Isobelle Carmody - Alyzon Whitestarr

The sky was a soup of colors swirled together, and the sea was restless under it. Waves lapped the shore fretfully, sighing.

A man and woman walked from their car down a steep curving road to the sea, wearing bathing suits, towels slung around their necks. His shorts were too heavy to dry well. Both wore sunglasses for no other reason than because they had worn them all day. As they rounded the road, they saw the shallow beach.

Well, the man said, and they both stopped.

There was a naked pregnant woman, wading in the sea; they were both shocked and fascinated. A barefoot man wearing jeans and no shirt prowled the shore, while a big older woman clad in a voluminous dark plum dress and a shawl was seated on a blanket facing the pair. A slight girl with mouse-colored hair seated beside her was almost hidden. The seated womans brooding presence suggested some ritual in progressa spell or an archaic binding. The girl might have been a sprite.

Well, the woman murmured at last, shaking herself slightly to dislodge an inexplicable premonition of danger. Lets go down.

Only when they reached the beach did they realize there were others; a plump youth of some eighteen or nineteen years peering into rock pools; a girl sitting on a rock combing her hair, which some trick of the sunlight rendered faintly green. The attention of these young people, like that of the man and the older woman, was focused on the pregnant woman.

As they drew nearer the strange group, the woman with the sunglasses noticed that the man in the jeans was extraordinarily good-looking. When he turned to smile at the newcomers, she felt the charm of the smile and responded.

It was not until they had come to the end of the path that they saw there was yet another girl curled under a bush at the rim of the beach. She was biting her nails. Even from a distance it was clear she had gone too far and was hurting herself. Unlike the others, her eyes were not on the woman in the water but on the handsome older man.

Feeling self-conscious, the couple piled towels, shoes, and sunglasses together. They swam, keeping carefully to one side of the inlet, leaving the other to the pregnant woman. When they were drying themselves, the woman in plum walked past them to an old van parked in the dunes. She returned with a steaming mug of liquid.

All the comforts of home, said the man.

Its herbal medicine for her, she said, nodding toward the pregnant woman. Shes in labor.

The couple turned to stare openly at the pregnant woman. She had come into the shallows, and the man was now positioned behind her, supporting her back with his chest. The watching couple suddenly understood. What was about to take place was both extraordinary and utterly common place: a woman was about to give birth. At any given moment there must be millions of them in the world.

The woman resumed her sunglasses automatically and, remembering her own labor in a hospital, felt an echo of the pain, the need to push, the excitement of it all that no one had ever told her about. She could see now that the pregnant woman was doing the shallow panting. Her long red hair was lying in damp streamers down her back and across her swollen belly. It made the woman watching feel both afraid and thrilled.

Tonight she would dream of a woman screaming.

The man at her side wondered at a couple who would offer themselves and the womans pain and their unborn child up to that sunset, that sea. What did it mean in a world of hospitals and doctors and nuclear fission? What was it saying to the world? (To him?) He remembered the rank stench as his own daughter was born. How primal the birth, despite the hospital bed, the hovering doctor.

As the couple left, the sun was setting and clouds saturated with night were beginning to reach long fingers over the sky. Again the woman experienced a stab of unspecified danger, and it occurred to her that her fear was not of the family on the beach, but for them.

The man glanced in the rearview mirror as he drove away. Two girls were leading a skittish brown horse between them across the road. They seemed barely able to control it, and he wondered what would happen if it got away from them.

It starts with my family, and in a way thats the whole story.

Theres my mother, Zambia. You probably wont have heard of her. Shes the artist, Zambia Whitestarr. Then theres my da, Macoll Whitestarr. His stage name is Mac, and hes the lead guitarist in a band youve probably never heard of that plays a lot of improvised music. Then theres us kids: my older brother, Jesse; my older sister, Mirandah; me, Alyzon; Serenity, who tries to make us call her Sybl; and last but not least our baby brother, Luke.

People always raise their eyebrows when I say how many of us there are. Five, they say, lifting their voice up at the end to show how they can hardly believe it. I guess we do have a pretty big family by ordinary standards. Mostly people have two or three kids. Somebody told me the size of a normal family is two-and-a-half-kids. I dont know how they figure the half. I mean, whats half a kid? A baby? In that case theres four and a half of us, Luke being the half, only what he lacks in size he makes up for in Starr quality.

Ha ha.

Da always says we have a cast as big as Ben Hur, which is this old movie about half-naked muscle men who wrestle lions. Da loves movies. He always says if he had another life, he would be a film director. Not the kind that makes movies about giant dinosaurs or meteors flattening New York; art-house movies where you dont have any idea what theyre about, but you cant help watching them because they are sooo weird, and then you come out and the world seems to have shifted a bit while you were inside.

Da says thats the whole point of those movies: to put you off balance; to make you see things from a different angle. I always answer: We Whitestarrs are unbalanced enough already.

I mean, you get the picture. This is not your common or garden-variety family where Da or Mum goes to work in an office or some place, and you shop and watch TV in the evenings, and go for barbecues on the weekends. For a start, Mum and Da work weird hours. Mum paints at night. Shes whats called nocturnal. She sleeps in the daytime and gets up and eats breakfast while the rest of us eat dinner. The best part of her being up all night is that if you wake up with a bad dream or you cant sleep, you can go to her studio. She wraps you in her shawls and lets you curl up in the corner of her tatty old studio couch while she makes Vegemite toast and pots of herbal tea, and you eventually fall asleep watching her paint, bathed in moonlight.

Da only works at night when he has a gig. Generally he and his band, Losing the Rope, rehearse four days a week in the afternoons and some nights. He earns a living arranging other peoples music and giving music lessons. The rest of the time hes either practicing his guitar or composing his own music.

To say were not rich is an understatement. Theres a few good months, a lot of bad months, and the occasional ugly month when were not having milk in our tea or butter on our bread and bills with red type and a nasty tone come in the mail because of what Da calls