The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

  Her daughter is all limbs. It feels as though Mim hasn’t been paying attention. There is a long scratch, red-rimmed, from the back of Essie’s thigh into the divot behind her knee, finishing on the back of her shin. Mim leans in and places her finger to it, Essie flinches her leg away, but not enough to break the touch.

  ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Huh?’ Essie turns her head over her shoulder to see, runs her own hand down. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘Want me to put something on it? Got to be careful of infection out here.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Mim fossicks amongst the gear on the little table, finds the red tube of balm, squeezes the goo on to her index finger and rubs it gently along the ridge of the scratch. She checks Essie’s hand while she’s at it. The wound’s closed over now and she’s let them both take the bandages off. But she’s got to watch them. Wouldn’t take much for that puckering line of skin to split, to suck in whatever strange bugs this new seascape holds. She traces the scar with the balm, layers it on thick.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I’m not going to get to do the tryouts, am I?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The tryouts. For the state team. I’m going to miss them.’

  She rubs the rest of the balm over the back of her daughter’s hand, feeling it melt into the skin.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Come here.’

  Essie gets on her hands and knees and then curls her head and shoulders round and into Mim’s lap. Mim rocks her ever so slightly, as if Essie were her baby again. The rhythm’s never left her. It’s deep, deep down in her bones.

  * * *

  It takes ages to leave the land behind. As they move steadily away from the other boats in the harbour, she keeps her eyes on the squat head of Darwin, the strange shapes of the buildings. From here, it’s easy to see why so much of it was swamped in the surges, and then the gradual, unrelenting rise of the sea. There is water all around them. Nothing is still. It is all wind and the whipping noise of the sail, the hum of the rigging, and then the tilt of the horizon, the dip and rise of the water, the white arc of the wake behind them. The sun is fierce, but there is the shade cloth, the cool of the wind.

  Nick emerges from the companionway.

  ‘All good?’

  ‘I didn’t realise…’ She stops because she does not have any words. Does not even know what she is trying to express, except that it is entirely new and foreign, this perspective on the world. It is opening something that she did not know was closed. That she did not know existed.

  ‘Makes you feel small, huh?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Never gets old, that feeling.’

  ‘You still get it?’

  ‘Kind of like coming home. Dad was gonna take us round the world, he reckoned.’

  ‘He didn’t?’

  ‘Never got round to it. Bit shifty, my old man. Mum got fed up and kicked him out.’ He runs his hand across the wheel and she is surprised at how gentle it seems.

  A dark shape appears in the air, an electrical whirring, getting closer. They all look.

  ‘Is that a drone?’ Essie says.

  ‘Under!’ Nick barks. ‘Now, quick!’

  They scramble. Mim pushes Essie ahead of her. Sam’s head pops up, and she yells, frantic, ‘Get out of the way, Sam, get under!’ as the three of them tumble through the hatch, cower on the couch, listening to the whirr above them.

  They make no sound. They wait.

  She feels the gallop of their heartbeats in tandem with her own as she squashes them to her. It would be too fucking unfair, after everything, to only get this far. She’s risked it all for this. Other people, too. Heidi – the name sears in her brain and her chest and she swallows down the choking terror she feels rising. She can’t go back. She understands now. Finally, Nick’s head appears above them in the hatch.

  ‘You’re good,’ he says. ‘Come up if you want.’

  But they stay under. For a while, anyway. Spooked that the sky is watching them too.

  * * *

  Later, she tries to make sense of the cupboards in the galley, stacking things in under the sink. Every surface serves a purpose: books and papers tucked into shelves with high edges, long padded bench seats that fold down into beds, heavy wooden boards that cover the stovetop and the sink to create a kitchen surface. Sam thinks it is a cubby. Especially the narrow passageway through which Nick stoops to get into his tiny cabin at the end. A slab of bed stretches back into the corner so that surely only his feet could be comfortable there. When he showed them, back in berth, he jumped up on the bed and stuck his head through the hatch above him so that they might all fit in to see. Even then, Sam had to climb in her lap and Essie on the bed behind her, ducking their heads down when Nick instructed her to pull down the chart table so they could see all his maps. She had been transfixed for a moment by the intricate markings, so like the maps she was familiar with. The reefs and deep trenches and shorelines all visible as if there were no water here at all, as if you were sailing over a mountain range. Something about it is just slightly beyond her grasp, the combination of the boat, the current and wind. She feels like she could understand the technicalities and, yet, there is something else that Nick has – an instinct for it.

  * * *

  By dinnertime, they have left Australian waters, and Mim feels more comfortable letting them eat up on deck, bowls of steaming pasta in their laps. The kids glow with the light of the sunset and she realises she must look the same. The colours – pink and orange in the high straits of cloud – are reflected in the water’s surface, which is the gunmetal polish of oil. It’s like they are sailing through sky and she has to remind herself to eat, slack-jawed with the beauty of it.

  ‘Pretty special, huh?’ he says.

  She nods. ‘What do you reckon, kids? Not a bad view?’

  The kids shovel in spaghetti. They are not old enough yet, she thinks, to realise that this is a kind of magnificence they won’t see often.

  16

  She can hear him now on the deck above her as she dries the tin plates, quietly stacks them in their little cupboard. The children breathe steadily, tucked into their narrow beds.

  She wipes her hands on the tea towel. Needs a drink. She shouldn’t, but god, now that she has allowed the thought, it consumes her. She can taste it. Can feel the warm ease that will rise from her stomach, that will fog her brain a little. She will welcome the fog, gladly, as she always has. Take the edge off it, the kinder mums used to laugh, giving each other permission to blank out the tedious evenings ahead. She needs more than fog now; she needs erasure. Visions of Heidi lying cocooned in bandages, hearing her scream in her mind.

  ‘Should we have a beer?’ she calls up through the hatch, stopping her brain.

  ‘Wouldn’t say no.’

  She grabs two bottles, flips the tops, carries them up on to the deck.

  ‘Kids asleep?’

  ‘Yep. Exhausted.’ She hands him one of the bottles. ‘How do you stay awake?’

  ‘Stop at one beer.’

  She nods. Looks out at the surface of the ocean ribboned with the light of the moon. The space around them is so big. So vast. There seems to be no end to it. They have sailed into a watery world and she wonders how long they could stay, suspended between places, out of time. The hushed sizzle of the wash as the boat slices through the waves. The blow of the sail.

  ‘I can usually go twenty-four hours,’ Nick says, ‘then I’ll have a snooze. We can switch on to autopilot once we’ve cleared these islands.’

  It is easy to forget. What they are doing. Where they are going. He must sense her holding her breath, because he shifts, starts something new.

  ‘Best night I ever had sailing, I was crewing for this bloke. English guy. He’d come into Darwin with his wife and I joined them there. It was so sti
ll, this night, in the middle of the Banda Sea. Full moon. Never seen anything like it. When it rose, the sea turned white. Milky. No horizon, nothing. A complete whiteout and us in the middle of it.’

  Mim watches him, how far away he is when he tells her this, back in that moment. He swallows and she watches the movement in his throat.

  ‘Never seen anything like it again. We asked a few people when we were in the islands, apparently only ever happens in the Banda Sea, maybe phosphorescence.’

  ‘How long did it last?’

  ‘Minutes, I think.’ They fall quiet. The breeze plays the rigging, a whispering.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. Or if it’s just a story I’ve told so many times I’ve made it real.’ He looks at her. ‘It’s like it got inside me. That night.’

  ‘Sounds amazing.’

  Keep talking, she wants to say. While you talk, I can’t think, and not thinking is what I want.

  ‘You did that. A bit,’ he says. Soft.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Got under my skin.’ He taps the bottom of his bottle against the steering wheel. The boat creaks and she’s aware of the lull, the movement.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He takes a swig. ‘Back when we were kids.’

  Not this. Not now. That’s back there, and I can’t think about back there. Here is all.

  He breaks the silence. ‘Did you end up travelling? I remember your brother, he went away for years, didn’t he? You follow him?’

  She shakes her head. Not sure of what will come out of her mouth if she begins.

  ‘Hard to come back when you go for that long, they reckon. He still over there?’

  The stars spatter the dark and flicker on the surface of the waves. Wind, gentle but persistent, moving into the hollows of her ears and out again. Perhaps she can say it here and the weight of it will be taken from her, carried away by this westerly, borne up and dispersed.

  ‘Michael died.’

  She feels his gaze shift to her in shock.

  ‘Fuck, sorry, I didn’t –’

  ‘He was an addict for years. Ice. He was taken into BestLife for those synth clinical trials, when they were doing the “radical change” to drugs policy.’

  He is breathing quietly, his eyes still on her. He is giving her space, he is listening and it is intoxicating. There are so many words to be said. They itch her tongue. She goes on. ‘I only visited him there once. It was bizarre, unreal. Something deeply, fundamentally wrong about the place. Spooked me, even though Michael seemed totally fine. Too fine.’

  The wind picks up for a moment and above them the tell-tales flutter and snap. They both look up and Nick moves his hands on the wheel, changing direction ever so slightly. The sound eases.

  ‘How long was he in there?’ Nick says softly, prompting her.

  ‘Only another three weeks after that. They said it was an overdose. His tolerance was down after the detox and someone must have smuggled some in. Who knows?’ She cannot look at him.

  ‘I should have got angrier. Should have made them explain. Should have been in there every day holding them to account, making them speak to my broken mum, my bitter dad. But I didn’t.

  ‘And later, god, years later, just after Sam was born, I got an email. Encrypted shit. Ben was terrified, reckoned he could lose his job just for the fact of it in our house.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Michael’s file. Or that’s what it looked like. The names were all redacted. There were dates and medical files, and then copies of pages and pages of Michael’s handwriting, scrawled, but still his.’ She spits out the words, they feel as though they are burning her tongue.

  Nick waits, his quiet is gentle and open and she feels like she might say anything, everything.

  ‘A lot of it was mad. Images, ranting, it looked exactly like the ramblings of a drug addict. I pored over it. Trying to find him in there. And I did. Kind of. In the middle of one page I saw my name. It was like a letter to me. Said he was sorry. Said he loved me. All of us. He said something like “it wasn’t what I thought after all”. Described himself as a rat in a cage. The last pages, they were just the same word, again and again and again, written so hard in places he had ripped the paper.’

  ‘What was the word?’

  ‘Resist.’ She throws her head back, lets out an enormous gush of breath. ‘I never showed Mum, figured she had enough on her plate. And Ben was stressed out about it. When I said that maybe we should try and get it to someone, a journalist in New Zealand, there was obviously some sort of underground that had got it to me in the first place, he just flat out said no. We couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk coming to the attention of the Department.’ She scoffs, looks at Nick in the half-light. ‘Blown that, haven’t I?’

  ‘I suppose you have, yeah.’ She hears a smile in his voice.

  ‘Anyway, that’s it.’ She wipes her mouth, as if she has just vomited. ‘Essie loved that, today, driving, steering, whatever you call it.’

  He pauses, thrown by the suddenness of the shift, but he goes with it. A new tenderness in his voice. ‘She did great. You didn’t get a turn, though.’

  ‘Happy to leave it till I get my sea legs.’

  ‘Come take it now.’ His face in the shadows, the strange colours from the deck lights, the moon. The way his gaze strikes at her throat in a way that she doesn’t want. She doesn’t. She doesn’t.

  And yet.

  ‘Nah. I’m good.’

  ‘Come on. Do you good. Anyway, I need a break.’

  She is annoyed to be patronised, pleased to be pushed. She feels like he thinks he knows something about her that she doesn’t know herself. She balances against the force of the lull, stands up and steps around to behind the wheel. It’s big. Her hands out straight from her shoulders when she places them at the top, ten and two, like she would a car.

  ‘See this?’ Nick points to the little screen behind the wheel, crisscrossed with coloured lines, a flashing dot which must be them.

  ‘All you got to do is keep this,’ he indicates the dot, ‘lined up with this,’ he shows her the green line that is their course. ‘All good?’

  ‘I’m pretty good with maps,’ she says.

  It’s as if she’s doing nothing at all, but when she tests, dropping her left hand just a fraction, after a moment she can see the dot move ever so slightly away from the line. ‘So, what? You set this up first and then all I have to do is follow the line?’

  ‘Basically.’

  ‘I can do that.’

  ‘Course you can.’ He hasn’t moved away and she can feel the heat off him all down her right side. Only a couple of centimetres between them. She hopes he moves away. And she hopes he stays.

  ‘Unless a boat turns up.’ He laughs quietly. ‘Or the weather changes.’

  ‘Then I hand over to you.’

  He leans back. ‘You’ll be captain in no time.’

  They are quiet for a time. But the heat of him, the closeness.

  She cracks the quiet. ‘There’s just so much water.’

  ‘Once you’ve been out for a few days, not seen land, not seen another boat, it feels even bigger then. Start to wonder if you imagined it, land, the rest of the world. If it’s not just you and the water. Odd feeling. Can’t explain it very well.’

  ‘I can see how that would happen.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

  Her breath catches. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Sorry, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance.’

  He is looking at her, she can tell, feels the focus ziplining up and down her body.

  ‘I can’t think about it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I just. I have to just concentrate on the kids, on getting there. Please don’t –’

  ‘Okay.’ He nods. ‘You finished?’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, reaching across to pass the empty bottle to him. He closes his hand around her fingers.

  He doesn’
t move and she doesn’t take her hand away. She’s got her eyes on the green line, one hand on the wheel. She feels him move closer to her, the weight of his leg, his hip, his elbow now, against her. This isn’t happening, she thinks. This is not me. She turns her head to look at him. His face open like that night at the seawall. A stirring at the core of herself. She drops her head forward, enough, enough, like she has granted permission, and then they are face to face, foreheads first. She can still back away. This is the line, if she crosses it, she doesn’t know how she will get back. The smell of him, up close like this, it’s complicated. Skin heat and sunscreen, sweat, diesel. It is not the same as it was, back then, not exactly, but there is something in it that unhooks her, takes her over.

  She kisses him.

  It’s not right, at first, noses squash, teeth clink, her shoulder wedged between them, but then he moves closer, something urgent now and there is more touching. He takes the bottle from her, bending a little, but won’t take his face from her face, mouth from her mouth, so he drops it and it clatters, rolls. She hopes it won’t roll off the edge but she’s not stopping now. Christ, she can smell the heat of them both, the panicked quick of it, the starbright, moonlit tide of what comes at her now, something remembered, something known rising up to wash her away.

  * * *

  After, she blinks in the dark of the cabin. Her body is electric. She imagines him up there, adrift, still caught in it, but she has pulled away, a clear voice in her head, something out of a dream, Stop now. Stop. So she has. She did.

  He is up there awake, in the dark, in the middle of a sea, the kids asleep and there is no one who can say, no one who would blame, it is entirely conceivable, regrettable but understandable. She grips the edge of the narrow bed. Holds tight. Feels the waves, the current beneath them, taking them forward, pushing them on.

  17

  She wakes to the tinny beep of her alarm going off. For a second she is unsure of where she is, and then there it is, the rock of the boat, the thrill-dread of remembering they are in the middle of the ocean. A moment later, the full body remembering of the kiss.