‘I was smuggled out early. Just me, the girl. Your father the same, except he was an only child so that was precious. We lived in the same city back home but we never met. Out here it was the one good thing, that we met. And then he goes and does a stupid bitch thing like signing up. I couldn’t believe it.’ The word ‘bitch’ in his mother’s mouth sounded like the most foreign thing she had ever said. She sighed. ‘He didn’t see those photographs. He didn’t want to look, but I did, I saw. I looked close at those photographs, I wanted to see my brothers’ faces. But they all looked the same.’
There was a photograph he’d found a long time ago, hidden between the pages of an atlas, cut from the paper. At first he’d thought he was looking at a record catch of fish, a netful dumped on a wharf somewhere. But then he’d seen the wax eye sockets and empty mouths, the arms and legs smooth and white. He’d seen the nakedness and that had been the worst part, that he’d wanted to see those parts, between the legs where everything sank into darkness. They’d seen other pictures at school, but there the people were alive, wrapped in shawls, saved. No look of relief in their faces. Nothing. He stayed still and watched the skin of her throat stretch and relax as she swallowed. ‘But this is a different war. Yes. This is a different thing altogether.’ She looked at Leon and her eyes were black marbles.
The next week a young man stood smartly at the door. Leon watched as his mother gripped him to her, heard a noise from her throat and thought, he’s dead. The young man stood very straight, his face red, his cap in his hand, blinking over her shoulder. He said, ‘There, there, ma’m,’ like a Yank. Then he left.
His mother sat holding Leon’s hands in front of her, her eyes bright, and white and red. ‘He’s been taken. Trapped. Caught. Now, this doesn’t mean anything, nothing at all,’ she said, her face a stone in a creek. ‘This is not like the last war — these are different people. It doesn’t mean anything at all, nothing, you hear?’
He nodded, shook free a hand and touched her shoulder. It was awkward, it seemed like some part of her he shouldn’t go near. Her eyes closed and she pulled him towards her so that they collided with their chests, and there was a hard ache in his throat. He breathed wetly into her shoulder, felt the same breath going back into his lungs, thought he’d like to shake her off and run out of the shop, tear down the street, run all the way to the bridge and find the thing in the ice-cold shadows, let it eat him whole. But instead he breathed in and out, counting the breaths, swallowing, his throat compressed against her shoulder. At least he was alive. They don’t shoot you in prison, they just keep you till it’s time to be let out.
In the next weeks, Leon would come across his mother staring into the open refrigerator, hanging there as though something unexpected had been put inside, the eggs replaced with light bulbs. Sometimes her lips moved soundlessly. He wondered what she saw then — whether she was talking to his father. Was it him in there? She still called Leon chicken and worried about the stiffness of his collar when he went out, fussed at the edge of his mouth with a wet hanky as if there were some grub there. But when she was in the bath or at night when she closed the door to her bedroom things became very quiet, like she had sat down just inside the room and stayed still until morning. Sometimes he looked through the keyhole to check she was actually there and she would be lying in bed, the covers up to her throat, with hardly a crease in them. She lay bone straight, her chest barely rising and falling, her eyes wide open. She stared at the ceiling like she was stopping it from falling on her. Once she sat in a chair, rigid, a wax creature with a tin frame. The chair was turned into the corner of the room, right up against the wall, so that her toes must have touched the skirting board. The back of her neck tense, still as the hot air.
At school things caught at his hair and plucked at the back of his trousers. His pen moved slowly across the page, ink swelled into the paper. He felt himself trapped between the bone and flesh of his face, and he couldn’t move. Everyone else’s hands moved at impossible speed over their work, the noises of the classroom were high-pitched and speeded up, made no sense. He felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell. With effort he stood up, ignored the squealed noises of the teacher, the weird electric sound of laughter, saw only that Amy Blackwell’s blue eyes watched him as he walked out of the classroom, away from the school, heavy enough that he might sink into the ground and suffocate, or else fall on the pavement and shatter into splinters.
At home his mother was sitting on the kitchen floor, the fridge door open, flour sprayed all over, eggs smashed and warming up on the linoleum.
He squatted down by her, moved a damp curl of hair that tangled in her eyelashes. ‘I don’t reckon I’ll go back to school, Ma,’ he said slowly and she looked up at him, as if seeing him for the first time.
She put her hands over his ears, bent her neck so that their foreheads were touching. ‘If you’re sure, sweet chicken. If you’re sure.’
3
The foreman of the marina, Pokey, was a pirate from a picture book, a scratchy beard and a cap that made his sun-cankered ears stick out like rudders. When Bob introduced the two of them there was a papery handshake and Pokey’s eyes focused on something over Frank’s shoulder. ‘The new fella, Fred or something,’ he announced to the rest of the men before turning his back and walking squatly into the cargo shed and shutting the door.
Bob cleared his throat and smiled, punching Frank softly on the arm, ‘Frank here lives down on the Mulaburry flats. Out past my place.’
‘Just moved there,’ agreed Frank. He shifted his feet.
Bob pointed to an aboriginal-looking man who as far as Frank could see was too old to work on a dockyard, but who had shoulders like an ox and a waistline like a berry. ‘This one’s Linus,’ said Bob. Linus winked at Frank like they’d met before and it was a secret. Next to Linus was another darker man. ‘Then we’ve got young Charlie. He’s sometimes crew, sometimes with us on the marina.’ Charlie was long and thin, with hair curled midway between his ears and his shoulders. The skin of his face shone in the heat, and he smiled widely and quickly at Frank, then looked away at the sun.
‘Stuart,’ said Bob, nodding at a white man, freckled-faced with straw hairs poking from his cap. His eyes were red in the whites from salt and there was a small swelling on his lip where something had been burnt or cut away recently.
‘You a fishing man?’ Stuart asked Frank, gripping his hand fiercely.
‘Don’t know too much about it.’ He held up his fingers as if they might show polished nails. ‘City slicker up till recently.’
Stuart seemed happy about this.
‘And these two’ — Bob nodded to the last two men — ‘are what we call the twins, Sean and Alex.’ They stood flat-footed in yellow worn thongs, their toes spread, grabbing on to the ground. They had the same thin lips coated in white zinc like cricketers, and they said nothing.
‘They’re boat crew,’ said Bob behind his hand but loudly, ‘they don’t make friends easily.’ Frank wasn’t sure of the joke, but he laughed anyway. The twins did not.
For a working marina the place had a good feel about it. There was a dark rainbow to the surface of the water, and the familiar smell of diesel overhung the sea and warmed his chest. Boats moored about the place, white yachts with fancy names Rosalind, Pengerrith, Serendipity, painted in navy on their sides. The slipways were white and someone had gone to the trouble of stencilling a small anchor on to every fifth plank. From the spot where they loaded he could see a sailing-club-style café that opened out on to the water, where a few couples lunched in knee-length shorts and deck shoes.