Separation Creek
The summer we came to Separation Creek was the summer I nearly lost Dick. Which, as he went on to become a Cabinet Minister, would have been a loss to a wider community. At the time I felt nothing but guilt. Hadn’t he been in my charge? The pain kicked in later. Not much later, only a matter of seconds. The pain had nothing to do with Dick at all.
It was one of those summers you look back on, but not with nostalgia. There was nothing mellow or somnolent about it; the heat alone was fierce and unrelenting. Blazing days, sun that split orange skins, iceblocks that melted before you licked them, our salty lips cracking like blistered parchment. Those things were obvious to anyone. I see other things now that I didn’t see at the time.
It was Mother’s first experience of Australian heat. Ours too of course, but it affected her more. She was supposed to be working, preparing lectures for her French literature course at the University, but mostly she lay on the daybed, prostrated, with a jug of water on the wicker table and a wet flannel over her eyes. The daybed was a stretcher we’d dragged in from the sleepout and put in the front room under the ceiling fan. The heat seemed to fell her, bodily. I put this down to her age.
I say mostly she lay there, but I suppose I wasn’t around that much to see what she was doing. Dick and I passed the endless days down at the crescent-shaped beach below the rented cottage, out of sight. It seemed somehow obscene to have that silvery mirror down there, splintering and shimmering through the scrub, while for want of water the land was flaking to powder under our feet. Nine times out of ten Mother would be supine, as still as death on the daybed when we dragged ourselves back. You couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not, with that mask hiding her eyes.
We tried to persuade her to come with us but she found the steep descent hard to negotiate and the climb back up way too enervating. Besides, she couldn’t swim, she could only lie in the shallows or paddle. And paddling was for dummies, as Dick pointed out. Dick was getting to be quite a smartarse. Quite a good dog-paddler too, with less input from me. He offered to teach Mother, but she wouldn’t have it.
‘I’m too old to be seen doggy-paddling by anyone, for goodness’ sake,’ she said. That there was no one to see her but us made no difference. We wheedled and nagged to no avail. ‘Anyhow, I haven’t a nice costume, and I haven’t got the time,’ she said. You’ve got the time to sleep, I thought. And there’s no one here to laugh at any silly costume.
The news was full of the drought. The stubby old-style TV with its curved screen showed dust storms and pitiful footage of stock dying of thirst. Mother, raised in the Scottish highlands where it rained all the time, was so distressed by the pictures that I tried to anticipate them and change channels, or switch off altogether, blaming the dodgy reception. I wanted to distract her from the unspoken question: why did we come here? Unspoken, but always there in our minds, always polluting the atmosphere between us. We both knew that.
When I say in my mind, it was actually in the back of it, crouching. I didn’t object to us being here, not especially. I was self-sufficient and an avid reader, and there were bookshelves in every room. I hadn’t yet reached the age where you want to avoid family holidays. Not that this was any such thing. Family holidays were supposed to be comforting and familiar, weren’t they, like an old sweet song? This one had the air of something that didn’t yet know if it was a beginning or an ending.
I can locate the moment the moorings began to sway. It was late one afternoon, when Dick and I returned to the house, lugging baskets stuffed with towels, sunscreen, empty water bottles and other baggage. The humidity was worse that day, we were sticky and crotchety; there’d been more than the usual quota of spats and half-hearted, one-sided physical tussles. I could always win against Dick in those days.
We traipsed into the kitchen and dumped our gear on the drab lino floor, trailing sand. Mother stood with her back to us, a letter in her hand. She must have driven to the post office, fifteen minutes away. She went there most days, I was fairly sure, and usually came back empty-handed as far as I knew. I asked if there was anything for me and she didn’t reply. I came closer and repeated the question. It sounded as if I was accusing her of something.
In profile her face looked fearful, her eyes staring not at the letter but at the blotchy wall behind the sink. She said, “Where am I, children? In limbo, that’s where I am. I’m living in limbo land.” Then she shook her head violently from side to side, heavy auburn hair swinging, lunged round to face me, and erupted. ‘Take those things off the floor this minute! And sweep up all that sand, for lord’s sake. I’m not your maid.’
We did as we were told. There was a raspy, distorted edge to her voice that shut my mouth. Both our mouths; normally Dick would have sprung back with some silly retort. He dragged his things onto the porch and made a beeline for the TV. I knew he was counting on her being too distracted to object to the cartoons. I lay on the hard narrow bed in my room in a lather of gritty sweat and looked up limbo in the dictionary. Its several definitions included ‘unbaptised’, ‘a condition of oblivion or neglect’ and ‘a prison’, all of which I discounted. Too readily perhaps, in retrospect. Then came ‘an intermediate place’. I took this to mean somewhere that was halfway, neither in one place nor another.
Was this what she meant by limbo land? An in-between place? A nowhere place? But this house was somewhere, we all knew it was real, the glassy sea and the trudge up from the beach were palpable enough. Could a nowhere place have such a pungent reality? I didn’t feel like pursuing the matter, not with her in this mood. Had the letter in her hand been an aerogramme? I wasn’t sure if the paper was blue or white, and somehow didn’t want to ask that question either.
The constricted atmosphere ran its familiar course. Mother had retreated into herself. She was inaccessible to us, apparently present, but somewhere else. She’d always had her ups and downs, but this summer the moods seemed to run into each other with no respite. I used to imagine her locked inside a windowless room, but now I found I had a clearer perception of where she had gone. She was in a nowhere place, in limbo. It may have been clearer, but it still told me nothing.
At least you could read in limbo land. She and I ate our baked beans on toast in the brownish light of the dining room with our books propped on the table. Most of our food came out of tins that summer. But I observed how her book stayed open at the same place for minutes on end even though she was a faster reader than me, and sometimes she’d turn back to the previous page and stare at it while Dick prattled away, oblivious. Dick was not in any kind of limbo. He was always solidly where he appeared to be. He was ineradicable, concentrated, always there.
I thought of him as a worker bee. He worked patiently all day on his sand city, a sprawling construction of roads and roundabouts for his cars and a network of canals with harbours for his boats. It was located up in the dry sand and needed constant repair every morning. A long canal fed seawater into a moat around a big sand castle. The castle was as tall as Dick, with a tunnel inside excavated by me. You could roll a tennis ball from the summit and it would come out at the bottom.
Dick’s sentries were stuck around the castle on platforms of driftwood or shells. These toy soldiers were his most prized possessions. Made of lead, they were old and had been Daddy’s. Dick positioned his favourite piece, the Duke of Wellington on a prancing horse, atop the summit. Some distance away behind a stockade of sticks were the marauders, a feral group of plastic farm animals and small pink cherubs from Christmas crackers. Not from last Christmas, because there weren’t any crackers. From the year before last.
The soldiers and marauders were Dick’s opposing armies, and the whole edifice was a work in progress. Never yet rained on, it had grown and grown, with grudging assistance from me at times. In truth, my contribution was more than half enjoyable. I was only just emerging from childhood, after all. In those days I was sure Dick would become an architect.
Sand city was out of reach of the furthest tendrils of the tide. But every afternoon before we left, to be on the safe side, Dick built a protective wall at the far end of the canal. Next morning he demolished it and then painstakingly rebuilt it before we left. There seemed no good reason not to leave the armies and all the boats and cars on the beach every night, and every reason not to make more than one toiling climb back up to the house. We never made a conscious decision not to tell Mother about that. We just didn’t tell her.
I realised this arrangement had come unstuck the day after the limbo outburst, when Dick, who was minutes ahead of me on the descent, let out a yelp and plunged out of sight. When I emerged from the scrub I saw it. The tip of the sandcastle had been sheered off. Instead of the Duke of Wellington I saw a makeshift flag on the summit speared with a gull’s feather. A skull and crossbones crudely drawn on a sheet of lined paper. At the base of the castle were two gigantic feet outlined in the sand.
Dick grabbed at my hands, shrieking and crying, incoherent with outrage. ‘A giant monster’s got them, they’ve all gone!’ All his precious soldiers had disappeared from their posts and been replaced by the marauding army. Cows and pigs and sheep and naked pink cherubs were perched cheekily on the lookout platforms.
The sight of this made Dick so distraught I feared he would tear down the castle and roll around in a frenzy, obliterating the entire city. I pinioned his arms and tried to calm him down, slightly rattled myself. ‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ I said.
We’d been alone on the beach for weeks, forever it seemed, although to begin with Dick had carried the Duke of Wellington home every day to be on the safe side. One afternoon he forgot, and after that he just left it there along with everything else. This little bay had seemed so remote and inaccessible we’d begun to treat it as our private territory. It was a shock to realise it was not. Close to the giant feet I had spotted a new line of human footprints, not huge but larger than mine, sprinting off down the beach.
I did not draw Dick’s attention to these and seized the flag from him before he could rip it to pieces. There was something written under the skull and crossbones.
Dick screamed, ‘What does it say, what does it say?’
‘Stop crying and shut up. It says, Banjo’s Red Hand Gang was here.’
This prompted renewed yelling. ‘They’ve stolen them all. Will they get us? Why didn’t you make me take them home? They’re monsters, they might kill us too – they might eat us!’ ‘There’s no such thing as monsters,’ I repeated, but he dissolved into floods of frantic tears, pummelling me and kicking and hurling himself on the sand. It was all I could do to restrain him without causing serious damage.
From his prone position he let out another bloodcurdling screech that contained a strong component of terror. I blinked. On the horizon, much further out to sea than I had ever ventured, was a human head and the tip of a surfboard. As we watched, transfixed, the unknown rider caught a wave, stood up for a second then toppled back out of sight.
I scanned every corner of the beach for clues and spotted some colour in the rocks below the eastern headland. I headed for it at speed, hauling Dick in my wake. His distress had now been supplanted by fearful sobs. He kept taking in rasping gulps of air and staring out to sea, but the mystery surfer was no closer to the shore. We found a striped towel with a prominent hotel monogram, an exercise book and a large pair of rubber thongs holding down a note.
‘Read it, read it!’
‘Shut up and calm down. Anyone would think you were a baby.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says: ‘Beware. You are being Watched.’
Dick gasped. ‘It must be them. Mustn’t it?’ He looked around maniacally, then emitted his most ear-splitting scream yet. ‘Look!’
I followed his wobbly, pointing finger. A phalanx of all his toy soldiers faced us on a ledge well above our heads, the Duke of Wellington at the fore. Dick hurtled up the rocks and snatched them, passing them down to me one by one. He was whooping now, with joy unalloyed.
We retreated to sand city in silence, clutching bundles of lead soldiers. Dick went back to work immediately as if nothing had happened, replacing the marauding army in the stockade and the soldiers back on guard duty. He seemed to have forgotten the board rider with his playful sense of humour, but I was acutely aware of him. I sat facing the sea, watching him attempt to catch waves, stand, waver, fall, submerge and bob up again. My book lay untouched on the towel. My watch on the sand told me two hours passed.
When he eventually made it back I felt a rush of relief startling in its intensity. Under the circumstances it also felt vaguely disloyal to my brother, who rushed away in a panic as the failed surfer staggered up the beach towards us. There was no sign of his board. I didn’t even flinch when he collapsed at my feet and lay on his back in the sand without a word, eyes closed. He must have known I’d been engaged in his struggle. He was only a youth, and I could see he was completely exhausted.
Dick crept back cautiously, his mouth hanging open. He whispered in my ear, ‘Is he the Red Hand Gang?’ He demanded to know if we should tie him up, but I said he was harmless. We pored over him. He was thin, bony and gangling, with a round guileless face that looked as if it belonged on a different body. Shapely dark eyebrows also looked as if they were stuck on. Collar length, bleached fair hair was plastered to his skull. The round face reminded me of a coloured illustration. When he eventually spoke I remembered what this was. It was the dish that ran away with the spoon, in one of Dick’s nursery rhyme books.
The boy was going to be badly sunburnt. I retrieved his towel and draped it over him. He opened his eyes. ‘I survived. Board died though. My Dad’ll kill me. Chrissy present.’ He shut his eyes again. I took off my canvas hat and placed it over his reddening face. He lay there immobile as another hour ticked by. It was nearly dinner time. Dick would start moaning any minute. I was in a quandary.
I jumped when the boy suddenly sprang to his feet, scattering hat and towel. ‘Holy Moses! Didn’t think I was going to make it out there for a bit. Filthy rip. Thought you might have to rescue me.’
I’d thought the same thing, and had no idea how this might be achieved. Dick spun round, eyes staring.
‘I don’t bite, Shorty,’ the stranger said. ‘Hope you’re okay with the raid on your men.’ Dick said he wasn’t, but he was okay when he got them back.
So, what were our names and how old were we, where were we from and what were we doing here, all alone in this godforsaken outpost?
Faced with this stream of questions Dick dropped his guard. We weren’t all alone, we were with our mother. She was always tired, so she let us come to the beach by ourselves. We were called Richard, aged four years, and Georgina, aged nearly twelve years, but we were called Dick and George for short. I squirmed at this recital.
‘No one should be called Dick, however short you are. Sir Richard is better. And I’m George too – coincidence! Amazing. George Paterson with one T.’ But there was no danger of us getting mixed up, because with only one T he answered to Banjo, obviously. This was not obvious to me, but I kept quiet.
‘Poms are you, George? English? Yeah, right. Educated guess.’ He was sixteen, on holidays from boarding school. He was staying with his dad and his dad’s new girlfriend in a rented house up in the scrub. I’d had no idea there was another house up in the scrub. The girlfriend was appalling, he said in answer to Dick’s question, like all her predecessors. ‘I had to get away so they could, um, er -’ pause, a glance at Dick, ‘fornicate away to their heart’s content.’ A grimace. ‘Parents’ behaviour is widely known to be disgusting, or we wouldn’t be here, would we? Impossible to be in the vicinity when they’re at it. As you can well imagine.’ I tried to look as if I could well imagine. I was aware of my shyness falling away. It felt like shedding an unwanted coat.
Still chatting, we clambered up the track together, deflecting Dick’s attempts to butt in. Banjo said he’d lived in Pommyland once. It wasn’t so bad, if you liked that sort of thing. We separated outside our cottage. We’d probably bump into each other tomorrow without fail? That’s if he survived his father’s homicidal wrath over the surfboard. Nowhere else to go was there? No nightclubs, no discos. Nothing but the perilous beach.
Yes, I said, we’d probably bump into each other. Without fail. No one had ever said the word fornicate in my presence, but I knew what it meant. I felt rather grown-up.
We dumped our gear on the porch and rinsed our feet under the outside tap. Mother was sitting at the rickety desk in the lounge room when we came in. She was reading a letter, but had a pen in her hand and an open writing pad. I could tell right away she was in a better mood, there was less tension in her posture, and in the atmosphere. I took a deep breath. .
‘Is that a letter from Daddy?’
She leant over it. ‘From Daddy? No, darling, what makes you think that? Daddy’s away somewhere, isn’t he? I expect he can’t write from there. Or phone.’ It wasn’t an aerogramme, I could see from the edge. It was on ordinary white paper. I looked at the phone. It had never rung when Dick and I were there, but it worked, there was a dial tone. I’d picked it up and listened.
We had omelettes with salad that night, and Mother drank a bottle of wine. Dick told her how we had met a funny kind of boy called Banjo on the beach. She made interested noises but asked no questions and her expression was blank. She seemed abstracted. Pleasantly abstracted, not the other way. It didn’t put Dick off, nothing did that. He embarked on a monologue about the giant footprints and the Red Hand Gang and the theft of his soldiers. He didn’t care if there was next to no input from the end of the table. I was rather pleased, it meant I could daydream pleasantly while appearing to read. It did occur to me that this might be exactly what Mother was doing as she appeared to listen.
After that I scarcely gave her another thought for five days. In this brief but intense interval I felt I knew what it was like to be Dick, living entirely in the moment. Or entirely in the idyllic, extended moments with Banjo Paterson, the days spent hanging out on the beach, exploring, swimming, talking. The evenings and the nights in the cottage were a world away from those spellbinding hours. They were like living another life in a parallel universe. A monochrome life that was dreary and irrelevant.
‘I hate these stupid bathers,’ I said to Mother after the second day. ‘They make me look like a kid. I want to grow my hair.’ And: ‘Do I have to have Dick trailing along the entire time? He’s so babyish. Why can’t you look after him sometimes? I’m not his nanny.’ She nodded but she wasn’t really listening; she had retreated into her own parallel universe. I had no idea where it was, but I guessed that it was more real to her than this monochrome one. It was a split second of empathy, of sympathy even, but it didn’t last.
Dick had become an irritant like never before. Until now I hadn’t thought about him very much. He was the undemanding companion you take for granted. Now I resented his constant presence. He sensed it and became more needy and querulous. He wouldn’t work on sand city by himself and wanted Banjo to help him, which riled me out of all proportion. Worse, he refused to lend Banjo his lilo and insisted on floating between us. We had nothing to bribe him with. Banjo was tolerant, but I was wary of the off-putting potential of Dick’s tantrums.
Worse still, Banjo would be going to Melbourne for the long weekend. To some parties, he said. I pestered Mother again. ‘Can’t I have even one day to myself?’ To ourselves, was what I meant. Mother was sitting in her bedroom. There was a small hinged mirror on the chest of drawers. She was holding it close to her face, plucking her eyebrows. I’d detected a difference in her behaviour that evening, an undercurrent of something. An unusual restlessness. Moving the furniture, such as it was, and pointlessly tidying things. I’d have said it was prompted by suppressed excitement, if there’d been anything to be excited about.
I thought I was in there with a chance. ‘Can’t you have him tomorrow? Please.’
She became quite animated, surprising me. ‘No, tomorrow’s simply impossible, dear. I need peace and quiet to prepare for the new course, you’ve absolutely no idea how much work it involves.’ She looked at her reflection, head tilted. I noticed a vase of flowers that hadn’t been there before. ‘But ask me another day.’
‘Why would another day be any different?’ I said angrily. She uttered a little laugh, surprising me again. ‘Oh, it might be completely different, darling. You have no idea.’
I related this to Banjo while Dick hovered, dragging the lilos and splashing us. We were lying in the shallows trying to get cool.
Banjo thought Mother was mysterious. He hadn’t been to the cottage, I was never sure how she’d behave. ‘You said she’s going to be a uni lecturer, George. Which uni?’
‘Not sure. Somewhere in Melbourne, I think.’ It sounded foolish.
‘What’s the course again?’
‘French literature. Like – Flaubert.’
‘Hmm. But she taught English in England. High school English.’ I nodded. Mother loved Jane Austen. I turned these things over in my mind.
‘Divorced, are they? Your parents?’ My stomach lurched. ‘Or just separated?’
I shook my head vehemently. ‘No, of course they’re not. Daddy’s just in England.’ I recalled mother’s remark. “Or away somewhere. He’s in oil, so he’s always going away. To Libya and Nigeria and places.’
‘Your mum’s got a job here, though.’ He glanced away and flicked water at Dick.
I nodded again. I felt numb and obtuse.
‘Look George, I don’t want to be alarmist but you should probably brace yourself. All the signs are there.’ He jumped up abruptly, showering spray. ‘To hell with all parents. Let’s have a swim.’
He had to leave after lunch. He was getting the train to Melbourne. As if there’d been some unspoken agreement we sped up the path nimbly, leaving Dick’s singsong whinging far behind. I was silent. I’d been silent for a while.
We stopped at our door. It was shut, although it was usually hanging open in the forlorn hope of a through draught. The car wasn’t there either, which struck me as odd. Mother usually went to the post office in the morning, before her sleep.
‘What can we do to cheer you up, George? Thinks: have you ever been kissed? No? Thought not. Stand by, the time has come.’ He grabbed me and planted a swift kiss on my lips, then a second, more emphatic one. ‘Well, you have now. Feel any better? Thanks for the company, it was a lifesaver.’ He turned and waved. ‘Ciao, Sir Richard.’
Dick pushed past me, humming. I felt stunned and slightly faint. I was unsure if this meant I was feeling better or not.
Inside the cottage we came upon the remains of lunch on the dining table. Lunch for two. Leftover salad in a wooden bowl I hadn’t seen, two plates, an empty wine bottle and two goblets, one stained with Mother’s telltale crimson lipstick. Half a fruit tart, two bowls and a small jug of cream. Dick and I hadn’t had dessert for weeks. We gobbled the tart, then I cleared everything away. My mind was racing. Mother didn’t have any friends here, did she? I felt I was living through a strange dream, or perhaps aftermath of one.
Soon afterwards the car returned. Mother was looking unusually smart in a blue silk sleeveless dress, her best, but her face was deathly pale. She swept past us without a word, went straight to her room and slammed the door. She didn’t get out of bed for the next forty-eight hours, except to go to the bathroom. Whenever I went to check on her I found her deeply asleep. Sometimes she came to, for an interval, and asked for soup or a cup of tea. Dick and I ate our way through the bits of food in the fridge and the tins in the larder, waiting for Banjo’s return.
We were late getting to the beach that day, to my frustration. Mother had finally decided to get out of bed. She said she’d have a sea bath to wake herself up, but she dithered around doing nothing. Dick was nearly hysterical, having been confined to the cottage for two days. At the last minute she decided against it. I’d guessed this would happen.
The beach was empty, castle and sand city intact as before. Dick dragged his lilo into the water, so desperate that he forgot about lobbying me. I was about to follow when I spotted a line of footprints near the water’s edge. There seemed to be two sets of them, heading east. The parties had been much on my mind. Had Banjo brought a friend back?
The footprints stopped at the rocks, but I remembered a secluded spot we’d once discovered, behind the eastern headland. There was a hollow feeling in my chest, like an ache, but it neither warned me nor held me back. I glimpsed the edge of his striped towel, first. Then a tangled confusion of arms and legs. The dark hair and chunky, working limbs of a stranger. A strange boy. Banjo’s round face, side on, contorted. He saw me.
Someone – it might have been me – uttered a guttural noise. I was on my knees, semi-conscious, choking. Other sounds, a yell. I was only dimly aware of them passing me, two naked figures racing into the water. Then I saw Dick. Out there, lilo bobbing. Way out, further than I had ever ventured.
They reached him while I was still chest-deep in the water. Dismissing my calls to wait, to wait, let me rescue him, he’s my brother! Dick was still aboard the lilo. I watched them towing it sideways to escape the rip, two of them, then three, sailing back on the waves.
When he’d got over his shock Dick crowed about his escapade. I hauled him up the path to the home that was not a home. Inside the cottage were two uniformed policemen. Mother was slumped at the table in her nightdress, hair awry.
One of the men was speaking. A gentle voice. ‘You knew it was illegal?’ Mother looked at Dick and me. A stricken look. ‘I was going to take them back.’
‘You’d hoped for – ?’ He handed her a handkerchief.
‘But it didn’t – . So I’d have taken them back.’
Two days later we were escorted onto the plane to London.
Before we left Dick and I went to the beach one more time to collect his soldiers. Etched in the sand in front of sand city, in enormous capitals, were two words: SORRY GEORGE.
‘Don’t cry,’ Dick said. ‘There’s no such thing as monsters.’
*