White
Last spring was filled with blossoms and badger babies. The good folk of West Sussex pulled on their boots and rambled.
This year, people are taking tea and tipples by fires. It’s no fit weather for walking.
But then, I’m from Brisbane. In two days’ time I’ll be flying home to the bright colours of my place on the Pacific. I’ll pack away my wool and perspire into cotton and so I feel the cold, now, as a call. I want to run my fingers over stone walls patterned with moss before returning to wooden fences warmed by the sun.
If this isn’t weather for walking, I don’t know it.
The tiny, white-haired woman who runs the three-room bed and breakfast is waiting when I arrive by taxi.
‘Welcome,’ she says. ‘I’m Hannah.’ She steps out into the dusk, reaches for the handle of my overstuffed suitcase and nudges open the front door. She heaves the bag up a flight of wooden steps and, through all the thumps and bumps, refuses my help. She drags the bag after her along a narrow corridor to a slatted wooden door, pulls a gate key from her trouser pocket, rattles and battles the lock, then drags the suitcase up, onto the patchwork-quilted bed inside. She catches her breath. Waves at the room’s whitewashed ceiling with its timber beams, the brass lamps casting yellow light through paper shades, the blue-and-white china bowl filled with apples, and the tall chest of drawers. ‘The second room’s unoccupied,’ she says. ‘I use the third one for washing and storage.’ Her brow crinkles as she looks out to the dark fields, the soft-trilling owls and the foraging foxes beyond the window. Wrong season for a country stay, I see her think.
Her gaze drifts to my suitcase with its peeling Australian flag sticker. Ah. A smile, quickly suppressed. She rallies, asks if the room is all right and whether I’m hungry, because I must surely not have eaten.
‘Don’t go to any trouble,’ I say.
She shakes her head, disappears into the shadowed space at the bottom of the stairs, returns soon after with a bowl of steaming leek-and-stilton soup on a tray, then vanishes again.
The next morning I tiptoe, self-conscious, into a pint-sized room filled with three tables for two. One is dressed in white linen.
Hannah appears like magic. Her kitchen whites match the table. She offers fruit salad and pressed juices. Suggests thick-cut toast with grapefruit, apricot, and pomegranate marmalades, all made yesterday, and looks hurt when I decline the mountainous, cooked English breakfast to follow.
I tell her I plan to walk Pagham Harbour.
She blinks as she sets a china teapot on the table. ‘Watch the tides,’ she says, all serious.
I recall the creek I saw running through the grassy plains on the way here and take her comment as Sussex wit. I respond in kind. ‘Do you know what a drop bear is?’ I ask.
She shakes her head.
‘It’s when we tell British tourists not to stand under gum trees in the Australian bush because feral koalas drop onto people’s shoulders and bite their necks,’ I say.
‘I see.’ Hannah stands perfectly still, looking alarmed. She blushes.
I blush, too. It’s not true, you know. I spread pomegranate marmalade on toast, eat, and push back from the table. I wrap myself in the black coat I borrowed from a neighbour in Brisbane, tie the red scarf she gave me just so, pull the strap of my bag over my head, the scarf over my chin, thrust my hands deep into the coat’s pockets, and step out into the wind.
I walk over a road and down a lane. Past a cottage called Pertwhistle. Past another, called Clackers, with a scarlet front door and a brass knocker.
Everywhere, signs remind walkers to close gates.
I come to a meadow filled with ewes and new lambs. The pairs are numbered with orange paint. I open a gate. Marvel at the landowners’ trust.
Two lambs watch me come. One stands, all a-quiver. The other sits with its legs folded under its belly. It moves to stand, then settles.
I pull my mobile phone from my bag. The camera captures the standing lamb just so. I study the screen. My God, it’s smiling… I tap, spread my fingers and squint at the image, disbelieving—but there it is. Lips upturned. Happy. I look from the image to the lambs and back to my phone. The thing I’d captured isn’t there now.
Voices.
A countrified couple in quilted jackets opens the gate behind me. He wears a tweed flat cap. She wears a black cloche hat. They carry walking poles and their heavy trousers are tucked into Wellington boots.
I look down at the muddied sandshoes — once white — I’d bought at Dubai airport in a currency I didn’t understand.
The couple heads my way.
I fix on a yellow flower by my left shoe. Pretend invisibility.
Amid the wonders of England’s stone buildings and myriad accents, I’d been repeatedly discomforted by locals’ reluctance to return my smiles. On the street, at shop counters—everywhere, it was the same.
I’d raised this with the daughter of an English friend. Wondered if I was breaching some invisible protocol.
‘Oh, no,’ she’d told me, all tea and scones. ‘It’s us. We don’t look people in the eye. We look here,’ she’d tapped her forehead, ‘or here,’ she’d touched her cheeks, ‘because we’re not good with outsiders.’ When she realised where that put me she’d blushed, stopped, and tried for a correction. ‘You have to be a member of the club, you see.’ Nibbling her lip and stumbling through an increasingly sticky puzzle of manners, she’d decided to exit the topic altogether. Presented her tattooed palms. When she pressed her little fingers and the heels of her hands together, the intricately-drawn halves of a heart—one on each palm—became one. ‘It’s not permanent,’ she said, quickly. ‘It’s just henna. It comes off.’
I told the girl the buds and vines, the scrolls curling around her fingers, were beautiful.
‘Good day.’ A man’s voice.
‘Hello, there.’ A woman’s.
I look up.
‘Hello,’ I say.
I follow a road flanked by whitewashed houses and a vast, open plain. Pagham Harbour, I think. Don’t harbours have boats in them? I listen to the creek, the same I’d seen yesterday, as it trickles past knobby islands. I hear the wind as it rustles through the grass.
The road makes a ‘T’ at a red stone garage. Cottages cluster in one direction. A narrow ridge stretches across the plain in the other.
A white-lettered sign fixed to the garage door reads, Think.
I do, I tell myself. All the time.
My hair flutters against my cheeks.
I take the path on the narrow ridge.
The flats to my left are ribbed by the tracks of animals I’ll never see.
The benches to my right are fitted with brass plaques, and I read the dedications to people I’ll never see.
I sit, and feel peculiar. Stand, and keep on. Walking.
I look out over the grasses. Down at stones covered with lichen.
‘Won’t you be lonely?’ someone had asked me before I left Australia.
The memory prickles as I step and I become self-conscious, navigating the chill in the middle of this harbour-that-isn’t. It’s time to find a fire. Enclose myself between the stone walls of a Rose and Crown, a King’s Head, or a Royal Oak. I start back.
A puff of air, a gigantic fluttering, and a heavy thud.
I raise a hand to protect my face, duck, and look back to where two swans have landed. Close enough to touch. As the wind rolls over the grasses to the distant Atlantic they fill the emptiness. Make it small.
I crouch and sit on my heels. Extend a hand.
‘I didn’t see you,’ I tell them.
The bigger bird spreads snow-white wings. Quivers them back into place. It assesses me, arches its neck, cranes for my hand and holds its beak—smooth as polished wood—a breath from my skin. It inspects my palm. Reads the mixed-up fortune it sees there.
I contemplate the black, unfeathered skin under its eye, the fuzz on its crown, and ache to touch it.
The swan moves its head under my hand. It lifts and bumps. Hard.
I fall off my heels. Sit on my coat and the gravel.
The second swan moves up to stand beside the first. We watch one another until I break the silence. ‘Australian swans are black,’ I tell them.
Instantly, the wind drops. The grasses still.
The birds waddle away, picking a path into the reeds, printing the sand with their webbed feet as they make for the creek—flicking mud onto their bellies until they reach the water. The wind rises and curls around them.
I tell a grandmotherly Englishwoman about the birds.
‘Nasty,’ she says. ‘They attack, you know.’
‘They wanted food,’ says Hannah.
Someone else waits for the punchline, then says, ‘Swans don’t do that.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They do.’
The final day.
I wake and set out for Pagham Harbour.
At the thinking garage I pull my hands from my pockets, loosen my scarf, and gape at the gigantic water covering yesterday’s plain.
A great silence slides over it. It moves across the road. Slips from gables, and settles under eaves.
Pagham Harbour, whispers the watery slab stretching to the horizon.
The English Channel carves a grey line against a white sky.
I dress in plane clothes, pack, pay my last pounds, and leave.
At Gatwick, I sit crying in a pub. The clock ticks towards midnight and the airport’s chrome and glass steals the whimsy from the accents around me.
No, I tell myself.
I approach customs, ticket in hand, dragging my feet.
A uniformed man questions my seating and sends me back to the airline counter.
No, the voice inside says.
‘Your final destination?’ asks a woman in pearl earrings.
‘Home,’ I say. You don’t have to, says the voice inside.
The woman looks at me in a way that says, Decision time.
‘Brisbane. Australia,’ I say. Again, the tears. I don’t want to.
The woman shrugs and stamps my ticket.
I confirm my window seat. Board and refuse a meal as the plane vibrates. Pull a blanket to my chin.
In Dubai, prayer calls send travellers through hundreds of departure gates. People mill around glass cabinets filled with handbags, perfume, and jewellery. A huge man wearing a thobe, gutra and black agal is evaluating a diamond-encrusted timepiece in a watch store. Salespeople scrum around him. Soldiers with guns jab at people. The huge man slips the watch around his wrist. He splays his fingers, makes a fist, and admires the match it makes with his muscled forearm.
I watch him over polished counters. He sees me looking, stands a little taller, and steps up to a mirror. His midnight-black beard makes a startling contrast to his swan-white robes as he steps back, raises the watch, and—catching and throwing the light—taps its face at me. Time is precious. His meaning is clear. He pulls his sleeve over the watch—nods at a dark-suited man who negotiates with a shop assistant before hurrying after the khaki men, already moving away, after the watch king’s robes.
I fly into Brisbane at dawn.
Above me, a cover of grey, its underside traced by wind and weather. Below me, cloudy plains stretch into the distance, like sand sculptured by the tide.
The horizon is soft.
I press my palm to the window as the rising sun blots the sky, gaze out, and see all there is to see. I sit back in my seat. Close my eyes and feel the sun touch my face.
No. I don’t.
I’ll have no white dress.
The cabin fills with light.
No white swans in Australia.
Linda Brucesmith is a writer and public relations consultant based in Brisbane, Queensland. Her short fiction has been published in Australia and the United Kingdom. She completed her debut novel, Elsewhere, in 2021, a picture book, The Dishevelled Little Owl, in 2022, and is currently working on a YA novel about a boy who is allergic to numbers.
Locative Magazine 