Audrey Liza – Chapter 1
The House by the Sea
It was always there, the Sea.
It breathed him in and out.
It rocked him to sleep at night, and rocked him awake in the morning.
If bad dreams woke him in the dark, it soothed him.
‘Shhhh,’ it said. ‘Sleep now, Jamie. I’ll watch over you. I’ll hold you safe in my arms until daylight comes.’
And it did. The Sea was always good as its word.
Their house stood where the beach met the dune, just above the wrack tossed up by the biggest winter storms. Kelp, dry and black as charred leather. Driftwood bleached and smooth like bones.
Lachie told him these were the remains of drowned sailors, washed up on the shore.
‘Liar, liar, pants on fire,’ sang Jamie – but believed it enough to run away squealing, when Lachie chased him with a blade of kelp stiff like a blackened arm.
‘Bwahahaha!’
There were old broken cray1 pots and strands of rope, unravelled and fuzzy at the ends. Beer bottles and skeletons of fish. Beyond the storm wrack and the sparse tussocks of grass, there was a stretch of windblown sand, dry, white and sugary. If you trod on it just right, skimming the soles of your bare feet across the surface, it squeaked.
Squeak squeak squeak squeak.
He loved to be first to set foot on that pristine surface.
Home was a faded blue weatherboard cottage, with tea-tree rails across the veranda, gnarly but smooth, grey and sun-warmed, polished by the touch of many hands. The house too looked like it had been tossed up there by a big storm.
Little Jamie lived there with Mum, Dad, big brother Lachie, and Lucky the kelpie.
Lucky and Lachie, it sounded almost the same. Jamie would complain: ‘Phew, Lachie, you smell baaad,’ – then pretend he said ‘Lucky.’
Then, if Mum and Dad weren’t around, Lachie would sit on him and fart in his face.
‘Who smells bad now, kid?’
On breezy days when the surf was up, spindrift came ashore in a fine salt mist. The salt and the ozone tickled your nostrils and cracked your lips. Your cheeks glowed red as ripe apples and your eyes smarted.
You were happy to be alive and four years old and the whole world was grouse.
Sometimes though the wind would howl and snarl around the house like the wolf from the tale, for days and days. If Dad was stuck ashore he’d get short with Mum, then they’d have words and he’d call Lucky and stomp off to the ute.
They’d be gone until long after dark. Jamie would lie awake in his bed, waiting.
Then you’d hear an engine faint in the distance, growing slowly louder. At last the ute door would thump, heavy boots would clump up the steps to the veranda and the house door would creak open, letting in a whoosh of cold air.
Mum would say: ‘There you are at last, you silly bugger.’
Which was rude and bad language, but not the way Mum said it then.
Lucky’s claws would scrabble on the floorboards and he’d nose open your door and lay his head on your blanket for a pat.
In the kitchen, Mum and Dad would talk softly into the night. Then you’d hear whispers and giggles and big feet tiptoeing past. Then the bed on the other side of the wall would creak for a while.
In the morning, Mum and Dad would be all smiles and cuddles.
It was much worse if the storm came when Dad and Lachie were out on the Maria Belle.
Then Mum would grow quiet and pale. She’d press her mouth together so her lips disappeared and there would be hard lines in her cheeks, like cracks. If you wanted something she’d snap at you, then be sorry.
Sometimes the other mums would come round and they’d laugh and chatter, much too loud, like they were happy and having a great time but you could tell they weren’t.
Lachie was sixteen, and did a man’s work. He was Dad’s deckie.
‘Best deckie the Old Man ever had,’ he’d boast. ‘One day I’ll buy me own boat, give him a run for his money then alright.’
Dad would let him run his mouth, said nothing, just listened with a big sarcastic grin. ‘That right, son?’ he’d say at last. ‘Just remember, you’re not too old yet, to feel the weight of my hand.’
Dad would never beat Lachie, though. He never raised his hand to either of them, nor even Lucky, that time he stole the snags piping hot off the barbie.
Dad’s big hands were rough and red from hauling pots and they smelled of fish and tobacco, but no living thing other than a crayfish, or maybe a whiting or flathead, had reason to fear them.
Then it was Jamie’s birthday and he had a cake and his friends from the village came to his party and played games, and he got a fishing rod and reel from Mum and Dad.
So Jamie was five when the Bad Thing happened.
The Maria Belle was working George Rocks, he was told later, much later, when he was old enough to know where that was and what it meant.
It was an isolated group of rocky islets and reefs far out in the Tasman, washed by unpredictable currents from Bank’s Strait and scoured by the strong norwesterlies funnelled between Cape Portland and Cape Barren.
The weather had been good, but a cold front was due in the next twelve hours. It was going to get ugly out there and they were working fast as they could to lay pots inside the surf break, using the tinny. The Rocks were steep to, dropping off to forty fathoms just outside the surf. The trick was to spot a gap, dart in round the breakers and drop your pots in the hole just inside the reef.
Read the breakers wrong and you’d be swamped or turned over. Then you could swim back to the boat.
Dad used to do the small boat work himself, with Len, his senior deckie. Lachie was fast and keen, though, and heavy enough at sixteen to keep the bow down. Len could read the surf better than any helmsman on that coast.
So Dad thought, ‘Why not?’
He let Lachie go with Len, and stayed behind on the Maria Belle to keep her half a mile off the break, far from the jagged rocks that would grab her and hold her fast while the surf tore her apart.
The first run went to plan. The tinny emerged from behind the shoulders of the big surf, flying across the water for a second load of pots, Lachie leaning out over the bow to keep her level.
They were going in for their second drop.
A nasty little wave snuck in under the quarter and gave her a shove. Lachie tipped forward, Len on the tiller lost concentration for an instant – and they were both in the water, the tinny bobbing like a loose surfboard and the baited pots, lines and buoys strewn across the foam-streaked waves.
The last anyone saw of Lachie alive, he was striking out for the Maria Belle. No self-respecting fisho wore a lifejacket in those days, of course.
Dad brought the big wooden cray boat in as close as he dared, right into the outer breakers, and chucked a line to Len. The deckie was frantic, ignored the rope and tried to turn back to where the empty tinny was being tossed and tumbled. Dad got a boathook through his belt and held him fast till he came to his senses.
Once Len was hauled over the gunwale, Dad got on the radio and sent out a mayday. The coastguard couldn’t get there for half an hour or more, but big Spindrift with her two boats was nearby and hove into view within minutes. The tinnies with their powerful outboards flew in through the breakers, risking all, in case Lachie had washed up on the rocks, still alive.
Dad said he was going home with Lachie, or not at all.
‘How can I face her, Len? Tell her I’ve lost her boy?’
When the storm hit, Maria Belle headed for the mainland, tucked in under the cliffs, in a tiny cove, and sat it out.
To his dying day, Jamie would remember the sound his mother uttered, when they found Lachie’s body. The news travelled over the ether, far more swiftly than the Maria Belle or even the Spindrift could.
It was not a sound that should escape any human larynx. The roar of a great animal in its death agony.
Neither could he erase the sight of Mum’s fists flailing against Dad’s broad chest, spittle flying in his unmoving face, when finally the Maria Belle had to come home.
What happened after that was confusing, blurred. He remembered the strong arms and big bosom of one aunty or another, blocking this nightmare vision, carrying him away.
It can only have been a short while later, that Mum packed their bags and told him they were going on holiday.
Dad hadn’t been seen for days. He was probably trying to drink up the courage to come home.
The ‘holiday’ lasted weeks, months, then years.
‘When are we going home, Mum?’ he would say, in their latest ugly bare rented room in the latest dusty mining town, up in the sullen hills, far from sight and smell and sound of the sea.
‘We are home, Jamie. This is our home now,’ Mum would reply, exhausted from her bar work, her cleaning, whatever else she did to make ends meet.
The cracks in her cheeks were permanent now, her mouth a straight, lipless line that never sang, never smiled. Her hair and her blouse smelled of cigarettes and disinfectant, overlaid by perfume which sweat had turned sour and sharp.
‘But what about Dad?’
Coming up:
This Friday in The Last Orchard: Leigh remembers a magical summer with Uncle Vernon. (Paid subscriptions.)
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Jamie and Leigh meet, and help each other to pass the time on a long journey.
Author’s note:
The protagonists of Audrey Liza (Jamie) and The Last Orchard (Leigh) will feature occasionally in each other’s story. The stories can be read separately, and will make perfectly good sense that way. However, reading them together will add depth and contrast to the reading experience.
To give you all a feeling for how this will work, I’ll be sending the first three chapters of The Last Orchard free to all subscribers.
cray – southern rock lobster
The scene where they learned of their kids' death is very powerful. Well done.
Good tale, I’m ready for the next chapter Steve xx