by Michael Sala
‘Your biggest issue,’ he said, gliding one finger over her work, ‘is just focusing on the problem. You know this stuff. I know you do. You were doing well for a while, but you’re slipping now. Must be summer on the way.’
‘What does summer have to do with anything, sir?’ she retorted.
Her tone caught him off guard. His face fell and he gave a short nod. ‘Maybe nothing, Freya. Maybe nothing. But the end-of-year exam is coming up, and I want you to do well. I want you to be ready.’
There was the usual smell about him of soap and the sea, like he’d come to school straight after a surf. Leather bracelets, all woven into one another, rested on the light brown hair of his wrist. The leather was faded, bleached by salt and sun. She thought of him rising from the water, dripping, surfboard under one arm, face calm, composed, as if his mind were still out there among the waves. He was so remote, like he floated above the regrets and sorrows of everyday life, like the world of numbers and symbols that he talked about really existed.
‘There,’ he said beside her, ‘you just have to look at it. It’s just problem-solving. You try.’
She could hardly breathe. There was a bird inside her head, hammering at the eggshell hollows of her temples.
‘Here.’ Mr Hind went through the problem with her. ‘See?’
She nodded, the pen slippery between her fingers.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you try. Just talk yourself through it.’
She did not talk, but kept writing down numbers and symbols to satisfy him, patterns that shifted in and out of focus across paper already smudged with her efforts.
‘Look more closely,’ he said.
‘I can’t.’
She felt heavy, as if she might start crying. A ceiling fan was gyrating on its uneven axis. The air was turbulent, but it did not cool her down.
Mr Hind looked at the handful of students who remained and pursed his lips. ‘You can eat while you work. I’ll get my lunch, and then I’ll come back. We’ll sort this out before you go.’
Once he had left the room, she shoved her things in her bag and walked out.
And then came the weekend, and she stayed in her bedroom listening to music, except for when she went to work, and she was quiet at work too, but Patrick didn’t mind. He gave her distance when she needed it, like some people knew how to do. Freya came home, ignored Mum’s searching glances, ate dinner, watched television and went to bed early. She lay in bed forever without feeling sleepy, but when Mum came to the door she shut her eyes. The rest of the weekend passed just like that.
Halfway through the night before school, Freya suddenly sprang into wakefulness. She swung out of bed and went to her window. The moon threw a shimmering, unsteady band along the dark water of the harbour, but the air was hazy, Stockton on the other side of the water lost mainly in blackness, though a few far-off lights glittered back at her. The air smelled of distant fire. Someone was walking down below. She couldn’t see them, but the skid and scrape of shoes carried to her. The footsteps trailed away, and she wondered if someone had been standing there, looking up at her window.
She crawled back into bed but didn’t sleep for ages.
In the morning she overslept, and by the time she got to school it was after nine. There was a police car parked out the front. That burning smell still filled the air, and a hot, dry wind picked up leaves and sent them swirling across the ground. Everyone was in the assembly area near the main gates, on the grass field bordered by fig trees.
There was always an assembly on a Monday, but this was different—she knew as soon as she walked through the gate. Everywhere she looked she saw girls crying, huddled in agitated clusters. The boys were off-kilter too, but they showed it differently, carrying on muted, close-quarter versions of their usual playground games and fights while teachers roved between them with scowling faces. The principal was talking to someone near the foot of the podium.
Freya pushed her way through the crowd and found Ally. ‘What’s going on?’
Ally’s eyes were red from crying. ‘A girl’s dead.’
‘Who?’
Ally told her the girl’s name, but she didn’t recognise it.
‘She was in the year below us, from Stockton. She was murdered.’
‘Murdered? Like someone killed her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Last night?’
‘Yeah. They haven’t caught who did it. She was raped, that’s what I heard. And her head was smashed in with a rock. The sicko that did it is still out there. They reckon it might have been someone from school.’
An image sprang into Freya’s mind of the girl they were talking about—dark, thick, curly hair down to her shoulders, and pale, freckled skin. Short. Always smiling, and there was a boy—not from Stockton, but from this side of the harbour—who she’d talk to. She’d stand there sometimes in front of the place where he sat with his friends, her arms folded or one hand on her hip, laughing as she talked.
The principal mounted the podium and tapped the microphone. ‘All of you will know by now,’ he began.
After school, she wandered down to the park with Josh, Daniel trailing behind them. Daniel was in his swimmers, his thin chest pale and fragile-looking in the afternoon light. The fountain in the park was pumping its five huge columns of water into the air. Daniel jumped from one to the next while they looked on. Whenever Daniel jumped into one of the columns of water, he disappeared completely from view.
‘Is your brother always that happy?’ Josh asked.
‘He’s never as happy as he looks.’
Freya’s gaze wandered around the park. There were hospital workers sitting on the grass nearby. Two people, a man and a woman, backs turned, sat on a bench in the shadows of the trees closer to the hospital, leaning in towards one another. Mum. She was staring at Mum. She recognised the man, too, with his close-cropped white hair. He was the one she’d seen the day she’d gone to the hospital, after Nan’s heart attack. Every now and again, Freya would see Mum’s face almost in profile as she talked. Then the man reached across and touched her shoulder, and Mum stood up, and the man stood up too, and they embraced. Freya was waiting for them to kiss, but they didn’t. They walked side by side, with very little space between them, back towards the hospital.
‘What is it?’ Josh said.
‘Nothing,’ Freya answered.
And then they were at his house, lying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. They’d left Daniel back at home. When she’d told him to, he’d gone up into the house without arguing. He was probably sitting up there now in his room with the clarinet in his hands.
Josh was lying at the other end of the bed. She had waited for him to lie down first, made sure that there was enough distance between them so that there was no chance of them touching by accident. What had seemed like potential before was now a problem, something she had to focus on, and it occurred to her that she might not come here again after today. Josh passed her the joint, and she drew back hard, made the tip burn. A dreamy numbness washed through her thoughts.
‘God, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it,’ he said.
‘What does?’
He shrugged. ‘Just life and shit.’ He watched her draw back on the joint again. ‘We’ll probably never know what happened,’ he went on. ‘They tell us we’re too young for all sorts of shit, and then something like this happens. We know nothing, but then we know this, and have to pretend we don’t, just to make adults feel better. That’s the way it goes in this place. Adults act like we don’t know half the shit we do.’
Their fingers brushed as she passed the joint to him. He sucked back deeply, suppressed a cough, hummed a fragment of song in the back of his throat.
‘Hey, Freya. You know what I was telling you about my mum?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘My mum, how she left.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘She didn’t leave. She jumped.’
‘What?’
&
nbsp; ‘Off the cliffs. That’s how she left.’
Freya sat up with a jolt. Her eyes felt dry, as if they were a thousand years old. ‘Your mum killed herself?’
‘Yeah.’ He was looking at her, smiling strangely. He sat up too.
‘That’s…that’s awful,’ she said.
‘My dad doesn’t know that I know. He thinks I believed him when he said it was an accident. But I heard him talking once on the phone. I heard him say what happened when he was talking to my aunt.’
‘Shit. Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
His eyes were glassy. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You should have told me sooner.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know. No one else. Don’t tell anyone else. It’s only something I want you to know.’
He leaned in and, in one motion, his mouth found hers.
She pushed him away and stood up.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘You shouldn’t have—I’m fine.’
He stood up too. She stepped backwards.
‘You sure?’ he asked.
She swayed a little, wiped her mouth. ‘I have to go.’
Before he could say anything else, she walked up the stairs and went for the front door. Josh’s father was in the living room, but she didn’t glance in as she walked past. She closed the front door behind her and walked towards the beach. Josh didn’t follow her.
It was late afternoon. The cliffs went straight up and down, and as she walked along the rock shelves beside the sea, she moved through their shadows. The water was dotted with frenetic whitecaps, but clear underneath, because the wind was blowing offshore, straight off the cliffs. If you jumped now you’d fall outwards, towards the water, though not close enough to reach it. Everything was wild and harsh and pitiless. Coal ships lined up along the horizon, their red hulls and white towers like distant city blocks. She stared up at the cliffs and thought of the night, not much more than a month ago, when she had walked along them with Josh, somewhere up above where she stood now. She wondered if it was near here that his mother had fallen, if that was why Josh had stopped there with her that night. What would it be like, to fall, to know that those few seconds of falling were all that you had?
After dinner, Dad went out alone. Freya didn’t know where or why, but she knew there was something happening again between him and Mum. There’d been tension between them over dinner, though nothing much had been said.
‘It’s terrible that girl was killed,’ Mum said later as they washed the dishes together. ‘Her whole life just gone, before it even really started. That’s why I don’t like you to drink. That’s why girls should be careful at parties.’
‘What, you think it’s her fault?’
‘Don’t pick a fight with me, Freya. I’m just saying that the world isn’t a safe place, especially for girls. That’s just the way it is. You have to be careful.’
‘Like you are?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? Do you really have to get your hackles up like that just because I ask you to be careful?’
‘I am careful, Mum.’
Mum plunged both hands into the foamy water, pulled out a pan and began scrubbing it. ‘Are you, though? God, she was probably doing drugs or something too. Where were her friends?’ ‘I don’t know, Mum,’ Freya said. ‘Probably doing drugs and getting drunk.’
Mum’s hands became motionless in the water. ‘Is that what you do when you go out?’
‘Is that what you did, Mum?’ Freya shot back. ‘Is that how you ended up with Dad? What crazy drug were you on to end up with him?’
Mum lifted one hand out of the water with a jerk, and for an instant Freya thought she was going to get a slap, and she hoped she would, because then she could really go off, say whatever she liked, but Mum just pushed a strand of hair from her own face with the back of her wrist and went back to scrubbing the pan.
‘We’re not talking about me.’ Mum said the words slowly and carefully.
‘Of course not,’ Freya said. ‘You’re always telling me to be honest, but you’re not, Mum. You’re not honest. You never are.’
Mum looked down at the dish in her hands, wiped away a layer of foam. ‘Well, thank you for the insight,’ she said, ‘but maybe you need to take a good look at yourself first.’
As Mum’s voice grew softer, Freya’s grew louder. ‘Right, Mum, pull that one out again. I’m a selfish teenager. Someone’s just been murdered at my school, and you’re giving me lectures because you feel guilty, because you know we shouldn’t even be here in this shithole. Do the dishes by yourself.’ She threw the tea towel on the floor and walked out.
‘Freya, wait.’ Mum followed her out to the stairs.
‘What?’
‘Don’t be…’ There was a pleading look on Mum’s face. ‘What’s it like there, at school?’
‘I hate it,’ Freya said. ‘I can’t wait till the whole thing’s over.’
‘Till what’s over? School?’
‘I don’t know. My life.’
Mum’s face crumpled. ‘Really? You’ve got the whole of it in front of you!’
‘Mum, why are we even talking about this?’
‘We could look at another school. Maybe.’
‘Now you’re giving me a choice? What, all it took was for a girl to get murdered and you’re ready to let me choose something for a change. I never thought it would be that easy.’
‘I let you choose things. All the time. More than a lot of girls your age.’
Freya laughed. ‘I never had a choice in any of this. I was happy when we lived with Nan, when we finally just got away, but you weren’t. For whatever stupid reason, you had to come back to him. But it’s fine.’
Something cracked in Mum’s voice. She was starting to cry. ‘What do you want from me?’
Seeing her cry only made Freya angrier. ‘I want you to tell the truth! I want you to at least have the guts to stop pretending that we’re here because of Daniel and me. None of this is about us! You tell me I’m selfish, but you’re the selfish one!’
She ran up the stairs. In her room, she locked her door, pulled her bong out from the box under her bed and opened the window. She pushed aside her desk, packed a cone with shaking hands and fumbled with her lighter until she had a flame, then breathed in the smoke, held it in her lungs as long as she could. When her head started to spin, she leaned out the window and blew the smoke out over the street, watched it drift away, as if it had never existed at all.
Mum must know that she was smoking pot. She just wouldn’t admit to herself that she knew. It was what she did—ignoring things that stared her straight in the face, trying to pretend it was all okay. It made Freya think of Mr Hind, talking about those useless problems while everyone in the class did as they pleased. Just talking, on and on, like that was the only thing he needed to do to go home and feel good. And maybe for him it was. Was that all adults ever did, though—lie to themselves? About themselves, about their children? Was that all there was to look forward to?
She leaned out of the window, balanced there on the sill with her hands, her upper body in the open air, her toes barely touching the floor. She thought again of Josh’s mother. When did you reach a point where doing that made sense? It was a very clear night, but really, what was there to see? Just stars. They weren’t anything special. She swung forward a little more, felt the weight of her body in her hands and wrists, the pressure of the windowsill against her palms and her belly, a different pressure in her head. The street looked hard. She leaned out a little more.
22
‘Beautiful,’ Dad said.
A cigarette was hanging out of his mouth, filling the air in the kitchen with a bitter haze. Freya looked in just as he began to lower a huge, dark slab of wood into place onto the cabinets under the kitchen windows, the full midday sun pouring in around him. One of his friends from work stood at the other end of the slab. He was a short, stocky man with eyes that mad
e her uncomfortable, or maybe it was the sour smell of him, or his mouth or his posture, or all of it—it all felt directed at her, even when he wasn’t looking her way.
The ruins of the old kitchen lay in a pile of debris out in the courtyard—she could see it through the open back door. Everything smelled of fresh wood and varnish. All the cabinet doors were shiny, with bright, silver handles. The wooden benchtop extended along the entire back wall of the kitchen, finished except for the hole where the sink should be.
‘What do you think?’ Dad turned to her. ‘You reckon your mother’ll be happy with this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Freya said. ‘I guess.’
Dad cast a sidelong glance at his friend and then laughed. ‘You’re right. It is hard to tell with your mother.’
‘That’s beautiful women for you,’ his friend said. ‘They’re all the same.’
‘Just be careful, mate,’ Dad said. He winked at Freya, the skin on his face gleaming with sweat. ‘The only one who gets to say that sort of thing in this house is me.’
Freya was in the kitchen sweeping up the lino floor when Mum came home from work. Dad’s friend was gone by then, and the sink was in place. Dad was examining the inside of the cupboards.
‘What do you think?’ he said, when Mum walked in through the dining room.
Mum hesitated a moment. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said.
‘What?’ Dad said.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘The wood’s very dark, isn’t it?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. It looks great.’
Dad nodded. ‘It’s an old piece of wood. Ironbark. It took me ages to sand it back. I could have gone a lighter varnish, I guess.’ He looked at her. ‘Is it too dark?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
He looked down at the benchtop, ran one thumb along the hard, gleaming surface. ‘You think I dragged this all the way here because it’d be fine?’