by Michael Sala
‘I just wanted to get his attention. For God’s sake, Maryanne, don’t look at me like that.’ Roy was crying again. ‘I know I fucked up. There’s nothing you can say to me that I haven’t already thought. I fucking hate myself.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘They’ll want to talk to you,’ he said, wiping his nose with the back of his arm.
‘I know.’
‘What are you going to tell them?’
Maryanne shook her head. ‘I just want Daniel to be okay.’
She sat down beside him, because the seat was there, because she could barely support her own weight. He put his hand on hers, and kept it there, hot and heavy and slack, until she moved it back onto his lap. He reached for it again seconds later.
‘Don’t,’ she told him, in a tone that made a few others in the waiting room look across at them.
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Tell them whatever you want. I deserve it.’
The police didn’t talk to her after all, for whatever reason—some other disturbance they’d been called to—but then a doctor asked to speak to her alone.
Roy was waiting near the entrance of the hospital, pacing back and forth, smoking a cigarette.
‘What did you tell them?’ he asked.
She could have tortured him then, let him sweat on it for a while, let him stew.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I told them nothing.’
His relief hadn’t lasted long. She had left him that day for her mother’s. Looking back on it now, as she stood in a different hospital, beside another child, there was so much she couldn’t understand. Why hadn’t she told that doctor everything? It might have ruined Roy’s life—that was one thing. And that was something you didn’t do lightly to another person. She couldn’t, anyway. And she had loved him—God, she’d loved him so much. Even when she was angry or scared, some fundamental belief in his potential beat inside her like a second heart, kept hope moving through her, so that everything needing to be nourished somehow received just enough. She had wanted, no, needed, to believe that it was an accident, that it would never happen again, that it was an aberration. And, until then, his lapses in judgement had only ever truly hurt her.
Maryanne looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes had passed and Davis was nowhere in sight. Sally was deteriorating, she was sure of it now—some subtle but essential part of her draining away. The wind outside lifted into sudden gusts, rattling the windows. Maryanne took the obs again. She thought about that boy, the one who had lost a leg and taken a dive off the balcony. The horror of seeing him vanish. The way it had become an image in her mind with no sound.
The girl’s pulse rate was increasing. Maryanne lifted her shirt, saw the rapid flutter of her abdomen, the drawing in of the muscles around her ribs and shoulders with each breath.
‘Sally?’
The girl swallowed as if she were forcing something down. Maryanne hit the emergency buzzer. She looked into the girl’s mouth, saw nothing, was doubting herself, wondering if everything, absolutely everything in the last few months—God, nearly the last year and half—had been too much for her, had taken hold somehow, distorted her instinct. Was everything these days in her head? Could she not trust her own instincts at all anymore? And then, between the girl’s teeth and her inner cheeks and under her tongue, she saw it.
Dr Davis had come up behind her. ‘What now?’
‘She’s started to bleed.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ He tilted back Sally’s head and opened her mouth.
Then it came, a kind of gagging moan from deep inside the girl’s throat, and the jet of blood, spraying across the doctor’s face, his eyes blinking pointlessly behind his glasses, and there was so little time in which something might be done, in which that sudden outflow of life from the fragile body might be stopped.
‘Jesus!’ he said, and it was clear that he had no idea what to do.
In the morning, Sally was gone. The blood was cleaned up. The bed sat empty, stripped of sheets. Maryanne started to walk home, but she stopped in the park. She sank down on the grass by the fountain and lit a cigarette.
The water rose and fell in front of her, spray drifting on the light breeze that feathered across her skin. The sun was rising. She drew the smoke in, felt its pleasant, numbing effect on her lungs, let her eyes close just a little and concentrated on the sunlight against the side of her face. It was all before her—those terrifying seconds as the blood had poured from the girl’s mouth in that torrent, Dr Davis’s stupefied, helpless expression, and the footsteps behind her.
Dr Godfrey, the specialist, was in his fifties, but he had moved like a much younger man. He’d shouldered the resident aside, picked up the girl, and gone running down the ward, shouting orders as he went.
Later, he had found Maryanne. He’d left for the hospital straight after her phone call.
‘It was something in your voice,’ he said. ‘I’ve been around long enough to take notice of it.’
She’d laughed. ‘I can be pushy, I know.’
Adrian Godfrey was a handsome man, fine-featured, unassuming, a melancholy look to his grey eyes that she found attractive. ‘Thank God you are,’ he said. ‘You’re the reason she’s still alive.’
When she’d finished her cigarette, Maryanne got up and walked the rest of the way home. She opened the door to the house and stepped inside. It was Saturday morning. Everyone was home. Roy was home. She could hear him clomping around upstairs. There was a song playing softly, the Beatles—‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’—and she guessed that he had put the album on knowing she would be home soon. He was like that sometimes. In the hallway, with the door still open, the light outside, the shadow of the house around her, she considered him for a moment longer. The house seemed so peaceful now, most of the work already done. It was home.
But still—
She closed the door and took off her shoes, the floorboards cool and solid beneath her bare feet. Her son was in the living room, on the couch, reading a comic. He glanced up at her with a quick smile and kept reading. Sitting on the armrest of the couch beside him, she kissed the top of his head, ran her hand through his soft, light brown hair, and felt the scar there. It had healed well, but it would always be there. She watched the slow rise and fall of his chest and let herself feel the joy of seeing it, the joy and only that.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’m just looking at you,’ she answered.
16
The Walkman, four bottles of perfume, some deodorant, five packs of razors, a bunch of magazines and a belt—that was the tally so far in the month or so since Freya had started shoplifting with Josh. Every couple of weeks they took a day off, wandering the mall to steal things for the thrill of it, and then to the beach, the hills and cliffs that climbed over the inner city and the windswept winter coast, just the two of them.
‘My report’s going to be a shocker,’ she told Josh.
He laughed. ‘Yours and mine both.’
They always gave it a few weeks before they returned to a particular shop, always acted like the things they were taking belonged to them, like they had nothing to hide. That was what you did, what everyone did—you hid things by showing you had nothing to hide. Sometimes they went in together, and sometimes they took turns, waiting outside the shop for the other to emerge.
Her knees would tremble beforehand, anxiety building to a thrum of doubt in her gut, but once they got away with it, she’d feel a rush of elation, of release, of power, of confidence. They’d end up at Josh’s house with whatever they’d stolen, reading magazines they’d shoved under their shirts at the newsagent, getting stoned, playing his Commodore 64, listening to music, feeling like they had something over the world.
She always checked the mail when she came home, caught the absentee letters from school before anyone else did, faked Mum’s signature and took them back. She supposed that they would catch on eventually, but she didn’t care.
Dad was aro
und more than usual, filling the house with his work and his mess and his moods, and his sudden bouts of swearing.
‘Seventeen percent,’ he was saying from the kitchen. He was standing in his singlet and shorts in front of the open fridge. ‘They reckon interest rates can’t go up again, but that’s what they said when they hit sixteen percent too. We’re not paying anything off at this rate. Just getting deeper into debt.’
Freya and Daniel sat at the table in the dining room, eating their cereal, with the cartoons on in the background—Astro Boy, a robot with big doughy eyes, blowing up other robots with a machine gun in his arse.
Dad poured some milk into his coffee, then took a swig out of the bottle. ‘Of course it has to happen when the work dries up.’
Mum was standing near him, buttoning up her work uniform. ‘I thought they promised you a full year. Wasn’t that the whole reason we came here, because you had that sorted?’
‘They did,’ he answered. He rubbed his temple, leaving a grimy smudge on his face. ‘I did have it sorted.’
Daniel was knocking his feet lightly against the rung of his chair, a muffled, agitated noise that carried over the sound of the television. Roy glanced in his direction, a vague irritation in his expression.
‘Did you misunderstand them?’ Mum said.
‘What, am I an idiot?’ There was a sneer in his voice. ‘Of course I didn’t misunderstand them. Something’s fallen through. They explained it to me, but it didn’t make any sense. It’s changed, that’s all. Some weeks it’ll still be every day. Some weeks it’ll be nothing.’
Mum shrugged. ‘Well, we just have to do what we can. We can’t throw our hands up in despair every time something goes wrong. Hopefully you’ll find more work soon.’
He closed the fridge and scowled at her, arms folded across his chest.
‘What?’ Mum said.
Freya walked between them. She rinsed her bowl, put it on the rack and passed between them again on her way out of the room.
‘You know what,’ Dad said.
He shook his head, finished rolling a cigarette, brought it to his mouth and pulled a lighter from his pocket.
‘What are you doing?’ Mum said as he brought the lighter to the cigarette.
Dad looked at her over the flame.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go outside. Because that’s what I’m doing for you.’
Freya picked up her bag and left the room. ‘I’m going to school,’ she shouted down the hallway.
Mum walked out after her. ‘Here—your lunch.’
Freya took it, but Mum didn’t let go.
‘Do I get a kiss?’
She kissed Mum on the cheek.
‘That’s better. Can you pick up your brother from the bus stop today?’
‘Sure,’ she said.
Mum put a hand against her cheek. ‘I love you,’ she said softly.
‘I know.’ Freya went outside.
She didn’t look back as she walked off, didn’t hear Mum close the front door, and she didn’t go to school.
Instead, Freya wandered around Newcastle East with Josh and up to Fort Scratchley. It wasn’t much of a fort, just a series of abandoned bunkers on a grassy bluff that looked towards the mouth of the harbour on one side and the ocean baths on the other. Two cannons in concrete gun emplacements pointed straight out over the ocean—for what?
‘It was the Japanese,’ Josh said. ‘Back in World War II.’
‘They attacked here?’
‘Yeah, and the cannons fired back at them.’
‘At what?’
Josh peered out over the ocean as if he might see it. ‘I think it was a submarine. No one hit anything.’
They followed the road that ran down the coast alongside the beach and past the hospital, then made their way up through the park that rose in terraced layers above the sea and into the high, saltbush-covered cliffs beyond. There was a complex of tunnels beneath the cliffs, Josh said, some of them to do with coal mining, some with the war. He led her down a narrow, dipping path that skirted a sheer drop to the ocean below and ended at an opening carved straight into the cliff face. The concrete facade around the entrance was scrawled with graffiti, the mouth of the tunnel strewn with rubbish. They stood among the beer bottles, the shattered glass and food wrappers, the black maw of the tunnel to one side and the ocean filling the horizon on the other.
‘I always used to be afraid of the dark,’ Josh said. ‘One day I just got sick of it, got sick of being scared, and I made myself go down this tunnel. I went to the end of it with a torch, and then I turned the torch off and just stood there.’
‘What’s it lead to?’
‘I’ll show you.’ He took her hand and pulled her with him, so that they stepped across the threshold together.
‘Are you scared of the dark now?’ she asked.
‘Now I like it,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe sometimes. But…’
‘What?’
‘It’s not the dark we’re scared of, right? It’s not knowing what’s in it.’
‘I guess so.’ He lit a match. Broken glass crunched under their feet. The smell of piss mixed with the odour of the saltbush and wet earth. They walked down a long, straight length of concrete tunnel, then turned a sharp corner into a closer darkness.
The tunnel ended after another twenty metres or so in rubble, as if there’d been a collapse. The light of the match in Josh’s hand spilled across the jagged edges of bricks and broken stonework.
‘Blocked off,’ he said.
He dropped the match as the flame approached his fingers, and they stood in blackness until he lit another. There was a joint in his mouth, his lips tight around it, arches of shadow dancing over his eyes.
‘If you had to die,’ he said, handing it to her, ‘what’d be the way you’d choose?’
She pulled the smoke deep into her lungs, held it there until it hurt, let it drift out around her. ‘I don’t know. What about you?’
‘Buried alive,’ he said.
‘Really?’
He smiled. ‘Nah. Jumping, maybe. A joy flight before the end. Don’t you reckon?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I wonder what they’re doing at school right now.’
‘Nothing that matters,’ Josh said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘They could fit it all into a year or two if they wanted to. Most of it’s just wasting time.’
‘Think of all the dickheads who’d be out of jobs then.’
They laughed together and the joint went out and they were in the darkness and then they fell silent. She wanted to see his face, but all she had of him was the sound of his breath, the warmth of his nearness. They walked back outside and stood blinking on the concrete bulwark of the bunker, foamy white breakers washing against the glistening rocks a long drop past their feet, the ponderous shadows of clouds darkening patches of the sea. She lifted her gaze towards the horizon. There was a part of her that wanted to keep walking straight out, if only for an instant, until gravity caught up.
On her way home, she waited for Daniel at the bus stop. She didn’t let on that she hadn’t gone to school herself. When they got home, the phone was ringing. She stared at the receiver, rattling in its cradle, and let it ring a while longer, but it didn’t stop.
She picked it up. ‘Hello?’
There was no reply.
‘Hello?’
The line crackled and hissed, and a woman at the other end cleared her throat.
‘Maryanne?’
‘No, I’m her daughter.’
‘I’m after your mother, dear.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘She’s at work.’
‘Can you get a message to her?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m calling about your grandmother, dear. She’s in hospital. She’s had a heart attack.’
Freya wrote the details on a scrap of paper with a shaky h
and and put the phone down. Daniel was looking at her.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We have to go.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s Nan. She’s sick. We have to tell Mum.’
They stood in the shadow of the hospital, the afternoon sun lost somewhere behind it. The hospital was huge when you were up close, and there were so many different parts to it, balconies and windows and doors and stairways from every angle, like a bunch of mazes thrown into a pile. Somewhere inside all of that, Mum worked.
‘This is the right part,’ Freya said. ‘I think.’
Daniel tilted his head, looked up at her. ‘Don’t you know?’
She gave her brother an irritated look. ‘I haven’t been here any more than you.’
‘But you’re older than me,’ he said. ‘You should notice more.’
‘You’re going to have to start noticing things too, you know,’ she told him.
He stared up at her blankly.
‘Okay,’ he said.
They went inside.
‘Can I help you?’ one of the receptionists asked.
‘I’m looking for my mum.’
‘Is she a patient?’
‘She works here.’
‘Which ward, dear?’
‘She looks after people who’ve had operations.’
‘That’ll be surgical. That way, two floors up.’
They walked together down the corridor and into a lift with metal doors. They got out on the second floor and turned a corner. Freya saw Mum down the corridor. She stopped and made Daniel stop too. Mum, her light brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, was talking to a man with tanned skin and short white hair, all neatly dressed in pants and a shirt and a tie. He said something, and Mum threw back her head and laughed. The light from a window gleamed on her neck.
Freya hesitated.
‘What?’ Daniel said.
Freya didn’t look at her brother but kept her hand on his shoulder. There was something about Mum, her posture, her voice, that same strangeness from before, when they’d walked together to her work. Like she was wearing a disguise—not now, but when she was home. Mum looked unburdened, younger, stronger. She laughed again, gave a quick nod of her head, touched the man’s arm. Then she glanced down the corridor towards them and froze.