Nora knows about these people, make no mistake; she’s been trying to disentangle her life from theirs since the day, more fool her, that she agreed against her better judgement to go through with the marriage to Felicity’s middle son. Even now, unhitched, she’s battling with the ties that bind.
Halley is still too young, too in love with her father, to share her mother’s prejudice. But she is also unable to reconcile Nana’s elegance with the rougher, more working-class qualities of her sons. You never see a crumb on Nana’s tailored dresses, never mind a crease. Nana, everyone has to agree, has class.
About her husband, though, Halley didn’t know, since Grandpa Murphy was long dead.
What she’s picked up, little scavenged pieces, is that he had a wild temper and a liking for drink. Was a philanderer involved in whaling. Which seems far too little to make a person real.
Why does she remember some snippet about Grandfather Murphy sozzled and trying to row back to the whaling boat when it had left port without him? Never a clock-watcher at the best of times, he’d been particularly unmindful of the time that day, being otherwise engaged at an establishment in Point Road called Smugglers’ Inn. Which Halley thought would be an exciting Famous Five adventure at Pirate’s Cove, but really it was only a smelly men’s bar.
She knows places like that, because they’ve walked past on their way to the beachfront. A bar always had swing doors, split into two stiff, varnished wooden wings like a cockroach exoskeleton. Behind, you sensed a sharp clinking, softened by a darkened hum. If a man came out as you were passing, it was always the same white man, his face doughy, nose large and red. Then Nora pushed the children ahead on the pavement, hurrying along. But she couldn’t hide the smell, or the sign. It said Kroeg. Which was crook and spoeg, so you knew exactly what kind of man it was.
Her unknown grandfather Halley tries to imagine as a man in a hurry launching a rowing boat out of his sloshing headache into the open sea. She can’t think from where, since every point along the wavering sand and stumbling, rocky shore seems as improbable as the next. She’s sure he tried hard, her grandfather, made a sterling effort as men were supposed to, but tugging at the awkward oars she sees him so poegaai he’s unable to scull, so he’s soon swamped and topsy-turvy under he goes to his watery grave.
Halley, her mother says, sick to death of questions she cannot answer, Give it up! Forget about him. He was nothing. Certainly nothing to you, my girl. Though she thought how Mark’s father was a sponge and an old soak.
Your grandfather, so-called, he doesn’t matter and I couldn’t care less. What difference could he make to anything?
Halley doesn’t know. Forgets if it was difference she was thinking about.
Some days, Halley feels she can only breathe under the sea, which is dangerous and polluted, but it’s a challenge that’s been set for her. It could be that someone’s held her head under water or something’s bearing down drowning she’s drowning though who and why makes no difference to the flailing in her lungs and so she makes herself unique, a creature unknown to biology or myth, neither denizen of the deep nor fabulous mermaid, able to survive because no one knows her like, not seasoned fisherman or mad scientist.
Beneath the sea, not everything’s the trap of the bathroom, where to stop the blood from messing where it can’t be cleaned, she must lean herself over the bath and close her eyes while the red gushes from her nose, splattering onto the white. Like headaches and bruises, nose bleeds are nothing, lovey, so she mustn’t worry. But for a child it’s too much as if she’s dying, and even later, when it’s over and she’s lying on her back in the darkened room, the wet cloth over her eyes and the cold key under her nose to stop the flow, she gags on the plug of mucus that’s congealed in the back of her throat. When she manages to snork it down, pulling silently against her mother’s disgust, there’s a thick gobby clot to spit onto the hanky. A red, frilled relation of the intertidal sea slug.
Under the oily harbour waters, nothing escapes her, though she is neither hunting nor hiding, only finding a shape for the things in life she cannot alter. When she is so low, down deep, having descended through all the unmarked levels, she can look up through the dirtied water glass, seeing keels like gulls cut a wake through waves, or bob about, toy tubs in the bath.
She flickers away. Down in this water, against concrete pilings, enormous hulls segue into a giant, blank-faced underwater city, all the characteristic signatures submerged, and scrawled about with painterly crabs, and schools of quick, stripy fish that swerve as one from her projected touch. They can’t know. Yet they want nothing to do with her.
Beneath the lapping meniscus, a curved caul which on calm days is stretched to near-linear precision but buckles and lurches with bad weather, beneath, as if fallen from the liquid sky, is the bilgewater life of settled garbage. Almost illegible among the particled silt, shapes becoming other than they were, are rusted cans bellied into mussel banks, hauls of slimy eelish rope. Sheer plastic bags, wavering like trapped jellyfish.
Swimming deeper down across the bar out of the mouth into the body of endless water, she tires, and rests a while upon a length that can only be pipeline, although its tubular surface has been claimed as much as all the other debris by a film of whatever life can manage to take hold. As she lies chest down, arms and legs hanging sideways in the drift like kelp, unwilling to embrace the pipe, the barnacles prickle her torso. The life of the pipeline thrums through her until she seems to be generating the close-mouthed noise from an internal engine, and her lungs threaten to explode.
The first time she sees a body it is eerily white. So terribly white. It’s only a decaying shark, cast back or dead in the wasting water. This is what she tells herself, yet still she is brought up sharply by the fact of it. Lifeless. Life minus. Life less.
Everywhere is evidence of who she is, an ever-ghostly merging with the water that filters through her girl’s gills. And then there’s the truly submerged tenth, that part of the surface which haunts the buried margins, swept away and cast out, over the hills and far away.
When she’s up again on the surface, the house behind the Ridge is an imaginative extravaganza though it’s modest in size, not much more than a cottage which has grown to accommodate a growing family with self-built add-ons. Yet it seems to occupy the narrow quarter plot with all the faded, decadent sprawl and crumbling aplomb of a minor mansion.
The house has been made by Byron, is being made, under the influence of his off-the-wall inspirations, among which is tawny Aunty Elda. The feel is Spanish, although extremely loosely, as Nora likes to emphasise of the family as a whole.
Terracotta tiling and a square courtyard; fat pillars; flamboyant trelliswork that never crosses anybody’s mind as standing for burglar bars. And the walls! Uncle Byron splatters on a knobby plaster with a wonderful contraption. He pours the sloppy dagha inside and sets the dial, then points his workman’s weapon at the wall and cranks away. Instantly, a slight, slurried crunching as the two cylinders rotate against each other in opposite directions, and speckles of cement spray out under centrifugal force.
Eureka! Halley declared in amazement the first time she saw this happening. But was embarrassed when Uncle Byron winked at her. It’s called Spanish render, doll, he said, and then she thought he was correcting her because probably eureka’s not a Spanish word.
Since then she’s often toyed with the beautifully balanced idea of rendering a surface Spanish, and of rendering something Spanish by means of surfaces. And maybe – she can get herself quite excited – could be you could do other countries too, different nationalities. Though also she’s not sure about how she’d make the divisions, as down back of the Ridge, all is sinuous abstraction.
It’s the drink, Nora’s said. Thinking also of the constant loud music, of Elda’s draped, impromptu garments. The windows always without curtains, only gaudy, sequined saris wisped over poles.
Uncle Byron doesn’t do anything with regard for the regular, Halley knows; and her mother says he’s an out-and-out alcoholic