Skyglow

by Leslie Thiele

  Above the pool table in the games room, there was a photo— faded on one side from sunlight—of a muddied, youthful Brian grinning like a loon, being carried by his teammates. It was one of his favourite possessions. Tanya never looked at it. She always put the stereo on loud when she tidied in there, her face tight. Tiny and indistinct in the background, the opposing captain leant against the ablution block. Arms folded. Angry.

  She’d been thrilled when he’d singled her out at the end-of-season celebration. They’d had beer, and something else sweet and sharp. Lots of bright stars hanging. Wet kisses out by the deserted goalposts. Then suddenly rough. He’d turned her, pushed her down and torn at her. The sharp dewy blades of grass scratching at her cheek. The awful thwack thwack grunt of him. And the hurting. Her tears leaking, mouth open, soundless. Her outrage.

  She’d waited, terrified and silent, in the darkness after he’d finished with her. Whimpered when he spat in her ear, Tell your stupid mates I won the end game, bitch. His sudden laughter. Sliding footsteps. She’d waited there alone until the butcher-birds stirred in the gums, in the end leaving even though she couldn’t find her knickers anywhere.

  Her mum had given her a look over breakfast, but she’d stared out the window at the sprinklers going around and around on the lawn, her skin sore from scrubbing. Who used all the bloody hot water? Her dad waiting by the car to go to church. Teenage bloody girls!

  Later, in the hot sunshine, she’d stood with her friends, laughing at the bloodstained pair of knickers hoisted on the flagpole outside the grounds. Whose could they be? they’d asked, looking at each other. What sort of slut would let a boy do that? Her cheekbones hurt like glass. She’d lived silently with the shame of it, a stone in her soul. She’d never said a word. Not one.

  Not even when Brian playfully flipped her over and she’d come up screaming, swinging at him. Beside herself with fury, fractured words, all snotty and glottal. Still, she just pushed it down, way down, and sobbed herself into a numb stupor, letting him pull the blankets up around her shoulders as she slept and slept.

  ‘You want to talk?’ he’d said when she woke.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know you can trust me, don’t you, Tan? Whatever it is. I’ve got your back. It’s part of the deal.’

  She’d turned away in silence; unwilling, unable.

  Now, with the party gathering pace around her, she thought of Sasha, so small beside her father tonight. God, if anyone did something like that to her, Brian would kill them. Unless Sasha stayed quiet about it, like she had. Silence taken as a free pass from consequences. They’d be like this guy. Standing here in his casuals in his big fancy house like he’d never been on the wrong side of the line.

  ‘You okay?’ Cam said now. ‘You don’t look so great.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said you bastard, you deaf fuck.’

  People turned to stare, but she didn’t care. ‘You make me sick.’

  ‘Hey, lady, um…Tanya? I don’t know what you’re on about, but I think you’d better calm down.’

  Her eyes were so wide she could feel the night air brush at her tears. ‘I was fourteen, you sicko. Fourteen!’

  Helen grabbed at Tanya’s forearms, forcing her to turn. ‘Tanya? What is the matter with you?’

  ‘Ask him what happened, Helen, what he did. When I was fourteen. On the school oval.’ Saying it out loud was like vomiting, her mouth a rush of sour.

  Something shifted behind Cam’s smile, and he laughed uneasily. ‘Jesus. She’s crazy.’

  ‘Tanya. I think you should leave now, honey. Something’s upset you.’ Helen was all conciliation, eyes round with concern. ‘Can I phone someone for you?’

  Tanya stared at her. ‘Upset me? You think something has upset me? Damn right it has.’ She pointed at Cam. ‘He has. Your fucking husband has. Fucking…’ She could feel hysterical laughter rising in her throat. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she choked. ‘Jesus, what am I even saying?’ Her hands shook as she grabbed her bag, shoving it under one arm and pointing at him with the other. ‘You know! You know what you did, you bastard.’

  Cam turned to his friends, his hands up in the air. ‘Sorry, folks, she’s one crazy bitch. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  She made her way out of the house, faces gaping behind her, a muffled rush of chatter starting up. Helen’s shrill voice, ‘What is she talking about Cam? What’s going on?’ Tanya didn’t hear his answer, didn’t care what he said. Her friendship with Helen was over. It didn’t matter. Nothing did.

  In the safety of the car, her fumbling hands turned the key twice before the engine caught, the tyres scattering gravel as she pulled out from the drive. Around the bay she drove, over the bridge, the harbour lights glittering still on the water. She drove fast, before the shame could catch up with her.

  On the high road, she pulled into a parking bay overlooking the beach and got out of the car. Clouds scudded across the night sky, and moonlight rode rippling whitecaps into shore. Tanya stood at the top of the weathered steps leading down towards the sand. The breeze coming off the ocean was cool, strands of her hair catching in the wet of tears which would not stop. Pulling her wrap close around her shoulders, she wiped her face with one end, careless of mascara, and stared out at the glittering sea. No-one knew where she was. Nothing could touch her here.

  There was still time to rewind what she had said tonight. Plead hormones. Nobody wanted trouble, not really. She’d known that even back then, her mother never asking about her rash-flushed face, the bruise on her jaw. Curiosity killed the cat.

  Time spun out and away, drifting into the giant sky. Her fingers were cold, the wrap damp from the sea air. No definitive plan of action presented itself. This was a small town at heart, her mother’s friends still speaking to her as though she were the child they once knew. Secrets slithered like serpents through the very fabric of the town.

  She felt empty, scoured out.

  Home. She wanted to be home. All she had to do was drive a few miles west and kiss her little girl goodnight, slide under the blankets with Brian and keep her mouth shut. Life could go on. It was a fair bet Helen and Cam would leave town earlier than planned. She’d seen fear slide underneath the muscles in his face. He wouldn’t want to risk another encounter. It would all go away. The path of least resistance beckoned to her in the quiet night air.

  Fishing the keys from her bag, she made her way back to the car, bone-tired. She swung the vehicle round to face the road, hitting the blinker for home.

  The glovebox sprung open. She hit it shut. ‘Stop it,’ she said, annoyed.

  Open. Slap. Shut. Open.

  ‘Just stop it, for fuck’s sake!’

  Open. Slap. Shut. Open.

  She slammed her hand against the dashboard, stinging her palm. ‘Stop it! Stop. Just STOP.’ The tears started up again, her face rubber and liquid. ‘I said no. I said NO!’

  The words echoed to silence. She was away from herself, watching the woman in the car.

  The indicator ticked loudly, flashes of green against her skin. Just leave it, Tanya. In seven years time, her daughter would be fourteen. Still a child, even then. Just leave it alone. She looked back towards town. The place had grown so much that the police station was open at all hours now. She and Brian had laughed about it over the breakfast talkback. What on earth would the cops find to do in the wee hours other than chase a few hoons around in cars?

  Here, in this back-end place, where nothing ever happened?

  The Boat

  Resting in its trailer, the boat took up more space than Vic had imagined it would on purchase, a statement all its own. He bent and scrubbed at an oily mark on the underside.

  ‘Selling the boat already, mate?’

  Vic jumped at the voice behind him, whacking his head on the sharp blade of the propeller.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to startle you.’ Gino’s voice changed abruptly in tone. ‘Hey, sorr
y, really, Vic. You’re bleeding.’

  Vic’s fingers came away from his forehead smeared with red. He forced a smile through the sudden racing of his heart. ‘S’alright, Gino. Just a scratch.’

  He felt foolish, scrabbled in the pocket of his chinos for the handkerchief he knew would be there and pressed it against his forehead. He felt at a disadvantage down on the driveway with his neighbour standing over him. He was a big guy, Gino. Northern Italian blood not too far away.

  ‘How come you’re selling her?’ Gino nodded towards the boat, sitting huge and gleaming in the sun, drips of sudsy water sliding off the sides and onto the bitumen. ‘I thought it was the big dream.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Vic struggled to his feet and looked towards the house.

  ‘I know, mate. You don’t have to tell me. Midlife crisis.’ Gino’s big smile was tinged with embarrassment. ‘Like that bloody Harley I had to have. Only rode the stupid thing twice.’ He laughed. ‘Scared the arse off me. Never been so happy to get back on a golf buggy in all my life. Essie hated the thing.’

  Vic kept his eyes on the house. He didn’t want to talk about Essie. ‘Yeah. That’s it, Gino. Getting old’s a bitch.’

  ‘Ha!’ Gino pulled his keys from his front pocket and jangled the heft of them in his palm. ‘Well, I’d better be off, got a round scheduled for ten. Essie says to tell you both there’s a barbie on at our place tonight if you want to come. Haven’t seen much of you lately.’

  ‘Sorry, Gino. We’re busy, I think. But thanks.’

  Gino walked towards his car, turning back as he opened the door. ‘You right, Vic? You seem a bit off.’

  Vic waved away the other man’s concern. ‘I’m right, mate. Have a good game.’

  He didn’t know if they were busy tonight or not, but he’d make damn sure they were now.

  Last week, the boat had still been Vic’s new toy. He had everything else a man could want: the house, the car, the pool, Sandra. None of it had made him happy. He spent a lot of time in the evenings cleaning that pool. There was something soothing in the slow motion of running the skimmer through the blue-lit water. Out there, he didn’t have to listen to his wife; could listen, instead, to the voices floating over the sandstone wall.

  It wasn’t that Vic could hear any distinct words from his neighbours, rather he could hear the sound of their conversation. It was that gentle cadence he found so mesmerising. The soft murmur of voices punctuated by Essie’s lilting laugh or Gino’s deeper guffaw. Vic would smile as he tipped sodden leaves out behind a long-suffering row of yuccas that bordered the dividing wall.

  Conversations between Sandra and him would hold none of the gentle notes he heard out there. The high and low would not run into and over each other as they did next door. Vic did not know how to begin such talk with his wife. The pattern of their relationship seemed set so fast as to defy any hesitant chipping away on his part. Sandra had no time for small talk, and he was too tired to dredge up false enthusiasm for any of her many causes.

  He thought he might be more than a little in love with his neighbour’s wife. Essie, all soft curves and bright lipstick smiles, in flowered frocks that floated out around her calves in the breeze as her heels tapped their way along the path. Vic didn’t know what it was about her. Ever since Gino and Essie moved in, he’d struggled. He had frequent urges to touch her, to grab at her as she passed by, to smell her. His reaction thrilled and repulsed him in equal measure. He thought he might be developing an obsession for Essie that bordered on the unhealthy. In truth, he’d bought the boat to distract himself.

  Sandra had harped on about correct safety procedures, alert as a terrier when anything came on the news about boating accidents. ‘See?’ she’d say. ‘It’s not all plain sailing out there.’ He’d organised for her name to be emblazoned along the side of the vessel as a sly dig, only half joking that if anything were to happen, they would go down together, at least in name.

  ‘Well,’ she’d remarked dryly. ‘Just make sure the insurance is all paid up. Might as well be some gain in all this.’

  Once the boat was delivered, he’d spent the first evening reading through the manual. Little of it had made sense, and he’d finally been reduced to flicking through the glossy accompanying brochure, staring at pictures of blokey-looking men pulling gigantic fish over the sides of their respective vessels, faces bright with victory. His tackle box started to collect expensive and, frankly, baffling lures; his clothing, even on land, began to take on something of a nautical hue. Sandra said nothing but handed him a first aid kit and refused to come on board.

  It had taken several weekends of trawling up and down the quiet river to gain the skipper’s ticket that would allow him out into open water. He hadn’t bothered trying to fish the river, and he hadn’t felt the need to clean the pool. It had been enough to stand square at the prow, wheel clutched in his hands and the motor thrumming through the soles of his feet, as the water slid obediently away beneath him. He was saving fishing for the solitude of the open seas.

  A picture had begun to take shape in his imagination: him and Essie out on the calm waters, laughing and drinking wine. Her head thrown back, the shine of the sun on her pearly teeth. In the swell, it was possible, probable even, that Essie might lean against him for balance with the slow rocking motion of the boat. Might turn her head to speak, her arms suddenly around him. Sometimes the thought made him blush on his morning commute. He was at a loss as to how he might arrange such things.

  Last Sunday, with his newly laminated skipper’s ticket stowed safely in the prow, Vic had finally taken the boat out into open water. He’d left early, happily padding along the loose boards of the jetty in the cool air, easing out through the heads and into the low swells of the bay. This was what he’d been waiting for, all these long years. Adventure and challenge, the spice of life. The Sandra purred out past the tinnies and shore-bound kayaks. Glancing behind him, he’d grinned at the twin white lines of the wake, drawing a pathway on the surface of the sea back to the marina entrance.

  Once out beyond the in-shore traffic, Vic had been surprised at how empty the ocean looked. Other than the smudged suggestion of a ship on the horizon to his left, there seemed to be nothing this far out on the water. He felt a fission of fear, rationalised it away. The day was calm, and the boat had an emergency beacon and radio. He prepared his reel and line, choosing a floppy rubber lure resembling a large shrimp, the activity distracting him from his anxiety—an unease more uncomfortable for feeling so familiar. This sense of aloneness.

  ‘Jesus, Victor,’ he scolded himself in the ringing air. ‘Get a grip.’

  Casting out, the line rose in a pure shining arc, the lure plopping into the water a good distance away. He settled himself down on the blue vinyl divan and put his sandshoed feet up on the esky. A light breeze ruffled the surface of the water, the click and drive of the reel as he played the lure a calming backdrop. He felt okay now, lulled by the rolling of the boat beneath him.

  The first bend and tug of the rod brought him up into a lunge, grasping at the fast-running line, cursing at the sting of its burn in the crease of his palm. Reeling in, he felt the tremor of the fish and eased off a bit, playing the tension in and out. Slowly, he drew the fish in towards the boat. In the last flurry, there were only impressions, the sun bright on the water, the silver splash of fin and tail, a desperate struggle for freedom. Then it was with him in the boat, long and bright and thrashing. He grasped at the fish in his excitement and wrenched the lure and hook from its jaws. It slid from his hands and landed towards the back of the boat, slapping wildly on the aluminium deck.

  ‘Ha ha. You beauty!’ He crowed in triumph, reaching towards his catch.

  The fish lay gasping on its side, staring up at Vic with a glassy yellow eye, bright blood leaking from the hinge of its jaw. It looked terrified. Vic stood a moment staring, and then scrambled for the side of the boat. Hot vomit came up and into the water. He felt his airways restricting, the burn of oxygen t
oo far away to grasp.

  ‘You be a good boy now, Victor.’ His mother’s voice in that place, the echo of it bouncing off the unfamiliar walls in the hall; the iron bedsteads, slanting strips of sunlight. She’d left him there, in the dormitory for chronic asthmatics. Out in the wheatbelt, in the middle of fucking nowhere. Even as a kid, Vic wasn’t stupid. He had seen the relief in her eyes.

  She would leave him for months, occasionally visiting on weekends in that flowered floating frock, her heels tapping up the long garden pathway, lipstick marks on his cheek from her final goodbye. Each time, another shadowy figure waiting for her outside. A new friend, a different uncle. He’d begged her every time to take him home. Until, eventually, he had learnt to manage the worst of it, and she finally—reluctantly, it seemed to him—took him home where everything had grown up and away from him. Where he could never catch up.

  In the boat, he and the fish both lay gasping, both drowning in their separate ways. He hadn’t carried a puffer in years, hadn’t had an attack, hated the weakness having one implied, as though he was never fully in control. Sandra kept one in the bathroom cabinet at home anyway, replacing it religiously as it expired. Just in case. When they found his body, she’d be more furious than sad. Vic wished she were here with him.

  ‘Just breathe for goodness sake.’ Sandra in his ear, sensible and severe. ‘Stop panicking and just breathe.’ In the long planes of her face, no girlish frailty nor red lipstick to mark his face. When he’d gone to the local hospital overnight for minor surgery last year, she’d sat all night in the chair by his bed.

  ‘Go on home,’ he’d told her.

  ‘No. I’ll wait here. Make sure they look after you properly.’

  He’d been embarrassed, the way she’d watched everything going on, felt faintly ashamed at the beigeness of her against the pale green walls. During the night, he’d woken, wheezing in reaction to the anaesthetic. Sandra had called for oxygen, pulled a puffer from his toiletry bag. After the nurse had left, she remained there, holding his clammy hand in her long dry fingers.