By Way of Water
Black Pepper, Melbourne, 2000
ISBN 1 8760444 30 6
What is it about?
From the back cover…
"In the end Vladimir chose London for us." She smiled, thinking about it. "So Leonora became an English child, dreaming of happy endings."
When her Italian mother takes up with the builder Tony Tomaselli. Leonora Stanislavski finds herself at a loose end in Cairns. She meets Vic Townsend, a tour boat operator fleeing his past. Leonora has been investigating her own past, in particular the mysterious death by drowning of her father in Berlin.
Their pasts seem destined to keep them apart. But when Tony Tomaselli sends them on a journey to the far north to deliver an Aboriginal painting to the derelict cattle station of old Albert Winters, their buried love surfaces. Then Leonora reveals the horrific things she’s done to uncover her father’s past.
Can we read some of it?
A blue sea, splashed with sunlight. An empty beach.
White sand, stretching north and south, disappears into the afternoon haze.
The Pacific Ocean. If you swam due east you would reach New Zealand. If you missed New Zealand your next stop would be South America.
Seagulls on the wet sand wait and hope as the breakers lift and curl and throw themselves on to the beach.
Crabs scuttle and hide. A cuttlefish’s dry, brittle flesh is gouged and torn by beaks as sharp as fishermen’s knives.
He wonders why the beach is empty. He has walked ten miles through the bush to get there, but still is surprised to find himself alone.
This is a pilgrimage.
Why here?
He sits leaning against a paper bark tree. Its bark, breaking away in broad, thick strips, is soft against his back. He looks up into the branches of the tree. Its dark leaves are lit by the sun. Light and shade flicker across his face.
Here he is alone. It is what he has been looking for, but now that he has found it, it is a surprise. He knows it will not last.
The sea is empty, all the way to the horizon.
It is not safe to swim. He can see the current: hard, fast-moving, dangerous. He is a big man, and strong, and loves the sea, but the surf is menacing, driven by far-away storms. By day you see and hear nothing. At night you see the lightning flickering silently over the horizon. Still you do not hear the thunder or feel the wind.
Once before he had sat beneath this tree and watched the sea turn pale then dark and hard as the sun at his back set behind storm clouds. A summer evening; hot, still and humid. He had sat there, waiting for the storm, sensing it beyond the mountains to the west. It was too late to look for shelter, too late to fear the lightning.
Where had he thought he would spend the night? He had not thought. Then or now.
He had waited for the storm to break. The rain came first, a wall of water beating at the ground, churning up the dry creek-beds, ripping through the branches of the trees. The sea disappeared as if it had ceased to exist. Somewhere nearby, a tree exploded in a blaze of fire as lightning descended on him and thunder cracked in his ear, flinging him sideways.
After the storm, he had walked on the beach. The sand was warm. He stood by the water’s edge, watching the storm move out to sea. Behind it the sky was clear. The moon rose out of the storm clouds, dazzling on the white sand. Far out to sea, lightning lit up the clouds from within or leapt forth and plunged down into the sea. He could no longer hear the thunder. Only the lightning remained, and clouds as huge as twenty mountain ranges piled one upon another, and the brilliance of a night that would never grow dark.
The smouldering stump of the shattered tree had dried and warmed him. He had slept briefly, waking as the dawn spread across the sea, the sun climbing into a cloudless sky.
This time there is no storm, only the imprint of the storm there in front of him, in the rip that would sweep him out beyond the horizon, towards New Zealand or South America.
He is here to say farewell.
It is time to move on.
Here he is at peace, as he rarely is. Here he can understand what it is he needs, why he cannot be still, why he must always move on.
Here, drifting, dreaming, dozing against the paper bark tree, by the empty beach, by the blue, empty sea.
From Chapter 5 of By Way of Water
In a park one evening he had met a woman with a dog. She was sitting on a bench under the trees, staring at a pond as it slowly vanished into the darkness. When he sat down he did not notice her at first, not until the fat dog shuffled over and leant against his foot.
The woman laughed at his surprise.
He glanced at her. She was tall and thin and her eyes shone in the pale light from a line of lanterns beyond the trees. She might have been in her late thirties or perhaps older; it was hard to tell. He felt young just looking at her. She looked back at him, smiling. He turned away and then back towards her, astonished by what he saw and what he felt.
Was it her shining eyes that attracted him to her? Or her laugh, that was abrupt but somehow open and uninhibited at the same time? He was surprised and uneasy, feeling something that it was absurd and unreasonable to feel: a kind of unexpected pleasure, a warmth that he knew was illusory, based on nothing but a desire he had not been aware of to make contact with another human being, to be close to a woman who would smile at him, like this, in the darkness. He knew he was deceiving himself, that at best he would make a fool of himself while at worst his life would collapse in ruins around him, but he could not stop himself wanting what he could suddenly see in front of him: the risk, the danger, the absurdity and the beauty of it, the unasked-for moment that promised perfection.
He became aware of the weight of the dog on his foot. He moved his leg away but the dog eased itself closer against him with a grumbling, snuffling sound, seeking out his warmth.
The woman laughed again. ‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked.
Of you, he wanted to say, but could not.
As the night closed in around them, she talked to him and laughed softly as he answered her quietly and the dog made low, muffled noises as if in sympathy. Fleetingly, she reached across and touched him on the cheek, like a mother reassuring a child. He was not reassured. Fear and panic and desire rose up within him as he felt her taking hold of him, drawing him to her, like the fat dog on its lead. And already he felt drawn to her and did not mind, but knew he wanted it and everything that might come with it.
When at last – was it minutes or hours later? – he stood up to go, to walk back alone through the dark suburbs to Johannes’s shop and the small room he had made his own, she got up too and walked beside him, with the dog reluctantly following. It was not her dog, she explained, but a friend’s, who was on holiday. In Hong Kong, she added. She would never have a dog herself. Or if she did it would run and chase sticks and balls, it would never get fat and frightened like this dreadful old thing that shambled along beside them.
Did she say, or was it only his imagination, that he had no need to be frightened of her?
He found himself walking her home to a small house in a garden overhung with trees and the heavy scent of flowers. She took him inside for a coffee, which became a glass of wine, and then another, and then a brandy, and perhaps another. He picked up the guitar he found lying dusty in the corner and played to her. She sat watching, admiring his skill. He sang to her, looking into her pale eyes, wondering who she was. Her hair was red and her face freckled, her legs were long and brown. She might have been forty, he thought, as if he himself would never be so old, but it no longer seemed to matter. She reached over and stroked his cheek, her hands soft and gentle, more gentle than anything he had ever felt before. He remembered what she had said while they were sitting by the pond, that she worked in the hospital, that she was a physiotherapist. She healed people with her hands, if they were ready, if they were willing to be healed. And she had laughed and picked up a stone and thrown it into the pond, as if to confuse him, while the dog at his feet snorted and shook, taking fright at the ripples of light that spread out into the darkness, disturbing the shadows. Had he imagined it? He wondered; and the touch on his cheek, the tenderness he had never believed could be possible? She had not even told him her name. But he was in love with her, he knew, as she poured him another brandy and sat closer to him, up against him, wrapping herself around him, taking him in her arms, smiling at him, kissing his cheeks and his eyes and his neck, running her fingers through his hair as if, somehow, he already belonged to her. He hardly knew what was happening, or why, even when they found their way to her bed – a huge bed, he could not help noticing – and she held him in her arms that were long and thin, but strong, like a gymnast’s or an athlete’s, with an athlete’s body, light and strong and firm, defying the logic of age and the lines forming around her mouth and eyes already. In the morning when he looked at her lying next to him, he supposed they must have made love. He seemed to remember it, as if it had been many times, as if it had gone on all night, but the ache in his head from the brandy suggested that at least was a dream. Nevertheless, he remembered her body with a kind of desperate familiarity as he reached out to touch her and she rolled over against him and looked up and smiled as if she, too, had enjoyed the dream. A shared dream, he thought, but knew he did not believe it. In the next room he heard a dog snuffling and chewing at a bone. The fat dog, he remembered, the fat, frightened dog that started at shadows.
What do they say about it?
Melissa Hart, in Australian Book Review, November 2000
‘By Way of Water is an intriguing and gentle first novel that is not so much driven by plot as by its characters and their unfolding memories and desires.
‘Leask’s writing style is consistent, confident and quite original – unlike a first time novelist who often stumbles here and there. His characters are also multi-layered. They are rich with personal histories and messy emotional baggage, which is something of a rarity in recent Australian literature.
‘… Leask is a promising and gifted new voice in Australian literature. One that values and dives into the emotional depths of his characters.’
Southern Cross Magazine, London, 10.1.01
'A great, sweeping story of unravelling pasts and love denied from Aussie author Leask. Leonora has been dragged up to Cairns by way of her mother's second marriage. Not knowing a whole bunch about her original old man, she goes about remedying the situation. On a delivery run to the far north, Leonora grows close to Vic, a man who is plain and simply on the run from his own past. As trust between the pair deepens, the shocking measures necessary to discover oneself are revealed.'
Margaret Linley, in Geelong Advertiser, July 2000
‘Phil Leask’s writing is rich and generous, sensually evocative and resonates deeply. … This is a wonderful book with beautiful lyricism, a kind of curl-up-by-the-fire-and-do-not-disturb-me book.’
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