The Restorer

by Michael Sala

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t throw something away that you cared about.’

  ‘You must have been confident we’d get back together,’ she said.

  ‘Confident,’ he said after a pause. ‘Confident isn’t how I’d put it.’ He took her face in his hands and kissed her again, on the lips. They began dancing, close together, small, shuffling steps in the space between the couch and the window. Her head rested briefly against his shoulder.

  ‘No regrets,’ he said against her neck. ‘Isn’t that what she’s singing?’

  They kept dancing until Mum pushed him away with a laugh. ‘Let’s eat.’

  They spent that weekend and the next scraping wallpaper off the downstairs walls, and then the layers of old paint underneath. A record was always playing from the other room and Freya had to admit that it did make it feel more like home.

  ‘God,’ Mum said. ‘I can’t wait to start painting.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to.’ Dad was scowling as he ran the heat gun over the walls. The old paint and paper came off in big, curling flakes. Freya swept up the mess and Daniel held the garbage bag, dragging it along until it was so full it bulged.

  ‘That paint’s probably been there a hundred years,’ Dad said.

  Mum flashed Freya a smile. ‘Hope it doesn’t take us that long to get it off.’

  ‘One day,’ Dad said, ‘someone will probably be saying the same about our work.’

  ‘I hope that’s not for a long time.’ Mum leaned across suddenly and kissed Dad.

  ‘What was that for?’ Dad said.

  ‘I’m starting to see it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The house. It’s starting to grow on me.’

  ‘You weren’t sure before?’

  ‘I had my doubts.’

  He laughed and slapped her on the bottom. ‘You certainly kept that to yourself, you deceitful woman.’

  ‘Watch out,’ she said, kissing him again.

  After dinner, they went to the beach for a swim. Even Mum jumped in. She was a great swimmer. She had an effortless stroke, like she belonged in the water. Only Daniel did not swim. He stayed on the edge of the water near Mum, making shapes in the sand with a piece of driftwood. They were halfway into autumn now, and the days were growing shorter, but the weather was still perfect and the water warmer than the air. Freya noticed the waning of the season more at the end of the day, the sudden coolness as soon as the sun dropped out of the sky. It was already getting dark. They walked home, Daniel and Freya lagging behind, while their parents walked ahead.

  10

  Maths, a double period jammed into the heart of the day, and the thought of all that time with a textbook in front of her was unbearable. Freya felt nauseous, disoriented, oppressed by the heat, the unseasonable burst of it, how it beat down on the school, filling every corridor and room, weighing down every step. Her armpits were wet with sweat, chafing where she’d shaved and nicked herself with a blunt blade.

  Everything seemed especially raw today, grating against her, laughter and shrill voices rising and falling in exchanges that echoed along the corridor, a dying fluorescent light flickering overhead, the jostle of arms and shoulders as she climbed the stairs, someone tugging at her bag, gone when she glanced back, wads of gum fossilised into the weave of the blue carpet under her feet.

  Mr Hind had a nose like a triangular sail. Every time he turned, a shadow fell across her book, or that’s what she said to Ally to make her laugh. She looked down at the numbers, the formulas, the symbols, and dug her pen into the page of her exercise book. Sine and cos and tan. Made-up words that belonged here and nowhere else. The seamed creases of her blouse rubbed under her armpits. She was aware of the boys behind her, smelled the sweaty sour smell of them, the room dank with it after sport, along with the chemical flower scent of girls’ deodorant.

  The noise never stopped in Mr Hind’s classroom. Some teachers knew how to stop it, had an authority you could respect, give in to, even if you didn’t think much of them, but not Mr Hind. After twelve weeks in his class, she liked that Mr Hind didn’t do much about the noise, but she despised him for it too. He had a voice that barely carried across a room and didn’t pack enough of a punch to make people want to listen.

  He was scraping notes on the blackboard. ‘Now, write this down,’ he murmured. ‘And work your way through the questions. You’ll need to know them for the upcoming test.’ He sat back at his desk and let his gaze drift to the window while the noise rose and fell around him.

  ‘So anyway,’ Ally said, ‘what do you think of him?’

  ‘Mr Hind?’

  Ally made a face. ‘Josh, stupid. Are you two going out?’

  ‘We’re just friends.’

  ‘Like friends or like friends?’

  ‘Friends. We just hang out. I don’t really know what I think about him.’

  ‘With all that stuff in his face? Come on. Tell me you’re not interested in him.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Ally laughed. ‘You know, Freya. You know. Tell me.’

  Mr Hind’s voice lifted again over the noise. ‘Ally, Freya, bring your work up here.’

  ‘But sir, we weren’t doing anything. Look at everyone else!’

  ‘Now, Ally.’

  They took their books to the front. Someone wolf-whistled behind them. Ally had somehow managed to do some work, and Mr Hind sent her back to her desk with a nod. Then he glanced up at Freya. He took off his glasses. Without them, his eyes looked startlingly naked.

  ‘Well, show us what you’ve got,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, show him what you’ve got, Freya,’ someone called out. Half the class burst into laughter.

  ‘Who said that?’ Mr Hind put his glasses back on, scanned the room and then glanced up at Freya again.

  ‘Not much to see, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Show me the book.’

  She put her book down in front of him. The top button of his shirt was undone. She caught sight of the skin between his shoulder and pectoral muscle as he leaned forward. He opened the book and flicked through it until he came to the last page, where she’d drawn a picture of a girl’s head with cracks in it. There was a hole in the side of the head, and a bird was visible inside, a piece of eggshell skull falling away from its beak.

  ‘Artistic,’ Mr Hind murmured. ‘I like the shading. Where’s the maths?’

  She was aware of everyone looking at her, waiting.

  ‘You tell me,’ she said.

  Laughter erupted behind her.

  Mr Hind’s expression didn’t change. ‘Lunchtime, then.’

  When the other students had all gone, Mr Hind sat down next to her. He smelled of soap and aftershave. He took her calculator, began punching in numbers with quick stabs of his finger. He wrote down SOH-CAH-TOA in her book, and then drew diagrams, small carefully labelled triangles, to explain what SOH meant, and CAH, and TOA, and the whole time he spoke in that gentle, vaguely amused voice. Then he made her do a few examples while he looked on.

  ‘You’re getting it,’ he said.

  ‘I just don’t know what good it’ll do me,’ she answered.

  ‘It’ll make you smarter. You could do this in your sleep if you tried.’

  ‘That wouldn’t make me smart. It’d make me good at things.’

  Those words were classic Mum, and it was weird to hear them coming out of her own mouth. But she did what Mr Hind asked her to, because it was easier than explaining to him why there was no point to it, and when she did it, and he put his hand on her shoulder for a brief moment, and told her, ‘See, you are clever,’ she felt good.

  He let her out for the second half of lunch. Two boys were walking in front of her, collars up, shirts loose over their surf shorts.

  ‘Hey, Ange,’ one of them called to a younger girl coming the other way. ‘Where’s your sister?’

  The girl made a face. ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Fucken baldy,’ he called back
at her. ‘Your sister’s an ugly stuck-up slut anyway.’

  The other boy shoved him. ‘Don’t pretend you wouldn’t fuck her, mate.’

  ‘I’d only finger her. Let her suck my cock, tops, if she begged.’

  ‘As if she’d let you finger her!’

  ‘Who says I haven’t already? Smell it?’ He waggled his finger under his friend’s nose, grinned, glanced back over his shoulder, and caught sight of Freya for the first time, walking behind them. He looked uncertain, then he grinned, elbowed his friend in the ribs, and muttered something under his breath that ended in laughter.

  Freya felt herself flush. She wanted to swear at them, tell them they were nothing, tell them they didn’t even know what they were, but they were already gone by the time her mind kicked into gear.

  After school, she had a two-hour shift at the corner store. Patrick was sitting in the back room reading a book. She wasn’t really sure why he’d even given her the job. The place wasn’t that busy—there didn’t seem that much to do—and if he wasn’t going anywhere, what was the point? She supposed that maybe he just liked having the company, and the four shifts she’d worked so far meant she had a bit of money, even if she hadn’t started saving up yet.

  He came out wearing a jacket that hung down halfway to his knees.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he told her.

  He came back fifteen minutes later, and stood at the counter with his coat on, as if he weren’t sure if he had just returned or was about to head out, his hair a white scrawl blown across his shiny scalp.

  ‘The beach looks nice,’ he said at last. ‘Still good for swimming, but it won’t be for long.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So your mum’s a nurse, is she?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And she works over in the hospital?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s a good place.’ He sighed. ‘I was born in that hospital. I’ve been there a bit. Had a couple of operations. My tonsils, a kidney. My mum was born there too, and died there. Lung cancer. Not long before she died, she said she could still remember me being born there, and how she held me up to the window to show me the sea. That view was one of the first things I saw, and the last thing she saw.’ He shook his head, ran one hand through the wispy lengths of his white hair. ‘I reckon all hospitals should be beside the sea. Does your mum like it there?’

  ‘I think so,’ Freya said.

  ‘What does your father do again?’

  ‘He builds stuff.’

  ‘Good for him,’ Patrick said. ‘He’s come to the right town. This place always needs builders.’

  When Freya got home, there was no one else around. She went through her schoolbag and found the latest bundle of tobacco and filters she’d stolen from Dad. She rolled a neat, thin cylinder and went out through Daniel’s room to the small balcony that offered a view over the alley behind their house. She leaned gingerly on the railing, put the cigarette to her mouth and brought the lighter to it.

  ‘Hey,’ a man’s voice called.

  The unlit cigarette dropped from her hand to the courtyard below. She was confused for a moment, until their neighbour, Richard, the one Mum was always chatting to, leaned out over the railing of the balcony next door. Richard had a mug in his hand, took a sip, swallowed, looking at her the whole time, a slight smile on his face, like he was happy not to mention the cigarette if she didn’t.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He gave the beginning of a laugh. ‘Kids are always doing nothing these days. I guess that’s mainly what I used to do.’

  Freya smiled back at him. She was thinking of a way to retreat from the balcony without being rude.

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  Something in his tone prickled her. ‘Still breathing.’

  He laughed fully now. ‘That’s a start. How you liking this place?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘That’s Newcastle,’ he said. ‘Ships from all over the world coming and going, and there have been people living here for thousands of years, but it still has a certain smallness to it, don’t you think?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘It can be a very lonely place if you’re different.’

  ‘I’m not different,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I am. It only seems like a bad thing when you’re a kid. When you grow up, you can turn around and say, Who gives a shit? I’m different. At least I know that about myself. You’d be surprised how many people go through their lives not knowing a thing about themselves.’

  Someone called to him from inside. A man’s voice, intimate and soft. Richard looked over his shoulder into the house, and smiled like he was sharing a joke.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I am too,’ she said. ‘Different. Just a bit, though. Not as much as you, maybe.’

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ He turned to go back inside, gave her a final glance. ‘Say hello to your mum for me.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  The next day she didn’t go to school. Instead, she and Josh retreated as the bus approached. They watched the other kids climb aboard and then walked away.

  ‘Let’s go shopping,’ he said as they cut through the park.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ she said. ‘I get paid on the weekend.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Who needs money?’

  They wandered around the lower part of the mall, right away from the hospital, near David Jones. The sky was clean and blue and full of light, and the tall buildings protected them from a cold offshore wind. They went into the packed-out pharmacy opposite the department store and Josh, walking ahead of her, showed her how easy it was to pick up a stick of deodorant and drop it into his bag.

  ‘It’s all about confidence,’ he told her. ‘That’s the secret to shoplifting. Soon as you make up your mind to do it, you check once, and then you put it in your pocket like you own it. If you believe it, you really believe it, everyone else does too.’

  11

  There was a knock on the door, a light, playful tap. Maryanne was expecting it to be Freya, home from school, but she opened the door to Richard.

  ‘You got any garlic?’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I was about to have a coffee. You want one?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, following her inside, ‘if you’re making it anyway.’ A door slammed above them. Daniel came down the stairs. He reached the bottom step and, with one hand on the balustrade and the other holding a comic, swung out into the hall and landed at the same time on both feet.

  ‘Hey, kiddo,’ Richard said. ‘That was a pretty good superhero move. How was school?’

  ‘Horrible.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘Because it’s always horrible.’

  ‘That sounds exactly like school to me,’ Richard said. ‘What comic are you reading?’

  ‘Conan the Barbarian.’

  Richard squinted at the cover of the comic—a muscle-bound Conan, seated on a horse half his size, skidding down the face of a mountain with his sword raised above him. ‘He looks pretty strong. I bet he’s smart too, just like you. I bet he got that strong and smart because he went to school and hated it. What do you think?’

  Daniel smiled a little. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He’s got holidays now, though,’ Maryanne said, ‘so it’s not all bad.’

  ‘What?’ Richard sounded amazed. ‘They give you holidays? That’s insane. For how long?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Lucky you!’

  ‘But then it’s thirteen weeks of school again.’

  ‘Is that so? Well, you’ve made it this far.’

  Richard was standing there in front of her son with his hands in his pockets, elbows sticking out, like they were two kids in the playground together. Totally comfortable. Some men were just like that. It made Maryanne think about Roy, and the ease with which he did everything he put his mind to—every
thing except interacting with his own son.

  ‘Are you all right, Maryanne?’ Richard said.

  ‘What? Yes.’

  She made the coffees, and they sat out the back at a table Roy had built, beside a pile of wood and other debris from the renovation, while Daniel sat on the ground nearby with his comic open in his lap. She’d been about to bring in the washing. The basket sat beside the table and clothes still hung from the lines that Roy had stretched from one wall to another, but they could wait for now.

  ‘It’s true,’ Richard said. He’d been telling her about a vast network of mining tunnels that ran under the entire neighbourhood, and under half the city.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Even under our house?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Richard said. ‘This town is built on them. Weird, isn’t it—all that coal’s gone now, puffed up into smoke and heat and dust more than a hundred years ago, and all that’s left is that empty darkness under our feet. There’s probably people buried down there too, convict miners buried in collapses. They didn’t really know what they were doing, and their lives weren’t worth much to the people in charge.’

  The front door opened and slammed shut. Maryanne turned as Freya walked outside. ‘How was your last day of term?’ she asked.

  ‘Just fantastic,’ Freya said.

  ‘She’s really being a fourteen-year-old at the moment,’ Maryanne said to Richard. ‘I hope it changes when she hits fifteen.’

  Freya dropped her bag on the ground. ‘Yeah, she’s standing right in front of you, Mum.’

  Maryanne turned back to her daughter. ‘Do you have to use that tone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ her daughter shot back. ‘Do I?’

  Maryanne looked at Freya, the defiant expression on her face. She wasn’t a child anymore, but that didn’t necessarily make her anything else, and Maryanne wanted to hug her and slap her and shake her until she understood how difficult it all was, how difficult it would be for her one day. Freya would have her own time to figure that one out, though.

  Maryanne forced a smile. ‘Richard was telling me that there’s tunnels under our house. I think he’s making it up.’