‘I saw Mason getting a passport photo taken at the post office,’ I say.
Dad raises his eyebrows. ‘Yeah? Better not let that get back to Ivy or we might be replacing another window.’
‘He lied to me about it, like he didn’t want me to know.’
‘Can’t really blame him for wanting to keep things hush-hush till he’s ready to leave.’
‘You think that’s what happened with Henry?’
Dad’s head tilts as he considers this. ‘Maybe. Less chance of anyone stopping him.’
‘You mean Ivy stopping him,’ I say.
‘Or his friends, for whatever reason.’
A small groan of annoyance escapes me. ‘I wish I knew what Henry was thinking! I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark.’
‘You’re not supposed to have all the answers, chook,’ Dad says. ‘I’m forty-eight and still figuring it all out as I go along.’
I place my chin in my hands. ‘I’m going to keep searching for Henry. Problem is, I don’t know what to try next.’
As I say the words I realise that’s not entirely true. I do know somewhere I might be able to find more information, but it’s a place I’ve never been allowed to go.
‘The important thing is not to give up hope,’ Dad says.
I stand up and cross the room to give my father a spontaneous hug. ‘Good talk, Dad,’ I say, planting a kiss on his stubbled cheek.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘you can blame Luisa. She doesn’t let me get away with grunts and one-word answers.’
‘Good,’ I say, and mean it. It seems Luisa might be helping my dad in more ways than simply answering phones.
I leave him to finish painting while I try to figure out how on earth I’m going to get inside the Weavers’ home.
Six weeks before the storm
Henry stared across the table at Mason, his back to the kitchen where their mother stood by the window with her arms folded. He looked five years old again, the way he silently appealed to Mason with his huge blue eyes. It’s too late, Mason wanted to tell him. We can’t leave. You have to sit here and white-knuckle your way through this. He had no idea what they’d done this time. Had Ivy realised one of the missing whisky bottles was not her doing? Maybe she’d heard about that fight with Darren Foster at school. It could be something as simple as Mason not having done the washing up.
‘Mason?’ Henry asked tentatively. He had trouble picking up on Ivy’s cues. This wasn’t a time for talking; it was a time for keeping your head down. Things would be so much simpler, Mason thought, if I didn’t have you to worry about.
He’d been an only child for four and a half years by the time Henry came along. His mother was working part-time back then at a hardware store in Mittagong, driving a beat-up red sedan everywhere that she ended up selling for parts years later when she lost her licence. Mason had done the calculations and worked out Ivy must have become pregnant with Henry almost as soon as she met Wayne Weaver. Mason was introduced to his soon-to-be stepfather only once before the man moved into their house, and by then Ivy’s belly was the size of a basketball.
Ivy and Wayne got married in a registry office one morning when Mason was at preschool, and while Wayne never formally adopted Mason, they started calling him Mason Weaver straightaway. His surname was still Ivy’s maiden name as stated on his birth certificate, and it was only when he was about to start primary school that his mother filled out the paperwork to make things official. She’d never been married to Mason’s biological father, who had been around on and off for the first couple of years of Mason’s life. For most of that time, Ivy claims, his father was mixed up with drugs and the wrong kind of people.
He wasn’t a good guy. Mason knew that. He was too young to remember most of it, but he’d heard it from plenty of people over the years. His father gave Ivy black eyes and bruised cheekbones, split lips that she tried to hide with red lipstick. Uncle Bernie said Ivy once had a broken wrist and she claimed it happened when she’d slipped in the shower. She never went into details with Mason, and got angry whenever he asked about it. He heard from their old neighbour, Mr Milburn, that his father once pushed Ivy off the verandah while she was cradling Mason in her arms. Most people in town thought that would be the last straw, but it took another two years before he was finally gone for good.
Mason wondered how much of his father’s blood coursed through his veins, whether some sick combination of DNA meant he had a predisposition to cause destruction wherever he went as well.
It felt like it.
It felt like searing hot coals pressed into his chest cavity, piled in and sewn up with no way to escape. Sometimes the heat grew so unbearable Mason wanted to tear at the skin on his chest, rip it open and let everything come tumbling out. It made his head hurt and his heart burn. It felt like he had a secret identity trapped inside that he didn’t want anyone to know about.
He might be a very bad person.
He might be dangerous.
What else would you expect, meshing his father’s genes with Ivy’s?
Henry had only half of that genetic shitstorm to contend with. And it made him soft. Where Mason had to be cynical and vigilant, Henry possessed the sort of naivety that made him needy and vulnerable. He wasn’t equipped for a mother like Ivy. His outer shell was too fragile for her teasing and insults, for her lack of warmth and attention. Mason had adapted over the years, but Henry hadn’t yet figured it out.
She watched them now, dunking a teabag up and down in a chipped ceramic mug. Curls of smoke seeped from her freshly-lit cigarette. The quiet was worse than the yelling because there was no way of knowing which way things would go. There’d always been a miserable predictability to her drunken ramblings, the way she’d feel sorry for herself and shake her fist at the world, drink even more and gamble their money, then throw up and pass out somewhere, wake up hungover and start the process all over again.
When she wasn’t drunk, there was a cruelty to her words and actions. Every look she gave them dripped with resentment. Mason felt himself bowing under the weight of it now. Sit up, he chided himself. Grow a spine. Show her that she hasn’t crushed your spirit.
He pretended to believe that or else he might as well give up. Ivy flicked the teabag into the sink and reached up to open a cupboard. Every door in the house had tiny red slashes near the doorhandles where her nail polish had scraped the wood, like the desperate scratchings of a hostage trying to claw her way out. She found the sugar bowl and took her time spooning three heaped sugars into her tea. The shrill scrape of the teaspoon against the bottom of the cup set Mason’s teeth on edge. A generous dollop of milk, then more stirring, round and round.
Screeech. Screeech. Screeech.
Mason chanced a quick glimpse at Henry’s face. His brother opened his mouth as if to speak, but Mason silenced him with a frown.
They’d never been close the way most siblings are. When they were younger, their age gap put them at different stages, and Mason was jealous of the extra time and attention Wayne devoted to Henry. After Wayne left, Mason became a babysitter and a buffer to protect Henry from Ivy at her worst. It was a job he’d never asked for and didn’t want. He found it hard to see Henry as anything other than more work and worry, of which he already had plenty. It was almost as if the idea of family walked out when Wayne did, and the three of them became resentful housemates, having to tolerate each other because they didn’t have any other option.
Mason tried to soften the blow of Henry’s dad disappearing with a few white lies here and there that gave the impression Wayne still cared. Henry had to find something close to family in other places, like Chloe’s big-sisterly doting, and home-cooked meals with Sally and Liv. He’d bonded with Raf over bad jokes and talked books with Tom, and Bernie Lawson treated him like another grandson. Henry had that sort of easygoing personality that people warmed to without him having to do very much at all. Mason knew how people in The Shallows viewed Ivy’s two children. Henry was the gen
tle, good-natured Weaver boy. And Mason was … the other one.
When Mason was five years old, just after the bath incident, Ivy told him he was a cold little boy. She said he was empty. He had no reason to disbelieve her because no one had ever told him otherwise. And who knew him better than his own mother? Mason had never really bonded with Wayne, and in the few years his stepfather had lived with them it had been obvious he’d favoured Henry because he was his own flesh and blood. After Wayne walked out, Ivy concluded a two-day bender by screeching at Mason that it was all his fault. ‘Something’s not right with you,’ she’d shrieked. ‘That’s why they leave! There’s something empty inside you and they know it. You drive them away!’
She didn’t remember a thing the next morning, but Mason had never forgotten her words. Something had been permanently woven into his fabric that day.
Ivy shuffled across the kitchen now in her Ugg boots, her face stony. She didn’t sit, instead placing the mug of tea down on the table between them. ‘I think one of you has something to tell me.’
Henry gave Mason a panicked glance. Why was he so worried? What could he think he was possibly in trouble for?
‘Don’t make me force it out of you,’ Ivy said, her voice flat. It was impossible to read her. Most of her moods at home were varying shades of bitterness, even though Mason had seen the way she was with her mates at the pub, all smiles and loud chatter. He ran into her once on the street outside the Criterion, and she made a big fuss of him in front of her fellow smokers. She slung a clumsy arm across his shoulders and used her other hand to take hold of his chin. ‘This is my boy,’ she said, her breath a vapour of spirits, Coke and cigarettes. ‘Good-looking blond like his mum, eh?’ That earned her approving comments and a ‘Cheers to that!’ from a big bloke with a shaved head and sleeve tattoos.
‘She’s good value, your mum,’ he told Mason. ‘You need to do what she says and make her proud.’ Mason felt a thud deep inside, like he’d been punched. None of those people would believe it if he told them how Ivy treated him at home. She was their drinking buddy; they knew her in the context of the pub and the pub only. They didn’t want to know about vomit stains on the carpet and grocery money gambled away on the pokies. They didn’t want to know that she could make a silence so menacing you wanted to tear off your own ears.
‘What’s wrong?’ Henry said to her now. Mason almost groaned.
Ivy picked up her mug, took a sip and placed it back down again. ‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t know,’ Henry said. The colour had drained from his face and Mason was as intrigued as he was nervous. Henry was hiding something. Mason didn’t think he had it in him.
Ivy turned and shuffled the few steps towards her glass cabinet, opening one door slowly, then the other.
Shit, Mason thought. The plate.
He’d forgotten all about it. Of course she’d notice eventually. It was her favourite. That’s what had made it so satisfying when it shattered into a billion pieces against the wall. He’d disposed of the little plate stand by tossing it into a garbage bin at the workshop, then spread out the other plates to fill the gap. His mother never noticed when there was no food in the house to feed her children, but you’d better believe she’d miss one of those precious plates.
‘Where is it?’ she asked, jerking her head at the open cabinet, the plates all propped there like targets. Mason had never wanted a slingshot more in his life.
It was time to confess. He’d say he bumped the cabinet when he was sweeping or something. She’d make him feel like crap for a few weeks and put her hand out for money to purchase a replacement. And then it would be over. Mostly. Apart from all the times she’d bring it up again to remind him how useless he was.
Henry shifted in his chair. ‘You did it,’ he said. Mason shot him a look, expecting his brother to be pointing him out like a criminal in a line-up. To his shock, Henry was staring up at their mother. ‘You broke it one night when you came home … tired.’
Mason’s eyes flicked to Ivy and her expression was impassive. He saw the ripple of fury beneath the surface, though.
‘Don’t you remember?’ Henry said. ‘We helped you clean it up and you said you’d get a new one from eBay.’
This was miraculous. For once in his life Henry was stepping up and helping Mason out. Had he seen Mason carry the plate outside that night? Or had he simply guessed Mason was responsible? Mason couldn’t shake the feeling Henry was relieved about this diversion. He seemed to have his own agenda, but Mason couldn’t figure out what it was.
Ivy levelled her stare at both of them. ‘Where’s the plate stand?’
‘T-the what?’ Henry said. He peeked at Mason. ‘Uh, it’s—’
‘You threw it away as well,’ Mason cut in. ‘Accidentally.’
His mother narrowed her eyes. ‘Really.’ Her expression was one of utter loathing.
Mason could sense something was about to happen. It was the same feeling he got when he felt the rage building within himself. It was like a starving creature prowling around the room, sensing weakness and waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Whatever his mother was going to do, it would be quick and brutal. She backed away from the table and Mason gripped the seat of his chair, bracing himself.
Ivy carefully closed the two glass doors of the cabinet, then turned and walked across the kitchen. She paused at the fridge, reaching her hand between the fridge and the wall where they kept the broom. Henry stiffened, his eyes almost comically wide.
‘You two are bad liars,’ she said, gripping the broom in her right hand.
Wanna bet? Mason thought. He was so good at lying it was scary.
Henry slid off his chair, taking tentative steps backwards into the corner. ‘It w-wasn’t us.’
Their mother turned her back on them and walked out into the hallway.
‘What …?’ Henry said, glancing at Mason. They remained frozen, waiting for what might come next.
A loud crash in another room. Mason jumped to his feet, trying to identify the source. Another bang, followed by the dull thud of objects falling onto the floor. A door flung open against the wall. The scrape of coathangers. Mason exchanged a baffled look with Henry before taking off across the kitchen. She was in his room. And it sounded like she was tearing it apart.
He stopped short of the bedroom doorway, Henry close at his heels, and heard his brother’s shocked gasp at the scene in front of them. Ivy had upended the mattress and yanked half of Mason’s clothes from the wardrobe. The contents of his schoolbag were all over the floor, and the middle drawer had been removed from his chest of drawers and tossed aside. Mason was relieved to see his lower desk drawer was still intact. A blue envelope of cash was taped to the underside.
‘It’s okay to break my stuff, is it?’ their mother growled, gripping the broom in both hands. She swung it towards the bedside table, collecting the antique table lamp that had belonged to Mason’s dead grandparents. It flew sideways at the wall, leaving a dent in the wood panelling. The heavy ceramic base somehow held together as it thumped onto the carpet, bending the lampshade at a funny angle. ‘Then it’s okay for me to break yours.’
‘No,’ Henry said, guessing what was to come.
Ivy marched across the room towards them, giving them no choice but to back up into the hall.
‘No, no, no,’ Henry cried. He hurried to the doorway of his bedroom and flung his limbs out like a starfish, attempting to block her entry. He kept that room pristine, the few books he had all lined up in rows, little trinkets he’d found in their grandparents’ belongings, polaroid photos from Uncle Bernie’s camera placed in second-hand frames along his windowsill. It was the nicest room in the house. Mason understood why Henry spent so much time hiding out in there.
Ivy lurched forwards, as though to rush him.
‘Stop it!’ Henry screamed. It was so raw his throat would probably hurt for days.
Still clutching the broom in one hand, Ivy raised the other and placed
it against Henry’s chest. She shoved his light frame backwards with such force both of Henry’s feet left the floor. Mason swore out loud. He felt paralysed. An image of the school toilets flew into his mind, how he’d shoved Darren Foster in exactly the same way. I’m just like her, he thought. He’d never laid a hand on his mother, though. It crossed a line he never wanted to find himself on the other side of.
Henry landed heavily on the carpet, an awkward jumble of arms and legs. He quickly raised a hand to protect his face, but their mother didn’t step inside the room. Mason stared past Ivy at his brother cowering on the floor, trying to assess him for injuries. There was wildness in his eyes, like a timid animal about to flee. She’s going to drive him away, he thought. One of these days Henry would run out of here and just keep going.
Ivy turned and trudged down the hallway, catching Mason’s shoulder with her own on the way past. She entered her bedroom and slammed the door.
Mason peered around the doorway at Henry. ‘You okay?’
His brother regarded him with such scorn that Mason’s chest tightened.
‘Go away,’ Henry muttered, kicking the door shut in Mason’s face. It rattled on its hinges. Henry had covered for Mason about the Wedgwood plate and Mason hadn’t stepped in to defend him.
But what was he supposed to do? Hit their mother? He didn’t want to be that person.
And he wasn’t a legal adult yet. Ivy still held the power, and she’d threatened things before.
‘I could’ve called someone, you know,’ Ivy had told him so many times since that day baby Henry slipped under water in the bathtub. ‘I could’ve had you taken away to live in a home for kids with behavioural problems. You did a bad thing, Mason, but I let you stay. You remember that. You owe me.’
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