Jake shrugs, climbs back up onto the counter and whistles at a group of passing girls.
Suddenly, I feel blood drain from my head, and my knees buckle. Harley’s hold keeps me upright.
‘What was that?’ he says, hands gripping.
Tiny yellow stars sparkle. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you okay?’
Goosebumps prick my skin. ‘I feel really faint.’
Sitting me down, Harley grabs a water bottle from the cooler. ‘Grace, your face is white.’
Jake looks over his shoulder. ‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
Beads of sweat gather on my upper lip, my brow. Harley uses his sleeve to wipe my damp hairline. ‘What did you have for breakfast?’ he asks.
‘Cereal.’
‘Was the milk off?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I don’t think so. It tasted fine.’
Harley, seeing me gag, is quick to grab the bin. A putrid mix of hot dog and chips fills the bucket. Jake apologises to a customer and asks them to come back in fifteen minutes. Harley offers me some more water, and I slush it round in my mouth and spit it into the bin.
‘Where are Mia and Ben?’ I say, my eyes darting around the fair.
Harley tilts his head to one side, his brow creases. ‘They’ve gone to Port Lawnam, remember?’
‘Yeah, I remember, but where are they? They should be here by now.’
‘It’s a Saturday,’ Jake says. ‘There’s probably traffic. Maybe they had trouble getting the hampers.’
‘No,’ I stammer. ‘They should be here by now.’
‘Okay.’ Harley combs cool fingers through my sweaty hair. ‘It’s fine, we’ll just call them.’
Jake hands me my phone, yet with hands trembling so madly I can barely maintain grip, let alone punch in the numbers.
‘Let me,’ Harley says, taking the phone and dialling Ben. He hands it back to me as it starts ringing.
‘No one’s answering,’ I say, tears escaping. ‘I’ll try again.’
It rings four times, then someone answers. ‘Hello?’
A man’s voice.
I hesitate. ‘Who is this?’
‘Constable Griffin from the Port Lawnam Police Department.’
His speech is slow, articulate – the way someone speaks when they want to make sure you’re listening. In the background, voices shout, words I can’t make out, words muffled by the wail of sirens. I hear a woman shriek and I drop the phone. Harley grabs it from the grass and brings the speaker to his ear. ‘Hello?’ he says, straight faced. ‘Who is this?’
‘What are they saying? Who is it? What’s going on?’ Jake pulls on Harley’s shirt, scratching for an answer.
When he hangs up, Harley puts both hands on my shoulders. ‘Grace, where are your parents?’
‘Here … somewhere. I don’t know!’
‘We have to find them. We have to go.’
‘Who was that? What’s going on?’ Jake is red in the face. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Port Lawnam Hospital. I’ll drive, we just have to find your parents,’ Harley says, taking my hand, squeezing it. ‘There’s been an accident.’
As Harley turns onto the country road connecting Marlow to Port Lawnam, Dad reaches from the front passenger seat into the back, placing his hand on Mum’s thigh. ‘It’s going to be okay, Mel. We can’t jump to conclusions. We don’t have any real information yet.’
‘If it was fine, the policeman would have said it was fine.’ Jake rubs her back as she sobs with her head between her knees. Harley presses on the accelerator.
Outside, green hills blur together, a wash of sap green. Seabirds soar above rocky orange headlands. My head, spinning, begins to ache.
As we near the outskirts of Port Lawnam, I feel a cool flush, an emptying, as if blood is draining from my body. In silence, I beg him to hold on.
Fifteen minutes later, we turn onto Roma Street.
Sound and light travel at different speeds, I learnt that in science, and yet I’ve never quite gotten over seeing this phenomenon in real life. Like how you see the crowds, people collected on the footpaths, in their front yards, the flashing lights, red and blue, well before you hear any of it. There’s a moment of disbelief in between, where you think maybe you’re seeing things, maybe this isn’t real.
Harley pulls to the kerb and we break from the car.
Dad reaches for my arm but I sidestep, slip past, and sprint into the chaos. There is police tape, a crying neighbour, a camera crew. Two cars, bonnet to bonnet, airbags blown, glass like confetti sprinkled across the bitumen, ambulance trolleys. There is the smell of antiseptic, of blood on concrete.
‘Hey!’ a woman shouts and I feel a man grab my shirt. He wraps thick arms around my chest, holding me back.
I writhe and twist, trying to get free.
Two paramedics peer through the driver’s side window as firemen work to cut the door open. ‘Wake him up! Wake him up!’ the girl driver screeches.
That’s when I notice the windscreen, a hole in the lower corner, cracks shooting out in every direction, like fissures around a bullet hole. A smear of red. A head protruding through the hole. Hair matted, his face mutilated, unrecognisable.
I vomit green bile all over the street.
I’m jerked off my feet and carried into the back of an ambulance. Someone drapes a blanket over my shoulders.
My pulse, though thumping in my temples, feels as if it’s slowing.
The rhythm becomes irregular.
His beat, the first sound I ever heard, fades, until his heart lies still and the world is suddenly a frightfully quiet place.
Thirteen
DUSK
I’m trudging on a deep seabed. Blues and reds of medical monitors glow like purple shades of dusk filtering down through water.
In weeks to come, I won’t remember that her room number is 15C or that the floor is polished smooth. I won’t remember the smell of citrus disinfectant, plaster or antibiotic creams. What I will recall, in acute detail, is the shaved patch of hair on her scalp where the stitches are. The right eye, swollen shut. The wires cascading over blackened limbs.
As I stand over her, Mia opens her left eye. I swallow hard at the sight of blood around the iris, mucus in her eyelashes. A single tear slips over her bruised flesh.
‘He’s gone.’ The words cut her dry throat. ‘Isn’t he?’
I peel back the hospital blanket and climb over the bedrail to lie down beside her. Her right wrist is frozen in a cast, slung around her neck. I interlace my fingers with those of her free hand.
She squeezes so hard, blood pulses in my fingertips. ‘I don’t want to go to sleep, Grace.’ She shudders. ‘I don’t want to go to sleep because when I wake up, for a moment, I’ll have forgotten.’
Fourteen
THE GREY
The sky falls silently into the sea.
I don’t know how many bodies have gathered. Hundreds. A thousand, maybe. They spill down the grassy hill, crowd the car park, all wrapped in woollen jackets. Some wander across the rocks and line the perimeter of the ocean pool. The majority stand here in wetsuits, on the crushed bones of the earth.
Some shiver in their black skins, others carry white flowers. All around puffs of breath cloud the air. Young girls, no older than ten, huddle together with purple lips, boards decorated with frangipani stickers at their feet. One of them I have babysat, Ellie, and I think of how she will go home after all this, to a hot shower, and her mum will make her hot chocolate with marshmallows as a treat to warm her up.
The icy, dry sand burns my skin raw. My muscles tighten around my throat.
Several men step aside so Dad can find the centre of the circle. Mum hangs from his side like a dead arm. He takes my hand and draws me to his other hip. A friend passes him a megaphone. Dad presses the wrong button and a high-pitched siren wails in the sea of still bodies. The friend leaps back to his aid.
There are some faces I don’t recognise, yet t
hey all seem to know me, and I realise that grief is a colour – beneath the eyes, a stain on my skin. For years we attended the big surf comps and none of them saw me. Now they’ve flown from all parts of the country, and suddenly I’m the one to watch. A celebrity yet the envy of no one.
‘I would … we would like to thank you.’ Dad lowers the megaphone to clear his throat. ‘I don’t know that there are words for a father to use when he says goodbye to his son. I guess it’s meant to be the other way around.’
In every direction, grey tears bleed from pink eyes.
‘All I know is that I am honoured to have raised a son who could have drawn you all to the waves. To know that he has inspired and touched the lives of so many people is everything to me … to us.’
Dad squeezes me against his ribs, so tight I fight for my next breath, and hands the megaphone to Mum.
Her hands shake so heavily, she can barely grip the speaker button.
‘Anyone who was graced with his presence knew there was never a dull moment with Ben. He was our light, our energy, my sun, and I cannot imagine the next hour, let alone tomorrow, without him.’ Dropping the megaphone, she falls in a heap among clumps of dead seaweed, and two girlfriends rush to help her back up.
I hold the urn against my chest, close my eyes and kiss the lid, as if my heartbeat could somehow inspire his.
At the water’s edge, surf club members wearing lifesaving caps and leis around their necks drag a jet ski off a trailer into the frothy tide. Dad carries Mum in his arms across the wet sand and sits her down on the back of the jet ski while a lifeguard climbs on and revs the engine. Mia is coming with us and her dad and Jackson help load her into an IRB, her broken wrist wrapped in a plastic bag to protect the plaster cast.
Dad takes the megaphone. ‘If you are participating in the paddle-out with smaller children, please make sure you keep them close by. Lifeguards are wearing red and yellow caps – please don’t hesitate to ask for assistance if you need it. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.’
Dad kisses my forehead, takes Ben’s ashes from my arms and hands the urn to Mum. The boat and jet ski’s engines spit, kick into life and fly forward over the first roll of white wash. The crowd follows.
Jake and Toby are at my side as we pick up our boards. We each wear a party shirt of Ben’s over the top of our wetsuits.
The boys clench the stalks of white roses between their teeth as we wade out together, sliding onto our stomachs when the water laps our waists. I duck-dive my first wave, water stripping back all that is left of me. As I surface, I can taste my own tears mixing with salt on my lips.
The ocean swell is small, the waves weak. We paddle through water as smooth as silk, past the pool and the rock shelf into the deep. The sky and the sea fuse together and I can no longer distinguish the horizon. From the cliffs, seabirds swoop down from their nests and glide across the ocean – a sheet of grey glass.
When we reach a place far beyond the break, I glance over my shoulder and struggle to take in the sheer number who are joining us. Friends and strangers paddle on long and short boards, stand-up paddle boards, kayaks, a rowboat and boogie boards. I even spot the bobbing heads of those who have swum. As the crowd collects, people paddle into position and link hands. The floating circle stretches hundreds of metres, with the boys, Dad, Mia in the boat, Mum on the jet ski and me in the centre.
I look across at Mia, her eyes pink, tears flowing down her face. A thousand words are said with silence.
Then, like a winter storm, voices cry out, thunder clapping over dead water. Some slap the water; others throw it into the sky. The waves of Ben’s life ripple through the deep.
Mum raises the urn from her lap and the cries become deafening. She removes the lid and tips a part of me into the sea. Passing the ashes to Dad, she unravels, breaking down in tears, covering her face with her hands. Dad sits up straight on his board and tips up the urn. A coarse powder of dust and broken bones pours out, clouding the water. His face contorts, an ugly, bitter mask of grief and whatever it was that held his sorrow at bay until now is washed away with the tide. As Dad dissolves with his son into the ocean, colour drains from his cheeks, as if it is escaping in his tears.
Splashes of water and flowers fly through the air.
I draw a breath deep into my lungs and exhale slowly as I take the urn from Dad, my feet dangling in the water, Jake’s hand on my shoulder.
I feel time beginning to slow, until the last of him is grey powder on the sea and time stops altogether.
Fifteen
SASHA
Pale sea. Silver dust on the horizon.
Someone knocks on my door and I roll over, shoving the crumpled, damp tissues under my pillow. ‘Hey,’ Jake says, leaning against the doorframe. In the middle of winter, he wears a thin white T-shirt and grey trackies. He steps over the mess on the floor and climbs onto my bed, lying down beside me. ‘My mum came back.’
We’re still, shoulder to shoulder.
‘Without her boyfriend,’ he adds.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
He shrugs.
My room smells of sweat, dirty laundry.
‘Have you seen Facebook?’
I shake my head.
‘Everyone is writing on his wall. I swear some of them weren’t even his friends. So stupid. It’s not like he can read it.’
Waves take huge mouthfuls of sand from the shore, feasting. I don’t know how long we lie here before Jake takes my hand, starting to sob. ‘I really miss him.’
There’s another knock at the door. Aunt Kate pokes her head in the room. ‘Grace, honey, you really need to eat something.’
She repeats herself twice before Jake and I climb out of bed, trudging down the hall into the kitchen. Kate pours me a bowl of cereal with almond milk, garnishing it with blueberries and fresh banana slices. Spooning it into my mouth, the flavours are bland. I force a swallow, my stomach churns and I fight to keep it down. My aunt offers Jake some but he declines.
Kate leans across the bench to ask Mum, ‘What about you, Mel, some porridge maybe?’
No more than ten feet away in the lounge room, it’s as if Mum hasn’t even heard her.
Kate sighs as I slide the bowl back to her and admit I’m not hungry.
‘Love, you need to eat something.’ Kate passes the bowl back, turns to Uncle Mark and adjusts his shirt. He says the car is packed and that the girls are dressed and ready to go.
I look at Daisy, in her frilly pink socks and hair in piggy plaits, lying with Monty on his doggy bed, playing with her dolls, then notice Rachel, uncomfortable on the couch. We make eye contact and she quickly turns away.
They arrived the morning after the accident, driving down from the city. Kate immediately took charge, organising the necessary events, making the phone calls, addressing the press, all the things Mum refused to do.
Daisy had asked where Ben was, and when Kate said he was gone, Daisy said ‘oh’, then asked where her gumboots were. She wanted to go outside and splash in the puddles.
Rachel, only three years older, clung to her dad’s side. She didn’t dare speak to Mum, Dad or me, terrified that she would say the wrong thing. In the two weeks since they arrived, Rachel has read four books, burrowing her face into pages of distant lands where dragons and fairies fly so no one will notice her wet cheeks.
Kate lays a slice of honeycomb on my cereal. I bite, gold syrup oozes. It all tastes the same.
Outside it is overcast, the light dull. The earth is dank, flowers droop. I hear the first drop hit the roof, thick and heavy, then a second and a third in quick succession. For the millionth time this week, the clouds clap, and it pours. Kate is at the sink by the window, washing Daisy’s and Rachel’s breakfast bowls. She turns to Mum, who’s slumped in an armchair with a bed quilt draped over her lap, loose strands of hair straggling over her shoulders.
‘You know what?’ Kate says. ‘All this rain, I bet it’s the angels crying with laughter. Ben’s
telling another joke.’
Mum makes a strange sound, primal and disturbing. Her body rumples in the chair and she bursts into tears as Kate throws down the tea towel and rushes to her side. ‘Oh, Mel, honey, I didn’t mean to.’
Jake nudges me. ‘The shed?’ he suggests. I shrug, leave my virtually untouched bowl, and follow him out through the downpour.
In the shed, my teeth are chattering, as we scurry under the woollen rug draped over the mouldy couch. Settling in, Jake draws a pack of cigarettes from his trackpants. He strikes a match, inhales, then offers me one. For the first time, I accept, drawing out a cigarette. He exhales a thick cloud and then strikes another match, holding it out to me. I suck on the filter, smoke fills my lungs and I choke. Jake almost giggles, patting me on the back, and tells me to try again. I do, and by the fourth inhalation, I have pins and needles in my toes and birds flying around my head.
Jake finds the remote under the couch and flicks on the old TV set. We play Nintendo, Ben’s character racing around the track with us, computer simulated. It crosses the line in first place. Jake says, ‘Fucker, he’s not even here and he’s still winning.’
We play two more times, until Jake crosses the chequered finish line in first position. He doesn’t do his usual gloating dance, just hunches forward and flicks off the TV, then offers me another cigarette. We sit back and, without saying a word, watch grey tails of smoke curl in front of the black screen. Above, raindrops drum on the tin roof. I feel the heavy rhythm in my blanched bones.
‘When do you think it will stop?’ he whispers.
I rest my head on his shoulder and squeeze my eyes shut.
We stay there, a sheath of silence draped over our shoulders for nearly an hour until the rusty roller door screeches as Toby lifts it. He and Mia scamper into the shed like two drowned rats. Wet cotton socks strangle their ankles. They dump soaked bags and fall back on the second couch. Wearing their school jumpers, each carries the odd scent of damp synthetic wool.
Breathing Under Water Page 10