by Michael Sala
‘Let’s go, eh? I know a better place than this.’
She hesitated.
‘Come on.’
‘Freya!’ Josh was walking towards her.
‘What?’ she said.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
Josh glanced towards Tim. ‘You’re not leaving, are you? Not with him?’
Tim’s hand tightened on her arm. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed or something, mate?’
Josh sneered. ‘I’m not even talking to you, dickhead.’
Tim bristled. ‘What’d you say?’
‘Let’s go,’ Freya said quickly. ‘Let’s get out of here. He’s drunk. Don’t worry about it. See you, Josh.’
Tim let her guide him away then, towards the path that climbed away from the beach.
‘It’s your lucky day, mate,’ he called over his shoulder.
Josh stared after them in silence.
Tim had left a light on in his car. Moths crawled across the windscreen in a writhing greyish-brown sheet. He squatted down, pulled his keys out of some dark inner crevice above the tyre, opened the driver’s door, and got in. After a few attempts, the engine kicked into life, and it was all she could hear. He switched on the headlights and the windscreen-wipers, and the moths scattered everywhere, some of them caught under the blades of the wipers and smearing across the glass. She could hear him laugh.
The headlights illuminated a section of the white fence that ran along the edge of the cliff. It was hardly anything, that barrier—she could easily climb over it and step out to the sheer drop on the other side, the rocks and the sand below.
The passenger window came down and he was leaning across, the shark tooth dangling from his neck, his eyes rolled up towards her.
‘Are you right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Get in,’ he said. ‘It’s unlocked.’
And then she was inside, and the door was closed, the fresh air replaced by vinyl and stale smoke, and with the breeze no longer on her, she realised that she was breathing hard from the walk, and sweating. The inside of his station wagon smelled of surfboards and piss-soaked wetsuits and something else she couldn’t place. She felt the slightness of her dress, the way that it stuck to her, the way that it laid bare her legs, but she didn’t move. He handed her a joint and she put it to her mouth and sucked back the smoke.
‘It’s good bud,’ Tim said. ‘Concentrated like. Blow your fucking head off.’
He reversed the car away from the fence and revved the engine a few times before rolling forward. The windscreen-wipers were still going, dirty water dripping down the sides of the glass, the front almost but not quite clean. As they left the car park, Freya thought about Josh, how he’d looked at her down on the beach. She wondered if she liked him more than she was letting on.
She thought of Mum then, as they got out onto the road, and everything she’d said to her in the last months, and everything that had happened. She imagined moving out, leaving for good, and she felt powerful, like she had something over Mum, had something Mum needed, and she was stronger for it, stronger at least than Mum, and that was a start. She never wanted to be as weak as Mum, and she knew that she was terrified she might be—and to think there had been a point in her life when she’d been proud to hear someone say that she was just like her.
She barely noticed as the beach slid past her on the other side of the window. And what Mum had said about not regretting being with Dad because of her and Daniel? It was an excuse. Why hadn’t she left after Daniel was born, then? Why hadn’t she just taken both of them with her? What had Mum said? That she wouldn’t give up her and Daniel for the world? God, why did she even think she had to?
Tim changed gears and, without taking his eyes off the road, put his hand on her knee.
Freya blinked. Her eyes felt dry, but it didn’t help to close them, like she was cutting off her one real connection to the world. She needed to talk to someone. She needed to throw up. Or maybe she didn’t, but it was close. Everything was moving, coming apart. Tim put on some music, something with a man yelling and growling and a mess of instruments pounding over and through his voice, and she just wanted it to stop, but it was so far away that maybe it didn’t matter. She grinned desolately, and wondered if she was experiencing the drag of her lips away from her teeth or only remembering it, if she was happy or sad or neither or both. She realised with a shock that she had no idea how long they’d been driving.
‘Where are we going?’ she said.
Tim glanced at her, changed gears and moved his hand a little further up her thigh.
‘I’ll show you. You good?’
‘Yeah.’
The road veered from the beach. They were above the city. They passed the turn-off that led to Ally’s house and came onto the highway. Through the trees to one side she could see the suburbs, the lit-up factories piled up beyond them and the arching line of lights that marked the bridge to Stockton.
Tim turned up the volume and returned his hand to her leg. She pressed her knees together, but his hand had moved up to the hem of her dress, and she couldn’t seem to slow down her breath, as if there were nothing in the world she could control, not even her own breath, and her whole life was just motion that she didn’t control, even when she thought she could. She thought of Mum again. She thought of Dad with his hand tight around Mum’s neck, looking up at Freya on the stairs and giving that smile, as if to apologise. She thought of the girl who had been murdered. She thought of Josh’s mother on the cliff.
‘I want to go home,’ she said.
He turned down the music. ‘What?’
‘Home. I want to go home.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t feel so good.’
He laughed. ‘I’ll make you feel good, and then I’ll take you home.’
The confidence in his voice filled her with rage. ‘Let me out.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘I’m not kidding.’
He turned his head and looked at her narrowly. ‘What’d I do?’
‘I want to get out.’
Something tightened in his jaw. He looked back at the road. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘I just want to get out.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you want. Why’d you jump in the car with me, then? And why the fuck get out here?’
‘Let me out. Now.’
He laughed again, but it was a different laugh, tight, angry. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
He leaned his head closer to the steering wheel, turned off the highway, bushland now on either side of them, the headlights washing into murky tangles of trees, pebbles snapping up from the tyres and rattling against the body of the car, a sensation of sliding. He didn’t slow down.
‘Let me out,’ she said.
‘Sweetheart.’
‘Let me out.’
‘You’re not getting out!’ he said. ‘Pricktease. Stuck-up cunt. You cunt. I left that fucking party for you. I could’ve stayed. Let me have a feel of your tits at least.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t act like a fucking tease and get away with it. You’re going to show me something before we leave. That’s why you got in the car with me and that’s what you’re going to do. That’s how it is.’
‘Let me out.’
‘You dumb bitch,’ he said through his teeth. ‘What are you going to do, all the way out here?’
Freya began screaming. It felt good to scream, good to see the boy next to her—because he was still a boy, no matter what he pretended—shocked out of his confidence. She reached for the door. The car swerved and slowed down. His hand locked around her other wrist.
‘Stupid fucking crazy bitch!’ he snarled. ‘All right! Fucking stop, all right?’
Freya pushed. The road was a blur beneath her.
34
An hour later, with all of that still coursing through her, she was alone, walking along the road that led up the
coast towards home. The sea, its noise, its smell, filled the air around her, beat into her with the breeze, the great dark expanse of ocean crunching and rippling against the beach to her right. She trudged on until the sea disappeared from view to her right, the city opening up below her to the left—its long, straight roads and suburban streetlights, the bright smoke-plumed industrial zones, and the glittering swathe of the industrial harbour. At night it was beautiful.
Both her knees and hands were bloody, and with the alcohol wearing off, she was beginning to feel the damage she’d done jumping out of Tim’s car. There was a long, deep scratch along her arm where Tim had made a grab at her. Though he’d been bringing the car to a stop, the impact when she hit the road had torn open her knees and jolted both her wrists. She’d jumped to her feet, and when he climbed out of the car and came to get her, tried to pick her up, she’d shaken him off. She would walk, she’d screamed at him. He’d returned to his car and driven alongside her for a while, by turns pleading and hurling abuse. She was fucking crazy—yes, she was a mad, stupid, stuck-up bitch who just needed a good fuck, like everyone said—but she’d cried back with savage abandon, ‘So fucking what?’ and he hadn’t dared anything more.
She turned a corner and the obelisk came into view. She couldn’t see the bottom of it, but she could picture that place in a smooth dip of her memory where she had lain back with Josh, their feet on the stone, the grass against their necks, their fingers almost touching. When she’d walked on a bit further, she paused and glanced back at it once more, the obelisk a luminous white path set against darkness, a bridge into nothing. Ahead was the hospital, and the headland from which the lighthouse cast its brilliant, sweeping beam. Everything she saw held some memory now, and maybe that was all there was to a place, the memories that started to fill it so that it became yours, even if you didn’t want it.
To her right, as she kept walking, was the path that led to the Bogey Hole, and she did not go towards its damp, hidden darkness but followed the road as it swung down towards Newcastle Beach, which was lit and empty, and past the huge old hospital on the left, half of it shrouded, all of it surrounded by wire fencing—where Mum had worked until the earthquake—and into the last streets that separated her from home.
And then she was standing on the back wall and staring into her house.
There it was, home.
She did not know why she had walked towards it with such purpose, did not know what to do now. She could hardly bear the thought of going inside. There was a light on, not in the kitchen, but past it, perhaps in the hallway. She felt slightly sick and almost sober.
Her knees were throbbing, blood still welling up through the grit raked into her skin. Trickles of it had hardened around her ankles. It was late. She had been walking for so long, hours maybe, all of the emotion slowly seeping out of her. The stars crowded bright and fierce overhead. Still standing there on the brick wall, she swayed. Everything looked hazy, indistinct, like she wasn’t really seeing it, as if the world, like her thought, was only half-formed.
The smell of Dad’s cigarette smoke carried to her. He was awake then. The thought filled her with a sudden anxiety, and she knew that she was frightened of him, had always been frightened of him, though she was the only one he had never turned on. It was so much part of her, that fear, that she’d always just thought it was the world, the way things were. She dropped into the courtyard, took off her shoes and approached the kitchen door. It was open. She slipped inside. The bitter cigarette smell hung thick in the kitchen, as if Dad had just been there. The tap was dripping. She crept on her bare feet across the room, to the door between the dining room and the hallway, leaning out until she could see all the way to the front door.
There, ahead of her, down the hall, exactly where she’d expected to see him, sat Dad, on the front steps. He was facing the street, hunched over in a light that must be coming from the living room. Smoke from a cigarette curled past his ear. And halfway between Dad and where Freya stood, flung across the floor, lay Mum.
It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at, to know what it meant. It was not how the hair covered Mum’s face. It was not the turn of her head. It was not the blood she saw spattered across the dark wall, and on the floor around her, half cleaned up, and soaked in a towel heaped just past her body. And it was not how little room that body took up in the hallway. It was her father, the way he sat there facing the street with that slumped, indifferent posture, like none of it had anything to do with him.
A tremendous thumping started up in her chest. She turned, nearly lost her balance, and then focused on just one thing—putting one foot in front of the other, as quietly and quickly as she could, until she was out in the courtyard, where she bent over and vomited.
And what she thought of then was Daniel.
Freya wiped her lips with one trembling hand, straightened in the darkness and stared at the house. She felt as if she were going to vomit again, but nothing came out—her belly had gone hard. All of this, she told herself, has already happened. You are remembering it. You are alive. Mum is dead. Dead, dead, dead. She knew that she could say that a thousand times over and not believe it. But her brother? What about him? The door to the balcony was open. She could see it angled inwards into darkness, the edge of a white curtain drifting out, Daniel’s bed just beyond it. Something filled her then, some strange, distant determination to see it through. No matter what happened to her, no matter what she found, she needed to see him. She hoisted herself back onto the wall, and from there up onto the balcony, where she stood by the door looking in.
A faint glimmer of light from the landing shone through the gap beneath Daniel’s bedroom door. She saw only dim outlines of the things in his room. She stepped fully inside. Her heart was beating so hard that she could hear nothing else. She took a breath and waited for her eyes to adjust, waited to see what was in front of her. And there he was—she had come too late. Her brother lay on his bed, the sheet on the floor, his body motionless, his face turned towards her, unseeing, darkness pooled over his eyes. She crouched down, touched his cool cheek.
And with that he awoke. A sob of relief shook through her.
‘What is it?’ he murmured. ‘An earthquake?’
She put her hand on his mouth, leaned in close. ‘Listen,’ she breathed. ‘Do what I tell you. Don’t talk. Don’t make a sound. Understand?’
He nodded, his face pale in the dark room.
She pulled him to his feet. ‘We have to leave,’ she whispered. ‘As quiet as you can. We can’t stop for anything.’
From the hallway down below there came a creak of floorboards. They went onto the balcony. She climbed over the railing, clambered onto the wall, then held out her hand for him.
Daniel just stood there on the balcony. He didn’t take her hand, didn’t reach for her. ‘Where’s Mum?’ he said.
She shook her head, held out her hand again.
‘Are we going to find her?’ he pressed.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But only if you come now. She’s waiting.’
His hand found hers. The balcony door creaked softly, but it was only a breeze. Bracing herself against a drainpipe, she helped him get onto the wall and then guided him along the top of it until they reached the alley. She jumped down first, turned, held her arms up. Daniel squatted on top of the wall, then hesitated.
Dad’s voice came from inside the house. ‘Freya? Is that you?’
There was something mournful and hesitant in that voice, a yearning.
‘Jump,’ she hissed at her brother.
In the alley, out of the wind, the whole world seemed trapped, welded into place by the heat of the day. Daniel looked down at her and then back towards the house.
‘If you don’t jump,’ she said, ‘I’ll leave without you.’
‘Freya!’ Dad called again, nearer and louder now, his voice filling the night, and she knew he was on the balcony.
Daniel jumped, and she caught him, and
then she was pulling him along, guiding him around shards of broken glass that littered the ground.
They were almost at the end of the alley when Dad roared out into the darkness, fury in his voice. ‘Freya!’ She heard the gate to the courtyard shake. ‘Freya!’
They kept walking towards the sea.
‘Why aren’t we going back to him?’ her brother asked. ‘Won’t we be in trouble?’
Freya didn’t answer. She was walking more quickly now, almost running, pulling him along behind her, gripping his hand as tight as she could. The night was full of small noises, but their footsteps echoed alone.
‘Freya,’ her brother said. ‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Sorry,’ she panted, but her grip didn’t loosen, her pace didn’t falter. ‘Just be quiet for a little while.’
Was he following them? She couldn’t turn to look. There were no lights on in any of the houses they passed. They followed the road up until they reached the hospital, most of which too lay in darkness. She paused there and gazed back the way they had come. The streetlights spilled down onto emptiness. She looked up at the dark, abandoned windows of the hospital, and her hand went slack and dropped his. They stood there in silence, side by side.
‘Why are you crying?’ her brother asked.
‘Don’t,’ she answered. ‘Don’t talk.’
They broke into motion again and followed the road beside the bluff overlooking the sea. The drop on the other side of the white fence was steep, the crumbling, dizzying heights plunging down to the rocks below. She knew, standing there, that this was as close to saying goodbye as she would ever come, that nothing else would come as close as this. In the darkness it seemed as if they might walk straight out to the distant ship whose lights seemed as fixed as the stars, neither rising nor falling ahead of them.
‘Are we going to see Mum?’ Daniel asked.
‘Yeah,’ she said.
He nodded and gave a small smile, but then his expression shifted. ‘Why didn’t we stop when Dad called?’
‘Did you hear anything?’ she said. ‘Tonight?’
‘Dad was calling us.’