by Michael Sala
With the rain beating down, and the world outside gone, they sat around the table and ate a hurried dinner of sandwiches and salad that Mum had brought with them in an esky, and then kept unpacking. Another crackling boom rattled the windows, and a gust of cool air billowed up around Freya’s legs from under the floorboards.
Daniel was hugging Mum around the waist.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, prying him loose. ‘We’re inside. We’re all safe.’ She opened another box, dug around inside it. ‘There!’
Mum held the candles up just as the next crack of thunder exploded outside. A burst of light filled the room and Freya saw everyone as if in an old black and white photograph—Dad wiping his hands uselessly on his sodden T-shirt, his eyes shadowed by his forehead, Mum beside the table, Daniel buried again into her side. Then the house, like the world beyond the windows, dropped into darkness.
Everything became louder. The house pressed in close. The rain sounded like it was crashing down on her skull. Her brother whimpered. Dad coughed and cleared his throat. A rustle came from somewhere in front of her, a metallic rasp.
‘For God’s sake,’ Dad said. ‘My hands are too wet to light this damn thing.’
‘Give it to me,’ Mum said.
‘Where are you then?’ Dad said.
‘Here,’ Mum said. ‘Give me the lighter, you take the candles.’
Freya couldn’t see them, but she heard their movement, the rasp of the lighter. Sparks, and then the sparks condensed into a flame that brought Mum’s hands into view, and then her face, and Dad beside her. Freya thought of a story in the book she’d been reading in the car, a book Nan had pushed into her hands that afternoon, in Sydney, just before they’d left. Greek Mythology. Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, Zeus chaining him to a rock, an eagle eating away at his liver, the liver growing back each night. She’d read about Prometheus and thought of Mum, the strange mixture of hope and suffering with which she lived her life, how she never gave up on anything, even when it hurt her.
Mum cupped the glow of the flame with her palm and held the lighter to the candle in Dad’s hands. When the flame took hold, Dad put the candle on the mantelpiece. Mum lit another candle behind him.
Daniel stood there between them and reached for the next candle.
‘Not you,’ Dad said as he turned back.
‘Roy,’ Mum said.
‘He’s eight,’ Dad said. ‘We don’t want the house burning down, do we?’
‘We can risk it.’ Mum lit the candle and gave it to Daniel. ‘Just put it on the table.’
Everyone watched Daniel walk to the table and put the candle down with trembling hands. After a moment, Dad walked over and shifted it to the other side of the table.
‘The draught,’ he said, without looking at anyone.
The rain filled the courtyard on the other side of the kitchen windows with a dull, constant roar. They placed more candles around the room. The flames shrank and danced while her parents set out the foam mattresses, two side by side, at either end of the table. They stayed up for a while, sorting through things by candlelight, but the power didn’t come back on, and there wasn’t much that could be done without it.
‘Go to bed now,’ Mum said at last. ‘It’s been a big day. We’ll get up early.’
‘I’m not tired,’ Daniel said.
But he was asleep as soon as his head settled on the pillow.
Freya lay down beside him. She pretended to sleep too, and perhaps she did, because when Dad’s voice lifted through a lull in the rain, it startled her.
‘Those scented candles of yours finally came in handy. I can’t believe you’ve still got them, after everything.’
‘I was smart enough not to leave them with you,’ Mum answered.
Dad laughed, but not for long. For a moment the rain took over.
‘God, I’m tired,’ Mum murmured. ‘But I don’t think I can sleep.’
‘You don’t know how to relax.’
‘Do you blame me?’
‘Never, love. It’s usually my fault.’
Freya was facing the other way, but she saw from their shadows on the wall that they were close together. She heard them kiss, saw the shape of his hands merge with the shape of her neck. Then they separated, and Mum began sorting through a box. The metallic rasp of Dad flicking at the lighter again cut through the rain, and the smell of tobacco filled the room.
‘I know I promised,’ he said, ‘but I can’t go outside. And I really need a smoke.’
Mum’s voice came back at him. ‘Can you at least do it in another room?’
Freya heard his footsteps, and then the door closing behind him.
The rain intensified. Mixing into the sickly odours of the house were more familiar ones: Mum’s incense, her candles, her floral perfume, Dad’s tobacco and that smell he had that Freya couldn’t describe but it was his alone and it reminded her of an animal that did not belong in a confined space.
The house was a drum being beaten by rain. The whole world outside was sinking. For a while she let herself imagine that she was alone, and drifted in and out of sleep until Dad returned and lay down on the mattress beside Mum. Only a single candle burned on the table.
‘I want water,’ Mum said.
‘Well, you’ve got that,’ Dad answered. ‘Plenty of it.’
‘I meant hot water. Tomorrow, I want a shower. I hope there’s going to be hot water.’
‘I’ll make it happen.’
Then Freya couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the rain. A picture sprang into her head of Nan, standing by the window earlier that day, arms by her sides, not waving, not smiling, as they’d pulled away and started driving. It had been a hot, still afternoon, no hint of a storm. She thought about the school she had left, and her friends, and whether anyone there would ever know where she had gone, or why.
A few hours, between all of that—and this.
Sometime after midnight the rain and the wind stopped. The room filled with the sound and smell of the ocean, both amplified somehow, as if it were about to pour through the windows, full of storm debris—ground-up shells, rotting wood, seaweed, the husks of marine animals, endless other fragments suspended in the salt water, all of it caught in the roar of the waves. But by then there was no one awake to hear.
2
One bird was calling to another. Bright morning sun lay on her face. An object crashed to the floor in the other room, and Dad’s curse carried through the wall. She had been sleeping on her hand, and it ached. Freya rolled onto her back and massaged the tingling skin. Light was streaming in through the doorway from the kitchen. Mum was washing dishes, humming a tune. From a distance, the second bird answered the first—a sonorous, reverberant cry that made her think of lonely streets and empty suburbs. Two weeks now of hearing that sound, always in the morning, always at this hour. She took a deep breath, and the house, its presence, its smell, filled her.
They had spent the first few days down in the basement, shovelling piles of rotting newspaper and rodent shit and rusty nails and all sorts of barely recognisable rubbish into thick plastic bags. Though they’d scrubbed the concrete floor, dousing it in disinfectant and liquid sugar soap, the odour seemed to have soaked into everything—the wallpaper, the brick, the exposed wood. She could still taste it in the air, laced with cleaning agent: the sickness and the cure inseparable.
Dad began moving around again in the living room. He was ripping up the fire-damaged floorboards—she could hear the splintering crack of wood being wrenched free. The new floorboards sat already in a pile in the hallway. Soon there’d be two rooms on the lower floor to sleep in, and sometime after that—she didn’t know how long—their bedrooms would be ready.
But for now it was the last day of January, and the first day of school. She stared at the paint curling in flakes off the ceiling and let the thought consume her. They’d gone there a few days ago, to enrol her. Afterwards, as they’d driven away, her and Daniel in the back of Dad�
�s steaming-hot car, tools sliding across the metal bay behind them, the windows wound down, Mum had turned and said, ‘Doesn’t it look good?’
Freya glanced back at the old brick buildings and empty sports fields behind a long line of brooding Moreton Bay figs. Sure, she’d answered. It looked great. She would have said anything to make Mum stop trying to win her over. It was bad enough that she had to go there, let alone that she had to be grateful for it.
She rolled off the mattress and rose to her feet, then went to the narrow window and leaned forward, her forehead almost touching the cracked glass pane. The sky was clear. The breeze that trickled in through the crack in the glass smelled good. Heat was already rippling across the rooftops of nearby houses. The bird closest to the house called out again. God, it was loud. After a pause, the one in the distance answered. Maybe they weren’t calling to one another. Maybe they were calling to the same silent listener. Or maybe in all of that sound there was just a simple message to the other: hey you, buster—stay away.
Daniel was sitting at the small table in the kitchen, legs swinging back and forth. He glanced up from his comic book, open at the first page. His face was blank for a moment, then he smiled.
‘Have you made it to the end yet?’ Freya asked.
‘I don’t want to read the end,’ he said. ‘Only the beginning.’
Mum turned from the sink. ‘Finally, you’re up. You’d better get ready for school. Don’t want to be late on your first day, do you?’
‘I could live with that.’
Something passed across Mum’s face. ‘I’ll make you some eggs.’
‘I’m going to have a shower.’
Freya pulled a towel from the coat rack in the corner. The stairs to the next floor creaked under her feet. The grout between the bathroom tiles was the colour of rust. The showerhead leaned from a corroding pipe over a bathtub chipped and rusting at the edges and around the drain hole. Leaking droplets spattered against the enamel. Freya let her clothes fall to the tiles. She stepped into the bath.
The pipe gave a shudder when she turned on the water. A groan came from deep within the house, followed by a hard knocking sound that faded as she turned the tap further. She stepped back and adjusted the heat.
The ceiling was pregnant with moisture, swollen into warped undulations peppered with mould. With both hands, she touched her hipbones, the curve of her belly, the beginning of her ribs, as if they belonged to someone else. Her feet were long and uneven, just a little, but once she’d noticed, she couldn’t stop thinking of it—they were like Dad’s feet. And she didn’t have any breasts. Nothing. Or almost. And she was fourteen. No girl would have less than her, not in year 9.
When she stepped out of the shower, she wiped away the fog on the mirror and looked at her face again. She grimaced, then bared her teeth more fiercely at her own reflection: you, buster, stay away.
Two glistening, perfectly poached eggs were waiting, arranged on two pieces of brown bread, the butter soaked away around them, yolks like cloud-filtered suns, with the steam rising from them in coils.
‘—must have been in the living room,’ Dad was saying.
‘How can you tell?’ Mum asked.
‘Food,’ Dad said. ‘An apple core. He must have thrown it down through the hole in the floor. Like he couldn’t even make it to a bin. After all the cleaning we’ve been doing down there, he thinks we need to do a bit more. Seriously.’
‘It was an accident,’ Daniel said.
‘So it was you. Then why didn’t you go down to get it?’
Daniel didn’t answer. Freya knew why. He was scared of going down there, but he wouldn’t admit that in front of Dad.
The phone began ringing.
‘Daniel,’ Mum said, ‘why do you do these things? You know you weren’t even meant to be in the living room yet. It’s not safe until the floor’s fixed up. Look at me.’
Her brother stared back at Mum over his comic. Mum was beautiful, usually—everyone said that—but today she looked tired and drawn, her pale skin blotchy, circles under her eyes, which were a little red, like she hadn’t slept, like she didn’t know where she was.
‘Say you’re sorry, Daniel.’
Her brother said he was sorry.
‘Say you won’t do it again.’
He said he wouldn’t do it again.
The phone was still ringing. Dad walked into the hallway to answer it. Freya caught Daniel’s eye and winked. His face didn’t change. He went back to reading.
‘The uniform looks nice, Freya,’ Mum said.
‘It’s ugly,’ she said. ‘I don’t like blue.’
‘Blue looks good on you.’
Freya made a face. ‘Not this blue. Not with white. I look like a sailor.’
‘I like my uniform,’ Daniel said solemnly.
‘That’s good, darling,’ Mum said, smiling, but then she turned back to Freya. ‘The blouse fits you okay?’
Freya cut her egg with her knife. The sickly yellow insides spilled out and spread across the white plate. ‘I guess.’
‘Well, do that button up. I can see your bra.’
Mum stood in front of her and waited. Freya did the button up.
The phone clattered back into its cradle. ‘No one there,’ Dad called.
Mum was standing behind her now, her firm fingers against Freya’s scalp, tugging at the hair hard enough to make her wince.
‘Such a waste. There are so many knots—do you actually brush it? As in move your brush through your hair?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Looks like you just wave your brush in the air and hope for the best,’ Mum said. ‘It’s not a magic wand, you know. If you’re going to keep your hair long—’
‘You know what you need to do?’ Dad said from the doorway. ‘Relax while you’ve got the chance. She’ll worry about how she looks soon enough.’
‘It’s not her I’m worried about. What’ll people think of us?’ Mum returned to the sink. She stood there with one hand against it and kept looking at Freya sitting at the kitchen table like there was no one else there. Dad went back out to the living room and started working again. Freya shoved half an egg into her mouth, forced the lump down with a gulp of milk, then burped.
Mum was still watching her. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Freya, on top of everything else, do you have to eat like that too?’
‘Yes, Mother,’ Freya said, imitating Mum’s tone, meeting her eyes. ‘I do. Thanks for asking.’
Mum’s mouth sank at the corners. Her chin became, briefly, completely ugly. ‘Don’t call me Mother. It makes me sound old.’
‘Well, aren’t you?’
‘You’ll be this old one day. And I’m only thirty-four.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘What then?’
‘Forget it.’
A piece of wood crashed to the floor in the hallway behind them.
‘You’re impossible sometimes.’ Mum turned to the sink and began washing up with a kind of furious motion, clattering each dish into the rack as she finished with it.
Dad walked into the kitchen again and swept his large arms around Mum’s waist from behind. ‘That makes her pretty much like you, doesn’t it?’ He kissed her neck. Mum stayed there, hands unmoving in the water, as if she were playing dead. He pulled her in closer, peered out through the window above the sink.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Not a cloud in sight. First time in a week. Ever seen anything so pretty?’
‘You shouldn’t use words like that,’ Mum said.
‘Like what?’
‘Pretty. They never sound right coming from you.’
He kissed her neck again, held her more tightly. ‘I can’t help it. Not around you.’
‘Oh, stop it.’ But she finally relaxed into the embrace.
Dad looked back at Freya sitting there at the table. ‘It does look good, sweetheart, the uniform. But not too good. You don’t want it to loo
k too good. Not with all those boys around.’
He grinned. It made him look much younger, more like a boy himself. He had a straight, broad nose and a wide mouth with the ever-present shadow of stubble etched darker at the corners, his big clean teeth made brighter by his olive skin. There was a spark in his eyes when he was being charming—especially bright when he knew you didn’t want to be charmed. Before she could stop herself, she smiled back.
The sun sat a good distance over the sky and the street radiated warmth. It was going to be a hot day. She’d be riding to school on a bike. It was a second-hand one that Dad had picked up cheap from the paper in Sydney and restored with her in mind, back when she’d thought they’d never see him again, when Mum had refused to say his name. A classic, Dad had called it when he’d given it to her.
There wasn’t a speck of rust anywhere, and he’d given it a new coat of paint. It had a thick, nicely curved frame, a white wire basket at the front, a back-pedal brake, no gears. She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse, threw her bag in the basket and set off. The chain creaked in protest as she pushed the pedals. She rode along the main street, shopfronts to the left, the railway line blocking off the harbour to her right, the corrugated aluminium flank of a Sydney train gathering pace as it pulled out of the city. The cars overtaking her came close enough to touch, the air full of their exhaust. It mingled with the briny odour of the nearby harbour, and, as she passed it, wafts of baking bread from the Vietnamese bakery. A car slowed alongside her and a flat, reddened, boyish face leaned out.
‘Show us your tits!’
The boy drew back inside the window. A burst of laughter came from deeper in the car before it accelerated and swerved around the corner. She kept pedalling and stared straight ahead.
Near where she sat with a group of girls for recess, under the shade thrown by huge Moreton Bay figs that lined the quadrangle, the boys put on their displays. They wore their collars up and their shirts untucked, shoved each other to punctuate sentences, tossed fuck and shit and cunt into laughing exchanges. When they weren’t playing handball, they sat mainly on the tables, feet on the seats, facing outwards, so they could perve on the girls, and keep an eye out for the teacher on duty.