The Boat (13 page)

It's raining. There she is. Stooped and somehow swanlike, waiting under the corner streetlight. The light drawn into her skin, soaking it, making it refulgent in the black mine of city. A serious young girl. Wind splaying her dark hair. No, I never had a shot-not really. Move, out of breath, toward that shore of light. Catch her and she'll smile, teeth showing-draw it for me-this matter of memory, word by word. Dirty old man. Wait up, Olivia, I'm coming. I see you now! Are you ready? Wait up for me!

IT WAS SHAPING UP TO BE A good summer for Jamie. Exams were over. School was out in a couple of weeks – the holidays stretching before him, wide and flat and blue. On top of that he was a hero. Sort of. At assembly that morning, the principal had paused after his name and the school had broken into spontaneous cheering and clapping. Jamie was onstage with the rest of the first eighteen. He could barely make out the faces beneath him – the lights turned off on account of the heat-but what he remembered were voices swelling out of the large, dim hall as though out from one of his daydreams. You couldn't buy that feeling. Still, his dad. Seated in the front row with the other guests of honor – unimpressed as ever. His smile as stiff as his suit.

"C’arn, Halfies!" the principal called out. He opened his arms. From the back of the hall students started stomping their feet.

Jamie had scored the winning goal in last week's semifinal. For the first time in five years, Halflead Bay High had a real crack at reclaiming the pennant. All his school years Jamie couldn't recall even having a conversation with Alan Leyland, the principal, but now Leyland turned around from the podium and half bowed to him. Everyone looked at the two of them. Then the cry was taken up –
Halfies! C’arn, Halfies!
– even teachers, parents, joining in – Jamie still and rapt in the hot roar until he arrived, again, at his dad's face. The uneasy grin. Of course. The stomping, chanting,
Leyland
's theatrical attitude: a faint film of mockery slid over it all. Jamie pushed it aside. His dad was wrong, he thought. He was wrong, and anything was possible.

***

ALISON FISCHER APPROACHED HIM AT RECESS.

"
Leyland
was licking your arse," she said.

He clutched up from the drinking fountain, mouth brimming water, swallowed. "Hi," he said. The word came out in a burp and left a wet trail down his chest.

"Hi yourself."

She stood with her head cocked to one side, hip to the other. Her school dress was stretched so tight it bit into her thigh. He wiped his mouth, looked around. Alison Fischer. It was a morning of firsts.

"
Leyland
couldn't be stuffed about footy."

"What?"

"He's thinking about enrollments," Jamie said. He tried to remember how his mum had put it. "He just wants the pennant to sucker new parents."

"Shove over," Alison ordered. She bent down to the nozzle and pursed her mouth in a glossy O. Her top button was undone – sprung open as though by heat – and he could see the inside line of her breasts. The stripe of sweat gleaming between them.

She said, "I've seen you down at the wharf." Her lips bright wet.

"I'm working there these holidays."

"Nah, the jetty, I mean. Fishing. With that surfie mate of yours."

"Cale?"

He looked around again. Most of the kids had stayed indoors for recess; others were lying in shade, as still as snakes, under the casuarinas. It was too hot for sport. Off in the paddocks a knot of boys poked at something on the ground. Alison switched hips and smiled patiently at him.

"That was your dad in there, right?"

"My dad?" He laughed weakly.

"With the tie."

This was how it happened: these girls, they did it for kicks, daring each other to go up to random blokes and act interested. He'd seen it before. A gaggle of them – Alison their leader – sitting apart from everyone else, watching on; they sealed off even their amusement, coughing it around their circle like a wet scrap. Tammie, Kate, Laura-all the rest of them, faces mocked up-they were bored with everything and totally up themselves and every boy at Halflead wanted them.

"He didn't even come to the game."

"
My
parents," she said, "after
that
game." Her smile went lopsided. "I reckon they'd adopt you."

He pretended to wave away a fly, looked around again. None of them were in sight. No Dory either. The sound of a piano started up from somewhere – each note hung-tin-fiat, percussive – then evaporated in the heat. So she wanted to talk about the game. No way they'd mess with him, not after last weekend. That assembly. She was alone. She was smiling at him as though she didn't belong to somebody else.,

"That'd make you my sister."

"We couldn't have that, right?"

Whoever was at the piano was a beginner, trying out a new scale: slow, stop-start. Jamie felt himself trapped between the notes, inside the heavy spaces where nothing moved. He realized his whole body was sweating. So she'd talk about his dad – himself sweating in that funereal suit, several sizes too small for him, cuffs up past his wrists – and he'd let her. Applause in his ears. That wry, skeptical smirk.

"So you reckon we can beat Maroomba?"

"I'm there heaps," he said. His voice came out rougher than he'd intended. "The jetty, I mean."

"What?"

"Don't be such a bloody snob. Say hi next time."

"And then what?"

"What are you after?"

"Alison!" a voice called from the school building. Everyone started moving back inside. The sound of the piano petered out, blaring moments later as passing hands bashed its keys.

She leaned toward him. That band of sweat between her breasts – he wanted to bring his mouth to it and lick it up. He wanted her to giggle, push him away, tell him it tickled. Her smile seemed different now.

"I can teach you how to squid," he said.

"Fuck," she said in a low voice, "you're a fast worker, aren't you?"

He didn't say anything.

"Who would've guessed it. Loose Ball Jamie – that's what they call you, right?"

His face flushed. Someone shouted her name again. The school grounds were almost empty now but he had the overwhelming feeling of being watched. Every window in the building blazed with reflected light.

He inclined his head in the classroom's general direction. "We should – "

"So is that what I am? A loose ball?" Her voice went weird, slightly off-pitched: " 'Just come down to the jetty and say hi?' "

The sweat on her collarbones, too, burned white in the sun. The back of her hip-cocked arm. That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at.

 
He looked at her face. She was grinning crookedly, her mouth still wet.

***

DORY'S GIRL – SHE WAS DORY'S GIRL – but then who knew how serious that was? Jamie had liked her forever. And not just in the way everyone talked, in the change rooms, about chicks at school: Laura Brescia, who wore a G-string under her school uniform; Tammie K, who gave Nick a head job and then gave Jimmy one as well so he wouldn't dob about Nick to her big-smoke boyfriend. She was gagging but kept going, Jimmy crowed. He mimed it: gripping her long hair, kneading it into her scalp. No – Alison was more than that. She ran with that crowd but kept herself apart, reserving herself, everyone knew, for the thrall of the big city. Where her family – and their money – were from. Where everyone assumed she'd head once accepted into the university there next year. Until this morning, Jamie would never even have thought to lob his hopes that high.

Still. Dory Townsend. You'd have to be a lunatic.

***

THEY LIVED, THE FOUR OF THEM, on a spur overlooking the sea. Their house must have been one of the most elevated in town. His parents had bought it twenty years ago, back when
Halflead
Bay
was little more than a petrol station and stopover to and from the city. According to Jamie's mum, that was how they'd first met: she was filling up the tank of her rented car when his dad's crew traipsed up from the wharf and into the pub. He was the one who walked without moving his hands. Hungry, worn out from her day in an adverse office – she worked, then, as a forensic accountant – she'd decided to go in too, for a counter meal. Two months later – her own car fully loaded, her career resolutely behind her – she returned to seek out the man who'd seemed, all that evening, to stand for a world of simpler details: a big sky, a sustaining sea, a chance to do work whose usefulness a child could understand.

At first they stayed with his dad's folks on the southern prom. A family of fishermen. Then, when they got married, they moved up the hill. Before the advent of all the developers and holiday-homers, the winemakers and tourists. Back then, Jamie's dad said, you could buy property for next to nothing: the town was dying, hemorrhaging people and industry first as the bay was overfished, then again when Maroomba poached its port traffic. Only the few hardy locals stayed behind. For the next fifteen years his parents had lived exactly how they'd dreamed, his dad skippering one of the town's few remaining trawlers, his mum working on her landscapes – seascapes, really – low, bleached blocks of color settling on a horizontal line. Sky and sea. It was why she'd picked this place. She needed to live in sight of the ocean as much as his dad needed to be on it.

Then, five years ago – the diagnosis. MS. The devastating run of relapses. Despite his wife's protests, Jamie's dad sold his stake in the trawler – started working in the home workshop, knocking out shop fittings, furniture. Jamie and Michael kept going to school. Everyone carried on – working through, around, the illness – as though every moment wasn't actually a dare. As though every word wasn't a word more, every act a further act of waiting.

***

MICHAEL WAS STANDING at the mouth of the driveway. His body bleared in the heat haze above the bitumen. Coming closer, Jamie felt a spark of affection toward him and almost called out his name.

"Dad wants us," Michael said first. He didn't look up from his Game Boy.

"I'm gonna head down the jetty." He hesitated, watching Michael's thumbs wagging on the gray console. "You can come if you like."

"They're fighting."

"So?"

"I just told you, they're lighting." His voice was too deep for a ten-year-old.

Jamie stopped himself laughing. "Mum okay?" He peered up the slope. The house was barely visible from the road, blotted out by foliage: ironwoods, kurrajongs, ghost gums bursting up through the brush. The garden was wild. As he started up the driveway, everything described itself as though to Alison: overhanging branches, knee-high grass, yellowed in places by warped, gutted objects – miscarriages of his mum's interest. Sprockets of leaves. Green everywhere plaited with brightly colored spikelets and bracts. There was his bedroom, the shedlike bungalow. Once his mum's studio, it still gave off an aftersmell of turpentine – faint as something leaked by a body in the dark and dried by morning. And there, a stone's throw away at the top of the driveway, was their double-storied house: a worn weatherboard that seemed choked by bushes and creepers, by the old white veranda that buckled all around it. What would she make of it?

He went round back and into the workshop. The lamps – they must have made it ten degrees hotter indoors. His dad was bent over a long, slightly curved piece of wood, one end wrapped in tape like a boxer's fist.

"I'm almost done," his dad said. His shirt clung wetly all the way down his back, right down to the apron string. "Figured it out. Front struts were too heavy, that's why it wouldn't rock." Using vise-grip pliers, he clamped down on the taped end with his left hand. With his right he started planing the length of the wood. The top half of the chair – the seat and back – lay tipped forward on the table before him.

"I'm going down the jetty," said Jamie.

"Storm's coming."

"Yeah?"

"Day or two. I need you to bring in your mum's stuff first."

"Okay."

"Make sure you look everywhere. Her stuff's everywhere."

"Okay."

"Hang on," his dad said. He put down his tools and turned around. His face and neck – except for two white trapezoids behind his goggles – were plastered in sawdust. It cracked around his mouth when he smiled. "You should've heard them cheering this morning," he said. "For your brother."

Jamie was confused, then heard Michael's voice: "What'd they say?" His brother stepped around him into the workshop.

Their father aimed a roughhouse swat at Michael's hair, then wiped his own brow with the back of his gloves, leaving a wavy orange smear. "Sounds like we missed a big game. But we'll make it next week." He nodded at Michael, the smile still tight and dry on his face. Was he taking the piss? "Biggest game of all, right?"

"We're gonna get slaughtered," said Michael.

"Shut up," said Jamie.

Michael shied away, out of his reach. "Everyone says so."

"Boys."

"Okay," said Jamie. "I'll move the stuff to the shed." He kicked some dust at Michael. "Come on."