Back and forth he hurled himself. Effortless, the body its own affair. Weightless. As if there was no limit to the energy that powered it. As if the breath it drew on might have no end.
Elsewhere
WHEN DEBBIE LARCOMBEdied she had not been home to her family for nearly three years. Her father decided at once that he would go down to Sydney for the funeral, which was already arranged. There was no suggestion of her being brought back to Lithgow Her sister Helen couldn't go. She had the children. So Harry's son-in-law, Andy Mayo, would go with him. The two men worked together down the mine and were mates.
Andy was a steady fellow of thirty-three. He'd been to Sydney once, with a rugby team, when he was nineteen. The prospect of driving down and seeing something of the Big Smoke excited him, but he felt he should disguise the fact. After all it was a funeral. “Are you sure?” he asked Helen, who was kneeling at the bathtub bathing their youngest.
“It's only for the day,” she told him. “And Dad would like it. I'd be worried about him going down all on his own.”
She paused at her work and said for the third or fourth time, "It's so sudden! I can hardly believe it.”
Andy, stirred by a rush of tenderness, but also of tender sensuality, brought his fingertips to a strand of hair, damp with steam, that had stuck to the soft white of her neck. Responding, she leaned back for a moment into the firmness, against her nape, of his extended forefinger and thumb, which lightly stroked.
He'd barely known Debbie; in fact he'd met her only twice. She had already left home when he arrived on the scene. After training college at Bathurst she had taught in country towns all up and down the state and had ended up at Balmain, in Sydney. She was four years older than Helen.
The one occasion they'd spent any time together — he had sat up late with her on the night of her mother Dorothy's funeral — Andy had been impressed but had also felt uneasy. She was nothing like Helen, except a little in looks — same nose, same big hands. Keen that she should see him as more than the usual run of small-town fatheads and mug lairs she had known before she left, but unpractised, he was soon out of his depth. They'd gotten drunk together — she was quite a drinker — and he was the one, being unused to spirits, who had ended up fuzzy-headed.
She sat with her legs crossed and smoked non-stop. Her legs were rather plump, but the shoes she wore, which had thin straps across the instep, were very fashionable-looking. Expensive, Andy thought. Though in no way glamourous, she was a woman who took trouble with herself.
The impression he'd got was that she moved in a pretty fast crowd down there, and some of what he caught on to of what Balmain was, and the people she knew — poets and that — and the fact that she lived now with one poet, and had been the girlfriend earlier of another, excited him. He had had very little of that sort of excitement in his own life.
He'd been a football player, good but not good enough. At sixteen he'd gone down the mine. Married at twenty. That there was another life somewhere he had picked up from the magazines he saw and the talk, some of it rough, of fellows who got down to the city pretty regularly and had much to tell. In Debbie, he had, for an hour or so, felt the breath of something he had missed out on. Something extra, something more. Now she was dead.
At thirty-six, some woman's problem. An abortion he guessed, though Helen had done no more than raise a suspicion and the old man of course knew nothing at all. So far as Harry knew, all Debbie had been was a high-school science teacher.
It hadn't struck Andy till now, but everything he'd heard of Debbie's doings had come from Helen and he wondered how much more she knew than she let on. Out of loyalty to Debbie no doubt — but also, he thought, to protect him from a side of herself that might be less surprised by Debbie's way of life, and less disapproving of it, than she pretended.
He felt, vaguely, that here too he had missed out. There was something more he hungered for, and occasionally pushed towards, that Helen would not admit. Because for all the twelve years they had passed in the closest intimacy, she did not want him to see in her the sort of woman who might recognise or allow it.
The drive down was uneventful. Harry was silent, but that wasn't unusual. They were often silent together.
All this, Andy thought, must be hard on him. He'd never asked himself how Harry felt about Debbie's being away. Proud of her, certainly, as the only one of them who had got enough of an education to make a new life for herself. Sad to see so little of her. Worried on occasion. Now this.
Andy followed these thoughts on Harry's behalf — he was fond of Harry — then followed his own.
Which sprang from the lightness he felt at having a day off like this in the middle of the week. The sunlight. The high white clouds set above open country. The freedom of being behind the wheel. The freedom too — he felt guilty to be thinking this way — of being off the hook, away from home and its constrictions. And along with all that, the exhilaration, the allure, of a faster and more crowded world “down there” that he would finally get to see and feel the proximity of.
He was surprised at himself. Here he was, a grown man, twelve years married, two kids, seated side by side with his father-in-law, both of them in suits on the way to a funeral, and he might have been seventeen, a kid again, he was so full of expectation at what the day might offer. In some secret place where the life in him was most immediately physical, he still clung to a vision of himself that for a time back there had seemed golden and inextinguishable. He thought he had dealt with it, outgrown it, let it go, and without too much disappointment replaced its bouts of extravagant yearning with the reality of small prospects, work, the life he and Helen had made together. And now this.
He was surprised, ashamed even. What would Harry think? But not enough, it seemed, to subdue the flutter he had felt in his belly the moment the idea of the trip came up, or the heat his body was giving off inside the suit.
They arrived early. To kill the time they drove out to Bondi and sat in the car eating egg hamburgers in greasy paper and watching the surf.
Boardriders miraculously rose up and for long moments kept their balance on running sunlight, then went down in a flurry of foam.
Mothers, their skirts round their thighs, tempted little kiddies too far past the waterline for them to run back when the sea, in a rush, came sparkling round their feet. Surprised beyond tears, they considered a moment, then squealed with delight.
Andy thought of his girls. He should bring them down here, show them the ocean. They hadn't seen it yet. He had only seen it one other time himself.
On their rugby trip they had come down here in the dark, half a dozen of them, seriously pissed, and had chased about naked on the soft sand after midnight, skylarking, taking flying tackles at each other, wrestling, kicking up light in gritty showers, then stood awestruck down at the edge, watching a huge surf rise up like a wall, and roar and crash against the stars.
He glanced sideways now to see what Harry was making of it, this immense wonder that at every moment surrounded them.
“That's South America out there,” Harry informed him. “Peru.”
As if, by narrowing your eyes and getting the focus right, you might actually see it.
Andy narrowed his eyes. What his quickened senses caught out there was the outstretched figure of a long-bodied woman under a sheet, thin as a veil, slowly turning in her sleep.