by Michael Sala
Later, while she lay with one leg slung across him, her face nuzzled into his neck, he told her about things he’d only hinted at before, the death of his mother when he was so young he could barely remember her, and the barren pathways that led from one part of his childhood to the next. He talked of the bitter, determined way his father had used words and his hands to hack at everyone he should have cared for, and that Roy had learned to forgive him for it, because there’d only been the two of them. These were things he’d never told another human being. She’d walked around with the glow of that night for days afterwards.
Maryanne found herself searching for the scar under her eye now, but her fingertips felt dull and clumsy, and the scar was hard to pinpoint at the best of times. The bottle, sitting there beside her on the concrete floor, was half empty. She hadn’t even noticed herself drinking so much. She felt heavy and she closed her eyes. It was very quiet in the basement, but when she had her eyes closed, when she just sat there, swaying a little, she could hear a soft rushing noise, and she wasn’t sure if it was inside her head—the sound of her own blood being pushed through her body—or whether it was coming from around her, coming into the room from the walls, or the floor perhaps, which felt cool and damp when she touched it with her hand, even though it was dry.
‘How do you know,’ one of her friends had asked her once, in an argument about him, ‘that anything he says to you is true? Maybe that’s why he never trusts you. Untrustworthy people are always the ones who trust others the least.’
They weren’t friends anymore.
That noise, that soft, full rushing of life, seemed to grow in her ears, and she imagined herself trapped in this basement, and it was filling, filling with water seeping up through the fine cracks in the concrete, rising around her, full of salt and carrying up all the stains that had accumulated over the years, rising around her so that she would take her next breath and draw it in, make it hers.
The glass slipped from her limp hand and shattered, and as she kicked out her leg to right her balance, she hit the bottle and knocked it over. It rolled away on its side, the remaining wine glugging out of it in red gulps.
9
‘What’s this?’ Dad asked. He’d spent the afternoon smashing out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room with a sledgehammer, and he’d gone upstairs to wash the dust off his face.
‘What?’ Freya said.
‘Look up.’
Freya looked up. On the ceiling of the bathroom, white clumps, twenty or thirty of them. She knew what it was—toilet paper soaked in water, squeezed into shapeless masses that stuck to anything. The boys were always doing it at school.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she said.
Dad’s voice was soft. ‘There’s only one person in this house who would do something like that to a freshly painted ceiling. But why, Freya? Why, when there is so much to do, why does he make more work?’
A kind of resonant sigh came from deep in his throat. He walked out.
Freya stared up at the ceiling. Dad’s feet creaked down the stairs. His voice drifted up, the thrust and jab of his words. She heard her brother reply.
A moment later, Daniel came upstairs. She was still standing there, but he went into his room without looking at her and shut the door. He stayed in there and did not make a sound. She felt angry at him for a moment, her brother. Couldn’t he see even ten minutes in front of him? He was like a kid with a box of matches, dry leaves everywhere around him, and all he had to do was sit still, not do anything. How hard was that?
She went to his door and opened it. He was sitting on his bed, one leg crossed over the other, his chin in the splay of one thin hand.
‘What did he do?’ she asked.
He wiped his eyes. ‘Not much.’
‘What, though?’
‘Nothing,’ Daniel said. ‘He didn’t do anything.’
‘What did he say?’
His mouth tugged down at the corners. ‘Not to do it again.’
‘Then why are you crying?’
Daniel shook his head, looked away. ‘I don’t know.’
Dad came back up the stairs. She waited for him to come into the room, but his footsteps did not slow as he walked past. She turned to leave.
‘Maybe,’ Daniel said softly behind her.
‘What?’
‘He wanted to. He lifted his hand and he looked at me, but then he didn’t.’
‘Better not do it again,’ she said.
Dad was in the bathroom, with a broom, gently knocking each clump of toilet paper from the ceiling. He glanced sideways at Freya as she walked past, his face blank, then he turned his attention back to the ceiling.
After school the next day, Freya walked home with Josh. They shared a joint in his room and listened to the whole of Dark Side of the Moon again. They lounged sideways on his red chairs, with their feet pointing away from one another, addressing their comments to the ceiling.
‘You hear the girl that’s singing now?’ Josh said. He reached behind his head to offer Freya the joint.
The girl on the record wasn’t using words but singing with her whole voice, like it did not need words, like she was shaping something out of her own soul and throwing it into the air. Freya couldn’t describe it any other way.
‘Yes,’ she said, taking the joint from his hand. ‘What about her?’
‘They brought her into the studio and didn’t tell her what to do. They just told her to come up with something, and then they didn’t even say if it was good or anything. She only found out she was on the album when she bought a copy.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I know how she feels, though,’ Freya said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That middle bit, where she just lets it all out. I want to do that.’
‘When?’
‘All the time. Or a lot, anyway.’
‘Now?’
She pulled back on the joint, slowly exhaled. ‘Maybe not now.’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Just listen to her. That’s why.’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
Their fingers brushed together as she passed him the joint.
‘Time drags on here,’ she said after a while. ‘Not here, but this city. Or maybe it’s just in our house. We’re all stuck there together, like all we’re doing is waiting for something. Sometimes I don’t think I can last here.’
‘Yeah, right. But what choice do you have?’
Freya didn’t have an answer for that.
‘Where’s your mum live?’ she asked, to change the subject.
‘Overseas. I don’t really know. She left a few years back.’
‘Why?’
‘She never said. Don’t ever mention her around my dad. He’s not over it yet.’
‘I won’t. I’m sorry.’
He laughed softly. ‘Don’t be sorry. Maybe it’s better this way. Who knows.’
‘It must suck, though, not having her around.’
‘It’s fine. Dad felt so guilty about it—when she was gone. He just gave me money, whatever I wanted. He still does. Want to stay for dinner? Dad won’t mind.’
She pushed herself to her feet, drew her hair back into a ponytail with an elastic she’d had around her wrist, and gave him a half-smile. ‘I’d better get back home, otherwise they’ll have a fit.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said.
Freya walked past the beach before she went home, to clear her head a bit before she had to face Mum, her schoolbag slung over one shoulder. Several men leaned on the balustrades of the concrete promenade with their backs to the sea, bare-chested, tanned. They turned to watch her, one after the other, and she felt suddenly aware of the lightness of her school uniform, how her whole body felt like a stranger’s under their gaze, how they weren’t worried about being caught looking at her, not like boys close to her age were. She walked past them a little more quickly, hating that she felt like she had to.
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She’d be out of this town as soon as she finished high school. Out, out, out. She’d go back to Sydney, stay with Nan. She wanted to squeeze all that time together, shove it into some dark hole, get it over with. She passed the corner store up the road from the beach, and there was a sign on the inside of the window, written in a scrawling, uneven hand. Help wanted, apply within. She stood in front of it, regarded her own reflection in the glass, hovering over the sign, then walked in. The old man behind the counter had a walrus moustache wider than his face and cheeks that sagged across his jaw. He was reading a tattered book with a three-headed dog on the cover. A radio crackled behind him, and a song she liked was playing, the one about how good it would be to be in someone else’s shoes and wish yourself away.
He looked at her with rheumy eyes. ‘What are you after, love?’
‘The job. Is it still available?’
He brushed a stray lock of long thin white hair across his skull and put the book down on the counter so that the three-headed dog faced her.
‘What job?’
‘The one in the window.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Really? You look about twelve.’
She pointed at the cover of the book. ‘That’s Cerberus. The guardian of the underworld.’
He nodded. ‘Well spotted. It’s science fiction. But go far enough into the future, and I guess you’ll end up in the past again. Ever worked in a shop?’
‘No.’
‘It’s easy. Even I can do it. Six dollars an hour. Eight on the weekend. Be about two shifts a week. I suppose they’re yours if you want them.’
‘Okay.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Freya.’
He extended one hand across the counter. She’d never really shaken a man’s hand before. She liked it—as if she were agreeing to something as an adult, rather than just nodding her head in deference to one.
His grip was dry and loose and cool. ‘Patrick’s my name. Come by tomorrow after school. We’ll get you started then.’
Mum was home. Freya could always tell as soon as she came in the front door—it was like a presence you stepped into. She went through to the dining room, startlingly bigger now that the back wall was gone. There was a vase full of flowers on the table, their smell filling the room. The petals were fat and fleshy white, stained with red on the inner surfaces.
‘Aren’t the flowers beautiful?’ Mum said, coming out of the kitchen with a stack of plates and cutlery.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Freya told her.
‘Smell them.’
Freya leaned down. ‘Where’d you get them?’
‘Oh, a friend,’ Mum said, as she set down the plates and started laying out the cutlery. ‘Don’t they just brighten the room?’
‘They do,’ Freya said. ‘I’ve got a job.’
Mum turned, a look of surprise on her face. ‘When did you manage that? Where?’
‘The corner shop.’
‘Are they paying you?’
‘That’s what a job is, isn’t it?’
Before Freya knew what was happening, Mum had drawn her into a hug and was holding her tight, pressing one hand against her hair so that their heads were close together.
‘Well, that’s good, Freya. That’s very good. Your first job. Like that, it just happens. You grow up.’
Mum was still holding her, her breath hot against Freya’s ear. She smelled of wine. An empty bottle sat on the windowsill of the kitchen. Freya waited.
Mum let go and walked into the kitchen. ‘I’m making spaghetti Bolognese. That’s your favourite, isn’t it?’
It hadn’t been for a long time, but Freya nodded and followed her. ‘I can help, if you like.’
‘Well, start chopping. Tell me about your day while you’re at it.’
Mum handed her a knife. In the quiet, a sound drifted down to them from all the way upstairs—a slow, steady fall of notes from Daniel on his clarinet.
‘He loves his new room, doesn’t he,’ Mum said.
‘Yeah,’ Freya answered.
‘Getting him out—now there’s the challenge.’
Freya got the chopping board out and carefully began to chop up the onion.
‘Doesn’t it make you cry?’ Mum asked.
‘What?’
‘Chopping onions.’
‘No.’
‘Amazing.’
‘Yep.’ Freya dropped the onion into the pan. ‘I love that smell,’ she said, as they began to sizzle. She poured in a bit more olive oil and stirred.
Mum picked up her wineglass from the benchtop, took a good mouthful and stared outside at the dulling sky. Suddenly she lifted a finger to her lips. ‘“Greensleeves!”’ she said. ‘That’s what he’s playing. You just have to speed it up in your head. I love this song. Do you know it was written by Henry the Eighth?’
‘Isn’t he the guy that cut off all his wives’ heads?’
‘That’s him. I don’t think he cut off all of his wives’ heads. Just some.’ Mum pushed the hair from her face with the back of her hand and grinned sideways at Freya, a sparkle in her eyes. ‘Probably the troublemakers, right?’
‘I guess this was him in one of his lighter moments.’
‘He did keep managing to get married. Must have had something going for him. Those sorts of men always do.’
They both smiled.
‘Make sure the onions are browned before you put in the meat,’ Mum said, picking up the knife.
Freya kept stirring. Overhead, ‘Greensleeves’ had started up again, the long, hesitant notes struggling to find one another.
‘He’s getting better, isn’t he,’ Mum said.
‘Yeah.’ She hesitated. ‘Mum?’
‘What?’
‘Do you miss Nan?’
Mum glanced at her. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘No reason,’ she said.
Mum studied her face, then nodded and began chopping the garlic with short, even strokes, the grip of her hand assured, methodical, staying clear of the blade. ‘Of course I do. Maybe I should call her. Maybe it’s time for that.’ She caught herself with a laugh. ‘No. It’s not.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s hard enough as it is keeping things together. The moment you take your eyes off what’s happening in front of you’—she slid all the finely chopped garlic onto the side of the knife and dropped it into the pan—‘things fall apart.’
‘Like what?’
Mum looked at her again. ‘Why are we even talking about this?’
‘I just wondered, that’s all.’
‘Keep stirring.’ Mum tipped the mincemeat into the pan. ‘Freya, we can’t rely on Nan to make things better. You understand that, don’t you?’
Freya nodded. She looked down, unable to meet Mum’s gaze, and couldn’t look up again, not for ages.
When Dad came home later, he was in a good mood. Freya could tell because he was whistling when he walked in the door.
‘I was expecting you home earlier,’ Mum said. ‘Where have you been?’
Dad was looking at the table. ‘Where’d the flowers come from?’
‘A girlfriend,’ Mum said. ‘Aren’t they pretty?’
Dad didn’t answer at once.
‘I’ve got a surprise,’ he said finally. ‘Don’t come into the living room until I say, okay?’
He glanced at them all, winked, turned and went outside again.
‘What do you think it is?’ Freya asked.
They heard him come back into the house, his breath labouring as he carried something into the other room.
‘It could be anything,’ Mum said. Her arms were crossed, slender and pale against the dark fabric of her dress, and she was smiling. ‘He gets an idea into his head, doesn’t matter what it is, and he just goes with it—you can’t stop him.’
‘Can I go and look?’ Daniel asked.
‘No, let him have his fun,’ Mum said.
Freya and Daniel sat at the dining table. The smell of the tomato sauce and the dried herbs and garlic made Freya’s stomach ache. Daniel said he was hungry. Mum went into the kitchen and came back with garlic bread. She put it on the table, broke it open and they each took a piece.
‘This’ll bring him out,’ she said.
Dad went on shuffling around in the other room.
‘I remember this one time,’ Mum said, ‘when we were just going out. I was still in high school. He’d been working a few years. He said he had a surprise for me. Said he’d only give it to me if I could guess what it was. I didn’t guess. He got me a car. He’d restored it at a friend’s place. He taught me how to drive, and you wouldn’t believe it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him that patient, not before and not after—God, he was good.’
Freya tried to imagine that, Dad being patient, him and Mum in a car together with her behind the wheel. She could only imagine them as they were now.
‘I was a slow learner,’ Mum went on, ‘but your dad was a great teacher. My father was furious. I think he was just jealous. They were down on him right from the start. Tried to tell me not to see him, all of that sort of thing—but that just made me want to see him more. Anyway, it was a good car, for as long as it lasted.’
‘Okay,’ Dad called from the living room. ‘Are you ready? Don’t come in yet. You still have to guess. Are you listening?’
After a pause, they heard the hissing warmth of a record player, and a female voice began singing in what sounded like French.
Mum put a hand to her chest. ‘Oh my goodness. Edith Piaf!’
She went into the living room, and they followed. In a corner, Dad had set up a record player with a large cloth-covered speaker either side. Next to it was a wooden cabinet, full of records.
‘My record player.’ Mum walked over, began thumbing through the cabinet. ‘They’re all here. All of my records. I thought you gave them away!’
He was grinning. ‘I’ve been keeping them at an old mate’s, waiting for my chance. He brought them down for me today.’
She threw her arms around him, and they kissed.
‘I can’t believe you managed to keep that to yourself for so long—or that you held on to them in the first place.’