Water Baby

f the town had only a thin veneer of innocence to begin with, it was stripped away that day - when Bernie Butler pulled his car up to the old hitching post outside Redford's Barber Shop. People spilled from stores and homes, onto the warped asphalt footpath, to watch the red dust cloud around the gleaming metallic body as it rolled down our main street. Some asked questions about the apparent stranger, and the old people were jolted into remembering forgotten tales of the town. And they looked back, not with the flush and single-mindedness of youth, but an understanding borne of greyed temples and lost opportunities.

I had known him myself, in what seems like another life, when I was just a fragment of a boy, in love with his daughter. When I still had my dreams. Marjorie Butler had entered my life, when I was four, if I rely on my memory alone. There are pictures I have seen of her though, yellowing in my mother's heavy albums, that show two grinning toddlers splashing, unashamedly naked in a concrete laundry basin, or the shy, curly blond head of a girl around three in a pink satin-trimmed party dress, her face freckled with a rainbow of hundreds and thousands. These are really my parents' remembrances though, of gatherings attended by their friends and neighbours. When I concentrate to look back on the time I believe she entered my life, it is not these celluloid images forced upon my memory that trigger my emotions, but the sweaty day a group of children sat in a circle on the hardwood floor of Mrs Lockwood's Sunday School.

We were playing rhythm and syncopation games and I nervously confessed to the little girl cross-legged beside me that I could not snap my fingers. Mrs Lockwood sat animatedly at the tuneless piano, turning away from the keys occasionally to nod encouragement and, in her wavering falsetto, lead us in the singing of her latest self-penned ode to the Lord.

"Jesus, (clap) is good. (clap, clap) He-ee is good". (click, click) That was opposed to the Catholic church down near the silos, which was, we were reminded every week, bad. When it came my turn to slap my knees and then click twice with each hand, I waved my dirty nails before me in a silent flourish and Marjorie let loose behind her back with two of the loudest finger-snaps I had ever heard. I was grateful for her discretion and in awe of her clicking talent, which, by the way, I have not matched in my forty-five years since.

We all stood in silence for a few moments, before shuffling in a tight circle around Bernie's shining car and it had been Ellen Douglas who astonished us all, by first pushing past the curious children to say in her understated way:

"Hello." She had never come into the pub I owned, although I had seen her many times at Adler's Greengrocers, selling the produce she somehow pulled from the rocky, barren earth inherited when her husband Jim had died. It was a token effort on Gus Adler's part. His wife Yvonne would even make a special little sign each Tuesday when Mrs Douglas deposited her weekly offering on their crookedly tiled counter.

'Ellen's Silver beet' it would say one week, or 'Ellen's Choko' the next, with a perfectly painted number beneath. Things always appeared as a glut of strangely unseasonal rarities. Food people had rarely heard of and weren't sure how to prepare, or things mundane but so badly timed that the weather was not conducive to eating them. But we bought them. Gus would sometimes tuck one of her items in your paper bag whether you had ordered it or not, and if he met with too much resistance he would on occasion, ask you to take it "...as a little gift" and still give Mrs Douglas the money the following Tuesday.

She had a smooth, always florid face that nobody could remember ever showing expression of any kind, yet she never seemed dour or mean, and not even sad, though we all suspected she was. Her face in old age had merely been etched with two shallow arcs on either side of her mouth to show she had sometimes laughed, and a deeper, vertical furrow between her unsculpted brows. She must have worried in her sleep.

Bernie Butler had worked on the Douglas farm and moved into a shack on the property with Marjorie shortly after his wife, Marjorie's mother, died during the birth of a second, lost child. Ellen was not to be 'blessed', as people would say, with even one child, and there were many times from those Sunday School mornings when Marjorie and I were invited on special day trips, if Mrs Douglas had some business to be done. We would bump around, unrestrained on the sticky vinyl of the FJ Holden and amuse ourselves with counting games of birds, or kangaroos that were always able to outpace the cautiously lumbering FJ before veering off into the mysteries of the scrub.

"One magpie means bad luck." Mrs Douglas would glance quickly over the bench seat at us and nod knowingly.

Her eyes would wander from the road as we all desperately searched for another one. Sometimes we wouldn't find it.

We were coming home at dusk once, her relatives having delayed us with beef stew and home made scones and, as we drove, Marjorie noticed the laughing crescent moon above us.

"The man in the moon thinks I'm special. He's on my side of the car watching me." I teased, and her nose wrinkled up as she craned her neck to see I was right.

Now, Marjorie wasn't prone to childhood tantrums, but that evening, (maybe because she was overtired) she began to cry, and Mrs Douglas turned to me and asked what I'd done wrong.

"The moon's following Laurence." Marjorie butted in crying, spitting tears from her twisted mouth.

Without a word Mrs Douglas slowed the car to a complete stop and laboriously turned it around on the narrow road. We travelled in the faint silvery glow, a couple of miles in the wrong direction, until Marjorie fell asleep with her cheek pressed against the glass as she faced the moon, and the car nearly rolled into the ditch near Woolshed Flat as Mrs Douglas again grappled with the heavy steering wheel and finally turned us toward home.

That day, in the main street, Ellen Douglas took Bernie Butler's hand firmly and after asking her if she required a ride home, Bernie led her to the kerb and swung the back door open for her, closing it again before he climbed in on the driver's side and brought the town sweeping up around him as he drove, for the first time in thirty-three years, back to his old home.

Marjorie and I were fifteen when she left with her father. The news of Jim Douglas' death was still on everyone's lips the day I dropped my pushie on the bare dirt near the screen door of the Butler's shack and, when Marjorie stepped out crying I didn't realise hers weren't just tears of grief. I rode along the unsealed roads with her balanced on my rust speckled handlebars, my balding tyres flattening with the weight of our combined carriage. She wore her favourite dress, cerulean with cornflowers, a matching ribbon sweeping her hair from her sandy eyelashes. I had watched the dress grow tighter across her chest as her braids turned to a ponytail, and that day, riding in the heat's gentle whisper, the cool, thin cotton felt like liquid against my bare knee as I pedalled.

We would ride to Watterson's dam on days like that and, when we were younger, strip bare in the loneliness and swim until our fingers and toes pruned in the green shadowed water. The day of her tears though, we rode to the dam, but, with adolescence having long before inhibited our nudity, merely sat under the euacalypt fully clothed, bathing only in the late morning sun. I spread my mother's old travel blanket on the ground to cushion our elbows and knees from the gumnuts and bull ants, and read aloud from my journal of poems and stories. She wept softly as I talked self consciously of love and flowers, and propped her head against her palm as she spoke my name.

"Laurence..."

Other school-friends called me Lorry or Mitch from my surname Mitchell. Only Marjorie and my mother favoured the grand name I had been burdened with the day I burst early from mum's womb and landed with a soggy plop in the middle of Mr Daly's wheat field on her way home from the movie theatre. She had seen "Pride and Prejudice" and was in love with the dashing Olivier. I was christened then and there and my father, (a truck driver all his life, with a liver spotted right arm and blonde Elvis sideburns) ignored it in his jealousy and called (and still calls) me simply; "The Lad".

"Do you think you'll really be a writer one day?" Marjorie went on, squinting into the glare of the sun rising directly above us as she looked at me.

"I know I will." I replied, and looking back I really thought I would.

"I thought I wanted to be an actress..." she said as she turned her head away from me.

I flopped onto my back with my hands crossed under my head and watched her from my crooked angle. Blue dress, blue ribbon, blue eyes and blue sky, swallowed in gasps between her sun-cracked lips as her words came.

"But I'm no good at pretending." she continued, and I inched my arm across her back to pull her toward me. I had only meant to offer comfort, in a way that had never been afforded me. My arms around her body felt so natural and perfect that I lifted my head for my lips to meet hers and I kissed Marjorie Butler, as a man kisses a woman.

"Laurence." Her voice was shriller than normal as she broke away from my embrace, like when my mother shooed the dog out of the chicken coop after it broke the eggs.

My eyes were closed when we kissed, as I had seen all the famous leading men do, and I blinked into the brightness to see her standing above me, her hands jutting from her hips.

"Why did you do that?"

My shame silenced me and I could only stand to shake the blanket free before wrapping my journal and my deepest feelings into its warm folds and squeezing it into the wicker basket.

"Laurence...wait." I heard her say as the blue flowers fell away from her blossoming body.

"Marjorie?"

"Don't you want to touch me?"

I turned away and waited a few moments, but when I turned back toward her Marjorie was only a bobbing wave on the horizon, and I stared until she disappeared from my sight forever.

Ellen Douglas called me to her property, on the day of Bernie Butler's reappearance and I saw him almost as memory had trapped him. A little duller perhaps, a little frailer, as if I were viewing him through a dusty window.

"We had to leave, Lorry," Bernie said suddenly, after several minutes of innocent recollections.

"We just had to go."

I sat nodding, although not understanding, and I watched his twisted knuckles hold the fine china cup awkwardly as he talked.

"Marjorie died about a month back and she wanted you..."

His words dissolved into the deafening throb my body seemed to emanate and I spoke clumsily as he thrust the folded envelope into my hands.

"What happened?" The thumping grew louder as I watched the envelope distorting through my moistened eyes.

"Stroke." He replied and I thought I saw his hand tremble. Or it might just have been an illusion my tears created as I watched them fall onto the pale blue note paper dampening in my clenched fist.

"My husband Jim......" Ellen tried to tell me, as I opened the envelope and read a woman's words write of teenage grief.

We had only ever called him Mr Douglas when we were children. He didn't seem to have much say in the running of the farm, because as we all found out later, he knew nothing of farming. His family were from Beaumont in Adelaide and everyone in our town knew fortune, rather than hard work, had acquired him the massive acreage. It lay fallow for a couple of years and as the latest machinery began to dot the landscape so too did the apparition of the newly wedded Ellen.

A sturdy woman, whose family had grown grey on the land, she put life into the idle soil when she employed Bernie, with his country yarns and laughter, who in turn tried to put a little life in her.

People mentioned an inheritance when the Douglas' bought the latest in automobiles and, in moneyed boredom, Mr Douglas began to collect horses. They rarely had visitors so Mr Douglas alternated between mares and stallions on his daily canter around town while Ellen and Bernie bronzed together in the wheat fields. He would hitch the reins outside the barber's every morning while Mr Redford lathered and shaved carefully around his dimpled chin. Once my father and I waited outside until we saw Bob Redford place the hot towel over his face, then dad lifted up his horse's hoof carefully for inspection.

"Gold." Dad said as he laughed and scratched his forehead. "He really does have gold horseshoes."

It was too much for my father, and even I had trouble fathoming such excess. In our household we ate mutton and old roosters and the only jewellery my mother wore was the wedding ring dad bought from a meat-packer he used to deliver for. Dad said his wife had died of influenza and he was too broken-hearted to look at it anymore.

When Bernie found Jim in the bottom paddock with a single shotgun blast to the head, Dr Parker called it suicide and after a suitable mourning, Ellen sold most of the possessions, including the horses. Although his life had been based on bequeaths, it seemed Mr Douglas encouraged self sufficiency in others and rumour spread from the local bank that he died without a penny in his account.

I heard Marjorie's voice as I skimmed across the page, absorbing what was necessary and saving the rest for a quiet time. They had moved down to the city when they left and she found part-time work cleaning houses until her belly swelled indiscreetly and she spent the last few months of her time in a special home. Unlike me, she had been lucky enough to marry and have children, even after the trauma of the baby she was forced to relinquish. "She told me it was you," Bernie's words quivered. "but then she told the truth. If it wasn't for Ellen helping the both of us, I don't know what I'd have done." He said. "Marjorie made believe it was you though. Right up until she seen it...and she knew it wasn't."

"I couldn't tell you Lorry. Even when you asked me if I knew. It had to be a secret." Ellen's hand held mine lightly and I looked into her blank brown eyes.

"I gave this to Marjorie before she left." She went on. "Her father tells me she wanted you to have it. She didn't want you to forget." Ellen placed something fine and fluid in my hand and, as the glinting chain drifted through my fingers, my eye caught the pale sapphire.

I pictured her, the last time, bare and trembling before me, and although I am a man, and men aren't meant to cry, I sobbed into Ellen's shoulder as Marjorie's father patted my back. I'm no good at pretending either.

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