The Boy Under the Table (15 page)

In her dream she was watching Lockie trying to stand up on his boogie board. The determination on the boy’s face was so like Doug that even he couldn’t help but laugh. In her dream she saw the blue sky and smelled the green sea as the waves leaped onto the beach. In her dream her family was whole again. She could taste the sharp, cold wine and she felt healed. Sleep was a balm; sleep was the life she wanted to live. Sleep was all she needed.

When they had first returned home from Sydney, Sarah had not been able to imagine achieving the miracle of sleep ever again.

When Dr Samuels had given her the pills she had asked doubtfully, ‘Do you really think I can ever close my eyes again?’

‘Try them,’ he had said, and he touched her cheek as though she was his child. Dr Samuels had hitched up his grey trousers and sat drinking his tea in silence. He was like that with all his patients. He would listen for as long as they needed to talk and if they only wanted to sit and just be in his presence, that was okay as well. He had come down from Sydney as a locum. There were rumours of a failed marriage but he never invited questions about his private life. He had only meant to spend a few months in town before taking a long holiday overseas but they so desperately needed a doctor he ended up staying. He had never married again but there was talk of a son in the city. Dr Samuels went up to Sydney to take exams and attend lectures. He belonged in a major hospital but he preferred the quiet of the town.

He had said to take one pill but she had taken two, defiant in her belief that they would not work. She had switched off the light and stared at the shadows on the ceiling, seeing only images of her child calling for her.

And then, without her realising it, the pills had dragged her into oblivion. And what a sweet nothingness it had been. She had been shocked to wake up to a sun high in the sky. She had never imagined that something as wonderful as the pills existed and that first afternoon all she had been able to think of was how long she had to wait until she could take the pills again. The pills and Lockie, Lockie and the pills chased each other around in her head.

Now she took the pills and, just before she closed her eyes, she summoned Lockie and his smile, and then the dreams would come.

In her dream her golden boy tries again and again and again to stand up on the boogie board until he manages to remain upright for at least a minute.

Sarah experiences again the joyful pride in her boy and the pleasure she takes in him being just like his father. Together she and Doug applaud his shout of triumph.

Sarah dreams of Lockie jumping the waves and Sammy building sandcastles. She dreams of those perfect moments.

The pictures from the holiday were pored over by the kids. It had been one of those magical times that make a family believe in itself again.

In her dream Sarah can feel the tears on her cheeks.

Her golden boy was lost and she was too.

She tried to dream that they found each other again but she couldn’t control her dreams any more than she could control her nightmares.

Right now the nightmares were in her waking hours so she needed to stay asleep.

When she dragged herself out of bed one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and she’d had to go back and look again. She could understand the gauntness that now possessed her body but it was her eyes that drew her. There was something there that she recognised. After a few minutes she realised what she was looking at. Her eyes were like the other woman’s eyes: the woman on the television whose child had been taken from the hotel room. Sarah had never been able to imagine what that woman’s life was like but here she was, staring at the same eyes. She was just like the woman on the television. She was broken. Shattered. Devastated. Crushed. There was nothing left of the woman she had been.

She could see it in her eyes.

When she was awake she had to acknowledge her brokenness. She had to admit to herself that she might never be fixed.

It was too much to think about. Her boy had to come back and, until he did, she needed to stay in her dreams.

Tina

Work would be impossible. There was no way she was leaving the kid by himself and an eight-year-old boy would not exactly be good for business. Oh, there would be some who liked the idea. The world was full of freaky wankers.

They divided the last of the food, Tina giving Lockie the lion’s share. When it was time for bed he snuggled right up to her just like she was the mother koala. She rested her arm over him even though she knew she shouldn’t think about him as anything except a burden.

It felt strange to be going to sleep so early, but Tina was exhausted. She didn’t hear Mark and the boys come in.

There were no dreams that night. Tina fell asleep to the feeling of Lockie’s ribs moving up and down. It felt strange to be touched by another person. She had not been touched by anyone for two years. Well, she had been touched, but those were the touches that burned your skin and made it crawl.

Tim had been a big one for cuddles. He liked to sit on her lap and rest his head on her shoulder. When he was a baby and he couldn’t sleep she would walk up and down holding him so her mother could get some rest.

In his sleep Lockie pushed himself further against her and grabbed her hand. Tina felt her eyes sting with the sweetness of it. She sighed into the air and brushed the thought away. She had to get this sorted out so she could get back to her life. She had to.

Lockie was up early. It was just beginning to get light. Tina hadn’t seen the sunrise for a good couple of years. Lockie was working his way methodically through the empty McDonald’s bags, looking for anything he might have missed.

Tina sighed. She had forgotten that kids needed to eat all the time. All she wanted to do was roll over and wait for sleep again but the kid was obviously starving.

‘Okay, kid, let’s get you to the bathroom.’

‘Can we get some food?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I don’t want to spend any more money so we may have to . . . wait a second, I know where we can go.’

‘Where?’

‘The Chapel. They serve breakfast. I used to eat there when I first got here.’

When I first got here. When I was starving and terrified and excited all the time. When I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, at least I could count on breakfast at the Chapel. In those days I could count on Ruby, but now there’s just me. Just me and some screwed-up little kid who is counting on me. How did that happen?

How did I become this person?

Once she had entered the Cross she had been determined to leave everything she had been behind.

She had phoned home only once.

After the first time.
The First Time
.

The twenty dollars had been warm in her pocket. Ruby had cheered and clapped like she had won some sort of prize. Mark had just touched her lightly on the shoulder.

Tina had almost backed out. The guy Ruby had found for her had taken down his pants and Tina had been so completely revolted that her stomach had cramped and she knew she was about to throw up. She wanted to get up off her knees and run until she was home again and safe in her own bedroom. She could imagine how horrified her mother would be if she told her what she was about to do. And Jack? Jack would tell her it was a terrible sin, a sin that would be punished. Jack’s God was big on punishing you for your sins. Tina had looked up at the pathetic man with his pants around his ankles and known that nothing could be worse than losing Tim. So how exactly could she be punished for this ‘service’? She had cleared her mind and got on with it.

It wasn’t a step she had taken easily. She had tried at first to find a regular job, any job. But no one wanted someone without references. They wanted an address and a home phone number. They wanted to know where and what and why, and Tina had come to the Cross to get away from the questions and the discussion. She did get one job, waiting tables at a café staffed by backpackers, but everyone wanted to be friends. They wanted to drink and laugh and visit the bloody beach. Tina couldn’t stand it. Her anger kept rearing up and forcing words out of her mouth. They fired her for yelling at a man who gave his kid a quick smack on the leg. Tina was not fit for normal people. She knew that. When she watched people milling around the Cross talking and shopping and eating they seemed strange and foreign. How could they not know about Tim?

How come they weren’t hurting when the world had lost such an amazing little soul? Didn’t they know?

Logically she understood that everyone had something they were hiding, some hurt they kept deep inside, some reason why they were not really normal either, but she didn’t understand how they functioned. She didn’t understand how they got out of bed every morning or breathed in and out without the hurt weighing down their lungs.

Ruby had waited patiently until she was ready. Until she had exhausted all her other options. Until she was desperate enough to join the others who were not fit for normal people.

She couldn’t quite believe she had become one of them. Her life had been so very different from theirs. She had never experienced the fear that Mark alluded to, that she saw flare behind his eyes in moments when he thought no one was watching, in the moments before he managed to cloud it all over with nothingness. She had never been mistreated in the way that the others had been mistreated.

Before she had walked out the door and out of her life she had spent hours on the computer haunting the chat rooms of the grief-stricken. One piece of advice stuck fast. A woman who had lost her young husband had written:
You may find yourself behaving in strange ways and doing strange things
.

Tina couldn’t think of a stranger place to be or of a stranger thing to do.

This was not who she was supposed to be. Despite everything that had happened, this was not who she was supposed to be. And yet she could not change it. There was always the choice to go home, but Tina could not see how to make it happen. Her feet would not walk in that direction. The anger kept her stuck where she was. The anger and the grief and the impossibility of ever feeling normal again.

When she called after the first time her mother had answered the phone and the words had stuck in Tina’s throat. How could she explain what she had just done and what she would do again? Her mother lived in a different world now—not that she’d ever been in the same place as Tina.

Christina, is that you? Oh, please come home. Come home to me and Jack and God. Come home to us and we can help you embrace the Lord. We can help you heal. Please Christina, if you knew the glory of God you would be so much better. Please come home to us. You’re only hurting yourself by being away. You need to come home and finish school. I’ve seen the truth now, Christina—Jack has shown me the truth and you need to come home. I want to share my life with you—we want to share our lives with you. Tim wouldn’t have wanted you to shut us out of your life, Christina.

Tina had hung up the phone then.
How would you know what Tim would have wanted?

They wanted her home but Tina never saw them in the Cross. If she was a mother it would have been the first place she would have looked. Maybe standing around and wringing your hands at your runaway daughter was easier than actually finding her. Her mother was free to start again. Tim was gone and now that she was gone her mother could take the same approach her father had. Family? What family?

‘Okay,’ said Lockie, breaking into her thoughts. Breaking in and breaking down.

Tina was pleased she had remembered about the Chapel. Getting food would be easy, although there was always the problem of questions. Everyone got suspicious when they saw a little kid. With enough makeup on she passed for much older than seventeen. Lockie could easily be her kid.

She made him brush his teeth again before breakfast and they made their way to the Chapel.

There was a line of people waiting for the doors to open. They stamped their feet in the cold. It wasn’t the kind of line that people got chatty in. Mostly everyone looked at their feet. Funny how human beings stop looking at each other when they are ashamed of themselves.

The strong astringent smell of alcohol was in the air. It clashed with the smell of dirty clothes and dirty bodies.

Tina looked down the line at the shabbily dressed men and women. Everyone looked like they were wearing everything they owned. The older ones were fans of Jack Daniel’s. The younger ones liked anything they could shoot, snort or swallow. There were some new ones as well now. Whole families who couldn’t quite believe that they were in the Cross waiting for a free breakfast. You could almost see them wondering what the fuck had happened.
Where did my big TV go?
the GFC people whispered to one another but in the Cross there had always been a financial crisis. Whatever was happening on the stock market would never change that.

The first time she had come to the Chapel for breakfast Tina had known instantly that she did not belong with these people. There was no way she was going to turn into them. The free breakfast was just until she sorted herself out. When she thought back on it now she managed a smile at her arrogance. She had been fifteen. What exactly was she going to do? Open a shop?