by Michael Sala
‘It’s beautiful,’ Mum said. ‘I’ve just come home from work. I’m tired. You haven’t given me any time to adjust. It’s lovely.’
‘I didn’t realise you needed time to adjust to a benchtop.’
‘Roy, please.’
‘I’m glad you like it.’
‘I really do.’
He leaned against the counter and folded his arms, grinning at her without humour. ‘By the way, Stan thinks you’re beautiful. Isn’t that what he said, Freya?’
Freya shrugged.
He turned back to Mum. ‘You remember Stan, don’t you?’
‘Yeah. He’s a bit off. I don’t like him.’
Dad shifted, unfolded his muscular arms. ‘You reckon he’s sleazy?’
‘A bit,’ Mum said.
Dad looked at her a moment longer. ‘All right,’ he said.
The dog was barking again, out in the lane.
‘I do love the benchtop,’ Mum said.
‘Good.’ Dad gave a sudden laugh. ‘Stop going on about it then!’
They had hamburgers and chips for dinner that night, and then Dad went back into the kitchen. Daniel disappeared into his room and began playing his clarinet. Freya sat with Mum on the couch watching television.
‘They have their similarities, don’t they,’ Mum said.
‘What?’
‘The men in this family. They both like their space.’
Freya laughed.
Mum leaned towards her, lowered her voice. ‘He has depth, that’s why.’
‘What?’ Freya said.
‘Your father. Remember how you asked me what I must have been on, to have ended up with him?’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘He’s interesting and passionate and very charming when he wants to be. People are complicated.’
Mum settled back into the couch. They fell silent. Sale of the Century was on. When it finished, there was a news bulletin. Freya rose from the couch.
‘Look at that,’ Mum said.
Freya saw grainy images of a wall, a huge mass of grey concrete, people on top of it, celebrating, jumping up and down.
‘The Berlin Wall,’ Mum said. ‘They’re knocking it down. When I was a child, that wall was always there, right through Berlin. People got shot trying to cross it.’
‘That’s great, Mum.’
Mum turned to look at her. ‘What?’
‘I mean, you know, that they’re knocking it down. That people don’t have to get shot trying to escape.’
Mum nodded. ‘Plenty of them would have outlived that wall.’ She turned back to the television. ‘If only they’d waited.’
‘Yeah, Mum,’ Freya said softly. ‘All they had to do was wait.’
A new story came on.
‘The thing is, though…’
Mum looked up at her.
‘How many people,’ Freya went on, ‘do you think died waiting?’
Then she was at the front door, and there was something wedged in the letterbox, a package. Happy birthday, it said. From Josh. She peeled away the paper and there was a tape inside, the label scrawled with the names of songs. She smiled to herself, and thought about going over to his place to talk to him, clear the air between them, but she didn’t know what she’d say, not yet. She went and found her Walkman, and inserted the new tape. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she called down the hallway.
The cicadas were making a racket, their song swelling from the bushes. She walked down the street to where the buildings ended and she could see part of the harbour, and the Norfolk pines on the other side where Stockton began. A gnat wafted against her cheek. She couldn’t tell where the sun was anymore. How long ago was it now since the girl in the year below her had died? Less than a week. Six days. Six mornings, six evenings. Try adding up the minutes. Somewhere on that other side, in the saltbushes, on that windswept expanse of beach that stretched off up the coast. And her killer was still out there too, living life, getting on with it.
She thought of something Josh had said to her, about this town, the way the water connected it to everything out there in the world, but all you got was the ripples. She found herself smiling, thinking of him, the things he said, and then her smile faded. She put her headphones on and pressed play. The comforting hiss of the tape balanced the noise of the insects, then the music kicked in and that was all there was, and she turned her back on the harbour and what lay beyond it and began walking towards the beach.
‘Every year they seem to start it earlier,’ Mum said.
‘Start what?’ Dad grunted.
‘Christmas.’
They had been to the shopping centre out in the suburbs, were heading home, but they hadn’t got far. There was an accident up ahead somewhere.
‘It must be a bad one,’ Mum said. ‘Look at all the cars.’
The boot was full of groceries. They were crawling at a snail’s pace, Dad hunched over the steering wheel, Mum beside him. All the windows were wound down, but the air coming in was hot and dry.
‘Now look at this,’ Dad said.
‘What?’
‘This stupid idiot wants to get in front of me.’ He thrust his chin towards a car trying to edge in ahead across a give-way line. ‘Look at him, being a fuckhead. That’s what we need right now, a fuckhead.’
Mum put a hand on his forearm. ‘Just let him in—it won’t make any difference.’
Dad shrugged off her hand. ‘That’s your answer to everything—give in. Let people off. I’m the only one you have to disagree with. You save it all for me. Has it ever occurred to you that’s half the problem with your life?’
As he turned to look at her, a horn blared. Freya could see the man in the other car waving his arms, shouting. Dad wrenched on the handbrake. The car jerked to a standstill and he was out on the road, slamming the door behind him.
The other man got out of his car too. As Dad approached, the man lifted his hands—whether to talk or to fight, it wasn’t clear. Dad’s fist made a blur. The man crumpled. Dad hit him twice more as he fell, sharp, precise blows, then he stood over him and spat on his hair. Another man got out of his car further down the road.
Dad turned. ‘Come on. Try something!’
The second man kept his hands down, backed away. Dad laughed. His face loomed in the rear window. Freya scrambled around in her seat to face the front. Daniel did the same.
When Dad got back into the car, his breath filled the cabin.
‘You do that,’ he said, ‘you should at least put up a fight.’
‘Roy,’ Mum breathed through her fingers, ‘for God’s sake.’
He lifted his hand, examined the knuckles. ‘He had it coming. I was just the one to give it to him.’
‘You’re a real man, all right,’ Mum said.
He looked at her. ‘Don’t you start.’
‘Or what?’ Mum said quietly, staring back at him.
The whole car was shuddering and vibrating against the engine. The muscles in Dad’s face were tight, the colour gone from his cheeks, his lips. Mum turned away first. Dad grunted, dropped the handbrake and shifted the car into gear, the taut line of his neck damp with sweat. A solitary car horn lifted across the stationary line of traffic. They rolled forward.
‘He shouldn’t have got out of the car,’ Dad murmured.
Five minutes later they started to speed up again, and not long after that they passed the scene of the accident, the police cars and the ambulance and the tow truck. There wasn’t much to see, no bodies or anything, just a lot of glass, a stain that might have been blood or oil or water, and two cars by the side of the road, or what used to be cars, crumpled together in a twisted embrace of metal.
23
Sunday passed without Freya really noticing. She went for a walk late in the afternoon to Fort Scratchley, with its views out over the ocean and the coastline. There were surfers out off the point near the ocean baths, hunched in the water over their boards, paddling effortlessly for lines of swell that turn
ed into waves as they rose to their feet. She wondered if Mr Hind was down there among them, or maybe Tim. Every now and again, very far off, a needle of lightning splintered across a horizon murky with rain that wasn’t coming any closer. The storm looked so peaceful from this distance. Staring at it, she felt as if some part of her were coming undone, peeling away from the world—she couldn’t describe it better than that.
That night was broken up by feverish dreams and odd moments of thought that floated in the gaps between waking and sleep. She woke at some strange hour. Her alarm clock was flashing twelve, as if there’d been a power surge, and it occurred to her that she’d forgotten to go to work that day, that Patrick had been expecting her. It didn’t matter. She thought about school. She didn’t want to go to school. She didn’t want not to go to school. Not that it mattered either way.
The murdered girl in the year below her came into her mind. Her death hung like a pall of smoke over the last weeks of the term, the last weeks of the whole school year. That pale freckled face and the broad, toothy smile. Standing there, in the shade of the fig trees, talking to that boy. Walking along the school corridor with a couple of friends, bag slung over her back, the top button on her white blouse undone. There was a rumour that she’d gotten too drunk to stand up that night, that she’d been surrounded by the boys from Stockton, that they’d spat on her and kicked her and poured beer over her head until one dragged her off into the saltbushes that separated the beach from the houses nearby. Most of the boys had lost interest then. The party had gone on.
‘So have you dumped him then?’
Always these conversations in maths, because it was only Ally who asked, and only in Mr Hind’s class, where they could get away with talking as much as they liked. With school nearly finished for the year, the class was out of control. Freya squinted down at the numbers on the page in front of her. They looked more pointless than ever. Why was she doing it to herself, coming to school when everything inside her was telling her not to?
‘We weren’t even going out.’
‘That a yes?’
A fierce westerly was howling outside. She could see trees bending and swaying with each gust, thick branches shuddering, their leaves like out-of-control thoughts. It was the middle of the day, cloudless, bright, all the shadows shrunken by an overhead sun.
Freya chewed on the inside of her mouth, blinked to make the numbers on the page stop their drifting. ‘We weren’t going out, I told you.’
She shouldn’t have come today. She’d hesitated at the sight of the bus bearing down on her. There’d been no sign of cloud or rain, the wind just beginning to stir with the first hint of violence. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach had only grown stronger after she got on the bus. All she was doing was waiting. Josh hadn’t been at the bus stop, but he was there at school—she’d seen him from a distance. Had he walked?
The noise of the classroom boiled around her now. She made a circle with her pen, circled again and again until there was a wet blue spiral ingrained in the page, the ink coming off on the side of her hand. She flicked the ring in her lip back and forth with her tongue, her teeth digging into the soft skin around it until it felt raw. Mr Hind was there up the front, talking.
Ally was chewing that gum of hers, the sickly fake berry smell all around her. Freya watched her take it out, balance it on her thumb and then press the wad under the desk.
‘I’m glad you ditched him,’ Ally said. ‘He’s a weirdo. All that metal in his face. Yuck. I mean, like maybe what you’ve got, that’s fine. But he’s definitely got too much. You’re better off without him.’
Freya slapped her pen down. ‘Jesus, you don’t know anything, Ally.’
Mr Hind’s voice rose above the classroom murmur. ‘Freya, I’m trying to explain something here. Can you stop talking for a little bit, at least while I do?’
‘Why don’t you stop talking for a little bit?’ She snapped it out without meaning to. Or maybe she had meant it. Someone chuckled behind her.
Mr Hind turned to stare at her. ‘Pardon?’
The class fell silent. Everyone was looking, waiting, the noise in the room almost snuffed out. She stared back at him and felt the blood rushing to her face, her right eye twitching as if there were something caught in it.
He walked towards her. ‘Are you having trouble? Do you need a hand?’
‘No, I don’t. I’m not having any trouble. Are you?’
‘Let me see.’
‘No.’
‘Go, Freya,’ one of the boys called in a mocking voice. ‘You tell him.’
‘Poor Hind,’ another voice snickered. ‘Are you breaking up with him?’
She didn’t turn around.
‘Okay, okay.’ Mr Hind scanned the classroom. He looked exposed, uncomfortable, standing there in the aisle by her desk. ‘Everyone back to work.’ He looked down at her. ‘Let’s have a chat outside.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Someone’s on her rags.’ The whisper sent a bunch of them behind her exploding into laughter. Other students—the good ones, she supposed—were looking at her with appalled fascination, like she was from a different species.
‘Freya,’ Mr Hind said.
She could feel tears brimming. ‘Just stop looking at me! Do your job! Just do your fucking job!’
‘Outside, please, Freya.’
‘Fuck off.’
His voice hardened, but still he didn’t raise it. ‘Outside. Now.’
She fixed her gaze on her desk. A moment—a moment was all she needed to calm down. She was sure of it.
Mr Hind stood in front of her, a piece of chalk clutched tightly in one hand.
‘Freya,’ he said, in his measured tone, but there was a tremor in it now, threatening to break through the surface. ‘You’re wasting everyone’s time. Out.’
She stood up. Her chair caught behind her and toppled with a crash. She hadn’t meant to push it over, but there it was, and Mr Hind’s startled expression made her angrier still, and she couldn’t think straight, and everything was a blur around her.
She wanted to punch him, punch him right in that stupid triangular nose of his, smash it in half. The urge to do it, to damage him—she’d never wanted to punch anyone in her life. Not ever. And the voice coming out of her mouth wasn’t even hers.
‘This is all shit—none of it matters. You’re the one wasting people’s time. Just like you’ve wasted your own stupid fucking life doing a bad job of’—she tossed her head, looked around the classroom—‘this.’
She picked up her bag and walked out, the class dead silent behind her.
The bell went for recess. No one had come for her. Among the spill of bodies rushing into the quadrangle, she found Josh.
‘I have to get out of here,’ she said. ‘You want to come?’
He didn’t ask. He just nodded.
They walked into town, to the mall.
‘Did you see her?’ she asked as they walked along the pale, uneven pavement between the shops.
‘Who?’
‘Your mother. After she jumped. At the funeral, I mean?’
‘No. They kept the coffin closed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘I didn’t want to see her,’ he said eventually. ‘Not like that.’
‘I know. I wouldn’t.’
They kept walking in silence until they came to a shop full of glass vases and crystal sculptures and stainless steel things, including a cabinet full of fancy lighters, like miniature Bunsen burners and tiny jet engines. The woman at the counter looked up at them and said hello in a clipped tone that held no welcome or warmth, only a dangerous recognition, and Freya knew it was a bad idea to stay here. Josh caught her eye after a moment and walked out again, but then several other customers walked in, and with a wild, sinking sensation in her gut, Freya decided she’d try anyway.
She didn’t even bother being discreet—just reached across to the glass display shelf when the lady at the cou
nter was talking to someone else. She knew she was being watched, but it was like falling, like she couldn’t stop now she was in motion, like it had already happened. The silver lighter felt cool and heavy in her hand, and she nearly dropped it, but then she turned, letting it slip into her pocket, and walked away. She was almost at the door, almost free, before someone was calling out, asking her to stop. She bowed her head and kept going, but slowed despite herself, like some part of her was used to giving in, used to surrendering to the inevitable. Then a hand fell on her shoulder, and Freya whirled, angry, panicked at last, lifting her hand to slap the woman away, and found her wrist caught in a surprisingly strong grip.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ The woman looked at her with a tight, unforgiving smile. ‘Don’t even think about running.’
And now she was sitting in Mrs O’Neill’s office, staring out at the world beyond the window while the old bag looked at her, bemused, from across the desk.
‘Why did you even take it?’
‘To smoke.’
Mrs O’Neill leaned forwards in her leather chair. ‘You need an eighty-dollar lighter to smoke? Goodness. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong.’
‘I thought a good lighter would help me get the last bits of pot out of the cone.’
The lines on either side of Mrs O’Neill’s mouth deepened. ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Do you even listen to a word I say in class? I give you the smoking talk at least once a week.’
‘You smoke.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs O’Neill conceded. ‘I’m also a teacher. And a deputy principal. It’s stressful. Don’t get into teaching, whatever you do. But times have changed, little lady. You shouldn’t be smoking. Anything.’
‘Are you going to call my parents?’ Freya asked.
Mrs O’Neill nodded. ‘That’s already happened, yes. And we’ll have to talk about all of these absences with your parents too. Now is as good a time as any. And the incident this morning with Mr Hind. Poor Mr Hind, of all people. He really does think the best of you, Freya, and he’s genuinely upset. As for anything else you might have done or said, well, there’s only so many hours in a working day. But don’t worry about that right now. I want to know why you’d do it in the first place.’