by Michael Sala
‘It would have been in the contract,’ Richard said. ‘Mining subsidence. Every now and again a hole opens up somewhere under someone’s house. The thing is, with lots of those tunnels, they’ve forgotten where they are. There could be one right under here.’ He tapped the ground with one foot.
Freya went inside and came back out with a glass of cordial and a biscuit. She pulled a chair out from the table and sat angled slightly away from them, as if she weren’t interested in what they had to say. Daniel had rolled up his comic and was using it as a pretend telescope to observe Maryanne and Richard.
‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Maryanne said, flicking her cigarette ash into her empty cup. ‘Tunnels under all of these houses.’
‘Yeah,’ Richard said, ‘you just take it for granted that the ground is solid. I’ll tell you what, though.’ He gave a quick wink in Daniel’s direction. ‘If you go down to your basement and put your ear against the ground, you might hear the sea.’
Maryanne felt a shudder run through her. She drew back deep on her cigarette and let the smoke soothe her from the inside. ‘Now I know you’re making things up.’
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘There are tunnels running under these houses that go out to the ocean. Some of them have been sealed off with concrete, and some have been flooded.’
Daniel lowered his comic telescope. ‘How’d the water get into them?’
‘That’s the sea for you.’ Richard tapped the side of his nose. ‘In the end, when you’re this close to it, the sea gets into everything.’
‘Why?’
Richard laughed. ‘Because that’s what the sea wants.’
From within the house came the sound of the front door opening and closing again.
‘That must be Roy,’ Maryanne said after a pause. ‘He’s home early.’
She smiled at Richard. He smiled back. Neither of them spoke. Part of her wanted to tell him to leave, just disappear out the back, but she didn’t. Roy’s footsteps rolled towards them. Her husband appeared in the doorway and stood there like he had come to the wrong house, or had discovered strangers inside it.
‘Richard,’ he said.
Richard got to his feet. He almost knocked over his coffee mug but steadied it just in time. ‘How are you, Roy?’
‘Good.’
Richard put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. ‘I was just admiring all the work you’ve done. The house is really coming along.’
Roy nodded. ‘It is.’
He walked over to Maryanne. She stayed in her seat and tilted her face up to him. He rested his hand on her throat, looked into her eyes and kissed her. As he straightened again, he kept his hand at her throat for a second longer, and a flush of heat filled her face. She could see Richard trying to look in any other direction but at the two of them. She resisted the urge to wipe her mouth.
‘I love the floors,’ Richard said. ‘What kind of wood did you use?’
Roy rested his hand on the back of her neck. ‘Blue gum. Like the dining table. Want a beer?’
‘I’m fine. I’d better be off anyway.’
‘I’ll walk you to the door.’
‘No, no. I’ll let myself out.’
They remained in the courtyard, the four of them, listening to the passage of his feet down the corridor and then the door gently closing.
Daniel picked up his comic and began reading again.
Roy had a tight smile on his face. ‘How long’s he been here?’
‘Half an hour. Why?’
Roy lifted the hand from the back of her neck and scratched the dark stubble on his own. ‘Just wondering. You didn’t say he’d be coming around.’
‘He came to borrow something.’
‘What?’
‘Sugar.’
‘He didn’t leave with sugar.’
The heat rose again to her cheeks. ‘Actually, now I think of it, it was garlic.’
Roy showed his teeth. ‘He didn’t leave with that either.’
‘Well,’ she said carefully, ‘he must have forgotten. We had a coffee and he forgot.’
Roy rolled himself a cigarette, put it in the corner of his mouth without lighting it and eyed her speculatively. ‘Would you have told me he was here if I hadn’t come home early?’
‘Do I have to tell you everything now?’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘I probably would have mentioned it, yes. Why not?’
He disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with a beer. He lit the cigarette, pulled back on it and let the smoke spill out through his nostrils, then drank half of the beer in one go, studying her the whole time.
Freya got up and went inside.
‘Does he come by often?’
‘Roy, he’s a neighbour. That’s what neighbours do.’
‘That’s right. They come by to borrow things. What was it, sugar? Or garlic?’
She stood up, began pulling the washing from the line and dropping it into the basket. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’
‘I’m just having a bit of fun.’
‘You know Richard’s not into women, don’t you?’
‘That’s what you told me. I don’t remember you ever telling me that he’s been dropping by when I’m not around, though.’
‘I don’t know what to say to that, Roy. Maybe it’s just the timing of it.’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
Daniel, she realised, was gone now too.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I still have things to do. I’ve got a pile of things to do before dinner.’
‘It’s not any different for me,’ Roy said. ‘Maybe you’ve noticed that.’
She couldn’t keep the edge out of her own voice. ‘Yes, Roy, everyone knows how hard you work.’
He was blocking half the doorway, and she brushed past him as she carried the basket inside. Roy remained out in the courtyard, drinking his beer, cigarette in hand, as she folded the laundry on the dining room table. She could see the back of his head.
When Maryanne had finished, she went upstairs to Freya’s room. She knocked and then opened the door. She put the washing on Freya’s desk and peered out through the window.
‘What a view,’ she said. ‘Have you got used to it yet?’
‘It’s fine,’ Freya answered. She lay on her bed, on her belly, her feet up in the air behind her, hair hanging around her face. She had a book in front of her, but Maryanne could tell she was only pretending to read it.
‘That’s not what I asked.’ Maryanne waited for her daughter to look up, but Freya kept pretending to read. Maryanne sat down on the bed, stroked her daughter’s hair with one hand. ‘I want us to be happy.’
Freya finally glanced at her. ‘I know that, Mum.’
‘If there’s something, anything at all, that troubles you, you do know you can talk to me. I never could talk with my mother, but you can with me.’
‘I know.’
‘Well?’
Her daughter offered a quick smile. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Okay, then.’ She smoothed the front of her dress down with her palms. ‘I love you. Have you got any plans for the holidays?’
Freya shrugged. ‘You know—friends, stuff. Not really.’
‘We’ll do some things together too. Go for some walks. We always used to go for walks, you and I—do you remember that?’ Maryanne looked down at her daughter, who showed no signs that she’d heard, and then rose to her feet.
‘Mum,’ Freya said suddenly.
‘What?’
Freya turned on one side, looked up at her. ‘Are you okay?’
The question was so simple, so quietly put, so unaffected, that Maryanne felt almost unable to answer it. She blinked, smiled against the stiffness in her face. ‘Of course I am.’
She closed the door behind her. As she went down the stairs and into the room below Freya’s—the one she shared with Roy—the image of Roy’s face as he’d stepped out into the courtyard sprang into her thought
s. She pushed it away.
She opened the windows, let the air pour around her, cool on her skin, then turned back to the room. Their bed occupied the largest part of it, the legs of the frame broad and sturdy and dark with varnish. Roy had built it himself. The doona made a high crumpled heap on one side—Roy’s side, as if he might still be under there—while the queen-size mattress they’d recently bought was exposed on her side. She could see whitish stains on the fitted sheet. The bedding was well due for a wash. For years Maryanne had made the bed every morning, painstakingly smoothing the sheets and tucking in the corners, but now she was always forgetting.
She wanted a drink, a glass or two of white wine with a few ice cubes in it—that was what she wanted. She reached for the doona and began to pull off the sheets. Most of the best times she’d had with Roy were in bed. Not only because of the sex. The simple need as well, the need to find one another, to know that the other was still there. No relationship looked much different from the next, she supposed, not from the outside. You had to be inside to know it. In the dark of their first room together, when the quiet between them had been uncomplicated, there’d been playfulness, light, and they hadn’t had to work for it.
Maryanne had always enjoyed having her feet snug inside the tucked edge of the bed. Roy had liked his feet to be free—he still did. The first thing he would do when he crawled into bed beside her, back when they’d first started living together, was kick out the tucked-in corner of the sheets with a fierce, muscular motion of his body. His feet, he’d tell her grinning, needed air. It didn’t matter how cold it was. If her feet brushed his in the middle of the night, he’d complain that they felt like ice, but it wasn’t a complaint really, more an affirmation of their difference—the sort of difference that made you happy to have the other person around.
She marvelled sometimes to think of him back then, not that he’d been all that different, but she’d seen him differently, as you did when you were young, when everything was mixed together in a way that thrilled you, and the things that worried you were caught up in everything else, and difficult to recognise or untangle.
Apart from that one fight when they’d moved in, they hadn’t fought all that often when it was just the two of them, not at first. Had she gone along with him more, given in when it counted? They’d had more sex—that had probably helped. What she remembered, though, was that they’d play at fighting. He’d kick at the sheets and tell her that he was making a break for it, that a part of him at least would get out of her grip. She’d laugh and poke him between the ribs to make him flinch and tell him that he was never, ever going to get away—they both knew the joke in that. They’d tease each other in the way that you could when the space between you wasn’t riddled with wounds.
And he’d been charming—God, he’d been charming. Something boyish about him, something that came out even now, though in rarer moments. A smile, a warmth that made you think of nothing more than perfect sunlight and dazzling potential. It had pushed her on for years, that smile, the promise in it, even as it became more memory than fact.
His hand on her throat, his mouth against her lips, his eyes.
Maryanne paused, the sheets stripped, bundled in her hands. She blinked against the sight of the bed, the naked doona gathered like a wave at one end. Her eyes were wet, and the floor felt as if it were swaying beneath her. At least she still loved him, after all this time. That was more than a lot of people had. If nothing else, there was that—wasn’t there?
She lifted the sheets against her face, breathing in their familiar smell to calm herself, to ease the dangerous dizziness in her head. Letting herself think too much when she was in a low mood was dangerous. It was better to let the thought pass without examination. She would feel that intense love for him again—she was sure of it. There’d been glimpses of it already, hadn’t there? No matter what happened between them, that love always returned. So come on then, she told the silence, come back.
‘What are you doing?’ Roy had come into the room behind her.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
He put his arms around her, pulled her in. ‘Well, don’t relax too much.’
There was beer on his breath, and underneath that a smell that was distinctly his, wild, musky. The scent of his body, it seemed to her, changed subtly with his moods. She often loved it, but sometimes it repulsed her. She’d never say that to him. Sometimes you lied for the sake of intimacy. Sometimes the intimacy itself was a lie. It had to be, so that you could get to the parts that were real again.
‘I won’t,’ she said.
12
Freya woke up with a dull ache in her belly. She’d been dreaming about Nan again. Don’t forget, Nan had been saying. Don’t forget. The numbers on the clock did not make sense at first, then she realised it was six in the morning. The holidays were gone, the first week of school was nearly finished too, and it was almost winter, cold enough already to be called winter, and she had her period. It was too early to get up, but the pain made her restless, and she didn’t want to stay in bed.
Her brother was on the landing outside the bathroom, squatting over Dad’s tool bag. Dad was in the shower, getting ready for work. She could hear him whistling.
‘What are you doing, Daniel?’
He smiled at her brightly. ‘Just looking.’
‘You know what’ll happen if he finds you looking through his stuff.’
He kept rummaging through the bag. ‘You steal cigarettes from him.’
‘Just be careful.’ She gave him a gentle push. ‘Don’t do things he tells you not to. It’s worse for you when he catches you.’
They went downstairs and sat next to one another at the dining table eating cereal while they watched Battle of the Planets and he explained the latest gigantic monster to her even as it exploded and collapsed into the sea. The villain escaped in the middle of the explosion, like he always did, in some hidden spacecraft.
The shower turned off, and Dad’s bare, heavy feet padded down the stairs. She glanced up from the television in time to see him walk past the doorway in nothing but a towel. His muscular body was flushed and shiny from the heat of the shower. Only his belly stuck out a little, a grotesque, hairy barrel. Mum was in the kitchen and gave a squeal when Dad hugged her from behind. He said something in a low tone, and she laughed and said, ‘Not now.’
After a while, Dad was gone again.
Daniel went upstairs and began playing his clarinet. The doleful tones drifted down the stairs. Freya went to the living room and sat on the couch, legs stretched out on the coffee table in front of her, and watched the television over her own bare, uneven feet.
Mum came into the living room. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, but she didn’t get up.
Mum walked out of the room and came back with two Panadol and a glass of water. Freya took the Panadol and drank the water. Mum smiled at her sympathetically, and Freya waited for her to say something comforting, but she didn’t.
‘Can you pick up Daniel from the bus stop today?’ Mum asked.
‘Yeah,’ Freya said.
Mum rested a hand on her shoulder, then took the glass and walked out of the room.
Then it was school, and she had science first, in a stifling lab that stank of gas fumes from the heaters. The gleaming grey paint of the bench she sat at was scored with names and dates scratched into misshapen hearts, the dates long since come and gone, the students too, as old now as Mum, or even older, some of them, and as she sat there listening to Mr Hunter drone on about catalysts, she thought she might well die of old age herself before the lesson was over.
As the day dragged on she wandered from one class to the next, that dull pain in her belly, filling her books with new assignments, more homework.
In maths, Mr Hind wrote his lesson up on the board and then stood at the window for nearly the whole period, staring outside.
In cooking class, they wrote about the theory
of proper hygiene in the kitchen.
In history, they talked about a place called Tiananmen Square, how protestors had been on hunger strike there for nearly two weeks, three hundred thousand of them. Troops and tanks were gathering around the city, but the people were refusing to go, and no one seemed to know what do next.
‘It’ll be like Les Misérables,’ Josh said to their history teacher, ‘only with a happy ending.’
Miss Grey gave him a level stare. ‘What do you know about Les Misérables?’
‘It’s a good play, miss. My dad took me to see it in Sydney.’
Miss Grey almost seemed to smile. With her short, finely sculpted hair that closely followed the line of her skull, she was one of those teachers who looked young and old at the same time, like she had never been either. There was often a dry, vaguely contemptuous edge to her voice, but never when she spoke to Josh.
‘Can you imagine Les Misérables with a happy ending?’ she said.
In English, they discussed a novel they were supposed to have read in the holidays, about a young Native American girl who’d been abandoned on an island. The girl had to use all of these skills she already knew to learn how to survive. That was the whole story—her just learning to use what she already knew.
‘This is boring,’ one of the boys said.
Mrs O’Neill frowned at him. ‘That’s because you think you know everything already. But that’s not the same as knowing it.’
The boy didn’t back down. ‘Maybe I do, miss. How would you know?’
‘You don’t know anything, Bill, because you never pay attention.’
He leaned back on his chair. ‘Isn’t that your fault if I don’t, miss?’
Mrs O’Neill nodded. ‘Maybe it is, maybe it is. The question is what you can do about it, my boy. Will blaming me be enough for you, five years down the track, or ten, when you are nowhere, when you’ve done things you regret?’
‘You’ll probably have died of old age by then, won’t you, miss?’
Mrs O’Neill was not just their English teacher but also the deputy principal, and she was only good-natured for as long as you didn’t cross her.