Riptides Read online

  ‘Don’t they have real evidence?’

  ‘Not enough to convict. But the lead detective is sure they’re guilty, and needs to make that appear credible while he gets some solid evidence.’

  ‘But they admitted they did it.’

  ‘False confessions. Both of them say they were verballed, beaten at the watch house until they signed.’

  On Wednesday, he’d come into the kitchen and kissed me goodbye so early I wasn’t even dressed.

  ‘We’re doing a final edit today, showing it to Reid. I reckon we can get it to air this week.’

  ‘That soon?’

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve been working on this for months.’

  ‘I know that. We all know that.’

  ‘Try to be happy for me, will you?’

  ‘Sorry. Just, I dunno.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ll be stuck at the pool all day with the kids.’

  He’d reached over, taken a piece of my toast. ‘Stuart’s sewn his lips together with paperclips.’

  ‘My God, why?’

  ‘To protest.’

  ‘Is this the same one who swallows chunks of metal and wire? Is hospital that much better than jail?’

  ‘Everywhere’s better than Boggo Road.’ He rubbed the top of Petey’s head. ‘See you tonight, champ. Where are your sisters?’

  ‘They’re dumbheads.’ Petey had a milk moustache, and a smear of Vegemite on his nose.

  ‘Girls,’ I called out. ‘Come say goodbye to Dad.’

  They ran down the hallway. Mark hugged our smiling, dishevelled girls then turned back to me. ‘Hope your day’s not too terrible.’

  ‘I didn’t mean – That’s awful about the paperclips.’

  ‘Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s nuts. They’d both kill you in your sleep. But they didn’t bomb that nightclub.’ We kissed goodbye.

  I’d stared out the window to calm myself so I didn’t snap at the children – their inane bickering, their tugs for attention. None of it warranted my rising fury. I wasn’t that angry at them, nor was I angry at Mark. I liked to swim. But some days felt so incredibly pointless, so driven by other people’s needs and desires, that the steam built inside me until I wanted to shout. I didn’t. Instead, I wiped a scatter of breadcrumbs from the benchtop into my scooped palm while I listened to the radio. Last year, Mark’s colleague Caroline reported a story called Housewife, in which she’d calculated what household tasks would be worth if we were paid for them in the working world. She’d only included the obvious: cooking, buying food, dishes, laundry, mending, ironing, vacuuming, making beds, taking care of kids, feeding pets. And sex. It’d caused a stir at the time. And nothing changed.

  Paperclips. What a strange thing to use.

  Life had once felt expansive – large and elastic enough to hold the things Mark and I loved to do, our Saturday tennis matches, pub lunches with friends at Caloundra overlooking the beach, drives to Mt Glorious, watching bands, seeing movies, sex in the afternoon, eating dinner in bed and then more sex, with space left for dreams about the future. Life was smaller now. Somewhere along the way I’d lost myself, and my life with Mark had become tethered to this house, governed by so many rules and such a different set of activities.

  I’d turned back to my children. Sarah spotted her opening, told me Petey was kicking her, then yelped for dramatic effect. I laughed and raised my coffee mug at her, confusing them both.

  Joanne, ignored by her siblings, quietly drew stick figures on the bench with a finger dipped in strawberry jam. Woof vomited something plastic on the kitchen floor.

  After five days the clouds clear, and the opposing forces of earth and sky begin to reclaim the water. The ground absorbs the lakes that cover it. The sun inhales triumphantly. Hard surfaces are coated in wispy columns of steam as water rises back to the heavens.

  We try to revert to life as it was before the flood. It’s not easy. Three-quarters of the state has been underwater. Grown men are stoic in front of Mark’s camera but become emotional when tripped up by a kind question. Our neighbours find solace in exchanging platitudes: ‘We’re better off than some’, ‘Won’t forget that in a hurry’. We stand on the scorching footpath and talk over the warbling magpies about our shared experience, like soldiers after war, women after birth.

  We help Lou and Andrew, since returned, clear the mud from their home. They don’t need us since Lou’s whole family is there – her solid, mulish parents, two muscly older brothers, her younger brother who’s not as hardy but good at directing the family workforce, two uncles, an aunt who brought ham-and-cheese sandwiches, honey for the children. I watch Lou’s family as they weave in and out of one another, touching a shoulder, working in pairs, the uncle and father in close conference about how best to move the fridge, the mother and aunt sharing a look at this or that ruined memento. Such a sad reason to come together, and yet . . . I regard them longingly, their relaxed warmth with one another.

  Lou walks along her squelchy hallway carpet, running her hand through her hair, holding up one dripping, dirty belonging after another. ‘We can’t fix this,’ she says. ‘Everything’s wrecked.’

  I don’t tell her that I agree. I’d always thought of rain as cleansing, encouraging growth, only temporarily the cause of mould and puddles, but this ferocious destruction is something different. This rain was violent. And mud coats everything, like the remnant drool of a subterranean creature that’s sunk back underground.

  Lou and Andrew hold one another while Mark and I work on, guilt at our good fortune energising us. We pile destroyed wooden chairs, waterlogged books, soiled curtains and shoes onto the footpath. There are similar bundles of ruined personal treasures dotted along the street, waiting to be collected by rubbish trucks. The children find dinted spoons and filthy underwear in the gutter. Mark finds a plastic flea collar and we wonder what happened to the dog who should be wearing it. We wonder if it belonged to Jock next door.

  The flood wasn’t part of my plan, not part of anyone’s. These few days will derail us for months. I know now that I should have recognised the flood as a warning, a caution. Everything I thought I could control was uncontrollable. Life, insistent, persistent, was about to take on new shapes, shimmery and unpredictable as petrol on a wave.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Friday 6 December 1974

  Charlie

  I’m on the plane at 2 am Bali time. Denpasar to Darwin, Darwin to Brisbane. Every part of me is crumpled, from my shorts to my face. I thought I’d sleep on the plane but that’s going to be challenging. The girl in the window seat next to me is a chain-smoking chatterbox, a toothy whippet-like thing who fills the first hour with rambling tales of tripping in Koh Samui and meditating by the Tjampuhan River – she might’ve said in the Tjampuhan River – and rants about people who don’t get it. Evidently I do get it. She’s flirting with me, and going about it in the most awkward way, twirling her hair into rope, watching my mouth as I suck on her cigarette. I’ll need a few more fags for the trip, but not from her.

  ‘Long flight ahead.’ She winks at me. It’s kind of endearing, but I couldn’t be less interested.

  ‘I need some shut-eye,’ I say. ‘Last few days have been intense.’

  That’s swear-on-the-Bible true. Wednesday was the busiest day and night we’ve had – a taste of the future, Ryan said, now that travellers are spreading their wings past Denpasar, ‘finding their balls’.

  ‘Manning up,’ I said. ‘Sal, what’s the chick version of manning up?’

  ‘Manning up.’ She gave me the finger. I smiled but it’d been a serious question, as serious as they ever get with us anyway.

  We’d cleaned the restaurant by eleven o’clock, and joined Ketut, Made and our mob of local mates at the beach for a farewell bonfire in my honour. I would only be gone a month, but these people love to celebrate. I drank my body weight in Bintang and fell asleep on the cool sand to the sounds of party murmurs, a settling fire and Ketut strumming a Dylan song on his guitar.

  Ryan
prodded me awake at sunrise. ‘I’ve got your board.’

  I sat up and ran one hand across my matted hair while I surveyed the beach: bodies arranged around a pit of charred logs, and stray dogs wandering between them, sniffing at tossed beer bottles and strewn clothing.

  ‘We had fun, right?’

  Ryan smiled. ‘Yes we did.’

  ‘Cool. I look forward to remembering it at some point.’

  I stripped off my t-shirt, getting a whiff of smoke and sweat as I pulled it over my head. I walked with Ryan towards the sea, squinting into the rising sun, achy and parched, my surfboard under one arm. The salty breeze was strong at the ocean’s edge, pushing the board against my body. I spread my legs to keep my balance and felt cold, frothy water pour over my toes. Looking at the blue sea, rising and falling, filling its lungs and exhaling a roll of clean water, a gust of fresh air, made me feel better. By the time I stood on the board, my top layer of grime and the sludge in my head had been sloughed away, gone.

  Between waves we lay on our boards, bare chests on slippery plastic, paddling to keep ourselves facing the shore, waiting. Salt water dripped into my mouth. Ryan flicked a lump of hair off his face. On the beach, our friends were waking up and moving into the shade of palm trees.

  ‘Paradise,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Let’s never leave this place.’

  I wasn’t so upbeat by the time we got to the market. The sellers have no respect for hungover customers, and I’m sure they called out to us louder than usual for fun. My head thumped, and everything smelled terrible: a cocktail of fruit baking in the sun, petrol fumes and dog piss.

  ‘Keep it down, dude,’ I said to Komang, our go-to man for noodles and greens. ‘I’m right here.’

  ‘You want a beer?’ He grinned and banged a stick of bamboo on the bars of the cage at his feet, making his monkey scream. Next to him, an elderly woman squatted on the ground, arranging flowers on a woven tray. Without pausing in her work, she shouted in rapid-fire Balinese. From her tone, I figured she said something like, ‘Charge the foreigners double.’ A young girl stood beside her, as poised as a ballerina, holding a basket of bananas on her head, smiling at us. We were the morning’s entertainment, not for the first time.

  After the beach, the market and the sweaty drive home, we opened up the restaurant and got back to work. I stumbled through Thursday, serving more fish and sambal than you’d think could come out of a shoebox kitchen. We set to drinking again after we closed. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. Maybe because I was stoned.

  Just after midnight, Sal drove me on the scooter to Denpasar airport, winding and beeping through the usual puzzle of motorbikes, overloaded trucks churning out black smoke and beaten-up cars driven by toothless men. I’d rested my aching head between her shoulderblades and closed my eyes.

  The plane was shutting its doors as I ran across the tarmac, shouting at the hostie to wait.

  I’ll be in Brisbane for almost four weeks, the result of being nagged, repeatedly, by Abby to ‘come home’. Except Brisbane isn’t home anymore.

  When I went to Bali I didn’t plan to stay for so long, but it turned out there was no compelling reason for me to rush back. I think if Abby visited Kuta she’d understand.

  After I graduated from Queensland Uni I’d spent a lot of time reading about different parts of Asia. Abby said I should channel my interest into a job, so I dropped down to part-time work at the student union and enrolled in postgrad studies in Mandarin, not to please my unpleasable sister, but because I figured a second language might get me a job as a translator. Mostly, though, it offered another stream of girls to date. Not a terrible result.

  When Ryan and Sal came back from Kuta for a month-long visit to appease their families (a great Australian tradition), we hung out. I stopped going to classes. I lost my job. The morning I got fired, I called Ryan. He said that there were other jobs and I shouldn’t stress out. But he and Sal are both from rich families, and the whole idea of working felt a bit optional for them back then. It still does. At some point Ryan will be expected to do something in law and Sal will do whatever it is she’ll do. But I went with them to our friend Jason’s house anyway. That day set me on the road to Bali.

  Jason lived on a steep hill, his house sitting on poles like a rangy mountain climber hanging on for dear life. I parked my VW outside his place with angled wheels, the way Dad taught me, and we walked up a broken concrete path through waist-high grass and scraggly lantana. At the bottom of the paint-chipped stairs I heard happy noises coming from the veranda, which was shaded and hidden from view, enveloped by lush tropical greenery.

  We slouched about in Jason’s living room on couches draped in saris. The windows were covered with matchstick-thin bamboo blinds; the walls were decorated with movie posters – The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, Klute. The smell of weed and seagrass matting wafted through the house. We kept our drinks in a bathtub filled with ice. The day drifted past, steamy and loose.

  Late afternoon, when Ryan and Jason had driven to the local pub on a beer-and-ice run and the others were strumming guitars out the front, Sal curled beside me on a sagging couch, her long arms wrapped around her knees.

  ‘Do you remember that day after our Victorian Lit final,’ she said, ‘when we were sitting on the lawn, and I said one day we’d do something meaningful?’

  Meaningful. She locked her almond eyes on mine, a smile lifting rose-painted lips, and I thought, ‘Finally.’ I’d adored Sal since we met. In truth, I’d lusted after her even before we met. I’d stood behind her in a smoky night-time crowd, watching Railroad Gin at Cloudland. A tight t-shirt, a glimpse of upturned nose, feather earrings brushing her neck. We almost touched when she’d lifted her arms up, twirled her wrists – I felt the heat of her, inhaled patchouli – but I stood back a bit to watch. It took all my willpower not to reach out and pull her towards me. At the end of the night, as Ryan and I were heading for the exit, she called out hello to him (a shared class, how great to see you here). She recalls that moment as the start of their romance. I don’t think she noticed, or remembers, that I was there.

  After that, and all through uni, we three hung out, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. We spent Friday nights at the Red and Black, Saturdays at parties. Sundays were for FOCO, the club in Trades Hall where we’d watch bands or the DJ, hear poetry readings and political talks, buy month-old copies of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper. You know you’re part of something cool when a federal pollie calls your club ‘Australia’s most repugnant nightspot’. That’d been a five-star review as far as we were concerned. Naturally, it spelled the beginning of the end.

  We found other places to go, went to a bunch of protest marches, racked up a million hours together. Whenever Sal’s parents went overseas, we’d have pool parties at their house, and I’d wonder why Sal was slumming it with us. But now, sitting on Jason’s couch on a summer’s day, alone, I felt sure this was the time to make my move. I touched Sal’s tanned thigh and she said, ‘A sanctuary. Do you remember?’ She gently lifted my hand back towards my lap. I felt my cheeks burn while she continued talking like nothing had happened. How had I got that so wrong?

  ‘Organic food, handmade soaps, homeopathics, Ayurvedics, oils. Hemp clothing. We’d make vegetarian meals, grow our own vegetables and herbs. It’d be a place with authenticity and soul.’

  Jason’s cross-eyed Siamese cat padded into the room, stretched out on the floor in front of us in a rectangle of white sunlight. Sal kept talking. I willed my heart to slow down, my cheeks to cool.

  ‘We’ve talked about how great it’d be if you joined us there,’ Sal said. ‘Will you come?’

  The cat had offered me a distraction while I calmed down, and I’d stopped listening. But I heard Sal say she wanted me to come to Bali. It wasn’t the move I’d had in mind, but as soon as she said it my bags were as good as packed.

  By the time I arrived in Kuta, Ryan and Sal had decided to set up a restaurant that woul
d serve noodles, juice and cheap beer. Not the vibe we’d originally talked about but there was a garden behind the kitchen and the food was right for the location. Ryan made an offer to rent a place on the beachfront. I wasn’t convinced there’d be customers for what they wanted to do; there were already two restaurants on the main road. But life in Bali was intoxicating – no other word for it. My days were filled with sun, surfing and getting high with my friends.

  Work did kick in. People showed up to eat and drink, but we’d chosen this work so we didn’t mind – we enjoyed it. Our surfer mates came by late morning, ravenous, along with their girlfriends, the people we knew from beach parties, random travellers. Ryan cooked, Sal waited tables and I washed dishes and spruiked for business. We went to the market in the morning and spent the night figuring out what would make the place even better: floor cushions in the back corner, more potted plants. We hammered up a noticeboard and left paper and pencils on the tables, made nice with anyone who had good drugs to sell. Sal put candles around the room. She wanted to call the place Kuta Dreaming, inspired by her favourite Mama Cass song, KD for short. Ryan painted a sign on a piece of driftwood and we hung it above the front door.

  Our first big purchase was a fridge. We rented a rust-bucket truck – one day for two dollars – and headed up to Kerobokan, the three of us squashed on the cracked vinyl bench seat, Sal in the middle. We drove on a narrow track through jungle, keeping the ocean on our left, for lack of any other marker. It was rugged driving. Twice we had to stop to move logs off the road, and Ryan rested one hand on the horn to beep at monkeys when they wouldn’t get out of our way. It must’ve been forty degrees. Sal sang ‘A Horse with No Name’ and passed around a joint to keep our spirits up – from Ryan to her to me, so each time I put the wet end to my lips I tasted her, smelled her.