The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

  ‘Maybe next time, huh?’

  But Sam is losing interest now. He stays twisted around to Nick, the sailor holding more potential thrill than the game.

  ‘Are you good at fishing?’

  Nick’s face shows surprise at the question that seems to have come from nowhere. ‘Not bad, I s’pose.’

  ‘Sam! Are we playing or what?’ Essie says, frustrated.

  Mim puts her hand on Essie’s. ‘Yeah, c’mon, Sam.’

  ‘Wait, wait.’ He scrambles up from the seat and over to the narrow shelf on the wall at the end of the couch. There is a stack of books, some photographs, a dish of odds and ends. Sam holds up a brass medallion, the size of his palm, etched with the crude shape of fish. ‘What’s this?’

  Essie throws down her cards and picks up her book and earbuds. Rolls over on the bench seat to face away from them. God, the space is so small.

  ‘Sam,’ Mim says, gentle admonishment.

  ‘I can tell you later, mate, if you want to play?’ Nick is awkward in his negotiations with the kids. Doesn’t own that he is the adult.

  ‘Tell me now, Essie doesn’t want to play anyway.’ Sam thrusts the medallion forward.

  Nick looks at Mim, checking to see if he should go on. She sighs and nods.

  ‘Well, what does it say? Is there writing on it?’ he says to Sam.

  Haltingly, Sam sounds out some letters, but stops, shakes his head.

  ‘Won it with my dad, fishing competition. When I was about ten, I reckon. Caught the biggest flathead on the day.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Sam, grinning. ‘Are there more?’ He scrambles up and over to the shelf again. ‘Is this your dad?’ He holds up a frame.

  Nick nods. ‘Yeah, that’s him.’

  Mim is struck by how much she wants to hold him.

  ‘What about this?’ Sam says and holds up another frame.

  ‘Sam,’ Mim says in warning.

  Nick laughs and moves over to Sam. ‘Nah, it’s all good. That’s my sister and her kids. My nieces,’ he says.

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Jasmine and Elly.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘Umm,’ he says and looks at Mim sheepishly.

  She laughs and shakes her head.

  ‘About your age, I reckon,’ says Nick.

  ‘This?’ Sam holds up an embroidered piece of fabric, a bookmark perhaps, garish colours, tasselled fringe.

  ‘Ha!’ Nick takes it from Sam and runs his thumb across it. ‘I got that off a little kid on an island. South-east of here. They don’t get many visitors. I stayed for two weeks, helped build a new room at the school. This was a thank you gift.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Sam. ‘Could we go there?’

  Nick looks at Mim. ‘Maybe. One day, huh? Not this time though, got to get you somewhere this time.’

  Sam nods, eyes and fingers roaming the shelf. ‘What about this?’ He holds up a stone, a shell perhaps, deep green, as long as his fingers. ‘It’s so smooth!’

  ‘Sea glass,’ Nick says and this time he doesn’t look at her, and then she knows.

  ‘Is that –’ She leans across the table, taps Sam’s hands and takes the green glass from him. The weight of it, the smooth rounds of the edges, the clarity when she holds it up to the light. ‘You kept it?’

  Nick takes a long drink of his coffee, avoiding her eyes. Then he can’t anymore. ‘I really like green glass,’ he says and laughs.

  * * *

  She’s tucked away from the wind behind the rocks at the base of the headland. Low tide, pool of sun, tucking her hair behind her ears, shading her eyes, the cracked red nail polish of her big toe as she flips shells on the tideline. Knowing he is watching her. How alive and at home she feels in her body. Grains of sand sticking to flesh, skin that he’s touched, speechless, adoring. He turns back to look, crouching in the sand. This one? he asks, holding up the purpled insides of a pipi shell, mock sad when she shakes her head seriously. All afternoon he brings her treasures: the sunshine yellow of a small scallop shell, the milky butterflied wings of a clam, oiled pearlescence of a broken abalone, half a sea urchin ribbed with tiny holes. Each one she takes and holds and lays out in a line, before she kisses him her thankyou. When he bounds away to bring her more, she adds her own. Smooth charcoal pebble. Perfect whorl of a white trapdoor. Electric pink seaweed frond. And then the sea glass, green and smooth and weighted just so, nestling in the deep part of her palm. She holds it out to him as he holds his final gift to her. They unfurl their fingers at the same time; in his palm, a triangle of blue glass, in hers the rounded smooth of green. They laugh and kiss and kiss and kiss. On their knees in the sand then, for it has weight, this serendipity, means something bigger than them, fillets their hearts a little, for the sun is getting low in the sky now, this summer is nearly done. Solemnly, they exchange the pieces of old glass. Safe into pockets, stroked under fingers, tucked into hearts.

  * * *

  ‘I can’t believe you still have it,’ she says.

  Nick runs his thumb across the glass in his palm, hands it back to Sam. ‘Your mum found this. She gave it to me.’

  Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Really! When?’

  ‘Oh, ages ago, when we were kids.’

  ‘At Eagles Nest?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why’d you keep it?’

  Nick smiles, screws up his face. ‘S’pose it reminded me of something good. A good memory.’ He looks at Mim and she can’t meet his eye.

  Sam’s face lights up with suspicion. ‘Orrrrrr,’ he says loudly, with delight, ‘were you boyfriend and girlfriend?’

  Nick laughs as Mim says, ‘Sam!’

  Essie stands up and puts her book down hard. ‘I’m going up on deck.’

  Nick puts the sea glass back in the dish. ‘Good idea, I’ll come up.’ Glances at Mim as he goes past, eyes bright.

  Sam shakes his head as Mim cleans up the cards, pushes the table back to make the bed. ‘You were never a kid, Mum. That’s too weird.’

  She billows the sheet over his head and reaches under to tickle him. ‘I was so!’ she says and laughs, and wonders at the thrum of that old self, awakening under her skin.

  18

  Lights glow on the deck. Red, green, white against the black of everything else out there. They do different things, he’s told her, but there is so much new information and she’s got nothing to hook it on to. He instructs her how to tie the line off. They are keeping the sail down. He’s happy for them to stay this way for a bit. Still need to watch though, no getting off the cycle of watching this vast dark water, even though, so far, she has felt like they are the only ones out here.

  ‘You sleep all right, this afternoon?’ she asks to fill the silence.

  ‘My bed smelled of you.’

  She hears the words in her knees.

  She knows now that it is inevitable. Or maybe she knew that from the very beginning.

  Out past the deck lights she can see something. A glow rising up out of the sea. ‘What’s that?’ she asks and points.

  ‘Rig. Oil, gas maybe.’

  ‘Will we go past it?’

  ‘Closer, not too close.’

  She is captivated by the otherworldliness of it, the eerie lit quiet.

  He goes on. ‘It’s big, an optical illusion. It’ll take us all night to get past it.’

  ‘They really do go anywhere to find the stuff, huh?’

  ‘They? Thought that was your gig, too?’

  A warmth, that he has listened, even if he hasn’t understood.

  ‘Not oil and gas. Always tried to steer clear.’

  ‘Your husband must be doing it, if he’s with that China project.’

  ‘That’s gold. Other minerals too.’

  Nick nods, tinkers for a moment with a switch. Mim watches the rig in the distance.

  ‘All the same though, really, isn’t it? Taking stuff out of the ground?’

  She laughs once. ‘It’s a bit more complex than
that.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He smooths the heel of his hand round the rim of the wheel. ‘Reckon people say things are complex sometimes, when they’re kind of really simple.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She’s had these arguments before. Always after the bristle when people realise she’s come through geology. So, mining? they’ll say. And she’ll have to say, Sometimes, that’s part of it. For the most part, she’ll hold herself back from attacking the smug satisfaction in their faces. She won’t argue that it’s essential services really. For everyone. For them. That without the industry they wouldn’t be able to move around their adored cities, wearing their curated outfits stinking of oil somewhere down the line, even if it’s as ethically sustainable as it purports to be. That the screens they religiously upgrade are powered by the very stuff the evil industry extracts from the earth.

  People find it hard to acknowledge such duplicitousness. Hard to acknowledge, but not hard to do.

  He must take her silence for hurt. ‘Suppose I’m saying the simple part of it is needs and wants. As long as there’s a market, there’s a reason to dig it up.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘We all compromise on stuff, right? Principles. Ethics. What we want.’

  He nods.

  ‘You ever wanted it all?’ she asks, after a moment.

  ‘All what?’

  ‘Kids, love, all of it.’

  ‘Haven’t found anything to keep me in one spot yet.’

  ‘No?’

  He touches her wrist.

  She’s not even sure how the space between is breached, it is so quick. And there’s a rope, so many ropes, and there’s the edge, Shit, hang on, careful don’t fall in, quick laugh, not now, not now that we’re here, and so backwards, into the pit, into the fire, him down on the seat, and she straddles him, her legs across. Who is she? What is this? How so soon, so quick, so right? And his hands are under and rough and damp and she knows that when she takes them in her mouth, because she will, they will be salt, but now, now is for mouths and hands in hair and tongues on necks and the sound and the moon behind and his beard where it scratches, and fingers now, ducking his head and mouth on her nipple so she drops her head back and gasps and they are gone, they are done, they are so far in. Like this? Here. Now. Fingers down now, wet. Like that? God, yes. And his hands, a moment of strangeness, of feeling too intimate. He is hard and so hot on her belly and fuck, fuck this is good.

  He speaks, low, into her mouth, ‘I wanted, from when I saw – at the house, I thought, how is she here?’

  And his want, it is something else. He wants her.

  ‘You got something?’ she says, quick, coming back to herself.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Pretty sure of yourself.’ Grabbing. Helping.

  ‘You knew too.’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘Yes. You did.’

  And then tearing and Get it on, fuck, there? Okay, yes, god, and kiss now again, lips, mouth, tongue, bite, Ahh, sorry, no, god, good, again, please, and now, and hand on him, taking him, wanting him, pulling him, so that she guides him in, and then

  Jesus

  fuck

  All starlight and wave upon wave on the boat up against and hard and then soft and please god more keep going I’m not breath mouth you this is just you’re so hard wet good come now please god not yet can’t we all night just forever again and again and again and she sees a planet she is sure that it must be so tiny so bright like it’s searing inside her it’s seeing inside her she has never been open like this in her life it is everything, everything, just noise now, and sound that they make which is tender, star song and breath, and breathe and slow and still skin heat wet heartbeat slows.

  The quiet, then.

  The quiet of after.

  * * *

  She is cold. Awkward, a little, and she needs the darkness of the cabin, sleep. Can’t bear to see his face, all stripped back and open. The flutter in her gut threatens to make her vomit. She pulls on shorts, untwists her long-sleeved top. No words now. Like the night will shatter if they speak. In the dark ahead of them, the rig glows, beautiful and monstrous, rising up out of the dark sea.

  Down the companionway, feeling with her feet, her hands, she doesn’t want to turn on another light. Allows her eyes to adjust to the blue glow from the nav desk.

  Then she yelps.

  In the half-dark, Essie is sitting up. Sheet loose around her middle, hands resting in her lap, whites of her eyes glowing, looking directly at Mim.

  ‘God! Ess! You okay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Her voice is clipped.

  Like a wave, fear comes to Mim. What has she heard?

  ‘You been awake long? Can’t sleep?’

  Breathe, breathe, take the edge off your voice.

  ‘Yeah. Awhile. It’s hard to sleep. It’s noisy.’

  ‘The water? Autopilot?’

  ‘Must be.’

  ‘You want me to get you a drink? Lie with you? You want a head torch to read for a bit?’ Mim knows she is babbling, but her daughter, serene and still in the darkness there, God, what has she heard, she must have heard.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be asleep? Isn’t your watch in the morning?’

  She reaches for explanations. ‘The ropes,’ she says, ‘wind change, Nick needed a hand.’ She feels the blush begin in her neck. Oh, you lie. She makes her voice tired. ‘I’m going back to bed. If you’re sure you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Night, my darling.’ She doesn’t go to her, feels she can’t, she can smell him on her.

  ‘Night.’

  Mim waits until Essie lies back down, and then she crawls across to her own slim bed. The rocking is gentle now, moonlight on the droplets of water on the small windows above her. She is wired, painfully aware of every point the sheet touches her skin, of how he just touched her, of how he breathed her name, the catch in his voice, the feeling that surged in her.

  She is turned on, again, and ashamed.

  She thinks of how loud her own breathing was in her ears, the feeling of all that space, the water, the sky, no one else out here, the gasping pleasure of it.

  She must have heard. She must have heard.

  * * *

  In the morning, she takes the breakfast bowl from Sam, passes it back.

  ‘Finish it off, there’s another two spoons there.’

  ‘I can’t. Full.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to take it up and throw the rest over. Essie, can you go with him?’

  Essie’s voice is level. ‘He can do it.’

  Mim stays facing the little sink, looking through that little rectangular window, the tilt and lilt of the horizon.

  ‘I can do it by myself, anyway,’ says Sam.

  ‘Fine. Up you go.’

  She wipes her hands on the tea towel. They don’t dry, nothing is dry, and turns to watch Sam climb the ladder, one hand gripping the bowl. She’s not controlling, it’s not that, it’s that she can see the inevitable disaster and she wants to prevent it.

  She looks at her daughter, all puffed up with her indignation.

  Does she know? She thinks she should say something, warn Nick, but then to say it would be to make it real and it is still just a star-tinged moment, a way of rationalising, of swallowing the guilt.

  * * *

  Up in the cockpit, Essie drills the ball into the fibreglass, again and again, so it comes back perfect and hard. Her face is set. Hair pulled back so she looks fierce, determined.

  There is a breeze this morning, the sail is up, they are moving, and all she can think now is Don’t go so fast, wind. Give me something, give me an extra day. This is a betrayal. To think like this. They must get to Ben. To Ben. To Ben.

  ‘Muuum. Booored.’ Sam holds the rope above his head and swings his body forward so it takes the weight.

  ‘Don’t do that.�
�

  Sam snaps his head at Nick’s voice.

  ‘On the rope, you can’t pull on it like that.’

  Sam drops his head and Mim glances at Nick. Her look must say it all.

  ‘Sorry, but –’ he begins.

  ‘Yep. It’s fine. He got it.’ She looks at Sam, puts her arms out to him. ‘What can we do, huh? You want to play Uno? We could do it up here.’

  Sam shakes his head, wounded.

  ‘C’mon,’ she says, cocking her head to Nick and Essie, ‘these two seem like they need some alone time anyway.’

  Essie is quick. Devilish. ‘It’s a pretty small boat,’ she says.

  Mim tries not to react. Goes down below with Sam, plays two hands.

  * * *

  And then Essie is yelling.

  Mim is up the steps so quick and she’s yelling at the same time. ‘What? What happened, are you okay?’

  And she can see her, thank god, she is there, and Nick too, at the edge.

  ‘Get it!’ Essie screams.

  ‘What, what?’ Mim is behind her.

  Sammy is yelling from behind her, ‘What’s going on?’

  Nick says, ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Can’t what?’ Mim yells. ‘Fuck! What?’

  ‘Her ball. Her ball went over.’

  ‘Shit. Ess. I told –’

  Nick says, ‘Don’t,’ warns with his eyes.

  Fuck you, she thinks, you are not her parent.

  But then Essie is standing on the edge. ‘Just turn the boat around to get me,’ she says and moves to propel herself forward.

  ‘No, Essie!’

  Nick has grabbed her and is holding her against the rail and then Essie begins to scream, to really scream and to wriggle and squirm and Mim goes forward, watching in horror, as Essie smacks her head back into Nick’s mouth.

  ‘Fuck!’ he yells, lets go, grabs his face and Essie wobbles, grabs the rail, goes to get one leg over but Mim is there.

  ‘No, Essie, no!’ she yells.

  Mim tries to be careful of Essie’s legs but not really because all she knows is that she has to haul her back in, haul her back over the rail and fall backwards onto the deck so that she has her in both her arms, and Essie is yelling, crazy, trying to bite her arm, but she holds, like iron, she holds her arms across her and she is crooning, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ and across Essie’s head, out to sea, she can see it, the ball, already so far. It’s crazy how quick and how far already and then there’s the chop of a wave, small. And then it’s gone.