Rock and Sea

By Jeanell Buckley

The sixteen short stories in Rock and Sea span an extraordinary range of mood and style. There are tales of tragedy, of mischief, of mystery and of gothic horror. Rock and Sea contains stories written by Jeanell Buckley over more than a decade, beginning in the late 1990s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Aug 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761095788

Book preview

ROCK AND SEA

Heat of the sun, full summer sun searing heat into my neck and it’s only eleven a.m. I’m looking down and my head is hanging from my neck like overripe fruit in neglected orchards. Below me, the rocks stay cool and wet and replenished by the sea.

It was there, right there where the sandy band slopes down, the thin layer of dirt over the top exposed now as a sham of stability. It was down there, right there, that she landed and died. There are a couple of guys now shaking towels at each other and where the spray is fresh and born in the air like jewels of light then returned to the rocks and smudged to nothing but salt water.

Her name was Poppy. She didn’t like swimming, was afraid of the surf and the rips in the bay down there, and thought the cliff was remote and safe in its remoteness. You could say it must have made her careless, complacent, but no, she was never that.

Beside me, a couple of kids are playing chasing with their little sandals slapping the path and the sandy bank. I’m fighting the instinct to say, ‘Get back, you’re too close.’ But I’m fighting the instinct for no good reason. Their little limbs are more precious than their mother’s ego. She’s doing nothing to stop them skipping close to the edge. She’s got sunglasses but still shades her eyes as she looks south to the waves smashing on the cliff face of the far shore. We can hear the noise from here, just a distant whooshing, and I think of their great walls collapsing and falling painlessly. You stupid woman, I think, are you playing Helen of Troy or something? You’re just flesh and blood and so are your kids, those little sweet creatures which could slip at any moment and splatter their fruit down there.

It’s too much, the weight of the sun on my neck and the ghost of her below, Poppy she was when alive, but now I don’t know what or who she is, if she’s down there in the rock pools.

I get up and trudge to the headland and the view east to the pale cloudless horizon. The woman and her kids are ahead of me. The boy is only about five, with dark curls on his head as rich and glossy as nuts. The girl is about seven with her hair a waterfall of brown and a yellow band across her head. They’re both skipping and twirling around each other with their clothes billowing in the wind.

‘Hey, watch it please,’ I yell.

They aren’t listening to me. They’re engrossed in each other and their game and each other’s bright voices.

‘Hey,’ I call again, a note of severity in my voice. ‘Hey, you both, back.’

This time, the mother has heard me. She’s been fingering a mole at her neck. Okay, lady, so you might be getting cancer from the sun. So what. Surely you want to go before your kids. They say it’s unbearable when you lose a kid. A living death. Dear God, my trouble’s bad enough – what must that be like? Poppy was just a girl. That’s how I used to describe her to friends – a girl I know. A girlfriend, if you like. But when her sandal slipped, that brand-new sandal, she became something beyond the mundanity of friend or girlfriend. Even the cops could see that. The main cop droned on about the sandal, how it was too new, that was the problem, no grip in loose sand, he knew accident stats like the back of his hand, footwear made all the difference. But while he went on, he kept looking at me, sorry for me of course, and you could see the relief in his eyes (that it wasn’t his kid that was dead) and also knowledge that she’d gone from girlfriend to piercing memory, glinting and painful behind a pain of glass too thick to ever be broken.

When she fell, the sandals flew to corners under the rocks where it never dries out, where it’s dank and fishy. They seemed to hide from me and the cops and my friend Alan who searched with me all night till we found them.

The mother of those flighty hallowed kids is calling them now. ‘Jake, Chloe,’ she says, and she’s holding out her hand to steer them forward and out of my cranky reach. ‘Come here – quick.’

That last word’s unnecessary, a bit spiteful, and perhaps she’s embarrassed, and she turns her back again on me, and the kids as well, the kids who’ve marched obediently to her side and now skip along the grass around her like little ghosts with their pale cotton clothes aloft around them.

‘I’m not kidding,’ I call to the kids, but maybe it’s to that mother too, to all of them, because they annoy me. I resent them living so easily, the way I resent myself for the same thing.

The ocean is so deep with its blues and surging with energy below us as we stand at the tip of the headland. There are more rocks here, but the mother has at last listened to me and is at her kids to keep close. Her legs are lean and muscular in white sports shorts and her sandshoes are firm and lean. She’s a runner, I can tell, because I run with people like her every weekend up and down the coast in triathlons and charity runs. But not lately. They always race past, and I can’t have that. They run the path past Poppy’s place, the spot she fell, and I won’t dismiss her by rushing past. Each time I tried, I couldn’t get past – just stopped and looked for her and shook my head and felt shame at my arms and legs which still pump blood and the sweat and life under the sun, but which for all that speedy blood couldn’t get to her in time to stop the slip, the horrible seconds of silence, that almost imperceptible thud of her body against rock.

‘It can be dangerous up here,’ I say to the sporty mother, but I’m not able to soften my voice and it comes out like the rantings of a clifftop preacher.

She’s thinking that – I start to laugh, giggle really, which makes the impression of madness more secure. There are no pockets in the long board shorts I’m wearing so I push my hands under my arms to hide them, to keep them under control.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ she says, but moves further away as if I’m the danger. I don’t look like a pervert. In fact, I’m pretty good-looking, with straight teeth and big wide eyes. They featured me on the annual report at the bank where I work.

‘Great kids,’ I try again.

‘I should know.’

‘No, I mean it. I’d love kids like that.’

‘Look.’ She puts a finger to her head to get the words right. She doesn’t want to lose it here on the headland where there’s only her between me and her kids. ‘Look, just leave us, will you?’

‘I’m not a pervert,’ I say, and it makes me sound like one. ‘But fine. I’ll leave you alone.’ The peevishness that comes out is so un-me, and it strikes me with fear of myself. My eyes are stinging and it’s not the salt air.

The sun is on my face now and momentarily I think, like the woman, of skin cancers. All those creams they make you slop on before triathlons, all those blood pressure and cholesterol tests. We’re so careful, so precious, but it’s not enough. It never will be. Unless we stop living, unless we stop doing all that stuff that makes us alive.

I’m back at Poppy’s spot and it’s all over again, like those recurring nightmares where you know what’s coming but can’t stop it. Poppy licking an ice cream and me listening to her go on about some crap job interview. She said she’d ‘survived’ it and I told her to get a life, that it was all shit anyway and the job not worth worrying about, and that she was better than cold-calling, especially when it meant selling stuff to people with too much money anyway. The bank had taught me that. I was worried for her, that she’d get stuck in the industry and never get out except with a package at fifty, by which time she’d have no friends.

She wanted me to share the ice cream, but I even denied her that as she held it out and waited and white milky mess dripped onto the rock beneath her.

‘Help me forget it,’ she’d said, but I couldn’t even do that for her. Not even lick a bit of ice cream and make her smile, the last smile she’d ever make, and we could have shared it.

Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and little fluff, not long enough to be hair, sprouted around her ears in the wind. Her skin still had make-up from the interview – so unlike her: she was into lentils and aromatherapy. She bought a black suit which didn’t suit her and wore it at the interview. The jacket was under her on the rock where she sat, and the flimsy inner layer rubbed against the palms of her hands. It was green, that lining, and shuddered as it lifted in the cliff wind as if it were about to take off in flying-carpet style with us aboard and her feet would hang over the edge and the sandals hanging off her toes the way feet hang off the edge of hammocks in ads for beach holidays.

‘What do you really want to do?’ I’d asked her.

She was too smart for cold-calling (‘relationship development’, it had said in the ad). But she was also a dreamer. Her friends called her vague, a procrastinator, but they had the wrong ambitions for her. Their ambitions didn’t fit her; she wasn’t a standard size. Like cats, she loved the vantage points provided by sea cliffs, maybe because you could see so far from there. And from there the screams of the kids on the beach and the screech of seagulls floating on the currents were texture to a world kept at arms length. She was waiting for something, even there with me while licking ice cream.

‘Don’t have the foggiest,’ she’d answered me eventually.

The air on the cliff, it does have something of a witches’ cauldron effect on you. You want to keep your head heavy with it and close your eyes and not think, wait for it (whatever ‘it’ is) to come to you. That was it, but I couldn’t see it then.

The rock we sat on is dry now, not like that day when the ants just went crazy for the ice cream. I was watching them, at the corner of her jacket where she’d let some fall, and that drop had annoyed the hell out of me.

‘You’re such a slob girl,’ I’d said disdainfully, as a weary father might.

God, what an arsehole I was. The wind’s picked up and I put my hands over my ears as if that’ll stop me hearing my own words again. ‘A slob in the first degree,’ I’d said. She was turning, I could hear her behind me, maybe turning to say, ‘Hey no, I’m Poppy, your girl’ – then there was the noise of her sandal. That quiet sweeping grind you’d expect of a blunt guillotine. The sound of plastic and stone meeting and dragging at each other.

Then there was Poppy screaming. I’d never heard such a thing, unlike a normal human voice, more a soprano in an opera, cranked up muscle of the human voice at a pitch only ever needed once in life, at moments like this, like then. When if I hadn’t had my back to her, I might have saved her.

It would have been no longer than a second from the top of the cliff to the shadowed hard bottom. And then there were gulls again and kids screaming from that distant remote beach.

‘Excuse me.’ It’s the little boy. He’s holding a sprig of tea tree out for me to see. ‘Excuse me, why are you sad?’

My cheeks are wet and my lips taste of salt. ‘Just am,’ I say.

He looks at the twig, tests its strength by bending it and pulling at it, going as far as he can without damaging it. For a second, I wonder where he got it, then I see there’s a strand of stunted windswept trees nearby planted eons ago by the council and just surviving. A few currawongs are pecking beneath the drying