Through a Camel's Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

hangar-like buildings right on the edge of the water. Two orange boats were moored side by side, bucking against the tide. They were long-prowed, small for the task she’d seen them performing, carrying pilots in and out through the Rip, pilots whose job it was to guide container ships and ocean liners through the narrow channel.
    Anthea walked on, Graeme and his jokes forgotten. Serious work was done here, by these modest orange arrows and their crews, work without which trading in and out of Melbourne could not function. She felt glad that the headquarters was situated in Queenscliff. She wondered when, and under what circumstances, the pilot service called on the police. She thought of Chris labouring away in the station garden, head down and back to the ocean, a deliberate turning away. She recalled his expression when she’d mentioned her walks along the cliff top, how his reaction, a swift closing down and turning inward, had seemed a barely conscious act of self-protection. She wondered if there’d been something offensive in what she’d said, and remembered how her one question about swimming had been met with a moment’s silence, then the quiet reply that nowhere was completely safe. At the time, she’d passed this off as further evidence that he was a fussy old maid.
    Gradually, as Camilla waited, her drawing took shape and filled out. There was the paddock with the fence around it, the Moonah, seaward side, where a fat lip of dune gave shelter from the southerlies. Camilla did not attempt to draw herself, only to pencil in an arrow at the place where she’d often stood and watched.
    She drew the young camel as well as she could, sending out a silent apology for the clumsy figure; then tackled other, human ones. Her fingers worked the pencil, strove to make the lines true. She stuck her tongue out, as a child might, that useless tongue whose ordinary work was forfeit.
    Camilla decided to include all the people she’d seen at the paddock since Riza had made his home there: Julie, then Frank Erwin and his wife Cynthia; Frank’s son Jim, who’d stayed for a week with his wife and their baby; Brian Laidlaw riding past on his bike.
    Cars passed, but mostly at a distance, on the main road. Few ventured along the dirt road, for the simple reason that it led nowhere except to a walking track through the sandhills. From time to time cars did come down it, though the sign said clearly, No Through Road. They turned at the end, where there was just enough room to do so. Of course, the driver and passengers couldn’t always be seen clearly; sometimes not at all.
    Then there were kids - kids used the dirt road and the dunes in ways that adults never did. They kicked up dust with their bikes. They made cubby holes and hideaways. Four boys in high school uniform had propped their bikes against the fence one afternoon and stared at Riza as though they’d never seen a camel. They’d been back next day, whooping and laughing, kidding one another.
    Camilla completed her drawing and leant back in her chair, thinking of the dunes whose movement was governed by the wind and their own weight. As a child, she’d believed they crept forward in the night, on feet the size of football fields. She enjoyed the steep incline, wind that met her headlong, catch of moon and starlight at the tops of waves. She enjoyed walking at night. She wondered if she went that way now, in the darkness, she would hear the scream again.
    Camilla missed Riza terribly, the beauty that was in his every step. No drawing of hers could come close to expressing that. The fact that an old woman of no account, whom children taunted and adults dismissed as mad, had been able to feast each day on beauty - now that had been something. She pictured the baby fluff and softness, those legs of a sweet, comical length. She almost tore up her drawing in frustration. Where was Chris Blackie? What was keeping him?
    She decided to