Shallow Breath

5

Desi




Desi wakes on the beach at dawn, and trudges back to the shack. After fifteen months sleeping on a lumpy, cold mattress in a small, stifling room, she can hardly believe she is home. The shack is Desi’s anchor. Whatever has happened, wherever she has gone, she always ends up here again, as though she too has her foundations buried beneath the earth. While she loves her brother dearly, the shack is full of her earliest memories, when she’d had her mother all to herself. While Charlie was on his boat or down the pub, Hester sang, baked, and became so proficient at growing a wide array of vegetables that she was always giving extras away to grateful neighbours. And best of all, as far as Desi was concerned, in one corner of the garden there stood a motley collection of cages, where Hester nursed small, injured animals back to life, tending to them until they could be released. There were a few permanent residents in those early days: Chuckles, a one-winged kookaburra; Tilly the blind cockatoo; even a three-legged possum. Her father ignored them, but endured this quirk of his wife’s character. Desi and Hester loved them all.

She peeps in the front window and sees that Pete is still fast asleep on the sofa. She doesn’t want to wake him, so she tiptoes around the rear of the house. It reminds her of one of her earliest memories. She had been searching for her mother in the small garden, swatting at the flies that clustered around her face, determined to get inside her mouth and eyes. She had been hurrying, in case hungry snakes were waiting in the bushes, wincing as the spiky grass stabbed the soft soles of her feet. The air was shrill with hundreds of screeching white-tailed black cockatoos raucously stripping the nearby casuarina trees. And it was then that she had seen the strangest sight, next to the washing that flapped and twisted violently on a line strung between the house and the water tank: an enormous silver fish with a crescent-moon tail.

It had been hanging by a hook from the tank, a tea towel brushing it now and again as it waved in the wind. It was surely twice as long as three-year-old Desi, its mouth gaping as though still in its last gasp for life, its large, round, vacant eye searching heavenwards. She had been mesmerised, stalking it across the grass, as though it might still move. Gingerly, she had reached out to touch it, and rapidly snatched her hand away from its hot, drying body. As she studied her fingers, she saw they were covered in tiny silver flecks, like magic.

When she was older, she had witnessed her father posing proudly in the garden for photographs with the largest of the fish he had caught. Kangaroos came to graze on the lawn every night, until they grew too clever at getting into the vegetable patch and a fence went up around the property. They had stayed visible on the other side for a while, but she hadn’t seen a kangaroo near the house for years. The snakes and flies were still around, of course, but the cockatoos had dwindled into small groups that sometimes flew overhead.

It is so still nowadays in comparison, she thinks, as she closes the back door quietly, and makes her way to her own bed. And so quiet, except for the cicadas’ ceaseless, chirping calls for a mate.




Once in bed, Desi falls asleep again, and when she wakes up she is alone. Pete has crept out quietly, leaving the blankets neatly folded on the sofa. She checks the clock and is surprised to see it’s nearly ten. It is time to find Maya, and she gets ready in a hurry, ignoring the deepening bite of nerves.

On the drive between Two Rocks and Lovelock Bay, the ocean disappears from sight. The view becomes a carpet of bushland spreading to the horizon, growing taller and denser the further Desi goes. The dull greens and browns are occasionally splashed with the vibrant orange flowers of an Australian Christmas tree, but otherwise all is concealed. Desi has long understood the illusion. She knows that life scuttles and scurries beneath branches or leaf piles, or rests until the heat of the day has passed. That stillness only truly exists once the developers have reached the bushland, and swept it all away in the path of progress. But here human influence has not yet extended beyond fragments of sheared tyres and the empty bottles and cans that mark the route.

When she reaches the turning to the bay, she sees that nothing has changed. A small sign for the caravan park marks the start of the unsealed road. Over the years the track has hardened, but there’s still a good few kilometres of corrugated dirt ahead, and she hopes that Chug will make it after having spent so long idle. Her palms are clammy on the steering wheel as she takes the turn.

The first time Desi’s parents brought her out here, she was sixteen and Jackson was four. She had heard them talking in whispers after she went to bed. She knew her father’s hands were getting worse, and he wouldn’t be able to keep crayfishing for much longer. What she didn’t realise was how much her parents longed for isolation again, to retreat from the vibrant tourist town that Two Rocks had become; not until they had taken her along this dusty old track, their car bumping and pitching until Desi’s head throbbed. At one point, an emu had run out of the bush, its long neck twitching, startled eyes registering them, before it bolted away, two bandy-legged youngsters scrabbling in its wake. From that moment they had Jackson’s approval in the bag, but Desi regarded the empty landscape with dismay. The only redeeming factor was the beach – an endless stretch of unblemished white sand in both directions.

She remembers how her mother put an arm around her, while Desi tried hard to keep the tears at bay. ‘There will be a house by the time we get here. Your dad is making a tidy profit on the boat. It will be much bigger than the shack.’

‘I love the shack.’

Hester sighed. ‘And you’ll love it here, I promise, when we’ve set up the campsites and the holidaymakers arrive.’

‘I’ll be trapped, so I guess I’ll have to.’

‘Perhaps you could stay with Rebecca now and again,’ Hester said.

Desi had looked hard at her mother. Was she really that naive? Whenever they saw Marie nowadays, she barely said a word. And she wouldn’t sit still, always jumping up to make tea or clean up, even in other people’s houses. Although Desi hadn’t witnessed any more violence, now and again she couldn’t miss the bruises, concealed beneath sleeves that were repeatedly tugged down. Since Desi had given her word, she and Rebecca had never spoken openly of Rick’s temper. However, to keep her dreams alive she would have to find somewhere to stay in Two Rocks, because she needed to be close to Atlantis.

Atlantis Marine Park had opened to huge fanfare in the early eighties, and quickly garnered a reputation as one of the state’s premier attractions. It had transformed the town from a sleepy fishing village to a hub of bustling tourism. It had won awards and drawn numerous celebrity visitors, from Rolf Harris to Torvill and Dean. It had an aquarium, a boating lake, a huge novelty clock and a seal show, but that wasn’t why it held Desi in its thrall. She had been working in its fast-food kiosk for a while now, but she cared about nothing except its dolphins.

There were three males – Rajah, Frodo and Nero – and four females – Mila, Rani, Lulu and Karleen. These seven dolphins were the undisputed stars of the park. Desi had followed their progress from the moment they arrived, driven one by one to their new home, in specially designed slings on the flatbed of a ute. They had been caught locally, and her father had been commandeered to help as they were lowered carefully into the water. Desi had gone to numerous shows, sitting first at the poolside and later in the grandstand, as the costumes, the tricks and the backdrops became increasingly elaborate. She had been invited to stroke their streamlined bodies, finding them like wet silk, and had gaped awestruck as they leapt through metal hoops that were raised higher and higher, sailing straight past one another, always perfectly centred. One dolphin could swipe a ball so hard with his tail that it flew over the top of the grandstand, out of sight. Together, they took paintbrushes in their mouths and daubed primary colours on canvases. If conducted, they sang strange squealing songs in chorus into a microphone. They danced on their tails, their gleaming bodies shimmying above the water. They played catch, and put hoops through their beaks and towed boats carrying children. The trainers could even hold on to their fins for a ride, and as a finale the prettiest girls would stand on their backs and wave as the dolphins swam around the pool. They were incredible, and Desi longed more than anything to be part of their lives.

She had kept her plan secret, because she knew her father had other ideas for her. When they had visited Lovelock Bay that first time, he had taken her down to the beach and pointed to a short rock that jutted from the water, at least five hundred metres away. ‘You can practise swimming there and back,’ he said, ‘and when you’re quick enough we’ll get you in a pool.’ Desi had been swimming in the ocean for almost five years. She was already strong and fast, but there was no sign that Charlie was planning to start driving her on the eighty-kilometre round trip to the nearest club pool. She had long grown immune to his talk. She suspected that the swimming was just a ruse to keep her out of the way. On the day they had driven out to Lovelock Bay, it had felt like the end of her life.

As she traverses the same track all these years later, Desi is surprised at how vividly she can still conjure those old memories. What would she say if she could talk to that teenage girl with her fierce, secret dreams, and her desperation that morning as she watched them dashed? Would she let her into the secrets of the future: that she would briefly be one of the showgirls? Or would she try to turn her young mind away from her ambitions, because they had set in motion the chain of events that had led her here, driving reluctantly up this uneven road, estranged from her father and her daughter, bewildered by the path her life had taken.

Chug has been determinedly bouncing along the track with Desi lost in her memories, and to her surprise she is at the gate. She returns to the present as she sees her father kneeling in the garden. She is shocked at how old he appears. His shoulders and cheeks have concaved, while his pot belly has grown ever larger underneath his grubby white singlet. He is working slowly, his fingers as swollen and twisted as tree roots, but she has no doubt he will stubbornly ignore the pain until the day he dies. Her mother has been gone for a decade, and Charlie had always relied on Hester’s practical care. Desi can see the neglect in his creased, unwashed clothes, his unkempt, untrimmed tufts of hair, his grey stubble and sagging jowls. She has tried hard to love him as a father, but they have never been friends, and she doubts they ever will be now.

She sees him glance up at the noise of the van, then recognise it and look down at his plants again, as though he can pretend he hasn’t seen her. It would probably be much easier for him if she simply disappeared from his life.

She climbs slowly out of the van and walks towards him. Determined to be civil, she stops. ‘Hello, Dad. How are you?’

He stands up, wipes his forehead with the back of his arm and takes a long look at her. Apparently he doesn’t like what he sees, as he gestures with his trowel. ‘She’s in the van over there.’ And then he bends down and carries on. As though he knows and cares nothing of what she might have been through over the last few years.

Desi has long let go of any desire to shout and scream at him. To do so would further convince him that he knows the truth of her. She turns and glances towards the caravan a short distance away, praying that she gets a better welcome from her daughter.