The Boat (20 page)

Jamie turned toward Michael, who shrank back, face already crimped in fear.

"Let's go," he said.

"Don't," said Michael. "Please don't."

Before they left, his dad's voice floated into the room, loud and raw and plain: "You should remember."

In the kitchen he got Michael in a headlock. "How'd they find out? You little shit."

"I can't breathe!"

 
"You told them, didn't you?"

"Everyone knows."

"What? What'd you say?" He shoved Michael's head against the sink washboard, forced it along the metal ribbing, then dropped him to the floor. Michael's body shivering. The storm muted in here. Slowly, he felt the remorse bleeding into him. Always it came, immediately afterward. He said, "Everyone knows what?"

Michael curled into a cupboard corner. He lifted his hand to feel the side of his head. He was breathing hard when he looked up, and he didn't look at Jamie's face but at some indistinct point beneath it.

"That you're gonna fight Dory," he said in his deep voice. "And that he's gonna slaughter you."

***

ALL NIGHT HE COULDN'T SLEEP.

He threw on some clothes and wandered outside. The rain had stopped. Branches shuddered the water off themselves. The moon was still bright, caught in their wet leaves.

His mother had fallen asleep on the reclining couch. She was snoring softly. The moonlight poured in from the window and buoyed around her as though to bear her up. It seemed unreal. He pulled the blanket snug beneath her chin. Her mouth dropped open as though its hinges had snapped, and she snorted.

"Darling?"

"Sorry, Mum," he said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

It was as though she were swimming up from some distant pit of herself. The drugs awash in her – he saw it now. With sudden clarity he understood how lost she must feel in her body.

"God, I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was drawn thin. "I was wrong. Who gets to choose where they die?" Her eyes were barely open, one of them darting about quick as silverfish.

"Mum, wake up."

"But the boys love it here. You too." Her face loosened. She said, "You wouldn't believe."

"Mum." He shook her shoulder.

"The things I see now. But my hands."

"Mum." A pulse in her eyes and then her mouth moved. It jerked, then spread slowly into a smile of recognition.

"Sweetie." She fell quiet. They listened together to her breathing. All through her the odor of bleach, bleach sopped and smeared with a used rag.

"What is it?" she said.

A nauseous rush of answers rose up in him but he said nothing.

"The girl?" She didn't wait for his response. "And that horrible boy. Are you scared?"

He nodded.

"You're my son," she whispered. A strange shifting in her eyes, as though grass moved behind them. For a moment she looked lost. Then she said, "My son does anything he wants."

Gradually her head drooped forward. The muscles around her mouth went slack and he realized she was lapsing back into sleep. This was where she lived most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour. He wanted it to stop. When? Monday, after training? What would be enough – what commensurate with his lack? And what if he couldn't? She had come back from the hospital and the first thing she said to him and Michael was,
This won't happen to you. I promise
. He was rubbish. Whatever he did or didn't do now, he'd hate himself later – he knew that.

A truck raced by on the coastal road, ripping skins of water off the bitumen.

Her head still bowed, she said in a slurred voice, "James?" He slid his fingers into the pouch of her right hand. He'd never before noticed how loose the skin around her knuckles was.

She said, "My wine." After a long silence she said, "Will you pass it to me, please?"

"Mum."

"Your father and I love you very much. No matter what."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

It wasn't until a minute later he realized she might be squeezing his hand. "Okay."

He dreamed he was alone. The glass was cold against his fingers and forehead. He shrank away, went to the next black, steamed window, and the next, calling out as he searched. His voice sounded as though trapped inside some metal bladder. What if the paddocks were empty? And the long white corridors, too, with their waxy floors, and the dark slopes of the dunes he clambered up and down as though drunk? What if he couldn't find him?

The ocean seethed and sighed in the dark. So this was where you ended up, sick in sleep. Your night a beach and all sorts of junk washing up on shore.

***

AT SCHOOL NEWS OF THE FIGHT HAD SPREAD. Monday at last. Everyone watched him and no one looked him in the eye. Even the teachers seemed to leave him to himself, steering their voices around. The semis, the assembly – all of it seemed long gone, preserved elsewhere. He was being quarantined. He'd seen it before. You were dead space, you were off – limits-until afterward. Nothing malicious in it. What made it strange for him was the incongruous buzz around school-everyone getting fired up for the holidays and, in particular, the grand final that weekend. First time in five years, and against archrivals Maroomba too. The tension brinking on hysteria.

Recess he spent in the C-block toilets. What was the grand final to him? He tried to throw up but couldn't.

Lunchtime he saw her. Her friends clustered in the concrete corner of the downball court where, as one, they turned to look at him, opening apart, unfurling like some tartan-patterned flower, and there she was, leaning against the wall with large concentric targets painted in white behind her. She held his eye for a second and then the circle sealed shut. He realized he was holding his breath.

Vague impressions of classes rolled on. Each period ending with teachers saluting the team, rallying everyone for the big game. Jamie felt exhausted. Time pushed him forward. His mind wound out, one point to the next.

"C'arn, Halfies!"

He spotted Dory just before final period. Taller than everyone else. Like a dockworker in his school uniform – shirtsleeves high on his biceps, shorts tight across his quads. His eyes too close together, his hair flaxen, floppy. Like some sick cartoon of a dockworker. The corridor packed and noisy. A few people saw them, made space, straggled, but Dory disappeared into a classroom. Lester was behind him, of course, and from a distance Jamie could see his face, pinched up in anger, yelling something out.

"Fucking retard!" he seemed to be yelling.

Jamie opened his mouth.

"Fucking retard mum!" he was yelling.

Of course he couldn't be saying that. Jamie shook it off – the bog-like feeling that accompanied the thought of his mum. There was his mind again, groping at anything but what was right in front of him. In front of him – wherever he went – Dory. Huge and hard, a thing of horror. He'd been dumped on the beach by his folks. He'd bashed up this guy, hospitalized that guy. He'd killed a Chink with his uncle.

The teacher talked on as Jamie watched the clock.

You had to shut it out. You could see it on players' faces, how they approached him, ready to take damage. You could hear it in your parents' voices. You had to shut it all out, otherwise it would sprout in you like weeds.

The bell rang.

He was headed for the lockers when his geography teacher flanked him, escorted him wordlessly to the principal's office and dropped him off there.

"Go on," said the secretary. She looked up. "Go on. Mr. Ley-land's waiting."

Jamie knocked, cracked open the door.

"There he is," a voice boomed. Coach Rutherford. He was wearing trackies and a Halflead T-shirt, a whistle around his neck. He stood behind the principal's desk. Where was
Leyland
?

"I was just coming to training," Jamie said.

"Good," said Coach. He waved him inside. Then Jamie saw
Leyland
– on the couch obscured by the door. With him was Jamie's dad. His mum in her wheelchair. His mum – what was she doing here? Jamie stood in the doorway and didn't move. All these people. All day he'd been waiting-all those days since Thursday night's party – and now it felt as though time had pushed him forward too far, too hard. Everything collapsing into one place.

Coach said, "But today, you get a rest." He smiled curtly and closed his fist around the whistle, shaking it like dice. Jamie's dad stood up and thanked him. He was wearing work clothes, his jeans smeared with oil and sawdust. Then he turned and thanked
Leyland
.

"Well," said
Leyland
, rising to his feet, "our students, our business."

Coach left the room. Jamie didn't say anything. He was thinking of Dory, the rest of them, waiting for him on the oval. What they must be thinking. He felt airy in his own body. What they must be saying. He remembered Lester's words in the corridor.

"It's not your business," his mum said quietly, but
Leyland
didn't hear.

His dad moved to stand behind her chair. "Come on, Jamie."

"It's between the boys. It's not their business."

"Maggie," his dad said under his breath, "we talked about this already."

Jamie couldn't bring himself to look at them. He sensed that to witness a drama between his parents here, now, might wreck him completely.

"Jamie," said
Leyland
. His voice took on added weight: "I've talked to Dory. He understands – there's to be no trouble whatsoever."

His dad pushed the wheelchair out of the room.

"Alright?"
Leyland
asked. "It's over."

***

Even from the car he could see Dory. Even at that distance. Tallest in a line of green guernseys, the one moving slower, as though to a separate beat, while the others jogged in place, ran between the orange witches' hats between whistle bursts. Sprint exercises. All the way home Jamie said nothing.

When they pulled up, he got out and unfolded the wheelchair.

His dad said, "Help your mother into the house."

"Bob, I'm okay."

His dad looked at Jamie and then at the house. "I said help your mother."

The front door opened and Michael came out. He stopped – transfixed and tense – as soon as he saw Jamie, staring at him without any of his usual bashfulness. Something like concern, deeper than concern, all through his expression. Then he went over to their mum and took hold of the wheelchair handles.

"I'm going down the jetty," Jamie told his dad.

His mum turned to him with a strange, clear-eyed face. "You're allowed. You're allowed to go. You can go."

***

HE WALKED, ALONE, down to the jetty. It was clogged with tourist families who'd arrived over the weekend. All along the walkway were canvas chairs, Eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water. He found a spot and sat. Someone had a portable radio and music streamed into the air in clean, bright colors. The bay a basin of light.

Could that really be the end of it?
Leyland
talking to Dory? What would he have said to him? That the school needed Jamie fit for the final? That Jamie's dad had begged Dory to spare his gutless son? That his mum, in that wheelchair, was dying? He sat in the midst of the jetty's hurly-burly, watching and listening. He felt the need of explanation. Here's what he could say to Dory – no, he could say anything, all the right things, and it still wouldn't be enough. Maybe things could be normal again. He'd finish school, run onto the field on Saturday and run off two hours later. He'd take up the job at the fish plant, or, better yet, he'd talk to John Thompson. His dad would take the sheets in. Stop. They'd pot the ashes under the waratahs; leave a handful for the bluff, throw it up and the wind would probably shift and putter it into their faces. She'd like that. No – you didn't think of that.

He got up and started walking. He'd sat there long enough – training would be done by now. He walked down the main street and past the wharf. At the tidal flats he took off his shoes and kept going. He had an idea where he was going but nothing beyond that. Sand spits sank into ankle-deep shoals. The night had been cold and the water chilled his feet. The sky flat and blue with mineral streaks. He passed the rock pier and started picking his way through the sedgeland – sharp, rushlike plants grazing his legs. At every step he dared himself to turn around, but he didn't. He followed a rough trail marked with half-submerged beer bottles, clearings where blackened tins from bonfire rockets were set into the dirt like sentinels.

And Alison. How would he have any chance with her otherwise? He stepped on solid-looking ground and sank to his knees.

The bile rose up in him. Roundabout here was where they'd found the poacher's body. Half stuck, half floating in the marshy suck. No-nothing was worth that. And in that moment he realized, deep as any realization went, that that wasn't what he was afraid of at all. He had to see it through.

He came to the shack in the middle of a muddy clearing. A man sat out front on a steel trap doing ropework. He was surrounded by other traps and old nets, dried and sun-stiffened in the shapes of their failure. It must have been Dory's uncle. He didn't look up.