kitchen in our house was straight out of the 1950s. She said back then it would have been the ‘in thing’, would have been featured in magazines and design brochures. Now, though, the laminated benchtops with steel trim around their edges were too narrow and the cupboards were too small. The wooden doors had been painted several times, the last colour an orange that was too bright. Mum hated the orange; Dad said it made him smile. But the worst part about the kitchen was the row of cupboards above the laminated benchtop. The doors were glass, framed by the same orange paint and were hard to close. The shelves inside the high cupboards sat on a slight slope towards the floor. If you put a glass too close to the edge, when you opened the door, the glass would tumble out and smash on the floor.
From where I stood leaning up against the sink, I could see Uncle Scott still sitting in the backyard, slowly, methodically chewing the skin around his left thumbnail. Mum had been going to get a new kitchen since we moved into the place, said she couldn’t wait for those wide bench tops so she could finally have room to move. Last year, though, when she and Dad had saved enough money, Mum changed her mind. She said she didn’t want the new kitchen anymore. Said she’d become attached to the old one. Wanted to keep it just the way it was. Dad had argued with her, told her she was mad. But she said she would rather go to New Zealand with the whole family than have fancy cupboards. In the end, they’d agreed to keep it the way it was – at least for the time being – and look into the holiday.
The family holiday to New Zealand never happened.
I think what really changed her mind was the table. Not a holiday. The big old wooden table that could fit eight people and a couple more at a squeeze. The mix-and-match chairs scattered around it. If a new kitchen was put in, the table would have to go. It was too big. Mum said we’d have to get a new one, probably a round one with six matching chairs.
Our table had been used for everything from Christmas lunches to birthday parties, jigsaw puzzles to Jazzie’s latest craft project, and there was the year Ray got the kit of twelve plastic model planes for Christmas. That summer holiday, Mum spent hours with him at the kitchen table, newspaper spread out, bits of planes sorted into piles, a pair of tweezers and a small tube of glue for every plane. I was allowed to sit at the table and watch, as long as I didn’t touch. Ray glued propellers onto noses, wings onto bodies and wheels onto undercarriages. Mum carefully balanced the planes that needed to be dried, well out of my reach. We spent hours that summer sitting around the kitchen table, me colouring in or building Lego cars, Ray gluing and painting.
Only once did I make the mistake of reaching for a plane. Ray screamed at me so loud to not touch, that I jumped and accidentally knocked the plane to the floor. It broke into three pieces. Ray lunged and grabbed my throat, screaming he was going to kill me. Mum had to put herself between us, yelling until Ray stopped. He had to go to his room for the rest of the afternoon and wasn’t allowed to build the planes again for three days. The one I’d broken sat there with all the other planes on the newspaper, waiting to be glued back together.
I stayed out of Ray’s way after that; I didn’t come back to the table when he was allowed to start gluing again. Instead, I played on the floor in the lounge room where I could still hear Mum and Ray talking. I made roads out of the brown swirls on the carpet for my Lego cars, built villages out of the Lego blocks. Mum would come and sit with me and play until she was called back to the table to find some tiny piece or other that Ray had lost.
The planes were finished a week before school was due to start back. Ray wanted to hang them from his bedroom ceiling with fishing line and thumbtacks, like his mate Billy at school had. Mum said to give the planes a few days to dry first, to make sure nothing was going to fall off, and then Dad could help him hang them.
When the planes were deemed dry enough to hang, Ray went and sat next to Dad in front of the TV after dinner. He showed Dad every plane and told him what every plane’s name was.
‘This one’s a Spitfire, this one’s a Hercules, and this one’s a Bristol Brownie, a sports plane – the only one that’s not a fighter.’
Dad looked at all of them, taking them in his hand, turning them over and then holding them up to see how the plane was going to look hanging from the ceiling. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, and then, ‘yep, you’re right, that’s exactly what it is,’ and, ‘I used to have one just like that sitting on my bookshelves when I was your age.’
‘So, can you come and help me hang them?’ Ray asked finally.
‘Sure, when the news is over.’
Ray sat and waited, flicking through an old surf magazine. But by the time the news had finished, Dad was asleep, his head rolled back and his mouth open.
Ray turned the TV off and shook Dad gently on his arm.
Dad jumped as if someone had just sprung through the glass window and come at him with a knife. ‘What? What the hell?’
‘It’s just me, Dad – Ray.’
‘What are you doing creeping around, waking people up like that?’
‘I wasn’t creeping. You said you’d help me put my planes up when the news was over. It’s over.’
‘Oh, right. Not tonight, hey? Can’t keep my eyes open. How about we do it tomorrow night, do it earlier so your old man doesn’t fall asleep on you.’ He got up and ruffled Ray’s hair. ‘Tomorrow night, okay?’
‘Yeah, okay.’
But the next night, Dad got held up at work, and the night after that, Uncle Scott was around for dinner. After the third night of no planes hanging from his ceiling, Ray woke up in a mood I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere near.
‘Beach?’ Mum asked when he walked into the kitchen that morning.
‘No.’ Ray went and got some cereal out of the cupboard and slammed a bowl onto the table.
‘Oi.’ Mum turned from the toaster. ‘Don’t. You’ll break it.’
Ray shook the cereal into the bowl, then poured the milk, and plonked himself down at the table near where the model planes were neatly lined up on newspaper.
‘So, do you want to go to the beach?’ Mum asked again.
‘Yeah, the beach!’ I answered.
‘And you, Ray?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, come on, it’s a beautiful day. Last day of school holidays, you don’t want to spend it stuck inside.’
Ray put a spoonful of cereal in his mouth and stared out the kitchen window with what Mum and I called his ‘cranky breakfast face’.
‘What’s the matter?’
Ray didn’t answer.
‘Ray, I asked you a question.’
‘Nothing.’ His answer was short and directed at the
backyard.
‘Doesn’t seem like nothing.’
Then I was stupid enough to speak. ‘No one’s helped him put his planes on the roof.’
‘Not the roof, dumb-arse, the ceiling.’ Ray glared at me.
Mum put my toast in front of me. It smelt of salty butter and burnt crusts. ‘Don’t speak to your brother like that.’ She was standing behind me, waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘So, you’d rather put the planes up than go to the beach?’
Ray kept eating his cereal.
Mum poured her coffee and sat down on the chair next to me, stirring the coffee with a teaspoon until there was a tiny whirlpool in the middle it. ‘What happened to your father? Thought he was going to help you put them up.’ Mum pulled the teaspoon out and took a sip.
Ray shrugged and said through a mouthful of cereal, ‘Busy.’
Mum looked at the planes. ‘Go find the fishing line, then.’
Ray stopped eating, and for the first time since he’d walked into the kitchen, he looked at Mum.
‘You know where it is.’
Ray nodded but still didn’t smile.
‘Go on, go and get it. See if you can find some thumbtacks, too, and we’ll get these planes up and flying, and hopefully still have time to go to the beach.’
Ray took his bowl over to the sink, plopped it into the warm soapy water and let it sink to the bottom. ‘Thanks,’ he said quietly without turning around.
‘That’s okay,’ Mum replied to his back. Then she jumped out of her chair and tried to grab him, but he was too fast: he dodged her and started laughing.
‘You get your bum into gear before I change my mind!’ She lunged again.
The morning of glorious sunshine and no breeze was spent in Ray’s room with Mum up a ladder in her denim shorts and singlet, her head bent towards the ceiling while she hammered thumbtacks into the old hardwood beams and threaded slippery fishing line. Every time the small hammer missed and hit her finger, she cursed, straightened up and sucked on whichever finger had been hurt. Then, with a deep, patient breath, she went back to hammering again.
By the time the planes had been strung up and left dangling from the ceiling, it was twelve-thirty. Ray’s room faced west. His window didn’t catch the breeze but instead let in the afternoon sun.
Mum said it was like a sauna. You could see the sweat trickling down her neck as she climbed down the ladder. ‘So, what do you think?’ She stood with us; our three faces were now turned up to the ceiling. The planes were jiggling on their new fishing line, as if there were miniature pilots flying them.
‘Cool,’ I said, a word I’d taken to using over the past month.
‘Thanks.’ Ray’s upturned face was smiling.
‘Reckon we’d get a better view if we were lying on the bed?’ Mum asked.
‘Maybe,’ Ray said.
Mum took one step closer to the bed and then jumped so she landed flat on her back in the middle of the mattress with a thump and a bounce. Exactly what she always told us not to do. The springs stretched down towards the floor and then sprung back, making the bed wobble.
I laughed and jumped onto the bed too, crawling over her and rolling on to my back so I was between her and the wall with the window, my head resting on her shoulder.
‘Good?’ she asked.
‘So good,’ I said.
‘See, Ray, the best place to see them from is here on the bed.’ She patted the small part of the bed left on the other side of her.
Ray hesitated, but for only a moment, then he laughed and jumped up like Mum had, landing on his back, squashed up against her. He wriggled around as if he needed more room, making Mum squish harder into me.
‘So?’ Mum asked again.
‘Definitely the best view.’ And then Ray turned as if to kiss Mum on the cheek but instead tickled her under her arms and on her ribs – the two places guaranteed to make her squirm and giggle. Ray tickled from his side, and then I joined in from mine. Mum was wriggling and kicking so much I had to curl myself up into a ball to make sure she didn’t get me.
Ray was laughing. ‘What do you say? What do you say?’
‘Stop it!’ Mum shrieked, tears now wet on her face.
‘The magic tickle word, Mum.’ I was still tickling her but trying to give her hints as well.
‘All right, I give in, I give in!’
‘Not the right word.’ Ray and I both laughed together.
‘Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!’ Mum yelled, and then, as if it really was by magic, we both stopped, laid back on our backs and stared up at the ceiling, our fingers tucked neatly away in our armpits as if nothing had ever happened.
Mum was panting, gulping in deep breaths and wiping tears off her face. ‘You boys,’ she said. ‘You should watch yourselves. One day, if you’re not careful, you’ll be tickling away and all of a sudden, you’ll find yourselves sitting in a warm puddle of smelly, yellow water.’
‘Mum! That’s gross!’ Ray moved to the edge of the bed as if Mum had a highly contagious disease he might catch.
I was a bit slower to catch on. ‘Ewww, do you mean wee?’
‘Der,’ Ray said.
‘You’ve got to watch us older ladies, Luka, you never know what we might do.’
‘Yeah, right, Mum, and you’re sooooo old.’ Ray put his hands up as if to tickle her again.
‘Older than you, buddy boy. And don’t you even think about putting those tickle fingers anywhere near me. Uncle’s the rule, and it means I’m immune until tomorrow. Break the rule and we become the tickle-free house forever.’ She said the word forever as if she was capable of using it to cast a spell.
Ray dropped his hand back down.
‘Is it me or does anyone else feel like it’s one hundred degrees in here?’ Mum asked.
‘Stinking,’ I said.
‘Lunch and beach, I think.’ Mum sat up and rolled Ray off the bed before he had a chance to realise what was happening. He hit the floor with a crunch.
‘Oi!’ He tried to grab her ankle as she stepped over him.
‘You snooze, you lose.’ She walked out of the bedroom, calling as she went, ‘Lunch! Come on, I need some salt water.’
The beach that afternoon was the same as it would have been in the morning. It was one of those rare, still summer days that lasted until the sun went down. Perfect glassy waves that lifted to one, two feet, before chasing their way onto the hot sand. We stayed until the heat had gone out of the day and the sand underneath our towels started to feel damp.
Mum bought us fish and chips on the way home. She let us sit and eat at the plastic chairs and tables outside the fish and chip shop. The chips were hot enough to burn your tongue, but Ray and I didn’t care, we were starving after being in the water all afternoon. We bit into their salty softness, trying to cool them with our breath. But then I gave in and swallowed the heat, feeling it slide down my throat and into my hungry belly. Mum didn’t eat, saying she’d wait and have dinner with Dad when he got home. But she did buy herself a ginger beer and us a bottle of lemonade each. She said we all needed to drink a toast to a perfect summer holiday.
She held her bottle up high in the middle of the table. Ray reached out his hand, so his bottle was pushed up against hers. I scrambled up onto my knees and pushed my bottle up too.
‘To my beautiful boys,’ Mum said, grinning. ‘To aeroplanes that hang from fishing lines and to endless days of sun and glassy, curling waves.’ She laughed and nudged her bottle up against ours. ‘Cheers, big ears,’ she said.
‘Cheers, big ears,’ Ray and I said back to her, knocking our bottles against each other’s and splashing lemonade onto the plastic table.
‘To never-ending holidays,’ Mum said, clunking our bottles again.
‘To no school ever,’ Ray said, raising his bottle higher than any of ours.
‘To all of us.’ I grinned, pushing my bottle so hard up against Mum’s and Ray’s that a big splash of lemonade fell onto some of the chips.
‘Watch it! I don’t want sweet, soggy fish and chips!’ Ray screwed up his nose.
‘All right, all right, enough holiday cheer,’ said Mum. ‘Let’s eat up and get home. Dad’ll be wondering where we are.’
That night, after hanging the planes and the beach, I woke busting to do a wee. Half-asleep, I wandered down the hall and stumbled to the toilet. As I was heading back, I saw Ray against the hallway wall just outside the lounge room door. I tiptoed to him and squashed myself against the wall next to him, ignoring the scowl he gave me and the way he mouthed the words, ‘Go back to bed!’
‘But you said you would, Nat,’ I heard Mum say. ‘For nights, the poor kid waited for you, but there was always an excuse: “I’m too tired; I’m too busy; Scott’s here.”’
Mum didn’t drink often, said she saved her glasses of red wine for the special people in her life, when they needed to celebrate something. But there were some occasions when nothing special was happening and she’d have a glass of red wine anyway. It made her voice go funny, like a schoolgirl, lots of giggles and all high-pitched, and then other times it would be low and raspy as if there was something really sad inside of her that she was trying not to let out. That night, it was low and raspy.
‘Come on, Kate, the kid’s not going to hate me forever just because I didn’t hang a few planes on the ceiling.’
‘Hate you? I didn’t say anything about him hating you. He adores you, thinks the sun shines out of your arse. You can’t do a bloody thing wrong – not for long, anyway.’
‘Well, Katie, who could hate a man like me? Perfect arse and all?’
Mum didn’t laugh. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘Come on, love. I get it. You want me to spend more time with the kids. I’ll try harder, promise, okay?’
Mum snapped, ‘They’re boys, Nat. Boys. They don’t need me, they need you. There’s not one thing I can tell them about being a boy, not one thing.’
‘Now, that’s not true. They do need you. Every boy needs to know his mum loves him best.’
The springs in the three-seater lounge creaked as someone sat down.
Mum’s voice was soft when she spoke this time, as if she was whispering from somewhere deep inside a dark cave. I had to hold my breath so I could hear what she said. ‘Ever since I was a little girl, Nat, I knew I would have a daughter. It was just something that was always going to happen. Stupid, I know, but it never occurred to me until Luka was born that it might not.’
‘I know, love, I know.’
‘You should be the one staying at home looking after them, Nat, not me. You know how they feel, what’s going on in their heads, what it feels like to be in their bodies. You’ve been them.’
‘Now you’re being silly. You know how much those kids love you. And how many times have you told me how glad you are that you don’t have to work full-time, how lucky you are not to be missing any of their growing up, like some of your friends are. You’re tired, Kate, that’s all. It’s been a long summer holiday, and you’ve been the perfect mum, as usual, keeping the boys happy, squeezing your work in around them. Maybe something’s got to give. Maybe you should stop working for a while, until the kids are a bit older?’
‘Yeah, right, that’d be fair. Give up the one thing that I love so I can come home and slave after you lot.’
‘I’m just trying to help, Katie, that’s all. We could survive without the money, tighten up a bit. We’d be okay.’
‘I know it’s just a little part-time office job to you, Nat, but for me it’s a piece of sanity.’
‘You’re tired, Katie, I just thought …’
‘I’m not tired, and I don’t need a break.’
‘Lovey, it’s late, let’s go to bed. We can talk about it tomorrow.’
‘I am not going to bed. I’m talking now.’ It was the voice Mum used just before she got angry.
‘Okay, talk.’
‘I want a daughter.’ Then she was crying, big hiccough sobs.
‘I know. I know. We could always have another one, Kate.’
Mum was talking while she was crying. ‘But we always said we only wanted two.’
‘Yeah. But if it means that much to you, we can change our plans. There’s no rule book.’
‘Would you do all the things? What the books say you have to do to get a girl? Go scuba diving, run five Ks every night?’
‘I’d even wear tight underpants if you thought it was going to help.’
Mum was laughing now. As I stood next to Ray, I imagined her face: blotchy and wet but creased up in a big smile. The laughing didn’t last, though. She took a deep breath and sighed. ‘But it’s not right, is it, Nat? To have a baby just to have a girl. It’s not fair on the baby. What if it’s another boy? What would we do then? Send it back and say we want a refund?’
‘No. We’d love him just as much as we love our other two.’
Ray nudged me hard in the shoulder and then clamped his hand across my mouth so I couldn’t protest. He jerked his head towards our bedrooms and then shoved me in that direction. He stopped at his bedroom door. ‘It’s your fault,’ he accused at my back.
I was angry and tired, my feet cold. ‘What?’
‘Your fault that Mum’s so upset.’
‘My fault?’
‘You weren’t supposed to be here.’
‘Be where?’
‘Here, dumb-arse. You were never supposed to be born.’
I turned to go back to bed. I was too tired to get into a fight with Ray.
‘You were supposed to be a girl,’ he said to my back. ‘I was meant to be the big brother and then there was going to be a little sister. Make Mum happy. She’d swap you for a girl the first chance she got.’
I could feel the heat of his words on the back of my neck. ‘Liar,’ I said, and then I ran the last few steps to my bedroom, in an attempt to escape the sharp sting he was trying to leave on my skin.
Standing in the kitchen with my back to the sink, staring at the big empty table, the planes and the hiding in the hallway with Ray seemed like a lifetime ago; it seemed like someone else’s life. Back then, Jazzie was only the beginning of a thought. It was another three years until she was born.
I turned back to the sink. There were two breakfast bowls in there upside down: Jazzie’s plastic one with the butterflies painted on the inside, and one of the green crockery ones. There were two spoons next to the bowls, a coffee mug and a small glass, also turned upside down. I reached out and ran my finger around the edge of the green bowl, picked up the coffee mug and pressed it to my cheek. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry yesterday morning, I would have come into the kitchen, would have had something to eat, would have sat down and watched my mum sipping on her coffee, looking at her watch, seeing if it was time to wake up Jazzie.
I put the coffee mug back exactly where it had been. Made sure the handle was facing the same way.
It was impossible to believe that today was my birthday. If everything had been the same, if everything had been like it was every year, I’d have already opened my presents. I’d be just finishing off the special breakfast – probably bacon and eggs on thick toast, maybe pancakes, or maybe even French toast with lots of icing sugar – that Mum would have made, getting ready to run for the school bus.
After the movies and Time Zone, Mum had said we were going to get takeaway pizza from the shop that does my favourite seafood pizza – prawns and calamari – and eat it down at the beach. After that, we were going to come home and have cake. I thought I might have been too old for cakes, thought Ray might laugh, but Mum said you’re never too old for cakes. Even the ladies who live to one hundred in those nursing homes have birthday cakes.
I wondered if Mum had already made the cake, if it was hidden in a big Tupperware box at the back of the pantry, or maybe she’d been going to buy it this year, like she did last year – a Freddo Ice Cream Cake that melted around the lit candles. If I found a cake at the back of the pantry, all iced and ready to have with candles already on it, would I be able to eat it? Or would the very sight of it make me want to throw up?
Dad was sitting in the lounge room, hunched forward like he’d been the night before. I wondered if he’d remembered that it was my birthday. ‘Luka?’ He looked up at me standing in the doorway, appearing confused, as if he was unsure who I was. Then he stood and came over, his face grey.
Dad surfs like Ray and I do. He’s tall with square shoulders, but he’s not one of these wiry types, he’s solid, from his thick neck down to his ankles. He’s got wild hair the colour of rust. Not curly or straight, somewhere in between. It only ever gets brushed when he goes out for dinner with Mum, when Mum insists he ‘spruces up’.
He looked like someone had slammed a bag of unmixed cement into his gut, made him collapse forward and gasp for breath – hunched at his shoulders and with his chest caved in. He looked like he would never catch his breath again. ‘Hey,’ he said, standing in front of me. He was wearing his work clothes from yesterday.
I wanted him to reach out and touch me, hug me, hold me. So, I could feel his breath moving in and out of his body. So, I could know that he was still alive.
‘I forgot,’ he said, looking down at the floor.
I figured he meant my birthday. I wanted to say it was okay. That it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. But instead, I just stood there.
‘I forgot,’ he said again, as if he wasn’t sure what to say next. He brought a hand up and ran it through his hair, then down over the prickle of his beard. ‘There’s presents, under the bed, on your mum’s side. Lots of ’em.’
‘Oh.’ My immediate thought was that a surfboard wouldn’t fit underneath Mum and Dad’s bed. Then my cheeks blazed red with guilt. Who does that just after their mum and sister has been killed? Wondered if their mum had time to buy the right present before she died.
‘She was good at wrapping, your mum.’
I nodded, not sure what to say.
‘She never forgot …’ And then my dad was crying. His whole body was shaking like a mini earthquake was moving through it – right in front of me. I’d never seen him cry before. It was as if his body didn’t know what to do with the tears, whether to hold its breath or to let everything rush out in one big scream. So instead, he twitched and jerked, convulsing like a fish left to drown in air.
I reached out awkwardly and put my arm around his neck. He leant down so his forehead pressed onto mine, making my body shake along with his. ‘It’s okay, Dad, it’s okay.’ I meant about my birthday.
He put both his arms around me and hugged me, burying his bristled face in the crook of my neck. ‘No,’ he said, tears on my skin and shirt, ‘it’s not okay, and it never will be.’ Then he let go, wiped at his swollen eyes with the back of his big calloused hands, tousled my hair like he used to when I was a small kid and left.