I was ten when I realised my father was just an ordinary man and when I realised what that meant, for the both of us.
This was before he sold the land, and moved north to take up a job in construction, and before I went to board with the Campbells down the road.
My father and I lived on a ten-acre block 30 ks out of town. There was a long gravel driveway leading up to our house, with dark macrocarpas on one side. I liked to think of myself, at the grand age of ten, as being reasonably grown up, but I was still afraid of those trees, looming high over my head like great black hands, magpies falling down suddenly out of their branches, slicing through the air just an inch above my head. They only did this when I was hurrying down the drive, alone. I don’t know if magpies can smell fear, but I swear they could tell.
I went to the small country school down the bottom of the valley; the same school my father taught at. There were slim pickings, for sure—only two teachers—but there was no doubting he was the favourite. He wore knee-high socks and shorts all year round, walking in a straight line up and down in front of the class, turning on his heel, clapping his hands. He was vaguely hopeless, which seemed exhilarating to all of us then. I held small-time celebrity status, being his son.
We had two relationships, my father and I. I called him Mr Todd five days a week, from nine to three, and he, in turn, said my name with no more emphasis, or emotion, than any of the twenty names of the other kids at school. At the end of the day I’d wait around for an hour or two, kicking a ball on the field or going through the books at the back of Miss Simpson’s classroom. When he was ready, he’d go to the car and toot the horn, twice. That was the signal. We’d move seamlessly into home-time. The passenger door would be flung open, waiting for me. And he’d be waiting, too, sitting in the driver’s seat, the engine running, his hands resting lightly on the wheel.
Even with my mother gone, we were doing all right. That’s what I thought, anyway. And then Sal Chambers came along, and all of us were set off course.
I don’t know where Sal had been before she arrived in our lives. I never got a chance to ask my father, and back then I wasn’t much interested in her at all. At first she seemed like something just on the edge of my life, like a black spot on my eye, nothing big enough to worry about but not small either. It seemed to me that she simply trickled into the house, and then all of a sudden she had filled it right up. She was everywhere I looked.
She had been a nighttime visitor before she became a day one. One night I heard her laughter spiralling down the hallway, long after I had gone to bed. I’d never even laid eyes on her before this. I didn’t know she existed. So it was her laugh that introduced her in a way. Long and high, sustained like an operatic note. At first I didn’t know what it was, and felt a thud in my chest, as if I had heard a wild animal, something calling for its life. That’s how it sounded: desperate.
This was in autumn. I know this because I remember the leaves on the ground the next day. I don’t think I felt particularly troubled, I just remember—looking down and seeing them, fluttering along in front of my feet.
*
My mother left when I was five. I hardly remember her now, just a flash every now and then of her hands, pale and freckled, or the backs of her legs as she leaned down to dry her feet after swimming in the waterhole. I can’t imagine having noticed such a thing when I was so small, but I feel certain there were slim spidery veins, bright blue, on the backs of her knees. And the light, watery and tinged with grey.
Perhaps my vision of my mother’s legs is just that—of plain, detail-less legs, just her leaning over, rubbing her foot with the towel. I know I can see that—her buttocks stretched quite flat, her taking care to dry between each toe—but that may be all it was. Perhaps I have added everything else in over the years; those veins belonging to some other woman, the light to another day.
It wasn’t that devastating, her leaving. I was five and had just started school; felt safe there, with my father in the next room. He had always been the one who put me to bed at night and read me stories and gave me my bath. He was a hero, of sorts. He was keeping the show on the road. And my mother? I think she just couldn’t cope, hated the endless paddocks and the top-dressing planes soaring over the house week after week. I think she was unwell. Not well enough to take me with her, that is.
My father and I had been alone for five years, coping fine. And then Sal Chambers came along, bringing her laughter in the middle of the night, filling me with a sudden dread, the sound ringing down the hallway and then stopping abruptly.
I said nothing to my father about it, about what I had heard, but I knew something had changed.
It wasn’t for another week or two that Sal and I actually met. It was almost accidental, though I think my father had been planning it for that day. I had been next door, playing bull-rush with the McKay kids, and I came home earlier than I should have, after falling onto my chest and winding myself on the hard clay. To avoid the driveway and the magpies, I clambered over a series of fences, some of them barbed wire, paddock after paddock. I was snivelling a bit, my nose running, filling my mouth with the taste of salt.
Sal Chambers was sitting alone on the couch inside, a cup of tea between her hands. She looked up at me with an expression of odd weariness when I appeared in the doorway, as if in that moment the movements of her face were slowed down and exaggerated. She had mousey hair in a ponytail and wore baggy denim overalls. Her bare arms were almost as thin as mine. I must have looked alarming, the dirt from my fall having mixed with my few, humiliated tears, snot streaming down my lips. She looked at me for a second, blinking.
‘Harry,’ she said then, quite blandly, as if she had met me before, as if she knew me well.
She reminded me of a kid at school, though she must have been in her mid to late twenties. She had a smooth pale face and pointy nose. Her hair was dull and slightly limp. She was almost pretty. I remember thinking that. That compared to Miss Simpson and Mrs McKay and Mrs Campbell she was, almost, half pretty.
That autumn the winds came. Sometimes I felt that the arrival of the wind, and the arrival of Sal Chambers’ wild laugh, were one and the same. That somehow a shell had been cracked, and all the noise was pouring forth. We were not used to wind like that, especially not at that time of year; it was not normal, as my father said. It would come out of nowhere, gale force, whipping the scattered leaves into a frenzy, carrying a watering can and piece of tarpaulin, once, all the way down our drive. My father and I started tying things down with rope.
‘We should tie the bloody roof down!’ he said, grinning as if it was all a great joke. Nothing could dampen his spirits.
Sal was working at Arbuckle’s Nursery, just round the corner from the pub. I don’t know where she was living, she only ever came to our house, and as time went on it seemed she did that more and more often. She always wore overalls, denim, khaki-green, and tight little teeshirts underneath that showed the smallness of her shoulders and the top of her narrow back. Her laugh seemed quite absurd, coming out of that head and thin-lipped mouth like a roar coming out of a mouse.
My father, who had always been absent minded in a cheery, inoffensive way, seemed to totally lose his head. He was not my teacher that year—I was in Miss Simpson’s class—but when I saw him round school he had a slightly daft expression on his face, as if he was somewhere else entirely.
At home he tried to butter me up. I think he felt bad, could feel himself losing a hold on his role as a consistent, stable father. I realise now that he was actually still quite young, thirty-five at the most, and that he had a right, with or without me, to have a life too. This was beyond comprehension to me at the age of ten, and as I have said, it wasn’t that at that point it seemed devastatingly huge to me. It was just strange.
During the weekdays Sal came over every evening after she had finished work. She drove a small, beat-up hatchback that looked a little like a beetle. I would hear the clunking of the engine coming down the drive long before she pulled up in front of the house. I would feel a slight sinking in my stomach every time.
Despite her laugh, her voice was soft and girlish. She would talk to my father in the kitchen and I would never be able to hear what she was saying. It was a sweet voice, I guess, the voice of someone who would never intend to do harm. Sometimes when we ate dinner round the table she would try to talk to me, ask a question, her head bobbing slightly as she spoke. Somehow her questions seemed unanswerable, although I always did my best.
‘What do you think of this wind?’ she would say, her head wobbling slightly on her neck, her light-grey eyes surveying the room, not me.
‘That’s you, Harry,’ my father would say, grinning idiotically, pointing his fork. ‘That’s a question for you.’ He was relieved, I think, whenever she made an attempt to talk to me. I suppose he hoped we could become great friends.
*
That year I got my first real crush on a girl. Her name was Bronwyn James and she was the Campbells’ niece. She was living with them for the year because her parents had gone overseas. She was fifteen. She caught the bus with the older kids every day to the high school in town.
It was an innocent crush on my part, and utterly hopeless, of course. Bronwyn was not only five years older than me, but she had the gangly charm of a girl who looked unnervingly grown up, whose body seemed to be one step ahead of the rest of her. She had long sandy hair and so many freckles they merged with her skin, making her look almost tanned.
She took a liking to me in a maternal, abstracted sort of way.
I would see Bronwyn whenever all us kids went down to the swimming hole on Grange Road, usually on Sundays. She would be there too, often with a book, sitting on the rough clay of the bank with her knees up. She had a pale-blue swimsuit with a slight silver sheen. When she rose up out of the water, the water would fall off her in a way that it seemed to me it didn’t do with any of the rest of us. It was as if, for a moment, she was liquid too, slippery as a seal.
I don’t think my awe of her was entirely innocent, but my fascination with her body was more with the foreignness of it, the novelty factor of having a friend whose legs and chest curved like that. There was something exhilarating—something I was yet to really understand—about being in the company of someone who moved their limbs so slowly, with such deft control. She would roll her damp towel into a turban on the top of her head, her wet hair curled in its middle, and my chest would do a little hiccup inside.
‘Come sit next to me, Harry,’ she would say sometimes when I was standing, shivering in the wind, on the bank. She would share an apple with me out of her canvas bag. She felt sorry for me, I realise now, me having no mother and all.
It must have been a couple of months into my father’s relationship with Sal Chambers that I first started to grasp what an adult relationship really meant. Perhaps, as country kids, we were all especially innocent and unsophisticated. We knew what sex was, I think, but didn’t really understand that it wasn’t purely a device for breeding. Someone at school had heard somewhere that you had to have sex twice in order to have a baby. Jimmy Rogers was one of six, and we all laughed at him: that would have meant his parents had had sex twelve times. I was the luckiest of all: mine had only had it twice.
I knew that Sal slept in my father’s bed with him, and that there seemed to be a vibration, something almost electrical, in the way they moved around each other in the kitchen, as if there was a magnetic force that locked their limbs, hands, sides together, when they least expected it. I knew that much. It made me feel odd coming across my father brushing his hand, lightly, across Sal’s bottom; the way she turned and looked at him when he did it, the expression on her narrow face almost defiant.
I came across them one night long after I should have been asleep. The wind was up again, making the whole house quake, the rose bush outside my bedroom window scratching its dry thorns across the glass. I felt agitated by the noise, and scared, though I don’t really know what of.
I got up and opened my door quietly, careful not to make it creak. It was nearly midnight and I expected my father and Sal to be asleep, but the living-room door was ajar, and a triangle of light lay on the hallway carpet. I should have turned around and gone back to bed, comforted by the knowledge that my father was still in the house, but something wouldn’t let me, and I walked towards the light, slowly and cautiously, drawn towards the golden hum like a bee.
My father and Sal Chambers were in the living room, by the mantelpiece. Sal’s elbows were resting on it, her overalls and underpants around her ankles. Her teeshirt was pulled up awkwardly, exposing one side of her back. My father was pressed hard against her. His pants were half on, half off, and the buckle of his belt jingled, flapping rhythmically against his thigh.
He was banging his whole body against her back.
Out of Sal’s mouth came a muffled crying, like an injured dog, and it seemed to me then, standing in the doorway in my cold bare feet, that Sal was in pain, and that it was my father who was causing it, it was my father who was hurting her.
*
Autumn slid into winter. The winds died down. They were replaced by frosty still days, the sky a cool blue, the grass always crisp in the morning.
Sal didn’t bring any belongings with her, she never officially moved in, but she seemed always to be around, miraculously surfacing in the morning, even if I’d never seen her arrive at night. She ate muesli for breakfast, floating in so much milk it looked like soup, and she still tried, in her strange detached way, to form some kind of friendly alliance with me. The unanswerable questions continued.
‘Seven letters,’ she said to me one morning, sitting at the table with the crossword in her lap. ‘Organic or natural. Seven letters. Any ideas?’
I had none, and had a mouthful of toast. I shook my head.
Sal glanced at my face, her cool slanted eyes expressionless, and then she smiled quietly, as if she liked what she saw, or found it amusing at least. She picked up her pencil and went back to scribbling words on the corner of the paper.
As it grew colder, I saw Bronwyn James less and less. She was above playing bull-rush or tag with us, and the swimming hole no longer provided a meeting place, the murky water’s edge often being laced with ice in the mornings.
I came across her one afternoon riding her horse down the road. I was on my way home, and heard the clipping of its hooves moving along behind me, getting louder with every step. She drew up beside me and tilted her chin.
‘Haven’t seen you around,’ she said, looking down at me from a great height, her knees and feet level with the top of my head. The horse snorted and stamped one foot.
I agreed with her; we hadn’t seen each other for ages.
Bronwyn smiled, and bowed her head down towards me so she looked like she could slide right off the horse’s back and land on my shoulder.
‘You know, Harry,’ she said, the corner of her mouth twisting into a smile, ‘I kinda miss you when you’re not around.’
The world seemed to go deathly quiet at that moment, as if all of the air had been sucked out of it. Bronwyn laughed, and then she kicked her heel and took off at a gallop.
I stood in the middle of the road, watching her bounce away, my chest thumping in time with her long ropey plait. I don’t know if she was teasing, or serious, but for days afterward I carried the knowledge of those words, believing that when I was old enough Bronwyn and I could get married, that we could ride off together into the sunset.
*
Things with my father and Sal Chambers didn’t have a notable decline. Perhaps after a couple of months, once we were through autumn and winter, once the daffodils had started poking their heads through the grass, their relationship seemed cooler somehow, but that was a relief to me, rather than a disappointment.
Sal was still at our house most of the time, and I was still wishing she wasn’t.
It must have been nearing November, on a blustery Sunday afternoon, that it finally became clear to me that my father didn’t think the world of Sal after all.
She wanted to go on a day trip, she was determined, so the three of us piled into the car and drove forty minutes to the sea. It was the first time I had ever seen Sal wearing anything other than overalls. She had shorts on that day, and a light knitted cardigan. I could see her knees from the back seat, knobbly and slightly pink. For the entire drive nobody spoke, and every now and then my father scratched the back of his head irritably, as if there was something under the hair that he wanted to get rid of. Sal had her elbow resting by the window, and looked out it, her palm pressed against her cheek.
When we arrived it was clear that it hadn’t been a good idea, coming to the sea, just as my father had said. From the car park, still buckled up inside the car, we could see that it was exposed and windy, the grey waves roaring, sand rolling in airborne wheels along the beach. It would get in our eyes, my father said, if we tried to walk down by the water. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
‘Does Harry think it was a bad idea coming?’ Sal said casually, staring straight ahead out through the windscreen. ‘Harry? Do you think it was a bad idea?’
I said no with as much conviction as I could muster.
‘Well, then,’ she said.
My father tried to smile brightly, and put on his running shoes, and the three of us loped across the driftwood, up onto the grass leading to the cliff-tops. Sal walked with her hands on her hips, hopping across the rocks like a sparrow.
The grass was long and scratchy, bending double in the wind. It almost came up to my knees. I felt like I was wading through water. It was steep, going up, and my father puffed a little. You couldn’t hear it, his heavy breathing, not above the sound of the wind, but when he turned to smile at me, to make sure I was keeping up, his chest was rising and falling faster and harder than normal, and his cheeks had a rush of pink. Sal seemed to be having no trouble at all. She whistled as if it was all great fun, and swung her arms.
I’d only ever been to the cliff-tops twice before, and they seemed slightly threatening to me, as if, no matter how far away you were from the edge, you could still fall off. Years later a man tried to kill himself up there, and failed. He mashed his brains and broke his back, and never uttered another word, not even his own name.
On that day, high up there in the whipping wind, all three of us stayed as inland as we could, without crossing the fences that led to the coastal farms and the small seaside town beyond them. We could only see the far horizon of the sea, where it looked quite calm and flat, and the sky above it.
We must have been nearing the top when my father tripped, going over on his ankle and stumbling, half falling, a little down the slope towards me. For a moment he looked comic, his face ruddy, his limbs all going in different directions, looking boneless, like soft rubber.
Sal began to laugh.
I don’t think she meant to be cruel. I think it was just that he did look funny, for a moment, and she lost a hold of herself, up there above the sea, right in the middle of that wind. She screeched with laughter, her lips spread back across her gums, almost in a grimace. She staggered a little, she was laughing so much.
My father was hurt and puffing and his face went redder and redder. He examined his ankle, and puffed and grunted. Sal continued to laugh, louder and more hysterically, her feet going round in circles, the sound on an ebb and flow with the wind. I stood in one spot and stared, not sure what the right thing was to do.
‘Stop it,’ my father said to Sal, quietly at first, trying hard to steady his voice. ‘Stop it.’
In her writhing stumbling dance, her mouth still open, the sound still coming out, Sal tried to shake her head, but she only laughed more, bending over double.
‘Stop it, Sal,’ my father said, louder this time, with more force. ‘I’m asking you please. Stop it.’
She didn’t.
He moved towards her, lurching on his bad foot, and she didn’t step away, just lifted her head to look at him, her laugh so airless now it sounded like she was crying, her hand on her forehead to steady herself.
‘Stop it,’ my father said again.
I looked down back where we had come from, at the grass bending in the wind, and a square of sand, driftwood scattered across it, the car park with our lone car on it, a dull green the size of my thumb. When I looked back, my father’s arm was mid-air, moving towards Sal’s face, and then his knuckles were against her teeth, hard, were skating upwards, dragging her lip with them, right up into her nose.
She fell back onto the grass, heavily, and said, ‘Oh,’ as if she had dropped something that didn’t really matter. ‘Oh,’ she said again, and then, ‘Goodness.’
My father stood beside her, breathing, and I breathed suddenly fast too.
We all stayed stock still for a moment. And then the blood came. It came out her mouth and out her nose, and she said, ‘Oh goodness,’ again, still quite calmly, one hand cupping the blood under her chin, the other making a little roof over her nose.
My father had never hit me as a child and he had never hit any of the children at school, and I don’t think he’d meant to hit Sal either, just to stop her laughing, but he was suddenly white, bone quiet, as if he’d killed her.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s okay,’ sounding as if he didn’t mean it at all. ‘Harry, stay here. Stay. I’ll get a rag. Stay, Harry. Sal—’ he paused— ‘it’s okay.’
And then he was off, half running, limping, staggering down the slope, passing me, not even looking me in the face.
‘It’s okay,’ he kept calling out as he disappeared from view, his voice coming and going, battered by the wind.
I stood facing Sal and Sal faced me, the blood snaking down her neck and over her hands and onto the sleeves of her cardigan.
‘Oh, Harry,’ she said.
I had no choice. I moved up the slope towards this woman whom I’d never even wanted to know, and stood beside her, facing the car park, so I could look out for my father. A flock of gulls flew over our heads then, quite low, crying out, their wings beating the air. And it occurred to me, just at that moment, that all of their voices together, rippling in the wind, sounded like Sal’s laughter—that they were her laughter—and that they were carrying it away. Sal looked up and I looked up, and then they were gone. There was only the sound of the wind and the grass and the sea, as if it was far away.
‘What did he do that for?’ Sal said in her bland, quiet voice. ‘What did he mean by that, Harry?’
It was the last unanswerable question she ever asked me. I didn’t know why my father had done it, but I knew he hadn’t meant it, not really. Sal was shaking a bit, and because I had nothing to say, I lifted my two hands and placed them side by side on the top of her head, holding her, if you like, like a ball. It was an odd thing to do, I think now, but right then it seemed be the only thing that was right, and she let me, Sal Chambers, keeping her head quite still, despite all that rushing blood.
The wind whipped at our clothes, and seemed to get in under them so that I suddenly felt cold. I could see my father moving across the sand, dodging the driftwood, up towards the car park.
‘What did he do that for?’ Sal said again, almost in a whisper, not asking me now, but asking the grass, it seemed, and the wind and the sky.
I pressed my hands a little tighter, and felt the slight pulse of her skull under my palms, the softness and the hardness of it, like an eggshell. I looked out for my father, whom I could no longer see. There was only the bare sand, and the driftwood and the car park with our small round car.
Sal shifted slightly under my hands, and a gust of wind blew a few dots of blood onto my leg.
‘Why did he do that?’ Sal said again, just to herself. She put her hand inside her mouth, and felt her tooth, and said, ‘Oh Jesus.’
‘Oh Christ,’ she said. I think she may have been crying.
I stared steadily out at the car park and at our car, the grey strip of sea to my left, Sal’s small narrow head beneath my hands. I waited there, seemingly on the edge of the world, for my father to come back, and make it all okay.