The House At Salvation Creek Read online

  Raoul and Larnce work at the boatshed now, so different from each other they could be from separate planets. Raoul is dark. Dark skin, dark hair – occasionally, dark mood. Larnce is golden: hair, skin, even his eyes, when they catch the yellow of the sun in the late afternoon. He threshes through the bays in a wild, mauve fibreglass boat he calls the Ghost Who Whomps. Nose pointing to the sky, his bony backside finely balanced on a sliver of the stern, engine roaring. Constantly on the edge of flipping, as though he is as immortal as the Phantom himself.

  'You go too fast, Larnce, too fast,' we all tell him when we pass by.

  He shrugs, a cigarette hanging from his fingers. He looks at the burning tip then back at us. 'Always something's gonna get you,' he says. But you can tell he thinks he's invincible.

  At weekends, Raoul brings his little boy, still a toddler, to play in the bay. By early afternoon, you have to watch where you step. He falls asleep suddenly and haphazardly, on bare floors, dirt, grass, concrete steps. Even, once, on the roof of a boat cabin Raoul was painting, his scruffy blanket clutched tightly under his chin, his smooth face angelic.

  The boatshed belongs to a new couple, Michael and Mary Beth. They have a young son and Michael has three grown sons and two daughters from a former marriage. Michael is whippet thin with a long face and flowing hair. He works like a demon, as though a moment of rest is a moment wasted. He comes from a family of ten children, two of them fostered. His father, he told us not long after he arrived, worked two jobs to provide for his brood – all day as an accountant, then as a cleaner in the hours before dawn.

  Like his father, Michael also has two jobs. He spends mornings at the boatshed, where tired yachts and boats are scraped, painted and restored – even, in some cases, made glorious, like the wooden cruiser with rot so deep and sustained it seemed she would never float again. The boys worked every day, hard and fastidiously, repairing what they could and rebuilding what was beyond saving. A year later, Blaxland slid into the water like a dowager queen, gleaming, her lines sharp and refined. Truly resurrected. In the afternoon, Michael jumps in his car and drives to Manly, where he works as a psychiatric nurse. Which is another form of restoration.

  Mary Beth, who is also a mental health nurse, is from the US and has a Yankee accent thick as mud. She is good-hearted and tender. Blunt, too, if she thinks it is the only way you'll get the message. Then her blue eyes focus, her hips thrust forward, her arms fold across her chest like an iron gate. That's how she stood the day a local politician told her he was amazed at what he called the new civility of people who live offshore.

  'You've got rid of all the ferals,' he told her, his tone ripe with approval.

  'Oh, they're still here,' she replied, her blue eyes glacial. 'It's just that we take care of them.'

  Bob and Michael are similar men. On hot summer evenings they stand, slightly slumped, on cool concrete, beer in hand, the setting sun framing them like electricity. They stare, not at each other, but at white-limbed mangroves dancing on the far shore, at an incoming tide filling the empty bowl of Salvation Creek. Proud, in a silent way, of their day's darg. Neither man ever gives in, only paddles harder. It is the bond between them, this quiet understanding of how to go about daily life in a way that is satisfying.

  'In the States,' Mary Beth says, 'we'd call Bob a good neighbour.'

  'Here, we call Michael a great bloke,' I reply.

  Not long after they take over the boatshed Andrew, Michael's son from his first marriage, who is lean like his father and has the same hawkish face, brings home a pup from the dog shelter. Jessie, she is called. She is brindled with brown, grey, black and white. Long-snouted with light-tan eyes and fur soft as mink. At first she is shy and skittish, slow to trust. Perhaps because beginning life in a dog shelter is rarely a good start.

  'Got some cattle dog in her,' we say. 'Bit of kelpie, maybe?'

  Then we notice she moves with the silence and stealth of a dingo. She has the same aloofness as a wild dog, too. We didn't hear even a light thump the day we found her on the table on the verandah, licking the cream bowl as though she had every right. Soon, she rides the bow of Andrew's tinny with the grace of a dancer. Before long, she and our tarty little terrier, Chip Chop, get into trouble.

  The complaints begin. Chip Chop is locked up, Jessie learns what a leash is. They still escape from time to time, but always by accident. When they do, Brigitte is immediately on the phone or banging at the back door. She's a furious guardian of our wildlife, although her passion faltered the day a brush turkey shat on her keyboard. A friend, dressed in a cloche hat and white overalls (for tick protection) and clutching a frail butterfly net, tried to help her catch the beady-eyed bird with its scrawny yellow neck and bulbous head. Chasing. Pouncing. Chasing. Pouncing. It escaped in a hysterical flap up to a power line, where it pitched backwards and forwards, clinging to the narrow wire like a red-faced drunken sailor, until she gave up and went home. The keyboard never recovered.

  Mary Beth's father, old Bob, lives at home with his daughter and son-in-law but he is peripheral in our bay life, confined to bed, his heart worn thin by the years, his body reneging on even the most basic instructions. He is cared for by a string of family and hired help. We all know he is there, waiting for death, urging it to come get me! But death is taking its time.

  'Wanted me to get his suit ready the other day,' Mary Beth says.

  'What for?' she asked him.

  'For the funeral!' old Bob shouted at her, as though she were an imbecile.

  'Why would I burn a perfectly good suit?' Mary Beth shouted back. And together they laughed and laughed. Death, by then, was her father's friend.

  He died one cold winter morning. Not in bed, as we all thought he would, but in the car after a visit to the doctor.

  'I parked at Church Point,' Mary Beth told the story later. '"Come on, Dad, let's go," I said. But when I looked at him, his head was slumped, his face smooth as wax, like he was cold as the morning. I felt his pulse. Nothing. Put my hand under his nose. Not a breath. I'm a nurse, I know what death is. So I got out of the car and called the ambulance. "My dad," I said, "has just died in the car. Can you come?" Then I called Michael. Sobbing.'

  Michael jumped in the boat he calls Bethie, after his wife, and flew across the water. At The Point, locals gathered around to comfort Mary Beth. She bought a coffee from the café in the General Store at Ferry Wharf, lit a cigarette as she waited for help, tears streaming down her face.

  'Then I went back to the car, to sit with Dad.'

  'Can I have a puff of that?' old Bob asked.

  'Dad! You're supposed to be dead! The ambulance is coming because you're dead!'

  'Dead or not, I'd still like a puff.'

  His pacemaker, it turned out, had kicked in, saving his life. His time wasn't finally up until a year later. By then he was cursing the pacemaker from dawn to dusk.

  There have been so many changes in so few years in this little cluster of houses in Lovett Bay, and yet I suspect that I have changed more than all else. I do not racket heavily like I did once, trashing through days and nights in a blur of booze and desire. I have a knowledge, now, that comes from an intimacy with death and grief and fear. Hard won but priceless. Live so there are no regrets.

  Sometimes I pick up a book that turns out to be about searching for the key to happiness. Once I would have devoured it. Now I set it aside for a civilised thriller or to revisit a classic. For this short period of my life, I need no gurus. And I have learned that only I hold the key.

  I am not smug, though, because I am aware the unexpected can drop like a hailstorm from the sky and steal joy in a flash. And if you are not careful, it might take years to rediscover it.

  ***

  Fleury's first tour group is due in November, on Melbourne Cup Day. Lunch on the lawn for one hundred corporate wives on a junket with their husbands who have a golf day scheduled. Not quite the small group we anticipated.

  'No problem,' I tell Fleury airily
, wondering where I'm going to find one hundred plates, knives, forks and spoons.

  'What about tables and chairs?' Bob asks.

  'Chairs are easy. Saw some blue plastic ones on sale the other day. Tables are harder. Thought I'd round up all the tables in the bay.'

  'I could use the timber from the old deck and build three trestles,' Bob offers. 'Make 'em big enough for ten people each.'

  I am amazed, as always, at being married to a practical man. My father was so technically inept we wouldn't even let him turn the radio on. 'Thank you. That'll get us sorted completely.'

  I come up with a ridiculous, overly complex menu from flicking through glossy food magazines. The recipes all seem to have at least fifteen ingredients, each one of them expensive. Naturally, I've never cooked any of the dishes before and it doesn't occur to me to do a practice run.

  Lisa, from Elvina Bay, agrees to help on the day. She is bouncy and blonde and holds nothing in. Laughter, she always says, cures most ailments. She is a master cook, catering local weddings and parties, and she never shirks when there's a fundraiser, or the fire brigade is doing a back-burn before the heat of summer turns the bush tinder dry. She coddles the fireys, making them exotic sandwiches and homey cakes. It's food so luscious, there's never any trouble finding volunteers.

  Marie, from Scotland Island, is quietly efficient. Not so much a cook as a subtle, dark-haired and aloof major-domo, she sees the details, aims for perfection, and is scrupulously careful to waste nothing. 'Scrape the pan,' she tells me as I rush around. 'The dog will eat it.'

  And there's my friend and neighbour Caro, who studied to become a divorce lawyer and then turned her back on the petty squabbles of people who married before they grew up. She searched instead for finer pursuits, spurred on by the clear-sightedness of nearly anyone who has had cancer. She offers to lend a hand, as long as she doesn't have to stir anything. Which is weird because she's a great cook. Just doesn't have the confidence to do it as a job. Neither do I! But I bludgeon my fear. Confidence is everything, and planning and preparation – right?

  Every night for a week before the big day I wake up in a cold panic. The nightmares are all the same. Not enough food. Prepare it for the wrong date. Can't find the plates. A couple of days before the guests are due, I dream about returning home from the supermarket to find crowds of people hanging around, bored, hungry and cranky. All I have is four small, raw chickens. I turn on the oven but it won't heat up. I'm screaming no, no, no when Bob wakes me. I'm wet with sweat. Breathless.

  'This lunch isn't worrying you, is it?' he asks, frowning with concern.

  'Nah! Hot flush, that's all.'

  I buy more and more food. Bob shakes his head without saying a word. He offers to help but my mind swizzles in increasingly confused circles. I forget why I thought I needed so much parsley. And what's the chutney for again? The pantry is stacked with old jam jars full of it. Quadrupled the recipe.

  The day before the lunch I halve fifty spatchcocks to marinate in lime zest, harissa, crushed garlic and salt flakes. It takes four hours to make one hundred fat veal meatballs stuffed with camembert, rolled in breadcrumbs and oven-roasted. Sprigs of fresh rosemary and crushed garlic are layered between delicate lamb cutlets to be barbecued on the day. I slow-roast beetroot and carrots in honey to serve cold. Spend the entire afternoon char-grilling vegetables on the barbecue – sweet potatoes, red capsicums, zucchini sprinkled with chopped garlic, mushrooms with a whiff of chili – until Lovett Bay smells like a restaurant and everyone wants to know what's going on.

  'A party?' the boys in the boatshed ask hopefully.

  'Nope. A lunch. A tour group. We're having it up the hill.'

  Their faces sag with disappointment.

  'There'll be leftovers,' I add, to cheer them up.

  The fridge bursts with neatly packed and labelled containers, but the stainless steel bowls I bought hoping they would magically turn me into a professional chef are still stacked, unused, on the kitchen table. I can't decide if that is a good or bad sign.

  Dessert will be easy, I tell myself before turning out the bedroom light. Lemon cakes, the kind you make in a food processor in a few minutes. They never fail. As I pull over the bedcovers, the smell of garlic and onions fills the air. From my hands. It takes about three days to scrub it away.

  ***

  At four am before it's light, I creep out of bed. Count forty-five eggs, soften five and a half pounds of butter in the microwave and zest twenty lemons to make five cakes, doubling the quantities with each one. Twenty slices to every cake. It takes twice as much time as I allotted, time that pounces forward in half-hour increments instead of minutes. My stomach is roiling with anxiety.

  By the time Lisa arrives with one hundred golden-crusted bite-size meat pies, the cakes are lined up. Only one has sunk a little alarmingly in the middle, pulled out of the oven before it was cooked. Impatience. A lifelong affliction, like plunging in without thinking about the details – or possible consequences.

  'We can save that cake for last,' I tell Lisa when she looks at it uncertainly. 'Only use it if we have to.'

  'Tell me again why you wanted the pies,' she asks, looking at the kitchen sink, which is head-high with dishes.

  'Melbourne Cup Day tradition,' I explain. As I say it, I remember we always had chicken sandwiches on Cup Day. I've got it mixed up. Meat pies go with the football. Bugger. I break out in a wave of hot flushes, spin a few times.

  'You alright? Think you might do well with a cuppa,' Lisa suggests, putting on the kettle.

  'Feel a bit stressed,' I confess. 'Everything changes when people are paying for something. What if it all goes wrong?'

  'Well, we fix it. I mean, what's the panic? Is anyone going to die?'

  I hear my own words coming back at me: If it's not life threatening, don't sweat it. That's how I try to live. But I forget. 'No, of course not,' I smile.

  Bob comes in for a cuppa. The knees of his faded jeans are caked with dirt. He's been kneeling somewhere, fixing something. He offers to chop the parsley lying in a deep green mound on the kitchen bench. I hand it to him with a grateful sigh. What's it for again? Then I remember he hasn't had breakfast. I'm about to ask him what he'd like, but he's already putting two slices of bread in the toaster.

  At nine o'clock, Bob and Lisa carry the food containers past the boatshed to Bob's rusty old ute parked at the bottom of the hill. The boys put in their orders for leftovers: spatchcocks and lemon cake. There's no mention of vegetables.

  At Tarrangaua, Caro, Fleury and Marie set the tables on the verandah, arrange flowers and fold crisp white napkins. We crank up the music. Tony Joe White belts out 'Polk Salad Annie', a song about a poor girl who lives on weeds from the riverbanks. I squirm. The largesse of lunch seems suddenly indecent.

  A breeze floats along the verandah like a cool spirit. Splendid yachts, a derelict working boat with a sexy, svelte hull, motor cruisers, old ferries and boats wreathed in grunge and bird shit rock on green waters. The window of a homemade houseboat we call the Fruit Box, which never moves off its mooring, winks in the light. Tree tops foam like gold tipped waves. Who cares about the food? To be here is privilege enough.

  Fleury organises water jugs, plates and servers, moves tables to strategic positions to serve food and drinks. Lisa sets up the kitchen like an army canteen while Marie and Caro polish cutlery borrowed from every nearby household, iron out creases in the tablecloths, sweep gum leaves that have flown in on the wind like butterflies.

  Friends Geoff and Jacqui arrive with a basket of glorious roses from their mountain garden. Marie arranges them in vases on tables, cupboards, the old pianola, the mantelpiece. It feels like the house has woken from a long, deep sleep and has dressed for the occasion in its best party clothes.

  'Ferry's coming,' shouts Lisa from the verandah.

  'Here, Caro, you cook the asparagus. You do it better than anyone else.' I shove a large box at her. 'It's got me stumped. There's too much.'


  Caro's brought her mother's old asparagus cooker, which is big enough for a couple of bunches. She laughs. 'This won't do it!' she says. 'What we need is a huge saucepan.'

  She climbs a ladder and passes down a gigantic stockpot from the top shelf of the pantry. 'Almost big enough,' she says. Then she lifts the box onto the bench and reaches in to begin snapping the ends off each spear. 'We'll tie them in lots of small bundles and stand them up,' she announces.

  'Go, girl!'

  Bob grabs the tongs and lays the naked little spatchcocks on the grill in orderly lines, tucking in their wings and legs tidily. Fleury's husband, Stewart, who's dropped by out of curiosity, gets ready to barbecue the lamb cutlets, so small and tender they're barely more than a bite each. Lisa arranges the dreaded meatballs on a large platter, cutting them in half.

  'No-one's gonna eat a whole one, Susan,' she says. 'They're bigger than footballs!'

  Marie and Lisa pour cool water, soft drinks or wine, as guests arrive, offer a bite-size pie. 'Melbourne Cup tradition,' Lisa explains, smiling. I decided not to confuse her with the truth.

  Mid-afternoon, Fleury organises a sweep, which has the Americans, Brits, French, German and Italian dames flummoxed. They understand winning, though, and when the race begins, the budgie yabber of a boozy lunch hushes.

  I stand back and raise a glass to my brother, a larrikin gambler who graced racetracks with Beau Brummel elegance, in a silent toast. As I will at this time every year. Wish you were here. Wish we were dressed to the max to hit the Spring Racing Carnival, our race books marked up and every horse a lay-down misère winner. Then I turn away from the television before the race ends. Too many tears. Too many memories. Better keep busy. Dirty plates are stacked from one end of the kitchen to the other. If my mother were around, she'd say leave them! I've always wondered how she thinks they'll get done. By magic? I turn on the tap and fill the sink. If my mother has a secret trick, I wish she'd pass it on.