The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  Mum’s face lit up with recognition of our old life. ‘Have you seen Yiannis?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ He took a deep breath. ‘When I get home I’ll show this toy to the babies and see if they think it’s their mum. They probably won’t.’

  Yas wrote faster. Therese went and sat on the other side of Ben, not too close, maybe just far enough to reach out if she needed to.

  ‘Why not?’ Mum said.

  Ben put the echidna on the grass. ‘Mums all smell different. You smell different, and Claud smells different, and Vin and Therese smell different.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. But today you smell like someone else’s mum even though I can see you and I know you’re the same one.’

  She adjusted her scarf. ‘That’s because I’m wearing this new perfume.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  Therese coughed loudly. ‘Shall we eat?’ she said.

  The sandwiches were spread into fans on their paper plates and she’d squeezed tomato sauce into smiley-faces on the sausage rolls. The others all took one. The air between us was dense with conflict and I felt sick enough without eating.

  Mum leaned into Ben. ‘I’m sorry about your turtle,’ she said.

  ‘Tortoise.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same thing?’

  ‘No.’ He took another sandwich and ate the filling first, balled the bread into white marbles in his fist. ‘I think I’d like to go in the pool,’ he said to Yas. ‘My feet are very hot.’

  ‘Sure, mate,’ she said. ‘You can leave your shoes here.’

  He ran off down the hill, hopping and shrieking across the hot pavement. Vin mentioned a TV show she and Therese had been watching. Yas talked about the trip she was taking over Christmas, down the coast to where the sea was turquoise. I played the lines I’d learned from Much Ado on repeat in my head. Mum rubbed her hands together, took a sausage roll but didn’t eat it, slipped her feet in and out of her sandals. Finally, she said, ‘Could you give us a minute?’ I went to stand up, but she said, ‘I meant them.’

  ‘Skye?’ Yas said.

  She wasn’t the mother we’d left flapping open in the driveway. Her hair was clean and pulled up into a ponytail, eyes lined with black pencil and mouth with pink lipstick. She wore jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt and a scarf with cats on it, and she looked like every single other mother in the park. Like the mother who’d worked at the bank and made me bring receipts from the supermarket.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. All three women left, set themselves up on a nearby bench and made out like they were talking to each other but all looked right at me. Mum swivelled on the grass until we were sitting side by side. She stuck her legs out straight in front of her and moved her yellow shoes from side to side.

  ‘I would have left on my own, you know.’ Her voice wavered. ‘After Christmas I was going to. I had a bit of money put away.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I did. You always think you know better than me, but you’re just a kid.’

  I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. It jumped out of me, a frog from a toilet or a scorpion running from a fridge, some tired and furious part of me just escaped and it was laughter and tears all at one.

  ‘I’m just a kid? How do you think we left, huh? How?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘We would’ve have needed money, right? Someone would’ve had to save up, to get us away.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Of course me! You know that job I got? The one you and Jason told me I had to get?’ People were looking at me, not all at once but a few sideways glances and shifting uneasily.

  ‘You’re making a scene,’ Mum said.

  ‘I don’t care. Do you know how I got that job? How I was making enough money to get me and Ben on the train and right the fuck out of Port Flinders? My boss there, big guy, maybe you saw him around. He touched me.’ She gasped. ‘He touched me and I let him because I was so afraid’ – tears banked up in my throat, in my nose, all pushing at once to get out – ‘I was so afraid I would lose my job and Ben would be stuck there forever.’

  At his name, Ben looked up from the pool. ‘Stop, Skye.’ Mum stuck out her hand like she was going to cover my mouth and I shoved it away.

  ‘I’m not going to stop yelling because you feel bad.’ I pushed my fingers into my eyes. ‘I’m going to stop because Ben might hear me.’

  Mum sat rigid, breathing fast. ‘You could have . . .’ She frowned. ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t.’

  Yas had moved from the bench and I fell into her shadow. ‘That might be enough for today.’ She gave Mum a gentle smile.

  ‘You want me to leave?’ Mum grabbed for her handbag.

  ‘Just for now, Linda. Maybe next weekend we can try the other park, that one with the adventure playground.’ Vin and Therese were there too, kind but forceful in that way they were. Mum stood, brushed herself down. Vin went with her to the pool and Mum stroked Ben’s shiny hair, squeezed him into her arms until his face popped out the other side. I remembered him the day he ran away, pretending he was a tortoise.

  ‘Sorry, Yas,’ I said. She’d dropped down next to me, file closed in her lap. ‘That was shit of me, saying that stuff where Ben might hear.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Skye. No one expects you to be okay with all of this right away.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Or ever. If that’s how you feel, that’s okay too.’ She held out a smiley-faced sausage roll and I took it, looked at it, copied the expression with my own mouth but it felt ugly and weird.

  ‘Am I broken?’ I said.

  ‘You? God, no.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘You’re an absolute champion.’

  Ben came back up the hill and grabbed his echidna from the grass. ‘Mum looked different,’ he said.

  ‘I think she was pretty tired,’ Yas said.

  He pushed the spines of the toy echidna into his fingertips. ‘Maybe next time she’ll look like the old version of her. When she’s less tired.’

  But I had seen her. Not the old her, not the same. Some of her other self with the stuffing punched out. Maybe she wouldn’t go back like she had before. Maybe the real Mum was different now. A woman who’d absorbed a terrible man but kept herself inside there too, not perfect, not exactly right.

  Vin took Perry’s leash and wrapped it around her hand. ‘Shall we go?’ Yas and Therese packed the lunch back into its basket. The other families had started to leave, too, dripping out of the park with tired children whining behind them. In the street, the sun reflected bright off the pavement. The adults walked ahead and talked quietly so they could still hear us. Ben threw his echidna in the air and caught it again.

  ‘I think I still like tortoises best,’ he said to me. ‘Echidnas are cool, but tortoises carry their homes around with them everywhere they go and I think that’s better.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘They can go anywhere and all their stuff is still right there. If I was a tortoise I’d take my toys and a book about space and pyjamas and a snack and paper for writing down notes about the things I saw.’ He looked up at me. ‘You’d take your phone and probably some pictures of Raf and sunglasses.’

  ‘Sounds right,’ I said. The fruit of the lilly pilly trees hung heavy on their branches and we ducked under them, cool in the shade. A man waved and shouted, ‘Hi, Perry!’ and the dog pulled towards him. Ben bent down to let a ladybird crawl onto his finger.

  ‘I don’t know why they call them ladybirds when they’re not all ladies,’ he said. ‘And none of them are birds. It would be more accurate to call them “red spotty beetles”. Some people think the yellow ones are poisonous but they’re not.’

  The day wrapped warm and easy around me like a cloth.

  ‘Yiannis told me ladybirds bleed from their knees when they’re stressed out.’

  ‘That’s crazy.’

  ‘Yiannis never lies. You can ask him yourself. Lavinia said he co
uld come over for a visit next week or the week after and Erin is going to come too.’

  ‘Erin?’

  ‘Yeah. From school.’ The ladybird cracked open its shell and flew off. I grabbed his hand and he squeezed mine back. ‘She’s my friend. Yesterday I showed her how to tie a balloon to a bee.’

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you:

  Mum and Dad, for supporting me in so many ways beyond what’s reasonable to expect of two people and for always doing so with sincere and warm hearts.

  The amazing team that brought this book to life: Geordie Williamson, Mathilda Imlah, Bri Collins, Libby Turner, Alex Craig, Jo Butler.

  Allison Tait, for all the reasons previously stated but especially for getting me through the ‘I never wanted to be a writer in the first place!’ moments.

  Erin Van Krimpen, who has a very big brain and has been like my own personal Google but with a much handsomer dog, and is also the most tremendous pursuer of fairness and equity and compassion.

  Peter Ireland, Katelin Farnsworth, Gerry Mellor and Helen Perris, for generous and ferocious assistance in the development of this story.

  My family, Gaz and Georgia and Lily, who make me laugh every day.

  Everyone who read my first book and sent beautiful messages and emails and told their friends about it, and who support Australian writing and the continuation of a sustainable arts industry across all mediums.

  And my own little brother, Jonathan Spargo-Ryan, who taught me how to find lizards under rocks.

  About Anna Spargo-Ryan

  Anna Spargo-Ryan has worked in digital marketing for fifteen years, including time on Ramsay Street, in the Formula 1 pits and on bus magazines. Her work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, The Big Issue and The Guardian, among other places. She won the 2016 Horne Prize for her essay, ‘The Suicide Gene’. She lives in Melbourne with her people, animals, and a cat called Norman. The Gulf is her second novel.

  annaspargoryan.com

  Also by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  The Paper House

  First published in 2017 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Anna Spargo-Ryan 2017

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760554026

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design and illustration by Emily O'Neill

  The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblence to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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