The Best Australian Stories (3 page)

They reached the town – a few bits of glittering tin.

It was here the picture-framer spoke up. ‘I've got a wife called Katherine,' he said. ‘She's a wonderful woman.'

Leaning over the steering wheel the driver was looking for a place to drink. ‘Well, we're about to enter Katherine right now. All of us. You mind?'

The other American was smiling.

Some time later Banerjee played the piano. Nobody appeared to be listening. The flow of notes he produced seemed independent of his hands and fingers, almost as if the music played itself.

The pilot and the picture-framer beckoned from a table. Between them were two women, one an ageing redhead. Her friend, Banerjee noticed, had dirty feet.

Both women were looking up at Banerjee.

‘Sit down,' the pilot pointed. ‘Take the weight off those old feet.' Leaning against the redhead he said with real seriousness, ‘I've got my own aeroplane back at the base.'

‘That beats playing a piano. Any day,' said the younger one.

The redhead was still looking at Banerjee. ‘Don't smile, it might crack your face.'

‘Hey, if a plane comes over and waggles its wings, you'll know it's me.' Taking her chin in his hand, the pilot winked at Banerjee. From the bar the tubby American constantly waved, touching base.

The drinking, the reaching out for women; the congestion of words. It was the opposite to his usual way of living. Banerjee went out and stood under the stars. He tried to think clearly. The immense calm enforced by the earth and sky, at least over this small part of it, at that moment. Also, he distinctly felt the coldness of planets.

When it was time to return he found the picture-framer squatting outside with his head in his hands. And in shadow behind the hotel he glimpsed against the wall the tall redhead holding the shoulders of one of the Americans, her pale dress above her hips.

On the way back the pilot kept driving off the track. ‘I need a navigator. Where are the navigators around here?' He looked around at his friend asleep.

Seated in front Banerjee didn't know where they were. ‘Keep going,' he pointed, straight ahead.

On the Thursday both hangars were finished. Everybody assembled on the ground and looked up, shielding their eyes, and were pleased with their work – about eight men, without shirts, splattered in paint. Still to be done were the long walls and ends of the buildings, the vertical surfaces. And there were sheds, the water tank, bits of equipment.

The camouflage officer unlocked one of the sheds. It was stacked with tins of beef and jam. ‘Will you have a look at that? Not a bloody drop of petrol to send a plane up, but plenty of tinned peaches.'

He stood looking at it, shaking his head. He wondered if Banerjee and the picture-framer could fashion a patch of green water and a dead tree out of packing cases and sheets of tin, to be placed at one side of the runway. ‘A nice touch.' Gradually the pattern was coming together.

*

For Banerjee these counted among his happiest days. The last time he had been as happy was when he had been ill. For days lying in bed at home, barely conscious of his surroundings; it was as if the walls and the door were a mirage. There were no interruptions. Now away from everybody, except a few other men, Banerjee with the sun on his back applied paths of colour with his brush, observed it glisten and begin to dry, while his mind wandered without obstacles. As the sun went down, the pebbles and sticks at his feet each threw a shadow a mile long, and his own shape stretched into a ludicrous stick-insect, striding the earth – enough to make him wonder about himself.

Since their trip into town Banerjee joined the Americans at tea-breaks or after meals. To squat down without a word emphasised any familiarity. The Americans were relaxed about everything, including a world war. Their talk and attitudes were so easy Banerjee found himself only half listening, in fact hardly at all. Without a word the pilot would get into the jeep, just for the hell of it, and chase kangaroos around the perimeter. A few times Banerjee and the pilot sat in the warm plane parked in the open hangar. When asked what exactly the plane was to be used for, the lanky American, who was flicking switches and tapping instruments shrugged. ‘Search me, my friend.'

In the few weeks that remained Banerjee formed a habit of strolling down the runway after dark, joined by the camouflage officer, who came alongside in his carpet slippers. With hands clasped behind his back the officer recalled performances at the Town Hall, the merits of different conductors and pianists, but invariably turned to his wife and three teenage daughters in Adelaide. ‘Imagine,' he said, in mournful affection, ‘four women, under one roof.'

Banerjee had been receiving regular letters. Here were trust and concern he could hold in his hand – words of almost childlike roundness, beginning with the envelope. Willingly his wife expressed more than he could ever manage. For her it was like breathing. In reply he found there was little he could say. Months apparently had passed. It came as a surprise or at least was something to consider: what about him did she miss?

He mentioned to the officer, an older man, ‘My wife, she has written a letter—'

‘Not bad news, I trust?'

‘She tells me the front gate has come off its hinges. A little thing. I mean, my wife would like me to be there now, this minute, to fix it.'

The officer put his hand on Banerjee's shoulder. ‘A woman who misses you. The warmth in bed. There was symmetry, it has been broken.' He coughed. ‘The symmetry we enjoy so much in music is illusion. That's my opinion.'

In the dark Banerjee found himself nodding. More and more he was conscious of a slowness within, a holding-back, as if he saw other people, even his own family, through pale blue eyes, whereas his were green-brown. Even if he wanted, Banerjee could not be close. Not only to his wife but to all other people, to things and events as well. It was as if the air was bent, holding him just away.

*

On the day in question the officer inspected the paint job from all angles, as the men waited. It took more than an hour. He came back, rubbing his hands. ‘Well done. That should do the trick. Tomorrow we go onto the next.'

The Americans looking on had their arms folded.

‘Only one way to test it.' The pilot put on his hat. ‘You with me?'

Banerjee hadn't flown in a plane before. Soon the earth grew larger and the details smaller, reduced to casual marks, old worn patches, blobs of shadow. He twisted around to see the aerodrome. At this point the pilot tilted away and began diving; just for fun. He went low, then rose in a curve; Banerjee's stomach twisted and contracted. As always he composed his face.

Levelling out, the pilot now looked around for the aerodrome.

He gave a brief laugh. ‘You sure as hell have done a job on the ground.'

Banerjee thought he saw wheel marks but it was nothing. The earth everywhere was the same – the same extensive dryness, one thing f lowing into the next. When Banerjee turned and looked behind it was the same.

Climbing, the plane reached a point where it appeared to be staying in one spot, not making any progress. It was as if he was suspended above his own life. Looking down, as it were, he found he could not distinguish his life from the solid fact of the earth, which remained always below. He could not see what he had been doing there, moving about on it. Knees together, the dark hairs curving on the back of his hands.

Everything was clearer, yet not really. Plane's shadow: fleeting, religious. In the silence he was aware of his heartbeats, as if he hadn't noticed them before.

Now the earth in all its hardness and boulder unevenness came forward in a rush.

Briefly he wondered whether he – his life – could have turned out differently. Its many parts appeared to converge, in visibility later described as ‘near perfect'.

Two Wrecks

Dorothy Johnston

Of the many wrecks I learnt about when I was a child, only two retain anything like a reliable place in my memory. These two, while undoubtedly stories of shipwrecks, were also much more ambiguous affairs, and one was almost certainly untrue.

Early settlers arriving at the bit of coastline where my parents lived had far from an easy time getting there. Many drowned, in the days before a permanent lighthouse was erected on the point, their ships turning to splinters on the rocks at the mouth of the rip. My parents, both self-taught past the age of thirteen, when, for different reasons, they'd had to give up school, were curious people, with acquisitive, restless minds. It took them no time at all to learn the names of wrecks and pass them on to me and my sister.

They had come, my father from the city of Geelong, my mother from the bush, to build their own house at Point Lonsdale. They borrowed a lot of money to do it. As a child, my father had made many trips to the seaside, but my mother, growing up inland, on a farm, had seldom had holidays of any kind, and had never learnt to swim. As for me, I soon took the ocean in my stride. It was within running distance, at my fingers' ends.

When we were not at school, or helping in the house, my sister and I built our own shelters and cubby houses out of driftwood, in the bush between our new home and what was known as the back beach. Elegant bungalows fill that land now, and gardens full of European plants, but in those days it was tea-tree scrub, acacias and eucalypts, and then, closer to the beach, small bushes flattened by the southerly winds.

The surf was wild and dangerous, and we were not allowed to swim. Life savers patrolled on summer weekends, but even then a rip could lift a person off her feet and carry her right out, in a twinkling, under watchful eyes. My mother was frightened, yet she let us play on the back beach, dragging our bits of driftwood to and fro, making up the games that children do, on sand.

She trusted us, she said, to stay out of the water. ‘Yes, Mum,' we replied, quietly obedient in her presence, and in our father's, who became an increasingly shadowy figure after we moved, having taken a second job in order to keep up with the mortgage payments. On Sundays he worked on our house, on carpentry he did not think it worthwhile paying tradesmen for. He let us help with painting. We painted the whole outside of the house, my sister and I on stepladders with a plank between, proudly wielding brushes, at first clumsily, then with growing skill.

Our mother worked inside, and in the garden, where she built windbreaks to keep the gales from f lattening her vegetables, and spent precious shillings on bags of loam to spread over the poor, sandy soil. Increasingly, she left us to our own devices, and we did not ask why.

‘You didn't go in the water, did you?' she might ask when we came back, wet with salt spray, our shoes with lines of rusty white up to the instep.

‘No, Mum,' we always answered her.

My sister, who was two years younger, more truthful and obedient than I was, might add that a wave had tried to catch us, and we'd run away.

Our mother told us cautionary tales then, repeating names I have since made it my business to research, though not a great deal is known about most of them. The earliest wreck for which proper documentary records exist was the cutter
Lively,
on her way to investigate sealing and whaling prospects in the Antarctic.
The Princess Royal
smashed to pieces on the Lonsdale Reef, followed by the schooner
David
and the barque
Victory.
The names of all the vessels lost will never be discovered.

One story my sister and I did take to heart. The first ship bringing animals to the Melbourne zoo foundered on the rocks, not breaking into pieces, but stuck, unable to lift, or be lifted off. Lions and tigers, bears and elephants were unloaded on the beach, that very beach my sister and I were in the process of claiming for our own, impatiently, and with a silent, stoical super iority to other children we encountered there. We did not stop to think of the unlikelihood of what our mother described, or ask questions such as: how were fierce wild animals unloaded onto such a treacherous beach? Who accomplished such a feat? And what happened to them then?

We rather took the story in good faith, and made of it what we wished. A possibility that did not occur to me till I was grown up, with children of my own, was that our mother was deliberately feeding our young imaginations with exotic tales in order to keep them busy, to furnish us with material for games, so that she would be left alone to occupy herself without us. I never wondered about this at the time because our mother was nearly always alone, surrounded by bush that may or may not have reminded her of her own childhood, left behind in a part of the country she had never taken us to see.

One night when we were returning in the autumn dusk, there was a large black shape under the porch light. We saw it from way down the street, and took each other's hands, and ran. The shape was large and black and still as one of the burnt tree bodies, cleared to make room for our house. But it was just our mother, ghostly and watchful underneath the yellow light.

‘You're late,' was all she said.

Quickly we apologised, and quickly ran ahead of her to take off our wet shoes.

Our mother was outwardly good-tempered in the evenings, discussing projects with our father after tea. We listened to the rise and fall of their voices from our still-unpainted bedroom. The outside of the house must be looked after first, our father had explained, because the salt air would soon rot untreated boards.

At the back beach, which had become our favourite place, we elaborated on our mother's story. The back beach was an unlikely refuge, open as it was to the elements, and with the added danger now of wild creatures who had landed there, and snarled and bitten, and perhaps escaped.

We pretended that we saw them, behind bushes, leaping out. We took it in turns to be tigers, or my favourite, the black panther, who waited in shadows, who knew exactly where to hide. We frightened one another greatly, and with enormous pleasure. Our thin legs shook, our small faces ran with sweat. Our shoes got soaked from tearing off from danger the wrong way, towards the insistent, muscular shorebreak, forgetting till it was too late to avoid a soaking, though we turned, shrieking, up the steep part of the beach, frantic to outpace the incoming tide. We took our shoes off and tried, futilely, to dry them.