by Michael Sala
‘Before that. Before I woke you up. How could you not hear anything?’
‘What do you mean?’
She didn’t answer. They were still heading up, along the coast, towards the highest cliffs that overlooked the ocean, and here the breeze blew stronger, coming from somewhere over the water, and there was the noise too of the waves worrying around the rocks, but then they turned in sharply, away from the noise of the sea and the wind and towards the police station, the grey bunker set against the hill on the other side of the hospital, and Freya paused again, let Daniel pause too. The whole world was different now. Her brother was still safe from it, for seconds, minutes even, but not forever. She wanted somehow to preserve this for him. Oh how precious to still be safe from it.
A car cruised on down the hill past them. The driver’s head turning to follow them as it passed. She saw a man’s face for a brief moment with surprising clarity, a pale expression floating in the dark interior of the car, curiosity or fear or hunger, perhaps, and then it was gone, and they set off again.
The glass doors of the police station slid apart at their approach, the waft of air conditioning enveloping them. Distant radio voices drawled through static. The policewoman behind the desk looked at them.
Freya spoke, and her voice was loud and flat and strange. ‘Something’s happened.’
The policewoman rose to her feet. ‘What do you mean, love?’
Her brother’s hand slipped out of hers. He stepped away from her, was looking up at her, his face frozen, contorted, like he didn’t know who she was, like he was afraid of her. She kept talking and she knew that she was destroying it, everything in him that was already crumbling within her. The policewoman came around the counter, took Freya in her arms. Someone came with a blanket. The phone was ringing. No one picked it up. It rattled on while they asked questions—How long ago? Where? Are you hurt? She told them everything she could. She did not cry. It was like giving a speech in school, knowing the words and saying them precisely, one after the other, but not feeling them in a way that made sense. Minutes had elapsed. Already police officers were leaving.
Now they were looking at her brother.
‘I slept,’ he said. ‘I was sleeping.’
Then he wet his pants.
After
Again. Richard finds himself awake. God, he’s awake. His heart is racing and his eyes are sore. The red numbers on the clock dance and dissolve and come together. Two-thirty am, he reads at last. The windows are rattling in their frames, the curtains billowing towards him, the air that moves across his skin warm.
He holds a hand against the sodden swirls of hair on his breast, feels the incredible beating of his life. He draws breath and shudders, pulls the sheet from his legs and swings around onto the floor. He rises and hunches over again as he begins coughing—wracking, convulsive coughs that come from deep within him and bring nothing up—an anxious cough, his boyfriend has told him.
He straightens, takes several steps and looks back at his bed. There is a residue of panic still inside him, a leftover from sleep, from dreams he tries not to think about once they are gone. He could use a cigarette right now. The cravings occasionally come when he sees someone else lighting up, but mainly at these times, when his body feels frail, like paper stretched around a brittle frame, like all he wants to do is burst into flame and be done with it. There are no cigarettes in the house, though. He stopped half a year ago, at the time of the trial, just when the stress of all of that should have made him want to smoke more than ever.
The curtains spill and gather around him and he steps through them to the window, to confront the breeze, the sky, the street, the harbour, the world. His hands resting on the sill, he stands there and lets his gaze drop back to the street. It is quiet and empty, but there is more to it than that these days. Beyond the street, beyond all of the houses, he can see the lighthouse, and beyond that, much further out, grey clouds that appear in the darkness with the quick, nervy flickering, from place to place, of a distant storm—like there is a battle being waged out there, artillery going off in rapid exchanges. Somewhere the noise must be deafening. He thinks he can hear the growl of the thunder, even here, but the sound, stretched over all that distance, is too subtle for him to be sure.
He steps back through the curtains, pulls on a bathrobe and goes down into the kitchen. While he waits for the water to boil, the lonely rumble of it building into his thoughts, he stares out into the courtyard. He can see the thick, high brick wall that separates his courtyard from the next one along, where he used to sit with Maryanne, laughing and smoking and drinking cups of coffee—then his gaze drifts back inside, to the kitchen, and finally to the paper that still sits on the benchtop. He picks it up and looks at the front page, the last thing he read before he went to bed.
There are two stories, both of them from this city.
One is about the rape and murder of the girl from Freya’s school. Richard has followed the story from the beginning—he supposes that most people in Newcastle have. There is something murky about the details, the evasive statements of witnesses. An eighteen-year-old man has confessed to murder and sexual assault. Two others have been convicted of lesser offences. Still others were involved, onlookers to the initial assault, participants, but they will not be charged. All of them are students, or former students, of the same school.
The other story is about a man who killed his wife.
He has been convicted of murder, sentenced to a minimum of ten years. Richard skims across the words, finds the judge’s comments and reads them again: hard worker, stress, provocation, no premeditation, devotion to family, remorse, still young enough to make something of his life.
Ten years. One of those years is already gone.
It was the lights that woke Richard that night, a year past, the wash of blue and red against his ceiling, the stop and start of a siren, then the sound of car doors opening and closing, and the crackle and murmur of police radios. Straight away then, it came, a sickly awareness of possibility, of all of his fears of the past months mounting into that pause when he had not yet known, had still had room for hope, but he’d known—some part of him had known. He’d gone to the window, looked down and saw them there, three police cars. A fourth pulled up as he watched, and by the time he’d put on some clothes and gone outside, there was an ambulance. The gurney being wheeled past had a body on it, hidden from sight.
He’d stumbled out into the hot, still night in a daze, without his bathrobe, just a pair of boxers and a singlet. The neighbours were coming out of their houses to stare, from a distance, at the scene, all of them stunned, curious, talkative about the family they’d barely gotten to know. He’d ignored them all.
‘Who is it?’ he’d asked a policeman.
‘Are you a friend?’
‘Yes. A neighbour. Both. I’m her friend.’ His voice cracked a little when he said this.
The policemen’s expression altered in some minute way. ‘I’m sorry then.’
‘Was that her?’
The policeman’s hand was on Richard’s chest, partly in comfort, but also preventing him from stepping forward, from getting closer to the house. Past the policeman’s shoulder, the polished floorboards gleamed in the hallway light. Bags were being taken out by people wearing gloves. They did not look in his direction.
‘Could you wait for us in your house?’
‘Are the children—are they?’ Richard couldn’t finish the question.
‘Only the mother.’
‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘Where’s Roy?’
‘Who?’
‘The husband.’
‘In there.’ The policeman nodded his head towards one of the paddy wagons.
Richard couldn’t see anything, though. The back door of the paddy wagon concealed its occupant. But he imagined Roy sitting there on the other side of the metal. Every paddy wagon he saw after that, for the rest of his life, he would think of Roy or someone like him, sitting in there,
waiting.
Later, and again in the trial, they asked Richard lots of questions. What had he heard? Fighting, yes, an argument, but that wasn’t unusual, and then nothing, just nothing. He hadn’t thought anything of the silence when he’d gone to bed.
Now he thought about it all the time.
A couple of weeks after the trial, a car had been out the front of their house when he’d gone out to his doorstep with a cup of coffee. Freya had come walking down the steps, followed by Daniel. She looked older, as if it had been years since they’d been here, her hair cut short, her stance a little straighter. Daniel looked the same as always.
What was he supposed to say to them? He’d put down his cup, walked across and, without a word, hugged them. That was a start.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said then in a voice that did not sound like his.
Freya nodded.
‘How are you?’ He ruffled Daniel’s hair.
‘I’m good,’ Daniel said, smiling vaguely, as if he believed none of it.
The last person out of the house was an older woman, slim and well-dressed, grey hair pulled back in a ponytail. ‘Who are you?’
Not hostile but not friendly either.
He put out his hand. ‘I’m the neighbour,’ he said to her. ‘We were friends.’
Were. It still seemed strange to say that.
The woman’s grip was slack within his own. ‘I’m her mother.’
That, he supposed, never changed. You didn’t stop being someone’s mother just because they were gone.
‘She talked a lot about you,’ he said. ‘All good things.’
Her smile reminded him of Maryanne’s—self-deprecating, an ironic glint in the eye. ‘All good things?’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Mainly. I’m Richard.’
‘Alice,’ she said.
He wanted to say then that he was glad to have finally met her, that he had always liked her, from the stories he’d heard from Maryanne, that he’d always thought her complex and interesting and funny, but he didn’t.
‘Gosh, you look like her,’ he said.
A small smile crossed her face. ‘Not as much as Freya does.’
Alice put a hand on Freya’s shoulder, then let it fall.
‘No,’ he said.
Alice turned, looked up at the house.
‘So this is it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to expect.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘To think there’ll be people living here again one day,’ she said.
He didn’t know what to say to that.
‘I remember her talking about it, the first time. She hadn’t even seen it and she came anyway. And look at it—it’s just a house.’
‘I guess so,’ he said.
‘I wish they’d demolish it,’ she said suddenly, with a great deal of feeling.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Me too.’
Alice looked back at him, her eyes red.
‘I’d better get on with it,’ she said.
She went back inside. Freya and Richard and Daniel stared after her in silence.
‘You’re a strong girl,’ Richard said, turning to Freya. ‘Your mum always used to say that.’
Freya looked away and nodded again.
‘I’ll never stop thinking about her,’ he added. ‘I promise.’
‘I know.’ She smiled, her lips tight, a dimple in her chin, a quick, firm nod.
‘Any time you want to give me a call,’ he said, ‘now or in ten years’ time or whenever, I’ll be here. Think of me like some weird good-for-nothing uncle. I don’t have much family myself, and you’re always welcome.’
Freya smiled at that, a flash of the old humour breaking through the sadness in her eyes, like a spark that ran from the grandmother to Maryanne to her daughter.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re weird, but so am I.’
Daniel laughed.
Richard picked up his cup again, lifted it in a half salute, went inside and paused a moment in his living room. He heard a voice outside. It was the boy from down the street, the one who stood there so often out the front of the house since that day. Richard parted the curtain and saw him talking to Freya, the two of them standing a few metres apart. He wondered what was passing between them. He felt as if he were intruding on something and yet he remained frozen in place, unable to resist taking it in.
The boy stepped forward, pulled Freya into an embrace, she with her head bowed and resting on his shoulder, he with his head against hers. It looked natural and simple and complete, as if they might stay there forever, but then he stepped back, a boy again, and Maryanne’s mother came out, and he stood there watching with his hands in his pockets as they got into the car again. After the car had gone, he turned and walked slowly out of sight.
Ten years. One gone already. He puts the paper down again.
Still young enough to make something of his life.
Roy will be out in another nine years, if he behaves. And what of those children? What has Roy made of their lives? Where will they be in nine more years? Freya will be twenty-five. Her brother will be nineteen. At least they will be alive. At least they will have each other. At least they will be able to choose what happens next.
He takes his coffee and goes out onto the front steps. There are stars overhead. He can hear the roar of the sea, the booming of waves collapsing against the coast. There is no telling where they began, those waves, but they have ended here, the noise of their breaking filling the space between all the hard, straight angles of the houses. Soon the summer will be gone again. He sits, looks across the dark, empty length of the street and sips his coffee, thinking of Maryanne, of Freya, of Daniel. Like he is waiting for them to arrive, like it is daylight, and he knows they will be here soon.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the many people who helped me see this novel to completion. To Rebecca Starford, for her belief in the first draft when I was full of doubt, and the many ideas she gave me in its development, one of which was her early suggestion of shaping it around the perspective of a fifteen-year-old girl. To Elizabeth Cowell, who stepped in at a crucial moment and worked incredibly hard and with great insight to help me achieve the novel’s final shape. To Michael Heyward, for the tremendous confidence he has shown not only in the novel, but in me as a writer, and to everyone at Text for supporting my work—I feel so honoured to be on your list. Also to Martin Hughes, for your generosity of spirit.
A huge thank you to Charlotte Wood, Hannah Kent, Kathryn Heyman and Fiona McFarlane not only for taking the time to read my novel, but also for saying such wonderful things about it. And also to Sandy Cull, whose cover design captures my novel so perfectly.
Thank you to my wife, Kimiko Yoshinaga, for being an amazing mother to our children—and for the inspirational example you set in so many aspects of your life.
Thank you to my readers, Ryan O’Neill, Dael Allison, Peta Cullen, Scott Brewer and particularly Patrick Cullen, who all read drafts at various stages and provided invaluable advice, and to my agent, Benython Oldfield, for taking me on. Thank you to my mother, Nici Sala, for encouraging me, always. Thank you to both Pam Yoshinaga and Mum for sharing their nursing experiences with me. And of course, to Ben Matthews, who hasn’t read any of it yet, but knows anyway—twenty years on from that first creative writing class, our brilliant friendship continues, as does my memory of the snake that ate the pony.
To all of those who have supported me at the University of Newcastle, from my mentor and champion, Keri Glastonbury, to the head of our school, Cathy Coleborne, to all of my colleagues—it is a privilege working with you, learning from you and being able to share my enthusiasm and passion for the creative writing program in English and Writing.
Lastly I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Australia Council for the Arts. Without that initial grant for new work, my journey would have been a lot more difficult.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Michael Sala, 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
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Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2017
Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Cover photo by Jarrad Hemphill
Page design by Jessica Horrocks
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
978-1-92225-360-6