To the Sea Read online

  She was amazed at how many paintings there were. A few were hanging on the brick walls or on picture wire from the rafters but most were leaning up against the lower walls. In some places, they were stacked five or more deep. A huge canvas was balanced on an easel in front of a paint-spattered wooden chair in the middle of the room under the largest skylight.

  ‘Do you want to talk me through it all?’ asked Sadie.

  ‘Nah. I just paint them. I’ll leave you to it and go and get some glasses from the kitchen.’ They had bought a flagon of wine in Glenferrie Road.

  Sadie walked around the huge room trying to take it all in. She didn’t know enough about art language to know what style it was or what school he belonged to. But she had spent a lot of time in some of the best museums and art galleries in the world. She knew Tim’s paintings were good. They were neither abstract nor realistic. They would have some sort of modernist label. They were all oils and appeared to have a person or people somewhere in them. There were also lots of stylised portraits. She recognised a few of Tim’s friends from the Monkey Bar. Modigliani came to mind initially but it was just a hint and she dismissed the comparison quickly. Many of the paintings were inner-city scenes with people in shadow or disappearing around corners. There were two big canvases at one end that were clearly Ireland. These were in multiple shades of green and grey and the land and people were overpowered by the huge churning skies and green overbearing hills.

  The shorter end wall opposite the bed was covered in canvases with one big one about two metres square surrounded by seven or eight smaller canvases. They were all Sadie.

  The smaller paintings were head or half body studies. Sadie with her head down and her hair falling across her face; Sadie looking straight at Tim with an embarrassing frankness; pensive Sadie; smiling Sadie; Sadie looking over a glass of whiskey; abstract Sadie; Sadie from every angle.

  But the central canvas dominating the wall was extraordinary. It was mostly deep blues, indigo and black with flashes of white. It was Sadie sitting on what could have been a rock against a blue–black turbulent background. She was looking into the distance beyond the viewer but her face was so blurred as to be almost featureless. And yet it was the very image of her. Her white hair was flying out from her head in Medusa-like strands, her fringe thick and low over her eyes. There were no clear lines anywhere and, as she walked closer to the canvas, it blurred into a lumpy blue and black haze with only the glaring white of her hair as contrast. Each step back revealed its clarity and depth. Viewed at different angles, the girl in the painting looked more like Eva than Sadie. But a tilt of the head or a step backwards and it was Sadie again. Sadie liked that better. She wanted her mother to be a long way away from this room and this moment.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Tim had come back and was standing just inside the door, leaning against the wall holding two pink wine glasses and a plate with half a chocolate cake on it. Sadie didn’t know how long he had been standing there.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’m pretty happy with it,’ he said plainly. ‘I painted it over three days, working like a madman night and day, long before I even spoke to you. And it’s you.’

  ‘It feels like me. How can you do that?’

  ‘Ah, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be a wise man,’ he replied, walking over to her, ‘and a rich one. I wish I could do it every time. Maybe the trick is to be besotted with the subject.’

  And that night, for the first time, she stayed with Tim. She knew she would never leave him.

  Sadie lived the happiest life that could be lived by anyone there in the stable. It felt permanent from the start. She loved the evenings best; Tim painting, her writing insights into Plato, while Talking Heads or Lou Reed or The Doors played on the stereo, the pot-belly stove glowing and sputtering. The sex was great and there was a lot of it but, looking back, it was the peaceful evenings together, coffee made from the old enamel pot which lived on top of the stove, Tim smiling at her from behind a canvas as he worked, dancing together and singing loudly to their anthems; and then that most sublime time of the day, lying in each other’s arms in bed as they fell into sleep. These were the memories that lingered and could still pierce Sadie’s heart unexpectedly.

  In the second Christmas holidays after they had moved in together, Sadie took Tim home to spend the summer with her family at Rosetta.

  Her mother was more reserved than usual but her moods were not as upsetting to Sadie as they had once been. It no longer felt important that her mother understand Sadie or forgive her for whatever it was that Sadie had done. Sadie had Tim and every other relationship in her life would fall into place somewhere in the slipstream of that love. And if a relationship with her mother couldn’t be part of that, Sadie no longer cared. She could live a wonderful life without it.

  That summer slid into the sparkling blue, glorious days and weeks Sadie remembered from her childhood. Tim didn’t exactly gain his sea legs but he was happy sitting on deck while Sadie sailed them around the coast and into deserted little bays where she taught Tim how to snorkel and dive for abalone. Tim and her father talked about painting long into the nights when everyone else had gone to bed.

  Tim was awestruck by Rosetta. Like most people, he had never seen anything like it and he spent hours exploring the house and getting to know its paintings, sculptures, books and stories.

  One evening, sitting on the front verandah in the late afternoon gloaming, Sadie listened as Tim asked Eva about the stories carved into the verandah posts. All of the posts on the verandahs were carved with shallow and intricate lines, so fine and detailed they were more like scrimshaw than wood carving. Unlike most people, Tim was able to get Eva to tell him some of the convoluted tales.

  The stories were of Ornice, Wynne, Deidra, Malise and others. The last of the posts on the eastern verandah near the library door told Getha’s story. A tale of colour and love and sacrifice. Branna and Eva’s stories were not carved into Rosetta. Eva told Tim they were too hard to tell. Branna’s the cruellest of them all.

  The style of carving had a sameness which belied the number of craftsmen who had carved them. Each post was smooth to the touch but still a blind man could read the story with his hands. Most of the stories were in muted sea colours of greens and blues and greys with long wave shapes wrapped languorously around the faces and hands and deeds of the women involved.

  Ornice’s post was Eva’s favourite. It was green and blue. The only sharp colours were Ornice’s black hair spiralling the full height of the post, her green eyes and her lover’s flying white hair entwined with her black ringlets. On the western side of Rosetta, out of the rush of the house, her post was easily missed. But it was the one Eva went to for comfort.

  Front and centre near the entrance of the house, Dorcha’s brave face looked straight out across Driving Sound and down to Storm Bay. It was the most weathered post, the colours the most faded, the wood the smoothest. The story most told. This was fair. Rosetta was her house. Ornice lived in the shadows.

  Tim told Sadie that he found her mother fascinating, nothing like the woman Sadie had described to him. He was impressed that she spoke Irish and embarrassed that he did not. He had asked Eva to talk him through the family tree on the wall in the library and although she said that she would, she didn’t.

  Tim eventually pushed Sadie to tell him all about the enormous parchment in sea shades in an ornately carved wooden frame hanging in the library. The parchment was bordered in old Celtic designs intertwined with the dragon heads and sea creatures more commonly seen on the carved prows of Viking ships. All the written words were in stylised Gaeilge. Sadie couldn’t read the words but her mother had told her what they said. They told the brief story of Ornice. Sadie remembered almost nothing of the story other than Ornice had been lost at sea in a king tide and returned to her family changed and haunted. Ornice’s black ringlets trailed down the generations linking all of the names to hers. Serpents, seal men, selchies and sea nymphs swam across
and down the years. Waves of every ocean pushed across the parchment. Winds were blown by huge blond, slant-eyed gods looking down on it all. The last name towards the bottom of the picture was Aoife. There was room in the waves beneath Aoife for more names.

  ‘Why isn’t your name there?’ Tim asked, pointing to the empty space.

  ‘It probably will be one day.’

  ‘One day? Why not when you were born?’

  Sadie told Tim to talk to her mother about it. She wasn’t going to lie to Tim or even try and tell him the story she half remembered from childhood but didn’t understand.

  Tim and Sadie returned to Melbourne in late February. They were tanned and relaxed and they quickly settled into the year and their life in the stable. Life at uni, Sadie’s final year as an undergraduate and Tim’s of his Masters, awaited them and they both talked about what they would do when it was all over in November. Tim wanted to return to Ireland but he would not go back if he couldn’t get a scholarship to do his PhD in Dublin. He would stay in Melbourne and try and make it as a painter. Sadie was even more up in the air. Teaching loomed and that was OK. She had always known her degree would not lead her anywhere specific. And she would be happy enough as a teacher. Maybe she would try for a post-grad program too. She would worry about it all later in the year.

  But none of these plans ever came to anything. Tim’s father had a stroke. Tim went home to be with his family for a couple of months. And under the watery sun of a cold September morning, just twelve days after Sadie had kissed him and waved him goodbye at Tullamarine, Tim and his sister went to a village market in County Armagh where they and nine other people were blown apart by a car bomb.

  Bruce, their housemate who had known Tim the longest, told Sadie when she got home that Monday afternoon. Tim was dead. They were standing in the kitchen and Sadie could hear a radio on somewhere in the house. She recognised the voice of the ABC announcer. A voice from her childhood telling her something important.

  Tim was buried in Ireland. Sadie didn’t go to his funeral.

  There was a wake at the Monkey Bar. Sadie tried to get into the celebration of Tim’s life but when the first sad sounds of the harmonica broke and everyone started singing ‘Dirty Old Town’, she hid behind the bar, crouched down low, blocking her ears and praying for a bomb to blow her to pieces and end everything.

  She sat her exams, passing with her worst results ever, and then it was over. Uni was finished. Tim was dead. Friends of his from art school came and took some of his paintings. It was up to Sadie to decide who got what and she did her best to be fair and do what she hoped Tim might want. But she knew what Tim wanted. He wanted to be there. With her. Painting new canvases. Getting on with his life. He did not want to be dead and buried in Donegal. His friends hugged Sadie, thanked her for giving them a little bit of Tim, and left with a canvas under an arm. The house was breaking up. Everyone was graduating and scattering.

  Her father and Carl arrived at the stable one day and packed up all Sadie’s things and the paintings she was keeping. Sadie sat on hers and Tim’s bed wrapped in the soft old sheets she had not washed since he had left for Ireland. She cried. Sometimes she heard screams.

  Her father and Carl loaded up the trailer and then they put Sadie on the back seat. They drove onto the ferry, crossed Bass Strait, drove down the empty Bass and Midland highways from Devonport to Hobart and there Sadie crawled into her girl’s single bed in her old room. She was still wrapped in the soft flannelette sheets from the stable. She continued to cry and scream but mostly she stayed in bed and waited. For what she could not have said.

  Sadie had read the books and heard the songs of the broken-hearted. They all seemed so trite. She waited for the fog to descend and the dulling of her senses to commence. She waited for her mind to numb and for her need of Tim and her memories of his slow stride, his soft touch, his warm sleeping body beside her to fade, and all those other words of lessening she had been promised.

  But the fog would not come. Sadie’s senses heightened. She couldn’t open her eyelids against even the earliest morning light. Her skin could not bear the weight or irritation of clothes. Her underwear chaffed her. Silk blouses rubbed her chest and arms raw. Socks heated her feet till they blistered and chapped.

  Food exploded on her tastebuds. She gagged on custard fouled by eggs tasting of feathers and the acrid heat of the chookhouse. Milk coated her tongue and gums with its creamy slime. The hot stench of cow filled her sinuses. Oranges scalded the roof of her mouth leaving it stinging and swollen. Water was too cold. Too wet.

  The house stank. Sadie could smell the furniture varnish and the paint on the walls. Breathing was nauseating and she gagged and vomited up bits of her empty stomach. She tried being outside but the sweet pungency of the trees, the flowers and the grass drove her indoors. The salty Derwent floating past was too blue. Too loud.

  Her bones ached. Her teeth rattled in her head. The voices of her family screeched and roared in her ears. She lay perfectly still in her bed between her sandpaper sheets, naked, wearing sunglasses and earplugs, not eating or drinking. And still the world was too much.

  She scratched weeping sores into her shoulders and neck, and cut her hair back to her scalp one night. Her father gave her bitter white pills and sticky pink medicine, so sweet it made her teeth ache. He cried most of the time now. Sadie couldn’t understand it. He had hardly known Tim. Tim was hers to cry for. She cried for every piece of him that was blown across that Northern Ireland market place. She lay in the dark piecing all the bits of him back together. She knew his body so well she could do it. If she picked up a piece of someone else, she would know to toss it aside. She needed only to find all the pieces of Tim and she could put him back together again. She demanded her father get all Tim’s pieces and bring them to her. It was time for her father to act like the doctor he was and do something useful.

  On waking early one evening, Sadie realised someone else was in the room with her father. Their booming voices made her head ache but she could make out some of their words clearly enough. The man’s name was Peter and he was going to send Sadie to the hospital. She thought she recognised Peter’s voice but she couldn’t be sure. Sadie lay still and listened. Peter was saying that Sadie would be better off in hospital. He put his arms around her father’s shoulders. Sadie could see that her father was crying again.

  The pills they gave her in the hospital were better. She slept a lot more and when she was awake, things had toned down a bit. She still wore her sunglasses and earplugs, and food still smelled and tasted wrong, but it was all a little less wrong than it had been before. She almost enjoyed her morning cup of Lady Grey tea.

  While she was in hospital, her father rarely visited her. Sadie understood. He was busy. Cecile and Edie never visited. Sadie understood this too. She knew she was poor company. Carl was in Adelaide. It was just as well. Frau Hessen came each day to bring her food and kiss her and cry.

  Sadie believed she would get better. Peter and the other doctors believed it too. She would return to her old self they told her every day. She didn’t know how she could return to being that girl though because that girl had been with Tim. Loved by Tim. In love with Tim. But she did believe that somehow she would find something of herself she could make a life from. There was nothing she could do to speed it up. She would have to wait and see. So she did.

  It was her mother who came to be with Sadie during her time in hospital. Eva spent the better part of every day sitting in the vinyl armchair by the bed. And she didn’t just sit there still and silent which was her usual way. She talked to Sadie. She talked to her in her own language. The first day, Sadie told her that she couldn’t understand what she was saying but Eva continued on speaking in her light, lilting voice as if Sadie had never spoken. Eva, who used the English language so sparingly as to be almost mute, talked to Sadie for hours each day in the whispering language of her childhood.

  There had been a time when Sadie and her mother had been cl
ose. But as a small girl she had been exiled from her mother’s world and had not been able to find a way back into that warm, comforting place.

  And now, here was her mother opening the door just enough for Sadie to remember how much she wanted to be in there. Sadie lay still and tried to pry the door open further, tried to understand the words, the music of the language of Mayo. She couldn’t understand what Eva was saying but she was comforted and healed by the soothing balm of the unfamiliar words. Sadie felt uplifted as her mother’s voice, filled with her rare smile, took her weakened daughter on a journey to find her strength. Sadie began to feel lighter and remembered what a smile was and that she might one day feel the spontaneous pleasure of one.

  There were sad times in this epic story that her mother wove for her; times of great weariness, of struggle and loneliness which Sadie endured and conquered with her mother’s help. Every day she asked her mother what the story was about but Eva just continued where she had left off the day before, leaving Sadie to follow the story the only way she could: through its music.

  And one day, the story ended.

  Eva sat in the vinyl armchair looking at Sadie but she said no more. Sadie missed the sound of her mother’s voice but knew it was pointless to ask her to continue. To fill the long silence following the end of the story, Sadie found her own voice and told her mother the story of her and Tim.

  Her mother listened as Sadie knew she would. She held Sadie’s hand as Sadie cried. But now her crying was subdued. Gentle tears for a gentle sadness. It was time to go home.