The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  Sounds came up from the street. They were different from the trundling trucks and cars along Dyson Road, and they were different from the low drum of the desert. In Wallaroo the sounds were bright. Birds picking stuff out of the sea. People walking their dogs and shouting at other people, but only because they knew them, not because they wanted to fight them. Neighbours in their gardens clinking their dinner plates together.

  After the sun had gone down we watched a movie in the front room with the breeze coming through, Raf with his arm around my shoulders and Ben in the recliner by the window, laughing as though he’d just learned how.

  13

  IN THE END, I only saw Nonno three more times after Dad left. Mum took me up there in her old bomb, Ben howling in his car seat in the back, and she waited in the driveway for me to go in on my own. Nonno didn’t say much, so for a while we just sat in his front room and he offered me tea six times.

  Afterwards he took me out to see his chickens, showed me how to collect the warm eggs from the roosts. We picked oranges from the closest trees, and he pointed across the fields to where he’d planted almond trees, because he’d heard a rumour about milk made from almonds and he thought it might be a good investment. Then he opened an old exercise book and found the recipe for Nonna’s orange cake so we made that with kookaburras on the breeze.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ I said, without meaning to.

  He went to pick up the book and the pages fell out like leaves.

  We spent the next morning on the beach, hitting a cricket ball around and chasing it into the freezing water. In the early afternoon, we hugged Reg and crammed into Trey’s shitty car. Ben pressed his nose to the glass and said, ‘Bye,’ and kept it there until Wallaroo was out of sight and we were back on the highway. Raf had me under his armpit and I read a book I’d found under the passenger’s seat and listened to the way his heart tripped over itself.

  Trey dropped us off at the end of our street and Raf climbed out behind me. Ben picked up his backpack. ‘Thank you for driving us, Trey.’ The car tore away. ‘Did you have a fun time?’ he said to me. ‘I had a fun time. Even though the crab was a bit disgusting. Yiannis says the most delicious food in the world is the Galápagos tortoise. He says they tried to bring them back to England on boats but they kept eating them because they were so delicious.’

  ‘Gross,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think Bilbo would be delicious?’ He laughed.

  ‘I don’t think I want to find out.’

  ‘Ben,’ Raf said. ‘You go on ahead, yeah? I’ve gotta talk to Skye about something.’

  Off he went, his heart all filled with gladness. I was light as air. I imagined us back there on the jetty with the sun on our skin. Raf with his arm around me, his hand on my hip, smelling like salty chips and deodorant mixed together.

  ‘I had a great time,’ I said.

  ‘Me too.’ He slid his hand into mine. ‘After the footy tour I’ll be able to get my licence and we can go out to the Flinders. Camping.’

  ‘Camping? Shit no.’

  ‘Glamping?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Something else then.’ He was whispering, pulling my body against his. All the blood drained from me and when he kissed me, hard, for a thousand hours, I felt like nothing at all.

  *

  Ben was waiting for me by the door, jumping from one foot to the other.

  ‘Skye. Skye! Get inside.’ He poked his head out and looked around, like I might have been followed. ‘I’ve found something,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like I’m going to be in trouble because I went into Jason’s room when he wasn’t here.’

  ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know. They weren’t here when I came in. I didn’t know if they’d gone yet so I tried to turn the door handle to Jason’s room and it just opened. He forgot to lock it.’ He looked at his skinny arms. ‘Or I just have superhuman strength.’

  My heart beat a little faster. ‘And? What did you find?’

  He pulled me into the room, where he’d taken out a few things and laid them on the desk.

  ‘Do you know what this stuff is?’ he said, and I did, the burning glass and the stream of smoke, but I didn’t say it. ‘There’re no parrots, so at least I was right that they’re not sending animals overseas in plastic tubes. I couldn’t find any credit cards either, so you were wrong. But what are these?’ He picked up a glass pipe with a bulb on the end.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Believed myself, for a second. ‘Did you find anything else?’

  ‘Weird stuff, like packets of alfoil and little Ziploc bags. Money. Not heaps and heaps of money but some five-dollar notes rolled up with rubber bands around them.’

  ‘I’m going to take a couple of photos and then we should put this back,’ I said.

  ‘Why would you take photos?’ He frowned. ‘Are you going to show them to the police? Don’t you remember what the kids said?’ He was tugging on my arm, urgent, pulling me down to his eye level.

  ‘Not to show the police.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘I thought Raf might know something. He can help us.’

  Ben’s shoulders dropped loose. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah, Raf will help us.’

  ‘Can you remember how you found it? Jason will really lose it if he finds out someone’s been getting into his stuff.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ben pulled out the notebook with the plan inside. ‘I drew a diagram. See?’ Each item on the table had a scribbled version on the paper. We carefully squeezed it all back into its original places and closed the door behind us. I tried to catch my breath but tripped over it.

  Ben danced back and forth across the kitchen, grabbing things from every cupboard. ‘I feel like a detective.’ He put bread in the toaster. ‘My teacher said she sometimes has toast for dinner because she can’t be bothered cooking anymore, because her baby is taking up all the space inside her body. So then I said, I could cook toast for dinner, so you wouldn’t have to.’ He peered into the toaster, face lit up with the orange light.

  ‘But I like cooking for you,’ I said.

  He tucked a tea towel into his shorts, like a waiter. ‘We have three spreads available. Peanut butter. Vegemite. And something called anchovy paste.’ He took the lid off and sniffed it. ‘Argh! Ma’am, I don’t think I can recommend the anchovy paste.’ He put it back in the cupboard.

  ‘Peanut butter sounds great.’

  ‘Please take a seat at the table.’ He shuffled around in the kitchen, disappeared out the front door for a minute, came back to spread the toast. It was cold by the time it arrived at the table. Cold, with a little spray of grass in the middle. ‘It’s like a restaurant,’ he said, and got his own plate from the bench.

  ‘You have to think of a name for your restaurant. So people know where to go.’

  ‘Sad Ben’s,’ he said, and then he smiled.

  ‘Well, Sad Ben’s, this toast is not bad at all.’

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘I like cold toast.’

  ‘I don’t mind that you’re lying to make me feel better.’ He gnawed on the last of his crusts, got a faraway look in his eyes like he was thinking deeply. After a bit he said, ‘Does the stuff I found mean the police really will take Mum to jail?’

  ‘Are you going to tell them?’

  He crossed his arms. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘And neither will I. So, no.’

  ‘You just looked pretty scared when you saw it, and then you said Raf would need to help us so I thought it must be bad.’ He took my empty plate, slotted it on top of his. ‘What do you think it’s like in jail? Would Mum go to a jail with murderers in it? I think they put murderers in their own special jails, with very high walls and guard dogs, and if you try to escape they just shoot you.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Amir, I think. He liked to talk about jails.’

  ‘Why does an eight-year-ol
d like talking about jails?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s weird.’ And then he laughed.

  We watched TV for a while, some old movie with aliens in it. I got him into the shower, sat outside the door on Mum’s plastic stool so he could talk to me. He told me stories about places he would go when he was all grown up, hunting for dinosaur bones on African plains and buried Aztec treasure in the rainforest. His voice ran frantic and urgent, the way it always did. I watched through the window for Jason’s car, its one dim headlight. Ben had disappeared into the bathroom fog. ‘Did you know’ – he shouted over the water – ‘a baby blue whale weighs three tons when it comes out? And they’re mammals, so after it’s born it just eats its mother’s milk and gains like, a hundred kilos every day for the first year of its life?’ He made a whistling sound. ‘One time I found a baby bird in the playground, but it only weighed about fifty grams and when I picked it up I realised it was dead.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but then I gave it a funeral and Amir sang a song about how the bird’s suffering was over and now it could fly free, so that made me feel a bit better.’

  Headlights lit up the hallway, for a moment, and moved on. I let out a slow breath.

  ‘Let’s get you out of there,’ I said. ‘It’s getting late. Don’t want to let Mum see you up past eight.’

  Water had streamed out through the crack in the glass, and Ben stood in it and shivered in his blue towel. ‘Jason should use all those five dollars to get a towel heater,’ he said. ‘I feel like my bones are going to rattle right out of me.’ Then he laughed.

  ‘Put your PJs on.’

  ‘But they’re covered in sand and fish guts.’

  ‘Trackies, then. Or a t-shirt at least. Look at you, you’re turning into an ice princess.’

  He smiled, lips thin and blue. ‘Maybe a snow queen. She was evil, you know, originally.’

  I rubbed his arms through the towel. ‘Get dressed. Your toes are going to fall off.’

  As he went to the bedroom, the hallway lit up again. A car whirred to a stop and doors slammed shut. Someone was in the driveway. I slipped on the chain lock, peered through the peephole. Jason’s old Ford was parked in the street, and in the driveway was a red car I’d never seen before. Jason stood next to it with one hand on his hip and the other wrapped around Mum. Kurt was there, too. He had Jason’s same bald head. They might have been laughing. It was hard to tell; laughing and yelling were so alike from behind.

  I kept the chain on and went to the kitchen. Everything was dirty, piled high in the sink with food crusted to it, some of it growing green edges.

  ‘Skye!’ The door banged, chain lock pulled on its screws. ‘Open the damn door.’

  ‘I’m on the toilet!’ I waited a few seconds longer. Washed a glass and poured myself a drink. Jason pounded on the door again. Ben came out in shorts, knees visible where he’d grown taller than them.

  ‘What’s all the banging?’ he said.

  ‘Mum and Jason are home. I’m trying to decide whether or not to let them in.’ I tipped the rest of my drink into the sink and went to the door, pushed it shut so I could get the lock open. Jason burst through it, still shouting.

  ‘Where do you get off, locking us out like that?’ He slammed the door open. It made a cracking sound as it hit the wall behind.

  Kurt stood behind him, then Mum with her face all lit up. ‘Don’t worry about it, Jase. It doesn’t even matter. Tell them! I’ll tell them.’ She was flushed red from her neck up, eyes shiny. ‘We bought a new car! I mean, it’s not a new new car, but it’s pretty new. It’s ex-demo. You explain it, Jase.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He shook his head, like he was trying to get his thoughts in order. He pressed the remote in his hand and the headlights went on and off. ‘Big twin-turbo. Goes like the clappers.’

  ‘The seats have bum warmers in them.’

  Kurt said, ‘Goes zero to a hundred in seven seconds,’ right as Mum said, ‘Goes zero to a hundred in seven seconds.’ Kurt laughed and punched Jason’s arm.

  ‘You got a good one here, brother,’ he said. Mum beamed like she was in a pageant.

  ‘And the headlights turn on by themselves when it gets dark!’ She giggled into her hands. ‘I’ve never had an ex-demo car before. Remember my shitty old car, Ben? Remember the time you got your fingers stuck in the boot?’

  He frowned. ‘Yeah, of course I remember. One of them got broken.’

  She rubbed his head. ‘Well, that’ll never happen in this car. You can’t even close the boot, you have to press a button on the remote thingy.’

  ‘That’s heaps better!’ He pushed past Mum and ran around the back of it, tried to pry the boot open with his bare hands. Mum pressed the button; it floated up like it had a balloon attached to it. ‘Cooooool,’ he said.

  ‘Ben, it’s cold.’ I followed him out, grabbed the waist of his shorts. ‘You should get back inside, or put some shoes on at least.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re right. My toes are like tiny little ice cubes. You could chop them off and put them in lemonade and that would be a pretty good drink, wouldn’t it?’ He gave a shrill laugh. ‘Don’t, though. I need my toes to walk. Do you know your toes are how you balance when you walk? I guess if we were kangaroos we would use a tail, but humans haven’t had tails since . . . well, ever, unless you count when you’re still in the womb. I don’t think I count that, though.’

  Jason looked up from where he was polishing the bonnet with his jacket. ‘God, you talk a lot of shit,’ he said, and nothing more.

  Mum made us look at the car for a few more minutes. Showed us the dials inside, the way they lit up blue when you had the headlights on. It told us how far it could drive until empty (four hundred and nine k’s), and the name of the song that was playing on the radio (‘Wrecking Ball’), and how cold it was outside (8.4 degrees). At the last part, she agreed it was too cold for Ben to be outside without shoes on, and Jason pressed the button to lock everything up. The whole car bleeped in the darkness, flashed the driveway into a false daylight.

  ‘Gonna head off,’ Kurt said. ‘Cheers for the car, Jase. It’ll come in real handy when the baby gets here.’

  Inside, Ben turned on the crap heater in the lounge room, shoved his feet right up to it.

  ‘Have to warm up my feet before I get frostbite. But not too fast. You can get hyperthermia from heating up too fast. But did you know, people who get hypothermia, the last thing they do is take off all their clothes? They get so confused they think they’re hot so they take everything off, even though they’re so cold their limbs are probably going to fall off.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ Mum said. She was smiling at him, standing in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest but with a look on her face like she couldn’t believe he was hers. He smiled back up at her. Wriggled his toes in front of the glow of the heater.

  ‘It’s too late by then,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve taken off all your clothes, you’re dead, even if they find you. That’s what happens on Mount Everest. All the people who die on Mount Everest get left up there because it’s too hard to bring them back down again. But it’s so cold they’re just preserved there. When other people climb it, they use the dead bodies to navigate. Isn’t that gross?’ He pushed a moth into the heater and it hissed and popped.

  ‘Grosser than setting moths on fire?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ He screwed up his face. ‘Heaps grosser.’

  Jason grabbed Mum’s shoulder. ‘Gonna hop in the shower,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, darl. Did you see how I knew the same thing Kurt knew? Did you hear him? “You got a good one here”, he said.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard,’ Jason said, went to the bathroom and closed the door. His big voice boomed underwater, singing something out of tune. Mum touched the keys on the front table, looked at Ben again with her big eyes.

  ‘Hey, Benny.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Let’s take the new car for a spin. I’ll sh
ow you how the windscreen wipers shoot soap all over the window.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, we can drive down to Port Pirie and get a soft serve from McDonald’s.’

  He was already up, trying to find his shoes under the table. ‘Can we get chocolate fudge sauce?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course,’ she said. Twirled the keys around on her finger. Jason’s booming still coming from the bathroom, steam streaming out from under the door. He would be twenty minutes, at least. Never thought about saving water. Always had it going so hot, like a sauna.

  ‘What about me?’ I said.

  Mum turned to me, dropped the smile a little but not completely. ‘You want a sundae, Skye? Didn’t know sixteen-year-olds still ate sundaes with their mums.’ She punched my arm, just a soft tap near my shoulder. ‘Go on, get a jumper on.’

  ‘Will Jason mind?’

  ‘Mind? Why would he? I chose it.’ But she looked to the bathroom door as we left, told us to be quiet when we shut the flyscreen door.

  The road was practically empty. A few trucks shot past with their big lights in our eyes. One overflowed with sheep, still alive but with the saddest faces, all drooping down like they were trying to drip right out of the truck and onto the road. For a while we followed behind one filled with pebbles, and they shot out and nicked the windscreen, bounced off into the night. Ben squealed every time, and Mum laughed. She laughed and Ben squealed and I thought about how long it had been since I’d heard both sounds. Watched the way Mum’s face got tight at her ears, where her mouth curled around at the ends, and Ben’s skinny face with his teeth bursting right out of it. I wanted to hug both of them. Sat in the back seat by myself instead, leaned against the door and tried to remember the way they sounded in case I needed it later.

  Later. When we were gone. After we’d stowed away in Ben’s bushranger room and got the train to Adelaide.

  I thought about what we’d do when we arrived. It would be colder in Adelaide. Raining, maybe. We could get off at the station right in the city and find a motel to stay in for the night. Catch a taxi out to Nonno’s farm the next day, or maybe after two days so we had a chance to see the city a bit. I could take Ben to the museum, or the zoo, or both. We could go to the reptile enclosure and see some proper lizards, a few snakes, a crocodile. I still wasn’t sure whether Mum would be there with us.