by Claire Zorn
Lorraine brought his mum’s jewellery box out to the kitchen table and emptied it out, picking through the shiny bits and pieces.
‘That’s not yours,’ said Sam. He intended it to sound forceful, but he could only manage a whisper and it sounded like a plea. He breathed deeply and tried to ignore the pain in his chest, the feeling that he was plummeting from a great height, the ground rushing toward him.
Lorraine watched him, hand on her hip, like she was deciding how to respond.
‘It’s not nice, love. I know. It’s a shame, but that’s the way it is. I’m next of kin.’ She opened her handbag on the table, rooted around inside and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it and held it in front of him. The paragraph was highlighted. Lorraine turned the page and pointed her hot-pink fingernail at his mother’s signature.
‘She should have talked to you about it. God knows I wish she’d talked to me about it. But she had no health issues, she had no reason to think she’d go anytime soon. You can have what you want, but I don’t know where you’re going to put it all.’
She would have given him a hug if he’d wanted it. But he didn’t.
‘Keep the dining chairs. They’re worth something.’
‘They’re old.’
‘Mum said they were good quality.’
‘I’ll see if we can fit them in the back of the van.’
*
They carried boxes down and loaded up the van, along with three of the bentwood chairs. Lorraine stacked the rest of Sam’s and his mum’s possessions on the kerb, including the textbooks. Sam couldn’t look at the pile. He put his sunglasses on and got in the van. Minty put the van in gear and looked over his shoulder to Sam.
‘Where to, brah?’
‘Down by the rail yard. I’ll show you.’
Luke and the rest of them were already there. Like time travellers visiting Sam from a past life. They were sorry, all of them. They told him and slapped his back. They kept it brief. The half-pipe was the same. Sam knew every groove, every chip, every spray-painted mark. It was a thumbprint linking him back to the scene; it made his time in the water with Minty feel like a flimsy alibi. For the first couple of hours he felt different on the board to the way he used to. There were days in the past when the sensation had been like he was on tracks almost, like he was floating above the surface yet glued to it, like he could do no wrong. Now he felt out of rhythm and like every eye was on him even though it wasn’t.
The talk eluded him as well. Every exchange was a thread of conversation woven over the past month. Sam couldn’t pick any of it up. He didn’t know the cues, he didn’t get the punchlines. When the talk did swerve into familiar territory – and someone made a crack about Sam’s suspension from school – he resented it.
It had felt like the worst thing in the world, the principal phoning his mum and telling her he wasn’t welcome back there for the rest of term. On the outside he had taken the piss – extended holiday! As if he was spending the time having a laugh instead of waiting in an empty house watching daytime television and counting down the hours until his mates were free from class. As if he wasn’t stressing about the effect it might have on his HSC, on his plans, on the grand dreams he had for himself. But he’d never been able to cop discipline like other kids. He always felt like he’d let everyone down. One sharp warning from his kindy teacher and he would be fighting back tears.
His mum’d always told him he needed to get perspective and learn that little problems were just that, not worth stressing over, not worth the angst.
He had perspective now. She’d given it to him.
After dark he rode his board to the train station. Luke and he said ‘see ya’ to each other and Sam thought about it on the train south. See you.
He wouldn’t. He knew he probably never would again. He would rip the band-aid clean off.
12
The sky was bigger here than in Sydney. It was a show-off. This morning it rippled with grey and muted light, a majestic, sweeping expanse of cloud above. In the month since he’d arrived in Archer Point, Sam had been in the surf almost every time Minty was. He was the one doing the shadowing these days. Although, when Shane had driven Minty to a comp down south last week, Minty had asked Sam to stay behind. It made him too nervous, he said, if anyone other than Shane was there. When Sam had asked him afterwards how he’d done, Minty muttered that he’d come third and didn’t want to say any more about it.
Minty urged him to use the weights and Sam felt his physicality changing. He doubted it was enough for anyone else to notice, but he felt different in himself. His feet were toughening up to the bitumen and he was easier with the board in and out of the water. He was more at home out the back in the line-up, behind the break with who knows what swimming around beneath the board.
The break off the point wasn’t crowded. There were usually only about ten of them in the water – more on the weekend. Minty said that in Sydney, at the good breaks, it was that crowded that you couldn’t get a wave because there was no room. Out here you had to be committed enough to paddle all the way out and around the headland, or have the balls to jump in over the rocks. Minty said it kept most holiday surfers away. The locals all knew each other. Ruby was the only girl and she was more aggressive than any of them; she would verbally abuse anyone who remotely got in her way or looked like they were perhaps thinking of dropping in. There was always talk out the back, ribbing, sledging. Sam sat back and watched. The flawless grace of Minty on the water never dulled and Sam remained struck by the transformative ability of a piece of fibreglass to take an inarticulate, hulking lump of a guy and turn him into a vision of fluid beauty.
Sam fell into a pattern without making a conscious decision. Out of the water he was messed up, he had turned every good thing he had to shit. In the water he was Minty Booner’s cousin and he would take on any wave that rose up against him. Recklessness or measured risk – the hazy space in-between was solace.
The more Sam went out in the water the more he felt the divide between the surf and the land. The ocean was like a parallel dimension, with its own laws of gravity, its own time; it felt like nothing that mattered on land mattered in the water and vice versa. Every time Sam caught a wave he felt the phenomenon of time slowing; nothing else in his mind, nothing, not even the snapshot of his mum lying unconscious in his arms, head lolling back. Or Pop Hudson dead on the grass. There was nothing at all except him and the velocity of the water. That same clear feeling he used to get during a fight. Something cleansed. Maybe, he thought, that was why Minty’s heart wasn’t completely into competing. What he did in the water during a competition could impact the direction his life took. The two dimensions overlapped.
Like when they were small and Minty would beg not to go home and whisper to Nana that he wanted to stay at her house forever.
Sam was learning that there was nothing, nothing at all, like walking up the beach – salt water trickling down his back, breath heaving in and out, limbs aching – and stopping to turn and look back at where he’d been. There was nothing like watching the horizon, his skin cool from the water, sun warming his face and shoulders.
That morning Sam had already got two waves, scrambling to his feet to ride both of them before they closed out. The next came and Minty shouted at him to take it. He paddled in, feeling the sensation of the wave lifting him up. He was up quicker this time and had enough presence of mind in the short moments to push his weight on the back foot so he was driving the board forward. The wave built and built behind him and the next thing he knew he was two storeys in the air with the simultaneous realisation that he was both slamming the biggest wave he’d ever had and about to be crushed beneath it. He imagined that the feeling as it dumped him was like standing on a mountainside during an avalanche. He thudded downwards and the water folded him into its fist, knocking all the breath from his lungs, pushing him under until his chin caught on the sandy bed below. A couple of metres to the south and it would have bee
n the craggy rock of the reef, a broken jaw or worse. The whitewater surged in front his eyes and in the lengthening seconds he was reminded of the time Shane held him under the water in a spa at the Bankstown Leisure Centre. He came up, salt scorching his throat and nasal passages. The air thudded in violent gasps into his lungs. The next wave came and he had just enough presence of mind to take a deep breath and dive under it. When he came back up he clambered back onto the board like it was a life raft. Somehow he made it to shore. On the sand, he doubled over, hands on his knees, hauling the air into his lungs. Eventually he picked up his board and headed toward the concourse. He needed to get water into him, the drinkable kind.
The beach was crowded with people sucking the most from the day. They milled over the white-hot concrete: ice-creams, dogs, bikes, roller-blades, skateboards, naked tantruming toddlers, stray grease-blotted sheets of butcher’s paper and shrivelled wedges of lemon, tomato sauce squeezies. The ocean pool was chockers with people, bombing in the recreation lane, slapping sloppy freestyle up and down the fast lane. There was a girl in a black one-piece doing elegant, honed strokes. It was Gretchen, he was sure of it. Kicking steadily she overtook the sloppers: stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe, repeat. Her ponytail trailed along the line of her spine, water sliding over the curve of her neat bum as it swayed side to side through the water. A tumble turn at the end and she was under, surging dolphin kicks then up and back into the rhythm of the stroke, metronome steadiness. He unzipped the wetsuit and pulled his arms free, rolled it to his waist as he watched her. Her hand slapped the end of the lane, no more than four metres from where he stood. He pretended to be watching the surf, but in his peripheral vision he saw her pull black goggles from her head and drop them onto the pool deck. Fingertips gripping the concrete stucco, she arched her back, head bowed, stretching the length of her spine. Palms down on the concrete, she sprang out of the water, turning to sit on the edge. With her legs dangling in the water she reached around behind her back and stretched out her shoulders. Sam crossed his arms in the hope it would make him look more toned rather than skinny. He watched the water and she stood up, pulled her Speedos at the bum, slicked the water from her hair and walked off toward the bench seats where her towel was.
There were change rooms near the seats. And bubblers. She vanished into a change room and Sam gathered himself and wandered over. It was quieter over there in the shade. He took a long slug of cool water from the bubbler, straightened and began the walk back toward the point, right at the moment Gretchen came out of the change room, directly in front of him. He was too slow to avert his eyes as she looked up. She was in cut-off shorts and a faded ‘Zero’ T-shirt, earphones in, a canvas bag over her shoulder. He stopped dead in the most awkward way possible.
‘Oh,’ she said, taking the moment to process that she knew him and should probably acknowledge the fact. She pulled an earbud from one ear. ‘It’s you. I mean, shit. Sorry. Hi.’ She didn’t look or sound like the kind of girl who said the word ‘shit’ a whole lot. It was adorable.
‘Hi.’ Don’t rush off because you’re piss weak. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Good. Just went for a swim. Obviously. I wasn’t just lurking around in the change rooms. Haha!’ She seemed stunned at herself, looking around, anywhere but at him. In the silence that followed he could hear the tinny sound of the music pulsing from her earphones. Billy Corgan singing that he’d tear his heart out. ‘Um, you?’
‘Yeah. Surf. Got dumped. By a wave. Like, surfing.’
‘Oh no!’
‘It’s okay.’ He could put his hand on her waist, ease her against the wall and kiss her. If he was a character in a movie that is what he would do. But he was fumbling and hopeless in front of her, heart thudding in his chest like a twelve-year-old in front of a swimsuit model. Why? She wasn’t in-your-face hot like other girls. There was something more understated about her – the round, perfect peal of a bell struck in a dark room.
‘Oh. Sure. Well …’
He didn’t move. He should move. He was staring at her. She had sherbert-pink lips, a slight gap in-between her two front teeth.
‘See you round,’ he said.
‘Yep. Sure. Okay. Yep. Bye!’
‘Bye.’ He turned. ‘Wait. You going to the party?’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s not really my kind of thing.’
‘You should come.’
‘I don’t really hang out with those people.’
‘But you’re friends with Jono?’
‘Hmm, yeah, but Jono’s like Switzerland. He’s neutral territory. Everyone else there is all like, you know, the surfer crew. I’m not really—’
‘You should come.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe then.’
A slow smile. ‘Well, see you.’
13
Sam had the piece of paper Nana had given him. If Lorraine was grumpy or there was nothing in the cupboard for breakfast, or he had a bad night on the camp bed, he thought about calling her.
He wasn’t expecting Nana to be waiting for him in the car park on the point. It was late afternoon, the air so warm that his hair was dry by the time he had walked up the hill from the beach. She was standing on the gravel, leaning on the door of her car, surrounded by utes and bombs and guys talking about the waves. She looked more comfortable than he would imagine most ladies in their sixties would. She was wearing gym gear, like she’d just come from aerobics class, her thin arms bare and bronzed. She wore a gold chain with a little love heart pendant, which she held between her thumb and forefinger and ran back and forth on the chain. It was the kind of fidgeting that she would have scolded them for as kids.
‘Samuel?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to talk to you. Thought you might be in the surf with Minty.’
‘What do you want?’
She looked like she was going to tell him off for being rude, but thought better of it.
‘Can I buy you a milkshake?’ She resembled his mother more now than the nana he remembered.
‘Did you come all the way from Port Macquarie?’
‘Can I buy you a milkshake? Caramel? You used to love a caramel milkshake.’
‘Yeah. I remember. You and Pop used to take me to the milkbar for one, before you pissed off and Pop died alone in his effing garden.’ He would have never spoken to her like that before; maybe Lorraine was rubbing off on him. He wanted to swear, but that was as far as he could go.
‘That’s fair. I understand, love. But I really think we need to have a talk.’
Sam took a deep breath. ‘Five minutes. Don’t want a milkshake.’
‘Right. Well, ah … Do you want to sit down?’ She indicated in the direction of a picnic table on the grass.
‘Whatever.’
He followed her and they sat on opposite sides of the table. She twisted the rings on her fingers as she spoke.
‘Is Lorraine looking after you?’
Sam shrugged. The silence sat awkwardly between them.
‘Darlin’, I had my reasons. You know that.’
‘Everyone thought you were dead.’
‘No one thought I was dead.’
‘How would you know?’
‘I told you. It was Lorraine, mostly. She wouldn’t leave that man and it was doing me in, the worry. I couldn’t be around it anymore. And, more than that. I couldn’t, I couldn’t … Your pop wasn’t an easy man to live with. You wouldn’t understand, love.’
‘It’s not Pop’s fault. You left.’
She seemed to be collecting her thoughts. She reached out to touch his hand and he moved it away.
‘I wasn’t … I was depressed. But people of my generation, we don’t get depressed, we just get on with it. I didn’t want to get on with it. I didn’t plan it. I was home one afternoon and he was in the garden as bloody usual. “Let’s go to the club for tea,” he yelled through the door. “Iron my slacks, would you?
” He didn’t even say please. That was it.’ She shook her head. ‘Lorraine had ignored my calls all day. It was enough. I picked up my handbag and walked out the door.’
‘’Cause you didn’t want to go to the club for dinner?’
‘It was more than that, love.’
Sam looked out across the water to where the last remaining handful of surfers, Ruby and Minty included, bobbed like seals.
‘But you used to … make jam and read the bible.’
‘I still make jam and read the bible. I’ve also been to Budapest and Florence and Morocco.’
‘Where did you get the money from?’
‘Always had access to the accounts. Just because I never used them before doesn’t mean I didn’t know how to. The thing you have to understand about your grandfather is that his reputation meant more to him than anything else. Anything.’
Sam sat and stared ahead.
‘He would never tell the bank that he didn’t want his wife using the account because she’d done a bolt. He cared more about what a stranger in a bank thought of him than his own family. And I think that he did have decency. He wouldn’t leave me out there with nothing.’
Sam felt the build of tension in his chest like the rise of a wave in front of him. ‘What the fuck do you know about decency?’ He was on his feet. He wanted to grab the edge of the table and flip it over. ‘You left us all! You left Mum! Pop died and she didn’t have anyone, no one.’ He stabbed his finger at his chest. ‘Except me, I was the only one left for her and I was ten. Don’t talk to me about fucking decency! Now she’s dead. She’s DEAD. I have a dead mum. I was all alone with her in the hospital. I was holding her hand when she died. Where the hell were you?!’
‘Samuel.’
He picked up Minty’s board and slammed the nose down onto the ground over and over, the coursing flood of hurt streaming through his veins, bursting through his sinew and muscle. He saw his grandmother stand up and steady herself against the table, flinching at him and his rage. He saw his cousin’s broken surfboard in his hands. The cousin who was the only person he belonged to in the whole world. Tears began their descent down his cheeks and he was furious at them too. He tossed the broken board on the ground and walked away from it all.