The Sea & Us Read online

  CATHERINE DE SAINT PHALLE

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2019 Catherine de Saint Phalle

  First published 2019

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design: Josh Durham/Design by Committee

  Typeset in12/18pt Baskerville by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in China by Everbest

  A pre-publication-entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-41-5

  To Elanor Tomazi

  To the poet and musician Jake Core I read in the morning before breakfast,

  To Louie Miller the Rat,

  And to Ryan Tamaki, and to Ryan Tamaki.

  And to Maria Antić who is so far away.

  1

  Fish and chips

  I’M ABOVE A fish and chip shop, standing at the window of an empty room. People are walking in the spring light, each at a different pace. There’s an old man in a black coat and gumboots, there’s a skinny guy with tight jeans and a Ned Kelly beard, there’s a pretty woman with bare arms and barely a gaze to spare, all marching past the shop windows – in and out of the shadows, in and out of the shadows. Eighteen years ago, when I left Melbourne, I felt strange in the world I was turning away from. Now, turning around to stare at the new doona and pillows on the floor, here I am again, at thirty-six – a stranger still.

  I list my few books, my English fountain pen with cartridges, my toothbrush, my electric shaver, my notebook, my iPhone, my three pairs of socks, four pairs of underpants, two T-shirts, two pairs of trousers, puffy jacket, and backpack, all Korean (except for the fountain pen) – as if I were on a desert island. When someone drowns or is put in prison, I’m always struck by the police’s account of the person’s belongings, as if that last summing-up, that last tally, will round off what has happened, or bullet-point what that human being may have become. The faint descriptions, ‘a leather wallet, a blue pullover, a set of keys, a white handkerchief, a whistle, a lead pencil’, feel fuller than a eulogy or a novel foraging into someone’s story – as if there were a stark dignity or a concrete poem in a list of belongings.

  Thinking of lists of disconsolate objects, I have just discovered that the expression ‘flotsam and jetsam’ used to consist of four words: flotsam, jetsam, ligan and derelict. In maritime law, flotsam is the floating wreckage of a ship or its cargo. Jetsam is a part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo, cast overboard or jettisoned (another appealing word) to lighten the load in times of distress, which has washed ashore. Ligan are goods or wreckage lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be reclaimed. Derelict too is cargo on the bottom of the ocean, but which no one has any hope of reclaiming. It can also refer to a drifting abandoned ship.

  It all depends on which one you are.

  After emailing about an ad on Gumtree, I walked (just me and my backpack) into the fish and chip shop called The Sea & Us. In spite of my travel-worn condition, the owner of the shop, a lank-haired, dark-eyed, tallish woman, looked at me and sized me up as if I were trying to sell her something. It never crossed my mind that she was the one selling something to me. Standing there behind her counter, she reminded me of my mother. Yet, strangely, after that instant recoil, she proved to be quite different.

  ‘Well, you travel light. All the way from South Korea, my goodness! Hello, I’m Verity,’ said the woman. Her Irish accent ripples from her. It’s her foreignness, I realise, that’s making me feel at home.

  I like people who make a comment before greeting a perfect stranger. It seems to announce a busy inner life that can’t be switched off on command. Verity wears a white linen apron over her jeans. Her gloomy features, her black hair and greyish skin hide nothing but the sunniest nature. But I couldn’t help staring at her. It was a double take, so much did she resemble my mother, Liběna.

  ‘Are you right? You must be dead on your feet after that long plane ride.’

  A plane ride, like a bicycle or merry-go-round ride. Verity makes things sound ordinary and safe, downplaying them so that anything coming through the filter of her remarks becomes less threatening, almost cosy. She manages this without making things banal either. It’s a strange talent, a kind of inverted Miss Marple swagger that keeps you right there on her doorstep, in that exact spot and no other, on Lygon Street, where the fish and chips are the cheapest and the healthiest, where the tables are the cleanest and you could eat off the floor, as my Czech grandmother used to say. It made my travel weariness vanish because I suddenly knew exactly where I was, and very nearly who I was. It also made me realise how often these two facts slip from my grasp.

  Speaking of hygiene, Verity’s rented rooms have nothing of the pristine cleanliness of her shop. Showing me the stairs with a resigned shrug, she advised me to go up there to ‘have a look’. The contrast started with the steps, a vertical back alley rising towards a grimy landing with three doors, two on the right and one on the left, as if in some Kafkaesque dream.

  Her voice came floating up the steps. I could have been scaling a mast for Captain Ahab.

  ‘The two empty rooms are on the right. You can choose. But the second one down, at the end, is the biggest one, with its own bathroom and its own landing,’ she called.

  ‘Is it locked?’

  ‘No, no, the guy left last week. Just turn the handle. I have the keys down here.’

  The strangest feeling came over me, as if I were fighting a sudden thickness in time. The landing felt like a terra nullius under its two dirty skylights. When I reached the last door, I opened it without effort. The smell, dusty, very nearly foul, held me back in the corridor, then diving into the murky waters I crossed the threshold. It was a small, dismal space, which boasted two other doors, each with a strip of light underneath it. The one on the left led to the bathroom; the one straight ahead led to the room. I stepped into the room first. The windows were so filthy everything was drowning in a sepia light. The papers and empty cardboard boxes that lay on the floor reminded me of clothes on dead bodies and burgled belongings. It was the first place I’d visited, but I liked the private landing, and after I had checked out the bathroom I knew it would look different with a bit of elbow grease and a coat of paint. This was a ligan situation. I closed the doors and climbed down the stairs, almost bumping into Verity’s hopeful expression.

  ‘You interested?’

  She smiled – a lopsided grin, with her head on one side. There was more to it than renting a room. It was as if she were asking me to take something on.

  ‘Hmm …’

  ‘It’s cheap. The wi-fi is included and all you have to pay above the rent is your share of electricity and water.’

  ‘Can I paint the place?’

  ‘You can. I’ll even knock something off the rent if you do.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  She looked stunned and then wrung my hand, pumping it up and down with two of her own.

  ‘I haven’t even given you a price yet! You’re a hopeless businessman.’

  Her ingeniousness reminded me of a young boy, rather than a middle-aged woman. Instead of a lodger, I felt more like a newcomer on a dirt road in a wheaty dusk, surrounded by bronze fields. Rare sounds, voices ringing out in the air, rusting, gawky tractors, bales of hay and this boy and I, for whom, from now on, things could be a little easier … We stared at each other until the fields, the tractor and the golden dusk me
lted away. She took no bond, just two months’ rent, and that was that. Then she gave me the key, taking it from a hook under the counter.

  ‘You can move in tonight if you want.’

  ‘I think I’ll do that coat of paint first.’

  She grinned. ‘Is it as bad as that?’

  I grinned back without answering. Something in me, a hidden Ishmael, instinctively colluded with her, doing my best to have her avoid going up those stairs. I know about hidden rooms you don’t want to be in. I know them when I see them – even in other people.

  I hopped out into the cold, sunny street, winter and spring jostling around, like two giant airy kids. A cold wind slapped me and then a breeze came round the corner, warm and forgiving. I found the nearest supermarket, nestled in the far reaches of Weston Street, and went in to buy some cleaning products.

  It was a strange experience to be in an Australian supermarket again. Here Asian faces say ‘no worries’, here the aisles are wider and the staff are a medley of students, mature women, tattooed, testosterone-fuelled young men, and the occasional beauty – like the one at the checkout.

  I watched her exquisite hands hanging from her slim wrists. They made me think of Billie Holliday’s ‘strange fruit’ for some perverted reason, maybe because extreme beauty often reminds me of death. You could imagine her sipping cocktails on the Riviera in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Yet here she was, looking into people’s tired eyes, handing them their bags of shopping, pouring hard coins into the cash register amid the humming of the fridges, the whirr of the air conditioning and the same old songs on the overhead speakers.

  When I got out of there I cleaned every square inch of my new abode and scoured the bathroom tiles, washbasin, shower and toilet. Then, after a further trip down Sydney Road to Bunnings, I whitewashed the suffering brick walls in a kind of Zen frenzy.

  I learned whitewashing from my Czech grandmother, Maruška. ‘Never paint,’ she told me once. ‘Paint is for Russian and American bozos.’ She hated both nations equally. One had invaded her country after the Germans and the other waved its dollars around and did not live up to its good literature. She culled foreign terms like ‘bozo’ from their novels. Not only words and expressions but also stories popped out of her, flotsam and ligan to be retrieved at will or at random. American stories were the best. She was sure that John Steinbeck was a closet Czech. ‘Whitewash is forever. Walls that have been whitewashed remember. There is no room for rozruch, for pussyfooting around the edges, you slap it on like a man. One part lime, five parts white cement and five parts water.’ She probably whitewashed as many barns as she had read books after the Communists removed her from her job as an art teacher at Prague University. She came to Australia to die, but instead of dying straight away lived on for years – the years it took me to know her and love her. She and my mother Liběna seemed back to front. They did not get on. When they spoke, their words were inside out. Coldly intimate or madly polite – there was no way out of their ‘farewell waltz’.

  When I finished the painting, I cleaned the windows. As I did so, I wondered how Verity could have let the place get into such a state.

  After two days of work, I gave up my hotel room and moved in. And now here I am, sitting in my white raft of a room. The Brotherhood of St Laurence is down the road. Maybe I’ll find a mattress there, even a bed for tonight. It’s ten in the morning. The prospect is mildly exciting. I grab my wallet, get off the floor and step out into the corridor, locking my door behind me.

  ‘Hey, mate.’

  How long has it been since someone called me ‘mate’? The Australian I met in a bar in Seoul last year? For the first time, I realise I’ve missed it. I turn round and see a short man in his fifties, or possibly his forties, scrawny and tattooed, his black hair tied in a ponytail. He’s standing there watching me, his thumbs hooked on his belt as if he were overweight. His caved-in chest, sunken cheeks and black eyes, which seem to be entirely composed of pupils, are searching me as if he were X-raying me for loose change in my pockets or pills in my wallet.

  ‘Hey,’ I echo lamely.

  I’ve always felt uncomfortable because of my height. I’m six foot four in my bare feet, and am developing a stoop to compensate for it. But now my shoulders work their way back into their natural position and I’m grateful to loom over him.

  ‘Fuck, here’s our neighbour,’ he announces to the stale air.

  His ‘our’ feels faintly ominous, as if replicas of him were going to pop out of the other closed doors.

  ‘So whereyafrom?’

  Where am I from? Always a difficult question …

  ‘Well, I’ve been living in South Korea for the last eighteen odd years.’

  ‘Last odd years, eh?’

  I nod once.

  ‘What they call ya?’

  I knew this difficult part would come sooner or later. Verity hasn’t asked me my name yet. There’s something diffident about that woman. I have an old-fashioned name, yet however much it’s laughed at, it feels like an old friend. Some part of me thinks it brings me luck, as if its very uncoolness were an obscure asset, a warding off of ever being too cool for school. When I was a kid, of course, there were other preoccupations. I was too busy being relieved I hadn’t been given a Czech name like Vlada, Zdeněk or Ctibor. But sometimes, as in right this minute, this advantage is not quite so obvious.

  ‘My name is Harold.’ I drive it in before the guttural laugh can gather in the creases of the disgusting carpet, behind the belching wallpaper and in the bug-infested ceiling lamp.

  But he doesn’t laugh. He swings out his hairy hand, covered with skull rings.

  ‘Hi, I’m Placido.’

  I swing out mine and return his monkey grip with gusto. Suddenly I like him. Nothing like having a ridiculous name in common.

  ‘I’m off, Placido. See you later.’

  ‘I’m off too, mate. Pub?’

  ‘Nah.’

  He nods understandingly.

  ‘Not a drinker, mate?’ His tone seems ready to forgive me this failing, as if he were graciously overlooking a limp.

  ‘On occasion.’

  ‘Right.’

  With his palm waving like a pennant above his head, he skips down ahead of me, filling the whole staircase, emanating his particular brand of machismo in each tambourine thud of his cowboy boots. In the street, he walks three doors down and is swallowed whole by the Quarry – a big ochre-red sandcastle jutting out into the street, with pokies, football and all the necessaries – as if he had never existed, nor I, for that matter.

  I wonder if this is a Czech thing, losing one’s existence, suddenly, on the turn of a shoulder.

  My mother’s kitchen was the last place I saw her before I left for South Korea. The wooden table, the window looking out into the dying sunlight, the three slightly wilted roses in their pewter vase, like one of Josef Sudek’s photographs, and her angular face with its odd yet perversely beautiful jawline.

  I had a backpack and did not put it down all the time I talked with her. She wasn’t surprised. Her shrug had been waiting for this further instance of betrayal. When my father left her, the scene was probably not so different. At least it felt like that, in the worn-out light between us. Her fingers formed a tent-like structure on the corner of the scrubbed wooden table. They resembled those of a lawyer about to launch into his opening speech, but she said nothing. I told her about the job I had scored teaching English in Seoul and that I was leaving that night. It was two days after my eighteenth birthday. As I looked at her she nodded with that nod that knows it’s too late, that tomorrow could just as well already be here, and that this moment, drab of meaning, is already gone. Flotsam, jetsam, ligan, derelict …

  Her house was in Richmond, a tiny worker’s cottage flanked on either side by similar cottages, benignly Victorian, yet Czech as soon as you walked through the door, because everything she touched became so, except me – an Australian kid with nothing from the past to recommend him, washed c
lean by this big, welcoming country, and heading off ‘overseas’, but not anywhere near Eastern Europe.

  ‘Bye, Maminko.’

  She smiled at that because at last I wasn’t calling her ‘Mum’, but the soft, slow, clicking Czech word for it, the word that changed from Maminko when I addressed her to Maminka when I talked about her, the word that slipped and shifted on the skates of Czech grammar, even if it was too late for us to be Czech together. Then I never wrote to Maminko or to Maminka; I disappeared.

  Could she still be there in that house or would she have cleared out? Who knows. Did I want to know? Did I want to board a tram in that direction? Go to Richmond? Unearth her? No. Vůbec ne.

  I hadn’t left Czechoslovakia, I hadn’t fled from the Russians, I wasn’t a refugee from anywhere, yet I didn’t belong here either. What I related to were her stories of exile and banishment, maybe because that’s what childhood was for me.

  If I didn’t come back to find my so-called roots, what did I come back for? I suppose to resume the course of my footsteps, as if they had stopped upon leaving here, and they needed to return to their last visible trace – my footsteps in Seoul seeming to have been washed away, part of a dream I’m still clinging to.

  I walk straight down Lygon Street and don’t turn back as I usually do because the last corner of the street usually holds some clue that I’ve overlooked. I soon find the Brotherhood. It’s a big barn of a place filled with lonely pieces of furniture. They loom large and orphaned while a suitably gigantic fan churns the stale air, though it isn’t summer, and hardly even spring yet. By some miracle, I find a new memory foam mattress and a slatted bed frame. An attractive, medieval-looking woman puts a sticker on them both with SOLD written on it. She has a long plait down her back and a wistful smile. I pay her and she calls a young guy working there to help me bring them back to The Sea & Us. He swings over in smooth, smiling strides.

  ‘Hi, I’m Ben,’ he says.

  We haul the heavy mattress away first, steering it down the street. Ben has a wise chuckle that seems to fill the cracks in one’s stray thoughts. I realise, as we progress up Lygon Street, that I have never met anyone quite like him before. This slight epiphany rides the tail end of my perception as we climb the disgusting stairs of the shop. We move along the corridor, instinctively protecting my new possession from any contact with the walls. His right wrist is near my chin. I notice it has a strange bulge as if it had been broken and badly set a long time ago. He steadies the mattress while I grab my key and thrust it into the door. His presence is an odd mix of strength and youthful frailty. The smell of paint assails us.