A slow, childish singsong ran through his mind as he
went inside, something straight out of a schlocky horror movie:
It’s raining, it’s pouring,
No more freaky drawing.
41
Six
Clayton stretched out in the bath, listening to the drip from the tap hit the surface. If ever he needed some time to himself, to stop and reflect, to switch off the world and focus, this was the place.
He heard the bathroom door creak open. Padding
footsteps, slippers on the tiles. The heavy wooden
toilet seat lid coming down with a crack against the
porcelain.
So much for alone time.
On the other side of the drawn shower curtain,
Clayton’s seventy-three-year-old grandmother, Tuula
(or “Firebreather,” as his grandfather had affectionately dubbed her), plunked herself down on the toilet seat with a muffled groan. Though he couldn’t see her, he knew her left hand held an ever-present lit cigarette. In the bathroom, her habit was to hold it close to the slipstream of 42
I N F I N I T E B L U E
air being sucked up into the ceiling by the exhaust fan
and away from the aged and highly flammable curtain.
“Mummu! Seriously?”
“You don’t have anything I have not seen, Clayton.
You used to love running all around the house alasti as the day you were born.”
“You might have noticed I’m not a child anymore,
Mummu. I’m eighteen.”
“Agh, you will always be a child to me, lapsi.”
Clayton sighed and sank deeper into the bath, resigned
to giving up any semblance of privacy. “It’s happening,”
he said simply.
Tuula blew smoke from the corner of her mouth and
frowned. “Ashley is going away?”
“Yeah. For a while.”
“Where is she going? When is she going?”
“To America. Publicity tour. Plane leaves Wednesday.”
“That is very sudden. It is, what, four days since her
record?”
“Yeah. Blythe and her army of droids or zombies
or whatever the hell she has working for her got real
busy making calls and pulling favors and brownnosing.
Ash is going to be doing stuff on tv and radio. Lots of
talk shows. Then to some specialist training facility in Colorado for a month.”
“For how long is she away?”
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
“Ten weeks.”
“And what flight will you be catching?”
Clayton laughed. “Well, I was going to hire a zeppelin,
but I thought a hovercraft was more my style.”
“Agh, you make fun,” Tuula said. “You can go. You
have money you have earned from your comics and your
shirts.”
“Mummu, I’m no Stan Lee.”
“I can give you the rest.”
“It’s not the money. This is strictly a ‘Team Drum’
affair.”
“What? Team Dumb?”
“Team Drum. As in Drummond. You know, Ash,
Blythe, Len, Ash’s coach, Mr. Dwyer. And the undead
publicists Blythe handpicks for these sorts of things.”
“Team Drum, Team Drum… Perkele.” Tuula reached
behind her and grasped the ashtray sitting on the back of the toilet. She tapped ash and cleared her throat. “Team Drum is the shit!”
Clayton bit his lip, holding back a laugh. “Mummu,
it’s just shit,” he said gently, “not the shit. The shit means it’s great.”
“Great? Shit is great?”
“No, shit is bad. The shit is great.”
Tuula muttered several phrases in her native Finnish,
took a long drag on her cigarette and emptied the smoke
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I N F I N I T E B L U E
via her nostrils. “And sick. You were telling me last week this also means great.”
“Yes.”
“Shit…Sick…How did this happen?”
“I don’t know. Somebody started using them that
way and they stuck.”
“Ya, kids.” The woman who had raised Clayton since
he was three scratched the part in her grayed bob, then
patted the porcelain bowl she sat on. “They turn English into a vessa!”
“Maybe we want to keep everyone else guessing.”
Tuula grunted, eager to leave behind the linguistic
crimes of today’s youth, and tacked back to the news of
the day.
“Well, you will have the no worries with Ash coming
back to you. She is not a devil like her äiti. She is a good girl. Very sensible. And the two of you are in love—any
typerys can see that.”
Clayton sat back upright. Though her directness made
him uncomfortable, his grandmother had considered her
words carefully. She knew a thing or two about love, and she wasn’t afraid to call it the way she saw it.
By the time he replied, Tuula was lighting a second
cigarette.
“Ash and I are meant to be together,” he said. “But
things are already changing because of that world record.
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
And there’s more change to come for sure.” He exhaled.
“I just hope we’re meant to stay together.”
Tuula produced a long grumble from the back of her
throat. “You wonder if you are enough for her, yes?” She gave the ashtray in her hand a little shake. “I will help you see. Did I ever tell you about your isoisä and the fortune-teller?”
“Yes, of course, Mummu.”
“Ay?”
“Yes, I’ve heard the story about Grandpa and the
card reader.”
“How many times?”
“Heaps.”
“How many?”
Clayton shifted in the water and opened the end
of the curtain to peer around at his grandmother.
“Fourteen.”
“Ha! Not nearly enough!”
Tuula cleared her throat.
“Your isoisä had fallen in love with me. We had met
on a tram in Fortitude Valley—he was very handsome
in his uniform and his slouch hat. He gave up his seat for me, and we began talking. My English wasn’t great—I
had been in Australia for one month and five days—
but he was very patient. He wasn’t like other people who would frown and roll their eyes and treat you like paska.
46
I N F I N I T E B L U E
He listened with care. He asked to learn some Finnish.
How to say ‘You are beautiful.’ Well, that’s what he wanted me to translate. I actually taught him to say ‘I look like a dog’s behind.’ I didn’t correct him until many weeks later.
Anyway, by the time we reached Milton, he had asked for
my hand in marriage. I said I would like to go to a movie cinema first. We went and saw South Pacific, and during the song ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My
Hair,’ he gave me a kiss on the cheek. That was the first time I thought he could be my armas.”
Tuula paused to smoke. Clayton smiled in anticipa-
tion. Fourteen times he’d heard the story of his grandparents’ courtship—fourteen times his heart had raced like
a hamster in a wheel. And if the future delivered four-
teen more—hell, fourteen hundred more—that giddy feeling would accompany Mummu’s words every time.
“We had known each other for two months when he
asked me again to marry. I didn�
��t want to go to a movie
cinema this time. I didn’t want to do anything except
say yes. But I was confused. Two months is not a long
time. How could I be very sure he wasn’t a kusipää? You know, an arsehole. I wanted a little information, a little guidance. I told your isoisä this, and he said he knew a fortune-teller who could give me the peace of the mind.
I didn’t think it was true, but I went along anyway because he was paying. The reader was a fat Australian woman.
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
Her name was Beryl. She told me the man I was seeing
was a ‘top bloke’; he would make a ‘ripper of a hubby’
and would never ‘shoot through.’ He would forever
be ‘dinky-di’ to me. I didn’t understand anything this
Beryl said, but I knew from her face and from the way
she said the words she thought your grandpa was a
very good man.”
Tuula flicked ash into the tray.
“Then I had a strange thought—I know Beryl!
I searched my mind for when and where I had met this
fat woman. It was two weeks before, on the tour your
grandfather gave me of his barracks. She had been
serving food to the soldiers in the messy hall.”
“Mess.”
“Ay?”
“Mess. Mess hall.”
“Ay…whatever,” replied Tuula, waving her hand.
“The important point is, I had seen Fat Beryl before, and she was no fortune-teller. So I asked her if your isoisä
had paid the fee. She said, My oath, which meant yes.
Then I asked her what she had been paid to do. Fat Beryl said she didn’t know what I was talking about, but I kept asking until she became red in the face and lowered her
eyes. It turned out your isoisä was the cheeky comedian.
He had paid Fat Beryl to pretend to be a reader and to
say nice things about him! Agh, can you believe it?”
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I N F I N I T E B L U E
“No way! Never heard of such a thing, Mummu.”
“Yet it is true! And when I confront your grandpa, he
laughed and said it was only a joke. He said he was sorry if I had been embarrassed. I told him I wasn’t the one
spending all my money on Fat Beryl. He laughed again
and said he knew a man with a crystal ball who could
give me proper information. And that’s when I decided
I must marry your isoisä before he became a penniless
kusipää clown.” Tuula rose, stubbed out her cigarette.
“That is the end. Now I am going to go heat up some
kesäkeitto. You would like a bowl?”
“Hey, Mummu?” Clayton drummed his fingernails
on the rim of the tub. “You said this story would help
me see.”
“Ay.”
“See what?”
Tuula narrowed her eyes and placed her free hand on
her hip. “Maybe it’s not that you can’t see, lapsi. Maybe you just need to open your eyes.” Turning on her heel and exiting the bathroom, she added, “Anyway, it is not for
me to give you everything like a television show! My job is to tell the stories! Stories that are the shit!”
Clayton closed the curtain again and sank back into
the bath. He touched his palms to the surface of the
water, watching ripples roll out from the disturbance. His grandmother’s tales were always funny and poetic and
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
compelling, usually reason enough to listen. But she was quite insistent that today there was a lesson to learn, that some strange brew of wartime Brisbane and South Pacific and Fat Beryl could provide insight into the immediate
problem of Clayton and Ash and ten weeks of absence.
He turned the story over in his mind, examining it.
Maybe if he stayed in the bath a bit longer, under-
standing would somehow be absorbed. Maybe he just
needed more time to soak it all in.
But the water was getting cold.
50
Seven
The clearing in the rainforest might have been a para-
dise found. Twin waterfalls, separated by a jagged spine of rock, plunged down a rhyolite cliff face. In the final meters of the drop, the two streams stretched and
divided, the droplets like tumbling diamonds. Beyond
the waterfalls, on the track leading back into the forest, grass trees resembled land anemones, swaying to and fro
in the gentle breeze. Eucalypts with frayed trunks reached high into the canopy. The bright, hopeful call of a lone Albert’s lyrebird floated up from some faraway hollow
in the valley.
Ash emerged from a private nook near the water-
fall in a pair of boardies and a crop top, her hair down.
Clayton watched her skip across the dirt track and onto a flat slab of granite overlooking the water.
“You coming in?”
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
“I still can’t believe that on your day off you want to
go swimming.”
She pointed to the water-lover ring on her thumb.
“No choice.” She grinned and dove into the pool below.
She spent a good half minute under—enough time for
Clayton to gingerly step out over the ledge to check on
her—before she burst up from the water with a spray
from her mouth and a deep breath in.
“Jesus, Ash. People hurt themselves doing shit like
that.”
“I checked before I jumped. What, did you think I
wasn’t coming back up? Did you think I was gonna stay
down there?”
He huffed at her, which only made her smile in
response.
“I like that you worry about me,” she said.
“I don’t.”
He watched her effortlessly glide through the water,
then float on her back, staring straight up at the sky.
“I know,” he said.
He took his shirt off and skirted the walking track,
searching for easier access to the swimming hole.
“Chicken.”
“The water’s cold.”
“It’s fine.”
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I N F I N I T E B L U E
Clayton held his breath and waded in. The water
was cold, and he was covered in goose bumps until he adjusted to it. Soon he too lay on his back, arms and legs spread wide, paddling to stay afloat beside Ash. Both of them stared up through the gray-green canopy of euca-lypts to a cloudless sky.
“You think I should come to the airport tomorrow?”
asked Clayton.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s going to be a circus, Ash. You know that.
Reporters and tv and stuff. Fans. And your mum, of
course. She won’t let us be together for two seconds.”
“It won’t be that bad. And for the last time, Mum’s
not out to get you.”
“You’re right. She’s out to get us.”
She flicked water at him. “You’re being a doofus.”
“Really? Because it seems like a pretty long trip when
there are no meets, no competitions. Just ten days of
that training camp. What’s the rest of the time for?” Ash started to respond, but Clayton spoke over top of her. “I know. I get it. It’s so Blythe can show off her world-record holder. Make Ash Drummond a household name. Give
the globe a little”—he made air quotes—“wake- up call
.”
Ash paddled to the shallows and rested on the rocks.
A dragonfly hovered above her left shoulder for an
instant, then flitted away.
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
“Mum wants the best for me,” she said. “All this
potential and the opportunities that go with it—she
doesn’t want any of it wasted. I know she’s a difficult
person. Okay, yeah, she’s a total dick-punch. But she’s
behind me. She’s got my back. And you know what? I
respect that. Especially after how it all went bad for her.”
She inhaled and again held the breath in her finely tuned lungs. Clayton figured twenty seconds ticked by before
the air was released. “I’m not going because she wants
me to. I’m going because it’s right. This is the next step in the journey.”
Clayton held his tongue. Ash was making a bunch
of crummy media interviews and a swim-training camp
sound like something written in the stars. If she thought this trip was the next step in the journey, she was not
asking herself about the final destination.
Tired of treading water, Clayton paddled to the
shallows next to her. She leaned over and kissed him.
“Things are going to be fine,” she said. “Please come
to the airport. Mum might be behind me, but I need you
beside me.”
54
Eight
Ash stepped through the rocks, waving Clayton along
after her. The hiking track, narrow and slippery, skirted the cliff face. At the midway point, it snaked through a gouge in the rock that acted as a small viewing place.
Securing the refuge was the merged waterfall, little
more than an arm’s length from the open edge of the
track. Ash found a comfortable spot and waited. When
Clayton joined her, she pulled him close and kissed
him, long and deep. She brought his hand up and
placed it on her left breast. Her hand found the front
of his shorts.
“What are you doing?” The knotted drawstring on
his board shorts came undone. Clayton gently took hold
of her wrist and eased her hand away. “There’s people
around, Ash.”
“So?”
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D A R R E N G R O T H & S I M O N G R O T H
He waved his hand toward a group of middle-aged
picnickers just visible through the scrub. His silent argu-ment was met with a renewed attack on his board shorts.