The Following, page 23
The boys were fourteen and sixteen at the time. Tiger was booked to follow in a month but did not come, sending a telegram explaining himself after cancelling his flights. Sylvia hadn’t placed any long-distance call to plead with him, as he’d expected, waiting by the phone – her forbearance eloquent, as he should have known. She’d finally sent a card agreeing he was best where he was. The hiatus stretched to an estrangement, teaching a lesson in paying attention to what ultimately might become nothing, could so easily become nothing.
‘Which is what?’ Tiger had asked when they were all back together, when the events of the year receded in levels of radiation.
‘Our marriage,’ said Sylvia.
Tiger in his letters had argued a totally cowardly, unfatherly, unhusbandly collapse over the idea of sitting on a plane for twenty-four hours watching the wings bend and flex, the engines wobble on their mountings high above the space-viewed earth. For close to six months David and George went to grammar school at Henley, played rugby, rowed, made lifelong friends, met girls, did better than all right and wrote happy footnotes to Sylvia’s mail without Tiger’s wretchedness blocking them. Tiger spent those single man’s long months with Gary Brill, wandering the Tussockdale gullies hoeing out noxious weeds, setting up crude firearm traps called ‘wombamatics’, slaughtering protected fauna and engaging in the rituals of underhand Dividing Range land management that Gary drew him into. He’d sunk to a desolated version of himself, eating baked beans and sardines from the tin, drinking cask wine from teacups, and it was strange: the warning signs were back, but the knowledge wasn’t helping Tiger and the timing could not be worse. He only had what he’d already been through to bolster himself.
Sylvia turned sidelong, tucked her knees up and leaned on Tiger’s back as they sat for another rare minute on the bench under the bough shelter.
‘You’re too tired to drive,’ said Tiger.
‘Judith will drive the first bit.’
‘She drives like a maniac.’
‘She won’t dare, not with Sonia in the car.’
Tiger stared out to sea. The horizon played an optical trick, curving up higher than the land. The pull of saltwater that had set his mind wandering these past weeks had been eased by their night on Workers Comp. As soon as he’d arrived back at Crater Bay, smelling the wind, watching the clouds scud over, a feeling renewed itself. Land biting into sea and vice versa. He wasn’t there, he was here. What blocked him in one place was the essence of the other.
The patch where Thursday had churned her propellers the day he was born was out there winking in the afternoon light. Jake had located a mark, a GPS fix, the layer of years dimming till maybe there was a rum bottle down there, a skull and crossbones ring, a saucepan, a spoon or a Neptune crown dropped overboard from Thursday as she did her tight, fast, tilted steaming turn, the jolly jack tars hurrahing at the rails, and Tiger greeting the green light of earth, an earthling bawling.
The sea was unchanging in its fluid mechanics. Within its sphere it incessantly indulged its mood for flow, collision, tide and resolution. It could never be finally known. It was not an element but a universe. When everyone left tomorrow, Tiger would pray for a kind wind, rig up the sailing dinghy and set off into the channel, tacking circles, and then if he could get the spinnaker handled properly he’d try for a billowy downwind leg. He might need Nick for that.
WHEN JAKE AND JUDITH RETURNED to the house after their time with Sonia, Judith startled Nick:
‘Nicko?’
The young man swung on Judith with his affronted stare: his standard way of reacting. The expression shocked those who didn’t know him as Judith did. Was it a snarl? A bite? The look cast Nick as freakish, a whack of observation thrown to the chops. Girls found it a challenge, but the one who loved him would understand. Sometimes Max looking at him had the appearance of someone who might understand. Who did understand. But said nothing to say he did.
‘Anyone in your life?’ said Judith.
‘In?’ Nick said, so that she knew, with the certainty of sentimental conviction, that he loved someone who scorned him.
Judith handed Nick a pink-and-white streaked camellia she’d plucked from shrubbery planted by Petra and Arch in contravention of the planting policy laid down by Tiger in the Crater Bay users’ manual, Nothing to be grown that needs regular watering. ‘Take it for Sonia,’ she said.
Nick thought of the rules as he walked up the shell-grit path lined with ti-tree.
If he was to spend the next two days with Tiger getting the place ready for the Sleights, he’d have to think of what to say to him. When Nick did things right Tiger made him feel he’d got them wrong. The alternative was to stay at the oyster farm with his father. What Nick wanted was to stay at the oyster farm but after Max was gone, to go fishing with Sam Noori and think a bit more about what he wanted to say to Max in the fight he’d felt coming ever since his father bought the oyster farm and had it declared inside a marine reserve. How it humiliated Nick, crushed him, took him right back to when he was a kid when what Max said went.
Nick had gone in to see Sonia last night, when Tiger and Sylvia were away, crowding through the doorway of the guest cottage with Max and Harry. Sonia hadn’t looked at him. When she did he realised there was something she’d wanted to say, but couldn’t say, wouldn’t say to him just then with the others there. Harry and Max were excluded from whatever it was. Was he all that important? ‘In the morning,’ she’d whispered.
Sonia was of his parents’ tireless generation who’d never had death in their faces, who’d mastered life with routine and ambition. Now she’d be the first to die out of them. It turned time epochal. She would not be present in this world anymore. It was momentous and unbelievable and yet routine and, for her, no different from planet earth being pulverised into dust.
Nick exempted Jake and Judith from his parents’ age group threatened with extinction. They seemed younger. They took on what mattered. That was what counted. But they were born round the same time as the others, with the same stats dogging them, all those generational body parts and body fluids with DNA fates attached that were talked about by means of a hyphen, lung-, breast-, prostate-, pancreatic-, adrenal-, talking about the escapes they’d made with their doctors telling them they were all right this time, until one day it was Sonia who came back, after tennis, and it wasn’t all right with one of them.
It frightened Nick that Sonia needed him for something the others couldn’t give her, when they were all devoting so much time to her, all of it, really, walking away from big jobs, in Harry’s case; in Max’s drinking himself numb with Harry, crashing his car when he should have been in Canberra getting himself counted; and in Jake and Judith’s calling off whatever it was they had in line next on their activist sailing calendar. What could Nick give her against all that?
Sonia was breathing through an oxygen mask when Nick came into the bedroom. Letting the mask fall, she smiled. Nick put the flower on the bedside table. Sonia took his hand. How am I to do this? he asked himself, biting his lower lip.
Sonia saw something of what Nick was thinking, the sickroom visitor with a clamp on honest grief. This unusually bright, unusually clumsy and absurdly self-conscious young man. As she left this earth she would bring him down to it, if she could.
‘These things – these illnesses, mortal illnesses – are often so much worse for everyone else, Nick, than for the person going through them.’ Her voice was thin and cracked.
‘Which is pretty hard to believe,’ he said.
Sonia showed the palms of her hands. White. They were like clay, tribal clay, ceremonial clay.
‘It all seems to follow quite naturally,’ Sonia said. ‘A road you follow down to the end.’
As a view of life it made Nick feel better but really made no sense – and he thought, again, No.
‘You’re doing pretty well, hanging on,’ he said.
‘That’s my obligation,’ said Sonia. ‘But I do need help. There is an envelope in the bottom drawer, the right-hand drawer at the very bottom.’
Here was how to bring him to earth.
Nick found it.
‘Bring it over here, sweetheart. Pull out the photo. The top one. Show me.’
‘It’s Daria,’ said Nick.
Daria Willis was Sonia’s goddaughter. Nick had visited the Willises at Henley when he went to England last year, taking a bundle of children’s books from Sonia. He wouldn’t have gone to them, or ever met them, without Sonia sending him. Thus his life, his mentality and feelings, would not have changed.
Of this invincible change there was no outward sign. Except Sonia saw what it meant. He’d spent an English summer afternoon in a village pub with Rod, Daria’s husband, drinking beer, the kids crawling over their knees while they made conversation. Daria dozed on the grass, peering up at Nick through slit lids when she thought he wasn’t looking – the way people did, wondering about him, making their minds up – and not really all that favourably, he suspected. And he was wrong about that.
Every phrase Sonia used cost her an effort. ‘There should be an address and phone number on the back.’
‘Got it,’ he said, meaning the address at Henley. Of course he had it.
‘Not Henley, this is somewhere else. Could you possibly telephone Daria and find out if she’s all right? I need to know. I’ve called and called. I’ve completely run out of puff to make the effort. Have you heard anything?’
Nick gave Sonia a flat look. That he’d heard nothing was obvious, he hardly knew Daria, at the source where she lived her closest life, he wanted to say, but to say so would empty him out.
‘You’re not all right, are you, Sonni? But you’re worried more about other people than you are about yourself.’
‘No,’ Sonia, high on painkillers, almost giggled. ‘I’m not all right – I’m dizzy as a bee on nectar. Daria lives near Oxford now.’
‘Where you were famous for being so clever,’ said Nick.
‘Where she’s not being clever at all,’ said Sonia. ‘Her marriage, all along, was miserable. She made a mistake. Rod the same. No blame for either.’
At that moment they heard the roar of a truck engine close by. Sonia put her hands over her ears.
Nick stood at the high window behind the bed and saw a tilt-truck arriving on the track outside the cottage with Max’s Range Rover mounted on the tray and Tiger striding up the paddock. The driver had the car winched to the ground before Tiger reached it. Another roar and the truck backed in a circle and settled behind the house, engine idling.
Nick was nothing to Daria Willis, he thought, except that when she’d looked at him, appraised him, he’d felt some sort of light beating him around the head. He’d felt he could take any amount of that soft, frank sort of light. Now here was Sonia telling him that Daria had asked if Nick could meet her off the plane. She was coming over.
Since that afternoon at Henley he’d had no contact with Daria or any of them. Someone else would have sent a card, made a call, sent an email: ‘Had a great day, see you round.’ Nick lacked that sort of grace, never seeing it as grace. Never seeing duty as a possible act of love. Though they were both the same age, late twenties, Nick came over as young, was young. If he’d sent word, he might have had word back, learned something that he could give to Sonia, the one who gave more than she took; that she was lost and looking to be found, and he was up to helping her.
TIGER HAD NO WARNING OF MAX having his car trucked over, no explanation. The truck driver expressed himself with a cunning grin. The district bristled with opinions about their slack and slackening MP. The media were on to him. National names told them how Max didn’t know what he was doing via tin roofs crusted with receiver dishes. Then they had the evidence of their own eyes.
The qualms of a politician’s friends were based on knowing too much about him. That he was human, for example. The instincts of Tiger, a PR hack, involved one reporter in particular, Wigs Wignall, navigating her close interest closer.
Wigs could not have been closer to Max at one time. She knew the lot. Her danger was a brittle honesty, forged on the memory of her husband, Powys Wignall, who’d died and left her grief-stricken while still too young. There were no children. They’d not been politically close – that’s what inspired her. To be caustic to her own side through sorrow. Loss made her unforgiving of fools to their faces. Her morning reports on national radio were at the higher, righteous end of opinion-making, worthy of a war crimes tribunal about office expenses and travel rorts. All was given significance in a ringing tone of voice. She had a private income inherited from Powys and was fearless with newspaper magnates threatening litigation. ‘Just try me.’
You could be certain that Wigs, now in her sixties, would be in some adjacent Parslow gully wearing an anorak and jogging shoes and cursing Max on discovering national mobile coverage meant nothing in a hilly electorate.
Tiger approached the tow-truck driver with a hesitant grin. ‘What’s the score, buddy?’
The driver handed Tiger a clipboard with a chewed pencil dangling from a piece of string. Collings was a short, balding man in a sky-blue boilersuit. He was the alternate tow-truck driver to the one who’d extended a wire cable through the mangroves to pull the car from the causeway the day after it went skimming over the flats. Tiger recognised him: Collings was one of the renegades who’d started a third branch of the party, in past one of the timber towns, a breakaway branch that had been finished off by Trades Hall in a pre-election swipe-through. Wigs had covered it. She was called that thin-arsed bitch on a barstool when she bought rounds, and they guzzled and wiped mouths swiped clean of foam with the backs of thankless hands as they gave themselves away.
‘I need your autograph,’ said Collings.
Tiger scribbled the loops of his name across the bottom of a clamped docket.
An explanation hung in the air. ‘Buying it from Max?’ said Collings.
‘Now there’s a thought.’
‘He said you might.’
Tiger caught on then. Max’s great gift was to bring others across to a moment of acceptance of themselves while remaining stubbornly himself.
‘I’ve always wanted one of these big, clumsy, high-set wagons,’ Tiger said.
‘Watch Max, he’s a born used-car salesman.’
‘Except for the public good,’ said Tiger. ‘What would they do in Canberra without him?’
‘You’re onto it. He’s a saint. Look, I’ve pulled more of these heaps from the side of the road than you’d want to know about. Saltwater’s been running out of the guts of her.’
‘Altogether though the damage doesn’t look too bad,’ said Tiger. Except what would he know.
‘It took more chain than Lance had to get her out of the bay, both towing straps and a whole length of rope that’s ruined from being over-stretched. Max would have had to be pissed out of his brain to go off on that track. He likes his drop – we all know that – but you’d have to ask, why did he go that far? He must have gunned her out over the flats as far as he could push till she rolled.’
‘He must have,’ said Tiger.
The man’s observations summed up Tiger’s thoughts so exactly that it was hopeless to try and change the man’s mind. Rumour could take a holiday. If Collings already saw things the way Tiger himself did in his most fearful self, that Max was trying to do himself in, then the whole district was asking the same question, coming to the same conclusion. Max was alive and spreading good cheer in his most intimate narrow circle but was finished outside it. No more proof was needed that Max was bent on it than what he’d done.
‘Maybe Max thought he was still on the made track,’ Tiger said, ‘and planted a little more boot when the going got rougher, on account of its being high tide, water up, dark, no moon.’
‘He’s lucky he didn’t kill himself years ago if that’s the way he drives. You need to go out there and have a look.’
‘I had a look,’ said Tiger.
Collings reacted with an expression that said, If you had a look, Tiger Yeomans, why are you so bleeding blind to the obvious?
‘We are having a clean-up,’ said Tiger. ‘With Pastor Arch and Petra coming, there’s a slab of VB stubbies we haven’t used, don’t want, they won’t want them – the wowsers – could you make use of a slab, Doug?’
As Collings hefted the carton onto the passenger seat of his truck Tiger remembered his name was Greg, not Doug. Most people got names wrong, but thought it was pitiful when you forgot theirs. Nobody ever forgot the name Tiger. Small children whimpered on meeting him. Their imaginations gave him stripes.
NICK SAT ON THE END of Sonia’s bed listening to the preparations for departure, car doors slamming, bags trundled on gravel. The moment of wrench was upon them. Leaning forward, curving his ribs around the photograph of Daria Willis in his shirt pocket, Nick found a space big enough for a dove to squeeze in. There it called to him – Daria.
Sonia gazed at him from her pile of pillows, white-faced, sharp-cheekboned, crow-eyed, her black, glossy wig hanging straight down. Whatever was alive in her was sustained by will. She was wanting to hurl some sort of hope for the human race from her as she sped away.
‘Nick?’
He leaned forward into that zone of pale intensity.
‘I’m here, Sonni.’
‘Something I’d like – for everyone,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Afternoon tea before we go. A plate of those . . . eats they have in the . . . what do you call it?’
‘Pantry?’
‘Small, thick, hard, with a light, no, not a light,’ said Sonia. ‘With a taste of . . . ah, brittle.’
‘Try not to talk,’ said Nick. Jesus, she’s away. The bedside table was scattered with silver foil pill trays. Endone. Tramadol. If she left some, he’d pocket some.
