He was golden. No, moonlight white. White hair, pale skin, grey eyes. He was laughing too, and for a moment I thought that perhaps I could be the girl, the one in the film, the one who has the nice things, the pretty things. So, I smiled at him and lifted my knees for him to pass, and I wanted to be able to play the flirting game, but I had no idea how, none.
He had a pillowcase full, I guessed, of washing. The pillowcase had a picture of Santa painted on it with Hobbytex, as though his mother or aunt had painted it carefully from a stencil, proud of her craft skills.
He took his shirt off and put it in the machine with the contents of the Hobbytex pillowcase, and I watched him, the folds in his pale skin as he bent. When he straightened up, he smiled again then nodded at the pile of books, said, ‘Are these yours? Mind if I take the Castaneda? I love him. He’s a genius.’
‘Is he? They seem like trash to me.’ It was too late to snap the words back, too late to stop that thing I always did, needing to be better, smarter, louder than the boys. But instead of walking away he laughed, said, ‘You’d probably know more than me. I don’t read a lot.’ He stood at the narrow table, still with his shirt off, and shuffled through the books, holding them up in front of me, asking, ‘Good? No?’ and putting each down when I shook my head. It was a folding card table, red leatherette pinned to the surface, metal hinges holding the legs straight and not one of the books on the table was one I wanted.
When he’d gone through all the books, looking at the covers, holding them up, putting them down, he walked over to the noticeboard on the other wall, stood scanning the torn-off pieces of paper and handwritten cards, while I tried to make sense of the words on the page in front of me. After a while he said, ‘Jesus, she’s beautiful,’ and I felt a stab of envy, familiar and sharp.
He was gazing at a photo not of a woman, but of a boat. And it—she—was beautiful. ‘She’ because you owned a boat, I suppose, or rode her, or led her. The joke, of course, was that she owned you, and you spent all your money on her. ‘You’ being a ‘he’.
The boat was beautiful. Gloria. Cloud-white, gleaming, broad glass windows with light bouncing off it. Below the photo was a printed notice:
Cook wanted. International sailing. Passport necessary. Interviews daily between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
As a kid I’d spent glorious summers sailing a small dinghy at the Speers Point Sailing Club. I sailed the club dinghy, heavy-bottomed and with an ancient sail, so worn it could never be fully taut. Saturdays were full of the jangle of rattling stays and the smell of salt, the air slapping at me and at the sail; I could be led by the wind in that little boat and no one could get at me. When high school started, I got too heavy for the club boat and that was the end of sailing, but the song of boat stays and anchor chains has always made me think of hope, of possibility and promise.
I read the notice again. International sailing. Passport necessary. I looked up at the plastic clock above the dryers: 12.20 p.m. This was my ticket. At last, my ship had come in.
At my mother’s wedding reception, we sat at a long table and were served prawn cocktails and steak Diane. My mother lifted Neil’s hand to her lips and raised her glass to the table. She said, ‘When I met you, Nellie, I knew that my ship had come in.’
Neil, my mother’s husband, was a tiny man, puff-chested, strangely upright, as though held by a piece of string from the ceiling, or from the sky. He’d met my mother at a dance. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he could move.’ His hand on her back, guiding her around the dance floor while other couples applauded. You look wonderful together, someone said, and my mother caught a glimpse of the two of them reflected in the long dark windows. She was tiny, a match for him. Later, she said this too: ‘He made me laugh. Oh God,’ she said, ‘how I laughed with him.’ She called him Nellie, as though he were a girl, or a doll, and it left a slight, unpleasant tang in my mouth.
He proposed to her after six weeks. They married two months after that, in a sailing club on the far side of the lake. We’re all smiling, in the photo. My brother in his new air force uniform, holding my mother’s arm. If it was strange that he gave her away, no one thought to comment. I’m fifteen, my hair bundled up into a tight French braid, twisted under my head, a silky brown dress that I’d bought from the store I worked in after school and on weekends. Even with the staff discount it took me five weeks to pay it off, almost the entire length of my mother’s engagement.
The day of the wedding was the second time I’d met him.
When they married, my mother and her new husband, she carried a Gideon’s New Testament, topped with florist’s ribbon and a bunch of lavender. It makes me ache, now, looking at the photo of her holding the Bible that she had no belief in, the too-shiny ribbon, the rose at her throat. Poverty, in our family, was not only the absence of money or land but a poverty of the imagination. My imagination, on the other hand, was already peopled with phantoms, ghosts, with hopeful heroines, with schoolgirls and rock stars. Every night I tried to map my way out of the world I was born into.
But at fifteen my future seemed to be mapped for me with my mother’s marriage to this broken man. The second bedroom in his shack-like house was full to the ceiling with boxes, cases, old papers, and there was no room for me. Cardboard boxes with the names of places and assorted dates scrawled on the outside tottered in the place that a bed should be. Later, after Neil’s death, I would discover that these boxes were full of stunning black-and-white photographs taken in Korea during the Korean War. Posted there as a young photographer, barely twenty years old, Neil took careful, loving photos of handsome soldiers gazing into the sun, their eyes narrowed. There were images, too, of Korean women and men, captured laughing together with the grasslands behind them. When I finally see these images, I am unable to reconcile the loving gaze behind the camera with the man I knew, the man my mother married.
As she left the sailing club where the wedding reception was held, my mother kissed me on the cheek and whispered, ‘Just give us a few weeks and we’ll fix it up. It’ll be lovely.’
I moved into the unlined shed at the back of the house, on top of a crooked concrete slab. The glass-slatted windows didn’t close, so the shed was full, always, of mosquitoes or cold night air. Every few days in that short period when I lived in the shed, my mother’s husband would drink too much whisky and have a blowout. Sometimes this blowout involved staggering through the house, breaking something and falling into bed. Sometimes it involved shouting, fist-brandishing, his face turning a mottled claret. Often, the fist would be raised and sometimes it would land on me.
They tore the house down, the two of them, when I moved to the hostel, where I borrowed old copies of Penthouse from one of the other residents. Skipping over the photos of pink labia and finger-wetted nipples, I tore out the psychedelic pictures and coloured illustrations, gluing them all over my wall, and I got ready for my last year of high school, the year that, apparently, would determine my future.
I came to their house, or at least the site it was to be built on, a year or so after they were married. They’d moved into the exposed shed while they tore down the old shack—its wine-coloured walls painted by Neil’s second wife in a drunken flourish, before the drunken flourish and despair that ended with her suicide. Neil and his brother built the new house, while my mother worked double shifts at the hospital and cooked meals on a camping stove. One night, after sharing a flagon of riesling with other residents of the hostel, I phoned my boyfriend from the hostel payphone and asked him to drive me out to the house, or rather to the shed and the building site.
My boyfriend asked if I was sure that was a good idea. He was kind, steady, loyal; a certain sort of salvation through those years. His wall was plastered with posters of Madonna; he could lip-sync perfectly to Annie Lennox singing ‘Sweet Dreams’, and knew all the words to ‘I Will Survive’. Drunkenly, I explained that he should be supporting me, not totally criticising me and all my choices, and if he didn’t want to drive me I was sure that Pet
er, the unemployed surfer who’d shared the riesling with me, would drive me out there.
My boyfriend picked me up outside the hostel fifteen minutes later and drove the forty minutes to my mother’s new house. When he stopped the engine outside, he said, ‘Are you sure—?’ I held my hand up in a stop sign. I knew a good idea when I had one in front of me.
My mother was in the shed, cooking on the camping stove. Her husband and his brother sat on camping chairs, each of them holding a beer bottle in a stubby holder. Neil’s read: If you have to ask, don’t ask.
I stood swaying, looking at the stubby holder.
Neil didn’t get up. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’
My mother, looking at Neil but speaking to me, parroted him. ‘What are you doing here?’
I waved my arms, windmill-like. ‘Come to see the new house.’
‘You’ve been drinking. You’re drunk.’ Neil pointed his stubby holder at me, the reds of his eyes glinting accusingly.
I lifted my hand in a ‘cheers’ gesture and slurred, ‘Takes one to know one.’
Long before he twirled my mother about the dance floor, Neil had four daughters. Like little steps, a year or two apart. Golden-haired, gleeful, fat-kneed. I imagine them, hands linked together, their piping voices calling up at him. He had the four of them in his car one night as he drove up to an intersection. Four fat-kneed girls giggling in the back seat. Seatbelts? Probably not. It’s dark, no streetlights beaming down, and the whistle of wind outside, rattling the windows of the thinly built houses. It’s hard to see on the corner, and Neil noses out. The middle girl is asleep, her chin resting on her sister’s shoulder. Chocolate milk stains make a pattern on her T-shirt. Earlier, she giggled so much at her father being a monster that the chocolate milk spurted down her shirt and he raised his voice, then, said there was no time to get a clean shirt. Honestly, he’d said. Little grub. Now, as she sleeps in the car, he puts his foot on the accelerator, pulls out from the corner. He doesn’t see the other car.
He pulled out—this is the story told to me by my mother—and an American actor (it’s important that he’s American, that he’s famous, that he has all the things that Neil does not) slammed into the side of his car. Two of the girls were killed.
I don’t know, have never known, whether the drinking and the bile came before his girls were killed or after. I don’t know, will never know, if he was sober on the night they were killed. Two little girls survived. His marriage ended.
Perhaps, like my mother, and like me, he was waiting for something better. Sitting on the dock of the bay, waiting for his ship to come in, not feeling fine.
I was glad, when I walked into the marina, that I’d plaited my hair. It made me feel clean and European at the same time. I belonged there, that was what I wanted to believe.
This was not like the dock. The dark green of the water was the same, yes. The land was the same, yes. But, shimmering off the water, a parade of white yachts and gleaming cruisers. At the end of one pier, a woman in a white tank top hosed down a shining hull. I peered at the side of the yacht. Gloria. Beautiful. The boat, and the woman. I was not like them. I’d learned this early on, and the lesson was repeated throughout my schooldays, then during my brief sojourn at Sydney University, where I’d arrived after miraculously completing secondary school with the grades to get there, before realising that I had no idea how to sustain myself in that environment, how to stay, how to thrive. Always, somehow, outside. Temperament, sometimes, but more often it was the sharp slice of class.
When I’d moved into my first share house in my first semester of university, I believed myself to be the same as the two boys I moved in with. Simon and Kris: med students who’d taken a gap year to travel around Europe. Unbelievably exotic. I studied them carefully, believing that I could be like them, failing to see the ladder of inherited privilege and assumption that they were lifted on daily. They thought it was cute that I worked weeknights in a tacky illegal Greek gambling club and on weekends worked till 3 a.m. at a Lebanese nightclub; cute that the late hours led to skipping lectures, missing events, failing exams. The people I served drinks with until the early hours liked me, and I liked them. Their work ethic, their forced good cheer: these felt familiar. But I was not like them either. When I returned to visit the house my mother lived in with her bantam-chested husband, I sat in the sun in the back garden, parked under the frangipani tree, trying to read while my stepfather disappeared into his shed, cradling bottles of gin, whisky and rum. In that world, I was a freak, a Matilda who’d sprung from—what? Some strange seed of hope and of words; the gift of found and borrowed books. My language and my expectations, both were hybrid.
The woman standing on the front of the yacht flicked her white shirt back. Sun blistered my sandaled feet, my toenails with their chipped red polish like fruit against the brown of the leather. At the side of the pier, a school of whiting swirled, moving up and down the length of it, twisting in and out of the centre. There was a pattern to it, to their swimming, I knew that. But I couldn’t see it. I could only see chaos or, when I looked closer, individual fish. Thin threads of silver, glints of green by the gills. Above me, the white shirt flicked again, and I lifted my hand to shield my eyes from the glare.
‘I’m here about the cook’s job?’ I tried to smile like someone who belonged on this yacht, someone who had grown up leaping from bow to stern wearing designer maillots; a girl with long tanned legs, a girl with straight white teeth, a girl with the right to be there.
I was not that girl. Also, I was not a cook.
The woman leaped down from the boat in one movement and landed on the deck beside me, her knees bending slightly, making barely a thud.
‘Hi.’ She held out a long hand. A gold anchor hung off the delicate chain circling her wrist; with her hand outstretched, the anchor pointed down to my toes.
I touched the tip of it. ‘That’s beautiful.’
‘Sue gave it to me. Sue and Joe own the boat.’
‘Oh, you’re not—?’
‘I’m the nanny.’
‘They have kids?’ Expansive, gleaming, the Gloria shone above me. Salty saliva, the taste of lust, filled my mouth as I imagined being the child of such riches. Having a nanny. Living on a yacht. I thought about the boys in Sydney; their easy assumption that their parents would pay a deposit on a house, help them travel. I thought, too, of their seamless, unquestioning belief, both of them, that they were the product of their own work and ambition.
‘Two little ones. Sue’s just gone up to the marina store. She’ll be back in ten.’
‘Okay.’ I tried a smile. ‘I’m Kacey.’
‘Like Casey Kasem and the American Top Forty?’
‘No. Like KC and the Sunshine Band.’
‘Cool.’ She stretched her legs out in the sun, toes pointed so that she made a perfect arrow. Her shirt was crisp and clean, like an advertisement. ‘Sun’s lovely, isn’t it?’
‘Where are the kids?’ I could be a nanny, I thought. Looking after two little kids. How hard could it be? I’m not sure what I intended—to launch the beautiful one into the school of whiting? Encourage her to apply for the cook’s job? I stretched my legs out like hers and leaned back, head up to the sun.
It was always like this, watching the others under my lashes, trying to learn how to do it, how to be it, this thing: a girl. Beside this one, my legs looked stumpy, badly shaved. Tanned only in blotches, the thickness of my skaters’ thighs loomed next to her elegant limbs. I imagined that written up in a magazine interview: her elegant limbs. If I tried hard enough, I could be that, I could be her. I could be anyone but me.
We stretched like that, backs against the hull of the Gloria, legs stretched onto the pier, letting the sun bake us. We chatted dozily: she was from Brisbane, had gone to a girls’ school, been a nanny ever since. I mostly listened, until footsteps padded along the deck. Above the water, they echoed slightly, a thick muffled sound, a slow music.
‘You’re
here about the job? You’re early.’ Sue wore white shorts, hair in a neat bob. Plastic shopping bags rustled in her hands. She stepped onto the gunwale and nodded at me. ‘Come on up.’
It didn’t occur to me to take her bags from her. Lack of initiative. She’d write that down later, for sure. It was my first mistake. My second was staring around the cabin with my mouth open. It’s a cliché, but my mouth was actually open. When I was a teenager my father took me out on a single-mast trailer-sailer with some friends; a little bench lined the inside cabin, where we sat peering though the grimy portholes. Perhaps I’d imagined that. In any case, not this: how could I have imagined this wide cabin, the sofas laden with creamy leather cushions, the bolted coffee table, the chrome shelves stacked with books and games, the carpet springing beneath my feet. I had nothing to build this from in my imagination.
‘So.’ Sue gestured to the sofa and I tried to sit like someone who belonged here, but my legs stuck out in front of me like a child’s, and the leather cushions squeaked like farts as I leaned back on them. I smiled without showing my crooked teeth. I did not say, That was the cushions, it wasn’t me, and nor did I snort with laughter, the way we would have in the house of my childhood. In any of the houses of my childhood.
Fury Page 9