The Boat

by NAM LE

  "Hey, Romeo," Cale called out.

  Always he returned to this. Get him off me. And – weak in the legs – he'd frozen. A heavy shape barreled across his vision and lifted the body clean off Lester and drove it hard into the ground. Trapped beneath Dory's weight, it gave out an odd creaking sound. Jamie circled around for a last look, saw Dory holding down the head, then saw the stranger's face – it could only have been Wilhelm – his mouth agape and crammed over a steel sprinkler head, cheeks streaming and shuddering. His face a picture of drowning. Lester staggered to his feet and glared at Jamie, then Dory looked up at him too. Lester made to speak but Dory stopped him. His arms still bearing down on Wilhelm's head, he'd said: You're rubbish.

  But that was a year ago. Now, things were different. He was a hero now.

  "Hey, Jamie, wake up." Cale's voice sounded as though it had risen a meter.

  "Hmm."

  "Your girlfriend's here."

  "Piss off."

  Bit by bit his thoughts tailed off; he began to feel the knurled wood jutting into his hip bone. His back roasting. He gazed down. Small schools of baitfish inflected the clear water. Old squidding lines and sinkers caught on the crossplanks, bearded with kelp.

  "Nothing you wanna say to her?"

  Jamie reached behind himself and pulled down his board-shorts, flapping one bum cheek open and shut: "Piss ... off."

  Michael sniggered.

  "Piss... off... Cale... y."

  "Any luck?"

  A girl's voice – he spun over, shielded his eyes. It couldn't be. She was standing at the head of the jetty with Tammie, both decked out in their netball gear. Alison still wearing a bib that spelled "GA" – goal attack – in large lettering. Cale, next to him, cracking up.

  "Nope," reported Michael. "No fish."

  "What'd I say?" said Cale.

  "You're a fuckwit," said Jamie.

  "I'm a fuckwit? Whose knickers are down?"

  Even Michael couldn't conceal his smile. Tammie laughed, a squeezed sound like the yapping of a small dog. She was playing with her camisole straps, studying him.

  "You told me to come," said Alison.

  He got up, face burning. He felt suddenly naked in front of them. Even though everyone, all summer, went around in just their boardies, he felt naked. "We're actually heading back," he said, gesturing to Michael. Why had he said that?

  "Cool," said Alison. "C’arn, then." She turned to address Cale: "There's a party on Thursday. Slogger Tom's place-you should come too." "What's in it for me?" For a second Jamie was thrilled by his friend's boldness, then he felt strangely uneasy.

  "You're Cale, right?" "Yep," he said, grinning broadly.

  But Alison didn't fall for his act. Her voice turned clerical, polished: "This is Tammie." Tammie smiled dutifully. She was hot alright, thought Jamie, but when she smiled there was something puddled about her face.

  Cale said, "So this is Tammie."

  The whole way, Michael walked in front of them, lugging the gear in one hand and his cricket ball in the other. He kept his head bowed and never looked back. By some instinct he led them on a roundabout route – avoiding the foreshore, the main street with its drab, dusty stretch of shops – and cut across the edge of the tidal flats. The afternoon was cooling fast.

  Still plenty of people around.

  When they reached the asphalt Alison touched her hand to the back of Jamie's elbow. She crossed the road and started hiking up the scrubby slope. Jamie watched his brother trudge the other way, up the road to their house. Then, without a word, he followed Alison. The ground beneath them skiddy with shell grit. As they climbed, the sun absorbed itself into her body: calves, hamstrings, the belt of skin above her skirt, the backs of her golden arms. The glaring nylon letters on her bib. She scuffed through the saltbush and mulga, kicking up little plumes of dust, and he stepped hypnotically into them.

  They reached the clearing. At the center of the bluff – on its highest table of land – was the old stone courthouse, long ago ruined. It was arched with white, oxidized columns, reared against a low sky. The seaward wall had been torn away by the weather, creating the impression of a great stage overlooking the ocean.

  Alison led him around the jagged masonry and leaned against a wall, bouncing on her heels.

  "What's the saddest place you know," she said, "this is mine."

  He didn't speak. Baffled by her question. Still catching up to the fact of being there, alone, with her. Then he said, "Why?"

  Before her sickness, his mum had often dragged him here in the dark of first morning. She liked painting the sea before sunlight came up and flattened the water. He 'd cart her stuff along the ridge, trying to stay awake, and she'd talk, sometimes to him, sometimes to herself. She'd always been fascinated by the courthouse's history. How, more than a hundred years ago, the town council, flush with fishing money, had commissioned a series of public buildings – of which the courthouse was to be the first – and how, a week after the naming ceremony, a storm had rolled in and ripped it apart. According to the legend, the chief benefactor, after whom the courthouse was named, had packed his wife and five children into a skiff the very next day and rowed them out to sea – never to be seen again. The story appealed equally to his mum's senses of the romantic and the absurd. The town had abandoned its building program, closed off all the access roads. Too many bad omens all round. As she laughed to herself he'd see the courthouse ahead, floaty and blue-glowing-hinting at a past that seemed, at that hour, still very much present.

  "Have you ever ..." Alison began. "Nah, that's stupid."

  Below them sunlight lay over the whole bay. The sea breathed against the lip of the pale shore. Back from the water's edge, flats and dunes encircling it, the town glinted like a single eye.

  "What?"

  "Nah."

  He looked around, listened. So exposed up here. The wind loud and brackish. He made out somewhere nearby the clickety sound of skateboarders, the high-pitched drone of jet skis out on the water. Human voices skimming like mozzies across its surface.

  He turned away from the sea and pointed out his family's house on the adjoining spur, along the winding saddle.

  "That's you guys?" she asked.

  "My mum used to come here to paint."

  She let it pass. She said, "Your brother looks like you," then, noting his lack of enthusiasm, went on, "You'd think you'd get an awesome view from up here – of all places, right?" It came out in a single quick exhalation: "But you look and you look and everything's just shithouse." Skating her hands down the side of her pleated skirt: "Your friend, Cale, is he always high?"

  "He's a good bloke."

  She didn't seem happy with that.

  "His girlfriend died in Europe," he added lamely.

  "Europe?" Her voice twisted up.

  "Yeah, he's been everywhere. Hawaii and Africa and everywhere, before he came here."

  She chortled. "Why would anyone come here?"

  Now she'd stopped bouncing, now she was brushing her hands together. Both of her hands were within reach.

  "I mean," she said, "there's not even fish here anymore."

  With other girls, it was just the next thing – hands, neck, pash, fingers under their tops. But with her, for him, nothing was next.

  "C’arn, then," she said softly.

  She eased forward and leaned her body into his bare chest. Her smile lopsided, bigger and bigger. Then her mouth sprang open and then they were kissing. He was kissing Alison Fischer. There was a mineral tizz on her tongue, the smell of wet rock. He lifted his hand to her hair.

  "Ugh." She stepped back, soles crunching on broken glass. "It stinks in here." She skipped over to the opposite wall, standing beneath a deep, high crevice that might once have held a window. The wind even choppier in that corner.

  "Animals come here for shelter," he said. Who'd told him that? The musty smell seemed familiar.

  "Well, they stink."

  She kissed him again. He felt the start
of a hard-on, pressing through the mesh lining of his shorts – then quickly wilting. Maybe thinking about it. Maybe thinking about Dory. An awful lag behind this happening and the idea of it. She lifted her bib and wiped her mouth.

  "Okay, then," she said.

  "Sorry."

  Wordlessly they looked out of the broken wall over the bay. The sun full in the sky. There was a blue kite on the wind and far below, way out on the ocean coast, the black half bodies of surfers, ducking into early-breaking waves or standing, slewing across the tall steep faces until they dropped into white slag. Every ride ended in failure. He'd never noticed this before.

  "I'm not scared, you know."

  He didn't say anything.

  "Me and him aren't really together."

  "Who, Dory?" He tried to sound nonchalant.

  "Everyone just assumes." She smiled into the open, blustery air. "So how well do you know him? Are you guys, like, friends?"

  "Dory?"

  "No, the fucking postman. Yes, Dory."

  "I mean," Jamie said carefully, "we play on the same team. He's a good ruck." He paused for a moment. "A good bloke."

  "A good bloke," she mimicked.

  He fell silent. The water of the bay seemed, if possible, to bulge. In that light it seemed as though the courthouse was tilting, about to slide into the ocean.

  "See that?"

  The kite hung in the high wind, still and full. Then a slip of color again. Way out a ship coughed up black smoke ever more feebly. He realized she was looking off to one side – past the dunes, past the old rock pier, even – to the low, wet lines of swale behind. Deep where it was dark, shallow where pooled with light.

  "That's where he lives," she said. "With his uncle."

  "Good fishing out there." Immediately, the rock pier imagined itself into his mind. Black and slick, lathered with surf. He'd managed, for so long, not to think about it.

  "Their place, though – you wouldn't believe."

  But it, too, was clear to him: one of those fibro, tin-roofed affairs, a single naked bulb shearing light through planked windows. He'd seen it from the boat. Stray dogs ganging outside.

  "How much cash you got on you?" she asked abruptly.

  "Cash?"

  She stepped out from the stone recess and a breeze snapped up a fistful of her hair, suspended it above her head.

  "We could go to the bottle shop," she said.

  He thought frantically for a moment. "What about ID? Do you have – I know, we could get Cale's ID."

  But she was already somewhere else in her head. It struck him she was bored with him. Without warning she came over and leaned into his shoulder and, slowly collapsing her knees, traced her upper lip – inch by inch – all the way down to the tips of his fingers. He stood there inside the stone walls, suffused in sun, shock-still, the hot tension through his body almost painful. What happened now?

  "It's you!" She crinkled up her nose. "You! You stink of fish."

  His cheeks flared red. "Shit," he said. He brought up his fingers and smelled them. Bait. "You're right. Shit, sorry."

  She hopped back with a childlike little scowl. He struggled for an excuse and she watched him, letting him struggle, saying nothing. Finally he slinked off. Now she was saying something but he was too busy with shame to take in her final words. The easterly gusted up. Then, at the edge of the granite ruin, he forced himself to turn around.

  "There's tonight," she called into the wind's low howl.

  "What?" He cupped his ear.

  "Thursday night," she was saying. "See you Thursday night."

  ***

  HIS MUM WAS dying and seemed torn between ignoring it and rushing toward it. She wanted to meet it in the middle of many arrangements. After the first relapse – the scans, the taps, the tests – she sank back into her work, her only concession to the diagnosis being a switch from spatulas to paintbrushes. She spent even more time outdoors, painting, gardening. She was always a physical gardener: sporting Blundstone boots and a singlet, gloves up to her elbows and her ginger hair scrunched back with anything at hand – a rubber band, a torn strip from a plastic bag. She was indefatigable. If asked, she'd say it was just like pins and needles. What was the phrase people used? – she refused to become her illness. She beat it back.

  Then, two years ago, the second major relapse. She claimed, afterward, that she didn't remember any of it. But she'd seen him. They'd seen each other. She'd lain on her side, the easel also knocked on its side. It was as though she'd been dancing with it and they'd tripped over together. Her face was compressed against the floor, strands of hair streaked diagonally across it, captured as though in a thrash of passion. Everywhere there was bright cerulean blue paint, the entire floor slick and sky-colored, a centimeter deep, leaching into her arms, her scissored legs, her smock and boots. Her palms were vivid orange.

  "Mum," he said.

  But she couldn't speak. The blue paint coated her lips – through it he saw the tip of her blue tongue – it matted her hair, enclosed her right eye like a face mask. That eye was open. It didn't blink. You could see. It was nightmare in her head.

  "Mum?"

  Never – it'd never been this serious. Once before, he'd come upon her slumped on the kitchen lino. Just dizzy, she'd said. She'd made him promise not to tell Dad. He knelt, now, watching her. He put out his hand but it seemed incapable of touching anything. Her eye roved, jerkily, like a puppet's, around the room – to him – away – to him again. She was frozen in the middle of her mangled sidestroke, the paint frothing in front of her mouth. Slowly it hardened into a lighter blue paste. He felt as if he were breathing it as well. Then the footsteps, the bottomed-out growl of his dad's voice – what happened, how long, how long – how long – the dark form crouching down, standing up, crouching down again and cutting off her hair, the crunch of the scissors, then stripping her up, limb by limb, out of the dry blue muck. A long pause.

  Come on, Jamie.

  Once, he'd seen her in front of the bathroom mirror. She was plunging a bone-gray comb again and again into her hair, as though punishing it. Arms trembling. She caught his eye in the mirror and smiled. Here, she said, holding it out. Help me.

  ***

  He washed the sand off his feet at the outside tap. When he came into the living room she shifted in her reclining couch, in his direction. She looked shrunken, he thought, diluted somehow. The red of her hair slowly ashing.

  "I could see you," she said, "at the courthouse." A mischief in her voice, even through its slow woolliness.

  He kissed her on the right side of her face. Then he stuck his head out her window, dodging the potted plants and flowers and trailing philodendrons. She wasn't lying. There was a clear view the whole way.

  "It was nothing," he said.

  "Didn't look like nothing."

  "I was fishing with Michael."

  "Yes, I know. He came home an hour ago."

  An electric saw revved up from the workshop downstairs. Despite himself, Jamie started smiling. Silly with the memory of kissing Alison. He recalled his dad's instructions.

  "How're you feeling, Mum?"

  "You're avoiding the question. Do you like this girl?"

  "Yeah."

  No other answer occurred to him. Her illness had had the effect of completely opening up their conversation.

  "And she likes you?"

  He hesitated. Summoning back the smell of her, the smell on your hands after scaling a wet chain-link fence. He smiled again. Then he remembered her reaction when she smelled his fingers. "I dunno," he said. "It's more complicated than that."

  "One more reason for us to stay here." The right side of her mouth edged upward; automatically he gauged the bearings behind the effort. Too much. During the worst spells, her face lost most of its sensation. "Yes," she went on, "I know why you're here."

  "Dad said to tell you – "

  "Tell your father," she said, "he can stop having his secret meetings." Her breath was coming out serrated
now, in little huffs, and he realized she was trying to clear her throat. "Tell him to tell those bankers, and real estate agents, and all those others ..."

  She stopped. He wasn't used to seeing her this bad. Speechless – almost entirely immobilized. Not so long ago she'd have never run short of a few choice words for real estate agents. The scum of the earth, she called them. Nor would she have been able to get out of her chair – any chair – fast enough. But she'd already been a couple of weeks in this one. She'd missed his semifinal in this one.

  He shook his head. "I'm with Dad," he said. "We'll go to Maroomba and come back when you're better."

  "Live with the enemy? You kids."

  "They need to know by Friday, Mum."

  She attempted another half smile. "Look at you now," she said. She scrutinized him for some time, then turned back toward her window. She said, "It's more complicated than that."

  He left the house. Partway down the drive he saw Michael sitting on the bungalow steps. Jamie went over to him and yanked out his earphones.