Below

by Meg McKinlay

  We rode down the hill in silence, apart from the cicadas and the magpies and the rattle of our bikes over the bumpy path.

  As we passed the pool, we slowed, then accelerated.

  When we reached the town hall, we pulled up outside. I straddled my bike while Liam leaned his against the racks out in front.

  “Well, I’d better go.” He jerked a thumb toward the door.

  “Yeah, me too.” I scuffed one foot against a pedal. “So . . . thanks.”

  “It’s okay. Um . . . see you tomorrow, maybe?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I kicked the pedals around and pushed down. “Hey, would you really have broken my nose?”

  As I began to roll, I heard him laugh quietly. “I don’t know,” he said. Then more loudly, as I headed off the sidewalk and onto the road: “Probably. Maybe.”

  When I looked back, he was grinning, watching me go.

  I was pushing my way up the last big hill when I heard it behind me — the roar of an engine, tires crunching on the dirt road.

  Tourists. It had to be. Dad would be in the studio all day, working on Finkle, pretending to work on pots. And Mom and Hannah would be home by now, waiting in the kitchen to ask if I’d hung up my towel.

  I moved over, crunching across the sticks and leaves at the side of the road, and waited for the car to pass.

  Instead, I heard the engine slow as it pulled up alongside me.

  It was a once-green utility vehicle. A now-faded and rusted and falling-apart old truck that none of us could believe kept surviving the trip all the way to the city and back.

  “Elijah!”

  “Hey, doofus!” He rolled down the window, grinning, then coughed as the dust cloud he’d stirred up hit him in the face.

  I scooted my bike over awkwardly. “When did you get back?”

  “Just now.” He nodded at the backseat, which was full of books and clothes and pillows.

  “Haven’t you been home yet?”

  He shook his head. “I went past the pool — thought I might give you a lift. Didn’t see you, though.”

  “I was probably getting changed.”

  “Except you’re not changed.”

  I looked down. Stupid. My bathing suit was clearly visible under my shirt.

  “I meant . . . I was in the bathroom.”

  “Oh, okay.” He frowned. “Must have just missed you.”

  “You can give me a lift now.”

  I climbed off the bike and wheeled it toward the back of the truck.

  He raised his eyebrows. “We’re basically there, Cass.”

  He was right. We were. But I suddenly felt like I couldn’t go any farther, like all of it had caught up with me at once — the swimming, the sinking, the stick. Not to mention this long, dusty hill.

  Elijah opened his door and climbed out. He lifted my bike into the back of the truck, then turned to me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just tired.”

  “Do your six?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hang your towel?”

  I punched him in the arm. “She still says it, you know.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it.” He put the car into gear and took off up the hill. “Seriously, Cass. Don’t push yourself too hard. You look wrecked.”

  When we eased into the driveway a minute later, the front door flew open immediately. Mom appeared first, followed by Hannah, then Dad.

  “Elijah!” Mom put her hands on her hips. “You should have called ahead!” She was smiling, already moving to the window to drag him out for a hug.

  “Does this mean my scones aren’t ready yet?” Elijah grinned as he climbed out of the car, unfolding his long frame and stretching his arms above his head while Mom tackled him around the waist.

  “I’d make you some,” she said. “You know I would.”

  “Yeah, but then I’d have to eat them.”

  “True.”

  “Good thing you teach history, not cooking.”

  “Cheeky!” Mom ducked her head, then caught sight of me in the passenger seat. “Cass?”

  Elijah reached up to haul my bike out of the back. “Yeah, I gave her a lift. From the pool. Right, Cass?”

  His lips were curved in the shadow of a smile. I hesitated a second before nodding. “Yeah.”

  “Do your six?” Mom asked.

  Elijah burst out laughing.

  Mom stared at him. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” He grabbed an enormous duffel bag from the back of the truck and hoisted it over one shoulder. “Better hang your towel, mate.”

  “Yeah.” I bit my lip to keep from smiling and headed for the clothesline.

  Later, after lasagna and apple pie and nothing at all resembling a Devonshire tea, we sat around the table. Elijah told us about his exams and the house he was living in with six other guys, and how he seriously doubted the truck was going to survive another trip. Hannah told him about the centenary celebrations and showed him the draft of the book she’d printed out to make notes on.

  Dad told him about the Finkle head and the pots, and Elijah agreed to help him finish things up and cart them into town. But when he asked Dad to show him Finkle, Dad shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said. “It’s still . . . developing.”

  Hannah sighed. “That’s one word for it.”

  Finkle was being difficult, apparently. Or Dad was, depending on how you looked at things.

  “He wants me to work from this,” Dad said, pulling a folded photograph from his pocket.

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “That old thing again?”

  Dad nodded. “I know. It hardly even looks like him anymore.”

  “We keep telling him,” Hannah said. “He won’t listen. Says he hasn’t changed that much. He’s in denial or something.”

  I peered down at the photo. There were some notes scribbled along the edge in black marker — Left side best and Not really that wrinkly. The face itself was crisscrossed by a grid of lines that divided it up into tiny squares.

  Dad snorted. “He seems to think I can just copy the photo, one square at a time.”

  He ran a finger across Finkle’s crosshatched face. It was like those drawings I used to do when I was little, where you copy a picture square by square onto a new grid. No matter how careful I was, they always came out slightly wonky.

  “That’s not how it works,” Dad said. “You can’t just break something down into parts like that. This is art, not construction.” He tossed the photo onto the table and leaned back in his chair. “I tried to explain to him — what I like to do is look at the photos, capture the essence of the thing, then put them away and just work from the mind’s eye, from the hands.”

  “That explains a lot, actually,” Elijah said. When Dad first started doing heads, he had done one of Elijah that ended up looking disturbingly like a cross-eyed ferret.

  Dad whacked him lightly on the shoulder, then sighed. “I just don’t think Finkle really understands the artistic process.”

  Hannah’s jaw clenched a little. “I’m sure he doesn’t, Dad. But he means well. Just do your best, would you? We’re all working hard on this.”

  She pointed at the centenary book. Elijah had been working his way through it slowly and had just reached my page.

  “Ah,” he said. “Welcome to New Lower Grange!”

  “Yeah.” I flushed.

  He flicked back and forth quickly. “Bit surprised I don’t get a mention. Defenders of the forest, heroes of the tree — carrier of the poo.”

  “Elijah!” Mom frowned. “Yuck.”

  “Yeah, it was.” He grinned. “I made sixty bucks, though.”

  “No one needs to remember that,” Hannah said. “They weren’t heroes. They were feral weirdos.”

  “Typical Finkle-spin!” Elijah countered. “They were cool. And they were right. That tree was a landmark.”

  “Trees grow,” Hannah said. “Besides, they have better ways of spotting fires now.”
/>   “Yeah, well, I liked the fire tree,” Elijah said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Come off it, Cassie,” Hannah said. “You never even saw it. That tree was dangerous. You could fall right through the pegs if you weren’t careful. I can’t believe they let anyone climb that thing.”

  “And I can’t believe you were too chicken to climb it.” Elijah gave her a scornful look. Then he turned to Mom. “Remember when she got about halfway up and was too scared to move?”

  Mom nodded. “Oh, yes. Because I was at the bottom, being told off by a family of Japanese tourists. They asked me if Australian mothers normally let their kids do such risky things.” She smiled. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  Elijah went over to the bench and filled the kettle with water. “Yeah, and I couldn’t get down because I was already up, and she was so hysterical, she wouldn’t let anyone past.”

  Hannah folded her arms. “I was ten, Elijah.”

  “Yeah, and I was eight. I couldn’t believe it. But that wasn’t the best bit, was it, Mom? Remember how that guy went up to his car . . . ?”

  I tuned out the rest of what Elijah was saying. I knew the story. I’d heard it a hundred times. About how an English tourist got a rock-climbing harness from his car and went up after Hannah. He put her into the harness and told her she was safe now, and she climbed all the way down like a monkey, even though he hadn’t clipped her to anything at all.

  It was supposed to be a lesson on the power of the mind, but when Mom told Hannah later, she just started crying all over again.

  “It was so funny.” Elijah reached up into the cupboard for the jar of coffee.

  “Well,” countered Hannah, “what about the time you were coming down the tree and that bucket of . . . stuff . . . tipped all over you?”

  Dad laughed. “Yeah, and remember when . . .”

  I sighed and leaned back in my chair. That was my cue to switch off — remember when? Once they started telling stories, there was no stopping them. They would bounce back and forth across the table for hours. Serve and volley. Volley and return.

  And there was never anything for me to do, nothing for me to add, because all of it had happened before I was born, in a place I’d never been.

  The only family story about me was from the day I was born, the day I threw the grading and the pottery and everything else you could possibly imagine into disarray by arriving not only accidentally but also way too early.

  It was a good story, and Dad told it well.

  About how he piled everyone into the Valiant, spinning the tires as they took off and taking a big wounded chunk out of the sod lawn.

  How when he saw the fuel light flashing, he pulled into the shiny new gas station. And when he realized it had lots of two-for-the-price-of-one Mars bars, supersize hot-dog deals, and ice-cold slushies, but no actual gas yet, he put his head down on the steering wheel, making the horn blare.

  How for a brief, crazy moment, he contemplated driving four miles west, back to Old Lower Grange, because — who knows? — there might still be gas there, and if he really floored it, we might be able to make it out before the mayor flipped the lever and drowned us all.

  “It was quite the drama,” he always said. “Eh, Cass?”

  And what was I supposed to say to that?

  Because even though it was a good story, even though it was a story about me, it was also a story I had no way of remembering and really, technically, wasn’t even there for.

  So I didn’t say anything. I sat at the table and let the stories wash over me — all the Remember when? and Oh, that was so . . . ! and I couldn’t believe it when you . . . !

  And when Hannah burst out with “Oh, my God, remember when you threw mashed potatoes at me, Elijah? You were such a little brat,” and everyone turned to stare at the wall behind my head, I lowered my face over my hot chocolate and blew down onto the surface, hiding myself in the billowing clouds of steam.

  The next morning, everyone went to work — Hannah to the town hall, Elijah and Dad in the studio, and Mom back to school to clean up for the year.

  And I went for a swim. With Liam.

  When I got to the lake, he was already there. He had hauled the raft out from behind the tree and was leaning over it, pulling the broken bits off and tying fresh branches on with new string.

  “I thought I could take it out,” he said. “Stop you from drowning and all that. We could go out to the tree.” He motioned to a paddle lying on the ground nearby. “See? I came prepared.”

  I knelt down next to him. “Do you think this’ll hold both of us?”

  He shrugged. “Only one way to find out. Remember, if we start sinking, just float and wave.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to return his smile. Kneeling down like this, I could feel a knot in my leg — not pain, exactly, but a lingering tightness — and when I looked out at the water, my throat felt suddenly dry.

  I wasn’t quite ready to laugh about it yet.

  Liam tied off a length of string in a complicated knot. “So what do you think?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Right. You take that end.”

  Together, we pushed and pulled the raft down the bank into the water. Liam climbed on, then shook his head when I tried to do the same.

  “Swim first.”

  “What?”

  “Your six, right?”

  “Yeah, but that’s much farther than —”

  “You made it yesterday. And I’ll stay close. If you want to stop, you can climb on.” He dug the paddle in and pushed off the bottom, and then, with a few quick strokes, was out and away.

  There was nothing I could do but kick off and follow.

  Liam did stay close, so close he whacked me with the paddle twice and almost ran me over once. Which may have been deliberate, although he denied it. But even with the bruises, it was better with someone there. In a strange way, knowing I could stop and get a lift made me feel less like I needed one.

  When we got there, Liam climbed off onto the platform and tethered the raft to the tree with some extra string.

  He was grinning. “Wow! It is the fire tree.”

  “Didn’t I say that?”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just . . . it really is.” He knelt down and peered through the gap in the platform. “You can see the pegs! Five, six, seven . . . cool!” He looked up at me. “Hey, do you think we could go down?”

  “I don’t know,” I began, then stopped.

  I had been thinking about it last night. About how silly it was, really. It was the fire tree. It was huge. It used to take Elijah ten minutes to get down with the bucket. Holding our breath, we’d never get anywhere near the town. And even if we did, it was dark down there. It wasn’t like we’d be able to see anything. A lookout underwater wasn’t a lookout anymore. It was . . . just an old, dead tree, I guess.

  “What?”

  Liam was staring at me. It was funny when you realized that none of the thoughts running through your head had made it into the outside world, that they were yours and yours alone.

  Sometimes, given the kind of thoughts that ran through my head, it was a relief.

  “It’s high,” I said finally. “I mean deep. It’s —”

  “Two hundred feet. I know. I made it, remember?” He made a snipping movement with his hands. “I didn’t mean the whole way. Hang on.”

  Before I could stop him, he had stepped through the opening. Then he grinned, ducked his head under the water, and was gone.

  I pulled myself past the raft and up onto the platform, then peered down into the opening. I could see his feet kicking and the edges of his shorts flapping around in the water. A steady stream of bubbles rose after him toward the surface.

  Then his shorts were gone and his feet. The water healed over him, and the stream of bubbles grew thinner and thinner until there was just dark and the surface was still and quiet, as if he had never been there.

  It couldn’t have been long. I knew
because I’ve timed myself, and thirty-two seconds is my absolute limit before I get to the edge of my breath and lift my head, spluttering and wheezing.

  I probably should have timed Liam. At least then I would have known when to start worrying. I would have known when to start tapping my fingers and rocking on my heels and scanning for bubbles. And maybe I wouldn’t have finally freaked out and stuck my face in the water at the exact moment he was rocketing up through it like he’d been shot out of a cannon.

  I reeled backward. “I think you’ve broken my nose.”

  He didn’t reply. He was too busy spluttering and wheezing.

  But he was also grinning.

  “I think I went too far,” he said finally. “You have to remember about getting back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The pegs are good,” he said. “You can pull yourself down. Can’t see much, though.” He squinted out across the water. “So, the town square would be that way.”

  I thought back to my mosaic map from the day before. “I think so. And then the Old Lenton Road goes up around there.” I pointed around the lake to where Elijah and I had stood all those years ago.

  “I know,” Liam replied. “Dad showed me.”

  “What, when you used to come up here? Could you see something?”

  Liam climbed up onto the platform and sat down on the edge, dangling his feet over the side. “No, just in photos and stuff. He used to talk about it all the time. He had maps and everything. He used to go over them, like this.” He made a scanning motion with one finger. “Mom made him get rid of it all. She said it wasn’t good for him.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “There was this doctor in the city. He said Dad was trying to go back to the accident, to work something out. He said our brains do that — try to fix things, even when there’s nothing to be fixed. He said Dad had to move on, do new things.”

  “Like the stuff he does for the town council?”

  Liam nodded. “That’s been good. Mom wasn’t sure at first. But Finkle said to give it a go, see how things went.”

  “Finkle?”

  “Yeah, it was his idea. He said the community should take care of people.” Liam trailed one foot down into the water. “It’s hard for Dad. One minute he can be fine and then . . .”