Cherry Beach Read online

  Parkdale was straight ahead in one direction, and I wanted to see how different it was to the Parkdale on the outskirts of Melbourne—a broad, flat place of houses and car parks. As we walked, Hetty’s step a little longer than mine so that I had to move fast, I watched the breath from people’s mouths like tiny parts of them escaping, and remembered: these people are Canadian. It seemed strange that we were here, among them.

  ‘We’re in Canada,’ I said, and nudged Hetty’s ribs with my elbow. ‘Canada!’

  ‘And so far it looks quite a lot like Melbourne.’ She laughed.

  I agreed. I saw a broad, calm, halcyon city with buildings of various heights, mostly pale and wet from the damp wind. I looked up again, this time to the clouds, and couldn’t see any. Instead there was a sort of white smoke against a grey blue. I hoped there would be clouds later in the day: white, slow, bloated ones that I could linger on.

  I pictured what we might look like to those who passed us—a tall girl in a maroon duffle coat a little too small for her, her long arms pulling at the skivvy underneath to keep her fingers warm, and her smaller friend with hair like a black scribble and some kind of body beneath all the layers, walking at a pace that suited neither, almost limping, almost falling. We were still only worth a quick, half-curious glance. I was happy with that.

  I decided to keep the map in my pocket for a while and walk without knowing where, heading west. We popped up onto Queen Street, a wide thoroughfare with red trams running along its middle, and confident shops playing music.

  ‘This is great,’ Hetty breathed.

  I pointed at a pile of dirty soft ice that sat beside the open door of an Urban Outfitters store, where a tall, broad bodyguard stood, eyes forward, back straight. We stopped to inspect it.

  ‘So that’s what snow becomes.’

  We had talked about snow so much before we’d arrived that it seemed strange to have our first sighting outside an Urban Outfitters in April, when it was more of a brown mess than a white carpet. I had never imagined where the snow might go when the weather turned. Apparently it didn’t go anywhere for quite a while, and the city kept on moving around it so that it lost its clarity and its power, and became just like everything else.

  ‘Snow without make-up,’ I said, to make Hetty laugh. She made a noise like a seal, and rubbed her arms.

  ‘I still think it’s beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you do, Het,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘Of course you do.’

  I slipped my arm through hers to keep us moving.

  We giggled our way down Queen Street past a vast park and restaurant after restaurant, until we turned and began a slow walk up the incline of a street called Ossington. There were a few Vietnamese cafes dotted between stores that seemed to sell clothes no one would wear, and an ice-cream place with a line, despite the hour and the chill. We kept walking up and found a little bakery with plastic chairs inside, and piles of sweet pastries and bready things that looked both familiar and different at once. It was a Portuguese bakery—said so in big red capital letters above the narrow eave.

  Inside it was warm and doughy and the few customers looked as if they had been sitting there forever, baked and sweetened by their surroundings. A large woman with a small chest and floury hands greeted us at the counter. Hetty chose a cupcake-shaped parcel called an empada de pato. I picked a tiny bacon pudding and a slice of honey cake. There was sugardonut dust on our table, and before we sat the woman came to wipe it off. She told us where the bathroom was, though we hadn’t asked, and placed a large key between us. After we’d finished eating, Hetty told me she had never tasted anything so delicious, and thanked the woman over and over until we were out the door and on the street again, our mouths slick with fat.

  ‘Let’s go down to the water?’ Hetty asked.

  Hetty loved water, and had already told me all about Lake Ontario: how it was so big you couldn’t see what lay on the other side; how, despite this, it was the smallest of the Great Lakes, and the most polluted, because its sister and brother lakes swam into it, and brought their mess with them. She’d read so much about it before we left that she’d become obsessed, and would talk to me about how she imagined we would love it, how it wasn’t like the ocean but was still big and wide and cold, and how she wondered what it would be like to swim in it.

  We started walking until we were back near where we had started on Spadina Avenue, having moved the opposite way along the broadness of Queen, and could soon see the greeny blue of Lake Ontario a little below. Toronto dipped down towards the water, and the wind I felt on my face was now connected to the texture I could see in the distance.

  I’d never really thought about why Hetty loved water so much. She would lie in the bath for hours when we lived together in a one-bedroom flat in Brunswick above a charcoal-chicken shop, filling it up with a little more hot every so often, wiping her wet, wrinkled fingers on a towel to turn the dry pages of her book. I’d brush my teeth, do a wee, swish mouthwash at the sink while she lay there. She always looked serene, and so skinny. Hetty would rather swim in the ocean or run out into the rain or do laps of the local swimming pool than anything else. When it was stormy I would find her staring out at the puddles forming, the sky fountain. I wondered if someone who usually stood just above the world found it easier to move in water.

  The wind got higher and swooped at us as we crossed the last road before the Harbourfront. There were people enjoying themselves down here, or trying to despite the weather. Hetty pulled me towards the edge of the walkway where there was a man selling tiny coloured flags on long sticks among little kids and dogs chasing each other. It didn’t smell like salt but the air was wet: a pleasing, fresh kind of wet that helped me remember I was breathing.

  We stood at the edge of the short stone wall and watched out over the blue and green and black water that moved gently, like a sleeping animal. Hetty inhaled deeply and moved closer to me, putting her silky head on my shoulder.

  ‘It must be the ocean. It feels like it is,’ she said softly, sleepily, as though she had just woken up.

  ‘If you say it’s the ocean, then it is,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s the ocean,’ she said, and lifted her head up to smile at me.

  We stood there a long time looking out at the lake, trying to see something beyond the water. We stood until the sound of the children and animals around us died down to nothing, their small and pretty Canadian noises just wind. I shivered inside my jumpers and stood in the moment.

  CHANNEL

  especially two seas

  Hetty and I met in Grade Two. It was the start of the year, and she had moved from another school in another suburb to be in my class, with Mrs Harris as our teacher. Mrs Harris was a strange woman—I could understand that even as a seven-year-old. She had tight brown curled hair that sat stiff around her head, a tanned face with slack pillow cheeks and nostrils that flared unpredictably, like a horse’s. She didn’t change her manner according to who she was talking to—she spoke to her pupils in the same blunt, flat way she spoke to my parents when they came to see the classroom, and the principal when he popped in to see how we all were. The principal was a man called Terry Hooven. He told all of us to call him Terry, and seemed to like us—the children—as well as the adults. He was thin, light on his feet, excitable. Mrs Harris stagnated beside him.

  I hadn’t really noticed Hetty until one day early in the year when it was raining terribly—the kind of rain that would almost scare you, when you would wonder if sheer water could take the earth away—and I was sitting at the window at recess, looking out. I was thinking about my four little guinea pigs, already with their vulnerable, delicate hearts, sitting in our backyard in their cage in the storm, shaking and making tiny, terrified peeping noises. I was on the verge of crying when I heard Hetty beside me say, ‘Are you all right?’

  Looking back, it seems unusual for one seven-year-old to ask after the wellbeing of another, but that was Hetty. She had five brothers
and sisters and was born near the middle, and this had given her the strong sense at a young age that she was just one human among many.

  Hetty had only ever told me a little about what it was really like in her house when she was growing up. She never said anything bad about her dad, but it became clear that he was sick with alcohol most of the time, and depressed the rest, and that he favoured some of his kids over the others. Hetty was a favourite, though I don’t think she realised it. She never thought she was special, but she was. Even Mrs Harris sensed it, and gave her extra, unique tasks throughout the year, believing in her more than she did the rest of us, with our snotty noses and claggy paws. The only time I saw Mrs Harris move her heavy mouth up into a smile was when she was talking to Hetty.

  That rainy day was ours. I told Hetty I was worried for my four little guinea friends, and she confided in me that she was worried for her two rabbits, also outside in her backyard in a flimsy hutch—all those tiny animals at one with the thunder and lightning and sheets of water. We sat together and talked about how we hoped they were safe, convincing each other that our animals were stronger than they were. We grabbed for each other’s hands when the thunder got louder, and when recess ended we sat together for the rest of the day. I didn’t have siblings—just a worn-out mother and a silent father—and I was lonely. I sometimes wonder if Hetty had sensed from that first day how much I needed her.

  From then on we were firm friends, and I began to understand the ways Hetty could help me, with her gentle laugh and imagination and sweeping care for everything. Through primary school and high school she stayed close by me, even when she became much more popular, much more admired than me, and when she was confirmed to be very beautiful. Loyalty suited her: I saw how the other kids started to see me as cool simply because she behaved as if I mattered. I let their eyes dally on me and was thankful.

  Hetty and I had made a sort of pact when we were sixteen that we would travel together to the other side of the world one day and live there for as long as we could brave it, in order to become better, more alive versions of ourselves. We knew that Melbourne was so far from the parts of the world that seemed to really matter, and that the drear of suburban Ringwood, where we had spent our days circling, trying to find something, was even farther. We didn’t leave when we had planned to, because Hetty fell in love with a guy called Sean just after we finished high school, and he ruined her life for a while, or at least stopped her from considering university or reaching out beyond herself to find out who she could be.

  Sean was obsessed with Hetty, and became more and more frightened that she would leave him. I was clearly a threat, and he was snarling at me rather than talking by the time it ended, telling Hetty I was a bitch when I was in the next room of their two-bedroom flat in Reservoir, calling their pet kelpie after me to make sure I knew he thought I was a dog. Hetty was so sorry for everything Sean did—from the beginning he placed her in anxious debt to everyone around them—but he knew how to make her feel for him, and how to pull her in with the tentacles he grew over those four long years.

  When Hetty was finally able to leave him, I wanted us to fly to Toronto straight away, to move beyond the pain she was feeling and the risk of her closing in on herself for good, but it took another whole year of Hetty and Sean bumping up against each other before she was able to truly pull herself free. He killed himself two days after she told him she couldn’t talk to him anymore, leaving a note that said she was heartless and had left him unable to live.

  Hetty broke into pieces then, and moved into my place, where she didn’t go to work or eat or cry or smile, spending her time lying in bed facing the wall or trudging off on long, aimless walks that she came back from gaunt and blank. I didn’t really know how to talk to her about what had happened—I hated Sean so much I couldn’t hear her speak of him with grace and love, and my anger meant she backed off from my pleas to let the guilt go. We kept smiling at each other, but her smiles were small and polite, and I felt our friendship dying.

  It was only after a long summer that Hetty spent by herself near water—the Yarra River, Red Bluff beach, the dam on her uncle’s property in Kangaroo Ground—and months of me leaving her alone even when I wanted to ask her everything, that she came back, and we booked our flights to Canada.

  OASIS

  a fertile spot in a desert, where water is found

  We found a place to live after a fortnight in Jo and John’s spare room, and it was freedom to leave, a freedom I had expected to feel the moment we arrived but hadn’t, perhaps due to jet lag, or because expectation often leads to disappointment. In that two weeks we had scouted some of the city and had decided where we liked and could see ourselves living.

  Despite his calm presence, John had been impossible to get to know, and would either sit silently on the couch or retreat upstairs each night. It was Jo who Hetty and I became unexpectedly fond of—she tried so hard it was impossible not to want to help her along. And she did listen, once she got past the obvious urge she had to tell her part. We spoke about her late into some nights, fascinated by her bubbles, her spiked energy and the blatant sadness she was fighting to ignore. Hetty admitted first that she had begun to like Jo, that she might even hope that we kept in touch. As was Hetty’s way, she pioneered tenderness and helped me feel it too.

  ‘I’ll miss you two!’ Jo said into my hair as she hugged me goodbye the day we left.

  ‘We’ll miss you too, Jo,’ Hetty said, and we promised to see each other again.

  From Jo and John’s to our new place wasn’t far and we only had our packs, so we walked. It was a beautiful morning—the sky was bright and there was sun across everything, but the air on our faces was cold. People were moving slowly; it was a Saturday, and we were in the part of Toronto that was mostly office buildings, so it wasn’t crowded. The old, slow red trams moved up and down collecting slow people. I couldn’t call them streetcars yet.

  We were moving into a big share house in Chinatown, on a street off Spadina Avenue. Hetty had seen it without me—I had been sleeping when she found the ad online, so she wandered up on her own, saw the room and met the five housemates we would be living with. She told me when she got home that it was ‘messy’ and ‘perfect’.

  We walked along slowly with our packs on our backs, beyond Queen Street and up Spadina. There were all sorts of people around us: a large man with a sign pretending to sell rugs on the corner, his guitar case open for anyone who wanted to throw him some coins; teenagers outside McDonald’s with large Cokes; women huddled in groups selling bamboo and aloe and mint leaves.

  When we got to the house, down a leafy street off the main, Hetty said, ‘This is it,’ and I looked up and saw how tall it was. Three storeys, with windows all over and grand steps leading up to the front door and verandah. It looked like a house out of a movie, with a family and a basement and a big, soft dog.

  Hetty rang the doorbell and we waited, pulling our packs off for relief. There was a small wooden sign next to the front door that read MARJORIE in curled letters. I had never lived in a house with a name. It seemed old-fashioned and charming.

  The door was answered by a pretty girl with mouse-blond hair and a tattoo like a vine circling her neck. She told me her name was Ingrid, and smiled so I could see her small white teeth. I put out my hand to shake hers and felt it flat and warm in mine. We were welcomed inside, where it smelt like sandalwood and cooked onions. A quiet cat wound around my legs.

  Steph, Ingrid, Dill, Clark and Robin. Two girls, three boys, one cat called Whitney. They told us when I bent down to pat her that her name had been Puss until the day after Whitney Houston died, when Puss retreated to her spot under Dill’s bed for three days, seemingly grieving, and they decided she should be called Whitney. They laughed at this, and so did Hetty. I found it hard to keep up with things when I was nervous and my laugh came slightly after, echoing a little in the honey-floorboarded kitchen. Whitney nuzzled at my legs as if to say: Don’t worry. Everyone smile
d and seemed kind.

  Dill helped us lift our bags up the two flights of stairs to our bedroom. He was chatty in in a reassuring way, as if he would like you no matter what, and he had soft brown hair and long eyelashes. Hetty bit her lip, her eyes straight ahead as we followed him. I noticed when Hetty’s face changed: she was squishing up her nose and her mouth and her cheeks a bit when he spoke to her, as if it was scary to let him really see.

  We waited until he had set our bags down in the middle of the room before we went in. It was dusty and bright, with a big window and a big bed and holes in the paint where the posters of the last housemate must have been stuck up with Blu Tack. Whitney had followed us, and jumped up to circle the mattress and knead at the fabric. Her purring made my cheeks warm, and Dill and Hetty smiled and looked at each other and the floor until Dill said he would leave us, and he did, and we sat down on our packs and said nothing together for a while.

  The house thrummed. I’d never lived somewhere where people cared for each other so much, and concentrated earnestly on the best things about being young and alive. Hetty had always been my window into this sort of thing, even though sometimes her eyes clouded over and she couldn’t see anything much at all. Now I was living in a space that was fuelled by an energy I’d never had. I was shy around it, and only started to feel close to comfortable after I had been alone in Marjorie a few times—after I’d had a chance to wander around without worrying who I would bump into and what I would say.

  The day after we arrived, Hetty set out and got herself a job at a bar in Kensington Market. It was a dark place with two beers on tap and cheap spirits and house wine from a box, and there was a shop across the street that made hot greasy grilled-cheese sandwiches for the drinkers who had started early and needed food. Ronnie’s seemed iconic in that way that meant it would never change. The chairs were odd and broken, the toilets were sticky and smelly, and people came to drink there at lunchtime and stayed until close. I felt intimidated when I walked in, but Hetty suited it. She was angled the right way for something cool, and too dreamy to know it.