The Break (11 page)

She didn't really want to eat now, at the kitchen table, this late, with none of the homely atmosphere that normally goes with eating — but she knew she'd wake up starving in the night if she didn't. Cray would have gone out and eaten on the balcony. She flicked on the late-night news, settled down with her microwave-warmed bowl, tucked her feet under her knees. After five minutes the test pattern came up. She hadn't seen the test pattern for years, didn't know it still existed. Maybe the station had a few different ones, she thought, just for variety. She tried the ABC. Accounting class. Shit. That was worse.

‘Cray,' she whispered loudly. ‘Are you awake?'

Nothing.

‘Cray.
CRAY
.'

‘Mmmnnnhhhh … what …'

She crawled onto the bed. ‘Hello, I'm home.'

‘Rosie, I need to sleep,' he said thickly, covering his eyes with the crook of his elbow.

‘I've just got home from work … I'm all awake. It was my first day, remember?'

‘I left a note,' he croaked.

She leaned back. ‘Oh, thanks, very kind of you.'

‘And some dinner!' He was waking now, propping himself up. ‘Jesus Christ, Rosie! I was completely asleep. What's the story?'

‘I'm not tired, Cray! My mind's going a million miles an hour and I just thought you might have stayed awake. There's only crap on telly. Unless you want me to watch the test pattern.'

‘God …' He fell back into the sheets. ‘I just want to sleep, Rosie. I left that note …'

Rosie closed the door behind her. Fine. He didn't want to hear about her day. He wanted to
sleep
. She wanted to know: how could he be tired when he hadn't done anything all day?

Rosie washed her bowl and put the kettle on. She looked sideways at the bowl, dripping in the rack, and imagined Cray putting dinner aside for her after he'd cooked and eaten (on
his
own).

After a moment she made a weak cup of tea, turned off the kitchen light and made herself as comfortable as possible on the seventies sofa. She'd not been able to hear it before, but the heavy rumble of the surf as it struck the sand and sucked itself away again came in through the sliding doors, came right into the house. And between the water and the houses, even closer, she could hear the bush, almost loud with noises still unfamiliar. Maybe there were a few accounting skills she could brush up on, she thought, concentrating on keeping her breathing steady.
Nothing to be scared of, Rosie.
She took a positive mouthful of tea and scorched her tongue. White-hotness travelled from her throat to her belly.

Rosie stood up and moved away from the sliding doors and the strangeness of the night. She flung open the front door, turning on the houses that leaned at the silvery night water.
Shouting pounded in her. Blackness pressed itself close.

Not a light was on. Fifty or so houses on the face of the hill, and not one window glowed.

Sam loved the night. Everyone was asleep; the world belonged to him. Him and the stars.

Stars. Weird things. He reckoned they were unreachable, mysterious, something he'd never be able to understand. Not
really
, not properly. What was weirdest was that they were part of things, part of the world, part of this solar system. Earth was a star. Well, a planet. Sam knew from his charts that Earth was just another speckle in the sky, one of the millions of speckles he could see most nights out his window. He wondered if maybe there was someone looking out from one of those stars at this one, this bright one, like he could see Venus and Mars sometimes. Maybe. It was funny, the way people thought of this planet as separate, as on its own, like it was special or something.

The next morning, Mike flipped the bonnet to check the Sunbird's vitals. Oil slid down the rocker cover. It didn't seem to matter which angle he came from, he just couldn't get the stuff directly into the engine opening. He mopped up as best he could with a grotty rag he found in the boot — an old pair of jocks — and then eased off the radiator cap.

Forty minutes to Margs. Should he go straight to the farm, or drop in at a real estate agent's first? He was going to have to get work pretty quick if he was paying rent. No more DSS. Social security.
Dole
. He could apply down there if he really needed to, but he wanted to work, keep busy, make a real break, show everyone. Show Ferg. How could he ever get back his brother's trust? Ferg still ground that axe, oh yeah, he couldn't put it down. And why the fuck should he? And Sam — he didn't want Sam thinking he had a no-hoper for an uncle. Mike wanted to be able to take him pressies. Stuff for the computer. Things from Mike.

It was now or never, Mike reckoned.

The old tree-lined avenue leading in and out of Brenn Head brought to mind the marri he used to sit in as a kid to throw honky nuts at Ferg. He grinned at the memory. But beyond that, Mike struggled to remember how it felt to live there before — twenty years ago. Twenty
years
! Before he grew up, before he was who he was now. Before Dad died. Before Mum had white hair and watched the afternoon soapies, before Sam was born. Before he was a user, before Jen left him. The world was different now.

He tried to clear his head. He was bloody starving. And he needed a piss. Why hadn't he gone before he'd handed his key
in? Mike didn't want to have to ask that dicknose manager for any favours. There was a bit of bush he could pull into a few minutes from here where he could relieve himself. His hunger would have to wait.

 

 

 

The earthworm pushes through dark, wet soil, searching for decay, something to work on and ingest. It slides against other worms, their bodies half hidden, protected against predators: the New Holland honeyeaters, the magpies and kookaburras. Ants, sometimes. Earwigs.

A coming: feet crunching over sticks. The pink fleshy earthworm elongates, retracts, elongates, burrows. Then: golden spray hard against the tree, a sprinkling of warm moisture over the leaves above.

The earthworm threads deeper down, comes across something soft, decomposing, as the steps retreat.

Liza straightened up from the paper. A car. And somehow, she knew.

But he was meant to
ring
first!

She wanted to go out to Mike with smiles, put on the kettle for a pot of tea, welcome him as he stood awkwardly at the door, feet making sounds on the verandah, and she wanted to send him away again, tell him to do it properly, for Ferg's sake, for their sake, for god's sake!, because he said he would, because this was the start, the beginning, the end of all that.

‘Hello?' he said through the flyscreen door.

The verandah creaked in the easterly, little tocks of falling seeds and skitters of leaves across the wood.

Liza leaned out, peered through the dark of the flyscreen.

‘Mike!'

She nearly said something stupid about door-to-door salesmen, but thought better of it. ‘What a surprise!'
Oh, beautifully done, Liza.

‘Well, yeah, sorry, Lize, hope you don't mind, I just …'

‘No, no, of course we don't mind.'

He was holding a paper bag gingerly. She eyeballed it. ‘What's in
there
? I'd better put the kettle on.'

Mike put the bag on the table in the kitchen, and then stood at the door that opened out to the farm.

‘Pip's in the orchard, checking to see if there's anything to pick.' Liza sighed. ‘We haven't really been looking after it, it all needs a good pruning and tidy-up. There's never enough time.' She laughed, but felt guilty about it. The orchard was her job, really. It was too much for Pip these days, though Liza still saw her out there on sunny mornings. Ferg was all day
in the plantation, and when Sam was at school Liza should have been out there with the folding handsaw, but there were always sheets and clothes to be washed, shopping to pick up. She wasn't even working, really, and she'd let the orchard go wild. Maybe that was something Mike could do, look after the orchard. Pip'd like that; Ferg too. He used to talk a lot about wanting Mike to be part of it. Talked less about that now. He'd wanted his brother to be part of this rambling house — their family home — with its cool stone walls and original weatherboard (which went from fifty degrees in summer to minus five in winter); its four-sided verandah and noisy old trees; its huge kitchen, and bathroom with knobbly taps; the grassy walk to the river. Mike used to be part of it, until he'd gone and stuffed things up so categorically.

‘Well, maybe I'll walk out there and find her. She'll be surprised.'

Liza watched him take his Capstan and walk out onto the side verandah, and towards the farm.
You're not wrong
, she thought.
Pip'll be surprised alright. She's been waiting for this for years.

Mike knew he wasn't going to have a problem with this nurse: it was a bloke. A local guy, probably about the same age as him. Surfed in his spare time, he told Mike. So did everyone in this town, Mike thought. All the cars he'd passed on the way to the Margaret River hospital were rusty old stationwagons stacked to the gunwales with boards and wetsuits, driven by guys going home after a day in the surf, with zinc lips and noses, wide black sunnies.

The hospital building was like an old homestead; hardly the imposing whiteness of the high-rise city hospitals.

Despite the warmth of it all, Mike felt like a loser, standing there swallowing methadone in front of this guy who'd made something of his life, who'd probably gone about his thing without too much fuss or bother; without getting on the wrong side of everyone he passed, the wrong side of his own family. If only he could have his time again. People said things like
This is the first day of the rest of your life
, but Jesus Christ, if only!

Outside, kookaburras broke into their regular evening guffaw, throats pointed to the sky.

After tea Sam had looked hopefully at the bag of doughnuts Mike had brought. But Mum shushed him off to his room
while the adults talked
.

Something about the old men's quarters, the old cottage where Mum shoved all their junk — that's all Sam could pick up from his listening post in the corridor. Mike wasn't saying much, just letting his dad speak, and they were all quiet for long periods, just the sounds of mugs being put down on the
table. Even Nanna Pip was in there, she was still up! Something was definitely going on. Normally she'd be padding off around eight or nine, even though they all knew she'd just read or watch telly in bed — the sport usually; Sam heard it when he walked past her room, she'd stay up late with it, with the quiet blare of TV filling her room.

Behind him, through his parents' bedroom window, Sam could see the two stars of Centaurus, the pointers, showing the way through the sky to the Southern Cross. He loved the Cross, the way some of its stars were brighter than others, loved the way someone had looked up at the sky one night and linked them all together, those five stars and their two pointers, like join-the-dots, even though they were light-years apart from one another, from Earth.

The door opened before he could turn back from the window, let alone escape down the corridor. Busted, big-time. Liza looked at him and grinned. He tried to give her the sign, the eyes, to say,
Keep it a secret, Mum! Let me sneak off, pretend you never saw me
, but she reached down and got him right under the armpits, went for the big tickle attack, right there in front of everyone, and he was writhing and trying to breathe when he saw Ferg and then Mike coming at him, Ferg laughing and saying, ‘This is what happens when you hide and listen in the hallway, you little scoundrel!'

After that they finally had the doughnuts, all together in the kitchen with sugar on their fingers, and Pip beamed over hers.

‘Mike's going to be staying in the cottage, Sam,' Ferg said.

‘Look, are you really sure about that, Ferg? I mean it's bloody' — he looked at Sam, mouth full — ‘very generous of you.'

Liza laughed a little nervously. ‘Don't argue with him, he
might change his mind. Look, Mike, it'll be a great way for you to save some money, and it'll mean you can spend time with everyone, but it's far enough away from the house for you to have your own space.'

‘The junk shed, Mum?' Jam squirted out of Sam's doughnut.

‘The storage shed, Sam.'

He grinned jammily. ‘How long for?'

There was a bit of a silence then, looks flitting awkwardly around the table.

Mike leaned over. ‘I don't know exactly how long, Sam. Um. A while. Is that okay with you? We can get your computer set up so it's really humming, if you like. There's some new software we can put on it that'll speed it up loads.'

Sam nodded. That was okay with him.

Now that Mike's arrival was over, he and Ferg and Pip could get on with whatever it was they had to do. Getting it all out in the open. Sorting out their differences.
Bonding
. Liza just hoped there wouldn't be too much friction in the process, that it wouldn't be too unsettling for everyone, for Sam. She knew it confused him, this thing with his uncle, saw it in his face sometimes — the affection he had for Mike and the strangeness of some of the vibes when Mike and Fergus were around each other. But Sam seemed to know how to sort it out, had his quiet times and his walks down to the river, and sometimes on his way Liza could hear him chattering quietly to himself. And when he wasn't at school or by the river, he'd be on the net or poring over his constellation charts, craning his head out the window when he was meant to be asleep. Liza smiled. She leaned back against the pillows.

Ferg was brushing his teeth savagely, wandering the corridor.