Baby

by Annaleese Jochems

  ‘Aw.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he tells her. ‘He’s only thirteen, prob’ly wouldn’t be able to reach anyway.’

  ‘Did you go without him?’

  He sprays a little over the line. ‘Nah.’ Then smudges it with his finger, making it worse, and pats the problem spot with the pad of his thumb. ‘Keep an eye out for teachers.’

  She nods and sits down in the bark, then asks him, ‘Are you bored?’

  He shrugs, but looks down at her, differently now. ‘I’ll give you forty bucks for a twelve-pack of Cody’s.’

  ‘Nah,’ she says.

  She hears him spray a little more, then stop. He coughs, and says, ‘You want something, or . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ Cynthia tells him, adjusting herself in the bark. Anahera’s probably found herself four jobs by now. He doesn’t start spraying again, and she looks up at him for a moment. His hair’s orange, a very bad attempt at blond. He almost definitely thinks it looks good. ‘You don’t have a job, do you?’ she asks him.

  His eyebrows scrunch down, and his mouth puckers for a moment, then he says, ‘I wash the windows and sweep the floor at my house. And I go to school.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what do you even do?’

  She should tell him off. Instead she says, ‘I have a boat.’

  ‘Whoa!’ He lifts up and down at his knees. ‘With Wi-Fi on it?’

  Cynthia remembers she’s wearing her best blouse, her best pants, and that her shoes are black leather with sensible but serious heels. ‘Of course,’ she says.

  ‘Fuck!’ He switches his can from one hand to the other, then back again.

  ‘Yup!’ Cynthia nods. ‘It’s quite big, I guess, too.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ he says, solemnly. He touches a finger to his mouth for a moment. Then asks her, ‘Do you drive through the rock hole?’

  Cynthia doesn’t know what he means. ‘I have a girlfriend,’ she says. ‘We live on it together.’

  He nods, bored. ‘Do you have a drinks cabinet?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cynthia tells him.

  ‘Oh my fucking god!’ he says. ‘I’ll give you my forty bucks if you take me through the rock hole.’

  Something about the way his nose twitches reminds her of Snot-head. ‘I’m not sure about the rock hole,’ she says.

  ‘Ah!’ he laughs. ‘Can’t fit, eh?’

  Cynthia scratches behind her ear, thinking. ‘There’s an island,’ she says.

  ‘Is it deserted?’ he asks, and she nods.

  ‘Alright,’ he says, and takes two twenties from his pocket. ‘I will give you my forty bucks if you let me come drink four beers on your boat, and take me to the deserted island.’

  She looks up at him and his money. She doesn’t want to be alone with Anahera. ‘Two beers,’ she says. It’s probably time to get back to the bridge, so she gets up and walks that way. He follows, gesturing back at his dick. ‘Can finish that another day.’ He gives her the money, and she pockets it.

  ‘You’ll have to let me stay the night,’ he says, trotting ahead, then pausing to wait for her. ‘Can’t go home to my mum drunk. I’ll text and tell her I’m staying with my boy Roger.’

  They’re early, and wait at the metal bridge together, under Snot-head’s tree. The boy lies down and sends his mum what must be a very carefully worded text message—it takes a while—then clicks a finger above his head. ‘Done.’

  Cynthia nods. He shifts his legs around, trying to get comfortable, but he never will—not in those tight shorts. Snot-head’s tree droops down and shades one of his legs. She points at its trunk. ‘My dog pooed there.’

  ‘Aw,’ he says, and that’s all. He coughs then, and she thinks he’s faking. ‘Is she coming?’ he asks, of Anahera.

  ‘Yes, I said she was.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  ‘Um,’ she asks him, ‘what’s your favourite subject in school?’

  He grunts, and as he does so, Anahera appears around the corner with bags of groceries.

  ‘Look!’ Cynthia says, pointing at the boy. ‘Isn’t he good?’

  Anahera peers at him for only a moment. ‘Sure.’ She looks bored, so Cynthia doesn’t say more. ‘There’s nothing going,’ Anahera says, about jobs. ‘Nothing I want.’ She waggles the bags. ‘We’re broke, pretty much.’

  The boy’s watching a seagull balance on one foot, pretending not to listen to them.

  Cynthia presents the forty bucks, proudly now. ‘I told him we’d show him our boat and some stuff.’

  Anahera looks down at Cynthia for a long time. The seagull flies away.

  ‘We’re broke,’ Cynthia mouths up at her.

  ‘What?’ But she got it. She walks off down the bridge to the dinghy.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ Cynthia tells the boy, ‘she’s often quite obscure.’

  He looks back at her, away from where the gull was. ‘It’s alright,’ he says, ‘my sister’s a complicated person too, she says so herself.’

  Cynthia can’t help smiling. She tugs his shirt, and he follows her down the bridge.

  In the dinghy he says, ‘I can’t see your boat.’ He’s big and he leans to the right, so the dinghy leans that way too. Anahera laughs and paddles.

  Cynthia tells her, ‘I thought we could go to your island, today or tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ the boy says. ‘That’s what I texted my mum.’

  ‘He already texted his mum,’ Cynthia explains.

  Anahera nods. ‘My island?’ she asks.

  ‘The one you swim to.’

  The water’s gentle around them, and the air’s a little heavy and wet on Cynthia’s shoulders; it’ll rain soon. Anahera keeps paddling, and sucks her top lip. The boy looks at each boat they pass, craning his neck for the big ones, then back at Cynthia. She smiles.

  ‘What sort of beer will it be?’ he asks, and it starts raining.

  Anahera swings her head around at Cynthia, glaring. Then back to the boy. She says, nicely, ‘You won’t be drinking any beer on our boat, sweetie.’

  ‘That’s fine, I guess,’ he says. He frowns, and settles his elbows against his thighs.

  ‘Do you want us to take you back?’ she asks him. ‘We’ll give you your money.’

  He looks at the water, and the rain falling into it in plonks, then lifts his shoulders and holds his hands together in front of him. ‘No thanks,’ he says. ‘I want to go to the deserted island.’

  Cynthia smiles at him, thankfully, and he grins back. Under his breath he’s muttering the chorus from that one Kendrick song, ‘Sit down, and drank. Stand up, and drank. Pour up, and drank.’

  He’s got the lyrics a bit wrong. Cynthia interrupts him. ‘With most things, I’m allowed some part in the decision-making process.’ The wind changes, and a lot of rain hits her face in a slap.

  He waits till she’s wiped her eyes and reassembled her face before nodding. Then he skips forward in his muttering to a later part of the song, ‘I wave my bottles, and watch girls all flock. They all wanna—’ Mid-sentence, he looks up and sees her still looking at him. She smiles reassuringly, and he settles, quiet.

  ‘Cynthia,’ Anahera says, now he’s stopped.

  Cynthia waits.

  Anahera turns to the boy. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  She keeps looking at him.

  ‘Fifteen, and uh’—he calculates with his fingers—‘four months.’

  Anahera looks back at Cynthia.

  Cynthia shrugs. He leans forward and takes an apple from their bags. His knees are high up, lifted at least level with his tummy button. She notices his yellow hair again, and touches her nose. It’s got a spot. The water’s a little rough, and the dinghy rocks now they’re out in it. He stretches his legs out, and they’re scabby. Rain runs down them in drops. He’s got broad shoulders, strong thighs, and a wider than average mouth. He shrugs for no reason.

  Baby’s much smaller with him on board. They sit around the
table, and he kicks the steel pipe holding it up. Anahera and Cynthia watch him quietly while he crunches through a second apple. When he’s done Anahera asks him, ‘What things do you like?’

  ‘Uh,’ he says, ‘sports.’

  ‘Oh!’ Anahera jumps up a little in her seat. ‘I’m a gym instructor, and I’m always saying to Cynthia, there’s so much exercise to be had here.’ She gestures to the little window above the sink, which is now being pummelled with rain. Cynthia nods, pleased to see her all perked up.

  He breathes in and touches his ugly hair. She gets up to show him his bunk, in the cabin. ‘It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks,’ she smiles and tells him, although she’s never slept in it. As they’re standing there, looking through the little door at the bed, the boat shifts suddenly sideways. She slips onto him, and he holds her up. His mouth smells thickly of lollies and Coke. Anahera’s weights are heavy and moving above them, and Cynthia puts herself firmly on her feet.

  ‘Cool,’ he says, and laughs, then stands up on the table and knocks the panel in the ceiling. ‘What’s this?’ Neither Anahera nor Cynthia answers, but he jumps up onto his seat, slides the panel back, and sticks his head through. ‘You should renovate,’ he tells them, echoing. ‘Make up here a second floor for lying down in. Hot-box it. Shit-tons of cushions, I reckon. Psyche-fucking-delic.’

  ‘No,’ Anahera says, ‘get down.’

  ‘Psychedelic,’ he repeats, as if he’s not heard her. He thrusts himself up onto his elbows, so his feet dangle at Cynthia’s eye level.

  ‘That’s dangerous,’ Anahera says sternly. ‘Get down.’ Cynthia remembers her weights up there. He sighs, and his feet thump back onto the table.

  Once he’s sat laboriously back down beside Cynthia and taken a full minute to look around at everything in their one room, he asks, ‘Where do you shit?’ He’s not looking at them, but up at the ceiling. Cynthia notices paint flaking there where she didn’t before, at the edges.

  Anahera gets up to show him the toilet and the bucket you dip into the sea for water to flush it with. ‘It’s on a string, so you don’t lose it.’

  Cynthia can’t see his face, but almost hears his mouth pucker. Why did she invite him into their home? They come back and he sits again, beside her. She inhales and says, ‘We’re out of money,’ dramatically, still trying to show him a good time.

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I heard before.’

  She forces a smile. ‘Yes, well. We’re unemployed.’

  22.

  His name’s Toby. There’s a near continuous patter, louder than the rain, of gulls shitting on the roof. Periodically he gets up and swings around the side of the boat, trying to swat them with a rolled-up newspaper. The way Anahera looks at him when he returns from these expeditions is either indulging, or exasperated, Cynthia can’t say for sure.

  The weather gets nastier. Anahera bakes more biscuits, and he eats most of them. Cynthia eats most of the rest. They’re delicious but he says so first. He goes to the toilet and doesn’t flush properly. Anahera says nothing, and lugs in a bucket of water to do it for him. He doesn’t seem guilty, or even to particularly notice.

  They play cards. Toby only likes Go Fish, which Anahera seems to find endearing. Cynthia says, ‘Maybe something a bit more grown-up?’

  ‘You kept asking to play Snap before Toby arrived?’ Anahera says.

  ‘Snap is more grown-up.’

  They play Go Fish. Anahera keeps smiling at Toby, then Cynthia. She seems to think Cynthia likes him, and that she’s doing her a huge favour just by having him there. Cynthia goes for a lie-down in the cabin, in Toby’s bed, thinking about her dog and almost pretending to be him. After a while she trudges past them, out to look at the water. It’s filled with shit from the estuary.

  At dinner, Toby’s busy glancing around again, rudely, at the wood their home is made of—chipped in places, and blistering in others. Cynthia makes sure not to look at anything while he is. His eyes could pull her dream to pieces. She peers down, under the table, at his very clean high-top shoes. ‘Are they leather?’ she asks.

  ‘What? Aw, yeah.’ He rubs them against the steel pipe that supports their table.

  ‘You definitely, actually want to come to the island?’ Anahera asks him.

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’ He looks around some more. Cynthia actually wants to slam his head against the wall, a bit. ‘I’m already here, and I already gave you my money, so yeah, I do.’ Cynthia gives Anahera a look. He’s not getting his money back.

  ‘When I’m older I’ll own an island,’ he says.

  After dinner they play more cards. Cynthia doesn’t even nearly win, not a single round. She watches the rain fall against the window and the light fading behind the wet glass. Anahera shifts some hair from her eyes, and Cynthia waits for it to fall back. When it does she shifts it again. The boy tires quickly, and Anahera pays less attention to the game, watching him slump. The light falls lower, and soon they’re not playing anymore, just all sitting there.

  He sleeps in the cabin, and Cynthia and Anahera sit facing each other at the table.

  ‘I went to places,’ Cynthia tells her, ‘but there were no jobs.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’ll have to go back with lower standards,’ Anahera says, not seeming to care if Cynthia’s lying or what.

  ‘You miss your husband,’ Cynthia says.

  ‘No.’ Anahera doesn’t ask about Cynthia’s dog, or her father.

  The next day Anahera wakes Cynthia, gently, with a hand on her arm. ‘Let him sleep,’ she says. Then, ‘Why do you want to go to the island? Why does he?’

  ‘Because we want to do something!’

  Anahera looks for a moment like she’s going to ask again, but Cynthia says, ‘Please?’

  ‘Okay, okay, sure.’ Anahera shrug-wriggles, and gets quickly out of bed. ‘We’ll leave soonish, when he gets up. Make eight jam sandwiches, and cut one in half. You and I get two and a half, and he gets three.’

  Cynthia lifts up on her elbows to see Anahera. She’s being told off, almost. ‘Please,’ she says again. ‘I really want to see your island. I wanted to anyway, before I met him.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Anahera says, ‘well I said we would, so.’

  Cynthia dozes for fifteen minutes, and while dozing she tells Anahera, ‘I think about you a lot, and your needs.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Anahera says. ‘We need jobs.’

  They fix the table. There’s noise from the cabin, Toby shifting into wakefulness. Cynthia makes the sandwiches, and Anahera sits out on the deck. While she’s buttering, he walks in and opens a can of spaghetti, quickly, before she can comment. ‘I’ll only want one of those, thanks,’ he says, nodding at the sandwiches. Cynthia shrugs and continues making as many as Anahera told her to.

  When they’re done she sits opposite him at the table. He’s eating from the can with a spoon, and long strands dangle over the side. He tilts it so she can see how much he has left; roughly a third. ‘They’re so saucy,’ he says disparagingly. It’s on his face. He puts two more spoonfuls in his mouth, then tilts it again, grimacing; there’s still roughly a third left. ‘Can I have some bread?’ he asks.

  Cynthia hears herself breathe in. ‘No, because you won’t be hungry at lunch time, for the sandwiches.’

  ‘I hate spag.’ He stirs the spaghetti around, glaring at it.

  ‘You have to finish it,’ she says. ‘We can’t afford to waste food.’

  He takes another spoonful, and fake gags. He’s got spots on his forehead, and some on his chin. He gets up and walks outside, past Anahera, and throws the can into the sea. He comes back in and says, ‘Now can we go? I want to see this island, but I’ve got shit to do today.’

  ‘Actually,’ Cynthia says. ‘Do you know what? You told me you were into creative destruction, blah blah blah. I thought you were adventurous. Really, you’re a little runt.’

  He looks down at her quizzically.

  ‘Psychologically—not in terms of size—you are a runt.’ />
  He preserves the same expression. Anahera’s looking in at them now.

  ‘Okay,’ Cynthia says, ‘sure, we’ll go. Whatever, but first you need to understand about our toilet, because it’s very simple.’ She makes him follow her to the deck, where Anahera’s still watching them. She gives him the bucket and fixes the end of the string in his hand, then watches him drop it into the water. For a second she thinks he’ll drop the string too, and she’ll really have to ruin the whole day by making him swim for it, but he doesn’t. The string’s tied at three places, at opposing sides of the bucket, so he should be able to pull it up against the edge of the boat without losing too much water. However, as she knows he will, Toby yanks and three quarters of the liquid slops out. She looks him in the face, and holds the bucket between them. ‘Now, is this enough to flush the toilet?’

  ‘Should be,’ he says. ‘Or you’d have a bigger bucket.’

  He’s a typical teenager, a real little fuckhead. ‘No,’ she tells him firmly, and explains the string while he looks off into the distance, at the island.

  ‘Cynthia,’ Anahera says, ‘what exactly is your problem?’

  ‘Well,’ Cynthia starts, ‘I just don’t like the way he’s looking around our boat. He thinks it’s crappy.’

  ‘How am I supposed to look at it?’ he says, far too loud. He’s wriggling his arms, with his weird sticky-out elbows.

  Cynthia doesn’t want to answer. She loves Baby, it shouldn’t be a problem if a teenager notices where the paint flakes, or complains that the toilet’s laborious. But the ceiling seems lower with him under it, and the floor makes a noise beneath his heavy-stomping feet that she hasn’t heard before.

  ‘Okay,’ Anahera says. ‘Look, Cynthia—you can see he’s sorry. He’s embarrassed.’

  His face is as red as blood, but that doesn’t mean he’s embarrassed or sorry for the right reason. Why doesn’t Anahera understand how this matters? But Cynthia looks at her—standing there in her dad’s Australian hat with the water moving behind her—and feels that if Anahera’s not worried about it, she won’t worry either.