by Carl Nixon
‘He stopped going down to his office, didn’t return calls from clients, started watching a lot of television. He never wanted to talk about Liam until one day I got a box and put all Liam’s toys out in the garage. That was the first time he ever hit me.’
‘Oh, my dear. I’m so sorry.’
‘I was so stunned I didn’t know what to do and then he hugged me and started howling. We were both standing there in the garage crying like babies. It’s been over a year, and there’s a stupid stuffed fish that my sister got Liam for his birthday sitting in the corner of the lounge. Liam never even liked it and Andrew still won’t let me touch the thing.’
‘I didn’t raise him to hit.’
‘He really thinks he should be this way. Like the war widow who wears black for the rest of her life, even though she was only married a month.’
Shirley pats her on the arm. ‘They say time heals all wounds.’
‘And a stitch in time saves nine. And have you heard that a rolling stone gathers no moss?’
Shirley blinks twice. ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me…’
Irritated, Tonia starts walking again. There are ripples on the lake where small insects alight on the surface and loud plops as fish rise. Shirley follows her like a kicked puppy. When they get to the totara Tonia says, ‘I want you to know I don’t blame Bill. I did for a while but now I think that if it had been me or Andrew there that afternoon it wouldn’t have changed anything. Liam was a boisterous, loud, beautiful four-year-old boy who was never in the same place for more than two seconds.’
Shirley cannot meet her eye. ‘We were meant to be looking out for him.’
‘Bill was meant to be.’
‘I only popped down to the butcher’s.’
‘Once Liam learnt how to open doors, a week didn’t go by when one of the neighbours didn’t find him out on the street or playing in their garden. Liam was a storm in the shape of a little boy. He had me on tenterhooks the whole time.’ Shirley starts to cry and Tonia holds her but keeps talking. ‘I used to worry about him all the time, torture myself imagining all the ways he could get killed: run over by a car; sticking his head in a supermarket bag; strangling on the cord for the blinds … It sounds wrong, but for a small part of me it was almost a relief to know that the worst had happened and I didn’t have to worry any more.’
She steps back and cups Shirley’s crumpled face in her hands and feels the soft sag of the old woman’s skin and the tears that begin to pool in her palms. ‘Listen to me, Shirley. Really listen. Liam came out of my body; no one loved him more than me, no one, not even Andrew, and I don’t hold Bill, or you, responsible. You both loved him. I never doubted that. It was bad luck plain and simple.’
They stand and hold each other next to the trunk of the lone totara and cry, and above them the sun comes out for the first time in days. For a long time neither of them notices.
It is almost midday and the sun has come out hot. The clouds have broken up and blown east so that the sky is blue above the green of the bush. His mother and Tonia are off somewhere walking, and Bill is up on the roof hammering on new sheets of iron where the old stuff has rusted through. Andrew goes back inside where it seems dark after the stark sunlight and grabs a beach towel with all the softness washed out of it years ago. It is a short walk across the road and down the path to the shingle beach. He walks along the edge of the lake until he is standing opposite the raft.
Swimming to the raft was, is, a family tradition. He has never come here when everyone hasn’t gone out to the raft at least once. Even his mother swam out in her baggy one-piece, moving through the water like an oil-sodden bird with her lazy side-stroke. Swimming to the raft was one of those tests of membership and fidelity that every family has whether they are aware of it or not. Then again he has never been here in August and he knows that the water is shockingly cold. But maybe that is what he needs now — a shock.
He takes off his shirt and kicks his shoes aside. The water-smooth stones press into the soles of his feet. The lake closes around his calves and makes him gasp. This water flows down straight from the Alps and the lake is deep. The sound of his father’s hammering carries across the road, and looking back he can see the old man crouching, hammer raised, looking over towards where he is standing. Andrew does not give any sign that he knows he is being watched, but turns back to the lake and begins to wade out and the shore quickly drops away.
The cold squeezes his thighs but it feels good to be able to focus on another pain. He stands with the water at the top of his legs and waits, breathing slowly in and out, listening to the sound of his breath, anticipating the cold clench of the water on his body. And then he throws himself forward and feels the shards slashing along his chest and sides and against the top of his scalp. It is colder than he even imagined.
He does not stop when his head breaks the surface but strikes out for the raft in an impatient, choppy freestyle. He is swimming now as much to generate warmth as to reach the raft. He kicks his legs so that his whole body is moving in the freezing water. His scalp aches and his ears are immediately sore but he keeps swimming out. All he can hear is the muted sound of his own breathing and the loud splash and slosh as he pulls in to his stroke. To forget the pain he lets his mind wander.
‘Not here.’
Bill was suddenly standing in front of Andrew. ‘Son. We have to talk.’
His father’s voice sounded hoarse as though he had a heavy cold. He was wearing the navy-blue suit Andrew remembered from weddings and other funerals. His tie was lopsided where the knot bulged at his throat. Tonia had been over with her family by the tea and coffee, near the door to the chapel. Everyone had drifted into two groups — his and hers.
No, three groups. And his father. Bill was apart from everyone.
People stood around saying how beautiful the funeral was. The kids from Liam’s kindergarten had trooped up one by one and put flowers on the casket and some of them had painted pictures for Liam. GOODBYE LIAM they said in bright paint with smeared letters. The picture that had struck Andrew most showed Liam being eaten by a bright red dragon. When you think about it, Death is like that — the red dragon that comes and eats you up.
As his father stood waiting in front of him, Andrew became aware of snippets of conversations people were having close by. Tonia’s cousin admired the flowers. (There were flowers everywhere, here and at the house — he felt as though he were being smothered by flowers.) Another woman murmured that the priest had done a wonderful job. Someone else muttered darkly that the sausage rolls were only lukewarm. But all the time he could tell that everyone was really watching him. Son and father standing facing each other. The father and his son. What can they say to each other, poor things.
That was the first time they had faced off since Liam had died. Bill had spent the three days organising. Taking matters in hand. When everyone else was bawling their eyes out, Bill was ringing funeral directors, booking the church, ensuring that the notice in the paper was in on time. At one point Andrew had leaned against the wall in the hallway at his parents’ home and listened to Bill talking to the caterers about whether they actually needed sausage rolls. Andrew had listened, incredulous, as his father haggled over the price. He insisted he would only pay forty-five cents each.
‘That was his way of coping,’ Tonia had said later. He shook his head and they had had a fight. The first of many.
And now his father was standing in front of him outside the chapel. It had been four days exactly since Andrew had dropped Liam off for an afternoon with his grandparents. It had been twenty minutes since he had helped load his son’s perversely small coffin on to the silent rollers in the back of the hearse.
‘Andrew …’ Bill said, beginning again.
‘I can’t talk to you. I don’t want to ever talk to you again.’ Andrew had simply turned and walked away and out the door.
He is lying on his back on the raft in the sun and he thinks that he may have been asleep. The hammering
has stopped. He rolls over on to his side and looks toward the bach.
His father is standing on the rocky shore. He is looking in the direction of the raft, although Andrew cannot tell if Bill is looking at him or beyond to the far side of the lake and the bush. Bill is wearing his old yellow togs and Andrew can clearly see the long pale scar from the bypass. His father raises his hand but Andrew does not wave back.
He watches as Bill wades into the lake and begins to swim out. His father is a slow, methodical swimmer. He keeps his head slightly too high, breathing forward rather than to the side as children are taught. His feet kick only occasionally, chopping up the dark water behind him.
The sun is hot on Andrew’s shoulders but his skin still feels shrunken and tight from the cold water. The gaps in the wooden boards have pressed into his back. He stands and watches Bill swimming towards him. Can’t he leave well enough alone? What is there left to talk about? Andrew considers diving in and swimming to shore before Bill arrives. What will they talk about when he gets here? Liam? The accident? Where to go from here? Probably not. Bill is a practical man, good with his hands; and he is Bill’s son. He knows that neither of them has the vocabulary for grief.
Bill is about halfway to the raft when Andrew sees him stop mid-stroke. As though he has run into something hidden just below the surface. He begins to tread water awkwardly and Andrew sees the look of pain on his face as he reaches down. It could be cramp. Or his heart again. Bill’s head goes under and then comes back up. Bill looks towards him, and Andrew waits for him to call for help but he doesn’t. Instead his father tries to turn and pull himself back towards the shore. He can’t swim properly and goes under again.
‘Bill!’
He dives flat and long from the raft and swims towards Bill with frantic strokes. He tastes the bitter-tea lake in his mouth as he lunges through the water, unsure of how far he must swim, desperate. When he finally stops, breathing hard, scanning the surface, Bill is gone. All around him the water is clear and smooth and reflects the sunlight in sequins.
‘Bill! Bill!’
It is difficult to tell how far he has come. He thinks he is roughly at the spot where Bill was when he last saw him but it is impossible to say for sure.
Duck-diving down, opening his eyes in the green-black light. He cannot see far, and swims down, kicking and pulling further and deeper until his ears flare with a sharp pain and he has to hold his nose and blow hard. He pulls himself down against the buoyancy of the air in his lungs. It is dark now but he can see the bottom. Silt, fine and who knows how deep, stirs like dust as he passes close over it. He swims until he comes to a waterlogged tangle of logs and branches which rises up like a house rattled into pieces by an earthquake. He cannot see Bill. Black shadows and green light. Bubbles cling to the hairs along his arms. He searches for his father through the alien twilight with a ringing in his ears.
The phone in the hall was ringing.
‘Hello.’ He could hear nothing at first. No. There was a choking sound as though someone was trying to speak through a crushed windpipe. ‘Hello? Who is this?’
‘Andy.’
It took him a couple of seconds to realise that it was his father.
‘Dad. What’s the matter?’ His mind had jumped ahead, imagining Liam falling, hitting his head, cutting his foot on broken glass. A visit to the emergency room, bandages, stitches. ‘Dad?’
‘Something’s happened.’
‘Where’s Liam? Dad? Is he okay?’
He could hear Tonia in the shower. They had used the Sunday afternoon alone to do the shopping, to go to a café for a half-guilty coffee. They had made love slowly in the spare room in the sunlight. They had talked about the what-if of another child.
‘Dad, are you there? What’s happened?’
Tonia had heard the ragged edge to his words. She came into the hallway, wrapping a towel around her, and stood, long dark hair dripping on to her shoulders, watching him quizzically.
His father was speaking again. ‘I was doing some work in the garage — building a birdhouse for your mother’s birthday. I wasn’t watching. It was only a few minutes.’ Each word is an effort.
Cold had lapped over him then. Tonia was looking at him, her face framed by her dark wet hair, looking for clues on his face.
‘Tell me, Dad.’
‘I found him in the neighbour’s pool. You’ve got to come, Andy.’ He was sobbing now. ‘Liam’s drowned.’
Andrew sees his father after his own air has run out. Bill is a foetus floating among a patch of trailing weed.
He swims down, pulling desperately at the strands, using them like a lifeline. They twist around his hands, slimy and slick, but pull free from the bottom. Clouds of silt rise and hang in the water until everything is gauzed and wrapped in a grey muslin shroud.
And then Bill is right in front of him. His father’s hair hangs away from his head, each strand with a will of its own. Andrew grasps him around the neck with his right arm, pulling Bill close to him so that the back of his father’s head is against his chest.
His lungs are a crumpled bag, small and useless. He kicks away from the bottom and more silt rises up. Pulling with his one free arm. Kicking again. Kicking. Kicking. He does not feel as if it is having any effect. The walls begin to draw in as he tries to swim towards the surface. He is not sure if he is rising at all. Together they are too heavy. Bill is too heavy for his one free arm. Andrew’s feet kick. A burning pain in his own chest. The light leaches away and the world is getting blacker and narrower.
Out on the edge of his vision, through the black water, he can see something move in a slow glide. He can feel it watching him from among the weed, nestled in the silt with only its eyes showing. Hunting them. His one arm pulls them upward, but he knows that whatever is below will rush to drag them back before they make the surface. His vision has shrunk down so that he is moving impossibly slowly, inching along through a narrow tunnel with walls that pulsate in time with his heartbeat. So slowly that he wonders if he is moving at all. His grip on his father begins to slip. Bill is starting to slide away from him. Trying to return to the darkness below.
And then Andrew looks up and sees himself reflected in the surface of the lake.
It is an endless silver mirror. He can see his own face upturned, pale and worried. They are small, figures in the middle distance, but he can see them both and knows that he may be able to make it. He grips Bill tighter, pulls and kicks towards the vision of himself. He is using his final strength, hidden even from himself until now. The water becomes lighter and begins to change temperature. He cannot look away or he will be lost. Whatever is moving below him, shadowing them, he can still feel it. It is just waiting for him to look away, to look back, and then it will strike.
Andrew can see himself and his father edging up, larger and larger. At the last second he reaches out his hand to touch his own outstretched fingers. The mirror shatters.
He gulps and sucks in lungfuls of air, pulls his father’s head above the surface and tows him, heavy, to the raft. With his last strength, Andrew drags Bill painfully on to it, scraping his own arms and his father’s back red against the wood. He leans his ear close to his father’s chest and hears Bill’s heart beating faintly, but there is no breath. He begins to blow into him. Bill lies on his back with his arms out from his side, pale, spreadeagled on the wood, the water lapping and sloshing between the boards against the back of his head.
Andrew pushes air down into his father’s lungs again and again until there is only the huffing sound of his own breath. And again. Until his own hair is dry in the sun. ‘Come on. Come on. Don’t you die as well, you old bastard.’ Andrew is shouting now. ‘Breathe! Breathe! You’re just doing this because you’re stubborn. Breathe! If you die I’ll never forgive you. Breathe!’
Until Bill coughs and vomits black water.
‘Dad.’
Bill does not open his eyes but struggles, moving his arms. Instinctively he tries to roll on to hi
s side. Andrew helps him, and more water gushes from his father’s mouth on to the planks. Bill’s mouth grimaces and he says something which Andrew does not understand. A rasping sigh.
‘It’s okay, Dad. I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.’ He shifts himself and lifts his father’s head so that it is resting against his leg. He strokes Bill’s thin hair where a lifetime of sun has left dark marks on the skin. On the shore he sees his mother and his wife return from their walk. They have seen them now and are starting to run towards the beach. He raises his free hand and waves.
As Andrew waits for the women to row the dinghy out across the lake he is aware of something below him, under the raft, something large and black, flicking away through the water, returning to the dark places beneath.
Tuesday’s Child
in the beginning there were just the two of us but we were not happy. And then came the video tape. It arrived in our letter box wrapped in heavy white cardboard. It was,’ she says, ‘a Tuesday.’
This is how she always begins the story. Anne sits on her knee (or later, when she is older, at her feet on the floor) and listens, face turned upwards towards her like a dark flower.
The quality of the image is not top-notch. Whoever operates the camera is unfamiliar with the niceties of tracking or focus. A patch of wall. The foot of a metal crib with a sheet hanging down. And then a toddler, a girl of course, with black hair and a full-moon face, standing, hands behind her back, staring earnestly up. There is a woman’s voice close to the microphone speaking in Mandarin. The toddler makes no response. Cut suddenly to a new scene. A white room with a low table and chair. It is the same toddler playing with some wooden blocks. There is a man with her. He is wearing a grey suit and it is impossible to see his face. He hands the child the blocks and encourages her to stack them. Later, the man passes her a plastic doll and the child holds it upside down by the leg. She turns and speaks to whoever is holding the camera in a piccolo voice. The man leads her through a number of tasks involving blocks and pieces of jigsaw. It is only near the end that the child gets agitated and swings the doll so that its head strikes the edge of the table with a plastic thunk which is picked up clearly by the camera’s microphone. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Cut to black.