Chapter One — Something In The Water
I’m waiting my turn for the dentist and the dentist’s father is with me.
‘Gum leaves,’ he says. ‘Aboriginal persons used to chew the leaves of eucalypt trees to clean their teeth. That is why they are called gum leaves. If you are ever without a brush or tube of toothpaste then simply pick a leaf.’
He goes from straightening the magazines, to the seat next to me, to the filing cabinet behind the reception desk, he can’t stay still.
‘Bacteria does not exist in an active form in the frozen wastes of the polar icecaps.’
Now he’s sitting in the receptionist’s chair and only his head is visible above the high bench top. His voice is very loud. ‘This is therefore the only place on earth where it is not necessary for man to brush daily.’
I select a National Geographic magazine hoping I can pretend to be too busy to listen to more of this lecture. But I’ve chosen badly and immediately I’d like to put it back; there are Eskimos on the front cover framed with that bright-for-science yellow. The Eskimos are standing dressed in fur which sticks out wide as porcupine needles, there’s an ice house behind them (they must bend low to make it through the doorway) and there’s an unattractive hole of brown water in front of them, as if the ocean has gone off. Perhaps it has.
‘Killer whales,’ says the dentist’s father suddenly materialising at my shoulder and staring at the magazine, ‘Killer whales, for all their black and white striped ferocity, are renowned as being the marine mammals with the weakest teeth.’
I didn’t know that.
‘You didn’t know that, did you?’ he says, sticking his face right into mine. ‘Orcinus orca does not require strong teeth because he has them by the plenty. Row upon row of them in constant manufacture. If the human head were blessed with comparable sets then, due to lack of space, our tongue would be reduced to cockatoo size.’
I didn’t know that either. He removes his face from mine and I re-fix my gaze on the magazine. Past advertisements for binoculars and American Express cards, the Eskimos reappear. Now they are getting out of a snow mobile which is parked outside a church. It is a picture grey with falling snow and only the yellow headlights of the vehicle provide colour. I don’t know whether it’s day or night. ‘Inuit: New Days And Old Ways’, says the title through the snow.
‘The study of primates in their wild state has contributed much to homo sapien sociology,’ announces the dentist’s father.
How did he get from fish to apes? He clears his throat and takes up a central position in the middle of the waiting room.
‘As part of a recognition ritual Orang-utans sniff each other nose to mouth. If unhygienic odours are detected the offending individual is shunned until the problem has been redressed by the vigorous chewing of tubers. Why? Why are apes, who are after all content to live with fleas, so sensitive to halitosis?’
Don’t ask me. But he’s boring a stare straight into my eyes demanding an answer. He taps his shoe waiting but I can’t think of a thing to say until he finally gives up and continues with exaggerated huffs, ‘Because the baring of teeth signals both aggression and desire. If teeth are missing or otherwise marred by decay the animal is deemed to be weak and unhealthy. Such a sorry beast would be unable to attract a partner.’
The dentist’s father shakes his head with woe-betide sadness.
‘Oral hygiene,’ he brightens up, seeing the happiness of his conclusion looming, ‘is thus crucial to the continuation of the species and it is for this reason that the group maintains such vigilance on individual standards.’
He seems pleased with himself and smiles benignly at the far corner of the room as if expecting some applause from this quarter. Just as I return meekly to the pages of my magazine, thinking I’m dismissed, he wheels on me again and prods the air.
‘BUT, how does the ape world provide a window through which to view the human race?’
My heart sinks in direct relation to the speed with which he jabs his forefinger.
‘Consider a young man’s smile to a pretty girl. Is this not the first overture of sexual interest?’
Now he’s onto sex! Any minute he’ll ask me something about a cervix and I won’t know.
‘Strong societies are populous societies and populous societies have strong teeth. Look at the Chinese peoples. Predominantly rice eaters, they possess magnificent chompers since their teeth are rarely defiled by sugar loaded foods. And the result — they have population to burn!’
He throws his arms out wide as if to demonstrate the enormity of the pyre required to do this.
‘The lesson is simple,’ he finishes, ‘Clean your teeth or perish!’
A door shuts down the hall and the dentist’s father sidles into the chair next to mine, becomes suddenly leery.
‘What are you in for?’ he whispers.
‘A cavity,’ I say.
Footsteps arrive in the waiting room. It’s the receptionist.
‘Mr. Pool,’ she says, ‘How about a cup of coffee?’
She lures him away with the promise of a bun and sends me a look of sympathy.
Right now I can think of better ways to spend an afternoon off work. My nerves are already ragged. Thankfully, the typeface of the National Geographic looks balanced and reassuring. I rest myself in the print and avoid the pictures. I don’t want to look at anyone’s mouth and know the future of their family line. The stuff about traditional Eskimo ways turns out to be absorbing and in the end I have to rush to finish the last bit because the receptionist is back and it’s my turn to go in.
I stooge down the hall glancing into the first room. It’s an x-ray area and has a 1950’s science-fiction-bakelite look. As I turn back, there, one foot from my face, is the dentist’s father. With the round vowels of a Vincent Price he says, ‘Allow me,’ and he escorts me to the surgery door. As he opens it he leans and hisses in my ear so that I feel the warm puffs of his breath,
‘Your mother was a whore and your father watched.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ says the dentist.
My mouth is agape like the hinges are broken.
‘You can wait till you’re in the chair,’ says the dentist, pointing at my open mouth. He waves me further into the small bright room.
‘Hope Dad didn’t bother you,’ he smiles. ‘My wife usually looks after him but they had a bit of a tiff yesterday and I thought I’d better bring him in. He loves it here.’
My tongue, much smaller than cockatoo size, is struggling for words.
‘...Was he a dentist too?’
The son shakes his head.
‘A zoo keeper?’
‘No.’ And he giggles as if he’s been tickled, this angular kind man. ‘He was a fitter and turner by trade but he always wished he’d been a teacher’
‘He’s very, um, impressive. He knows a lot.’
‘He used to, he educated himself,’ says the dentist stooping to soap up his soft hands in the little white wash basin, ‘but unfortunately his memory’s gone so he makes up a lot.’
‘My father’s memory might be going a bit funny,’ I say. ‘He’s done a few things recently that have sort of worried me.’
‘Well, it’s their short term memory that’s the first to go. Dad’s pretty scrambled now but he often remembers things that happened years ago with a hundred per cent pin-point accuracy.’
I gulp. ‘Is that so?’
Your mother was a whore and your father watched.
The dentist adjusts the sucker thing in my mouth.
‘Oh yes, names, dates, the lot.’
I wince.
‘Don’t worry — this scraping is just going to be a loud noise in your head.’
The dentist has a very nice plaster rosette in the middle of the ceiling directly above this chair. I wonder if he ever lies back here, maybe for a rest after lunch, and looks up, past the headlight glare of the lamp, into the creamy folds of decoration. It’s a handy thing to concentrate on while your lips are being stretched in three directions and your mouth is full of metal tools. There’s a comfort in the order of the formal shapes. It looks cool, it could be sculptured ice.
You know, in that magazine it said that inside an ice igloo it’s warm enough to take off all your clothes — walk around in the nude? Mind you, your clothes are things like shirts made out of a hundred birds and trousers of polar bear fur. I think you’d want to take off your clothes because I reckon they’d get itchy. And you’d need to look after them because new clothes would be pretty hard to come by. No shops - you trudge out on the winter pack ice in the dark and kill your bear, I don’t know how, and then you drag it all the way home, still in the dark, an Arctic wind screaming to be let in the holes of your old suit, minus 54 degrees (wind chill factored in). And probably you must sing some polar song through chattering teeth to thank a spirit for what seems only relative good luck. And should you forget to do this simple thing then maybe the ice will rear and split and you and your bear will disappear. The crack will close and there will be no trace that you were ever there in the endless icy waste.
Actually, it’s a bit rude to call it a waste. I mean, it’s not a waste if you know what to do with it. And after all, your home’s your home, you’re stuck with it.
‘Lal?’
‘— Oh. Yes. Pardon?’ And I suddenly realise I can open and close my mouth unimpeded by medical steel and suction things.
‘You can rinse now.’
I go and pay, talking carefully through my frozen face like someone practising ventriloquism. The dentist’s father is lurking with a feather duster, dabbing at the ‘Sorry no cheques’ sign. I’m scratching around in my purse for the cash thinking I’m sure I had another fifty dollar note tucked away. If Davey’s light-fingered it I’m going to kill him when I get home. With a machete.
‘Money just disappears these days,’ says the receptionist to hide my embarrassment.
Yeah, especially when your husband’s dipping into it.
‘I don’t know what I’ve spent it on half the time,’ she says.
‘Well that’s the truth,’ I say and I drag out the note which was stuck behind a lotto ticket.
‘There’s a little bit of truth in everything,’ pipes up the dentist’s father and he looks me fair in the eye and winks. So smug he might have just swallowed a Persian cat and all her kittens and especially enjoyed digesting the fur.
Your mother was a whore.
The bus home from Coolie is slow. It’s always slow since a fair percentage of the journey involves the headache-inducing use of low of gears to climb uphill. The road finally levels out along the coastal ridge and then it drops quickly to the last stop — my stop — Pocket Head. I spend the long eight miles staring out the bus window the way I always do; inlet glimpses, houses, trees, Five Wells, more bush and trees, the odd intersecting road. Only today I don’t feel so well.
When I get off the bus I walk past the only shop, past my street, and on to Dad’s. I call out at the back door and go on in to find him in the front room, elaborately set up. He’s got the traymobile pulled up to his chair as a work bench. Flux and metal scraps and wool and wire and blu-tack spread about. The dangling legs of a set of wind chimes are laid out with care as if it is a jellyfish whose tendrils require repair.
I slump in the chair opposite. It’s lumpy bottomed and awful but I can’t sit in the other always-empty one. It was Mum’s. Looking at Dad, I’m disturbed by the strangeness of his work but I tell myself it’s okay, he’s okay, this is nothing compared to the antics of the dentist’s father.
My lips are numb and rubbery. One whole side of my face is a blank from the left nostril right up to a cold nub of ear lobe. I could be wearing half a mask. I am heavy hearted. Maybe those drugs can get to other parts of your body but if I’m honest it’s not really the anaesthetic that’s got to me, it’s the dentist’s father. For ages, really quite long periods of time, I can be matter-of-fact about what happened to my mother, I keep it clamped, it takes some effort, life goes on, but then some small incident jabs up out of the blue and I am forced to take quick glances at it all again; the questions surface, the familiar pangs begin, spikes of grief pain. I want to know, I don’t want to know, I have no way of knowing what happened to my mother.
Dad turns his contraption over and potters from piece to piece with quiet and methodical purpose. It was his birthday last week and I gave him the chimes to sing him some company. Davey was disgusted, but Dad seemed pleased enough. He admired the workmanship, the weights and balances of tones as he put his fingers through the curtain of tubes. Davey helped him fix them to the eaves outside the window. But now, after only a week, here they are splayed out on the tray mobile undergoing an operation.
‘In the gas company,’ Dad’s saying, ‘efficiency was not necessarily a good thing.’
‘Dad,’ I say, pressing at my nostril to see if any feeling’s returned, ‘What dentist do you go to?’
‘Armitage.’
‘Not Pool?’
‘No, never been to Pool. Pass me those scissors will you? Is he a young fella?’
‘No he’s older than me. I thought you might have known his father.
‘A modification, Lallie, can sometimes...,’ he ties a knot, ‘...work wonders.’
‘Did you know him? The father?’
‘Pool?’
‘Yeah, he says he knows you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
But Dad’s not concentrating properly on my questions. He’s peering at the smoking point of the soldering iron and I know he’s not listening properly.
‘You might know him. He was a fitter and turner.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I never knew a Pool at all, not him or his son.’
And just the way he dips the solder in the flux with such a fussy care for that and nothing else makes me think this is the truth. He didn’t know a Pool.
But did a Pool know him?
To distract myself I get out the ironing board and push it in close to the window. There’s a few things of Dad’s that need doing. I love the cosiness of this front room. It’s a closed in verandah which gives the house a bit of a blank-faced look from the outside, but when you’re inside it’s like a picture frame for the view of the inlet. While the iron heats up I pick up Dad’s binoculars and scan the bay, bumping over the water until I isolate a putt-putt motor boat. I keep moving with it, giving it a little bit of open water to cut into. What I’ve got before my eyes is an old fashioned motion picture, grainy and unsophisticated and containing one simple uncluttered truth. It’s just a picture of a boat moving through water, and it’s lovely.
I whip the binoculars round making the world blur and then pull up short. I’ve got myself an eyeful of Merrengong rooftops, red tiles and painted iron, the gable of the old iceworks, a forest of television aerials spiking up tall to catch the best of a bad signal. Whip and blur again. The oysterman’s house. It’s lonely in the picture, crouched at the base of steep bush which leans over it. It’s no more than a tumbledown shack really, a fox hole. I see him, in this late afternoon, come out with a bucket of probably chook scraps. He disappears with it behind the outhouse. He moves quickly as if spending too much time in the open is poor strategy, as if eyes like mine could pick him off and do him harm. His yellow weatherboard cottage is black-stained where mud from the gutters has streaked black down the walls. When he ducks back inside it seems too flimsy to give him cover, too cranny-bored by draughts to keep him warm. The oysterman lives in full view of us and we forget he’s even there, although there’s no mistaking him if you should be in the corner shop when he makes one of his rare visits.
I remember him embarrassing Mum and me one day. Well, it was me who was embarrassed — I was a teenager and everything made me cringe. We walked into the shop and there he was mumbling and passing a list to Mrs Grattan, the lady who owned it then, and attached to him was the usual plume of odour, the lethal combination of low tide mud and unwashed skin. We kept well clear and headed towards the magazine rack. Mrs Grattan packed up a box of goods and had just asked the old man for money — he seemed old even then — when in swaggered a bunch of local boys. The shop was suddenly full of testosterone.
‘Er phew, who shat themselves?’ they called out while the oysterman fumbled and dropped the change. He struggled to pick it up in shaking fingers while the boys tried to push each other closer to him. ‘Hey, Mrs, do you sell pegs in here?’
Mum went over and helped the oysterman gather the coins and she held his dirty hand as she paid the money into it. He seemed to freeze. The fine fingers of a woman touching his cut-scarred hand. He was transfixed by the strangeness of it. Staring at her white wrist as if it belonged to a creature he’d never seen.
Hoots and whistles.
The oysterman scrambled for the door.
On reflection, I’m still embarrassed. I’m embarrassed now because I didn’t help pick up the money too.
I damp down one of Dad’s shirts with the water bottle and set to with the iron. After thinking about the oysterman the warm smell of clean cotton is heavenly. I do the collar and move on to the back of the shirt. I like doing the backs best, it’s where the whole garment starts to come under your control and you get to take the iron in wide hypnotic arcs as a change from the straight up and down. As I come to do the sleeves I see one cuff is beginning to fray and two buttonholes on the front are torn. I take the iron away.
‘This one’s had it, Dad,’ I say. ‘Time to pitch it.’
He looks up from his operation on the wind chimes and frowns over his spectacles.
‘Ah, not that one, love, it’s a beauty.’
I give my cheek a Three Stooges slap but it’s still cold as concrete.
Davey thinks I’m paranoid looking out for signs of Dad’s mind becoming unravelled — after all, he isn’t that old — but you lose one parent holus-bolus and you don’t want to lose the other by degrees. After today, I’m seriously beginning to wonder if there’s something in the water that eventually sends all the old men dotty around here, and, when you think about it, it’s not something new. The oysterman had a father who went the whole hog and really flipped his lid. The thing is, he was an unpleasant man. They say he kept his wife and son almost prisoners in that mangrove dark arm of the inlet. Wouldn’t even let the boy go to school until a truant officer threatened the law and arranged for the Methodists to pick him up each day in the mission boat. But just because the bad man had a suitably bad end that’s no reason to dismiss the story neatly. What about his poor son looking on? If you ask me it turns you raw, seeing a parent crumble or get taken away.
Imagine the oysterman, barely more than a boy, watching from the front door of the yellow cottage. I want to touch his shoulder or squeeze his hand as he watches his father skip — nude — in the knee deep water out of the valley shade into a spotlight of midwinter sun. The old man’s raucous laughter disgusts the boy more than the unfamiliar sight of all that white father’s flesh, cauliflower bottom and lolling doodle. The old man laughing, as if he always knew how.
After they tied the father up in a blanket and carted him off, I imagine the oysterboy standing in the doorway of that house for days, not knowing what to do next. Where once it took a day’s labour to navigate the troughs of his father’s moods now there is time. I see him finally climb into his wooden boat and take up oars, rowing the slate mornings of winter and the opal of summer afternoons, inscribing himself on the inlet in an effort to take up space. They have taken his father and with him all chances for change. He’s a boy preserved. Missing the little he had and lonely for hate. Creak of rowlock and oar.
Lay low, lay low. These are the secrets of a boy who would become an oyster farmer.
There’s something about the sea, about being born within sound of the sea, that binds you to it. Its rhythms put you in leg irons. Lay low, lay low, you are hobbled to the sea.
I’ve almost come to the bottom of the second basket of clothes when Dad says into the empty air, ‘That should just about do it,’ and holds up the wind chimes. They binkle and bong in muted tones and the music is more beautiful for the notes they don’t strike, for the ones he’s removed. In his tinkering on the traymobile he has somehow made a melody of absence.
The steam iron puffs. It might be a sigh. The smell of impregnated sweat rises, as sweet as marzipan.
Your father watched.
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