Where the Line Breaks Page 2

  Next batsman in was a scrawny little weed, looking to plant himself in the crease for the remainder of the afternoon. From Alan’s position in the outfield, Red was a lanky beanpole approaching the wickets with a lolloping gait. He grunted as he sent the ball down the pitch. For Alan, in the outfield, the ball looked to be moving through molasses. It spun around the half-hearted defence the batsman threw out, and clattered into off stump.

  Next man in was their star all-rounder, the same kid who bowled Red in the first innings. Alan knew what would happen before it happened; knew he needed to be five metres to his left, to shield his eyes against the lowering sun, adjust for the afternoon breeze, soften his hands to account for the bounce. A wild swing, top-edged towards him on the boundary. Planted in the short grass, all he had to do was watch as the ball miraculously fell from the sky into his waiting, cupped hands.

  The heart fell out of the opposition, and the fast bowlers mopped up the tail, but it was Red’s hat-trick that they remembered.

  Afterward, gathered in the pavilion, the older boys sneaking beers from the bar, Alan and Red were speechless, soaking it all in. A young girl approached, dressed in her Sunday best, golden waves of hair tumbling down her shoulders. Alan and Red were speechless all over again. She walked right up to them, laughing in the face of their obvious discomfort.

  ‘Great catching out there.’

  He glanced across at Red, couldn’t read the expression on his face, fumbled his words. Butterfingers. ‘Thanks. Red got the hat-trick, but.’

  She looked over at Red, as if noticing him for the first time and offered him a delicate hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Rose. Rose Porter.’

  ‘I’m Red.’

  ‘I gathered. And you are?’ She swung the hand his way.

  ‘Yes. I am,’ he said.

  She cracked up. A loud, rolling peal of unabashed laughter. His nostrils burned and he wished for instant death. She took his hand, her skin warm, and he could breathe again.

  ‘I’m Alan. Everyone calls me Al.’

  ‘I bet they do.’ She laughed again, and his cheeks hurt from the strain of smiling. ‘My father’s club treasurer,’ she said, indicating the white walls. ‘I’m down here quite regularly.’

  He couldn’t look away from the shimmer of hair held back by her ear, the perfect arch of gold. Red broke the silence.

  ‘Hope you enjoyed the game, Rose.’

  Rose nodded, her eyes glowing.

  ‘I did. Well played, Red,’ she turned to leave. ‘Hopefully I’ll see you soon, Alan.’

  She walked away as Red’s parents and sister Laurie approached, and amid the backslapping and congratulations, he lost sight of her.

  The pavilion is dark, the doors locked, and the sun has settled over the horizon as Rose and Alan, breathless from the run, cross the oval. Over the crest of the hill they can hear the waves crashing on the beach, the gulls screaming.

  Rose shimmies one of the windows loose, and hops through the window with a dainty leap. He follows, two heavy boots knocking against the wooden frame.

  The members room is huge and still, an empty cathedral. To the left are the change rooms and the slight whiff of stale sweat. Rose takes his hand and pulls him up the stairs, her free hand running over the polished grain of the oak rail. The top floor is taken up by long wooden pews, all facing the oval, and a large open balcony that they push out onto through an unlocked door. They take a front row seat, looking out over the brown patches of grass, the few streets and buildings that make up the town tinged pink. Over the beach the setting sun streaks the sky pink.

  He laces his fingers between hers, and pulls her hand into his lap.

  ‘Rose Benedict Porter.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Rose Marjoram Porter.’

  She raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Rose Penhaligon Stirling Lexington-Porter the Third, Wisest of Women, Keeper of my Heart.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He closes his eyes, and then turns his head towards her, reopening them and loving the way the corners of her eyes crinkle as she waits for him.

  ‘You can do so much better than Red.’ Her face breaks into a smile, and he wants to cry. A breath, a blink, and she makes him brave enough to say what he has been afraid to say. ‘If I die –’

  ‘Alan.’

  ‘But if I do …’

  She squeezes his fingers tighter.

  ‘Alan Archimedes Ulysses Lewis.’ He can’t help but smile. ‘You’re coming home, to me.’

  He can always talk to Rose.

  ‘Promise me this is real?’ He’s not sure if it’s a question, not entirely sure where it’s come from.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean home, the beach, the farm. You.’ He squeezes her hand, trying to disguise the way his fingers shake. ‘You promise it won’t all vanish? You won’t vanish, the moment I look away?’

  She doesn’t speak, gazing out over the field. Her hair is flames, falling across her face in that way she hates but he loves. She burns.

  ‘I promise.’

  When the letter came in offering him a spot in the first take-up of the new university, it was Rose who urged him to give it a shot. Rose who assured him it would be fine. Rose who eased his fears with her calm voice and her warm hands. And for the first time, he wasn’t just copying whatever Red was doing, but making his own way. Making that first long train trip to Perth, it was Rose who waved from the platform, and as the rest of the town faded in the distance, it was her he could still make out, that same flash of sun streaking on her hair.

  Perth – a freedom Alan had never known before. The first-year lessons for his bachelor’s degree took place in a series of temporary wooden huts in the city, the corrugated iron roofs creaking in the heat. They were the first to pass through those ramshackle walls – an experiment in free learning in a young country. They were the first to question everything. The first to take full advantage of the opportunity afforded them. Alan joined a local cricket club, worked in the city library, loved debating the rich boys fresh from private schools in the wealthy suburbs. He wrote letters to Red, who had been made manager of the local hardware store and spent his weekends playing cricket. At twenty-three, Alan was old enough to drink warm beer at the bars alongside the shiftworkers from the city in their ties, the sweat showing through their starched shirts, packing them away before the six o’clock swill. He fell in love with Perth: cycling around the river in the evening, the flies converging around his lips as soon as he stopped; the smell of leather-bound books they were forced to read for tutorials he hadn’t studied for, the hours spent debating and arguing and learning, their professors making the units up as they went along; the cheap glue of the paperbacks they bought from the bookshop in Subiaco; the annual cricket club piss-up with the boys drinking long into the night, daring each other to run across the cricket oval naked, their arses shining white in the moonlight.

  When Rose came up and moved into the nursing college in Fremantle, he figured he had it all. He cherished their long summer days at North Cott, reading paperbacks on their towels, the sand peppering their skin. The Freo Doctor rolled in each afternoon, windows and doors opened throughout the suburbs to its cooling breeze. He hung around the older boys, who, like himself, had been sent letters offering them positions in the first intake, some much older, some with wives and children waiting for them in the country towns where they lived. Men who seemed like they knew what they were doing, men who reminded him of Red. They’d make their way to the Cottesloe Beach Hotel, discussing literary theory, and cricket, and girls, three beers deep, with the sand crusting between their toes, and he listened intently to everything they had to say. He’d amble home in the dusk sporting a six-beer buzz, and lie awake with the windows open, mosquitoes whining round his ears.

  One weekend, Red came through on a flying visit, buying an entire crate of mangoes from the European bloke who ran the stall at the markets on the way. All weekend they lay
in the sun reading second-hand books, mango juice dripping from their elbows, sticking pages together. Every so often they ran down to the waves to cool off, to wash the sweet liquid from their chins. By the Monday morning, when Red needed to hop a train back home, and he was due in class, they were both in and out of the toilet so often they were considering setting up camp in the bathroom. Rose, trainee nurse, and as always the voice of reason, said they had no-one to blame but themselves.

  He would have been among the first contingent to graduate if the war hadn’t come along like the rips at North Cott and swept him out to sea. Red sent him a letter saying he was signing up with the Light Horse. It didn’t take much convincing to head down to the recruitment centre. There was more to life than black swans on the river each evening and the weekend football, and he signed up in a sweaty haze of patriotism and adventure.

  Returning from the recruitment centre, he jumped on his bicycle and rode down to the nursing college to tell Rose his good news. He expected her to join in his happiness, to swirl and dance in his joy. He hadn’t expected silence. The way her face fell apart with each word he spoke. She begged him not to go. He tried his best to explain. He told her Red had signed up too, but she didn’t listen. He couldn’t put it into words – that she had inspired him, had pushed him, had given him the belief that he could do this. That he had signed up for her.

  That she made him feel brave.

  They lay on the foreshore and watched dolphins swimming in the bay, and he reached an arm around her shoulder, and she smiled a sad smile.

  He glances down at his hands, calluses on his palms from the hours spent cradling the rough wood of his rifle. Sitting here, in his pressed and clean uniform, his hair parted, buttons polished, boots glossed, it doesn’t feel real. He can’t imagine a world where Rose isn’t within his sight. But his kitbag is sitting packed in his room, and the bars on his sleeve burn into his arm, and there’s an altogether different part of him itching to go, restless to test itself in a new world, but afraid of losing the old one. Scared of letting Rose down.

  They sit for a moment in the last stretching fingers of daylight.

  Rose shivers.

  He removes his jacket and places it around her shoulders, the desert brown dull against the white of her dress, the bright gold of her hair. He turns her head and kisses her with his eyes closed, to hide the tears.

  Rose has always had the taste of the sea on her lips, like she’s run straight from the waves, her hair in long dark strands down her back, and water dripping from her nose. A sudden dark silhouette above him, blocking out his sun – cold drops on his face and her laughing, cold lips. Rose tastes like salty skin, stretched tight by sun.

  He pulls her closer and lifts her onto his lap, her legs around him and dropping over the bench behind, her dress covering his khakis. When she sits on him they are the same height, and he can look straight into her green eyes. She smiles, her canines bared, and the animal inside him growls. His lips graze her neck, her earlobe, the perfect triangle of her collarbone. Beneath her thighs, he is stirring. His hands run up and down her back, restless. The shivering has stopped, the cold dread down his back, the heavy beat of his heart.

  ‘Alan.’

  But he doesn’t stop kissing her, covering her skin with the lightest of touches. He makes a noise in the back of his throat as if to say ‘Yes, my love?’ and she smiles.

  ‘Alan.’

  He pauses, looks at her, her smile, her hands across his shoulders. He runs his wet tongue from the base of her neck all the way up to her lips, and he kisses her as that perfect rolling laughter floats away across the field, stopping and starting as their lips meet, lock, and part.

  ‘Alan, stop.’

  He stops. She sighs, and slides off his lap onto the pew next to him, rearranging her dress. They stare out at the patchwork grass in silence for a long minute.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  Her voice is small when she does speak. ‘I’m scared too.’

  He reaches for her hand, the familiar warmth. The cricket pitch in front of them is cracked and broken, dead grass. ‘Who’s meant to be looking after this place now, anyway?’

  Two weeks after the Hat-Trick, desperate for a way to spend more time at the cricket club, and potentially run into Rose, he had approached the groundsman’s hut behind the pavilion, knocking at the flimsy wooden door, heart in his mouth. He’d never been as scared as he was at that moment. The door swung open and a mountain of a man emerged from the dark to regard the skinny kid standing in the doorway. His voice catching in his throat, he plucked up his courage.

  For Rose. It had always been for Rose.

  The next time she saw him he was drenched in sweat, pushing the heavy roller across the pitch, the back of his neck bright pink and his hands covered in blisters. She approached from the pavilion, and for half a second he thought she was a mirage, the way she floated across the trimmed grass.

  ‘Father told me the club had hired a new groundsman.’

  She brought him fresh lemonade, made it herself, and he was too worried about scaring her away to tell her it was far too sour. He finished the glass in one long gulp.

  He spent the rest of the winter helping maintain the grass, each day after school, ensuring the pitch was protected, trimming the lawn. Hours spent walking around the oval, the smell of grass in his nose, on his clothes, in his dreams. When it rained (if it ever rained) they sat inside the shed and he would dip into the groundskeeper’s endless well of stories, glued to his seat as the grizzled old-timer yabbered away about his days as a drover, crossing the Nullarbor, living under the stars. Red would ride down, and they’d bowl to each other in the nets.

  And when the holidays came, and Rose returned from boarding school, they lay together on the raised grass banks eating lunch – Alan chewing his bread and cheese, or chomping his way, core and all, through an apple. The sound of her laugh, ringing out across the ground, made his cheeks ache.

  He told her about his family, the farm and the harvest. The long days in the fields and the evenings spent exhausted. Dad and his eccentricities. Ma and the horses. His brothers, Tom and Robbie, grown men, and how he worried his hands would never grow as large or as hard as theirs. How Red was school prefect and head boy, but Alan was top of the class. About his small collection of books, the escape they gave him at the end of a long afternoon. He would open his mouth and all his worries would tumble out. He was scared she would crumble under the weight, but she never did.

  For her part, Rose told him about her parents, her mum who was knitting her a muffler despite the weather never getting cold enough to wear it, and about her sisters, the Little Princesses, who stayed inside, their skin porcelain like the dolls they played with. She told him about her boarding school in Perth, spending half the time away from home, away from the family. She told him about Sister Mary, the English tutor, who brought her new books each week, whose eyes shone when she read Hardy. Rose filled his head with Conrad and Conan Doyle, Whitman and Kipling, laying the groundwork for the essays that would eventually lead him to university. He lay on the grass and closed his eyes while she read him Yeats. She loved the old poems. Their strength, their beauty.

  He wrote a poem, but never showed her.

  He soon met her father, his voice always the first indication of his presence, booming across the oval, calling Rose to him. He imagined Mr Porter as a kookaburra, king of the bush, singing his song through the gums, Rose’s replying laugh guiding her back to him. Alan would offer to ride Rose home on his bicycle, but she said no, the walk home with her father was their special time. The first time Mr Porter shook his hand he thought his own might be crushed. He tried to stand taller, puffed his chest out, lowered his voice. A grin spread across the big man’s red cheeks, and father and daughter laughed their raucous laughs.

  Mr Porter called him ‘my boy’, and winked at him behind Rose’s back, brothers-in-arms. When Alan was invited around one Sunday for dinner, cleaned and polished, feel
ing out of place, dressed in his brother’s hand-me-downs, Mr Porter made sure he sat by his right hand at the table.

  ‘Us men have to stick together,’ he said, doling out the potatoes.

  The way Mr Porter rolled over and did anything his girls asked filled Alan with a sense of joy. The old lion, turning circles for his pretty cubs.

  A few years later, at the start of his second year of university, when they were both living in Perth, Rose received an urgent telegram. They hopped the earliest train back home and spent a week haunting the rooms of their family homes like ghosts, and then, on the hottest day of the summer, Alan sweltered through the funeral service in one of Tom’s suits, several sizes too big. When they ate dinner, the chair at the head of the table sat empty. Alan pulled Rose close at every opportunity, trying his best to hold her together, until she pulled away, saying he was hurting her.

  He tried to tell her how inadequate he felt, but the words wouldn’t come out. They spent the rest of the week in a humid silence.

  His own father never talked about his worries. Hid his thoughts behind a stony demeanour and his insecurities behind a heavy hand. Dad commanded respect through silence, distilling the words necessary to communicate a message into the shortest possible sentence. When Dad spoke, people hung on each word, breathing in the long gaps between them. He might not know a lot of Alan’s ‘facts’—never went to school, never studied—but he knew what he knew. His word was gospel.

  When Alan first started at the university, he worried that if he had nothing to say in tutorials and lectures, people would think he was stupid. So he spoke up and asked questions. With Rose’s family and down at the pub, he was the same, trying to mask his anxiety with talking. But when he sent letters home about the books he’d read, the Latin studies, the long lectures, it was always his mother who replied. Dad was busy. Dad was working hard.

  When he arrived home in October for the harvest, and told his family that he had signed up, had quit university and spent the past few months in training, Dad didn’t respond. Instead he took another sip from his beer and said, ‘Early start tomorrow, Al.’