This Water Read online

  THIS WATER

  OTHER BOOKS BY BEVERLEY FARMER

  ALONE

  MILK

  HOME TIME

  PLACE OF BIRTH

  A BODY OF WATER

  THE SEAL WOMAN

  THE HOUSE IN THE LIGHT

  COLLECTED STORIES

  THE BONE HOUSE

  BEVERLEY FARMER

  This Water: Five Tales

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2017

  FROM THE WRITING & SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE

  AT WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

  BY THE GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING COMPANY

  PO BOX 752

  ARTARMON NSW 1570 AUSTRALIA

  WWW.GIRAMONDOPUBLISHING.COM

  © BEVERLEY FARMER 2017

  DESIGNED BY HARRY WILLIAMSON

  TYPESET BY ANDREW DAVIES

  IN 11/17 PT ADOBE GARAMOND PRO

  DISTRIBUTED IN AUSTRALIA BY NEWSOUTH BOOKS

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

  CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  FARMER, BEVERLEY, AUTHOR.

  THIS WATER / BEVERLEY FARMER.

  978-1-925336-31-3 (PBK)

  978-1-925336-36-8 (EPDF)

  978-1-925336-37-5 (EPUB)

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED,

  STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM OR TRANSMITTED

  IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL,

  PHOTOCOPYING OR OTHERWISE WITHOUT THE PRIOR

  PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

  FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER

  MIA SOPHIA TALIHMANIDOU

  AND FOR MY TRAVELLING COMPANION

  PENNY HUNTER

  CONTENTS

  A Ring of Gold

  This Water

  The Blood Red of Her Silks

  Tongue of Blood

  The Ice Bride

  Acknowledgements

  A Ring of Gold

  At new moon and full moon, high tides have always ravaged this southern shore, back beach and front beach alike, and this year the last of the winter king tides has been dragging on into September, in the wake of the spring equinox. Storms and dark days of heavy swell have sent the waves smashing over the bluestone seawall, breaching it, flooding; a slab of the cliff face has slid off overnight, cracked in half like a biscuit; the little wooden pier by the lighthouse has kept disappearing, lurching, reappearing from under a weight of water; and the ocean swell always licking away at the dunes has been wolfing them down lately, undermining them, dragging out post-and-wire fences and making sandslides, scouring the ropy roots of the marram grass. When at last the day dawns, when the sky and sea are silent and the sun is out, a sparkling stillness has fallen on the town overnight, a sense of aftermath, a salt haze to the horizon. A stillness, suspended. At low tide the rock shelf at the headland falls open and steaming under a knitted brown hide of bladderwrack sleek with wet. More bladderwrack lies rotting in mounds along the waterline, and black bull kelp with tough shanks and claws, holdfasts, some shod in stone.

  As on any other fine day the woman is walking barefoot on the water’s edge under the lighthouse, where the rock shelf runs under the sand except for limestone formations here and there, grey hoary fretworks. This first day of the calm being a Sunday, along with the locals walking their dogs, some on a lead and some loose, there are city folk down for the weekend. Up ahead on the waterline, where a spur of rock is split into pools, black figures are gathering against the light, one or two stooping to clip on a dog’s lead, in a far yelping of voices. Eel, she makes out, and sea! – no, see the eel? And then a couple go hurrying past saying loudly, There’s a seal up there. A seal? Alive? Seems so.

  A seal! Alive? And yes, now she can see it for herself, oil-dark, water-dark and as glossy as the bull kelp, a blot on the hard sand, rearing and blinking in the sun and taking no notice of the gathering onlookers. Some are keeping pace alongside as the seal goes back in, floundering in and out through the low pools and channels, the water breaking over it making it look like any smooth rock. The woman’s heart beats hard. In all her born days she has never seen a live seal on the beach and she strains her eyes now to see the last of its rolling back as it makes its way out to sea.

  But the seal has changed its mind. It turns and begins heaving up the beach again on its bent wrists, tucking its back flippers in like a dog its tail, to sit up with closed eyes, its narrow nose lifted and its long whiskers coppery in the sun. It shakes itself violently and sends a spray over the onlookers, who fall back exchanging shamefaced grins and remarking on their own jumpiness. A beading of water shines on the cape of fur over the shoulders, and the tips of the ears that poke down like dark little teats. Can it hear the voices? Her own ears are too full of her harsh breath. The crowd edges closer, no one can get enough of the wonderful apparition. What does it want? a child asks, and is answered in hisses and mutters. Is it hurt? Not as far as I can tell. It’s got blood! Where? Yes it has! Is it a him or a her? Male, by the size of it. Yeah, bull seal. Massive! See the mane? It’s been beaching itself here. How’s that? Sick, is it? Ma? Is the seal sick? Look, it’s got blood. Will it die out of the sea? Why won’t it?

  The seal’s rump and belly have a pale coat of sand. Absently he scratches his back with a hind flipper while his pin head rolls. For a moment his eyes open, dark eyes, globular, and again he shakes a spray of sand and water off, a halo of light. Then he is off humping down the sand, clumsy, laborious. His track is a double warping like that of a turtle, a caterpillar tyre like on a tank, and the dogs on leads come stiff-legged to sniff at it, hackles rising. But they back away fast when he turns around. He is tough-haired like a cattle dog but they all know this is no dog oozing and moiling up the beach again.

  Fluid, wire-whiskered, blind, monumental, the seal sits and shakes his water off. He bends himself to scratch and sends more spray flying out with his flipper, which is a long-boned hand of bronze, she sees. A mailed hand. Where is the blood? She can’t see any. A beading, or is it water, along a fold, or gash, burning – she peers. And now two girls dare to step up close, giggling, and then a tall young surfer in a wetsuit. Some of the onlookers exchange grins. Tame for its size, eh, someone says, poor old bugger. There is a shift of mood as plain as a tide and everyone feels it, feels how the awe is seeping away and threatening to turn into contempt, impatience, hostility. The woman’s jaw drops. Any minute now, she thinks, someone is going to make the first move, throw sand or a stone in its face, slip a dog’s lead for the hell of it. It only takes one. She moves forward. Seals are protected, she gets ready to say.

  One of the girls, the one in red who is right in front of the seal, is moving her body now in time with his sway, insistently, swinging her skirt in a slow dance and staring up into his face because he is so tall, taller than any of them there, even the surfer, and her hair swings from shoulder to shoulder catching the light, in rhythm. Still the seal is taking no notice, the eyes in his roving head fixed somewhere beyond and out of reach, so that the other girl is emboldened to lean in and whisper in her friend’s ear, a dare perhaps, or a warning, or a splutter of laughter.

  The seal rears up. He sees where he is. He sees the crowd of faces that are close enough to kiss. Suddenly eye to eye he takes them in and his head splits open, a throat stretched wide, a ring of golden bone, a silent roar as he sways over them like a cobra, transfixing them, bathing them in a sour hot breath of fish. Then before anyone can move he convulses. With a cobra’s speed he whips away and in seconds the dark bulk of him is gone from the sand, leaving them gaping, and gone from the shallows, surging strongly from pool to pool far out into the high breakers of the Rip.

  It has happened faster than the shocked girls can leap back into the circle of onlookers, who in their turn gape in frigh
t, and then laugh, shaking their heads in amazement. There is an outbreak of relieved chatter, the hilarity that comes after a close escape – Shit look at him go! He won’t be back in a hurry! Nothing much wrong with him! – as they scatter away with their dogs along the beach.

  All but the woman, who is left standing rigid, open-mouthed with shock. Before her eyes is the salmon-red gullet of the seal bared in a mute, a mutual scream of horrified recognition.

  The house she has lived in for most of her life stands midway between a lighthouse whose lantern swings out wide at night over the rock pools, and whose foghorn is caught up by passing ships and boomed back and back, and a church with a Sunday bell that is also the passing bell on those weekdays when a new grave lies open in the grass of the cemetery, planked over, with the tawny sand that underlies the soil spilt in a heap alongside, like sawdust. Her house is wooden, old and thin-skinned, and her windows are hooded except at the back, where the storm winds blow up. In rough weather the wind, the rain and the sea are one torrent that bellows and thumps at her shell of a house. She wakes to the creaky groan of branches nudging the roof. Now and then rain seeps through the ceiling boards or spills down the inside of her back windows instead of the afternoon sun.

  After all these years she is still under her mother’s roof; and her father’s, of course, only she was so young when he died.

  A deep sleeper for most of her life, she has slipped into the habit of sleeping light in summer, getting by on catnaps; she can always make up for it over the winter. Now more and more she lives for the hot weather, slow as it is to arrive on these shores, intermittent at best. Half the year the prevailing winds up from the Antarctic ice flay the branches off trees and jolt roof iron, filling every space with the sea salt and seethe and roar. A still day comes as a rare blessing, a reprieve, a visitation, the sea barely moving, like a memory at the back of the mind or a waking dream, a silence fallen out of nowhere, out of time. Except after heavy rain the sea is at its clearest in the cold months and dolphins breach out in the channel, sometimes even a whale or two, puffing out mist. Some years even in the height of summer the sea runs cold, murky with sand, when the heat is swept away for weeks at a time by southerly gales that tug at roofs and branches, whipping waves and sand high over the seawall, felling fenceposts and trees. Then the town battens down and waits for the sun to bring it back to life, much as the skinks do that she comes across on the stairways up and down the dunes on the first calm days of spring, crouched with their fingers spread out on top of a fencepost, as still as the wood, grey whorls and stripes and a red eye, waiting till the last minute to whip off into the scrub. There are big lizards huddled in their hides, and invisible snakes that come summer will go looping like molten glass over the sand. When a snake comes across a snakeskin, does it know if this was its own old skin, or not? All the wildlife of the dunes lies low in the long dream of winter, numb of flesh, inert, congealed, lying in wait for the sun.

  The paths that tunnel through the tea-trees used to be stony at first, then dark soft ash, the shadowy sand up the back of the dune, then paler grey gnarled with roots, then yellow, then down into one long white hot barefoot swoop of sand. Now there are wooden steps up to the brow, where you break through and all you see is the water, as if you could take a running jump in or climb down a ladder, like the deep end at the baths. A step or two on and you see the beach and behind it the sea is rising to a height of horizon, a blue wall right across, with a toy ship on top, tossed high in the air, all in a dome of blinding light. On the loose edges are deep footprints running, and now and again a heavy track, a double rope of tread goes winnowing up, or down, too faint to make out what walker left it behind, before you scorch downhill and thunder wallowing into the first break of wave.

  For the swimmer the surf beach at the foot of the dunes is full of pitfalls, undertows, rocks and whiskery limbs of dark weed. It was a childhood dread of hers, being taken to the surf beach. Try as she might to stay between the flags where it was safe, the current would always haul her stumbling on to hidden rocks sooner or later, or a wave knock her down and pull her out of her depth, and she would be told off. Sometimes she just sat on the rocks with her legs in the water and her back to the ridge she has always thought of as the Mountains of the Moon, for its air of remoteness, with no other landmark seaward; a promised land at a distance in shimmers of light, a relic, a sunken castle in its labyrinth of stone. High and dry or submerged – always the last to go under the tide, where the whorls of wave give them away, and the first to come back up – the Mountains are smoother and lighter than the rock shelf, a pale gold, sculpted. Her mind might veer away sometimes but never her eye. Not that she has ever swum that far out of her depth, into the dark chambers of rock and rooted bull kelp where an octopus might be lurking or a stingray. Never a strong swimmer, she mistrusted the sea until the day she was lent a mask and bobbed under and saw it come alive. Once she had seen the underwater as it really was the fear was gone. She found her way easily among the rocks that in the water light were more deeply coloured than when they were high and dry, and through the weeds in their lushness, layer on layer, lacy, ambered, weightless, moving as the water moved. Since the first time she put on a mask and lost her fear, though she was still wary, she never saw any point in going in just for the sake of it. In swimming blind.

  Is the first time something ever happens to you imprinted for good? Why do our earliest memories last the longest, as if having had longer to embed themselves made all the difference? She remembers learning to swim at school, the brown bus to the baths, the instructors strutting, blowing their whistles. She can still see her underwater arms and legs all marbly with light, every faint hair in its own bead of light, and her bubble bathers. They were red, like her frilly sundresses and beach towel, so that her mother and father could always pick her out straight away; and ever since then she has had a red beach towel, to mark where she left her clothes in case a current sweeps her away along the beach. Her bathers were wet flame, flickering, huge, she was always a big girl once she was in the water, a red balloon, her arms and legs all in a dapple of waterskin. Even so she was never allowed to swim alone or out of her depth; she was all right as long as her toes reached the bottom. But sandbanks shift with the tides and sometimes the sea would go in one step from glassy and warm to cold blue-black and deep. One day she splashed out and some of the water running down from her new bathers was dyed red, she saw, only it was blood all down her legs, when she was eleven, and her mother towelled her down and hustled her home and straight into the bathroom before anyone saw. What’s wrong? she whined all the way.

  Never mind, muttered her mother. Come on, hurry up.

  It’s my bathers!

  No it’s not. Is it hurting? Did you hit a rock in the water?

  She shook her head in the bath, being sluiced down. Let’s see, her mother said, parting her legs. Oh it’s the curse all right.

  What curse?

  I’ve been meaning to tell you. You’re early. It’s about turning into a woman, you know. Having babies.

  I’m only eleven, she whimpered.

  That’s what I said. When you’re married.

  What curse?

  The curse. It’s a nuisance, that’s all. Just a saying. God’s curse on Eve or one of them. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

  Why did God curse Eve?

  She ate the apple.

  Are you sorry you had me?

  Of course not, silly! It’s in the Bible. God’s will. You put up with it. The birth pangs –

  Pangs?

  Pains. Same thing.

  So I am having a baby!

  Of course not! Turn round, I’m trying to dry you.

  It was just blood and it had its part to play like everything else and she was to keep out of the water while it lasted or she would fall ill. Why? Do as you’re told, like a good girl. How long would it go on for? A few days. Days! And no baths, did she hear? Or going in for a swim.

  As i
f that was not enough, and the blood, she was ill anyway from the ache, the deep gripe and drag inside, the birth pains. Pangs. For five days she had to hold between her legs one of the cottonwool pads in the pack her mother gave her, pinned on an elastic belt. The pads shifted and she had to walk tightly, stiffly, to keep them in place. The ends poked out under her uniform. Some of the girls were exchanging secret smiles. Once at playtime the pad fell out, shredded into red wads and tufts that she had to chase all over the basketball court in the wind, floundering, while the others stood and watched, even the boys in their playground were lined up jeering along the wire fence. She would never live it down. As long as there was blood she was not allowed to have a shower or a bath or have her hair washed over the basin. It was for her own good and as long as she lived under her mother’s roof she would do as she was told. And she was not to tell her father, as if the thought ever crossed her mind.

  One bedtime her mother came in with a leaflet that had a diagram of two little nests she had in her tummy, like lamps on a stand, where her eggs were stored. Eggs? Yes, eggs, and blood when each egg was flushed away. Don’t look so full of woe, she said, it’s natural. Haven’t you done it at school? No? Well, it’s the same for all us mammals. We start life as an egg inside our mother.

  One night when the blood had run dry at last she went for a swim in the air. She was in the act of taking a bite out of her meat pie and sauce at lunchtime when there she was airily afloat facedown at shoulder height over the playground, not flying but lifting off, swimming, and no one saw her clear the fence and hover in the headmaster’s garden, out of bounds, and dogpaddle back into the sun, until her pie broke in half and splashed like a red egg on the asphalt. Heads jerked up then, white faces calling out, wanting to know how you did that, not that she knew, all she had done was slide forward and float on thin air. It was like Peter Pan, she thought, it was true all the time, a revelation of weightless, effortless free flight, miraculous. Knowing she was going too far she tried diving upwards, palms joined; only to wake up in bed, bathed in a rapture she would remember all her life.