The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Mum won’t let them.’

  He was quiet for ages, pushing chips around in his mouth. Seagulls came to squat nearby. Strutted their feathered pants around, making out as though they didn’t want the chips for themselves.

  ‘Try not to worry,’ I said, and pulled him close to me.

  His voice squeaked out: ‘Yiannis says you can be so worried you die.’

  ‘Yiannis doesn’t know everything.’

  ‘Yiannis does know everything. He says that his yiayia used to worry all the time, like she would go round her house turning on every light and turning it off again and putting her whole hand on the iron to see if it was hot and taking her dog to bed with her because she was worried about burglars breaking in, and then one day she worried so much she died.’ He took a breath. ‘And no one even found her until her dog had eaten part of her leg off.’

  ‘He might be exaggerating a bit there.’

  ‘He said her brain exploded.’

  ‘I don’t think brains can explode.’

  ‘Do you think my brain is going to explode?’

  ‘I promise your brain is not going to explode.’ I threw the last soggy chips to the pack of gulls, and they blew into a cloud of white. ‘Do you remember that trike from the flats? Maron’s trike?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘He rode so fast on that once that you flew right out of the back and a car nearly ran over you.’

  ‘No he didn’t.’

  ‘He did. I was racing you guys down the driveway, running as fast as I could. And he beat me to the end but when he stopped you just came straight out. Like this’ – I squeezed around his shoulders – ‘pop!’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Then this car came around the corner and tried to pull into the driveway and you were right there in the middle of it. Crying. Like maybe you had scraped your knee, I think.’

  He sat up and looked at me. ‘And was I worried then?’

  I pictured him on the bitumen in his green tracksuit, face torn into pieces. The howl that came from Maron as the car turned the corner at speed. The two of them afterwards, sitting on the brick wall that faced the street; Maron with his head between his legs and Ben throwing bits of grass into the air and laughing.

  ‘I don’t think you were worried then. Maron did all the worrying for you.’

  ‘And did his brain explode?’

  Maron when we moved out, crouched in the doorway of the western building with a joint between his thumb and forefinger, sunglasses on. His mum had died. Or his step-mother. Or his sister’s mum. Someone had died, and he had sat that way for weeks, waiting for the days to end.

  ‘Maybe a little.’

  ‘Told you.’

  Monday night, Jason was back and Mum had chicken drumettes on, filling the kitchen with smoke.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Jase bought me this grill while he was gone. You plug it in and you can have a barbecue inside. Clever, huh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’ll make things easier. Maybe you can cook us something other than sausages.’

  ‘Right, I can.’

  She’d made a little salad, flat and limp in a glass bowl. I took it to the table. Jason had his body stretched down the couch and a man I hadn’t seen before sat in the armchair, watching the football with his feet up on the coffee table. Barefoot. His toenails poked long and yellow towards the ceiling.

  ‘Uh, hello?’

  He waved with a bandaged hand. ‘Watching the game.’ He pointed with the other.

  ‘I can see that. Who are you?’

  ‘Merv. Friend of your mum’s.’ He had a bag of corn chips in his lap and he rustled around in it. ‘Chips all gone. Got any more?’

  ‘Mum doesn’t let us buy those chips,’ Ben said.

  I kicked the couch. Jason groaned a little.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Merv said. ‘Bit on the nod. He’ll come good.’ He tipped the last of the chips into his mouth. ‘You kids got any video games?’ He pulled up his shirt and rubbed his belly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Might head off then.’ He walked out the door and closed it behind him.

  ‘That was weird,’ Ben said.

  Mum called out from the kitchen: ‘Merv? Not staying for tea?’ A motorbike started up downstairs.

  After dinner I sat on the couch with Ben, who caught flies and glued them to the coffee table. Mum stood with her ear against her bedroom door, waiting for something. I read aloud from Macbeth, giving Ben the dramatic supporting lines.

  ‘Come, you spirits

  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

  And fill me from the crown to the toe topful

  Of direst cruelty!’

  ‘What does unsex mean?’ he said.

  ‘She doesn’t want to be a woman anymore.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She thinks if she can get rid of her feminine feelings, she’ll be like a warrior. Strong, like a man.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I know.’

  The smoke alarm went off in the hall. Jason’s voice shot out, ‘What the hell?’ Then Mum, ‘You’re up!’ I went to the linen closet, took the broom and used the handle to stop the alarm. Jason wiped a string of spit from his cheek.

  ‘Hey, Linda,’ he said, and his eyes got very wide. ‘Forgot. Estate agents called before. Reminding you there’s an inspection Wednesday. Four pm.’

  ‘Shit. You didn’t tell them you lived here, did you?’

  ‘Nah, said I was your brother or something.’

  ‘Can you help out?’ she said.

  ‘Nah, I’ll be in Flinders on Wednesday. You know that.’

  She rubbed her hands around his shiny head. ‘Skye, I’ll give you ten bucks to get the flat clean. Ten bucks.’

  I put down my book. ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Deal.’

  I knew she wouldn’t. A couple of years ago I’d started keeping a tally in a tiny notebook I kept in my drawer. When I reached $145 I decided to stop waiting for her to pay up, and got it back in other ways. Keeping the change at the supermarket. A faked school excursion. We were nearly balanced. For a woman who’d worked in a bank for eight months, she was shithouse at money.

  My room was fine, but I pushed open the window to get the stale air moving. The flat was full of it – just a general feeling of being trapped in smog. A dull cigarette odour. A fruity, fishy smell. And a thin layer of grime on nearly every surface, which only budged when I used the proper Ajax stuff, the powder. Two of the kitchen cupboards had come loose; one of the hinges had fallen out completely. I scrubbed the bench tops with steel wool but couldn’t shift the burnt patches – Ben’s science experiments.

  ‘Don’t let them open the oven when they come,’ I said. ‘Smells like someone took a shit in there.’

  ‘Skye!’

  ‘Did someone take a shit in there?’ I said.

  Jason’s throaty laugh came from over the couch. ‘Are you serious?’

  Mum laughed, too. ‘Maybe it was Merv.’

  Ben hovered in the doorway while I tidied his room. ‘Don’t look under the bed,’ he said. ‘I mean, you can look under the bed. It would just be really boring for you if you did. I don’t want you to have a boring time when you’re cleaning because it’s already boring and the last thing you need is to be even more bored because underneath my bed is so boring.’

  ‘I’m not going to look under your bed.’

  ‘No, but I mean, you can if you really want to, it’s just like I said, there’s nothing there that’s interesting and I know how much you like things to be interesting.’

  He hopped from one foot to the other.

  ‘Well, now I have to look.’

  I leaned down and peered into the abyss below. There was a faint whiff of mould and sweat. Part of a sandwich. Socks with mud caked onto them. Some kind of electrical circuit board. I pulled out a box of shells and a plastic conta
iner with a lemon inside it.

  ‘Yiannis is behind this, isn’t he?’

  Ben said nothing, just tapped his feet against the floor.

  Scratching.

  ‘Ben, is there an animal under here?’ Another box, and another. I pushed them aside in search of the sound, found a shoebox with holes cut in the top. ‘This had better not be a spider.’ Opened it; inside, a brown shell the size of a tennis ball.

  ‘A turtle?’

  Hop-hop-hop. ‘A tortoise, actually.’

  ‘Mum is going to kill you.’

  ‘You can’t tell her.’

  ‘Sure, I just won’t tell her and it can go on living under your bed forever.’

  ‘It’s not mine. I’m just looking after it.’

  ‘Yiannis?’

  ‘He found an egg at the park so he incubated it and this tortoise hatched out and his mum says he’s not allowed to keep it at their house.’

  ‘Just found a turtle egg in the park, huh?’

  ‘Tortoise.’

  ‘How long has it been here?’

  Hop-hop-hop. ‘Since my birthday.’

  ‘Far out.’ I bundled the tortoise back into the box.

  ‘Please don’t tell her.’

  ‘He can’t stay here while the inspection is happening. What if someone sees him? You know we’re not allowed to have pets here.’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’ He frowned. ‘Do you reckon he ever thinks of his family at the park? I mean, what are the chances of finding one tortoise egg just on its own? There must be others.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yiannis never lies. Maybe I should take Bilbo back to visit.’

  ‘Bilbo?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s on an adventure. Pretty obvious.’

  ‘Why don’t you just focus on keeping him hidden for the next twenty-four hours?’

  ‘He likes carrots the best. You know sometimes you cut them into little sticks and put honey on them? That’s his favourite.’

  ‘Great. So glad I go to all that effort for a tortoise that lives in a shoebox.’ He grabbed box and tortoise from me and climbed through his window to the balcony.

  We had to leave the house during the inspection, so I went down to the park and had a few goes on the spinning thing. It was warmer than it had been and kids were everywhere, all laughing until they fell over and cried and someone hugged them and they started laughing again. On the other side of the playground, some guys were hitting a cricket ball, and the laughter was occasionally drowned out by a cry of ‘Howzat!’ and the thwock of ball against bat. I walked over and leaned into the fence. Some of the guys from the party were sitting in the grandstand, fading in and out behind their cigarette smoke. From the kiosk I bought a lemonade with the two dollars I’d found cleaning under the fridge. Someone was clean bowled. The next guy went in. The ball came bouncing towards him and he hit it over the bowler’s head and they ran.

  I crushed the lemonade can under my foot, took it home so Ben could cash it in for ten cents. Most of the people had dispersed. A couple sat in their car with a brochure, looked from the brochure to the flat and back again. They didn’t look much like investors, but I had never seen one anyway. I tapped on the driver’s-side window.

  ‘Sound investment, these flats.’ The man nodded. ‘Not much of a place to live, though. So much noise at night. The couple in number six fight constantly. No one gets any sleep.’

  ‘Good to know,’ he said, and slipped the brochure into the gap beside his seat.

  Every Saturday for a month, people traipsed through our flat. I watched them come and go to see if I could spot the investors, see who turned up in an expensive car or wore a good tie. And each Friday afternoon Mum promised me ten or fifteen dollars (depending on her mood) and I cleaned from top to bottom before slipping Bilbo next door to hang out with Amir.

  Jason went to Port Flinders most weekends, and sometimes during the week. He was always gone on Wednesdays – a weekly meeting, Mum said. On those nights she let us get a pizza from the dodgy place behind the corner shop, and it always tasted like the toppings had been dead for months but at least I didn’t have to cook it.

  ‘Are you still going to work for Jason?’ Ben said, on the Wednesday before the last open inspection.

  ‘Yep,’ Mum said. ‘Jason’s business is booming, you know. All my connections. That’s what’s done it. He’s going to be a millionaire.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a millionaire,’ Ben said.

  ‘Millionaires do actual work,’ I said. ‘Like getting off the couch in the daytime.’

  ‘He works at night,’ Mum said. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The next morning he was back, sweaty and black around the eyes. Mum jumped on him when he walked through the door and his knees buckled and the two of them went crashing to the floor. Later, I heard Mum sobbing in the bathroom: ‘You think I’m fat.’

  She hadn’t asked again what we thought of him, and his place in our flat seemed like a done deal. Even my bedroom had some of his stuff in it – a couple of plastic tubs that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. I was banned from opening them.

  ‘Do you think he’s sending live birds overseas in Coke bottles?’ Ben said to me one night. I was watching the people come and go from the Westfield again, trying to decide which ones I would follow home. One family had bought a TV as big as their car and were trying to cram it in around the children. ‘TVs don’t bend,’ I said aloud. ‘You’re going to have to get out.’ After a few minutes the mum and daughter got out of the car and waited in the car park while the dad and son drove off. I wondered if they would come back to pick them up. Probably just stay home and play Xbox for a while first.

  ‘Or,’ Ben said, pulling himself up on the bench to see what I was looking at, ‘do you think he’s selling something on the black market? Or the dark net?’

  ‘What’s the dark net?’

  ‘It’s part of the internet you can only get to if you have a secret password and I think you can buy human body parts there.’

  ‘How do they ship them to you?’

  ‘Maybe in an Esky?’

  ‘Gross.’ The mother and daughter moved to the trolley bay and leaned against the railing. A guy in a hi-vis shirt came over and talked to them for a moment, pulled all the trolleys out in one long snake. ‘How does he manoeuvre that?’

  ‘Inertia?’ Ben said. ‘Or, I heard about this guy in Canada who stole all the maple syrup in the country and the whole government collapsed. Could you do that here? What if Jason was stealing all the Vegemite in the country?’

  The daughter was crying now, cross-legged on the bitumen. The mother tried to pick her up by her wrists but she was stubborn and they were locked like that for a few seconds, until the mother fell backwards and started crying herself.

  ‘I reckon he’s skimming credit card details,’ I said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s when you steal other people’s credit card numbers so you can spend the money on them. Didn’t they do cyber safety stuff with you at school? Never give someone you don’t know your password and that?’

  ‘But why don’t we have heaps of stuff here then? If he’s spending all this money on things?’

  ‘Why do you think he’s got a whole separate house?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘I still reckon birds. Port Flinders is in the country, right? They have heaps of birds there. Cockies and kookaburras and those big eagle things and parrots. He could go part-time into lizards as well. Heaps of lizards in the outback.’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t think he’s going to tell us.’

  The car returned. Mother and daughter climbed in, still crying.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I have to get the bathroom cleaned. And you have to take Bilbo next door before Mum gets home.’

  At the end of May, an auction was held. We weren’t allowed to come so we set up a couple of folding chairs across the street and listened. A man in a suit shouted num
bers that couldn’t have even been real. Two hundred and ninety thousand dollars. Two hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars. He got excited, all shiny with his mouth hanging right open. He demanded the people in the crowd give him more. ‘Can I get three hundred?’ and the people looked to one another and shrugged and shook their heads, but there was always another one to shout out right afterwards.

  After ten minutes he said, ‘Third call,’ as though the words had tripped out of him without his permission, and then he rolled up his brochure and slapped it into his hand. Off to the side, a couple hugged and the woman shouted, ‘I’m freaking out!’

  Afterwards we sat around the kitchen table, eating salty biscuits from their box.

  ‘Did they look like investors to you?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know what investors look like,’ Mum said. Jason frowned at his phone, tapped furiously for a few seconds. ‘Jase?’

  ‘Investors.’ He shoved the phone in his pocket and went out to the balcony. We listened to him pace back and forth past the front door, stopping occasionally to make a pained grunting noise. An earthy smell came in through the crack in the window and Mum stopped looking at us. Jason’s phone rang. ‘Give us some good news,’ he said to whoever was on the other end.

  ‘See?’ Mum said. ‘Investors. Nothing to worry about.’

  4

  THE FIRST TIME Dad took me for Chinese food, at a place on the corner near our house, we had sweet and sour pork and noodles with flat fish pieces. He said he’d taken Mum on a date there once, because she had never had Chinese food and he liked the lanterns. They ordered lemon chicken and fried rice.

  They found out she was allergic to prawns that night. He rode with her in the ambulance and she swore she’d never go out with him again.

  Eight months later, I was born.

  Every afternoon I walked into the same flat and saw Jason counting out his five-dollar notes, and every afternoon I went to my room and thought about an afternoon he might not be there, always exactly the same. Mum had started counting the money too, after she got home from work. She was good like that, thimble on her thumb, flicking through the plastic and counting it without really seeing it.