Cabestana waterhousei

Pieter’s love affair with his neighbour Charlotte was no secret. In fact most people in the district knew, including Pieter’s wife Patricia.
Pieter was tall and slim with coppery skin and strong white teeth. His handsome face made quite a contrast with that of his wife, who, when she looked in the bathroom mirror, saw only freckles and raw-bones.
Sometimes in the bathroom as she watched him shave, she would catch his eyes assessing her face. She guessed he was thinking the things her father Patrick always said: ‘Plain as a pikestaff Pattie’ usually finishing this thought by hoping some man would marry her one day. He was worried his ‘line’ would not continue. When her three boys grew to look like their handsome father, Patricia felt that she had successfully improved the breed. Unlike her father.
Pieter was a sailor by inclination and a boat-builder by trade but when he married Patricia he came ashore. Now he lived in the midst of vast plains of beef, towers of ant hills and forests of stunted gidgee. And all of it belonged to his wife. Patricia was born to the cattle, as the saying goes.
Every year the family went south on an annual jaunt to the coast, after school had finished but before the Wet began. Stock were moved off the flood plains and extra provisions brought in. Everyone helped with the muster, even Pieter and the boys. It wasn’t until after all this was done that the family could leave for their house at Burleigh Heads.
That year, the last year they ever went, there was something different. Instead of the station manager from Dalgetys taking charge, Patricia put young Mr Scott, the overseer, in to the job.
‘Scotty’s been with us since Daddy died,’ she said. ‘He knows every aspect of the business.’
Pieter knew nothing about Herefords or Brahmins. Nor did he have any say in Patricia’s business. But Scotty, like his boss, was born to the cattle. In fact, he rarely left the Gulf except to travel Patricia’s estates with her. He wanted nothing more than the life he had alongside Patricia, that of being a cattle man.
On the day they were to fly to the coast, everyone stood waiting at the side gate. They were ready to go except Charlotte had not arrived. Patricia chatted with Mr Scott and Pieter got the three children wedged into the ute’s tray with their boogie boards, flippers and goggles piled all around them. This year the boys had a project from their School of the Air teacher: to investigate a sea creature. One of the boys had even brought a magnifying glass.
‘Too much stuff,’ Pieter protested.
But he laughed. He was excited too. The sea was his domain and he missed it out here in the red dust of the northern plains. He would teach his boys more about the ocean, as his father had taught him. The dogs panted and barked by the ute, waiting to chase it down the track to where the Cessna stood ready.
‘Finally,’ Patricia said. She was not one to be kept waiting.
A coil of dust could be seen billowing through the casuarinas where the home cemetery was. Here were the family graves, one for Patricia’s father and another for the first of his two wives. The first wife, Patricia’s mother, had drowned so it was said, and in the middle of a drought. The district thought this strange. His second wife had refused a burial in such a place and her site remained empty of her.
‘I am sorry,’ Pieter said to Patricia. He had a slight Danish accent. ‘I am sorry it is always Charlotte who keeps us waiting.’
But he didn’t look sorry; he looked elated. He was lucky to have such an understanding wife. And such a gorgeous mistress. The incoming car juddered over the cattle grid and into the yard.
‘She is a little spoilt,’ Pieter said, explaining something that his wife knew without explanation. ‘It is because she is pretty.’
Charlotte leaned across to smile at Pieter while her husband talked through the window.
‘Late again,’ he called cheerily. ‘But this time you can blame me not her. I had to fix one of the gates on the way out. The bull was trying to get through to his girls.’
The two women greeted one another without expression.
‘Patricia.’
‘Charlotte.’
Male adoration was Charlotte’s element. When she spoke, it was in a low quiet voice that took some effort to hear. Not that anyone made the effort to listen. The district thought Charlotte showed ‘side’ because of her marriage to a wealthy grazier. Patricia was practically royalty around the place she owned so much, yet she never made others uncomfortable, unless that was her intention.
Charlotte’s appearance fascinated most people. Her face was a perfect oval with large dark eyes and full unsmiling lips. She wore her black hair coiled into a spiral at the back of her head, in a chignon. Instead of the functional outfits the women mostly wore around the yards, or for riding, Charlotte dressed in close-cut linen which showed her excellent figure. Her enigmatic presence drew men to her, like blowies to a cowpat, Patricia thought.
‘Well you’re here,’ Patricia said. She had the voice of someone used to command. ‘So now perhaps we might head off.’ She pronounced it ‘orff’.
She and Pieter drove carefully with the kids shoving one another in the back of the ute while the dogs raced them across the open ground. She breathed in the home smell of eucalyptus and dust, as familiar to her as the freckles on her hands. It was already close to midday. They were starting late because of Charlotte.
The cars pulled up by Patricia’s aircraft, a twin-engined Cessna.
‘Hope you picked up any kids that fell out on the way,’ Pieter laughed as he got out. He was so proud of his three handsome sons. Charlotte had no children.
The men opened the clam shell doors of the plane, hoisted the children in and stowed the family luggage all around them. Charlotte kept her vellum carry-all by her feet. From long practice, it was settled that Patricia sat in the back with the children in case they got airsick. Charlotte took the passenger seat next to Pieter.
‘Goodbye Scotty,’ Patricia said. ‘Let me know if anything floods or burns or starves.’
Then she did something new. Instead of the usual handshake, Patricia leaned forward and kissed her overseer on the cheek. Scotty blushed beneath his battered Akubra.
‘Come back safely,’ he said.
‘Steady on old girl,’ Pieter joked. ‘Hop in before you embarrass the young chap.’
Within minutes they were airborne, with just an aerial view of the landing strip and miniature house below and the two toy cars heading back along the track to the homestead. This time the dogs were in the ute tray where the kids had been, barking into the wind. Up in the air there was no sound but the drone of the engine, and Pieter’s voice as he explained the altimeter reading to Charlotte. She listened with her trademark smile, gazing at her handsome lover.
Patricia’s newly married parents had built their house at Burleigh Heads years before Patricia was born. It was a long box shaped structure, cantilevered at the front so that the house echoed the promontory of the Heads it stood alongside. Its construction was of timber and glass with huge glass windows facing onto the ocean like an observatory. When the weather was bad, the sea misted and fogged the glass, giving the overhanging front a kind of underwater light. In fine weather, the rocky protrusion of the Heads seemed like a fortress alongside the scraggly windblown plants of their garden.
Patricia loved this house, and she loved the intertidal strip of rock pools next to it at the base of the Heads. With her speckled skin and pale blue eyes, she was not good at the beach. The salt stung her eyes and the whipping winds made her ears ache. But every afternoon at low tide, with her head wrapped in a scarf and glasses to protect her eyes, she joined the children in the rock pools. Like their father, the boys were robust sea-going creatures. With their buckets and strainers, they splashed around in water left by the torrential force of the waves, crouching over limpets and barnacles and whelk capsules, and reciting the names they had got from books left at the house: arthropod and crustacean, mollusc and spirobranchus.
The family ate crab most nights, boiled alive in an unseen café on the tourist strip. Pieter usually went out to get them in the late afternoon. All six of them ate together in the open kitchen as soon as he returned.
The children’s table talk was of their school project. They had decided upon the predatory whelk and in their playroom already had a collection of shells from these huge sea snails. They’d found some of its empty egg masses and even a live whelk which they were keeping in a bucket. This they fed on worms and bits of crab smuggled from the kitchen. The boys liked describing the cruel practices of the whelk, the drilling of the mollusc shell and then insertion of its proboscis. And then how it drew out the hapless flesh while the poor creature inside was still alive.
‘Cabestana waterhousei,’ the eldest child intoned in his best baritone, holding up a whelk shell like a microphone. ‘It kills the thing it loves.’
‘They like corpses the most,’ said the middle one, hoping to offend. ‘Dead seagulls. Squashed jellyfish.’
‘Squids with flies eyes.’
The children got the giggles at this.
‘We’re going to put a dead prawn on our chart,’ one of them said.
‘Oh no you’re not,’ their parents said together.
‘Sometimes the whelk jams its foot in the barnacle valve,’ the eldest went on. ‘Then it just smothers it and eats it.’
‘Enough. Enough,’ Charlotte said at the thought of the squashed and the dead. She clapped her hands to her ears.
The children had seen men die from careless guns and run away horses. They had watched animals killed in the slaughter house. They knew that animals lived and died cruelly, just as humans did.
‘But they like eating things alive,’ the littlest boy persisted with delight. ‘The taste is better.’
‘Not listening,’ Charlotte trilled, bending forward to dig the meaty flesh out of a claw.
Patricia looked at Charlotte’s hair, coiling upwards from the back of her head, just like a whelk’s cone. ‘Charlie-whirley’ the boys called her behind her back, after her spiral of hair.
‘You cannot stop them Charlotte,’ Pieter laughed. ‘They are boys.’ He beamed at his handsome children.
‘They see their prey with their tentacles,’ one of the boys explained to Charlotte. He circled a finger in the air, like a probing limb and aimed it at her hair.
‘They smell with them too,’ the middle child said, putting a hand towards Charlotte’s bottom and pretending to smell.
‘Enough,’ Pieter said. But his eyes showed merriment.
Charlotte was a child of the coast, and a fine surfer. She could read the tidal movements of the bay as easily as Patricia could assess a stud bull or Pieter a yacht. But when she was with Pieter, she kept her coil of hair tucked into a tight bathing cap and wore goggles to keep the salt out of her eyes. Her lover was not to see her with eyes and nose sluiced by salt water and hair stiff with salt.
People in the district wondered aloud how the affair was conducted.
‘Where does she sleep?’ they asked one another.
By ‘she’ they meant Charlotte. If asked, Patricia would have said. Charlotte took the guest suite at the back of the house. Pieter and Patricia were in the main suite at the front. The three boys slept together in a ‘sleepout’. People wondered at Patricia’s acceptance of the affair not understanding that keeping Pieter busy suited her purposes.
‘So plain,’ they mouthed towards one another. ‘Took after the father.’
As though that were good reason for her husband’s treatment of her.
Patricia was not a good swimmer but in the afternoons when the tide was low, she ventured in with the children. This was often the time of day that Pieter and Charlotte pursued their affair. If they were not on the beach then no-one returned to the house until after four, something understood by them all.
‘Charlie-whirley’s got Dad in her fang,’ they laughed naughtily. The boys loved the natural world in all its ferocity. ‘Like a funnel web.’
‘More like a whelk,’ Patricia thought. ‘A great big blood-sucking blob.’
The bay where they paddled was beside the promontory of the Heads, an inlet which was unsafe because of the rips and currents that formed there. But it looked deceptively calm. The children played in the shallows, mostly lying on the sandy bottom of the water with their snorkels or drifting on their little boards.
One afternoon, a strong rip began dragging them out to sea. The biggest boy got back to shore, and the smallest was close enough for Patricia to hold onto. But the middle one was towed further and further out. Patricia was beside herself. If she went to his rescue she could drown them both. It was early afternoon. The children knew that Daddy was ‘busy’ with Charlotte. Patricia could think of nothing but her drowning child.
‘Somebody help.’
She began running mindlessly to and fro, attracting a surfer at the Heads waiting for his next break. He quickly coasted in to grab the struggling boy.
‘Come on mate,’ he said, dragging the child onto his board where he lay flat, resting his face on the cool watery surface. Eventually the two came gliding onto the sand on one long wave. In his mother’s arm again, and inside her huge beach towel, her son clung to her. Patricia, feeling the trembles of his butterfly bones, wept with relief.
That night at dinner the children could think of nothing but this adventure.
‘He towed my boogie board Dad,’ the rescued one said. ‘And he put me on his board and we caught the biggest wave in.’
He demonstrated with his little arms.
‘Big as a windmill. It was awesome.’
‘Come off it,’ said his big brother, jealous of the attention not coming his way. ‘You were just scared about nothing.’
‘Fraidy cat,’ the youngest said.
‘That’s enough,’ Pieter roared. No-one had ever heard him yell this way, not even to the dogs.
He turned to his wife.
‘Some stranger rescued my son?’
‘A surfer,’ Patricia said.
From his tone she knew he was taking the high moral ground. This infuriated her. But she spoke calmly.
‘We were lucky he was there.’
She wouldn’t say much in front of Charlotte. But Pieter was not so reluctant.
‘What were you doing letting them get into trouble in the ocean?’
Even the boys saw this was unfair.
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ they said. ‘Mummy always keeps us safe.’
‘Always?’ Pieter was too angry to listen. ‘Apparently not.’
‘You know I am careful Pieter,’ Patricia said. ‘And the water was shallow. It looked calm.’
‘There are rips Patricia,’ Pieter said. ‘Rips and currents. You have been warned so many times.’
How dare her chastise her in front of his mistress.
‘I can’t help it if you’re not free to watch over your own children,’ she said.
There. Now the words were out.
They didn’t normally quarrel, and never like this. Something had changed. Charlotte gazed at her plate. She and Pieter had brought their sex life to some new height this summer. Now this. The child had been rescued, wasn’t that what mattered? Outside in the darkness the ocean crashed remorselessly onto the sand.
‘Why didn’t you send one of the boys to get me?’ Pieter demanded.
‘We didn’t because the two of you were obviously ... busy.’ Patricia spoke in a cold level voice, staring straight at her husband. She ignored Charlotte entirely.
Pieter stood up. Although he was a slender man, he seemed to loom over the table.
‘It is always my children who come first,’ he said. ‘Always.’
He glared at Patricia. The boys were upset.
‘He is angry with me and with himself,’ Patricia whispered to them. ‘Not with you.’
Pieter took up his windcheater and began putting it on.
‘There won’t be any more swimming without my supervision,’ he said. ‘And that is final.’
He crossed to the front door. ‘Now I am out for a walk. Alone.’
There was enough noise from the wind and ocean to drown the awkward silence which followed. Charlotte toyed with the long fork she used for eating crab. But she had lost her appetite. By the time the table was cleared away and the dishwasher stacked, she was in her room.
Every week, Patricia rang Mr Scott. He was a man of the bush and used to his own company. But he was a good listener. At first Patricia’s confidence in him had been overwhelming. Her family were great patrons of the area. They kept whole townships employed. Scotty, while also a child of the land, came from a far more modest background. It took him some time even to address Patricia by her first name. Now, they went everywhere together. They were so close that and people in the district joshed him about being sweet on the boss. At this he blushed but said nothing.
That week Patricia told him of the near drowning. Where was their father, he wanted to know.
Patricia cleared her throat. It was delicate. ‘In the house Scotty. With Charlotte.’
‘The girlfriend shouldn’t be there mate,’ was his advice.
Scotty called everyone ‘mate’. Patricia found it comforting and friendly.
‘Are you supposed to do everything?’ Scotty asked. ‘Jeez, a man should keep a lookout for his own family.’
He was always direct like this. It was why she liked his company.
Although Patricia agreed with his view, she had never said it out loud. She put food on the table and provided shelter and work for Pieter. The least he could do was watch over his sons and not blame her when he didn’t.
‘If I was there I’d look after you all,’ Scotty said.
‘I know you would,’ Patricia said.
After the rescue, Pieter no longer spent much time with Charlotte. Instead, he surfed and played with his children, while his mistress sunned herself on a straw mat. Every day Charlotte dressed in one of her spotted bikinis and carefully selected beach coat and hat. With toenails painted to match her sandals and her perfect tanned legs and flat stomach, she turned heads as she crossed the sand to her spot. But not Pieter’s.
Even Patricia noted the difference and with some satisfaction. Charlotte looked wonderful, as she always did, but Pieter’s focus was upon his children.
‘I am changing my ways darling,’ he said to his wife. They lay in bed that night after sex she had acceded to, but not much enjoyed.
‘I will be a better husband and father.’
When Patricia had first learned of her husband’s infidelity the pain had been intense. But she had accommodated it, at first because he was important to the boys, but later for other reasons. Patricia had her businesses to run, and the welfare of a great many people to consider. Looking perfect, keeping her man interested—that was for women like Charlotte who advanced themselves through men. Later again, at least for the last year, Patricia realized she was no longer in love with her husband and that for her the marriage was over.
‘The boys are fine Pieter,’ Patricia said. It was strange to find him turning back to her, when it was too late.
‘But they did not turn to me,’ he whispered. This had upset him greatly. ‘When I am their father.’
There were only two days left before their holiday finished and they flew back to the Gulf. Pieter spent most of this time in Coolangatta preparing for the flight home. The boys were excited to be getting back. They missed their dogs and horses and the orphaned calves they raised to sell. The whelk was still alive in its salty prison. They planned on taking it home with them.
Pieter planned on leaving Coolangatta early. He wanted to get home while it was still light. He was glad their holiday was coming to an end. Charlotte was not to come with them any more. The boys were making jokes about her.
‘One last swim,’ he promised everyone on the day before they left. ‘As soon as I am back from the airport.’
But traffic and paperwork delayed him and the tide had already turned before Pieter returned to the beach. The sea was climbing steadily up the sand to where the women and children sat, Charlotte with her knees up and her chin resting on them, the boys digging underground tunnels. Charlotte assessed the ocean. She had a plan. There was a telltale streak of sand marking the water as it streamed back past the promontory. This was a rip and it was flowing strongly out to sea at that point. She waited calmly for the signal they could all go in. Conditions were perfect.
Pieter stood on the beach as Patricia and the boys took to the shallows. He still had the physique for speedos.
‘My God,’ Charlotte thought, admiring him. The two of them were made for one other. She turned and began to swim slowly out into the deeper water. She allowed her body to float into a cool patch where the sandy floor dropped, and there she waited. The waves rolled through. She was sorry to be going west again. It was only Pieter who kept her there.
‘Patricia,’ Charlotte called. “It’s wonderful out here, so refreshing. And quite safe.’
She stood to show that the water was lapping at her ribs and not deep. But right behind her, she knew, was the gulley which had altered the water temperature. Anyone who understood waves would know there was a trough just behind her.
‘Plant your feet into the sand, like this,’ she called. ‘It’s so cool. And the last day. You must come and enjoy it.’
‘I will watch over you,’ Pieter yelled to his wife. He would be responsible, and he’d make amends. ‘Enjoy the water you two. One last time.’
So that was how Patricia got caught in a rip, by dropping into the deep gulley and then being towed out to sea by a powerful current. In a rip it is best to swim with the flow, gradually moving to the edge until out of its pull. Charlotte knew this. But the natural instinct is to swim straight for land and Charlotte knew this too. As the power of the water drew Patricia out to sea, her struggles to get back to land slowly drained her energy away. Then all Charlotte needed to do, she planned, was feign her own difficulties and Pieter would then rescue her over his wife. This way he could have the woman she knew he really wanted. Herself.
But Pieter ran straight into the surf and struck out towards Patricia.
‘Stay together,’ he yelled over his shoulder to the boys. ‘Get out of the water.’
He swam powerfully, his head above the water and his eyes fixed on the spot where he had seen last seen Patricia.
‘Help,’ Charlotte called. ‘Over here.’
But even if Pieter had wanted to rescue Charlotte, he was now caught by the current himself. Pieter was a good swimmer but had learned in the more placid waters of Europe. The tempestuous Pacific was a different matter.
By the time he reached Patricia he was spent. She threw herself at him, hanging on so hard they both went under. Then as if possessed, she began to fight. Exhausted and struggling he held her aloft but the more she felt his strong hands on her body the greater her strength seemed to be against him. Finally a surfboat roared alongside and he pushed her towards it. She grabbed the gunwale, clutching the slippery edge while kicking out wildly with her feet. Pieter’s energy was gone, sapped in his last efforts to save his wife. A wave took him under as he approached the boat again, and Patricia’s flailing foot struck his chest. When another kick smacked his face he gave up his struggle and just as Patricia was pulled onto the surfboat he began his long descent to the ocean floor. Getting to him was impossible. The boat was in danger of being dashed against the Heads. So it was left for his body to roll in and out with the currents and tides until two days later he came ashore for the last time. They found him wedged back among the rocks, his handsome face cut and bruised and his body unrecognisable.
After the funeral, Scotty prepared to fly them home in the Cessna. He had arrived quickly to be with Patricia in the awful days that followed. It was Scotty who organised the service and cremation. And it was Scotty who spoke to Charlotte about the return journey. The aircraft would not be available for Charlotte’s use.
As the children waited on the driveway, Scotty packed up the hire car they would leave at the airport at departure. They stood close together with their luggage, pillows and teddies, boogie boards and shells. The oldest boy sweated in his father’s windcheater. As soon as Patricia spied the bucket with its whelk, she banned it at once.
‘Ugh. I’m throwing that awful thing out,’ she said. ‘Foul creature.’
She took the bucket and emptied it on the sand in front of the house.
‘Don’t Mum. It’ll die,’ the eldest said. He was trying not to cry.
‘It’s not coming back with us,’ she said. She hated it.
They left Coolangatta Airport at dawn, this time with Patricia in the passenger seat, the children in the back, and Scotty at the controls. As the plane soared up and out over the sea, and the enormous rim of the sun was showing across the horizon, she turned towards him and said in a low voice ‘Thank you. For everything.’
She picked up his large knobbly hand and felt the calluses he’d got from years of fixing fences and taming stock. She and Scotty were like the beasts they worked with. Some day they too would decay back into the soil they came from—tough and weathered and of the land.
‘We’ll talk tonight,’ he said, patting her hand, ‘when we’re all safely home’.