Free The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr

onto the back of the truck, many standing, some of us seated on rough wooden planks. I clung to my cello in its case, clamped tight between my legs, pushed against my skirt by the mass of baggage piled on the truck. Uncle Valentine stood towards the front, leaning back jauntily while his arm gripped tight to the railing. The captain climbed into the front with the driver, and two men raised the sail up a sturdy wooden mast clamped to the truck. Unfurled, the canvas hung loose, empty for a moment and then, with a whoomp, the wind caught it, filled it to a billowing belly-fullness, and with a jerk the truck was underway.
    I looked up through the sail’s swell to the endless sky above it as we sailed into the railway station of Carnarvon town in a cloud of canvas and dust. How wonderful we must have appeared! But the people of the small town barely raised their eyes to us, so mundane to them was this marvellous apparition.
    The railway station was a tin shed on the port side of the town, close to the best hotel, the Gascoyne, itself made of concrete, corrugate and pressed iron. The Gascoyne had ample rooms, and Uncle and I took a single room each. I went to sleep that night with the wind buffeting the window, the tin roof creaking and crackling as it cooled, and dreamed of sailing over the land, a full sail above me, powered by the wind, powerless to change course.
    We were to wait two nights in Carnarvon for the arrival of the bright new motor ship Koolinda to continue onthe next leg of our journey. I passed the time playing my cello, tuning and retuning it as the heat of the day flattened the pitch even of my gleaming aluminium machine. My sheet music was packed in my leather valise; I would prop it on the dressing table in front of me, pull the dressing table’s chair in and perch between the bed and the table, straddling my cello, play to resonate the room, to make the whole creaking building, the whole dusty windy township, reverberate with Haydn, Brahms, and the Bach I loved best.
     
    We left Carnarvon on the Koolinda and steamed steady up the coast past Onslow, berthing at Hedland and Broome. We carried on to Derby where we took on a great stinking, lowing herd of cattle in addition to the cargo of sheep already destined for Singapore. We reeled out of King Sound on the swirl of a rip past Sunday Island, the ocean surging under us with the power of the sound’s tides. The animals muttered, as if under their breath, and only occasionally bellowed and roared with discomfort or displacement or fear.
    We were in open seas, the land hazy, far-off. Flying fish leapt and soared, glistening blue-green, reflecting the sun; we saw whales like dark islands spouting, and sea snakes curved like bass clefs on the glassy roll of the ocean.
    Despite the gentleness of the seas, and the claims of the Aluminum Company of America for the indestructibility of their instrument, I found myself unprepared to expose my cello to the extreme elements on board the vessel – so it stayed in its case, away from the salt and moisture. Still, I found myself itching to play. I would take out my sheetmusic and read through it all, fingering the pieces in the air, wielding my bow across the space where my cello should be. I hummed the music as I played it in the air, taking my beat from the engines of the Koolinda as she moved, lentissimo , on the swell of the ocean.
     
    The heat was oppressive, the air heavy with all the smells of sheep and cattle, of oil, of garbage from the galley. The saloon boys and Chinese stewards stretched out on the decks and hatches on their backs as we forged ahead over a leaden sea with an oily roll. I felt peevish and quarrelsome, and snapped at the stewards when they brought me tea.
    But the tension broke when it rained, as only the tropics can rain. Decks flooded from hatch to scupper, the bows of the ship were hidden from the bridge, cascades of water ran from the boat deck and down to the saloon deck below. The rain