Instead, Stuart turned to Linus. ‘Don’t like your mate, Linus.’ Linus looked up with total lack of interest. ‘What’s his trouble?’
Linus laughed and went off down the pontoon holding a heavy iron hook in both hands like an injured bird.
Stuart stared darkly at Charlie. ‘Fuckin’ boon,’ he said.
Frank bit the inside of his mouth, feeling the word echo round the marina.
‘Don’t be a prick, Stuart.’ Bob walked past, yanking on his work gloves. ‘She doesn’t like you anyway.’
‘It’ll be his fault Ian’s not working,’ Stuart muttered to the floor, but loudly.
‘Hey!’ Bob said sharply, climbing into the fork cabin. ‘I said, don’t be a prick.’ Stuart picked at something, maybe a splinter in the palm of his hand, as Pokey walked by eating a large pink apple. He eyeballed Stuart, but didn’t speak, just crunched on his apple, drips of juice hanging in his beard. Frank tried to keep his eyes elsewhere on the edge of the wharf as Bob backed towards it in the fork, but Stuart was wound up. Now everyone else was safely deafened by the motor, he carried on as they hooked pallets.
‘I’m all for Linus, he’s me mate an’ all, but, fuckin’, in general — you don’t want to get in with them — that’s what I was saying it is with Ian Mackelly’s kid.’ Frank gave the thumbs up to Sean who was operating the derrick and the pallet swung slowly into the air, turning slowly, cellophane glinting in the sun. Frank wanted to look like he wasn’t interested, but it couldn’t have been that convincing because Stuart carried on, ‘She used to hang out with the blacks at school. Sooner or later these white girls hang around with the abos — they all get into trouble.’
‘I think you’d better drop it, mate.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Frank, like I said, Linus’s me mate — an’ most’ve them are fine on their own — it’s just in a pack they’re trouble — look at the old bastard now.’ He nodded to Linus who was laughing with Charlie, the girl gone back to the marina café. ‘All thick with that bug-eyed fella. Joyce Mackelly’ll show up a week from now, but she’ll be messed up. All’s I’m saying is if you’re a girl and you hang around with that sort, sooner or later you are going to get yourself beat up.’
Stuart wiped a greased hand across his chin and made off towards the boat.
With the drop toilet out of use, Frank had taken to going in the sea. It took some getting used to, the waves made it difficult to balance and he worried about having everything wash back on to him. After a few goes, swimming quickly away, he found it was easiest to perch on the top of a half-submerged rock, hang his bum over the edge and face out to sea. The rock was pretty comfortable and he could spend a good half-hour there, depending on the tide, perched with a lap full of cool water making him feel weightless from the torso down. The problem of the backwash was resolved, as what came out would be sucked down behind the rock and washed out to sea to be dealt with by whatever fish were ripping the water open; he could see their grey fins and white bellies from the easy chair. He could watch the weather, the shape of the sea, the difference in the horizon and the height of the white horses. A sacred type of crapping, he decided.
Memories came to him then, old ones he thought he’d finished with. He remembered when Eliza had turned up without Beth and she had a small bag of resin and a bottle of rum. ‘It’s lolly day,’ she’d said as she held them up in plain view of a woman walking past the shop. The woman had tutted and Eliza looked after her, laughing loudly so that the woman quickened her pace. They went out to the jacaranda and ate the resin sandwiched between pieces of chocolate. It was sweet and awful tasting, and nothing happened so they set about the rum, taking quick swallows and clearing the backs of their throats with it to get rid of the musk of the mull. And then, soon after they’d got a quarter-way through the rum, things started to happen. Eliza snorted rum out of her nose when a duck took off nearby and laughed about it, tears rolling, balls of her hands shucked into her eye sockets. Frank had only been able to smile with his top lip.
‘You look like a pervert!’ Eliza managed to squeak out between hysterics. And then it went quiet and they did some sitting still and Frank was worried that he might piss himself, even though he was sure he didn’t need to go. Eliza’s face was multi-sided. She had a new hair wrap that he hadn’t noticed before, purple and black thread wound around in stripes just above her ear. Like a bandicoot tail. He’d never seen a bandicoot.
‘Bandicoot,’ he said out loud and Eliza looked at him as if she didn’t know who he was. But she did. He reached out and touched the side of her boob, which he could see was next to her armpit where it belonged. She shrugged him off. Maybe they didn’t know each other. He sweated. Had he just touched a stranger’s boob? Would he go to jail? Her bandicoot tail twitched.
‘My mum’s had it off with your dad. Did you know that? That kinda makes us brother and sister.’
Frank waded back into the shore holding his fists tightly at his sides, that ache in his jaw from clenching. There were headaches some mornings and he’d tried going to sleep with a piece of bread in his mouth to stop the grinding, but had woken up choking. To shake off the feeling he ran the length of the bay, then turned and ran back. He kept on up and down until sunspots clouded over and he felt weak and steaming, then he slopped himself in the shallows like a hot dog.
4
On his sixteenth birthday Leon was confronted by a heart-shaped cake that his mother had baked. ‘We can have a party, chicken, if you’d like,’ she said in a way that made his toes grip the insides of his shoes. ‘You can invite your friends, we can have maybe some sherry and cake.’ To look at it, so bright and red, made him uncomfortable.
‘Thanks, Ma, but I’d rather not, ta.’
‘Why, sausage? Are you embarrassed?’
He cleared his throat. ‘No, a few friends — man friends — want to take me out somewhere, is all. I’m just busy, and…’ He let the ‘and’ fill the room.
‘Oh? And who is taking you out?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual crowd.’ He tried hard to think of who that might be. ‘Darren, Sid, Johnny. Des. Mark.’ He said boys’ names as they came to him.
‘Darren Farrow? That boy who hit you?’
‘That’s a long time ago, Mum. It’s fine.’
The last time he’d seen him, Darren had been leaning solidly against a girl behind the Four Square at night. He’d seen Leon looking and given him the finger, which he trailed down the girl’s front and hooked under her shirt, all the while meeting Leon’s eyes. His fat had turned hard and he was thought of as a dangerous kind of a bloke now. It was a pity that he’d never got around to running off to Korea. Leon imagined them having a drink together and it almost made him smile.
His mother shook her head, but cut the cake for him anyway, and he ate a piece in front of her. It had too much colouring in it and it was dense and far too sweet; it made his teeth sing. She smiled and cut herself a piece and left immediately to have her bath, leaving her slice dead on the table, and he went to chop the date slabs that had cooled on the shop counter.
A moment later a girl put her head round the door of the shop.
‘Got some black pears for youse.’
She smiled as she bumped her way through the door, ricocheting it off her hip so that the bell rang several times before she got through. It took him a minute to recognise Amy Blackwell. She took up her space differently, as if she’d been taken apart and put back together in another way somehow. Her hair was piled on top of her head out of her face, her cheeks were pink from hefting the box of pears. She wore a pair of brown work overalls that were filthy, streaked with dirt and a pinch too small for her. She chewed gum and he could smell it on her breath. He looked at her chest in amazement. They’d just grown, like potatoes do.