After half an hour I switched the walkman off. For a start, the rumble of the car engine was encroaching on the sound quality. Secondly, the cold grey of dawn was over and in its place was a soft kaleidoscope of early morning colours. It was surely worthy of comment.
After I let loose with the appropriate superlatives, Graham didn’t look at me but spoke to the windscreen. “Emerged from your cocoon,” he said.
I looked away at my side window and made a face at the reflection there. Gradually the farmlands with their sagging barns and burnt tree stumps gave way to clumps of native bush, rocky stream beds and encroaching hillsides. The hills were growing taller. At first, the bush made its way right to the skyline ridges, decorating an undulating mass of green spurs and shady gullies. But as the hills grew in height, the highest slopes no longer carried the deep green beech trees. Instead steep grasslands, the colour of hazelnut shells dominated the upper reaches. I absorbed each of these familiar unfolding mountain ranges with delight. Within my belly, a seed of well-being was planted and beginning to grow. I couldn’t wait to don my boots and climb up to the lofty heights again. In my peripheral vision I could see Graham’s countenance also losing tension. He began to drum fingers on the steering wheel and to quietly hum an obscure tune.
After a steady climb the road achieved a plateau. Here the land had been cleared to produce large paddocks that encroached into the original mountain beech forest. The road terminated where it met the Marlborough-West Coast highway. Turning right, we accelerated down an incline of new seal as the road began to dip towards our target, Lake Rotoiti. For a moment, the road ahead was running straight towards the heart of the highest mountains. Mt Cotterel was visible, right at the apex of converging East and West ranges.
“There it is,” Graham said. We swept into the St Arnaud township, a scatter of houses nestled on an ice-age terminal moraine. We turned into our drive, a stony cause-way that led to the lake-house. I left the confines of the car and stood amongst knee high grasses, inhaling the sweet smell of the woodland. It was the fragrance of former family holidays. I recalled a child in the 1960’s, lifted by his surroundings and filled with a lust for action, running through a field of rippling grass, sprinting and sliding amongst the evening sand flies. I contrived the child to have just consumed some of Julia’s chocolate cake pudding, his favourite dessert . . . a satisfied stomach in a garden of plenty.
I lifted my gaze, and the memory faded. Before me, the corrugated iron lake-house stood resolute – a testimony to a builder’s victory over the ravages of time. Graham unlocked the only door with a huge key – the type you might imagine used in a psychiatric institution. Pushing through the big heavy door into darkness (the drapes were all pulled); I was assailed by the stale musty atmosphere of the large living area. Graham flicked on the lights in order to retrieve a key for the garage, where the boat was stored.
Looking around the living area, my thoughts encompassed my far away siblings. It was here, in this enclosure of corrugated iron, that we had our happiest of times. On holiday, it hadn’t mattered so much that as a family we were rather solitary. One could feel comfortable in the quiet of a long summer’s day – the gusting summer winds flaring and dying amongst the manuka. Looking down on the threadbare carpet, I recalled Isobel in dressing gown and nightie, stretched out before a humming one-bar heater, dealing cards, or setting up for a game of Monopoly. Julia would be watching us from an upright armchair, knitting or darning a sock. And Graham would occupy another armchair, his reactionary mind arrested – an open book upon his knees.
My daydream ended and I followed Graham out to the garage, helping to slide back the heavy rusted bar that locked the two doors together. The rod of flaking oxidised metal had held the two swing doors in place for upwards of fifty years. As the doors drifted open, a shaft of light lit the foredeck of the family dinghy, a plump plywood design that had come with the house. Typical of Davenport behaviour, it had never been given a name. But then, the naming process is a form of self-disclosure.
We grappled with the trailer, swinging and jerking it to achieve a coupling with the car. Methodically and without asking for assistance, Graham went about the remaining preparations. He located the Seagull motor, standing it up against a tree-stump to fill it with oil and petrol. He removed the spark plug, checking the gap before sanding the ends and spraying it with CRC. He located two rowlocks, hanging off a nail hammered into an internal garage wall. He inserted these through slots in the boat’s thin gunwale, securing them to a handrail with wire.
From the car boot, I lifted a pack, intending to load it into the boat.
“Not yet,” Graham said. “The weight will damage the bottom. We’ll do that when the boat’s in the water.”
“Oh . . . Of course,” I said.
The lake appeared calm as we rattled to a halt by a launching ramp. The atmosphere was almost balmy with a cicadas’ roar in the trees – loud enough to force us to raise our voices. Sand flies flirted with our faces, some of them settling on skin, doomed to an early death under a crushing hand. There was no one else about – only ourselves and an encircling gaggle of ducks hoping for bread. After four pulls on the starter rope, the Seagull motor burst into life, filling the cockpit with acrid blue smoke. In our wake there lay a psychedelic oil-slick, a shameful marker of our passage.
The racket of the motor isolated Graham and I into separate worlds. As we slid up the lake, I took an apparent interest in the western shoreline, while his gaze was affixed upon the east. The passing bays and stony beaches, framed by beech and tough Manuka, were the habitat of my childhood summer days. Rather than risk the social milieu on the main beach, Graham would secret us away in the dinghy, his target a distant place of seclusion. Isobel and I would perch upon the front thwart, our legs hidden beneath the varnished triangle of deck at the bow. Silently, we would watch the target bay appear beyond the wavelets. At first it would be merely a slash of white between the water and trees, soon to reveal itself as an inviting slope of pebbles, partially shaded beneath an umbrella of leaves. Upon arrival, with a single bottle of beer placed to cool in the lake, Graham would search the shore for dry wood. He would build up a stack beside a circle of large gray stones. As the sun peaked in the sky, we would gather around with buttered bread, to receive a smoking sausage from his spitting frying pan.
At first, in the naivety of youth, our days seemed idyllic. But as our bodies felt the surge of adolescent hormones, so did our tolerance for seclusion diminish. I had watched as the teenage Isobel became restless, her top lip curling in derision. I too, succumbed to the rebellion disease myself, three or four years later. By then, as our dinghy put out from the main beach bound for some isolated cove, the excited laughter of gregarious children cut me to the quick. Diminished by this new realisation, I would hang my head and stare at the sodden floorboards, my anonymity now a prison.
I stole a look at Graham, his right hand vibrating on the steering arm, his face half turned away, watery eyes focused on a distant shore. Briefly resentment welled into my throat, an acidic regurgitation that threatened to become an acrimonious outburst. I tried to calm myself, revisiting the elation of my success. I closed my eyes and let the memory wash through me. ‘We want your song,’ the voice had said. The thrill had rocketed up and down my spine – a physiologic shockwave. I had felt weightless, barely able to speak, my throat engorging in a new ecstasy. Today, my melody was known far and wide across North America. How many kids of my era could claim such a triumph? I could never reclaim any lost youth, it was gone forever. But now, in these heady days, I was a winner. The song, created a year before its publication, was written for Joanna . . . ‘We want your song,’ the voice had said. I recalled coming off the immediate rush, a fist raised in triumph, dropping to my knees before Isobel, my eyes welling with tears. “Oh yes, yes, yes!” I croaked. She had come to me, clutching at my raised arms, her hair spilling down into my face. I had gently tugged her downward to the wooden floor, to roll about in exalted e
mbrace.
As I travelled the length of the lake in my far flung country, a familiar ache came into my upper chest, like a chunk of apple descending the gullet. I was as far from Joanna as I could imagine. In visualising her face, I was brought to hear the strum of a guitar, and an overlay of mandolin. I was hearing my song. It fantasised about an unlikely scenario . . . a girl and her transistor radio in the cold climes of North America, hearing the new song for the first time – the song bearing a plea to her from a long lost lover . . .
Twenty years before, the early seeds of musicianship implanted and grew, and I hungered for my first guitar, the iconic symbol of the new music culture. Graham had come out with the expected resistance, his face portentous, forehead ridged and eyes blazing. “What about something cerebral like the Cello,” he said. Julia acted the mediator. She wasn’t often successful in changing Graham’s mind, but when it came to my musical development she seemed to put in an extra effort. She sought and obtained the compromise solution. I could have a guitar in a year’s time, provided I agreed to classical piano tuition first. Since there was no other route to my objective available, I went along with this plan. I doggedly followed the prescribed course, wringing a featureless but competent performance out of each weekly manuscript.
“Are you sure you want to be here Gerry,” the music teacher said one day, after listening to another annihilation of Bach or Chopin. I assured him that, yes indeed, I did desire to be there with him, hunched over his dusty keyboard and cloistered in his grey music room. Until I achieved my goal, I was for all appearances, at his service. I would do just enough to keep him from boiling over. Come the day of the guitar though, I would drop Mr Barcarolle like a hot coal.
Christmas 1966: the big triangular box under the Christmas tree had me in a lather of anticipation. I lifted the lid and there it was. Six strings. The shiny varnished wood of the hard top – the lovely feminine curves in the body – the copper wound steel strings and a mellow, undamped ring with the first strum. I nursed it up to my room, away from the doubtful father. I turned it upside down. The wood of the flat back had a deep vivid stain, as if under painted with purple. The back of the long and curvaceous neck was longitudinally lined, like the plans of a newly drawn yacht. I opened the accompanying guidebook, my heartbeat quickening with anticipation. All morning I worked away, pushing my fingers into the positions required for the chords C, G and D. By midday Graham had had enough. He thrust his face around the leading edge of my door. “Any possibility of giving it a rest,” he said.
After a half hour, the end of the lake was visible. The southern arm down which we were travelling, was narrowing. The two apposing mountainsides were closing in. A slash of yellow marked the termination of the still waters and the start of the sun-bleached tussocks of the valley floor. Our target, the rocky spire of Mt Cotterel, stood beyond the valley centre, a high point in the eastern range of a valley that curved westward. As we drew closer, I found its countenance an irresistible force. My dreams and regrets were squeezed by a rising excitement. The mountain was becoming, for the moment, the focus of my mind.
In the final moments, the lake edge seemed to race to meet us. As we pulled up to the landing stage, I recalled the excited babble of Isobel, when she too had started a similar journey, in quite the same manner, from the very same landfall twenty years before . . .
Chapter 6