"The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude."
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening
The grass was cold under his feet. A late-autumn cold, mild and provisional, the dew soaking through his soles as if the earth were drawing something out of him. Bob stood on the first terrace of the stepped lawn with a coffee in his right hand, wearing yesterday's chinos and a linen shirt he'd slept in, and he looked at the ocean.
It was just past seven, and the light had that quality it only had at this hour: pale gold, uncommitted, as though the day hadn't decided about itself yet. The Norfolk pines threw long shadows westward, their strange columnar shapes dark against the brightening sky. Below and to the south, the Indiana sat closed and white on the beachfront, its facade catching the first horizontal light. A magpie picked at the edge of the path. The ocean was flat, pewter, the colour that would burn off into blue within the hour, and it stretched -- as it always stretched, as it had for every one of the fifteen years he'd stood here with a coffee in his hand -- unbroken to Africa, or to nothing. The sky above it was enormous. That was always the thing you forgot about Perth until you stood outside before the day started and looked up: the sky was enormous, and the silence was almost total, and for a few minutes you could believe nothing had gone wrong yet.
This was his ritual on the mornings when he couldn't sleep, which was most mornings now. He'd come out the back gate and cross the street and stand on the grass and do the thing he'd done for years: not-thinking. Letting the view fill the space where thought would be. The view had cost him four and a half million dollars -- what he'd paid for the house in 2010, at the peak of the mining boom, stretching further than he should have because Jeannie wanted this address and this address was what Jeannie got. He did not think about the fund, or the phone call he needed to return, or the quarterly reports due Friday that contained numbers corresponding to nothing real. He looked at the ocean and he was no one for a while, and the no one felt like the truest thing about him.
He was forty-nine. Sandy hair going grey at the temples. Six foot, with an extra ten kilos that had settled around his waist and softened the line of his jaw, so that his face, which had once been handsome in the way that suggested competence, had gone bland -- a face for a bank advertisement, a face that made people feel their money was safe. His hands were large and well-kept, the hands of a man who had never built anything with them.
His left hand -- the one not holding the coffee -- curled slightly at his side. The fingers closed, not into a fist but around something that wasn't there, the thumb bracing against an invisible neck, the fingertips pressing against nothing. The gesture was so small and so unconscious that Bob himself didn't notice it. But it was there. The hand remembered what the mind had locked away.
He turned and looked back at the house. Five bedrooms. Limestone. Ocean views from the upper floor. It sat above him on the rise, lit by the early sun, and from here it looked like what it was supposed to look like: the house of a man who had done well. Jeannie's curtain -- her retreat, as she called it, the second bedroom she had colonised three years ago -- was still drawn. The house was quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound.
He came through the back gate into the kitchen, and the kitchen received him the way it always did: with marble and light and the faint hum of appliances that cost more than his first car. The Calacatta island bench gleamed under the east-facing window. The dual-zone wine fridge hummed -- one side for white, one for red, though the red side was mostly empty because Jeannie drank only white and Bob drank beer and nobody in this house drank red wine, but the fridge hummed on regardless, cooling nothing, maintaining the correct temperature for an absence. He rinsed his cup and stood at the sink and felt the house settle around him like a suit he couldn't take off.
From upstairs: Jeannie's voice. Not the words -- the walls reduced language to melody -- but the tone. The bright, performative register she used with her friends, pitched ten degrees warmer than the voice she used with him, rising and falling with the cadences of someone organising, arranging. She was on the phone. He could map her emotional state by the pitch of her phone voice the way a sailor reads weather by the shape of clouds. This morning she was organising something. A lunch. A charity thing. Something that required her particular genius for the choreography of social life, which she performed with an energy she never directed at him.
He moved through the house. The living room: white walls, Italian floor tiles in a pale grey that Jeannie called taupe and Bob saw as the colour of nothing. Furniture from a shop in Claremont that had closed two years ago, its pieces now irreplaceable, which Jeannie mentioned to admiring guests the way a collector mentions provenance. The photographs on the console table: the family in Bali, all of them brown and smiling on a villa terrace; the family at Rottnest, the water that impossible turquoise; the family at a charity gala, Jeannie in a gown that cost what some people paid in rent. In every photograph they were smiling. In every photograph Bob stood slightly apart from the others -- a few inches, a half-step -- as if he'd wandered into someone else's portrait and was waiting for the right moment to leave.
Chase's door was closed, which meant he was in there, which meant he was asleep, because Chase at twenty-one slept the way he did everything -- fully, without reservation, without the low-grade insomnia that kept his father on wet grass at seven in the morning.
Shanel's door was open. The bed was made. She was already out running -- a habit she'd picked up from a university friend, one of the few things she did that Jeannie hadn't initiated. She ran along the beachfront before the heat and the families, and she came back flushed and quiet and disappeared into the shower and emerged as if she'd completed some necessary private negotiation with herself. Bob noticed the made bed, the books on the desk stacked with a precision that reminded him of no one in his family. She is more disciplined than any of us, he thought, and the thought arrived with something that might have been pride and might have been sorrow, because discipline in this family was not rewarded. It was merely survived.
Jeannie's footsteps on the stairs. Not the phone voice now -- the call concluded, the warmth switched off -- but the footsteps, which had their own vocabulary: brisk, precise, the heel striking each step with the certainty of a woman who expected the house to arrange itself around her arrival.
She came into the kitchen. Already dressed: white linen pants, a silk top in a colour Bob couldn't have named but understood was expensive, her hair pulled back in the style that made her look like a photograph of herself. She looked at him -- standing at the sink in yesterday's clothes, barefoot, hair sideways from the pillow -- and her mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile and not quite a wince, a verdict delivered before the defendant had spoken.
"You look like you slept on the lawn," she said.
Not loud. Not angry. The tone of a woman commenting on a stain on a tablecloth. Bob absorbed it. He turned back to the kettle and began making more coffee, and the kitchen held the remark the way the house held everything -- silently, without registering a mark.
She cut; he absorbed. It had been this way so long that neither of them registered it as abnormal. Simply the prevailing conditions of their marriage, as constant as the Fremantle Doctor that blew in every summer afternoon and rearranged the surface of things without touching anything beneath.
"The Hendersons are already across," Jeannie said, looking at her phone. "They left at six. We'll miss the good mooring."
They were taking the Riviera to Rottnest. This had been arranged -- by Jeannie, because all social logistics were arranged by Jeannie -- for a week. Chase was bringing friends. She'd packed hampers the night before with the precision of a military operation: cheeses from a deli in Subiaco, bread from the bakery on Napoleon Street, two bottles of Leeuwin Estate chardonnay in ice packs, a fruit platter for the photographs. The boat was at RFBYC -- the Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club in Peppermint Grove, where membership required a proposer and seconder of five or more years and the waiting list concealed an architecture of social vetting so thorough it would have impressed a security agency. Bob had joined because Jim was a member. Jeannie had joined because it mattered.
"There's always a mooring," Bob said.
Jeannie looked up from her phone. "There's always a mooring in Thomson Bay for people who don't care where they end up."
This was not about moorings. The mooring was a metaphor, and the metaphor was a weapon, aimed at the same target it was always aimed at: his insufficiency, his willingness to settle. He poured his coffee. He said nothing. He went upstairs to shower, and the morning advanced along the rails Jeannie had laid for it.
The Riviera 48 was called Chardonnay. Jeannie's choice. Bob had found it funny once and now found it merely accurate. Forty-eight feet of fibreglass and teak, twin Caterpillar diesels, three cabins, a flybridge. She was not new, not the biggest boat at the club -- the real mining money had sixty-footers with professional crew -- but she was what Jeannie would have called appropriate, the coded restraint of RFBYC being as important as the thing being restrained. She'd cost four hundred and twenty thousand second-hand in 2015 and ran forty thousand a year. Bob had not thought about whether he could afford her. This was because he could not, and not-thinking was what Bob did.
He was on the jetty, prepping the boat, when Chase arrived. The Swan River was silver and flat, the jetty timbers warm under the early sun. Bob was checking the engines -- fuel, oil, bilge pumps, safety gear. This was the one domain where he was competent in a way Jeannie couldn't diminish. He knew engines. He knew tides. He knew the crossing the way he knew this ritual: by feel, by repetition, by the body's accumulation of knowledge that required no thought. Out here, with his hands on the boat, Bob was a version of himself that almost worked.
Chase came down the jetty with two mates trailing him. He was physical, loud, taking up space -- six-one, broad, dark-haired, Jeannie's jawline set in a face harder and more certain than Bob's had ever been. He greeted Bob with a half-hug, one arm, the briefest compression -- the physical vocabulary of affection between Australian men -- and then he was past him, stepping aboard, taking over the helm with the ease of a son who'd been driving this boat since sixteen. The handover from father to son at the wheel was a ritual they both enjoyed without examining, one of the few transactions in this family that didn't carry a hidden cost.
The mates -- two boys, interchangeable in the way of western suburbs twenty-one-year-olds, both in board shorts, both carrying slabs of Emu Export -- settled into the boat with the confidence of guests who knew they were welcome. They called Chase "Hazza" and Bob "Mr H" and they laughed too loud and took up too much room and Bob liked them for it, liked the noise of them, the uncomplicated volume of young men for whom the day was still a thing to be filled rather than endured.
Jeannie arrived last. She descended the jetty in white linen and a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses that covered half her face, and she boarded the Chardonnay the way she entered every room -- as if she were completing it. She had a glass of something in her hand before they cleared the river mouth, and Bob, navigating the channel markers past Freshwater Bay, did not look at it and did not count.
The crossing: Bob handed the helm to Chase at the river mouth, where the Swan opened past the Fremantle traffic bridge and the swell hit them. The Indian Ocean was not the gentle, island-dotted sea of postcards. Here, where the continental shelf dropped away, the water was serious. The Chardonnay lifted and slammed and Bob loved it. He stood on the flybridge and held the rail and watched Chase at the helm below, his son's hands on the wheel, the way he read the swell and adjusted the trim without thinking, and he felt something that had no agenda and no cost: love. Simple, uncomplicated love for his son's competence, his son's ease, his son's hands on the wheel.
Chase was good at this. Bob watched him and thought: this is the version of me that worked. The physical, confident version. The one that doesn't need silence, doesn't carry a weight in his chest that no one can see.
Rottnest resolved from a grey smudge into its true self: low, scrubby, the coastline scalloped into bays where the water changed from navy to turquoise that visitors photographed and showed to people who didn't believe the colour was real. It was real. It was the reef shelf rising, the white sand turning the water luminous. As Chase brought them into Thomson Bay, throttling back, the diesels dropping to a murmur, Bob felt what he always felt at this moment: the constructed world receding, and the open water receiving him with an indifference that felt, to a man who was needed by everyone and known by no one, like mercy.
Jeannie was on the flybridge, taking photographs. The wind in her hair, the hat tilted at the angle that said effortless. Content for the feed. She held her phone and smiled the smile she'd refined over ten thousand posts -- warm without being eager, beautiful without being vain. She did not look at Bob. She looked at herself looking at the ocean, and the looking was the experience, and the experience was the content, and the content was the life.
Thomson Bay in the late afternoon held a stillness that made the rest of the world seem like a rumour. Thirty-odd vessels sat on the water, rafted in twos and threes, their hulls ticking against fenders. The water was absurdly clear -- four metres down, the sandy bottom visible, a school of herring drifting beneath the hull in a formation that tightened and relaxed, going nowhere.
Chase and his mates had taken the tender to shore. Jeannie was below, resting -- the word she used for the state that followed three glasses of wine and two hours of sun. The cabin door was closed. She would sleep for an hour. She would emerge showered and changed and ready for the evening as if the afternoon hadn't happened, and the performance would resume.
Bob was on the flybridge. His feet were up on the rail. He had a beer in one hand but wasn't drinking it. He was, for once, not not-thinking. He was thinking. Or rather: something was thinking him, pushing up from beneath like water through sand, a restlessness he couldn't name. He'd been feeling this more often -- in the car, in the shower, in the moments between sleep and waking when the mind's defences thinned and things that had been sealed away leaked through. Something knocking at a door he'd closed a long time ago.
The sound came from across the water. He didn't identify it immediately -- it arrived as part of the afternoon's ambient texture, mixed with the wind and the lapping of the hull. A violin. Or what might have been a violin. A few bars of something, carried on the breeze, distorted by salt air and distance. A child practising on another boat, or a busker at the pub, or a radio, or nothing. The wind shifted. The sound was gone.
Bob went still. The stillness of an animal that has heard a sound it knows, from before language, from the body's oldest archive. His right hand didn't move. But the left -- resting on his thigh -- curled. The fingers closed around a neck that wasn't there. The thumb braced. The fingertips found positions on invisible strings. His breath changed. Something in his chest opened, or tried to -- a door swollen shut from years of disuse, and behind it a room he hadn't entered since he was seventeen, a room where a boy stood with a violin under his chin and played a Handel sonata and the world, for the duration of a phrase, made sense.
The music stopped. Or the wind shifted. Or it was never there. The sun dropped. The sky turned copper and rose and violet and then the deep blue of an ocean at dusk, and the lights of the other boats came on, warm and yellow against the darkening water. The stars appeared. The Milky Way was visible. The Southern Cross hung above the horizon like something that had always been there and didn't care whether anyone looked at it or not.
He heard the tender before he saw it. The outboard's whine, the thud against the swim platform, then Chase's voice -- loud, happy -- and the scramble of bodies boarding. Chase came up the stairs to the flybridge. He was slightly drunk. His face was open and flushed and he looked, in the fading light, so young that Bob felt something turn over in his chest.
"You right, Dad?"
Bob looked at his son. The stars were behind Chase's head, and the lights of the other boats were reflected in the water, and the night was soft and enormous.
"Yeah, mate. Good."
Chase nodded. He dropped into the chair beside Bob and put his feet on the rail and looked at the stars and said nothing, because nothing was the language they shared, and it was sufficient and it was not enough and it was all they had.
Whatever had opened in Bob did not close entirely. But he couldn't speak of it, and Chase wouldn't have known how to hear it, and the night settled over the bay and the boats rocked gently and the stars turned overhead and somewhere -- on the wind or in memory -- a violin played a phrase and stopped, and the silence after the music was the loudest thing in the world.