Southerly Breeze

SOUTHERLY BREEZE

It was a certain cold falling apart that was felt in the air.

Nothing was said exactly, but I sensed that this would be the last trip to Goolwa, and that Mum and Dad would sell “Southerly Breeze”, their beloved beach house.

It was unusual for Mum to be driving. Seemingly equal in all other arenas, my mother almost never drove if my father was in the car. Although it was understandable that since the accident three months earlier Dad had lost his nerve, there was still something unusually dominant in my mother that I had never seen. A slight shift in the balance of power. And my father’s passivity made me uneasy.

They had barely spoken for three months. My father, physically and emotionally broken from the accident, stopped his research. My mother also put hers down to care for him. Both of them were planning to get their PhDs together. It looked now as though they weren’t ever going to do them.  And that fact, more than anything, told me that my parents’ marriage was over. Because it was marine biology that brought them together, as young researchers. Coral and sea-cucumbers and plankton were the glue of their togetherness. They got married on a beach. They bought “Southerly Breeze” before they had bought an everyday family home. They loved the sea and everything in it. And I thought they loved each other. At 12 I still idealized my parents as the ultimate couple. And now, it would be this coast-line and this town, that they loved so much, that would witness the end of their love.

As we drove up to the house, I had a surge of remembrance of all the weekends and holidays we had spent down there. It was more a home to me than the house back in Adelaide which was really somewhere I boarded while I went to school. This was where I felt the most real, and I was grateful that my parents had at least thought to bring me down here one last time before they sold it.

White weather-board with touches of blue. Dabs of paint and pot-plants and odd ceramics made by my mother during her pottery phase. Hardy plants: geraniums, agapanthus, Hebe. Not untidy or unkempt, but not planned either. We just kept the garden neat and saw what plants turned up. .

They always hated the silly name plate on the house when they bought it, but left it there as a testament to its archetypal qualities.  Australian beach houses come in all shapes and styles, and yet there is a generic quality to them. Slightly run-down, even if relatively new, shells in odd spots-around the garden, in the toilet, on the fence-and intrinsically ramshackle.

The inside was pretty much the same. Just wait and see what furniture and knick-knacks turn up. This is another common quality of the Australian beach house: no one would be able to tell you where half of the furnishings came from. Beach houses attract old vinyl chairs, laminate tables, strange artefacts made of coral and awful prints of awful gum-tree paintings. They wear a comforting patina from the years of sand being blown in on the eponymous southerly breeze or tramped in by sun-burnt, damp, happy children. And there is always an old calendar pinned up on the kitchen wall that never seems to get replaced or taken down. Ours was “1986: Pt Eliot Bakery”.

And yet these houses are perfect in their imperfection. Just as my parents’ marriage had been.

It was early afternoon when we arrived and usually at this hour we would dash down Cadell Street to have lunch. But all my parents did this time was unpack the few items they had brought with them, make some instant coffee and sit quietly outside staring straight ahead and not speaking. And although I was safely ensconced in my old room, I could hear the deafening silence coming from the front veranda.

And in that silence, I thought I could hear a small crack, like a stick. It was the sound of my father’s heart snapping in two.

I wanted to stand between him and mum and say to her “It wasn’t his fault. It could just as easily have been you driving.” But I knew it would do no good. It COULD have been her driving, but it wasn’t. It was him. And that fact hung between them like an iron curtain.

They took that curtain with them to bed that night, as soon as the sun went down. No more were they late-night people. And they slept as they had done for the last three months: in post-traumatic comas.

Mornings in Goolwa are glorious, winter or summer. Before the small but steady parade of traffic starts, you can see Ibises wondering around the streets pecking at the bins outside the Corio Hotel. There is often a mist on the Murray out of which the glorious, controversial Hindmarsh Island Bridge rises. And all three wonderful bakeries are pumping out smells to make a grown man weep.

As an adolescent who could happily sleep all day, I always woke early when we were in Goolwa. Sometimes all three of us would walk down to the wharf and have breakfast at the cafe there, gazing at small sailing craft bobbing about ,and being watched by a pelican who would sit on a pylon, eyeing our bacon and eggs.

Needless to say, this didn’t happen that day. Mum and Dad had not really eaten breakfast since the accident. In fact they hadn’t eaten much at all. They seemed to survive on coffee and biscuits and, in my mother’s case, the odd sneaky cigarette.

Mum was standing outside having one of these when Dad found my old scrapbook. I used to keep it at Goolwa because there was always so much interesting detritus I could stick in it. It contained all of my meanderings and passions from the age of four till about ten.

He didn’t say anything to her. Simply thrust it at her with one hand and took her cigarette with the other, holding it in case she might want another puff. She sat down on the old brick garden edging and started to go through it, page-by-page. After a while, Dad put out the cigarette and timidly sat next to her. Gradually, almost like shy teenagers, they moved a little closer and she started sharing the pages with him. Her hands held stuck-down shells, bird feathers, little drawings, stickers from the local servo, my writings and my favourite photographs. She was cradling in her lap me at four, at seven, at nine, at ten. Her face held all the unmistakeable bliss of the mother at one with her child.

And then suddenly, yet without seeming to move, she was cradling my father’s head in her lap too. But as she stroked his hair, she still did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon.

We went down to the beach that afternoon as planned, parking next to the rows of surfboards and sandy wetsuits, and it was Mum who carried me gently out of the car.

The three of us walked down to the edge of the water and wandered in to ankle depth, confronting those huge, ceaseless waves. For the first time in three months I witnessed my parents turn and look at each other. There was a tenderness in the look. A minute thawing. Imperceptible to the naked eye maybe, but to me, their only child who knew them both so well, it was as loud and clear as the whistle of the Cockle Train, which was clunking past in the distance.

And at that moment I knew with delirious certainty that they would not sell the house. Not yet. That they would pause awhile and bask in, not perhaps their love for each other, but their mutual love for this place.

And I saw that their hands touched as they tenderly scattered me over the southern ocean.