44

When I turned off the tarmac, the western sky was the unnatural pink of denture plates. In the east, the light above the lakes was dirty grey and going quickly. I crossed a cattle grid and drove up a dirt road that made its way around boulders and stands of yellow box.

At the top of the hill, I stopped. The road forked and the landscape revealed itself. To the left was a bay, its right shore a narrow heavily treed peninsula. To the right, the country was open, grazing country, fenced into paddocks, with a belt of trees along the lake shore. The road to the right twisted down a long way to what looked like a cluster of farm buildings surrounded by trees. The left fork went to the peninsula, entered the trees and was lost from sight.

Dead Point, the map called the peninsula.

I was tired, sore everywhere, filled with a feeling of futility, the feeling that I was moving because I was scared to stop. Sharks couldn’t stop; they moved or they died. I wasn’t a shark. I was an old goldfish in a pond the new owners were filling with rubble, a fish swimming around trying to find water that had oxygen in it. A shaking of the head, a moving of the shoulders, creaks heard in the joining places. Time to move.

I turned left, drove down to the peninsula, in the direction of what I took to be Dead Point. A few hundred metres before the tall trees began, a new fence and a gate between fat posts barred the way. Beyond the fence, hundreds of trees had been planted, gums, waist-high, planted not in lines but in clusters.

I opened the gate, went through, stopped to close it. Door open, leg out, I changed my mind, left the gate ajar, fuck the farming ethic, drove on, down into the trees.

A narrow road, twisting, etched into the land by wheels, dull water in pools, the old gums close and oppressive, blocking the light.

There was a final bend and then a clearing, large, a quarter of a football field, two timber buildings directly ahead, a ramshackle two-storey structure on the right with a set of big doors, one open a metre. The other building, single storey, was weathered but in good condition. A vehicle was parked in front of it.

An old Land Cruiser.

I parked beside it and got out. Clean air. The sea wasn’t far away, its chip-salty taste in the nasal passages.

The keys were in the Land Cruiser. No crime out here in the clean air. I followed a worn route, walked down between the buildings, not so much a path as a rut, reached a portico, a new structure, sheltering a door in the single-storey building.

No bell. This wasn’t a bell building. No knocker either.

I gave the door a few hits with knuckles, winced in pain.

Nothing.

Used the left hand to do it again.

No sound from within.

Again.

No-one home.

I tried the door handle. The door opened.

A passage. Dark. Doorways ahead, three to the left, one to the right. Outdoor clothes hung on a peg rail beside the right-hand door.

I went in, opened the right-hand door.

It was a big room, warm, a combined sitting room and kitchen lined with timber, its age and its history showing in the adzed posts and beams and the oil stains deep in the now-polished floorboards. The eastern side had once had sliding doors and the upper tracks had been left when a wall of glass was installed. In the middle of the room, a fire glowed behind the glass door of a stove.

‘Anyone home?’ I said loudly.

No sound, then a log spluttered in the firebox.

I walked to the window past a kitchen table with turned legs and through a casual arrangement of old armchairs and a sofa covered with bright rugs. Beyond the sliding glass doors, a new deck and jetty ran to the lake, huge and still and empty, shining like metal in the gloaming.

Look in the other rooms?

At that moment, nothing on earth held less appeal. I went back to the passage, opened the first door.

A tidy room holding four bunks. Empty.

The second door on the left.

I felt my skin tighten, realised my mouth was dry.

For some reason, I knocked and waited. Turned the handle, pushed the door open.

No surprises. Another bedroom, a large bed, made, nothing lying around.

The third door. A bathroom, two toilet bags on the basin cabinet.

I went out the side door, turned left down the path between the buildings. At the end of the dwelling, I stopped and looked around. The two-storey building had been the boat workshop. Out of its yawning front entrance, wide-apart rusty steel trolley tracks ran down to the water’s edge and disappeared under water. Boats had been brought up to the tracks and a wheeled cradle run under the keels. Then they had been winched up the incline into the huge shed.

The shed was a half-dark, empty cavern. I went in, feeling the texture of the packed and oily dirt floor underfoot. Now the cradle stood at the end of its track, near the back doors, piled with 44-gallon drums. It was all that remained of the trade plied in this great space, the hard work of repairing boats.

I went back into the house, into the sitting room, looked out of the window.

A sailing boat was coming in to the jetty, sails furled, under power, two people in yellow rainslicks on board, one at the tiller, one leaning on the cabin.

I moved back from the window and watched the person at the tiller take the boat up to the landing at a near right angle, change direction sharply, cut the power, drift the vessel gently side-on to meet the jetty.

The other person stepped off the boat, went to the bow to begin tying up. A man. He was joined on the jetty by his companion, a woman, who secured the stern line, got back on board, closed the cabin, put a cover over the engine. The man waited for her, put out a hand. She took it. On the jetty, they embraced, kissed, I saw her teeth flash as she laughed. They walked towards the house, his right arm around her shoulders, her left arm around his waist.

I sat down in an armchair, the springs compressing unevenly beneath me.

Waited.

I heard them in the passage, laughing. They would be hanging up their yellow rainslicks.

She came into the room first, didn’t see me, ruffled her hair with both hands, an attractive sight.

‘Warmth, warmth,’ she said, turning back, ‘I don’t understand…’

He was in the doorway and he saw me and she saw it in his eyes.

I stood up.

‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘Susan. Marco.’

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