by Nicole Hayes
What was she waiting for? Too many things … The sky to fall in. The other shoe to drop. Life to kick her back where she belonged. All of the above. ‘I’ll think about it, okay? I will. Now, we need to get going – we still have to swing by the pub.’ She picked up her phone, but the battery was dead. ‘Got a charger in your car?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just want to grab my pencils. Be right back.’
She headed for the studio, gathering her thoughts. He was right. She was starting to think he was right. So why was that so difficult to accept? What was she waiting for?
Tessa gathered her studio kit, and found Nick behind her.
‘Where’s your painting?’ he asked.
The easel stood there, empty of the canvas.
She hesitated, ready to lie, to bury the story again. She took a deep breath, shook it off. ‘I’m finished with it. I don’t need it anymore.’
‘I never saw it,’ he said, sounding hurt.
‘No. It’s a mistake. But … there’s something you should know.’
‘Is everything all right?’ Worry dented his brow.
She nodded. Braced herself. ‘Yes and no. I found him,’ she said quietly, clasping her hands together in front of her. ‘My dad.’
Nick stepped towards her, but she moved back. Needed space between them to go on.
‘He killed himself. When I was eleven. Hanged himself in the shed.’
Nick blinked. ‘Jesus.’ He crossed his arms, then let them fall, as though unsure of how to hold himself. ‘You never said anything.’
‘It only just came back to me – in pieces at first, then all at once. I had no memory of the day, only glimpses from the funeral and the days and weeks after. Mum was a mess and I wasn’t much better. I guess I blocked it out.’
‘All this time?’
Tessa studied the tiny marks and scuffs on the floorboards, each of them unique, distinctive, and wondered if maybe she wasn’t damaged after all – just shaped. Moulded. ‘Yeah. I’m not sure what brought it back. The paints? The smell? My dad worked with oil paints a lot. It was his specialty before he got too ill – to do anything.’
‘Have you told anyone?’
She shook her head.
‘Not your mum?’
‘Especially not my mum.’ She straightened, fighting the urge to shut down. The words were there – the story she’d kept quiet since it had come together – and she needed to push them out. ‘Things had … Well, they’d finally started to get better. School. You.’ She waved a hand vaguely towards the empty easel. ‘I didn’t want to go back to how it was. It wasn’t too bad when it first happened, in primary school, but Carrima High was feral. Apparently, your dad committing suicide makes you fair game when you start high school.’ She hugged herself. ‘And then Mum went off the rails, barely got out of bed for a time, then when she did, it was to go to a pub. And one day she brought him home.’
‘Tessa …’
‘I was at Yuki’s that morning. We had an argument.’ A broken smile that didn’t touch her eyes. ‘I can’t even remember what about. But I left. I ran … home.’ She shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
‘God. I’m so sorry.’
‘It didn’t look real. You know?’ The words came out clipped and even. It was as if someone else was speaking, but her mouth kept moving. ‘His face was …’ She reached for the right word. ‘Not his face. And his eyes seemed to beg for something. For help? For forgiveness? For us to let him go. I don’t know.
‘It didn’t look like him. It looked like some bad replica. For a second, I tried to convince myself that it was. Like a sculpture. That he was back to doing his art. The wild experiments he’d stopped in those last months. He used to take me to galleries when we lived in Melbourne. Trying to teach me that art can be different things. Not just paintings or photos or sketches, but everyday things transformed by context or placement.’
If only.
‘Anyway. It wasn’t art. It was him.’ She glanced out the window. ‘So I ran. I just left him there and ran to Yuki’s. She must’ve been able to tell something was wrong. I remember she just took my hand and led me back to our game. We never even mentioned the fight.’ She drew a big, shaky breath, feeling almost dizzy.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nick whispered again.
Tessa hugged herself. ‘It’s okay. I mean, it’s not. But … I’m okay. I think it’s done.’
‘I’m sorry you went through that, Tess. I really am. But I’m also glad you told me.’
They held each other for a long minute, his chin resting on her head, his hand drawing circles on her back, until she looked up at him, a smile on her face, and said, ‘If you keep that up, we’ll never get out of here.’
The sky looms, heavy and laden. She looks up and, as if in answer, the first raindrop strikes her cheek. They quickly increase, fat and full and cold, almost sizzling as they land on the hot rock beneath their feet.
‘That feels good,’ she breathes, the rain running down her face.
Nick laughs. Holds his hands out as though to catch it. ‘It’s getting heavier.’
They stand there together, letting the rain rinse them clean, feeling the water catch in their clothes, dampening them at first then soaking them through. She tugs at her shirt to peel it away from her skin.
‘You’re soaked,’ Nick says.
Tessa nods, the cold beginning to seep through, and something else too. Realisation. The air has cooled significantly, there’s no shelter and no way for them to dry.
‘It’s really coming down,’ Nick says.
Tessa wrings out her shirt. Futile but somehow satisfying. ‘We need to keep moving.’
‘Let’s go,’ Nick says, and then they’re heading along the path, already slippery and treacherous. The smooth boulders that had provided relief to their aching feet are now slick and filled with puddles. Their shoes slap against the water, kicking up mud to splatter the backs of their legs, each other, their shins. Tessa’s runners slip more than once, and she nearly falls into a small crevice.
The raindrops have turned into sheets, and soon Tessa can hardly make out the ground in front of her. Her left foot slides from one rock to the next, turning her ankle. She reaches for Nick but grasps at the air instead. She crashes to her knees, grabbing at the stump of a tree, finding it – just. It tears at the fleshy heel of her palm, but she hangs on for long enough to regain her balance.
Nick’s hand is at her elbow, helping her up, but her knee is bleeding and she’s wobbly on her feet. Her whole body starts shaking, and she stares at the puddle, numb, cold to her very core. She sinks to the ground, her legs refusing to go any further. ‘I need to rest. Just for a bit,’ she pleads. Even she can hear the frailty of her words, the transparent lie.
‘We can’t stop,’ he says. ‘Not now.’ His voice is hollow and echoey, as though from a great distance, but she can see him, right there in front of her. Reaching out to her, shimmery in the torrential rain.
She blinks, pushes her hair from her face, and gets up.
Tessa slid low in the passenger seat, propped her feet on the dashboard and watched her street fly past.
Nick glanced at his watch as they headed out onto the open road towards Beringal. ‘I’ll be two minutes, I promise.’
‘Yuki will kill me …’ Tessa chided.
‘We’ve got time.’
‘If we’re late, you can deal with her.’
Nick grinned. ‘She’ll be fine. She adores me.’
Tessa laughed then. ‘Is that what you call it?’
The Beringal pub was always packed on a Friday afternoon in December – local tradies knocking off to escape the summer heat. All the spots out front were full, so they turned the corner and entered the main carpark through the back. The beer garden was in full swing. Tessa could hear the noise through the car window, small bursts of laughter, the thud and clang of kegs changing over. She wound down her window and glanced into the beer garden –
And saw her mum.
Her expression was impossible to read, but the glass of wine in her hand was evidence enough. Tessa’s eyes then fell on the man opposite her, his hand on her wrist.
The arsehole.
A wave of fury washed over her. Disappointment a rock in her belly. Why did she believe her mum, when she’d seen this so many times before?
‘Tess?’
Nick must’ve seen them too.
She couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear to see pity in his eyes. The humiliation of him feeling sorry for her as unbearable as being mocked. And before she knew it, her litany of disasters descended like an avalanche of shame: the school fete, the kids’ laughter afterwards, rowdy pub nights when she’d been stuck by herself in the bar, or times she’d been forgotten at someone’s house, everyone staring at her or careful not to … Too many nights hiding in her room, her head under her pillow so she didn’t have to listen to the arsehole and her mum in the next room, stifling her sobs so he wouldn’t know she was awake. So he’d leave her alone. The terror of not knowing if her mum was alive whenever she’d disappear for hours.
All those memories playing out in her head like some horrible home movie, suffocating her in the front seat of Nick’s car. She looked at her mum one last time, Ellen’s failing now as much her own. Tessa had believed in her. Trusted her.
‘Are you okay?’ Nick asked. ‘Tess?’
She shook her head, no. Because she wasn’t. She was so not okay. ‘Let’s just go.’
‘Tess?’
‘Please. Just go.’
Nick glanced back at the pub, then reversed out of the carpark and headed out of town.
Tessa slips and staggers, sliding to the ground and righting herself again and again. Nick is beside her, the rain so heavy and relentless that she loses sight of him in snatches. They coax each other along until, finally, Tessa finds herself propped against a tree at the fringes of the thickening bush.
Water drips from the tree’s canopy, and she lifts her good hand to her face. Her fingers wrinkled and pruning, the cold turning them purple and blue. Her shoulder still throbs, but at least the sharpness of the pain has subsided since she forced it back into place. She lets her hand fall to her lap and rests her head against the trunk of the tree. Nick is sprawled beside her, his shoulder pressed against hers. They should be there by now, but they’re at the beginning of another wide stretch of bush land which rolls on and on, punctuated by rocky clearings.
Tessa knows that, despite all the rain, they are dehydrated, and suffering from exposure. She tastes the metallic tang of thirst in her mouth, tips back her head as far as the tree allows and sticks out her tongue. The rain feels good but it isn’t enough to live on. And she’s so cold, which only hours before seemed impossible. She spots an overhang ahead, a rugged embankment riven with clefts.
‘I’ll be back,’ she says, climbing heavily to her feet.
She limps over to a rocky ledge with moss growing down one side. A thin trickle of water dribbles over it. She holds out the bottle to collect it, but her hand shakes so hard she keeps missing and bashing it against the rock. She bends over then, frustrated, and sticks her mouth under the trickle, letting the water drip onto her tongue. She licks her lips, tries again, filling her mouth before swallowing, just to enjoy the idea of a whole mouthful. She straightens and sticks the bottle under it, and is able to hold it steady enough to line the base of the bottle. She has to stop and shift her arm every minute or two to avoid the uncontrollable shaking that grips her hands and body, but after some time she has half of the bottle filled. Replacing the lid, she leans against the rock to fill her mouth one more time, then heads back to Nick.
They’d been driving in silence for a while, the mountain road opening up ahead, before she finally spoke. ‘I can’t go back to Carrima.’
Nick glanced at her then turned back to the road. ‘We don’t have to. Not yet.’
‘Not ever.’
‘Tess.’
She felt his eyes on her, felt their question, their worry. But he didn’t argue, and she was thankful for that. Tessa watched the rush of colour and sunlight play on the glass. The landscape of mountains loomed ahead, vast and towering, green and purple and blue. She wanted to disappear inside it.
‘Where are we going?’ Nick asked as they drove on, drawing closer to the mountains.
‘Away from there.’
‘Yeah. I’m going to need some specifics.’
‘I don’t know.’ But she’d been here before, years ago, and found a kind of comfort in its familiarity. ‘Can you keep driving? I need to think.’ She leant her head against the car window and watched the road fly past.
As they pulled into a service station, she felt the rumblings of hunger, and went inside to order them both food while Nick filled the tank. They ate quickly and messily and mostly in silence. When they were done she licked the juice from the burger off her fingers, the smell of garlic clinging to her skin. She sipped her water as they both got in the car, shoved it into her backpack while she took her seat. Held Nick’s milkshake while he took his.
Nick started the car when Tessa’s phone vibrated between them. Yuki.
Tessa couldn’t tell her about the pub. Couldn’t bear to hear the disappointment in Yuki’s voice. She’d find out soon enough. The whole town would. Beringal might be one town over, but it was just a matter of time.
‘Let me,’ Nick said, unplugging it from the charger.
‘I’m not going.’
Nick eyed her. ‘Don’t decide now.’
‘I’m not going. That won’t change.’
‘I’ll tell her we’ll meet them tomorrow, down at the beach. You can change your mind then, if you want to.’
‘Say what you want. It’s not happening.’
Nick tapped out the message, then pulled back onto the road. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I can’t go back there.’ She sat up and looked at him. ‘You saw what was happening.’
Nick glanced at Tessa’s side of the road. It was so narrow, barely space for oncoming traffic to pass. The cliff dropped off rapidly and Tessa felt her stomach churn just looking at it.
‘I don’t know what I saw,’ Nick said.
Tessa shook her head. ‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s not bullshit. At least I don’t think it is.’
‘She can’t help herself,’ she said. ‘She can’t.’
‘She looked … different.’
‘She looked drunk.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Trust me.’
‘Tess …’
‘Why are you defending her?’
‘I’m not defending her. But you don’t know what was going on either. Things are hardly ever what they look like. Trust me on this.’
‘I saw enough.’
‘You’re not being fair. She’s your mum.’
Tessa snorted. ‘She stopped being my mum years ago.’ Even as she said it, she knew she was lying. Her mum had come back. For near to three months, her mum had come back. Which made it so much worse.
Nick exhaled loudly. ‘Where will you go?’
She twisted her gran’s ring around her finger and massaged the palm of her hand. ‘Melbourne, like I’d planned. Only sooner, that’s all.’
‘What about school? Uni? Your art?’ His voice lifted and fell.
‘What about them? I’d probably fail anyway.’
‘Tess, you can’t just give up.’
‘Why can’t I? I’m tired. I’m too …’ She was done and she was ready to own it. The last months weren’t real. Deep down she’d known that. This was always going to happen. Always. ‘I can go back later, if I want to. It’s not like they don’t have schools in Melbourne.’
‘But, Tess –’
‘Seriously? You’re taking the year off! Why can’t I?’
‘I’m deferring. You haven’t finished school yet. It’s completely different.’
‘Not to me.’
‘You can’t just bail on everyone! Wha
t about Yuki? The others?’
‘You really have no right to say this. None. You’re out of here too.’
‘Not yet.’
She could see the lines in Nick’s face, the frustration around his mouth. Good! she thought. Good. He was going to leave her anyway. Why should she listen to him?
She watched out the window, fixing on the plunging cliff beside her, the racing of the bush beneath them so near she couldn’t see the road by the car, not without sticking her head out. They were deep into the national park, high up the mountain, the thick bush a wall around them, the wind rustling through the tall, ancient trees.
‘Tess, please,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I don’t fucking care!’
He sucked in air, increased speed, taking the bend tight. Too fast.
‘It’s fine. Let it go.’
‘I don’t feel right leaving it like this. Leaving you.’
Fury swelled in her, humiliation and shame with it. ‘Don’t you dare feel sorry for me!’
‘God. That’s not what it is! Yuki said you’d say that …’
Tessa blinked, felt a kind of sinking. ‘Yuki said what?’
‘Nothing. I mean, she cares about you.’
‘What were you talking to Yuki about?’ Tessa knew, though. Knew in that instant. ‘You told Yuki you were leaving?’
Nick’s jaw clenched and a muscle twitched. His eyes staring straight ahead, unwavering.
‘Who else? Zane? Did he know too?’ And then the sharpest pain of all. ‘Lara?’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘That’s what it was, wasn’t it? The party? Their friendship? All of it! They felt sorry for me!’
‘No, Tess! No!’ Nick turned to her, the steering wheel jerking in his hands. He righted it, the sun glaring through the windscreen as they took the corner. The mountain disappearing sharply next to Tessa.
Her phone beeped again, and she saw her mum’s name blinking at her like some warning sign. She snatched the phone from the console and threw it onto the back seat.
‘Tessa, please.’