The Last Thread Read online

  Through the thick glass the city spreads below them. Skyscrapers in the distance, suburbs fleshed out with green, rising and falling over folds of land like clothes tossed on the ground.

  ‘Now we keep close together,’ Dirk tells them. ‘I just want to get out of the airport without any stupidness, okay?’

  ‘I’m sure we all want to get out of the airport,’ Mum says.

  The plane lands with a jolt. The airport slides into view. One moment it is impossible to think that you will ever stop, and the next you get sucked back as the movement bleeds away.

  ‘I can’t wait to put my feet in the ocean,’ Mum says as they get out into the brisk air.

  ‘Ah, verdomme, it’ll be cold.’

  Mum barely glances at him. ‘I don’t care. It will be wonderful.’

  When he thinks of Australia, Michaelis imagines summer. He thinks of mulberry trees and bright sand and bare feet with soles toughened by heat-softened roads. But winter has another two months to go here. They won’t be staying in Sydney, not even for a day. They are going straight to Newcastle. Rebecca and Brent have come to pick them up from the airport. Rebecca and Brent, whoever they are. Rebecca hugs Michaelis and holds him at arm’s length.

  ‘Gosh, you’ve grown,’ she says.

  Michaelis stands there stiffly and stares at her, feeling the awkwardness of his own smile. He doesn’t say that he can’t remember her. The only thing that he knows of Rebecca is that Mum used to get cassette tapes from her when they lived in Bergen op Zoom. On the tapes, you’d hear her talking about things, nothing in particular, just life back in Newcastle. Mum would listen to the tapes when she got sad and lonely.

  ‘I can’t wait to see what’s changed in Newcastle,’ Mum says.

  ‘Not much,’ Rebecca says. ‘Still the same old place. Hasn’t taken off quite yet.’

  ‘But any moment,’ Brent says. ‘Any moment.’

  Michaelis and Con walk to the beach as soon as they arrive at Rebecca and Brent’s house. They are still wearing the clothes they wore when they got off the plane: jeans and long-sleeved checked shirts.

  The beach has been gouged by storms. With each wave, a mountain of foam buries the length of the ocean baths. Then the sea draws back, and for a moment the water is too far away to be threatening. They start racing the waves. Michaelis follows Con and thinks that this is exactly when he is closest to his brother, behind him on some adventure, the silence between them broken only by a few spare words. They run along beside the pool, towards the edge of the rock shelf, as if they are going to jump into the water. Foamy dregs from the last wave recede around their feet. The water changes shape, gathers height and weight. They slow as the distance narrows.

  ‘Run, Mike! Run, now!’ Con turns on his heel and sprints back past.

  Michaelis follows a step behind, always a step behind. The wave booms across the rocks. The roar gathers at his back. Spray climbs over his head. He feels pressure, a hum in the ground, finds a metal railing and clings with both arms. The water buries him.

  There is such strength in the sea. He has forgotten it until now. It pulls at his limbs so that his feet touch nothing and only his desperate grip keeps him there. A sensation comes to him of being separate, of seeing it all from a great distance, as if he cannot reach out and touch the world. Then the noise dies in his ears; the sky appears again above him.

  Michaelis walks home shivering in his wet jeans, with Con ahead, still dry, still composed. This was the same, not so long ago, in Bergen op Zoom, when the ice broke. A cold wind gusts around them along the broad, empty street. Merewether is full of such streets, no trees, the footpaths bare and exposed to the elements. In the summer, these roads sit under layers of heat and glare, and you long for a patch of shade as the sea evaporates from your skin, but it is hard to imagine now. They turn a corner, walk along a windswept park with the cricket oval dominating the centre, and there it is. Home.

  The house sits facing the distant ocean against a dense tangle of lantana and saltbush and mulberry trees, halfway up a hill. They are staying in one room. They aren’t paying rent, because they don’t have much money. Dirk is repaying Rebecca and Brent by building a second level to the house. When the second level is built, they will live there.

  Rebecca and Brent have a son who is Jonno’s age. Mum met them at a mother’s group, when they were living in Carrington. Rebecca’s son is called Caleb and he throws tantrums all the time. He isn’t allowed to watch cartoons because they are too violent and there are a whole bunch of foods that he isn’t allowed to eat because they make him difficult to manage.

  ‘She obviously doesn’t understand,’ Mum says to Dirk when Rebecca is out of earshot, ‘what really makes children difficult to manage.’

  The new school is not at all like the one he left behind in Bergen op Zoom. Like Carrington Public, you have to call everyone Mr or Mrs or Sir. There’s another grey uniform, and there are lots of rules. The motto is Manners Maketh Man. His only friend is the librarian. Although he cannot speak English well, Michaelis picks up reading quickly. The librarian points him to the history books, and he reads about Alfred the Great, Caesar, William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc, Horatio Nelson. These are the people he gets to know in the language that is so clean in his head yet comes out so muddy from his mouth.

  At home, Dirk is busy working above their heads every day. He seems to be building the house from his imagination. He is up there alone, his old scuffed tool belt around his waist, hammering and sawing, building the skeleton of a second storey against the vast sky with views all the way to the ocean.

  ‘Your dad’s a genius,’ Brent tells Michaelis. ‘You’re lucky, son. You’ll grow up knowing how to do whatever you want.’

  Sometimes Michaelis sneaks up to have a look at Dirk’s work when Dirk isn’t around. One time he tripped over some wood while Dirk was there. His stepfather turned, his face all red and twisted up, and threw a spanner at Michaelis’s head. Michaelis ducked and the spanner clattered against a wooden scaffold. Dirk picked up the spanner and went back to work, a grimace etched into his face, his shoulders knotted at his thick neck.

  When he is not working, Dirk is teaching Mum to drive.

  ‘It’s not that hard!’ He scowls at her. ‘Why do you make everything so difficult? It’s all in your head!’

  Mum stalls the car and storms off a few times—once she stopped the car in the middle of the road and walked several kilometres to get home—but she keeps coming back.

  Most days, Michaelis stays out of everyone’s way. He finds a quiet corner and reads books or writes.

  ‘It’s not healthy,’ Rebecca says to Mum, ‘for a boy just to sit indoors by himself all day, just brooding like that.’

  It is late July. Michaelis has a new book that Mum bought him for his tenth birthday, with a green leather cover, an illustrated version of The Hobbit, the title written in gold lettering on the front. The book is written in English, and he has written his name in English inside the front cover. But he gets the spelling wrong. Both his own name and Dirk’s last name.

  ‘Officially,’ Mum tells him, ‘you still have your father’s last name, though you’ve never used it. But you could, if you wanted to.’

  His real name is on the birth certificate that Mum has managed to carry around for years, but he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want either of those names. From now on, wherever he is, here or back in Holland, he decides to call himself Michael.

  Con and Michael get snorkelling gear for Christmas. They go to the ocean baths and snorkel in among the people. Tufts of seaweed wave from the bottom of the pool and crabs scuttle into cracks in the concrete. There are fish, small silver fish that are barely visible until they turn sideways to flit through the murky water between people’s legs.

  Beside the baths, where the water washes through rusted grates, a deep rock pool is connected by a narrow channel to the ocean. There are many more fish here, ones that look tropical: tiny yellow fish and others with black and
white stripes. Con swears that an octopus inhabits the darkness of the rusted grate, but Michael’s ears hurt when he goes down to look. He prefers staying near the top and running his hands along the crevices full of shells and fronds of weeds.

  Next Con leads Michael onto the rock shelf from which the open ocean stretches, heaving and dark, towards the coal ships on the horizon. Con fixes the mask to his face and jumps into the open sea. His head bobs up and he spits water from his snorkel. He stares straight ahead and begins paddling. Michael watches him grow small. He wonders if he should follow, break through his own terror and jump into the ocean. Con stops and turns. Michael feels his body tense and gets ready. Con waves at him and shouts something. Stay there. Michael waves back, flushed with relief. Con disappears.

  Not long after that, Con does some labouring work for the next-door neighbour and he uses what he earns to buy an aluminium hand spear with a three-pronged head. The first time he goes out, he comes back with two fish. He fillets them as if he’s been doing it all his life and cooks them up for himself for lunch.

  Michael and Mum watch him head out there some time after that. Con is tiny against the water. He’s out much further than surfers, further even than the dolphins that cruise past the coast in the afternoons. He is not yet thirteen, but he does things that adults are afraid to do.

  ‘I can’t watch him do that,’ Mum says. ‘I don’t know why he’s so reckless. Sometimes I wonder if he wants to be alive at all.’

  They move into the finished upper storey of the house and Michael shares a room with Con again, and Mum has laid down the usual straw tiles and put up some pictures that she painted herself. The cake Mum baked for her own birthday was left too long in the oven and collapsed into a hard shell. Dirk gave her a present and then drove off. Mum sits in her bedroom for a long time, wiping her eyes, and Con comes in and hands her a box all wrapped up. She undoes the wrapping and inspects the chocolates.

  Her face drops. ‘These aren’t even good quality, Con! Why can’t you at least give me good chocolate?’

  Con storms out of the house. Mum begins crying even more, big wracking sobs. Michael is holding his own present: jade earrings he bought at the Mother’s Day markets at the new school. They have made him repeat a year at school because of his bad English, but his teacher, Mrs Ross, offered to let him live with her if that would be easier on Mum. Mum was shocked. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘would anyone make such an offer?’

  The earrings that Michael bought at the stall are antique and you have to screw them onto your ears very firmly like little vices to make them stay. He’s holding the present in his hands, lingering in the doorway, watching Mum cry, wondering if he should give her the earrings. He decides to hold off.

  Con is downstairs, at the back of the garden, sharpening the knife he uses to gut the fish he catches when he goes spearfishing: a filleting knife with a long, rusty blade. Only the edge is clean. He finishes sharpening the knife. He gets up and walks towards Michael with that blank look on his face, the knife loose in his hand.

  He walks straight past without even a sideward glance, pulls his bag full of snorkelling gear onto his back and jumps on his bike. He vanishes down the sloping road, through the ripples of midday heat.

  Later, he returns with three big, silvery fish, guts them out the back and throws the entrails in the bushes. Mum comes down to watch him.

  ‘Con,’ she says, placing a hand on his neck. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ Con says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about what I said. I didn’t mean it at all. It was lovely of you to buy me chocolates. I mean, I do like quality, but it doesn’t matter. It was a nice thought, really.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Con doesn’t look up at her.

  He scrapes his knife once more across the outer skin of the fish. Scales litter the ground at his feet. They glint on his fingers as he reaches into the splayed belly.

  Mum straightens and stands beside him, folds her arms into her chest, a helpless expression on her face. ‘I’m so sorry. About everything. Do you understand, Con? Do you understand?’

  Con flashes a dazzling smile. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mum. I’ve already forgotten.’

  She walks off. Con’s face goes blank again as he throws the last of the entrails into the bushes. He stands there for a moment, his stained hands loose by his sides, then he turns to Michael.

  ‘You know,’ Con says, ‘there’s something about your face. It always makes me want to hit you.’

  When Dirk comes home, Michael hears arguing—Mum sobbing, Dirk’s voice low and fierce. Michael lies in bed, his body rigid. Outside he can hear crickets, a curtain of them through the night, and beyond that the ocean, the same as it has always been.

  Nikki and Susan come to visit. They live in Queensland now, in Brisbane, not so far from Bribie Island. Nikki has an uncle in Newcastle and Michael spends an afternoon with him there. Nikki and Michael wander around Hamilton together, the old neighbourhood where they both once lived. Nikki is still the same gentle, quiet boy he used to be, although Michael finds that he is not as drawn to him as he once was. For the first time, he wonders if Nikki isn’t a girl’s name.

  Susan gives them a dollar each and they walk down to a corner store together. They don’t talk about why Michael has returned, or about Holland. It is easier to pretend that nothing has changed. Michael buys a packet of chips and eats without really tasting them. Nikki buys a packet of instant noodles and, when they get home, cooks them and shares them with Michael. Not long after that, he goes back to Queensland with his family.

  And then it is time to leave Rebecca and Brent’s house. They pile into their beat-up car, with a trailer full of stuff behind them. Mum and Rebecca hug.

  ‘Be good,’ Rebecca says.

  Mum laughs and promises to call. The engine splutters into gear and they accelerate down the hill.

  ‘Thank God that’s over,’ Mum says. ‘I couldn’t stand another minute with those people and their ridiculous ideas. They were happy to criticise me, but they call that raising a child?’

  ‘They were your friends,’ Dirk says.

  ‘Things change. They always change.’ She looks at Dirk when she says this, challenging him with her eyes, and then everyone in the car is silent.

  Bar Beach is only the next suburb along, but it is as green and overgrown and damp with shade as Merewether’s streets are barren and scoured by glare. Mum drives off every weekday to study nursing at university. Things will be better once they have two incomes, but Dirk is struggling to find enough work.

  Their new house has two levels. The bottom level is below the street, and you can smell the rising damp. Perhaps it is the sea, which is not so far away. There are mining tunnels beneath the ground, their neighbour remarks. Everywhere, the ground is riddled with holes, long winding tunnels from the days when the ground under the city itself was mined for coal. You don’t see it, but they’re there, the tunnels.

  All of this, all of the ground beneath their house and in the entire city, is a subsidence area, shifting by small degrees. Michael and Con have their bedroom downstairs, next to the kitchen. The concrete floor is covered in bright yellow straw tiles, just like the last house, and many before that, but Michael knows that each house is different. There is a window at street level, narrow and short. He can see the feet of people as they walk past.

  Summer is drawing to a close, but you can’t tell, not yet. The sea is warm and the days linger. The heat settles over everything and it is easier to forget things. Bergen op Zoom. No one here knows what that means. The words are beginning to sound strange on his tongue. They have not heard from or spoken of Dad for many, many months.

  A friend of Mum’s from university drops her off one day, a large man with a round face, a hunched posture and big glasses.

  ‘This is Simon, boys.’

  Simon smiles, shakes their hands, and his gaze drops to his feet. Simon is twenty
and drives everywhere on a motorbike.

  Dirk is out looking for work and will have to meet Simon some other time. Simon doesn’t stay long. When he gets ready to leave, Mum goes out the front with him to say goodbye and does not come back for a while.

  Later that day, Dirk is holding Mum against the wall, one hand crushing her neck, the other clenched into a fist.

  ‘Fucking shut up!’ Dirk tells her. ‘Godverdomme!’

  Mum looks like nothing next to Dirk’s bulk.

  ‘Let her go,’ Michael screams, ‘or I’ll call the police!’

  Dirk looks down at him. It is as close to mounting a challenge as Michael has ever come, and no one is more surprised than Michael himself. Not a shred of bravura lingers in his body, but there is rage—helpless, frightened, focused rage that blazes from his face.

  Dirk steps away from Mum. He gives the barest hint of a shrug, lifts and drops his hands, walks past Michael and stomps up the stairs. Mum touches Michael’s head and walks past him too. Their bedroom door closes. The house fills with conversations Michael cannot hear.

  That evening, Dirk comes down to their room and looks at Michael and Con. His eyes are red with grief, his cheeks wet. ‘I’m leaving. Your mother doesn’t want me.’

  Michael has never seen Dirk cry before. It is the most shocking thing he has ever seen. ‘When will you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe never.’

  ‘Don’t go! Please don’t.’ The thought of Dirk going fills him with panic. Mum is so frail by herself.

  Dirk wipes his nose and shrugs. ‘Too late. Your mother doesn’t love me. It’s because of you.’

  Before Michael can answer, Dirk is gone. The two brothers lie in silence on the bunk. The front door opens and slams shut. Dirk’s car rattles off down the street. Con begins to tap on the side of the bunk, a soft, complex rhythm that Michael has been listening to forever.

  ~

  They live in Newcastle East now. Close to the sea, on the inner edge of the city, the part that juts out to form one arm of the harbour. The sea presses against this strip of land from three different directions, which you notice at night, when the murmur fills the air and haze drifts over everything. The houses huddle on a latticework of narrow, crisscrossing streets. No matter which direction the wind comes from, you can taste salt in the air. It seeps into stone and wood and fills metal with veins of rust.