Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  That first sight of Beatrice when she bent over to adjust her sandals and her soft breasts curved outward from the delicate secrecy of her armpit, cupped in by the slipping rim of her bathers.

  For the first time in ages Charlie found himself smiling.

  +++++

  Already certain patterns were being formulated, almost without his conscious control or direction. He found himself walking the half kilometre along the ridge to the little newsagency at the top of Bulcock Street for the the Australian. He had not descended to the Courier Mail yet, but that would come.

  Then, after a few more weeks, he discovered a small café where he could skim through the paper and have a coffee – long black, not cappuccino. That had been Miriam’s morning drink She could spend all morning in a café in Brunswick Street or Lygon, over endless coffees and just the first three or four pages of the Age. Charlie had imagined her in Paris or Venice similarly occupied, and Miriam would have known how to soak up the ambience as well as the necessary caffeine. Charlie had always been impatient, a list in his pocket and things that had to be done.

  All the things that didn’t have to be done.

  After his coffee and sometimes even a clunky Florentine, he would stroll down to the front, the Stillwater of the Passage. The line of Norfolk Island pines was still there, out of his childhood, but now streetscaped with a concrete and porphyry walkway right along the front where the channel cut close into the banks (his uncle had once shown him a groper’s hole along there) and up behind the little changing room and lifesavers’ hut (almost unchanged) to lead higher along to the point, which had now been turned into picnic areas, parking places with little loops of grass around each tree and brick toilets and another changing shed with an outside shower. Beyond that he remembered the sand-duney hillocks with their thin casuarina groves and banksia scrub. From Pen Y Sarn they had trekked through that wasteland to reach the foreshore and the turn that led to the surfing beach. It was now all graded and turned into family playgrounds with shade trees predominating above wooden benches and tables. Attractive in its way. Civilised.

  Charlie sometimes would take another rest on one of the benches, leaving the paper on the table and perhaps wandering over to the fence that protected the open beach from small children.

  It was a bit of a hike uphill from that point, so Charlie more often walked out onto the sand and stood mesmerised by the endlessly recurring surf. And each time, he thought: perhaps I should have bought somewhere where the surf itself would be close enough to look at from the balcony. But then he thought: storms, erosion, salt spray and that sticky moistness. And he knew that the slow momentum of the incoming waves would be capable of holding him in a thoughtless drugged stupor, perhaps for hours. Surf was like that.

  The surf he remembered from the old holiday years had been something to challenge and stimulate, something you plunged into and caught in an exciting roller. Charlie had been a relentless body surfer.

  There were other patterns that began to help fill his day. He had never been a man for breakfast, but now he purchased packets of cereal and mixed them with yoghurt and cut up fresh soft fruit from the greengrocer down past the newsagent.

  He began to take a kip after lunch. Memories of those after-lunch rests at Pen Y Sarn were replaced by a simple need, an early exhaustion. Sometimes he lay on his back for almost two hours.

  Back then, when their parents closed the door of the main bedroom, the young people would play euchre or dominoes. Charlie had learned his first chess moves. Hot sweltering afternoons before the sea breeze came up with its always welcome agitation and relief. There were occasions he had lain on the side sleepout upon the small chaise-longue that seemed like a reminder of Victorian times.

  There was the time Beatrice had snuggled in beside him on that narrow horsehair shelf; they had read Boofhead comics and giggled together, imagining an American world of College Students and baseball and gossipy afternoons over milkshakes. Beatrice fitted under one arm, into his shoulder and he had felt her warm body, enticingly soft against his damp shirt. She had wiggled in her bottom to secure a more stable position. He had crossed his legs to make more space, and to hide his excitement.

  The high bedroom in his Westaway flat occupied a north-westerly position but any passing breeze seemed to circulate the air and Charlie, so far, had not considered air conditioning. The subtropical warmth was too full of old associations and it seemed to lave him gently. He remembered days of uncomfortable heat and oppression, when they would get in their togs and bring out the hose in the backyard near the outside dunny, just to cool off. After lunch was not a good time for the surf, and his mother always warned them not to swim after a meal. Was that instruction really valid? He had never thought to question it.

  But as he shambled out of the back bedroom he found himself doing the same thing, making coffee – it was something which had become a pattern of his marriage and all the times he and Miriam had been together – and in retrospect, that seemed endless and endlessly linked up together. Three weeks, four weeks, sometimes a month: their separations defined them, but their linkings were less spectacular yet more genuinely constant. They simply slipped into old patterns. Like this business of making yet another coffee, and such a pedestrian coffee, Bushells Espresso, straight out of the jar. When he had been to the small supermarket last week Charlie had quite instinctively picked up the 250 gram jar, though the taste of the thing had never delighted him. It was a taste like old cinders, he had once said. But Miriam had brought over to him the new, unopened bottle, and had shoved it right under his nose, after she ripped off the foil. ‘Smell this. Aaah!’ she had said, and the promise did seem, for a moment, about to be fulfilled. Smell is always more pertinent than flavour, he had said then, and she had laughed, ‘Not more pertinent, more perfidious. Fortunately!’

  The coffee tasted bitter, but he did not add sugar, though there had been a time in his life when three spoonfuls had been adequate.

  But the long hours until dinner had to be filled. He decided to take the car out in the afternoons, and make a series of sorties, not too far, but to reacquaint himself with his neighbourhood. Mornings were fine for his walk. He could afford to be a little self indulgent later in the day. He would plan out a series of excursions: Montville, Buderim, Noosa if he felt inclined.

  Sitting with maps and a Gregory’s, Charlie felt a return of that sense of purpose, and he carefully worked out kilometres, times and potential traffic flows. At this stage he had nothing like a picnic set (there had been three wicker baskets, and an Esky, gone, gone). For his first expedition (not tomorrow, the next day) he would buy something on the spot. Already he was thinking Buderim; the ginger factory there would have some sort of café and no doubt any number of ginger confections. Would he indulge himself in a bottle of ginger in some sort of syrup? Miriam had preferred candied ginger, but he recalled the time when they drove from Caloundra up to Buderim on the back of his cousin’s old Willies Knight utility, that had boiled on the way – the radiator and the occupants. But the new ginger factory then was a discovery for them and they returned with three bottles, heavy with syrup. He had broken into the first one on the way back, and Jane complained that her hands were dirty with grease from the back of the ute so Charlie had fed the pieces into her mouth. Beatrice was next.

  Yes, Buderim.

  The car had not been serviced since whenever. Charlie that afternoon looked into the Yellow Pages and selected a garage at random. In the old days at Caloundra every service station was also a garage. No self-serve then.

  The next week, the next two weeks or more had been planned out.

  +++++

  The following morning Charlie was up early, as if there were an important business appointment lined up. Huh! He laughed at that, as if Miriam in another room would call out, ‘And what is it this time?’

  But now he was up there was nothing for it. He showered, shaved and completed his toiletries. The bathroom still had that look of foreign
ness about it. This was the one room where the old widow still kept a ghost hovering. At first it had been almost amusing, when Charlie stripped and he danced and flaunted himself for the benefit of the ghost, or of the old lady. He imagined her still with a sparkle, why not? All the recent Guides praised octogenarian sex, didn’t they?

  He decided not to make his own breakfast, but to walk down to the village and see what was available. A beachside resort had to have something one off, and he had no intention of walking all the way down to McDonalds.

  In twenty minutes he was sitting outside that modern little café on the ground floor of one of the recent high-rise apartments just up from Bulcock Beach, the Stillwater. It was an amiable view in the freshness of early morning. He was suddenly reminded of those very early mornings when some of them would come down here, though there was only a little milkbar and grocery in those days. It was the fresh ripple under his shirt that reminded him. It tightened his nipples, even now.

  But whether he wished it or not, the other memories did come nudging in. It was on a morning just like that Charlie had first realised how Beatrice and Alan had become flirtatious. ‘Flirtatious’ was the term he had used, in his mind back then. Alan was just through his first year uni and had always been, in his younger brother’s mind, bossy, even surly. Alan had built his own laboratory under the house and Charlie had been banned from it, right from the outset. Alan allowed only one or two of his schoolfriends entry and though Charlie had (of course) invaded it secretly, it was just chemistry things and dry-as-dust smells. His older brother had become a little more tolerant of him once Alan started at St Lucia, though the tram and bus meant he seemed hardly ever home. Alan was saving up buy his own car.

  The only activity the brothers shared, really, was tennis. Alan played for keeps. His stinging serve was formidable but thanks to the Saturday contests Charlie’s own game had improved out of hand and he had been awarded a half-pocket at school. Alan’s other redeeming feature was his loud laugh. It was infectious, and Alan did have a mad sense of humour. He seemed to be able to memorise limericks endlessly, clean and dirty ones depending on the company. It was, he confided to Charlie in a moment of weakness between matches when they all relaxed in the shade of the hire courts they had booked for every Saturday, a way to make conversation with the girls and to break the ice at parties. Alan had started regularly going to parties, in various suburbs.

  Alan had suggested the hire court for tennis during that vacation. Great idea. Beatrice paired him in the first mixed doubles. Her game was terrific. It was clear that Alan was impressed: you could tell that by the way he began his string of limericks, which had them in stitches even though Charlie and Jane had heard them all before. Well, most of them.

  And then, for Christmas, Beatrice had presented Alan with a book of comic poems, The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery. Alan was over the roof. ‘Ogden Nash is THE comic genius!’ he had exclaimed. And all my pals at uni drool over him.’ Alan even recited an Ogden Nash poem he had already memorised from one of those uni parties. Before the week was out he had them all by heart also. Beatrice had been transformed from being one of the friends of his kid brother into a smart, sporting type, who was, incidentally, very pretty. Jane had pointed out to the rather dejected Charlie that girls that age – fifteen and sixteen – always had their eye out for older boys, and never, but never, those their own age.

  Beatrice still joined Charlie in all his walks and activities, but he did notice how she kept up with Alan now, and was not even quite so close to Jane – who was quite happy to return to her own reading and her habit of designing imaginary garments for some future grand occasion.

  No, he had not been jealous of his brother. He knew that Alan would be back with his university friends in a few weeks and this little summer diversion would be forgotten. He, himself, had been awakened sufficiently by Beatrice, who cuddled him all the way back in the car to Brisbane and gave him a very affectionate goodbye kiss at the end, whereas by this stage she gave Jane a peck and Alan a VERY long smile but only a sort of sisterly kiss, like Jane.

  Charlie had not understood the nature of all that, and he had not really encountered Beatrice again, except in the distance when he partnered someone (who?) in the Debutante Ball two years later. By this time Beatrice was a truly radiant beauty and was surrounded by admirers. Charlie had waved, and for an instant her smile back had spurred him, but the men around her were so much older and he remembered Jane’s warning. She had passed out of his life.

  Now, sitting over his second cup of coffee and the brick-like raisin toast that he had allowed to spoil, he found himself stirring more sugar, and he gave a harrumph and pulled himself out of the slouching position. The young Italian hovered while he paid the bill. He took a brisk walk along the esplanade, already familiar in its new way and with almost no shadow of the old shape it had those years back.

  Beatrice, and the memories of Beatrice, had served some sort of purpose, he recognised. They were happy memories. Yes, they had given him back some sort of joviality of spirit, as it were. Some lightness out of the past; even, if he were honest, some sense of his early erotic sensibility, when everything was expectation, anticipation.

  Before everything happened.

  No, he would not brood. Alan: now how much of all that would Alan possibly remember? Alan had been living in London for thirty years now and his children were prune-voiced little snobs. When Charlie was in London he sometimes – not always – gave Alan a tinkle but it was tacitly agreed he would not go up to Hampstead. Cynthia and Charlie had fallen out rather badly once, when Miriam was ‘a new number’ as Alan so patronisingly put it in those worst big-brother tones. Cynthia referred to Miriam as ‘another Jewish Princess’. Charlie had never forgiven her, and in fact it had been two years before he even made contact with Alan again, though Alan was not the one who had made slurs.

  Oh, water under the bridge.

  Though he did attempt to reinvoke memories of Beatrice again, as he walked slowly back to his flat, it was suddenly difficult. Alan, as ever, seemed to spoil things, simply by being there.

  The sun was getting hotter, very hot in fact. Why had he not thought to bring a shade hat? Trudging along the high crest of the road at last, and looking down at the always soothing expanse of water, sand and the long sweep of the island, Charlie found himself repeating one of the Ogden Nash ‘trasheries’:

  I give you now Professor Twist,

  A conscientious scientist.

  Trustees said ‘He never bungles’

  And sent him off to distant jungles.

  There, by the tropic riverside

  One day he missed his charming bride.

  She was, a native told him later,

  Eaten by an alligator.

  Professor Twist could not but smile;

  ‘You mean’, he said, ‘a crocodile’.

  No no. Had he got it all right? But Charlie grinned to himself and recalled the very laughter both Beatrice and Alan bestowed upon him, back then, when he had picked up the new book and read out the first thing that came to hand.

  +++++

  Three p.m. he judged a good time to make his first small tourist excursion into the hinterland. Buderim was a tiny ­settlement on one of the volcanic hills that bumped into the ocean just beyond Maroochydore. It had once been a place of small steep banana plantations and small market ­gardeners, and a few retirees who enjoyed its remnants of rainforest jungle and the amazingly fertile deep red soil, which had proved excellent for hibiscus and dahlias, fruit trees and custard apples. Those little wooden cottages (one or two still with sweltering attics) were worth gold now. When the family first went up there in 1950, 1951, they could not give them away. The ginger had been started as a makeshift alternative to the bananas, when market gluts threatened to kill the market. The farmers had tried coffee between the rows of bananas, with some success, but the ginger turned out to be the winner. It was the only ginger factory outside China, someone had told them. Bac
k then, a few neighbourhood homes, with their big sprawling blocks, had thickets of ginger and these were sometimes dug up and the roots placed on airing trays (usually corrugated iron sheets) to dry and be used, later, in cooking experiments, though Charlie had never actually witnessed their consumption. Ginger was one of the few exotics you might see in a Queensland kitchen, but generally as a Christmas gift, crystallised and in Oriental bowls, syrupy in bottles.

  The ginger factory was a makeshift thing in those days. It was now, Charlie discovered, the full production number. Marketing and merchandising had moved in and everything from drinks to dried was available. Busloads of tourists were thronging through. Postcards and photographers were lined up to tackle the visitor.

  Nearby a plant nursery displayed hibiscus in pastel shades, large as dinner plates, in token of the area’s fecundity. BMWs and Mercedes crowded the lanes and were already dusted with the red imprint of the area.

  Driving past the little primary school with its Arbour Day plantation of hoop pines, Charlie caught a reminder of times past, but sumptuous villas preened above the still breathtaking views, either southward to the long line of beaches, or north overlooking the steep hillside down to the Maroochy River right below and the developing or developed real estate beyond. It was all real estate now.

  As Charlie moved back towards his own car, parked rather further away than he had expected, he paused as he was about to cross the road to allow an open topped sports car to glide past. It was filled with several young people, animated and all singing together. The sight of that made him grin, it was so, almost, old-fashioned in its sense of innocence and delight. Did young people engage in community singing any more? Was it perhaps a small church group, and they might be singing New Age religious songs? No, they were in bright colours with lots of brown or tawny flesh, they looked too healthy for that.