The Restorer Read online

  ‘Come on, boys and girls—it’s healthy, the salt,’ Mrs Lanigan was shouting as she paced back and forth between them. ‘Just get wet. Do you the world of good.’

  Turning to the choppy water of the pool in front of her, Freya couldn’t make out the bottom. A wiry, tattooed man with no hair and half his teeth missing squatted by the dark water and cleared out his nostrils, one after the other. He shook his fingers before dipping them in the pool, muttering all the while, as if he were the last man in a desolate world.

  A whistle screamed behind her, and Freya shuffled forward with the others. She tried not to look at her feet. Mum was the one who had once said, in passing, that they were Dad’s feet. That was a year or two ago now, but she thought of it every time she looked down. Dad’s feet, the asymmetry of the left and the right, the shambling path they cut.

  All the students stood in rows. They had to plunge in and swim across the pool, hit the other side and come back, then do it all again. Seagulls drifted and veered away above them. A plastic bag floated on the water over near the rock shelf. Now Mr Graham blew his whistle. Jump. Wait. Jump.

  Boys pushed each other, jostling for position, pulling in stomachs or leaning into themselves, trying to hide what they didn’t have, most of them with flat or sunken chests, a few more muscular, and holding themselves like they knew it. She liked the skinny ones better, the ones full of doubt. With each gust of wind, spray leaped in at the edge of the rocks beyond the baths and filled the wind that cut through her swimmers.

  ‘There’s a party on Saturday,’ Ally said behind her. ‘Coming?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sarah’s parents are away for the weekend. They always leave her with money for the week. She spends it all on the first night. Everyone’s invited. There’s going to be heaps of people there.’

  ‘Sure. Sounds good.’ Freya made herself give a quick smile.

  She pulled her crossed arms in closer against her chest and let her eyes stray to the hospital up on the bluff, its angled structures towering over the beach, level upon level of windows and white balconies gleaming under the sun’s glare. Mum was working there right now. Freya didn’t know where exactly, just somewhere inside all of that.

  Mum had been the first to leave that morning, but she’d sat down on Freya’s bed before she’d walked out the door. ‘Try to look ahead,’ she’d said. ‘Don’t brood. Just live. There’s so much to get excited about. You and I both have to learn that.’

  The last girls between her and water had plunged in.

  ‘Go on,’ Ally said behind her.

  The hairs on her forearms were standing on end. She straightened her hands, leaned forward. The water lapped up against her toes, the concrete slick beneath her feet. The wind threw spray up against her legs. Her swimmers were biting into her bum. She sensed the other kids behind her, heard some boy make a laughing comment that might have been about her, the words slap and arse in there.

  She hoped her bum didn’t wobble when she hit the water, but it probably would. She was skinny everywhere but somehow still had a bum that could shake when it hit the water. That was probably worse than having feet like Dad’s. She imagined the boys behind her looking, waiting to see. She was like a combination of all of Mum and Dad’s worst features, the mutant survivor of a nuclear war.

  ‘Go on. Jump in.’ Ally made a face and stuck her fingers down her throat. ‘Don’t make me look at Mr Graham any longer than I have to!’

  Mr Graham was standing a few metres to the side, one hand on his hip, the other clutching a whistle, his greasy reddish brown hair fluttering in the wind. Nothing embarrassed or backward about him. His nipples were like sagging erasers at the tips of pencils. Freya could see the press of glistening blue speedos against his crotch, and strange patches of pale skin on his otherwise tanned brown hairy legs. He had heavy eyelashes, like a labrador, not that you’d want to pat him or anything.

  In PE he always used girls for demonstrations. He would trace his hand along their legs to adjust their postures and show the proper techniques for sports that none of them cared about. He turned now, fixed her with a vacant stare and blew his whistle again. She dove in, imagined the ripple pass through her, all the boys looking on.

  The water smacked her face. The cold shot into her ears, swished across her scalp and radiated into her chest. For a moment she couldn’t breathe, could only float in the sensation, her heart racing, then she took control of her limbs. Ribbons of seaweed swayed through a silty landscape on the bottom. An old bandaid floated past. A school of silvery fish, bright and glittering as painted fingernails, flicked away beneath her.

  She sliced one hand through the surface, then the other, kicked her legs. Turning her head, she pulled in the air, tasted the salt water, spat it out, kept swimming. She pushed smoothly through the turbulence of the other kids—that was all they were, turbulence, and she could get through it, get past them. With each stroke she caught a blurred glimpse of the boys standing there on the edge, jeering and laughing, but whatever they were saying was lost. As long as she focused, drew out each breath, made her hands cut through in steady, unshakeable time, swimming was the calmest thing in the world.

  In the late afternoon, with school behind her, she stepped from the bus, waited for it to turn the corner, then bent down and took off her shoes and socks. There was plenty of day left—the hot, bright sun hung a good distance in the sky.

  Somewhere behind her she could hear the grinding metallic squeal of a train pulling out of Newcastle Station. The park was to her right and, looming over it, the hospital where Mum worked. Past that, out of sight, the sea. Home was only a couple of blocks away, but she veered into the park instead. There was a fountain near the edge, in the shade of the surrounding Norfolk pines, a glistening circle of black tiles, flush with the grass, from which five bubbling columns of water took turns towering into the air before dropping down again. A gust of the breeze carried a fine mist against her face. A couple of children were playing, running from one column of water to the next. They’d scream and laugh as the water rose around their legs, their waists, their heads, and they’d be gone, their screams muffled, until it fell again. She came close to the water herself, let it rise up around her feet, her shins, her knees—then stepped back as it climbed higher still.

  She walked home barefoot, enjoying the feel of the concrete against her soles, and the cool memory of the water like an echo in her bones. Some of the houses along the street were shuttered up and abandoned, patches of the walls crumbling, pieces of their roofs missing. They looked a thousand years old. A stream of cars filled the road, most of them heading in the opposite direction. They were heading home too, back to the spread of the suburbs. Sometimes she’d sense the cars slow alongside her or the drivers turning to look, and she’d steel herself, but it was nothing. It was usually nothing.

  Their house was empty. All the windows were shut. The air was stifling—brooding and dank. The old smell wasn’t so strong anymore, but it was still there, especially when the place had been locked up all day. The makeshift curtains Mum had thrown together with her old sewing machine were drawn. She went around pulling aside the curtains and opening windows. She started in the living room, where Mum and Dad slept, then the dining room, where her mattress lay a short distance from Daniel’s, and had just gone into the kitchen when a soft creak and bang of wood drew her back to the hallway.

  The basement door was open again. Before she shut it, she turned on the light and looked down the stairs, she supposed to make sure that the basement was empty, even though she knew it was. Who would bother staying down there anyway, when they had the whole house to hide in? A knife-wielding maniac, maybe, out of one of those movies: the kind that waited until girls were getting undressed, and never broke into a run and yet always seemed to catch up with you. You could laugh at them because they weren’t real, but then sometimes the silence and emptiness came at you in a way that made you not want to laugh. The grey concrete floor still loo
ked dirty, but at least she could see it. There were a few boxes of Dad’s things, his workbench, and some of his tools laid out on a canvas sheet at one end of the floor. Nothing else. She wrinkled her nose at the faint smell, turned off the light and shut the door.

  She went to her suitcase, took out the stash of paper and tobacco she’d stolen from Dad the day before and rolled herself a cigarette, practising doing it with one hand like Dad did, but she had to use two in the end and the cigarette wasn’t perfect. She smoked it in the courtyard, listening to the sound of the neighbourhood over the murmur of the sea and the distant, wind-cut clang and boom and whine of machinery from the harbour, waiting for the telltale slam of the front door.

  The sky was framed by the brick wall that separated their courtyard from the next one along. She imagined she was sitting at a dead end, like in that movie with David Bowie. Labyrinth. If she got up and pushed the wall, it would fall over, and there’d be goblins or monsters on the other side. There was moss in the brickwork, and a crawl of vines speckled with white flowers that carried a heady scent around her. Jasmine. A few clouds just made the blue of the sky bluer. She stared up at it, watching the thin smoke of her cigarette wither into nothing.

  Pop had smoked a pipe. As far as she knew, it still sat on the desk in his study, back in Sydney. Nan hadn’t taken anything out of his study since he’d died. She just went in and dusted it sometimes, like it was a museum exhibit. Looking at it, you could imagine him wandering around somewhere else in the house, talking to himself, teeth clenched on the pipe—but he was gone. Daniel had always been in there, even though he wasn’t supposed to be. Freya had only ever stood on the threshold.

  A brilliant man, Nan had called him. Brilliant. She often said she’d been incredibly lucky to end up with him, lucky to have even known him. That’s why she kept the room the way it was, to remind her of that luck.

  ‘Hopefully you’ll be lucky too,’ she’d told Freya last year. ‘They say it can skip a generation.’

  Mum, who had been sitting in the living room too, had stood up and left.

  ‘All of this,’ Nan had said, ‘and I’m not allowed to make a little joke?’

  There was a loud bang as the front door slammed shut. Mum had come home, as if summoned by that memory. Freya heard her short, sharp steps in the hall and stabbed the cigarette into a pot plant, waving the smoke away from her face. A moment later she heard her in the kitchen, clattering the breakfast dishes in a way that said, Would it hurt anyone else to wash these when they came home? That anyone else being Freya.

  Daniel came out into the courtyard and stood in front of her, waiting. He was holding a black case.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  He sat down beside her without a word and opened the case.

  ‘A clarinet,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Play something,’ she told him.

  He stared down at the pieces. ‘I don’t know how. I just got it.’

  ‘Can you make a noise at least?’

  After a moment, he took out the clarinet, fumbled with the pieces, fitted them together and lifted it to his mouth. He kept it there, in place, his large grey eyes fixed on her.

  ‘What?’ she asked at last.

  He lowered the clarinet a fraction. ‘I can’t with you looking at me.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  She faced in the other direction. After a moment, he blew into the instrument. A squeak came out. He tried again. This time he played a single, clear note that trembled away into silence.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, looking at him over her shoulder. ‘That’s like the start of a song.’

  Something like a smile came onto his face. ‘I can do more.’

  Then a voice called from the alley. ‘Hey!’

  A head poked up over the top of the wall. Blond hair, the upper half of a pale face, blue eyes that met hers before the head vanished. Freya jumped onto the pipe next to the wall, the one her bike was chained to, and peered down. The boy in the alley stepped back.

  ‘Hey yourself,’ she said.

  He grinned up at her. His light blond hair was swept back from his face. His arms were skinny and his shoulders sloped ahead of his chest. He was wearing a pair of board shorts patterned with multicoloured skulls and a Guns N’ Roses singlet. A small silver ring pierced the middle of his lower lip, and another went through his eyebrow. There was one in his left nostril, too. She didn’t mind that. It reminded her of some of the boys she’d known in Sydney.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘You?’

  ‘Not much.’

  She rested with her elbows on the top of the wall. ‘Do I know you?’

  The boy lifted a hand to shade his eyes. ‘I sit behind you in English. Whenever Mrs O’Neill says she won’t go on until the class stops talking, that’s usually me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s all right if you didn’t notice me. I notice you all the time, but you know.’

  She liked his eyes. ‘Mrs O’Neill’s kind of mental.’

  ‘Yeah, isn’t she.’ He grinned, showing his teeth. He had braces. More metal.

  ‘So, what are you doing?’ Freya said.

  ‘Going to the beach,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘I saw you the other day at the beach. I thought about coming over then, but I didn’t. But now—well, here I am. It’s a nice arvo. You keen?’

  She glanced behind her. Mum wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  Daniel was still standing there, the clarinet in his hands.

  She climbed up onto the wall. ‘Tell Mum I went for a walk, okay?’

  ‘I want to come too,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Next time. I’ll be back soon.’

  His face dropped in a way that made her feel guilty, but before Daniel could answer, she swung down the other side of the wall and into the alley beside the boy.

  They walked to the corner and stepped out onto the street that led towards the beach without saying a word. She was happy, happy at the thought that each step was carrying her further from Mum, and from the house.

  The boy gave a short laugh. ‘I lied about it being a nice arvo.’ He smiled at her again.

  ‘You still haven’t told me your name,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, I’m Josh.’ He lit a cigarette, put it to his mouth and squinted as he sucked back on it. He handed her the cigarette, their fingers brushing. ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This place. Newcastle.’

  She held the smoke in her lungs, exhaled out of the side of her mouth. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Yeah, I hate it here too. How long have you been here now?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  He bit his lip. ‘Give it six months. Then you’ll really be ready to get out of here.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m ready now.’

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I think about it all the time. Anyone with a brain does.’

  They crossed a road, continued along the street past a decrepit wooden building with a red light hanging over the front door. Two storeys high, its wood was cracked and peeling with paint, its windows shuttered.

  ‘That’s a brothel,’ he said without looking at it.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Opposite an ice-cream shop. Perfect.’

  The beach made a fat crescent with cliffs and saltbush at either end. There were hardly any people down on the sand, and the sun had disappeared behind the hospital at their backs. Clumps of seaweed and broken bits of reef littered the shoreline. The waves were large and thick, and turned to rusty foam as they broke. Several surfers drifted near the rocks beside the baths. Every now and again one of them rode a wave all the way in to the shore, then ran along the sand with a springy step and jumped again off the rocks. She sat with Josh on one of the seats that lined the c
oncrete along the edge of the beach.

  ‘Did that hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  She pointed to the piercing in his lower lip.

  He shook his head. ‘Dad’s a dentist. He’s got great needles. It was like a bee sting.’

  ‘A bee sting on your face?’

  ‘Maybe less than a bee sting then. Maybe a mosquito. Somewhere between the two.’

  ‘Your dad was cool with letting you use his needles?’

  He shrugged. ‘I just took them.’

  ‘He didn’t notice?’

  ‘He’s got things on his mind. You know how it is.’

  ‘I guess,’ she said.

  ‘I can pretty much do whatever I want. School went on about the ring in my eyebrow—said they were going to send me home—until my dad came in and spoke to them. They left me alone after that.’ He gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Hey—I can do you if you like. I mean, you know, pierce your face. Your lip, maybe. That’d look good, I reckon. If you want.’

  He coughed. They both looked at the water.

  ‘At least there’s the beach here,’ Freya said. She brushed the hair away from her face, though it wasn’t really in the way—more like just something to do.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘The beach is cool.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, for sure.’

  ‘My mum works there,’ she said, with a nod towards the hospital. ‘She’s a nurse.’

  The wind blew flecks of cigarette ash back in their faces. Shadows were lengthening across the sand.

  ‘I’d better get home,’ she said.

  They didn’t speak again until they reached the corner of the street and the alleyway, the ocean a dull roar at their backs, a bulk carrier entering the harbour ahead of them. They could see only the top of the ship from where they stood, the hull and the harbour hidden by the shape of the land.

  ‘You should come over sometime,’ Josh said. ‘I live just around the corner. Alfred Street. The place with the red front door. My room’s in the basement. Got this window just at street level. Just call down into it. I’m usually home.’