The Restorer

by Michael Sala

He walked out of the room, Freya stepping back to let him pass. Maryanne stared after him. His heavy tread lifted into the house above her. Their bedroom door slammed shut. She had wanted something from him, she realised. She had wanted him to snap one last time, so she could take the children and walk out, do it when her anger was larger than everything else put together, when it filled the space inside her that had been carved out by exhaustion and anxiety and doubt, when it all became worth the risk.

  ‘Mum?’ Daniel stirred on the couch.

  Freya was watching her too.

  Her racing heart. The sudden trembling that surged up from her knees, the wash of adrenalin that had nowhere to go, and the heat in her wrist, now a dull, aching throb. She stood there between her children in silence, knowing that they were waiting—they were always waiting for her. Then she sat down again, put the ice against her son’s head and stroked his hair with her other hand.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said eventually. ‘Everything is okay.’

  Whenever something like that happened between them, a fight like that, if it remained unresolved by the time they went to bed, they would end up having sex. It was something she couldn’t really understand, as if the energy that had erupted needed an outlet, one way or the other. He’d be insistent, urgent, vulnerable and aggressively sexual all at once, not so much apologising as offering himself, and wanting something in return. To say no to him then seemed inconceivable, like breaking a law of nature. And the truth of it was, when she gave him what he wanted, no matter what her mood had been before then, she enjoyed it on some level, that sense of being anchored, of being consumed by something vital and fundamental. God, it didn’t even make sense to her, let alone anyone else, but there it was.

  Afterwards, Maryanne took a deep breath as Roy rolled off her. Her body felt sticky, her pubic bone tender, her chest hollowed out. Her wrist still hurt. Her pulse was losing its urgency, a strange, frozen clarity settling over her thoughts. They lay on their backs, the sheet drawn across their waists, his hand slung like an anchor across her belly, those thick, heavy fingers splayed.

  ‘That was good,’ he said.

  She didn’t say anything. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. He repulsed her all of a sudden, his nearness, the weight of him.

  The curtains were flapping softly in the wind, by turns clinging against the window frames then snapping into the room. She got up to go to the bathroom. The light was on in the landing. Daniel’s door was ajar. She stepped under the shower and let the water run across her body, enjoying the feeling of the water, so hot it was almost painful, burning into her and spilling away. Roy. She thought of him, there on the other side of that wall, in the bedroom. She thought of him on the day their son had nearly died—how long ago was it now? Almost two years, two years. She turned off the taps, tightened them, but they were still dripping as she stepped out onto the cold tiles.

  She hoped that he would be asleep, and when she walked back into the room she thought at first that he might be, lying there with the white sheet bunched at his tanned side like a wave that had washed up against a hard coastline, one arm over his head. But then she lay down beside him and he shifted his arm, put his hand back on her belly, settled those thick, rough fingers into her skin.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, as if they had just finished, as if he had taken a single breath since she had gone and come back. ‘That was definitely good.’

  She lay there and did not speak.

  ‘You know, it’s pretty much done,’ he said, staring up at the ceiling. ‘This house. We set out to do it in a year, and we did. No wonder we’re on edge, hey? There’s a few things to do still, bit of work on the bathroom, and outside, but really nothing that’ll take too long. I can see to that after Christmas. Then we can think about what to do next—if we’re going to sell it, or maybe hang on to it. What do you think?’

  She didn’t answer.

  He turned his head. ‘Are you even listening to me?’

  ‘Sorry, I was—’

  ‘What?’ He raised himself on one elbow. ‘What?’

  ‘Thinking.’

  He was silent, something working on the other side of his eyes. ‘About today?’

  ‘Just thinking,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he said. ‘And about what happened. Let’s move on.’

  ‘Because that’s what we do,’ she murmured.

  He made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a grunt, his mouth closed. ‘You just can’t help yourself, can you,’ he said. ‘Look at all the good it’s done you, all this thinking you always do.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll learn.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. It means nothing, Roy.’ She curled into herself with the blanket around her.

  He lay down again too, and the room became quiet and heavy until she heard him begin to snore. She shut her eyes, floated in a waking dream alongside him, and in the noise of his breath she heard that wave on the breakwall, saw it over and over again, Daniel caught and swept away from her, felt that feeling, that terrible feeling, wondering why her voice had not been loud enough to call him back or if she had even called him at all.

  26

  Without realising that she was going to do it, Maryanne picked up the phone and dialled her mother’s number. Her mother picked up after two rings.

  ‘God,’ Maryanne said. ‘Were you just standing there waiting for me to call?’

  ‘That’s what I do,’ her mother answered.

  Maryanne wondered if calling her had been a mistake.

  ‘Well?’ her mother said. ‘What’s happening?’

  Everything was arranged in her head, pressed in there, waiting to explode out of a single, compressed space—the things she would tell her mother, the man Roy had beaten in front of the children, the walk on the breakwall, the wave, Daniel, the way she had faced Roy afterwards and been sure that he was going to snap—all of that waiting to burst out of her.

  ‘I just wanted to see how you were,’ she said.

  ‘Well, good. The new medication they’ve got me on is working beautifully.’

  Did her mother mean that she was good, or that it was good that she’d rung? A pause lengthened between them. Maryanne imagined her mother adjusting her hair with one hand.

  ‘How is Roy?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Fine,’ Maryanne said. ‘He’s done a great job with the house. You didn’t see it when we first moved in—’

  ‘And how are the children?’

  ‘They’re well. Daniel had an accident—’

  Her mother’s voice tightened. ‘An accident?’

  ‘A wave,’ Maryanne said quickly. ‘He was hit by a wave.’

  In her head, all she could see was Roy afterwards, in the living room, his bare chest heaving, the whole of him a coiled spring, his eyes unrecognisable.

  ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘He’s fine. He cut his forehead, but he’s okay.’

  Her mother pressed on. ‘It was a wave, wasn’t it? Were you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maryanne said, feeling the back of her neck prickle with irritation and something else more desperate. ‘Of course I was there. Why do you have to make everything so difficult?’

  When her mother spoke again, her voice was cool, formal. ‘Is there something on your mind?’

  Maryanne wrapped the cord of the phone around her fingers, pulling it tight. ‘I just wanted to talk, really, just to hear your voice.’

  ‘All right,’ her mother said. ‘Well, I’m good, and you’re good, and I’m glad Roy’s behaving. I suppose things have fallen into place for you.’

  ‘They have,’ Maryanne said. She was glad her mother couldn’t see her face.

  Her mother sighed. ‘God, Maryanne. You should be with someone who treats a woman properly.’

  Maryanne laughed sharply. ‘Like Dad?’

  ‘Well, why not like that?’

  ‘You never said anything when he hit me.’

  Her mother
drew an exasperated breath. ‘Don’t go confusing what he did once or twice with what Roy does. No one back then gave a smack a second thought. Things are different now.’

  ‘For you, maybe.’

  ‘Well,’ her mother said. ‘It’s Christmas coming up. I’ll be thinking of you and the children. I hope you’ll be able to enjoy it.’

  ‘I have to go,’ Maryanne said.

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘There’s someone at the door.’

  ‘Well, that’s convenient.’

  Maryanne held the phone at arm’s length. She stared at it, and then she pressed the plastic receiver to her cheek again. ‘I love you.’

  ‘So you should. I’m your mother.’

  As Maryanne started to put down the phone, her mother’s voice came back at her.

  ‘Maryanne, wait.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t either. But it’s your life now. You’re at the wheel. There are people depending on you.’

  ‘Yes, so you’ve told me. I have to go.’

  ‘The door,’ her mother said. ‘Yes. Well, you know how to reach me, and I guess I’ll just be waiting until then.’

  Maryanne returned the phone to its cradle and walked down the hall. She opened the front door without knowing why, almost as if she had to, as if opening it would somehow make what she’d said to her mother less of a lie. As she looked out, the neighbours across the road were getting into their car. The man looked up at her and smiled and then, still smiling, got into the car and drove off. Her heart was thumping in her chest, as if it were about to burst through. How could the world not hear it?

  Maryanne left Daniel with Freya and walked into the mall alone. She wanted to walk, to keep walking, until there was nothing left inside her to think about. She wanted to see people, strangers, but she did not want to talk, and she avoided anyone she recognised. There were always plenty of people from the hospital bustling around at all times of day. The harbour came at her in glimpses between the buildings, framed by the wires and fences and iron structures of the railway line.

  David Jones was full of people and laughter and animated voices, the escalators carrying a constant flow of shoppers up and down from the higher floors. She drifted around the ground floor in the narrow channels between shelves and racks, looking at hats and bags and gloves as if she were making decisions, but she didn’t really see any of the things that passed through her hands. She had a splitting headache. She rummaged for Panadol in her bag and swallowed three.

  She wasn’t looking where she was going and almost collided with an older man, who leaned back to let her pass. He was well dressed, a salt and pepper beard shaped around his jaw. He gave her a smile and a wink that emptied from his eyes as swiftly as water tipped from a glass. It made her think of her father.

  Her father. The way he’d always opened the door for her mother, or pulled out her chair when they went out. The way he’d sat there in the years before his death, slowly deflating, in his favourite chair or at the dining table. He had been pleasant enough as an old man, sitting there with his pipe, holding court for brief moments, easing off, letting Freya and then Daniel clamber around him, giving a soft chuckle if they misbehaved, shaking his head, but never saying anything much. She could still see it—his hand coming to rest on Freya’s head, then lifting away, the bemused look on his face when she gave his leg a sudden hug. A benevolent vagueness had filled him up by then, only flashes coming through of what he’d been like before, when Maryanne was growing up. He had mellowed, like so many men did, better at being a grandfather than a father.

  When she was nine or ten she had often played with the boys and girls on the street after dinner during summer, with the days winding away into long, sullen sunsets. One time she’d found herself in the diminishing tail of some long, worn-out summer afternoon, at the end of their street, beside a derelict house, in a hollow surrounded by several dense bushes, with a boy from the neighbourhood.

  The other kids had all gone home, but they remained there, whether by pure chance or intention or the rhythm of the day or something more instinctive. Daring each other into something neither of them wanted to talk about. They’d been facing one another on their knees, almost close enough to touch, twigs and seeds digging into her knees. The smell and the taste of burnt leaves and blossoms hung in the air, the watchful sound of insects blurring the more distant sounds of the neighbourhood.

  The boy had his shorts and underwear pulled down past his thighs, which were pale and smooth and surprisingly not so very different from her own. She had her skirt around her waist. He was touching her very gently with a dry length of grass. Perhaps it was the heat that softened the world outside even as it sharpened theirs, or perhaps their intense fascination, but neither of them heard the approach of her father until the bushes nearest them were violently shoved apart and he stood there looking in. She had probably dropped her skirt in time, but the boy’s pale genitals were on full display. The boy stayed there on his knees, staring up at her father with a blanched, stunned look.

  She did not even remember her father’s face, only that he picked her up by the hair and dragged her back towards the house without ever letting go, and that when she tripped, she felt a hot pain ripple through her skull, and all she saw looking up was his broad, implacable back. Inside the house, he threw her down and kicked her. It was the first time she remembered being kicked by anyone. The shock of it was worse than the sensation—being on the floor, her bladder emptying, her hands not knowing where to go, once or twice catching the hard tip of his shoes, her mother hiding somewhere, in some other part of the house, until it was over.

  Her back and buttocks had still felt hot and bruised when she sat at the table for dinner.

  Her father did not look at her. ‘Maryanne should stay inside more after school,’ he said as her mother handed him the gravy dish. ‘Help you around the house.’

  Her mother had nodded and then asked a few questions about his day.

  When he’d finished eating, her father dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and leaned back in his chair while her mother cleared the table. He appeared thoughtful—sad, somehow. Her mother paused near him as she walked out with the used dishes, to rest her free hand on his shoulder, and her mouth pursed, her eyes flicking for a moment from Maryanne to the top of her father’s lowered head.

  And there was a clarity in that gaze, like all the parts in her eyes had shifted for a brief instant to show the thoughts on the other side clear and unfiltered, and her mother knew exactly what. Then she lifted some loose fragment of hair or lint from his jacket in a way that was both tentative and affectionate, and walked off into the kitchen.

  Maryanne saw the boy from the bushes around a few more times, but they never spoke again, as if any words at all might resurrect between them the humiliating and shameful shape of her father.

  After she’d taken the Panadol, Maryanne headed in the direction of the house, but she turned right before she came to their street and wandered instead to the beach. It was wild again today, the heat in the sun magnified through high grey clouds, but the wind that swept in off the water was cool, the red flags warning people away from the surf whipping and snapping with each gust. She found a pack of Valium in her handbag and took a couple of those as well.

  Walking south along the esplanade to the end of the beach, she came to a set of crumbling concrete steps and followed them up to the narrow road beneath the cliff that led towards the terraced park overlooking the sea. She was sweating, could feel it dripping along her ribs and down the small of her back. At the top of the park she took another road back down the hill, back towards the sea, not stopping to look around her or take in the view. She followed the road as it dipped down past the squat bunker-like structure of the police station, and past the hospital and the people there leaning on the balconies stacked up against the sky.

  She lit a cigarette and smoked as she walked. It was strange how often, w
hen her mind was free of other things, her thoughts now turned to Roy, the thought of leaving him. Just thinking of it, being immersed in the thought of it like some sort of dream, was exhilarating—living in a house that was empty of him, just her and the children—but then there was always the anxious tumble of decisions to be made, actions taken, the impenetrable valley of cause and effect, and finally the bleak tension of wondering what it would mean to set all that into motion, the counting of what would be destroyed, what would be left standing—and above all what he would do.

  Eventually she reached the street that intersected theirs and carried on until she reached their back alley. The dog was barking, the sound echoing down the length of the narrow lane. Its home was a small courtyard out the back of a terrace a few doors from theirs. She came to a halt beside a gate as high as her head, dropped the smouldering stub of the cigarette and ground it under her foot. The gate shuddered against the dog’s weight and the scrabble of its claws. Through a gap in the wood, she could see it, a chocolate labrador with large, black, shining eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you just shut up!’ she hissed. ‘It’s not getting you anywhere!’

  The dog kept barking. Maryanne wanted to wrench open the gate and send the dog running down the alley and out of the neighbourhood forever. She wanted to hit the dog with her bag. She wanted to fill a piece of meat with poison and shove it into the animal’s mouth.

  There were tears in her eyes. Her vision was all blurry with them. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her shirt and got her first clear look at the dog. It was watching her intently now, without making a sound. Crouching beside the gate, she pushed her hand through the gap. The dog came forward, its head lowered, silent. She stroked its muzzle, its wet nose. Her rage was gone and she felt only pity.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she told it. ‘Everything’s okay. I understand.’

  The dog pressed its nose against her hand, and then she felt the warm, wet rasp of its tongue.

  By the time she got home and closed the gate of the courtyard behind her, the dog was barking again.