The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘We won’t be back for dinner,’ I said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Didn’t want you to starve without me cooking for you.’

  ‘Your mum didn’t even notice you were gone.’ He walked off, juggling his items in his hands. When the line had died down I excused myself to go to the bathroom, slipped into the break room and out the back door. Daryl came barrelling out, chin-first.

  ‘What did I just say, Skye?’ he said, his face gleaming with sweat and anger. ‘You’re here for three hours. You don’t get a break.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He huffed and stomped across the car park. ‘I don’t think this is working out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s your second shift and you’re already taking liberties.’

  My chest tightened. ‘It was an emergency. Really.’

  ‘I have to give you a written warning. If that’s how you’re going to be.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Three warnings and you’re out, Skye. I don’t make the rules.’ He slopped his way over to me, put his hand on my shoulder. ‘I just enforce them. You understand?’ His hand slid lower, across my back, sweaty. Warty. I shifted on my crate.

  ‘I need this job.’

  ‘Maybe we can work something out.’ His breath smelled of food court curry and peppermint gum and every part of his face that crinkled ran in rivers of sweat.

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  He sat on the crate next to mine. His other hand went to my knee, bare between my skirt and my socks. Face close to mine. Curry breath hot on my cheek. ‘There are always other ways.’ Sweaty fingers on the outside of my thigh, the hand on my back moving lower, trapped between these arms like jellied tree trunks. My breath stopped. I felt in there, caught in the space below my throat. Not moving. Afraid to move. It stuck there and it stayed there and my face was numb.

  Fingers on the inside of my thigh. I froze. Watched the sea bang against the retaining wall. Watched the people walk past it, fifty metres away at most, walking with their children and their dogs and their husbands and not knowing I was on a milk crate in a car park with a hand inside my skirt and no one to tell me what to do next.

  Daryl grabbed my hand. Acid rose in my throat, pushed past the bit where my breath was caught. Moved it for me, with his burning, blistered fingers. Pants pulled tight across his crotch. He pushed my hand to his dick, pressing hard against his leg. I choked on my spit. My body shook and froze all at once. Closed my eyes. His hand was so greasy on top of mine, moving my palm in his lap.

  ‘What do you say? Can we get rid of this silly warning?’

  His lips on my neck. Wet. Air hissed through his nose. Beard on my skin like a cheese grater.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  He groaned in my ear. ‘You filthy tease.’ He got to his feet, heaved his massive body in front of me. Grabbed the back of my head, got my hair twisted tight around his fingers. Shoved my face into his crotch, held it there while I fought for air. ‘Written warning. You don’t get a break when you’re only here for three hours.’ He let me go. The door slammed behind him, and the lock clicked.

  I sat. The crate rocked beneath me. Still people walked, safe with their people. Watched out for. I sat and sat and my shift ended and still I sat.

  I found my legs again sometime after the sky had turned pink but before the mozzies came out, and went back inside. Daryl stared at me while I spent most of Mum’s money on chocolates in different shapes and flavours. Threw in a couple of pre-made Caesar salads as an afterthought, mostly so Ben wouldn’t go hungry – or worse, actually eat any of the mouldy junk festering in Jason’s pantry. Jeannie looked me up and down. Passed me my bag and put her hand on top of my hand, gave it a little squeeze. Like we were in a club together.

  We had a test at the end of the day and finished early.

  ‘Come to mine,’ Raf said, but I wanted to get home, be there when Ben got back. I was quiet coming in and Jason had his door wide open. He sat on a scratched up leather couch next to a desk stacked with containers. Mum sat next to him with her head down. They hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Just do it,’ he said. He had a bit of glass in one hand, thin like a straw and with a bulb at the end, and a blue lighter in the other. ‘They’re gonna think you’re a narc. Someone’ll rat on you.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. He slammed his hand into the desk and the glass smashed under it.

  ‘Fuck, Linda,’ he shouted, shoving his bloody palm in Mum’s face. ‘Fuck!’

  My heart raced. The credit card skimming, the parrot exporting, stealing Vegemite. Any of that would have been better. I slipped into the bathroom, put my forehead to the wall and listened to my breaths slam against the cool tiles.

  Mum came to the bathroom door. ‘Skye, Jesus.’ Her hand went to her throat. ‘How long’ve you been there?’ Her hair had got thin, crispy at the ends like paintbrushes hanging off her head.

  ‘Just finished.’ She didn’t move as I pushed past her, stuck firm in her own ground.

  She rummaged in the bathroom cupboard, went back into Jason’s room and didn’t come out again.

  Later, I made a few pork chops and dropped them on a plate with a bag of salad I’d got at the supermarket. Jason ate the chops with his fingers, one hand bound in sloppy bandages, left the salad behind. We sat around the kitchen table and he stared at us, at me first and then at Ben.

  ‘We’re learning about the First Fleet,’ Ben said to me. ‘I borrowed a book from the library.’ His face was greasy, ‘It didn’t have all the information though. D’you know how many Aboriginal people died when we brought our boats? I found that out on the internet. Ninety per cent. That’s almost all of them.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Jason said. Wiped his mouth on the back of his bandage.

  ‘It’s true. They called Australia terra nullius but actually there were heaps of people here and we didn’t even count them as people until 1967.’ He chewed on his chop bone. ‘I have to know this for my presentation.’

  There was silence for a minute. ‘Where’s Mum?’ I said, in the end, with nothing else to say.

  Jason’s voice was quiet. ‘Got a migraine.’

  ‘She was okay before,’ I said.

  ‘Well, now she’s got a migraine.’

  Jason scraped his fork across his porcelain plate. ‘Funny.’ He dumped his cutlery in the sink and disappeared out the front door. Murray barked at the car starting, and Ben stared through the window until the noise stopped.

  ‘Yiannis’s mum sometimes gets migraines,’ he said. ‘She stays in her bedroom, too, like Mum. But they have sixteen pillows on their bed. Square ones and rectangle ones and triangle ones. Yiannis showed me. He said the square ones are the best because you can build them into a pretty good fort, but I told him triangles are the strongest shape there is so we tried it my way and I was right.’ He looked over at me. ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not sad.’

  He came and sat next to me. His feet barely touched the floor. ‘You look pretty,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, mate.’

  We got an old blanket from the cupboard in the hallway and sat in front of the TV. Nothing was on so we just flicked through the channels. After a while we were watching the ads instead, picking out Christmas presents for people in town. Vegetable slicers and magic cleaning balls and things for microwaving eggs. Ben reckoned we could set up a stand in town, with him dressed up as Santa and me as his elf, handing out this crap I knew no one would ever use. He had something picked out for his teacher and the lady at the canteen and the sleazy grandpa at the pizza shop. He tore the back off a magazine and started writing them down, everyone’s name and the infomercial garbage he would buy for them.

  ‘Maybe I can get you one of those cyclonic vacuum cleaners to help with the cleaning? Is that what they said it was? Can you rewind it?’ He wrote SKYE and next
to it, VACCUM (CYCLONIC). ‘Do you think Jason is nice to her?’ he said.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To Mum. He seems like maybe he isn’t nice to anyone. Maybe if they got married he would be nice to her. Yiannis said husbands and wives have to be nice to each other because it’s in the marriage constitution and the police will come otherwise.’

  I stroked his hair. ‘Yeah mate, I reckon that’s how it works.’ I flicked over to another ad break. Thought of the apartment again, for the first time in ages, the dining table jammed in the TV cabinet.

  Ben wrote MRS NERINGTON (FROM THE BUS) and SHOWER STOOL on his magazine.

  ‘Sometimes you have to go, though,’ I said. ‘You remember how the Adelmanns always argued? Whenever you walked past their door they were always behind it shouting at each other?’

  ‘Kind of,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I saw them kissing through the window.’

  ‘Yeah, but sometimes people are only kissing because they’re trying to stop fighting.’

  He wrote MUM (LINDA) and HELICOPTER DRONE. ‘Do you think Mum would like a helicopter drone? I was thinking maybe she could use it to send me messages when I’m at school. Maybe you can get ones with two controllers so I can send messages back to her. Like if I forget my lunch I can just zoom the drone over to her with a note that says Mum, I forgot my lunch! and she can make me a sandwich and send it back on the drone.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘I might have to teach her to use it though. I got a radio-controlled car once and she tried to use it and drove it into the street and a truck ran over it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, but she said sorry for like, an hour, and then we got McDonald’s. I think. That might have been a different time.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I grabbed the pen from him and wrote BEN. ‘What do you think Ben would want?’

  His eyes widened. ‘Out of every single thing?’

  ‘Anything at all.’

  ‘A dolphin-shaped speedboat.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It goes over the water and under the water and it’s shaped like a dolphin so it goes really fast through the water. That’s how they were designed. Not the boats, dolphins. Their beak cuts through the water so their body can come up behind it. That’s aerodynamics. Did you know it’s called a rostrum?’

  ‘The boat?’

  ‘Not the boat! The beak. A dolphin’s nose is called a rostrum.’

  ‘You’re like an encyclopaedia.’

  ‘Nah, I’m just good at organising stuff in my brain. I pretend it’s like a library and everything is in alphabetical order, and then when I need to remember something, I just go to that part of the library. Like just then, I went to D for Dolphin, and then I found the thing I knew about rostrums.’

  ‘Tell me something else.’

  He closed his eyes and his fingers moved like they were typing. ‘Emus and kangaroos can’t walk backwards. I found that under C for Coat of Arms. That’s why they’re on there, because they can’t go backwards. So it’s like Australia can’t go backwards.’

  I flicked the channel again. A man shouted at us, hair so black it was like he’d drawn it on with texta. ‘Someone in your life need cheering up? This frypan is for them! Make delicious pancakes with your custom message cooked right into them. Specially designed to put a smile on any dial!’

  Ben took the magazine from me and wrote JASON. Next to that he wrote PANCAKE FRYPAN.

  10

  DAD HAD A brown notebook he carried in his top pocket, next to his cigarettes. A pen, too; a certain kind of pen with a round lid and blue ink like a river. He said he couldn’t write anything unless it was with that pen.

  Sometimes he took them out while we were on adventures. Watched me and wrote notes, laughed and wrote notes, frowned and wrote notes. I wasn’t allowed to open it. He would slip it back into his pocket and it would be hidden, like it had gone through a wormhole.

  Once, he was in his favourite chair in the lounge room, music on, and I was quiet on purpose so I could sneak up on him. He had the book open in his hands, eyes closed, music playing, and on the page he had written: Vanilla milkshakes – Skye’s favourite.

  On Saturday morning I dragged Ben from bed and stood over him until he’d eaten all his Cornflakes. Mum and Jason had gone for a drive out of town. She hadn’t spoken to me again, even when we were together in the kitchen in the mornings, but she knew I would make sure Ben went to school, that he’d have an apple in his lunchbox. I’d tried the handle on Jason’s door twice but it didn’t move. I was almost grateful.

  It was cool and clear that Saturday. No clouds for miles, but it meant the warm air escaped. I showed Ben how to walk along the train line to get into town, and we blew dragon clouds as we walked, steam from our warm bodies.

  ‘You can hear it coming,’ I said, ‘so you don’t have to worry. Just need to make sure you get out of the way in time.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll hear it. See how flat everything is? It can’t sneak up on you.’

  ‘What if the wind is blowing the wrong way?’ He looked behind us, looked around me to see in front of us. ‘What if it’s blowing so hard it blows the sound of the train all the way in the other direction?’

  ‘It won’t. Here’s the bridge. Sometimes I come and sit here so I can look at the whole neighbourhood.’

  ‘Why would you want to look at the neighbourhood?’ he said.

  ‘Makes it seem further away, maybe.’

  We stuck our legs through the gaps in the railings. He swung his and they bumped against mine.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said.

  ‘You can see all the way down the street from here.’ He started pointing at things. ‘There’s the park and there’s the beach and there’s the tip. I can smell it. Do you know they sometimes set the tip on fire to get rid of some rubbish, even though there’s plastic in there? Plastic fumes are poisonous. They probably shouldn’t do that.’ He looked both ways down the train line.

  ‘You’ll hear it,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ He didn’t look at me. ‘There’s the girl who lives down the end of the street. She goes to my school. I guess all the kids my age go there though, don’t they? Because it’s the only one.’

  ‘Maybe. I think there’s a school in Port Pirie that some kids go to.’

  ‘That’s a long way to go. They must really hate my school.’ He picked a bit of enamel from the railing and flicked it to the canal below. ‘My teacher is leaving. She’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘That sounds nice.’

  ‘I guess. I like her. I kind of wish she wasn’t going to have a baby. Is that mean? I don’t want her to think I don’t like her because I don’t want her to have a baby.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘She’s always nice to me. You know, like when the other people aren’t. Sometimes in the playground they ignore me and she comes to sit with me. We have a spot together near the monkey bars and sometimes she sits with me all through lunch.’ A few more leaves of enamel flaked away.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, standing up. ‘You hear that? The train’s coming. I thought it was further away.’

  He leapt to his feet. ‘You said I would hear it! I didn’t hear it!’ He started running, throwing his skinny legs along the line, jumping over the sleepers.

  ‘It’s still ages away. Don’t run, you’ll trip over.’

  But he went, running for his life across the bridge. ‘It’ll get us, Skye! Trains are fast! Yiannis said there are trains in Japan that go more than three hundred kilometres an hour. That’s nearly as much as a Formula One car.’ He was at the other end of the bridge. The train had rounded the corner before the station. We had a few minutes. I chased after him, wishing I’d tied my shoelaces, hoping they wouldn’t catch in the bolts.

  The horn sounded. Ben squealed, tore away from me.

  ‘Slow down!’ The wind was blowing the wrong way and my voice came crashing back into my face. ‘Ben, seriousl
y!’

  The train wasn’t slowing. It was going to skip the station. It was going to skip the station and come straight for us, all those passengers charging right at Ben, who was running and tripping along the tracks like a gazelle.

  ‘Ben!’ I lurched for him, grabbed him around the middle, dived for the embankment. His whole body shook inside mine and we fell to the grass. I reached for my breath but it shot away from me and over the field. He got to his knees, started taking in gulps of air with his whole body. After a minute, his breathing slowed, and then mine did. The train slipped away into the distance.

  He sat next to me, frowned. ‘Never make me do that again.’ His face was so serious I nearly laughed, all the lines folded in.

  ‘Okay, I promise.’ I grabbed him in a headlock. ‘We were safe, though. Like I told you, you’ll hear it.’ But he hadn’t, and I’d almost missed it.

  We went the rest of the way along the road, past Ben’s school and into the main street. There were people everywhere, finding their way around their Saturdays. Families, some of them. Mums with bags of groceries and dads wearing kids on their shoulders, and every kind of combination. Ben watched them, and I watched him watching them.

  ‘How about we get a milkshake?’ I said.

  The place on the first block did a ripping milkshake. It was a corner store like any other, but the guy running it had a chest freezer full of ice-cream and three milkshake makers that ran pretty much all the time. And he’d bought a deep fryer, so you could get chips as well, and dip the chips into the milkshake. That was a thing Raf had taught me. It was disgusting, but in the way things can be disgusting and delicious at the same time.

  Ben looked up at the sign. ‘JOE’S STORE,’ he said. ‘Not very original.’

  ‘You’ve never been here?’

  ‘Who would take me here?’ He pushed through the plastic curtain.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ Joe said. He looked at Ben. ‘You look like a caramel, to me.’

  Ben grinned. ‘Yes, caramel! Thank you, Joe.’