by Michael Sala
Freya started walking.
17
The dog was barking again. Its noise was more agitated than ever, as if it knew Maryanne was sitting in her courtyard and wanted to get at her. That mad, stupid, tireless dog. Did the owners not hear it too? Did they not wonder why the hell they were keeping it?
‘So—’ Richard shifted in his seat, crossed one leg over the other. ‘Is your mother okay then?’
Maryanne shrugged. ‘Pretty much. I called the hospital, and they said it was relatively minor. She was very lucky that they got to her as quickly as they did. It sounds like she’ll make a full recovery.’
‘I didn’t think heart attacks were ever minor.’
‘Well, some are more minor than others, I guess. She’ll live.’
‘Did you talk to her?’
‘Why?’
‘To see how she was.’
‘What’d be the point?’ She smiled. ‘My mother could be at death’s door and she’d say she was doing okay.’
‘Pretty much like you then?’
Maryanne lit a new cigarette, took a drag and narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t tell me that I’m like my mother, Richard. It’s too early in the morning.’
‘It’s two in the afternoon, Maryanne.’
‘Still too early, Richard.’
They drank their coffees and smoked in silence.
‘So are you going to talk to her?’ Richard asked at last.
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’ll always be your mother.’
Maryanne made a face. ‘Now you’re starting to sound like her.’
‘From everything you tell me about her, I like her. It sounds like she loves you. That’s more than I can say for my mother.’
‘I know, I know. But...’
‘You love her, don’t you?’
‘Richard, you don’t know what she’s like. She never admits a single mistake, and she’s always there, judging me.’
‘But she’d drop everything if you asked her to.’
Maryanne shook her head. ‘Whenever I ask my mother for help, she makes me pay for it.’
Richard studied her with an air of bemusement. ‘In what way?’
She tried to think of how she might sum it up for him, the subtle and not so subtle things her mother said, the pressure she exerted, the way every conversation was loaded with allusions to Maryanne’s past failures—the drip, drip, drip of her commentary. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ she said.
‘You need friends, more than just me, and you need your mother. You need to know you can pick up the phone. You’ve got an excuse to contact her now. Just don’t tell Roy.’
‘Oh, but you know...’
‘What?’
‘Roy thinks that we should always be completely honest with one another.’
‘Like he was about Daniel’s clarinet?’
‘He was making a point.’
‘He was being a psychopath. I think that’s what you call it.’
She flicked the ash off her cigarette and sighed. ‘I guess he was a bit.’
‘Maryanne, are you actually honest with Roy all the time?’
‘I try to be honest where I can. It sounds stupid when I explain it.’
‘Maybe because it is stupid.’
‘You must be sick of hearing all of this.’
He winked at her. ‘This is the best entertainment I get all week.’
‘Well, at least there’s that,’ she said dryly.
‘Just call your mother, Maryanne.’
‘If I’m going to call my mother when I promised Roy I wouldn’t, I might as well go off and sleep with another man. He’d probably prefer that, actually, if he could choose.’
He grinned. ‘Why not do both? And when you’re finished with the man, send him my way.’
‘Right.’ She laughed again. ‘Roy’s due home soon. You’d better be out of here. Maybe out the back way is better.’
He stood up. ‘Yes, we really need a secret passageway between our houses.’
‘I’ll ask Roy to put one in.’
‘It’s always worth asking,’ Richard said.
They went to the gate, and she unlocked it, setting off another angry round of barking down the lane.
‘Do you think you could kill that dog for me?’ she said.
‘Have you asked Roy?’
‘Oh, he’d do it in a heartbeat,’ she said.
Richard watched her.
‘That was a joke,’ she said.
He hesitated. ‘I worry about you.’
‘Well, you don’t have to.’
As she faced him, her hand on the gate, she suddenly remembered Roy, the day he’d come to her at her mother’s house almost a year ago now, the way he had been there at the threshold, all of him bunched together, as if he were waiting to be invited in, not into the house, but into her whole life. What would he have done, if she’d refused him?
Richard tried again. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
She hadn’t even told him what had really happened to Daniel back in Sydney. She’d never admitted that to anyone, not even her mother, though she was fairly sure her mother had guessed. As for Daniel, he acted as if it had never happened, as if he couldn’t remember it at all.
‘I probably make it sound worse than it is,’ she said. ‘I know how to handle Roy. We wouldn’t have made it all this time without me knowing how to handle him. And not just that—I love him.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Get out of here, Richard.’
‘Call your mother,’ he said, and then he was gone.
Maryanne stood alone in the courtyard and smoked another cigarette. The dog, the dog, oh that bloody fucking dog. She took their coffee cups back inside, washed them, dried them and carefully put them in the cupboard, side by side. Then she looked at them again, took one out and put it in the sink. She went through the bottom of the house after that, dusting the furniture, and she came to a halt at the phone, sitting on its small, wooden table in the filtered light of the hallway. She walked away from it, and then turned and walked back.
The receiver was in her hand. She dialled.
Her mother answered almost immediately. ‘Alice speaking.’
Maryanne thought about hanging up. Her fingers tightened around the receiver and she took a sudden, deep breath. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ she said, and just saying those words set something in motion—or perhaps the motion had long since begun.
‘Maryanne,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve been better. And you?’
18
Freya was sitting at the dining table, books spread out in front of her, staring at them without seeing them, when she heard Dad’s footsteps. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He gulped it down and then turned, leaning back against the sink to watch her.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Homework,’ she said.
He gave her a teasing look. ‘You do homework now?’
Freya smiled back. ‘Sometimes.’
‘What is it?’
She frowned. ‘Maths.’
She hadn’t started yet, the pen loose in her hand. She’d been thinking of Nan, wondering about her, hoping she was okay. She’d tried calling her last week, from the phone booth near the beach, but she’d only reached the answering machine.
Dad walked across and peered over her shoulder. ‘Ah!’ he said. He sat down beside her, slid the book away from her so that he could look at it. ‘Algebra. It’s not that hard. I’ll show you.’
He took her biro and began writing. He smelled of sweat and tobacco and cut wood. He’d been working down in the basement, the dull whine of an electric saw alternating with hammering. Now he began explaining the first problem to her. His thick fingers, ingrained with paint and dirt, seemed too large for a pen, and he held it at an awkward angle, but he wrote neat, square numbers and did not slow down, explaining what he was doing all the while, his words rising barely above his own breath, as if he were telli
ng only himself.
‘Do you get it?’ he said at the end.
‘Not really.’
The phone began ringing. They both turned towards the sound. Dad got to his feet and pointed one finger down at the open book.
‘That’s how you do it. Look carefully. You just have to be methodical.’ He went into the hallway and picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’ A floorboard creaked as Dad shifted his weight. Somewhere over the harbour, a ship’s horn lifted and fell five times.
‘Who is this?’ Dad said into the phone. All the volume of his voice compressed into something heavy and low and dense. ‘Just fucking talk, whoever you are, or I will fucking—’
There was silence. The receiver clattered back into the cradle.
Freya closed her book just as Dad returned. He cast a lingering glance back into the hallway, as if there were someone waiting for him there. Something twisted across his face, a kind of shuddering glimpse of emotion that he quickly pushed away.
‘They hung up,’ he said.
She didn’t say anything.
‘Do you know where your mother is?’ he asked.
‘Isn’t she at work?’
Dad took a deep breath without opening his mouth. ‘She should be home.’ He thrust his hands into the pockets of his shorts, took another breath, then curled his lip up into a smile. ‘I’ll run you through it again. If there’s one thing I can help you with, it’s maths.’
Freya was on her feet already, her books gathered in her arms, and stepped past him to the stairs. ‘It’s fine, Dad. That’s why they have teachers at school, right?’
She went up to her room, put the books on her desk and closed the door. She sat on her bed and painted her nails. When she came down to phone Ally half an hour later, Dad was sitting at the table, his large hands resting flat on the surface, eyes fixed on some point beyond the wall, like he was awake but dreaming.
And then holidays, two weeks that would take them from the dregs of winter into spring and the last thirteen weeks of school before the yawning expanse of summer. Freya worked a bit more at the corner store, enjoyed sitting there at the counter watching the sun move in and out of the front window while Patrick pottered around somewhere else or sat in the back reading a book. It wasn’t that busy.
During a particularly quiet spell one afternoon, he asked her to make him a coffee, and she accidentally dropped a cup. Shards of cup and instant coffee exploded across the floor. She found herself on the verge of crying as she swept it up.
Patrick watched her from behind the counter. ‘You all right?’
She didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Yeah. Just stuff. Life, you know.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is, it hasn’t happened yet or it’s already gone. Like that cup.’
She paused, glanced at him. ‘Do you ever worry about anything?’
Patrick shrugged. ‘There’s no point. You know that thing where some old fellas tell you they still feel the same on the inside as they did when they were young? Not me.’ He patted his belly with both hands. ‘This is me now.’
‘What—old?’
‘Not old. No, love, that’s not what I mean.’ He chuckled. ‘I’m worn, maybe. My mind’s fraying a bit at the edges, but that’s to be expected. It’s more that I don’t get so worked up over things. I don’t have the same passions I used to. Or they don’t hit me so hard. I remember being a kid and hearing a song for the first time—and you usually heard them first back then, you didn’t have all these televisions—and feeling like I was the only one hearing it. The song was coming straight down the line only to me. Now I just listen and I know everyone else is listening too, and that it’s just a song and it’s different and the same for everyone.’
He watched as she tipped the broken pieces and coffee into the bin. He boiled the kettle, poured two new cups, put in a couple of sugars and half milk in one, and handed it to her. They both stood behind the counter, drinking their coffees, their attention fixed on the street outside with its blue edge of water.
‘It’s not bad, you know,’ he said.
‘The coffee?’
‘No, not the coffee—I mean getting used to how life works. Realising that a lot of the feelings you have aren’t as big as they seem. They matter, but they’re not important in the way you think they are. You can’t get the exact same ones back and you can’t hold on to them. You can really only tell what matters when you look back.’
She regarded him dubiously. ‘So I won’t be able to tell which of my feelings are important until I’m old?’
‘Sort of.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s like driving down some winding country road at night and all you can see is what’s in your own headlights, right up close. And because that’s all you can see, you focus on it like it’s the only thing in the world. But it isn’t. Do you follow me?’
Freya shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘Enjoy what’s in front of you, Freya, but try not to get too caught up in it.’ He leaned forward on the counter, rested his elbows on the glass. ‘I wish someone had told me that when I was your age.’ He sighed. ‘The coffee’s not bad, though. Enjoy the little things. Enjoy everything.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said.
School started again, and the days were getting longer, especially at school. They were into the second month of spring, and they were studying Julius Caesar now in English. Freya had missed a few of the classes, but she’d skim-read the play at home. Mrs O’Neill was talking about Caesar’s death, the mystery of it. ‘Now, I’ve had a thought—Caesar, he gets all of these warnings, but he still goes down to the forum alone. Why? Write this down. Caesar dies because he can’t stop being Caesar. Discuss.’
At lunch time Freya snuck out of school with Josh. They headed for the mall. They didn’t know what to steal, so they settled on some magazines from the newsagent and a couple of bags of lollies.
And then it was the first Friday night of October, and she was standing on a stranger’s balcony, and the harbour glittered under distant, illuminated columns of industrial smoke, and she was thinking, yes, she would enjoy all of this, why not? Even if none of it would last. A tug slid past the gap between two buildings down on the mall. And up above it all, on the other side of this insanely tilted street, other houses faced this one—this house abandoned by its owners and left to a bunch of teenagers—with blank stares.
Only a dense green garden overgrown with vines separated the house from the next one down on the hill. There was a boy under the balcony on all fours, his moaning rising above the sound of ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ as he vomited into the vines. Another boy was talking to him in reassuring tones over one shoulder while he pissed against a tree.
‘Look at him,’ Ally said, disgusted. ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone calls the cops now. Or maybe they already have.’
They went back inside. Someone had thrown up in the bathroom too—there was vomit on the wall over the toilet. They descended a steep wooden staircase. Freya pushed past people in the darkness, shared the last of a bottle of Passion Pop with Ally, took a swig from someone’s vodka, and then a police car did pull up on the street outside the open front door, its blue and red lights flashing silently along the hallway.
Josh appeared in front of her. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said.
‘She’s fine,’ Ally told him. “She can get a lift home with my dad.’
‘No,’ Freya said. ‘I want to walk.’
She said goodbye before Ally could say anything else, and then she was walking with Josh through the backyard. They climbed over the neighbours’ fence and followed the street up into the quiet of the rich neighbourhood around the cathedral.
She felt like she could breathe again. It was a windless night, warm for spring. The noise of the mall and the city below them grew fainter, their footsteps suddenly loud. They talked in fits and starts until they reached a sandstone bluff crowned with grass and palm trees, and—higher than anything else and with spo
tlights trained along its length—the huge white obelisk she had seen for the first time, months ago now, from Ally’s house. They sat at its foot and shared a joint.
‘Look at it all,’ he said. ‘You can see everything from here, without being part of it.’
‘Best way to see it,’ she said.
He laughed.
‘At night,’ she said, ‘even the factories look good.’
‘There’s enough of them, all right.’ He handed her the joint. ‘Lie on your back, put your feet against the obelisk.’
She lay back, faced the sky with the thick grass damp against her neck, and placed her feet on the stone. He lay beside her.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘imagine the obelisk is like a stone path. Can you imagine walking straight down it into the stars?’
‘Don’t you mean up?’
‘In space, up or down is whatever you want it to be. Just look.’
She stared up at the tip of the obelisk. It pointed into a clear sky so layered with stars that she could see the arm of the Milky Way curving away on the other side like the tail of a monstrous fish in deep water.
‘You can almost feel the earth spin,’ she murmured.
‘That’s just your head.’ Josh’s hand brushed hers. His fingers pulled back, then returned, resting just against the tips of hers. She kept her own hand where it was.
‘What is this thing, anyway?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘The obelisk.’
Josh’s voice was dreamy. ‘Dad told me they used to have them in Egypt thousands of years ago. But this one got built like a hundred years ago for the ships coming into the harbour. There used to be an old windmill here for grinding the city’s grain or something, back when they first built this place, and when that came down, they put this here instead.’
‘I would have liked the windmill better,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Imagine that, if they’d kept a windmill as the highest thing in the city. Do you ever wonder what it was like before that, before any of this stuff, before white people came here?’ ‘Beautiful, I’ll bet.’