She whacked me with a throw cushion. ‘I hate you.’
‘We could work at Mau’s shop.’
‘Gwen.’
‘And Gordon’ll probably be on the mainland. You two won’t need me.’
‘Oh, goodie. So he can continue working on his Loretta’s der-brain series.’ She pulled a face. ‘I really hate you.’
‘I hate you too. Night, Rets.’
She sighed. ‘Night, Gwennie.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke up with a headache and stared at the clay mermaid for ages before shoving it into my bedside-table drawer. It hurt too much to look at it. I jumped into the shower, taking my time, even though Tyrone – despite his hangover – was hammering on the door, telling me to hurry up. Which was so unfair when he took the longest showers out of any of us. Whenever I banged on the door and told him to hurry up, Biddy and Dad always told me off. They said to just give him some space in there.
I tried not to think about last night, about how stupid I’d been with Ben. Amber had probably seen. It had probably made her night, me sprinting out of the shed like I was training for the hundred-metre nationals.
Tyrone glared at me as I came out then walked, very bow-legged, into the bathroom and slammed the door. I found Loretta still in bed.
I sat on the end, picking at the frayed edge of my t-shirt. I heard Loretta’s breathing change and knew she was awake.
‘Want to go down to the beach?’ I asked.
Loretta groaned. ‘Nup. Going home. Need smoothie. Need rest. Must recover from crushing disappointment that was last night.’
‘Alright. Want a cup of tea or something?’
She shook her head, yawned and reached for her jeans. ‘At least I got to see Tyrone fall off a horse and get kicked in the little men. That’s an image that I’ll treasure forever.’
I snorted. ‘Little men?’
‘It’s what Mum calls them!’ She kissed my cheek. ‘See you later.’
I intended to go straight out for a run, but I was so tired. I curled up in bed and dozed for a while.
I could hear Dad and Tyrone talking in the kitchen.
‘Oh, mate,’ Dad was saying, ‘go out and give ’em a good soak in the ocean.’
‘You reckon that’ll help?’
‘For sure it will. For sure.’
I didn’t really sleep. I knew because I could still hear all the goings-on in the house. Sunday-morning music videos and the coffee grinder and quiet murmuring. It was nearly midday by the time I finally got up and went out onto the beach. Tyrone was standing out in waist-deep water, grimacing and pulling faces. The water was frothy and restless in the wind. Mermaid, I thought, staring out at the waves.
Amber and Ben’s aunty rode by on her grey horse, one big, feathered hoof hitting the sand at a time. She waved at me and I waved back. The horse looked like he’d recovered completely from being ridden by Tyrone last night. Poor thing.
I watched them become smaller and smaller, disappearing in the direction of Songbrooke. I gritted my teeth. I won’t think about Ben. I won’t think about the painted mermaid. I won’t think about smashing glass. I won’t think about Mum. I won’t think about Jamie. I won’t think about being Pearl.
Water dripped down on my head. ‘Hey!’ I yelped.
‘Sorry,’ Tyrone said. ‘You’re on my towel.’ He tugged it out from under me.
‘Why do you go out there, anyway?’ I asked, wiping the damp sand off my hands.
‘Where?’
‘The surf!’
‘You’ll think I’m nuts,’ he said. He went to sit down but winced and changed his mind. He offered me a bit of his towel. I ignored him.
‘I already think you’re nuts,’ I said. ‘Why’d you have to turn up last night?’
He looked away. ‘Amber invited me.’
‘Hmm.’
‘What? She’s nice. And she’s hot.’
‘She’s awful.’
‘To you maybe. She’s nice to me.’ He grinned. ‘She’s very, very nice.’
I elbowed him. ‘You’re so disgusting.’
‘Anyway, about the surf. A few months ago I was out there, and something was out there with me.’
I felt a prickle down my spine. ‘Something like what?’
‘I dunno. Guys down at the surf shop reckon it was a shark or a dolphin, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything like that.’
‘What was it?’ I asked, thinking stupidly of my mermaid stories.
Tyrone looked away from me. ‘I don’t know.’
He started to walk away, then stopped. ‘It’s the weirdest thing,’ he said. ‘I swear, whatever it is that’s in the water, it turns up more when you’re on the beach, too.’
I stared after him. The beach was empty. I went down to the shore and stared out at the surf. I shivered at the roar of the waves. I decided Tyrone was just pulling my leg. He was probably still drunk. He was probably deliriously in pain from his little men getting kicked. It started to rain. I wandered along, jumping in the horse’s footprints for a while, then I realised how weird I’d look from the road and headed back up to the house.
I was embarrassed by how much I wanted what Tyrone had said to mean something about Mum and Jamie, even though I knew it couldn’t. Of course it couldn’t.
As I walked into the kitchen I did what I’d seen a lot of frustrated characters do in movies. I punched the wall next to the fridge and immediately curled over and swore.
I got a bag of peas out of the freezer and sat down in front of the television with the bag pressed to my throbbing knuckles. Maybe I could be a television producer? But Mum had hated television. She’d always said it rotted your brain.
Lying there, knotted up with pain and frustration, I was relieved when the doorbell rang.
I opened the door with my good hand. It was Ben. I immediately wanted to run away. Very, very fast.
‘Want to go for that run?’ he asked. He didn’t look bothered by the fact that I’d bolted last night. He looked red in the face from the cold and the rain and was puffing slightly.
I stared at him. I couldn’t form words.
He frowned. ‘What happened to your hand?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Punched a wall.’
‘Right.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Fair enough.’
I grabbed a raincoat and shut the door behind me. And then we started to walk. We walked along in the footprints of the big grey horse, stretching our legs to reach from print to print. As long as I didn’t look at him or keep reminding myself that I was walking down the beach with Ben, I found I could breathe and even talk a bit.
‘What do your parents do?’ I asked.
‘My parents?’
‘In the place that’s not Sydney.’
Ben pulled a face somewhere between a smile and a grimace. ‘Mum’s a lawyer. Dad grows garlic.’
‘Your dad grows garlic?’ I grinned. ‘Like, a farmer?’
‘If Amber knows I told you, she’ll kill me.’
‘Do you miss your parents? Just being so far away and everything.’
‘A bit,’ he said.
‘Right.’ I recognised that tone – I’d used it often enough, when I wanted people to back off.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you about my garlic-farming dad. What happened to your mum?’
I bit my lip.
‘It’s okay – you don’t have to tell me. Just, sometimes it helps. The talking.’
‘She died.’ I shrugged. ‘And I don’t know what’s happened to her stuff.’
‘Her stuff?’ I could practically hear the cogs turning in his brain. ‘Like, her clothes and shoes and things?’
‘Yeah.’ I wiped the rainwater off my face.
He thought for a moment. ‘Would your dad know?’
‘He doesn’t want to talk to me.’
‘About the clothes?’
‘About anything. The only time we talk for longer than five seconds is if we’re both up in the middle of the
night and run into each other in the kitchen.’
‘What about Biddy?’
I crossed my arms. I couldn’t ask Biddy.
‘Can I help you? With any of this? I’d like to. If I can.’
He didn’t sound flirty, but no boy had flirted with me before, so who was I to judge? I cleared my throat. ‘No.’ I cleared my throat. ‘C’mon. Let’s run.’
It was nice on the beach, even with the rain. The wind was coming from the north-east, so the coast was pretty quiet. Well, as quiet as our coast ever was. ‘Have you ever been to the cove?’ I asked as we pulled up near the water a few hundred metres down the beach.
‘The cove?’ He looked oddly sad. ‘No.’
‘It’s right near Songbrooke! How’ve you not?’
‘Whenever I go anywhere near that part of the beach I get caught in prickles.’
‘C’mon – it’s really awesome.’
It didn’t take us long to get to the cove. Ben was fast. Not as fast as me, but I hadn’t met anyone else who was. I heard Ben let out a low whistle as we climbed over the final bit of cliff and had the cove open up in front of us.
He pushed his sweaty, rain-soaked hair out of his face. ‘Wow!’
I smiled. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it? I’m the only person who comes here, I think.’
He sat down. ‘It’s kind of creepy, though.’
‘What? Why?’ I was instantly wounded.
He gazed at me, puzzled. ‘Well, just that drowned kid and all. It’s sad.’
I stiffened. ‘What? What kid?’
He looked uncomfortable and started playing with handfuls of sand. ‘I was just looking at old newspapers for the history project – you know, to catch up on all the stuff I don’t know about the area – and I found this article.’
‘What article?’ I asked. My chest was tight.
‘It said these three kids were playing up on the cliffs. Two little ones at first, then their big brother went up to get them down ’cause it was dangerous. But, before he was able to do that a big wave came and knocked the two little ones off.’
I swallowed. I’d seen waves like that along Wade’s Point. Huge waves that crashed over the rocks, splashing water right up onto the top of the cliffs. The point was notorious for its unpredictable waves.
‘Well, John, the seventeen-year-old brother, dived in after them, right off the cliff.’ Ben dusted the sand from his hands.
I sat down next to him. My swelling knuckles started to throb again. I didn’t know if I wanted him to finish the story.
‘And the two little kids had been really lucky and clawed their way up onto the cliff face. They managed to get back onto the main beach.’
‘What about John?’
‘Well, there was a massive search. Heaps of search parties because he was the son of this hot-shot artist or something. I dunno. Eventually, everyone gave up except his little brother and sister, and apparently they spent the next week just wandering up and down the beach, calling his name.’
‘Why didn’t their parents stop them?’ I demanded.
‘I don’t know.’
‘They should’ve been sent to a therapist!’ My voice was so loud a flock of seagulls took flight on the other side of the cove. Not that Mr Blended-family-therapist had been much help to me.
Ben blinked at me. ‘It was back in the seventies. It wasn’t done like that. Anyway, about a week after all the search parties had stopped his body washed up in the cove.’
‘Oh.’ I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t let myself think of anything else. Not my clay mermaid. Not my mother. Just the water. The shore. The power of those frothing, dark waves.
‘And his little brother and sister found him and the article didn’t go into details, but after a week and a half in the ocean I reckon he would’ve been looking pretty gruesome.’
I shuddered and felt a lump in my throat. He had drowned. John had drowned, right here in my little cove. He’d drowned trying to save his little brother and sister. This cove was never mine. It had always been his and suddenly I felt claustrophobic, barricaded in a place I didn’t belong.
‘They named it after him,’ Ben added.
‘What? John’s Point?’ I asked, nonplussed. ‘Because it’s not John’s Point.’
‘I know, Wade’s Point. His middle name was Wade.’
‘That’s the most awful story I think I’ve heard.’ I stood up. ‘C’mon. We should go.’
Ben jumped to his feet. ‘Sorry, Gwen. I thought you would’ve known. I just kind of thought everyone around here would know stuff like that.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ But it did.
He leaned in towards me but I backed away. He sighed and gave me an awkward arm and back pat.
We didn’t talk until we were over the cliff and back on the main beach.
For the first time in the half of my life that I’d been coming here, I was glad to put Wade’s Point behind me. Ben kept up with me the whole way home.
I think it was because we were running away from something. You run faster when you’re running away. You run like the wind.
***
FROM THE DIARY OF GWENDOLYN P. PEARSON
So, after he lent Biddy the book, Dad came to the classroom to pick me up from school every day. Which was kind of weird. But I liked getting picked up from school and I liked it even better when he collected me from the building. The schoolyard always felt a bit strange when it was so empty. I had to wait, but I didn’t mind. I had the quiet halls, the solo squeak of my shoes on the pale green floors, and most of all I had Biddy, who always had time for me, even when my mum didn’t.
I didn’t even mind it when Tyrone hung around. He used to give the kids in his class a hard time, but they couldn’t really do anything. Everyone knew that Biddy was his mum and so he was untouchable. I don’t think Biddy knew what a bully Tyrone was back then. I don’t think she’d have believed us if we’d told her. He stole people’s roll-ups and fruit straps, and if anyone tried to sit at his table at the back of the room he’d drag them off the chair.
If he sauntered into his mother’s work while I was still there, we acknowledged each other coolly.
Mum didn’t know. She didn’t know about the lent book, she didn’t know about Dad talking to Biddy every afternoon about nothing and everything as I sat and drew, or read, or wrote. Sometimes I sat across the room from Tyrone, each of us stiff with indignation as our parents laughed together at the front of the room. Mostly, though, I sat alone.
One afternoon, in winter, we went home, Dad and me, and Jamie was playing with his violin in his room. He was so little that he could barely hold it up, but he’d seen it and liked it and Mum had bought it for him because that was what Mum did.
When I went into my room, I could tell by the loud noises coming from the kitchen as Mum made dinner that she was angry about something. It was best to stay out of Mum’s way when she was angry.
I heard raised voices, then yelling.
I ran to my bed and hid my head under the pillow, trying to muffle out their voices. In the next room, Jamie’s violin twanging grew louder, as if he was also trying to drown them out.
I started humming, but no amount of humming or head hiding could mask my Mum’s final yell before the door slammed shut.
‘Why don’t you just marry her?!’
Good one, Mum.
It was the first thing he did.
***
I felt off balance, once I got home. Like a friend had just told me an awful secret about themselves that I couldn’t quite get to fit in with my idea of who they were.
Maybe it wasn’t true.
I told myself this, over and over, sitting out on the verandah, but I knew it was. Ben didn’t seem like the kind of person who would make up something like that. And he was exactly the sort of person who’d be looking at old newspapers to catch up on facts for a history project.
My hand was throbbing and I couldn’t settle, so I ran to the police station, where Martin looke
d at my hand, sighed, and got me an icepack from the tearoom fridge.
‘I’ve got to go out on patrol, soon,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to get out of here. Can’t have dodgy kids hanging around when the station’s unattended.’
‘Alright.’ I chewed on my lip. ‘Martin?’
‘What?’
‘This police station smells very much like Mau Fischer’s perfume.’
He reddened. ‘I’ll take the icepack back.’
‘How rude.’
‘I’m serious,’ he said.
‘Um, Martin?’
‘What?’
There was a lot I wanted to ask him. I wanted to ask him about my mum and Wade’s Point. I wanted to ask him whether he’d known about my dad and Biddy being friends before everything had happened.
‘When did you know you wanted to be a police officer? Like, how did you work it out?’ I asked instead.
He shrugged. ‘Just did.’
‘You know, that’s not very helpful. Did you think about becoming anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Ever? What about when you were really little?’
‘I always wanted to be a policeman.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘Liar. I’m sure you wanted to be an acrobat or a train driver or something, somewhere in the middle there.’
He held something out to me. ‘Here.’
I glanced down. It was a worn paperback book. ‘What is it?’
‘Some book Elaine said helped her choose her uni course and TCE. Whatever.’ He glowered at me. ‘Anything to get you to stop talking.’
‘Thanks!’ I flipped it open. Elaine was Martin’s daughter, but she was about five years older than me, so I’d never had all that much to do with her. The book seemed to be about ways of tapping into your strengths. It was the sort of book Mau sold at her shop, kind of vague with a faint whiff of incense. Martin had read a lot of those books after his wife left him and Elaine before I was born. He’d never said so, but I could tell these sorts of books had helped him through. Or, at least, going into Mau’s shop to buy them had.
‘What happened to your hand?’ Martin asked.
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