by Laura Elvery
‘Jeremy texted back. He said he doesn’t have a girlfriend.’
‘Of course he’d say that.’
‘What will you do now?’ Beth asked. ‘Would you like to stay?’
‘I guess I’ll stay, yeah.’
‘I’ll take you home tomorrow. I can’t drive tonight. Put your shoes on, hey?’
They walked back to the cabin in the dark, Beth leading the way. Inside, Tennille looked towards the fold-out couch. Beth lifted a stack of bed linen out of the storage box that doubled as a footrest. She inhaled the air: it smelt like vinegar in the dim, warm home of her grandmother.
‘I don’t think you’re a bad person,’ Beth said.
‘I know that,’ Tennille said. She caught a pillowcase up by its corner and it unfolded like a flag. ‘Neither do I.’
North
In the campervan heading north from Leeds to Whitby, Amy sat in the back passenger seat beside her brother, Robert, who was ill from eating the whole packet of Jammie Dodgers. Amy’s broken left arm throbbed inside its cast. The scent of jonquils honeyed the air and she held her breath, straining across with her good arm to wind the window up.
Traffic was slow, one lane in each direction, passing through the Yorkshire moors. Finally, a parking spot at a lookout opened up and their dad shifted gears and pulled in next to a dozen other campervans. Amy climbed out and removed the gum she’d been chewing since London. She wrapped it in its square of paper to leave behind on the seat. She and Robert followed other tourists, other families, and stepped over a low, steel rope fence to gaze at the shallow hills. Dad handed his new camera to a teenage boy and asked him to take a couple of pictures.
Before this trip, Dad had tried to explain the part of the world he’d come from, where their mum’s mother still lived. Amy hadn’t understood what the moors were and, even standing here with the brittle, patchy purple, brown-and-black land falling behind them, she still couldn’t say. She stood to the right of her brother and tucked her cast behind his back.
The boy took one photo, then wound on the camera for another, while their hair spun in the hot wind.
Back in the campervan they tuned into the BBC World Service because it was the closest thing to the ABC, which her dad had been missing.
‘They used to listen to this during the war,’ he said. ‘Families would crowd around it.’
‘Which war?’ She pulled her knees up to her chin.
‘The second one.’
Amy returned the gum to her mouth, relishing its plasticky suck, getting plainer and safer as the hours wore on.
On the radio, there was more talk of the massacre in that place called Srebrenica. Of machine guns and children starving in the midsummer heat. It had been a week since the murders. The whisper of something broken on the continent they were visiting.
‘I’ll turn it down a bit,’ Dad said, reaching forward.
‘How did they die?’ Robert asked Amy. Strangely childlike, almost remorseful. She knew then that her brother had been having bad thoughts about those people.
They arrived in Whitby after lunch, lurching through the town’s tight streets as Amy tried to follow the map laid open on her legs. The houses were white with brown roofs, and had cats in their windows. On the hill above the harbour stood the ruins of Whitby Abbey – they would go there, Dad promised. He was excited, his first time back home since he’d had kids. In the driver’s seat, he ducked his head to show how small he and his friends used to make themselves to squeeze inside the abbey’s stone coffins. Scaring each other with, I vant to suck your blood, back then always smoking, always drinking, sometimes bringing their girlfriends along to look out to the North Sea. He hoped he might see all those friends and girlfriends again. They’d meet up in town, while Amy and Robert were with their nan and cousin Pippa.
At the flat on Scoresby Terrace, their dad shifted suitcases inside as Nan kissed Amy and her brother. ‘You’re here, you’re here,’ she said. ‘Just in time for the baby. Pippa’s due any day now.’
Amy had seen her grandmother twice in Australia. Once after Robert was born, and then, with Pippa, at the funeral. Two years had passed and Nan revealed herself to be shorter than Amy remembered. In her letters, Nan often wrote about getting her hair set. This, then – a head of small, neat, grey curls – must be what she meant.
Robert put his arms around Nan’s waist and sighed. ‘I’m tired.’
‘I want to see Pippa,’ Amy said.
Their dad emerged, twirling the car keys around his finger. ‘I’ll take her over, Pat. I can drop her at Pippa’s on my way.’
Pippa was dressed in her uniform from the pub, watching television. She lay back on the couch, her legs bent over pillows and her belly mountainous in the middle. Amy didn’t know how to hug her, especially with one arm fixed in its cast.
‘Just gone into labour, can you believe it,’ Pippa said. ‘Early days though, ha, so don’t worry.’
Amy had expected screaming and swearing, blood and sweat. On the lounge room floor was a toy car playmat and a baby swing with its packaging stuffed into a box. To her right, in the kitchen, a man tipped a tin of baked beans into a frypan filled with egg. He stirred vigorously.
‘This is Owen,’ Pippa said.
Amy concentrated on Owen’s face so she didn’t have to look at the beans. Beside him stood a tall boy, blonde hair parted down the centre, blue short-sleeved shirt with a collar. He was like all the boys back home, but prettier, paler, cleaner.
‘That’s Owen’s brother. Scott, this is my cousin Amy, the one who’s visiting.’
‘Hi,’ Amy said.
‘Hi.’
Owen opened the fridge and poured Pippa a glass of juice. She seized up, silent, then raised a watch to her face. ‘Still the same,’ she said.
Amy sat down cross-legged next to the TV. Scott lowered himself to the carpet beside her. She looked side-on at Pippa’s black trousers – the baby right there, centimetres away, about to cross a threshold – and flinched at the flash of pain in her broken arm.
‘Did you hear?’ Owen asked. ‘Pippa didn’t even know she was pregnant till four months.’
‘Three-and-a-half.’ Pippa narrowed her eyes at Amy. ‘Makes me sound like I’m not right in the head.’ She sipped her juice. ‘It happens. Hormones and the pill, and you think you’re just getting fat. You’ve got all that to look forward to.’
‘I’m only fourteen,’ Amy said. She thought of Natasha and Rachel back home, who’d both had sex at least twice and who spoke at length about whether they would ever consider having an abortion.
Scott leant in close. ‘What happened to your arm?’
In her mind, Amy batted away the truth. ‘Netball,’ she said. ‘I play keeper. I went up for the ball and landed funny.’ Her skin tingled with the lie, with his scent.
Owen tipped the contents of the saucepan onto a plate and moved to Pippa’s side, rubbing the back of her head.
BBC News came on, and fragments flashed during the introduction. People ran from a train station in Paris. A comet had been discovered. UN trucks sat stationary beside fat green trees. There was Brian Lara, saluting the crowd, helmet in hand. Temperatures were due to rise in the north of England: children and the elderly should stay hydrated.
The three of them watched Pippa at the start of another contraction. She grabbed her breath in one big mouthful. Amy marked this moment in her life, there on Pippa’s floor. The pain that she knew Pippa was experiencing – where did it come from? How did it start? Was the baby in pain? – coupled with the memory of her arm breaking last month after the fight with Dad over food, over how little she’d been eating. Robert had watched from the other side of the dining table, chicken bones scattered, their father sobbing. Amy’s anxiety had been grainy and fibrous, and had never smoothed out.
She thought of her own mother going through the same thing as
Pippa fourteen years ago, perhaps with the TV on and eggs on the stove. And, yes, Amy was hungry for her mother. She felt hollow.
‘What do you need?’ Scott asked Pippa. He spoke very kindly, Amy noticed. Pippa’s eyes were shut tight and she whimpered. Still no screaming.
Then the contraction was over and Pippa resurfaced, shuffling forward on the couch to sit upright. ‘I really felt that one,’ she said. ‘How’s Australia? Nan’s been talking non-stop about you coming here.’
‘She and Dad won’t get along.’
Pippa nodded. ‘But it’s you she wants. And Robert.’
‘Don’t know how you stand the heat where you’re from,’ Owen said. Amy’s eyes locked onto the yellow egg on the end of his silver fork. She held her breath.
‘It’s hot here for two, three months, max,’ he continued, ‘and I want to top myself.’
‘Love?’ Pippa patted Owen’s hand. ‘We’ll call the hospital soon. Amy, what’re you doing this afternoon?’
‘Nothing.’
Owen scraped his cutlery on the plate. ‘Scott, take Amy somewhere.’
‘Like where?’
‘How about the ruins?’ Amy asked.
As they were leaving, she waved her hand towards Pippa’s belly. Whatever she wanted to express felt stuck in her gut, like food. ‘I hope you have a good time,’ she said, as though Pippa was off to a party.
They walked up the hill towards Whitby Abbey, talking about school, sport, the baby. The hot breeze swelled against their bodies on the last push to the peak, where they moved silently through the cemetery. Beyond that, Amy saw arches and the toothy blocks of the old stone abbey cut out against the denim sky.
‘How old is it?’
‘At least a thousand years.’
Below them, the North Sea spread its infinite body against the cliff. Amy felt very light against the wind. As if sensing this, Scott reached for her hand, held it, then slipped his arm around her waist, the first boy to do that. She felt even lighter.
It was almost dinnertime, she realised, seeing the shadows of the ruins arranged on the grass. She wondered what Nan was cooking for tea and whether Nan would fight with her, or be sad, or even notice if she ate at all.
Scott’s arm still circled her waist, unmentioned. He touched the cloth of her sling.
‘There they are.’ Amy pointed at an outline, human-shaped, the remains of coffins, sunken into the grass beneath an arch. The slabs of stone put a briny taste in her mouth.
‘Dad told me about these,’ she said. ‘I’m going to squeeze in.’
Scott looked at her as if she was crazy and then, differently, sideways, as if he was going to kiss her, which he did.
*
A day later, Amy stood beneath the light outside the flat on Scoresby Terrace. She wondered if Nan was still napping. Out all afternoon, Amy had met up with Scott again, this time at the pub where Pippa and Owen worked, a chalkboard announcing the baby’s arrival: Eight pounds eight and doing great! She longed to tell Nan about Scott. Having come this far, knowing Nan so little, she might discover a lot in the telling, in the listening.
Across the narrow road, two police officers lowered themselves into a car. One wrote in a notebook. The other tossed his helmet onto the back seat. Amy watched them drive away into the gentle, stretched-out dusk that felt so different from the ferocious summers back in Townsville.
She knocked. Nan wrenched the door open and peered up, then hugged her. The hallway smelt of cleaning liquid. The sharpness of pine.
In the kitchen, Nan lifted the lid off a tin of sweets. ‘Here,’ she said, shifting the tin towards the fingers of Amy’s right hand.
‘No, thanks.’
‘You’re very thin.’
‘They make me gag.’
Nan put the lid back on without losing eye contact. ‘Your dad’s in some trouble.’
‘What? Dad is?’
‘Put your things on the bed,’ Nan said.
Amy stared.
‘Go on.’
So Amy took off her cardigan because she had nothing else with her and draped it over the edge of the bed. Three huge teddy bears in pink satin dresses were lined up on the pillows. A quick thought pressed into Amy, about how easy it was for adults to behave like children.
Nan called out, not waiting till she returned. ‘He’s going to find it hard to get back on that plane in a week. He’s in some real strife, the silly man.’
‘That’s why the police were here?’
‘You saw them, then? I’ll not have this.’ Nan reached for a tea towel on the oven handle and squeezed it. ‘I thought, yes, I’ll pay for their flights, even his. It’s the only way to see my grandchildren. Eileen next door says I’m a fool. Course I’m a fool. I am. My daughter was. The smoking may have killed her, but what came before that—’ Nan brushed her other hand across the bench and the tin fell to the floor. ‘But I wanted to see my grandchildren.’
Amy asked, ‘What did he do?’
Nan hitched up her dress and crouched down one knee at a time to pick up the sweets. ‘He started drinking, didn’t he, with friends from years ago. Came across people they didn’t like. I shouldn’t say any more since you’re … But the police found him along the beach early this morning. Your dad spent the rest of the day locked up. Come all this way just to … A fool!’
That was one word for it. Years ago, at a theme park, when Robert was too young to say such things, he’d called their dad a big fucking kid as they watched him squeeze into a seat on a mini train that chugged around a track. Other people started waving, laughing, till Robert and Amy, too, started waving, started laughing. Maybe it would be useful one day. Maybe it would be exciting to have adventures with a dad as silly as that.
In the middle of the night, Amy left Robert on the floor of their bedroom, asleep. She padded down to the kitchen, which was small and smelt of bacon fat. She didn’t turn on the light. In a pair of long, button-through pyjamas with frills at the wrists, Amy opened the fridge. Sweets, like those in Nan’s tin, made her gag. So did seeds from strawberries and tomatoes and kiwifruit. Mushrooms hadn’t been safe for years. She’d once vomited the carrot her dad had persuaded her to eat, so carrot was out. Any meat other than tiny bits of tinned fish chewed very slowly were out. Broccoli and green beans tasted like the earth, like dirt. Bright yellow cheese she felt in her stomach for days. Vegemite and honey stuck in her throat. There’d been arguments about uneaten sausages and, of course, the chicken. By the time they boarded the aeroplane for London, Amy was down to food that was white, cream and pale brown. She felt none of the panic her dad felt. On the plane she ate bread and rice, and mashed potato that was stirred through with salad dressing and licked from a spoon.
There was the sound of a key in a lock. One shoe, then another, dropped in the hall.
‘Dad?’
‘Amy, love.’
‘What happened?’
He watched her from behind the fridge door. ‘Nothing bad. Don’t get upset.’
Amy nursed her left arm with her right.
‘What did you tell Nan about your arm?’
‘Nothing. She didn’t ask.’ She let that sit. She let him wonder at all the people she may have told. ‘Are you banned from getting on the plane?’
The light of the fridge shone on his hands as he gestured wildly. He moved towards her. ‘Banned? What did Pat tell you? I have the tickets. No, I’m not banned. We can go home.’
Amy lay listening to the sound of her dad’s voice in competition with Nan’s. Flat on her back next to Robert. Brother and sister. The easy conspiracy of being frightened, apart. She folded back the covers and went downstairs and out into the night.
At sunset, beside the pub where Pippa worked, Amy pushed coins into a payphone and waited.
The phone was snatched up after one ring.
�
��It’s Owen.’
‘This is Amy, Pippa’s cousin.’
His words were slower and softer this time. ‘Where have you been all day? Pippa’s worried.’
‘Is Scott there?’
He wasn’t, so Amy gave Owen the message: ask Scott to meet her at the pub, as soon as possible. They both paused while the baby screamed in the background, and then Amy hung up.
She entered the pub and sat by a window. In a dish in the centre of the table were single-serve packets of mayonnaise and tomato sauce. Her mouth tasted coppery.
A vision came to Amy: a cottage in Whitby with a light on at night, fish on Friday and chips with vinegar. Helping Pippa push the baby in a pram down narrow streets. Boats bobbing on the water.
She would stay. With Scott. Yes.
A lightness in her head made her turn and she saw her dad walk past the window. He stood at a distance, not noticing her. He glanced at the sign above the door then looked away for a long time in the other direction. She liked to think he seemed worried, that he was searching for her.
But she wanted to be alone. To be at a distance from everything, to fill herself up.
She pushed her chair further from the window, and sat with her right hand in her lap. At the bar were two young men, handsome, lean as dogs, spinning coasters between them. Amy watched the men for signs of unhappiness, for signs of interest in her, for signs of peace. Yes, here was the town where her life would happen. And if Scott didn’t come, she’d simply choose another one of these boys, and stay forever.
A Man About a Moon
Riding on the bike down Macquarie Street Hill with her mother. To the beach. To see a man about a puppy, about a puppy and a moon. Hug the towel close, because maybe the day will warm up enough for a swim. Straddle her mother’s bike with her short, thin legs. Don’t let go. Let her mother ride the bike as fast as she wants. Let her stick to high speed, to what she’s used to when she cycles to work at the milk factory, when she cycles home with three pints of milk and one pint of cream, to stir through their porridge, to sprinkle with sugar – ‘We need to fatten you up, Susan.’ Wonder at the name of the man’s puppy and the colour of its fur. Practise the name she might give a puppy if she ever got one, as the bike whizzes past the bait shop and the fruit shop and the big yard with the bright red heavy trucks lined up. Whisper, ‘Here, Buzz,’ to herself while she looks up at the soft creamy underside of her mother’s neck that shudders along to the rhythm of the bike, while her mother stares ahead towards the sea. Wonder what her mother is humming. Hop down from the parked bike along the row of shops with their high white awnings and signs to attract the tourists. Button her coat and tuck the thermos of tea into the fold of her towel. Look for a man in a mustard-coloured jacket, who will stand out on account of the empty beach, on account of everyone being inside and excited on this winter’s day. Try to forget the fever that’s kept her home from school for two days. Tell herself to conjure ‘bright thoughts!’ in the wise and patient way she would train her puppy to return time and again to its mat. Keep her eyes open and take her mother’s sweaty hand after she locks up the bike, and climb a short hill to cross the road to the beach. Wiggle her toes in her shoes across the sand. Locate the man in the mustard jacket, who smiles kindly at them and says, ‘Quickly now. Let’s not miss it’ – the moon! Don’t miss the moon! Notice how much nicer the houses are here, how they’re not as tightly packed together as the houses on Esther Street, how there’s room for great big wedges of midday sunlight to shine between them. Follow her mother, who tucks in close to this man and listens as he points things out on the walk, till they’re out the front of a grand white house and there’s a woman waving at them from beneath an arch above the front stairs and her mother is nudging her in the back, saying, ‘Quick. This is it.’ Meet the man’s wife, who smells like lavender and says ‘Susan’ with a lisp. Shuffle into the man’s lounge room to see a television on four legs and a puppy nosing about in the corner before it scampers over to prod its brown paws on her shoes. Settle into the couch with her mother and the man and his wife and the hot tea and a dash of milk from the refrigerator, shooing the puppy away from the lip of the cup. Test the voice in her sore throat, saying, ‘Look,’ to the puppy while an astronaut bounces on the screen. Hear the television’s beeps and a sound like the ocean rushing. See the ladder and the underwater shadows on the astronaut’s glassy face. Feel her heart swell like the first breath in a balloon. To wonder what all the other children in her class are doing, now that school is closed for the day. To feel certain she’s the only one whose mother has a bike, whose mother has a friend from the factory with a nice wife and a television. To look at nothing but the screen and the puppy in her lap. She knows the moon is in the sunny sky outside, but for the first time it’s up there at the same time as it’s down here.
