The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (16 page)

A
woman with blue eyes in a plain face, and dark black hair roped into a thick plait, took money at the public bathing pavilion that stood guard over the beach. Two turnstiles funnelled people through on a strict separation, men to the right, women to the left, to wade through a shallow foot pool reeking of bleach – for hygiene – and on through to the changing rooms. The blue-eyed woman sat between the turnstiles, eternally smoking cigarettes while overseeing pennies dropped onto a tray for inspection before she fingered them down a smooth wooden ramp and into a metal box. When I reached the beach each morning it was too early for the turnstiles to operate, but by the time I had swum and was ready to climb back into my clothes, the door would be open, the wooden sign would be out, and I would nod to the woman as I dropped my penny into the tray. She’d nod back at me, blow smoke from her nose, and smile, smiling more – as the months passed – at my belly than my face.

There came a day when, as I waddled up to the turnstile, the blue-eyed woman stepped off her high chair and, waving her cigarette at me, indicated that I should
walk through at the side, where she unlooped the heavy rope that hung across from the edge of the turnstile to the far wall.

‘Through here, love, don’t want you jamming halfway.’

I thanked her, handed her my penny, and she looped the rope across behind me.

The next day, she smiled over her cigarette as I approached and, as she unlooped the rope, told me, ‘I’m Cath.’

‘Lena,’ I nodded at her, smiling back, dropping my penny into her palm.

A week later, on an overcast morning, there was no one behind me at the turnstile as I went through under the unlooped rope. Cath waved me through, screwing her nose up at my penny, ‘Through you go, love.’ I saved my pennies from that day on.

Cath was a brick-shaped woman who, though she looked much older, was close to me in age, thirty to my twenty-eight. We progressed quickly, after that week when the rope first unlooped, from learning first names to taking a cup of tea together in the sunshine while her husband, Eric, limped in from his maintenance work and spelled her at the turnstile midmorning. After my early swim, dried and dressed in the pavilion changing rooms, I’d come out past Cath, blinking into the sunshine.

‘Cuppa?’ she’d ask as I came through past the rope.

‘Lovely.’

I’d install myself on the limestone retaining wall in the shade, bring out the novel or magazine I carried in my bag, knowing that by the time the sunlight moved enough
to heat me, Cath would appear from the entrance to the pavilion carrying two thick china cups and saucers in her hands, with the cigarette clamped into the corner of her mouth somehow balancing her as she walked.

We sat and smoked and talked and drank our tea in the shade. Cath soon knew that I was due to give birth in early May; that I’d been living in New Zealand; that I was comfortable but unsettled living at my uncle’s house; and that, while I didn’t want to talk about it, I was a recent widow. I found out that Cath and Eric had been married for ten years; that they’d come up to the city from the bush three years ago; that Eric’s leg had been mangled in an accident on the farm and Cath didn’t want to talk about it; and that she grew sadder and sadder with every month and year that passed without her falling pregnant. These things were enough for each of us to know. They were the basis on which our friendship grew. Cath and I would sit in the sunshine on the limestone wall, my hair drying into salt curls on my cheeks, me dobbing smokes from Cath, my belly growing bigger by the day.

It caused disapproving looks on the beach, that big belly, more disapproving the bigger it became. It seemed it wasn’t proper to be seen in a swimsuit, stretched alarmingly, no matter how carefully, how demurely, I covered myself with a loose, long cotton shirt until the very moment I plunged out of sight, into the water. Complaints were made. But they were made to Cath.

‘Bugger ’em,’ she said to me. ‘Silly straightlaced buggers. What, do they think babies are found under a bush? Bloody bugger ’em.’

I began to spend more and more of each day at the pavilion – Cath and Eric called it the Pav, so I did too. They lived frugally at the Pav, rent-free in exchange for working the turnstiles and some light maintenance, their small wage from the council supplemented by the proceeds of an insurance payment after Eric’s accident. When March came, summer – despite the searing heat – was deemed officially over and the Pav was open only at weekends and so, on weekdays, I would knock on the door and walk through to the kitchen, and Cath and I would sit and put our feet up on the low windowsill that looked over the ocean and we too would look over the ocean, smoking and drinking tea. Often, we found that we didn’t speak. Cath and I were comfortable just sitting. We did a lot of that, that autumn and winter. Just sitting.

Cath started calling me Princess. She told me I spoke like one. I talked about Uncle’s house as if it was a castle, she said, or a palace or a museum or something posh where I couldn’t make myself at home. She’d ask me why I spent so much time at the Pav with her and her crip hubbie. I’d just smile, shake my head at her,
oh, Cath
, and we’d sit and smile and talk when we needed to.

We were there in the kitchen one such afternoon. I’d brought horseshoe rolls fresh from the bakery, a pound of butter. The three of us, Cath, Eric and I, had demolished the rolls, Vegemite smeared on thick butter, lettuce wetly crunching, washed down with cups of tea. Eric had disappeared again after lunch. He never stayed with us unless he was eating.

Cath asked me again what it was like living where I
was – whether I was happy there, whether I’d stay.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Cath. My uncle’s lovely, but – well, it’s hard to say. It’s not that he’s said anything to me, but I think a baby in his house is the last thing he’s ever imagined.’

‘What, he doesn’t want you there?’

‘No, he’s happy for me to be there. He’s – bemused, I suppose. I think he just can’t imagine what he’ll do with a baby.’ I realised as I spoke that nor could I imagine what I would do with a baby. I rubbed my hands over my belly.

Cath butted out her cigarette without lighting another from its glowing tip. She stood, rubbed her hands together as if she were trying to make fire, or warm them.

‘Well, Madame Princess, what about coming and having a look upstairs.’

I remember being surprised – Cath had never talked about an upstairs. She led me down a hallway and through a door at the end. Four wide steps led straight up, then turned a right angle to the left, then turned back again on themselves – just a half-storey up from the level of Cath and Eric’s flat. At the top, the steps opened out into a square room soft with sunlight trying to get in through windows whitewashed to block it. Through the whitewash though, through the big, arched, paned windows stretching across two walls of the room I could see the Indian Ocean, so close, so blue, spreading forever. Furniture was piled against one wall of the room, and boxes; I poked at the corner of a bookcase, a chair with a broken leg, a narrow iron bedhead, a tea-chest. Dust rose, further softening the light. The smell was of dust, and dried salt.

‘Oh Cath, it’s beautiful.’ I felt surrounded by the ocean; not in the way it surrounds you on a ship, but with the height and groundedness that being on land provided.

Cath stood in the doorway, unmoved by the ocean view she’d seen every day for the past three years and was afraid she’d be compelled to see for many years more.

‘What would you reckon’– Cath leaned forward to me, pivoting herself free of the doorframe –‘to paying us a bit of rent, just on the q.t., and moving yourself and your bub in here? Share the kitchen with us, of course. There’s the little bathroom at the bottom of the stairs you could use. We’re at the other end of the building, so Bub can scream his head off and we won’t mind. And I could give you a hand with things, with Bub. What d’you reckon about that, Princess?’

I stood with my face pressed against a gap in the whitewash on the window, where I could look through and see all the way to Rottnest Island, a flat streak of ribbon floating hot above the water on the horizon. Heads bobbed on the surface of the water below. The white sand stretched forever up the coast, towards the north, past where the houses ran out, the city ended. I unlatched one of the windows; it stuck at first, but opened with some persuasion. Now I could taste the salt in this room – the north tower of the Pav – hear the gulls, the waves.

‘I reckon that’d be perfect.’

I walked across the room and put my arms out towards her. We hugged, tentatively at first, then tighter.

‘Move when you want, love,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Eric to sort a key out for you.’

R
ather than, as I feared, having to be convinced of the sense of my move, Uncle Valentine – bless him – was so transparently relieved to see us go that he showered us with money and made us promise to come to tea every Sunday. I happily agreed.

Eric handed me a key the following morning when I went for my swim. I turned the key over in my pocket, until it felt warm from my touch. We moved the next day. Uncle Valentine organised his man, and the gardener and his cousin, to tote my trunks, my theremin, and some furniture that Uncle Valentine insisted we choose for the room,
to be comfortable,
don’t want you camping
. His housekeeper reluctantly handed over a rattan basket piled with linen, sheets and pillowcases, towels. A tea-chest filled rapidly, as Uncle Valentine cycloned through the house pointing at random.

‘She’ll need one of those, and one of those – fix it, will you, Mrs Anderson, you’re a dear.’

Uncle Valentine’s small army trooped to the Pav carrying scraping tools, a ladder, and dropsheets. They took away the dusty pile of unloved, broken furniture, then draped the
room with dropsheets, and spent the afternoon removing the whitewash from the windows while I sat and drank tea with Cath in the kitchen downstairs. Some hours later, we watched them carry my belongings, brought in procession from Uncle Valentine’s house, up the narrow stairs of the Pav, huffing and shifting and arranging themselves cleverly to fit. Mr Anderson saluted as they left,
All done, Miss
, ladder under his arm.

Cath and I climbed the stairs to the north tower. The windows and floor shone. My belongings were clustered neatly against the wall where before a pile of broken furniture had been. Across the floor of the clean new room we unfurled an oriental rug in deep burgundy silk picked out in cerulean. ‘I’m sure it was your mother’s, darling; you must take it,’ Uncle Valentine had told me. I drew my hands over its surface, wondering if I remembered its colours from long ago.

Cath helped me arrange the furniture in the room. We placed the wide bed against the wall opposite the windows, so that I could lie and look out on two sides, have two ways of looking at the world.

I grew larger and larger in that bed. I would lie there until I heard Eric leave each morning, then waddle down the stairs to slump myself in the warm kitchen with Cath. She’d knit, fragments of wool left over from a hundred different garments forming a rainbow rug for my Grace. She tried to teach me – I had never learned to knit, although I could sew, the Misses Murray had seen to that long ago – but I never got the knack. The metal needles slipped in my hands so that I held them, somehow, in a cello
bow grip that could make no sense of the strings of yarn, forming a tight tangle I couldn’t be bothered loosening. So while Cath knitted, I’d sit and read, or talk with her, or just look through the windows at the darkening, wintering ocean, rubbing my taut belly with restless hands.

Cath and I were warm, enclosed, in the kitchen. Eric drifted in and out, always quiet, sometimes smelling of beer a little earlier in the day than he ought. A little rain came as the months progressed. I stopped my morning walks when I moved into the north tower – I was bigger, the rain stopped me – all these were excuses, but really I felt the restlessness slip away from me once I came to the tower. I inhabited it; the tower room around me, me around Grace.

Every Sunday, I waddled up the street for tea at Uncle Valentine’s, as promised. Sometimes I persuaded Cath to join us, but Eric wouldn’t come. Mrs Anderson would make us cakes and sandwiches, too much to eat in a sitting, and send us home to the Pav with a not quite approving look and a basket of food.

It was on one such Sunday that Gracie decided to arrive. I felt a pain start from somewhere far away, saw it approach out of the corner of my eye as Uncle Valentine offered me a plate of lamingtons. I stood up as the pain got closer. It reached my core, and started to radiate out from my centre to all the parts of my body all at once, like a sonic radiation, or like starlight. I remember Uncle Valentine calling for the car, still holding the lamingtons. My uncle drove us away from the ocean, across the railway track, and over
towards the river, and in no time at all I was installed in a high-ceilinged room in the little maternity hospital called Devonleigh. Uncle was waved away by the busy women who bustled around me, hushing me, stripping me, shaving me, shushing me. But I would not be shushed, I who had always made sound. And when our time finally came, it came with a roar, and I – making sounds like keening and lowing all at once, like the cattle on the boat so long ago up the coast – pushed Gracie out of me, all slick and new.

Holding her to me, I felt as if all the pain in the world had been funnelled through my body and made good, turned into light.

G
race lay in Mrs Anderson’s old rattan washing basket, sunlight through the windows warming the white sheet covering her. The blanket that Cath had knitted was folded down to the bottom of the basket; the late autumn sun was warm, most days, after cool nights. I sat by her side, my hand on the basket, near but not touching my little dark-haired daughter, and watched her sleep and breathe while my body healed and flowed back to its former shape, but softer, fuller.

We kept ourselves in the tower for most of that first winter, once Grace was in the world. Rain threw itself against the windows. The ocean swelled up close to the footings of the pavilion building, big wintry waves thrown up high and hard by storms far out at sea. When the rain stopped, I would open the window and lean out over the high thrashing waves eating at the limestone that formed the base of the building, the limestone made of long-dead sea creatures, the waves taking them back to the deep. Salt saturated the air; a light crust would form on my face. Running my tongue around my lips, I could taste it.

Grace was three months old before I swam in the ocean again. It was a beautiful calm late winter day – not spring, that wouldn’t come for a month. But a taste of it. Midmorning, milk-full, Grace slept in the washing basket, pushing out to its edges, only just fitting within it. She was a big bonny baby, pale skin under dark hair, eyes like dark steel; or like coal, sharp and shining. In the kitchen, I could hear Cath clattering cups, humming.

I wasn’t sure then what made me want to swim, that day. I ran down to Cath in the kitchen before I could change my mind; of course, Cath was happy to watch Grace. I ran back to the tower, then carried the basket back down to the kitchen. Grace seemed to settle deeper into sleep with the jigging of the basket down the stairs, along the passage, into the kitchen and onto the table in the sun. Sun was good for babies, they said.

From the drawer of my dresser I took my black swimsuit, laid it on the bed. Grace and I had pushed it out of shape, stretched it, as we swam into the late summer, bigger and bigger. I removed all my clothes and stood naked by the bed. My emptied breasts drooped, dark blue veins running through pale flesh to long dark nipples. My stomach bulged, soft. I missed the taut containment of pregnancy.

I stepped into the swimsuit, pulled its straps over my shoulders. It sagged on my soft, changed body, pouched at the belly and over the crotch. I shivered, grabbed my towelling gown from the hook behind the door, eased my feet into moccasins, and stepped towards the stairs and down, out onto the beach.

The tide was high. I dropped the dressing gown off my
shoulders and draped it on a limestone wall where the water wouldn’t reach it, slipped my shoes off and placed them on the wall. Before I could think about it, I ran into the water.

The cold took my breath away. A pain shot through my crotch as the water hit. I dived under the water, and my head felt as if it would burst. My teeth screamed in my skull. Salt water filled my nose, ballooned my swimsuit; I felt my breasts float free from the slack wool, as if they were trying to escape from me. I felt the wool of the swimsuit pull up between my legs, still Grace-sore. Salt water eased into every corner of my body, every empty crevice and cranny. As water flowed in, so sound came from my mouth, a deep guttural sound that changed to something high and yet from the back of the nose, from the sinus cavity. I shouted, something that sounded like yes!, but that wasn’t quite a word. I thought of Trix. Finally, now, I let myself think of Trix, a year to the day in the cold, damp ground overlooking the beach by Tomahawk Road.