The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘Vanilla for you, young lady?’

  ‘Right.’

  We took our metal cups into the street. Joe had set up a rusty table there, with two folding chairs that would catch your skin if you moved a millimetre the wrong way. We perched at the edge of them, as close as we could get to not being on them at all without falling off.

  ‘My milkshake is really good,’ Ben said.

  ‘Told ya.’

  ‘Thanks for saving my life before.’ He swirled his straw around until it stood up on his own. ‘I should wear a lifejacket or something. Maybe I can build a bubble and live in that. Yiannis says there are kids who actually live in bubbles because they’re allergic to everything in the whole world. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I read about that.’

  ‘I feel like I’m starting to forget the things Yiannis told me.’ He took a long sip of his shake. ‘Maybe this is what it’s like to get old.’

  ‘Why don’t you call him?’ I said.

  ‘Call him? What would I say?’

  ‘You could start with “hello”, I guess. Go from there.’

  He jumped from his seat. ‘How do I call him? Can we find his phone number?’

  ‘I bet we can. We can call the directory assistance people.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Sure. Finish your milkshake first.’

  He drew it through the straw so fast his eyes crossed. We went across the road to the payphone, chucked two dollars in the slot. The number was listed. I passed the phone to Ben and he jiggled his feet, sucked his lip through his teeth like he was waiting for an old girlfriend to pick up.

  ‘Yiannis?’ His face was alight. ‘It’s Ben. Teller. It’s Ben Teller.’ Feet jiggling. ‘I’m in Port Flinders. Yeah, that Port Flinders. I know! I forgot to tell Skye about the guy who drowned in the wheat silo here. Do they call that drowning, or something else?’ He took a deep breath. I could hear Yiannis’s squeaky voice on the other end of the line.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘It’s cold sometimes here but we’re two degrees higher latitude than you so it’s not as cold. And the desert is right near us. Nah, I haven’t been there. We might go fishing. Did you know jellyfish aren’t actually fish, even though their name has fish in it? Oh yeah, I did too. Nah, yeah, of course I did.’ He was smiling and frowning at the same time. His voice dropped. ‘How is my old school? Is anything different?’ He looked over at me, moved his hands for me to go away. ‘Have you got other friends now?’ Pause. ‘Yeah, me too. I showed them how to tie balloons to bees but I guess they already knew how to do it.’ Pause. ‘Oh yeah, sorry. I have to go as well. Skye’s taking me on an adventure today so we better get started I guess. Okay, bye, Yiannis.’

  He dropped the phone into its cradle and stared at it for a bit.

  ‘Yiannis doesn’t have any new friends either,’ he said finally. ‘Can we go and look at the water?’

  We went down past the pub, between the post office and the doctor’s surgery and behind the supermarket.

  ‘Is that where you work?’ Ben said.

  ‘Yep. That’s where I work.’ I thought of the conversation with Daryl. The thought of his spit-filled mouth made me want to puke. ‘Maybe soon I can buy my own phone,’ I said. ‘Then you can call Yiannis whenever you want.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’ We walked past the sign to the motel. Ben jumped up and punched it.

  The water was clear, small waves breaking over the rocky reef. Ben flattened a bit of sand and we sat together for a minute just watching. People went past. They were always going past. None of them stopped.

  ‘Reckon there are crabs here?’ I said.

  ‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are blue-ringed octopuses. They kill people. If they start to turn blue you have to run away as fast as you can or they will chase you and kill you.’

  ‘Terrifying.’

  ‘Let me bury you.’ He scrambled to his knees. I let him throw sand over my legs until they were buried in a mound. He went up and down the shore, looking for shells to make my leg mound into a castle, brought back a colourful pile of them.

  ‘These ones are from cockles, I think. We have them in Adelaide. I mean, we did have them in Adelaide. I guess the people who live in Adelaide now still have them.’ He pushed one into the sand castle, splayed open like a butterfly. ‘And I found some mother of pearl. It’s like an opal from the sea.’ He put that one on top. The sunlight caught it and bounced into my eyes. ‘And this is a cowrie. Hermit crabs live in them. They move out when they’re too big and go and find another shell.’ He added a few more. ‘All done.’

  ‘I make a pretty sandcastle, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sat next to me again, took a lot of fast, small breaths. ‘Will you move out when you get too big?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you’re too old to live with Mum. Will you leave?’

  He frowned, went all bug-eyed, panicked. Like I was going to leave him right at that second, not wait another minute there with him on the sand.

  ‘Where would I even go?’

  The tide was starting to come in. Kids gathered along the shoreline and dug trenches for it, squealed as it ran through.

  ‘Want to go build some canals?’ I said.

  He’d tucked his body over and rested his chin on his knees. ‘They’re called aqueducts.’

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

  ‘I dunno. I just know it.’ He let out a spherical breath. ‘Can I tell you something?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course you can.’

  ‘I’m scared about Mum.’

  ‘You are?’ The newly black circles around her eyes, the late nights counting five-dollar notes into a locked tin.

  ‘It’s pretty obvious Jason isn’t trafficking birds in tubes, which means he must be doing the thing you were saying.’

  ‘What did I say again?’ I thought of Mum with her hand curled around the arm of the couch, Jason’s hand bleeding right through its bandage.

  ‘You know, the thing with credit cards.’

  ‘Oh. Skimming?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m worried because Jason seems like he doesn’t like us very much and what if Mum goes to jail?’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She’s an adult,’ I said. ‘She’s . . .’ God, his sad eyes. Eyelashes all stuck together. ‘Hey? Look at me. Everything’s going to be fine. Okay?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mum’s not going to jail and even if she did, they wouldn’t let Jason look after us.’

  ‘So no one would look after us?’

  ‘Not no one. No, they would . . .’ What would they do? Take us away? Put us in an orphanage? ‘They’d send us to Nonno’s house.’

  ‘Your nonno?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He has a big, safe house. And goats.’

  ‘I wish we were at Nonno’s house now.’

  ‘We could be,’ I said. Just like that. Cogs turning in my head, imagining the three of us on his farm.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We don’t have to stay here.’

  ‘Yes we do.’

  ‘What if we don’t? What if we can take Mum and go?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We can make a plan. I’ve got a job now, so that’s a start.’ At $12.36 an hour, six hours a week, it’d take three years to get us out of Port Flinders.

  Ben was sitting straighter. ‘I’m good at making plans.’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘We’re going to need a good one,’ he said. He grabbed my hands, tried to pull me from the sandcastle. We went up to the post office and bought a tiny lined notebook and a pen shaped like a flamingo. The people in the line bought their things with their eyes down. The guy served us with his hands flapping all over the counter, shoulder twitching. He dropped the flamingo a couple of times. Didn’t charge us for the one he broke.


  We sat on the kerbside. It was after lunch; people were starting to go home to their Saturday afternoon families. What did people do on Saturday afternoons? Watch TV? Play board games? Wash their dogs? Some of them had paper bags with bread and vegies sticking out of them. Maybe they were having people around, making a roast. I knew how to make roast. Couldn’t afford to buy the ingredients though, and Mum didn’t like the way it heated the house up.

  A couple of older men shouted in the street. Walked down the middle of it, just shouting to one another, shaking brown bottles in the air and throwing empty ones into the pools of old rain. I watched as the bus did its u-turn and came back up the road again, watched the driver lean out the window and shout, ‘Get a job, Kenny!’ Ben watched, too.

  ‘That’s the guy I was telling you about.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘The homeless guy. Is he sick?’

  ‘He might be.’

  The bus drove on. Kenny dropped to his knees on the bitumen, then to his face, and lay there with his eyes on the chicken shop and his hands behind his back, laughing.

  Ben tugged on my arm. ‘The plan is,’ he said, showing me where he’d drawn a crude map on the first page of the book, ‘we sneak out in the middle of the night. Jason can’t see us leaving or he’ll make us stay.’ He looked up at me. ‘Or he’ll make Mum stay, I guess.’ He pointed to some dotted lines, an arrow. ‘We could go out this way. The train line would be the easiest but I don’t know if it’s safe unless it’s easier to hear the train in the middle of the night. Is it easier to hear in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I’ve never tried it in the middle of the night.’

  He made a hmm noise. ‘We should test it out before we go. Then we can hide at the station until the first train comes. Do you know what time that is?’

  ‘Nope.’

  He frowned. ‘Tell me your plan then.’

  Daryl again, his sweaty neck rolls. I could get some more shifts. Go in every day and be close enough to him to hear the hair growing from his earlobes. And to Jeannie, who’d never done anything except stand behind that counter with her smile pasted on.

  ‘I had only got as far as going to Nonno’s farm.’

  ‘Where is Nonno’s farm?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but it’s in Happy Valley.’

  ‘That sounds nice,’ he said, closing his eyes. ‘Happy Valley. It sounds like the kind of place they would make juice, don’t you think? Happy Valley Juice.’

  ‘Nonno used to make orange juice with me,’ I said.

  ‘How will we find him?’

  ‘If his number’s not private I’ll find it in the White Pages. Or I think maybe you can sometimes get people’s addresses from the electoral roll.’

  ‘Maybe the police can find him.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask the police.’

  ‘Oh.’ He nodded. ‘Because of Jason’s credit card skimming.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ben ran over to the payphone and pulled out the White Pages.

  ‘What’s your nonno’s last name?’ he said.

  ‘Same as my dad’s last name,’ I said. ‘Esposito.’

  He ran his stubby finger down the pages. ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘E-S-P-O-S-I-T-O.’

  ‘Oh, here they are. Espositos. There’s a bunch of them. What’s your nonno’s name?’

  I had the picture of him so firmly in my mind. His crooked nose, the way his eyebrows kind of shot out from his face like they were trying to escape him. Big hands, dirty from working on the farm but the kind of dirty you couldn’t wash off, so dirty the skin underneath his skin was dirty. But his name. His name.

  ‘Claudio?’

  Ben frowned at the page. ‘There’s one C Esposito but they live in Modbury. Is that near Happy Valley?’

  ‘Nowhere near.’ He had one big jacket he wore all the time, with wool folded over the ends of the sleeves, and it smelled like his pipe and oranges. He tucked me under it in the afternoons, let me use his silver letter opener to unpack his mail. ‘It ends with an “O”, I’m sure.’

  ‘Okay, but the phone book only has the letters names start with.’

  ‘I remember! Gino.’

  ‘Two G Espositos in here. It says this one lives in somewhere called Reynella. Is that near Happy Valley?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I think so.’ I went to take the book from him but he pulled it away.

  ‘The other one is in Seaford Downs! That can’t be Nonno, he would have come to visit you if he lived in the same suburb, wouldn’t he?’

  I frowned. ‘It’s a really old phone book.’

  ‘What was your dad’s name? You told me once but I can’t remember. That hardly ever happens. I always remember everything. Was he a G Esposito?’

  Greg Esposito. My dad, Greg.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘Maybe you should call both of these. Maybe you should call them right now. I guess it could be a woman, couldn’t it? Gin-a Esposito. I feel like I’ve said Esposito so many times it doesn’t make sense anymore.’ He peered into the book.

  My throat felt like someone had put Glad Wrap over it. I couldn’t get the air in properly – it stuck to the film at the back of my mouth.

  ‘Let’s call them. There’s only two. I can call the one in Seaford Downs if you’re worried. You seem worried.’ My windpipe full of stones, lungs tightening. ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘It’s expensive to call from the payphone. Anyway, I can search for them online at home.’

  He chewed on the flamingo’s fuzzy head. ‘I guess that’s a good start. Maybe we can blend our two plans together.’ He handed the notebook to me. ‘I don’t know what happens after we get on the train. You might have to figure that bit out.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, and wrote EARN MORE MONEY at the top of a new page, put the notebook in my pocket. ‘I’ll put the book back.’ I tore out the page of Espositos and shoved that into my pocket too.

  Clouds had clustered together down past the highway, wind blowing around an empty can in the street. Ben crossed his arms and brought his bony knees underneath them. ‘I thought we were going on an adventure,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even had any lunch and now it’s going to rain.’

  ‘Why don’t we go down to the oval? Sometimes they play footy there on a Saturday afternoon.’ He wasn’t convinced. ‘If they’re playing, the sausage sizzle should be going.’

  We could smell it before we even turned the corner, the fat meat burning on the grill. Some days you could get your sausage and bread with onions and even bacon, depending on who was cooking it. Two dollars, and a dollar for a can of drink.

  The guys were on the oval. I heard Raf’s voice from the gate, not the words he was saying but the way he was saying them. Ben jumped over the fence, caught his shorts on a bit of loose wire. We lined up for a minute, bought two sausages and drowned them in homemade barbecue sauce. I got a lemonade, cracked it open and let the bubbles spit at me.

  Claud had a seat in the grandstand, away from the wind. She waved us over. Ben sat between us with his head on her knee and ate his sausage sideways.

  ‘Hey, kiddo,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, without lifting his head. ‘I hate football.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘At least this is the last game they’re playing here before they go on their big tour.’

  They’d got all dressed up in their proper guernseys, all matching. It was getting dark so early. The oval lights were on – the two that worked, anyway – and the seagulls had already gathered around them to pick off the moths. Cold air came up from the sea and into my shoes. I tucked them under my legs.

  Raf always started on the wing. The captain would never start in the ruck, he’d said. If he really wanted to inspire his team, he had to be everywhere. Forward line, back line, chasing down the ball. He was easy to spot, even though their tops were identical. The whistle blew and he came running down the south side, where I was sitting
, his hair shiny in the gloomy afternoon and the artificial light. Grinning. Taking the mark. Pointing to his teammates as they swarmed the field like pack animals, each one vying for the best spot, to be the open man. It started to rain, just a little.

  They moved as one. A living organism. The ground got slippery but they used it, sliding back and forth across the oval to the music of the whistle. Time after time they got it out of the centre, passed it to the guys on the flank or to the centre-half forward, and they kicked it on past the fifty-metre line and each time the ball went between the posts they gathered together on the grass, twenty of them in a laughing, gasping heap with their red-and-white stripes like a snake.

  The siren blew for half-time, and the players all huddled together in the middle of the oval.

  ‘They must be cold,’ Ben said.

  ‘Nah,’ said Claud. ‘That’s a team huddle. Rafferty’s going to give them a half-time pep talk.’

  He had their attention, stomping around the outside of the group, pointing his finger into the air a lot, then shoving it into his palm. He looked across to the other team, brought his guys in close and said things we couldn’t hear. And then he looked to the grandstand. Saw me. Smiled, pointed to the clouds.

  Claud squeezed my knee.

  The siren went again. Ben was restless, jiggling his knee up and down. ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he said.

  ‘You’re just bored.’ I gave him a shove. ‘You know what they say about being bored. Only boring people get bored.’

  ‘I’m not boring. This is the worst adventure I’ve ever been on. I was thinking it would be like Shackleton or the Titanic. Action. It’s so cold and football is so boring and my sausage is all gone.’ He sighed deeply.

  Claud pulled some biscuits from her bag. ‘When I’m bored watching the footy, which is always’ – she winked at me – ‘I eat these bickies. They’ve got the time on them, see? You gotta check the time before you eat them, so it makes them last a bit longer.’

  Ben took one. ‘Five past one. This is easy.’ Claud handed him another. ‘Nine thirty.’ He sighed. ‘I wish it was nine thirty. Then I could be in bed instead of watching this.’ I kicked him in the shin. ‘What? It’s true.’

  ‘You don’t normally complain so much. You’ve been listening to Jason.’