Cool Water

by Myfanwy Jones

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Why this novel? Because we need empathy, understanding, some magic and hope more than ever in our lifetimes.' HOLLY RINGLAND

'Most novels leave us with learnings, but very few refine your character. I left more astute, more empathic, and somehow wiser after I read these pages.' HILDE HINTON

Frank feared a reckoning, but what he feared more was that all the men in his family were cursed.

Frank Herbert's family has gathered at Tinaroo Dam for his daughter Lily's wedding - the first time he's been back since the death of his father, Joe, a year earlier. Like Frank, the dam is at an all-time low and as the water recedes, objects begin to emerge - abstract and disquieting.

Joe's father Victor - Frank's grandfather - was the butcher of Tinaroo during the dam's construction, but Joe refused to speak of him. Joe was not a talker, but he could roar. And he could smash things. What sorrow was his fury, and this place, concealing? And can Frank find a way into a future of his own making?

Moving between the weekend of the wedding and the explosive year in the 1950s that would shape the Herbert men's destiny, Cool Water is an unforgettable novel about fathers and sons, what it means to be a good man, and the damage that can ripple through generations.

A breathtaking story brimming with insight and emotional power by Miles Franklin-shortlisted author Myfanwy Jones.

'Myfanwy Jones has become one of my favourite authors and Cool Water should make her one for any Australian reader. This is a generational novel imbued with grace and grit.' A.S. PATRIĆ

'Cool Water leaves an enduring imprint. A vivid and profound novel that conjures old hurts from the depths and brings them to the light. I loved this novel.' KATE MILDENHALL

Release date: February 28, 2024

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

Frank pulled the car door closed – hard. It was soundless but he felt it in his teeth. A tiny release.

They were on schedule and everything was in place. The shop was closed for the weekend, with a sign on the door. The speech was written. His nails were clean. But that was the simple stuff. He wanted Lily, his daughter, to feel loved and safe; encircled. Free to wave her arms around, raise her voice, sing, snarl, or be still and quiet. Not monitoring herself from minute to minute. Not swallowing shame.

Did you ever want that for me?

But Joe was dead – and still withholding.

I know you hate it when I swear, Dad, but fuck you. Really. From the bottom of my heart. You relentless, ungenerous cunt.

He pressed start. ‘Ready?’

Paula was still kneeling on the passenger seat, rummaging through bags. ‘Can you wait?’

They’d removed the back seats to fit two large crates of bonbonnière; an esky and box of groceries; booze for the smaller family gatherings; gifts for Antonella, the chef; Paula’s suitcase, and her dress hanging from a hook; Frank’s suit on the opposing hook, and the old canvas kitbag he’d inherited from his father, which had once belonged to his grandfather, HERBERT and a serial number stencilled along the side and base; a crusty tackle box and fishing rod wedged into a corner.

The soles of Paula’s upturned feet were dirty pink and crumpled, sweetly candid. Frank had an urge to grab hold of one, rub his thumb down the arch the way she liked – to be candid back. He didn’t. It had been brittle between them for weeks … months. His fault, mostly. And now they were returning to Joe’s birthplace to see their daughter wed.

Paula corkscrewed into her seat and dragged the belt across. ‘Ready.’

As Frank reversed down the pebbled driveway just before seven on this molten Friday evening in February, it all had the portentous feel of a last act.

Their elderly neighbour, Duc, in saggy orange shorts, fifty years from Saigon, hosing his twilit fish pond, his tidy frangipani: ‘Good luck, my friends! Blessings to your family!’

Frank winking, grinning: ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll bring you back some cake.’

Their own garden grown wild. A proliferation of sensitive weed; bougainvillea swallowing the house; deep cracks through the render. The busted porch light. It had been their container for twenty-four years so the disrepair was a dark mirror. Frank had been working twelve-hour days for the past eighteen months to get the new business going. Paula was managing everything else. Nothing was getting fixed.

‘Traffic’s not bad,’ she said, looking at her phone. ‘Hour twenty-five.’

‘Easy.’ He tapped a tachycardia on the steering wheel. ‘So, here goes.’

They swung out onto bitumen to face west, and then away – in their new hybrid Range Rover Velar, black with light oyster interior. They owned eight per cent of it. Velar from the Latin velare: to veil or cover.

Driving along their street, Frank recalled the parachute of pale blue silk they’d tacked to Lily’s bedroom ceiling while she slept on the night before her second birthday. Surprise! The sky had billowed when they opened her casement window. He remembered lying on the floor beside her bed with coffee, listening to her commentary on life and the three-note phrase of the peaceful dove, gazing up at that rippling sky.

The big box he’d built in the living room to hold her toys and crayons and disguises. When Lily jumped up and down on its lid, smacking the wood with her flat fritter feet, the china on the shelf rattled. Jump, Papa! He’d jumped. There were no more babies – much as they tried – and so no end to Lily’s benevolent reign.

And that got him thinking, somehow, of the early edition of a Hemingway novel that Paula had given him when he left the family business to branch precariously into sea meats. He’d kept the tale of endurance beside his bed for a decade.

A pair of handsome chairs they picked up from a roadside and reupholstered with gold velvet. Too firm to actually use, they were still decorating the sitting room.

Paula’s collection of tiny glass animals that gradually jungled the house.

Once, all these things had held wonder, and it had felt like they had all the time in the world. But it struck him now that things were just cladding and consolation. When did it change? Maybe his dad was right: he should have been paying more attention.

Past the tennis centre, floodlights just on, and a new building site – more apartments. Under the belly of an airbus descending into Cairns Airport, then a sharp right onto Captain Cook Highway.

Heat had cleared the streets. The strip shops were all shut but the McDonald’s drive-through welcomed them.

‘Do you want anything?’ he asked Paula.

‘Nah, I had the last of that soup you wouldn’t eat.’

Frank smiled. ‘Blending parsnip with curry powder doesn’t make it better.’

‘You’re such a mama’s boy.’

Brandy short-changed him a dollar but her supervisor was watching so Frank let it go.

He ate with one hand as he drove through a series of roundabouts and across a meander of the Barron River, past billboards advertising Skyrail and Hartley’s Crocodile Adventures. Flags of conquest on stolen land.

The car got foggy with fries so he turned up the A/C.

‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’ Paula asked.

‘Yeah, fine.’

Paula donned the big headphones that made her look like an air traffic controller. She hated this road – she’d come upon a bad accident once. She kept modifying it in her dreams.

Frank returned the half-eaten burger to the paper bag with the untouched fries. He was empty but had no appetite.

He could feel a thrumming through his body as they started to climb the Kuranda Range. Thick woods loomed at either side; trucks closed in fast, loaded with fresh produce. The whiz of his father’s knives on whetstone; the reverberations of Joe’s rage. It was hard to judge time and space. Each bend was drawing them closer to the dam. Six years since they were last up here, for his father’s seventieth birthday, and Frank had this uncanny sense that Joe was up here still. Waiting for them.

When his father died eleven months ago, a pea-sized aneurysm exploding his brain at dawn, Frank had needed to see the body to believe it. Joe’s mouth had been agape, as if in a yawn. His eyes lightly closed.

When were you not tired of life?

It had been, Frank thought, a measured suicide: deliberate self-neglect – ignoring doctor’s orders. His father refused to quit smoking, and when he developed diabetes he upped his sugar intake. Not a mark on his body and no goodbye; he was not a talker, Joe, though he could roar.

Despite all the jobs that Frank and Betty took on for their mother – arranging the funeral, putting a notice in the paper, applying for the death certificate, closing bank accounts, disconnecting the mobile phone – the first days and weeks were strangely seamless and light. Frank mistook it for liberation, but it didn’t last. Joe was too powerful to end.

He must have been speeding because Paula took off the headphones. ‘How does the car feel? Is it holding the road well?’

Frank smiled. ‘Feels fine, honey. Very firm grip on the road.’ He took his foot off the pedal, though. They were both trying to avoid conflict. The past week with all its last-minute hoo-ha had been especially bad and there was already a good will deficit. ‘You think we forgot anything?’

‘Of course.’

‘Remember the rings?’

Their own wedding had been briefly delayed when his sister, hungover, forgot her principal job. While Betty slipped out the priest’s door at the back of the pretty white church in Port Douglas, word had passed over the pews and out to the waiting bride. Someone paused the cassette. Frank remembered rocking on his heels, wondering if Paula might, at this precipice, call it fate – call it off. And then the best man was back with the rings in her fist, comically breezy, and they’d resumed Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’. He could still recall his father’s face in the foreground: deadpan.

‘Yeah, that’s why Betty’s not responsible for anything important this weekend.’ Paula replaced her headphones, ignoring the invitation to reminisce.

Frank bit down on a reaction and fumbled his phone to stream The Pearl Fishers. The audio system was not quite the concert hall the salesman promised but maybe the lament would drown out his thoughts.

It didn’t.

Many years ago, Frank and his mother Alma flew down to Brisbane to see the opera and he remembered, now, reading that an original ambiguous ending was altered in later productions to add a final reckoning for Zurga. Ambiguity left the audience adrift.

Frank feared a reckoning, but what he feared more was that all the men in his family were cursed. And that however hard he tried to be good, he would not be able to escape his shadow.

When they reached the tablelands, the road straightened and the landscape opened out into crops; a cool moon rising. Farmers would be burying their noses in the books, looking for anything more they might possibly trim, or drinking grappa on back porches, contemplating their lots. The dam was at an all-time low. River systems all over were fucked. Human beings may be fast adapters but they also had a genius for self-destruction. The Herberts were a case in point.

A left turn at Tolga; Frank whistled along to the opera. Now the billboards announced Pinnacle Produce and Affordable Living, and on the dash screen the dam appeared. It looked monstrous on the display’s night mode: a demon with its tendrils spreading across the flat green farming land, beckoning them closer.

Ten minutes later, they were outside Kairi Hotel.

‘Back in a minute,’ he mouthed to Paula. She nodded.

A bunch of locals were scattered through the bar – no-one he recognised. They sized him up and then made him invisible; he would always be a blow-in up here. A young man at the pool table was telling his mate about a fight he’d been in, acting it out with raised fists and slitted eyes. Last week, last month, or was he rekindling some ancient crowning glory? The friend nodded sagely, bending to line up the shot. From the speaker above the bar, Bruno Mars implored a girl to marry him.

Frank took a cold sixpack back to the car.

Without removing her headphones, Paula pulled off a can and put the rest at her feet. She ripped off the tab and had a long drink before passing it to Frank. He drank and passed it back.

Soon after they turned onto Tinaroo Falls Dam Road, pademelons began appearing in the headlights. Not endangered enough, the small macropods bounced across the road playing chicken; twitched in ones and twos on the verge.

Frank could still taste the hamburger. It took him back to his father’s shop, and the mounds of fatty mince Joe sculpted each morning with a wooden paddle. Whatever his father couldn’t move that day would make the next day’s patties – and the family’s dinner. Or he’d bring home chuck steak, grey with age, or buttery brains that Frank’s mother crumbed and fried. Alma swore the brains would make the children smart and rich. Less often, an ox tongue served with parsley sauce. Frank’s fish shop had frayed a long line of Herbert butchers.

He could taste it all as they began the descent into the township and glimpsed the dam, polished pewter under the moonlight. Feeling his way along familiar roads, the precise arc of each curve; feeling the shallowness of his breath and the nearness of childhood – the nearness of his father. He’d tried to talk Lily out of having the wedding here but she had insisted. All the things his only child understood, and did not understand.

He held out his hand for the beer; he needed to wash away the taste of bad meat.

On Lamb Street, Paula removed her headphones and cleared her throat theatrically. Frank smiled without turning his head. It had always been her unconscious way of punctuating a transition. They had arrived at this mythic weekend, a year in the making.

Frank turned off the A/C and lowered the windows as they drove through Tinaroo. The air was cooler and thinner up on the tablelands. It smelled of grass and hot dinners. Crickets sang and a farm dog howled.

Past the caravan park, left onto Church Street, right onto Palm.

He turned into the lodge and, a hundred metres along, pulled into their parking bay. Cut the engine and turned to his wife. ‘How do you turn up to let go?’

She rested her hand briefly on his leg, light as the tablelands air, then crushed the empty can between her palms. ‘Nice question.’

The lodge, some quarter-century old, still wore its diffidence, an uncertain purpose, like the town itself. A horseshoe of two-storey units embraced a banquet hall and bone-shaped swimming pool. Built on a small cape, all the units had hypnotic water views and direct access to the shoreline but occupancy rates were low. It only filled for weddings and conferences.

After the dam was completed in the late 1950s, much of the edifice that supported its construction was relocated or dismantled. Local councils argued over what to do with the remainder of the makeshift town that had housed the temporary workforce. A case was put for converting Tinaroo into a permanent military base. They already had barracks, storerooms and a mess; the jungle and a savannah for drills. But the forestry department didn’t want shrapnel in their valuable timber. Another frontrunner was the ‘eventide home’, but the site’s remoteness would make staffing this difficult. In the end, the tourism pitch won out. They’d call the dam a lake and fill it with fish.

It had never really taken off, though, option C. When Frank was a kid, spending holidays with his family at the caravan park, the orchid gardens had attracted the odd tour bus. They flogged tea towels and postcards of their glasshouse specimens. But it had long since gone out of business. The single restaurant, Pensini’s, was now permanently closed. The dam continued to irrigate, provide town water and drive hydro-electricity, but aside from weekend waterskiers and the annual Barra Bash, Tinaroo had floated off the tourist map. Paula said the place was eerie, but the Herberts were tied to it. It was in their DNA.

The key had been left hanging in the door. While Frank began to unload the car, Paula knocked on the door of unit 14, where Lily was installed with her bridesmaids, Em and Kerry.

‘Tell her “hi”,’ Frank said over his shoulder. ‘Tell her it’s not too late to pull out.’

Paula snorted. ‘Tell her yourself.’

Frank flicked on the lights in unit 16 and dumped the esky and box of groceries on the counter in the kitchen nook.

Little had changed in the unit. Still the same smoky glass-topped table that protested every time you set down a fork; cane lounge set with soggy blue cushions; cold, hard biscuit tiles underfoot. The stagnant air was musty with a note of old pilchards.

He opened the doors leading from the living space onto the deck. And he pictured his father standing alone in the exact same doorway on their last visit. The days of Joe’s eruptions, of breakages and bellowing, had passed by then, but he had been cantankerous, irritated by the fuss made of his birthday – he had never liked birthdays. He refused to have candles on the cake, and a father–son fishing trip backfired. Joe had spent most of the weekend watching snooker on the TV, doing crosswords and chewing Minties. But in that moment, when Frank found Joe looking out over the water unobserved during a family lunch, he had sensed a keenness in his father, like prey alert to threat. What had Joe seen or heard or recalled?

On the wall above the TV was a black-and-white aerial shot of the dam construction site taken in the mid-1950s. Frank had never paid it much attention but now he used the corner of his t-shirt to rub at the layer of dust over the glass. Minuscule men in motion, machinery, mounds of excavated earth; a study of human error or ingenuity, take your pick. Frank’s paternal grandfather had been the butcher in the town’s brief heyday but he died long before Frank was born, when Joe was just seventeen. Your father found Victor at the shop, out the b. . .