RESTING PLACE

Ritchie Grafton could not ignore the indices of approaching middle age. Stepping onto a slimy slab of rock, his left thong slithered into a crust of oyster shells that stung his legs like razor nicks. For some while he was hobbled with dejection – somehow the world might be brushing him off.

So warily he struggled, up crumbling tiers of grey, faceless boulder. Below, runnels of froth shimmied round and through, up and over the oyster beds, mauvish–creamy shells glistening like over-blown liquorice allsorts.

Off Monkey Beach a catamaran lilted towards the haze of other people’s desert islands. The flak of commentary from the Keppel II reminded him of last week’s excursion. Swilling in the cruiser’s boom-net alongside some svelte young bloods had fermented bubbles of nostalgia that burst with desperation. So that Ritchie would peek from behind his Financial Australian at the willowy, blonde housemaid from Perth gliding to yoga in her Balinese sarong before the setting sun.

Across the bay, still discernible in the Thierry Mugler costume and poncho in which he had chosen to dress her, his wife was sauntering towards the Shell House.

Raelene . . . could still be a sexboat in her own honey-haired, cuddly-assed way. So why does she want to have another scone in the oven now when that franchise is ripe for plucking? Okay, so I lost fifty thou on the restaurant. Preston didn’t cater for executive luncheons and uni profs, so it should’ve proved a winner. So much for bloody market research and free cocktails.

You should never have gambled away our security. Doesn’t your family mean anything to you? And what are we going to do with fifty dozen bottles of wine racked out in the lounge?

Look, every other big shot I rub shoulders with is an entrepreneur, feathering his own nest and reeking of two hundred grand, maybe three.

Just when are you going to take responsibility for your son’s growing up? He desperately needs you to talk, to play, to see who you are! Instead of sneaking sideways glances at you, anxious about whether Daddy has any time for him.

And who’s supposed to shell out for your Spanish stucco, your kidney pool, your social tennis, your pissy Perrier Water? You never complained then.

But I gave up teaching primary so you –

We, remember?

could buy the child care centre. Then tossed a satisfying career down the drain, as well as my beloved piano lessons, to supervise it

But that’s where the big bucks are in education – admin!

to get you started.

Bullshit! My first strike was that video hire business, sending off tapes of Aussie TV programs to Mount Hagen before anyone else wised up to it. You just don’t get it, do you? You’ve got to seize the right moment, spread your assets, put your dough where your mind’s at.

All right, Ritchie, all right, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But do let’s try for a little girl soon. Please.

Don’t for christ’s sake keep nagging. I just need time. Time.

You are aware that Jon’s a slow reader, aren’t you? You have grasped what that means, I suppose. Your own son . . .

Jon . . . scuffing sand, punting a footy. Like dad, like son, else he’d want to know the reason. Jonno too would win his footy colours, but better get his eco degree at uni first time, not have to wear the stigma of night school.

A rueful grin lifted the sullenness from Ritchie’s lips: Mr Joblin, the housemaster, all beard and bristling smiles, had declared that Jon was a top-class fellow, junior prefect material. After all, the lad played the game hard, even in sixth grade, and had broken a leg to prove it.

Along the hinterland trail compacted of white sand and couch, Ritchie beat at the corridor of waist-high grass with a branch wrenched from a fir tree to ward off the black snakes rustling about him. Already two pencil-length youngies had squiggled under the matting of grass beneath his feet. As he crossed the sliver of airstrip that rolled down to the huddle of white-washed units, he warmed to the financial viability of this bush setting. A grid of asphalted pathways to his goldmine would be signposted in Japanese: Grafton’s Tea Emporium . . . Tea House of the Keppel Moon . . . The Sayonara Sushi Lounge

. . . If only Rae would show some interest in laying a golden nest egg instead of carrying on about a second bubbo. That was a bit rich, specially seeing how she was always razzing him about his lack of help around the home. But he was the breadwinner, goddamn it!

From the ridge above the fluting waters, Ritchie surveyed his picnickers’ paradise. The feathery foliage below had indeed sprouted patches of canvas and washing lines that he hoped would spread beyond discretion. A glass-bottomed boat was puttering over the stag horn, a grey parody of coral reef, for the scrum of tourists who might spot twenty Coke cans before a sea snake, or even a turtle, but could be mesmerized by the silky luminosity of red emperors and solemn fusiliers.

When the airline bites at my proposition, Ritchie calculated, I’ll make a pile. With the Japs financing the biggest marineland on the Reef, I’ve got to run like a rat up a drainpipe to convert that run-down Homestead. Whack in a few pandanus and pineapples. Promote ginger as the island speciality. Stick up half a dozen swings and roundabouts, a waterslide and a cowrie model village for the kiddoes. Airlift the Nips in for parrots’ feeding-time and pitch ‘n’ put, and there you go, Capricornia, you beauty, the new Mecca of the Club Med set!


At Leeks Creek the smooth eddies of high tide splayed out to put a damper on these speculations. What a bummer! The day held too much promise, too much potential, to waste on sinking a skinful of tequila sunrises back at the pool.

Then, as he glanced round, the mangroves appeared to furl back. Through the salt pan, a canoe thrusting in darts, red shiny as chilli. A goose flapped its emerald wings and strained for flight.

The canoeist was dipping into the tannin waters so effortlessly, as if bevelled at the hips to the lithe craft. Beneath a ruffle of bleached-blonde thatch, he was sporting a crimson singlet, floral board shorts and bruised triceps of serpentine tats.

‘Howdy, mellow man!’ The mid-Pacific drawl redounded with a suspicion of mirth as he stroked alongside. ‘Beaut day. Good vibes.’

‘Too damn right!’ Ritchie replied, flinking perspiration from his forehead, then suddenly thwacking his chest to mash a couple of persistent flies. ‘Gotcha, yer bastards. Death in the afternoon, huh? Yeah, mate, trouble is, the nearest bar’s three kilometres away. And that’s out of Carlton Draught.’

‘What chance a sarsaparilla smoothie?’

‘You must be joking. That’s no heart-starter.’

‘Quack’s orders. Lost half my brain cells already. Whither lies this watering hole?’

‘Follow the shoreline round Putney Point. Take you a good twenty minutes.’

‘Huh, I clocked out years ago.’ The stranger had slumped a little, allowing his spine to curve and cling to the darkening singlet. ‘Prefer to watch my breath.’

Ritchie chuckled, but quizzically. This young screwball was hardly a reassuring promo for Asian honeymooners. ‘How deep is the drink out there?’

‘Way up past your deadeye, skipper. Like a taxi to the other bank?’

‘Much appreciated, mate.’ For the practical gains of instant bonhomie outweighed the vagaries of smart-arsed humour.

The sleek prow gritted up the sandbar. Ritchie teetered, then eased into recline opposite his ferryman. To find that the canoeist might have aged anywhere between eighteen and thirty. With a body growing darker on inspection, shielded now out of the sun’s relentless glare, varnished, somehow removed from the grind of making a crust. Except for the puffiness of rain-cloud blue about the eyes and the slow, irritating manner of speaking. Yeah, there was something about those eyes too, a hard iridescence, that intrigued him. And the pendant of quartz crystal at his neck.

A bronzed arm flexed along the paddle and the canoe skimmed back several metres across the creek.

‘Ritchie Grafton’s the name.’ To which claim the young man nodded, almost smiling but distracted. ‘Are you from Rocky?’ Ritchie was uncertain whether there wasn’t a glint of mischief in those eyes or whether the spangled sunlight was dancing tricks.

‘Just cruising the coast in a mate’s yawl. My scene’s back of Kyogle.’

‘My neck of the woods is staid old Melbourne. The leafy glades of Canterbury. Well heeled but dry as a nun’s tit.’ A black-bearded goat sneezed and flanged up the gulley. ‘Real estate, that’s me, and the market’s burning right now. Listen, if you can lay hands on any property near the Reef, snap it up quick smart. You’ve got it made. Why do you think I’m touting around? It’s a dead cert. These islands are gilt-edged, provided we develop them right.’

The stranger shrugged off these prospects, letting his craft drift diagonally across the mouth of the creek towards the foot of a bush trail at bank’s edge, apparently more attuned to the sullen tock of frogs and the regal glide of a distant osprey.

Scanning the crescent of firs and tea tree, Ritchie was smitten by a shaft of sunlight. His eyes, two burnt chestnuts behind his Ray-Bans, screwed. Perhaps too he smelt the heavy musky goatiness of the bush. ‘Yes, sir, gilt-edged,’ he purred, lulled by the riffling.

Upon re-opening, his peepers started. The sun’s smouldering imprint was clarifying into an orb of grainy wood, ochre but bleached, poised in front of his nose. He blinked . . . stared along the haft to the web-footed blade . . . and squirmed at the taunting grin.

‘My oath! What the fucking hell are you playing at?’ snapped Ritchie, who understood only the pinch of his new Reeboks with extra-large fore-foot.

‘Breadhead, eh?’ The canoeist cavorted the handle of the paddle about Ritchie’s white-creamed beak that steadily grew more clownish. ‘Doughface!’

‘Hey, cut it out, you crazy bugger!’ His voice serrated with angry pleading. Gingerly, he dabbed at the offensive weapon.

All of a sudden, with martial vehemence, the stranger retracted the paddle, tossed it from left hand to right, and with a samurai yell lunged at the midriff of his open-jawed passenger.

‘Aaaagh!’ Ritchie’s terrified whine choked on a prickling sensation – the handle was merely resting against his navel.

The burnished face of the protagonist exploded with raucous laughter that reverberated up the gulley after a scatter of wagtails.

Ritchie ground his spine into the sweating cushion. If he grappled with this weirdo now, the canoe would doubtless overturn and he’d heard the creek was a haunt of stingrays. In any case, he could not be certain whether the hip- toted paddle masqueraded as sten gun or guitar.

It was then that he noticed. Meshed with tackle along the ribbing by his feet – a spear gun! Too late, his wits must have silted. The stranger dropped the paddle, snatched up the gun and jerked back the rubber, scrambling into a squat that keeled Ritchie’s pudding. And stirred planes of stippling blue.

‘You’re sick!’ Ritchie dared, goggling at a steely arrowhead. The pressure could have been forty pounds. His shoulder blades seared the wooden slats. ‘This is bloody outrageous!’

‘You know something, feller?’ The stranger’s voice had assumed the roughness of gravel from film noir. ‘That fake Newk mo really bugs me!’

‘Look, mate, I don’t know what your bloody game is, whoever you are, but . . . I have a wife and kid back at the resort.’

‘Pick another card, sunshine! They have to find their own space sooner or later, however much you’ve blown things for them.’

The drift of the canoe had snagged on a slow mid-stream purl: Time itself was freezing into a yawn.

Ritchie rummaged feverishly for other pawns. ‘What’s the pay-off, eh? What exactly do you want from me? Is it the moolah? I’ll give you everything I can.’ His buttocks ached leadenly, as if shot with penicillin. ‘Within reason. I’m not loaded by any means. In spite of appearances.’

‘Screw appearances!’ Contempt was working the corners of the stranger’s mouth with spittle. ‘What concerns me right now is we’re getting some communication going. Does there have to be anything else?’

A threat of thunder from behind the hills gave slack to the stranger’s jaw, before a twin-engined Cessna ratcheted from the tree-tops.

‘Some day I’m gonna break your face! You hippie scum should be run out of town or locked up. In bloody straightjackets!’

‘Bravo, old man. Now you’re really getting into the part. Beginning to generate some authentic chi at last. Savouring the juice.’ The stranger’s sneer lent him a waxen glaze. ‘Does the prospect of a trip to the other side freak you out? Well, does it?’

Which the slap-slapping of the wavelets against the gunwale couldn’t quite drown.

‘Surely, you don’t mean . . . the deep six . . . not death?’ murmured Ritchie, as if tasting the word for the first time and finding it bitter. Then emitted a breathy sound through his nose, as if aiming for a dismissive snort but conjuring only a whimper of fear. Before recovering a modicum of bravado. ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous! Tell me you don’t intend to . . . to . . .’

‘That depends, see. You have bad karma, man, yer know that? Ugly bad. Question is, do you have a rendezvous with Death? Or is this death counterfeit? The curtained sleep comes in many guises, many degrees.’

Jesus Christ! Oh, Rae leeene, precious, sweet-smiling Raelene of cuddlewarm caress and patient love, if only I were hugging you now!

Dribbles of perspiration were tingling his skin, already soaking his gut- piece.

‘B-b-but what gives you the right to p-p-p-ick on a respect-spectable fam’ly man? I keep my nose clean, don’t I? Mind my own business. Pay my own bills. Why pick on me, for god’s sake?’

An acrimonious careering of crows distracted them both. Other dramas might have been entering their last throes.

‘So you want to buy into the old psychobabble? Jesus H! Look, every so often I need to relate, real close like, though I’m not shit hot at it. I crave something beyond the crap chat of familiars or the jolly pretensions of the chardonnay cliques up themselves or the vacuity of cult personalities so-called. Yet somehow when I do get involved, really fess up like, I keep coming back to the same old tragic flaw: How to avoid pitching one’s own sickening ego. I feel like a drama queen well past her use-by date. Inventing my own legend that’s not really me at all. Truth is so elastic, so slippery, it’s got legs, goes running off in different directions all at the same time. I get burned out gritting to track down the right way. What’s for real, eh? I can’t give anything authentic without causing pain. I’m deadly serious, man. I’m dangerous to know.’

‘Perhaps you should bloody settle down and get yourself some bread and honey!’ blurted Ritchie, who found it easier to solve other people’s dilemmas. ‘Strum and stroll, mate.’ Toey, he was fast becoming, to swat the arrowhead away; its very closeness inscribing his flesh with tics.

‘Words . . . words . . . words,’ the stranger sighed, gimlet eyes loured and puckered. It was hard to tell if they were blue, green or sun-blinded.

‘Every few weeks I come down from the hills. Bring me a pouch of weed. It’s beaut sailing the Queensland coast. No hassles, man. I go bush, pitch a tent whenever and cook fresh whitebait, surf, nick off when I damn well feel like . . . Meditate by some waterfall or near the sound of water burbling away. My chi becomes part of the life-force, like I free-fall through a dream. No shit, man.’

‘But where in the name of bejesus do I fit into this hare-brained scheme?’

No longer on a sixth floor in Collins Street, apparently, for his head swam with gleaming black ledgers, toppling, spilling into white pap . . . like entrails of wallabies he’d skittled in twilit hills round Mirboo.

‘Sometimes, just to shoot up on the adrenaline, I get some impro going, jamming. Like we funked around at NIDA. Acting was the best drug ever. The only time I came intensely alive, my feelings in over-drive, my heart thumping, my breath racing for hours after, as if all the gunk inside me had been blown right out the water. Boy, did I feel purified! The sad sack of shit was, always I was someone else. Can you believe it?’

‘Go tell it to a shrink, mate! Whatever you’re on, I don’t want a bar of it. What are you, some sort of blow boy? Out with it! Mula or muller?’

The stranger’s face fell. After a few seconds he spoke again, without any animation, as if muttering to himself. ‘Yeah, our two souls rubbing against each other is something else. Can’t always rely on the moment. Or pure chance. You’ve dumped me right back in Pitsville.’

‘While you’re giving me an enema, you bastard.!’

This outburst seemed to placate the stranger, or intimidated him in turn, for his countenance became alert, even benign. ‘Look, man, there’s all kinds of space. Haven’t I given you a real buzz deep down, so you can make connections with your deeper self, instead of offloading your hang-ups onto your own bit- players? Hey, lighten up. You gotta wing it some time.’

With clenched jaw, Ritchie honed the quivers in his voice and craned for an executive vision. ‘Under all this verbal guff, you’re playing a very infantile, bloody dangerous, frankly downright stupid game. Even as we speak, my wife will be checking with admin at the resort.’

‘You know what, bud? You’re really getting under my fingernails.’ The pervert grazed Ritchie’s moustache with the arrowhead, as if ascribing value to the texture. ‘Why oh why do we burn to violate so much of what we need but don’t key into?’ He pointed his gun briefly at the scree, which cast oblique shadows from the water’s edge. ‘Are you blind to everything but the mystique of Mammon? Your heavy-duty fulfilment is putrid, man, like a few quick bangs in a fuck-truck.’

‘Fuck off yourself, why don’t yer!’

Giddiness was splitting Ritchie’s head, confounding. Sweat, possibly a whimper of tears, blinded and stung. Yet the canoe was drifting further from landfall, at the mercy of the current, bobbling in choppier waters just beyond the estuary.

Do something, he had to, urgently. Frustration, then rage spurred his resolve. In spite of rational judgment, he felt his right foot suddenly kick up to divert the spear gun, then a shiver of wind furrowed his cheek as the arrow went whipping by.

Ritchie flung himself at the blaze of red; callused hands reached around his own throat. Every muscle of his heavier frame he was straining to conquer the psychopath. With the canoe rocking violently, he finally arched back the madman’s body, prising the stiff fingers from his neck with a final wrench that sent his sunnies spinning through the air. Just for a fleeting moment, though, he suspected that he might actually be relishing the struggle. Scarcely able to gulp breath through a compressed windpipe, he somehow chopped and fisted, hacked then butted

. . . and the green hills somersaulted, water sucking him down among a swampy morass of mangrove limbs, cutting him with spiky horror. Splashing like a lunatic, he swam and swam towards the spit by the creek’s mouth. At length, blowing hard, the silt clagging his bruised feet, he crawled out over the mud and sagged onto a shoulder of sand. His wild, bulging fish eyes scoured back, expectant, hoping to hell . . .

The red canoe was bobbing upside down, drifting out beyond the lee of the gulley, a weal on the turquoise sea. Ritchie knuckled the sensation of salt from his eyes to focus, but there was no sighting of the crimson-vested maniac. He listened acutely, beyond the mesmeric soughing of the waves and the mockery of the crows, so that little by little he became aware of the novel susurrations warming through his own wracked body.

                                                                                                                               Michael Small  
1978

published:  Generation, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, April, 1980

& Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo, 1989