Surface Tension (5 page)

Or maybe it was like me telling Ellen that I was sorry. That I was just looking, that Dad’s pottery had slipped.

Each of those things was true. But put together, they didn’t tell the real story. There were cracks in between where important stuff leaked out. It’s a funny thing, an unsettling thing – how you can tell the truth and have it still be a lie.

“Yeah,” I began, “but what about …” I stopped. There was a crunch of gravel as a car came round the bend into our driveway much too fast.

Tourists!
I thought. It was hard to see through the shower of dirt and tiny stones thrown up as the car braked outside, but I knew that’s who it would be. They come out here accidentally sometimes, taking a wrong turn on their way to the tearoom. They flatten the tiny wildflowers on the side of the road, spray dust all over Mum’s washing, then get cranky with us because we’re not a genuine copy of a rustic historical cottage serving Devonshire tea.

There was a loud banging on the front door. I leaned back on my chair and looked down the hall. That way, I wouldn’t even have to get up. I could just yell directions to Ye Olde Tearoom and tell them no, we absolutely definitely could not just whip them up a batch of country-style scones.

Instead, the door to the studio swung open and Dad elbowed his way into the hall like a surgeon going into an operation, his hands slick with clay.

“Howard!” he said. “Come in, come in.”

I stared down the hall. Finkle? What was he doing here?

That man really was everywhere.

There was a photo of him right there on the screen, one that looked like it had been taken about twenty years ago, when he still had hair. He was resting his chin on one balled-up fist, evidently trying to appear thoughtful. There was a caption underneath: “Howard Finkle, Centenary Mayor”.

“Hello, girls!” he called down the hall. Then he clapped Dad on the back and followed him into the studio, the door slamming shut behind them.

That was when I realised.

Finkle’s oddly crooked nose – not unlike a random blob of mashed clay which could possibly be something someone had left there by accident.

I turned to Hannah. She was grinning.

“Commemorative sculpture,” she said. “Also my idea. Howard loves it. Dad loves it. Everybody wins.”

Mum sighed. “Not if Dad doesn’t get all his pots finished in time for the holidays. I can’t believe you’ve got him making a free head right before the busy season, Hannah.”

Hannah clicked the mouse impatiently, making the screen blur. “I told you, Mum – it’s not really free. It’ll be great publicity. We’ve got big plans for the centenary. There’ll be people coming down from the city – newspapers, TV, the whole thing. And Elijah will be back soon. He can help with the pots.”

As she stopped talking, Hannah stopped clicking. The screen snapped back into focus and I leaned down towards it. The book was in thumbnail view now, showing everything at once. My page was in the middle somewhere, surrounded by pictures of the pool and Country Crafts and the newly sealed main street. Somewhere near the top of the screen was a photo of Finkle with a lever in his hand.

And off to one side, something else.

I drew in a quick breath.

It was another newspaper clipping, dated a few months earlier than mine. There was another grainy photo – another tired couple, two more small bundles. Underneath were paragraphs of closely typed text. I leaned across Hannah and clicked on the magnifying glass icon to blow them up:
newborn tragedy, local man in hospital, possible brain damage, cause unclear, fatigue may be a factor, driver error likely say police.
Above them, the headline read: “Miracle Baby Survives Crash”.

Hannah followed my gaze. “He’s in your class, isn’t he?”

I nodded, peering forward. “Is this going in too?”

Hannah shook her head. “No, that’s just something I found when I was going through some other stuff.” She tapped a finger repeatedly on the keyboard, enlarging Liam’s miracle-baby face until it filled the screen, huge and pixelated. “No point dredging all that up again. Not now everyone’s moved on.”

I glared at her. Moved on? I couldn’t help but picture Liam’s curious gait, his too-long shorts, could almost feel, suddenly, the tightening grip of his father’s hand on my wrist.

I reached for the mouse. “It’s time for dinner.”

“Wait!” Panic flashed across Hannah’s face. “I haven’t saved it!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m only putting it on sleep.”

She nodded. “What a surprise.”

Elijah always used to tell me off for never shutting the computer down completely. He said it wasn’t good for it, that things need the chance to switch right off and then start again clean. But I couldn’t help myself. There was something about sleep mode that I found irresistible. I loved the way it suspended everything just the way it was. How everything went dark and quiet and still but when you opened it up it snapped back into life, all of it right there, just waiting for the light.

I stared down at the computer. Then I clicked the button once, twice, and watched Liam’s face disappear as the screen faded to black.

Thunkity-thunk. Thunkity-thunk
.

I didn’t look up from the mosaic. This was a tricky bit, snipping the blue tiles just right so they would fit into the outline I’d traced for Tuckers Supermarket. We each had a section to work on and when they were done, we were going to piece them all together like a giant floor puzzle. It was important to get the edges right, to follow the template so it all worked, so everything fit the way it was supposed to.

But even without looking, I knew what the familiar
thunkity-thunk
was. For me, this was the soundtrack to every school day – Liam’s feet kicking rhythmically at my chair from the desk behind.

It had annoyed me at first. I used to turn around and tell him to stop. He would, for a while, but then it would start up once more and when I turned around again he would look surprised, like he hadn’t realised, like his legs had simply taken on a life of their own.

After a while, I stopped saying anything. A while later, I stopped minding.

After a longer while, I kind of started liking it.

It got so that if he was away, I missed it. It was like a background hum you don’t even realise is there until it’s gone and the air around you feels empty all of a sudden.

In some ways, that was true about Liam too.

It wasn’t that we were friends or anything – at least not particularly. It was just that he had always been around. We used to run into him at the hospital when I was little and still going in for my check-ups. I remember sitting with him in the corner of the waiting room, building unsteady worlds out of blocks while our mothers sat straight-backed along the wall, leafing through old magazines to pass the time. Later, at school, we sat out of sport together, shredding leaf after leaf in the shade of the spreading eucalypt while other kids ran and jumped and hurled themselves at things.

Every now and then a ball would come our way, or a bored boundary fielder would take a few extra steps backwards to strike up a conversation.

Liam would always look up. He’d grab the ball, throw it back in a long, swooping arc. He’d say, “How’s it going?” and “What’s the score?” and “Heads up! Here comes a long one.”

But I would keep my head down, the way I always did, keep my eyes on my leaf, concentrating on shearing a clean, smooth line right down the centre of the spine.

Now, though, I looked up. I stopped my pliers mid-snip and stared over at the door to the classroom. Because someone was coming in. Someone familiar. Someone with an oddly crooked nose.

“Good morning, children!” Finkle was holding a wooden box. A display case, with something inside it, nestled snugly between velvet pillows.

He smiled, a broad, Cheshire cat grin as if all our wildest dreams had suddenly come true and he was the dazzling messenger of them. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “It is what you think it is. Can you believe it?”

I couldn’t.

It was the lever. The actual lever.

From her desk, Mrs Barber nodded. “From the
archives.
” She said the last word in a whisper, as if it was a secret.

Finkle nodded solemnly. Then he passed the lever around the room so we could all take turns holding it, so we could all
feel the solid weight of history in the very palm of our hand.

As we did, he told us all about his artistic vision, which involved our mosaic, his lever, and a whole lot of weirdness.

The lever wasn’t only here for inspiration. It was also so we could make sure it fit. So we could mould our hundreds of tiles around it.

It was coming out of the archives and going into our mosaic. Mosaics plural, in fact. There were two of them.

One for Old Lower Grange. One for New.

They were going to lie side by side in the city square, with the lever in between, surrounded by a decorative border.

“A sundial!” Finkle boomed, as if he was announcing the most important announcement in the entire history of announcements. Then he picked up a marker and drew a sketch on the board.

New Lower Grange was going to be a sundial, with compass points directing tourists to places of vibrant and/or laid-back interest.

Old Lower Grange was going to be a water feature, with a drinking tap on one end.

The town would sit underwater and when the level dropped too low, you could flip the lever, releasing more into the well, drowning the old town over and over again.

I told myself not to think about whether it was morbid or festive.

After Finkle left, I studied my growing pile of blue. That should be enough for now. It was only the new Tuckers that was blue. For the old one, I needed some orange and yellow from the pile up the front.

I pushed my chair back and stood up.

“Ow!”

Behind me, Liam had one foot tangled in my chair leg.

“Sorry.” I looked down at his desk. He was snipping tiles for the fire tree – green and brown, green and brown. It was one of the easiest sections of the mosaic – firstly because it was pretty much just a tall, straight stick, and secondly because there was no “after”. They couldn’t exactly rebuild a tree and it would take hundreds of years to grow one even close to tall enough.

Liam hardly had anything to do, really, but Mrs Barber said it didn’t matter. She said he should just take his time and do a really good job of the fire tree.

She said that because she had accidentally almost given him the clocktower. It was the only other section left by the time she got to Liam, and I saw panic flood her face when she realised.

Mrs Barber shoved the photograph back into her clipboard and took it back to her desk, where I saw her studying it later.

She was working on it herself. It was easier that way.

That way she didn’t have to look Liam in the eye and say the word “clocktower” and we could all get on with piecing New Lower Grange together and pretending none of it had ever happened.

All of us except me.

Maybe it was seeing his dad the other day. Maybe it was passing the pool every day on my way back from the lake and seeing those familiar shorts flapping on the other side of the fence. Maybe it was going back through my box and finding all those old clippings –
Tragic Accident
and
Local Man in Coma
and
Crash Case Continues
, all those articles that couldn’t possibly be used because the centenary was a time for celebration and moving forward and no one wanted to think about that.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I couldn’t stop seeing the clear night, the clocktower, the car crashing and rolling and burning.

It was probably all wrong, what I was imagining. No one could say for sure what happened. There hadn’t exactly been anyone there who was able to describe it later.

Only Liam’s dad in a coma.

Liam, two doors down the hall from him, mending his bones and his burns.

And his brother, further down again, under a thin white sheet, a wall of expensive machines fallen quiet by his side.

Liam untangled his leg. “What?”

I realised I was staring. “Nothing.”

I began to turn back around but then he spoke softly. “Hey, where’ve you been anyway?”

“What do you mean? Here.” I pointed at my chair. “There.”

I knew that wasn’t what he meant. He had seen me a couple of times. He might have called out to me once as I was passing the pool, but it was hard to be sure with all the yelling and squealing and announcements about hot chips.

He peered up at me through his fringe, with a little smile that said
You know and I know that’s not what I’m talking about
.

“The pool,” he said. “You haven’t been going.”

“Yes I have,” I began. “I–”

“No you haven’t. I looked.”

It was so unexpected that at first I didn’t know what to say. My mind raced, hunting for ways to explain. “Oh, you mean the laps,” I said finally, as lightly as I could manage. “I don’t have to do them any more. I’m … I’m better now.”

Liam stared at me. “Really?” he said. “That’s great.”

I nodded. “Yeah. So …” I began to turn back around, then stopped.

Because this was a small town and there was a good chance Liam’s mother had a friend whose cousin’s sister worked with Mum. All it would take was for Liam to casually say something like “Cassie Romano’s finally stopped doing those laps”, and within twenty-four hours the hairline cracks in my story would have spread and spread until they split everything wide open.

I glanced back over my shoulder and kept my voice light, as if it was an afterthought. “Could you … could you not tell anyone? About the laps.”

“About you being better?” Liam raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah.”

He hesitated a second, then nodded.

“Thanks,” I said quietly, but his head was already bent over the desk. I headed for the front, picking my way in between the fragments scattered here and there so as not to grind them into the carpet.

I gathered orange and yellow tiles from the box, looking across all the while towards my desk, towards Liam, his head bent low over his pieces.