‘Did they like it?’
‘They got bored of waiting for me to tie it on so they just left.’
‘Did the bee like it?’
His face lit up. ‘Yeah, bees love being tied to balloons! They can fly even higher than Mount Everest but there’s hardly any nectar up there so mostly they don’t. So when you tie a balloon to them it’s like they get to go back to their true calling.’ He leaned against my arm. ‘I’m glad you came with us.’
‘To school?’
‘Nah, here to Port Flinders.’
‘I was always going to come with you. Where else would I go?’
‘Dunno. Just Mum said you might not be coming. That you might stay in Adelaide.’
‘I don’t know why she would tell you that.’ I put my arm around him. He was hardly anything, like hugging a stick. ‘What if tomorrow I take you into town, just the two of us, and we get a vanilla slice?’
He nodded quickly. ‘Did you know vanilla slices were originally from France? They had heaps of pastry and sometimes they made them into whole cakes of vanilla slice. I reckon I would like a whole cake of vanilla slice.’
‘Don’t know if they do those in town.’
‘I guess they might not. Maybe we can go to France one day and have one.’
‘Let’s do that. But tomorrow, we might just go to the bakery on the main street.’
‘Maybe you can show me your school, since I showed you mine.’
‘Nothing much to see at my school.’
‘Do you have any friends?’
Raf and his grinning, his always-warm skin. ‘Dunno yet.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Like when I tied the balloon to the bee, Braydon came over to have a look but when I gave him the special close-up, he told me the bee would die.’ He curled closer to me. ‘But I only do it to bees that have already lost their stingers. They’re going to die anyway. It’s like their last big adventure.’
We were a team, Ben and me. I felt it then more acutely than I had ever felt anything.
Mum and Jason got home late, after Ben was already in bed. I’d found a movie on the shitty regional stations we got, watched it while I waited for Jason’s car in the driveway. They were fighting before they got inside. I could hear them through the window. Jason’s voice raised. Mum’s voice low and short. A car door slammed. Jason: ‘You fucking liar.’ A thud. Jason shouting, not even words but just sounds. Gravel hitting the window as the car tore off again.
I went to the door. She was there, folded, on the ground. Knees drawn up to her chest. Her body moved rigidly, statically, and her shoulders slumped as though the air had been pulled right out of them.
‘Mum?’ I said.
Nothing. The streetlight above her flickered. She stared into the empty space where the car had been. I sat on the ground next to her and put my fingers to her cheek, under the bone where the red birth of the bruise began.
‘Come on. I’ll take you inside.’
She leaned into me and her hair smelled of cigarette smoke and something unfamiliar but putrid, and I half-dragged her into the house and dropped her on the couch. Her eyes remained half-focused, hands folded together in her lap. Inside the bruise, a paper-thin cut stretched from her lip to her cheekbone. Her breath came in quick bursts, as though trying to escape.
I wanted to find Jason, to push his head through a window. I watched myself parent my parent, got her a drink in a scungy plastic cup, washed her face with a warm towel.
‘Where were you?’ Silence. ‘Is Jason coming back?’
She shook her head slightly. I took her hand and tried to think of a time we had been together this way, with our selves right open. Hadn’t ever practised the words to say to her. I sat there with my mouth half-open, waiting for the right things to come out.
The movie roared in the background. Headlights flashed across the wall and Mum flinched, but they continued down the road. I turned her face towards mine.
‘You’re all right now,’ I said. She rolled her eyes. My chest tightened. I looked for other words, better words, ones that would take us from Jason’s rancid living room and back to the flat and the TV cabinet before it had a table in it. ‘I don’t know what to say. Okay? I don’t know.’
Then we were just there for a while, in the glow of the TV, and Nicolas Cage was on a plane with some other guys, and still we sat there and Mum didn’t say a single word. During the ad breaks I watched her face. It moved in and out of shadow; sometimes the bruise was there, and sometimes it wasn’t.
Ben appeared in the doorway, stood there in his dinosaur pyjamas and rubbed his eyes. ‘Mum?’ he said, and her head snapped up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing. I’m fine.’ She wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘Turn the bloody TV off.’
I didn’t turn the TV off. She sat there with me for another thirty minutes while I watched Con Air and thought about my own days, one after another. And every so often her whole body shook, until her breathing eased and she was asleep with her hand curled around mine.
7
ONE WEEKEND, DAD took me on the O-Bahn bus, pushed his face up against the window like he’d never seen it before. And I squeezed up next to him because I really had never seen it before.
It stopped off in a place called Paradise, which was actually just concrete paved into a couple of palm trees, and a bus depot someone had graffitied from top to bottom. We got out there, and Dad said, ‘So this is Paradise,’ and we sat under the PARADISE sign and he made the joke a few more times before he took me back to Mum’s house.
Jason didn’t come back for two days. I took Ben into town but no one sold vanilla slices, so we got a stale finger bun each and one for Mum. She stayed on the couch the whole time he was gone, only moving to go to the toilet and stare out the front door for a minute. I brought her cups of water and asked if she wanted toast, but she didn’t. By the end of the first day, half her face was purple. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
‘Could you stop?’ she said, and pulled her hair over it.
‘He shouldn’t have done that.’ It seemed so obvious a thing to say.
She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re fifteen.’
‘I’m sixteen.’
‘Whatever, sixteen. You don’t know anything about adult relationships.’
I pointed to the bruise, the way it curled around her cheekbone, sent blue flushes down the side of her nose. ‘I know that shouldn’t happen.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
She sighed. ‘It was my fault. I pushed him. I know he’s done it tough with his dad. He was an alcoholic. Did you know that? ’Course you didn’t. He only came home to beat him. I should have known better than to ask questions when he was already tired. Okay?’
‘No?’
‘Well, that’s all you’re getting. I’ve got stuff to do.’
‘Right.’
‘Business is crazy. We need to make it easy for Jase when he gets back, try not to overwhelm him.’ She held out her empty glass. ‘We’ve all gotta do our bit.’
‘We all do?’
‘He’ll be back soon and there’ll be more work than ever. He’s just so busy. I’ve gotta support him.’ The conversation was over.
Ben and I ate toasted sandwiches in our bedroom.
‘My sheets feel funny,’ he said.
‘They’re dirty,’ I said. ‘I’ll wash them for you.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your other clothes, too. Has Mum washed your uniform?’
‘Nope.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘It’s okay.’
I opened the window to let the air in but it was still and wet. Somewhere in the room, Bilbo was scratching.
‘Where is he?’ I said.
‘I told you, I can’t say. What if we become worst enemies and you tell Mum to get back at me?’
‘We’ll never be worst enemies, Ben.’
‘What if the Gesta
po comes and says they’ll take you away unless you tell them where Bilbo is? What if Yiannis changes his mind about letting me have him and his dad comes and makes you give him Bilbo at gunpoint?’
‘I mean, none of that seems very likely.’
‘Yiannis says we live in a multiverse and there are infinite other universes with every possible outcome playing out all the time.’
‘Can’t argue with that.’
I took a blanket to Mum and she drew it around her into a cocoon.
‘You’re welcome,’ I said. She grunted. Her face now had shades of yellow and green in it; I pointed to it. ‘You should’ve used an icepack.’
‘Mind your own business.’
When I got home from school the next day, Jason’s car was in the driveway. He and Mum had the blanket over both of them, and they were watching a Biggest Loser repeat with the blinds closed. Mum had her hair pulled over her face again; Jason sat on the other side of her. She glanced over as I walked past, but didn’t say a word.
‘I’m not making tea tonight,’ I said. ‘One of you is going to have to get off your arse and go to the supermarket.’
‘Pizza,’ Jason said, waving me away.
They didn’t move for that, either, not even a courtesy walk to the front door to pay for it. Ben and I sat on the floor in front of the TV and we all ate from the boxes with our hands. Mum and Jason had their faces as close together as physically possible and he whispered, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘It won’t happen again’ to her until she was glowing almost in rainbow colours. Listening to his apologies brought out bugs on my skin.
‘This pizza is so bad,’ said Ben. ‘The ones from the freezer are better than this.’
Jason’s whisper: ‘It was an accident.’ Mum’s whisper: ‘I know.’ And she rubbed his head with her oily hands and they were both smiling.
When we were finished, there were rings of grease on the carpet.
I took my last slice outside, sat on the concrete and watched Murray sniff at the air. ‘Storm coming?’ I said. He didn’t lie down. I put my hand out to him and he shoved it with his nose and the low growling came from the back of his throat again.
‘Want some?’ I tore off a bit of cheesy crust and he snapped it out of my hands. ‘Great. Good manners.’
Yellow light burst from our bedroom; Ben’s silhouette moved behind the curtain, shoulders down. I tapped on the window and the fabric parted.
‘You okay, buddy?’
He shook his head.
‘What’s happened?’
He wound the window open and stuck his head through, looked at me upside down.
‘Mum yelled at me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing! I was just telling her about how you can’t bury toads alive because they can get oxygen out of the soil and when it’s raining they can even suck it out of the water, which is part of the reason there are so many cane toads in Queensland and now they’re even going to the Northern Territory, as if it’s not scary enough there already.’ He took a deep breath.
‘Is that true? They can suck the oxygen out of the water?’
‘Yiannis says it is.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Then she shouted at me. She said, “BEN DON’T YOU EVER SHUT UP EVEN FOR TEN SECONDS SERIOUSLY I HAVE HAD AS MUCH AS I CAN TAKE” and then she said some words I don’t want to say.’
He pulled his head inside and wound the window closed. I threw the rest of the pizza at Murray and slammed the door, stormed into the living room. My throat burned with the words that wanted to pour through it and I pulled myself up as tall as I could and stood over the woman and her dickhead on the couch.
‘Ben’s in his room. Crying. Because of you.’
She took her mouth away from Jason’s ear and looked at me.
‘He wouldn’t shut up.’
‘He’s ten. He’s trying to tell you something he cares about and you can’t even give him one minute to listen to what he’s got to say.’
‘I told him, I’ve got a headache.’
‘He’s in there right now crying himself to sleep. Do you even give a shit? Happy just to let him grow up to be a loser like you?’
She shrugged. ‘He won’t. He’s so smart.’ Jason snorted.
I yanked the blanket, their naked bodies twisted underneath it, threw it across the room. ‘This is fucked. You are both fucked.’
‘Settle down,’ Jason said, still laughing.
I squatted next to him, looked him right in the eye. ‘If you touch my mother again, I will call the police.’
And I went to our room, pushed my bed against the door, and turned off the light.
In the morning Mum and Jason were sitting at the kitchen table together. Both of them on the same side like it was a job interview.
‘Sit,’ Mum said.
‘I have to get ready for school.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Skye. Sit down.’ Jason. His face was all lit up, eyes flicking everywhere. Jaw clenched in one flat line. I sat.
‘What?’
He put his hands palms-down on the table. Jason the Godfather. He stared right into me with his eyeballs bulging. ‘No one threatens me. In my own house.’
‘Is that a threat?’ I said. ‘Because I mean, that would be pretty ironic. Threatening me not to threaten you.’
‘I’m not mucking around.’
Mum put her hand on top of his hand, pushed her fingers between his. ‘Look, Skye. If you’re going to be in this house, throwing your weight around, acting like you’re the bloody adult’ – I laughed – ‘you need to get a job.’
‘What for? Jason earns so much money.’
‘So you can learn some responsibility.’
‘Me? Are you actually serious?’
‘You can pay bloody board, that’s what,’ Jason said.
I rose slowly from the table, keeping my eyes on Jason’s. ‘Fine. A job? No problem. Maybe then I’ll be able to afford whatever it is you two are selling.’
Raf was waiting for me by the front gate.
‘What’s up?’ he said.
‘I have to get a job.’
‘A job?’
‘Mum says. Bitch.’
He wrote his name in the dirt with his shoe. ‘Now you’ll never have time to come to footy training.’
I rubbed his name out with my own shoe. ‘I can try.’ He frowned. ‘Maybe next week.’
‘Fine. At least come and meet some of the guys.’
‘Do they want to meet me?’
‘They want what I tell them they want.’
‘That seems like a good deal.’
‘When you’re the captain, these are the kinds of decisions you get to make.’
‘When?’
‘Come to the pipes at lunch. We can go halvies in a pie.’
I thought about the pipes all through English, and all through History, and again through Geography. I learned nothing about topography, or the lines we use to indicate changing altitude, or how to read a mountain on a map. Instead, I watched the oval, tried to zoom with my eyes to see the pipes. I couldn’t place what made me so nervous about it, except that I’d never been asked to go anywhere with footy guys, or any guys, really, and the way Raf had asked me made my legs ache right into my knees.
He was waiting for me by the tuckshop. ‘I told them you were coming and they had to be nice to you.’
‘Would they not be nice to me? If you hadn’t?’
‘Nah, they’re a pack of wankers.’ He smiled in his one-dimpled way and took a huge bite out of the pie. ‘Fflrfing hoooooot!’ Threw the rest of the pie to me and fanned his open mouth.
‘Hot?’ I said. He nodded furiously.
The pipes were not a footy thing, or a skateboarding thing. The railway tracks ran the full length of the school and these guys were sitting right on them like some kind of dare. Some girls were there too, sitting on the fence, laughing with each other and squealing each time the lights changed from red to green.
‘Fellas,’ he said. A couple of them came up from the tracks and hugged him, slapped him across the back. ‘And ladies.’ He curtseyed to the girls on the fence; they laughed, pushed their hair behind their ears.
‘Rafferty,’ one of them said.
He pushed me forward. ‘This is Skye. Like, you know.’ He pointed up. ‘She’s new and we are going to be nice to her. Okay? That means you, Ellen.’
I knew Ellen from my Geography class. She had been anything but nice to me. ‘Hi,’ I said. She ignored me. One of the other girls tapped the railing next to her.
‘Where you from?’
‘Adelaide,’ I said.
‘Oh, the city. Nice.’ She pulled a cigarette from her pocket. ‘You like it up here?’
‘Bits of it.’
‘Lucky you got Raf here to show you round. He knows all the best stuff to do, don’tcha, Rafferty?’
He shrugged. ‘I can hook you up with a pretty good art gallery. If you’re into that kind of thing.’ Ellen snorted a laugh. The other girl turned back to me.
‘The guys on the pipes are all dickheads. The fat one is Hamish. You’re gonna want to ignore him best you can. If you haven’t seen him yet – good.’ Hamish let out a huge burp and they all laughed. ‘The two sitting on the sleeper are Seb and Al. They’re twins, in case you couldn’t tell. Identical. None of us know which one’s which.’
‘I do,’ Raf said. ‘Seb’s dick is smaller.’ Ellen laughed again, slapped Raf’s arm.
‘One on the end is Yardy. Not a bad bloke if you go in for the kind who’ll love you with his fists.’ She blew a cloud of smoke in my face. ‘And I’m Renée.’
‘It’s nice to meet you,’ I said.
Ellen leaned across Renée, took the cigarette from her hand and inhaled. ‘You don’t know that yet,’ she said. When she smiled, I counted three different colours in her teeth.
Raf came back to sit with me. ‘What do you do here, at the pipes?’ I said.
‘This.’ He gestured as though to his kingdom. ‘Sit here, eat a pie, back to class.’
‘Why are they sitting on the train line though? What if a train comes?’
‘Trains do come,’ he said. ‘Gotta get your kicks somehow.’
The Gulf Page 7
