by Michael Sala
He laughed. ‘Not likely.’
A couple of old women walked by. One of them took in Daniel and then smiled at Richard.
‘He looks just like you,’ the woman said.
Richard and Daniel glanced at each other. Both had a slight stoop, their hands clasped behind their backs.
‘He could do worse,’ Richard replied.
After the women had passed, he made a show of hooking his arm through Mum’s and walked several steps in a way that reminded Freya of The Wizard of Oz, then Mum pushed him away with a laugh. Daniel had stopped walking and looked at them in silence.
‘Don’t worry,’ Richard said looking back at him. ‘I won’t steal her away.’
‘More’s the pity,’ Mum said.
They kept walking. Freya pushed Daniel gently on the shoulder. ‘They’re mucking around.’
‘I wasn’t worried.’
‘Okay then. Good.’
They didn’t go straight home, but kept following the shoreline south until they had passed the baths and come to the esplanade overlooking Newcastle Beach. They stopped in at the ice-cream shop opposite the brothel. It smelled of waffles inside. Richard insisted on buying them all an ice-cream. ‘What else am I going to do with my money?’ he said.
When they turned into their street, they saw Dad’s station wagon parked out the front of the house. They slowed down, finished their ice-creams.
‘Were we out that long?’ Mum asked.
‘Only an hour or so,’ Richard said.
‘He must be home early.’
They fell silent as they walked the last stretch to the house.
Richard hesitated as he reached his front steps, watching as they went past him and up their own steps to the front door. ‘Goodbye then,’ he said, and gave them an awkward nod before he took out his key and disappeared from sight. They stood there, Freya, Mum, Daniel, each on a separate step, all of them fixed on the quiet sound of Richard’s door closing. Then Freya looked at Mum and waited.
25
Maryanne shook herself and opened the front door into the house. It was surprisingly dark inside. The only light came from down the hall, in the kitchen, but the thick, low sound of a throat being cleared came from the dining room as the lock snicked into place behind them.
Without needing to be told, without saying a word, Freya and Daniel went up to their rooms. Maryanne stood at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the bannister. The sound of their feet overhead and the closing of their bedroom doors made her feel abandoned and relieved at the same time.
She walked into the dining room, her eyes still adjusting after the glare outside, dark blotches swimming in her vision and coming together to make Roy’s shape, hunched forward over the dining table.
She flicked on the light. ‘You’re home early. I thought they had a full day for you.’
Roy lowered his head. ‘They did, but it doesn’t matter.’ There was a little grey, she noticed, in the dark, thick sprawl of curls that ran from the nape of his neck up into the close-cropped tangle at the base of his skull. His hands were clasped together in front of him, resting on the table. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Just out for a walk,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’
He held up his left hand to show a bandage around his thumb, soaked with blood, a dark line of it dried along the inside of his forearm, halfway to his elbow.
‘Let me see.’ She pulled out a chair next to him, her knees either side of him, took his hand, unwrapped the bandage.
‘It’s deep,’ she said. ‘How did you do this?’
‘I wasn’t paying attention.’
‘So that’s where Daniel gets it from.’
He didn’t smile. ‘I was thinking.’
‘It’ll need a couple of stitches,’ she said.
‘I’ll be fine. Just bandage it properly for me.’
‘Okay.’ She went and got the first-aid kit and came back to sit beside him.
He flinched a little as she took his finger and swabbed it clean with alcohol.
‘Who,’ he said, ‘was that you were talking to outside?’
She kept her eyes on his hand. ‘Just Richard.’
‘Richard again.’
‘He was just going for a walk,’ she said. ‘He asked us along.’
‘Right.’ His other fingers curled a little, and something tightened in the fleshy part of his hand. ‘So you go for walks with him now. Why didn’t you say that in the first place?’
‘Does it really matter what order I say things in?’
Maryanne focused on his hand. She put disinfectant on the wound, pressed it together and wrapped it firmly with clean white gauze. The dog was barking in the lane outside, in that rapid way it had, as if it were trapped inside a burning house. She tried to make her voice light. ‘You know, we should walk together more. I like walking. It’s easy to get out of the habit.’
He put his left hand on hers, closed it around her fingers and pressed her hand against the table, the bandage rough against her skin. The gesture made her feel oddly naked. He was studying her, waiting, his chin and mouth making a jagged cleft of shadow. She smiled—a stiff, false smile—and waited too.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll go for a walk sometime.’
‘I’d like that.’ She pulled her hand out from under his and rose to her feet. ‘I’m going to have a shower, then I’ll cook dinner.’
‘You’ve just been with a man,’ he said, ‘and now you’re going to have a shower.’
For a moment they faced one another in silence.
‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘It was a joke.’
He rolled a cigarette and brought it to his mouth. She could hear him flicking at his lighter as she walked up the stairs.
‘We’ll go, though,’ he called softly after her. ‘Soon.’
A week later they were walking, just as promised, Maryanne and Roy, and Daniel, the three of them on an outing like any family, but sometimes promises like this weren’t the ones you wanted kept. Freya had refused to come. She’d already gone that way, she’d told them, her jaw set in a defiant line as she’d looked from Maryanne to Roy. They weren’t going to force her, and so they’d gone without her. Somehow that refusal of Freya’s, the knowing manner of it, had affected Roy, Maryanne sensed it, like some small fuse had been lit inside him and was burning its way through his nerves. He kept his head down as they walked.
Where the causeway divided they veered left, out along the breakwall. It was a strip of concrete only a few metres wide that jutted from the headland, separating the ocean from the harbour. Daniel ran up ahead and swerved against a gust of wind. He flung his skinny arms either side of him for balance, then recovered and slowed down.
‘He doesn’t run like a boy,’ Roy said.
She ignored him. A week. A week since they’d gone for their walk out to the lighthouse with Richard, a week in which the weather had turned on its head the way it did on the coast, everything—the warmth, the calm, the clarity—thrown away, rain coming over at unpredictable moments, on again, off again, pummelling in fists against the windows and the roof, then fragments of blue stumbling across the sky, a sudden burn of intolerable sun, before the clouds locked back into place again and it was all humidity, and waiting, just waiting, for something to break.
The shelter of the headland was behind them, and they held hands as the wind buffeted them. It was like they were on a ship out at sea, Maryanne thought, one of those long container ships that queued up on the horizon, carrying their cargo, coming and going from this place to the next—but this one was carrying nothing and going nowhere, and only the water moved, beating the shore the way it always had, and always would, until none of this was left. Up ahead, the red warning light mounted on its wooden platform blinked through the hazy air.
To one side was the harbour—grey, impenetrable, almost calm—but on the other was the ocean, wild and windblown, booming against the concrete bl
ocks that lined the breakwall, hissing through cracks and crevices between them, clouds of spray drifting across the path with each wave.
‘Let’s turn back,’ Maryanne said.
Roy glanced at her, his dark face flushed, teeth bared, everything in his eyes moving. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’
‘Back home,’ she said. ‘That’s where it is.’
They kept walking.
‘You know why I hurt my thumb?’ Roy said, raising his voice to keep it above the wind. ‘I was distracted. I was thinking. Do you know what I was thinking about?’
‘Daniel!’ she called. ‘Not too far ahead.’
Her son ran on without stopping.
‘Why is it,’ Roy said, ‘that you never mention anyone from work?’
She hesitated. ‘I mention people. All the time.’
He cut her a quick glance, dense with calculation. ‘Not the men.’
‘Where did that come from?’
Maryanne wasn’t sure if he was serious. He often said things in an offhand way at first—it was how he followed them up that counted, how the conversation dropped from one moment to the next, like the lurch you felt going down in a lift. Perhaps it hadn’t been Freya’s words that had lit the fuse, set him smouldering, but this thing, this other thing.
‘Just tell me,’ he said.
‘Don’t be—’ she began, and regretted it straight away.
‘Don’t be what?’ he said. ‘Crazy? Stupid? Ridiculous?’ His voice was bitter, accusing, but eager too.
They kept on walking, leaning a little against each gust of wind, a couple, like all the other couples out for a stroll along the breakwall.
She shook her head. ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘What then? What were you going to say?’ She hadn’t noticed his grip getting tighter, but now it hurt. She didn’t know how to take her hand away without making a scene, without starting something.
‘Not that. I wasn’t going to say that.’
He jerked her to a standstill, turned his back to the ocean to face her, still holding her hand, like he’d forgotten he was holding it, tugging her slightly off balance. ‘What then?’ It was almost a snarl.
A couple walked by just then. She didn’t look up, her face full of heat, but she saw the waves rolling in from the horizon strike the breakwall and burst into spray, wetting their legs and feet as they hurried past. She recalled what Richard had told her, the ship going down there in the mouth of the harbour, all the passengers drowning while people gathered on the shore and looked on, in horror or maybe just because it was the most interesting thing that had happened to them in a long while—a story you’d think back on years afterwards that let you know with a grateful shudder that, yes, you were still alive, even if sometimes you felt dead.
The hours it took for the ship to go down. One survivor.
Another couple were walking towards them, arms interlocked, leaning in towards one another. It wouldn’t do them any good if a large wave hit, but Maryanne envied their closeness. Roy, with his back to them, turned to see what she was looking at, his face rigid. Neither the man nor the woman acknowledged him, and neither spoke as they walked past.
Roy turned back to her. ‘Never the men. Never. You only talk about the women.’
Daniel was way ahead of them now, alongside the blinking red eye on its wooden platform near the end of the breakwall.
‘Let’s go back,’ she said. ‘Please.’ She raised her voice, threw it down the length of the breakwall. ‘Daniel!’
Did her son even hear her? She was about to call out to him again, louder, but Roy wrenched at her hand, still gripped tight in his fist, pulling her back around to face him.
‘Never,’ Roy repeated. ‘So why?’
‘I’m sure I have,’ she said, but she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t—she just couldn’t. Maybe she hadn’t. And what if she hadn’t? She tried to pull her hand free. The feeling was welling again inside her, the mad, relentless feeling of wanting to be away from him at any cost, of wanting to pull the pin on everything she’d been trying to hold together—and why not? Why had she come back to him, again, after everything, come here with him, come back for this?
‘I want an answer,’ he said.
She looked towards the bulwark at the end of the breakwall, the concrete slabs stark against the boiling grey sky surging above. Daniel looked so small, sheets of spray slicing through the air, soaking him as they splattered and fell. He was no longer running, but had turned and started back towards them, his head bowed, as if he were looking for something on the ground. The red light blinked atop its platform in a mute warning or reminder.
‘And don’t give me the silent treatment.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Talk then. Talk. Or do you only talk when you go for a stroll with Richard?’
‘Listen—’
‘No.’ He finally released her hand but then took hold of her chin so that she couldn’t look away. ‘You’re keeping something from me.’
An answer, fierce and reckless, stirred inside her. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff and wanting to topple forward. Except she had fallen before, too many times. And there was nothing you could do once you were falling. All the decisions were made.
Whatever thoughts were in her head, she had to guard them. Maryanne took a breath, made everything quiet inside her, and was about to answer when the air slapped around them in a booming roar and, as she wrenched free of Roy’s grip in wild panic and turned towards her son, she was in time to see a foamy white wall of sea water explode around him.
Then she was screaming, Roy was running, the water tumbling in frothing torrents into the harbour on the other side of the breakwall. Roy was there ahead of her, ankle deep in water, his back turned, then he lifted a bundle and came stumbling back towards her, hugging Daniel’s pale, bloodied, distant face to his chest.
They did not slow down or exchange a word until they got home, Roy clutching Daniel against his bare chest, holding his shirt, wet and bloody, to their son’s forehead. He walked with his head down, not meeting her eyes, and a fury built inside her as she kept pace beside him. When he pushed through the front door, Maryanne was right behind him, and as he carried Daniel through to the living room, she snatched the blood-stained shirt from his hand.
‘You’re not holding it right,’ she snapped as Roy lowered him onto the couch. Daniel’s head slumped against the armrest, his face drained of colour as she pressed the shirt against his forehead, but he was conscious, and his eyes, she noted with relief, were alert. The wound was nasty, but more of a graze—he’d only scraped his forehead.
‘What happened?’ Freya was standing behind them, in the hallway.
‘A freak wave,’ Roy answered in a thick voice.
‘Show me your eyes again,’ Maryanne said, peering at her son’s face.
‘He’ll be okay,’ Roy said. ‘Boys get scratched up. It’ll be fine.’
Maryanne stood up, focusing still on Daniel, but aware of Roy standing there in the doorway, bare-chested, hulking, with that air of sullen defensiveness, like an overgrown child, like it was her job to reassure him that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
She turned her back on him, blocking his view of their son, some part of her daring him to be upset. She pushed the hair away from Daniel’s forehead. ‘Can you see everything clearly?’
‘I think so,’ Daniel mumbled.
‘Go and get some ice,’ she told Freya. ‘Wrap it in a tea towel.’
‘The water makes the blood run,’ Roy said. ‘Makes it look like more than it is.’
‘We can’t afford to take chances with him,’ Maryanne said, and she could feel the edge creep into her voice, the dangerous contempt that must have betrayed itself in her expression as well. ‘The specialist said that. Do you remember? When he was in hospital with his injury? Do you remember that?’
Roy’s voice was soft behind her. ‘Is that a joke?’
Freya re
turned to the room. Maryanne took the tea towel from her, sat beside her son and put it gently against his head. ‘We owe it to Daniel to be more careful.’
Roy scratched his cheek, nails scraping the hard bristle, as if his hand needed something, anything, to do. ‘You were calling to him and he wasn’t listening. That’s what happened. He has to learn to pay attention to what’s happening around him. He needs to take some responsibility.’
‘Responsibility?’ Maryanne couldn’t contain herself anymore. She was up on her feet, facing him. ‘Take responsibility? Like you do, Roy? Like you do?’
He actually took a step back, a startled look in his eyes. Then he recovered. ‘Boys get hurt, Maryanne. They’re meant to. It’s normal.’
‘What happened to him is not normal! You, Roy, are not normal!’ Maryanne pushed him in the chest with one hard finger. ‘What made me leave last year was not some fucking accident!’ She pushed him again. ‘It was not you being careless.’ She pushed him again. ‘You did it! You nearly killed him! It was not an accident. You aren’t some freak fucking wave. You aren’t a force of nature. You are a fucking man with a brain and you decide to do things!’
She went to push him again, but he caught her hand. He gave it a sharp, hard twist that made the bones in her wrist grind into one another, and then he tossed it away.
‘And you?’ he snarled. ‘What about what you decide to do?’
Water dripped from his chin and glistened across his hairy chest. His hands had curled into fists and he stepped forward so that his face almost touched hers, something hard and endless and inviting in his eyes.
‘Go on,’ Maryanne said quietly. ‘Show us your self-control.’
Every breath lifted and dropped his shoulders, his whole body taut, ready, straining towards her. Then he loosened, turned towards Freya and gave a strangled laugh. ‘I’m not the one calling the shots, am I, Freya?’
‘Leave her out of it,’ Maryanne said.
‘She’s a part of this,’ Roy said. ‘We’re all part of this. You’d better remember that.’