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The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.

Nick Earls is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novels Zigzag Street and Bachelor Kisses, Headgames, a collection of short stories, and several novels for young adults, including After January and 48 Shades of Brown, which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for older readers in 2000.

His work has been published internationally in English and in translation, as well as being successfully adapted for film and theatre. He worked as a suburban GP and medical editor before turning to writing. Nick Earls lives in Brisbane.

HOUSE of BOOKS

NICK EARLS

Making Laws for Clouds

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

First published by Penguin Books Australia in 2002

Copyright © Nick Earls 2002

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Contents

Acknowledgements

The Night Sky from Battery Hill

The Stormy Deluxe

Making Laws for Clouds

acknowledgements

This time I’d particularly like to thank Jessica Adams for inviting me to be part of the otherwise all-girl anthology, Girls’ Night In. Somehow her Nick(ola) Earls joke led to the story that began this novel, and once the characters were in my head they wouldn’t leave.

Girls’ Night In and its successors have how raised millions of dollars for the international aid agency War Child, and some of the royalties from this novel will go to War Child as well. War Child provides immediate, effective and sustainable aid to children affected by war in order to build peace, resolve conflict and empower future generations.

I’d also like to thank the people at Curtis Brown, Penguin and home who got behind me when I decided this story shouldn’t stop before the nativity play, and should last the whole summer.

the night sky from battery hill

(december)

This is the best summer of my life. This is the summer my mother isn’t always on the bus, and I used to dream about that.

No more of my mother burping and farting and creaking like an old house with all that gas in her. My mother cracking those lame boozy jokes no one gets and smelling something like old fish. She’s a bit of an embarrassment.

My mother sits in the second row on the bus and takes up the whole seat, but mainly on account of her knees. They’re quite far apart, so there’s no room for anyone else. She sits on the window side, but her right knee gets most of the way to the aisle.

It’s the chafing, her thighs chafing. That’s what she says, and she says chafing’s hell and she doesn’t say anything about hell unless she means it. She says if they wanted to make hell hell they could forget the eternal fire and just go for a long hot summer with lots of chafing.

Summer’s when the chafing’s at its worst and she sits on the verandah sometimes, flapping the front of her dress to make a breeze, and she says it’s raw as a skinned possum in there. That’s usually when she calls the doctor. And, since it’s summer, there’s usually fungus involved and I’m off to the chemist to get a big tube of cream soon enough.

The first time she said ‘skinned possum’ my brother Wayne cried. He’s younger than me, and not good with surprises, even when they’re just ideas. He had nightmares about the skinned possum up Mum’s dress, in case it might come out and get him when he was asleep. It took me some talking to get him over it. Now he just asks her not to say it because it makes him want to spew. But lots of things make Wayne want to spew. All his life his stomach’s been on the sensitive side. My mother’s not too bad about that. We make allowances. She says I should always buy groceries with Wayne’s stomach in mind, and not make a fuss about doing it. So, no peanut butter.

Enough about my mother. This is the best summer because she isn’t always on the bus (except on Sundays), and that completely changes the seating arrangements. The regular seating arrangements go like this: front row – Tanika Bell and her mother (who always faces forward, and prays when we come up to intersections), second row – my mother, third row – me and Wayne. I’m older, so I qualify for the window seat, but I give it to Wayne. I should be giving it to Wayne because of his tendency to get motion sickness, but that’s just a good excuse. From the aisle seat of row three my mother isn’t as much in the way, and you can talk to Tanika Bell. See the back of her head the whole way, talk to her sometimes.

So how much better is it when my mother’s not there, and it’s Wayne and me in the second row instead of her? Much much better. From the aisle seat of the second row, you can see every freckle on Tanika Bell’s face when she turns around. And we don’t have all my mother’s noises to deal with.

I’m working right now and I should be concentrating, but it’s Tanika Bell’s face from one row back that I’m thinking about. Working and sweating in this foul summer heat, and the weeds get up knee-high overnight so there’s always plenty to do to keep the roads looking the way they should. I stop for water and some petrol for the Whipper Snipper, then I’m into it again, putting a straight edge back along the Nicklin Way, taking out weeds and the new strands of grass that are pushing out onto the bitumen. That’s ambition for you – grass thinking it can grow over bitumen, take over the Nicklin Way. That’s four lanes of traffic and two of parking.

Things have been better here since Tanika Bell’s father came along and got the job of church caretaker and driver of the minibus. And much better since rehearsals started, since that means bus trips without my mother.

We are the Magi, Tanika Bell and me, two thirds of the Magi in the church nativity play. It’s my first speaking part – Magus Three, the carrier of myrrh. But I’ve done three years as a shepherd (non-speaking), so it’s fair enough. People know I’ve earned it. And people probably knew I was shitted off with being a shepherd by now too. If they looked they could tell. The second year I worked hard with that crook, and all it got me was another year as a lousy fucking shepherd. The third year I just made up the numbers, stood there with a broom handle that had had nothing done to it – nothing to make it look like a costume – and I made sure sheep never crossed my mind.

My mother kept making me go. She doesn’t see that sometimes you’ve got to have something to live for to make you keep going back. Some understanding that you’ve got prospects.

I didn’t want to put my name down this year, but my mother made me. ‘Not if I’m no lousy fucking shepherd again,’ I said to her, and she said, ‘Righto, I’ll talk to Father Steele.’

I think my mother’s a pillar of the church – I read that expression in the paper once, and she’s the right size to be a pillar – so the talk with Steelo seemed to do the job. She came back and said they’d put me down for a Magus this year, along with Mattie Hartley and ‘that girl on the bus who talks too much’.

And I said, ‘I thought it was just you on the bus who talked too much,’ mainly to cover the fact that my face had gone red and my heart had started thumping like a knocker on a door and something in my pants was showing some kind of interest in answering.

‘She’ll have to wear a beard, of course,’ my mother said. ‘But she’s the right height for it, I suppose. Joe Bell’s daughter.’

As if I didn’t know who ‘that girl on the bus’ might be.

And that’s when, weeks out from Christmas, this started to look like it might be the best summer of my life. Forget the fact that Steelo makes us do the nativity play exactly the same way every year. Forget the fact that this is year three for me on the council road crew and summers are the worst time by far for doing this job. For me this year is different. I’ve been bumped up to Magus Three, and I’ve got dialogue with Tanika Bell.

I realise I’ve developed the thing my mother calls a ‘soft spot’ for her but, trust me, it’s a hard spot. It’s a good thing these council work shorts are loose in the front or everyone on the Nicklin Way would know exactly how I’m feeling about Tanika Bell right at this moment.

My mother – a woman all made up of soft spots – is pretty quick to pick them in other people, and give them a hard time about it. So it’s best to keep my dealings with Tanika Bell totally professional when she’s around. And to try to keep Tanika out of my mind when I’m at work, since this job involves some fierce equipment sometimes, and requires precision.

Tanika Bell has interesting teeth, some of which only look straight when she’s turning round to talk over the seat. Sometimes in rehearsals she catches me looking at her mouth, and she shuts it. It’s usually open, but in a way that I’d call thoughtful.

I pick up some Bundy rum on the way home, and three bottles of Diet Coke. The Bundy’s on special and that’s the best way to buy it, so I take two. I can always hide one until we need it. It’s not such a long walk from the bottleshop to home, but it’s too long for my mother to take on. I’m fit. Working for the council does that for you. I’m particularly fit in the legs.

Actually, it’s handy that there’s a bus to church, since I don’t know how we’d get my mother there otherwise. We’re early on the route, about a third of the way from the Bell’s place at Battery Hill to the Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla. We get on just before Mrs Vann, who embroiders flowers in the corners of her hankies and always smells of powder. Sometimes she gives us a batch of her date slice. She’s definitely another pillar of the church. The stop after that’s Mr Tooley, who tells lies about being a war veteran and goes to three churches for the food and one more for bingo. Then there’s the Skerritts, who take three rows down the back on the right and always have wet combed hair that’s turned frizzy before the trip home. The Skerritts’ hair drives them close to mad.

‘Hey, we’re the flock,’ Wayne said to me one day when he was about ten, so now that’s pretty much how I think of us – the flock being rounded up for church by Joe Bell’s bus. And we’re not such a bad flock really. Round Christmas, there’s carols. We wind the windows down and we sing and we don’t care if all Caloundra hears us.

It sounds like it runs pretty smoothly, and it does now that Joe’s been in the job ten months, but it didn’t at first. There was a bit of trouble when Mr Marcuzzi retired and my mother realised the new man’s wife and daughter thought they owned the front seat. My mother has a sense of something that I think is called proprietary. It’s to do with owning things. Not that my mother thought she owned the front seat, but she didn’t think the Bells should have it either. She went to Father Steele on that one, not that she wanted to make a fuss. There were people who had been around for years, she said, and it was all a question of who was entitled.

As it turned out, not everyone was as much into proprietary as that. Steelo fixed it somehow. He called it a reshuffle, and by the time it was done we were a couple of rows forward of where we had been (to rows two and three), and Tanika and Mrs Bell had held onto row one. Which Father Steele said was only fair – only fair for Joe – since he had no one but the other Bells on the bus at first, and he might want some conversation.

I didn’t mind the look of Tanika Bell from the start, I have to admit it. For the first couple of months, I just got to see the back of her head in the bus on Sundays and say hello a couple of times at the shops. It was my mother who told me to make her welcome and talk to her (so I couldn’t). Later on it was my mother who made me go in the three-legged race with her at the church picnic, since we were the same height. That’s the kind of thing my mother notices. It gave me five whole minutes tied to Tanika Bell, and almost a minute with our arms around each other during the race. We finished fourth, so just out of the places.

After that Tanika would turn round on the bus and talk, often enough that we got used to the idea. Before then it had only happened sometimes. And I’d lie in my hammock at night and I’d wonder what we’d talk about the next Sunday on the bus, and I’d wish that my mother wasn’t there all the time and I’d think about suggesting practice for next year’s three-legged race. And about how Tanika Bell’s body felt with my arm around it. Pretty good.

And on the bus the times when I’d most want my mother not to be there were the times when she’d crack a joke or fart. Whenever she farts on the bus, everyone pretends she hasn’t, because they’re a church crowd. The first time she dropped a bad one when Tanika was looking our way, Tanika stopped talking and stared. Right at me as though it was either my fault or she was forcing herself not to look at my mother, in case it’d give the game away.

I took that to be a hurdle for us, and I knew we’d have to get over it. So when we got off the bus I said to her, ‘Look, we pretend she doesn’t fart. It’s just what we do.’ And she said, ‘Right,’ but maybe meaning it in more of a ‘Right, get away from me, you’re an alien,’ kind of way. Which meant it was still a hurdle.

We didn’t talk properly for weeks after that, not until the three-legged race. I spent quite a few nights lying in my hammock wondering how to let her know that I only fart about the regular amount. That my mother’s different, or I’m different to her, whatever. Gas moves through my mother in strange ways. Maybe it’s because there’s more of her.

The doctor told her to change her eating, which means she now takes a Big Mac out of my pay every week. It’s got salad on it, that’s the reason. And she says her invalid pension doesn’t stretch all the way to a Big Mac. Big Mac, large fries, chocolate shake that actually means.

Sometimes I imagine her insides and they’re like balloons – long sausagey balloons like the ones they twist into animal shapes at American kids’ parties (I’ve seen the movies). Fat squeaky gassy pipes. One day I asked Father Steele about my mother, and he said God made no two of us the same way. Simple as that.

My mother is not a well woman. Parts of her came out – actually came out, they say – when she had Wayne, so we didn’t get to have Shane. My mother and father thought it’d be good to have three and go Kane, Wayne, then Shane, with the beauty of it being that Shane would have worked either way. But then there was the issue of Mum’s parts coming out, and Dad left, so there is no Shane. But I did work out that we’d ended up with three, in our own way – Mum, Wayne and me.

Wayne feels bad about Mum’s parts, but I took him to Father Steele – since he seemed good on that kind of thing – and Father Steele said with babies in the act of birth you were pretty much guaranteed one hundred per cent innocence, so Wayne was in the clear. And what happened to Mum was just a thing that God would think of as bad luck, but he’ll see her right in the long run.

Then her back went, then she started stacking on the weight, then her back got worse, then things went all the way to chafing. She doesn’t move much now. At least the back pain’s under control most of the time, with the Panadeine Forte and the rum and an occasional dose of what she calls ‘medicinal herbs’. Which we think is probably marijuana, but you’re not allowed to call it that, not even to the guy who comes round with it in a bag. Wayne’s pretty sure it’s marijuana, and he smokes a bit of it sometimes, if he’s had a bad day at school. I don’t, of course, because I’m in a position of responsibility with the council.

Now there’s something I wish I hadn’t said. I wish I hadn’t come up with that thought in my head weeks ago when I was explaining to Tanika Bell about the herbs, because it ended up being the way I said it – ‘a position of responsibility with the council’. I might have even said ‘there’s heavy machinery involved’ (and that might have been a reference I got from a sticker on the Panadeine Forte packet).

Of course, I’m totally embarrassed about it now. I just do verges. Good verges, but still just verges. I’m not the mayor, or anything.

Tanika’s a part-time receptionist for Bob Kotter Realty, the one that goes by the line ‘Bob Kotter – the Most on the Coast’. It was Tanika who told me that Bob Kotter doesn’t do the most on the coast at all – he was just the first one to notice the rhyme between ‘most’ and ‘coast’ and get a patent on it. She says with the places they sell it’s more like ‘Bob Kotter – the Shack out the Back’. Our place was ‘a Bob Kotter home’ (also patented) before our landlord bought it, so Tanika’s never coming over, now that she’s said that. She’s right though. Bob Kotter – the romp by the swamp. He could have that one too if he wanted it. Bob Kotter – the dump by the dump, the bomb by the bombs, the hole in the hole.

There’s sweat running down my legs and into my socks. You don’t stop sweating on days like this, and the weight of the bottles doesn’t help. But my mother’ll be glad of them. She’ll be ready for a rum now, sitting on the verandah doing what she calls ‘looking out to sea’, but that’s just another one of her jokes. She says we’re only about two storeys down from a sea view, but if we had a sea view – if we lived on a hill instead of in a dip – we couldn’t afford the place.

So much for Bob Kotter. I used to think having ‘a Bob Kotter home’ amounted to something until Tanika set me straight. I shouldn’t be such a fool for advertising. ‘Life’s a breeeeze in your Bob Kotter home’ (also patented, with all four Es). Well, it’s not. Most days the breeze, like the sea view, is two storeys up, and we get hot still air and views of the swamp and the lagoon and the bare patch of land that they used for artillery practice during the war. It had signs up about unexploded bombs until a couple of years ago. It’s now the Recreation Council Camp. They cleared it, but my mother says to mark her words and her words are, ‘One day a kid’ll go off in there.’

My words to Tanika, after trying to impress her with all my council talk, went something like, ‘I’ve kind of moved out of home, you know.’ Another thing I wish I hadn’t said. It’s the most impressive way – but not the most honest way – of saying Mum and Wayne sleep upstairs and I sleep in a hammock downstairs. I’ve got some old sheets hanging to mark off my bit down there, and I’ve got a bar fridge and a radio. It was my father’s workroom, not that it’s a room, and not that he did much work (according to my mother). But at least it means there’s a bar fridge, a sink, and a jar of something green and slimy that, for the nativity play, will do for myrrh.

It’s a good place, a good space. I had a T-shirt once that said, ‘Everyone needs their own space’ and that’s where I got the idea for it. Plus, it gives Wayne his own room upstairs, so everyone’s happy. Everyone really has got their own space. And my space is semi-outdoors but livable. I’ve got a couple of posters up, and I can do what I like down there. I’ve got Diet Coke in the fridge, I’ve got some African violets growing in pots next to the sink and a selection of magazines. I’ve got my own space where I can hang out nude if I’ve got the inclination, and I’ve got a box of tissues to go with those night thoughts about Tanika Bell (or Pamela Anderson).

My mother thinks I’m tidy, just because I own tissues. She says, ‘See, you were brought up right.’ My mother says that people who can’t look after their own noses can’t look after much. You’ve got to start somewhere, and your nose is as good a place to start as any.

She also says you don’t bear grudges in this life. She would have helped out at rehearsals if Mrs Bell had asked her to – the way Mrs Marcuzzi used to, every summer – but she didn’t ask and that’s that and you don’t bear grudges. That’s my mother. That’s her take on the world.

She sees me coming down the road, sees the rum and the Diet Coke and she shouts out, ‘Good on you, Kane,’ when I get to the gate. ‘Are the Cokes still cold?’

‘Just bought ’em.’

‘Good on you.’

She can’t turn much because her back’s bad – she says her pension report reckons she’s lost at least thirty degrees of turn – so it’s easy to sneak the spare rum by her, particularly since she knows I’m going straight into the kitchen to get a round of drinks happening. I usually drink my Diet Coke neat, because I think it’s cool that you can use the word ‘neat’ when referring to a drink, and because I don’t like rum. Alternatively, I go for ‘on the rocks’. I bought my mother a couple of ice trays last Christmas, which means we can do ‘rocks’ any day we like in summer, as long as we remember to keep filling the trays.

Wayne, it turns out, likes ice. He doesn’t drink much of anything, so finding out he liked ice worked out well, really. It’d work out better if he’d remember to fill the trays once or twice, but that’s Wayne. I can hear him now, in the backyard. He’s doing catching practice. That’s when he stands near the jacaranda tree and pings a golf ball at it and tries to catch it when it ricochets back. Wayne can do that for hours and then come in and suck only a couple of ice cubes. He’s pretty low-maintenance in a lot of ways.

Mum wants it on the rocks today. We both do. She holds the cold glass against her face and says, ‘Beautiful.’ Slowly, like she means it, like it’s a thing of actual beauty. ‘Could you wet me a face washer?’

Wayne says no to a drink, but yes to a cupful of ice. He puts a cube in his mouth and starts his catching practice again. He takes a dive to his right and nearly chokes on the cube when he hits the ground, but it clears. He crouches in the dust catching his breath and trying not to be sick.

I don’t know what Wayne’s going to do with his life. That’s what worries me. Not everyone can get trained on a work-for-the-dole scheme and end up at the council. Not everyone’s got it in them to end up with some kind of expertise about edges. But I don’t know what to say. I know he wants to field at second slip for Australia, but he can’t bowl and batting scares him – so, face it Wayne, it’s not going to happen. It could be time to live in the real world. Okay, so he’s only fourteen, but you’ve got to start thinking about these things. I was fourteen four years ago, and I had a few ideas about where I wanted to head by then.

It’s Wayne’s night for dinner and he does spam-burgers, which is what he usually does. Cut the right way you get three burgers to a can, so it’s okay. I can smell the spam frying while I’m in the shower. We’re eating early again tonight because of rehearsals.

With Wayne, advice can be good sometimes but you have to go about it gently. You have to pick your moment.

‘Hey, those were pretty excellent spamburgers.’ That’s what I tell him, since a compliment’s not a bad way to start. We’re waiting for the bus, and there’s a thing or two he needs to hear before the others turn up. ‘Remember how last time – after the last rehearsal – I said you looked a bit too much like Wayne up there? Well, that’s okay, but if you want to end up a Magus one day, you do have to put some work in. If you want to create the right impression as a shepherd, you have to have sheep on your mind. Get it? That’s acting.’

Wayne sits there picking at the scabs on his knees. I sit there in one of my mother’s old dresses with a long piece of rope wrapped around me three times, since I think that’s what they did for belts back then.

‘See, you don’t think I feel exactly like a wise man in this, do you?’

Wayne laughs, picks a bit more at a scab. Puts his finger on the drop of blood that comes out and turns the knee away from Mum.

‘You get what I mean? I’ve done four of these now, and you learn something every time. Like, just sitting here getting ready for the rehearsal, I’m getting used to my Magus gear again and I’m giving a bit of thought to my myrrh. See, it turns out I’m a wise man who chooses to express himself through his myrrh, and that’s got to mean something. Something specific’

Wayne frowns. He’s not there yet.

‘Okay, paint me a picture, Wayne. That’s what they say sometimes. Paint me a picture. You’re a shepherd, you’re on the job. Now, what can you see?’

‘Okay,’ he says, staring across the road and hopefully visualising the Holy Land. ‘There’s a swamp. And bombs.’

‘Wayne, it’s a rocky hillside outside Bethlehem. Acting is about making stuff up, getting beyond your own little world. You’ve seen that TV ad about thinking outside the square? That’s what it’s about. You know what that means?’

‘No.’

That’s when the bus turns up. At some stops Joe Bell gives a couple of toots of the horn, but not ours since I always make sure we’re ready early. There are only a few people on it tonight, because it’s just for cast and crew. Cast and crew and Mrs Bell, on account of the catering.

I try not to stare at Tanika on the way to the bus. Tanika in the front row with her gingery Magus beard, trying – if I’m getting it right – not to stare at me. Or maybe it’s just that her beard’s not on straight.

‘I’ve never seen a bomb,’ Wayne says when we’re getting on. ‘So I made that bit up. I just know they’re out there.’

‘That’s good Wayne. That’s the way’

Old dresses and sandals are pretty much the go for most of the people on the bus but my dress’d be the biggest, since I’ve got the biggest mother. It’s bunching up when I go up the steps, and I have to lift it like a queen going over a puddle. Very elegant. Mum gave Wayne a bathrobe for his costume, and he got to cut the bottom off but he still catches a sandal on it and headbutts me in the back.

‘What is it with you shepherds and your bathrobes?’ That’s what I say to him, to stop us both looking too stupid, and Tanika laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh into her beard, and I quite like it.

‘Hey,’ she says when I sit down.

‘Hey back. Bearded lady’.

‘Nice dress.’

‘Thanks. Don’t know about the hibiscus pattern, but maybe I’m just that kind of Magus.’

‘Cool,’ she says, and laughs again. Her beard is stuffing from an old mattress stuck on a piece of cardboard and attached by fat ginger sideburns to sunglasses that’ve had the lenses knocked out. Not a bad job at all.

So I say, ‘Nice burns,’ and I’m tempted to give them a tug but I don’t since her mother’s there (even though she is facing forward). ‘You’re very resourceful.’

‘My mum made it.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s pretty resourceful too.’

‘I’ve got my frankincense,’ she says, and holds up some incense sticks. ‘They’re musk flavour.’ I show her my myrrh jar and I open it so that she can see the goo inside and she says, ‘Oh, yuk, what’s the baby Jesus going to do with that?’

We all laugh – except her mother – and I tell her, ‘Grease axles or something. He could do worse than get himself a trade, you know.’

The bus gets to the Blessed Virgin all too quickly, and we have to get down to business. Wayne goes off with the other shepherds and I go with Tanika to find Mattie Hartley. This is a Father Steele strategy – get together in your groups first and talk through some of the issues.

Mattie’s down the back, drinking a cup of cordial and eating as many biscuits as he can fit in before we have to get started. He’s found a packet somewhere. No surprise.

Clearly it’s up to me to take the initiative and I’d rather do that than watch Mattie Hartley crack biscuits open and lick the cream out (and then sometimes stick them together again and put them back in the packet), so I kick our Magus meeting off by saying, ‘Okay, what have we found out since last week? I’ve found out that myrrh is a resin, and it comes from trees. I reckon I’d have been the kind of Magus who would have been wise enough to have a few myrrh trees in the yard at home.’

Tanika goes next. ‘Okay, mine’s frankincense, right? So I looked it up in a dictionary and it said it was old French for . . .’ she checks a note she’s written on her hand ‘. . . luxurious incense. So I thought musk.’

‘And the wise part of it?’

She gives it some thought, a lot of thought, and then says, ‘I bought it when musk was cheap. And now it’s not.’

‘Good one. Mattie?’

‘Well, I’ve got the gold, so I reckon I’d be the richest Magus. And that’s what my dad reckons too. Also the smartest, since I’ve got the gold.’

Some of us don’t actually like Mattie Hartley. We decided that a while back.

‘The other thing I found out,’ Tanika says later when Mattie Hartley’s getting his beard fluff re-glued, ‘is that the star in the east – the one we follow to get to the baby Jesus – that was probably Venus. That’s the planet of love, technically.’ Then she goes bright red and looks the other way and says, ‘I’m off for a loo break before we go on.’

Steelo rounds us up as soon as she’s back. We, the Magi, have two scenes and our first one’s early on.

Herod’s Palace, Jerusalem.

Mattie Hartley: ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’

Tanika Bell: ‘For we have seen his star in the east.’

Me: ‘And are come to worship him.’

Herod: ‘Why, I have it he is born in Bethlehem of Judea. Go and search diligently for the young child and, when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.’

Herod turns and swishes his gold cape at that point, then he stops and looks at Father Steele. ‘How about an evil laugh? How would that go then?’

‘You probably don’t need it,’ Steelo says. ‘And you probably don’t need the turn either. Not that it’s a bad move, but you are the king. You’re already in the position of power, remember.’

‘Righto. Got it. Puff up the chest a bit?’

‘Why not? Good. Now, let’s keep moving. Let’s have Matthew turn and do the next Magus One line, and then the Magi can depart.’

Mattie Hartley: ‘Behold, our star, our guiding light. Off in the east. Bring frankincense and myrrh, and I shall bring him gold.’

Steelo nods. ‘Good. And if we could have you all looking in the same place to behold the star . . . How high do you think it’d be in the sky? Matthew? Kane?’

‘Low. You can’t see it at our place at all. We’re in a bit of a dip.’

‘All right. Thanks Kane. Low. Good.’

That’s us done for the moment, so Steelo moves on to the next scene. Back in the stable. We walk through the shepherds backstage and I check that Wayne’s okay before going outside.

He nods but he doesn’t look happy about me asking in front of people. He glares at me like he wants me to go away. I notice the blood from the picked scab has trickled down to his ankle.

I ask him if he’s got a tissue and he says, ‘I’m a shepherd on a rocky hillside outside Bethlehem.’ He really, really wants me to go away.

So I just tell him, ‘Good work, Wayne,’ in a mate-to-mate kind of way, and I leave it at that.

Mrs Bell has the cordial and biscuits out on the table. The cordial’s in cups already, so Tanika and I take one each and walk away from everyone else, including Magus One Mattie Hartley.

That’s better,’ she says. ‘Better with just a couple of Magi, hey?’

‘Yeah. What’s his story? It’s just cause he’s got gold. And a couple more lines than the rest of us.’

‘Yeah. I never liked him anyway, but. Is that bad, not liking him anyway?’

‘No, it’s fine. I never liked him and I’ve known him for years.’

‘I want to be Mary,’ she says. ‘I wanted to be Mary, but they wouldn’t even let me try out for it.’

‘That’s the way it goes here.’

The last church dad worked at, they reckoned I’d have a fair shot at being Mary this year. And the Mary we’ve got here is such a bitch to me. I don’t know why. I hope she’s not a friend of yours if I’m calling her a bitch.’

‘No way. And it’s her problem, babe. All her problem. You’d be such a good Mary and she knows it, I reckon.’

‘I hate all this moving. You’ve got to keep starting again. And people don’t like you and there’s all that business about who sits where on the bus.’

‘Yeah. That’s all sorted out fine now though. Your dad’s entitled to some conversation. Everyone’s okay with that. So the bus is fine and hopefully you’re all settled in and it’s feeling a bit more like home here. Everyone’s got to have their own space, and you get your space and then you keep it. That’s how it should be. You should be here for a while, shouldn’t you?’

‘Hopefully.’

‘Yeah. I mean, there’s your job at Bob Kotter Realty. And stuff. You’re not just some kid who can be picked up and carted around any more. You’ve got some responsibilities now.’

‘Well, not really. But thanks. I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

Then the break’s over. We’re backstage again, waiting for our next scene. I’ve never seen the girl who’s playing Mary being a bitch, to Tanika or anyone. Maybe there are women’s issues going on. The roughness of the beard makes Tanika’s skin look particularly smooth. That’s what I’m noticing when she shuts her mouth again and looks at the floor.

Steelo claps his hands and says, ‘Tableau,’ which is the signal for the nativity people to freeze as we come to the edge of the stage to do ‘voices off’.

Mattie Hartley: This looks like the place, though all the rooms are given up to others.’

Tanika: ‘Not all the rooms.’

Me: ‘There are stables too, and people staying there, the inn keeper says.’

Knock knock knock. Tableau comes alive, shepherd opens door, the Magi are welcomed.

‘Exceeding great joy,’ Steelo says. ‘Let’s see exceeding great joy. This is Jesus, remember. You’ve just walked into a stable and found Jesus.’

Mattie Hartley: ‘We have followed the star and it has brought us here.’

Tanika: ‘To you, Christ Child and Blessed Virgin Mother.’

Me: ‘We come bringing treasures, Lord.’

Mattie: ‘Of gold.’

Tanika: ‘Of frankincense.’

Me: ‘Of myrrh.’

Steelo claps his hands. ‘What’s that myrrh, Kane?’

‘We had it at home, Father. I think you get oil off your hands with it.’

‘We might have to look at that.’

‘But I’ve looked up myrrh, and I think this is about the right consistency. It’s green too. Green wouldn’t be bad for myrrh.’

‘All right. Maybe a new jar though. I’m sure someone round here would have a spare coil pot, or something like that that’d be just right for a myrrh jar. Leave it to me. Move on, depart, tableau for the nativity people, Magi out the door and Magus One . . .’

Mattie: ‘But, lo, I had it in a dream that we should not return to Herod and should make our journey home another way.’

Exit.

I’m a bit annoyed with Father about the myrrh, to be honest. If he was going to chew me out about the myrrh jar he could have done it later, in private.

The bus takes us home via the Christmas displays at Bokarina, but I’m over the whole nativity thing right at the moment. Dune Vista Drive is already full of cars and minibuses, and some of the houses in the side streets have amazing numbers of Santas and lights and shit but a guy I don’t know says, ‘If you’re such a wise man, what’s going to win the fourth at Eagle Farm on Saturday?’ and I’m just not in the mood.

‘Venus is pretty low down sometimes,’ Tanika says when she comes up beside me. ‘You were right with that. And how can anyone say exactly what kind of jar myrrh would’ve come in back then?’

‘Yeah?’

‘All you’ve got to do is take the Vegemite label off before the first performance, and you were going to do that anyway. I bet you were.’

‘For sure.’

That’s when she holds my hand and says, ‘There we go.’

Tanika Bell is holding my hand in this night not long before Christmas in the best summer of my life. I should get over the jar. People around us get excited and I wonder if they noticed Tanika’s move. Then I hear hooves.

We turn around and Mary comes past us on a donkey – an actual donkey – led by Joseph. She sees us and smiles at both of us, but it’s like a smile in an old painting – a smart-arse smile half held back, like the Mona Lisa.

Tanika looks at the ground and says, ‘Fuck,’ down into her beard as everyone else says, ‘Ooh, Mary.’

We go back to the bus, just the two of us, and we’re still holding hands. I almost say something about the Mona Lisa and that Mary’s up-herself smile, but I don’t. We look around for Venus, but maybe we’re in a bit of a dip here too or maybe it’s behind a house.

She takes her father’s lighter and she lights an incense stick and says, ‘You can see it from my place. We’re up on Battery Hill. You could come over and see it from my place some time, if you wanted.’ She waves the musky smell around.

‘I thought that stuff was expensive.’

‘But I’m wise. I own it all, so I can do whatever I want with it. Whatever I want.’

‘Yeah?’

I kiss her then. I move to kiss her on the mouth, slowly, but when I get there she pulls away.

‘What’s wrong? I thought . . .’

‘My mouth.’ She looks away from me again. ‘I hate my teeth. And my nose is bent on the inside. It’s okay from the outside, but the bit in the middle is bent so I mainly breathe through my mouth. So that’s a problem. And if I kissed you and you didn’t like it . . .’

‘It was only the beard that had me wondering. I’d be fine about kissing that mouth.’

And I do, and this time she kisses me back.

I don’t sleep till well after midnight. I’m nude in the hammock and tonight there’s a breeze coming through the slats, bringing in wet salty swampy smells. I can remember every second of how Tanika’s rough teeth felt on my tongue. And my neck, and my ear. And the taste of blood in my mouth that time when she gave my tongue a bit of a gouge without meaning to. She’d be quite an eater, I’d reckon.

I didn’t tell Tanika about my mother’s views on the importance of looking after noses as one of the basics. Tanika, like Wayne and the birth incident with Mum’s parts, started life a little behind and you know what? I like her all the more for it.

I can hear my mother upstairs not sleeping either, but that’s the rum. No one sleeps well on rum. That’s just how it is. She’s talking, louder, arguing. That’s how it goes in Mum’s dreams. Then there’s Wayne’s feet in the hall, and he’s talking her down. I should be less worried about Wayne. He’s a good guy, and not everyone has ambitions. ‘Lofty ambitions’ – that’s what one of my teachers called them just before I left school and I told him I wouldn’t mind working in a plant nursery one day.

I can’t believe I pashed Tanika Bell. I want that to be the last idea in my head tonight. Not my mother’s messed-up dreams. Me, Tanika Bell and the night sky from Battery Hill. That’d do me. That’s my lofty ambition for now.

Sometimes we get a Blue Nurse in to dress my mother’s ulcers. This week the doctor lines that up for Thursday, and you can even smell the fresh bandages when I get home from work.

‘Looks good, Mum,’ I tell her, for a bit of encouragement.

‘Good on you, Kane,’ she says, and she gets me to fix her a rum and Diet Coke.

‘Rocks, Mum?’

‘Yeah.’

For tonight’s rehearsal Tanika is actually in the driver’s seat when we get to the bus, and Mr Bell is nowhere to be seen.

‘You didn’t know I could do this, did you?’ she says when we’re getting on. And she’s got one hand on the gear stick and the other on the steering wheel, and she’s sitting there like a complete expert. ‘If you’re lucky I might let you borrow the front seat. Give the driver a bit of conversation.’

‘Does that mean Wayne has to pray at the intersections?’

‘I really hoped no one had noticed Mum doing that.’

At that point Wayne trips coming up the steps and headbutts me in the back again. I shouldn’t have stopped.

Tanika shakes her head and says, ‘Bloody shepherds.’ And she tells us she’s already dropped a carolling group off at a shopping centre, and her parents were part of it.

So tonight there’s no Mum, no Mrs Bell, no Mr Bell, and I watch Tanika driving, driving the bus. We’ve come a long way in a few months. It wasn’t so long ago that I only got to watch the back of her head, and she was a passenger then. To think I showed off about operating heavy equipment, and she can drive a bus and she didn’t say anything.

And it stays different tonight at rehearsal. I’m not a good Magus Three this evening. All I can think of is Magus Two and her mouth, and I’m never ready for my lines. I make a mess of my lines, and that’s not like me. There are several things I want to say to Tanika Bell, but I don’t know what they are.

Tonight the rehearsal started early and we break for dinner at the halfway point, after we’ve gone through the whole play once. I didn’t get my shit together as far as dinner goes either. We’re supposed to bring our own. I managed to find enough in the fridge to put together a left-over package for Wayne, but I might have to make do with biscuits.

Which makes it more embarrassing when Tanika says, ‘Hey, want to eat together?’

And I have to tell her, ‘A couple of biscuits’d do me, I think.’

‘Oh.’ It’s like I’m turning her down.

‘No, I had a big lunch.’

‘Oh, okay.’

‘All right, I ran out of stuff at home, stuff that was in the fridge and ready to go. I didn’t get home from work in time to make anything new.’

‘You can have some of mine. It’s back in the bus.’

‘Back in the bus?’

We look at each other and then she says, ‘I’ve been thinking about you since Tuesday night. Nothing but.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’

We start walking to the bus, and our arms end up around each other. I kiss her on the cheek, just in front of one of her big gingery sideburns.

It’s a surprise and she takes a breath in and says, ‘There’s people . . .’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, don’t be sorry. I was just saying there’s people.’

We get to the bus and she takes my hand and leads me up the steps. And it feels like it’s her bus now, now that she drives it. I’ve been a passenger on this bus all my life – three changes of seats, gradually moving forward – but I’m with Tanika Bell tonight, and her first seat was the front row and her second seat was the driver’s. That’s the kind of woman she is.

‘It might be down the back,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember. There might be a bit of searching to do.’

She walks ahead in the dark, and I reach out. My hand finds her shoulder and I move it down to her side.

‘Mmmm,’ she says, ‘are you helping me find dinner?’ She pushes back against me. Takes my hand in both of hers and moves it up to her breast. She half turns her head and our beards rub together. I get a mouthful of fuzz and she pulls her beard off, then mine and says, ‘No more wise men.’

Then our mouths are together and I can feel her tongue, her teeth, hear the air whistling through her nose. She leads me down onto the back seat, then climbs onto me, crouches over me with the moonlight coming in the back window and onto her face. She moves so she’s lying on me, and we’re kissing again. I can feel her back, her thighs through her dress, and she’s rummaging around in mine which is just one fold after another down there. She stops to breathe, and it becomes a laugh. Just a small laugh.

‘I’ve never had this kind of trouble with a dress before,’ she says. She lifts it up, fold by fold, slides her hand into my underpants. ‘So, what have we got here?’

‘Watch out. Or I’ll . . . it doesn’t need much encouragement.’

‘I wouldn’t mind some,’ she says and puts my hand where it’s never been before. ‘There. Just there . . . but not that hard . . . yeah.’

Her breathing changes, gets heavier. The moonlight comes in on her closed eyelids and I lift my head up to kiss her eyes. She makes a noise, and it almost pushes me over the edge.

‘I have to tell you, I’m close.’

Back home this is round about when I’d be reaching for lots of tissues.

Tanika says, ‘Yeah,’ like it’s all under control, and she still doesn’t open her eyes. She reaches into her bag, pulls out a small packet, bites the end off. ‘Here.’

I feel the condom go on, her fingers unrolling it, and I have to bite my lip and take the Lord’s name in vain. Then she moves on top of me again, rubs me up against her and suddenly I’m somewhere else and then . . .

Then Father Steele appears on the steps of the bus just as I let it go. I hear myself going, ‘Aaagh,’ like someone who’s just had a tooth pulled without a needle, and Father Steele makes the same noise as he slips back down the steps.

Tanika lies on top of me, very still, puts her face down against the base of my neck and says, ‘Shit,’ quietly.

Outside the bus, Father Steele clears his throat.

Tanika lifts her head and looks at me, looks right into my eyes.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

We move. She pushes herself up and away from me and my dress falls back into place, almost, and I take the condom off. I can’t go and talk to Father with it in my hand, so I give it to Tanika and I don’t know what to say so I say, ‘Sorry.’ It seems appropriate.

When I leave, she’s sitting there holding the condom like it’s an undersized fish that’s given up the fight.

‘So, Kane . . .’ Father Steele says when I get out of the bus, and the next line is up to me.

‘I know we’ve done the wrong thing, Father. I know it’s things like this that can spoil Christmas for everyone, and I know we’re out of the play now. You don’t have to tell me that. I know that neither of us deserves to be a Magus after this, and that’s just the way it is.’

‘That’s a very mature approach, Kane,’ he says, and we start walking. Father Steele always likes to pace when he’s thinking about life’s dilemmas, and I don’t mind it either. I think I picked up the habit from him.

‘I’m eighteen, Father, it’s about time for a mature approach. And I could have done better tonight. I know that, in that bus, Tanika and me, we succumbed. We were weak, Father.’

‘Yes, you were. I know you’re eighteen, and she’s eighteen too, isn’t she . . .’

‘I think so.’

‘I hope so. You’re eighteen and you have to make your own decisions, I know that, but this . . .’

‘I do love her, but. Does that . . .?’

‘It doesn’t fix it completely. It’s not the whole answer in the eyes of God. Love’s a fine thing, but there’s also holding back. There’s restraint of these urges. But maybe it’s some consolation, unofficially. And she . . .?’

‘I don’t know. We haven’t said all that stuff yet. But I’m pretty sure I love her. Even if it’s just, you know, recently.’

‘Well, we should talk. Not this evening, but tomorrow maybe.’

‘That’d be good. Um, my mother . . . you don’t have to tell my mother do you?’

‘Oh, no. I think this is between you and me and God. And Tanika.’

‘Just the four of us then.’

‘Just the four of us, as long as we can sort out the nativity play part of it smoothly.’

‘Good on you, Father. And you know something? When you’re looking for a new Magus, you could do a lot worse than young Wayne. Mum’d like it if I stepped aside for Wayne occasionally, I reckon. Can’t hog the limelight every time. It could help bring him out of himself, you know? And we’ve been practising at home, so . . .’

The last bit’s a lie, but if it gets Wayne bumped up to Magus it’s not a bad lie, I don’t think.

‘That’s very good, Kane. A good suggestion. And maybe we do have more shepherds than we need. So you’ll be off now, the two of you? And Tanika will be back later to drive people home?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘And the two of you could talk this through in the meantime.’ He leads me back to the bus but, just before we get there, he stops and says, ‘Was there, um, protection?’

‘Yeah. That seemed to be . . . organised.’

‘Well done.’

On my way up the steps, he pats me on the shoulder.

‘And so, life’s next challenging phase begins,’ he says.

‘But, lo, I had it in a dream that we should not return to Herod and should make our journey home another way,’ Tanika says in the bus and laughs madly as she changes down gears for a hill.

‘We got off lightly with Steelo. I’m pretty sure that counts as fornication where he comes from. How are we going to explain being out of the play? What are we going to say to people?’

‘We’ll come up with something. I’m feeling . . . optimistic. I don’t often feel optimistic, so let me.’

How could I not be crazy about Tanika Bell – bus driver, optimist and, it’s turned out, woman of the world.

Back at her place, she gets sausages out of the downstairs freezer and tells me she never wanted the sandwich in her bag anyway.

‘We’ll do them on the deck,’ she says. ‘On the barbecue. And we’ll find Venus out there somewhere.’

We go up the stairs, pick up bread rolls and sauce in the kitchen, and she takes me outside. Venus is just above the trees, the cold white dot of Venus, bigger than the stars. Just big enough, if you look hard enough, to be distinctly round, to amount to something with a shape.

‘Venus,’ she says, and kisses me again.

She fires up the barbecue and gets the sausages going. She says the light out here is blown, but if it wasn’t she’d keep it off tonight anyway.

‘I watch the stars from out here sometimes, if I can’t sleep,’ she says. ‘When I was just a kid, I used to think my name was Tinkerbell, but no one else could say it right. So I thought I’d fly up there, with the stars, one day when I worked out how to. What an idiot.’

‘You’re not an idiot. You’ve got to have dreams. And anyway, did you know there are places now – cities – where, when it’s night time, you can’t see anything in the sky that’s smaller than the moon, there’s so much junk up there in the air? I saw that on TV. We’ve got a great sky here. Specially up on the hill.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Remember what I said about the council? The position of responsibility?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, it’s a bit of an exaggeration. I have to admit that. I pretty much just do verges. On the road crew.’

‘I know. But how would we get anywhere if plants grew all over the Nicklin Way?’

‘I guess.’

‘Anyway, Dad says you can always tell Kane’s verges. They’re neat as.’

‘Your dad notices my verges? What are we going to do after tonight?’

The sausages are already spitting and she turns them with tongs.

‘Jude chapter seven,’ she says. ‘Sprung giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh.’

‘Are you telling me there’s a problem with these sausages?

She laughs, and turns the barbecue down a notch. ‘The next bit of the Jude quote’s something to do with hell. Something to do with the vengeance of eternal fire.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be worried so much about the fire. My mother says hell’s to do with chafing. So that’s what we’re up for then. You and me and chafing. Don’t worry. We’ll talk to Steelo. He’s good, really.’

‘You reckon he’ll tell our parents?’

‘He said he wouldn’t, and he’s a man of his word. He knows how my mother’d go off her nut if she found out we’d done it in the back of the church bus in the middle of nativity play rehearsal.’

‘I guess we’re probably out of the play for next year too.’

‘Yeah. I was hoping for Joseph, but . . . Did you know that, back in Steelo’s early days my mum was lined up to be Mary. Then she got pregnant with me, of course. She wouldn’t have been showing by Christmas but people knew, and your chances of Mary – or anything – are done for after that. She didn’t go back to school either. She thought about it for a while, but it never happened. Probably too old now. She’ll be thirty-six in April.’

‘She hasn’t had an easy time.’

‘No, she hasn’t. But she’s made what she can of it. Wayne and me, we’re okay.’

‘Yeah.’

She turns the sausages again, and I look out at Venus. There’s not a cloud in the sky tonight.

‘I’m going to make something of my life, you know,’ I tell her.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘No, really. I’m . . . determined to. That’s the word. Determined. To. I’ve applied for a job in Parks, for a start.’

‘Done enough for you?’ she says, lifting a sausage with the tongs and holding it up into the light from the lounge room.

‘There was this lady once, years ago, who ran the cafe at Currimundi and she had this big hair and the longest nails. She used them for tongs sometimes, turned sausages with them. Now, that was worth looking at.’

She laughs. ‘Is that allowed, or does it count as touching them?’

‘I might open a nursery one day, actually.’ All of a sudden, there it is – my Year Ten ambition, out of me and turning loftier without me meaning it to. ‘A plant nursery. Native trees. Bottlebrushes and that. I might open one of those. Or work in one anyway.’

‘That’d be good. Better than real estate,’ she says, and rolls her eyes as if real estate’s the stop on the road to hell just before chafing. ‘Let’s do it. One day. Let’s save money and not tell anybody and one day just do it.’

‘Yeah.’

the stormy deluxe

(january)

Harbo’s boat went up on New Year’s Eve, and they say you could see the flames from a mile away up the canals. He tried to put it down to fireworks but no one was going to buy that, particularly the council. He’d got it all wrong, they reckoned – the time, the place, the prevailing wind. Along at the wharf they thought it was part of the show, just going off early, but then they heard the sirens.

‘It was a gust,’ he kept saying. ‘A flamin’ gust.’

But from the way the Stella Maris burned it was pretty clear the gust had started on the inside. Lucky he’s one of the flock.

tuesday

Sometimes I come here on my bike, sometimes the bus, but with each day’s work we get a little closer to putting the Stella Maris back into the water, and Harbo back with it. He doesn’t like the land much. He reckons it rocks. He’s a boatie through and through, and water’s like the land to him.

I’m sandpapering. That’s today’s job, yesterday’s and today’s. We’re still on the coarse stuff so it’ll be a while yet before it’s done.

We’re all chipping in, money or time. That’s how we do it at the Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla. Even those of us who might have been mighty deep in the poo for about three weeks and four days now. That’s me. I’m on the outer, and that’s all there is to it. It’s a complicated state of affairs but, suffice to say, I’m not exactly crowded out up here, standing on a plank between two trestles at the starboard side of the bow.

They passed the hat around after Harbo’s boat went up. First to get it lifted off the bottom, then to get the experts in for major structural repairs. Budgeting for that pretty much emptied the hat, so that’s when Father Steele really went to work, talking charitable acts out of all kinds of people – two colours of paint, a second-hand gas stove, a bit of space at the corner of Brown’s Slipway where the Stella Maris could be hoisted up so we could fix her.

I’m sandpapering outside and Tanika Bell’s sandpapering inside, as far as I know. I can see her there, imagine her exactly. There’s the thickness of new wood between us, nothing more, but it might as well be miles. It’s like one of those prison scenes in movies where the people put their hands flat up on the glass and line them up with each other. Except the glass is wood and our hands have got sandpaper in them, but there’s a few seconds sometimes when all the big machines shut up and I can hear the sanding going on inside. Tanika Bell, back and forward, back and forward, down near the bow, starboard side. Her hand and my hand, as close as they’ve been for three weeks and four days.

But the sun’s setting and the bus is here. Mr Bell’s calling out to us – to everyone in general and some people by name, but not me. There was a time when my name would have been one of the first, a time when I was famous round here for my hard work, always the first to pitch in and lend a bit of muscle to something. Bugger it, those days are gone. I’m pitching in harder than ever, but they’re still gone.

I give my arms a shake but the dust from sandpapering sticks to the sweat. I’ll have a bath when I get home, a shower to wash it off and then a bath. Just me lying there in cool water floating my tired arms and my tired legs and getting less annoyed. These days are long and hot and hard – work for the council, work on the boat. And we don’t even get to talk now, Tanika Bell and me.

Mr Bell’s at the door of the bus, but he looks down at the ground when it’s my turn to get on. Word wasn’t supposed to get out but of course it did, despite Steelo’s plan. You can’t sack two Magi from your nativity play ten days out from Christmas and not expect talk. Rumours and speculation, then specific questions and it’s out there and there’s no stopping it. No stopping it turning from just a story going round into some great big deal.

So Tanika doesn’t turn round on the bus any more, and my whole family got demoted. Wayne, Mum and me – we’re two rows further back now, and everyone knows your position on the bus is some kind of sign of your accomplishments. I was the one who had to break it to Wayne. Not that I broke all of it but, since he’s the quiet type, no one else would have told him anything and he might have taken it internally. Father Steele’s been onto that one for a while – Wayne’s tendency to take things internally. It makes a mess of his guts and puts him off his food.

If there’s a difference between having Wayne around the house and having a pet, I’m not always sure what it is. No, that’s not fair. Wayne’s Wayne, and Wayne’s all right. And most pets don’t live as long. I had a lizard once.

‘It’s all down to me,’ I told him straight up, as an example of how to take it like a man or, alternatively, like an adult. ‘We got bumped a couple of rows because I kind of racked up a negative accomplishment. My behaviour standards took a bit of a tumble at nativity rehearsals.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘You’re usually the one who’s Mr Too Cool For School.’ And I think he even smiled, so at least one of us got something out of it.

Tanika gets on the bus, and she stares out the window as though not one of her fellow passengers exists. So many things have changed, and not for the better. She’s looking out at the sea, across the park and through the she-oak trees with their branches swaying around in the onshore breeze. There’s not a boat in sight, not a thing out there, just the darkening water and sky, night coming down. And the water would be cool and clean and I’m caked with sweat and sawdust, and if we swam down there it’d be just the two of us, goosebumps coming up on Tanika’s skin with the first shock of how cold it was.

‘So how’d you go with the sanding today, Wayne?’ It’s not one of life’s big questions, but if I don’t say something the silence’d get me thinking the wrong things. You usually start off with sins of thought before moving on to word and deed, Father Steele tells me.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘The wood’s hard but. So I did my shoes.’ He pulls them off and shows me, and he’s sandpapered both heels completely flat.

‘That’s good Wayne. They’re more moccasin-style now, and that’s pretty interesting. You’ll probably be ready for the wood tomorrow then, hey? I’ve got to say it’s a neat job though. Those heels are flat as.’

‘Thanks.’

‘See, this could be useful for you, so you should keep at it. If you can do that to timber, well, the ability to use coarse sandpaper could be the first step on the road to you having a marketable skill. “Job-ready”, Wayne, that’s what you could be. In a while. When you’ve picked up what you can from school.’

Tanika Bell – I can see the back of her head over Mrs Vann’s shoulder. I can see the back of her head and remember how her hair felt when I slid my fingers into it. A few rows back from here, a few weeks ago. And how her mouth felt and how other things felt in that amazing second before Father Steele appeared at the top of the stairs. And we were gone, out of the nativity play right away, never to return. Fornication.

We’re not even supposed to talk to each other now. Not a word. That’s down to Mr Bell, mostly. Steelo says these things take time. Everyone gets a second chance as far as he’s concerned, it’s just that sometimes there are other people who don’t want them to get it right away. The day will come, he says, when Tanika and I can talk again, but it’d be best to have a good and proper purpose.

The water’s not that cold now anyway, thinking about it. Not cold enough for goosebumps. That’s just how I’ve imagined it on some of these nights.

wednesday

Harbo’s hands got burned in the fire and he’s still got the bandages on. Up to the wrist on one side, most of the way to the elbow on the other. I’m onto the fine sanding when he shows up. Apparently they’ve started painting inside and he wanted to see.

He stands at the gate of Brown’s Slipway, sizing it all up. This is all he’s got, the Stella Maris, all he’s got in the world. His bandages are so white they practically gleam. It’s like he got dressed up in his best bandages to come and see how she’s going. There’s a bandage on his head as well, and one around his right leg. He sees me looking, and he gives me a wave.

Steelo brings him over and I ask him how he is.

‘Oh, no worries, mate,’ he says. ‘Coming along fine. But don’t let me stop you working. You don’t want to waste your time yacking to some old idiot who can’t fix his own bloody boat.’

‘You’d do the same for me.’

‘Yeah, but don’t you go looking like this.’ He lifts his hands up, as if I wouldn’t have noticed the bandages otherwise.

‘Come on, it just looks like strapping. Like you’re about to slip them into a couple of boxing gloves and go a few rounds.’

‘A round or two for a pound or two,’ he says, and he crouches, fakes at jinking back and forward, throws a couple of soft practice punches.

‘Come on old guy,’ Steelo says to him, ‘we should get you inside before you start getting big ideas. Old salts, Kane, they never forget the scraps they got in when they were youngsters. Hey, Harbo?’

‘Never lost one, mate. At least not how I recall it.’ It’s a big claim, but he laughs as soon as he says it. ‘Nah, I’m a lover, not a fighter. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

And he gives me a wink and his whole ugly old face crinkles up. Steelo smiles, gives a bit of a laugh himself, like a man who’s heard a few of Harbo’s stories in his time, and they leave me to the fine sandpapering of the bow and head down the back. Harbo goes up the ladder first, and not quickly, but Steelo’s hands are both there waiting in case things go wrong.

Harbo’s been laid up at someone’s place, convalescing. He can’t even roll his own smokes at the moment. They say he hasn’t been doing so well, so Steelo told us he’d be dropping in from time to time for a ‘morale boost’. He used to run some pretty big ships, years ago. Freighters, all around Asia. He spent a few years working a Brisbane River ferry too, not that that seems like much after time in international waters. He’s been up here at least ten years now, retired at the coast, him and the Stella Maris. And he makes things out of wood for church fetes – boats and trains and things – so he’d hate the bandages, I’d reckon.

‘Hey.’ It’s Tanika’s voice, saying ‘hey’ quietly like it’s still in my head, like it’s one of all the bits of her voice I’ve stored up to think about these past three weeks and five days. ‘Hey, chippie, you with the sandpaper.’

She’s on the deck, right above me. When I stand back on the plank, as far back as I can go, she’s there, leaning over the railing and looking right down at me. Tanika Bell, in sunlight, late afternoon light, making her cheeks look brown and her hair all kinds of colours.

‘I’m looking for paint,’ she says. ‘They’ve sent me out to get more paint, so I thought I’d check and see if you had any.’

‘Good idea. So, what are you looking for? White or blue?’

‘What have you got?’

‘None at all. Just sandpaper. But if I find some paint, you’ll be the first to know.’

‘And if I need some sandpaper . . .’

Then someone shouts out, ‘Found some.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ she says, still looking down at me.

‘Yeah.’

‘I . . .’ She looks around. I think there’s no one there. ‘I miss you, you know. Heaps.’ She looks around again, then back down to me. ‘And this isn’t over.’

Then she’s gone. Maybe I can hear her feet on the deck, maybe I can’t. She’s a quiet walker. She saves her energy for when she means it.

She misses me. And it isn’t over. Tanika Bell. We had ten seconds there, ten or twelve, and she didn’t waste them. That’s her all over. Much more dynamic than most of these people realise and, one day, that’ll give us an edge. Tanika, up there in the light, coming for paint she knew I wouldn’t have, folding her arms on the railing and leaning over, showing us both twelve seconds of how things might have been if the past month hadn’t happened. How things might be, when enough time’s passed. Maybe.

These might be early versions of the thoughts that Father Steele says are lustful thoughts, but they might also be the kind that he said were quite okay. We did some counselling after the incident, and that was supposed to see me right. That was Steelo’s plan. It was only when Mr Bell got wise to what had happened that it all turned bad and I ended up on the outer. So did Tanika. She didn’t see the outside world till Christmas, other than work and groceries and the trips to church for her sessions with Steelo.

Mum said I was an idiot and I could spoil it for the whole family and hadn’t I learned anything? Anything from the past, from her and dad, and me coming along when she was seventeen? Didn’t I know how that kind of business could wreck your life?

And, sure, she had a point to make but thanks very much Mum, by the way. Sorry for wrecking your life, and that. Mum, who would be a millionaire rocket scientist now if I hadn’t come along then, right? Mum, who would have invented Microsoft and been prime minister by now if I hadn’t come along. Mum, who’s bigger than doorways and spends her days dealing with fungus and rum and the heat of summer.

If only Kane hadn’t come along and wrecked all those plans that she never got round to having. Kane, who does his best and answers to the call of lust no more than once. And answers to it with Tanika Bell, of all magnificent people.

Forget the lust. I also have the ‘clean thoughts of meaningful attachment’, and what about those? Steelo said those were fine, but where’s the attachment when Mr Bloody Bell stands in the way, looking at the ground, waiting for you to pass like you’re a bad smell and he’s downwind and he’s had a faceful of you already.

I can do without him in my head. I lean in against the boat, get back to sanding. It’s Harbo I’m here for and it’s worth remembering that. This is about getting Harbo sorted out and back in the water.

My father had a boat. The Stormy it was called. We had a couple of good years with her. I’d already been around a while and I’m pretty sure Mum’s life wasn’t wrecked at that stage, despite the version we’ve been getting lately. We had Wayne too by then, so Mum had lost the downstairs parts but other than that things were hardly wrecked at all. She got a scar from Wayne, and a big one since they had to go in quickly to get him out or to sort out the damage. Something like that. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it. She always wore a one-piece to the beach from then on, back in the days when she went to the beach.

I can remember a few trips out on the Stormy. Dad liked nothing better. The Stormy heading out past Point Cartwright was like Christmas morning for him. And Wayne was okay when he was lying-down size, but he was a goner as soon as he grew and got vertical. Wayne threw up so much on the Stormy that Dad got him his own permanent bucket and he said that, if he wanted to be a seafaring type, he had to tough it out. But by the time Wayne was four, or maybe not even four, the Stormy was gone and Dad was gone and that was that.

I hadn’t thought about those days for ages, but Brown’s Slipway smells like varnish and paint and diesel and the sea, and that can only say boats. So to me it says Stormy. They were good times.

‘Hey, what’s the story?’ Wayne says when Mum’s in bed and we’re watching ‘The Best of the X-Files’ summer repeats.

‘Well, a lot of it gets back to what happened to Mulder’s sister,’ I tell him. ‘Or what might have happened. You see . . .’

‘She was taken by aliens, dickweed. I’m not stupid. What’s the X-File on you and Mr Bell’s daughter? That’s the one they’re really talking about.’

‘Who’s talking about? Who’s been talking to you about that?’

‘No one. No one talks to me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t listen sometimes. You were sprung up the back of the bus, that’s what they reckon. And you might have been nude. And people found out, so . . .’

‘We were not nude.’

‘Oh. You’re sure?’

‘Sorry to disappoint you. We were mostly clothed.’

‘Mostly? Then what’s the story?’

‘We were showing poor judgement. We answered the call of lust.’

‘Really? Cool.’

‘No, it’s . . .’

‘Oh my god. My god. You mean you did it. That’s what you mean. Like, “it”. The big “it”. Up the back of the bus. With a girl. That was your answer to the call of lust. Doing it. The call of lust actually said “Kane, do you want to do it?” and you said “yep”.’

‘Yeah, look . . .’

‘What was it like? How did you know how? How did you know how to do it? It’s got a few steps to it, hasn’t it? You don’t just set the ferret on her straight up.’

‘Wayne, this is more than you’ve spoken the past two years. It can’t be good for you to try and get all these words out at once. You’ll only hurt yourself.’

‘God. God. Getting in trouble for doing it.’

‘And that ferret talk. I don’t know about the company you’re keeping . . .’

‘Slung out of the nativity play for doing it. You went and did it in a play that’s about the little baby Jesus. And you got slung out. Awesome.’

‘We walked, mate. We walked, as we should have, and then we got slung out. To make it official. And we got the ban on talking to each other until further notice and all of that. They had to send out the right signal and . . .’

‘This is so cool. It’s like a movie. A movie from America, ’cause in a lot of European countries you could still be in the play after that. After doing it. With Tanika Bell . . .’ He lets out a big sigh. And why wouldn’t he? ‘Tanika Bell . . .’ He rolls his eyes and clenches his right hand into a shaky fist. ‘What was it like? How much room is there, like, in a woman? Generally speaking.’

‘Wayne . . .’

‘How about that? All that practice by yourself downstairs in your hammock at night, and finally . . .’

‘Yeah, righto. You know, I think this is “The X-Files” episode where some really ugly alien penetrates your dreams and rips you in half trying to get out of you. Rips you open like a zipper with its razor sharp claws, and your guts just pour out like lumps of fresh roadkill. Like a bag full of dead cats. Slopping all over the floor like chunks of whales sliced up by big Japanese knives. But it won’t happen unless you fall asleep, of course, Wayne.’

Wayne shuts up. Shuts up and his eyes bulge and his upper lip gets quivery and it’s like there’s a big lump of something pushing up against his throat from down inside. But something more like tea than like an alien.

‘Kane, I’m bad with that stuff,’ he says eventually. ‘You know I’ve got a very active imagination. It’s in one of my school reports, in the maths bit. You’ve seen it in writing, you bastard.’ There’s a scratching sound above us, a possum running over the roof. Bad timing. ‘What’s that noise? That noise outside?’

‘Dunno. Could be the alien, ripping a few sleepy possums apart for practice. Or maybe it’s not. I guess we’ll see. Those of us who dare to fall asleep tonight.’

‘Now wait a second. With “The X-Files”  . . .’ Wayne’s getting a bit wobbly with the talking now . . . ‘with “The X-Files” when there’s that light and they come to get you . . .’

‘Wayne, remember I said we could only watch the show if we didn’t have to have the talk about aliens again.’

‘Yeah, but what if, like, really truly . . .’

‘Okay, Wayne. There are no aliens. Or if there are, they’re basically grey and peaceful and kind of globular in the head and just here to check a few things out.’

‘Kane, even the quiet aliens take your temperature using your butt. I’m not stupid.’

‘There are no aliens. I made up that stuff with the ripping and your dreams. You were doing that breathing that gives you a turn, so I had to slow you down a bit. Now, back on the subject of the other thing, I knew we’d get to it some day, and maybe this is the day. To start with, the question of room and the female parts. Let me just say first, man to man and in a respectful way, it’s not like you’re rattling a sausage around in a lunch box . . .’

I don’t know where to begin with Wayne and sex, but I figure I’ve got to start off mechanical to get his attention. Well get nowhere with a lecture on ‘clean thoughts of meaningful attachment’. I can’t tell him that, with Tanika Bell, it’s not just about the bit where you roll your eyes back and get shaky. It’s about the two of you taking in the night sky, shutting everything else out for a while, shutting out all the crap in the world. It’s about the minutes or even seconds when there’s no one else, and she gives you one of those looks that no one else gets. And she says just a few words that will get you through the crap, and that’s what it’s about.

thursday

With the first coat, the wood soaks up the paint and makes it look like a bad job – makes the Stella Maris look patchy and us look like the amateurs we are.

It’s hot and I stink and my legs itch from the grass from Whipper Snippering for the council. There’s been some rain lately and the grass has gone mad, meaning lots of cutting and lots of seeds, and the seeds tunnel down into your socks and bug you all day.

Some days, I just want Harbo’s boat finished. And I want these people to treat me better and talk to me like they used to. There’s fornication all over this coast, and plenty of people keep right on doing it. I’ve done the right thing since Christmas, and they should give me a break.

‘Tanika – you know, Joe Bell’s daughter,’ Harbo says to me on his next inspection tour, and I think I’m in trouble. I think some of my sins of thought might have become sins of word while I wasn’t concentrating. ‘She was saying she thought she’d hang back a while this evening and do some more of the other side. Not that I’m trying to push you into staying, but she reckoned she’d get her dad to drop all the others off and then come back for her. And maybe you if you were up for it, but . . .’ Not trouble at all. The opposite of trouble. ‘Anyway, there’ll be a second run happening. For the two of you if you aren’t doing anything. If you don’t have plans.’

‘Just painting plans.’

‘Well, if that’s . . .’

‘Harbo, is there no one else you can yack to? I’m a busy man. Someone’s got to give this baby a second coat.’

He laughs and says, ‘Good on you,’ and I keep pushing the brush along the timber, focusing on the job and not the turn things are taking.

Tanika Bell. Tanika Bell and me working on the boat, and practically no one else around. If we worked all night till it was finished, maybe we could just push it into the water and leave. Cruise the high seas.

‘I should have brought beer,’ he says. ‘I should have brought a cold beer or two to pass up to you right now.’

‘Hey, I’m on the job. You can buy me as many beers as you like when we’ve got you back in the water.’

‘I’ll tell Tanika you’ll be staying then?’

‘Sure. Actually, it’d be good if you could tell Mr Bell when he gets here with the bus. It’s, you know, a passenger issue.’

‘No worries.’

No worries at all.

Mr Bell gets here right on time and Harbo meets him at the gate. I dunk the brush in the paint again and slide it along the wood. I paint like a quiet machine, I look like a worker, I think only of Tanika Bell. The sun’s getting low but it’s still hot on the back of my shirt and the sweat’s running down my chest. The second coat looks better than the first. This time the timber stays white and looks painted.

Towards the front the boat narrows, and Tanika’s somewhere just over there on the other side, working away in the shade, loading up her brush with white paint and doing plank after plank. Like me.

I can imagine just how she looks right now, trying to keep her hair out of her face and getting flecks of paint in it, blowing it out of her eyes the way I’ve seen her do, tucking it out of the way but it doesn’t stay. I know her from watching her, not recently but last year. I suspect I remember more about Tanika Bell than they think I do, and this isn’t over.

Mr Bell goes round the back of the boat, with a look on his face that lets me know why they call the back part the ‘stern’. There’ll be talk going on round there. I keep painting, taking the new white paint right to the top of the hull where the blue trim’s going to go. I keep painting and looking straight ahead at the timber, as if it’s the only thing on my mind.

‘Kane.’ It’s Mr Bell, back already. But he hasn’t said my name in a while – that’s what takes me by surprise. ‘Kane, just clarifying this evening’s movements.’

‘Sure, Mr Bell.’

I turn around and he’s looking up at me with the sun glinting from his sweaty head. He’s got his hand up to his face and he’s squinting, even though the sun’s behind him. It’s the white paint that’s making him do it. The glare of the sunlight from the white paint.

‘You see the difference with the second coat?’ I figure a comment related to the job could be a good choice. ‘The wood just soaks the first one right up, so I thought I’d stay on and do some of the second. At least give myself some sense of accomplishment.’

‘Yes. Good. Well, I’ll be twenty minutes and then I’ll be back. Twenty-five at the outside. And Mr Harbison’ll be here the whole time. So keep at it.’

‘That’s the plan. See you in twenty.’

He keeps looking up at me, as if he’s about to say something more, but I haven’t done one new thing wrong so he has to go. He turns round at the gate. What’s he looking for? Fornication in a matter of seconds up on a plank in Brown’s Slipway? I give him a wave. I’d shout out to him, something friendly about twenty minutes, but there’s a circular saw going over at a boat nearby.

So I wave and I smile and I let him know that it’s me who’s looking at him as much as the other way round. He nods – that’s all I get for my wave – and he leaves.

The bus pulls away, and I watch it go.

I paint, towards the bow. Twenty minutes isn’t long so I paint quickly, starting with a band of second coat running along just below the deck.

Around the bow, on the other side, I can hear a brush tapping on the rim of a paint tin when the sawing’s stopped. Boots sliding along a wooden plank with the small sideways steps of a painter.

I get closer to the front and I can see a trestle round there, lined up with mine, and the end of a plank sticking out. Then a foot, an ankle, another foot, a calf. Tanika Bell. Then the other ankle, a knee, a thigh. Fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes at least. That’s how long Mr Bell’s been gone.

I load up with paint, push further forward, load up again and push till the brush is dry, right to the edge of the bow.

‘Beat ya,’ Tanika says as her brush hits mine and pushes it away.

We each take a step towards the water, and we’re standing on our planks face to face. She’s got paint in her hair, like I knew she would, and a daub of it on her forehead.

‘Hey worker,’ she says. ‘Who would have thought these things got so narrow at the front they just ran out? It’s not like the back at all.’

‘No, if we were at the back we’d still be miles apart. No wonder they call it the stern. There’s no fun there.’ Okay, my stern joke isn’t brilliant but I might as well get something out of it.

‘You must be hot in the sun,’ she says. ‘Even round this side it’s so hot I’m sweating like I’m having my own wet T-shirt contest.’ She pulls her shoulders back and of course I stare right at her front. ‘Ha, made you look.’

‘Well, you were making certain claims. I had to see if the evidence stacked up. About the sweating.’

‘So, how’d I go?’

‘I don’t think you want to know. I think I should be painting. I think you did fine. It’s a hot day. You stacked up. You sweated, quite a lot. Actually, I think I might be going from “clean thoughts of meaningful attachment” to something altogether less appropriate and possibly deeply lustful.’

‘Sure, I get that too.’

‘We’ve got to, um . . .’

Tanika Bell’s shorts are creased at the front from bending, and most of her T-shirt’s wet and there’s sweat above her upper lip and down her neck. She’s smiling, smiling the way she did the night we left the nativity play and before word got out. And that’s not the same as the regular smile people get from her on the bus. There’s a subtle but definite difference.

We should have known there was going to be trouble. I think we did know, back at her place that night. But we didn’t have our stories straight, and you’re not supposed to have a story anyway.

‘Mr Harbison’s gone for some smokes,’ she says. ‘He reckons they might sell them at the fish and chippie next door.’

‘And he’s a slow old walker at the moment, Harbo. It must be frustrating the heck out of him. It could take him ages.’

‘Ages. Yeah, ages.’

She spins the brush in her hand but it’s spiky with drying paint and none of it comes off.

A bus horn honks at the gate. Tanika ducks back behind the bow.

‘That wasn’t twenty minutes,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t even eighteen.’

And there’s another of those careful tapping sounds as she dips her brush and takes the extra paint off and gets back to work.

Tanika told her father that the nativity play just wasn’t her thing. That’s what she said to him later that night, after we ate sausages on their deck and she drove me home and then went off to fill the bus with carollers who were finishing their stint at a shopping centre. I don’t even know which shopping centre and I don’t know exactly when and where she spoke to her father, but she tried to play it down, as if it wasn’t such an issue to change your mind about being in the play. It only made him ask around. Apparently he was worried she wasn’t fitting in, since they’re relatively new in town.

He found out we left together in the break. He knew he was onto something. And the most interesting rumour people had already come up with happened to be the truth, so we just had to cop it then. By the next rehearsal it was probably common knowledge, and talked about by everyone there other than Steelo, Wayne and the baby Jesus.

And Mr Bell told Tanika that their family had responsibilities, and the church was his job. All that kind of stuff. Responsibilities and disappointment – we got to hear a lot about them and they’re two things I’ve known about for years, so I’m not sure I needed it, to be honest.

On the bus on the way home tonight after working on Harbo’s boat, the two of us sit in our regular seats, four rows apart with all the other seats empty, and no one says a word. Mr Bell keeps checking me out in his rear-vision mirror. After a while I get sick of it and I give him a wave, since that strategy’s working for me today. He pretends there’s a bug on the mirror and wipes it with his thumb. He drives through a red light.

‘Dad,’ Tanika says, telling him off like the back end of a boat. ‘There’s no hurry.’

There’s practically no limit to ‘stern’ jokes, that’s what I’m thinking.

friday

Stormy. That boat was trouble. ‘Trouble from the start,’ that’s what Mum said. ‘Should have been called Trouble.’

I don’t know though. We had good times on the Stormy. And Mum thinks a lot of things are trouble. The problem with trouble is that she’s just too used to it. Most things are trouble for her, unless they categorically aren’t. Fungus in your creases, movement, humidity – trouble, every one. Advertising, Wednesdays when the money runs low, the way people talk these days. All trouble.

I’m putting on more white paint and the Stella Maris is coming up well. They fitted the new stove today, so Harbo’s inside tinkering around with it. Trouble? That could be trouble. The last time Harbo got his hands on a stove he burned a hole in the side of the boat and sank it. Harbo plus gas plus a naked flame – and my mother thinks fungus is something to get stressed about.

‘There’s nothing fresher than new paint,’ he says when he’s back on the ground and he’s wandered round my way. ‘I had that on a calendar once, from an old auntie in England. “Fresh as new paint at Whitby” it said, and there was this harbour full of fishing boats. I had the picture up on my wall for years. Here, give me one of those brushes and I’ll do some of the low-down bits.’

He’s got a new bandage now and there’s more room for his fingers to move. Not a lot more, but enough for him to keep hold of the handle. He slaps the paint on in great sweeps, round about waist high since he can’t bend down much further.

‘You’re doing a good job there,’ he says, exactly when it’s obvious to both of us that he’s twice as quick.

But it doesn’t seem to take long for his hand to start to hurt, and he has to stop.

‘Bloody thing,’ he says. ‘Ten minutes of painting and it’s no good any more.’

‘That’d be ten minutes more than yesterday, wouldn’t it? And about half a boat more too.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve had practice.’

‘Burned a few in your time, have you?’

He laughs. ‘Parked them under too many fireworks displays, maybe. I’m always where the excitement is. You don’t have to do all this you know.’

‘It’s no problem.’

‘No, mate, you should be off doing what young people do. “Raging” – isn’t that what they call it? You shouldn’t be hanging round here like it’s some penance.’

‘Penance? I’m hanging round here to work on your boat. No one’s making me. And you’d do the same.’

‘Yeah, maybe I would, I don’t know. But I appreciate it. You and your friend, you’re doing a lot. She said she’d be driving Mrs Vann and the Skerritts home in a while and coming back to do some more, and that you’d probably be up for it too. She said I should put it to you. Like yesterday. But you don’t have to.’

‘I know I don’t have to. I know all that stuff.’

I nearly go off at him then, but I don’t. He’s probably just embarrassed that he can’t do more. In which case he shouldn’t have said penance. He shouldn’t have brought that kind of thing into it. This is not a religious deed. I’m painting his boat because he can’t paint his boat. I’m painting his boat because it’s a good thing to do. I haven’t done some deal that says however many hours of painting gets me off the hook for something.

Something. Bugger them. I have the right to have feelings about Tanika Bell. Look at her – the way she stands, the way she talks, the way she paints and drives the bus when her dad’s busy and shows her sweat off only to me. I want her style, I want to talk to her for hours, I want to put my hands on her again. But respectfully, of course.

Okay, it’s not all about Harbo and good deeds. It is about that, but it’s not all about that. And I’d still be here working on Harbo’s boat if the Bells had never come to town. That’s what I do, what we do. It’s one of the better things about this group of people. Even Mrs Vann comes to help out, and she’s next to useless.

Soon enough, Tanika rounds the others up and they’re off. She leads them across the yard, tossing the keys in the air and catching them again, and she stops at the gate and looks back at me. She waves in a way that her dad never could, not even at the best of times, and she shouts something. There’s an angle grinder going, so I only catch some of it but I know what she’s saying. She’ll be twenty minutes, twenty-five at the outside.

If Tanika Bell was driving the bus, you should expect community singing. By which I don’t mean ‘Kumbaya’ – I mean those cheery songs about the bus driver. People should just burst out and do it. That’s how they should feel. But it doesn’t happen. Her dad spoils it, turns the driving of the bus into a dreary thing. He slouches across the yard as if he’s on his way to pay a parking fine, so everyone takes a serious approach to transport.

These people, simply, undervalue Tanika Bell. Tanika Bell is a bright light regularly hidden under a bushel by this crowd. To them she’s the girl who got sacked from being a Magus for doing it with Kane. The girl who got sacked even though we walked first, and who will be forever banned from nativity plays and maybe also the three-legged race at the church fete. That’s what they think of her, probably. That’s my guess, because I’m pretty sure what they think of me. Three-time shepherd, one-time near-Magus, gone. And I reckon I know them well enough to be pretty sure that our three-legged-racing status is in doubt. That’s how far this goes – all the way to a stupid picnic months in the future.

She should drive the bus wearing a cap. She would look hot in a cap. And maybe boots. Is there such as thing as bus-driver boots? They’d go at least up to your knee, wouldn’t they? And be black and shiny? And if there’s any mucking up, Miss Tanika takes you down the back and sorts you out.

Yep, they’d go for that at the Blessed Virgin at Wurtulla.

Tanika Bell and thigh-high shiny black boots. Classify that thought under seriously lustful, my friend. That’s what I tell myself, as if I’m doing Father Steele’s job since he’s not around. But it’s just a fashion garment, Father, I’d tell him. It’s what all the young folk wear when they go out raging. Harbo, mate, where did you get that old word from?

Paint goes on, white on white. Fifteen minutes of it, more. This must be the last coat for this part of the boat.

Where is she?

I take a look around, in case the bus is back. There’s been some fire in the hills today and the sun’s going orange as it gets down closer to them, settling in the smoke. I can see along a couple of canals from up here, big houses like castles with their own jetties, and new developments inland, new canals. And I can see past the beachfront apartment blocks to Mount Coolum, and over the fence and through the she-oaks to the beach, though there’s not much of it with the high tide. That’d be enough for me. If we could sit down there and just be left alone to watch the sea getting dark, that’d do.

Just us, once the families have folded their umbrellas and had their last fight about getting out of the water and packed up their stuff and walked off up the sand. And we’d talk, in a way we can’t talk here. And it’d be night soon enough, and I’d sit on Tanika’s left side so that the light from the unit blocks and maybe the moon would be there on her face, for only me to see. That’d do.

I could, in all honesty Father, forsake the bus-driver boots. Most of the time.

When Tanika gets back, Harbo’s on the deck doing something that looks very like farting around. Fidgeting and looking into the distance like a sentry with wrapped-up hands and no real idea who the enemy is. Like someone Joe Bell’s had a quiet word to. Maybe, maybe not. Tanika goes straight to her side of the boat.

Harbo sticks his head over the rail. ‘I’ll be inside, if you need me,’ he says. ‘Not that I think you’ll need me.’

So I paint. I paint and I edge my way to the right, to the bow. She’s waiting when I get there.

‘So, hi,’ she says.

‘Hi. How’s your side coming along?’

‘Good. Who knows, actually? It’s pretty dark round here. Too late for painting.’

‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘We’ve got to talk,’ she says. ‘Before anyone else sticks their head up somewhere.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Listen, what happened, with the nativity play and that . . . You’ve talked to Father Steele, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And he wanted to know if it was impulsive, or if it meant more than that? Did you have to think about that one, too?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, for me it wasn’t so much impulsive. Given the two choices. I’m not really one of those people.’

‘Yeah, I know. And the same for me, right?’

‘Smoko,’ Harbo calls out, pretty much right above us.

He manages to have quiet feet just when you don’t want him to. Clatters round like a drunk old bastard in there most of the time, scaring you into thinking an explosion’s imminent, moves like a ghost when it’s just you and Tanika Bell under the bow with issues coming up.

‘It’s getting dark anyway,’ he says. ‘And I’ve worked out how to boil water on this bloody thing. I’ve made us a pot of tea, so get yourselves up here.’

The cabin looks different this evening, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. It’s not a shell any more, and there’s a mixture of old things saved from the fire, new things just brought in and the mess of unfinished work. But he’s been tidying it, as much as he can, stacking the tins of varnish at one end and making space for the three of us to sit.

‘I hope you don’t mind your tea Chinese style,’ he says. ‘There’s no fridge yet, so nowhere to keep milk.’ He starts pouring, and then stops to sniff the spout. ‘Smells like lapsang souchong. The teapot was here in the fire and maybe it’ll take a while before it stops smelling smoky. Hope the tea’s okay. Here, give it a try.’

He hands me a mug and I taste it. ‘Seems fine, good. A bit different, but I’m pretty much used to Bushells, Australian-style – white with one. I don’t know much about the lapsang kind.’

He gives Tanika a mug as well, and takes a sip at his own.

‘Yuk, it’s foul,’ he says, scrunching his face up. ‘Can’t even make bloody tea any more. Smells like a firework and tastes bloody worse.’ He puts the mug down and leans back in the bench seat, easing his body back slowly as though his healing burns need careful handling. ‘Still, we’re getting there I suppose. Not that you two aren’t giving me headaches along the way, putting in all this hard work turning the old tub into something rather deluxe and making me feel like a guilty old bludger.’

Tanika laughs. ‘Don’t feel guilty, you old bludger.’

‘It’s the “deluxe” bit that’s the real problem of course. How am I going to look, an ugly old mongrel like me, skippering something spiffier than the yacht club commodore’s? He’ll think I’m putting on airs, getting above myself.’

He pulls his shoulders back and goes for a serious snooty face and sits with his head half-turned, like the boring portrait of a retired admiral. Or as close as Harbo could ever get. Not too close.

‘So how long have you two been an item then?’ he says, like it’s a regular question, the next thing to get to after talking about boat repairs and the feelings of commodores.

A hot mouthful of bad tea gets stuck in my throat.

‘Depends how you look at it,’ Tanika says, since one of us has to answer him. ‘We don’t always get to see a lot of each other. It’s a bit complicated. A month maybe. But it feels like longer to me. Longer in a good way, like it’s good that it feels longer, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Some things, if they feel right, they feel like they’ve been around a while already, hey? You just didn’t notice them before. You know, you’re lucky, you two. I never got to be a teenager, not in the way you can be one now. I was off on ships from when I was thirteen or fourteen and most of those months felt pretty long, and not for the best of reasons. I think it sort of stunted my growth socially. That “girl in every port” lark’s not what they say it is. I was a shy kid, but. Maybe that was part of it.’

We didn’t have enough of a plan. That was the problem. We left the rehearsal, we drove back to her place, we ate the sausages and we checked out the night sky. And there was this weird mixture of excitement and the fear of what was coming next. We should have had a plan, but we didn’t. Not that we would have lied. We would just have been very careful with the truth. We would have let it out on our own terms, but that’s not how it ended up happening.

‘The others’d get as much rum in them as they could when we got into port,’ Harbo’s saying, ‘rum or beer, and then they’d be roaming round looking for the first chance to swing the leg over. And I’d done nothing up till then, not even kissed a girl. Anyway, that’s how it started for me with the sea. But what am I telling you that for? That was years ago. That’s where it started, and this is where it’ll end. Me and Stella. Nice and quiet. This’ll do me.’

‘Why’d you call her Stella Maris?’ Tanika says. ‘And who is she?’

‘Who’s who?’

‘Stella Maris.’

‘Stella Maris? She’s an Italian movie star from the fifties. Very deluxe. No, I’m kidding. She’s the star of the sea. It’s Latin. Someone else called her that. It’s not really right for her, is it? She did a good few years fishing off here, then some bloke bought her and refitted her so that he could live on her. He went broke and he had to sell her pretty cheap since she was neither one nor the other – not really a fishing boat any more, but not really a cruiser either. Anyway, how’d we get onto that? That’s right – I think he might have given her the name. But, look, I shouldn’t be keeping you here, at least not until I can make a decent cup of tea. Stop drinking it, Kane. It’s bloody awful, and I don’t require that kind of politeness.’

He grins and I realise how old and wrinkly his face is, or how old and wrinkly it’s become, how many years it must have spent on decks in the sun and wind. Thrashing-down weather, endless sunlight beating into his skin, making wrinkles and cancers. He’s had bits cut off here and there – the top of one ear, chunks of scalp, and something at the corner of his mouth. He looks as though the mice got at him during the night and, with the sun setting and not much light coming through the porthole behind him, the last of his hair is like a wisp of pale grey smoke. The sea has worked him hard, every cell of his body, and it’s no surprise he likes it nice and quiet now.

There’s a cool salty breeze coming in from the east when we get back on deck, and the last orange piece of sun on the hills.

‘I’ve got a few blokes to catch up with,’ he says when we’re down on the concrete and Tanika offers him a lift home in the bus. ‘A couple of boaties at the yacht club for a couple of beers. Just to get me measured up for that smart white skipper’s cap I’ll need to go with the new-look Stella. Lots of gold braid and shit, hey?’

‘No worries, skip,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it’ll suit you. So, you’re right for a lift after that?’

‘Yeah, they’ll drop me back at the place where I’m staying. I’ll be right.’

We walk with him to the gate and watch him as he heads over to the club. Big old Harbo, all limping and bandages and creaky old parts that aren’t quite up to what they used to be. Lumbering through the darkness of the car park, then stepping into the light of the yacht club foyer, showing his wrapped-up hands to the receptionist in lieu of a signature in the book and taking a seat to wait for his boatie mates.

‘You got much on tonight?’ Tanika says. ‘Any Friday night things happening?’

‘Sure. But family, you know. Fridays we do takeaway if we can. And I’ve got a Domino’s voucher. Two pizzas for fourteen ninety-five if you pick them up yourself.’

‘I’d take you home,’ she says. ‘But, you know, that’d be you and me in the bus by ourselves. Just us and your pizzas. And you can guess my new deal for driving the bus. The new rule they came up with for me as regards passengers.’

And here, in the car park, when the evening’s become night, with the chandlery lights glinting in Tanika Bell’s eyes, I could break a lot of other people’s rules and kiss her and she’d kiss me right back. I feel her fingers on my arm, touching it so lightly it’s hardly a touch at all, hardly even a bend in a rule but still there anyway.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ve got my bike.’

And she says, ‘Yeah,’ but slowly.

‘I’ve got my bike, so that’s probably good. No dilemmas, then. We can toe the line tonight and look totally respectable. Fine upstanding members of the community. But, like you said, this isn’t over, hey?’

saturday

Rules apply on Saturday too. The rest of the church crowd are off to see a band – some Christian country group – but Tanika and I still have an event ban slapped on us.

So, today we win. And they don’t even know.

Wayne knows. Wayne who was shouting at Mum as she slicked down his hair. Something about ‘Kane fornicated so he gets out of it. It’s totally unfair.’ And Mum said there’d be some soap heading for his mouth quick smart if that trash talk didn’t stop.

‘But Wayne,’ I said to him as I put my boots on, ready for Brown’s Slipway. ‘You love a bit of music, don’t you?’

Wayne loves music all right, a few kinds of music but particularly metal. Big grunting thrashing metal. Not Christian country. Wayne loves the metallest metal so much that he hates Metallica for selling out and doing that Symphony album, and he hates AC/DC for being old. It turns out Dad was into them and we’ve got his records from about 1980, only Wayne didn’t know they were from 1980. Wayne, mate, they’re records. You could have thought it through.

Wayne thinks Acca Dacca ripped him off, as if they were young and angry and loud and totally convincing, and then they whipped twenty years away from him behind his back and turned fifty and rich to embarrass him. ‘Fifty’s not so bad,’ I said to him. ‘Nanna’s fifty-four remember. You playing Acca Dacca’d probably give the two of you something in common. She probably even knows them. Like, from school.’

So Wayne checks the dates of things now and he likes Rammstein and Sepultura, and he doesn’t mind that Nine Inch Nails song with the animal reference that’s not consistent with Christian practices.

It’s not fair that they should send Wayne to a Christian country band, not unless he’s done something very bad. It’s just not him.

The bus pulls up outside our place and we take our usual seats.

‘Country songs about God, Wayne,’ I whisper in his ear. ‘You all have a good day now, you hear.’

He belts me in the thigh and glares out the window.

Mum’s head whips around and she says, ‘Stop it you two,’ in that crabby voice of hers that never takes the facts into account. ‘Country music’s changed, Kane. You know that. And you could be a bit more open-minded.’

She turns to face the front again and Wayne points forcefully at the back of her seat and looks at me and says, ‘All day. Right? That and country songs about God.’

‘And respectful of other people’s tastes,’ she says, louder this time, since upping the volume is easier than turning. ‘What about that Heartaches and Highways album I wanted for Christmas, Kane? And you got me Powderfinger instead . . .’

She has this habit – and it’s not a good one – of finishing what she’s saying, then totally ignoring what anyone else says and starting up again with an And, as if she never stopped in the first place.

Wayne just looks at me – gives me a blank look that says, fill in the blank with whatever look’ll do justice to the next six hours of my life.

Mr Bell stops the bus in the street outside Brown’s Slipway.

‘Okay, you two,’ he says as Tanika and I walk past him and down the steps. ‘Mr Harbison’ll be around all the time for advice or anything. So you should be right. I’ll be back for you later this afternoon.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Tanika says. ‘Have fun.’

The door swings shut and the bus drives off, Wayne looking straight ahead but discreetly giving me the finger through the window.

And the day gets better. The work on the boat’s nearly done, and Mrs Bell gave Tanika money for the three of us to have fish and chips for lunch. First I thought I was back in with the flock, but then I figured she might have been planning to buy lunch for Tanika anyway and it’s Christian to do things for Harbo, and in that case it could have looked pretty un-Christian to cut me out.

We all go to the fish and chip shop together, since Harbo reckons he should be there to sweet talk them into a couple more potato scallops. We get it takeaway, all wrapped up in paper, and we go across the road to the ocean side and grab a table with a view. It’s a family picnic table with a bench seat on each side, and Tanika sits next to me and she fights me for chips sometimes.

‘Oh, all right,’ she says when she wins a particularly good one. ‘Here you go then.’ And she puts it straight into my mouth.

‘It’s like feeding time at the zoo, watching you two at work,’ Harbo says, just as a big chunk of potato slides out of the scallop he’s holding and slaps down onto the table. ‘Bloody thing. No wonder they give ‘em away.’

He tosses the piece to a seagull and it picks it up from the grass and takes off, flying back across the road and over the slipway. We’ll finish the boat today. It’s over there now, nearly done. Fresh as new paint at Whitby. We’ll finish the boat, and then what will we do? It’ll be back to Sundays on the bus and only Sundays on the bus, four rows apart. Tanika Bell, a person in the distance I’m barred from talking to without a good and proper purpose. That’s all we’ll have, that at the most. That’s how it’ll be.

She sees me looking at her and says, ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘White with blue trim,’ Harbo says, looking back at the boats. ‘Would the Stormy have been white with blue trim too? Your dad’s boat, Kane?’

‘Might have been. She was certainly white.’

‘Yeah, I think she was, you know. White with blue trim. Of course, I’d only just come back here round that time and it’s one of your more common colour schemes. It was a bugger all that, all that business.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think anyone knew your dad had so much owing, with that and everything else. And no insurance.’

‘Didn’t think he’d go though. That’s the bit I remember. I knew she sank off the coast, and I knew he left, but I didn’t know the money side. Until not so long ago. I thought they just . . . it was just . . . We don’t talk about it much. Actually, we don’t talk about it.’

‘Oh, sorry mate. I didn’t mean to bring it up if it’s a problem.’

‘No, it’s not a problem. It’s just, well, it’s just life, isn’t it?’

Is it? Is there any more to say than that? She went down straight out from this beach, in deep enough water. The sea’s dark blue off here, and that works well on postcards but it means it’s deep.

He gives me a sad kind of look, but Harbo’s face was probably made with looks like that in mind. Tanika feeds a few more chips into her mouth and looks out to sea.

‘Not fair though,’ he says. ‘But you wouldn’t want to hang around waiting for fair, I suppose. You liked that boat though, didn’t you?’

‘Sure. Some of the best times I can remember, frankly. From when I was a kid anyway. I liked her a lot.’

‘Well, maybe you’ll have one of your own one day.’

‘Not this side of a Lotto win, I don’t imagine. But that’s okay. I’ve got . . . plenty.’

Three African violets growing in pots. That’s what I’ve got, once the Stella’s fixed.

I think Harbo can tell he’s depressing me, so he starts talking about himself again, something about starting off on coastal steamers because he was just a kid and the war was on and he wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near combat.

I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. I don’t need it. We worked out years ago that we were better off without Dad. So we don’t talk about him. There’s nothing to talk about. He was pretty much a jerk anyway, Mum says. Just a jerk, and there’s no need for us to talk about the money. What’s done is done.

Three African violets, a hammock, a bar fridge, a steady job with the council, and this is just a pothole I’ve hit at the moment.

I was already depressed because of finishing the boat. That’s the main problem. It’s not so much Harbo bringing up the Stormy or the changes in the family situation. I’m okay with how things are, always have been. And it’s not like we get much of a shot at Lotto anyway. Mum says there’s some of that gambling gene in the family on account of Dad, and we can’t take any chances. She’d rather the money went on rum. And she does go through a bit of rum, so I can see what she means.

But when the boat’s finished, I won’t be meeting Tanika at the bow again, or sitting here eating chips with her, and that’s just not fair.

‘And then the Japs sunk that hospital ship, the Centaur, right off the coast from here,’ Harbo says. ‘So there you go. So much for nowhere near combat. Not supposed to call them Japs any more though, are we? It’s racist or something. So people had probably better stop calling us Aussies too then, hey?’

He tells us it’s not a bad life, the sea, sometimes. Not that he’s got much to do with the sea any more, but he’s used to the movement of water and it’s good to still have that. He doesn’t mind waking up in the middle of the night with a change in the weather and the boat rocking on waves coming up the river.

Lately, on land, he’s been dreaming of the boat rocking and then slamming into something or running aground, and as he comes out of the dream the first thing he knows is that he isn’t moving at all, so it might be true. Twice he’s swung his feet onto the floor to check if the Stella’s taking on water, then he’s realised it’s a bedroom he’s in, the small third bedroom of a brick house owned by people who mean well but ask him too often how he is and get him too many fresh towels.

He carried it all in his time, when he was properly at sea on freighters. Spices from exotic places, but tyres and shoes and office furniture from the same exotic places too. That’s the world for you.

‘Got shot up once,’ he says. ‘By pirates in the Straits of Malacca. There wasn’t a lot of that going on in those days. Not that they were up to much. They were only pirates ’cause they had machetes and a couple of guns. Otherwise they would’ve just been a bunch of layabouts with an old fishing boat. I was married then, sort of. Well, no sort of about it. I was married but she nicked off with my best mate not too long after that.’ He looks up, as if his piracy story’s suddenly turned strange on him. This was a story about being shot up, an adventure story. Life got mixed in and caught him unawares. ‘So, who’s your best mate, young Kane? Better watch him with this little lady.’

He’s making a joke, but he hadn’t expected to and he doesn’t know the score. We’ve been pretending, Tanika and me. With Harbo we’ve pretended this is more than it’s allowed to be, and I don’t know what’ll happen after today. Suddenly, this could kick me in the guts again, and my plan was to toughen up. Where did that go?

‘Sabine, her name was,’ Harbo says. ‘She had a Dutch father – actually, a Belgian father – and an Indonesian mother. I learned a bit of cooking from her, you know.’ He stops and nods, thinking back to something. Something a long time ago, and that he hasn’t thought of for a while. ‘Anyway, what is it Buddhists say? Shit happens? Sometimes it does, but not always. It’s worse, I reckon, when people make it happen. When some of the better stuff’s around and people stand in the way of it. Don’t you think? There’s a lot of bull gets talked about how people conduct themselves. Isn’t there? But I don’t reckon much of it’s worth listening to. I reckon, a lot of the time, people should mind their own business a bit more. They don’t get it. You shoot up a boat, you bust up a marriage, that’s bad stuff. But there’s a lot of stuff people make a fuss about for no good reason. Hey? And some of it might even be important, or good at least, but they’re just too used to looking at it the wrong way. That’s what I think. About a lot of things.’

Harbo declares an end to all the bulldust he’s blowing up, and he says he’s not usually given to this much philosophising unless he’s got a good few full-strength Fourexes in him.

It’s hot inside the Stella and he starts unpacking some boxes of supplies, but he’s asleep soon enough. Flat out on a new mattress up in the bow, away from the light, grunting his way through overheated middle-of-the-day dreams, like a man fighting pirates. Or the ghosts of pirates, coming up at him out of the dark.

Tanika and I finish off. Everything but the name on the stern, and there’ll be a signwriter over on Monday to do that.

‘I put a bit of the boat varnish on my nails,’ she says when I find her in the cabin again after I’ve washed out the brushes. ‘What do you reckon?’

She shows me, all ten glossy fingertips, and I have to walk away then because I’ll kiss her if I don’t. I have to get out of the cabin and up into the daylight, even though there’s nothing more to do outside.

‘We should have something to drink,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll get some drinks.’

Joe Bell comes back around sunset.

‘She’s looking good,’ he says to Harbo, and he pats the white side of the Stella.

My work, and he’s putting his grubby hands all over it. But that’s all right for once, since this conversation’s about to get better than he’s expecting. So I can just smile, and take my share of the compliment.

‘Nothing to do with me,’ Harbo tells him. ‘But it’s a good job all right. I thought we might have a barbecue or something, maybe next weekend, to thank everyone who helped out.’

‘You don’t have to do that. It’s a very decent thought, but you don’t have to do it.’

‘No, but, you know, everyone’s been decent to me. And I’d like to acknowledge that. So I thought we’d have a barbecue next weekend, and I’m planning to have these two young ’uns round on Monday for tea. That’s the day she’s launched again, and they’ve put in a lot of effort, you know. They were working all day today, finishing off, and I was yacking on and I got to boasting about my fancy Indonesian cooking. So I’ve got to show them I can come up with the goods, haven’t I?’

Mr Bell says nothing.

‘It’s a matter of honour, hey? Can’t let ’em think I’m some old guy who’s all talk and no action. And the bandages come off my hands on Monday. So, that’s it then. Tea at the captain’s table, with the skipper back on deck. Tanika was pretty sure she was free. She’s not doing anything on Monday, is she? Oh, how was today? How was the music?’

‘All right,’ Mr Bell says, with mean vanishing lips that’d rather say nothing at all.

I’d high-five Harbo right now if his hand wasn’t wrapped in bandages, and if the gesture wouldn’t look a little obvious. Like a master yachtie, he’s tacked right around Joe Bell and left him bobbing up and down with nowhere to go.

He told us he’d fix it. He asked us to dinner once he’d woken up and taken a look around, but Tanika said she wasn’t sure that her dad’d be up for it. There were circumstances, she said, and coming here to fix the boat was one thing, but . . . And Harbo smiled, a cocky old-bugger smile, and said, ‘Yeah? Watch me. Christians are putty in the hands of the elderly and infirm. Supposed to be anyway. We’ll be right.’

We get on the bus – Tanika row one, me four rows back, the usual seats. Harbo’s already on his way into the yacht club. He’s got quite a few mates who, it turns out, don’t mind a beer. More mates like that than we first realised. I don’t know why I thought Blessed Virgin people were the only people he knew.

He started unpacking boxes again once it got cooler, and that’s when the suggestion of dinner came up. The church people had kicked in to replace the food he’d lost, but most of them had given him tinned pineapple or Spam and, as he said, ‘There’s only so much Hawaiian pizza a man can stomach.’ Not that he was ungrateful.

He’s sick of the bandages. You can tell. The fixing of the boat’s kept him going, watching it getting closer to finished every day, but he wants his hands fixed too. He wants them to feel the simple pleasures of life again – that’s how he put it, and then he told us that meant how cold a beer glass is late on a hot summer afternoon, the second a fish takes your bait on the end of a hand line, things like that. And he wants to get back to cooking and making things, and from that point of view he’s not so much into tinned pineapple and Spam. He learned things from Sabine about spices, and you don’t forget them just because she ups and leaves you.

The street lights are on by the time we turn onto the Nicklin Way this evening, and there’s a shop I have to look out for. One where Harbo says there’s an Asian lady who stocks just the right stuff. I think I know the one, but I’ve never been there. He gave me a list of the things he’ll need for Monday, and he gave me some cash. She’s somewhere near the big fruit barn.

Joe Bell moves around in his seat while we’re waiting for the lights to change, and he reaches forward and does something I can’t quite see. Tanika leans over and takes a look. And I’m stuck, of course, watching the back of her head. Like someone sitting a couple of rows back from their own life, waiting for a second chance. I don’t need another reminder of the prison scene in movies with the window and the hands – everything real out of reach and just for watching, and then gone.

Country music starts to play, Christian country music.

‘This is that group we went to today,’ Mr Bell says, his head half-turned so he can call out over his shoulder. ‘That band.’ Said loud enough for me to hear it, loud enough for row five, not just row one, and that’s a change. ‘Thought you might want to listen to them.’

Tanika says something I don’t quite hear, and I shout out ‘Thanks’ since it seems like the smart thing to do, whether I want to listen to them or not.

‘Why don’t you come up the front, Kane?’ he says. ‘Next to Tanika. You’ll hear it better here.’

I stand up, but then I wonder if I’ve heard him right, so I don’t move.

‘Hurry up if you’re coming,’ he says. ‘The light’s gone green.’

Tanika slides along the seat to make room, but she keeps looking out the window rather than anywhere near me. And I sit down next to her, just like he said, but with one buttock practically sticking out into the aisle I’m so careful not to make a mess of this. We sit there frozen, a good third of the seat empty between us, and we say nothing, all the way back to my place. Tanika and me, staring out at the cars, abiding by the rules as we understand them, listening to some song about how the Lord saved a man from his loneliness after his heart got broken. And fair enough. That kind of thing can be intense, I’m sure.

So I forget to look for the shop where I’m supposed to pick up the food for Harbo.

Mr Bell pulls up in our driveway and I say ‘See you’ to both of them, but only when I’m on the steps and getting out.

‘Good work, Kane,’ he says.

And I say ‘What?’ before I remember my manners, and that now would be a particularly good time to use them.

‘With the boat. With Mr Harbison’s boat. Good work.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

And it’s not quite a smile on his face, definitely not a smile, but it’s also not that you-fornicated-with-my-daughter glare that I’ve come to know and not love over the past month. Tanika says nothing, just watches. It’s as if we could break this spell of slight improvement with just one wrong word.

The bus drives off and I stand at the gate for a while, wondering if something’s actually changed. And wondering what I’ll do if it has or, at least, if it’s starting to. Wondering just how accommodating I’ll be to any change of mind from Mr Bell. Pretty accommodating, I would think. This is the world I’ve got to live in, and it’s not a time for pride.

‘Hey, dickweed.’ It’s Wayne’s voice, shouting out from the verandah. The outside light’s off but I can see him there, standing in the doorway. ‘Get your butt in here. I’ve made tea.’

‘Good work. What are we up for?’

‘Nachos. And it’s getting cold. Mum’ll lift the cheese off the top of yours and eat it for you if you don’t get up here.’

‘Good on you, Wayne.’ I’m not particularly hungry, but nachos is Wayne’s second-best meal (second-best of two). ‘What did you think of the band? Mr Bell played the tape in the bus just then.’

‘So you know they sucked. Obviously. How was the boat?’

‘We finished it. We finished the painting. And the Bells shouted us fish and chips for lunch and Harbo told us about getting attacked by pirates, back in the old days.’

‘Pirates? Like, pirates with cutlasses and that?’

‘Cutlasses and buried treasure. A bit of plank walking and the odd beheading. Fair bit of flogging. I’ll tell you about it later. Once your tea’s gone down.’

‘Cool. Pirates, hey? So what did he say about them?’

‘Oh, lots of stuff. He reckons they were pretty tough. You know, those pirates used to flog people just for interfering with themselves, Wayne. Flog ‘em nude. They’d creep up on them in their hammocks while the lights were out and catch them at it. So Harbo reckons.’

Wayne gives me the look of someone about to introduce their pants to a bad surprise. His mouth moves, but no words make it out. Tonight, he’ll barricade his bedroom door and get up every ten minutes or so to check that his windows are locked. Terrorising Wayne would have to rank relatively high on my list of life’s simple pleasures. Poor Harbo. He never had a brother, so he had to get his fun fishing with a hand line. It’s just not the same.

monday

Harbo’s new hands grind the spices while some seeds roast on the grill, and the smell of it all makes you realise why Hawaiian pizza could never really meet his needs.

‘It’s a banquet,’ Tanika says when he fills the table with food, and the smells of the meal grow big enough to hide the smells of varnish and paint and turn the cabin a step further back into a place where someone lives. ‘Like one of those twenty-four ninety-five per head minimum four person ones. A total banquet.’

‘That was the idea,’ Harbo tells her. ‘But don’t worry, the other idea was that I’d get a couple of reheats out of any leftovers, so there’ll be no offence taken if it’s not finished.’

It’s almost ceremonial, the way he serves it out a small amount at a time and tells us about each dish – the spices, the idea behind it, the tricks of the trade.

‘So there we go,’ he says. ‘She was worth some of that trouble, Sabine. Before she came along I was limited to the old hundred-and-one-ways-to-reheat-beans style of cooking.’ He shovels in another mouthful. ‘But maybe, cooking aside, this’d be a good time to make a bit of a break from the past. What do you reckon, Kane?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, conquer the past, more than just break from it. That’s probably more like it. Do you ever want to do that?’

‘I don’t have much of a past. No Japs except tourists. No pirates.’

‘Anyone who’s lived has a past, mate, even if there’s only eighteen years of it and all on this coast. I was thinking something symbolic, maybe a new name for the boat. Stella Maris always struck me as a bit . . . pretentious. So I cancelled the signwriter and I’ve got him coming back later in the week. How would you be about the name Stormy? Do you reckon it’s time to give it a run again? Partly recognising all the work you’ve put in. I’d only do it if you were happy about it, of course.’

‘Stormy? Yeah. I don’t know how Mum’d feel though. Not a big fan of the Stormy mark one, as I recall. But I’d like it. Maybe a name with Stormy in it, Stormy and something more, another word or two. Anyway, she’s a bit more flash than the Stormy now, after the refit.’

‘Yeah,’ Tanika says. ‘Deluxe. That’s what you called her, Mr Harbison. The Stormy Deluxe. How about that?’

‘Stormy Deluxe,’ Harbo says, trying it out. ‘Sounds like a racehorse. I’m up for it if you are, Kane.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s good.’

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Next issue. The long-term future of said Stormy Deluxe.’ He puts down his fork. ‘Here’s the bit you don’t know. You’d be thinking, to look at me, that I’d have a few years left, right? A few years, but not a lot of years. It turns out it might be quite a bit less than that, but there’s no drama there. Nothing to get worked up about. While I was in hospital that couple of days for the burns, they picked something up on my chest X-rays and it doesn’t look good. They said I should play it safe and start making a few plans, and I don’t have any kids – I’ve got no family at all – but what I do have is this old tub that’s now been turned into a prize specimen.’

He looks around, at the varnished wood and shiny fittings and cushions everywhere like you’d see in a magazine. But it’s not about that. He’s not telling us about the boat. They’ve told him to make plans.

‘I felt bad about that for a while,’ he says. ‘People putting in money and time, fixing the old Stella for me when I’d sent her to the bottom out of my own stupidity and now I’m going to peg out on them some time anyway. But how do you stop people fixing a boat for you with that piece of info? You can’t stop all that generosity by killing the mood and telling them maybe they should just prop you in a corner somewhere ’cause you might not be worth their bother. So she’s fixed now, spectacularly, and it’d make me feel a lot better if someone like you two could take her on when the time comes. If you don’t blow up the stove, she shouldn’t cost you much to look after, and she might show you a few good times.’

I have to look away from him, but I make the mistake of looking at Tanika and she’s stopped chewing mid-mouthful and she looks like she might cry. I feel sick. He’s fed us with all this amazing food, and now I feel sick. So I look at the table and tell myself it’ll be okay. Harbo looks good, not good but sturdy. Like an old tree that once got hit by lightning but got through it. Nothing’ll bring him down for a while yet, surely.

‘But don’t feel sorry for me,’ he says. ‘Here’s how I look at it. I sink my boat, and stacks of people turn up wanting to help me. You two most of all. I know I keep myself to myself sometimes, and that suits me – it’s suited me since Sabine jumped ship – but it can leave you wondering if people notice you’re there at all. And now I know. They notice, and they want to help me. That’s about the best thing that’s happened to me in years. See? And that’s enough. That’s better than I was expecting. And now there’s this bigger thing they can’t help me with – the shadow on the X-ray – but that’s okay. They would if they could. I know that. And I’ve got a bit of money set aside, so I’ll talk to Father Steele about that and see if there’s anything he wants done. But I wouldn’t mind it if you two took the Stormy Deluxe.’

There’s thunder outside, and a cool wind blows through the hatch and into the boat.

‘There we go,’ he says. ‘Like bloody King Lear. The old bugger comes to grips with his own mortality and that, of course, portends a storm. I think portends is the word. Did you ever see that one? King Lear?’

‘So what’s going to happen?’ I’d rather not ask it, but I need to know.

‘We’ll see. They haven’t even finished the tests yet. But I wouldn’t get too worried about it. I’m pretty well set up here, whether it’s weeks or months or whatever. I just thought you should know. Before they turned up at one of your houses one day with a bloody big boat. I wanted to run it by you, that’s all. And I reckon you two don’t always get a fair hearing from some of those church people, so . . . So, have a boat instead. Something like that.’

He laughs, and I laugh with him since it’s not a choice anyone gives you. So, Kane, it’s up to you – would you like the fair hearing or the boat? Like one of those dramatic game show moments, when you can take the cash and leave or risk it all on the next question.

‘Well, thanks,’ Tanika says. ‘I don’t think we thought you’d . . .’

‘Of course you didn’t. You were here to help. And maybe to spend a bit of time with each other, but mainly here to help. What do you reckon, Kane? You wouldn’t mind having one of these, would you? A smart-looking tub like this one?’

‘Well, it’d be great, but . . . I hope it’s yours for a long while yet.’

And maybe it’s reassurance that I’m looking for, but he says it doesn’t really bother him either way and he tells us he’s pretty tired now and he might have a lie down. But just tired – all gourmeted out – and fully expecting to wake up tomorrow, so we shouldn’t look so worried. It’s been a big day, seeing the boat go back in the water and his hands come out of bandages.

And we shouldn’t bother with the dishes. He’s the host, so he’ll fix them up later.

‘Might even leave them till morning,’ he says. ‘Just this once.’

Outside, the wind’s picking up, tossing around leaves and rubbish, and the stars are all gone. There’s a flash of lightning over the hills and thunder rumbles across us.

I pick up my bike from where I left it near the fence and a warm heavy drop of rain lands in my hair.

‘Any second now,’ Tanika says. ‘We’re going to cop a pounding.’

‘Not a lot we can do about it.’

‘I reckon, in the circumstances, I could probably give you a lift home. You and your bike, in the bus. I think that’d be okay. You know, Samaritan. It wouldn’t be safe for you out there.’

‘You sure?’

Rain slaps down onto the concrete, each drop practically a handful at a time. Just a few so far, but plenty more to come.

‘Yeah, I’m sure. So come on.’

I follow her to the bus and the bike tyres bounce as they hit the steps on the way in. Rain lands on the roof, lumps of it, more than before but still not yet the real thing.

Tanika stands there next to the driver’s seat, leaning on the steering wheel as I lead the bike past, and she says, ‘Father Steele and my mother both talked to Dad.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And it’s not like it’s all fixed, or anything, but I told them about my feelings. So, we’ll see. Anyway, Dad reckons he’s been not quite right about you. The family-man side of him got the better of the rest of him for a while there. He figures you’re a good bloke who just succumbed to lust before he’d really had the chance to think it through. He’s wrong of course. You succumbed to me. But that’s their problem, the stupid way they think of things. I thought it was a top night that night, and I couldn’t give a rats about the nativity play, if truth be told.’

‘I was kind of over it myself. Steelo does it the same way every year. I know you can’t change the story, since it’s the birth of Jesus, but he doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. And, if we’re being honest, I wouldn’t have been up for it this time around if I hadn’t heard you were lining up for one of the other Magus spots.’

‘Good,’ she says, and the rain comes down harder. ‘Better drive this thing, I guess.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hey, I’m the bus driver, so I make the rules, right?’

‘Sure. The driver’s ultimately responsible for whatever happens on board. But the usual rule is just sit down and shut up, in the interests of safety. A bit more imagination wouldn’t go astray.’

‘Exactly. Well, my rule is you should kiss me now. Or this bus isn’t going anywhere, pal.’

‘All right, that’s probably fair. Harsh but fair, and who am I to question the bus driver? But I thought it was just a Samaritan act, you driving me home.’

‘No one in the Bible kissed like the Samaritans, they reckon. They were just careful about it. Kept it to themselves and didn’t push it too far before the time was right. So when they wrote the Samaritan story, they just looked like a bunch of people who’d go out of their way to help an old guy when he was down.’

She lets go of the steering wheel. Car headlights through the windscreen light up her face, streaky with the rain on the glass.

It’s dark again when my hand reaches her arm, when my arms move around her, when my mouth finds her mouth for the first time in weeks, here in the stale warm summer air in this unlit bus with my bike squished between us as the edge of the storm is replaced by the worst of it, clattering down on the roof so nothing else can be heard. No cars, not the change in my breathing, not the quiet thing Tanika says to me when the kiss comes to its end.

I take the seat right behind her, the seat that’s usually hers, and I put my hands on her shoulders for a second. It’s as if Joe Bell could turn up now, or Father Steele, and any time I touch her could be the last, so I don’t want to stop just yet.

She flicks the indicator on, and she drives.

I watch the road ahead of us, the lights blurring with the rain washing all over the windscreen, parked cars passing below us to the left and the dull shapes of boats on the water beyond them.

I’m leaning forward and I think I can smell her hair, the fragrance from her shampoo with new rain mixed in. Ill remember that tonight, later. There’s a lot not to forget. Harbo, the Stormy Deluxe, the things I didn’t know about life. My life and his. And sometimes you get to know things slowly – they take weeks or months – then other times they come in bunches, fast, almost too fast. Onto you like this rain. Harbo and the shadow on his lung, his past with Sabine and the pirates and the ultimate piracy of his best mate. But sometimes those things happen. My father leaving all those years ago. Tanika Bell, turning up last year, doing the nativity play, telling me it wasn’t over and meaning it.

I keep leaning forward, listening to it all, watching it all, remembering everything from then and now. Glimpses of other times and this, the deafening sound of water pounding steel, Tanika’s white hands on the wheel when the lights catch them, working the bus through the streets of Mooloolaba and onto the Nicklin Way, into the mad face of this thrashing pounding storm, the worst of the summer.

She shouts something out to me, something about the storm and how wet I’d be if I was out there on my bike. And I don’t mind being wet, I don’t mind storms so much, but I tell her, This’ll do me.’ And she doesn’t hear any of it. ‘You, me and rain on a tin roof. That’ll do.’

And the words don’t seem to make a sound, but we don’t really need them to. Not now.

making laws for clouds

(february)

part two: friday evening

Fridays we do takeaway when we can, and tonight we definitely can. And I’ve gone the full family-size takeaway deal, first time ever – three large pizzas, two bottles of Coke plus garlic bread for twenty-four ninety-five (more for home delivery).

When I’m stopped at the lights I can lean over and breathe in the aroma of Meatosaurus pizza, but I hold myself back from eating. Not even the end piece of garlic bread between now and home.

It’s bought for sharing – for Mum, Wayne and me to eat what we want and as much as we want because we can. Not every night, but tonight we can because I’ve been bumped up to a level two at work and it means a bit more money. So, just this once, I’ve pushed the dinner budget up ten bucks to let us celebrate.

It’s for Wayne, partly. Wayne always wants to do all-you-can-eat, but it costs a lot and it only ever works out financially if you want to eat a lot of those bacon bits. And Wayne only ever really wants to eat pizza anyway so this should be ideal. We’ve never done all-you-can-eat, not since I was a kid. Maybe we’ll do it when I get to level three. That’ll happen one day.

They’ve left the outside light off at home, as always, but it’s only just getting dark and it’s not as if I don’t know the front steps pretty well by now. I park the bike under the house and I pile dinner in my arms and I find myself singing the old Domino’s ad about having the hots for what’s in the box with the dots. There were some pretty cute girls on that ad. Student girls in a city somewhere, probably down south.

Upstairs there’s TV noise, the six o’clock ‘Simpsons’ repeat, and heavy footsteps heading down the hall. Slow, heavy footsteps, a door shutting with a bang it didn’t need. Mum’s already been at the rum, obviously, and that makes her a bit unco.

I duck under the beams and past the broken lattice and the creeper that’s sending skinny wavy tendrils out across the steps. She’s talking to herself down the back of the house, probably in the bathroom. I can hear her. She talks a lot when she’s been drinking – about things gone wrong, the lack of fairness in the world, and good things too. Loyalty, and her two good sons. It could be any mixture of that right now. I can’t make out the words. But sometimes when she’s talking she wanders down the back of the house and when you do that it puts you in the bathroom.

It’s dark inside, with just the flickering light from the TV. That’s how we like to watch it when we can. It’s economical and it’s also atmospheric, particularly for SBS which tends to have more nude stuff. Wayne hates watching nude stuff in full light. It totally shatters the illusion. He’s fine with subtitles though, and most of the nude stuff on SBS does have subtitles. In some ways, he’s more sophisticated than a lot of people think. He’s become pretty nifty with accents, not that he’s found a lot of use for that yet. But he has a good ear and he likes nothing more than a few naked ladies, so SBS works for him pretty often.

I ring the doorbell to create a sense of occasion. Tonight calls for that, at least at the start. There are footsteps inside, Wayne-size, then a head-shaped shadow low down on the louvres. The corner of the curtain lifts up by about the width of a human eye.

‘Hey, it’s only you, doofus,’ Wayne says when he opens the door. ‘Why didn’t you use your key?’

‘’Cause I like seeing you peep through the curtains, in case I’m a scary Mormon come to tell you about the evils of your personal habits, or someone come to terrorise you with a hot new mobile phone deal. Woo, Wayne. Woooo, watch out for the scary doorbell ringer. Sign up for our new prepaid one-dollar deal with a free phone plus huge monthly bills that you can’t possibly pay and then we’ll come around and give you a kick in the nuts every thirty days. Woo-ooo. Even if you don’t use the phone at all, we’ll still kick you in the nuts. Woo-ooo. Every thirty days.’

‘Dickweed. Ghosts don’t sell phones, so you can quit the stupid noise. Hey, that’s pizza. A whole stack of bloody pizza.’

‘You bet. And it’s okay, Wayne. It’s okay to check who’s ringing the bell. I can tell the difference between respectable caution and downright fear.’

‘Yeah, well. That’s right.’

‘So how are the pants, Wayne? Are the pants saying caution to you, or fear? Will there be laundry?’

‘Dickweed. That was years ago, the last time that happened. And it was surprise, not fear. And there’s a huge difference between those two and you know it. I was just caught out for a second. It could have happened to anyone, that’s what Father Steele said. Anyone who hadn’t got round to asking where the facilities were, and then got a bit of a shock of some kind.’

‘Sure, mate, no worries.’ Some days I’d like it if it was slightly harder to suck Wayne into getting totally defensive, but it’s still pretty good value. ‘If Steelo said it, who am I to doubt you?’

‘Anyway, pizza. Pizza, dude. And is that Meatosaurus?’

‘You’ve got a fine nose on you, young Wayne.’

There’s noise further back in the house, then the big shape of Mum, looming up out of the dark, swaying from side to side in the twitchy blue TV light as she makes her way along the corridor.

‘Late home, Kane?’ she says, like it’s the only thing she’s noticed.

‘Yeah, but only slightly. Only slightly later than usual. It’s only just dark.’

‘Oh. Oh, righto.’ She looks around, towards the windows as though they’ll give her a better idea of exactly how dark it is and that’ll make things right.

‘And, you know, I had that meeting today, that work meeting with the big boss. And it was pretty good, so they bumped me up to a level two and that’s more responsibility.’

‘Oh.’ She hasn’t had a good day, I can tell.

‘Yeah, level two, Mum. So that’s . . .’

‘Have you got pizzas there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Boxes and bloody boxes of pizzas? Are we having a party and I didn’t know?’

‘Well, not a party, but it’s the level two that . . .’

‘How many pizzas is that? Is that three pizzas? Three pizzas and three of us? What are you doing, Kane?’

‘Well, it’s the level two . . .’

‘What do you think this is? Bloody Christmas? No, that’s right. If it was bloody Christmas you’d’ve come home with another CD you’d been wanting to listen to and then you’d give it to me and borrow it back.’ She takes a mouthful of drink and puts her hand against the wall to steady herself properly. ‘Powderfinger. When did I ever ask for Powderfinger?’

Wayne’s looking at me. He wants me to pick her up on her lousy musical tastes, like usual. Tell her I was only trying to educate her, stop her getting out of touch. But not today. It’s not the time for it, and she’s got this wrong.

‘Look, you don’t understand. The level two – you’ve got to let me explain.’

‘I look in front of me and I see three pizzas when two would do and that’s not like you. We’re on a knife edge here, mate, and you can’t go doing things like this. You can’t go getting big ideas. You can’t order three of something, plus garlic bread, when two would do. That’s where the rot starts. Things like that.’

‘What do you mean? There’s no rot. It’s perfectly all right. It’s perfectly all right to do this in the circumstances. I got bumped up to a level two. It’s a big deal, right? Well pretty big, anyway. I’m going out after with the guys from work . . .’

‘Going out? Going out? Jesus, Kane. Not to one of those places with pokies?’

To the surf club at Mooloolaba.’

‘Definitely pokies,’ Wayne says.

Thanks Wayne.

‘Ever since Christmas,’ she says, and we’re back to that again. ‘Ever since before Christmas . . . It’s that girl. It’s that girl. Is that bloody girl going to be there tonight?’

‘Tanika? Yeah, hopefully. She’s my girlfriend. Why wouldn’t she be there?’

‘What is she trying to do to you? This is what I hoped would never happen. Hoped it and hoped it. Look at yourself, Kane. This is how it always starts. Look at you. Fornication and gambling and reckless behaviour. This is where it starts, but where does it end? Where does it end?’

‘What do you mean? I don’t know what you mean. That thing before Christmas is totally sorted out. We did our time. We’ve got clearance. We’re semiofficial. And you can’t blame her for anything. And so what if I’m going somewhere with pokies? It’s not like I was planning to play them. And even if I was you should trust me. You don’t even know what this level two means.’

‘Trust you? Trust you? I’ve been through that kind of talk before and that’s a mug’s game. And don’t you go shouting at me about your fancy level two. I don’t even know what it means. All I know is that all of a sudden we’ve got you buying stupid amounts of food and coming in here and big-noting yourself and setting off for a night on the town. And don’t you dare go telling me not to worry about that. Not to lie awake all night worrying about that.’

‘It’s cool, Mum,’ Wayne says. This is Kane. We can always trust him. It’s only pizzas.’

And she’s still leaning against the wall and breathing noisily through her nose and not really looking anywhere. Taking a few words in, maybe, holding her glass low down by her side at an angle, but it’s practically empty. ‘The Simpsons’ comes back on after an ad break. There’s a thousand things to say, but I’m saying none of them. There’s not one’d get into her head right now and do any good.

‘Which one’s the Meatosaurus?’ Wayne says, and then he works it out by smell and slides the box out and takes it into the lounge room.

Mum goes after him, but for no particular reason – it’s like she’s just drifting along and that’s where things are going – and I go down the hall and into the kitchen. I get us three plates. It was supposed to be a special occasion, bugger it, they could at least eat off plates. I serve us each a slice of the other two pizzas, and I pour three Cokes. No more rum for Mum while I’m here tonight, if I can help it.

She doesn’t look away from ‘The Simpsons’ when I set her plate down in front of her. She just stares ahead at the TV, and Mum doesn’t have a clue about ‘The Simpsons’.

‘Good on you, mate,’ Wayne says when he sees I’ve given him a couple of big bits. They never cut pizzas evenly, so there’s often a debate about who gets what. ‘What’s a level two?’

‘It’s a promotion.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. And it’s not an automatic one either. It’s an earned one. And not one you usually get when you’re eighteen.’

‘And more money?’

‘Yeah. And training. Maybe a truck licence. Maybe heavy vehicle. Or maybe something to do with plants.’

‘Well . . . well, good for you. And lucky for us, hey? Lucky for us that Kane’s on the job.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. Thanks.’

Mum’s still hearing none of it, even though I said it loud and clear. Wayne and I both look at her, she stares at ‘The Simpsons’.

Mum’s been different since the incident before Christmas when Tanika and I got involved up the back of the bus. That’s what occurs to me when I go into the kitchen to get my plate. With all the other things that’ve been different, that’s the one I didn’t notice. And now that they’re all coming good, it’s there to see. I’m working hard and, the harder I work, the edgier she gets. It’s been a lesson in consequences, all of that, even though it didn’t really have to have any. There was all this talk of how we’d ‘strayed’ but, when we worked it through with Father Steele and he knew our feelings, he said everyone at the Blessed Virgin could get used to it being us ‘getting involved in a manner that was briefly inappropriate but now totally above board’.

The pizza boxes are next to the phone. I call Tanika. I’ve got to get out of here.

‘How was today?’ she says, straight up. ‘How was your meeting?’

‘Good, pretty good really. I didn’t get an increment this time. I got put up a level.’

‘Put up a level? That sounds good.’

‘Yeah. It’s better than an increment. It’s a good result.’

‘Excellent. And no surprise, might I add.’

‘Well, thank you. So a few of us were thinking about going out for a couple of drinks in a little while. Up to the surf club at Mooloolaba. And Steve was reckoning you should maybe join us, if you’re okay hanging out with our lot from work.’

‘I reckon I can handle them. What are they like?’

‘A cut above our lot at home, I can promise you that. ’Cause that’s not promising a whole lot. So, I thought I might have a shower and get on up there.’

‘Okay. I’d pick you up but I’ve still got a couple of things to do. How about I see you there in an hour?’

‘Yeah, no worries.’

‘And that’s good about the level two, hey? You should feel pretty proud about that.’

That’s better. Just a bit of that wouldn’t have gone astray earlier, a bit of that a little closer to home. That’s what I’m thinking when I’m in the shower, washing off all the sweat of the day and telling myself I’m washing Mum’s shitty attitude off with it. Standing under the shower with cool water powering down on my head, because I can’t face picking up my plate full of pizza just yet and going back into the lounge room where I’ll want to get angry.

And I’m telling myself to forget it, forget it, she has her bad days and her other days, and on one of the other days we’ll talk about the level two and I think she’ll be proud of me. But tonight I’ve got to get out of here. Tonight shouldn’t be working out this way.

Me, Tanika Bell, a drink or two, and maybe some time when it’s just us. A walk on the beach, a look up at the stars, no guys from work, no nothing. That could be soon, not much later tonight, and it’s so much better than this.

That’s when Mum comes in.

‘You don’t understand,’ she says. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I’m in the bloody shower. That much I understand for sure. I’m in the bloody shower, right?’

And with the water in my eyes and looking out through the fogged-up glass, this first full-colour picture of Mum for tonight is blotchy and blurry, and her voice is blurry too with the water pounding on my head and on the walls of the shower.

She’s got the TV remote in her hand and she’s standing in the open doorway and saying, ‘No, Kane, you don’t understand.’

‘And you don’t even listen. Get out, Mum. I’m in the shower. I’ll talk to you later. Get out and eat the bloody pizza before it gets cold. I bought you bloody pizza.’

‘Mum.’ It’s Wayne’s voice from back in the lounge room. ‘We have to change channels. You’ve got to get in here. It’s bloody “Neighbours” now.’

Then she’s gone, with the door still wide open, the door forgotten like the last stupid idea that entered her head and then left while she wasn’t looking. I shut it when I get out. There’s a lock on it, but it’s been broken all my life. We give people privacy in the shower, that’s a rule here. You don’t just barge in on them. If the door’s shut and the shower’s running, that’s all the information you need.

I dry myself and I get dressed, and I go back to the kitchen to get my plate. I feel spectacularly clean. That’s what I tell myself – spectacularly clean, and with a collared shirt and long pants and shoes that aren’t work boots. I’m already participating in the night out beyond this stupid house. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Mum’s in the kitchen, waiting for me, and her face is red and she’s leaning on the bench. ‘Look, what you don’t understand is my life.’ That’s what she says. ‘That’s what I meant before.’

‘Yeah, well I couldn’t tell that because I was trying to tell you something about my life. Something good about my life that happened today.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t understand. That was my point.’

‘What point? Understand what?’

‘It’s this stuff you’re getting into. This life. This spending money and the business with the girl.’

‘Yeah, so what? If you’d listen, you’d know the money situation was okay. And part of my news, but you don’t listen. And you’d know the situation with Tanika. You should really know that a lot better than you do. One thing went wrong two months ago, particularly in the eyes of certain people, and we haven’t put a foot wrong since. We’ve been playing by a bunch of other people’s rules and we haven’t broken one of them for two bloody months, so everybody else is now starting to cut us a bit of slack.’

‘Yeah, but . . .’

‘There’s no “but”. There’s no “but” to that. The people – people you respect – people who get out of their houses and do things during the day and see what the world’s like are starting to cut us a bit of slack.’

‘“What the world’s like?” What would you know about that? What would you know about the world? You’re eighteen and you can’t know anything about the world, and you’ve gone and got yourself all these big ideas. And that’s when it started. It started two months ago, and I dread to think where it’ll end.’

‘It could end somewhere good. How about that for a possibility? It might not end at all. Did you ever think that there’s just the remotest chance that things might keep getting better? That one day, they might add up and amount to something? Did you ever think that?’

‘Jesus, Kane . . .’ She shakes her head, as though I’ve just said the stupidest, most dangerous thing I could.

‘And did you ever think that what’s happening between me and Tanika might mean something. That it wasn’t just an impulse? That it’s lasting a bit longer than that, and still getting better?’

‘What are you saying? What are you saying, Kane? You scare me with talk like that. Nine times out of ten those things end in disaster, those kinds of thoughts. Love’s a luxury, Kane, a complete luxury. If love’s the kind of word – kind of thing – you’ve got in mind. It’s never played a part in my life, not that kind of love anyway. You and your fancy ideas. I blame TV. That morning television’s full of opinions, and it’ll do you no good. Do you know how much they pay those people? They aren’t like you. If you want love, mate, if you want any kind of choices, you’ve got to make a mess of nothing. That’s why what you did in the bus scared me. What you did with Joe Bell’s daughter before Christmas.’

‘What about Dad? What about Dad? At least back ages ago? Things with you and him, back when they started.’

‘That wasn’t love, Kane. And when did anyone tell you otherwise? Love’s for TV, and maybe for people who are planning not to wreck their lives and who don’t have their lives wrecked for them. We messed up, I got pregnant. If you’re going to be the man about town – the man with the ladies and spending the money – you should know those things now. I was stupid and young. He was kind of suave and my friends reckoned he was excellent. That’s more like how things happen. And you end up as a thing they call a de facto or a common-law wife and you don’t get that big fairytale day with the white dress and all that.’

‘Got pregnant?’

‘With you, Kane. With you.’

And it’s as blunt as that. The feeling of hunger in my stomach changes to a feeling that I might be sick, the feeling of my stomach falling away from me, out of me.

‘So that’s why I worry,’ she says, as if the new information puts all the right on her side. As if it makes any sense right now. ‘Things can happen so easily. But don’t get me wrong. You’re the good part of all that. I went through a lot of crap, but you were always the prize at the end of it, remember? You, and then Wayne.’

She’s really drunk now, properly drunk as far as I can see, but maybe she has been all along. She’s slurring and looking past me, looking all over the room. There’s no point going on with this.

‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got people waiting for me. People from work. I’ll be careful. Really careful. No pokies. We could talk another time about this, maybe.’

I don’t want to cry in front of Mum, or anyone in fact. I can’t take this like a kid, because I can’t be a kid. I bring the money in here, most of it. I go out, I work hard, I get promoted and I very rarely make mistakes. Because we can’t afford it, and no one knows that better than me.

She shouldn’t be telling me stuff like that. I bet it isn’t even true. Not really, not completely. She’s bad on her bad days, very negative. It makes her say things. We were a good family once, when I was very young. I’m sure about that. I remember good times. They must have been real.

I’m on my bike going down our street, and maybe it’s Mum’s voice shouting something out behind me, maybe it’s not, just someone else’s TV up too loud. It’s someone shouting, back that way I don’t know who. I just keep pedalling and I block it out, every word. My hair’s still wet and I’ve got a piece of Meatosaurus in one hand, the biggest piece. Wayne gave it to me on the way out and I told him things’d be okay. We’d had a minor misunderstanding in the kitchen, Mum and me, and that was pretty much it and now I had people to meet and I was already late. So I’d see him later. And he should keep her away from the rum, or at least try to.

I’m steering with one hand, but it’s no problem. I can ride with no hands if I need to. I’m stuffing Meatosaurus pizza into my mouth, losing pieces of meat of three types all over the road. It’s worth the extra buck sixty-five, undoubtedly, but best not eaten on a bike.

I get as much into my mouth as I can and then I throw the crust to a crazy dog that chases me all along its fenceline.

I can’t believe there was never love involved, just bad luck. I can’t believe I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that. Me, on this bike, turning right at the lights and taking my place on the Nicklin Way between two cars. I can’t believe that Meatosaurus is so excellent but so hard to swallow, and I might not keep it down at all.

But I paid good money for those pizzas and I’m not going to bring it up now. Not just because of her and the things she says because of the rum.

I don’t want to go to the surf club. It’ll be too bright and too busy. And it turns out my parents might not have meant a lot to each other after all. It wasn’t that things went wrong. It’s more that they were never right. That’s the story, the true story. The version that comes out on rum, true or not.

There’s too much in my head right now, whizzing round. Too much. But I’m going to see people soon, work people and Tanika Bell, and I have to lift my game.

I focus on the ride, on the wind blowing my shirt back and blowing into my face, on avoiding parked cars. It’s all too much, for sure, but it boils down to one simple idea: the whole world has changed since the day began. Even if it hasn’t changed at all.

part one: friday afternoon

Suddenly, there’s shade. My skin burns less. There’s a cloud between me and the sun. Not for long, but there are one or two more blowing in.

I stop for a water break and I crouch down beside the truck to keep the sun off me for a while at least. Cars pass at seventy or so, people cruising by in air-con, talking on phones, shouting at the kids in the back on the way home from school.

Then it’s into action again with the Whipper Snipper, whacking the weeds down to ground level, keeping it interesting by pretending I’m one of those old buggers with a metal detector, checking the beaches for whatever it is they check for. Or that I’m out on the World War Two artillery range sweeping for shells, for ordnance. What is about the old signs that say ‘ordnance’? Ordnance sounds like something you could do with at a council meeting, or in court. Not much like bombs. The new signs say ‘ammunition’, I think.

On the other side of the fence, the new canals are going in. They’re cutting back into the old swamp and piling the dirt up high for houses. So, there’ll be more roads with weeds for us to deal with soon enough.

There’s another cloud, a bigger one this time.

They did a story on clouds on the ‘Today’ show this morning. Clouds and skydiving. There’s a law that says it’s illegal to skydive into a cloud, and I didn’t know about that. Wayne was making his breakfast at the time, so I shouted out to him about it, something like, ‘Hey, Wayne, did you know that for skydivers they make laws for clouds?’

It’s long been a view of mine that we should talk through current affairs in the mornings, or there’s not much that’ll get Wayne ready for the world beyond school.

And Wayne said, ‘Laws for clouds? How do you make laws for clouds? And why should the skydivers care about what the clouds are supposed to do?’ Okay, maybe I wasn’t totally clear with my presentation, and Wayne’s known for being a bit of a slow waker in the mornings, but . . . ‘How do clouds understand that kind of thing? They’re just water, aren’t they? And, like, what if the clouds were really bad? Would you set the law on them and chase them all around the country and put ’em in jail? How do you lock up a cloud?’

‘That’s a fair point, mate. I don’t think you do. You know those little packets of crystals you get that stop bags getting mouldy? You just blast a few of them up their way and that pretty much nukes ’em. Sucks the clouds right up and then they just hit the ground like a bag of wet socks.’

‘But I like clouds. People like clouds, Kane,’ he said. ‘They’re in poetry, and that.’

I set him straight, of course, the second he said, ‘Come on, Kane, what’s it really about?’ But I kind of like the idea – laws for clouds – even though it’s actually to do with the skydivers. We both preferred the other version – big huge lawless clouds, drifting over us, doing whatever they want, maddening people by raining too much or not enough. And not even listening to the weather forecasts, let alone rules and isobars and the southern oscillation index.

There were three good stories in that half hour on the ‘Today’ show. First the clouds, then a space guy talking about Mars (but a space guy of the beard and brown pants and big telescope variety, not the astronaut type), then a shark they’d pulled in up north that had a human thigh bone in its stomach. Wayne had to finish his breakfast on the verandah – moaning away and going, ‘I think I’m going to gag, Kane, I’m thinking about the bone’ – but it was a good story.

‘Think about the poor bloody shark,’ I told him. ‘Think how it’d be if you were the shark, trying to swallow that. A full-on human thigh in your mouth, with the knee bumping away at your tonsils, and then suddenly you’ve got this hook in your cheek as well.’

So he spewed his Vegemite on toast up into the garden, but I made him a fresh batch and we both got to have a laugh about it in the end.

Actually, the Mars story came then, after the shark story, when Wayne was having his second shot at breakfast. Something about a NASA mission looking for signs of life and how, if you’re a very early riser, you can see Mars right now coming up in the east, a while before the sun.

I’d quite like to see that. I’d quite like to see Mars because you’ve got to wonder if the redness is overrated, but no way could I get up that early to do it.

The ‘Today’ show’s good for information, even if not all of it’s useful right away. There’s quite a bit of political commentary, and I’m going to need some of that this year since I’ll be getting to vote for the first time. There was a phone call a couple of weeks ago at home and they said it was a survey company and was I over eighteen? Yes. Was I eighteen to twenty-four and male because that’s what they needed in my area? Yes. And did I have five minutes to answer some important questions? And I gave that a big Yes too, thinking it’d be political, but it turned out to be only to do with which brands of cleaning products you’d heard of. But I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t eighteen, and maybe it’s no bad thing not to start with questions about the government straight up. And I am the guy in the house who buys the cleaning products, so I had it pretty well covered.

Okay, I’m a bit bored with the Whipper Snipper-ing, but it’s fine if your mind drifts onto other things as long as you don’t totally forget and run the Snipper over your boots. Not that it gets all the way through to your toes, or anything, but you do look like a bit of a dickhead.

We’ve made the morning news a regular habit at our place. Wayne and me at least – Mum’s not always up in time. It’s best when it’s all three of us, all three of us at the table, striking up a conversation about tax reform or murder or a house that burned down somewhere during the night.

If you look at a lot of TV shows that feature good families, you’ll often find that they have breakfast together. Usually with a newspaper, but we go for the televised version instead. It’s totally up to the minute, updated every half hour, and it costs you nothing.

You see the same kind of families in ads as you do in the shows. Better versions of them, even. Smarter, a bit more beautiful, and really together. We don’t exactly push the beauty aspect in my family, but it’s not the most important. Vanity is a luxury we can’t afford, Mum says. And she’s right. We can afford the essentials, and Mum has a card that covers medical creams and lotions. Which are nothing to do with beauty, but are really your only chance when a bad rash gets truly set in and it’s summer. That’s what Mum says, and for her it’s rash season about nine months of the year, but February’s the worst of it so there ends up being more rum drinking to take her mind off it.

‘As long as it doesn’t go to pus in the chafed areas,’ she says, and if she says it at a meal time there’s a fair bet we get to see some reverse stomach action from Wayne. And if we don’t I can always come out with a line like, ‘And you know the pus is really bad when it makes that sticky noise between your thighs when you walk, hey Mum?’

So, we’re not exactly your cereal ad family. Maybe, if they ever got round to making a cereal called Very Unspecial K, it’d be us they’d come to. But the message from the ads – apart from the obvious: ‘buy our cereal, it does wonders for your bowels and makes you beautiful and happy’ – is that the family breakfast, with some sort of news input, is a good thing. Cereal companies wouldn’t do it if people didn’t see it as good. And why wouldn’t they? If I had my way, I’d do it all, right down to the chopped strawberries on the cereal and the blue-and-white stripey milk jug. The three of us sitting there, neat and tidy and charming, talking through the cloud story, the shark story, the Mars story.

My father went up north a while back. Ten years or so ago. And he went crewing fishing boats up there so it’s hard not to wonder, at least for a second, when you hear a story about a shark being pulled in with a thigh bone inside it. But he did other things too. He picked bananas and mangoes, he worked on the roads, he even packed parachutes for a skydiving company. And that’s not so much co-incidence – it’s just that, eventually, he got to do every job going. But he’s not the kind of guy who’d ever get so attached that he’d hear about the finer points of any of them, the precautions you’ve got to take, the laws for clouds and things like that. He never liked detail. Detail held him back.

Mum put it another way, as she would: ‘He’s a reckless bloody bastard who never listens and never thinks things through and only ever thinks about himself.’

Dad put it down to detail. I asked him some questions in a letter once. He said he wasn’t suited to answering to people, and when they crowd him out with stuff (which I’m taking to mean excessive facts, responsibilities, a long-term view) he can’t stomach it and he has to go. That’s just him, not us. That’s what he said. ‘You’d be worse off if I was around, mate.’ That’s what he actually said. That’s the quote, though he said the other stuff too, all of it in a few lines written small on the back of a card with a view of a sunny day in Innisfail.

But it’s been years since I last got anything from him, and I always wondered if one day there’d be news. Thigh-bone-in-a-shark’s-throat kind of news. He’s not the sort of guy we’d hear about in a normal way. No one’d ever go, ‘Hey, your dad, he’s mayor up this way now,’ or ‘Sure, he owns two Maccas and a servo, he’s a pillar of the community.’ No, it’d be the cops coming to the door, telling us guess who they just pulled out of some big fish.

So I had that second when I wondered if it was him, but I know it wasn’t. It was just a thought. And Mum was up by then but not properly awake, and she was staring at the screen – at the guy reading the prepared statement – and I knew it was a thought that no one but me was having, and that I wouldn’t be taking any further. Not with Mum just sitting there gazing at the screen kind of bug-eyed, like a shark with a gobful of thigh, and taking nothing in.

‘How’s your day looking, Kane?’ she said when she noticed me looking her way. She’s good when it comes to asking about people’s days and how they might be.

How’s my day looking? Pretty damn fine, to be honest, as it’s turned out. Sure, it’s hot out here buzz-cutting the roadsides back to something respectable, but the day’s had its moments. Moment One: 11.15 a.m., ‘Performance, Planning and Review’ talk with Steve, my boss on the road crew, and Tony, the unit manager. Tony’s quite senior. He doesn’t wear a tie, but the next guy up does.

I have to say it went well. Tony even said we could get some coffee in, but I settled for water. And it seemed to send the right kind of signal. It’s a council that respects a sensible attitude to hydration among its outdoor workers.

We do PP&R once a year. Everyone does it now, to identify strengths and weaknesses (which are actually ‘opportunities for further development’). I wasn’t sure how I’d go, since I didn’t get the job I went for in Parks in December, but they said that was down to the bozos in Parks. Well, okay, they didn’t quite say ‘bozos’, but I can read between the lines. ‘Their loss, our gain.’ That’s what they said.

And how did it go? I got an upgrade. I was a level one before, now I’m a level two. That’s significantly more senior, and way better than increments. Up till now I’ve just had increments, which is a small increase you get each year as long as everything’s going okay. And they said it was pretty rare for an eighteen-year-old to make level two and ‘there’s a future for you here, if you want it.’ And maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but it’s good that it’s there. Not that I get stressed by the idea of taking a long-term view but, when I take one, I’m not totally sure what I see there. I’m pretty sure that’s a different thing, and all it means is I don’t see myself spending my whole life with a Whipper Snipper in my hands.

But Tony and Steve are good guys, and they know all that. And they said that, now they’d bumped me up to level two, I was up for some training if I wanted it. Maybe a truck or heavy vehicle licence. But since I get around on my bike and I don’t even have a regular driver’s licence, they said maybe I could start with that. And that’d be a step up in the world.

And they asked me if there was anything else I’d be up for and I said, ‘Plants. I could do a course that’d teach me a thing or two about plants. For verges, and that.’

‘That’d be horticulture,’ Tony said. ‘No worries.’

And he wrote it in my file, so it’s on the cards as well.

And then, on the way out, Steve said maybe we should have a few drinks tonight. It’s not every day you make a new level.

Yeah. We walked out of the council offices, past the potted palms and the typing noises and the phone calls, and I wanted people to ask me about it. To get up from their desks and ask me. Just go, ‘Hey, how were things with your PP&R? Some of them don’t go so well. How was yours?’

But they didn’t, and I knew they wouldn’t.

I also wanted to stop on the way out and borrow one of the phones and call Tanika. She’d get it. She’d know this counted for something. My guess is Mum and Wayne mightn’t but Tanika would. Mum might get the bit about it meaning more money, but that’d be it.

Then Steve talked about drinks, and he said, ‘You could bring your girlfriend, if you want. If she’d be okay hanging out with our lot.’

Our lot. It’s a fair point. Look at our lot. Laszlo, who’s a big bugger and not always polite and who doesn’t have the full complement of fingers, courtesy of work safety practices once being not as good as they are now. He’s known as Lurch to the others, because of some old movie or TV show and because of the strange way he moves. He’s like a series of lumps in a permanent process of rearrangement, but he says his wife Tina just puts it down to him never having found clothes that do much for him.

Then there’s Benno, who breeds kittens and reckons he hates cats and who trains his mates’ greyhounds in his spare time. And Trev, who lives to fish and who said they should make a bumper sticker that goes, ‘Live to Fish’. He once got so excited about a trevally that he caught, that the two of them did a video together – him and the fish (by then a bit dead ‘cause he couldn’t find a camera fast enough) – and he sent it in to the local TV stations, in case it might be the start of something.

‘I’m gunna wear ’em down, mate,’ he said to me once. ‘Every time I pull in a big ’un, they get the video within forty-eight hours. And I’m not stopping till I’m their fishing dude, hey? Till I’m the guy at the end of the news telling youse all what’s what about the tides and what’s bitin’ and that.’

Good on you, Trev. Good on you, Trev, for having aspirations.

‘This is Trev Neale with a stonking bloody big trevally, doin’ it for WIN News on Bokarina Beach, hey? So youse all get out there, slap a few yabs on your hooks and get on to it. They’re runnin’, and they’re runnin’ right bloody now.’

Enthusiasm’s got to count for something, so who knows?

‘Your girlfriend’ – that was the best bit of the conversation with Steve on the way back to the road. It was maybe the first time someone had said ‘your girlfriend’ and it had made sense straight away, sounded right. Sounded like the way it is. So, we got to sit in the truck on the way to Bokarina and talk a bit about Tanika Bell, me and Tanika Bell. The happening thing. Two people, going out. Me, and my girlfriend who’d probably be up for a quiet drink or two this evening.

And I wound the window down and the air blew in on my face, and it was hot but it didn’t matter because I could say to myself ‘This is the life’ and it felt true.

‘Yeah, she’s pretty good,’ I said to him. ‘Pretty good.’

And I said her parents’d be away for the weekend and Steve said, ‘Wah-hey, over to the chick’s place for a bit of the old horizontal dance of love, then.’

And I had to say, ‘Well, maybe not quite. It’s a complicated set of circumstances.’

Which was when Steve showed that he’s a good bloke, ’cause he didn’t say anything more than, ‘Oh, right,’ and then he let it go. ‘So, what does she do, hey?’ I think he said next. ‘Work-wise.’ Something like that.

‘She’s in real estate. Working for a bloke called Bob Kotter.’

‘The Most on the Coast?’

‘That’s the one. She’s the front office person, Tanika. The first one the public sees when they walk in off the street. Responsible for first impressions.’

And you can bet she’s good at that – that’s what I didn’t say. I’ve seen Tanika dressed for work, and she looks very business-like. Bob Kotter likes the idea of a skirt on his front office person, and skirts work out pretty well for Tanika.

Steve played one of his tapes after that. Shania Twain, I think it was, and he sang along to the bit about not being in it for love and the wind whipped in off the new canals and the wet dirt and the fallen trees, smelling musty and rank. It’s the perfect weather for growth and decay, both at the same time. It steams and rots and germinates and propagates till the weed plants grow so high they’re pulling on the branches of trees and bending them. Then making flowers – blue, yellow, red.

I’ll call Tanika when I get home.

We’re okay with Mum’s rum supply at the moment, so I figure we can go for a pizza splurge to celebrate my level two. I’m up for an extra forty-two dollars a week, back-dated to last pay, so I think it’s okay just this once. We usually go for the fourteen-ninety-five two-large-pizzas deal (pick up only), but tonight we’ll get the top-of-the-range family deal: three large pizzas, two bottles of Coke plus garlic bread for twenty-four ninety-five. Sure, there’ll be leftovers – we’re not the biggest of families – but that garlic bread’s special and today’s special, and we can heat up anything left over tomorrow. I’ll even go the extra buck sixty-five for Meatosaurus on one of the pizzas.

On the way to Domino’s, I can practically taste it. Meatosaurus – there’s nothing meatier. A selection of meats set in tomato sauce with a chewy pan pizza base, topped off with handfuls of mozzarella cheese.

Lucky Mum likes to eat early.

I’m at Domino’s by about six and there’s only a few people waiting so, in about fifteen minutes, I’ve got the boxes clipped to the back of my bike and I’m heading for home. Set to deliver a feast, and ready to watch them eat themselves sick. Because we can, because I’m level two and that’s worth noting. Worth a splurge, just this once.

part three: friday night

Steve says we should get a jug, a jug or two of Fourex or maybe VB, but I tell him that I reckon I’ll just stick to lites, maybe a couple of lites, just pots. ‘Drinking doesn’t always work out so well in my family and, you know, there’s that thing about it being in your genes.’

‘Oh, righto.’

‘So I’m kind of careful. If that’s okay.’

‘Sure. But you like beer, don’t you?’

‘Yeah. That’s not the issue. Who wouldn’t like beer?’

‘Yeah.’

He tells the guy at the bar we’ll have a jug of full-strength and a jug of lite and he says, ‘Gives everyone a choice, hey.’

The guy gets the pouring started and leaves the jugs sitting there to fill. The girl next to us orders two rum and Cokes.

‘Better make it rum and Diet Cokes,’ she says, and the guy says, ‘No worries. Diet Cokes it is.’

She’s by herself, I think, so maybe they’re both for her. Or maybe she’s got a friend off ordering food. She looks at me looking at her, and I hadn’t expected that. I think I felt invisible, not quite in the room yet, without Tanika here. I don’t want to be here like this, just me and the guys and beer. It’s suddenly clear. And the girl with the rum and Diet Cokes looks at me as if I might be checking her out, and all I’m thinking is I wish Tanika was here. I’m looking right through her.

There’s harness racing up on six screens, maybe from Albion Park in Brisbane. I’ve never really got harness racing – men on buggies hanging off the back of horses – but there are a few old guys standing round under the screens holding tickets, so they’re obviously into it. What with that and all the pokies, there’s quite a bit of betting going on in here tonight. The pokies built this place, probably. On the walls they’ve got photos of surf clubs before pokies – black-and-white photos – and they’re just old shacks and a few muscly guys with messy hair and one boat. Not now. This place has high ceilings and exposed beams and a long restaurant overlooking the sea, a carpeted floor – good carpet – and bars made of expensive timber. And uniforms for staff and a dress code applying to all three types of acceptable patrons (members, guests and bona fide visitors).

Mum knows that a lot of that’s got to be down to pokie money, and that’s partly what she’s on about. The money comes from somewhere, and some of it comes from people a bit like Dad, who didn’t mind a wager on whatever was going. And none of it – none of it – comes from me, and she should know that. And she shouldn’t get stupid about it because she should just know.

Steve and I each take a jug and a few glasses and we go back to the table. His fisherman’s basket’s arrived while we’ve been at the bar, and he sticks a few chips in his mouth as soon as he’s put the glasses down.

He starts pouring himself a full-strength beer and I pour myself a lite and he says, ‘Our young Mr Level Two’s pacing himself. Probably figures he’ll have more fun watching you blokes get pissed and stupid than if he got too far that way himself.’

‘Always been a thinker,’ Laszlo says as he goes for Steve’s jug and pours himself a glass. ‘Good on you, Kane.’

‘Pours better than you too, Lurch,’ Trev says. ‘Are you planning to drink that or use it as an aid to shaving?’

‘Ah, you’re all bloody comedians, aren’t ya?’ Lurch says, in a way that’s not exactly happy ‘And so bloody funny that you do verges for a living. Any bloody funnier and they might even let you stick bitumen into holes in the road.’

It’s a joke, but a little obscure. Not to worry. That’s Lurch for you.

The others are all having burgers – Lurch, Trev and Benno – but I told them I’d eaten at home so I’d just have a couple of beers. The way things went at home, I couldn’t spend any more money on food tonight. Plus, that piece of pizza was just about enough.

Steve says he doesn’t like calamari, but he can never talk them into extra prawns instead so he’s got a couple of calamari rings going if I want them. Sometimes people trash calamari in the deep fryer and the rings are like little white car tyres inside the crumb coating, but these ones aren’t bad.

It’s hard to believe what Mum said. And I can’t remember the exact words any more, so maybe I’m not getting it right. I had such a clear plan for this evening. It had been such a good day, so maybe I didn’t want to listen to anything that’d spoil it. That’s all I thought was going on – the usual crap at home, the crap that’s become usual – and then it took a turn. All that stuff started coming out and it seemed to be about my life and the time when it began. I’d always known it hadn’t been the best of circumstances, but I thought they must have been good times anyway Good in some respects, at least.

Like before Christmas, like the last two months or so – the best summer of my life, and some of the worst days I’ve had in ages.

Tanika turns up when Lurch is off getting another jug (full-strength). She looks like Kylie Minogue to me, or as good as you get round here. Kylie Minogue from round about the time of ‘Locomotion’, but with much more original teeth. And she’s dressed up for this, for tonight, because she wants to let me know my level two’s a big deal. And I appreciate that.

Suddenly, she realises we’re all watching her walk across the room and she gets embarrassed, but the guys don’t stop watching. There’s this thing about going the group perve when you’re working on a road. Everyone expects it, and there’s got to be some perks with the job. They watch her all the way to the table, and Trev pulls up a stool so she can sit between him and me.

‘Hi,’ she says to me, and she puts her hand out and touches my side as she pushes herself up onto the stool.

It’s all just part of the hello, but it’s also taken in by the group perve, and I’m kind of ready for them to stop it now. This is Tanika we’re dealing with, not passing pedestrian traffic, and we’re not on the job now. She’s got a midriff top on, and my hand goes on her bare back, just as a reflex because she touched me.

‘Introductions wouldn’t go astray,’ Benno says, so I do the honours.

Tanika says it’s good to meet them and that she’s heard a lot about them, though I’m not sure she has. She’s got lip gloss on, and big earrings, and she’s blow dried her hair so that it’s bigger than usual, big and frizzy. With the short skirt and the midriff top, it’s a hot combo. And Trev’s perving her right up and down at close proximity and then giving me a look that says I must be the luckiest man around, and what did I ever do?

Good question. She’s just in from outside, so her back is warm under my hand, like the evening out there. Her skin often surprises me. Mine’s always dry and rough, and it’s not helped by sun and work and sweat, and I thought skin was just skin until I met her. Tanika’s skin is always soft and smooth.

I am to turn these thoughts, Father Steele says, into an appreciation of the wonders of nature. And I truly appreciate the fact that nature is under my hand just now, even if it comes along loaded with improper thoughts.

‘Hey, I picked Harbo up from the hospital this afternoon,’ she says to me, and then she looks around at the others. ‘Harbo’s this old guy we help out sometimes. He’s kind of sick. They thought he had cancer for a while there but it’s actually TB, a sort of chest infection. He’d had it a long time ago and it was coming back. Anyway . . .’ my turn again to get her attention ‘. . . they’re pretty happy with him. He’ll be on the tablets for a while, but they reckon they’re doing the job.’

‘That’s good news. So we’ll have the old bugger round for a while yet.’

‘Well, probably. Not that you’d think that to talk to him.’

We don’t give them the whole story. We know what the whole story is, just the two of us. Harbo only heard the word cancer when the doctors talked through the possibilities, and he walked out of that hospital thinking he should get his affairs in order. We made him go back there, and it took some pushing. I told him he owed us a favour for the work we put in on his boat, and that was it – go back to the hospital one more time and get everything properly looked at.

‘Wouldn’t mind a drink,’ Tanika says. ‘You wouldn’t have a spare glass so I could pour myself a beer?’

‘Jeez, we’re a rude mob,’ Trev says. ‘I’ll get you one. You’re sure you’re right with beer? You don’t want spirits or anything? A Breezer or something?’

‘Beer’s good.’

He slides off his stool, and looks past her at me. ‘And she thinks beer’s good. Jesus, Kane, where does a bloke get himself one of these?’ And he rolls his eyes and sets off for the bar.

‘He’s a bit of a dag,’ Tanika says, smiling about it.

‘He’s a lot of a dag,’ Lurch says. ‘He’s the whole arse end of the sheep if you ask me.’

‘Hey, did you get that dickhead on the door with the “no trainers” rule?’ she says, and she swings round to give Benno and Lurch a look at her shoes.

And therefore her excellent legs. They perve mightily, like two people with a lifelong passion for footwear. We probably won’t be seeing these guys again socially, that’s what I reckon. At least not until a time of year when there’s a fair bit less flesh on show.

‘They’re not trainers,’ she says. ‘Are they? You guys’d agree with me, wouldn’t you?’

Steve leans over and says, just to me, ‘I reckon she could say they were clogs and those guys’d agree with her. What do you think?’

‘I told him they were a fashion shoe,’ she says to the other two, and it’s become a bit of a performance. ‘And if he didn’t know the fashion that shouldn’t be my problem.’

Too right,’ Benno says. ‘Do you want me to hit him for you?’

And he could be serious, but we all laugh. The rest of us laugh, then Benno laughs too.

‘I might tidy up a bit of that drool around your mouth first, but, Benno,’ Steve says. ‘And maybe stop the tongue hanging out. You don’t want to go belting people while you look like your mind’s on other things. It could be seen as impolite.’

‘And . . .’ Lurch says, and then he remembers that only Steve makes jokes about Benno, so he stops. ‘Nothing. They’re not trainers, but. Obviously. They’re a fashion shoe. Hey?’

Benno isn’t smiling. He doesn’t have to. Benno will never get caught up laughing at something he doesn’t definitely think is funny, and that’d include nothing that’s at his expense. But we know how it is and, if you can get a laugh out of Benno, you know you’ve done well.

Trev comes back with a glass and pours a pretty dodgy beer for Tanika.

‘Fetch me a bloody razor, someone,’ Lurch says. ‘Mr Neale’s up for a shave.’

‘It’ll settle,’ Trev says in a shitty kind of way, and Lurch just laughs.

Tanika holds up the glass and it’s more than half-full of foam and she says, ‘Yeah, and any time you want to pour me a beer to go with this, that’d be fine.’

And she gets a laugh out of Benno with that. There’s a lot to admire about Tanika Bell, always, even if I could have done without her driving my pervy workmates crazy with that performance about the shoes. It’d actually not be that hard to get them talking for an hour or two about a fine pair of tits or a great arse, or whatever, so it’s not a huge accomplishment really to fascinate them with your obviously excellent legs.

‘Well, now that we’ve all got a glass,’ Steve says, ‘a toast to young Kane and his accomplishments. One of the hardest young workers for Caloundra city, and a guy who’ll go far, hey?’

And we clink our beer glasses together over the middle of the table, and even Benno gives a nod while the others are saying, ‘Good on you, Kane,’ and ‘Go for it, Kane,’ and things like that. It’s a good moment, a good moment in a strange, strange day.

There’s talking after that, but I’m not much into it. It’s my mother I need to talk to, but probably in the morning.

Steve says something about plants, my interest in working with plants, and they all start talking about TV gardening shows, particularly the backyard makeover type. No one’s interested in the quieter kind any more, the kind where there’s just some old guy with a lisp talking about plants as though he’s a bit excited. Now they have to rip your yard up to make it look like anything worth watching, and they always finish the job with only seconds to spare.

The guys talk about ‘Backyard Blitz’ and we all know every one of them’s totally hot for Jody but it’s Trev who actually says it first.

‘She knows so much about plants and how they’d do in different parts of Australia,’ he says, in awe of something (and it might be wisdom, I suppose, but it’s probably not). ‘She knows more about ’em than they’d ever put on the tag that you get on them when they’re at the shop. She’s good. She gets real dirty too. Specially on the wet jobs. Real dirty I love an episode of the Blitz when you see the clouds rollin’ in on the Saturday morning and they’re knee deep in dry dirt already and you just know Jody’s going to be getting all muddy. And that’s when you wish there was another chick in the crew as well, and they’d have disagreements on the wet days, really bad ones, and . . .’ And that’s the moment when he realises he isn’t in his lounge room at home, talking to himself. ‘Christ. More beer?’

‘You’re the saddest man in the world, aren’t you, Trev?’ Lurch says. ‘I’m not sure I was totally aware of that till now.’

‘Hey, it’s . . . So, ever watch the Blitz do you, Tanika?’ It’s the first time Trev’s said her name, and it makes him edgy and he has to look over her shoulder at the oars mounted on the wall behind her. He’s not gifted with the ladies, they say.

‘Oh, sometimes,’ she says. ‘I’ve watched a couple. It’s on Sundays, isn’t it? We usually keep pretty busy on Sundays. But I don’t mind the skinny Pommie guy, ’cause his jokes are pretty bad and his accent’s funny’

‘Not Jamie then? He’s the Manpower one, the one who runs the show and used to be a stripper. Stripper or a dancer, but I think semi-nude. Maybe even more nude than semi.’

‘Nah, I’m not so much into the fully professional gym body. You know, the buffed and oiled thing. I don’t mind a bit of muscle but, once a man’s gone around getting money poked down his jocks for a living, you know . . . it’s not my thing.’

‘Sure,’ Trev says. ‘I know what you mean. Every muscle on this body’s au naturel, hey? Made out of sheer hard work.’

Lurch laughs and chokes on his beer. That’d be at the weekends would it, Trev? Round at your place or something? Not Monday to Friday, that’s for sure. What a line – “every muscle on this body’s au naturel, baby”.’ He pulls up a sleeve and shows us a bit of bicep, swivelling his wrist round and stroking his muscles as though we should all be wanting them bad. ‘Let us know when you’re using that line on a chick who isn’t taken, Trev. I’m pretty sure we’d all want to watch.’

‘Nah, you’re being a bit harsh,’ Benno says. ‘There’s that muscle in your finger that you use for the TV remote – Trev’s got one of those that’d get a fair bit of a work-out. It’d be pretty fat, I reckon.’

‘I’ve got cable,’ Trev says to Tanika. ‘And some people don’t. If you get my drift.’

‘Sure,’ Lurch says, figuring it’s his turn again. ‘I’m jealous as hell. We all are. Of most of Trev’s life, actually. Trev needs that channel that gives you the weather in three hundred cities around the world, ’cause he could find himself in any part of Caloundra on any given day.’

‘There’s movie channels, prick. And more sport than you could poke a stick at. And an unbelievable range of documentaries. Just last night I was watching one about these Americans in search of a frozen woolly mammoth in the permafrost of northwestern Siberia, and they got out of their truck with about sixteen coats on at this nomads’ camp in the snow. And there’s this nomad there, just standing there, chatting to ’em, hey? And you know what he’s wearing? A bloody T-shirt. And I just thought, you, Siberian man, are one tough mother.’

‘You see,’ Steve says, leaning across in front of me and talking to Tanika, ‘this is why they have a girl in the crew on those TV shows. They need a kind of moderating influence. See what I have to deal with every day? These guys’d argue about anything. Next up, Lurch or Benno’ll start saying something uncomplimentary about the Siberian guy, and Trev’ll take it personally.’

‘Hey. Bullshit. I was just saying . . .’ Trev realises, just in time, that he’s taking it personally ‘Anyway, why can’t we have a chick in our crew, Stevo? A chick who humps plants around and gets a bit of dirt on her. I’d be up for that. I could do with meeting a lady like that. As a colleague, and stuff.’

‘Colleague, mate? Sounds like you work somewhere pretty flash. Would you be talking about that other part-time job of yours with your colleagues on the board of BHP, or something?’

Trev gets shitty when we all laugh. If he was at BHP, he’d be the only guy on the board with a seventies rocker mo and hair going past the collar of his Motorhead T-shirt, and the knee out of one leg of his faded jeans in a way that makes it clear it’s not a design feature (not a fashion hole). He must have given the dress code of this place a fair shake on the way in.

‘Hey, rack off,’ he says, having maybe had enough of being the butt of the jokes, but picking his time badly, as ever, since I think the others are only getting started. ‘This is just equality I’m talking about. Chicks have got as much right to hump plants and get dirt on ’em, hey? They shouldn’t be excluded.’

‘Yeah, mate,’ Lurch says. ‘And then you’d be saying we should set up some team showers and you’d be responsible for soap.’

Trev glares at him, and then he decides to laugh along. ‘Well, I like to think of myself as a team player, yeah. And you know what they say, mate. At the end of a hard day on the unisex work crew, cleanliness is next to excellent.’

Steve changes the topic of conversation.

‘Hey, I’ve got a photo of my boy,’ he says. ‘It came back today.’

He can never quite stop being in charge of the crew, even when the only thing that’s going wrong is excessive smutty talk in a public place. But being in charge is something he handles pretty well. Maybe there’s something for me to learn there. Maybe that’s the kind of job I could do some day.

He opens his wallet and he pulls out the photo of his new baby, his son who’s six weeks old.

He shows Tanika first and she says, ‘Look at him. Look at him and his little round face and his red cheeks. What’s his name?’

‘Ewan,’ said in a proud-father way, and Tanika looks at the photo one more time before handing it to Benno. ‘The wife’s got a bit of a thing for that actor, Ewan MacGregor. But I s’pose if she doesn’t take it any further than this I can be okay about it. He’s married anyway, apparently. Seven pounds five-and-a-half ounces he was, so that’s not a bad size. There’s a bit of heat rash or something on those cheeks, but you get that.’

I get the photo last and I look into Ewan’s eyes to see what he knows. To see what you know, that early on, about the world you’ve got. In his case, two parents who have only ever seemed happy to me. But he doesn’t even know the camera’s on him, doesn’t even know what the camera is. He’s looking right past it, but probably not at anything.

And he’s so small. I want things to work out for him, I really do.

I give the photo back to Steve and I want to tell him he’s got to look after that kid. That little round-faced red-cheeked kid. Stick around and give him the best kind of life. Steve’s a good guy. Why would he not stick around? But will he? Can you ever tell? Can you ever know what you’re really like until you’re put to the test? Can you know what the test will be? Can you ever really know what you’re going to have to deal with when you’re starting out? Debts and disagreements and a boat going down in a storm. And no love there in the first place, I’m now told. Eighteen years on, that’s where you can be. A working adult, getting promoted, finding out the truth when you’re on your way out for a beer.

Was there ever a night in a place like this when my father passed around a photo of me, and looked glad to have it in his wallet and told his friends how much I weighed and things like that? I can remember his face, and some of the things he said and most of the things we did, but I’ll probably never get to ask him about that. I can’t remember him ever having the expression Steve had when we started handing the photo round, but the baby in the photo never gets to see that anyway. Someone should tell Ewan about that expression, but it’s a story they should save up for some shitty day in his future, because we all have those. And that’s when they can tell him he was wanted from the start.

I can’t get into this evening. First, there was Tanika stirring up the guys, then the TV backyard show talk, then the baby discussion. It’s easy to limit it to two beers because that’s more than I want.

It wraps up pretty early. Steve’s been missing out on sleep because of Ewan. Lurch says Trev’d surely have to be heading home soon anyway, for a bit more Siberian T-shirt spotting on Foxtel. Then Trev says – in a poke-that-where-it-goes kind of way – that he’ll be watching a full-on Star Wars marathon, actually, and Lurch says if he buys the beers can he come over?

Benno stops at the door guy when we’re on the way out and he gets so close to him that they’re practically nose-to-nose and he puts on a look that’s nearly a snarl and he says, ‘The lady’s shoes, pal. They’re not trainers, you dumb prick. That’s a fashion shoe you’re looking at there.’

And the guy looks a bit confused, and Tanika says, ‘Actually, there was a different man out here earlier.’

And Benno says to the guy, in the same tone of voice as before but with his face just a bit further away, ‘Well, I think you get my drift.’

Everyone but the bouncer laughs. He still looks like he feels a bit threatened. ‘I wasn’t looking,’ he says. ‘We don’t actually check shoes on the way out.’

‘He’s quite a kidder,’ Steve says to him, since Benno’s still standing a bit too close and the line between joke and straight out mean is often a fine one for him.

Trev can’t stop laughing all the way down the stairs.

‘Hey,’ Benno says, ‘At least I didn’t hit him. That could have been embarrassing.’

When we get out onto the street, we go our separate ways. Or at least the others do, and I stand at the door with Tanika.

‘Does anything embarrass Benno?’ she says.

‘Not that I’m aware of so far. But I’ve only known him a couple of years.’

I unchain my bike from the railing and push it along beside us as we walk to the church bus. Tanika’s parked it a street or two away, the nearest she could get. This is the part of the evening I wanted. This is the part of the day that I wanted all day. There’s a night breeze coming in off the sea, blowing Tanika’s hair around and, finally, it’s only the two of us. No Mum, no baby photos, no stupid talk.

It’s all crowding around in my head at the moment, and I want to stop here and think about it. Just stand still, and say nothing and think. There was too much noise in there, inside the surf club, too much going on. Dumb jokes about nothing and Tanika playing up to it all, messing around with the guys and I’d rather she hadn’t but I don’t know why.

‘You’re quiet tonight,’ she says.

‘Yeah, well, there was enough bullshitting going on in there without me needing to chip in.’

‘Is something wrong?’

‘Why would something be wrong? There was just too much bullshit, and you were showing off your legs and fooling around with them and . . .’

She stops, pushes the hair back out of her face. ‘And what?’

‘What do you mean, “And what?”?’

‘What? What was I doing wrong? I just wanted to create a good impression with the people you work with. And you always said they like a joke. That’s all it was. What did you think I was doing?’

She’s right, obviously right. I’m not thinking straight. She was just playing along with what was happening.

‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m an idiot. And I’m pretty sure you created a good impression. There’ll be a fair bit of talk about you during the Star Wars marathon at Trev’s place. Talk about how lucky that young Kane is, a level two and a girl of that sort.’

‘That’s more like it,’ she says, and she takes hold of my free hand.

We walk along the path not saying much, tree branches bending down over us in the breeze, people walking past heading the other way, going out for a few drinks at a bar or maybe to see a band. Backpackers, from the accents. Backpackers from Europe, with dark tans and sandals and hippy clothes. I think the pubs have a different dress code for them.

‘How about that baby of Steve’s?’ Tanika says when we get to the bus. ‘Funny looking thing, but kind of cute. I never really know what to say about babies.’

‘Yeah.’

‘He’d be a good dad, Steve. Don’t you think?’

‘Yeah. He’s a good boss, anyway. A good dad? He probably would be. But I don’t know about that.’ And it hits me again, like a fist in the guts. What’s got into me tonight? ‘I don’t know about that stuff. I never had a good dad, did I? I don’t know how I’d get to know about that stuff, about who’d be good and who’d be bad. About who stays and who leaves. I don’t know if you can ever know, anyway. Not for sure. I don’t know what Steve’d be like or what anyone’d be like. This level two – I can take that responsibility. How would I be if I was in Steve’s position? That could happen one day.’

‘You being the boss?’

‘No, the father. I’m being totally theoretical.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, really. Like I said, it’s all theoretical. Way, way in the future, hey, but you wonder sometimes. I had this kind of fight with my mother. She said a few things. Some about Dad, some about me. How do you ever know when you’re ready for that kind of responsibility? Ever. How do you know you’ll take it on and do it well and keep doing it well? It’s so easy to make a mess of things.’ She nods, but she doesn’t say anything. ‘Look, it’s easier for you. Look at your family. You couldn’t understand. You get the paper at your house, delivered every day, right? Even though no one really reads it and your mother always says there’s nothing in it. You told me that. She’s said that your whole life about the paper. But you still get it, and you get it every day, and you sit at the breakfast table and you can talk about anything. All the news, anything. You and your family, like a TV ad.’

‘What? What are you saying? Why shouldn’t we be like that? We’ve . . . What are you saying? You have no idea about my family, about . . .’

She stops there, pulls it to a stop and gives me a hard look. I’ve done something wrong. I don’t know what it is. I’m doing a lot wrong tonight. She takes a big breath in, lets it out.

‘I’m not totally sure what you mean,’ she says, in a calmer voice. ‘Why don’t we go and see how your mother is? See if some of that can be sorted out . . .’

We get into the bus, and I fit my bike in behind the first row of seats.

‘Anyway,’ she says as she starts the engine and the doors shut. ‘Maybe we could talk about the paper at breakfast time, but we don’t. And we don’t get to watch TV either. That’s a rule of Dad’s. He prefers the quiet. You do that at your place in the mornings, don’t you? Watch TV?’

‘Yeah. Generally. For the news and stuff. It’s not bad.’

We pull out from the kerb, Tanika turning the big steering wheel like she’s turning a ship around. And I’m sitting right behind her on the front passenger seat, watching the streetlights shine in on her bare thighs and her forearm muscles – more wonders of nature, working smoothly away to swing the bus out onto the road.

‘Do a lot of people watch TV in the mornings?’ she says. ‘What do you reckon? Maybe I could drop into your place some day at breakfast time. Do they have it on a weekend, breakfast TV?’

‘Sure. Well, Saturdays they do.’ I’ve been an idiot, and Tanika’s the kind of person who can make that apparent in a second, without ever having to tell you directly. Without even meaning to tell you at all. Just in the name of peace, getting on, turning a conversation somewhere better. I want to lean forward right now and kiss her on the mouth, but we’re driving at fifty and the road’s pretty narrow. “That’s “Today” on Saturday. There’s a whole different program on Sunday.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘“Sunday”. I think they make the names easy ’cause it’s early in the morning.’

‘Well, I could come over.’

‘Sure, that’d be good. And maybe we could make it a bit different to usual. You know, special breakfast food, like pancakes with maple syrup and strawberries. And cream from a blue-and-white striped jug.’

‘Maybe even tomorrow.’

‘Well . . . maybe some other time. We don’t even have the jug yet. It’s a good idea, but. Let’s see how Mum is first.’

She caught me there for a second. She had me thinking about her coming over for breakfast, just the way I’d like it to be. She made me forget, and had me dreaming of a better life. She didn’t mean to. It’s how she looks, how she is, what she does. It’s just her, au naturel. She had me dreaming of a better life, a better life where pancakes happened. Maybe some day. Maybe some of that level-two wage could go on a pancake date at my place. I might have to have a couple of goes at it with just Mum and Wayne first, to get the recipe into shape before we do it. Maybe it comes in packets. That’d be good.

All the lights are off when we pull up outside. The TV’s flickering away in there, but the volume’s down and there are some other noises going on.

‘Is that your mother?’ Tanika says. She sounds worried. ‘Can you hear that? Does she ever have trouble breathing?’

‘No, I think that’s something else.’ I take my keys out and I give them a good shake. One of the louvres is open a crack and I put my mouth up to it and shout out, ‘Pants up, boy. Visitors.’

There’s a lot of panicky shuffling in there, and some throat clearing, and the noise of static as the channel changes to anything other than video.

‘Wayne doesn’t mind the occasional international film,’ I tell Tanika. ‘And he gets rather involved. I think he tries to treat the subtitles as an opportunity for self-improvement.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Tanika says, and she laughs.

That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. Or sticking to something, at least.’

The truth of course is that, whenever he can, Wayne goes halves in $2.15-weekly porn videos with Les, the neighbour out the back. But the less said about Les the better. He’s a bit more hard-core than Wayne, who’s perfectly happy with just nudity.

Wayne says Mum’s asleep. She’s been in bed for an hour or so, maybe two hours. It hasn’t been such a good night. He’s been in there a few times with glasses of water or to sort her curtains out and stop them flapping around, things like that.

‘Not the best video night,’ he says. ‘I’ve been working that pause button. And her timing hasn’t always been good.’

‘She likes fresh air,’ I tell Tanika. So she likes the windows open wide. But the curtains in there get noisy on windy nights. And if the moon’s out and shining in on them, and they’re waving round and you’re half-asleep . . . you know the way that kind of thing gets into your dreams?’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Sure.’

‘There was other stuff,’ Wayne says. ‘Other stuff too. She was talking.’

And he’s saying it to me, looking right at me, but he keeps twitching his eyes over Tanika’s way. The TV’s fizzing and crackling with static, with the static of being between channels, and the light from the screen is coming out of the lounge room in a hazy glow and lighting one side of his face. His cheek and his hardworking eyeball, trying to let me know that there’s some kind of secret going on.

‘It’s all right, Wayne,’ I tell him. ‘We don’t keep anything from Tanika.’

‘Well, okay then. Okay. It’s Mum. You got her kind of worried. I think it’s to do with a lot of stuff happening at once. It’s kind of to do with you becoming the family success story. What with the new level at work and with . . .’ He turns to Tanika. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way . . . with, um, friends with jobs in real estate and who drive buses, and that. And who ended up not in the nativity play.’

‘Wayne . . .’ It’s time for my calm big-brother voice. ‘You might have to get a bit more precise about the actual issue. And, also, I’ve got a few years on you, remember? You and Mum forget that sometimes. There’s room in this family for more than one success story.’

‘Yeah, righto. That’s good. Um, well, it was to do with the level that you got today at work, and you going out a bit and getting a licence that’d let you drive long-haul trucks and stuff.’

‘I’m more likely to go for the horticulture, actually. That’s the plant part of the training.’

‘Yeah, but that’s just how it starts, she reckons. Ideas that aren’t so big can get big pretty quickly. And then you’d be out of here, which is the main worry. If you got to travelling you might see places better than here and, you know . . . girls in different towns, and gambling. And that’d be that.’

‘But that’s stupid. I don’t want a girl in a different town, or even a different girl in this town, and if I wanted a look at places better than here I could take a quick trip next door, either side. Did you talk her out of it all?’

‘Well . . . I didn’t know what to say. You’d just had that fight with her, and then you’d gone out. I can’t read your mind.’

‘Doofus. Next time what you say is, “Kane’s not leaving.” Something like that. Keep it simple. “For Kane, this is home.”’

‘She was worried because of Dad.’

‘What’s he got to do with this? That’s the past. You know that, don’t you? It’s long ago. I can’t remember much about Dad, and you can’t remember anything, so what’s he got to do with it? We’ve got our own thing going now. Have had for years. And it’s on the brink of getting better. That’s what’s happening now. Right?’

‘Right.’

There’s a noise from Mum, coming from down the hall. It’s like one side of a conversation. She’s talking in her sleep again and it starts off making no sense and then she’s going, ‘What? What?’ as if the conversation’s turned on her.

‘Okay, my go,’ I tell Wayne. ‘Leave this one to me.’

Tanika’s standing there, saying nothing. Which was fine till Mum started making noise. Now I’m not so sure. She hasn’t seen this side of things before, not close up, but there’s no point in hiding it from her.

The light’s glowing in her hair and on her face. I reach my hand out to her, and she reaches hers out and takes it.

‘Is this okay?’ That’s what I say to her because I want to say something but I can’t think what it’d be.

‘Yeah. Of course.’ She smiles, to make the situation seem closer to normal than it is. ‘Go and talk to her.’

Mum’s voice is louder now, back there in the dark. Angry or confused – the two get mixed up sometimes.

‘I’ll wait here,’ Tanika says. ‘Wayne can tell me about the movie he’s watching.’

‘Or not,’ Wayne says, looking a bit tense. ‘It’s very . . . European.’

It’s darker the further you get away from the lounge room, but I don’t turn any lights on. Lights freak Mum out when she’s stuck in a bad dream. I open her door, and she’s lying across her bed at an angle, with just a sheet over her. A sheet with the moon on it, making shadows like a hillside, the huge body of my mother rising up out of the landscape.

‘Wayne,’ she says when she realises there’s someone there. ‘Wayne,’ in a murmury, rum-heavy voice. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘It’s Kane, Mum.’

‘Kane . . . Kane.’ Said the first time almost like a question, but the second like reassurance.

‘Yeah.’ I go and sit on the bed, round the far side – the window side – down around knee level so that she can see me in the light and I’m not casting a shadow on her face. She doesn’t like that. ‘It’s me, Mum. I’ve just been out for a few hours, but now I’m back. Simple as that, and same as always.’

‘Oh.’ She’s still half asleep. Her mouth moves into the O shape a while before she makes the sound to go with it, then the sound comes out slowly.

‘We got our wires crossed a bit earlier on. That’s all that happened.’

She opens her eyes, and looks at me. She reaches out and squeezes my hand. ‘Good boy,’ she says. ‘That’s my boy. My young man.’

‘Yeah. But still here, right? We’re getting somewhere, Mum. That’s all that’s happening. But it’s us. Not just me. See? That’s the idea.’

‘You came back tonight.’

‘Yeah, like every other bloody night.’

‘Yeah.’ There’s enough light coming in that I think I can see her smile. She nods her head without lifting it off the pillow.

‘So everything’s like it usually is,’ I tell her. ‘Just a little better. I’m doing well at work, Mum. I’ve been promoted. That gives us more money and it means that I’ll get training opportunities. That’s what I was trying to tell you.’ There’s a snuffly noise, which turns into a snore. A one-off loud snore, then more snoring, slowly, steadily. ‘So everything’s fine.’ She’s asleep now, her mouth half-open and her eyes closed and noisy breathing passing in and out of her. ‘Even tonight, I think it still stacks up as the best summer of my life.’ A gust of wind blows in, flaps the edge of the curtain up, then drops it down again. She doesn’t stir. ‘And Wayne’s had a good evening. He’s watched a European movie, so there’s culture involved. And he’s been kept busy performing unholy acts on his middle regions, of course. But that’s our boy. Never bored while his hands are free and his pants are loose-fitting. And in the morning we’ll talk about Dad. You and me. In the morning or some time soon, when it’s early in the day and it suits us both. Okay? And we’ll talk about you. If you want.’

More snoring, but the snoring of someone lost far away in sleep. I slide my hand out from under hers and I stand up and go to the door, as quietly as I can. On my way out, I shut it behind me with hardly a click.

Meanwhile, Wayne, not Caloundra’s greatest conversationalist, has taken Tanika into the lounge room. He’s got her sitting in Mum’s chair and he’s on the couch and they’re watching David Letterman with the volume down low, still in the dark. He’s leaning forward, staring at the screen and pointing the remote at it too, as if he’s ready to try for a better option the second Tanika says she’s bored. He sees me in the doorway and nearly says something, but then he doesn’t.

‘Good work, Wayne. You sure know how to entertain a guest.’

‘No worries,’ he says, as if he’s just copped a compliment. ‘Mum okay?’

‘Yeah. Fine. Everything’s fine. Just a few wires crossed, and we’ve sorted it out now. So Tanika and I might head out again for a while. Give you a chance to watch that video of yours all the way to the end. Does that sound okay, Tanika?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘And, Wayne, could you not use the tissues with the aloe vera in them? They’re kind of expensive and we got them because some of Mum’s skin’s pretty fragile, remember?’

‘Um, yeah, sure. She must have brought them out here earlier, or something. I’m just watching TV.’

The sound of heavy on-screen breathing is back before we get to the front door, just for a second or two, and then he mutes it till we’re down the stairs.

‘I’ve got to tell you a bit more about all of that,’ I say to Tanika. ‘Everything that’s been going on. It’s been a funny sort of day.’

‘Yeah. I thought it might have been. Are you hungry? I know it’s the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t mind some pizza. How about that?’

‘I think I used my voucher already. But we could reheat the leftovers in the house . . .’

‘Fresh pizza’d be better. And it’s my shout. It’s a special occasion. And I hear it didn’t go so well earlier. Wayne told me a few things. I think it’s still a bit confusing for him, though.’

‘Do you think he’ll be okay?’

‘Back there with his video? Yeah. He’ll be fine. You’ll probably need to explain some things to him some time, though.’

‘Yeah. I will. But there’s still some things I’m only just finding out about myself.’

She drives us to Domino’s and when we get out of the bus she says, ‘Meatosaurus, isn’t it?’

It’s bright in Domino’s, fluoro bright, and there’s a crew of them in there still at work, rattling trays and folding boxes and scooping up pizzas when they come out of the oven. Tanika orders and pays and they tell us it’ll be ten minutes maximum.

In the car park we talk a bit about what’s been going on. Two delivery cars turn up and then go again, but there’s only us waiting and the car park’s mostly empty. Tanika leans against the bus door, and I walk along the white line that’s marking out two parking spaces, then off that line and onto the next. And I tell her. I tell her I thought the problems had started for my parents when I’d been around a while, but that’s not how it is. And I knew I’d come along a bit early, but I didn’t know I hadn’t been meant to come along at all. And that’s a different situation, and it’s kind of hard to take. He used her, that’s what I reckon now. He was older by a couple of years and she was our age or, in fact, younger and not at all ready for a man like that. A user and a scumbag and known all the way along to be reckless, even though he came across as suave and interesting. That’s how I put it – as tough as I can make it, because I think she has a right to know and to hear it in the most direct of ways.

‘And I could be like him in some respects,’ I tell her, also because I have to. ‘I look like him. I’ve seen the photos of when he was young. Mum doesn’t know that. They’re under the house and she never goes under the house.’

And the speaker on the wall outside Domino’s says, ‘Bell, Bell. Pizza for Bell.’

And Tanika says, ‘That’s okay, you know. He’s your dad. It’s no surprise you look a bit like him.’

‘And that doesn’t worry you?’

‘No.’

‘Pizza for Bell,’ the voice from Domino’s says again. ‘That’d be you two, wouldn’t it?’ And the guy who took our order is at the microphone, and he’s waving to us, shouting about us all across the car park in a crackly electronic voice. ‘Yep, you two. Don’t want to interrupt, or anything . . .’

‘We should get the pizza,’ Tanika says. ‘This is all fine. So your dad was a good-looking man. So what? Let’s get the pizza.’

We go inside and the guy says, ‘What were you doing out there? Solving the world’s problems?’

‘Well, it’s got a few,’ Tanika says. ‘So we thought we’d make a start.’

And we take the pizza and drive to the beach, Tanika at the wheel of the bus again, me just behind her with the box on my lap and the steaming meaty aroma of Meatosaurus rising up through the holes.

We park and the door opens and I can hear waves breaking, just over the dune. The sand is cool under my feet and the breeze is cool too, finally, and still coming off the sea. The dune’s off-limits for revegetation, and we walk around the fenced area and the tide is in, waves breaking and breaking, silvery grey in the moonlight. Breaking and piling up and thinning out and running to nothing, up the sand and shells, ending in a rush, disappearing in that last noise, like a long breath out.

The moon’s up high and behind us, and the sky’s completely crowded with stars. And I told Tanika most of what I needed to, I think, and it seems to be okay.

We sit in the sand and eat pizza and this feels much closer to the night I wanted, though it took a while to get here.

‘Would that be Venus?’ she says when we’ve talked some more. ‘That one over there?’

And she’s pointing to a star or a planet that’s just coming over the horizon in the east. And it’s not white, the way Venus would be, the way Venus was when we first paid attention to it, back two months ago. It’s red, kind of red but not red really, more a glinting kind of rusty orange.

So I tell her, ‘I reckon it might be Mars,’ and I tell her about the ‘Today’ show, what I heard on the ‘Today’ show back on a day that was long ago now, as far ago as yesterday.

And she says, ‘Mars. I don’t know that I’ve seen Mars. But I must have, I guess, without knowing. It’s not like they just invented it. God, what a sky it is tonight. But maybe I just don’t look up often enough. There’s a lot out there. Who knows what? Hey, remember the music of the spheres? Did you do that at school? It’s from Shakespeare. It’s about how there was once this idea that planets and stars made noise. You know, put out a kind of music. And you look at them tonight, and you think maybe they could. I don’t even know what play that’s from. That’s the only bit of it that stuck in my head. We saw the movie at school, and I remember that bit, but the teacher said it wasn’t particularly important.’

She moves in closer to me, and I put my arm around her. We slide the pizza box under our bent knees with the lid three-quarters down to stop the last two slices getting any colder.

‘Everyone finds things out, you know,’ she says. ‘People are always hiding something from you, waiting for a better time to tell it. So you end up finding out in a way you’re not supposed to, and it makes you feel like bringing up your tea. I know how it goes. It’s always a pretty foul kind of surprise when you hear that way.’

‘Yeah. I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

Her hair’s blowing around again, and she pushes it out of her face. ‘I’ve got to get this cut,’ she says. ‘It’s driving me nuts. My family . . . they’re an example of the things you find out, you know. And you can’t tell anyone this, okay? Not anyone. But my Uncle Barry, a guy you don’t know – and a guy I don’t know, so how would you? – he’s actually . . . well, he actually started out as my father. Technically So that’s kind of one of those things as well. They were about the same age as us too. When Mum got pregnant to him, I mean. You’ve got to wonder what was going on back then, all those kids coming along. Didn’t anyone ever tell them how it happens and how to make sure it doesn’t? Anyway, Barry did a runner, as soon as he found out. And Dad, who was about five or six years older, thought that was a really bad thing, bad for the whole family. And he kind of liked Mum – not that he’d met her too often – and he was training to be a priest at the time. But he said he figured it must have been happening for a reason. He said it was a sign that he was being called to do something else. Not that they got around to telling me. I found out a few years ago, when Nanna was going off her nut, and not the best with secrets any more. She thought I was Mum, and she started having a go at me for fooling round with Barry, and I didn’t even know who Barry was. I spun out, like you’d expect. They should have told me. Dad put it in a better way once he’d had time to think about it. That’s when he said I’d become his calling. Even before I was born, the most important thing he had to do was see me right. It’s special in a way, but not the way you’re expecting.’

‘Which sort of explains how he was over Christmas. I thought that was a bit intense.’

‘Sure it was intense. And maybe I should have told you then.’

‘Well, you have now. And there was that month when you weren’t allowed to talk to me . . .’

She nods. ‘Yeah. Good on you, Dad.’ She takes another bite of pizza and she chews it, looking out to sea. ‘So they didn’t choose the relationship either. It’s all a question of circumstance too. Or, at least, Dad made a choice, but a choice about me, not so much a choice about Mum. They’ve never . . . loved each other in the regular way. As far as I’m aware. But we make it work, most of the time. You know how it is. And he was going to be a priest anyway, so . . .’

‘Yeah.’

And she tells me that, despite all that, and despite my father and how he handled things, she still holds out some kind of hope that it doesn’t have to be that way. That there’s better luck going around, and sometimes it goes to people who deserve it. And she says she believes not everyone’s like my dad or her Uncle Barry. She really believes it. That I’m different and her dad’s different, and he annoys the crap out of her sometimes, but he’d never let her down.

‘You’re like that, I think,’ she says. ‘Not the annoyance part, that’s not what I meant.’ She laughs. ‘People can depend on you. Even if they freak out sometimes. You’re probably not like your father, even if you’ve seen the photos. Some people think about other people. Some people don’t. Some people make the most of what they’ve got, others’ll toss it away in the hope that something better’11 blow along. Or they drift along themselves, in and out of things, and they don’t play by the rules.’

Like clouds. That’s what I’m thinking, as she keeps talking and I keep looking up at the sky. Like Wayne’s misunderstanding about the ‘Today’ show, and the prospects of making laws for clouds. Though I’ve been more like one of the sky divers today, falling and falling until I hit this sand. Hitting clouds and pockets of clear air, one after another, all the way down. It’s like that cartoon, that old cartoon with the coyote, falling off the edge of some canyon and punching holes in the clouds all the way to the ground. Holes like they’re punched by a cookie cutter, like gingerbread men. Mum used to make those once, when we were younger. They’d have Smarties for buttons. We have to do something about Mum.

It doesn’t make sense to jump into clouds, if you look at it from a practical point of view. How would it feel to fall through a cloud, without a clear idea if it had a bottom or not? What if the last part of the cloud was fog all the way to the ground? You’d never even know.

The last I heard from my father was a couple of letters from north Queensland, where he was crewing fishing boats, mainly.

I tell Tanika a bit about that – Dad going up north and the shark story that came on on the ‘Today’ show before the Mars story.

‘I wrote him a long letter once, care of the Post Office at Babinda, but I never heard back. That’s when the letters from him stopped. Or postcards, really. He’d send postcards, and I’d send postcards too. That happened a few times. Then, that one time, I sent him a long letter. I wracked my brain about that afterwards, obviously, about my letter and anything I might have put in it. But you don’t know, in the end. That’s what you’re left with. A lot of not knowing. When we had that boat, the Stormy, a lot of things got a lot clearer. Particularly when she sank when Dad shouldn’t have been out in her at all. Mum goes on about Dad taking risks. She’s always afraid of risks but, the thing is, he’d take them all at once. There was the money issue with the Stormy too, not just the problem with him taking her out that night. That’s how he lived. How he still lives, probably. So I notice those kinds of stories like the one on the ‘Today show. Shark stories. And I always thought one day we might get the call – the call to say he’d been off doing something mad or stupid and they only knew because they’d found him years later in some gully somewhere and the dental records matched up. That sort of thing. And that’s why there’d never been another letter. Or postcard. Except I don’t know if he ever went to the dentist. It’s not really his thing. So he’d probably just be some mystery guy.’

But who knows? Who ever knows? I’ve wasted a lot of energy on that one over the years. You brace yourself for that kind of call, and now’s the time to stop.

Some people take other people into account, others don’t. And you probably can’t make them. And you probably didn’t have anything to do with them being the way they are. Whenever you came along, however you came into the world, whatever you did to whatever plans they might have had. As Father Steele’s always said, you’re pretty much guaranteed of being innocent at birth.

And you might have done your best since then, as often as possible, and that won’t make them come back or change the way they are. It’ll do other things though, some of them good. That’s what you have to hope for.

Some people stick by rules, some people duck and weave and live outside them. And make millions or hurt people or go to jail (always feeling as if they’ve been treated unfairly) or leave their bones on hillsides or in the bellies of big fish, showing where they ended up and the last thing they did. But even the people who stick by the rules can get tipped from their boat by a freak wave. The guy missing up north – the guy whose thigh bone they think it is – he never took a risk. Not that kind of risk. He was a regular guy, with two kids or three, and not a bad word said about him all the time he’s been gone.

But you can only do what you can do. And some people will do far less. And expecting my father to live by any rules is like making laws for clouds, the way Wayne thought they meant it.

Mars gets higher in the sky, the night ends. There are lights out to sea – container ships, trawlers – and they become less distinct as the land takes shape around us and starts to take on colour, and the sky goes kind of purple on its way to blue.

It’s TB that Harbo’s got, not cancer, and he’s getting better now. We made him go back to the hospital, and now he’s getting better. But he keeps telling us he won’t be round for ever, and there’s a boat in it for us when he goes. As long as it’s not the gas stove that takes him out, of course. Harbo can’t stop himself making jokes about his own death, now that he probably won’t be up for it for a while.

‘I’ll be careful with the cooking now kids,’ he said a few days ago. ‘Don’t want to leave you nothing but splinters and an oil slick in the water.’

The sun comes up, and Tanika goes down to the edge of the sea and goes in up to her ankles. I walk along the beach a little way and I pick up a stick and start scratching in the untouched sand left by the going-out tide. First the tightest perfect spiral that I can, growing out and out. Then something that becomes a letter T, dressed up like iron lace-work on a balcony. You don’t get that here, but you get it in Sydney. I’ve seen it on TV.

Then I scuff it up and hide it, press it flat with my feet, and I move on. I draw a planet, a bone and a cloud. Then another letter T, chunky and strong this time, not so ornamental.

And Tanika shouts out, ‘What are you doing?’

The water’s up to her calves now.

And I tell her, ‘Nothing much. Just thinking. But I’ve probably thought enough for now. I should stop while I’m thinking that things are pretty good, shouldn’t I? And that a lot of stuff that mightn’t be as good doesn’t matter in the way I thought it did.’

‘That’s getting complicated,’ she says. ‘But it’s probably right. Come over here. Stop thinking. Come and we’ll get wet. I want to swim, and the morning’s the best time.’