by Michael Sala
‘Do what?’
‘The lighter. Steal something like that, something you don’t even need. I don’t care about the question of right and wrong. Steal as many lighters as you like—but that’s not what you’re really doing. Do you know what you’re doing?’
Freya glanced at her and then went back to staring out the window.
‘You know,’ Mrs O’Neill went on, ‘your reports from your last school are terrific. You should be near the top of every class, but you’re not. This year has not been a success for you. You’re making problems for yourself, creating turbulence. I don’t know why. Do you know why?’
‘No.’
‘Is there something going on you’d like to tell me about? At home or at school? Anything at all?’
Freya shook her head.
It was quiet in the office. A tennis ball made a hollow, repetitive sound against a nearby wall. The noise of the other students outside in the quadrangle was muffled by layers of brick and glass.
Mrs O’Neill was the one who finally spoke. ‘What is it you want?’
Freya met her eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, Freya, that’s not an answer. Think about it. I’m not talking about right now. I’m sure right now you just want to get out of here. But where do you want to go? What do you want to do? I’m talking about your future. You’re heading towards it as we speak. Full throttle. Can’t you tell? You need to take charge. Make some decisions. Maybe one decision is all you need to make, and the rest will fall into place.’
Freya stared past her at the grey sky outside the window.
‘Freya, are you listening to me?’ Mrs O’Neill clicked her fingers in front of Freya’s eyes. ‘What is it you want?’
She swallowed. ‘I want to get through this.’
‘Through what?’
‘This conversation, for a start. It just doesn’t mean anything to me.’
Mrs O’Neill walked around the desk and put a hand on Freya’s shoulder. ‘You have more control than you think. That’s what you have to remember. You have control. No matter what anyone tells you. It’s yours, if you take it.’
They looked at one another in silence.
The phone rang. It was a relief.
Mrs O’Neill picked it up, listened and then nodded. ‘Bring her in.’
The rest—Mum coming in, the jerky motion of her head as she spoke to Mrs O’Neill, and then the three-way conversation—was all a blur, and then she was sitting on the bus next to Mum, and neither of them said a single word as it turned from one street to the next and wound its slow, stifling way home.
‘I don’t want to talk about this with you now,’ Mum said without looking at her as they got off the bus. ‘Except to say that you’ve let me down. You’ve let the whole family down.’
She began walking.
Freya stopped behind her and laughed. ‘The whole family? Do you really mean the whole family, Mum?’
‘I’m trying hard here.’
‘Are you going to tell Dad?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
‘I guess that’s what you do, right?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You decide what you do and don’t want him to know.’
‘I can talk to him if you like. Let you sort it out with him.’
‘So can I.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know about that guy at the hospital. He has white hair. I guess he’s good-looking, for an old guy. I saw you and him together.’
‘When?’
Freya just stared at her.
‘You have no idea,’ Mum said. ‘You really don’t.’
‘Don’t I? You’re cheating on Dad, right?’
Mum’s neck tightened. Pink patches of colour rose under her eyes. ‘Don’t push me into a corner, Freya.’
They walked on in silence for a while, past the park and up the road.
‘What happened to you?’ Mum said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘In spite of everything, don’t I look after you? Aren’t I a good mother?’
Freya realised that Mum was crying without making a sound, only her flushed face and the tears running down her cheeks to betray it. Mum was always crying these days—as if that would solve anything—but this time it filled Freya with pity and guilt. She wanted to say something, then, tell her that Dad was the last person she’d ever talk to, that she was just saying things, she didn’t even know why, hurling out words to see which ones would stick, but they were turning the corner into their street and Dad’s station wagon was parked out the front.
‘How was your day?’ Dad asked Mum over dinner. Freya felt the heat rise into her cheeks and didn’t dare look up. It was warm and stuffy in the dining room, the air unmoving. The television was on in the corner. On the other side of the world, a news presenter was talking about how the communists in Czechoslovakia had bowed to weeks of protests and given up their power without a fight. She’d only been half-listening, thinking about how school was nearly over, just a week and a bit to go, but she’d have to go every day, with Mum and Mrs O’Neill both breathing down her neck.
‘It was good,’ Mum said.
‘No news?’
‘None.’
Dad put down his knife and fork. ‘Have you been crying?’
‘No.’
‘You have.’
Mum looked distracted, not quite there. ‘I’m just…I was thinking about my mother.’
‘What about her?’
‘Just the pity of it, our relationship. I wish it were different.’
‘Are you thinking of getting back in touch with her then?’
‘No,’ Mum said.
Daniel poured himself a glass of water. He used only one hand, and the neck of the bottle knocked against the glass.
Dad gave him an irritated glance, then turned back to Mum. ‘You sure?’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘you’ve done it before.’
Mum didn’t say anything. Daniel noisily gulped down his water and reached for the bottle again. Freya took it and filled his glass for him.
Dad watched her pour, drumming the thick fingers of his right hand on the table. ‘Get in touch with her if you like,’ he said to Mum. ‘I’m not going to tell you what to do.’
‘I don’t want to get in touch with her.’
Dad nodded and pushed away his plate. He rolled himself a cigarette, put it in his mouth and lit it, keeping his eyes on Mum as he pulled back and then released the smoke. ‘That’s probably for the best. Some things you just have to leave behind.’
Freya kept eating. Daniel had arranged fragments of his macaroni and cheese around the edge of his plate, to make it look like he’d finished.
Dad’s eyes swung towards her. ‘And how was your day, Freya?’
‘It was fine,’ she said. ‘Nothing to report.’
24
And then school was over, and she had survived a year of it, and that was doing better than some people. Freya lay in bed, listening to the sound of Dad’s station wagon driving off down the street. She had been awake for ages, waiting for him to go. A bird started up outside, the one she’d heard for the first time nearly a year ago now, when they’d just moved in and the house was still a wreck and she’d woken every morning on her strip of foam in the dining room. Another summer, another world. It was summer again, but a cool, strange day that hardly wanted to admit it.
The bird threw its warbling, full-bodied cry out into the distance, its voice rising to a higher pitch, a more frantic rhythm, and another, further off, called back with the same melancholic frenzy. Freya got out of bed and went to the window. The outside of the glass was covered in a faint film of grime—salt, whatever else filled the air—and through its grey filter, she could see the harbour, and Stockton, and the yellow arc of sand that curved towards the distant wreck of the Sygna. She frowned and looked back around her room—at her books crammed into the bookca
se, and the surface of her desk, littered with make-up and hairbands and cassettes with peeling labels, and her clothes strewn across the floor. She got back into bed, pulled the cover to her chin and lay there staring at the slanted ceiling a while before getting up again and going downstairs.
She spent the rest of the morning and the early afternoon stretched on the couch watching daytime television. Daniel wandered around, playing with Lego in his room, bringing some of it down and quietly building and dismantling objects on the thick patterned rug Mum and Dad had bought second-hand for the living room, and then disappeared back up to his room. At one point she heard a strange thumping noise, as if her brother were playing hopscotch upstairs, then the sound of his clarinet. He was still practising ‘The Final Countdown’, his notes closer together now, more convincing, even sounding pretty good at times.
Mum wandered around the house too, sweeping away the dust like it wouldn’t come back in a few days, putting new flowers in the vases in the living room and the dining room, arranging them and rearranging them with jerky motions of her hands until she stepped away with an air of not quite having succeeded.
For a while Freya read a book while the record player was on—the Mamas and the Papas, then Neil Sedaka and, a few times over, The Very Best of Don McLean, and then Tim Buckley, then the Smiths. Every now and again Mum would come in, and if their eyes met she’d give Freya a bright smile, but at other times there’d be a look on her face like she didn’t see anything around her.
In the midafternoon, someone knocked at the door and Mum answered it.
Richard’s voice filled the hall. ‘Maryanne, what are you up to?’
‘Not much. Just cleaning,’ Mum said. ‘It never seems to end.’
‘Tell me about it. I’m going for a walk. Want to come along?’
‘The kids are home. They’ve started their holidays.’
‘They can come too.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What else are you going to do, Maryanne?’
‘I don’t know.’
There was silence, as if Mum had asked rather than answered a question, one that Richard couldn’t answer.
Freya got off the couch and walked into the hall. ‘Hi, Richard.’
‘Hey, gorgeous. How are you?’
‘Good,’ she said, suppressing a yawn.
‘That’s you all over,’ Richard said. ‘Steady as a rock.’
‘I probably should do a few things,’ Mum said, ‘before Roy gets home.’
‘Oh, come on.’ Richard put his hands in his pockets. ‘There won’t be many days like this before it gets into the ugly part of summer again.’
Mum laughed. ‘Okay, we’ll go out—but just for a little while.’
Soon they were walking, one narrow street, then another, heading towards Nobbys Beach, and the way out to the lighthouse. Richard was whistling as they walked.
‘Why are you always so cheerful?’ Mum said.
Richard laughed. ‘Me? When I’m not cheerful, I’m drunk. I’m a sad drunk, and then you won’t see me at all.’
‘So that explains why I haven’t seen you these last few weeks,’ Mum said.
‘It hasn’t been pretty,’ Richard murmured.
‘What’s a sad drunk?’ Daniel said.
‘Nothing you need to know about,’ Mum told him.
‘You’ve probably seen one without realising it,’ Freya said to Daniel.
Mum glanced at her. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Freya has real sass,’ Richard said. ‘I love that.’
‘She has her moments,’ Mum said.
They had left the road and were walking along the causeway that ran behind the beach. To their right, on the other side of a ridge of low, saltbush-covered dunes, waves were peeling from the ocean and striking the sand in clean rippling sheets. To their left, a breeze feathered the grey-brown waters of the harbour. The causeway divided up ahead—one part continued on and became the breakwall, while the other part, blocked off by a boom gate, veered up towards the lighthouse on the top of the headland.
‘You know this wasn’t always here,’ Richard said as they made their way towards the fork in the path.
‘What wasn’t?’ Mum asked.
‘Any of it. The causeway. Nobbys Beach.’ He swept one arm back the way they’d come. ‘A hundred and fifty years ago, we’d have been walking across water. The headland was an island—they kept convicts on it for a while—and this was a channel.’
‘Right here?’ Daniel asked.
‘Yep. Maybe right beneath our feet. They started building it to protect the ships coming into the harbour, because it was so dangerous. Ships used to sink here all the time, so they lopped the top off the island and used the rocks for the causeway. Convicts did the hardest part—the poor bastards had to work day and night, even during storms, on the edge of a raging sea.’
‘Where’d the beach come from then?’ Daniel asked.
‘The beach is just the sand that has been washing up against the causeway ever since.’
‘And the ships didn’t sink anymore?’ Daniel asked.
‘No,’ Richard said. ‘They kept sinking. There were still lots of shipwrecks until they built the two breakwalls either side of the harbour. The worst was a steamship called the Cawarra. It went down just as it rounded Nobbys Head. It took hours—crew and passengers getting washed into the sea and drowning while everyone just stood on the shore, watching. There was only one survivor.’
‘They didn’t try to save them?’ Mum asked. ‘If they were that close?’
‘The harbour rescue boat didn’t come out—there was some kind of scandal, not enough men on duty or some of them were drunk—and you have to imagine how dangerous it was back then, the deep water, the powerful currents, oyster banks, rocks like teeth, huge waves.’
The distorted, nasal tone of a lifesaver came to them on the wind, carried from the beach, directing swimmers back between the flags.
Daniel climbed up onto a rock and stared over the saltbushes towards the sea. ‘Is the ship still in the water?’
Richard nodded. ‘Not just that one—dozens. They built them into the breakwalls. The Cawarra’s over on the Stockton side.’
‘Wow,’ Mum said. She shielded her eyes, stared down the length of the beach, caught Freya’s eye and grinned at her, a wild, open smile.
Freya smiled back. ‘Ships still sink, though,’ she said to Richard. ‘Like the Sygna.’
‘That’s true,’ Richard said. ‘Human error. When people are involved, you can’t get rid of the risks entirely—you just manage them the best you can.’
‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘I know about that.’
Richard chuckled. ‘Anyway.’ He pointed at the headland. ‘The local Aboriginal people used to say that there was a giant kangaroo sleeping in there. Every now and again it shakes its tail and the whole place shakes.’
‘Like an earthquake?’ Daniel asked.
‘I guess so. Might have been like ten thousand years ago, when it happened the last time. The locals think about time differently to us. The real locals, I mean.’
‘Will it happen again?’ Daniel asked.
‘What?’
‘The kangaroo?’
‘Probably,’ Richard said. ‘I’m sure we’ll be long gone, though.’
They reached the boom gate where the path divided. Richard crouched to get under it.
‘The sign says keep out,’ Mum said.
Richard smiled. ‘Yeah, well—bit rich coming from them.’
‘From who?’ Freya asked.
‘You know, the family that live here now to look after the lighthouse. How long do you think they’ve been here?’
Freya didn’t know.
‘The blink of an eye,’ Richard said. He was on the other side of the boom gate.
‘You sure about this?’ Mum said.
‘Oh, live a little, Maryanne,’ he laughed.
Freya went under the gate. Mum f
ollowed, and then Daniel. They all started walking again, up towards the lighthouse, breathing a little heavier against the steepening incline.
‘I know the family, anyway,’ Richard said. ‘They won’t mind.’
‘I don’t believe a word of what you say,’ Mum said.
‘Oh good,’ Richard replied. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere.’
They stopped as the path came to an end near the lighthouse, and turned to look back at the city. It was deceptive, the height they’d climbed—far higher than Freya had imagined. She could see the buildings surrounding the mall, and above them, the steep hills around the cathedral. Further off was the obelisk, a white needle pointing straight up at the sky. Before all of that lay the harbour, narrow at the neck and broad in its belly as it forked into two grey-brown rivers that twisted their way inland between the factories and coal terminals.
Looking north, across the harbour, she could see the Stockton breakwall, with its hidden bones of long-dead ships, and beyond it the long, isolated curve of beach where the girl from her school had been murdered. Much closer, a coal ship was gliding towards them, heading for open water. She looked down across its deck, imagined standing on it, watching the land slide past until there was no land left, only water, and water, and water.
They began walking down again, back towards the causeway.
‘They were going to blow all of this up in the end,’ Richard said, ‘so that sailing ships would be able to get into the harbour without losing the wind. They ran all of these tunnels underneath where we are, and through the centre of the headland. They were going to fill it all with dynamite.’
‘Why didn’t they?’ Freya asked.
Richard shrugged. ‘Maybe they realised they were being stupid. Maybe they realised it was important, what they were destroying. Funny, isn’t it. That headland’s millions of years old, and they’d have destroyed it for ships that became obsolete a few decades later. Idiots will sometimes tell you that Aboriginal people have no sense of time. But it’s us. We’re the ones who don’t. We’re the ones who don’t learn from it.’
Maryanne sighed. ‘Is there a place in this entire town that isn’t riddled with holes?’