The DJ morphs one reality into another and I’m torn away. I see Jake across the room and he grins at me before he’s swallowed up in the crowd again. I am surrounded by strangers, alone, anonymous, but it is glorious, a grin stretching my cheeks until they ache, strangers grinning back at me, all of us dancing together, one huge, sweaty, grinding mass.
After a while – I don’t know how long – I stumble out of the crowd and collapse onto a couch next to a boy smoking a joint. He pulls out his phone and I lean across to see what time it is. Four hours have passed. I lean back, exhale and wipe sticky hair from my face. The boy slides his phone into his pocket and offers me the joint. I take it and suck. It tastes like damp earth and wood. I cough for a moment. He laughs and cups his hand over my knee.
I feel it first in the crown of my head, a creamy warmth that dribbles down through my body into my boots. We sit giggling, passing the joint between us, until we seep into the couch like butter melting in warm milk.
The music slowly dying, my eyes roll around in my head like marbles as I drift in and out of the passing hours.
A hand shakes my shoulder. Jake’s silhouette comes into focus.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he says, reaching for my hand, peeling me off the couch. We stumble out of the warehouse to find the sun already climbing high above the surrounding factories. The light hurts my eyes. We have defied sleep, and it feels strange, somehow unnatural.
‘How about a feed?’ Jake’s smirk splits chapped lips. ‘There’s a drive-through at the edge of the industrial area.’
I can’t remember the last time I ate a burger and fries. Thanks to Mum, I didn’t even taste fast food until I was thirteen years old and we stopped roadside on the bus to school camp.
Jake, eyes glazed, orders three times as much as me and we drive down to a parking lot near the centre of town, overlooking the harbour. Fish scales scattered on the concrete sparkle like glitter confetti. As Jake winds down his window, salty air and the smell of yabby bait engulf the inside of the car, and we devour our food, so greasy its paper packaging is now translucent. At the end of the pier, men in washed-out jeans, flannelette shirts and gumboots cast fishing lines into the sea. When one reels in a catch, gulls flock from every direction. He waves his arms to scare them off, slamming the lid on the esky before any bird swoops on the prized fish.
Jake throws a handful of fries out the window. Within seconds, the gulls have abandoned their efforts on the pier and are fighting over the oily chips, squawking in argument. We notice one that’s missing a leg, hopping along behind the others. I toss it a fry, only to see it drop the other webbed foot.
‘Little shit,’ Jake says. ‘I hate it when they do that!’ and he hurls half a chicken nugget at the bird’s head, knocking his box of fries across the dash in the process. He gathers several, squishes them with his hands and rubs them into my hair. Squealing, I scramble onto his lap and stuff my half eaten burger down the back of his shirt. Pushing me off, my back presses against the steering wheel and the horn honks. Two fishermen turn around, staring.
‘What’re you looking at?’ Jake yells out the window. ‘Get a real job.’ The men quickly look away. Jake and I exchange glances. Smiles crack and we burst into laughter. I lean against his chest, surrounded by mashed fries. Jake holds me until I am still.
Mum is still asleep on the couch, in exactly the same position she was in when we left. Monty hobbles up to me as I walk in the door. His eyes are sad and muddy, as if he hasn’t been fed in days, and I wonder if perhaps he hasn’t. Jake and I fill his dish to the brim with dog biscuits, top up his water bowl and put a few of the muffins Mum made in his bed, a treat for later, an apology.
Jake and I have a shower together in our underwear. I wash dirt and remnants of the mashed chips from my hair, scrub the smell of tobacco and spilt beer from my skin and squeeze extra toothpaste to brush away the grit.
In the shed, Jake looks at the blankets and pillow on the fold-out couch. ‘Your dad sleeping in here?’
‘Either here, or at the factory.’
‘Heavy.’
We kick aside empty beer cans and settle ourselves on the couch with a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Jake flicks on the TV and asks what I want to watch. I shrug and he picks a rom-com, something he would have never watched with Ben.
Jake jokes the entire time about how corny it is, but I’m not really paying attention. Being overtired has made me strangely numb. It’s almost enough to stifle the ache inside.
My breath catches when the roller door screeches and I notice Harley stepping into the shed, holding a Tupperware container. ‘My mum asked for me to bring this over.’ His eyes touch mine as I bite down on a chip, salt and vinegar burning my tastebuds.
‘What is it?’ Jake asks.
‘Harira soup,’ Harley says, then explains, ‘it’s made with tomatoes, lentils, chickpeas and lamb.’ Harley reaches into his pocket and pulls out a zip-lock bag with some chopped coriander in it. ‘You’re meant to put this on after you heat it up.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, my voice shallow.
He looks at the towel on my head, Jake’s wet fringe. ‘What have you guys been up to?’
‘Went to a warehouse in Port Lawnam,’ Jake explains.
‘A party?’
‘Yeah, we just got back.’
Harley glances at his watch. ‘Whoa. It’s almost twelve.’ He forces something that almost resembles a laugh. ‘Must have been good.’
Neither of us answers him, and he shifts his weight, uncomfortable. ‘I better go,’ he says.
‘You can chill with us, bro,’ Jake says.
Harley shakes his head, says, ‘See ya round,’ and is gone.
‘What happened there?’ Jake says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you were basically his girlfriend.’
My throat swells. ‘Was not,’ I stammer, and turn back to the TV, almost angry now at the girl on screen, the silly girl who fell for a dickhead.
Jake shoves a handful of potato chips into his mouth. ‘Whatever. He’s lost the plot.’
I laugh from the stomach. ‘And we haven’t?’
Eighteen
A BEACH VIBE
‘You stink,’ she tells me. ‘Like you actually stink. When was the last time you washed this?’ Mia takes a bottle of perfume out of her locker and douses my school uniform in frangipani, both of us sneezing.
The bell rings and the crowd dissipates. We hang by our lockers until we’re the only ones out here. Mia tells me she went to the police station again.
‘I thought you already made your statement.’
‘I did.’
The frangipani perfume on my uniform makes my nose twitch. Mia tells me the cops still wouldn’t give her any information about what might happen to the woman.
The woman who was taken to hospital with a broken rib. The woman who stole everything from us.
I fall back against the lockers. ‘Stop telling me this. I don’t want to know.’
‘What!’ Her voice is shrill, incredulous. ‘Still? I mean I understood at first, tried to at least, it was fresh … but are you serious? Are you actually being serious?’
I shrink beside grey metal, thinking of how Kate had hidden the newspapers. How Mia had shown me anyway.
‘My god,’ she says, not caring now who can hear her. ‘I don’t believe you.’ She grabs her bag and slams her locker so hard it echoes down the corridor.
A teacher pokes his head out from a nearby classroom. ‘Is everything all right?’
Mia storms off, leaving me alone. The teacher asks if I’d like him to call someone. I shake my head, waiting for him to step back inside before I let go of the tears.
Stepping out of the girls’ bathroom, face washed, water dripping from my chin, I almost bash straight into him. ‘Sorry,’ Harley says, stepping back, then ambles away. It’s not until I’m sitting in biology, next to an empty chair, that I realise he had actually turned and walked off in the o
pposite direction.
I sit alone in biology twice more before I hear Mia ask in the yard why he dropped the subject, the only class he and I had together. Harley shrugs. ‘Too many units, I guess.’
I skip my next biology class, instead joining Jake by the rock pool with a box of fish and chips, smoking rolled cigarettes and throwing stones into the ocean, unable to sit in a classroom where two people are missing.
Mr Mitchell, the school counsellor, has a daughter who goes to our school. Young with orange frizz and freckles, she’s one of the few girls at Marlow High who wears the school uniform properly, with no fashionable alterations or additions. Her puppy fat makes her a target for the taunts and ridicule of other kids, older and younger. I don’t know her name, but for years I have seen her in the corridors, always slouched with her head down, trying to make herself small enough to slip through unnoticed, to hide from the girls who gossip and guys that shove. Watching her from a distance, I liked to think that having a counsellor for a father might make things easier for her.
Mr Mitchell gestures for me to sit down, turns on a kettle and spreads an assortment of biscuits across a plate. He holds them up and I shake my head.
‘Okay, well, they’re here if you want one.’ He lays the plate down next to a box of tissues on the coffee table. ‘Have you ever seen a counsellor before?’
I shake my head again.
‘I want you to know that everything you say is confidential. Nothing leaves this room.’
I shrug, looking at the door, which is covered in a collage of mental health posters and positive phrases scrawled on colourful post-it notes.
‘Grace, these sessions will work best if you are able to speak openly to me.’
Leaning back into the couch, a slab of sunshine pressing on my shoulder, I wonder if there has ever really been a time when I have spoken openly.
On the floor, the carpet is ocean blue. I stare until I am swimming in it, deep beneath the surface.
‘The school went for a beach theme,’ he finally says.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The room, they tried to give it a beach vibe.’
‘It’s pretty ugly.’
He smiles, a smooth curve. ‘I agree,’ he says, handing me a box of tea bags.
I pull out chamomile.
‘Good choice,’ he says. ‘Chamomile is my favourite too.’
When we were thirteen, Dad took all us kids up to Illuna Bay with the tinny to go fishing. It had been raining, and it was so murky in the shallows you couldn’t see your hand when you stuck it under the water. The grand fishing escapade proved not such a grand idea when the racket the boys caused in the boat scared away all the fish. They were stealing bait from Dad’s esky and shoving it down each other’s shirts. When Jake squished a yabby head against my cheek I squealed and hit him. He laughed and pushed me out of the boat.
I had to take off my soaked clothes beneath the privacy of a towel, and sit, shivering, on the floor to shield me from the wind as we headed back to the boat ramp.
Two days later, my glands were swollen and the boys teased, saying my face was so chubby I looked like a thumb. Mum made herbal tonics and loose-leaf tea, but by the fifth day, I had strep throat, my skin was speckled with pink dots and I was in bed with a raging fever. When I missed Mia’s birthday party, Ben brought home a piece of cake in a paper towel and one of the lolly bags Mia had insisted on giving out. I thanked him even though I couldn’t stomach any of it.
Slipping in and out of sleep, shaking in a pool of cold sweat, it wasn’t the cramps that ached most. I was yearning for the ocean.
Down the grassy hill, waves called, still alive even after they’d reached the shore, pulsing in the ground. Lying in my bed, I felt it, I always feel it, a rhythm as known to me as my heartbeat.
I was in bed for almost two weeks and out of the water for a further five days. It was the longest I’d ever been without the sea, and I remember how when I dived back beneath that blue skin for the first time, it was like coming home.
Now, three weeks after the paddle-out, four and a half weeks after the accident, so homesick my core aches, I pull my surfboard off the shelf in the shed. My wetsuit hugs tight, my neck pulses. I draw two deep breaths to slow my heart, another two for reassurance, walking down the grassy hill toward a body of water Ben is now a part of.
When I step from grass onto the beach, there’s someone there, a figure in a wetsuit and a hooded winter jacket, sitting on the sand by the car park. They’re too far away for me to make out their face, yet as I meander across the beach to the shoreline, I feel their eyes on my back. I wrap my leg-rope around my ankle with hands shaking.
The first step beneath a wash of foam is cool grey. My skin tingles, almost stings. Lying on my board, I stroke, push beneath. In the second before I surface through thick clouds of turbulence, I feel a bizarre sense of both presence and absence, as if he’s here in the water, but the ocean is so huge, so dominating, and he is just one tiny part of it.
On an ordinary day, heads would turn when I reached the line-up, people would say hi, but then they’d turn away, looking back at the horizon. Today, eyes widen, linger on me.
‘Grace, it’s good to see you back in the water,’ one man says, breaking the silence. He was our coach at Nippers for a couple of years, back when Ben won every board race and Jake thought it was funny to eat sand. I half-smile, rising and falling with the tides.
As the sun slides behind us, blue water turns to orange satin. No one speaks, at least not to me, as if I have a kind of buffer zone stretching around me, as if grief is contagious. A set approaches, but as I paddle, racing for the big wave, men and boys paddle out of my way, out of position. I pull onto the wave, feeling like a foreigner after weeks on dry land, my legs wobbling. My board skids out and I come unstuck, slammed by the breaking lip. This feeling, this lack of conviction, is unlike anything I have experienced. I can’t remember a time when my legs didn’t dance on water. I never learnt to surf. I never learnt to breathe.
With my heavy arms I paddle out to the line-up. ‘Nice wave,’ one guy says, a few years older than me.
My brow creases. ‘No it wasn’t.’
‘Sure it was.’ His voice wavers. ‘Everyone falls off sometimes.’
I paddle around him, my cheeks hot.
Another wave climbs out of the water and I claim this one too, uncontested. This time, I don’t stand up, riding down the face and all the way to shore on my stomach.
A breath of night air drifts across sand as the sun sinks behind the mountains. Further up the beach, by the car park, the figure who was watching me earlier stands up and walks toward me. When he pulls down the hood on his jacket I see that it is Harley. I don’t stop, walking past him to the outdoor showers, but he follows me.
Turning the tap on, bitter winter water spits from the showerhead, droplets sharp on the skin.
‘How was it?’ he asks.
I shrug.
He tucks his hands into his pockets, slouches his shoulders. ‘I only just got here, thought it was a bit late to be paddling out.’
I turn off the tap hard, my knuckles white, and start walking back to the grassy hill, away from Harley.
Over my shoulder, I call, ‘You didn’t miss out on much.’
Nineteen
TWO-MINUTE NOODLES
When BBQ dies, lying limp in the coop on scattered chicken feed, I don’t tell Mum, scared she’ll go and bleach our house.
We bought the chickens on our way back from a surf comp up the coast a few years ago. It was before Mum got the full-time position at St Mary’s High School in Port Lawnam, when she used to travel with us to competitions. We’d surfed our finals on a Saturday and had the whole of Sunday to cruise back down to Marlow. Driving a scenic route, we weaved through a coastal town on the edge of an inlet. The main street was lined with bait shops, milk bars and a fish and chip shop with a giant prawn sculpture on the roof. On the sports field of the local school was a farmers market. Mu
m had her seatbelt off before Dad had time to park the car. There were stalls selling fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, handmade jewellery, clothes made locally out of Australian cotton, a petting zoo and rides on ponies. Ben asked the farmer with the Shetlands if he could ride one and was told he was too big. Laughing, he’d fallen to his knees, hands together in prayer, begging the man in his Akubra, who hardly knew how to react.
We left the markets with paper bags filled to the brim with produce, a few jars of homemade jam and a bag of popcorn for Ben and me to share. It wasn’t until we were loading our goods into the car that Mum saw them. A man by the gate had a pen with baby chicks. She passed Dad her bag and ran back toward them. ‘Oh heavens, they’re adorable! Come look!’
Running around in circles on yellow straw, squeaking balls of fluffed feathers tripped over and bounced off each other. Mum – who loved cooking with eggs but hated the idea of buying them from farms where they kept chickens in tiny cages – saw the chicks as the perfect solution. By having our own chickens, she could ensure they were fed clean, quality grain and were free to run around the yard, sleeping in their coop at night.
Ben and I were allowed to pick one each and sat with them on our laps the whole way home, debating over what we would call them. When Ben suggested BBQ, we laughed so hard warm tears wet our cheeks. When we caught our breath, I suggested Honey Soy. We erupted again and the baby chicks squawked with us. Even Mum giggled, though I’m not sure if it was because of the names we’d given our chicks or at our fits of giggles. Ben and me laughing – it was infectious.
Now, standing on my neighbour, Mrs Brown’s doorstep, I ring the bell three times before she opens the door.
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