Moonlight Sonata

by Eileen Merriman

  ‘Don’t worry, I can take us.’ Tom reappears around the side of the house, holding a set of car keys.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Noah says, anger flashing. Fuming, he takes off, down the road and towards the beach.

  There’s a smattering of people on the beach, three on the sand and two in the water. Noah stomps through the sand until he reaches the giant pohutukawa down the end of the beach, near the cliff. There’s a rope swing dangling from one of its gnarled branches; if you clamber up the cliff you can swing out over the sea.

  He’s not in the mood for that, though. Instead, he climbs up onto the rocks, watching the sea-foam swirl below. Wild thoughts hurtle through his head.

  I hate Dad I hate Melbourne I hate I hate.

  He’s only been there a couple of minutes when he hears a voice say ‘Hey.’

  Lola’s standing behind him, fiddling with the wishbone pendant around her neck. ‘Do you want to come for a drive?’

  ‘Yeah, I dunno if I feel like an ice-cream anymore.’ Noah flicks a stone into the surf. ‘You go.’

  ‘We could bring back something.’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ he says, feeling even worse when he sees her face fall.

  ‘I was just asking.’ Lola starts walking back down the beach, her head down.

  ‘Shit.’ He scrambles off the rocks, scraping more skin from his stupid knees. ‘Hey, Lola.’ She doesn’t turn, barely slows when he catches up to her and taps her on the arm.

  ‘Lola.’

  She shakes him off. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Noah blurts, suddenly, inexplicably on the verge of tears.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I just need to be alone for a bit,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’

  Lola glances up the beach. Following her gaze, Noah sees Tom leaning against the front of their car. Tom waves. Neither of them wave back.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Noah says.

  ‘About what?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Tonight,’ he says.

  ‘Tonight, what?’

  ‘Swimming,’ Noah says. ‘Just you and me.’ He brushes the small of her back. ‘I’ll catch you later. I promise.’

  He watches her make her way to the car, his stomach tipping and dipping the whole time.

  That evening, they play Five Hundred again. Nana, partnered with Uncle Ants, has bet ten no trumps as usual. Austin and Tom are trying to claw their way back after losing an eight hearts bid, and Lola and Noah are holding their own.

  Maybe Noah would play better if he could concentrate. The dipping feeling in his stomach has spread into his chest. All he can think about is Lola’s leg pressed against his, on the rocks, in the tent, and how long he’ll have to wait until he can feel her skin against his again.

  Making a show of rearranging his cards, Noah drops a card on the floor. Bending to pick it up, he notes where Lola’s legs are, one tucked up on the chair, the other directly opposite his. There is also, unexpectedly, a Christmas fairy tied to the table leg beside her, its arms spread in a crucifixion pose. Ignoring the fairy, he plucks the card off the floor and straightens up, letting his foot come to rest against Lola’s ankle.

  Lola’s eyes meet his ever so briefly before she looks back at her cards. Noah’s heart is pounding, pounding. What if she moves away?

  She doesn’t.

  Nor does he.

  It’s late, half-past eleven, by the time Austin and Tom finish their comeback, beating the rest of them to reach their score of five hundred.

  ‘I’m hitting the hay,’ Noah says.

  Lola yawns. ‘Me too. See y’all in the morning.’ Noah is hoping she hasn’t forgotten their swim. He’s hoping no one else has got the same idea.

  ‘Y’all come back now,’ Austin drawls, and Tom cuffs him around the head.

  ‘We should play Bastard tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Like old times.’

  ‘We used to play that in uni,’ Uncle Ants says. ‘With beer.’

  Nana tuts. ‘No need to put ideas into their heads.’

  ‘Too late,’ Noah says, grinning at Tom.

  Tom grins back. ‘Now, there’s an idea for New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘There are to be no drinking games,’ Noah’s father calls out from the lounge. He’s so predictable.

  ‘We were joking,’ Noah says and hurries after Lola, while trying to look like he’s not hurrying. Catching up to her on the stairs, he whispers, ‘I’ll meet you out front in ten, OK?’

  Lola barely looks at him. ‘Ten, OK.’ She walks into the downstairs flat, and Noah crawls into his tent, using the torch on his phone to locate his toothbrush and toothpaste.

  He’s brushing his teeth by the back fence when Tom wanders past.

  ‘Catch you in the morning, Bas-tard.’

  ‘Sir to you,’ Noah mumbles around his toothbrush. Reaching out, Tom ruffles Noah’s hair. Noah swings around and gets him in a half-hearted headlock, before Tom breaks free and sprints to his tent, pumping his fists in the air.

  ‘Tomorrow, Bas-tard.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Noah says.

  ‘Noah, language,’ Nana calls out from the balcony, which suggests she’s not as deaf as she sometimes makes out.

  Back in his tent, Noah tugs his board shorts on, still damp from his afternoon swim, and checks his phone. There’s a text message from Aimee, sent half an hour ago.

  Are you awake?

  If he answers that, his phone is bound to ring. No, he’ll pretend he’s asleep, answer it tomorrow. Guilt sluicing through his chest, Noah grabs a towel and crawls outside. In the distance, he hears the faint thump of bass music, the hiss-boom of the sea. When he reaches the letterbox, Lola’s already there, her towel wrapped around her.

  He slinks up behind her and grabs her by the elbows. ‘Boo.’

  Lola spins around. ‘Don’t do that,’ she whispers.

  ‘Do what?’ He whispers back, and they dart and weave around each other, all the way to the beach. Once on the sand, they drop their towels and run at the black waves. The water’s warmer than he thought it would be, maybe because the air’s cooler.

  ‘What if there are sharks out here?’ Lola asks, bobbing over a swell.

  ‘Only orcas around here,’ he calls back and dives under a wave. Once they’re beyond the breakers, they float on their backs. Noah can see Orion’s Belt, the Southern Cross, the Milky Way. The immensity of the sky is overwhelming, the stars brighter and bigger than he ever thought possible. Forever, he thinks. I’ll remember this moment forever.

  ‘Did you think you were going to die yesterday?’ Noah asks.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Did you?’

  ‘Only when my dad told me off.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Nah, he wouldn’t kill me,’ he says. ‘He just likes to make my life miserable.’ Before she can ask him what he means by that — he doesn’t really want to talk about his dad anymore — he swims away, and she follows. Twisting and turning through the water, over and under the waves, as if they’re orcas too.

  Later, they flop onto the shore, laughing and breath less. Draping his towel around his shoulders, Noah gazes up at the sky. He feels cleansed inside and out, his nerves humming, his mind flying free.

  ‘We should do this every night,’ he says.

  ‘Every night.’ Lola settles back. ‘Uncle Joe was talking about going for a walk to a waterfall tomorrow.’

  ‘Cool.’ Tomorrow reminds him of the text message he got just before they left, the message he doesn’t want to think about right now. He takes a deep breath. ‘Do you want to hear something crazy?’

  Lola sits upright, plucks a strand of seaweed off her thigh. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish Uncle Joe was my dad. Is that weird?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice. ‘He’s so much fun. Sometimes I used to think that too.’ Used to, like it’s something she’s grown out of, rather than something she’s growing into. ‘And he’s so easy to talk to, rig
ht?’

  ‘Yeah, he hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be seventeen.’ Noah glances at her. ‘Or fifteen.’

  ‘Nearly sixteen,’ she says, and he dares to pick up her hand. He traces the bumps in her skin, all the places where she’s drawn blood so she can work out how much insulin she needs, so she can work out how not to die.

  ‘Nearly sixteen,’ Noah echoes. He can feel how still she’s become, as if she’s holding her breath. ‘Hey, Lola?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Have you ever kissed a boy?’

  She pulls free of his grasp. ‘I’m not telling you.’

  ‘So you haven’t, then,’ he says, trying to turn it into a joke, glad it’s too dark for her to see his glowing skin.

  Lola shakes her head, looks away.

  ‘Do you want to?’ Noah’s heart is all over the place, wild and out of control. Jesus, what is he doing? But they’re only cousins. There’s no harm in kissing your cousin, is there?

  He feels her breath, warm on his ear.

  ‘I want to,’ she says. So he curls his fingers beneath her chin, tilts her face towards him. And this, this is what it’s like to kiss the girl you’ve known since you were two years old, who knows you better than any other girl ever will.

  This.

  In that instant he knows there is nothing, no one else, who will ever make him feel like this again.

  Chapter 9:

  MOLLY

  Molly wakes in a sweat, the sheet tangled around the lower half of her body. She is alone. Richard has always been an early riser, even more so recently.

  But I enjoy it, he’d said, when Molly had asked if his brain ever took a holiday. Why do I need a holiday from something I love?

  Molly stretches. Love, she thinks, staring at a patch of mildew on the ceiling, just visible in the early morning light. She’d been just as excited as Richard when he’d made professor a couple of years ago. No wonder the students admire him. Every idea is a potential project, a potential publication.

  She should go back to sleep, but her brain has other ideas. After putting on a thin dressing gown, Molly walks down the hallway and into the lounge. As expected, Richard is sitting at the table with his laptop, a cup of coffee at his elbow.

  ‘Spare coffee in the pot if you want some,’ Richard says.

  ‘Thanks.’ After pouring her coffee, Molly sits beside him. ‘Still crunching numbers?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m missing one, but I can’t find it.’ He turns the computer towards her, showing her a pair of Excel spreadsheets. ‘See, I’ve got twenty-two here, but my query spat out twenty-three here.’ He stands up and shuffles through a pile of paper. ‘It’s driving me batty.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Molly looks at the screen. ‘Here,’ she says after a couple of minutes. ‘You’ve entered this one twice.’

  ‘Really?’ Richard strides back to her. ‘Oh, you’re right. Beauty.’ He kisses the top of her head. ‘I’ve been looking at that for half an hour.’

  Molly smiles. ‘Just needed a fresh pair of eyes.’ How long since Richard has kissed her spontaneously like that? She hates to think.

  ‘Great. I should be able to send the abstract off later today. On another note, do you fancy a trip to Paris?’

  ‘Paris?’ Molly looks up as Ants walked into the kitchen. ‘Morning.’

  ‘Morning.’ Ants picks up the kettle and jams it under the tap. ‘What’s this about Paris?’

  ‘I’ve been asked to speak at a conference.’ Richard brings up the email to show Molly.

  ‘Ooh,’ she says, reading the invitation. ‘Flights and everything. What about Noah, though?’

  Richard rubs his bald patch. ‘He’ll be OK for a couple of weeks, won’t he?’

  ‘Send him to us if you like.’ Ants leans over the breakfast bar. ‘Tom and Lola would love it; Beckett, too.’

  Molly pushes the computer back towards Richard. ‘Thanks, but it’s in August, right in the middle of the term. We really need to get Noah through his last year of high school.’

  ‘He can board at the school while we’re away, if you’re that worried,’ Richard says, irritation creeping into his voice. ‘I thought it could be a delayed twentieth wedding anniversary celebration.’

  ‘Two years late,’ Molly says, and Richard holds her gaze before looking back at the laptop.

  ‘Think of it as a second honeymoon, then,’ he mutters.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ Guilt searing her gut, Molly takes her coffee out onto the balcony. She’s tried to resuscitate their marriage, she has, but she doesn’t want to abandon Noah at such an important time.

  Sure, just keep using that excuse, a voice says in her head. It sounds like Joe.

  Shut up, will you?

  Molly sinks into a deckchair, watching a shadow dart across the street below — a cat? A possum? Not long after, she hears the creaking of Ants’ knees as he joins her.

  ‘You sound just like Dad,’ she says when he sits beside her.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Your knees. And when you answer the phone too. Your voices are almost identical.’

  ‘Haunting you, am I?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Molly says, and they smile into the dawn. The coffee is lighting up her neurons, racing across her synapses.

  You’re thinking some logical, sciency thing, aren’t you?

  ‘What do you reckon Dad’d think of us now?’ Ants asks.

  ‘I think he’d enjoy the kids. Not sure about him and Mum, though.’

  Her brother grunts. ‘They’d probably still be living together, just in different parts of the house.’

  ‘Disgruntled flatmates.’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Ants tips his head back. ‘He always enjoyed a game of street cricket.’

  Molly grins. ‘Yeah, remember when he broke the car windscreen?’

  ‘When the bat flew out of his hand after a few beers?’ Ants laughs. ‘Mum loved that. Think Lola was the last one to break a window, though.’

  ‘She’s a pretty talented bowler, isn’t she?’

  ‘She really is. I thought Tom was going to be the one I was taking to cricket, but she’s been a natural from day one.’ Molly can hear the pride in her brother’s voice. ‘She hasn’t let the diabetes slow her down one bit.’

  ‘That must have been really stressful for you, though, when she was diagnosed.’

  Ants balances his cup on the arm of the chair. ‘Hell, yeah. The doctors said she could have had a cardiac arrest if we hadn’t brought her in when we did, because of the electrolysis imbalance.’

  Electrolyte imbalance, Molly thinks, but doesn’t say.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘I thought Kiri might have been …’

  ‘Exaggerating?’ Ants gives her a half-smile. ‘No. And we felt so guilty, all those weeks where she’d been drinking gallons of water and getting up to pee twice a night. We thought she was going through a stage, trying to drink eight glasses of water a day and all that, but it was because her blood glucose was through the roof.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known that.’ The first rays of sun are sliding over the top of the railing. Molly leans forward to shrug her dressing gown off. ‘If you worried about every little thing your children did, you’d be demented.’

  ‘Maybe you should talk to Kiri about that sometime.’

  ‘Being demented?’ Molly tucks her hair behind her ears. ‘Hell, I’ve only got one kid to drive me up the wall, and he’s doing a good job of it. I don’t know how you cope.’

  Ants shrugs. ‘Not much choice, really. Noah’s a good kid, though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mostly. There was a stage last year where he was hanging out with the wrong crowd, going to wild parties. The police broke up one of the parties, and they found cocaine.’

  ‘Whoa. Mind you, at least it wasn’t P.’

  ‘I know.’ Molly shuddered. ‘I asked Noah if he’d ever tried anything like that, and he said no way, but why would he tell me if he had? God, when we were teenagers it was just a bit
of weed.’

  ‘Don’t forget the glue- and petrol-sniffers.’

  ‘True. After that we gave him a curfew, and made him stay in on school nights. I really thought he hated us for a while.’

  ‘You’re doing a good job, Sis,’ Ants murmurs. ‘He seems OK now, anyway.’

  ‘I think so. He and Lola have really hit it off, haven’t they?’

  ‘Sure have. It’s nice to see them having fun.’ Ants stands up. ‘I’m getting hungry — do you fancy some bacon?’

  ‘I’d love some.’ Molly follows him into the kitchen. Richard has disappeared, presumably to have a shower. She peers out of the window. ‘Gosh, Mum’s out already.’ Hazel is kneeling in front of the patch of garden beside the fence, a weed-filled bucket beside her.

  ‘You didn’t think she was asleep, did you? I think she’s been up for an hour, at least.’ Ants drags a frying pan out of the cupboard and places it on the stove. ‘Any sign of life from the kids?’

  ‘Are you kidding? They won’t wake for hours, will they?’ Molly leans against the bench. ‘Austin said he was going to make waffles.’

  ‘Waffles? Did someone say waffles?’ Sully wanders in from the hallway, scratching his bare belly. ‘Wish my kids were into cooking.’

  Ants, his head in the fridge, says, ‘Except we’re out of bacon and there’s only one egg left.’

  Sully grabs his keys off the bench. ‘I’ll head to the shop. Do we need anything else?’

  ‘Just get lots of everything,’ Ants calls after him, as Sully thunders down the back steps.

  ‘Lots of beer, OK,’ Sully yells back.

  Hazel’s voice drifts through the window. ‘Sully, honestly, do you want the whole neighbourhood to hear you?’

  Molly and Ants grin at each other. Some things never change.

  Three hours later, and they’re on to the second wave of breakfast. Molly is feeling sluggish, her belly heavy with bacon and eggs, followed by a completely unnecessary but very satisfying waffle.

  ‘Heck, I have enough trouble keeping up with food for three teenagers,’ Kiri says, watching Beckett top his waffles with bacon, bananas and maple syrup, ‘let alone six.’