by Michael Sala
Maryanne pushed past Roy and went to her son. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
Roy gave a soft grunt behind her.
Her pulse was thrumming against her temple. She took a breath, released only part of it. Roy was standing there still, in the middle of the room, all his weight concentrated in his stare. Even with her back to him, she could feel it bearing down on her shoulders and neck. She smiled at Daniel. ‘Of course you are, darling. Dinner must be ready. Let’s have some.’
A stew. The meat was tender—it had been cooking for long enough. They sat around the table, the three of them, and ate, though Maryanne only picked at it, had trouble swallowing. The news was on, grainy pictures of the long-ruling Romanian dictator and his wife who had been executed in Europe on Christmas Day.
‘Aren’t you eating?’ Roy said.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t feel well.’
A bird was calling out in the gathering gloom outside, its sad cry lifting and falling above the soft burr of the television in the corner, and the dog was barking too. Get out, she imagined it crying. Get out. Roy was staring at her, and she kept a smile on her face, never meeting his eyes, while she figured out what to do next.
After dinner, she took Daniel upstairs. It was a relief to have an excuse to be away from Roy. While Daniel showered, she stayed in his room, then she put him in bed and sat with him, running her hands gently through his damp hair.
‘You still haven’t listened to the songs I learned,’ he said.
‘I promise, tomorrow.’
He pulled the sheet up to his neck. ‘Are you going to work tonight?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Daniel’s expression collapsed a little. ‘I don’t like it when you’re not home at night.’
She kissed him on the forehead. ‘Close your eyes, and when you open them, it’ll be morning and I’ll be home. That’s how you make time disappear.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he muttered.
‘It’s easy,’ she told him. ‘I’ll do it too.’
It was silent downstairs. Roy hadn’t turned on the television or put on a record. She imagined him sitting at the dining table with his large, restless hands in front of him, brooding on his anger, building it. There was nothing she could do about that now. One thing at a time. She rested her head against Daniel’s, let herself be calmed by his breath against her skin, its particular childish scent, and waited for her son to fall asleep.
31
The sun was gone and Ally was holding her hand in a sweaty grip as they passed a bottle between them. They crossed the barrier and set off along the path from the cliffs down to the beach, and Freya saw a fire burning below. There were moths around her, a plague of them, something strange and biblical, bogong moths, beating soft and powdery through the air. She’d never seen so many.
The roar of the sea gathered and thickened in the salt-saturated air. She thought about Daniel, the broken promise—who would read to him if she didn’t? She thought about Josh, his mother in midair, plummeting towards the hard ground and away from him, away from everyone she had ever loved. Love—what was it even? She laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing. These moths. There’s so many of them.’
‘I know,’ Ally said. ‘Never seen anything like it.’
‘I’m so drunk.’
‘Slow down then.’
‘Nah. Let’s speed up.’
A pleasant fog swirled around her head, but it was treacherous too, like it was hiding something that meant her harm, and she realised that, in a way, she was afraid of herself, like she didn’t know what she would do next. She shivered and rubbed her arms. Ally handed her the bottle and she swallowed another mouthful of the cheap, sweet, passionfruit-flavoured wine. It was easy to drink, went straight to your head without you hardly noticing. The gassy drink ballooned inside her and lapped at the bottom of her throat, threatening to come up.
She tried to imagine Mum somewhere like this, doing something like this. Mum must have. She must have all the time. God, she never wanted to be like Mum. But she wanted to figure it out—how you could end up like that, with a man like Dad, how you could stay with him and live like that for so long, longer than she had even been alive?
They were halfway down the narrow concrete path, with the cliff face beside them and the rocks and scraps of saltbush falling away in a ragged tumble towards the sand. She burped. Ally laughed at her. She saw in her mind suddenly the girl from school, the one who had been killed, standing in the quadrangle, one hand on her hip, talking to a boy, looking over her shoulder a moment, looking behind her, before laughing and returning to whatever it was she’d been saying. Like she’d known, or some part of her had, that something was waiting for her.
‘It’s funny how it all just goes on, isn’t it?’ Freya said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, that girl from school got killed at a party. And here we are, at another party. And whoever did it is still out there.’
Ally looked away. ‘You’re being morbid.’
Freya ignored her. ‘She was like this person that we knew and talked to—I mean not much, but still. And now she’s just like a story we talk about.’
‘Weird, huh. Anyway, that was last year. New beginnings, all that.’
‘Yeah,’ Freya said.
As they stepped onto the beach, the fire was burning high before them. Piles of driftwood lay heaped like bodies in its light. A portable stereo wedged in the sand was playing ‘Johnny Come Home’ by Fine Young Cannibals. She walked with Ally over to some of the boys and started talking. Despite the heat of the day, it was cool down here between the sea and the cliffs, and getting cooler now that darkness was falling. Only the sand was warm.
All the while, Freya kept drinking, one conversation bleeding into the next, one song into another, more and more stars filling up the sky. Mum would be heading off to work soon, off to see that doctor with the white hair, to stand around and chat and laugh with him, maybe. Did Mum think about them when she was at work? When she was that other person, the one who threw her head back when she laughed? Mum said she always worried about them, but at the hospital that day she’d looked like she didn’t have a worry in the world. Freya thought about the girl from school again, wondered what she’d told her mum before she went out that night. And somewhere in all of that thought, she was standing alone again with Ally.
‘Do you reckon she knew?’
Ally looked at her with glazed eyes. ‘What?’
‘You know, her mum. That girl who was murdered.’
‘Are you still talking about that? Have you been obsessing about that all this time?’
‘But do you think she knew something was wrong, that her daughter was gone, before she like found out?’
‘How would she have?’
‘I don’t know. You know how they reckon people just feel things sometimes?’
Ally shrugged. ‘I’ve never thought about that. You need to stop thinking about it too. No one wants to talk about that anymore.’
Suddenly Freya didn’t want to talk about it anymore either. She took the bottle out of Ally’s hands and swallowed a warm mouthful before handing it back. Someone was looking at her across the fire. Tim. A shiver rippled through her.
She wanted to fold her arms across her chest, but she didn’t. He came walking over. He had a goatee these days, a bunch of leather necklaces draped against the taut indentation of his tanned chest, a shark tooth on display, an ivory cross. It made him look even older. Before she knew it, they were talking together, just the two of them, at the edge of the water.
‘Haven’t seen you around much,’ he said.
‘I haven’t been going down to the beach that much.’
‘Shame. You looked good in a bikini. Here, have some of this.’
He gave her his flask, and she took a swig. It was whisky or something like that. It burned the insides of her cheeks and he
r throat and made her cough. He laughed and she saw the white edge of his upper teeth as he cocked his head to one side. A muscle flexed in the line of his jaw, like he was chewing on something.
‘The first bit,’ he said, ‘always tastes like shit.’
‘After that it tastes good?’
‘After that you stop noticing.’
She nodded, swallowed some more while he watched. She thought about the darkness of the water and how there could be anything under it now, anything, swimming close to the shore right where some of the others were splashing around. Anything, and you wouldn’t know until it found you.
She licked her lips. Her mouth felt dry. The tape finished and then someone put in a different mix. The first song on was ‘Jeane’ by the Smiths. Josh had put that song on a tape for her. That line about happiness and not knowing what it meant but looking into someone’s eyes and not seeing it there—she loved it.
‘What?’ Tim said.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I like this song.’
A couple of boys threw a heavy piece of driftwood onto the fire. Cinders flew up from the fire in plumes of heat and wafted over the sand. Within the dark boundary of rock and saltbush at the foot of the cliff, someone was hunched over and vomiting.
She suddenly noticed Josh sitting there off to one side with a couple of other boys.
And Ally was standing beside her again. ‘I’m going. This party’s no good. You coming?’
It was past ten already. She should be heading home soon. Can I trust you? Mum had asked her.
Freya felt Tim listening beside her. ‘I might stay,’ she said.
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah.’
Ally dragged her off to one side, swayed in and out of her vision. ‘You’re too drunk. He’s like twenty-something.’
‘So?’
‘You’re fifteen. And he’s a creep. Everyone knows he’s a creep. Except his stupid deadshit mates. How can you not see that?’
‘Maybe you just don’t know him.’
A look of disgust passed over Ally’s face. ‘I know him all right. You just have to look at a guy like that to know him.’
‘Maybe that’s the thing.’ Freya heard herself laugh. ‘You don’t even know anything about me.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I’m staying here for now.’
Ally tugged at her hand. ‘Come back with me. Don’t be an idiot. You’re smashed.’
‘I’m not. Just go. I’ll be fine. I can look after myself.’
‘I’m not leaving you.’
Freya raised her voice. ‘Go on. Just go.’ A few people turned their heads. ‘Fuck, Ally. Don’t act like my mum. I’ve already got one. Go.’
‘I’ll give her a lift home,’ Tim said, and something in his voice unsettled her, but it didn’t make her change her mind. And then Ally was gone, walking up the narrow steps towards the city, which from this angle, down below on the beach, with the sea so close, might not have even been there at all.
32
Maryanne lifted her head with a start. Daniel was snoring softly. She realised that she had drifted off too. It was almost time to go to work. Her face felt sweaty. It was hot in the bedroom. She rose to her feet, went to the balcony door and opened it. She stood there and watched her son, lying in his bed, hardly filling it—he was still not a large boy, he never would be—with his sheet already flung to one side, his fragile-looking chest covered only in a white singlet, rising and falling with his breath. She remembered the girl who’d nearly died on the ward.
How tenuous these moments were, she thought, between life and death, those small choices you made, like making an extra phone call when you’d been told not to, or leaving for work when some instinct warned against it. She stepped onto the balcony. It was warm outside too, and humid. A moth fluttered against her, and then another. A single star shone over the line of rooftops between her and the sea. She had never noticed that star before—God, how couldn’t she have? It was fierce. Nearby, lights had sprung up everywhere, from all the different windows that looked out on her, all the lives she did not know though they were so close to her own.
Moths were fluttering around her through the haze, spiralling up through the darkness against the stars, more of them than she’d ever seen, and they were crawling along the railing of the balcony too and on the glass of the window beside it. She could hear the soft, sloughing rhythm of the ocean, and she wondered about Freya, where she was right now, who she was right now. It wasn’t her daughter’s fault. The fault was Maryanne’s—she’d been preoccupied, let herself be consumed by her own problems. That was why her daughter was lost. That was why she was lost too.
She went inside but kept the door wedged open for whatever breeze there was. The moths didn’t matter—she felt sorry for them.
Downstairs it was even warmer. Roy was sitting on the couch in the living room, his feet on the coffee table, contemplating the record player, which rested in its dark corner of the room.
‘I apologise,’ Roy murmured. ‘For everything. Your turn.’
She’d been determined to lie, to make peace between them again, to bury all of this for now, to wait until the morning at least, but at those words, the tone in which he said them, something inside her fell into place.
‘I don’t want to,’ she said.
He stood up. ‘What?’
‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’
‘Do what?’
‘Be with you.’
Roy looked at her for a long pause, then he shook his head, and every part of his body shifted as he spoke. ‘You don’t mean that. If you mean it, fine. But you don’t.’
She didn’t say anything.
‘Tell me you love me,’ he said. He closed the distance between them. ‘Just say you love me and we’ll leave it for now.’
He tried to kiss her. She pushed him away. He looked startled, let himself be pushed—looked weak, so weak that she wanted to touch him, make sure that he was okay. Wasn’t that one of the things she’d fallen in love with, that vulnerability? But she didn’t touch him.
‘Are you leaving me again?’ he said.
Pity welled up inside her, but she did not stop. ‘I have to.’
He nodded again, strangely calm. ‘Where would you go?’
‘I’ll figure it out.’
He looked away from her and sighed. ‘You mean your mother. You’ve been talking to your mother.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She reached for his shoulder. ‘Roy.’
He shrugged her off, began pacing. ‘It does. Of course it does! Talking with your mother behind my back. I’d like to punch her fucking face in.’
‘Roy, please don’t talk like that.’
He bared his teeth. ‘Doesn’t it matter that I love you?’
‘Of course it matters.’
He frowned. ‘But what?’
‘We’re not good together.’
‘What did I do? Is it because of the other day? Because I lost my temper?’
‘It’s not about that.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re lying. It’s my fault. Of course it’s my fault. That’s what you’re thinking. You’re just not saying it. You’ve just been living here with me and letting me do all this, and planning your escape.’
‘You need to calm down,’ she said. ‘I have to go to work.’
But she couldn’t go to work, she knew that, not with him like this, so agitated, not with Daniel upstairs. Maybe he’d do nothing, but she couldn’t be sure—she could never be sure, there was always the thought now—and it struck her then as madness that she had managed to live with him so long, that she had made herself do it, that she had returned to it. No, she couldn’t go to work. What she had to do was get Daniel. What she had to do was walk out of the house with him and keep walking. She would figure out the rest later. She turned to leave the room. He blocked her exit with one arm across the doorway. His white T-shirt was stained with sweat. She could feel the heat radiating
from his face.
‘Look me in the eye,’ he said. ‘Say it like you mean it. Are you sure?’
There was a way to diffuse this, she knew, some careful combination of words, like last time, and the time before, and those words would lead into their bedroom and all would be buried between them, but she couldn’t bring herself to say them, not again. She had to move on—she had to.
He was breathing hard, that wounded, pleading look in his eyes, and rage too, his whole body shivering with the effort of containing it. ‘Do you really want to leave me?’
She felt exhausted, alive, terribly alive, and the hallway, the house, the whole world was leaning in towards her, daring her to say it.
33
The music kept playing, the sound steadier now that the wind had dropped off, but the song itself was high and wavering. ‘Silver’ by the Pixies—another one Josh had put on a mixtape for her. Freya shivered and looked around. The beach wasn’t so crowded anymore. Couples were wandering off among the rocks or were entwined already at the foot of the cliffs. Others still stood at a distance from one another, drinking and staring at the flames, moths fluttering between them. There were bits of clothing strewn here and there on the sand, a few shadowy figures splashing out in the water.
Tim took her by the hand and pulled her away from the glow of the fire. They stopped near the water. There was a surfer’s sinewy strength in his body, no fat on him, just hard skin and hard edges, an adult’s heft in his movement that startled her when he drew her in close and kissed her. His tongue pushed into her mouth, and his hands fell from her back to her bum, pressing her against him, so that she could feel his hard-on through the metal kink of the zipper in his jeans, and she did not feel good or bad, but something stirred inside her. She tasted pot in his saliva. The inside of her own mouth felt tacky. When he let her go and pulled away, she caught a glimpse of Josh over his shoulder, sitting alone on the other side of the fire, looking straight at her over a can of beer. Their eyes met and he didn’t look away. Tim jerked his head up towards the path.