The Restorer

by Michael Sala

  Daniel came out as she walked into the kitchen.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  She pulled him in close, his warm, thin body, ran her hand over his forehead and the bandage there. ‘Does it still hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  He was studying her. ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘No, sweetheart.’ She gently pushed him away. ‘It’s just my day off. I just want to have a day off.’

  ‘Do you want to hear my song? I’ve been practising.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be a good listener right now. Maybe later.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. After dinner.’

  ‘I want to play for you now.’

  ‘Just…let me be for a while, okay?’ She put her hand on his head, touched the edge of the bandage again, ran her fingers through his hair, but he walked away without a pause.

  It was one in the afternoon. Hunger gnawed at her stomach, but she didn’t want to eat. She took more tablets. Valium barely seemed to touch her—it hadn’t for a long time. She lay down on the couch, her heartbeat flicking like a whip against the inside of her ears. Her eyelids sank down for a moment, and when she opened them, it was two-thirty. Roy would be home soon. The mountain of everything she would have to get through before she lay down again that night in bed reared above her.

  She imagined him getting into his car and driving home from work, in towards the city, towards her, guiding the car along with one hand on the steering wheel, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, one hairy elbow resting on the edge of the wound-down window. She pictured another car coming in the other direction. She pictured the two cars crumpling into one another. She sobbed. For grief, for loss, for something that had long since been dug out of her.

  She went down the hallway and picked up the phone. She dialled. Her mother did not pick up this time. ‘It’s me,’ she said to the answering machine. ‘I need to talk to you. We need to talk. Mum, are you there? Can you pick up? Please pick up.’

  She put down the phone, wiped her face with the back of one hand, and stood there staring at the phone, willing it to ring. She could remember it all too clearly, her mother’s hand on her father’s shoulder, that look in her mother’s grey eyes, and the way it had been buried with that small, controlled gesture of affection. It wasn’t fair to think of it now, but she couldn’t help it. She could see her mother sitting in her chair by the window, staring at the phone too, that same look in her eye, and giving a slight, almost imperceptible shake of her head. As if to say, you can wait. You can wait a little longer.

  27

  And then it was full-blown summer, and the year had dwindled to a few last restless days. Christmas had come and gone, and Freya was glad it was over, all of them stuck there together in the stifling heat and gloom of the house, and who cared about presents, and her and Mum both thinking of Nan but not talking about her, Dad veering between bursts of good humour and black, brooding moods, and the beach too blisteringly bright and crowded to offer any sort of relief. She was stretched out on her bed, headphones on, listening to music. Heat already radiated through the window in her bedroom and it was only morning. The forecast was for a storm today, severe weather. She was longing for it, but there was no sign of it yet. It was impossible even to imagine.

  Mum and Dad were talking again downstairs—she could hear them through the music—and after a while she realised they were getting louder. She took off her headphones and swung out of bed. By the time she’d made it down the stairs to the landing outside Daniel’s room, they had fallen silent.

  They were below her in the hallway. Dad was pressing Mum against the wall by the neck, his face close to hers. A step creaked under Freya’s feet. He turned and saw her standing there, blinked rapidly several times and dropped his hand. Mum rubbed her neck and looked away.

  ‘Freya,’ he said. ‘We were talking.’

  Freya didn’t say anything.

  ‘Why don’t you get out for a while?’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s beautiful out there.’

  He stepped back from Mum, wiped his hands down his shirt and thrust them into his pockets. Mum manoeuvred past him and disappeared towards the kitchen. He glanced after her, then back up at Freya.

  ‘Don’t waste it,’ he said, ‘the morning.’

  He took his house keys from the hook that he’d mounted on the wall near the front door, gave her an awkward nod and left the house. Freya waited until he’d gone before she came down into the hall.

  Mum was in the kitchen. The tap was running and she was facing the courtyard, splashing water onto her face. A thousand thoughts ran through Freya’s head, but in the end she couldn’t figure out what to say, so she backed away, returned to her room and lay back down on her bed. She put her headphones on and pressed play on the Walkman, then stop, then she fast-forwarded until she found herself halfway through a song by Pink Floyd about being comfortably numb, and she wished that was her, comfortably numb, but the numbness inside was too heavy to be anything close to comfortable, and her heart beat through it like a blunt hammer.

  She closed her eyes and thought of Josh’s mother, standing up on that cliff, thinking—what? There was a new song on about being on thin ice, things cracking. She became aware that she was trembling, but it was not her, it was the bed itself, and as she realised this, the trembling exploded into a violent, rocking lurch that threw her from the bed onto the floor, which was shaking too, and it might have been an explosion, the way the walls wrenched into life, but they kept moving, back and forth, and back and forth, the whole structure around her drawing into a shuddering kinaesthetic groan, and she was part of the house, part of its coming apart, part of the glass shattering and objects thumping down around her, her eyes fixed on the carpet, her knees and elbows rigid, the ground beneath her lifting, rolling, as if on a wave, and her mouth open, caught on a breath, a scream that she could not release, until there was nothing, nothing around her—and all of it stopped.

  She was on her hands and knees, remained there, waiting, listening warily to the sudden quiet of the house, but nothing came. She got up, slowly, and took a shaky step towards the window. A huge crack had appeared through one of the panes, right across the sky. Dust swirled up from somewhere past the houses on the other side of the road. The sun blazed down across an empty blue sky.

  The door swung open behind her. Mum stood in the doorway, Daniel’s arms around her waist. ‘We’ve just had an earthquake. A big one. Let’s get outside.’

  Out the front, people were spilling onto the street, milling about—neighbours, Freya supposed, people whose faces were only a little familiar, whose lives seemed almost as remote from hers and from each other’s as they were from life at the bottom of the ocean, but they were talking to one another now like they were old friends. Richard was on the footpath with an old woman, and they joined him.

  ‘There won’t be another one straight away,’ Richard was saying. ‘There might be an aftershock later.’

  ‘But did you hear the crash?’ the woman said, her eyes large.

  Richard nodded. ‘A big building’s come down somewhere on the other side of the mall.’

  The woman’s red painted lips sagged at the corners. ‘What about our houses?’

  Richard shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, they’re not going to come down. They’ll be here long after we are.’

  From the direction of the hospital, they heard several ambulances start their sirens, loud at first, then trailing off as they sped away into the city.

  Mum looked in the direction of the hospital. ‘There could be a lot of people injured. They’re going to need everyone they can get at the hospital.’

  ‘Go on then,’ Richard said. ‘I can keep an eye on the kids for you.’

  Mum hesitated. ‘Maybe just until Roy gets back?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Richard said, ‘maybe until then.’<
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  ‘He can’t be far away,’ Mum said.

  She went inside and soon she was back out again with her uniform on.

  ‘Don’t go, Mum,’ Daniel said.

  She put a hand on his head. ‘I’m only a few blocks away. People will need me over there. Your sister’s here, and Richard too. You’ll be fine.’

  Freya put her arms about him and they watched Mum walk away, her steps quick and sure, until she vanished around the corner.

  ‘Hey!’

  Josh was coming down the street towards them. He’d been running.

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ Freya said as he came closer.

  He stopped in front of them and stood there, breathing hard. ‘I just came to see if you needed any help.’

  A faint smile crept onto Richard’s face. ‘You look like you need a glass of water. I’ll be right back.’ He went inside.

  Freya stood facing Josh. ‘What would you have done if we actually needed help? Like if we were trapped under rubble or something?’

  He grinned and flexed his skinny arms. ‘I would have used my superhuman strength to get you out.’

  Richard came out and gave Josh the glass of water, and then looked around for Daniel, who was standing at the edge of the footpath, his face tilted up towards the house. ‘Don’t worry,’ Richard said. ‘You know how long these houses have been here?’

  Daniel shrugged.

  ‘You can see the years they were built along the top.’ Richard pointed at the facade above Freya’s window. ‘See? Yours says 1905.’ He winked at Freya, and then, still talking and pointing up at the houses, one hand on Daniel’s shoulder, guided him away.

  Freya sat with Josh on the steps. They both looked at the street, at the people clustered on the footpath, arms crossed, still talking, occasionally staring at their houses with wary expressions. Freya and Josh talked for a while too, and then they lapsed into silence.

  ‘Listen,’ Josh said then, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For telling you about my mum. I shouldn’t have. You didn’t need to know that. I wish I didn’t know.’

  ‘It was okay.’

  He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his chin cupped in his hands. ‘Not like that. I’m over it, anyway.’

  ‘No you’re not. How could you be?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not, and I couldn’t. But listen. If you just want to be friends, that’s okay too. We can be friends. The way I see it, people like you and me need all the friends we can get. You can’t knock that back, especially not for any stupid reasons, not in a place like this.’

  ‘Do you think it’d be better somewhere else?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘Like in Sydney?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. Another country maybe even. Just right away from here.’

  He shrugged. ‘Depends. It’s worth finding out, I guess. Better than always wondering.’

  ‘You have it, you know,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Superhuman strength. Your mum killed herself, and you get up and go to school every day.’ She laughed a little. ‘Or most days.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and gave a brief smile. He rested his arms on his knees, and they looked out together, towards the harbour.

  Freya wanted to put her hand on his shoulder, but she didn’t. She sat beside him, though, and the silence between them was at least comfortable again.

  At that moment, Dad’s car pulled up out the front.

  Dad got out, glanced from her to Josh and back again. ‘I tried to call. The phones are all dead.’

  Richard came over, Daniel beside him. ‘Hi there, Roy. Maryanne’s gone off to the hospital. I was keeping an eye on the kids until you got here.’

  Dad grunted. ‘And she just went off, leaving you in charge, did she?’

  ‘There’ll be people injured,’ Richard said. ‘She wanted to help.’

  ‘She always wants to help other people.’ Dad glanced from Freya to Daniel. ‘Come inside with me.’

  ‘Go on,’ Richard said to Daniel. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  He turned to go.

  ‘Richard,’ Dad called.

  ‘What?’

  Dad walked back down the steps, so that he was standing right up in Richard’s face, his arms tense, hands not quite loose. Richard was taller than Dad, just, but much skinnier. ‘They’re my children,’ Dad said. ‘I’m the one who tells them what to do. Got that?’

  He turned and went into the house. Freya grimaced apologetically at Richard and took Daniel’s hand.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said to Josh.

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered.

  Dad was in the hallway. He was touching the walls, running hands over the cracks as if he were nursing a dying animal. Freya hesitated to go past him, and he didn’t seem in a hurry to move.

  ‘So much work,’ he said, and she didn’t know if he was talking about what had been lost or what was still to come.

  28

  By the time Maryanne got there, they were already bringing people out of the hospital. The North Wing, the York Wing, the outpatients building—all were being emptied. Stunned patients were walking or being guided out the doors, standing there in the park, looking up at the hospital, medical staff everywhere, bustling about, getting organised.

  ‘We have to go up,’ a nursing unit manager was saying. ‘We’ll need to bring down the patients who can’t move. We can’t use the lifts. There could be an aftershock.’

  ‘I’m not going in there again,’ someone said. ‘The whole place could collapse.’

  Maryanne stepped forward. ‘If it goes, it goes. It’s the same for us, really.’

  Adrian Godfrey was rolling up his sleeves. ‘There’s no point waiting around, then.’

  A group of them started forward, more surged behind them, and then she was clambering up the granite steps, solid under her feet, though they were hidden in near darkness, and then back out into the light of day. The abandoned wards looked so strange, cluttered with overturned trays and blankets and all sorts of debris. The only thing that felt the same was the view of the sea framed by every window they passed, and the sea breeze that came through.

  Doctors, clinicians, orderlies and nurses were moving around her, anyone who could do anything, and then down the stairs she went with Adrian and two others, each of them grasping a corner of a blanket—it was all they could lay hold of at short notice—with an old man not long out of surgery slung between them, groaning softly with each step.

  As they worked, bits of information came through—widespread damage, injuries, a number of fatalities, most of them where the Workers Club had collapsed, although there would have been a lot more had the earthquake struck in the evening.

  It was coming into the middle of the day. Outside, ambulances were coming and going, their sirens blaring. Tarpaulins out in the park shaded patients against the blazing sun, food was being organised, and a couple of lifesavers had brought over large wheelie bins full of drinks. People were holding up blankets so that patients could go to the toilet. ‘Just put the blanket over my head,’ an old woman said to an orderly as Maryanne walked past. ‘I don’t care if people see me doing my business—I just don’t want to see them.’

  Minutes later they were climbing the steps again, making their way back into the wards. Someone had already ransacked a drugs cabinet, pulled it straight off the wall to get it open.

  Maryanne shook her head. ‘When did they even find the time to do that?’

  ‘There’s always an opportunity,’ Adrian said, giving her a look, ‘if you’re willing to take it.’

  Things didn’t slow down the whole day. A woman was brought in from nearby in the back of a car. She’d been under an awning that had collapsed. A couple of doctors stood in the makeshift emergency ward in the park discussing what to do with her. The triage nurse looked down at her. ‘It doesn’t matter. She’s dying.’ Maryanne found hers
elf sitting beside the woman, who was not much older than her, watching her die. She held the woman’s hand, and wondered as she waited who would sit by her bed one day.

  By the time the last patients were being put into an ambulance and taken off towards other hospitals, she was beyond exhausted, and the sun was gone. Workmen were setting up barriers and fencing around the hospital. Maryanne stood at the edge of the park, slid a cigarette between her lips and stared up at the Nickson Wing.

  Adrian came to stand beside her. He offered a lighter and she bent her head towards it.

  ‘Shame to think this is probably the end for the place,’ he said.

  She drew in the smoke and exhaled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’ve been people wanting to get rid of the hospital for a long time. Coastal land’s worth a fortune these days. They’ve already got engineers talking about demolishing it.’

  ‘Do you think they will?’

  ‘Like I said,’ he smiled, ‘there’s always an opportunity, if you’re willing to take it.’

  ‘I can’t imagine this neighbourhood without the hospital,’ she said.

  He lit his own cigarette. ‘I used to go bodysurfing when I was on call. I’d just keep an eye on the Nickson Wing. Someone would hang a red towel over the balcony if they needed me. I’d be up there in five minutes.’ He glanced at her. ‘That’s not something they let you do these days. I guess everything changes.’

  ‘My unit’s being closed down,’ she said, ‘but they told us it was just for the time being. I’ve been given a few days off while they figure out where they’re going to put me next. I’m not looking forward to it.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘They’ll be happy to have you wherever you end up.’

  She gave a wry shake of her head. ‘I wasn’t talking about that. I meant being home for a week with Roy.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  She wiped her damp face with the back of one hand. ‘Isn’t there meant to be a storm coming tonight?’

  Adrian nodded. ‘Apparently it’s already in Sydney, a big one.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know it, though, would you?’