The Restorer Page 8

  ‘Your dad’s interesting,’ she said.

  Josh made a face. ‘I think the word you’re looking for is weird.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

  ‘He’s weird.’

  ‘All right. My dad’s weird too, I guess. What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just playing my Commodore 64.’

  She sat down next to him. ‘What game?’

  ‘Golf.’

  ‘How do you play it?’

  He showed her. They sat side by side at his desk for a while playing Golf, which he said he hated in real life, but he was good at it on the computer, then they played California Games, taking turns to surf across a big, blue pixelated wave. She’d never really played computer games before. It was fun, maybe because she was sitting next to Josh, taking turns with him.

  ‘I don’t like surfing either,’ he said as they played.

  ‘Do you only play games you don’t like in real life?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Footsteps creaked overhead. The front door opened and closed. Josh climbed up on his desk and put his head to the window. He kept peering out until a car door opened and closed and the sound of an engine faded away.

  ‘Dad’s finally gone,’ he said. ‘I thought he was never going to leave. He won’t be back now till late. Let’s crank the music up. Sit over there, near the record player.’

  She sank down into one of the big red chairs.

  ‘Be careful.’ Josh began rifling through a wooden box full of albums. ‘Those chairs are like quicksand. They’re older than we are. It’ll take you a while to settle into the cushions, find your place. Just go with it. Don’t panic. If you panic, you’ll never get out.’

  Someone walked past along the street, only their legs visible through the window.

  ‘I’ve never seen a bedroom in a basement before,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a basement but it’s horrible. It doesn’t have windows, not proper ones. You should have seen it when we moved in.’

  Josh pulled an album out of the box and held it between his hands. ‘This room’s perfect. I can always hear Dad a mile off when he’s coming down the stairs. And it holds the sound really well. Half of these records used to be Mum’s.’

  Freya wanted to ask where his mum was, but she didn’t.

  ‘You listen to music?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Whatever’s on the radio.’

  ‘Pink Floyd?’

  ‘They did “Brick in the Wall”, didn’t they?’

  He made a face. ‘Three minutes out of a double album. Any good album, you have to listen from the beginning to the end. Especially Pink Floyd.’

  ‘Why especially Pink Floyd?’

  ‘Because of this.’ He opened the chest between the chairs and pulled out a bottle and a bowl. The bottle was plastic and half full of murky water. A piece of hose had been inserted through the side. ‘You have to have a bit of this to really get where they’re coming from.’

  He offered her the bottle. She looked at it.

  ‘It’s a bong,’ he said.

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘You ever smoked before?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not that.’

  ‘It’s a great way to deal with life in this town. Takes the edge off. Better than getting drunk. You want to try it?’

  He put the bong in her hands.

  ‘Let’s start with Dark Side of the Moon,’ he said.

  He slid the album out of its sleeve, put it on the turntable, placed the needle in the groove. First there was only the crackling of the record, then came a beating heart. Josh sat down and began cutting threads of pot with a pair of scissors. A ringing cash register cut through the beating heart, and someone spoke—about always having been mad and knowing it—and then came laughter repeating in loops, and she felt an odd panic stir inside her though she hadn’t even smoked anything yet, but maybe it was the thought of doing it or perhaps it was the day, the week, the last two months—God, had it really been that long since they’d arrived in this city?—and that tightness was there in her lungs the way it so often was. From outside, the bell on the nearby clock tower rang once and then faded. Didn’t they say that some people got schizophrenia when they smoked pot? Smoked it once and never came back, if you had it in you, that madness, and maybe that was what she was feeling, and Mum would kill her if she could see her right now. Then came the warm strum of a guitar and Josh was passing her the plastic bottle. He showed her how to put her lips to its mouth and pull the air into her lungs while he held the lighter to the tangle of dark green.

  His hands. They rested on hers just a moment. Josh was very careful, the way he did things. She inhaled, felt the burning fill the back of her throat. A hot numbness crept up from the bottom of her lungs. The bud caught fire and shrivelled into a black seed. Her chest felt small and frail. The music was all around her. He kept the flame going and she sucked the last burning fragment through the small brass bowl and at the same time felt a rush into her head, and it was like shutting a door on everything, and there was suddenly all the space in the world inside her, but if you looked closely, it wasn’t space at all, just thoughts so crowded together you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

  Josh didn’t touch her again, although his hands were near hers. They were nice hands, with slender fingers. He refilled the bong, pulled it clear in one go—the soft pop as the last fragment succumbed to the flame—and then squinted, holding his breath, the fleeting ghost of an old man in his drawn expression, before he released the smoke and sank back into his chair.

  They sat side by side in silence while the music shook around them.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to listen from the beginning.’ She giggled. ‘You have to sit in front of these big speakers and just let your ears get ripped off.’

  They both began laughing. Then they fell silent again.

  ‘You got a hi-fi system at home?’

  ‘We used to,’ she said. ‘Right now we just have a radio.’

  ‘I got this one from my dad,’ he murmured. ‘He used to put on these albums all the time. Now it’s all classical music he buys on CD.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he listen to them anymore?’ she asked.

  ‘Listen—I love this part.’

  A woman on the record was wailing out notes. It sounded chaotic, random at first, but then it started to find some kind of shape, to make sense.

  Freya liked sitting there with Josh and the swallowing feel of the chair, and being underground in a basement listening to music she’d never heard with someone she didn’t know but felt as if she did. She even liked the smell of his room. No one at home knew where she was. She could get on a train and leave this city and go all the way back to Nan’s before anyone knew any better. It would only be for a while, before it all came crashing down, but still, wasn’t that how everyone lived? Then she glanced across at Josh, sitting there nodding to the music, drawing notes out of an acoustic guitar on his lap, and it was enough just to watch him.

  He put the guitar down suddenly, stood up.

  ‘I’ve got something else for you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He picked up a pen, kneeled beside her chair and took her by the wrist, his fingers firm and warm against her pulse. ‘My number.’ He wrote it on the inside of her forearm, without looking up at her. ‘Call me whenever you want. I’m always around.’

  Walking home, she felt strange, the way her feet hit the ground subtly distorted, the world’s timing somehow out of sync. As she opened the front door, she heard a noise, a plaintive wail, followed by a squeak. Daniel and his clarinet.

  Dad was in the kitchen, naked from the waist up, lying on his side and shaking a can of spray. The muscles in his hairy shoulders rippled as he sprayed up under the sink. There was sweat on the folds of his soft belly. The radio was on. Bon Jovi—‘De
ad or Alive’, the guitar solo. Dad looked up at her as she stood in the doorway. Above them, another squeak from the clarinet cut through the sound of the radio.

  ‘He’s been doing that for hours,’ he said. ‘You think he’s going to get any better?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘You’ve always been the optimist in the family, Freya. You get that from me, I reckon.’

  Freya didn’t say anything.

  He shook his head. ‘These bloody ants. They’re everywhere.’ He cursed under his breath and kept spraying.

  Freya looked at Josh’s phone number on the inside of her arm, and thought of Nan. She went upstairs, unzipped her suitcase, and pulled out the book of Greek mythology. She stood there holding it, listening to her brother, and the silence between his notes. The house creaked and groaned around her, and the roof keened against the wind, like it might at any moment peel away.

  There was a phone booth overlooking the sea. Freya looked up at the hospital through the hazy glass, pitted by the sand and the salt, with the receiver to her ear.

  ‘If anything ever happens,’ Nan said at the other end of the line, ‘I can always come and get you. Or you could always hop on a train.’

  ‘I know, Nan.’

  A boy on a skateboard rattled past. He wove across the footpath, launched onto the road, and hopped the board smoothly up onto the next kerb. Two kicks and he kept flying along. Freya put her extra coins in front of her and pressed the phone more firmly against her ear.

  ‘Nan, I don’t know how long I’ve got before I run out of money.’

  ‘It’s just lovely to hear your voice. I was wondering how you were, if you were okay. How’s it going with your father then?’

  ‘Good. I don’t know.’ She looked down at her bare feet, studied their unevenness.

  ‘Is that why you called? Is he behaving himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he done anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Nan cleared her throat on the other end of the line. ‘Well, we can only live in hope. Just like your mother. It’s certainly an adventure.’

  Freya could picture Nan standing there in her living room, her fierce grey eyes, her tight-lipped smile.

  Nan chuckled darkly. ‘Sometimes you just want boring, don’t you?’

  They both laughed, the way they so easily could. It had driven Mum mad back in Sydney, and Freya had enjoyed it, but she felt a flush of guilt now as she stood there in the phone booth, in the shadow of the hospital, as if every window looking down on her were an eye. Perhaps Mum would see her from wherever she was in the hospital and ask why she’d been talking on a public phone when they had one in the house.

  ‘—anytime, you know that, right?’

  ‘Yes, Nan, I know.’

  ‘Are you holding anything back?’

  ‘No. I mean…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ she lied. ‘I just have to go. I’ve run out of money.’

  ‘Call me if you need to. Or even if you don’t. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got no money. Reverse charges. Just make sure your mother doesn’t find out. She’ll hate it if she thinks we’re talking.’

  ‘Okay,’ Freya said, desperate now to hang up the phone.

  A couple of nurses walked past. One of them glanced at her.

  ‘You know how to do reverse charges, don’t you?’ Nan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, not even understanding the question until after she’d answered. She didn’t know how, but she could figure it out some other time. She hung up the phone, then took it off the hook, put in a few more coins and dialled the number on her wrist. It rang half a dozen times before a sleepy voice answered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Josh,’ she said.

  ‘Freya? I didn’t expect you to call that soon.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No. Don’t be dumb. I’m glad you called. Are you okay?’

  ‘Does it make you feel weird when you start to sober up, the pot?’

  ‘Sometimes, I guess. Depends what I’m thinking about.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You okay?’ he said again.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  Josh was quiet for a moment. ‘I guess you just have to go with it, you know. Don’t panic. Settle into it. Want to come back here? Want me to walk up and meet you?’

  Freya wanted him to. ‘I’ll see you at school tomorrow.’

  She hung up and started walking home.

  8

  The basement. Maryanne stood in the middle of it, with a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other. Of all the places she could sit and drink, why here? Because when she drank alone, she never drank to enjoy it. Then why drink at all, Roy had asked her once. She hadn’t answered. But why did people do half the things they did if enjoying it was the point? It was more a reflex action, the drinking, a way to let things out when there was no one around to see it.

  The concrete floor beneath her feet was uneven, rough, and still ingrained with dirt. It was cool down here, despite the afternoon warmth that filled the rest of the house, but it still smelled faintly of bleach and rising damp. It was really Roy’s domain, and that was fine by her. His workbench was set up there, and he’d put up some metal shelving on which his various tools were arranged. They’d cleared out all the rubbish, but there were a few random milk crates lying around. She sat down on one of the crates, poured herself a glass, and took a mouthful. It wasn’t a terrible wine, but it wasn’t great.

  She looked at the tools in front of her and thought of Roy, how he was always working on something, pacing around, restless, until the moment he collapsed onto the couch or into bed at the end of the day. At night, when she was often struggling to sleep herself, he ground his teeth. She’d lie beside him, just listening. It sounded like he was breaking rocks in his mouth. Sometimes he’d moan and grunt and whimper, or even start crying, almost awake, but not quite, and his face would look like nothing so much as Daniel’s, full of vulnerability and fear, though his eyes remained shut. She’d gather herself around his naked body, holding him until he fell into a deeper sleep. He had always done it, as long as she’d known him.

  He never remembered it in the morning, though, and there was no hint of that vulnerability during the day. Sometimes, when he was working on the house, she’d get her cup of tea and watch him, how he moved, the easy way he had of picking things up and putting them in their place without seeming to pay any attention at all. There was an expression on his face when he worked that she’d never really been able to read, like he was on autopilot, like he wasn’t there behind his eyes.

  It was the same thing that happened when they fought, that sudden absence, that sense of a part of him just going missing. The first time they’d ever had a fight, a real one, anyway, was when they moved in together, into their first flat, on the very first night, when they’d both been exhausted, strung out, fed up with all the packing and unpacking, the endless minutiae that came with uprooting yourself and planting your life anew. What had it been again? What had they been fighting about? Something about her parents. She’d wanted to ring her mother, once they were in the flat, just a quick call to say they’d got there, and Roy had told her not to.

  It wasn’t so much what he’d said about them—she agreed with half of it—but how he’d put it, the way he’d told her that she wouldn’t be calling her mother. They argued then about how they spoke to one another, and he threw her own words back at her, things she’d said to him months before, things she couldn’t remember saying. When she’d told him that, he’d asked if she was calling him a liar, and after an hour of words and accusations and justifications thrown back and forth, she wasn’t even sure what he’d said to start all this, and what she was trying to say in return.

  They’d been arguing from one room to the next, and ended up in the kitchen screaming at one another. What a lovely introdu
ction that must have been for the neighbours. She called him an arsehole, told him he was stupid, and she did it deliberately, because he hated being called stupid. He picked up a cup and threw it against the wall, near where she was standing. Something small hit her below the eye, a sharp razor point of pain. It had been a sliver of the cup—the rest lay in pieces on the floor—and he’d stood breathing hard, surprised, shocked even, as if she’d been the one to throw the cup.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Why’d I do that?’

  Maryanne reached up to touch the spot below her eye, and came away with just enough blood to cover her fingertip. He stepped towards her tentatively, as if he expected her to shrink back. They both looked at the blood on her hand. He examined her cheek carefully and shook his head.

  ‘Why’d I do that?’ he said again. ‘I could have really hurt you.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not. I wasn’t thinking.’

  He was crying, she realised—suddenly childlike, like when he dreamed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she told him again, and she hugged his head to her chest, running her hand through his thick, dark curls.

  When he finally straightened and stepped away from her, he picked up a sliver of broken cup still lying on the floor and pressed it deep into his finger until a large, bright drop of blood sprang up around it. He gently touched her face with his other hand, dabbed the fresh drop of blood there, mixed it with the blood on his own finger, then stuck it in his mouth.

  ‘Now we’re the same,’ he said.

  They cleaned up together, and then finished unpacking. For the rest of the night, Roy did exactly what she asked, deferring to her suggestions about what went where in the apartment with quiet affirmations of her expertise. They made love that night, in a fierce, tender, complete way that was nothing like they ever had before, as if they’d each revealed parts of themselves that they’d been holding back, as if now there was nothing left for them to hold back. She didn’t call her parents, though.