The Boat

by NAM LE

  "Hang out in your own room, will you?"

  Michael shrugged.

  "Go tell Mum you wanna move to Maroomba."

  "What? I don't, but."

  "I don't care. Go tell her."

  Michael slouched up from the concrete steps, sheaves of hair – he cut it himself, using kitchen scissors – hanging over his brow. He was too skinny and his arms too long and every part of him that bent was knobbly. No way they looked alike.

  "I hate Maroomba, they're all posh there."

  "Would you rather move to the city?"

  Michael jerked his head up. "Do you think she '11 get better if we go?" At one point his voice dipped into a lower register and sounded like their dad's. The earphones still buzzing around his neck.

  Jamie tsked impatiently. "Why else would we go?"

  "Cale said he'd teach me how to surf."

  "Cale won't teach you shit." He instantly felt bad for saying this. "Look, it's not till next year anyway."

  Michael put his hands in his pocket.

  "Go," said Jamie.

  Michael pursed his lips as though readying to whistle.

  "Go!"

  "Lester saw us. Before – with Alison." He glanced up ques-tioningly. "Just past the service station."

  For a moment Jamie felt booted outside himself. His voice spacey in his skull. He heard himself say, "So what? Stop following me around."

  Michael shrugged again. "I saw him, and he saw us," he said.

  Jamie came at him and punched and pushed him against the doorjamb. "You better shut up."

  "Sorry," Michael cried out.

  "I mean it."

  "I'm sorry I'm sorry."

  At teatime, Michael ate by himself in the kitchen. Sulking in front of some TV show. Jamie joined his parents, who'd already started, in the living room. As soon as he walked in he could tell they'd been fighting. His mum sat facing the window under her striped blanket and his dad was angled opposite, feeding her. They ate in silence. A light breeze rumpled the curtains. Jamie watched the dull green of eucalyptus leaves bleed into the darkening sky. His mum started coughing.

  "Are you okay?" his dad asked.

  Once she'd fetched her breath she said, "Jamie."

  "Yeah, Mum."

  "You know what no one ever asks me?"

  His dad stared straight ahead, over her shoulder. "Ask her," he said.

  "What, Mum?"

  "Everyone always asks me if I'm okay. No one ever asks me if I'm happy."

  The sound from the kitchen TV faded, then amped into the voice-over for a commercial. His dad put down his plate and left the room.

  She'd already made her instructions clear. She wasn't timid about these things. She didn't want a machine breathing for her, nor her body grafted into a computer. She didn't want any hoo-hah. She wanted to be cremated and then planted in the soil under the waratahs. Part of this was slyness – they'd be more likely to keep the property. She wanted this, and she wanted his dad to buy back his stake in the trawler. Jamie remembered their conversations, after her second relapse, about moving. Money. Dim voices and lamplit silences. One night he was in the driveway and glimpsed a slice of his dad's face through their bedroom window. It was hard and tear-smudged and sneering with hurt. Then he saw a dark shape flit in front of the window in the next room. Michael. Both of them, sons, watching their parents. One handful, his mum said, she wanted brought to the bluff, where she watched the storms come in, and she wanted it scattered – she said the word cheekily – into the ocean.

  She was in fine form when his dad came back in. Teasing Jamie about incredible views at the courthouse.

  "Jamie was up there today," she explained.

  "Got some free time, has he?"

  "That reminds me," she said. "Your holiday job, Jamie – when you get a chance, go talk to John Thompson at the wharf. Word is he's got a spot on his boat."

  His dad made as though to say something, but didn't.

  "Tell him I sent you. He might even start you straightaway."

  "The final's coming up," his dad broke in. "Can't it wait till after then?"

  "Fishing and football." She let out a dramatic sigh. "That's all this town cares about."

  The room lightened, loudened, as Michael barged in from the kitchen. His expression anxious. "Thirty percent chance of thunderstorms tomorrow," he said. "But higher on the weekend."

  His mum looked at him intently. She said, "Thank you, sweetie."

  "I'll have your rocking chair done by then," said his dad.

  It was dusk outside now – the window a square of black, brooding colors. Waratah shrubs lifting their scent of honey into the room. Hundreds of kilometers away the ocean streamed into itself, careening its mass over and over, sucking even the clouds down.

  "Shall we open a bottle?" his mum asked.

  "You sure, Maggie?"

  "Let's open a bottle."

  ***

  THE NIGHT WAS WINDY. Clouds hung low and fat, lit up by the massive bonfire in the backyard. People were feeding it anything they could toss a couple of meters: furniture, textbooks, beer cans and bottles, even their clothes. Farther back from the fire the darkness was crumbed with cigarette ends, glowing, fading, each time seemingly in different spots. People might have been dancing out there.

  Cale quickly ditched him for some surfie mates-the bloke could trace a sniff of mull through a dust storm.

  "Hey, Jamie!"

  Someone lifted a bottle to his mouth. Jamie hurled his head to the sky.

  "Jesus," he said, coughing, laughing as a hand thumped his back. He spun around and saw Billy Johnson – left half-orward flank, an ordinary player, but one of those blokes everyone got along with.

  "Hell's that?"

  "Bourbon, I think," Billy said, teeth gleaming widely.

  "Fuck you," said Jamie.

  "Stole it from my sister's room." He held it out like a handshake. "Have some more."

  Jamie took another swig. The burning rushed through him, mixing with the fumes from the fire. He felt deeply awake.

  "Thanks," he said. "Thanks a lot, man."

  "Ready for the game next week?" He tossed the bottle back to Billy. "What game?" he jeered.

  By midnight, the party was peaking. She hadn't arrived. He sat in a tight pack with the other Halflead High kids, drowsing in their cheap deodorant. Norsca and Brut and Old Spice. They had the next day off – curriculum day – and everyone was going balls out. They drank. They drank and talked about the upcoming game. Jamie watched the bonfire, gusts of wind playing havoc with the smoke, people gliding in and out of its thrown light.

  Cale rocked up, off his face. He started making toasts-to footy, to cunt, to mates, to getting fucked with your mates – each word swerving in the smoke-dark wind. At one stage he threw himself to the ground. Everyone watched as he did a strange, simian dance across the lawn.

  Jamie drank. The wind moved through the tall purple grass, sifting the light of an arriving car's high beam. Like the wind was made of light. Next to him one of those UV bug lights thrumming purple above a pit of carnage: skeletal legs, carapaces, wings.

  Cale held something up: "Got it!"

  Then he saw her. Trying to light a cigarette, her face in the brief flare of a struck match. White skirt and a boob tube. She looked somehow smaller-figured in the night. On an instinct she turned and met his gaze and then, bold as you like, started walking up to the group. Tammie and Laura close in behind her.

  He looked away.

  "Got a light?"

  But she was talking to Cale, the twenty-dollar bill flapping between his fingers. Billy rifling through his pockets, striking, restriking the wheel of his lighter, hands cupped, body swiveling to shield the flame.

  The girls waited and then walked off, giggling.

  Cale whispered to him: "So?"

  But he couldn't speak. His head teemed. It was late and he sensed all around, in the shadows, mouths straining against each other as though to breach, to break through to a cl
ear feeling.

  "So what?"

  "So you gonna score with her?"

  "What, are you stupid too?"

  She was waiting out front. Cross-legged on the trunk of an old Holden, cornered by a chaotic blockade of cars and bikes. Someone next to her in the darkness. As he came closer, he saw that it was Tammie: she flicked down a cigarette, whispered something into Alison's ear before leaving. Under the cloud-strained moonlight Alison's skirt was hitched up past her gleaming thighs. Her two legs interlocked.

  "You look different," she said.

  "You too," he replied. He wasn't lying. Closer up, the light wasn't kind to her face. Makeup moved like a tight gauzy screen on top of her skin.

  "Most of these things," she said, "no one even talks to me."

  He nodded. Laughter spilled from the backyard. Then the smash of a breaking bottle. He spun around.

  "Dory's not here tonight," she said.

  He deflected it, the cold edge held up to his warm drunken cocoon. From the house came the rising scud of voices. Then the wind shifted. They were alone again.

  "He hates these high school parties."

  He said, deliberately, "You can talk to me."

  She looked at him without smiling. "You're funny," she said. "But seriously, all me and him do is talk. How his uncle's gonna get an abalone license one day. How he's got friends in Fisheries. Remember that time with the Chinese poacher?"

  The chill came back, darting through every fissure in him. He remembered. The young woman's body they found in the swale – within shouting distance of where Dory lived with his uncle. Its blank, salt-soused face. The cops at school, pulling Dory, and later Lester, out of the classroom. After they were released from questioning, Lester had pantomimed the whole thing in the school paddocks. Jamie was too far away to hear anything, but saw the circle of boys reshape itself as Lester knelt down-he was Dory now, straddling the woman's body. Punching the ground like a piston. Dory himself standing aside, watching on without a word.

  Alison soured her face. "His uncle – he's a nasty piece of work." She quickly looked behind her, then swung back around. His heart pounding his skull as she considered him. He took a long breath.

  "So are you and Dory together or not?"

  She bounced her shoulders. "Honestly, sometimes I wonder if he's a poofter. Seriously, Tammie cracked on to him once, the slut. And, you know."

  "Yeah?"

  "You know. He didn't do anything."

  "He didn't do anything."

  "I even asked, but you know him. Won't talk to save his life."

  Her conversation was like surface chop, trapped in the same current, backing over itself. It made him seasick. He realized she hadn't answered his question. He was about to ask again when he heard her name being called out. The front door of the house banged open and a figure surfaced from the red rectangular glow, coming straight at them, trailing a small wake of commotion.

  "Fuck," Alison muttered.

  "A – lison." A singsong tug, stretching out the first syllable.

  His stomach rose up thick and rancid. He swallowed, breathed it down. Here it came. "Who is it?" he asked, as if he didn't know-as if asking were proof he didn't care. Always there were the rules, plying, pressing in around you.

  "Alison?" The voice affected surprise now. Two black shapes – then another two – their shadows scrambling ahead of them across the yard. One by one the faces came into sight. "Dory's been worried about you."

  "Fuck you, Les," said Alison evenly.

  In response Lester dipped his head and lifted his bottle above it. Then he turned and leered to the person who'd accompanied him out: a tall, lanky mullet-head who'd dropped out of school last year.

  A few steps back Tammie tottered against Cale. They seemed engrossed in their own windy drama. Both held their beers out in front of them like candles.

  "I'll pass that along," Lester said.

  "Sure," said Alison, "once you pop his cock out of your mouth."

  Lester's tall mate started snickering. "Slut," said Lester. He was unfazed. "You think you're top shit now? After one fluke goal?"

  In a single moment Jamie realized that Lester was talking to him and that Alison was watching. He prepared himself to say something. The words, however, snagged deep inside him.

  "We'll see you at training on Monday," Lester went on. "He's gonna fuck you up." He shook his head in amazement. "You're fucked." He turned to Alison: "Remember your old loverboy, Wilhelm?"

  Alison stayed quiet. Her face stern, narrowed, like she was trying to light a cigarette. Cale took a step forward. "Come on, man." He sounded unsure – and unsure who he was talking to. Lester's mullet-headed friend watched him steadily.

  "Fucked," repeated Lester.

  What should he say? He felt sickened by his words – hollow, soggy-sounding – before they even came out. He said, "Whatever, mate."

  Lester laughed. "So fucked."

  And it was true: each iteration struck Jamie with its truth, drained his body cold. The sick dread soaking and the worst was how familiar it felt. Too late to turn back. You'd think it was too much for one person but no, he'd already made room for it. He was rubbish.

  Alison watched, then nodded. "Let's go, Jamie."

  "See you Monday," Lester sang out. "Have a good weekend!"

  She led him off.

  For a while they walked without speaking. There was a shape to the silence between them: unfolding, contracting in the night. At the end of the street Alison reached out her hand. He held it desperately but there was no exhilaration in it. He wondered if she could feel that it wasn't his hand at all – that it wasn't he who was connected to it. They ducked under a fence and then his knees gave way beneath him.

  "Sand," she said.

  They skirted the edge of a caravan park. Light and music wafted over from the lots, carrying the day-old scent of sunscreen, charred barbecues. Early summer tourists. Finally they reached a shoulder of cliff. There was a steep drop-off behind it, and, behind that, the bay.

  "You wanna keep walking?" she asked.

  "Okay," he said. A strange formality had arisen between them.

  "You know a spot? I'll follow you."

  He continued on the same track. Along the headland, abstracted from any thought of direction, through the mulga scrub, and paddocks of wild grass, and fields stubbled up to burn marks delineated by dark trees. Maybe he could just keep walking. Just not stop. And what if he did? Would he want her to follow him? The wind was sharp, and salty, and then there was water on it.

  "It's cold," said Alison. She hugged her bare arms. "Where are we going?"

  He was dazed, for a moment, by the trespass of her voice. He looked out. In the high moon the water was sequined with light. Muted flashes from the freighters past the heads. Beyond that, stars. But directly beneath him – that, there, was the real shocker. The black stub in the black bay. He'd brought them right to the rock pier.

  "You wanna go down there?" Her tone was a little impatient.

  "It's gonna rain."

  "C’arn," she said. "It'll rain up here too."

  She swayed and shimmied down the dark slope. He followed her down and then onto the rocks, almost sprinting across them until they reached the tip of the pier. Water boiling over its edge. Vertigoed, he looked back – saw, across the long darkness, the foreshore thinly threaded with lights. Then, breathing hard, he turned around again and looked out into the deeper black, toward the heads where the water came in strong and deep and broke on the raised table of the reef.

  "I haven't been here for ages," he said.

  Alison found a curved rock on the lee side, long and canoe-narrow. The pier a heap of shadows in the night. "Lester's just a dickhead," she said. She drew her legs beneath her.

  "Yeah."

  "You should have seen him when he first met Dory. Talk about arse-licking."

  He sat down opposite, shivering. It was like the wind was greased, he thought, it slid right against you, leaving your
skin slippery where it touched. The mention of Dory triggered something inside him and he reached for her.

  "Come here."

  He heard himself say it. He saw his arm stippled by cold. The smell of kelp and metal dissolving on his tongue. She fended the hair from her face as he hauled her in, his hands up and down her body, claiming as much of her as he could. She responded at once, then drew herself upright.

  "I just don't get why he hangs out with him," she commented.

  "What?"

  He rocked back, hugged his shins tight. Looked at her. Her hair silver in the pale spill of moonlight. Her makeup worn down and somehow, in this light, accidental – as though she'd been rehearsing on a friend's face. She looked like a complete stranger.

  "I mean. He doesn't even like him."

  "Will you shut up?" He realized, suddenly, that it pissed him off: that strange, settled face of hers. "Please? Fucking Dory this and Dory that." Words gushing up in him, frothy and cold, but he couldn't give body to them, not fast enough. "Why were you even with him? Don't you know what everyone says? What everyone thinks?"

  Her expression was level. "Go on."

  It occurred to him instantaneously that this was her real face, and that it was the same as Dory's – the same blankness of expression – and that that was what had been drawing him in. That was what he wanted to break himself against. As quickly as it came, the heady anger began to seep out of him.

  She said, "So what does everyone think?" He didn 't answer.

  "C’arn," she said. She leaned into him again, almost aggressively, urging his hand with her own, up over her shoulder blade. Her lips muzzling his neck.

  "C’arn." "Just that you could do better than him." His voice came out as if by rote. "Like ... he's slow or something."

  She pulled back, teeth flashing, and then she was laughing, liquidly, into the night. He waited, watching her. Sensing, deeper and deeper, how profoundly her laughter excluded him. In the distance he heard metal rings clinking against masts. The creaking of stretched wood. He would stay quiet. He'd say nothing and maybe she'd say something – one thing – that would release him for good.

  Alison's face remembered itself. "Sorry," she whispered. She crawled forward on all fours and put her hands on his knees.