by Claire Zorn
‘Who’d he assault?’
Minty scratched his scalp, sliding further down in the chair. ‘Mum, mostly.’
The picture Sam had in his head of his uncle didn’t fit. Sam saw a lot of him as a little kid, much less after he and Minty were around eight. When Glen was around, Sam was captivated. Other than Pop, Uncle Glen was the only grown man in Sam’s life. He was funny and Sam remembered being chased through Pop’s flowerbeds, held upside down by the ankles and tickled until he was out of breath from the laughter. He sat beside Minty now and tried to take in what he was being told.
‘I had no idea.’
‘Yeah. He was always dodge, ay. Like, he’d disappear for weeks and if we asked Mum where he was she’d go crook at us. I mean, he didn’t work much, so he musta been getting money from somewhere, ay. We were little, but. Didn’t know any different. Looking back on it now, though,’ Minty pulled his head back and widened his eyes. ‘It’s like, shiiiit, ay. Then there’s all the crap between Mum and Aunty Rachel. What happened there? You know?’
Sam shook his head. ‘I asked about it and Mum told me not to. Figured they had a fight or something. You seen Nana?’
Minty scratched his scalp again and his dreadlocks moved as one mass. ‘Nah. Mum’s heard from her though. Who knows. Weird, ay?’
‘I just remember that she was around and then she wasn’t,’ Sam said. ‘Same with you guys. It was like everyone disappeared.’ Sam couldn’t say anything else. It was too much. He took a slug of alcohol, hoping it would burn away the lump in his throat. He didn’t look Minty in the face, but the silence before his response, and the change in his voice indicated a shared grief over the woman who had helped raise them.
‘Nana was overseas. Travelling or some shit. She’s back now, up north somewhere.’
They sat in silence, gazing out at the empty street. Somewhere a dog barked. A metal gate scraped on bitumen.
‘You start surfing when you moved?’ Sam asked eventually.
‘Yeah. It’s like I was shit at everything else until I got in the water. Changed my life, brah, changed my life. You’ll get it, ay. You can skate, so you’ll get it. Same thing, just on water.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘When you get it, like, you won’t be able to stop. You’ll get hooked. It’s like flying. No. That’s not it. It’s like you’re part of the world and the world’s moving.’
‘The world is moving, Mint.’
‘Yeah. It’s like you’re moving the world.’
‘That’s deep, man.’
‘I know.’ Minty belched loudly. ‘I farkin’ know … No, you know what surfing’s like? It’s like having amazing sex with this girl that you really love. Like not smutty stuff. Romantic.’
‘I wouldn’t repeat that to anyone else, Mint.’
‘It’s like flying and having sex at the same time.’
‘Like in a plane?’
‘No. I’m serious. Like flying like a bird and having sex.’
‘Birds don’t fly when they have sex, I don’t reckon.’
‘They should. I would if I was a bird.’
‘Who taught you to surf?’
‘Shane took me out there for the first time. I was eleven, I think. He would have been, what? Fourteen? We never went near the beach before that. Mum never took us or nothin’. There’s a whole heap of people who live here and work in the mines and the steelworks, who never go near the water. I could hardly even swim. Shane started going down the beach all the time, and I just followed him around. We got some of them little styrofoam boogie boards, you know? Dunno where from, probably nicked ’em. Then we started to try and stand up. Too funny. We nicked some cash from Mum and bought boards at a garage sale, fibreglass ones. Mine was way too big when I was starting out. Grew into it, though. Shane learned then took me out the back and taught me.’
It was difficult to imagine Shane being sensitive enough to teach anyone anything.
‘He pushed me, ay. I was pissing myself when I started out. He’d make me go right out the back. I could barely swim. He’d push me under the water and hold me there, longer and longer each time.’
‘Sounds fun.’
Minty shrugged. ‘He wanted me to be able to handle myself out there, I guess. I kept going in with him. I wanted to learn. After a bit we started to enter in comps.’
‘How’d you go?’
Minty shrugged. ‘I won most of ’em.’ He said it without ceremony, like it was banal. ‘Shane went okay, but he shifted focus to me, ay. Says I’m the one who could make it. But, you know, it’s different competing, ay. You gotta stay psyched.’ Minty shifted in his chair and Sam sensed he was telling him more than he would admit to anyone else. ‘Dunno, it’s intense, all the judges and that. I try to just have fun. But I kinda freak out sometimes. Shane’s so into it all. If you make it, like go on the World Tour, that’s it, that’s your job. It’s all I know, ay.’
The van pulled onto the grass in front of the house. Shane got out and loped across the grass. He stopped in front of the picnic chairs and pulled a face like he smelled something rank.
‘What’s this?’ he grunted.
‘Havin’ a drink, brah. Join?’
‘No piss during the week. You know that.’ He shifted his glare toward Sam. ‘He’s training. Don’t get him on the piss.’
Sam held up both palms in surrender. ‘I didn’t—’
Shane leaned down and took the bottle from Minty’s hand, passed it to Sam. ‘Then let him get pissed. You gotta stay clean.’ Shane left them and went into the house.
Minty leaned further back in his chair and stretched his legs out in the sun.
‘He’s mellowed, old Shane.’
‘Doesn’t seem heaps mellow. That his van?’
‘Yeah. Was Dad’s. First time it’s actually been used for legal work in about ten years.’
4
In the afternoon Sam slept, passed out on the camp bed in a glorious way. He dribbled on the pillowslip and didn’t register the rest of the day going by. He was woken by the thrashing pulse of Metallica from the other side of the fibro wall. ‘Enter Sandman’. The irony was not lost on him. He got to his feet and staggered, bleary-eyed, out into the kitchen. His mum would have been making dinner now, or he would be, if she wasn’t home from work. It probably would have been stir-fry, that was her usual. The kitchen was empty. And still looked like a crime scene. Sam had the urge to howl, to bawl, to clutch onto the bench and sink onto the lino. He didn’t. Instead, he grabbed his skateboard and took off.
Sam remembered Minty as the quiet kid with the white-blond bowl-cut who used to piss in Pop Hudson’s garden at the house in Punchbowl. Pop would wrench his pants down and smack his bare bum whenever he caught him. Minty would always look stunned, like he had no idea he was doing anything wrong.
As kids they would ride their skateboards up and down their grandparents’ long driveway, all the way up beside the little house to the garage at the back of the block. Pop would haul planks of plywood out of the garage and prop them up on bricks for Minty and Sam to use as jumps. He would stand on the lawn and watch them, pipe hooked out the side of his mouth, arms folded across his white singlet. Whenever they landed a jump he would say, ‘Fan-tastic.’ If they fell he would give a curt nod and declare, ‘You’re right. Up you get.’ Minty always wanted the jumps higher. Sam always followed Minty.
The back lawn at Nana and Pop’s was a neatly kept carpet divided by great circular garden beds that teemed with carnations, roses, chrysanthemums, daffodils, jonquils. A narrow concrete path led from one bed to another, with an off-shoot path running up to the outside toilet. Pop tried to teach them the names of the flowers but Minty could never remember any of them. Sam was better and Pop would grin and tell him he was sharp like his mum. Minty didn’t seem to mind; he would just laugh.
Sam and Minty would catch skinks in the garden beds, holding them between thumb and forefinger as they wriggled. Sam was fascinated by the delicate pulse of their
heartbeats drumming. If Shane caught a lizard he would crush its head into the concrete with his thumb so the brains would ooze out. The memory made Sam think of his own mother’s brain and how it had self-destructed, like one of those secret messages in the Get Smart reruns they used to watch together.
Sam’s mum and Lorraine would sit on the front veranda eating scones and drinking shandies with Nana while he and Minty dashed up and down the concrete, the steady whir of the wheels like a train on tracks. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw Aunty Lorraine, Minty or Shane. His mum told him they had moved south for a fresh start but Sam didn’t know why it couldn’t involve him and his mum. She had said it was a long drive but Archer Point really wasn’t that far away.
He did remember the call the night Nana went missing. Pop had come home from the shops and found the door unlocked, the house empty, none of Nana’s possessions missing but her handbag.
Sam never went around to the house in Punchbowl after that. His mum would go, but never take Sam. He didn’t see Minty again. Six months later Pop died of a heart attack while he was transplanting bulbs from the greenhouse to the flowerbed. Sam wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. His mum said she wanted Sam to remember Pop the way he’d last seen him. Sam wasn’t supposed to know the details, but he overheard that his pop had lain on the grass all afternoon and overnight until a neighbour saw him over the fence the next morning. Sam would always picture Pop lying alone on the cool grass in his white singlet, clouds of dew on his glasses. He hated the snapshot but once it was in his mind he couldn’t get it out. He knew he wasn’t supposed to know and he worried about upsetting his mum, so he never told her about it.
Now he had a new snapshot: his mum in his arms, head tilted back, mouth slack. Heavy and gone.
*
Sam thought about Pop as he glided down the empty streets on his skateboard, beneath a flat blue sky, faded and bleached out at the edges. He wanted to believe his mum was with Pop again, maybe in a garden, but he couldn’t make the thought stick. He could only see her head lolling against his arm as he punched triple zero into the phone. Sam stepped off his board, leaving it to roll down the street without him. He leaned over the gutter and vomited. He wiped his mouth, then jogged off after the board.
He didn’t know what day it was. Saturday? The disorientated feeling hadn’t left him. It didn’t help that he hadn’t told anyone from home what had happened. Were his mates wondering where he was? Luke would have tried to reach him at home. Sam knew he should phone him. He planned to. But he couldn’t imagine describing what had happened. For the moment it was easier to stay here in this strange parallel universe and stop the two worlds from overlapping. He pushed off and glided down the hill.
The town was built on the flat between the mountain ranges and the sea. It was one of a string of towns that led south to Wollongong: a grid of weatherboard miners’ cottages – tiny windows, bare squares of lawn – and a queue of sad-looking shops. The highway and a train line divided the leafy escarpment from the coastline, with houses on either side. The shopping strip was on the escarpment side, Lorraine’s house on the flat, 500 metres from the beach. Most of the houses were clearly built in a time when the coastline was viewed as an inconvenience more than anything else, the saline air a force that eroded door hinges and caused house frames to swell and contract. The older houses were built back from the beach, closer to the shops and the shelter of the escarpment, tight boxy places with little windows to keep the heat in and the harsh light out. Blow the ocean and its views. When he had gone to the beach with Minty he had seen how the headland loomed over the curved, open mouth of the coast. The town didn’t loom, it cowered. New houses were being erected on the coastline – weekenders for Sydney people. Outdoor showers, sliding doors and big windows. Decks. But back toward the town more cottages than not had mobility ramps with sturdy rails to the front doors, unfurled like tongues panting in the heat.
A long strip of battered shops lined the gentle undulation of the main road. Being evening, they were mostly shut. The charcoal chicken shop wasn’t; it glowed as Sam rolled past. The Jewel supermarket was also open, stray trolleys dribbling out onto the street. Streetlights flickered on, the odd car drove past, but mostly it was just Sam and his board. He rode down the main road and saw that there was nothing to see. He turned back toward Lorraine’s, following the streets and hardly remembering where it was he’d come from. A battered street sign pointed toward the beach and he followed it. It was almost dark as he slipped into the car park on the headland next to the surf club. There was a handful of cars and out on the water he could see the slippery shadows of surfers. Beyond the southern point, the towers of the steelworks pumped soot into the orange sky. The swell was big, the waves looked good but he wouldn’t really know. He spotted the white of Minty’s hair, right out the back, straddling his board, straight-backed like he was in church. Most of the others were straggling in now. A wave rolled toward Minty; he slipped onto his stomach and worked at the water with his arms as the wave built behind him, the board caught and he was up, weaving his way across the face of the wave into the shallow. He was a flash of white teeth and whiter hair. Minty stepped casually off the side into the water and swooped the board up under his arm.
Minty walked, dripping, up to the car park. He saw Sam waiting in the glare of the streetlight and grinned, surprised as if he was caught by the novelty of having Sam around, as if he didn’t believe he was really there in the first place.
‘Nice out there. Shark feedin’ time, but. What you doing?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Just looking around. Couldn’t remember how to get back to the house.’
‘Ha. Surprised you can remember anything. You were out of it, brah. Figures. Wanna get some food? Bloody starving.’
‘Sure.’
In the chicken shop, Minty stood in his wetsuit, feet planted wide, eyeing the menu board above the counter. He gnawed his bottom lip as if the future of humanity depended on his order.
‘Burgers are good. Fish is shit from here. Savs are good,’ he said.
‘What are you getting?’
‘Dunno. Burger.’ He rolled a twenty-dollar note over and over in the palm of his fist, jiggling his right leg. A girl came out from the back of the shop. Minty swallowed visibly and Sam noticed his ears pinken. She was dark-skinned, tall, lean and long limbed. An auburn pixie cut. Big eyes rimmed in kohl eyeliner, nose stud.
‘Sup, Mint?’ she smirked.
‘Hey, Ruby.’
Her treacle-brown eyes fell on Sam and the smirk grew. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Sam. My cousin. He’s … bereaved.’
‘Bereaved? That’s a big word, Mint. What happened?’
Sam looked away and Minty filled in the silence for him.
‘Nothin’. Just … he’s stayin with us for a bit.’
‘In the spare room?’
‘Yeah.’
Ruby scowled. ‘Not good timing.’
‘Get your own family then.’
She tilted her head to the side and fixed Minty with a glare, then dismissed him and turned her attention to Sam. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Alright.’
‘Ruby.’
‘Hi.’
‘Hi yourself.’ She pushed her jaw out. ‘Well?’
‘I’ll have a burger,’ said Sam.
‘Get out. Really?’ she deadpanned, scribbling on the pad.
‘Yeah, I’ll get a burger too,’ said Minty.
‘Wow, really pushing the boundaries.’
‘And two bucks’ worth of chips.’
‘Ten-forty.’
‘And two chocolate Mooves.’
‘Fourteen-forty.’
He handed her the twenty. Ruby worked the cash register, took out the change and put it in her back pocket rather than giving it to Minty. She tore a number from the bottom of the pad and handed it to Sam with a wink. Then she turned and sashayed out the back of the shop.
Minty exhaled.
; ‘She took your change.’
‘She takes everything, brah.’ He rolled his neck back, flexing his shoulders.
‘How do you know her?’
Minty gave him a funny look, like he didn’t know how to answer. ‘Rube’s … she’s … we’re mates, you know? She stays with us a bit. She’s alright. I mean, she’s a nightmare but she’s alright.’
‘Sure.’
Minty went out onto the footpath and slumped in a white plastic chair. Sam took two chocolate Mooves out of the fridge and followed him. He sat down and put his feet on his board, rolled it back and forth.
Minty grinned. ‘So, you gonna be around long?’
‘I don’t even know. Don’t know how it goes, legally or whatever. DOCS’ll be in on it a bit, I reckon.’
‘They don’t know what the fark they’re doin.’ Minty hocked a glob of spit onto the footpath.
Sam opened his mouth to ask what he meant but Ruby came out holding a wad of butcher’s paper and two styrofoam boxes. She dumped them on the table and sat down between Minty and Sam. Tiny shorts, black Doc Martens.
‘Table service?’ noted Minty.
She picked up Minty’s chocolate Moove and took a long slug. Then leaned back in the chair and put her feet on the table, legs outstretched, ankles crossed.
‘In tomorrow?’ Minty asked.
She shook her head and unwrapped the chips.
‘Help yourself.’
Ruby turned to Sam. ‘What’s your story?’
‘Don’t start on him,’ said Minty.
‘I’m just asking a question. Being friendly.’
Minty snorted.
‘What’s tomorrow?’ Sam asked.
‘Gonna be crankin’ tomorrow.’
‘It’s ’cause of El Niño,’ Sam said.
Ruby looked at him and crinkled her nose. ‘What the—’
‘El Niño. It’s a weather thing. They’ve found that the western half of the Pacific Ocean’s way warmer than it should be. Gonna cause havoc later in the year. Like typhoon havoc. Already there’s changes in the swell ’cause of storms.’