Night Street by Kristel Thornell Read Free Book Online

splattered cheerily with blues and reds, a wandering palette.
    â€˜Tired?’ he asked.
    â€˜Not now. You?’
    â€˜Fit as a fiddle. Tea?’
    â€˜Oh, yes.’
    He made for the caravan. As Clarice methodically packed up her kit, she noticed a man on his morning walk. The Doctor. They had never been introduced or said hello; local gossip had taught her his profession. She saw the Doctor most days, usually in the evening, knowing his silhouette and slow, sure-footed steps almost as if he were a feature of the landscape.
    She joined Herb by the caravan. She took her tea from him and nursed it in her cramped hands. The blessed first cup of tea. Leaning forward on camping chairs, they studied the day: perfect, nearly smug, it might have been congratulating itself on inventing the idea of day.
    â€˜I won’t be able to stay much longer,’ he said eventually. ‘They want me away from the beaches.’
    â€˜They’re mad. What harm are you doing?’ Her voice was rusty, not yet self-conscious. ‘Still bent on France?’ Everyone seemed to lust after France.
    A beguiled smile. He was lighting up with exoticism, with the immortal feeling that comes from closing in on a dream. Perhaps she would miss his laconic companionship, when he went. They understood one another and his enthusiasm was a tonic; she laughed.
    He seized her empty cup. ‘Coming in for a swim?’
    â€˜I am.’
    He let her change in the caravan. It was innocent between them. He might have liked it to be otherwise, but he appeared to appreciate that it was the generous distance in their friendship that made it. Inside, his caravan was somehow roomy, holding a vocation and the few, rough-hewn pieces of an itinerant life’s jigsaw puzzle. Herb had driven through South Australia in this, crossing deserts. The incestuous jostling together of art and day-to-day existence, the whiff of grand emancipation, pleased her immensely. As she undressed, her eyes travelled obliquely over her now remembered, renewed body; she was well coordinated, unhesitating.
    They stood in their bathing suits with just their ankles submerged, feet taking root in the liquid sand. It thrilled them that they had spied on the beginning of the day, had participated in it; they felt young, in the best way: bold. The water was an amazingly cold reward.
    The sea gave itself entirely. It did not hold back, having no modesty or reason for restraint. It surrendered because it never lost anything. The water’s embrace was soothing and alarming; she was never sure out here which had the upper hand in her, happiness or crazed fear. It was the world in raw form, the swimmer constantly on the edge of the precipice, kicking to stave off drowning, deceptively weightless.

7
    Clarice saw him for the first time on a Tuesday promising rain.
    She was early for class and, on her way there, she had paused to admire Princes Bridge. Her notion of what was interesting—aesthetically pleasing or beautiful, you might call it—was large and flexible. She was not concerned with grandeur or decoration, and she ruled nothing out. Clarice loved her city well, comprehensively; all its plain, enticing fragments. A length of half-empty road, a long wistful shadow stretched out over it. An arrangement of telegraph poles. Some were offended by change, but she thought it a pity to see progress as the enemy of beauty—because then, you were left only with nostalgia, having turned your back on so much that deserved your attention. An infinite-seeming number of small and indispensable views asked to be looked at, demanded it, and proceeded to etch themselves onto her awareness. It was usually after she had finished a board when she realised that a painted view suggested something beyond itself: the substratum of an emotion, the air that a story might pass through. On that Tuesday of imminent rain, she saw Princes Bridge. A slice of it: the solidity of cast iron resting