Finn wanted to follow Bridget. Wanted to say: Where were you all night? Wanted to ask: What’s happening to us?
Wanted to say: I’m so fucking scared.
Couldn’t.
The garden gate clicked open and the boys came through, ruddy-cheeked, streaked with sweat. Tom said something to Jarrah, inaudible from where Finn was watching, and Jarrah turned his head and smiled. It was a smile that smote Finn. For a second his son was open, unguarded. It was a sweet smile, from a forgotten world.
They came up the steps, across the verandah; they were beautiful. Slender Jarrah, loose-limbed from running, moving easily, his boy’s body maturing, hinting at what it would soon become. Tom, beside him, broad-shouldered, strong, in his young prime. Finn hadn’t run or played sport in years. His belly was too big, his knees hurt, he was hairy, he was punch-drunk with pain, he’d become an old man too early.
Jarrah’s face closed when he saw his father, his body visibly tightening.
Finn sat up and forced a smile that felt like a grimace. ‘Hi, guys. Good run?’
Jarrah nodded.
‘Hi, Mr Brennan,’ Tom said. ‘Yeah, Jarrah’s thrashing me. You never said he was that fast.’
‘Tom, call me Finn. Please. How about a beer?’
There was a hesitation and Finn willed Tom to say yes, to stay with them, to share the normality of his life, sprinkle it around them.
‘Thanks,’ Tom said, somehow getting it, ‘Finn. That’d be great.’
Finn got to his feet and looked at Jarrah. ‘Wanna try one?’
Jarrah blinked, and Finn had a sudden image of the scene in his bedroom, his son and the girl, kissing in that way of teenagers, all tongue and need.
‘Sure,’ Jarrah said, and Finn was certain the flush on his cheeks wasn’t just from running.
‘Your mother doesn’t need to know everything.’ Finn paused to make sure Jarrah knew what he was talking about. When he saw relief in the boy’s eyes, he gestured. ‘Sit down. I’ll bring them out.’
In their old life, on such a Friday evening, the Brennan family would have headed out to the pool, plunged into its cooling embrace, laid around dripping on the deckchairs. Finn would have enjoyed watching Bridget in her swimming costume, would have wished his own belly were smaller, would have decided to eat less pizza. His sons would have played in the pool, Jarrah throwing Toby up and letting him fall into the water, snatching him out a few seconds after his head went under.
Finn shook his head. Way too dangerous. He opened the fridge, pulled out three longnecks. Corona wasn’t a bad beer to start Jarrah on. He shook his head again. Best not to make any assumptions. He didn’t think the kid was drinking, but then again he’d had no idea Jarrah was kissing girls – or more: at home during the day when he should have been at school, so what did Finn really know?
The boys had kicked off their shoes and socks and thrown them down on the grass. Finn sat down, handed over the beers.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and the three of them clinked and drank. He watched Jarrah out of the corner of his eye and saw the boy grimace slightly. Finn relaxed a little. Maybe it really was his first taste of beer. He wondered if Bridget was still sitting over by the pool, obscured by the thick palms. One small interaction at a time, that’s what he could manage. He couldn’t risk starting a discussion about offering their son alcohol. Better she stayed away, just now.
‘Much work on?’ he asked Tom. Wonderful, safe Tom.
‘Been a bit quiet this week,’ Tom said. ‘But that’s how it goes. Got a job on tomorrow.’
‘You like the work?’
Tom nodded. ‘Don’t have to take it home.’
‘You’re good at it,’ Finn said. ‘Thought of an apprenticeship?’
Tom took a big swallow of beer. ‘I dunno, Mr Bren— Finn. Mum’d like me to go to uni. We’re doing the forms at the moment. I can probably get into teaching sport.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Maybe.’
Finn turned to his son. ‘What about you, Jarr? Any thoughts of late?’
Jarrah looked at him guardedly. ‘No.’
He should have known that asking teenage boys about their future was a dead-end topic. Finn felt a wave of weariness. His muscles sank down into the chair and he took another mouthful of beer, trying to make it last.
‘Hey, how’s it going with your sculpture?’ Tom asked. ‘Jarrah says you were picked for a big show.’
Finn shrugged. ‘Sculpture by the Quay. I missed it. I’m meant to be working on a couple of commissions.’ He stopped. Gathered himself. ‘Don’t know if I can finish,’ he confessed.
‘D’you want a hand?’ Tom asked as casually as if offering to mow the lawn.
Finn blinked. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, you know,’ Tom shrugged. ‘Me and Jarrah could come over. Help you, like, lay it out, or weld stuff together, whatever.’
Finn felt a little flutter in his chest. He wouldn’t call it hope. He wouldn’t call it anything, he decided, lest he frighten it away with the weight of a name. ‘We could give a try, I guess.’
‘Great,’ Tom said, as though this actually sounded fun. He got to his feet.
‘Now?’ Finn asked.
‘Yeah, why not? I’ve got a couple of hours. We can make a start.’
Jarrah also stood and the two of them looked at him expectantly. Finn pushed himself up. ‘Right. Let’s go.’
Bridget was nowhere to be seen in the pool area. She must have slipped away while they were drinking beer. Finn led the boys through, opened the studio, and felt a wave of shame. It was disgusting. His life, in all its disaster, was laid out for everyone to see. But Tom seemed to take it in his stride.
‘Can I make a bit of space?’ he asked, and when Finn nodded, Tom instructed Jarrah to help him. They pushed the awful sofa bed into the corner and Tom tossed something over it. He shifted a few other hulking things to the perimeter and made an open space. Found a blue tarp, and after checking with Finn, spread it out on the floor.
‘OK,’ he said, hands on hips. ‘What’ve you done so far?’
In a daze Finn went over to the bench. He’d rearranged his scraps with the components of Dragon Sentry so often, trying to turn it all into something else, that he’d lost it. He waved his hand at the scramble of metal. ‘It’s a bloody mess.’
‘If you pass me pieces, we can lay it out down here,’ Tom said.
Finn rummaged in the pile, struggled with a large, pitted flywheel that had been a centrepiece of the work. Tom stepped forwards, gestured to Jarrah. The two of them took hold of it and Finn disentangled it from the rest of the mess. When it came free, they laid it down in the centre of the tarp.
Finn felt another rush of shame that the boys should see not only his failure, but what he did in here even when it was working well. Playing with bits of scrap metal. It was nothing. Anyone could do it.
But Tom was looking at the pile of crap with interest. ‘Next?’
Even Jarrah looked if not exactly interested, then not bored and not shut down, and God, that was something.
‘The centre of it is a series of clockwork gears,’ Finn said. ‘They go on the top of the big flywheel.’
They continued. The piece started to take shape again, down there on the floor, and he only noticed the passing of time when the studio became too dark to see properly.
‘Looking good,’ Tom said, arms crossed. ‘I can come back Sunday if you want?’
‘Sunday?’ Finn rubbed a kink in his shoulder. The weekend, when he’d planned to pack his bags, pack all their bags, get them out of this place, try to get them somewhere safe. Bridget wouldn’t come and he wasn’t brave enough to test her. He couldn’t force them and he couldn’t leave them.
‘Thanks, Tom,’ he said. ‘That’d be great.’
The anonymous delivery of meals to the doorstep had dried up and the fridge was as disgusting as the studio. Worse. Finn pulled out some Tupperware thing from the back of the freezer, zapped it in the microwave until it was steaming, ladled it into bowls. It was unsuitable for the hot evening, but it was food, and he could put something on the table before calling up into the far reaches of the house: ‘Dinner’s ready.’
Jarrah and Bridget both emerged from whatever they had been doing up there on the second storey, where he almost never went now. Jarrah turned on the television as he came through the lounge, and by unspoken assent, all three of them took their plates and headed back in there. Dinner together at a table wasn’t quite possible, but dinner together in front of the television could be tolerated. Finn willed himself to become absorbed in whatever was on, but it might as well have been pictures and sounds from another civilisation for all he could grasp it.
Bridget and Jarrah seemed content to stare at the glowing screen once they’d finished eating, so Finn collected the plates and took them through into the kitchen. He loaded the dishwasher and then stood with his hands on the sink, looking out the window into the darkness.
‘Night, Dad.’
Finn turned. Jarrah was already withdrawing his head from the door, but at least the boy had voluntarily made the effort to speak.
‘Night, Jarr,’ Finn said hastily. ‘Hey, thanks for today.’
‘Yeah. You too.’
It was only a moment in which Jarrah paused and their eyes met, but it was something. Finn felt a stab inside him. He’d keep Jarrah’s secret; it was the only line of trust connecting them. But it was the first time he’d hidden something about his son from Bridget and the tug of loyalties hurt.
Finn heard Jarrah climb the stairs. What had happened between Jarrah and that girl up there in what used to be Finn’s bedroom?
In the other room Bridget switched off the television. Finn tensed, waiting. Then heard her footsteps on the stairs.
She wasn’t even coming in to say good night.
He heard the faint overhead sounds of her getting ready for bed. The thumps, the soft thuds, the flush of the toilet, the creak of the bed as she got into it.
The house settled into silence. Finn reached across and flicked off the stove light, the kitchen’s only illumination. Let the darkness fall around him, heavy on his shoulders. Let the silence lap at his earlobes and elbows. Let the steel of the sink cool his fingertips.
And let the memory of Toby come, from before. He could balance, for a moment, on that knife edge. Try to think of Toby without falling into the abyss, and without reliving what happened.
From the moment he could grasp things, Toby was fascinated by how they worked, and Finn knew that came from him. They both saw the world in a physical way, saw how its components fitted together, took pleasure in the arrangement of things to bring about a desired result.
It wasn’t wood carving that interested Toby. It was the clockwork pieces. He wanted to watch, to touch, to hold. Finn had got into the habit of putting him on a floor on a mat with a pile of cogs and wheels and scrap metal in front of him. Totally unsuitable as toys, though he at least made sure everything was too big to swallow. Toby never tried to swallow them. He lay them out, rearranged them, banged them together. The interest came from Finn, but in Toby it went much further. It was a fascination, a drive. He would have lived a life centred on how things worked.
Finn stared, dry-eyed, into the dark, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet to let the pain know it hadn’t won. His body thrummed. He’d come home wild with the energy of gathering Bridget and Jarrah and getting them out of there, the promise of doing something about the pain, even running from it, something.
The bed creaked above him, so faint he could barely hear it. He knew every creak and scrape it made, he knew how the timbers rubbed together, which joints needed tightening from time to time. How had it come to this, that he was afraid to set foot in the upstairs of his own house?
He pushed himself away from the sink. Very well, they wouldn’t flee this weekend, but something had to change.
At the bottom of the stairs he found himself holding his breath, and taking the first step in a creep. He halted, took a deep breath straightened himself. Climbed the stairs like a normal person, not thumping but not creeping either. Walked down the hallway, past Jarrah’s door, to the closed door of the master bedroom. Opened it.
Bridget’s shape in the bed was unnaturally still. Finn stepped inside, shut the door. He pulled his T-shirt over his head, slid off his shorts. Walked across to his side, slid in, pulled up the sheet.
‘I’m not sleeping away from you any more,’ he said, low-voiced.
She said nothing. Didn’t move. Didn’t reach for him. He knew she wasn’t asleep. It occurred to him that sleeping like this might be lonelier, in fact, than sleeping on the little couch across in the studio.
‘Good night,’ he whispered.
There was a slight stir, so subtle he might have imagined it. But nothing more. The dark lay heavily on him and he was so tired, so very tired. His body, feeling the familiarity of the bed, imagined itself safe, and he could feel sleep already coming upon him, feel his legs beginning to twitch, his breathing starting to slow. He’d intended to lie awake, to watch over her, but he was slipping, slipping.
When he jerked back into wakefulness he didn’t know if minutes or hours had passed. He turned his head. Bridget’s side of the bed was empty and Finn felt a rush of weariness. Coming back to their bed was pointless if it just drove Bridget to sleep somewhere else. Where could she have gone?
He got up. It was like moving through molasses. He put on his shorts, opened the door silently. The only place he could imagine she’d have gone was Toby’s room, but when he crept down the hallway and peered in, the sterile little room was empty. Could she be sleeping on the couch downstairs?
The lounge room was empty, as was the kitchen. Finn stepped out onto the verandah. The car gleamed faintly in the driveway. She hadn’t left him, then. Not yet.
Then he heard it. A ripple in the pool and a soft mammalian explosion of breath, like a porpoise. He shuddered, wondering if he was dreaming in the warm, surreal night, under a sliver of moon, the dark thick and full, the sound of the pool perfectly clear. What the hell was in there?
He crept to the gate, keeping to the shadows, and peered over. A little illumination from the streetlight spilled into the pool area and spread across the surface.
It was Bridget. She surfaced again, exhaling as though she’d held her breath as long as she could. Was she trying to hurt herself? Drown herself?
Faintly, in the dark, Finn saw her dive again. She stayed underwater so long he was about to wrench the gate open and dive after her, but he waited another moment and another moment and heard her surface.
He couldn’t imagine ever going into that water again. Something was happening over there, in the water, with his wife that he couldn’t understand. It was worse than sleeping separately. Now he knew just how far apart they actually were.