The Submerged Cathedral Read Free Page A

gather their own bags and make their way to their homes.
    Jocelyn had to raise a hand to shade her eyes from the hard white light as they walked towards the line of new houses strung along the beach.
    Martin had nodded – ‘There’ – at one of the newest. Its iron porch railing was wound with Neptune’s necklace, the beaded seaweed he sometimes brings back to the house to garland the verandah with until it stiffens and shrivels, to be tossed over the rail into the garden in the morning when they sit out drinking coffee.

    Jocelyn puts down her pencil and gets up from the table. Her back aches. She stretches, bends down to touch her toes. As her fingertips brush the floorboards she thinks of Martin on his way to work, his long drive through the bush and the beaches running alongside the road.
    Since her arrival, the people from the older cottages, small buildings subdued by passionfruit vine and overgrown kikuyu, stare fixedly at the track as they walk past this verandah to swim, or fish. Occasionally one will grunt a greeting, but mostly they walk with heads down, shamed at these young people who will sit so exposed with their breakfast outside, at this bare house set almost amongst the waves, its doors and its windows always open to the gulls and the fish and the sea.
    The mass of bush in the hills behind the houses meets the city’s northwestern outskirts not so many miles away. But here there are no roads and they can travel only by boat or the public ferry from Palm Beach, making their small headland an island.
    Each morning they wake with the sun blaring. They lie in bed, and Jocelyn listens to Martin waking up. She hears his breath change from slow to sharp as he first leaves sleep. She hears his yawn, feels the slump of his body become alert, his movement behind her as he stretches, arching his back. She lies, eyes closed, half-awake, half-waiting. And then, each time, his heavy handcomes to her shoulder, or hip, and he kisses her through the blankets while he thinks she is asleep, and then he rolls away and heaves himself upright.
    Once she feels his hand resting on her, that moment’s stillness, she falls easily back into sleep.
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    Whenever Martin leaves the house he is in the wash of this thing, this tide. On the drive to the city he thinks about past women, the times he thought he was in love; those imitated feelings, the flowers and the chocolates. No woman has imprinted herself on him like this.
    He had offered her a gold ring that morning before they stepped onto the boat, to protect her from the locals’ gawking. Before they reached the jetty he pulled the pawnshop wedding ring from his pocket. She had held it a moment, and given it back to him.
    â€˜I do not need a ring on my finger,’ she had said. ‘I am not ashamed.’
    But he could feel the gut depth of her fear, and when she stepped onto that boat, when she smiled into those staring faces, it was the work of a death-defyer, an acrobat.
    He thinks of her working at the house now, head bent over the paper, chewing a pen. And then his car rounds the Bilgola bends and the sun blares over that curved sheetof ocean, and all the risk explodes like fireworks in the shimmering blue air.
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    Morning and night every closure of his eyes attracts her, their every opening challenges her. In the past Jocelyn has shaken her head at women like the one she has now become. Who would risk all their future, who were called harlots, who bore this shame in place of marriage. Their stupidity, their masochism , astonished her.
    But she is worse; she has chosen this disgrace herself.
    She straightens, goes to the bedroom to find her bathing suit.
    She thinks of her mother, her father, glad they are not alive to hear the rumours she knows will already be flying about the mountains town. She has not told Ellen, safely married in London, about Martin yet. Again she remembers her sister’s face, her mother’s, at that broken