Authors: Robert Minhinnick

Limestone Man (10 page)

Fateful day, looking back. It was seven o'clock, late for me. I was usually gone by six. Would be in school at 7.15. And OK, as you've asked, I'll bloody tell you.

We're waiting, said Fflint.

There was a woman in my bed. She had never slept in that bed before. She never slept there again. Her name was Libby and she was a teacher at the same school in Adelaide.

Teachers, laughed Mina, looking serious.

I know teachers, said Nia.

Don't tell me, said Fflint. From the art department. It's all women's libby there.

Spot on, said Parry. Now, are you listening? Because I'm not saying this twice.

Listening, said Mina. Honestly. The man further down the bar had ordered another drink. The black mist on his sleeves was dull now. His coat was sodden.

Then I got up. Slowly. Bit of a heavy night, if I'm honest. I think Libby put on one of my sports shirts and went to the kitchen.

I could hear her in the next room. Said she'd make the tea and asked where the breakfast was. Fat chance. Usually I had porridge but there wasn't a crust in the house.

So, I dressed. Just tee shirt and shorts. It wasn't summer any more, but that's all it took. Warm enough compared with The Caib. I went into the kitchen and found a mug.

No comment, said Fflint.

And I must have said something to Libby. Something that took a few words. And she looked at me strangely. Asked why I was speaking as I did.

Speaking like what? I asked. But I noticed it too. Speaking with a slurred, drunken accent. When I wasn't drunk. Heavy night or not, I swear I wasn't drunk.

Yeah. Sunday morning coming down, said Fflint.

It turns out, children, said Parry, that I'd had a stroke.

Iesu,
said Mina.

My God, said Nia.

Cut a long story short, I was in hospital for a week. Brain scan, heart scan, carotid investigation. The works. Had some time off and yes, could have returned to teaching. It was a real option. But thought better of it. So the school asked me to stay for three months. To find a replacement. Couldn't have been nicer. But that was it.

And Libby? asked Nia.

She had a shock. That's all. It's not as if I died on top of her.

Tut,
said Mina.

But I have to sayâ¦

What? asked Fflint.

That Libby was the headmaster's wife.

Better and better, said Fflint. Like I said, those art teachersâ¦

Two children of her own, said Parry. She was thirty, I suppose. Much younger than me. Much younger than the Head. Can't say I evenâ¦

What? asked Nia.

Even liked her I suppose.

Just enough to get her into bed though, said Mina. Poor cow. If she wasn't Australian, I'd feel sympathy.

I'm sorry for Libby, said Nia. She was risking everything for you.

For me? Yes, said Parry. I understand that. Now.

VII

Slim, always dark. That was Libby. Yes, Libby in black bondage trousers and black lipstick. Or, possibly aubergine. With her hair dyed black. And cut short in black feathers.

Libby, who imagined she was an artist. Who thought Parry was funny. Or original. Or at least, novel. Parry the pom who drove in from the sticks somewhere. Way out near Lake Alexandrina. The bloke who hated sport and took her to the Chinese cafÃ©s in Gouger Street market. Who once bought her a Chinese dragon amulet carved from water buffalo bone.

Yeah, Libby. He'd left her as he found her. Undamaged and possibly untouched. A long respectable life ahead of her, as the headmaster cruised towards his pension, then bought the
Rough Guide to Western Europe.
For the tour he'd always planned. As her sons went to university and into business. Two boys who never thought about art. Who never dreamed of asking their mother about that cobwebby canvas rolled up in the attic. The pieces of her installations scattered around the garden.

Yes, he remembered waking. And Libby waking at the same time. She must have turned over because she asked him something.

What's that? Libby had wondered.

Parry had pulled himself up to look. There was a greasy plate on the bedside table, piled with oyster shells. An empty sauvignon bottle. Beside them was a pebble he had brought from The Caib. He'd had it for years, found on one of his expeditions around Caib Caves. A grey pebble with a white ball of quartz in its centre. Within the white quartz was a core of red quartz.

Parry had discovered it and his friend Severin had wanted it.

Like a red eye, Sev had insisted. Can I have the eye? Go on, I'll be your friend forever.

Parry had considered the request. The pebble fitted his fist. It felt exactly right, the heft of it. He licked the stone and tasted its salt. Then looked into the quartz, the white, the red. It was smooth after aeons in prehistoric seas.

Libby had picked up the pebble and balanced it in her palm.

The evil eye, she laughed. My God, don't tell me this has been looking at us all this time? At us in bed? It gives me the creeps, this thing. And it's hot? Why's that?

Coming to, Parry had shrugged. But on the day he had discovered it he had kept the pebble all the way home, Sev whining about friendship. Which wasn't Sev's style.

On one occasion Sev had complained so loudly, Parry had made ready to fling the stone into the sea. But he had held on.

The white quartz, the red quartz were, yes, Sev was right, like an eye. And the pebble was perfect in his palm. He resolved to keep it.

EIGHT

Parry walked into the fog. The air was salty and saturated. It was foolish to persist but he felt determined. In Goolwa he had dreamed of a fret such as this. Even more so on his expeditions out of Adelaide. In that red dust country of iron meteorites, the days were dry as ash.

Now he remembered a nearby cove, no more than an inlet. It was impassable terrain, a scattering of enormous rocks. He had often wondered how many thousands of years those stones had lain there.

The rocks were at the bottom of The Caib's highest cliff, as if tipped from the summit. Each boulder was the size of a room, the largest as big as a house.

Parry had always thought the crags looked cut from carding by a tailor's scissors. Impossibly shaped boulders in relief against the cliff.

Like flowers, he had once said to himself. As extraordinary as flowers could be. Ice
-
grey lilies, beneath a rind of salt. But here the lily petals were pearls of limestone.

Parry moved on through the mist. It tickled his eyebrows. He remembered his friends used to camp in that inlet, sharing flagons. Sometimes they lit driftwood fires that burned with iodine's green flame.

A loose gang of girls and boys, maybe ten in all. Vine was sometimes there, always with Sian. They had married early, the fools. Weren't they called
the invincibles
?

And Gil? Gil who was going to do great things. As they all were.

But usually there were only four or five in the group. From sixteen, Parry was one of those who stayed all night, sand
-
rashed and tipsy. Before a final plunge into the surf and the crawl home.

Often it was the girls who led the way. The girls Parry recalled, who smelled of vinegar, tasted of salt. Their hair stiff and black as wrack.

There was Lizzy with her sunglasses hooked on her bikini strap. And Branwen, a local Aphrodite, cuttle
-
white skin, floating in foam.

Yes, those all
-
nighters, he thought now. Talking coal strikes and the iniquity of scab hauliers on the motorway. Or whatever were the best tracks from âExile on Main Street'. The riff from âTumbling Dice' was still in his head. Its underwater throb.

Despite that, he'd hated the Stones. There was something calculating in their communal sneers, the band's indestructibility.

But what was the inlet called? Immediately, it came. As few other things did these days.

The Horns, that was it.

Going over The Horns tonight? was the question everyone asked.

But âThe Gods' was Parry's private name. And the moment now returned.

Yes, The Gods. Grey polygons, those boulders. Streaming even at low tide in summer, surrounded by rock pools. The Gods of the Caib. If there were ever gods in that godless place, there they were. And still were, under the cliff. Hulking stone toads. Strange melted megaliths.

Or that's what Parry could remember thinking. The maze at the cliff's base was never free of shadow. There was a continuous settling of the limestone lagoons.

He remembered one occasion. He had scrambled down the cliff alone. To find no one else from the gang had appeared. And yet he decided to stay.

Far out, the surf was a silver stave. But no other swimmer was to be seen. Gradually Parry had become afraid. That time in the dark he had listened as intently as he had ever listened. As a kestrel listened. Looked and listened, poised above the darkening thrift. The hawk electric in its last stoop.

III

Summer
-
cold and uneasy, Parry had waited for whatever was out there. His belly was shrunken, the hairs on his nape erect as the eyelashes of anemones.

He had listened until he overheard the sighing of his own blood. And, yes, he was sure he had heard the boulders. Heard the boulders breathe. An endless exhalation that was not the distant tide or the wind that riffled the surface of the rock pools. The boulders breathing. As alive as he.

Such was the beach at night. And the beach was always a different world in darkness, a salt forest of groans and whispers. To the south was the surf's drone. But there was something else. Inaudible yet always present. The murmur of great engines cooling. Liquids returning to equilibrium.

He imagined the rock roaches on the cliffs around him. Those sea lice were almost fragments of the stone themselves. Some lice were three inches long, armoured, alien, as they crept over the stone tablets. The girls hated them.

Down at The Horns, Parry had crouched in the starlight, amongst the phosphorus and fizzing lime. This was where the fossils were found. For Parry the fossils resembled pocket watches. Frosted jewellery, ghostly in the rock.

And again he overheard the boulders sigh as they settled. As the stones gasped in their sockets. On their immemorial plinths.

He remembered even then there were satellites crossing the sky. All that starry traffic, for those who cared to look. Dared to look. But when had Parry ever looked?

Years later, Lulu had looked. Yet it had not saved her.

Yes, Lulu, yes, he now heard his own voice. A man in the mist on the coastal path, muttering to himself.

One day, girl, they will name a star after you.

And he saw the child again, Lulu raising her forefinger to her lips. And then to the bloody pinprick of Mars. As if that dry world could explain her own. So Parry had stared into himself. And found nothing.

Maybe near here, he thought.

One Saturday afternoon, he recalled, it was cold, dry. He had been walking with Severin at low tide. Gulls had been attracted to something in the water. The boys had gone over to explore.

Yes, Parry supposed. Possibly near here.

A net, about thirty yards long, had been washed up. Sev took one end and pulled. He succeeded only in raising the closest edge. The net, of green nylon mesh, rose and fell with each slack wave. Parry examined what was caught in its stave.

Durex.

Okay.

'Nother Durex.

Yeah, wellâ¦

Dead fish.

Spiny dogfish, said Sev. Big fucker. See the barb? Through the roof of the mouth. Through the excuse for a brain.

It's speckled, said Parry. Brown and cream.

Camouflage. But dogfish can glow in the dark.

Christ, it stinks, said Parry.

I can see the backbone, said Sev.

Look, said Parry. A crab. Inside the fish. Eating it.

Shore crab.