‘Auntie?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I go and play in the garden now?’
A sigh came out of her, and her face crumpled up. He stared at her for one long moment and then ran out of the house. Someone called his name. He ran down the garden, the inside of his head all blank and hollow, smooth as the lawn beneath his feet. He didn’t stop until he reached the wild part of the garden, the part he called the Jungle. He stood still, in gloom that was almost green. He looked up, past branches tipped in orange, into the deep blue sky where the chalk line that the plane had drawn was just beginning to break up.
The next day, after breakfast, Yvonne asked him if he’d like to come and stay at her house on the beach. He’d been before, some other summer, and he remembered the excitement of those words ‘house on the beach’, but things were different now, with different meanings, so he thought for a moment, then he said, ‘What about George?’
‘She’s going somewhere else.’
A whirl through his stomach as he thought it might be for ever and ever, like prayers. Yvonne put her hand on the back of his head. ‘It’s only for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘You’ll be back together before you know it,’ and he looked up at her, with her copper hair that fitted on her scalp like a magnet and her smile that was bright, missed lipstick and crooked teeth, and suddenly he trusted her again, and could smile back. So it was settled.
The day came for them to leave. Dad called Nathan into the lounge and pressed a silver coin into his hand. ‘I just wanted to give you something,’ he said, and then he turned his head away. Nathan clutched the coin in his fingers and stared at the table leg, how it had an ankle, and how the ankle curved into a golden paw. How one of the claws was chipped.
Dad waved goodbye from an upstairs room, his face rising in the window like a pale moon, smudged craters for his mouth and eyes. A full moon seen through glass. Bad luck, as Yvonne, who was superstitious, might’ve said. She wore her special fish brooch that morning. She believed that fish were sacred. ‘They’re the guardians of the soul,’ he’d heard her say, and he couldn’t pretend he understood. She’d been wearing the brooch for a week now, ever since her sister, his mother, ever since it happened. It stood for loss, it was so she remembered, it was how you could tell she was sad. You’d never have guessed otherwise. Yvonne dressed like someone from another time. Which time, though, nobody could ever quite decide. Dad was always asking her where the costume party was; it was one of his jokes. For the drive up north she’d fastened her copper hair in a canary-yellow headscarf. Triangles of turquoise swung from the lobes of her ears. She wore dark glasses with tortoiseshell frames and a silk blouse that wrinkled and shimmered like a piece cut out of the ocean. A small box, made from the same metal as her hair, hung from a chain around her neck. Inside the box was a clove of fresh garlic wrapped in a twist of crackly red paper. To thin her blood, she said, and keep the devil on his toes. But it was still the fish brooch that you noticed most. When the man in the gas station leaned one friendly smeared forearm on the window and asked how much she wanted, Nathan watched the fish catch his eye and reel it in, and suddenly the man was stepping back and ducking his head and muttering how sorry he was.
‘My sister just died,’ Aunt Yvonne said. ‘This is her little boy.’
She turned away and stared through the windshield, into the light, and Nathan could see her right eye through the side of her dark glasses, could see the tears shuddering on her lower lid. Back on the highway she rolled her window down and stepped hard on the gas pedal, it might’ve been a beetle the way she crushed it into the floor. The needle on the speedometer leapt and trembled. Ninety, ninety-five. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. He thought she was brave.
It was six hours to Hosannah Beach and he didn’t glance at the silver coin that Dad had given him, not even once. All the way he clutched it tight in the palm of his hand and felt the bevelled edge bite into his skin. They arrived in darkness, the headlights trained on a stand of cactus, its leaves a pale chalk green and sharp as the fins of sharks. Waiting in the car while Yvonne unlocked the house, he brought his hand up to his face and opened it. His sweat had the bitter smell of hot metal, hot and bitter, this was what leaving home would always smell like. Through the open window he heard the wind in the pine trees and the ocean, he couldn’t tell which was which, he was too drowsy now from the long drive, and then Yvonne’s voice, calling him inside.
He woke early and listened. Nothing. He lifted his head. Morning lay against the window in a thick grey fog. He left the warmth of his bed and crept downstairs, thinking he would be the first, but when he turned into the kitchen he found Yvonne adjusting the shoulder-strap on her black swimsuit. Her skin looked dry and brown and crinkly like the paper Dad gave him to paint on when it rained.
‘I was just going for a swim,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come?’
The house stood on a low cliff overlooking a stony beach. A narrow footpath led down steep rocks to the sea. There was a handrail, made out of wooden posts and faded orange fishing rope. You had to hold on tight, otherwise you might fall. He let her lead the way. She held one arm out in the air as if the footpath was a tightrope. The backs of her thighs rumpled and quivered. Once on level ground she became strong again. He liked the way she marched across the beach, as if she was leading an army, the stones chinking under her wide bare feet like chain mail.
The water was colder than he was used to. He swam until his lungs burned, then he wrapped himself in a towel and explored the beach. He found a skull wedged between two rocks and managed to prise it loose without breaking it. He showed it to Yvonne.
‘It’s some kind of gull,’ she told him.
‘Can I keep it?’
She laughed. ‘What would you do if I said no?’
He smiled, but was uneasy.
Then he looked down at the skull again, his skull, and a strange pleasure eased through him. Everything spread outwards from the object he held in his hand, everything spread round him, unlimited, available.
Back at the house, after their swim, they ate a breakfast of eggs speckled with fresh herbs from the garden and waffles soaked in maple syrup and tall glasses of cold milk.
‘You know, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen you swim,’ Yvonne said. ‘You’re pretty good in the water, aren’t you? You were made for it, I’d say.’
‘Dad says it’s in my blood.’ Nathan licked a trickle of syrup off his finger. ‘You know when you get hot and sweat? That’s how you can tell. You taste it and if it tastes like salt, it’s because the sea’s in your blood. Dad’s got the sea in his blood too. He told me.’
She was smiling down at him. Sometimes, when she smiled, her whole face seemed to wobble, like a drop of rain just before it falls off a twig.
For the first few days the weather stayed damp and grey. In the early afternoon the sun would almost burn through, you could sense the blue sky somewhere high above, the blue sky planes fly through, and then the light would fade and the mist would come ghosting in off the ocean, over the dunes and the marshland, over the withered silver bushes that looked like bits of witches, over the old coast road, and you had to switch your headlights on if you drove to the store, even though it was still daytime, otherwise some tree’d step out and put an end to everything.
Yvonne told him about the walk out to the headland. She had cut the path herself, she said, with her own two hands and a machete, and nobody must ever know. It was their secret, other people would ruin it, you must never tell, she said.
‘Who would I tell?’ he asked her, and saw that smile on her face again, that smile that was like a drop of rain, and then she took his head in one hand and brought it to her breast and held it there.