Read More: A brief Q&A with Eva Lomski
They bought a split-level shack on land beside the ocean outside Warrnambool, a town small enough to live in, yet big enough to hide. It was big, flat dairy country, and the wind smelled of either sea or grass. He’d work and surf, while she would take time and watch the Southern Right whales with their calves in the winter. They’d buy some chickens, maybe even pigs. Together, they’d plant vegetables and fruit trees, and give each other space to grieve.
They dug into her grandmother’s legacy to renovate. Alice washed, scraped, sanded and painted. Jerry dug, composted, bought and planted. On the days one of them couldn’t speak, the other was silent. When one couldn’t move, the other kept going. When they argued, it was hard to see a way ahead. But on good days, they made sandwiches for lunch and ate them together on the steps of the front porch overlooking beige-green paddocks that swept down to the sea which, depending on the weather, ranged from teal to cobalt to stone. They watched, at a distance, the crashing waves.
“It’s too early for the whales,” Alice often said.
“Yes,” agreed Jerry, “too early.”
Every year, the whales swam from the sub-Antarctic to bear their calves at nearby Logans Beach. Whale and calf were shielded by the shallows there from great white sharks. Sharks were what Alice feared most whenever Jerry headed out at dawn with his board on the roof on their Jeep.
“You’re surfing the safe beaches?” said Alice. “I don’t want you mistaken for a seal.”
“Let’s build the coop,” said Jerry. “Get those chickens.”
“How about we plant a tree, or something? To remember him by.”
Jerry didn’t talk about that topic much, but they both agreed a garden could be a good thing to do, when Alice had the energy.
On a side of their property were twin stone fireplaces that stood flue to flue in the wallaby-grass, slim remnants of a long-gone Victorian cottage. The chimneys overlooked the patch they’d chosen for the coop, which would be built from a discarded cubbyhouse.
“Do we demolish them?” said Jerry.
“They survived whatever it was,” said Alice.
“They got each other’s backs,” said Jerry. “Like you and me.”
Which made Alice cry for many reasons. After that, she never passed the chimneys by without a nod to their resilience and solidity.
At night, when Jerry returned after a day selling real estate, they ate with ingredients grown by Alice and watched documentaries and travel shows on TV. When Alice got bored, or when she despaired, she posted online: photos from the previous year, quotes about tiny angels, poems. The likes and comments were comforting, but not nearly enough.
In bed, when Jerry reached out a hand to her breast, Alice turned to him and tried to imagine herself as pristine, as expansive, as teeming with life as the waters of the Antarctic, but warmer. She needed the touch. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not.
Alice took to cycling the twenty minutes to Logans Beach lookout, dipping under massive cypress tree branches cropped like ballerinas’ tutus. There was a sighting a few weeks back – a humpback – and she waited with binoculars for its return. As for the Southern Rights, called that once because they were slow and therefore apparently the right whale to hunt, they were late. Some blamed the weather. Others said seismic testing off the coast scared them away. When she searched their images online, she wondered at the whales’ long upside down mouths and the crusty white callosities on their heads, warty-like disfigurations, as unique to each mammal as a fingerprint.
She was peaceful at the lookout, something she couldn’t have imagined not that long ago. On the days she liked best, tourists were absent and she was alone with the seagulls and the swamp harriers, who glided low, hunting. She kept her hands and mind busy; scanning the ocean; hiking along the paths; enjoying the rhythm of the rain on her umbrella when squalls battered the timber decks; listening to the ocean’s metronome of old-man yawns and young-man calls.
She took her old sketch-book made drawings of the plants along the coast. There were small rosemary-like shrubs – bush-peas with yellow orchid-like blooms, and honey-pots adorned with translucent bulbs. There was grey hairy spinifex which rose from the dunes like implanted hair. Olive-colored tussock-grass clumped like eyebrows. Of the blossomers, there was the delicate pink stork’s bill and cliff-loving yellow dune thistle. She wondered which of these plants had fed the Indigenous people of this area, and which of them might be best for the memorial garden.
On bad days, she was beaten to the lookout by an older woman with a neat blonde ponytail under a scarf and a face etched by sun and wind. The woman wrote in a notepad and kept to herself. Alice knew soon she would be followed by tourists in their busloads and carloads, trampling down the length of the lookout in their soft shoes and parkas, disturbing the subdued muted tranquillity of it with their bright colours, unsuccessful deodorants and conversations about last night’s pizza. If the whales came, Alice wanted them all to herself, at least for a moment. Those days, she cycled home early, eyes peeled for the twin fireplaces breaking skyward through their land, and worked, or walked to the nearby forest, or sought the company of her mother or friends online. She often ached to talk through her feelings, but she didn’t want anyone to see them.
When the chicken coop was finally finished, and Pickles, Hazel, Clucky and Boris were installed, Jerry stood in the dirt looking at the fireplaces.
“Should we demolish them?”
“Absolutely not,” said Alice.
“Don’t they make you think of the past?” […]
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