‘Your father’s not very well, Nathan,’ she said. ‘He’s going to need help,’ and she peered at him over the rims of her dark glasses, ‘especially from you.’
‘I know.’ He looked out of the window. The sun was so bright that day. Like a razorblade it cut round the roadside diners, the billboards, the trees. Such sharp edges to everything. But thinking of Dad, Dad’s sadness and Dad’s wounds, that thought was like shadows. He saw the place where he’d grown up. Somehow there was shadow even in the yellow of the sunlight on the lawn. As if all colour, even the brightest, held darkness. Nothing was safe. Everything could turn, give way. Fifty miles north of Moon Beach they drove into a gas station and he couldn’t see anything for a moment. It was just being in the shadow after being in the sun. But that was what it felt like to be going home.
When they turned into the driveway, Dad was leaning against a pillar, almost shy. He ran into Dad’s arms. Smelt the wool of his cardigan, smelt the talcum powder he used. He remembered the skull and how it smelt of nothing, and he was happy then. Dad smelt of things. Dad was alive.
Dad spoke to Yvonne. ‘He looks well. Was he a good boy?’
‘He was very good.’
Nathan touched Dad’s arm. ‘Is Georgia back?’
‘She’ll be back tomorrow.’
That night Nathan spent an hour arranging his trophies on his bedroom windowsill. He gave the bird’s skull pride of place, the silver coin shining in one of the empty sockets like a brand-new eye. It was a kind of reminder: if his life was a book, then the skull marked the place that he’d got up to. He sat on his bed. Heard a car grind up the hill in low gear; a distant siren; the hum of someone talking downstairs. It was so quiet. He moved to the window. Tilted his head back on his neck. A soft crunching sound, like gravel shifting in water, like a finger pushed into sand. He undid the string on his pyjamas and, rolling over, pushed against the hard part of the mattress and then, as if by magic, it was morning.
She’ll be back tomorrow, Dad had said. And she was. One front tooth missing and her black hair twisted into two short plaits. It was a relief to see her, he felt he’d been holding his breath until she arrived. Since his dream about the jets, he didn’t feel he could trust anyone with her. He knew he couldn’t bear to lose her. That moment in the dream when the gap opened up between their hands, that was such panic. He could see their fingers separating in slow motion, like pieces of a space capsule. It was a relief and a reprieve. He’d learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be all over any time. Those movies where the hero runs against the constant red and orange blooms of fire, where all the bullets noisily fly wide, that just wasn’t true. Or true, but very difficult. Or just plain lucky. He’d be more patient with her in the future. Even walking home from school. Even on the dreaded hill.
In the past Dad had sometimes rested in his bedroom after lunch. Now he rested every day, often for two hours. If Nathan and Georgia stayed home they had to be quiet till he came downstairs again. It wasn’t easy. Silence didn’t come naturally to Georgia, it never had, and Dad slept so lightly he could hear the handle on the back door turn. Nathan invented a new game. He called it Red Indian Feet.
‘You’ve got to have Red Indian feet,’ he said, ‘like this,’ and he went into a sort of crouch, with his knees bent and his fingers spread in the air.
You had to talk in a whisper or, better still, in sign language, which they learned from a book about deaf people. You had to walk in a special way: your heel touched the ground first, then the hard outside edge of your foot, then the ball of your foot and, finally, your toes. You had to make devilish Red Indian faces. It was the simplest of games, yet it worked like a charm. Georgia crept through the house, shoulders lifted on a level with her ears, hands spread in front of her, eyes wide. She’d turn a corner and there he’d be, a hunchback with a twisted face, and because you weren’t allowed to cry out, because everything happened in silence and slow motion, they’d both double up, roll gasping on the carpet, and the only way to hold the laughter in was to run out to the garden and stuff your mouth with mud and grass and stones.
The jets were still flying. High altitude. Sometimes, as he lay on his back and stared into the sky, he saw a glint of silver high up in the blue. But heard nothing. That was what the word dead was. That glint of silver, that speed he could never guess. At night Georgia used to cry out and he’d wake in the next room and see her through the open door, flailing at the empty air like someone waving goodbye with both hands at once. He invented another game, to calm her. Windshield Wipers, he called it. You had to lie on your back and move your head from side to side on the pillow and make a soft droning sound. They did it together, in their separate beds. It wiped the bad dreams away, it brought the deep sleep back. After their mother went to the bottom of the sea, the days would pass in silence, the nights in fear. They walked through their childhood on Red Indian feet. Not a crack from a stick, not a creak from a stair. Not a sound.
On the way down in the car Aunt Yvonne had told Nathan that she’d just be staying a week or two, until they settled back in, but in the end she stayed till Christmas. Nathan would come home from school to find her painting in the garden, an overcoat thrown over her shoulders, lipstick smeared across her mouth, a cheroot burning in her left hand. ‘I’m making the whole neighbourhood reek,’ she shouted. ‘It’s your father’s fault. He won’t let me smoke in the house.’
Nathan spoke to Dad. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘It’s only like cupboards.’
But Dad shook his head and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room. ‘It gets in my pipes. It makes me cough.’
So Yvonne went on painting outdoors, often until dusk, sometimes even later, by candlelight. The fresh air seemed to inspire her. It was like her studio, she said, only more so. She was beginning to move out of her ball period, though she hadn’t made up a name for her new period yet. The balls had gone, it was true. They’d rolled right out of her pictures, and the lines that used to hold them in place were no longer straight, they now wriggled horizontally across the canvas.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nathan, who’d become the leading authority on her work. ‘It could be the ocean, I suppose.’
Yvonne turned to him, and her eyes narrowed in the candlelight and her lips stretched wide across her face. He knew the meaning of the look. It meant that things were coinciding in a way that pleased her. He’d seen the same smile earlier that summer when she discovered that sausages tasted good with marmalade.
The day she left, he helped her lash the new paintings to the roof of her station wagon. ‘I need to get back,’ she shouted. ‘My ocean period’s just beginning, and it’ll flourish up there, I can feel it.’
He glanced at the sky anxiously. ‘I hope it doesn’t rain.’
She squatted beside him, her back against the wheel, her face close to his. ‘Promise me something, Nat.’
‘What?’
‘Try not to be too serious, OK?’
He nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Come on,’ and she got to her feet and took his hand, ‘I’ve got something for you.’
She led him into the kitchen. There was a painting leaning against the wall. She turned it round. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s for you.’
It was a ball painting. A ball of marbled grey and white against a background of midnight-blue. It was one of the first paintings of hers that he’d looked at. It was a real moon.