Vertigo Read online

  The odd thing about the vicar’s collection is this: there is precious little theology in it and a great deal of travel writing, strange works like Travels in Mesopotamia by Col. George Hedley-Smythe, A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Miss Amelia B. Edwards and The English in the West Indies by J.A. Froude. With their marbled endpapers and silk ribbon markers, their gothic plates in black and white – ‘the author’s own engravings’ – these exotic tomes are unlike anything Luke has read in the past.

  Tonight he is about to give himself over to one of these volumes, The Land That Is Desolate. It’s an imposing object, solid and stiff with a cover of coarse red linen and a title embossed in gold lettering, and it appears that the author was a notable in his day, an eminent physician, Sir Frederick Treves, Bart, G.C.V.O., C.B., LL.D., surgeon to His Majesty King Edward VII.

  The Land That Is Desolate, subtitled ‘An Account of a Tour in Palestine’, is a travel diary, published in 1913. When first he delved into the vicar’s collection, Luke had been intrigued to find a book that pre-dated the creation of Israel and the PLO, one in which Sir Frederick’s own crude black and white photographs suggested nothing so much as a frozen stillness, the very antithesis of what now appears on the nightly news. Luke had forgotten about this book until, watching the news last night and the latest footage of a rocket strike in Gaza, it popped into his head; he would welcome some insight into the history of Palestine and he went out to the shed to dust off Sir Frederick and bring him inside.

  But Treves is not at all what he expected, not some sanctimonious Edwardian pilgrim but a man of science with a cold eye for fakery. In mourning for the death of his daughter he has embarked on a journey to the source of all meaning, but from the moment he arrives in the Holy Land, Sir Frederick is acerbic and disgruntled. At every stop along the way, every crumbling town or dusty village, he is pestered by touts making extravagant claims for holy relics, and within the sacred spaces of the great churches he is roused by a Protestant dislike of priests and gaudy altars. Even Nature itself disappoints him, and his description of the biblical landscape is unremittingly bleak. ‘The Promised Land has been for centuries ravaged by war and torn by internal dissension. It has been plundered and laid waste. Its inhabitants have been blotted out, its forests have been recklessly cut down and woods rooted up. The rainfall has in consequence diminished so that the land has dried up. Vineyard terraces have fallen into ruin and water channels into decay. Obsolete processes of cultivation have been maintained, the people have been harassed and oppressed until there is little joy in them. All this might have been foreshadowed in the deeds of the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel: “Ye shall … fell every good tree, and mar every good piece of land with stones.”’

  As Luke reads on, it becomes clear that no corner of this sacred terrain will be spared Sir Frederick’s unflinching appraisal. The desert of Judea is a ‘mean country’; the River Jordan a ‘muddy stream’; the town of Bethlehem is ‘unredeemably ugly’ and the road to Bethlehem ‘traverses a poor, bare, and colourless country, unfriendly and unlovable, where the land is treeless but for a few mendicant olives.’

  A few mendicant olives? It reminds Luke of the new olive plantation along the coast that belongs to a man called Haremza, an ex-surfing champion who has bought up a stretch of Ross’s original farm and planted four thousand olive trees. A sign of the times, he thinks; olives, vineyards, walnut farms. The old-style selectors are gone and change is everywhere, and now he and Anna are a part of it. And with this encouraging thought he puts down his book and walks to the window where the blinds remain furled and big cigar moths beat against the glass. Only the stars at night seem fixed in their station, and this, too, he knows is an illusion. Still, there are nights like this one when often he closes his book and wanders out to the edge of the veranda to gaze up in awe at the perfection of the dark, at stars so numerous that a profligate god might have scattered a million fireflies across the roof of the world. One evening when there was a full moon he walked Anna to the headland and they stood at the edge of the blowhole and looked out to an ocean lit up in a swathe of silver-white water. Concealed beneath a thicket of she-oaks they embraced on the spiky ground, enveloped in its pungent conifer scent and the sound of the surf, its soft wash against the rocks below.

  II

  AND SO THEY SETTLE IN, and it seems they have everything they need; everything, that is, except water. If only it would rain. There is a shower one morning early and Luke, who sleeps heavily, quizzes Anna about its duration. ‘I didn’t hear it,’ she says, so he must go and rap against the new fibreglass tank and listen for any increase in the level. As far as he can tell there is none.

  They knew about the drought before they came, but this was only a weather report; it was not the same as living, day to day, in the big dry. For the first time they understand what it means to live on the rim of the driest continent, a land of empty rivers that for most of the year, and sometimes for decades, are nothing more than lines on a map, some cartographical promise of a deluge that may or may not arrive. But now here they are; a part of it. The creeks are stony beds and the narrow winding river that feeds the lagoon has shrunk to a muddied stream.

  Accustomed to the sub-tropical downpours of the city and the smell of mould in their old apartment, they cannot believe how dry the air is, and how this dryness becomes a part of you, of your skin and hair, and your whole body, and how after a while you crave the feel of moisture in the air, of dampness against your cheek. Soon their tank water begins to smell strange and they send for a filtration system which Luke fits under the sink with surprising deftness. He has turned out to be more practical than Anna imagined.

  One evening on a stroll beside the lagoon they come across a handsome, sunburnt man who is fish ing for perch with two small children at his side. They strike up a conversation and the fisher man introduces himself as Alan Watts and invites them up to his house on the headland to meet his wife, Bette.

  In the weeks that follow they ease into a friendship with the Watts, one that might always have been there in their lives. Alan and Bette belong to that coastal tribe who seem entirely at ease in their sun-ripened bodies and who rarely appear in anything other than shorts and thongs. Anna sometimes jokes to Luke that the Watts’ wardrobe must be empty, or used for storing old sporting equipment, but she admires the simplicity of the Watts household; the sparseness of its furniture, the no-frills housekeeping. Bette is a parttime nurse and competition kayaker, an athletic woman with cropped dark hair. Alan is a tall, barrel-chested man in his early forties who teaches maths at the Brockwood High School, in and around the pursuit of his passion for collecting rustic hardware, which he crams into a barn-sized workshop. Both he and Bette are energetic and practical and seem able to do almost anything. A decade ago, before such things were talked about, they built an energy-efficient house with sun walls and solar panels, built it from scratch while they and their two children, Zack and Briony, lived out of a caravan on their block. On a vacant plot next door Alan has tidied up an abandoned tennis court and strung an old fishing net across the middle of its cracked concrete surface. Delighted to find that Luke and Anna can both hit a ball he invites them to play doubles on the weekends, and sometimes of an evening after work. Like all social tennis, it is played with an underlying ferocity, the men volleying at the net as though their life depends on it and swearing under their breath. Nor is Anna immune to this manic athleticism, even if there is something comically grim in the way that Alan barks out the score after every point.

  Ten kilometres down the coast is an army base and occasionally a helicopter flies low over the court on a training manoeuvre, materialising from out of the cloud like some jaunty mechanical bird. One late Saturday afternoon a chopper lands on the headland and two young men in uniform get out and stand about chatting under their becalmed rotor blades. Alan can’t resist. He breaks off from the tennis and jogs across to say hello. Luke follows at a stroll, not wishing to appear too eager, whi
le the women look at one another and roll their eyes.

  Alan introduces himself, and then Luke, and invites the visitors into the Watts’ bungalow for a coffee.

  ‘Better not,’ says one of the men, amiably. ‘We’re a bit early.’ He looks at his watch. ‘We’ve just got a few minutes to kill.’

  ‘Great spot here,’ says the other man. ‘I’ll bet you get good surf.’

  ‘Not as much as you’d think,’ says Alan. ‘We get a lot of wind and it can flatten the waves.’

  Luke is struck by something. These guys are only a few years younger than I am, he thinks, and yet they make me feel old. He perceives that he is no longer spirited, not in the juiced-up way that these guys are; that he no longer has their youthful sheen, a kind of cocky invincibility. Maybe he never had it. Or maybe he had it and, somewhere in the transition to his thirties, he lost his nerve. Maybe that’s why he’s come to live in the country. Maybe it wasn’t about Anna at all.

  Alan, typically, wants to know about the chopper and because he is so friendly and so direct, before long they have learned that at the end of the month one of the crew is off to Afghanistan. ‘Well, best of luck,’ says Luke, realising that he is old, because nothing would induce him to put himself in a place where he might be shot at. Then again, there are things in his life he would die to protect, and with that thought he looks around for the boy, who would surely have been drawn to the mechanical beast. He thinks he catches a glimpse of him lurking in among the shadowy she-oaks that line the court, but no, it’s only Zack, skulking after a spat with his sister and searching for lost tennis balls. Luke turns again towards the bluff and gazes wistfully at the crew as they climb back into their machine. The blades begin their whirr, that insistent hypnotic whoomph, and the big metal bird rises in a gush of wind, fluttering out over the water towards a pink horizon.

  That evening after dinner the two couples play cards. Alan announces that he has rationed the family to two showers a week each and is planning to install a dry lavatory, because flushing is the biggest single use of household water. He is also looking into buying a portable desalinisation plant and running seawater up from the beach to his roof. ‘I’ve downloaded some brochures from the net,’ he says, shuffling through a pile of papers at one end of the table.

  While the two men are engrossed in these, the women stand at the window, gazing out at a pod of dolphins carousing off the bluff. Bette is not a shy woman but she has a natural reserve so Anna is surprised when she says, ‘Do you think, Anna, that you’ll ever start a family?’

  ‘We’ve put that on hold,’ says Anna, firmly. ‘First we have to decide where home is.’ This isn’t the whole truth, far from it, and she hopes the boy isn’t listening.

  In July, Luke’s father comes to stay, bringing a case of Margaret River whites and a bottle of Glenfiddich. Ken is restless and edgy; he has the air of a man on red alert, primed to move in on a problem at a moment’s notice. ‘Your father is still adjusting to retirement,’ Marg had said when she rang to say he was coming. ‘He’s like a brigadier who’s lost his battalion.’

  On the first evening Luke takes him for a stroll around the grassy headland. ‘There’s not much here in the way of facilities, is there?’ his father says, tactlessly, gesturing with one of his overlong arms towards the shacks behind the bluff. Ken is a very tall man, and lanky, and it gives him an air of lofty judgement, like a bemused prophet. He has never been at home in the outdoors and he strides towards the Norfolk pines as if an explorer in the New World, part awed and part baffled at how the other half lives. ‘You haven’t got sick of it yet?’

  ‘It grows on you.’ Luke does not want to submit to one of his father’s inquisitorial probings. He does not want to get into an argument about his career, about why he does not want to work as a solicitor and has ‘wasted’ his law degree; about where he is ‘going’ and whether his superannuation is adequate. The abrasion of his father’s implied censure spurs him along at a brisk clip. The sooner they get home and get into the scotch, the better.

  ‘How is Anna’s asthma?’

  ‘It’s been a lot better, though it’s early days yet.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ says Ken, managing to insinuate that from what he’s seen so far, the rest of life in Garra Nalla is pretty much nothing. ‘And how is she recovering from …’ He pauses, trying to find the words, ‘… from that other business?’

  My God, he can’t even name it, thinks Luke in a spasm of bitter scorn. Typical. His father never could deal with the messy human dimension of feeling. But then as he watches the spray foam up from the blowhole, for the first time it occurs to him that the ‘other business’ must have been painful for Ken, a man with no grandchildren. How helpless he must have felt; an old-fashioned man who took responsibility for everything around him, who felt a duty to protect the weak.

  In the days that follow Ken does his best not to appear bored but he doesn’t fool Anna. ‘He’s like an old-fashioned school inspector,’ she says to Luke in bed. ‘I keep getting the feeling that we’re not coming up to scratch. He thinks we’ve turned into yokels.’

  ‘I hate the way he patronises Gil,’ mumbles Luke. He is thinking of that awful false mateyness his father deems it necessary to assume. And Gil with his stiff politeness is almost as annoying.

  ‘You can see they don’t like each other.’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘It is to me.’

  Anna has observed that while Ken is visiting, the boy does not appear, and nor is he to be sighted when Gil is around. Perhaps he doesn’t care for older men. But then on the last night of Ken’s visit she wakes and thinks that she hears the boy crying. Or has she dreamed it? She gets up and walks to his room at the end of the hallway but the bed is empty. Still, she is not alarmed; she knows that he will return. He always does.

  *

  Months pass and they move into a difficult spring. It seems that almost every day the winds blow and there will be no spring rain. The drought is one thing, the hectoring wind is another. No-one warned them about the wind. Sometimes on the coast it can bluster for weeks at a time, but this year is worse than any Gil can remember. The surrounding grass, faded to a mustard colour, turns orange at the tips from wind-burn. Even the trees begin to get a crisp look; their canopy is brittle and the undergrowth dried to tinder. On her walks Anna can see that the grasslands are eaten down to bare stubble and grey sandy soil, while the great fortified homestead hovers like a mirage on a plain of shimmering straw. One afternoon a flock of glossy black cockatoos alights on a cluster of sheoaks in the western corner of the yard where they screech in ear-splitting decibels until dusk. When she goes for a walk before dinner, she finds Gil by the near fence, staking his runner beans around an old tyre spoke, and he tells her that the arrival of black cockies is a portent of rain. But the rain doesn’t come. Nature is out of whack, thinks Anna; even the birds can’t read the signs.

  In defiance of the wind she persists in swimming the lagoon so that she can keep up her regular run along the beach to Rittler’s Point. Surely the wind must drop soon. But for days, and then weeks, it continues to harass her, blowing in fine swirling gusts so that the sand sticks in her hair and lodges in the crevices of her clothes. Her skin turns to parchment, dried out and stretched tight across her cheekbones in a mask.

  ‘This is getting on my nerves,’ she says to Luke. ‘Do you realise that bloody wind has howled around here for forty-one days without a break?’

  ‘Forty-one?’ he asks, wryly.

  His detachment is infuriating. It’s alright for Luke, the heavy sleeper, but almost every night now her sleep is disturbed by the wind gusting against the house; the roof groans and she is woken by the sudden slam of doors along the hallway. Luke never so much as stirs. His head is scarcely on the pillow and he is dead to the world until resurrected at dawn like some bush Lazarus.

  One afternoon, foolishly, she hangs the sheets on the line instead of laying them out in the spare roo
m to dry. Instantly they begin to balloon out like galleon sails, flapping violently in the hot gusts that batter the garden. Later, when she walks out to collect the washing, there is a great gap in the line where a white elasticised under-sheet has blown away. She swears, and strides towards the fence to peer through the bushes. Sure enough, there it is on the empty block next door, draped across a patch of bracken like a collapsed parachute. She swears again, because Rodney keeps two pet sheep on this block and their droppings are all through the grass and ferns, and she will have to wash the sheet a second time and water is scarce. She unlatches the gate and the sheep run to her sociably and nuzzle at her hips, trotting behind as she treads roughshod over the brittle ferns. ‘Shoo,’ she says, as she approaches her washing, ‘shoo,’ and stoops to lift a corner of the sheet. There, coiled in a perfect whorl, is a black snake with a long, pointed head. And she is frozen. As the clutch of warm cotton falls limply from her hand she begins to back away until, with a shriek, she stumbles backwards onto a pile of stones, grazing her elbow. When at last she reaches the gate, nursing her bloodied elbow, she wrenches the gate open and, half-running, heads for the house. ‘Luke!’ she shouts at the bottom of the ladder to the attic. Then she opens the fridge, takes out a jug of iced water and pours it over her head. When Luke comes into the kitchen she turns, dripping, towards him. ‘Go and get Gil,’ she gasps, ‘there’s a snake in the paddock next door. Under the sheet.’

  ‘What sheet?’

  ‘It blew off the line.’

  ‘I’ll get a shovel,’ he says.

  ‘No, no, get Gil, he’ll know what to do.’