The Last Thread Read online

  PRAISE FOR MICHAEL SALA

  Winner of the New South Wales Premier’s Award for New Writing, 2013 Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize, Pacific Region, 2013

  THE LAST THREAD

  ‘Michael Sala has a rare gift: in prose that takes your breath away, he tells a story of heart-rending sorrow without a trace of sentimentality. His debut as a novelist is one to celebrate.’ RAIMOND GAITA

  ‘Sala captures perfectly the puzzled silence of the uncomprehending child in a narrative swollen with unspoken secrets.’ DEBR A ADEL AIDE

  ‘Skillfully written…Sala explores the common but often damaging saga of family myth-making.’ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

  ‘Leaves a potent sense of blood-and-bone humanity.’ CANBERRA TIMES

  ‘A gutsy, moving, beautifully wrought and utterly compelling work.’ READINGS MONTHLY

  THE RESTORER

  ‘There is so much to praise about this book. Michael Sala’s prose is clear and unadorned, the setting exquisitely rendered, but it is his characters—all of them flawed and complex and deeply, deeply human— who will stay with me for a very long time. I would defy anyone to read this story and remain unmoved. The Restorer is an incredibly powerful novel and, I believe, an important one.’ HANNAH KENT

  ‘The Restorer is a beautifully written novel about growing up, starting again—and how the riptide of personal history can pull us further and further from safety, no matter how hard we fight.’ CHARLOTTE WOOD

  ‘Builds and breaks like a summer storm— just as beautiful, just as brutal.’ FIONA MCFARLANE

  ‘Closely observed, with the visceral force of truth, Michael Sala’s heartbreaking novel captures the tender hope of love and its terrible cost.’ KATHRYN HEYMAN

  Michael Sala was born in the Netherlands and first came to Australia as a child in the 1980s. He lives in Newcastle on the New South Wales north coast. He is the author of two novels, The Last Thread and The Restorer. The Last Thread, his critically acclaimed debut, was winner of the New South Wales Premier’s Award for New Writing and regional winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2013.

  For my wife, Kimiko

  CONTENTS

  BERGEN OP ZOOM

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  NEWCASTLE

  8

  9

  10

  11

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  BERGEN OP ZOOM

  1

  Television on. Living room swims in light and noise. The shhh from the speakers sounds like rain, so loud you can’t hear the drops. The corridor is dark. Michaelis stops his tricycle at the bedroom door. His face makes a ghost in the orange gleam. He reaches up and rattles the handle. He hears them on the other side, Dad and his brother, and he calls out. The door doesn’t open.

  ‘One day, you’ll have a face like this.’

  When Dad smiles, his nose curves, and you can see hair in his nostrils, a tiny forest of it. He trims it sometimes in the mirror in the hallway, but it always grows back. They ride on a pushbike, Michaelis at the front, on the bar between Dad’s arms, Constantine at the back. They ride alongside a field locked in early morning fog. The ears of rabbits rise and dip as the bike rattles past.

  ‘You always say they’re rabbits,’ Dad says, ‘but they’re not. They’re hares. Hares have longer ears.’

  Smoke plumes from the factory in the distance. The air smells of yoghurt. Dad’s arms tense with each push against the pedals. He wears a black leather jacket that smells like an animal. The leather folds and shines in the crook of his elbows.

  In the park, Constantine and Dad pass a ball between them with stabs of their feet. Dad talks about how he used to be the star player in the army back in Cyprus.

  ‘This is what I used to be good at. You should have seen me.’

  ‘Where’s Cyprus, Dad?’

  ‘Oh, a long, long way off.’ Dad talks to Michaelis from the side of his mouth. ‘Concentrate on the ball. Pass it to him, Constantinos.’

  Con can turn on the ball and kick it to exactly where he wants. He’s pretending there are players around him, ready to fight for the ball, but there’s no one.

  Michaelis runs between him and Dad, waving his arms. When the ball comes his way he trips over it. Dad helps him up and points to the inside of his foot. ‘This is where you hit the ball. That’s the sweet spot, where you control it. Just look, really look. See?’

  Michaelis doesn’t. The ball skids off, and Dad follows. ‘Constantinos, see if you can take the ball from me.’

  Constantinos. That’s how they say it back in Cyprus.

  Dad is panting now, working the ball from foot to foot, talking only to Con. ‘Do you know why Holland lost, Constantinos? They didn’t have Cruyff. That’s why Argentina beat them. But one day, in the World Cup, Holland will have you.’

  Con steals the ball. As he runs, the ball skims over his heel and spills out in front and he guides it away.

  ‘Ah, Constantinos,’ says Dad, standing in his wake, bowed over, hands on his knees. Then he straightens and turns. ‘Micha-ayleees! Don’t go too close to the water!’

  Michaelis doesn’t know if he is drawn to the pond or bored by the game. Water ripples around the reeds. Something splashes at the corner of his gaze. He turns and waits. It doesn’t come again. Dad is trying to catch Con. He runs out of breath and begins laughing and coughing all at once. He says he should stop smoking, but smiles as he puts his jacket back on and takes a cigarette out from the inside pocket.

  Constantine stands apart, juggling the ball, making no sound but the echo of leather and air. Michaelis swears that ball will never touch the ground. When it does, Con simply scoops it up with his toes and flicks it to the other foot like nothing happened. The wind lifts his hair and lets go. Dad looks at Constantine as if he has forgotten to tell him something and Michaelis watches Dad, his face hollow at the cheeks, his paper-thin eyelids, and his teeth pulling at his bottom lip. It is fascinating, the look of the smoke unravelling into the air from his mouth, like knots coming undone.

  They ride into town along the bicycle path. Naked trees separate the path from a road gleaming with afternoon traffic. Houses huddle together on the other side, bay windows shielded by small gardens. Once Mum told Michaelis about how she used to stop outside windows when she was a little girl. She’d stop on her way home from school and stand there all by herself. She did this when someone had died inside.

  ‘The curtains were drawn for three days. That’s how you knew. I’d stand in front of the curtains and feel sad for them inside. No, not sad, but I wanted to share their sadness.’

  Even when Mum isn’t close to him, her stories are.

  They pass through a cluster of trees, along another park and into the heart of town. The salmon-pink path is a blur beneath them. Dad’s shoes catch the light with each turn. People queue at the stand in front of the closed department store for newspapers and thick red lengths of boiled sausage. The man hands them over in white paper bags full of steam. Rookworst. At the first bite, the juices squirt out and burn the back of your throat. When they go there, Michaelis only ever gets a small piece, but it’s rich and salty and he never finishes it.

  The Pepper Shaker rises ahead: the grey stone cathedral with a clock face in the sky, its roof narrowing to a spire pressing like a needle against the clouds. They ride past it, across the cobble-stoned market square and stop at Crusio, the ice-cream shop. Crystal bowls are stacked in the window, brimming with balls of ice-cream that never melt, swirls of chocolate, wafers and thin tubes of biscuit. The door opens and warm air spills over them, full of waffles and coffee. Voices echo amid the creak of chairs and scraping spoons and laughter. A
smiling lady behind the counter carves them their own mountain. Michaelis eats until he’s sick. It’s the middle of the day, though you wouldn’t know it from the rain drizzling onto the polished stones.

  Dad hunches over the table in his leather jacket and wipes his mouth with a napkin. ‘You boys have to go home soon.’

  From the beginning, when Michaelis first sees him, he knew this would happen.

  Dad drops them at the front door, stays on his bike and chats with Mum. Michaelis watches them talk from inside the doorway, Dad’s skin very dark next to Mum’s, the nervous twitch in Mum’s hands and her eyes. Then Dad is off, weaving his bike back and forth across the path. He winks over his shoulder as he rides away.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Michaelis answers.

  Constantine is already gone.

  ‘It’s true.’

  Mum stirs on the couch, fingers wrapped around a cup of coffee in her lap. She is staring out the window. The coffee is cold. She tastes it, frowns, and puts it on the table. ‘Your brother is right. We did live together once. We lived together in London. And in Cyprus, on top of a hill with no running water or electricity. But it had such a view! Your dad’s parents brought out a jar of sparrows when I arrived. They were plucked bare and pickled in the vinegar, and your grandparents wanted me to eat one, beak and all.’

  She makes a face. Michaelis can see the gums of her teeth, pink and clean. Her upturned nose grows small between her large blue eyes. She smells of patchouli, a mossy, rich scent. You can smell it in the house when she walks from one part of it to the other. It’s in all her clothes.

  ‘Oh, God, those naked little sparrows. It made me sick to the stomach just looking at them!’

  ‘I remember that,’ Michaelis says.

  ‘You don’t remember anything.’ Constantine is standing in the doorway, watching them. ‘We were together, Michaelis, until you came along.’

  ‘And after,’ Mum says softly. ‘For a while after.’

  They lived together in London and then in Cyprus, with its mountains full of dark-skinned relatives and blue sky and bright oranges and narrow, dusty trails. It’s true: Michaelis can’t remember much from back then, but he knows the stories. And when he listens to Mum, it’s like he really can remember.

  An old woman lives in Cyprus in a stone house on top of a hill that looks out to the sea. She makes treats: almonds threaded together with string, encased in a pale tea-coloured sheath, like a length of hose. They taste sweet, full of strange spices, and the almonds make a paste in your mouth that you need a drink of water to swallow down. The almond chains reach Dad by mail. When the boys visit him, he hands them over coiled up in an old ice-cream container.

  ‘From your grandmother,’ he says.

  Although the taste makes him queasy, Michaelis eats as much as he can. It is all he knows of this woman.

  ~

  Boiled potatoes tumble into a silver strainer over the sink. There are scars in the metal. Steam gathers around Mum, and she smiles, running her fingers back and forth across her apron.

  Crouching in front of him, she takes one of his hands in her own. ‘They’re like mine, you know, and like your grandfather’s. Artistic.’

  Mum straightens, drops the potatoes back into the pot and begins crushing them into mash, pausing to drizzle over the fat from thinly sliced bacon and onions that she has just fried.

  ‘You were blue. That’s how poor we were in London. We couldn’t afford the heating. We lived in a tiny flat. The place was fine in the summer, but the winter was cold and went on forever, and you cried and cried. One wall was constantly damp. You were unhappy, sick all the time. You never slept well. Your dad was hardly there. Sometimes I had to go out and walk the streets all by myself—I couldn’t listen to your crying.’

  Her arms work at the potato masher, her bare, red elbows bent outwards. She pauses to drop in some salt. Add a pinch of this. Stir. Taste.

  Her stories are strange and often sombre, but magical too. Michaelis can listen to the same ones again and again. It’s like touching stuff that doesn’t exist. Fairytales. He can imagine Mum walking the streets. She has this desperate look sometimes, where her chin tightens, her head tilts to one side, and her movements get jerky. You can hear it in her steps.

  ‘And your brother didn’t want you there. Soon as you were born, he tried to bury you. He would throw things in your cot. Shoes, jackets, toys, anything he could find. I came in one day and couldn’t even see your face.’

  Michaelis remembers one thing about London. He remembers standing in his cot and rattling the wooden bars, crying. The insides of his ears hurt. Some time, before or after that, Mum gives him a tablet, which tastes sour. This was when Dad lived with them, and now that time is gone.

  Dad lives somewhere else. He smells of expensive aftershave, and every hair on his head is in place. His skin feels rough, especially when you go against the grain, as if there is sand under the surface. Dad laughs and winks and everything is a joke, and when the boys are at his house, in the mornings, he chases them on all fours in his pyjamas, which flap around his wiry body. He likes to wrestle with them, too, until sometimes the games go on without Michaelis, and he is left in the living room or listening from the corridor.

  When Dad chases them, he calls them animals, but he lengthens and bends the last part of the word. ‘Animaaales,’ he exclaims. ‘You are both animaaales!’ The words come to Michaelis between his own shrieking laughter, between trying to get away from Dad and rolling with him on the floor.

  Then he is gone.

  There is someone else in their family—Dirk: larger than Dad, heavier, without jokes. You can hear him moving a mile off, his breath and the plod of his workboots, his sigh and the creak of his belt when he sits down. Michaelis carries his last name. To make things easy, Mum says. But Michaelis can’t even spell that name. There are too many letters.

  Dirk has a thick beard, large hands and corduroy pants that sag beneath his belly. His pipe moves from one corner of his mouth to the other. He smells of tobacco and leather and wood shavings. His black hair is short and curly across his large head.

  On the weekend, Dirk works in the shed at the end of the back garden. When he works, his mouth disappears into his beard. He makes furniture and occasionally toys out of wood. He leans over the wood, a long, heavy chisel angled beneath his tar-stained fingers, and things get made. ‘The cleverness of the man,’ Mum says. Sometimes he hammers things together and hits his own finger, cursing in a voice that rattles the inside of Michaelis’s head.

  ~

  The clouds are dark grey, like the concrete from the wall is seeping into the sky. Michaelis rides a go-kart, while the boy behind him pushes. Michaelis doesn’t pay attention and steers into the wall. The boy behind him doesn’t pay attention either, and keeps pushing.

  One of Michaelis’s fingers gets wedged between concrete and metal and splits open. He screams. The go-kart stops and he sits there, staring at the wound. It is beginning to rain, light drops drifting onto his cheeks. A curled leaf of skin hangs from his finger. The tears do not come straight away. The blood holds back. Both come out at once, and then he can’t stop. He is bleeding and wailing like he was made for it. A fascinated ring of children bustles closer.

  The tomatoes are swollen and dark red. Mum runs a knife along each one before she drops it into boiling water. A thin cut in the flesh, barely visible. The skin of the tomato unfurls when it hits the water, like a flower blooming. Michaelis is standing on a chair, holding the benchtop for balance, looking down at the pot on the stove, watching Mum work.

  ‘When Constantine was your age, maybe a bit younger, about three, he got his first bike. It had training wheels.’

  Michaelis’s bike has training wheels too.

  ‘Constantine absolutely refused to ride the bike until we took them off. I don’t think he wanted the other kids to see him needing those wheels. He fell over a few times, but he kept going. He does
n’t like help, your brother.’

  ‘Why?’

  Mum shrugs. ‘He just never has. He’s always been his own man. When he was two, when Moessie visited, he got everyone water. He insisted on doing that by himself, too. Brought it out for us one after the other, in the same cup, like we were at church. We drank and only then did we wonder how he got the water. My father followed him into the bathroom. He was getting it from the toilet bowl.’

  Mum tells these stories when Dirk isn’t around, when she has visitors. She goes on telling the stories when the visitors are gone, when it is just Michaelis and her, when Constantine is at school and they drink tea and listen to music on the record player, or when she is cooking dinner.

  ‘Your brother used to write on the walls when he was little. He’d do these sprawling murals from one end of the wall to the other. He’d use his own poo. Very involved, he was. He stuffed the poo into his toys as well. He had this small red double-decker bus. I don’t know how he got the poo all the way to the back. It must have taken him a long time.’

  Listen. The look on Mum’s face is more important than the story, but listen to every word and try to give her more. Put yourself inside the stories, so that the laughter can be about you.

  ‘Start here,’ Michaelis says.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sebastiaan looks away. Every time he breathes, a bubble of snot comes out of his nose before shrinking back inside. Mum and Dirk are drinking coffee with Sebastiaan’s parents downstairs. The boys are upstairs, where it is quiet.

  Sebastiaan’s room is full of strange toys that Michaelis doesn’t own himself—a Godzilla nearly as long as his arm, a tub of green slime, a narrow plank on wheels called a skateboard, a bunch of Playmobil cowboys and Indians—but he’s grown tired of them. Now he wants to make a trail of poo from one end of Sebastiaan’s room all the way to the stairs and down them, if they have enough ammunition.