The Last Thread

by Michael Sala

  ‘Why,’ he hears Irene say in a low voice, ‘was this necessary?’

  On the drive back, Dad is subdued. He puts a new cigarette in his mouth, lights it, and lets the smoke pour out of his wide nostrils. ‘Maybe we won’t do that again too soon. But it was good to see them at least once, yes?’

  Michaelis and Constantine stare back at him in the rear-view mirror. Dad, who was here all the while that they were in Australia, fixed in memory, has continued living and has created a new family, as if one can simply be left behind.

  ~

  Dirk and Mum have bought an old house which has four storeys, and which no one else wanted because it is falling apart. The fourth storey is a cavernous attic with two rooms at the front. Dirk tears out the front of the attic and puts in massive windows using a system of pulleys and a crane. Before the windows go in, he hoists in a competition-sized ping-pong table.

  One of the rooms in the attic belongs to Michaelis. It’s the first room that he’s ever had to himself. Walking alone up four flights of stairs terrifies him. Dirk will make him walk up by himself at night, and he isn’t allowed to turn on the light. He isn’t so scared of sleeping alone in that room, though—a streetlight shines into the window. And the street beyond the window is busy. On wet evenings you can stare outside at light glimmering and vanishing and reappearing on the slick road between the cars.

  When Dirk is not working on the house, he is at work, and comes home covered in paint and dust. He is a foreman again, building things that Michaelis never sees. Dirk goes to work while Mum looks after Jonno and does things around the house or sits there with her cup of coffee, listening to records—Neil Young, Neil Sedaka, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas; records that she carried from Holland to Australia and back again. The crackle of their voices fills the house as she stares out into the garden without seeing it.

  One day Mum answers the front door and there is an old woman there. She looks apologetic.

  ‘I don’t mean to interfere,’ the woman says, ‘but there’s a baby on your roof.’

  And there Jonno is, in the broad guttering, laughing and peering down at the street, four storeys below. He must have climbed from Michaelis’s chair to his desk and out the window. While Michaelis watches, Mum leans on the desk and coaxes Jonno inside with a piece of Lego.

  ‘I feel so terrible,’ Mum says. ‘I get so easily distracted.’

  She goes into the living room and stares off into space, Jonno in her arms, patting his back.

  There isn’t room for a dog, but they own a rabbit for a short time, a small grey thing with floppy ears. They keep it in a cage at the back of the house, and let it out in the afternoons, so that it can hop silently around the living room. Michaelis comes home from school one day and the cage is empty.

  ‘The rabbit is gone,’ Mum tells him simply.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Off to a better place.’

  Michaelis doesn’t believe her. ‘Where, Mum?’

  ‘In the backyard,’ Dirk says flatly, staring down at him over his beard. ‘Jonno tried to give it a shower and broke its neck.’

  Michaelis stares at Dirk for a moment longer, a knot of anger in his stomach. If he’d done that, he’d be lying in bed right now trying to ignore the fire in his arse. Jonno is in a world of his own, one with different rules. Dirk doesn’t touch him. It’s because Jonno is Dirk’s real son.

  Michaelis watches his younger brother sometimes, the same large forehead as Dirk, the same heavy gaze when he focuses on some game.

  ‘He’s only two,’ Mum says. ‘He doesn’t know these things. He was just trying to help. I was on the phone and I didn’t realise what was happening. I’m sorry. Don’t be angry. We’ll get something else.’

  Maybe it is Michaelis. Maybe it is the anger he feels, the sense of rage that rises in him sometimes when he looks at Dirk, but he can’t forgive Jonno as easily as everyone else does.

  Michaelis has joined the Cub Scouts, and made a friend who is a year older. Max has blond hair that hangs to his shoulders, almost translucent skin and an air of separation from the crowd.

  They go on a camping trip with the troop. Michaelis is used to trips into the bush taking hours and ending in wilderness, but they hardly drive at all and end up staying at a farm for a night. When all the kids are called out for activities, Max and Michaelis hide inside.

  ‘We should do something really fun,’ Max says.

  They climb into the roof of the farm building and jump from beam to beam, tempting their luck, until Michaelis misses a beam and breaks through the roof. Chunks of plaster rain down into a kitchen below, and startled faces look up at him, dangling there by his hands, until he pulls himself back up into the roof.

  Max swears at him. ‘We’re done for now,’ he says. ‘We’re done for.’

  They are taken to see the Scoutmaster.

  ‘We don’t need people with your attitude here,’ he tells them. ‘Your fathers are coming to pick you up.’

  Michaelis becomes aware of every part of his body when he hears this. Something is twisting in his stomach, making everything feel weak. His spine is tingling; his buttocks have tightened. All there is to do now is wait for Dirk to turn up. Like when you say the word lemon and your mouth waters.

  When the top level of the house is finished, they go to a special restaurant to celebrate. The Cauliflower. They know the restaurant is special because you have to wait so long for food to come out.

  ‘Get your elbows off the table!’

  Constantine has moved before the words are out of Dirk’s mouth. He never needs to be told anything twice. Michaelis stares past him to the window with the slender trees marching off beyond the panes into the darkness.

  ‘Michaelis. Michaelis!’ Dirk is wearing his workboots. Michaelis knows it the moment he gets a kick in his shin. His knees jerk and his legs thump at the table. Heat gathers in his ears and around his neck.

  A couple at the next table look across. Dirk doesn’t take his eyes from Michaelis. ‘Are you a little girl? No? Then why are you crossing your legs under the table?’

  ‘Oh, Dirk, what does it matter?’ Mum says.

  ‘Because I tell him, that’s why.’

  ‘How do you even know what he does with his legs under the table? This is supposed to be a celebration.’

  ‘You let him get away with too much. It won’t do him any favours.’

  Michaelis separates his legs. He leans on the table, catches Dirk’s eye and pulls his elbows back before Dirk can react, Con grinning in the background.

  That night, before he goes to sleep, Mum sits beside him on the bed and strokes his hair for a while. ‘Your grandfather used to cross his legs. He loved to read too, just like you, and he was very clever. You would have liked him.’

  Michaelis doesn’t say anything. He loves it when Mum strokes his hair, and yet he feels sad too, because he knows that it never lasts. And before too long, he is alone again in the darkness.

  ~

  ‘Blood,’ Constantine says, pointing at the tank. ‘A round went right in there and blew them up.’

  The war museum is not what Michaelis expected. The path has led them through the forest from one broken war machine to another. They are drawing near the end. The stain around the hole in the tank looks like rust. A spring coils through the darkness inside.

  ‘Come on then,’ Mum says.

  Michaelis hesitates. ‘Did people really die here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Dirk laughs. ‘They dragged this here after the war. For some stupid reason, people want to look at it.’

  Mum folds her arms across her chest. ‘Other people are always stupid, according to you.’

  ‘I know what I know. It’s obvious.’

  ‘Well, I want to see them.’

  Sometimes these exchanges lead to an argument, but not today. They walk to a building at the end of the path and step through the door into a strange heaviness. A wall curves the whole way round the inside
. Black and white photographs hang along the wall. Jews. Joden. He has heard that name often. Mum talks about them. She’s always watching documentaries about World War II. Michaelis doesn’t know much about what happened to the Jews, only that they were taken away in trucks, that they disappeared during the war from the neighbourhood in which Mum later grew up. There is a familiarity to the word, though, and he has wondered in the past whether they are Jews themselves. No, Mum assures him, they are Roman Catholics.

  In some photos, the Joden are naked and dead and piled on top of one another, like misshapen candles. In other pictures, they are alive, but they don’t look much better. Everything on them has shrunk, except their teeth and their eyes. The people Michaelis pities most are standing in queues. They are waiting to be killed. Seeing doomed people is worse than seeing dead people. Michaelis wants to reach into the huge pictures and yank those people out of their fate. There are ovens and chimneys spewing out thick, black smoke.

  ‘The Nazis made them into soap.’ Constantine stands at his shoulder. He sounds like he’s telling stories of vampires and werewolves. ‘When the Germans weren’t making them into soap, they burned them in the ovens.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the Germans,’ Mum says. ‘Lots of people got involved. Lots of people from other countries were also Nazis, or agreed with them. They couldn’t have done all of that alone.’

  Michaelis tugs at Mum’s hand. ‘How can people do that?’

  ‘They can do lots of things.’

  As he settles into bed that night, Michaelis wonders how soap can be made out of people. He wonders what his soap is made out of.

  ‘Why didn’t people help them?’

  Mum pauses at the light switch. ‘Some tried. A lot just pretended it wasn’t happening. They got on with things or even took advantage of it.’

  ‘Why did we go there today?’

  ‘It’s important to know what happened.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know…If enough people know, if they really know about that sort of thing, maybe it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Leave the door open?’ he says.

  ‘A little,’ she answers. ‘Just a little.’

  When Mum is gone, Michaelis lies in the darkness thinking about what she said. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how knowing about something can stop it from happening again. It’s never been that way for him. Like when he crosses his legs under the table. He’s eight and he’s been doing it forever. When he crosses his legs, Dirk kicks him in the shin. Once the pain has died down, Michaelis just does the same thing again.

  It is called forgetting.

  The house is constantly changing, level by level, and when you don’t pay attention, it changes more rapidly. When Dirk isn’t at work, he’s tearing up floors and stripping walls and building stuff, painting cornices, smoothing over holes, pressing in tiles. The boys have to help, carrying buckets and wheelbarrows of rubbish outside, collecting nails, scraping away wallpaper from the old walls. At other times, Dirk makes things for Con and Michaelis: wooden swords, and boxes to put stuff in. He hands them over without a word.

  The house becomes magnificent, with wooden tiles laid perfectly along the bottom level, the windows opening smoothly and lightly, lacquered wood everywhere—bookshelves, tables, cupboards—all springing from his hands and filling the house with marvellous life. There is no problem that he can’t solve with his hands.

  And Constantine has become the best football player on his team. In Australia he was brilliant at cricket; here he is brilliant at football and surrounded by a new group of friends who admire him. His room is plastered with soccer posters. His hero, Johan Cruyff, is there on the wall, playing for Ajax, playing for Feyenoord, playing for Holland. Con can turn on the ball exactly like Cruyff does. He practises it on the street outside their house, then kicks flat and hard at the wall. Michaelis has never seen Con in a game. Mum doesn’t go to things like that. Con rides there on his bike. Dad goes to the games, though, every week. Michaelis knows this because Con talks about it to Mum.

  ‘I don’t want him there,’ Con says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just want to play and not have to think about him.’

  Something strained creeps into Mum’s voice. ‘Has he done anything? Did he say something to you?’

  ‘No.’ Con falls silent for a moment. ‘He talks to my friends.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t know. He acts like they’re his friends.’

  ‘I’ll tell him to stop going, then.’

  Michaelis gets a kitten for his ninth birthday. He calls it Ed. He’s black with a streak of white on his neck, like a bow tie, and he sleeps in Michaelis’s bed at night: a small, soft engine of noise and warmth.

  Con often goes off alone, fishing, just like he used to do on Bribie Island, although now he goes into damp, cool wetlands where he’s after carp, huge fish that take a long time to surrender. He takes a fibreglass rod, leans it back over his shoulder and rides off for the day. He never comes back with fish. You have to rip the hook out from the thick, fleshy lips of the carp and throw them back into the muddy water. The fish don’t feel anything. They keep swimming through the darkness until they’re caught again. He goes only for the fight.

  Winter returns. Mornings, Michaelis jumps on his bike—a different, larger one, second-hand, because the last one was stolen. All the bikes in the neighbourhood look the same and they are always getting stolen—by kids, by drunk people coming home at night, by the gypsies who live in the trailer park just out of town. When it is still dark and foggy, you pedal along the icy street towards school, lungs aching, the pant of breath in your ear, the whir of the light generator on the tyre. Sometimes you slide on the ice and fall and your hands hurt in the cold.

  At school, things aren’t so bad. They don’t wear uniforms here. Michaelis calls teachers by their first names. They get disappointed rather than angry, even the time he disappeared into the nearby wetlands at lunchtime and came back covered from head to toe in mud. That was the summer just passed, and right now St Nicholas Day is drawing near again, so it begins to get gloomy towards the end of the school day and they all sing St Nicholas songs in the classroom until Black Peter knocks on the door and throws sweets into the room, everyone giggling and panting and grasping on the floor. Dutch sweets. One of the girls wrote him a Christmas card and he has shoved it in his pocket. He scrambles on his knees on the floor, and worries for a moment that if he looks up, he will see the cramped insides of the unit on Bribie Island.

  Con and Michaelis go out some afternoons and play in a nearby park, which is vast and arranged around a small lake. In summer the grass is dark green, but now everything is buried in white and the trees are shadows, and when he talks, his voice feels like the only living thing in the world.

  ‘I wish I could run like you,’ Michaelis says as they drag their sled up a hill.

  Con is in a good mood. He smiles across at Michaelis. ‘You will, one day.’

  They’re riding the sled down the hill and braking at the bottom, near the ice-covered lake. The trick is to pull only on one brake so that the sled digs into the snow as it turns.

  Michaelis is half in the sled. ‘I wish Dad liked me as much as you.’

  Something twists in Con’s expression. ‘That’s because you’re an idiot.’

  Before Michaelis can answer, Con shoves him, and Michaelis shoots down the hill. At the bottom he doesn’t brake properly and goes skating over the ice on the lake. With a crisp, rippling splinter he crashes through. The water slaps the heat out of his lungs. He starts swimming for the shore.

  Constantine is there, waiting. ‘Get the sled. Go back and get the fucking sled.’

  Michaelis swims back through the ice, breaking it with his strokes until he reaches the sled. When he finally makes it out of the water, he is shaking so violently that he can’t hold the sled. They walk home, Michaelis shivering and wary. They turn into their street. The front doo
r is there ahead of them.

  ‘You never pay attention,’ Con says.

  Michaelis doesn’t know what to say. Michaelis loves Constantine as much as he loves his father, in the same aggrieved, unsatisfied way. The few times that they see Dad out in the park for a few hours, to kick a soccer ball, or when they go for something to eat, things always follow the same pattern. No mention is made of their brother and sister, or of Mum, and for a brief moment it seems like they are just like other boys out for the day with their father. Except that Constantine is surly and withdrawn and Michaelis is shrill and eager. He knows that he is awkward in his eagerness, but he can’t stop. Dad hardly notices him, anyway.

  ‘They would love you in Greece,’ Dad says sometimes, fixing Constantine with a brilliant stare, as if it is just the two of them alone together. ‘You’re a beautiful boy, Constantinos. Maybe one day I’ll show you Greece.’

  ~

  From the beginning, Michaelis has called him only by his first name. He is married to Mum, but Dirk will never be his father.

  ‘Go get some milk.’ Dirk thrusts money into Michaelis’s outstretched hand.

  Michaelis walks to the store. Night comes quickly in the winter, like a door closing. The street lamps pump misty light into the evening. On his way back past the park with the milk in his hand, he stops and stares across the lake. The ice is a hard, slippery shell that sits over the blackness and thickens with each night. There are leaves out there, brown or flame-coloured, caught in the surface, and there are orange fish—gold carp—lying on their sides, staring up at the grey sky with cloudy, alarmed eyes. You wouldn’t fall through anymore.

  He suddenly has a bright, jagged memory of digging a hole at the beach, with the swirling sound of the surf and children screaming and the air smelling of suncream and vinegar and salt. He unscrews the milk, takes a mouthful. The milk tastes good out here, in the cold. He’s like an explorer, drinking his ration. He screws the lid back on very tightly, lets the light of the street lamps fall into the bottle, across the surface of the milk. It doesn’t look like he’s taken any, but a familiar weight seeps into him as he walks home.