The Gulf

by Anna Spargo-Ryan

  ‘That right?’

  ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

  ‘How many more hours?’

  ‘As many as you can give me. Daytime. Monday to Friday.’

  ‘You want to wag school so you can work in a supermarket?’ He laughed. ‘Why don’t you just drop out?’

  ‘My mum can’t know either.’ I thought of Jason counting five-dollar notes onto the glass table. ‘It’s a secret. A surprise.’

  He rubbed his sweaty jaw. ‘And what’s in it for me?’ A smile crept in at the corners of his mouth. He had a bit of food stuck there, maybe toast. Stomach acid rose into my throat.

  ‘Sixteen-year-olds are cheap,’ I said. ‘You can pay me less than Jeannie and I can stay on my feet longer. And no more breaks with Jeannie.’

  He slid closer. Old-man aftershave, mouldy-clothes smell like when they’ve been left in the machine for a couple of washes. ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘What else are you gonna give me?’ When he smiled the gaps in his back teeth showed.

  ‘Whatever you want.’ My stomach turned over. That settled acrid smell between his fat rolls. He drew his sweaty mouth along my cheek. They were just words. I’d be finished and on the train before he cashed in anyway. ‘Deal?’

  ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow. Don’t be late.’

  I ducked out through the back door, slammed it behind me and hyperventilated into my hands. I heard a man shout out across the docks, Hey, dog! and then just the sea birds calling for their breakfast.

  On Monday morning, I put on my school uniform and took Ben down the road to the school’s morning walking bus. He liked it better when I took him to school, he said, but I had to be at the supermarket when it opened at nine and it was right across town. He looked up at me like his face was stitched on, those sad eyes and his drooping mouth.

  ‘You’ll be all right, mate,’ I said. ‘It’s just the walking bus. You’ve done this heaps of times. Hang on to the rope.’

  He made a little bleating sound.

  ‘I have to go to the supermarket every day this week, for work experience. Wait for the bus home after school, by the main building, okay?’

  He nodded. He’d drawn a picture of a tortoise on the back of his hand in biro. The other kids started arriving to walk to school but none of them talked to him. The woman leading the bus didn’t even talk to him, just fussed around the other kids, asked them about their lunches and their dads.

  It was still cold, just a bit of spring breaking through. I thought about getting the school bus – it was just a couple of blocks from the oval to the supermarket – but I couldn’t risk being caught. Not on the first day. Daryl would never give me another chance. Instead I went around the main road, slipped in behind the weird shopping centre at the main roundabout, walked in short steps through the sand. The beach was quiet. Wind picked up the granules and flicked them in sharp slashes on my skin. A couple of boats hung out in the marina with their sails down, beat a slow rhythm into the jetty pylons.

  I thought about Ben in the walking bus. Couldn’t stop thinking about him, for a minute, filled up my whole head with thoughts of him going to school and the other kids ignoring him.

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Stop it.’ A bird looked at me with its one red eye. ‘Just piss off.’

  At the corner I stepped over a guy with his hand inside a paper bag, eyes closed into his head. He didn’t move. Grunted a bit, breathed out in one long stream.

  Daryl had the front door open and was scrawling some specials on a whiteboard.

  ‘You’re a girl,’ he said. ‘Your handwriting’s probably better than mine.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s how it works,’ I said. The back of his head had rolls of fat with hair coming out of them. Rivers of sweat already, not even nine in the morning and the middle of winter. When he breathed, the sides of his body expanded. He was bagpipes. I laughed at the idea and he shoved the texta in my hand.

  ‘What’s this? School uniform? Gonna sneak in a Maths class at lunch?’

  ‘Habit,’ I said.

  ‘You can get changed in the freezer room. Don’t be long, though. Someone might need to come back there.’ He wheezed his piano accordion sides.

  For a while I just sat there, in the freezer room, on some plastic crates with the sides broken off. Took out my bit of paper with the plan on it, but it still just said EARN MORE MONEY and nothing else. We could catch the train back to Adelaide, find Nonno on his farm. I could pick fruit there, walk Ben down the hill to school in the mornings without a rope. He had orange trees and the neighbours had apple trees and some of them sold them from stands right on the road. Mum could get a job at the bank again. Happy Valley had to have a bank, didn’t it?

  I pulled on my work uniform. Adjusted my badge, which had been upgraded from TRAINEE to LISA. Someone else’s badge. It didn’t matter; no one was going to have a chance to learn my name anyway. In six weeks I could earn three thousand dollars, which was more money than I could even think about in one go.

  I thought of school, struck for a second by how good it had felt to learn my lines for Macbeth. I could catch up. Once we’d got out, I could catch up.

  The door to the freezer room croaked. Daryl stuck his head in, pulled the door right open and shoved his body through it. ‘Get a move on,’ he said, in a spray of spit. ‘Need you to get those specials written up before the oldies get here. Monday is scenic-route day on the community bus, you know.’ He slid next to me as I left, put his body between the exit and mine. His whole body throbbed, like his heart was trying to escape.

  I pulled the sweaty texta across the whiteboard. Apples: $2.99 a kilo. Homebrand cheese slices: $4.95. Plastic-wrapped mince: $6. I drew a picture of a cow next to it, put a bell around its neck. Some of them were actual bargains and I planned a couple of good meals, imagined pulling a proper dinner from the oven instead of a pizza with bits of pig gut frozen to it. Thought again about Ben and the walking bus. He would be there by now, if the clock above the exit was right. Ten past nine. Tired and sad at the front of his classroom, waiting for someone to talk to him.

  Jeannie blew in. Her hair was newly dyed, dark and shiny at the roots, and she’d pinned it away from her face. Dark red lipstick, circles of blush the way women wore it in pictures from the eighties.

  ‘You’re late,’ Daryl said, but only for show. She clipped on her name tag, set herself up at her regular station. She had a bit of knitting stored in the cash register, for the quiet times. I watched her nicotine-stained fingers work the wool around and around.

  ‘What are you knitting?’ I said.

  ‘Skye!’ She put her hand to her chest, like she’d seen a ghost. ‘What’re you doing here? It’s Monday, right?’ She looked up at the clock as though it knew the answer.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m doing some day shifts. Got a bunch of frees at school.’

  ‘Gotcha.’ She touched the hooked rows of wool. ‘Daughter’s having a little’un. Up in Darwin.’ She turned it over in her hands. ‘Guess they don’t need much knitting in Darwin though, huh. Never been there myself.’

  The oldies filed through. Jeannie talked to all of them, told them something they already knew about themselves: ‘Dave Cheng, your daughter is having a baby! Klaus, we’re all getting older, aren’t we? Ha ha. Lou, look at that shirt.’ They stopped to listen. Turned their hearing aids up and down, depending on whether they liked the conversation. Pushed their way along the day, found something to keep them busy in the supermarket. They came through my line, too, with their faces all done up and their hair nice and asked me about one thing or another as though they were all my grandmothers. Not all of them, of course. Some put a pack of gum on the conveyer belt and paid in ten-cent pieces while I ignored their bulging pockets. I had a lunchbreak, pushed a milk crate against the concrete wall and stared out at the ocean because I didn’t know what else to do with my thirty minutes. Kicked a couple of stones. Ate a Kool Mint I’d found in my cash drawer, turned it ov
er with my tongue until the chewy part had got hard and then dissolved.

  That first afternoon, I waited for the bus under the clock tower and listened to it chime for five thirty. I stood there in the dark, thought of Ben getting himself home from school, finding his own afternoon snack, talking to wherever he kept Bilbo. My feet ached in my cheap shoes. Knees, too, trying to bend under my tired weight but fixed rigid. No wonder Jeannie had a stool.

  The bus was due at twenty-to. School had finished hours ago, no one would see me. But Ben, alone in the house. I decided instead to walk up to the chicken shop, get one of those rotisserie ones with their backs all burned. Peas and gravy. Ben loved peas and gravy, loved stacking them all up on his fork to see how many he could balance there.

  The guy at the chicken shop looked me up and down, the way they always did. Grunted a bit from behind his greasy moustache, boiled and slobbered inside his skin. They had a family special and I bought it with the money I had left from last week. Tried not to think about the name of it – ‘the family special’ – the people I would take it home to. Let myself picture, for a second, the way the three of us might have eaten it around the table together, before Jason, with the light coming in from the train station and the Adelmanns arguing down the walkway.

  A family special was the chicken, large chips, peas and gravy, a couple of sad wedges of pumpkin. He said he would throw in a Greek salad, or a pasta salad. Or I could take a 1.25L bottle of soft drink, it was up to me.

  ‘Greek salad,’ I said, then, ‘Actually, Coke.’ Ben would snort it out through his nose and squeal and laugh because according to him the bubbles felt like setting your nostril hairs on fire.

  ‘Fifteen ninety-five,’ the chicken man said, coughed a bit of phlegm into his fist. I tapped my card on the machine. The money ran out of my bank and into their bank, just numbers tripping along from one computer to another. I’d earned a hundred dollars at the supermarket in just one day. Enough to buy a ticket from Port Flinders to Adelaide, but only one.

  I took the plastic bags back to the bus stop. Five forty-eight. I watched the bus do its u-turn at the end of the main street. It was like a morose merry-go-round, making its way up and down the main part of town all day long, as though it had actual places to go. It sighed to a stop at my feet. The doors folded open in that way they had, with a kind of reluctance. I said hello to the driver and without looking up took a seat by the door. The bus croaked away from the kerb, bundled itself along the main road.

  A voice at my side. A bolt of warm skin and hot breath.

  ‘How’d you go?’ Raf said.

  ‘Pretty good, I guess. Ordered some stock. Did some . . . inventory.’

  ‘Oh yeah? I pulled bugs from the front grille of an old ute.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Life skills, huh.’ He yawned. ‘I’m knackered.’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘Would it help if I got us some hot chips?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘With gravy?’

  ‘I’ve already got some.’ I held up my bags. ‘They call this a family pack. I’m taking it home to my family.’

  He smiled a bit, just with the narrow part of his mouth. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay.’ The bus filled up with the chicken shop smell. Not just the chicken, but those styrofoam packets and the gravy seeping into the pores of them. Plastic and permanent. I pulled a couple of chips from the foil bag; they were soggy in the middle and they drooped into my mouth. Raf grabbed one. He pulled a face as he ate it.

  ‘You went to Sad Tom’s,’ he said.

  ‘I did what?’

  ‘Sad Tom’s is the worst chicken shop in the world. I can’t believe you went there. Everyone knows you go over the road to Roosted.’

  His voice had laughter in it, and my chest was heavy with the weight of the bags but he didn’t notice. We were at his stop, anyway; his neat house with its people inside.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? After “work”.’ He pulled a face at ‘work’.

  I watched him through the window, watched Claud hug him at the front door and the light was all yellow behind her. I’d had forty-two dollars in the bank and now sixteen of it was sad chicken wrapped in non-degradable plastic.

  At the spinifex block, the bus stopped its last stop before its next u-turn. I took the bags inside. Ben sat alone at the table, writing on a bit of scrap paper with the flamingo pen. He took the family pack from me and got us a couple of plates and a spoon for the peas. Stacked his high on his fork. They tasted of nothing – lumps of flour and crushed bugs. He shoved the leaning tower into his mouth, grimaced for a second, swallowed it down.

  ‘Thanks for getting this great dinner,’ he said.

  I told him about Sad Tom, owner of the worst chicken shop in the world.

  ‘It’s not the worst chicken in the world,’ he said. ‘The worst chicken in the world would be poisonous and maybe even still alive.’

  ‘Where are Mum and Jason?’

  He shrugged. ‘They yelled at me a bit before because I had the TV too loud, then they went out the back and shouted at each other. And now Mum’s in the shower.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How was work?’

  ‘Fine. Working on the plan.’ Hiding from Daryl in the meat freezer and working on the plan. Standing out the back of the supermarket in the cold wind and working on the plan. Soon I’d have enough to get all three of us to Adelaide and – Nonno’s? Maybe Mum could find us another apartment. Either way, Port Flinders would be far behind.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve been working on my part of the plan.’ He pushed across his scrap of paper. ‘Did you know the train station has a really old section where bushrangers used to hide out? I found a book about it in the school library. There’s a trapdoor and you’re not supposed to go down there because the government decided to protect it, but I reckon if we went in the middle of the night no one would notice. And they wouldn’t be able to find us. We could wait there until the train came.’

  ‘That’s a good thought,’ I said, chewed on a bit of chicken skin.

  ‘I’m just so worried Jason might try to come after us. Because he misses Mum.’ He flipped the paper over. ‘So I’ve got another plan as well, in case he tries.’ He had a picture of the three of us together; Mum and I with suitcases and he with a tortoise on a leash. ‘Mum told me about someone in her family who lives in the hills too, like Nonno, but they live near a chocolate factory or an alpaca farm. Do you know they sell broken chocolate for cheaper? Even though broken chocolate tastes exactly like normal chocolate?’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Jason wouldn’t be able to find us. I bet they would let us all come and stay with them, if she told them what was happening.’ He took a quick breath and was quiet, hand shaking over the paper.

  I spoke in the lowest voice I could find, the least demanding. ‘What is happening?’

  ‘You know. The credit card thing you said.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He picked at the skin around his fingernails. ‘And the yelling. I don’t know why he’s always yelling. If people yell too much they can get a thing called polyps in their throat and sometimes cancer.’

  I pointed at his reversed paper. ‘What’s this part of the diagram for?’

  ‘That’s the beach,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how far it is from the hills but I thought we could go there and visit the apartment, maybe, in case the people who bought it want to move out. I want to meet Amir’s new baby. Well, his mum’s baby.’ He paused. ‘Do you think we should tell Mum about the plan? I don’t want her to find out and not have any time to pack. Maybe we need to tell her enough in advance so she can decide whether to come or not. So we’re not just leaving in the middle of the night without her knowing.’

  I pushed the paper back to him. ‘Just let me worry about that bit, okay? How’s your chicken?’

  He shoved a bit more into his mouth. ‘It’s goo
d,’ he said, but it was hard along the edges, like it had been sitting in the bain-marie for days.

  *

  In the morning, I dropped Ben at his walking bus again and went back the long way to the supermarket. I wrote on the specials board, pinned Lisa’s name tag to my shirt, took the sharpie out to the meat freezer. On Tuesdays we did a package deal on sausages made from pigs’ arseholes and yesterday’s bread. Bargain. I drew a little pig on the specials board, drew a knife sticking into it. Rubbed it out.

  It was the same, all day, as the day before. The old people examining every single apple before they chose one. Their yelling at the deli counter, the processed meats all too colourful. Children around the lollies, the way they tugged at their parents’ clothes until they found some substitute for actually bothering to listen to what they had to say. A packet of Smarties. The end of a sesame bar. The main door slid open and shut like peek-a-boo hands, keeping me from the near-empty car park beyond, and at lunchtime I sat at my milk carton picnic table and ate cheese sticks from the packet.

  Daryl groaned around me, eyes always going. He watched me go to the bathroom, watched me clock in and out of my thirty-minute lunchbreak, counting every second I was late. And each time I marked down the meat in the freezer, he was there, appearing as if from nowhere in the dark corners where no one would see him. Tapping his watch. Pointing at the clock. Always, always hurrying me along, as though he had somewhere to be besides looking me up and down in my work uniform.

  At five thirty I took the sale-priced sausages and a few vegetables and caught the bus from its u-turn stop. I saw Raf there again, waiting for me in the middle row with a big smile. I sat next to him. Didn’t put the bag of sausages too close, in case they got hot against his skin.

  ‘I got sent out to get pies for the guys today. You?’

  ‘An old lady peed in the cereal aisle.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  He laughed a bit, rode with me back to my house and didn’t say anything, just waved from the window as the bus turned around. Ben had his knees around his ears, watching TV half upside down, all the blood rushing into his face.