Infinite Blue Read online

  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

  44

  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.

  47

  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?”

  48

  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

  49

  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.”

  “Uh-huh. Seriously, come on in—it’s beautiful.”

  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.”

  52

  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.