Watermark
Page 4
The pool in Sawtell is nothing like the one where Morgan taught me to swim. Every Saturday for a year he took me to the Aquatic Centre and used the sink-or-swim method to train me. He took me to the deep end and told me to lie on his back and wrap my arms around his neck. He did breaststroke out to the centre of the pool and then he moved like a dolphin, plunging his whole body deep into the water and breaking the surface when I pushed my fingernails into his skin. Then he waded out with me to the centre again, and turned and swam back to the edge. I’d paddle and paddle and my mouth would fill up with water and sometimes someone else’s dad would grab my shoulder and shake their head. Morgan would say, ‘Butt out, mate; keep an eye on your own ball.’ After that he’d make me hold on to the side of the pool and blow bubbles and he’d rest his hands under my thighs to stop my legs from dipping.
After the lessons we’d get changed in the toilet block, where old men perched on the bench, their towels on their shoulders instead of wrapped around their waists, and I’d try not to look. I always got dressed in the shower. I peeked at those men through the gap in the door and I wondered if they could see me. It was wet and warm in there and it smelled like salted popcorn and bleach and, sometimes, piss. You want to know something funny? I once said that word in front of Mum. Here’s the funny bit: she’s never had a problem leaving me with Morgan but she went ballistic over a little word like that. Another funny peculiar for you. Anyway, Mum was trying to get the key in the door and I was hopping around on one leg and in the end I said, ‘Mum, I’m busting. I’ve got to do a piss.’ She told me not to speak like that around her ever again. After she said that, I said sorry, and then I went up to my room and I touched myself the way Morgan sometimes touches me. I said piss under my breath until I wet myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.
• • •
There I go, off track again. You probably think I’m jibber-jabbering too. We were at Sawtell, weren’t we? I’ll take you back there. There was no-one in the ocean bath that day. It was murky and full of weed. Over on the rocks, a fisherman cast out to sea. Mum had a book balanced over her face and she twitched every now and then like she was caught in a dream. I couldn’t see Morgan even though I searched for him. There was a tiny black spot way up the beach, smaller than a speck of dirt that you could brush from your hand. I thought that maybe that was him. I grabbed my mask and snorkel. Mum had bought it for me for my birthday and I’d been practising in the bath with the water nice and deep so I could let the snorkel fill up with water and blow it out again like a whale.
I walked to the guardrail; it threw curved shadows that reached into the water like hooks. The water trembled in the breeze. I thought about how that’s the sort of thing Mrs Avery goes crazy for when we do art and how I’d like to paint it for her. I’d paint the shadowy hooks spearing into the pitted steel water and schools of fish swarming and scattering like filings round a magnet. She’d hold up my painting to the class and tell them that I was going to be a famous artist. That’s what I want to be, but Morgan thinks I’m going to work in the family business if I can get myself up to scratch, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I pressed my feet against the mossy steps and I plunged in. Do you want me to tell you what I saw down there? Take a breath. Just one breath. See if you can stay with me.
• • •
. . . the salt water gurgles it chokes in my snorkel and laps in my ears and down and down it whirls and no words no words for me to stumble just sounds and colours fold in on each other and dots like a painting press in and upon me I fall I fall no today no tomorrow the water the water and me are all one all one and tiny fish flicker I spin I spin and in the distance maybe Mum calls me but maybe she doesn’t the water and me all one and the same and I force myself to the light to the surface . . .
• • •
You can let it go now. Did it make you a bit dizzy? Morgan always says one and the same. ‘I’ll be buggered, Oar-sten, if you and Blind Freddy aren’t one and the same.’ I once asked Mum who Blind Freddy was and she said, ‘I don’t know, Oar-sten, maybe he’s Deaf Jimmy’s brother.’ I cleared my snorkel and put my goggles on my forehead. Up on the sandy bank, Mum had rolled onto her stomach. Her legs were sprawled out wide like she’d collapsed or something. I stared at the fisherman. I could see his fishing rod but not the line. He looked strange with his blue-black wind jacket flapping in the breeze but his body so still. He looked like someone had speared him into the rock with the rod. Like he was one of those butterflies that people pierce and press behind a frame and mount on their wall as though they’ve created it. I wondered if that fisherman pinned to the rock knew how beautiful a trevally looked under water. I’d seen one on the television. I wondered if he knew how it glinted and flashed as it swam to his bait. I swished my mask through the water. I filled up my lungs and clamped my lips around the mouthpiece like I was an anemone sucking on a finger. I moved further along the wall of the pool and I let myself fall. You can give it another go if you want. Fill up your lungs and fall in with me.
• • •
. . . purple and green and flickers of light and bubbles colliding and rising up to me up through me and my heart beating my head pounding my blood moving into my mouth and no space for full stops no space for pauses and it tastes like salt salt fizzing on my tongue in the dark corner there might be someone but the water ripples as light as the sky and white and white and white . . .
• • •
Did you make it in one breath? I can tell you, no word of a lie, that it gets easier every time. That was the longest I’d ever stayed under water. And that’s how I knew that what Morgan had always told me was true. That there is a moment when you can just keep going forever. A moment when you stop resisting. Resisting just makes everything worse. Morgan taught me that it is better to play along, keep your head low. Say nothing. When I used to try to fight back, he’d take me out to his shed and show me pictures of boys who refused to go along with the games that real men play. You need to keep this bit quiet. Okay? He keeps those photos high up in the rafters in a box with a lock. They don’t look like any of the kids I know. Some of them are really skinny and some of them have bits missing. One is missing his whole leg. I wonder if that boy is still alive. I wonder if he can see anything anymore.
When I came up from that last dive, I looked across at the fisherman and he gave me a sort of wave. Not a real one. He just held his hand halfway up like he thought he knew the answer to a question but he wasn’t really sure. I waded out to the breakwall so he couldn’t see me. I pressed my face into the water and walked my hands down the mossy wall patterned with periwinkles. I lodged my fingers into crevices and crept further and further down. I guess you’re feeling a bit lightheaded now, but if you can try one more time, I’d really like it. I’d like to have someone with me.
• • •
. . . it glistens silver and crimson and crushed in the weed it churns and rolls and deeper and deeper and in the corner in the dark dark corner his eyes are slits and he hovers down there so grey so grey with a black harness on and one fin two fins three and across his eyes like a streak of graffiti on an alley wall a shadowy stripe and I force myself down I force myself down till I’m almost on him he doesn’t struggle he just trembles and I hover upon him and maybe he’s sick and maybe I’m stronger and this time I’ll win this time I’m on top and I press down my hands and he quivers and shrinks on my fingers I follow I follow and the water the water it’s breathing with me it’s breathing for me and grey so grey so black so black so black . . .
• • •
This is the last bit I’m going to tell you, if that’s okay. I’m feeling pretty sleepy.
I felt Morgan roll me onto my side. I felt his hands press against my belly. I didn’t fight. I wondered why he was trying to force the life out of me when there was none left. Mum was there too; I could hear her voice. She was crying and saying, ‘Oar-sten, Oar-sten.’ I wanted to ask her why. Why didn’t she stop him, but I couldn’t speak.
He moved me onto my back and pressed his hands on my chest and his mouth over mine and she just kept crying. Against my closed eyes the world shimmered and blurred and specks of light swivelled around the darkness like letters spinning in Mrs Avery’s kaleidoscope. Then he said, ‘Come on, my boy. Come on, little man.’
That’s when I knew. His voice sounded different. Sort of rough and warm at the same time. Through my flickering lashes I took in his blue-black jacket and his face as jagged as a rock and then the ocean spilled from my mouth and onto his neck. The fisherman pulled me up and pressed me into his chest and I curled myself into him like a limpet. I thought about the big-man games and the box with a lock. I thought about how Mrs Avery had said she thought she knew what was wrong and that she’d try to help me. I figured that she was the sort of person who’d know what to do about Morgan. Turns out she did. That’s how I ended up here with you.
Oh, there’s just one more thing. While I was lying there, holding on to the fisherman, he said something to my mum. It wasn’t funny ha-ha or funny peculiar, but it made me smile and it made me think. He said, ‘You don’t know how lucky he is, lady. You can’t take your eyes off them. Not for a second. Even in a place like this. A place where you think they’re safe.’
The Neighbours
It was just nine. A time when the day held hope and uncertainty in an uneasy balance. When the scales could become out of kilter, ready to tip irretrievably on the side of despair. But right now the sun was a warm pause on Miranda’s skin, a tender, quiescent friend. The day was tilting optimistically in the right direction. She’d taken a break from her work to sit on the front verandah, an irregularly timbered refuge that housed precise pairs of shoes and a Moroccan pouffe (pistachio green) that she’d inherited from her mother. Rob had left at seven smelling of a punchy new aftershave. He’d kissed her forehead, and she’d pretended to be asleep.
There had been few creature comforts in her mother’s house. ‘Sit on the pouffe and I’ll make you a tea,’ had been a familiar refrain. Miranda was addicted to caffeine by the age of twelve, her mind jittery before her morning cuppa. Twenty years later, the tea, the comment, her mother and the tuffet were inextricably linked. If she rested her cheek on its pliant, faded leather, it felt fleshy. She half-expected delicate fingers to curl around her own. Next to the pouffe was a resin chequerboard dotted with squatting frogs and plump lily pads, a modern take on noughts and crosses that she’d never played. It had seemed quirky and desirable when surrounded by second-hand books and dream-catchers at the local market, but in reality it was another dust-gatherer. She wiped the frogs with her fingers and repositioned them so they were facing each other. She noticed one was missing. Funny how on a bad day that would have been enough to send her reeling, but today she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let the verandah enclose her within its worn beams and its warm warped base. It didn’t hold too tightly and she felt at ease again.
Between sips of tea, Miranda fidgeted with her tangled brown hair. She was still dressed in her pyjamas, pale pink and grey, the usual dress code of her current job, at least until midday. The girl next door, Bella, was dropping pegs into a plastic bucket, coughing in between with a coarse and jagged beat. Bella was just nineteen. A girl Miranda’s mother would have called a wisp of a thing. Her belly was permanently exposed, even in cool weather. She favoured slack-shouldered midriff tops and denim shorts with exposed pockets, two frayed scoops that cupped her tiny thighs provocatively. Now and then the boyfriend, Harko, mumbled or swore and Bella said, ‘Aay?’ like a geriatric. She didn’t ever seem to comprehend him the first time.
Bella and Harko had a baby girl just a few weeks old, Suhbi, which meant Lucky, Miranda discovered, after searching for the meaning. After the baby’s birth, they had readily accepted her presents – romper suits and cot sheets and a mobile with bobbing blue giraffes and tigers. Harko had wound up the mobile as they grouped around it, biting his lower lip and saying, ‘Cool,’ as the animals chased but never caught each other to ‘Für Elise’. They were appreciative, perhaps overwhelmed, by Miranda’s gift-giving. Bella had rejected the breast pump, though. The baby was thriving on formula after a momentary setback involving raw nipples and angry swelling. Suhbi couldn’t latch, the teenager said with an air of mothers’ club confidence. Besides, Harko didn’t really want to share that part of her. Sometimes she added a bit of Farex to the bottle to help the baby sleep right through, not that she’d tell the clinic that. Bella had given Miranda this account between firm pats on Suhbi’s nappied bottom as drool spilled from the infant’s lips and pooled on Bella’s flawless shoulder. When they left, burdened with paraphernalia, Miranda observed that the girl had none of the physical markings of motherhood, and yet she was a natural. The perfect procreator.
As the weeks went on, Bella’s motherly routine became part of Miranda’s. She kept an ear out and was always greeted, at ten, with a few sobs, and again at two, then eight. Controlled. By the book. Bath time was eleven, the running tap and the lavender scent. The cries were never desperate, but Miranda had become hypersensitive in this quiet, coastal village. She heard gates being relatched and bottles clinking into recycle bins. Sometimes, bringing in her washing, she caught the sound of Bella and Harko making love: Bella’s oblique, whimpering melody followed by Harko’s disciplined groans. Miranda decided that Harko was, if nothing else, a thoughtful lover. They preferred afternoons, just before Judge Judy, though once the sounds had been close to the baby’s waking time and Miranda had hoped they’d be interrupted, put off at least. In her own home the noises were different: the constant thrum and scrape of her washing machine, the muffled exhalations of her dog, Bess. Now and then the dog yelped, trapped in a bunny-hunting dream.
They’d been neighbours for a little over three months. Miranda and Rob had bought in just two months before that, a corner block, with a side street on one boundary and a vacant ramshackle dwelling on the other. At the time she’d been thinking of her mother again. The house had a Hills Hoist and a veggie patch. It was close enough to the hospital for Rob’s work, but far enough away from Miranda’s friends (friends who now crossed streets to avoid her) to be viable. When she sat on the back lawn, she caught a glimpse of her four-year-old self making mud pies, hair fresh and dripping, smelling like Lustre Cream. And the washing – her tiny pinafores and her mother’s embroidered underwear – twisting and snapping in the breeze.
The open inspection had been poorly attended and the agent had seemed a little too ebullient when Rob and Miranda showed up. His name was Steven Trott, a springy man with a flushed complexion and a silver cross on his jacket lapel, who told them he was expanding his portfolio along the coast. ‘Too much information,’ Miranda had said to Rob as they peered into the pantry. Steven said the owners were after a quick sale. It was an ex-rental, still furnished, though sparsely. The smell of stale incense hung in the air. A local resident, Gordon ‘from up the hill’, said he’d take it off Steven’s hands, though not at the price indicated. Gordon had pointed to light streaming up from the floorboards and said, ‘There’s the problem. Termites.’ Miranda had rested her hand on Rob’s shoulder and with a ferocity she thought had been sapped out of her said, ‘He’s not getting it.’ There was a derelict structure at the rear of the property. She imagined converting it into a chook house, scratching and clucking sounds punctuating her work. There was a hostile surf beach over the hill and a bay within walking distance. She would take up kayaking, her stroke as strong and precise as a metronome, her arms firm, a radiant tan. She’d get a one-piece. A nautical navy one with white piping that would cover the welts on her midriff. Revealing and concealing. Multi-purpose.
Miranda and Rob had assumed the place next door was a knock-down, but the teenagers arrived on a forty-degree day with packing crates and friends in vans. They rattled through the house, prising open windows, scraping furniture into empty spaces. There was a shriek and then giggling when they found a dead rat. Later they celebrated with raucous housew
arming drinks, their laughter pressing through the limbs of flowering gums and frangipanis. When the vans left, roaring up the street, Rob and Miranda cautiously walked down their paved driveway and across to the adjoining overgrown yard, feigning neighbourly hospitality to get a better look. The girl stood out in a yellow bikini top. She had a daisy-print bandana wrapped around her forehead and a white sarong looped under her bulging belly. In the fading light, her skin was like polished mango wood. Rob flicked his black fringe out of his face and stared at her as though she were an actual mango or some other exotic, delectable fruit. The boy looked emaciated, bare-chested, in board shorts that sagged beneath his underwear. One arm, from bicep to wrist, was black, as if he’d dipped it in ink. When he turned, Miranda saw he had ‘Bella’ tattooed in the hollow between his shoulder-blades. In for the long haul or just a bit thick, she thought. They made their introductions and Rob gave an open-ended ‘call if there’s anything you need’ offer before hastily retreating. Later that evening he pinched strands of Miranda’s hair off her swollen eyes and said, ‘How could we have known? We couldn’t have known, Miranda.’