir Augustus Harris, the lessee of Drury Lane Theatre, had instructed the artist Theodore Bush to draw inspiration from the prints and repaint his theatre into a ‘Panorama of the Golden West’.

  This elaborate redecoration was to acquaint Londoners with ‘authentic atmosphere’ for a production of The Princess of the Golden West, a drama inspired by the discovery of the Londonderry gold reef. It would play to packed houses at Drury Lane, and now a Harris protégé, Marcus Doyle, had—rather bravely—brought The Princess of the Golden West, with the great Hammond Lloyd from the original cast, to the Golden West itself.

  The famous visiting actor doesn’t look enthusiastic at the prospect. He’s pink and hot but declines to take off his jacket. If he did, Will wonders, would he remove the shoulder holster?

  Ham looks solemnly at Angelica. He is yet to acknowledge Will.

  ‘Your mother has passed away.’

  Her calm is astonishing. ‘Yes. When exactly? And from what?’

  ‘Three months ago. A paroxysm of the brain. For the best, Little Root.’

  ‘I guessed it. I know she is happier now,’ she says. ‘The important thing is she won’t take disorder on with her.’

  ‘On, Sweet One?’

  ‘To wherever she is.’

  ‘I had her interred in Bath. I thought the asylum cemetery was inappropriate.’

  Surely she should be weeping, or arguing, by now.

  ‘Did you see her before she died?’ she asks, just as calmly.

  ‘You know, Rooty,’ Ham says, staring out across the water. ‘Our dear Mummy was mad as a hatter and never too ecstatic about the vagabond life of the theatre.’

  Something occurs to him then. He is gathering her up in his arms, pressing her face to his lapels and moaning while his tears suddenly stream down.

  ‘She was not like you and me.’

  Since the opium pipe of the previous night they have not been alone. Eventually, late in the evening, Ham leaves for his suite in the Palace Hotel. They wave him off on the last ferry, turn away from the white-suited figure on the stern and walk home along the sand. From a crabbing party in the river comes a splash, a yelp, a snatch of laughter. She doesn’t resist Will’s arm around her.

  ‘The gun!’ He laughs. ‘I thought I was dead.’

  ‘I thought both of us. I hope he doesn’t hurt himself.’

  ‘It’s my balls he has in his sights.’ A sudden thought. ‘You know in England he had me followed?’

  ‘Not always had you followed as such. Sometimes it was him.’

  He draws her against the soft trunk of a paperbark tree. Its bark strokes against them like loose skin. Many questions are making his heart race, but he is also keen to turn the mood back to the intensity of the verandah.

  ‘Actually, I thought: shoot me now. After last night I don’t care!’

  ‘It was a dream.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I mean, you dreamt it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were miles away. You weren’t inside me. I should know.’

  He steps back from her. A pile of crab and mussel shells crunch underfoot. He almost stumbles.

  ‘It’s a pleasant effect of the opium to give men the fantasy of entering.’

  He can hardly talk. ‘You’ve noticed this confusion often?’

  She doesn’t speak, just passes like a superior apparition from the waning light of the ferry wharf into the darkness over the sand.

  Appearing in an improbable play a long way from home, with an uncertain director, before an uncritical audience, Hammond Lloyd was at his worst, his performance grandiose and histrionic. The Princess of the Golden West, a melodrama about honour and fortune lost and regained, was a huge success.

  His every entrance was applauded by a grateful first-night audience prepared to overlook the play’s many implausibilities for the rare and flattering experience of seeing a famous English actor represent its own story. Even a bizarre version of it. (The Princess turns out to be a large gold nugget.)

  ‘Didn’t he get away with murder?’ Angelica says to Will.

  ‘They lapped it up.’

  ‘The naughty boy, he needs a tight rein. I blame the director.’

  The opening-night party at the Palace Hotel. Local dignitaries, new gold barons and society matrons are drinking French champagne and fawning over Hammond Lloyd. After five curtain-calls and three glasses of champagne, he is magnanimously sharing credit with the other actors, kissing and lavishly praising even the lowest-ranking members of the cast.

  From the chattering throng he spies them. He beckons.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she sighs.

  Her dress bares her arms and shoulders. As she moves off, Will has an urge to stroke her, to grip her familiar but strange smoothness from behind. Shower her shoulders with kisses. Hold them back. But he follows them, craving that dense, sweet skin.

  ‘Darling girl! Do join us.’

  In the few steps it takes her to reach Ham’s side, he sees the shoulders realign themselves and become those of some actress.

  Something she had said about herself before the theatre still bobbed in his mind. They had been strolling to an early supper. Along
Adelaide Terrace the upper classes were making the usual evening celebration out of watering their gardens. The young ladies of Perth liked to dress up and show off their ability to water their lawns and flowerbeds simultaneously with the popular new flexible hosepipes.

  ‘What a stupid waste, pouring water into the sand,’ she said. ‘It just runs away.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ he said. He loved the smell of moisture on this summer grass. ‘Keeping up an English country garden on arid sand in a hot place with little water is so difficult that everyone wants one. It’s a desirable social asset.’

  ‘It’s perverse.’

  ‘It’s the element of difficulty that makes life interesting.’

  ‘I’m tired of tests,’ she said. Just a few hours later, uncomfortably shuffling around the brittle hubbub of the opening-night party, his viewpoint has changed. He is also tired of tests, of constantly pushing uphill. He feels like giving in to gravity for a change.

  Her remark keeps coming back to him. As they had sauntered among the sweet atmosphere of dampened couch grass and dewy tea roses, its vehemence had made his skin prickle.

  ‘I want to be selfish,’ she said.

  They sit quietly on deck on the midnight ferry to South Perth, his arm resting along the rail behind her head. His fingers stroke the rail. When they encounter a bump in the varnished surface, a congealed drip, they worry at it and pick it off, then recommence stroking and smoothing. She sits lightly beside him. Champagne is on their breath. Her perfume drifts toward and past him. Their bodies don’t press, rather they tip against each other.

  There had been a scene in the play where Ham, playing an aristocratic prospector down on his financial and romantic luck (but not for long), stood in a make-believe stream panning for gold. Will recalls it and laughs.