Isabelle the Navigator Read online

  Luke Davies is the author of three novels, Isabelle the Navigator, God of Speed and the cult bestseller Candy, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and has been published in Britain and the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew, French and Greek. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies Best Adapted Screenplay at the AFI Awards.

  Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published four books of poetry, including Running With Light which was the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and Totem, which won the John Bray Poetry Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award.

  ALSO BY LUKE DAVIES

  Four Plots For Magnets (poetry)

  Absolute Event Horizon (poetry)

  Candy (novel)

  Running With Light (poetry)

  The Entire History of Architecture … and other love poems

  (limited edition poetry chapbook)

  Totem (poetry)

  God of Speed (novel)

  This edition published in 2008

  First published in 2000

  Copyright © Luke Davies 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that adminsters it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; and by Insearch UTS, formerly known as Insearch Language Centre, through the Writers in Asia Partnership Program.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  The Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 526 8.

  Text design by Simon Paterson

  Set in Adobe Garamond Expert by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Karen Brien, fearless explorer

  We must, incidentally, make it clear from the beginning that if a thing is not a science, it is not necessarily bad. For example, love is not a science.

  RICHARD P FEYNMAN

  Six Easy Pieces: the Fundamentals of Physics Explained

  Contents

  Prologue: The Funeral

  Part One

  Tess and Tom

  Meat Truck

  Dan

  Crossbar

  Love and Loyalty

  Arrest

  The Ticking of the Clock

  Love Calls You By Your Name

  Matthew Smith

  Accident

  News in Brief

  After Matt

  Part Two

  Baxter, Victim of Powerful Forces, and Other Boys

  Birds That Are Fish of the Sky

  Tom

  Zooming

  Snow

  Volcano

  Fish That Are Birds of the Ocean

  Postscript 2006

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  The Funeral

  AROUND THE TIME MY FATHER DIED WAS AROUND THE time I discovered the sheer poetry of the Beaufort Scale, that extraordinarily concise chart for mariners that relates wind forces to sea states. I was adrift in Paris for a year or two after Matt had died, and one day found the Scale hanging on the back wall of an old bookshop. Studying it, I realised that everything, the whole of life, is just like a series of sea states. The very concept of solid ground is a myth. The galaxy itself is adrift. Then in 1999 I turned thirty and my father died at fifty-six and I came back from Paris for his funeral. Dad had been losing his mind for quite some time. Yet his death could hardly be called a relief. At the funeral I began to cry, not so much for what had been, but for what might have been. He might have been happy. I cried for months.

  When you talk about love, and family, invariably too you are talking about compassion. This would include the notion that we are all just lumped together, and tolerance is a virtue.

  The ocean, though, is liable to remind us that things are very small, that memory has its limits and that even thirty years is a long and weary stretch. What passes relentlessly through the years is blood, and time; all the bitterness or warmth along the way is almost incidental. Even blood gets forgotten eventually, bleached into stories which are bleached into myth which are bleached of all colour into ashes of myth.

  Nothing should come as a surprise and yet everything is astonishing. Out of the oceans the continents form. Then everything moves forward and there are only the rarest of paths back to mute rest, as in madness, as in my father, and the way he died. I have no idea what it all comes to mean, in the end. What everyone fails to notice, when talking to the other humans, to mothers and lovers and strangers in the street, is the one obvious point: ‘future corpse, future corpse’.

  When the pallbearers lifted his coffin so effortlessly onto their shoulders, a wrenching anguish tore at my heart and I began to sob with that oxygen-depleted heaving felt in deep dreams. Over many years I’d watched Dad, lanky giant though he was, grow smaller, a shrinkage that seemed to signal not just the bones becoming brittle, but the soul’s attempt to condense those bones in preparation for an easier return to dust; the soul’s preparations for discarding, in some bizarre physics brought on by death’s approach, the ballast that would hold back its own sudden soaring into vertiginous realms beyond atmosphere. But maybe it was just a trick of perspective, his receding from us all.

  What was acute that day was my awareness of the imminent absence of his actual body from my life and the planet. A terrifying sense of his insubstantiality consumed me; at the same time it was almost comic, the pallbearers like poker-faced muscle men hoisting shoulderwards a balsa-wood coffin. It seemed to me suddenly that we live half our lives and then watch ourselves wither. It’s an awful state of affairs. There was no more future between Dad and me, only a series of moments of connection in the past. Everything was now contained in my mind.

  Late at night, the night of the funeral, after the wake when everybody got drunk, I dreamt, in that heady mixture of grief and the glimpse funerals give us into our own impending doom, that the funeral was happening all over again. The only difference was that the interment took place on swampy ground, a kind of mossy sponge across which the funeral party bounced like the Apollo astronauts on the moon.

  In the dream I began to cry, profusely, just as I had in reality earlier in the day. My crying woke me up and seamlessly continued. It was 4 a.m. I sobbed myself into calmness. A while later I fell back to sleep.

  I woke again just before dawn. In Sydney the day always starts white, then the light turns pale yellow before darkening gradually into the greeny-blue of morning. Later the day bakes out into a blue so rich and hard that its echo, its glare, is white. And then evening comes to soften everything, dark blue flaring into mauve after sunset, and the glide into dark red and darkness. Tom Airly was dead. My mother’s tragedy, and mine. In a hundred years’ time it would be no-one’s. I snuggled into the sheets and looked around the walls of my bedroom. They were simply too white.

  In th
e days that followed I painted with meticulous care, on one of the walls, the Beaufort Scale. Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort had died one hundred and fifty years earlier, and here he was, this beautiful man (as I imagined him) invading my room with the lucidity of his language. Notable for its beauty as well as its brevity and practicality, this two-page chart was still the world standard, the common navigational language for describing the force of winds and storms. I loved the lunacy of the notion of trying to structure, with small words, the forces of the weather.

  My mother Tess thought me moderately unhinged, but pretty much any behaviour is excusable after the dislocation of death. I photocopied the chart onto a transparency; borrowed from a teacher friend an overhead projector; projected the image onto the long white wall of my bedroom; and traced from that a faint stencil. Even the enlarged letters looked beautiful: the curves and serifs, the commas, the slither of the s and the hoops of the g. Slowly, meticulously, I painted black in the stencil, and the chart emerged.

  And the fact that my father was gone was made somehow easier to bear in the months that followed by the presence of the words on my wall. In the slow haze of waking I would let my eyes wander over the lissom phrases all around me. Across the top of the wall, near the ceiling, was written, in the largest capitals, BEAUFORT WIND SCALE, and beside that, in smaller capitals, WITH CORRESPONDING SEA STATE CODES. The chart was divided vertically into eight columns, five of which were filled with technical details and terminologies, and three of which contained the poetry.

  There were thirteen ways, according to Beaufort, in which the wind could be described as affecting the oceans and the planet. Force Zero was an almost non-existent wind, less than a knot, and Force 12 was a hurricane. One read across the columns ‘Effects observed far from land’, ‘Effects observed near coast’ and ‘Effects observed on land’, and could guess the corresponding wind speed and Beaufort number. Or one could, like me, read the chart for pleasure, and as a way of defining one’s future.

  Sometimes when I closed my eyes I could sense my life as a movement through ocean. The past recedes from view until finally it disappears, and all that is properly visible is our most recent wake, which is foam, a bobbing chaos where it was easy for a while to live. Everything converges into a point ploughing into the future. And the future, while it gives the illusion of unfolding, is always just beyond the approaching horizon. I was thirty years old— have I said that? My mother was a woman whose present consisted of the echo of old events. My Uncle Dan, though I loved him still, was taboo. My father was dead by his own hand, and anyway had been crazy for years, ever since he came out of prison. Matt had gone under the wheels of a truck two years earlier. It’s an old, old world. But I would lie in bed looking at the Beaufort wall and the day would begin to take on colour.

  My eyes would roam over the wall: ‘far from land’. I pictured the different workings of the wind. Sea like mirror. I imagined the wind beginning, the faintest breath, like a lover’s exhalation on the back of the ear. Ripples with appearance of scales; no foam crests… Small wavelets; crests of glassy appearance, not breaking. And then the crests begin to break and there are scattered whitecaps and later numerous whitecaps gathering on the ocean in my mind.

  I loved the transition from ‘strong breeze’ to ‘near gale’: it seemed so sudden. Sea heaps up; white foam from breaking waves begins to be blown in streaks. And now the edges of crests begin to break into spindrift, and the sea begins to roll and there are dense streaks of foam—my eyes were wide open, sailing all over the beautiful Beaufort wall, and yet it’s as if the whole room was filled with television static— and there are very high waves with overhanging crests and the rolling is heavy now, and I am feeling heavy. Air filled with foam; sea completely white with driving spray; visibility greatly reduced. It was as if a wave rolled over me.

  My eyes came at last to ‘Effects observed on land’. Being the most recognisable to me, these descriptions were somehow the most beautiful. When the sea is like a mirror far from land, the day here on shore is calm; smoke rises vertically. Soon the wind is felt on face; leaves rustle; vanes begin to move. It’s like those early scenes in The Wizard of Oz: leaves, small twigs in motion; light flags extended. The day is broiling upwards. The excitation of molecules. Dust, leaves and loose paper raised up; small branches move. Force 5, small trees in leaf begin to sway, and soon there are larger branches of trees in motion and whistling heard in wires. Then it’s whole trees in motion, and I pictured their shimmying, their whiplash. Resistance felt in walking against wind.

  It gets worse. I mean better. Wilder. Twigs and small branches broken off trees; progress generally impeded. Slate blown from roofs. And then Force 10: seldom experienced on land; trees broken or uprooted; considerable structural damage occurs. And at last, the strangely unspecific but ominous Force 12: very rarely experienced on land; usually accompanied by widespread damage. I slept again and dreamt of giant waves.

  On such a morning, a few weeks after the paint had dried, with a hard blue sky forming outside the windows, I woke and felt the need for less dreamy forms of action. There would be time for a swim before I went to the TAFE college to enrol in marine-navigation night classes, a decision I had made, surprisingly enough, in Paris, along with the decision to learn to scuba dive. It’s not that I intended to make a life at sea, nor would I have known how to go about that. It’s just that you reach a point where metaphors become indistinguishable from the things they represent. And the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. And it feels like being born. I only knew that a life as if at sea was possible, the rolling grace of movement. We are all, without knowing it, straining at our moorings. The dock creaks. The planet spins endlessly on its axis. The wind sweeps over us. Beyond the horizon all certainty tumbles away; we would love to make that place our home.

  Every lover loves, first and foremost, an absentee. Absence precedes presence, in the hierarchical order of things. Presence is just a special case in the category of absence. Presence is a hallucination protracted for a certain period. But this in no way diminishes our pain.

  ROBERTO CALASSO

  Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

  Tess and Tom

  WHEN MY FATHER TOM AIRLY STARTED SEEING MY mother Tess he was nineteen and she was sixteen, about to finish school, about to start training as a nurse. This was a happy coincidence, since Tom was in his second year of medicine—a fact that went some way towards negating Tess’s mother’s disapproval. He had done so well at school that he’d won a scholarship to the University of Sydney.

  Grandmother Constance, despite her own father, George, working in the steelworks, always felt that Tess had married a little ‘beneath her station’, because the Airly boys came from Petersham and had gone to the local state schools. ‘Can’t trust that pair,’ she said in various permutations over the years. On the day Tom went to the volcano I have no doubt she would have felt this to be, had she been alive, the ultimate vindication of her belief. In the meantime, for most of the 1960s and seventies and into the eighties, nursing and stroking her own bitterness like a favourite cat, she brooded about her own husband, John Carter, who had simply vanished in 1946, when Tess was born.

  Sometimes the three of them would go out together, Tom and Tess and Tom’s younger brother Dan, my uncle, who was eighteen. Mum found it hard to believe they were actually brothers, though in the shape of the nose and the lips she could see it was true. Tom was tall and almost spindly, with the red hair and green eyes that I would inherit. Dan was shorter and stronger, with brown eyes that seemed black, and dark hair swept back with Brylcreem. When I was a very young girl, the smell of Uncle Dan’s hair when I ran to hug him would make me think of the olden times, the place from which Dan had emerged fully formed—the 1950s, or the distant, early sixties—a kind of film set that existed outside the known universe. The smell, and his thick tattoo, the faded blue of the mermaid on his forearm.

  Tess loved Tom because, above all,
he was so gentle. All she really knew of her own father came from the picture Constance painted, some fugitive quality, the absence that surrounded him as if he were no more than a hole in the atmosphere; the cold-bloodedness of his desertion.

  Tess loved those early dates with Tom. Her whole teenage life had been lived in the shadow of her mother’s dourness. The world was a place not to be trusted; Constance’s hatred knew no apparent earthly bounds. So the boys were like the messengers of light. Tom, aloof and gawky, was unbearably handsome to Tess, his very flame-red hair a portent of release from a childhood of darkness.

  The three went to the drive-in movies. Tess felt a sharp pang of delight at the extravagant amount of sweets and popcorn the boys bought. They sat three abreast in the front seat of the old Holden and saw Jason and the Argonauts. Tess leaned into Tom’s chest and he stroked her hair softly. They squealed in mock-terror when the harpies descended upon the blind Phineas among the ruined pillars, or during the battle with the Cyclops or—her favourite part—when the skeletons gathered themselves up from the ground and fought Jason and his men on the edge of the cliff.

  Nothing is invented here: you have to believe, I cross-referenced all my stories, extracting the last bit of detail like water squeezed from a towel. From Tess to Dan, and while he was alive and making sense, Tom himself.

  They went on a picnic to Palm Beach. This is 1964, maybe ’65. Tess invited Elaine along, a friend from her nursing class, in an effort to match Elaine and Dan, and of course the match worked, but of course not for long. Tumbling together in the surf, Tess’s hand suddenly and accidentally brushed against the bulge in Uncle Dan’s swimming trunks. A shiver ran through her and she erased the event from her mind. Perhaps I have entirely made that part up. But something had to happen, somewhere. There had to be a starting point. Later, in the park behind the beach, the four of them set up a picnic blanket beneath the shade of a huge Moreton Bay fig. They ate cheese and drank Resch’s Dinner Ale kept cool in the esky. I imagine the radio playing the latest hit from the Shadows.