In bed that night I got to thinking about a frosty morning that Jennifer and I had spent at the Ramada Inn. I couldn’t even see the tennis courts out the window because of the condensation. She was kneeling on top of me. Her eyes looked like dark marbles. It was warm inside her. It felt like a safe place to spend the winter. She told me to leave it in. No thrusting, nothing. I asked her for how long, and she said, ‘As long as it takes.’ She closed her eyes, arched her spine and her breathing slowly grew heavier.
As I peeled back the covers and found my way to the bathroom in the dark, I hoped that Paul would never need to feel anything like it.
MAINSTREAM
‘Mum, something funny is happening to my ears,’ said Harrison, leaning back in his seat, gripping the armrests and tilting his head upwards. It was his first time on an aeroplane. I used to chew gum to help with the take-off, but I hadn’t packed any because he didn’t like the texture.
‘If you swallow your saliva it helps your ears go pop,’ I said.
‘Pop!’ he said.
He held the pose, trying to aid the aircraft in its ascent over the brown hills of Adelaide.
‘Why don’t you try to find Grandma’s house?’ I said, pointing out the window.
‘Pop!’
The seatbelt sign above us was soon switched off. Harrison spent the next twenty minutes staring at the fluorescent cigarette next to it. I eventually managed to distract him by removing Peter Pan from my backpack. He slowly traced his finger over the illustrations, only turning each page when he had absorbed every last detail on it. Halfway through the flight one of the flight attendants—a doll in her mid-twenties with her hair coiled in a slick bun—asked if Harrison wanted to visit the cockpit.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You’ll love it.’
I doubted that he could cause an aeroplane crash, even though he had just been expelled from school. I unbuckled his seatbelt and he crawled from the window seat, over my lap, and dropped into the aisle with a thud. I could sense people staring.
‘Would you like to come too?’ asked the flight attendant, smiling at me condescendingly.
‘No thanks, I’m fine here.’
Harrison ignored the flight attendant’s outstretched hand, but followed her along the aisle. I moved to the window seat and stared at the bed of white clouds below. I had forgotten how peaceful it felt to fly above them. I used to love reading on aeroplanes, but Peter Pan was the only book I’d packed.
I remembered my first flight, when I was nineteen. It was only fourteen years ago, but it felt like a different lifetime. I was flying to Vanuatu with my friend Melissa Tang. As the plane was approaching New Caledonia, I caught sight of the coral reefs out the window. They looked like the lungs of the turquoise ocean. It had struck me that there were infinite tiers of beauty beyond our mainland, waiting to be peeled back over the course of a human life.
Melissa and I slept with nine men between us in the week we spent at Le Meridien resort. I could only remember one of the men’s names. John. He was twenty years older than me and he was a business development manager with one of the major insurance companies in Melbourne. He didn’t think there was any shame in having fun on a holiday. As I was undoing my bra, I asked him to take his wedding ring off and put it on the bedside table.
I hadn’t seen Melissa in six years, but we still sent each other Christmas cards. She’d moved to Sydney to work for the Department of Infrastructure and Transport. The last Christmas card had a photo of her and her fiancé, Vincent, at a charity golf day. He looked tall, outgoing and much younger than her. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them meeting at a bar overlooking the harbour and exchanging phone numbers. They had just moved into a rented North Shore apartment. In the card Melissa had written that I was welcome to visit any time. She didn’t mention Harrison.
■
The minibus driver was standing outside the airport terminal, continually checking his watch. He insisted on putting our ‘luggage’ in the boot, even though I was only carrying a backpack. Harrison couldn’t stop staring at the driver’s hideous red goatee.
‘Where you headed?’ he asked, nestling the backpack between suitcases.
‘Drive us anywhere,’ I said.
He grimaced. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you know a cheap place we can stay tonight?’
‘There might be some vacancies at the YMCA. It’s tough to know at this hour.’
‘Great, take us there.’
He ushered us into the minibus. There were elderly people sitting in the two front rows. He spent the next few minutes answering questions from them.
‘My guess is we’ll make it into the city in fifteen minutes,’ he said in a patronisingly loud voice. ‘Maybe fourteen minutes if we get all the green lights.’
We drove past the car dealerships, the service stations and the bright lights of McDonald’s before crossing the Swan River. The driver kept glancing at me in his rear-view mirror. He dropped the elderly people off at separate hotels near the waterfront, then snaked through dark city streets that seemed incredibly desolate.
‘Do you know where St Georges Terrace is?’ I asked.
‘We’re on it,’ he said, laughing.
There was something about his manner that I couldn’t stand. It made me want to start listing aloud jobs that were more important than driving a minibus.
The YMCA was just past the hospital. It was a tall grey building with a concrete tennis court out the front. A handful of dishevelled-looking people were congregated near the entrance, smoking. One of them was clutching a portable intravenous stand.
‘Do you want me to wait here?’ asked the driver after he’d pulled into the car park.
‘We’ll be fine,’ I said, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.
There was a young man called Prasad working at the reception desk. He agreed to allocate us a single dormitory. ‘The lock’s a bit wonky,’ he said, handing me the key. ‘You’ve just got to apply a bit of pressure on the cylinder with your thumb.’
We caught the elevator up to the eleventh floor. Harrison kept saying the word ‘Prasad’ out loud until I told him to stop. I had to swipe a security card to gain entry to the dormitories. Our room was smaller than I had expected. I turned the fan on immediately because Harrison was very sensitive to heat. The carpet was wretched. There was a Holy Bible, a foam cup and three sachets of instant coffee on a fixed bench. I grabbed the cup and walked to the communal kitchen at the end of the hallway, where the shelves were bare except for a microwave and a kettle.
When I returned to the room Harrison was standing by the window, staring through the lattice and counting out loud. I stood beside him and admired the mosaic of lights along the freeway. I thought he might be counting the trucks in the fire station across the street. But there weren’t enough. It was only when I noticed his line of vision that I realised he was counting the aeroplanes in the night sky.
Only one channel worked on the television and the screen was fuzzy. I lay on the bed and watched it anyway. Letterman was on. When I was young I used to think that David Letterman’s drawl was sophisticated beyond belief. Now that I was old I thought he was the least interesting person on the planet. During the ad break after his opening monologue, I noticed that Harrison was riffling through the rubbish bin.
‘Jesus Christ, honey!’ I yelled. ‘It’s filthy in there. You know that.’
He stopped without acknowledging that he had heard me. He made his way over to the bed and hopped onto my lap. I rested my head against the wall, which was painted red. It only added to the stuffiness of the room. I switched off the television and sat in the dark, hugging him. I was too tired to force him to brush his teeth. His breathing gradually slowed, which helped me relax. I couldn’t remember exactly when I’d let Harrison start sleeping next to me again. It must have been shortly after Eddy left, when I had been faced with the prospect of sleeping alone for the first time in a decade.
■
We sat on the edge o
f the jetty, away from the seafood outlets and the families dining alfresco, sharing a large paper cup of chips. Harrison hated the smell of the Fremantle fish market. He was a vegetarian because he loved animals. He was always peaceful when he was around them. I had seriously considered adopting a greyhound when I first started working at the veterinary clinic. But I was worried that he might talk to it instead of talking to other children.
‘Miss Rylee!’ he said, reading the name of a navy-blue dinghy that was swaying in the harbour.
The harbour was bustling with restaurants, bars, food stalls and souvenir shops. I could see the top half of a Ferris wheel slowly revolving above the pine trees in the distance. A large group of children in yellow uniforms and floppy hats were sharing fish and chips behind us. It was difficult listening to them discuss the best way to ration their tomato sauce, knowing it was the kind of chat that Harrison would never get to be involved in.
Once we were full we started throwing chips to the seagulls. Harrison didn’t have much of an arm on him. When he was in crèche Eddy had observed that sport was never going to be his calling. A crowd of seagulls gathered around us on the jetty. Harrison tried to mimic their squawking.
‘You sound happy, Harry.’
‘Fight for the potatoes!’ he said, flinging dismembered chips onto the planks of the jetty. He was obsessed with potatoes. Aside from sultanas, they were the only food he ate.
When the paper cup was empty we took a walk along the esplanade. We passed market sheds, cargo ships, cruise liners, a ticket booth for the Rottnest ferry and a statue of a man, his daughter and two suitcases. We stopped to admire a vessel that was docked outside the Maritime Museum.
Harrison ran his eyes from the upper deck to the main mast. ‘Do you think that’s a pirate ship?’ he asked.
‘It definitely could be.’
‘Then where’s the Jolly Roger flag?’
‘Maybe when pirates come to shore they don’t want people to know they’re pirates anymore.’
Harrison continued to inspect the mast. ‘Yes, probably.’ His lip curled and he turned the fingers on his right hand into a hook.
I took a detour on our way back to the train station so that I could enjoy some of the restored heritage architecture. Looking at the grand old port buildings and the facades of the bustling hotels, I promised myself that I’d study architecture if I were ever given a second chance at life.
Harrison seemed happy meandering along the footpath in front of me. He eventually stopped outside a large limestone building with a sign above the entrance. The sign had a cartoon of a rooster and bold lettering that read: FREMANTLE HERALD.
‘Roosters don’t have running shoes.’
‘No, of course they don’t. I think it’s more about what the running shoes symbolise.’
‘What do they symbolise?’
‘I don’t know, honey; let’s not get too caught up in this.’
Harrison continued to stare at the rooster with running shoes. It looked remarkably similar to some of his sketches. He was a fantastic sketcher. He always managed to take his subject’s most notable features and warp them for comic effect. I had already taken him to a few cartoon studios to show him how people made a career from it. Sketching usually calmed him down. He had a great capacity to absorb information while he was scribbling away on his notepad, even if his teachers thought it was unfair on the other students to permit it in class.
■
I lay on the lawn outside St Mary’s Cathedral, soaking up the evening sun. In the last half-hour a refreshing breeze had wafted in from the Swan River, rustling the leaves on the surrounding palm trees. It was a lovely city. Even though it was late autumn, I still didn’t need a jumper. I wondered whether it was too hot for Harrison. He always struggled with the long, dry summers back home. As a treat, I sometimes let him run around in the fountains at Victoria Square after school. He was clutching Peter Pan and looking at me expectantly.
‘I’m ready,’ I said.
I closed my eyes and he started to read out loud. He was a beautiful reader. For all the things he didn’t understand in this world, he innately understood elocution. He imitated the tick-tock of the crocodile that ate Captain Hook’s hand. Our fridge was plastered with sketches of poor old Hook plummeting into the open jaws of a crocodile.
My mind returned, reluctantly, to three days earlier, when I had been summoned to the principal’s office. It was the fifth time since the beginning of the term that I’d been forced to leave the clinic mid-shift. I had always wanted Harrison to attend a mainstream school. His intelligence wasn’t the issue. He scored fifty-nine out of sixty on the Raven test; most adults couldn’t even manage that. Eddy had been vehemently opposed to the idea from the beginning, and every time there was an incident, I could hear his high and mighty lawyer’s voice in my head telling me I wasn’t living in the real world.
I’d found Harrison sitting in the conference room, immersed in an ancient Vietnamese block game with sentries and prisoners. They always gave him that game to play.
The principal, Ms Donoghue, told me that he had ripped a girl’s hijab off in the music room.
‘He was obviously overstimulated,’ I said. ‘We both know he finds music very confronting. There are sounds coming from everywhere and the room’s terribly ventilated. Plus that teacher you’ve got in there is a pushover. All the parents talk about it. I don’t even know why you employed him in the first place.’
‘No one’s mentioned anything to me,’ said Ms Donoghue, lying through her teeth.
‘I’m telling you, it’s chaos in there. Maybe you should pay him a surprise visit sometime and see for yourself. Isn’t that what principals are supposed to do?’ I realised I wasn’t doing myself any favours, but I was so sick of her pretending like she cared and then never following through on anything that we’d talked about.
She called Harrison into her office and asked him why he’d ripped the girl’s hijab off.
‘Because I wanted to see what Aisha’s hair looked like,’ he said, understanding from the looks on our faces that remorse was required of him, but not understanding why.
‘The first thing I think we should do is write a letter of apology to Aisha’s family,’ said Ms Donoghue, turning on her friendly voice. ‘We don’t want these things being blown out of proportion.’
Harrison wrote the letter and gave it to Ms Donoghue.
‘Thank you, Harry,’ she said, putting it in the top drawer of her desk and turning to address me. ‘Now, as I’m sure you’re aware, this suspension is going to bring Harrison up to fifteen days in total for the year, which means expulsion is mandatory. Unfortunately our hands are tied on this one.’
She looked at Harrison and spoke to him as if he was a three-year-old. ‘Do you understand what that means, Harry?’
He nodded.
When I went to his locker to collect his books, I found it wide open. He’d hoarded eight student diaries.
On the drive home he asked, ‘Why is there water coming out of my eyes?’
‘. . . and thus it will go on,’ Harrison read now, ‘so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.’ He closed the book.
I opened my eyes and patted his hair, which was cut shorter than I liked. ‘That was fantastic, Harry.’
‘The Lost Boys are a bit sad, aren’t they?’
‘Maybe, but at least they’ve all found a home.’
He traced his fingers along the cover. ‘And lots of friends.’
The lawn had been swallowed by shadows and the breeze had picked up. People were beginning to arrive for evening mass. A young nurse was leaning against the side of the cathedral, fixated on her phone. Her fingers looked manic. The only thing worse than shift work, I wanted to tell her, is a shift that never ends.
■
At 4.06 am Harrison awoke and asked if I could go with him to the toilet. I hadn’t managed to get to sleep. The male bathroom was filthy. I felt like I was contracting tinea just by setting
foot on the tiles. I settled Harrison in the end cubicle and waited by the open window. Insects milled around the light fittings. I looked out over the cluster of city buildings and listened to the faint ebb of traffic. The lines had almost faded away from the concrete tennis court.
I splashed cold water on my face and studied my complexion in the bathroom mirror. The pouches and wrinkles along my cheeks made me want to cry. It had been years since I bothered to wear make-up. There was no way John the business development manager would even look twice at me now. I wished that I could go back in time to Vanuatu. Everyone in the streets had said hello to us and smiled. I remembered the day Melissa and I took a ferry to Hideaway Island to go snorkelling. She was afraid there were going to be sharks. I couldn’t recall being afraid of anything in those days.
What had happened to that fearlessness in me? I wanted to believe that I could get it back and start an eight-hour shift without being frightened to death that my phone was going to start vibrating in my pocket. There were so many other things, too. I wanted to have time to read bestsellers and join a book club and maybe even buy the box set of Grand Designs, so I could lie on the couch and laugh at how ludicrous some of the houses were.
Would I ever get to experience the hot smell of whisky on a stranger’s breath again? Not that I’d know what to do if I did. Since Eddy had left and Harrison started sleeping in my bed, I hadn’t been on a date that had lasted beyond dinner. I didn’t even fantasise about it anymore. The only way to recapture that fearlessness was to accept Melissa’s offer of a bed in a North Shore apartment and to abandon all sense of care and duty, like I was back in Vanuatu, trying not to think about John’s wife and family.
■
The wide avenues of St Georges Terrace were swarming with traffic. Harrison was keeping a running tally of the taxis that drove by. He was already in the two hundreds. Most of the buildings in the central business district resembled giant shards of glass or giant cheese graters. The only visible exception was a beautiful old colonial building across the street next to a veil of scaffolding. I wished I could run to a local library and read up on its history.
When there’s nowhere else to Run Page 3
