Late on Wednesday afternoon, I fell asleep in my room with my iPod blaring in my ears. When I woke up, the battery was dead, it was night-time and the smoke alarm was squealing hysterically.
I got up and covered my ears as I walked into the kitchen, where my mother was waving a tea-towel at the alarm mounted on the ceiling. Finally the noise stopped, and she tossed the tea-towel beside the sink. Sighing, she leant against the bench and crossed her arms, frowning at me.
Between us, on the bench, was what I assumed was the same tray of chicken nuggets I’d put in the oven hours ago. Except now they looked a lot more like charcoal briquettes.
‘Jewel,’ she said.
‘I fell asleep.’
Her eyes slid away from me, looking instead towards the parquet beneath our feet, as she sighed again, her shoulders sagging.
‘I think we need to have a sit-down chat,’ she said. ‘We’ve barely talked since you’ve been back.’ She didn’t look up as she spoke, as if she was addressing the parquetry, not me.
‘Standing’s just as good, really,’ I replied. ‘If you think about it, it counts as incidental exercise. What with the obesity epidemic and all, the difference between standing and sitting is an important one.’
‘Jewel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you depressed, Jewel?’
‘Oh, God,’ I huffed. ‘I’m going back to my room.’
As I went to walk out, she caught my arm. Not firmly, just reaching over to me. I could have kept walking, but I stopped and turned towards her.
‘You can talk to me, you know,’ she said softly.
‘I haven’t seen you in years, Rachel—’
On the outside, I was fierce and angry. But inside I melted. There was anger there, yeah, but the sadness and loneliness swallowed it.
‘Please call me Mum,’ she whispered.
‘Mum.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’ve grown up without you. You hardly ever called me. Grandma and Grandpa were my parents. I don’t want to hurt you, but it’s true.’ As I spoke my body twisted away from her. We probably looked like statues, frozen there in the ugly kitchen.
She let go of my arm. ‘I thought it would be better for you.’
‘Better for me? Fantastic parenting there!’ I said.
‘Don’t be like that,’ she snapped. She turned and fumbled for her packet of cigarettes and a lighter. ‘I thought it would be better for you because you were young enough not to remember—’
‘I remember all right!’
She got out a cigarette and waved it as she spoke. ‘I had my own things to sort out. You know that, Jewel.’ Her tone was almost apologetic.
‘And you’ve sorted them out?’ I spoke quietly now, the words slow. Maybe I was hopeful.
She frowned again, and the lines on her forehead deepened. ‘It’s an ongoing process. But I wasn’t able to be a very good parent to you for a few years there.’
She flicked on the lighter and I held up my hand. ‘Don’t smoke in the house!’
‘You do realise that I’ve lived here for a lot of years on my own, Jewel? That I’ve got my own life and my own friends and a job?’ She shook her head. ‘God, how could I forget what it was like having kids?’
‘I’m eighteen now.’
‘You’re the same little girl,’ she said. ‘And I’m still your mum.’
‘Not really. A lot of things have changed since—’ ‘Let’s not talk about that.’
‘I thought you wanted to talk?’ I said. ‘Jesus—I just don’t get you.’
‘Oh, Jewel, I’m sorry. Please don’t yell.’ Her mouth curled into a grimace.
‘You offer to talk to me, but you don’t actually want to,’ I said. ‘You want to seem like you’re supportive, without actually giving me any support.’
‘Jewel, it’s been tough on everyone—’
‘Please, please, please don’t give me that crap,’ I muttered. ‘Did you get a handbook of things to say to kids when their sibling dies or something? It was a while back, Mum. A decade changes things a bit.’
‘I don’t have the patience for you.’
‘Obviously. That’s why you sent me away. Bet you wished you’d never had kids in the first place; bet you wished he’d never been born, I’d never been born. Bet…bet you forgot about me altogether once you sent me to Grandma and Grandpa. You resent that I’m here. You’ve got your own life and it’s bigger and more interesting than me. I’m not dead, Mum, even if you wish I was.’ The words tumbled from my mouth before I even thought them. I spat them out, my shoulders tense, blinking back angry tears.
They were the same words my father said to me ten years before.
She opened her mouth to reply when the front doorbell rang. She was shaking, her unlit cigarette fluttering in her unsteady hand. ‘You get that. I’m going outside for a cigarette. Don’t forget to sort out that burnt stuff.’
She picked up her lighter again, swept past me and out the back door, sliding it shut behind her. In the backyard, she was lit dimly by the moon and I could see her, walking away from me until she disappeared around the corner of the house.
I stood there a moment longer, then turned and walked up the hall to answer the front door.
There was a short boy and a tall girl on my doorstep. The boy was holding a plastic lobster and the girl was grinning at me.
Then the plastic lobster moved and I realised it was most definitely alive.
Sacha and True.
‘Jewel,’ said True.
‘True,’ I replied.
‘We need you to give us a lift,’ she said, glancing meaningfully at the lobster, and then at my mother’s car sitting in the drive. ‘It’s of utmost importance.’
‘Life or death,’ added Sacha. ‘A race against time.’ He held the lobster up into the light for me to see. It looked psychotic.
I only paused for a second before I said, ‘In that case—’ and grabbed the keys dangling from the hook beside the door. ‘Let’s go.’
We drove towards the bay, Sacha and True taking turns to hold the lobster and tell me about how they stole it from the Chinese restaurant.
‘I wouldn’t say “stole”,’ said Sacha.
‘You don’t mean to say we’re borrowing him, do you?’ I asked, eyeing the lobster. It writhed. It was bizarre.
Sacha replied, ‘Emancipated. Liberated. Rescued. We’re noble and brave, not thieves, Jewel. Robin Hood is to the poor what we are to crustaceans.’
‘This is a one-off, Sacha,’ said True. ‘We’re going to let this little guy go, and that will be the end of our adventures stealing from Chinese restaurants and giving to the ocean.’
‘How do you know it’s a boy?’ I asked.
‘We don’t. And we’re not game to check,’ said Sacha.
‘How do you check?’ I laughed.
‘Exactly,’ he answered, though it wasn’t much of an answer at all.
We parked under a streetlight and made our way towards the pier. When the footpath became sandy I rolled up my jeans and slid off my shoes. Sacha skipped across the beach, looking back at us and smiling, awkwardly clutching the lobster.
It wasn’t dark on the beach—there were streetlights dotted along the road opposite, as well as a pub and restaurants and coffee shops all lit up and filled with people. The moon was large and bright, and its reflection in the water made the ocean look silver.
I was almost afraid of what I’d see if I looked into the water.
True yelled out to me, so I pushed the thought from my mind and ran to catch up with them. The only people on the beach, a few dog-walkers and night-joggers, were keeping to themselves, and the noise from the strip of shops across the road felt distant.
On the beach, staring out to sea, I could imagine I was anyone, on any coastline, at any point in history or into the future. Even though water had been a contributing force in ruining my family, right then the ocean made my life and everything in it seem full of possibilities.
True and Sacha were already most of the way down the pier, but I was careful as I followed them. Each time I took a step I glanced down between the planks to the water beneath. There was a biting wind, not strong enough to move the pier, but I was convinced it was swaying.
Sacha was kneeling at the end of the pier, and he was looking back over his shoulder and calling me.
I caught up with them and knelt down at the lower level of the pier with Sacha. I felt uncomfortable that close to the water. True was still grinning madly at the preposterousness of what we were doing. I smiled back at her.
‘We need to say something meaningful before we set him—her—free,’ said Sacha.
‘It’s not a funeral,’ said True, leaning on the railings of the pier, a few steps from us.
Sacha looked up at her. ‘It’s a momentous occasion, True. Not like a funeral, more like a…citizenship ceremony. We need to say something brief, concise, but meaningful…memorable—’
‘Mr Lobster, I hereby declare you citizen of the sea!’ True proclaimed. ‘Something like that, you mean?’
‘No, no, no!’ said Sacha. ‘This is an important time in our lobster’s life. He’s getting out on his own, finally living his life, getting his feet wet, if you will—’
‘Get it over with, already!’ laughed True. ‘You could go on all night.’
Sacha hesitated a moment, then he lowered the lobster into the water. The lobster wiggled a little, and then disappeared from view.
‘Happy travels, little lobster,’ whispered Sacha, his hands still hanging over the water.
We all leant back, and then I stood.
Sacha looked up at me. ‘Was that the right thing to do? Will he live?’
I offered my hand and helped him up, and we were both standing with hands held just a moment longer than necessary.
‘I’m not exactly an expert on the topic,’ I said. ‘Why are you asking me?’
‘You seem to be someone smart,’ he said.
‘And Jewel has plenty of moral fibre, too,’ added True, ‘saving lives and all.’ She gave Sacha a look. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. ‘Could you shut up about that? It wasn’t a big deal. About the lobster—do you think it was freshwater?’
‘Shit,’ murmured Sacha.
‘A brief life lived free is better than a long life in a tank that ends in boiling,’ True pronounced.
‘True, True,’ said Sacha. ‘And you need to change your name.’
‘I think it’s a beautiful name,’ I said quietly.
‘Thank you.’ True smiled.
I dropped True off at her house and, after she got out, she came around to my window. ‘Thanks for driving us around, Jewel. We’re not usually this weird or demanding.’ She glanced at Sacha in the passenger seat. ‘The lobster was a one-off.’
Sacha mumbled to me, ‘True doesn’t have much of a sense of adventure.’
‘I heard that,’ said True. ‘See you.’
Sacha and I didn’t say anything to one another all the way to his house, except when he told me what street to turn down, murmuring ‘Left here’ or ‘There’s a right turn coming up.’ It wasn’t an uneasy silence. The radio hummed a Top 40 song.
Soon enough I stopped the car outside his house, the engine still thrumming as it idled. Sacha paused, perhaps not knowing what to say.
‘Thanks for the lift.’ He smiled at me. ‘I know it was a bit crazy tonight. Sorry. Like True said, we’re not usually like that. Honest.’
‘I had fun,’ I said.
‘Good.’ He smiled again; his smile was lit up by the lights on the dash and by moonlight streaming through the windscreen. I wanted to take a photo of all his teeth, the way he bit his lip in thought.
The smile fell slowly from his face and he glanced over at his house. ‘I’d better go in. I’ll see you at school in the morning. And you’re coming on Saturday?’
‘Yeah.’ I nodded.
Sacha got out and walked up to his house and waved before he went inside. There were lights already on. I sat there a moment, the engine still running, the radio still down low, a crappy house song playing.
I changed the station and drove home, and I thought of the ocean and of my mother with her own life without me for so many years, and of lobsters and True and Sacha.