Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“We’ll be climbing that big feller there?”

He could see the children’s eyes flick towards the Big Nobby. Not a question that it invited you!

“You and Joe can go up there after lunch,” said Tim. It was the right sort of physical feature for courting. It demanded that hands be reached to each other. But he didn’t want mad Johnny up there.

“What can you see from the top?”

“The whole coastline of New South Wales,” said Kitty dreamily. “At a total sweep. And the air. A lens, you see. The air like a bloody telescope.”

“Can we go, papa?” asked Johnny bolt upright like a jack rabbit, on his knees. More than ready for high places again, the little ruffian.

“I’ll take you over the creek to the beach,” said Tim. “Mr. Habash might take his grey again and you can ride. But not gallop, son, not gallop. I know you.”

“But can’t the children come?” asked Mamie. It was as if she did not want to be left alone with Joe. “We can all keep an eye. You’ll be good won’t you, Lucy?”

Lucy looked up at her levelly. “I learned my lesson,” said Lucy in a way which implied canings and made everyone laugh.

Something entirely convincing about Lucy swayed Tim, as did the size of the day. He remembered too the gradual, accommodating lines of the Big Nobby.

“Then I’ll go too,” said Tim. “I’ll keep an eagle eye out. And you, Bandy. You come too if you would, and watch these little blackguards.”

He felt sorry for Joe, the corner of whose mouth conveyed disappointment. Mamie was a bugger of a tease.

“But first the tea,” said Bandy. He had made a fire a little way down on the creek. He now went and fetched the excellent tea he had brewed. Mamie stood up and asked to see into the billy he was carrying.

“There’s tree leaves in that tea,” she complained.

“That’s gum leaves,” said Tim. “Australians make their tea with gum leaves thrown in. When there’s a tree handy.”

So, it struck him now: Bandy was by habit an Australian.

They drank plenty of this tea to ready themselves for their thirsty climb. When they were finished, Tim wanting to get up there and down and have it over, they left Kitty lying on a blanket in scant shadow, with her parasol leaned across her face to give double shade. A strong sea breeze cooled her and played with the tassels of the parasol.

On the flanks on the great whale-like Big Nobby, whorls of tussocky grass made the climb easy. You stepped from one knot of grass to another. Step by step, like climbing a pyramid. Johnny kept racing ahead and looking down like a gazelle from some nest of grass. But Lucy mounted the headland beside Tim, whose hand was held by Annie. So they rose up the green slope quite easily, Joe O’Neill chattering away, to the domed top of the thing.

Bandy seemed to take care to be up there first, not it appeared for rivalry’s sake but as if he too wanted to prevent any madness in Johnny. As Tim and Annie rose higher on the great headland, they began to pick up the welcome southerly on their brows. Tim finished the climb with Annie on his back, since the child did not believe in wearing herself out. All the others were waiting on top for them, looking south, Mamie exclaiming at what could be seen. Joe had a wrestle-hold on Johnny, and Johnny struggled in it, laughing. Lucy stood soberly there like one of the adult party.

Arriving and dropping Annie so that she could take up her normal august posture, Tim saw Back Beach and its wild surf stretching away to Point Plummer, Racecourse Beach, etc, etc. You could have seen Port Macquarie except that the day’s haze blurred the scene about twenty miles south.

“Now you don’t see a sight like that,” said Mamie, “anywhere on the Cork or Kerry coast.”

“Because it’s always wrapped in mist there,” murmured Joe.

From here it could be seen that the headland on which they stood had two tops, this one and another further to the south. In between, a green saddle with grass and little thickets of native shrubs. Beneath the saddle a partially seen great rock wall fell into the sea, which grew plum-coloured in the shadow of the black stone. You could hear and partly see the ocean raging down there, making caves. Of course there was no way, having got here, the party would choose not to walk on into the saddle towards the other, lower dome. Finding a way past the spiky banksias, and so to the Big Nobby’s second summit. From there they would, of course, be able to look from safety directly down into the turmoil of rock and sea below.

“No shy-acking then, Johnny,” Tim called out. He didn’t utter any warnings to Lucy. For she seemed a changed child. She knew about witnessing angels.

As they walked down into the saddle, dragging their feet through clumps of button grass, the Big Nobby maintained its gradual character. Not like cliffs elsewhere—not a case of grass running sharply to the definite and dramatic precipice, and then the sudden fall. You knew that somewhere to their left the black cliff began. But here, because of the headland’s gentle angle and its thick grass tufts, each one a rung of its massive ladder, there was no sense that you could topple and roll.

“Prickly, prickly,” said Annie as they reached the thickets, flapping her long-fingered hands at him, pleading to be picked up. She had those delicate fingers utterly unlike Kitty’s. They came from his sister Helen, who’d married the newspaper editor in Brooklyn.

He lifted her and followed the path the others had taken. These strange, olive green banksia bushes with their black cones. Splits in the cones like eyes and mouths. “Look,” said Tim, holding one of the cones. “The Banksia Man. He’s an evil little fellow.”

Annie threw herself about in his arms with fake shudders.

They came back up out of the banksias to Big Nobby’s grassy southern crest. Ah yes, you could see down to where the grasses grew steeper and the rock layers began and the hungry surf worked away. A number of birds wheeled around the semi-circle of this rock wall. It seemed to Tim to be the mad energy of the waves that kept them up, since none of them flapped their wings. A little way up from the wall above the sea, a sea-eagle considered a dive. A sharp, pearly, commanding shape with black wingtips.

“That one there’s a sea-eagle,” he told the others. “When they dive, they bloody dive.”

“This is the place,” said Mamie. “You could have a tea-house up here.”

“A pub perhaps,” amended Joe O’Neill, who was sure to crack more ale once they got down. Lucy stood beside Joe and on the other side of him, still quiet from respect for this soon-to-be uncle, Johnny. Good. They were still. They watched the sea-eagle. Its circles had them hypnotised. It had authority over the air. It put the frenzied children in their place.

“Will you carry me down like you carried me up, papa?” asked Annie ceremoniously, at his side.

“To walk will be good for your little legs.”

“I don’t think that’s true. My little legs don’t agree.”

He heard Mamie laughing. The sea-eagle banked and Tim took a new sense of it, that it was no mere natural wonder of some kind. A sudden gust came up to them as if the bird had manufactured it for them with its banked wings. Tim felt the stirred air all around him. The damned wheeling thing had command of the day. Its very ease, he felt at once, was a frightful temptation and the young should not be exposed…

He heard Mamie shriek, and Habash cry, “Stop this!”

Somehow the bird had by its malign circling and its sending a breeze engendered something unspoken but at once mutual between Lucy and Johnny. In all their campaigns, had they ever exchanged a word? If they had, no one had heard it. They planned it as if by fishing in each other’s mind.