Tim Winton - Eyrie

Not much to say, really. I just saw her in passing.

What does she do? How does she seem?

Dunno, he said. It was just a chance encounter.

Family?

There’s a grandkid. A boy.

Good for her.

He glanced up, saw her appraising stare, felt the lost moment in her false brightness.

I often think about them, Baby and her.

He nodded, wishing he could go back, begin the evening again, but it was hopeless. He lacked the gumption to set things right, he was too accustomed to the logic of defeat. He saw it now, the rest of the meal. They’d eat in fraught politeness and leave the moment the last fork was laid down. She’d insist on driving him home. He’d protest, pile in anyway. And she’d want to come up and see the flat once and for all but refrain from asking. She’d take his kiss on the cheek like a lowball tip and wheel the boxy old Volvo away, looking game as ever, masking her hurt and disappointment as he stood limp and seething on the forecourt.

The task at hand was getting to that final, miserable moment as quickly as possible.

Keely was halfway along the open gallery, digging at his temples, when he noticed something flapping in the security mesh of his door. Some civic announcement, no doubt: a plea for a lost kitten, a notice about building maintenance. But when he pulled it from the grille he saw it was a child’s drawing, a crayon outline of a bird. Dumpy, earthbound, like an overfed kiwi.

Once he got inside he clamped the sheet of paper to the fridge with a magnet. At other people’s places — friends from work, people with kids — he’d always looked with an inner sneer at their fridge doors plastered in clumsy daubs. Everything their brats committed to paper was so special, so important it required immediate and prolonged display. The kids probably forgot their work the moment they put the brush down, never thinking another thing of it. And now here he was, chuffed to have it there. This peculiar burst of colour, this lovely intrusion.

He banged down a couple of Panadeine Forte with a chaste swish of apple juice. It was ten-thirty but from his balcony he saw that the lights were on over at 1010. A few moments later he was outside her kitchen window, tapping lightly. The curtain ricked aside. Gemma squinted out, tense, alert, annoyed.

She cracked the door but left the chain on. A gust of fried onions and menthol smoke blew past her. In the gap he saw she wore a faded housecoat. She was barefoot.

Sorry, he said. I know it’s late.

You orright?

Yeah. Just got home.

Right.

We’re all set. Tomorrow.

Fair enough.

Meet you out the front at ten?

Like we said.

Yeah. And hey, I got his drawing.

You what?

Kai’s drawing. Of a bird. It was in my door.

Little bugger. I’ve told him a million times. Jesus. He’s not sposed to wander off.

He’s okay?

Asleep.

You look tired.

Because I am.

Right. So I’ll see you in the morning?

She closed the door on him.

Keely slunk back down to his place. He glanced at the bird on the fridge. Thought of his mother. Knowing Doris, she’d still be up. So he called.

Are you okay? she asked gently.

Sorry about tonight, he murmured. We didn’t really get to talk.

I was talking, she said.

I know. Like you said, I was a goose. A stupid mood.

Doris was quiet.

You’re working? he said.

Reading, she said. Charles Birch.

So, you’re a pantheist now.

After menopause, she said, all bets are off.

Very funny.

If you still need the car, the keys are on the sink. I’ll be in church.

You still go?

You know perfectly well I do.

The Anglicans. It’s come to that.

Well, I am the demographic. Sometimes I’m half the congregation. You should come one day.

What, and spook the poor buggers?

Is this about the beard?

No, Mum, it’s not about the beard.

It does make you look like him. It’s… well, it’s a little unnerving.

I hadn’t realized. To be perfectly honest. It just grew of its own accord.

Tommy, love, go to bed. You’re slurring.

Slurring? I had two glasses, he said truthfully.

My mistake.

But shit, he thought. I’m sober. Slurring?

Tom?

Yeah?

What’re you doing? Are you talking to me or thinking aloud?

I’m going to bed, he said, hanging up, rattled.

But to get off he needed help. A sleeper slug. Just the one. And a couple of Valium to ease past that hunted feeling that lingered of late any time he had to entrust his head to the pillow.

It was nine when he woke. So he had to scramble. Burnt his mouth gulping tea. Wasted time searching for a clean shirt. Then, halfway to the station and hopelessly late, he hailed a cab he could sorely afford.

Doris lived in a stately Edwardian weatherboard in a riverside suburb of Perth. From just below her place, at the water’s edge, you could see upstream, past the snaking coils of the river, the thousand-eyed towers of the business district with the shimmering red-roofed plain behind. The hills were shrouded with bushfire haze that formed a dirty yellow rampart against the world beyond. At times Perth really did feel like an island, a country unto itself. This brassy little outpost of digging and dealing tilted relentlessly at the future, but these days it lived on life support — desalinated seawater and ancient shrinking aquifers. Behind the veil of smoke lay the wheatbelt and the salt-ravaged badlands that only a century before had been a teeming woodland half the size of Poland.

Up on Doris’s verandah, however, there was no view, grand or troubling. Her place was much of a piece with its neighbours but for the telltale wind chimes and the signs of a garden run amok. He dragged the dinghy and trailer down the drive, swept leaves from it hurriedly, stuck the bungs in, then hitched it to the old Volvo. Somehow he still had the presence of mind to check the outboard fuel and when he saw the state of it he poured it guiltily against the wall behind the shed. He’d stop in at a servo along the highway.

Stalking back past the house with the petrol tank, he was startled by his mother standing in her nightie on the deck. She held up a coffee mug and he nodded. While she was indoors he checked the motor, the oars, the mouldy lifejackets.

I thought I was going to have to use it as a fishpond, Doris said, handing him a mug.

I thought you were putting it out on the verge. And shouldn’t you be at the nine-thirty?

Late night, she said, blowing across her mug. I’ll go to the eleven o’clock. Uproar at Saint Whatsit’s, no doubt.

Everything alright?

Hope so, she said, without quite glancing his way. She looked a little frail without the armour of her fabrics and bangles. Her silver hair was loose, fanning in skeins at the whim of the breeze.

Keely said nothing, just sipped his coffee. He wanted to say something kind, conciliatory, but he was stranded. She seemed relieved when he finally passed the empty mug and shook the car keys. Gemma looked surprised, even concerned, to see the boat in the street beneath the Mirador, but Kai seemed delighted. Keely drove them down to the riverside ramp and shoved the dinghy off its seized rollers. Neither the boy nor his grandmother had the first idea about boats so just getting them aboard was a mission. He had to wrangle the kid into a lifejacket and once she saw him in it, Gemma decided she needed one too. There were slips, tumbles, a shriek or two as he swept them out into the channel and steered upstream with the wind ahead and the tide behind them.

I thought this was a birdwatchin expedition! yelled Gemma, dashing the hair from her eyes, hunched awkwardly beneath the cumbersome roll of the jacket collar.