The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  His seat is at the back of the class. His gaze drifts to the window and the huge sky beyond it, the tall, wasted trees with their thin leaves. Red leaves and scrolls of bark fall with each hot gust of wind. The leaves crack into a thousand pieces when you crush them in your palm. The air is so dry that it hurts your lungs. It hasn’t rained for weeks. Back home, it’s always raining. People sit inside, smoking and eating and talking about the rain. Gezellig. The sky back home is so low that you can scoop water out of the clouds with your hand.

  The classroom has gone quiet, but he doesn’t realise until it’s too late. Mrs K has come up behind him. She flicks his ear with her ruler, short and sharp like a bee sting, and walks off.

  ‘Pay attention,’ she says.

  These are the only words she says slowly. The other children stop giggling and turn back to the front. They screw up their faces and lean over their books. Michaelis doesn’t do this. He knows that all he has to do is follow Mrs K with his eyes.

  At the end of the day, Mrs K lets the children touch her belly. ‘There is a baby inside me. Feel.’

  The children line up in front of her, each taking their turn. Her bare stomach is round and taut. The belly button is a knot straining at the middle.

  ‘Go on, touch me.’ She holds up her blouse and smiles, as if that is all it takes to be kind, to have a child inside you.

  The next day, Mrs K tells the children to open their books. They will practise writing the letter f. Except for Michaelis. A boy stands at the door with a note.

  ‘Go with him,’ Mrs K says.

  In an empty classroom, a man sits behind a kid’s desk. He is hunched over in a suit, playing with puzzles. He smiles when he catches sight of Michaelis. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves.

  ‘Do you want to play, too? Can you help me with this puzzle?’

  Without talking, they work it out together. When it’s done, they start a new one.

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

  Michaelis shrugs.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Do you like school?’

  Michaelis shrugs again.

  The man nods as if that was the right answer. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Holland.’

  ‘What’s Holland like? Take your time.’

  As he works on the puzzle, Michaelis begins talking. Words from home tumble into his sentences. He talks about Dad and football in the park. He tells the man about the endless rain—de regen—about his ten uncles and aunts, one for each finger, though he never saw most of them, and about snowy-haired Moessie who lives with a white dog, Baasje, on the top floor of an apartment block called the Bunthof. Underneath the apartment block stretches a dimly lit tunnel with lots of doors. Each door leads to a dry, stale-smelling room like a prison cell, except people put bikes and old stuff they don’t need down there. Moessie is always shoving stuff out of sight; Mum said that about her once.

  Michaelis runs out of words and has to draw pictures.

  ‘You’re a good drawer.’

  ‘I am born dere.’ Michaelis points to the top of the apartment block.

  He has heard the story so many times that it is as if he remembers for himself. The midwife with a cigarette in her mouth. Dad turning up late and having to borrow money for flowers.

  ‘Very good,’ the man says. ‘You have lots of windmills in Holland, don’t you? Want to build one together?’

  They mix water and flour and it turns into glue. The man shows him how to curl a piece of white paper into a cone and cut around the bottom so that it can stand on its base. Michaelis tells the man about a windmill near where he used to live. It had windows and pots out the front overflowing with yellow and red flowers in spring. People lived in it. Or maybe this is a story that someone told him or maybe it was a picture. Some things become strange when you say them out loud. Dad chasing them around the house in his pyjamas. Animaaales. The man helps him put the vanes on the windmill with a thumbtack, and they blow against them from the side. The vanes don’t turn very well.

  The man laughs. ‘The idea is always better when it stays in your head.’

  After that, they play some more puzzles. They race each other.

  ‘You’re faster than me, clever boy.’ The man ruffles Michaelis’s hair. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  But Michaelis knows the man is letting him win.

  ~

  ‘This is how I met Dirk.’

  Mum stirs a pot of macaroni and milk and sultanas spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and clove. They will eat the pudding after dinner, and the rest will go in the fridge. Mum will cut it into cold, slimy squares, Michaelis will take it to the school, and other kids will pause nearby and glance down at him with looks of curiosity and distaste. They eat different things here: pasties, meat pies, sponge squares covered in chocolate and shredded coconut.

  ‘It was a dark time in my life,’ Mum says as she circles the spoon around the edge of the pot, ‘after your father, after what happened to me. My family didn’t want much to do with me. Dirk came up to me in a bar. He seemed so solid. He told me that we had something in common, that we both needed a good shave.’ Mum laughs. ‘He was never good with people. But he was kind to me. For a while, he was very kind to me. Anyway, out of the frying pan, into the fire.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing. It means that when you make one mistake, it’s easier to make another.’ She gives a slight shake of her head, then looks across at him and smiles. ‘No. It doesn’t really mean anything. I’m just talking.’

  Dirk lies on his back on the shore. Waves foam and draw back around his feet. His belly hugs his sides. The colour has drained from his face, but his beard holds a golden film of sand. Hair plasters his chest in black clumps like seaweed. The man bending over Dirk is tanned and wiry and a lot shorter. It’s hard to imagine that he just dragged Dirk out of the water.

  ‘All right, mate?’

  Dirk gets to his feet, sways, and thuds back down.

  The man puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘Sit back, mate. Sit back. Take a deep breath. Just stay between the flags next time, mate. That’s what they’re there for, the flags. Strong rip this arvo.’

  The nearest flag cracks and straightens out again on the breeze. Rip. Michaelis searches the water, but he can’t see anything. He doesn’t even know what he should be looking for.

  ‘We’re going,’ Dirk says. ‘Get Con.’

  Constantine has already worked out how to catch waves across the shoreline. He tucks himself inside the glassy barrels of water that break on the sand. There are a few other boys there alongside him, but none manage it the way he does. Michaelis shouts to him. His brother turns and stares straight through him. Michaelis keeps waving his arms. The water shapes before him into a wave and sucks the sand from beneath his feet. He falls and kicks against nothing. The next wave throws him back. He splutters with a mouthful of foam.

  Constantine emerges alongside, dark hair flat against his forehead. He’s holding a jellyfish. With a grin, he drops it onto Michaelis’s belly and jogs past.

  ~

  ‘He wasn’t listening,’ Dirk says. ‘Verdomme. I told him three times. All I did was give him a tap on the back of the head.’

  ‘You hurt him. Everyone was looking.’

  ‘Maybe you should spend a bit more time thinking about me.’

  ‘Don’t be jealous.’

  ‘I’m not jealous, verdomme. He just has to carry on and you go running to him, pandering to every weakness.’

  ‘Michaelis is a little boy and you’re a man.’

  ‘Verdomme. Godverdomme.’

  ‘What’s wrong now?’

  ‘The car. It’s stuck.’

  The engine groans and revs into the stillness, the car shudders and does not move. The smell of the clutch drifts around them. They get out of the car. The sun bleeds over the dunes. Mosquitoes waft in lazy swarms through the beams of the headlights. A wall of s
altbush grows larger either side. In the stillness, you can hear the roar of the sea. It is not yet night, but getting darker all the time. The soft yellow sand gathered around the tyres is growing dim.

  Dirk slaps his neck and stares at Mum. ‘Get in, turn the engine, and I’ll push. You boys help. Push when I say.’

  Mum gets in the car.

  ‘Now!’

  The ignition scrapes into life and dies again.

  ‘No, verdomme. I said now! Are you even listening? For God’s sake! It’s simple!’

  ‘I can’t drive, Dirk!’

  ‘Idioot! Push! Pay attention!’

  It is pitch black by the time they stop trying.

  ‘We’re just getting deeper into the sand,’ Dirk says. ‘Turn off the lights. Wait in the car. I’ll go and get help.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mum crosses her arms and turns away from him. ‘All of these beaches in Newcastle, and you wanted to drive for forty-five minutes to the only one without a proper road. Well, go then.’

  They sit, the three of them together in the darkness of the car, with the night and the light of a large moon pressing against the windows. Con is tapping on the door of the car.

  Mum keeps her arms against her chest. ‘It’s horrible, that darkness. Anyone could be out there.’

  Con shifts in his seat and leans forward. ‘This reminds me of a story I heard…’

  Mum gives a short, dissatisfied sigh. ‘Don’t start, Con. Just don’t start. I don’t need you making things worse.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  Mum begins sobbing. Her shoulders shake. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  ‘What, Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know why we came here. What was I thinking?’

  Constantine and Michaelis watch her in silence. Her whole body shudders with her sobs. Michaelis thinks and tries to understand. Every now and again, Mum flicks on the lights of the car, as if to remind herself of something. As she does, Michaelis sees all the insect life swirling against the shadowy backdrop of dunes, on and off, on and off, the life revealed for a moment before disappearing again.

  3

  Walk in any direction and you’ll soon come across lawns, roads, footpaths and weatherboard houses. But, as Michaelis stares into the tangle of shadows and trees, he finds this easy to forget. Bat urine fills the air, cockatoos screech overhead in metallic calls. Kangaroos and wallabies slouch and hop on the other side of a wire fence. Further along, a pair of wedge-tailed eagles hunch inside their wings in a concrete cage. There are barbecues everywhere, ancient stone-and-brick squares with fire-darkened hot plates, scattered along the tracks, circles of stones holding small mountains of chopped wood. Between them, people playing cricket, kicking balls, laughing, talking, holding beers.

  ‘You couldn’t imagine it back home,’ Mum says. ‘This heat.’

  She still talks about home as though they might turn the car around and go there. Michaelis thinks suddenly of Carnaval, the crowded marketplace, all cobbled and hard underfoot, stone surfaces and dark windows rising everywhere around them, throwing back and mixing the people’s voices.

  ‘Verdomme.’ Dirk flicks his hand at the mosquitoes that float in over the open window and come to rest on cheeks and necks. ‘Verdomme. Everywhere you go, these damn mosquitoes.’

  There is a fleck of white paint on his ear. Dirk is helping to build a police station in the city. They went to see it yesterday. The station is a grey bunker complex overlooking the ocean. It looks like something under siege. Dirk comes home every day from work covered in paint and glue and dust. He speaks mainly in English but swears in Dutch.

  ‘Daar,’ Mum says. ‘There.’

  They pull over and get out their things. Dirk pours beer over the barbecue plate and scrapes away layers of grime. He is always hitching his belt up under his belly. The sausages and the onions burn and they’ve forgotten the tomato sauce again. Mum takes one bite of a sausage and puts her plate to the side.

  Constantine’s friend James has come along with them. After the barbecue, Michaelis wanders behind them, listening in to their conversation about vampires and werewolves, although he knows that it will give him nightmares. Constantine suddenly looks back over his shoulder. In that instant, he becomes Dad, with his brilliant hazelnut eyes and the gleam of his perfect teeth.

  ‘Go away.’

  Michaelis stares at him.

  ‘Go away. Out of here. Fuck off.’

  Michaelis wanders off alone. He hasn’t heard much about him, but now Dad is there again, at the heart of his thoughts. Maybe he was always there, because Michaelis remembers him easily, his aftershave, the roughness of his cheek, and it feels as if he has been missing him forever. As if that might be the source of the sadness that comes to him in quiet moments when he is lying in bed or playing alone. Dad is no longer part of their lives. Mum will only say Dad’s name on the phone to Moessie and to her sister. Andreas, Andreas, Andreas. This is Dad’s other name. Repeat it under your breath as you walk along in the afternoon sun, and see if the meaning changes.

  He comes across an ant heap. The ants are big and orange and stalk across the dry sand in busy, complicated patterns. He squats down between them and watches. The ants are searching for something. They meet one another, confer, keep searching. One ant is dragging another back to the mouth of the heap. It stops every now and again, then picks up the other ant and keeps moving. The other ant does not move. It is bent inwards and has a leg missing. The two of them make a mysterious pair. Are they friends, he wonders, or will one eat the other?

  ‘Micha-ayleees!’

  The voice is friendly, warm. He lifts his head. Something fills his head with a thwock. There is pain and everything blackens. Rocks and twigs dig into his back. He feels sick. Someone is crying. He wants to throw up. There is water on his eye. The sky is spinning itself out of fog.

  ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ Mum lifts him to his feet and touches his face. Her hand comes away covered in blood. Constantine is on the other side of her, James standing behind him with a fascinated half-smile.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hit him. It was a joke.’

  Constantine is talking to Dirk, but Dirk doesn’t say anything at all. He lifts Con by the hair and kicks him towards the car. People watch briefly before turning back to their barbecues. Constantine never cries or moves at times like this. He goes silent, a focused, empty look on his face, like a boy competing in some sport.

  ~

  ‘A dog will make it feel more like home, don’t you think?’

  Michaelis touches the scar above his eye and thinks of Moessie’s dog back in Holland. He glances up at Mum, the blush and the blue eye shadow she has put on her face, the paleness of her skin underneath. She meets his gaze and he nods and smiles.

  They have already lived in a handful of houses and neighbourhoods, but she fills each place with the vinyl crackle of her records from Holland, the smell of her cooking, and her perfume that lingers from one room to another. Patchouli. If the carpet is old, she buys a covering made from straw tiles and lays it everywhere so that a fresh smell fills the house. On damp nights, you smell the carpet underneath anyway.

  ‘Here,’ the man says, handing a leash over to Dirk. A black labrador with a gleaming coat strains against the other end.

  ‘Barry will be fine,’ the man says, scratching his ribs under his blue singlet. ‘Yeah. He’ll be right when I go.’

  Barry whimpers. Constantine stands nearby, peeling bark from a stick. The man gets into his ute and drives off.

  ‘There,’ Mum says, ‘now we have a dog for the backyard.’

  Constantine gives the stick an impatient wave. ‘Can I take him to the park now?’

  Dirk closes the gate and unclips the leash from Barry’s collar. The dog explodes from his grasp, bolts to the end of the yard, around the clothes hoist, and back past them.

  ‘Barry!’ Con waves the stick.

 
Barry clears the wire gate with a leap, skids on the tar and keeps running. They walk out onto the street. Barry swerves around a car at the intersection, flinches at a horn and disappears on the other side. Dirk scratches his neck.

  Mum is holding her throat. ‘Goodness. Do you think he’ll come back? Should we go after him?’

  ‘Verdomme. Can you even see him anymore?’

  ‘Well, I guess we can wait and see. Maybe he’ll come back. It’s not that I don’t understand how he feels.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

  They stand there for a while longer. Mum and Dirk go inside. Constantine uses his stick to hit a tennis ball against a wall. Again and again, rarely missing, the ball echoing against the bricks until Dirk comes outside and tells him to stop or else.

  The road is soft with heat in the summer, the tar surface treacly and bubbling around the edges. Sometimes he picks loose, soft bits and shapes them with a stick. It reminds him of something Mum said, about growing up in Holland, an explosion in a neighbourhood liquorice factory. And how they ate the chunks of smoky liquorice that fell like soft hail around the nearby streets.

  Michaelis is walking towards the house of his new friend, Nikki, a pale, freckled boy with blond hair and a gentle manner. Nikki’s house is hidden from the world by a tall green fence, on the corner of the next street. Michaelis is almost six and Mum lets him go there alone.

  As he walks to Nikki’s place, Michaelis feels some sort of strange tension drain out of him. Most of the time, he is not even aware of the tension until he leaves the house. Lizards scurry away from his feet into the crisp, dry leaves in the gutters.

  Nikki’s backyard has a mulberry tree. There are mulberry trees everywhere—in people’s gardens, in the overgrown places between the houses or at the edges of parks—and they give up their smell at night along with the frangipani trees and jasmine bushes. Springy bows crowded with hand-sized leaves and swollen mulberries sway over Nikki’s fence and drape towards the footpath.

  When Michaelis pauses to pluck a handful, his gaze drifts across the intersection to his new school under a brooding canopy of fig and eucalyptus trees. Hamilton South. Owls and bats sleep in the trees. They are quiet during the day, but you hear them stirring as the sun drops down. Clouds of birds gather from the fiery summer sky, screaming over one another, hidden from the world, as if it is the trees themselves coming to life.