Watermark Read online

  Contents

  Boondi Wars

  Lone Shark

  The Neighbours

  Jesus Sandals and Anchovette

  Oasis Estate

  Initiation

  Reunion

  Tessellating Shapes

  No Words for It

  Lovely Day, Valmai

  An Almost Happy Ending

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  To Troy, Chloe and Sam.

  Boondi Wars

  There he is. Covered in red dirt, and beaming. Burst water balloons blanket the parched grass. My carefully prepared games – Bob for Apples, Pass the Parcel, Balloons on Spoons – lasted just minutes. June thought my party planning was comical. ‘Boondi Wars, that’s all they’ll want to play,’ she said.

  There’s a brackish smell sweeping across from the ocean. The view is postcard-perfect except for the bins, burdened with takeaway boxes and disposable nappies swollen and heady in the blinking breeze. Under our table, beer-bottle shards glint against the concrete like crystallised resin, but he won’t put his shoes back on his blistered feet. None of the kids around here wear shoes and he has adopted the same stubborn stance. The skin on his shoulders and cheeks is peeling; his legs are dappled with salt water. His eyes are like miniature rock pools, swirling with seaweed and opaque from the lunar tide sand.

  June and Tom are resting under the snaggled branches of a bloodwood tree. Tom has kicked off his work boots and is leaning against the trunk. June has her head in his lap, her wiry hair spilling over him. He is fanning her with a folded newspaper.

  I glance at him again. ‘Toby,’ I say. ‘Are you in there somewhere under all that dirt? We’ll have to soak you overnight.’

  His chapped-lip grin is wide against his skin, against the red dirt on his face and his matted hair.

  For the first few weeks in this town he hovered so close that I kept tripping over him, but now he can stand at a distance. The breeze oscillates against the sweat on my neck. My body feels stronger than it ever has from all the walking and riding we do. My new short haircut feels like freedom, nothing left to run my fingers through.

  • • •

  I fill out the forms for Year Six. I write in our new address and leave a gap under occupational details. ‘Home Duties’ sounds pathetic. There is a section titled Father/Guardian. I leave it blank. Details about former schools? There are not enough lines. I write very neatly. The office lady scans the details and she scans us between the gap in the glass window. Scans us as though she is speed reading: she only reads the first and last words of each line and she guesses the bit in the middle.

  I say I’d like to help out in the classroom. I’m waiting to hear about a job, but it’s only part-time. I tell her that I could help out with reading groups. I don’t mention that when I was in high school I was on track to top the state, a different state, in English. Before things got messy. Before things derailed. The look in her eyes, over the rim of her glasses, under the line of her fringe, is at odds with her smile, like that book Toby and I used to read. Dissected through its centre. You could mix up the features of one person with another. A Caucasian builder’s forehead and the bridge of his nose with an Asian schoolgirl’s nostrils, mouth and neck. That sort of thing. The office lady gives me a volunteer staff pro forma and a police-check form.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about speeding fines or anything like that,’ she says. ‘It’s just so we can make sure you haven’t committed any crimes against minors.’

  I don’t tell her that Toby’s father doesn’t even know he exists. That’s my only crime and one I guess I’ll pay for in the long run. Toby doesn’t even ask about him anymore. I guess my stumbling and fudging has worn him down.

  ‘Come on, Toby,’ I say. I slot his old school reports back into their plastic sleeve, back into my backpack. We leave the air-conditioned office and I unchain my vintage bike with its wicker basket and rusted frame. He sits on the handlebars, too hot to walk, and I pedal standing up. We lean and swerve along the boab-lined path like a well-oiled machine until I hit a rock and the bike slides around until it’s just the rim grinding against the pavement. We both say bugger and it seems like such a deflated, inadequate response that we get the giggles. We walk the rest of the way with the bike limping between us. I squirt water down his collar and he doesn’t complain. By the time we reach our granny flat, our clothes are stuck to us like wet rice paper and Toby’s face is fever red.

  On the small timber porch that creaks like an old man are clean blue towels, fresh eggs that June has placed in our sneakers as though our shoes were little nests, and two white envelopes she has wedged under a leg of the faded timber chaise. The first, from Aunty Grace, is no doubt full of blustery advice and third-hand gossip. It can wait. I tear open the second envelope. I think of the medical centre full of toddling kids and dozing men and women fanning themselves with dated magazines. The grizzling and hacking in the waiting room. I scan the first paragraph: We would like to thank you for attending the interview for the position of medical receptionist. The standard of applicant was extremely high. I don’t need to read beyond that. We were taught how to write bad-news letters in office studies. Buffer. Bad News. Buffer.

  • • •

  In the garden, June shakes out purple sheets and flings them over the crucifix clothesline. She has tea towels and washers slung over her shoulder and she sways and pats at them like she’s calming a colicky baby. She’s wearing a red linen shirt and black harem pants. A row of wooden pegs pinches the crease of one of her sleeves.

  ‘All done, Mimi?’ she asks, without turning around.

  ‘All done. How did you know it was me?’

  She turns, stretches her hands next to her face and wiggles her fingers before breaking into a wide white grin. ‘It’s a good school. Good education. Good rugby on the weekend, Toby. You like rugby?’

  We are growing used to June and her ricochet questions.

  ‘I’ll take him for language classes on Wednesdays up at the school. Scary at first, hey Toby?’

  He nods, uncertain. June draws an arc with her big toe in the red dirt.

  ‘Not as scary as nobody speaking language. Not as scary as having no language left to speak.’ She makes another sweeping curve and then flattens it back down with the sole of her broad foot.

  ‘It’s all learning, Toby,’ she says. ‘Those nuns, to start. What were they talking about? That’s what I kept saying to myself. You nuns aren’t making any sense. And scared. I was scared at night. Scared all right. I kept running away, getting lifts back home. Mum’d get cross at me. “You get back to that school, June. No choices for me. Not even a husband choice. You get back there and get a good education.” And that’s what I did. Now I teach them. Now I’m the smart one.’ June snorts and shakes her head as she always does when the nuns or the developers or the pen pushers confound her.

  ‘You got some letters, Mimi?’ She asks as though it’s just a hunch, as though she didn’t personally deliver the mail to our porch.

  ‘Aunty Grace.’

  ‘And another one?’

  I give in to her grilling. ‘I went for a job. Receptionist at the medical centre.’

  ‘I know. I know that. My brother, you know. My brother Eddie was on the panel.’

  Even here, so far away from home that we have almost fallen off the other side of the map, we can’t escape. We can’t be anonymous.

  ‘Really? Your brother? I couldn’t believe how many people there were. Five on the panel for a medical receptionist. Two elders. I didn’t get it. I must be useless.’

  ‘Oh, Mimi.’ She shakes her head at me. ‘My brother called and he said to me, “June, you got a girl living with you? She’s using your address on her p
aperwork.” I said, “Yes, brother.” He said, “Well, she came in here for a job last week,” and I said, “Yes, brother; well, you had a job going.” And he said, “I didn’t know how to tell her.” “Tell her what?” I said. And he laughed and said, “Tell her . . . tell her that she’s white.” ’ June bursts out laughing. Holds her belly and rocks back and forth. ‘Tell her she’s white!’

  ‘I had what they were asking for.’

  ‘You need more than this.’ She taps her fingers on a pretend keyboard. ‘You need more than this.’ She mimes holding a phone up to her ear. ‘You don’t have lots of things.’

  June steps towards me, holds me out in front of her with her outstretched arms and breaks into another fit of laughter. ‘I didn’t know how to tell her . . .’ She’s laughing so much she’s gasping. ‘Oh, Mimi. Next time you go for a job, you tell me and I’ll let them know. I’ll . . .’ She stares at me for a long time and then turns away and hoists one of Tom’s work shirts over the line. She folds up the sheets, dividing them in the centre, holding the edges with her teeth and looping them up into neat squares.

  ‘Let them know what? What will you let them know?’

  ‘Just that you’re a good girl. Now stop your niggling. You want fish tonight?’

  ‘You don’t have to cook for us.’

  ‘You don’t like my fish?’

  ‘I love your fish, June.’

  ‘You pick the herbs, Toby. Lemongrass and the Thai basil. I’ll make the curry. Green curry tonight. And coconut cream. You check for me, Mimi. Check if I’ve got coconut cream. I’ll make smoothies. Mango smoothies. Got to keep the old boy happy when he gets back from work. Fatten you up. Look at you. Emu legs. Check I’ve got mangoes, Mimi. Tonight, after dinner, we’ll watch a movie. Tom always snores through the endings. Watches movies with his eyes closed. We’ll watch a movie together.’

  We pad across the jarrah floorboards. Toby props himself up against the kitchen bench. The pantry door whines like a child. The cupboard is crammed with jars of sauces and tins and bottles of oil and herbal teas. June doesn’t need to shop for months. There’s a whole shelf of coconut cream. I open up the freezer and it’s full of mangoes, sliced and frozen in plastic bags.

  ‘Toby, you go out there and tell June she’s run out of everything.’

  He flings open the screen door and the bamboo chime plays its hollow melody.

  ‘Mum says you’ve got nothing.’

  June’s laughter ripples out across the yard.

  ‘You go back in there and tell your mother that we’d better go shopping again.’

  June shops every other day. Burdens her trolley. Buys up like there’s a food crisis. Like someone’s going to raid her home and take it all away.

  • • •

  We spend the night in the main house, splayed out on June’s huge brown lounge surrounded by wide-eyed Wandjinas that see but don’t speak. Toby is spread out across me, one leg dangling over the lounge and his face on my chest. It’s too hot, but I don’t want to move him. In a couple of years, maybe just one, he won’t want to rest like this with me. We drift in and out of sleep. Tom comes home from his job at the prison. June heats up his meal in the microwave and they speak in pastel voices.

  Tom sighs long and hard. ‘News for you, June. News you’re not going to like.’

  ‘Get it over then, Tom. Get it over like a needle.’

  ‘Archie’s inside. They’re keeping him in for a week this time. Giving him a scare.’

  The room is quiet except for the rattan ceiling fan that whoops like a wobble board.

  ‘You know how much Archie loves crabbing,’ she says, finally. I hear her footsteps, the scrape of her chair. ‘He needs to go crabbing again.’

  ‘He needs a hell of a lot more than crabbing, June,’ Tom says. ‘Not just small-time theft now. Big stuff.’ Tom slurps at his curry. ‘Hanging around, being a nuisance.’

  ‘You’ve missed your mouth,’ June says. ‘How do you miss your mouth when it’s so big? So, Archie isn’t allowed to hang out now?’

  ‘Not just hanging. Freaking out Sister Louise. Creeping around at night like a shadow. He’s got a bruise around his eye. Looks like a pirate. You know, I wonder if Archie does it on purpose so he’ll have to stay in there. I wonder that, June.’

  ‘He’s a good boy. Kids always go a bit wild. That’s how they learn. Wild like the wet season. We were wild, Tom. You were a wild boy. Puberty.’ She tilts her head. ‘I read about this. This is in my notes. He’s going through that awkward stage.’

  I steal a look at them sitting across from each other at the table. Tom puts his spoon down and folds his arms across his chest. June fusses with a piece of bread, daubing the dregs of the leftover curry.

  ‘This is so much more than awkward. This isn’t a puppy growing into its paws. He’s past juvie now. He’ll be charged like a man,’ Tom says.

  ‘I wish Mum was here. Mum would know what to do with him.’

  The fridge creaks and a twist-top hisses like a leaky valve. I roll my face back into the leathery back of the lounge. ‘So, Mimi’s moved in with her boy? Kick me out of my bed soon, ay? Put me in the granny flat.’

  ‘They need family, Tom. You know she went for a job at the medical centre last week.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Eddie was on the panel.’

  ‘Does Eddie know?’

  ‘Ha, he called up and asked me if I knew I had a white girl living with me.’

  ‘Are you going to tell him who she is?’

  ‘I will, Tom. In time.’

  Their voices fall away into whispers.

  ‘You need to talk to her.’

  ‘Sshhh. Stop nagging me. Nagging enough to be an old horse. Nagging enough for me to send you to the knackery. I will, Tom.’ June’s voice suddenly lightens. ‘Toby’s enrolled in school. You can teach him rugby. Rugby will help him fit in.’

  ‘I guess you’ve settled it for me, then. I’ll do it for a cuddle,’ he says. ‘As if you’d give me any choice.’

  She shushes him again. ‘No cuddles. You’ll wake the children,’ she says, as though we were the same age, Toby and me. As though we were her kids. ‘Give me your foot, Tom.’

  I hear Tom’s chair drag against the floorboards. His resigned sigh. The smell of shea butter. The slap of her palms against his feet settles me to sleep.

  • • •

  At first light June shuffles her handwritten notes and her social work books into a pile so there’s space for breakfast at the teak dining table. Tom is out on the porch lacing up his boots, his belly like a broad bowl against his khaki work shorts. Toby and I sit and June arranges her usual eclectic mix of condiments in the centre of the table – soy sauce, Nam Prik Pao, loquat jam and melon flower honey. She heats up some leftover fish soup, sizzles butter in a pan and cooks pancakes. She cuts them into long strips and ladles it all into oriental bowls that she sets out on the table. She cradles a cup of liquorice tea, rests her elbows against the cloth’s fuchsia-and-indigo weave, and chews the dry skin of her bottom lip. Fragrant plumes linger a moment, then falter in the morning breeze. Outside, the pindan-stained porch collects the dust of a new day. Mango leaves curl against each other as though seeking protection. Cowrie shells traverse a low Balinese table in dappled pairs. Tom comes back inside, wipes his brow and kisses her.

  ‘What you got on today, June? More psycho-babble note taking?’

  ‘I need to work out what’s wrong with you, ay? Not far enough into the course yet.’

  ‘Cheeky bugger.’ He limps out the door and down the driveway with a lopsided gait.

  ‘You home for lunch, Tom?’ she calls out.

  ‘No time today.’

  ‘Shame,’ she says and moves to the sink, where she scrapes the plates and plunges them into sudsy water. I grab a tea towel and she smiles at me with her mischief-making eyes.

  ‘You know what, Mimi. We’ve eaten all the fish; we’d better stock up again,’ June says.

&n
bsp; I know there’s another freezer in the garage loaded up with salmon and mackerel and clam meat. ‘Do you think? I was going to take Toby to the beach.’

  ‘Yes, I think. You don’t believe me? You don’t think I know how much you and Toby and that old man eat? High tide soon, Mimi. Why do you want to go in the bathwater with all the tourists and the Irukandji floating around? No good there today, Mimi. Fishing. Over where Archie’s mob lives.’

  • • •

  The three of us pack up the four-wheel drive. Water. Flour. Bags of fat oranges. Blue eskies. Hand-lines twined around plastic reels, crab hooks and throw nets. June opens the passenger door, and I slide in. Toby climbs into the back. She settles into the driver’s seat and the vehicle idles as though lethargic. It kicks over and she pats the dash affectionately.

  ‘Another year in you yet, Roger,’ June says. She turns her head to the backseat. ‘Five hundred thousand on the clock. Roger never gives up.’

  At the service station, we fuel up and June goes in and pays. She comes out with a sports drink for Toby, and two cappuccinos in Styrofoam cups.

  ‘Keep us going for the trip. Keep up your fishing energy, Toby.’

  ‘Servos charge like wounded bulls, June.’

  ‘Wounded bulls. I like that. I’ll remember that one. You don’t want my coffee, Mimi? You don’t want my good-morning, good-fishing coffee?’

  ‘I love your coffee, June.’ I hold it up to my mouth and the car staggers into gear. The liquid spills out over the lid and down the brown and cream swirls of my batik top. June stifles a giggle.

  ‘Don’t lose your coffee. Your good-morning coffee. Today we’re going to get lots of fish. You like to fish, Toby?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He’s never been fishing.

  ‘All of us like to fish, Toby. You men think you’re the hunters and gatherers. Tom stamps forms at work all day with his Mr Important stamp, and I hunt and gather. No good Tom teaching you. He only knows how to catch fish in Chinatown Coles. Number ninety-seven at the deli. Ten slices of polony and some fish fingers. That’s how Tom gets his fish.’ June winds down the window, flicks on the radio. It’s the seventies hour. She croons along to ‘Dancing Queen’.