The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  Quarter to five. Young families had started to make way for groups in school uniforms and they were so easy and loud that I wanted to hide. All those sounds banging together, automated voices shouting prices and prizes.

  I didn’t see Raf until he grabbed me, face full of goodness. ‘Skye.’ He pointed up.

  ‘Still going with the whole sky thing, huh,’ I said, but my heart pounded, all the anxieties in my shoulders and my ribs and my knees.

  ‘I missed you.’ He kissed me near my ear. Soft, warm. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘I ate every single sample.’

  ‘Well, I’m gonna get a baked potato. Claud’s favourite. She forced me to make them my favourite.’

  He ate from a foam box, standing up beside the food cart. A kid puked into her glittery top hat. Raf led me by the hand through Sideshow Alley, down to the one where you threw ping pong balls into dishes, and he fed the guy dollar after dollar. Eventually, a ball dropped into a blue dish. Raf picked the biggest toy from the top shelf and I hugged it. It smelled like plastic and factories. We took it on the pirate ship ride, then to buy showbags. Raf got an Adelaide Crows one and he bought me three different kinds of chocolate ones. When we came out, it was dark. Rows of white lights gave everything a ghostly glow.

  We sat on the side of a hill and watched the cars go round the arena. One was lining up to jump through a flaming hoop. None of it seemed real, stuck inside a circus with this guy I knew from somewhere else. The spinning, flashing lights of the rides with bodies screaming inside them.

  If Ben had been there he would have told us about the kids who died on the rides. Fell out of the cage and into the crowd below. Caught their jeans on the crossbar and had their head cut off.

  I pulled on the oversized glasses from ‘The World’s Least Crap Showbag!’, looked over at Raf. The light from the flaming hoop was reflected in his eyes.

  ‘This has been really nice.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He reached across to me. Always touching, always some physical contact. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Mum wanted me to ask.’

  ‘I wish she hadn’t said anything.’

  He sighed, put his drink on the ground. ‘I mean, I was gonna call her about the win anyway.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yeah, everything. I’m really sorry, Skye. That stuff he did to Ben, it’s not right.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘I could’ve stopped him. Pissed him off out of town. Told the cops.’ It was dark in the arena. Four cars jumped one after the other through the flaming hoops.

  ‘You didn’t know.’

  ‘I wish you’d told me.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He hugged his knees to his chest.

  ‘You know what I did before we moved to Port Flinders?’ I said. ‘Nothing. Went to school, did my homework, hung out with the one friend I had, took Ben to school, cooked dinner for Mum. How did I even get here, Raf? My mum’s been in jail.’

  ‘Just the holding cell,’ he said.

  ‘You know that, too?’

  He scratched his head. Bought himself some time. ‘The whole town knows, Skye. Half the deadbeats in the place were tied up in Jason’s bullshit.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘Milkshakes Joe?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sad Tom. Dini who runs the pub.’ He pulled the plastic packet off a Redskin. ‘Yardy.’

  ‘Yardy?’

  ‘All of them, I guess. Our squad, Yardy and fat Hamish and El. Not Seb. Bunch of the seniors, even a kid in Year 8.’ Bang! The sky lit up like daytime. A kid squealed. ‘Yardy tried to get me into it a couple of times. Said he wanted me to make enough to go to that training program.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  ‘You think you can still play footy if you get caught dealing ice?’

  A boy down the front cheered, flapped his hands around his face.

  ‘I was the one who called the cops,’ I said. ‘Like, to arrest my own mother.’

  ‘That was the right thing to do, I reckon. Anyway’ – he took a deep breath – ‘Claud had already called them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Or child protection. Someone.’

  ‘But I asked her not to.’ He stuck his hand in a showbag, pulled out a tiny Snickers bar and held it out to me. ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  He unwrapped the chocolate and bit into it. ‘She was freaking out. They’d probably been to Jason’s already by the time you called.’

  ‘So I didn’t even do anything?’

  ‘Nah, screw that. You got Ben out of there. No one else was going to.’

  The crying pulled my ribs tight, grabbed and twisted and burned them.

  ‘Hey.’ He dropped his arm around my shoulder. ‘You’ve got huge fucking balls, Skye Teller.’

  ‘Ovaries.’

  We sat and I relived all that time again, playing like a movie in my head. Every minute I’d spent watching Mum transform further into Jason, his balled fists. Our escape train booming beside the wheat fields, the way the stalks had turned from green to yellow while I’d been watching and waiting.

  ‘When do you go back?’ I said.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  The air had got cold without me noticing. ‘And after that? When will you come back?’

  ‘Christmas holidays?’

  I saw it, just for a second. Me and Raf in a yellow brick house with a Hills hoist spinning in the wind and a gum tree stretching into the sky. I put my hand into his hand. Fireworks exploded, rained their sooty bodies onto the grass, and when their thunderclaps chased after them I said, ‘I’m scared,’ so only I could hear it.

  *

  Vin’s echidnas got bigger. She showed Ben how to feed them from a syringe and he made a chart to track their weight gain. One afternoon, after school, she took us both to the zoo and told us everything she knew about wombats. Ben watched her so closely while she talked. Afterwards we went to the restaurant and I ate chips while he kicked bark around the playground and shouted wombat facts to the other kids.

  One night, after Therese’s chicken stroganoff, my phone lit up: Hey Skye. Heard you’re back. Feels like ages. Got so much to tell you! Kxxx and I imagined crawling back into my old body. Catching the train to see Kirrily at Noarlunga, our old apartment being close enough to smell. Defs, I wrote, and stopped. I hadn’t talked to a real friend for months, didn’t know if I could even remember how or where to start. I put my phone back in my pocket.

  Raf texted every day. All kinds of things – a photo of the baby eagle that did eventually turn up by the oval, maths questions, a bit of a poem he’d found on the internet, a photo of his half-eaten pie. Nothing from the rest of the town. Not Joe’s, closed until further notice, or Sad Tom’s, chickens dried out in the bain-marie. I opened them at school, on my own under the gum trees, read them all from start to finish. Sometimes the crying started way down in my guts and made my face explode on its own. Other times I felt nothing. I read Much Ado About Nothing aloud in class and people watched me do it without making me feel stupid. Sometimes Claud texted as well, always just to say she was thinking of us. I was thinking of her too, but I didn’t know how to tell her.

  One afternoon I was waiting for the bus with some kids I recognised from my Maths class. The Maths class I was nearly failing, but they’d said I would get special consideration. The guy in the group turned to me and said, ‘Where’re you headed?’

  ‘Just home,’ I said, and I said it again. ‘Yeah, home.’ My yellow lamp and my ceiling of stars. I took Perry for walks along the fruit-stained footpaths and through the park, stopped at the café down the road for a milkshake. At school, a couple of girls asked me to sit with them. They didn’t ask me why I was new and I didn’t tell them. The nights were getting light and warm.

  Yas knocked on the door one morning be
fore eight. Vin opened the door with an echidna in one hand, milk bottle under her arm.

  ‘Yasmin,’ she said, and looked up at the clock. ‘We weren’t expecting you for another hour.’

  ‘I know. Got an early start, had to . . . it doesn’t matter.’ Yesterday’s hair, fluffed out at the sides where she’d slept on it. She did a double-take on the echidna. ‘That’s a real echidna, right? I’m not imagining it?’

  Vin frowned. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, of course.’

  ‘Come through.’ Vin popped the animal back in its crate, slipped the lock closed. Yas dropped her pile of folders on the table. ‘Can I get you a coffee, Yasmin?’

  Yas shook her head. ‘I’m good. Let’s sit.’ I took the chair at the end of the table. I could see Ben from there, through the sliding door, doing his baby’s puzzle on his bed. ‘Can Ben hear us?’ she said. ‘He probably doesn’t need to be part of this conversation right away.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’ She opened a file. ‘We had a development late yesterday. Your mum’s interim protection order was finalised and the courts have allowed’ – she looked down at her paperwork – ‘three hours a week, supervised.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means she can see you, but one of us has to be there.’

  Vin got up and put the kettle on. ‘When does this start?’ she said.

  ‘As soon as you like.’

  I thought of the last time I’d seen her, disappearing with Jason while Ben’s throat bloomed into blackness. I tried to place her in Vin and Therese’s house. Mum in front of the fire. Mum by the pool. Mum in my bedroom, with its ceiling of stars. ‘I don’t want her to come here,’ I said.

  ‘She won’t, not here.’ Vin poured herself a cup of tea. ‘It’s good for it to happen in a neutral place – the park or a café. This is your space, Skye. You and Ben need to feel safe here.’

  Yas took us through the options, the likely scenario. We could meet her at the park. There would be lots of other kids around with their families, so we wouldn’t stick out. If we felt like we needed to leave, we could. Yas would be there, and Vin and Therese. If Mum put a foot out of line, they would bring us back here again.

  ‘I need to ask Ben,’ I said.

  He had his head bent over his puzzle, slotting pieces into rectangular and triangular holes. He’d been able to do puzzles like it practically since he was born but he seemed deeply focused. Eyebrows down. Tongue poking out in concentration.

  ‘Ben.’ I knelt beside him. Didn’t know how to choose the right words, thought of him with his head in Vin’s lap, watching the wombats at the zoo, going to school with his face always clean. ‘Mum wants to come and see us.’

  ‘Finally,’ he said, jammed a circle piece into a hexagonal hole. Jammed it again, turned it on its side and rammed it as hard as he could.

  I grabbed his hand. Held it in mine for a second. ‘Yas said she could come and visit us at the park. You know, the one around the corner with the pool? You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. Vin and Therese can tell her we can’t go.’

  He tipped all the pieces out again. ‘Will Jason come?’

  ‘Jason? No way. No. We never have to see him again.’ He nodded. ‘Anyway, we don’t have to decide right now. We can go next week. Whenever we’re ready.’

  ‘Okay.’ He left the room. The door to the bathroom slammed shut. I picked up the puzzle, put all the pieces back in.

  Vin’s voice came from the next room: ‘He wet the bed again.’

  ‘Did he tell you?’ That was Yas.

  ‘No. He wrote a note to his teacher.’ The sound of paper rustling. Yas’s sharp breath in, a tiny Oh!

  ‘That poor kid.’

  ‘He misses her.’

  ‘The mother?’

  ‘Yeah. He has a picture of her in his school bag. Perry found it next to the old apples right at the bottom.’

  ‘Oh, the little love.’

  They were quiet for a while.

  ‘What about Saturday?’ Yas said. ‘Is that too soon? He must be desperate to see her.’

  I couldn’t quite remember what she looked like. All the versions of her mashed up together in there: fucked up on the floor with Jason; big hair and tall boots with that guy who’d worked at the pharmacy; ironed and responsible in her bank uniform.

  I walked out to the kitchen. ‘Ben says okay.’

  Vin spoke even more kindly than usual: ‘How about Saturday?’

  ‘Fine.’

  The numbers all came back to me at once. G Esposito, Seaford Downs. And then G Esposito, Reynella. I closed the door to my room and dialled Nonno’s number, put the phone right up to my face so I could feel the sound coming through.

  The number you have called has been disconnected.

  Saturday.

  For three days, I thought about her. I helped Therese make lunches for Ben in the white kitchen, sandwiches cut into shapes and sliced-up apples and every flavour of chip in one Ziploc bag, and I thought of her. I took Perry for a walk around the block, talked to the man on the corner with his lines of white roses, picked the cherry blossoms, and I thought of her. I read Much Ado About Nothing again, sitting in the front window with the fireplace empty and the sun through the window, and I thought of her.

  Yas came once more that week, on Thursday. The police were finished with the house, she said, and Mum was going to be allowed to go back to collect her remaining belongings. It wasn’t a lot. The new red car had been impounded, and when they’d really looked, properly looked, there wasn’t much worth keeping at all. A few boxes of clothes we’d never unpacked.

  We could go too, if we wanted. Pick up our own things. Or the case worker could pick them up for us.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. Then: ‘There’s nothing there I need,’ and then I felt stupid, like I’d blurted out a tacky line from a book. But the relief was overwhelming, the feeling of never going back. I didn’t need to ask Ben; I’d crammed everything he had into that one bag, the day Claud had come to take us away.

  On Saturday morning Therese packed a picnic lunch. The proper way, into one of those baskets with two lids. A checked tablecloth, knives and forks with rubber handles and plastic cups with removable stems. She made all kinds of things: vegetarian sausage rolls, quiches the size of fifty-cent pieces, layered sandwiches with different-coloured fillings.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ I said, and she said, ‘Once or twice,’ but it still felt like this time was especially for us.

  We took Perry and the basket and photos of the echidnas on Vin’s phone. The park was close, a couple of blocks, but we walked through sludge to get there, pushing hard through the sweet air and laughter. Ben gripped my hand. Breathed short bursts in and out, took a few steps forward and a couple back. Vin bent down level with him and said, ‘We can always go home,’ and he didn’t say anything but moved forward again, and back, and forward.

  It was packed. Kids running everywhere, shouting like they were being chased by wild animals, and parents looking on from their barbecue boundaries with boredom. Mum was supposed to meet us near the pool. In the warmer weather we smelled it, the chemical combination of chlorine and the gum leaves floating in it.

  There she was. On the edge, sitting on a low wall, looking at us. She’d seen us first. Watched for us to come, waited.

  Ben stopped, but his whole body was warm and soft. Breathing out. He twitched at my side. Hopped from one foot to the other. I let go of his hand but he grabbed it back, harder than before. Mum lifted hers to wave. We walked towards her in one mass, me and Ben in the middle like we had a group of bodyguards.

  ‘Linda? I’m Yasmin. I’m your children’s case worker.’

  Mum put out her hand to shake Yas’s. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Hello.’

  Vin stepped forward. ‘Hi, Linda. I’m Lavinia, this is my partner Therese.’ Vin spoke without emotion, measured, no judgement. Mum had painted her eyelids green.<
br />
  Ben pointed to a cat on her scarf. ‘Vin, this looks like your cat.’

  ‘So it does.’

  ‘Lavinia’s cat is called Tickles.’ He was relaying the information to Mum but not looking at her, talking from the side of his mouth. ‘She’s a Maine Coon.’

  ‘Right,’ Vin said. ‘The biggest breed of cat in the world, right, Ben?’

  Mum’s eyes went between the two of them, searching for her place in the conversation. ‘Maybe,’ she said, coughed a bit, started again. ‘Maybe we could get one, in our new place.’

  Ben looked at me, looked at Vin. ‘Maybe,’ he said, still not looking.

  Mum looked up at me. ‘Skye?’

  I had nothing to say.

  ‘Shall we sit?’ Yas said. The picnic basket came out. We sat on the grass like a regular family, assembling the plastic cups and taking out the sandwiches. Mum and Ben sat really close, like they were hatching an egg together. She gave him a box. He was hesitant to begin with, like he might find a bomb inside, but eventually a stuffed toy dropped out.

  ‘An echidna,’ he said, his voice flat.

  ‘It’s . . . you know, all its parts are like they are in real life.’

  ‘Anatomically correct.’

  ‘Yeah! They told me you’d been learning about them.’

  He turned it over in his hands. ‘Lavinia’s a zookeeper. She’s got real baby ones at home and she’s showing me how to feed them with a bottle.’

  Vin pulled out her phone. ‘We have some photos, if you’d like to see them,’ she said, but Mum’s eyes stayed on Ben.

  ‘I bought it from that shop with all the science stuff you like,’ she said. He ran his finger over the glass eyes, the stitched feet. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘The ones at home are so small they don’t have proper spines yet,’ he said. ‘Just short ones. Like how babies don’t have proper teeth.’

  ‘I knew you’d like it,’ Mum said, and smiled with her lips tight.

  The afternoon sun beat brightly on the park and Perry ran laps of us, barking at things she imagined in the trees. Mum put her arm around his shoulder, pulled him into her. Yas watched them and wrote notes in her folder.

  ‘There’s one kind named after David Attenborough. He’s Yiannis’s favourite adult.’