Halflead Bay

IT WAS SHAPING UP TO BE A good summer for Jamie. Exams were over. School was out in a couple of weeks – the holidays stretching before him, wide and flat and blue. On top of that he was a hero. Sort of. At assembly that morning, the principal had paused after his name and the school had broken into spontaneous cheering and clapping. Jamie was onstage with the rest of the first eighteen. He could barely make out the faces beneath him – the lights turned off on account of the heat-but what he remembered were voices swelling out of the large, dim hall as though out from one of his daydreams. You couldn't buy that feeling. Still, his dad. Seated in the front row with the other guests of honor – unimpressed as ever. His smile as stiff as his suit.

"C’arn, Halfies!" the principal called out. He opened his arms. From the back of the hall students started stomping their feet.

Jamie had scored the winning goal in last week's semifinal. For the first time in five years, Halflead Bay High had a real crack at reclaiming the pennant. All his school years Jamie couldn't recall even having a conversation with Alan Leyland, the principal, but now Leyland turned around from the podium and half bowed to him. Everyone looked at the two of them. Then the cry was taken up – Halfies! C’arn, Halfies! – even teachers, parents, joining in – Jamie still and rapt in the hot roar until he arrived, again, at his dad's face. The uneasy grin. Of course. The stomping, chanting, Leyland's theatrical attitude: a faint film of mockery slid over it all. Jamie pushed it aside. His dad was wrong, he thought. He was wrong, and anything was possible.

***

ALISON FISCHER APPROACHED HIM AT RECESS.

"Leyland was licking your arse," she said.

He clutched up from the drinking fountain, mouth brimming water, swallowed. "Hi," he said. The word came out in a burp and left a wet trail down his chest.

"Hi yourself."

She stood with her head cocked to one side, hip to the other. Her school dress was stretched so tight it bit into her thigh. He wiped his mouth, looked around. Alison Fischer. It was a morning of firsts.

"Leyland couldn't be stuffed about footy."

"What?"

"He's thinking about enrollments," Jamie said. He tried to remember how his mum had put it. "He just wants the pennant to sucker new parents."

"Shove over," Alison ordered. She bent down to the nozzle and pursed her mouth in a glossy O. Her top button was undone – sprung open as though by heat – and he could see the inside line of her breasts. The stripe of sweat gleaming between them.

She said, "I've seen you down at the wharf." Her lips bright wet.

"I'm working there these holidays."

"Nah, the jetty, I mean. Fishing. With that surfie mate of yours."

"Cale?"

He looked around again. Most of the kids had stayed indoors for recess; others were lying in shade, as still as snakes, under the casuarinas. It was too hot for sport. Off in the paddocks a knot of boys poked at something on the ground. Alison switched hips and smiled patiently at him.

"That was your dad in there, right?"

"My dad?" He laughed weakly.

"With the tie."

This was how it happened: these girls, they did it for kicks, daring each other to go up to random blokes and act interested. He'd seen it before. A gaggle of them – Alison their leader – sitting apart from everyone else, watching on; they sealed off even their amusement, coughing it around their circle like a wet scrap. Tammie, Kate, Laura-all the rest of them, faces mocked up-they were bored with everything and totally up themselves and every boy at Halflead wanted them.

"He didn't even come to the game."

"My parents," she said, "after that game." Her smile went lopsided. "I reckon they'd adopt you."

He pretended to wave away a fly, looked around again. None of them were in sight. No Dory either. The sound of a piano started up from somewhere – each note hung-tin-fiat, percussive – then evaporated in the heat. So she wanted to talk about the game. No way they'd mess with him, not after last weekend. That assembly. She was alone. She was smiling at him as though she didn't belong to somebody else.,

"That'd make you my sister."

"We couldn't have that, right?"

Whoever was at the piano was a beginner, trying out a new scale: slow, stop-start. Jamie felt himself trapped between the notes, inside the heavy spaces where nothing moved. He realized his whole body was sweating. So she'd talk about his dad – himself sweating in that funereal suit, several sizes too small for him, cuffs up past his wrists – and he'd let her. Applause in his ears. That wry, skeptical smirk.

"So you reckon we can beat Maroomba?"

"I'm there heaps," he said. His voice came out rougher than he'd intended. "The jetty, I mean."

"What?"

"Don't be such a bloody snob. Say hi next time."

"And then what?"

"What are you after?"

"Alison!" a voice called from the school building. Everyone started moving back inside. The sound of the piano petered out, blaring moments later as passing hands bashed its keys.

She leaned toward him. That band of sweat between her breasts – he wanted to bring his mouth to it and lick it up. He wanted her to giggle, push him away, tell him it tickled. Her smile seemed different now.

"I can teach you how to squid," he said.

"Fuck," she said in a low voice, "you're a fast worker, aren't you?"

He didn't say anything.

"Who would've guessed it. Loose Ball Jamie – that's what they call you, right?"

His face flushed. Someone shouted her name again. The school grounds were almost empty now but he had the overwhelming feeling of being watched. Every window in the building blazed with reflected light.

He inclined his head in the classroom's general direction. "We should – "

"So is that what I am? A loose ball?" Her voice went weird, slightly off-pitched: " 'Just come down to the jetty and say hi?' "

The sweat on her collarbones, too, burned white in the sun. The back of her hip-cocked arm. That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at.

 He looked at her face. She was grinning crookedly, her mouth still wet.

***

DORY'S GIRL – SHE WAS DORY'S GIRL – but then who knew how serious that was? Jamie had liked her forever. And not just in the way everyone talked, in the change rooms, about chicks at school: Laura Brescia, who wore a G-string under her school uniform; Tammie K, who gave Nick a head job and then gave Jimmy one as well so he wouldn't dob about Nick to her big-smoke boyfriend. She was gagging but kept going, Jimmy crowed. He mimed it: gripping her long hair, kneading it into her scalp. No – Alison was more than that. She ran with that crowd but kept herself apart, reserving herself, everyone knew, for the thrall of the big city. Where her family – and their money – were from. Where everyone assumed she'd head once accepted into the university there next year. Until this morning, Jamie would never even have thought to lob his hopes that high.

Still. Dory Townsend. You'd have to be a lunatic.

***

THEY LIVED, THE FOUR OF THEM, on a spur overlooking the sea. Their house must have been one of the most elevated in town. His parents had bought it twenty years ago, back when HalfleadBay was little more than a petrol station and stopover to and from the city. According to Jamie's mum, that was how they'd first met: she was filling up the tank of her rented car when his dad's crew traipsed up from the wharf and into the pub. He was the one who walked without moving his hands. Hungry, worn out from her day in an adverse office – she worked, then, as a forensic accountant – she'd decided to go in too, for a counter meal. Two months later – her own car fully loaded, her career resolutely behind her – she returned to seek out the man who'd seemed, all that evening, to stand for a world of simpler details: a big sky, a sustaining sea, a chance to do work whose usefulness a child could understand.

At first they stayed with his dad's folks on the southern prom. A family of fishermen. Then, when they got married, they moved up the hill. Before the advent of all the developers and holiday-homers, the winemakers and tourists. Back then, Jamie's dad said, you could buy property for next to nothing: the town was dying, hemorrhaging people and industry first as the bay was overfished, then again when Maroomba poached its port traffic. Only the few hardy locals stayed behind. For the next fifteen years his parents had lived exactly how they'd dreamed, his dad skippering one of the town's few remaining trawlers, his mum working on her landscapes – seascapes, really – low, bleached blocks of color settling on a horizontal line. Sky and sea. It was why she'd picked this place. She needed to live in sight of the ocean as much as his dad needed to be on it.

Then, five years ago – the diagnosis. MS. The devastating run of relapses. Despite his wife's protests, Jamie's dad sold his stake in the trawler – started working in the home workshop, knocking out shop fittings, furniture. Jamie and Michael kept going to school. Everyone carried on – working through, around, the illness – as though every moment wasn't actually a dare. As though every word wasn't a word more, every act a further act of waiting.

***

MICHAEL WAS STANDING at the mouth of the driveway. His body bleared in the heat haze above the bitumen. Coming closer, Jamie felt a spark of affection toward him and almost called out his name.

"Dad wants us," Michael said first. He didn't look up from his Game Boy.

"I'm gonna head down the jetty." He hesitated, watching Michael's thumbs wagging on the gray console. "You can come if you like."

"They're fighting."

"So?"

"I just told you, they're lighting." His voice was too deep for a ten-year-old.

Jamie stopped himself laughing. "Mum okay?" He peered up the slope. The house was barely visible from the road, blotted out by foliage: ironwoods, kurrajongs, ghost gums bursting up through the brush. The garden was wild. As he started up the driveway, everything described itself as though to Alison: overhanging branches, knee-high grass, yellowed in places by warped, gutted objects – miscarriages of his mum's interest. Sprockets of leaves. Green everywhere plaited with brightly colored spikelets and bracts. There was his bedroom, the shedlike bungalow. Once his mum's studio, it still gave off an aftersmell of turpentine – faint as something leaked by a body in the dark and dried by morning. And there, a stone's throw away at the top of the driveway, was their double-storied house: a worn weatherboard that seemed choked by bushes and creepers, by the old white veranda that buckled all around it. What would she make of it?

He went round back and into the workshop. The lamps – they must have made it ten degrees hotter indoors. His dad was bent over a long, slightly curved piece of wood, one end wrapped in tape like a boxer's fist.

"I'm almost done," his dad said. His shirt clung wetly all the way down his back, right down to the apron string. "Figured it out. Front struts were too heavy, that's why it wouldn't rock." Using vise-grip pliers, he clamped down on the taped end with his left hand. With his right he started planing the length of the wood. The top half of the chair – the seat and back – lay tipped forward on the table before him.

"I'm going down the jetty," said Jamie.

"Storm's coming."

"Yeah?"

"Day or two. I need you to bring in your mum's stuff first."

"Okay."

"Make sure you look everywhere. Her stuff's everywhere."

"Okay."

"Hang on," his dad said. He put down his tools and turned around. His face and neck – except for two white trapezoids behind his goggles – were plastered in sawdust. It cracked around his mouth when he smiled. "You should've heard them cheering this morning," he said. "For your brother."

Jamie was confused, then heard Michael's voice: "What'd they say?" His brother stepped around him into the workshop.

Their father aimed a roughhouse swat at Michael's hair, then wiped his own brow with the back of his gloves, leaving a wavy orange smear. "Sounds like we missed a big game. But we'll make it next week." He nodded at Michael, the smile still tight and dry on his face. Was he taking the piss? "Biggest game of all, right?"

"We're gonna get slaughtered," said Michael.

"Shut up," said Jamie.

Michael shied away, out of his reach. "Everyone says so."

"Boys."

"Okay," said Jamie. "I'll move the stuff to the shed." He kicked some dust at Michael. "Come on."

"Hang on." His dad took off his gloves, then his safety goggles. Sawdust swirled in the lamplight. "I need you boys to do something for me," he said. "For your mum."

He went to the sink. Using the heel of his palm, he pushed open the tap, then washed his hands under the water violently, absorbedly, the old habit of a fisherman scrubbing off a day's stink. He threw water on his face.

"I got an offer on the house," he said.

Neither of them said anything.

"It wouldn't be till January. But they need our go-ahead by Friday." After a moment, he reached behind himself and untied his apron, looped it over his head. "We talked about this." He glanced at Jamie, "I know you got that dock job these holidays. Shouldn't clash, though."

Michael said, "I don't wanna move."

Jamie corked him just beneath the shoulder. He felt his knuckle meet bone: that one would bruise.

"Don't," said Michael.

"Don't be such a little dickhead then."

Their dad frowned at them, blinking water, rust-colored, out of his eyes. Michael massaged his arm and muttered, "That was a good one."

"But Mum wants to stay here," said Jamie. He was thinking about Alison.

"Last month," said his dad, "when me and your mum went to Maroomba." He inhaled noisily, the sawdust jiggling on air currents in front of his face. "We talked about this," he repeated. "Everything's in Maroomba. All the facilities. Your mum – right now – she needs to be there."

"What's that mean, 'right now'?"

His dad sighed. "Come on, Jamie."

Earlier that year he'd seen his mum naked, slouched back, knees spread, in the bathtub and his dad kneeling over her, holding a sponge. The water was foamless and he saw everything – most of her body the color of the water except for two large dark nipples, her pubic hair. Dark spots wrinkling under the liquid skin. That time, her eyes were closed.

"I need you boys to talk to her. Tell her you don't mind. Moving, I mean."

"She doesn't want to, but."

"Not if you boys keep acting like this. Like you don't want to either." He ran his hands through his hair, orange sweating down his forehead.

Her body a ghostly rippling film of her body. Ever since the diagnosis she'd been separating, bit by bit, from her own body. His dad hadn't even fully turned around from the tub. Come on, Jamie – he'd said that then too.

"What'd the doctors say?" Jamie asked at last. He remembered, before they'd left for Maroomba a few weeks ago, his mum's familiar protests – she was okay, she didn't need to go, not this time.

"Jesus – what's so bloody complicated about it, son?" His dad was blinking hard now, as if to bully his eyes into some new clarity. "You can't just do what I tell you?"

Michael, still caressing his arm, didn't look up.

His dad went to the sink and washed his face again. A stool beside him was stacked high with creased linen and he used a corner of the top sheet to towel off. His face in his hands, he said, "You know what she's like.

 "Sorry," said Jamie. His voice sounded too loud. "I'll talk to her."

After a few moments, his dad nodded. "So you going down the jetty."

"Probably the flats first."

"Sandworm?"

"Yeah."

"We need to let the buyers know by Friday."

"I know."

By then – Friday – the sheets would be washed, hanging from lines that zigzagged across the backyard. They'd fill with light and puff themselves up like curtains. She'd be upstairs, on her reclining couch, looking the other way. Out toward the water. "You know what she's like," his dad repeated.

***

HE'D FALLEN OFF THE JETTY ONCE. He was with a group of mates, chucking rocks at the moored boats. Longest throw won, loser was a poofter. His turn: one moment he was doing a run-up and the next he was dead – what death must be like – a thrown switch, a fizzling of the senses, the sound sucked out of things. Your eyes a dark cold green hurt.

He'd come into his mum's studio and offered her his head.

"This is what I mean," she said in her clear voice. His dad was by the window, leaning heavily with crossed arms over the top of an easel, a sandwich in one hand. Underneath him a canvas was set and stretched and primed – this was years ago, when she would work on several paintings at the same time.

"I better go, Maggie, I'm late. What happened?"

Jamie looked up. His dad's forearms seemed as dense as the wood they rested on, scored with scabs, sun lesions. He stuffed the last of the sandwich into his mouth and came closer.

"You okay, son?"

His mum poured Dettol on the wound, rubbed it in with her sleeve. The thin, toxic fluid leaked down Jamie's face and into his mouth. In his spit, still, the gagging memory of seawater.

His mum slapped her palm against his dad's cheek as he was leaving, pulled it in for a kiss. "Of course he is," she said.

At first she kept it to herself. There may have been minor episodes but Jamie and Michael were both at school, their dad out on the trawler all day. She worked alone. Her city life a lifting impression. By that time she was beginning to make a name for herself painting with big steel spatulas, smearing and scraping her compositions over broad canvases. She mixed her own paint. The house and studio and yard were cluttered with the junk of her labor: glass panes and book dust jackets used as makeshift palettes, improvised seashell slabs as mullers. Every window she passed was thrown open – for ages afterward she'd come across sketches and enigmatic notes to herself crammed between books, weighted down under tins of pigment powder, turps and binding oils. Even before the diagnosis, her work – and it was heavy work-seemed driven by mania.

As if she knew. As if before it all, she already understood how it would happen: one moment you were bunching up the full strength of your body for a throw and the next you lost your purchase on everything, you'd slipped on squid guts and woke up drowning in paint, your body a hurt, disobedient in paper-thin sleeves. After all, what was to say it shouldn't hurt? – to feel, or move; to push a hand or eye across a plane? If your body endured for no real reason, what was to say you should feel anything at all?

***

SEAGULLS, HUNDREDS OF THEM, wheeled and skirled overhead. Jamie lay down on his back and followed the light-dark specks against the sunlight, tuning out Cale's voice.

"Easy, big man," Cale was saying. "Easy." He was talking to Michael, his speech already slurry with pot.

"The backpackers too."

"Nah, big man, they're not the enemy," said Cale. "Them and the blackfellas, they just mind their own business. They're all right by me. It's the holiday-homers, those rich wankers. And the local bogans."

"Yeah."

"And the Asians, hey," Cale added.

The line tweaked under Jamie's fingertips. He sat upright, fumbled with the rod, but already he could tell the tension had slipped out of it. Seaweed, probably. He sucked down a couple of deep breaths to ease the head rush.

"Some of them are okay," mumbled Michael. "At school." He was playing with a scuffed cricket ball, sending it into elaborate spins from right hand to left.

Cale turned his attention to Jamie. "Monster bite, hey?"

Jamie couldn't remember how they'd become mates. Cale had blown into town a couple of terms ago and started hanging around the beach. Just another shaggy-blond layabout in his twenties. One day he ran up the jetty and helped Jamie gaff a big banjo. They clubbed it dead and Cale held it up under the gills, both of them gape-mouthed, then introduced himself: he was from out west, a surf-chaser: he'd surfed off the coast of Tassie, in Hawaii, around the Horn in South Africa. That leather topaz-studded necklace had been souvenired from his girlfriend's body, wiped out in Europe. He'd glazed his eyes, letting that sink in. Sure, he'd teach Jamie to longboard.

"You're stoned."

Cale nodded, almost shyly, then his face sank into its usual easy, thick-lipped smile. "Those Israelis, man. Always farkin stashed." He teetered up in his red boardshorts and reeled in his line. After prolonged examination, he set a fresh worm on the hook.

"You seen them?" he asked Jamie. "Out near the heads?"

"The Israelis?"

"The Asians, you dimwit."

"What about them?"

"The reef. That's where they poach now."

He had, of course, from a distance. Everyone had. Sliding in and out of rubber dinghies, slick-faced – indistinct even about town where they banded together, laughing in low lilts. An impudence in their laughter. And why not? thought Jamie. They pretty much ran the fishing racket in town now – they'd bought out the fish plant when it was going belly-up years ago. He vaguely recalled being dragged to those rowdy town meetings- all the tirades against those money-grubbing Chinks – his parents arguing on the way home.

"Makes sense," Jamie said. "Hundred bucks a kilo."

Michael looked up. "A hundred bucks?"

"That's right, big man. Flog it off to posh restaurants, don't they? And those restaurants, they flog it off to posh wankers – for ten times that much."

"Ten times easy," said Jamie.

"Farkin abalone." Cale grinned. "A month's pay, hey?"

Jamie's parents, finally, had agreed to his getting a job over the break. He'd have cash of his own. He'd be able to buy things. He was starting at the fish plant, where Cale worked as well, but secretly he hoped to get a spot on a commercial boat before too long. He was his dad's son, after all.

Michael started whistling, then stopped. Jamie lay down on his back. The wooden planks seared his skin for a second, then eased their heat throughout his body. He closed his eyes: a dark orange glow, shadowed fitfully by gulls. He felt, in his bones, the slap of Michael's cricket ball against his palm. Muzzy with warmth, he allowed himself to relive that morning's assembly: the gale of applause ... Alison ... but each time, at that point, his mind looped back around. He found himself thinking about Dory. That huge, mean body-the man's face on top of it. He'd been held back a couple of years. He'd been full forward for Halflead four years running. From the sudden silence, the irregular scuffing of feet, Jamie could tell Michael had tossed the ball high into the air. He pictured it arcing slowly up, out – over the water. The dangerous thought came; he brushed around it, then he let it in: What if they – Alison and Dory – weren't together anymore? When was the last time, anyway, anyone had seen them together? Michael caught the ball. Then, against the planking . . . thump . . . thump . . . each bounce a mottling shape in the sunglow.

"Cut it out," Jamie murmured.

The bouncing stopped. Cale wet his lips loudly. Water lapped against the pylons.

"So," said Cale. "What the fark." Jamie remained quietly on his back.

"Look who's in a good mood lately."

He said it accusingly. "Alison Fischer. She got anything to do with it?"

"What?"

"Yeah yeah." His mouth made more slopping noises. "What a shifty cunt. You, I mean."

Jamie sat up, opened his eyes-the world bursting yellow and vivid-and gestured his head toward Michael. His brother's shape crouched over the tackle box.

"Sorry." Cale lowered his voice. "He's always around so I forget."

"What'd you hear?"

"Nothing." He smirked. "She's a bit alright-that's all." He licked two fingers and held them curled upward, then glanced dramatically at Michael. "Remember Stevo . . . Stefan? That Danish show pony? He reckons he got a finger in – you know. After that school play in April."

Jamie rolled over onto his stomach. He hadn't expected word to come round so quickly. Who was where, with who, how far they got – a town like this spread gossip like the clap. Cale, despite being older, hung out a lot with high-schoolers – couldn't hack being out of the loop. He was looser-lipped than any girl. But it'd only been a couple of hours since Alison had come up to Jamie . . . and – he kept reminding himself – nothing had happened.

Cale paused. " 'Course Dory never found out... that time."

"Shut up."

Of course what Cale meant was: Remember those other times? Jamie remembered. The whole town remembered. There was an element of community ritual in remembering all the things Dory was known or suspected to have done. The worst, of course, being the to – do with the Chinese poacher. Never cleared up. He was only twenty but he stood in as the town's hard man. And Alison – the girl with the silver spoon, the girl with the reputation – was known to give him plenty of reason for it.

"So?" said Cale.

"You don't know shit." Cale nodded in satisfaction. "Ahh," he said. "If only you truly believed that."

Jamie laid one eye up against a crack between two timbers, felt the old, beaten wood on his face. If he could choose a place – if it could be all his – this was it. Strange how trying to think and trying to forget amounted to the same thing here. Cale was still talking about Alison. The sound of his voice familiar, pointless, in keeping with the complaint of the mooring lines, the metal creakings from the wharf's gantry crane across the bay. He was talking about Alison and Jamie wasn't listening but then something dislodged itself from the craw of his memory and the incident was undammed, clear and natural as breathing: Last summer – sun-white day – Jamie crabbing on the flats when word was sprinted down from town: Fight. The thrill in his blood as he raced up the main street. Kids streaking in from every direction, breathlessly swapping accounts on the way: Dory – him and some bloke – Vance Wilhelm, that was his name – who'd been spending time with Alison. Sirens started up to the south just as Jamie veered into the main carpark. Through the mayhem he took in the whole scene at once: a black jeep, its windshield smashed, keeled back at an odd uphill slope; people limping off, nursing arms; the flash of a blood-slagged face. He was about to scatter as well when he saw, on a grassy strip, two bodies asprawl one another – elbows bloody, pebbled with glass – one finally shunting its knee into the other's back, wrenching the head up into an armlock. The face looked full at Jamie. It was to Lester – Dory's best friend. Jamie, it gasped, get him off me.

"Hey, Romeo," Cale called out.

Always he returned to this. Get him off me. And – weak in the legs – he'd frozen. A heavy shape barreled across his vision and lifted the body clean off Lester and drove it hard into the ground. Trapped beneath Dory's weight, it gave out an odd creaking sound. Jamie circled around for a last look, saw Dory holding down the head, then saw the stranger's face – it could only have been Wilhelm – his mouth agape and crammed over a steel sprinkler head, cheeks streaming and shuddering. His face a picture of drowning. Lester staggered to his feet and glared at Jamie, then Dory looked up at him too. Lester made to speak but Dory stopped him. His arms still bearing down on Wilhelm's head, he'd said: You're rubbish.

But that was a year ago. Now, things were different. He was a hero now.

"Hey, Jamie, wake up." Cale's voice sounded as though it had risen a meter.

"Hmm."

"Your girlfriend's here."

"Piss off."

Bit by bit his thoughts tailed off; he began to feel the knurled wood jutting into his hip bone. His back roasting. He gazed down. Small schools of baitfish inflected the clear water. Old squidding lines and sinkers caught on the crossplanks, bearded with kelp.

"Nothing you wanna say to her?"

Jamie reached behind himself and pulled down his board-shorts, flapping one bum cheek open and shut: "Piss ... off."

Michael sniggered.

"Piss... off... Cale... y."

"Any luck?"

A girl's voice – he spun over, shielded his eyes. It couldn't be. She was standing at the head of the jetty with Tammie, both decked out in their netball gear. Alison still wearing a bib that spelled "GA" – goal attack – in large lettering. Cale, next to him, cracking up.

"Nope," reported Michael. "No fish."

"What'd I say?" said Cale.

"You're a fuckwit," said Jamie.

"I'm a fuckwit? Whose knickers are down?"

Even Michael couldn't conceal his smile. Tammie laughed, a squeezed sound like the yapping of a small dog. She was playing with her camisole straps, studying him.

"You told me to come," said Alison.

He got up, face burning. He felt suddenly naked in front of them. Even though everyone, all summer, went around in just their boardies, he felt naked. "We're actually heading back," he said, gesturing to Michael. Why had he said that?

"Cool," said Alison. "C’arn, then." She turned to address Cale: "There's a party on Thursday. Slogger Tom's place-you should come too." "What's in it for me?" For a second Jamie was thrilled by his friend's boldness, then he felt strangely uneasy.

"You're Cale, right?" "Yep," he said, grinning broadly.

But Alison didn't fall for his act. Her voice turned clerical, polished: "This is Tammie." Tammie smiled dutifully. She was hot alright, thought Jamie, but when she smiled there was something puddled about her face.

Cale said, "So this is Tammie."

The whole way, Michael walked in front of them, lugging the gear in one hand and his cricket ball in the other. He kept his head bowed and never looked back. By some instinct he led them on a roundabout route – avoiding the foreshore, the main street with its drab, dusty stretch of shops – and cut across the edge of the tidal flats. The afternoon was cooling fast.

Still plenty of people around.

When they reached the asphalt Alison touched her hand to the back of Jamie's elbow. She crossed the road and started hiking up the scrubby slope. Jamie watched his brother trudge the other way, up the road to their house. Then, without a word, he followed Alison. The ground beneath them skiddy with shell grit. As they climbed, the sun absorbed itself into her body: calves, hamstrings, the belt of skin above her skirt, the backs of her golden arms. The glaring nylon letters on her bib. She scuffed through the saltbush and mulga, kicking up little plumes of dust, and he stepped hypnotically into them.

They reached the clearing. At the center of the bluff – on its highest table of land – was the old stone courthouse, long ago ruined. It was arched with white, oxidized columns, reared against a low sky. The seaward wall had been torn away by the weather, creating the impression of a great stage overlooking the ocean.

Alison led him around the jagged masonry and leaned against a wall, bouncing on her heels.

"What's the saddest place you know," she said, "this is mine."

He didn't speak. Baffled by her question. Still catching up to the fact of being there, alone, with her. Then he said, "Why?"

Before her sickness, his mum had often dragged him here in the dark of first morning. She liked painting the sea before sunlight came up and flattened the water. He 'd cart her stuff along the ridge, trying to stay awake, and she'd talk, sometimes to him, sometimes to herself. She'd always been fascinated by the courthouse's history. How, more than a hundred years ago, the town council, flush with fishing money, had commissioned a series of public buildings – of which the courthouse was to be the first – and how, a week after the naming ceremony, a storm had rolled in and ripped it apart. According to the legend, the chief benefactor, after whom the courthouse was named, had packed his wife and five children into a skiff the very next day and rowed them out to sea – never to be seen again. The story appealed equally to his mum's senses of the romantic and the absurd. The town had abandoned its building program, closed off all the access roads. Too many bad omens all round. As she laughed to herself he'd see the courthouse ahead, floaty and blue-glowing-hinting at a past that seemed, at that hour, still very much present.

"Have you ever ..." Alison began. "Nah, that's stupid."

Below them sunlight lay over the whole bay. The sea breathed against the lip of the pale shore. Back from the water's edge, flats and dunes encircling it, the town glinted like a single eye.

"What?"

"Nah."

He looked around, listened. So exposed up here. The wind loud and brackish. He made out somewhere nearby the clickety sound of skateboarders, the high-pitched drone of jet skis out on the water. Human voices skimming like mozzies across its surface.

He turned away from the sea and pointed out his family's house on the adjoining spur, along the winding saddle.

"That's you guys?" she asked.

"My mum used to come here to paint."

She let it pass. She said, "Your brother looks like you," then, noting his lack of enthusiasm, went on, "You'd think you'd get an awesome view from up here – of all places, right?" It came out in a single quick exhalation: "But you look and you look and everything's just shithouse." Skating her hands down the side of her pleated skirt: "Your friend, Cale, is he always high?"

"He's a good bloke."

She didn't seem happy with that.

"His girlfriend died in Europe," he added lamely.

"Europe?" Her voice twisted up.

"Yeah, he's been everywhere. Hawaii and Africa and everywhere, before he came here."

She chortled. "Why would anyone come here?"

Now she'd stopped bouncing, now she was brushing her hands together. Both of her hands were within reach.

"I mean," she said, "there's not even fish here anymore."

With other girls, it was just the next thing – hands, neck, pash, fingers under their tops. But with her, for him, nothing was next.

"C’arn, then," she said softly.

She eased forward and leaned her body into his bare chest. Her smile lopsided, bigger and bigger. Then her mouth sprang open and then they were kissing. He was kissing Alison Fischer. There was a mineral tizz on her tongue, the smell of wet rock. He lifted his hand to her hair.

"Ugh." She stepped back, soles crunching on broken glass. "It stinks in here." She skipped over to the opposite wall, standing beneath a deep, high crevice that might once have held a window. The wind even choppier in that corner.

"Animals come here for shelter," he said. Who'd told him that? The musty smell seemed familiar.

"Well, they stink."

She kissed him again. He felt the start of a hard-on, pressing through the mesh lining of his shorts – then quickly wilting. Maybe thinking about it. Maybe thinking about Dory. An awful lag behind this happening and the idea of it. She lifted her bib and wiped her mouth.

"Okay, then," she said.

"Sorry."

Wordlessly they looked out of the broken wall over the bay. The sun full in the sky. There was a blue kite on the wind and far below, way out on the ocean coast, the black half bodies of surfers, ducking into early-breaking waves or standing, slewing across the tall steep faces until they dropped into white slag. Every ride ended in failure. He'd never noticed this before.

"I'm not scared, you know."

He didn't say anything.

"Me and him aren't really together."

"Who, Dory?" He tried to sound nonchalant.

"Everyone just assumes." She smiled into the open, blustery air. "So how well do you know him? Are you guys, like, friends?"

"Dory?"

"No, the fucking postman. Yes, Dory."

"I mean," Jamie said carefully, "we play on the same team. He's a good ruck." He paused for a moment. "A good bloke."

"A good bloke," she mimicked.

He fell silent. The water of the bay seemed, if possible, to bulge. In that light it seemed as though the courthouse was tilting, about to slide into the ocean.

"See that?"

The kite hung in the high wind, still and full. Then a slip of color again. Way out a ship coughed up black smoke ever more feebly. He realized she was looking off to one side – past the dunes, past the old rock pier, even – to the low, wet lines of swale behind. Deep where it was dark, shallow where pooled with light.

"That's where he lives," she said. "With his uncle."

"Good fishing out there." Immediately, the rock pier imagined itself into his mind. Black and slick, lathered with surf. He'd managed, for so long, not to think about it.

"Their place, though – you wouldn't believe."

But it, too, was clear to him: one of those fibro, tin-roofed affairs, a single naked bulb shearing light through planked windows. He'd seen it from the boat. Stray dogs ganging outside.

"How much cash you got on you?" she asked abruptly.

"Cash?"

She stepped out from the stone recess and a breeze snapped up a fistful of her hair, suspended it above her head.

"We could go to the bottle shop," she said.

He thought frantically for a moment. "What about ID? Do you have – I know, we could get Cale's ID."

But she was already somewhere else in her head. It struck him she was bored with him. Without warning she came over and leaned into his shoulder and, slowly collapsing her knees, traced her upper lip – inch by inch – all the way down to the tips of his fingers. He stood there inside the stone walls, suffused in sun, shock-still, the hot tension through his body almost painful. What happened now?

"It's you!" She crinkled up her nose. "You! You stink of fish."

His cheeks flared red. "Shit," he said. He brought up his fingers and smelled them. Bait. "You're right. Shit, sorry."

She hopped back with a childlike little scowl. He struggled for an excuse and she watched him, letting him struggle, saying nothing. Finally he slinked off. Now she was saying something but he was too busy with shame to take in her final words. The easterly gusted up. Then, at the edge of the granite ruin, he forced himself to turn around.

"There's tonight," she called into the wind's low howl.

"What?" He cupped his ear.

"Thursday night," she was saying. "See you Thursday night."

***

HIS MUM WAS dying and seemed torn between ignoring it and rushing toward it. She wanted to meet it in the middle of many arrangements. After the first relapse – the scans, the taps, the tests – she sank back into her work, her only concession to the diagnosis being a switch from spatulas to paintbrushes. She spent even more time outdoors, painting, gardening. She was always a physical gardener: sporting Blundstone boots and a singlet, gloves up to her elbows and her ginger hair scrunched back with anything at hand – a rubber band, a torn strip from a plastic bag. She was indefatigable. If asked, she'd say it was just like pins and needles. What was the phrase people used? – she refused to become her illness. She beat it back.

Then, two years ago, the second major relapse. She claimed, afterward, that she didn't remember any of it. But she'd seen him. They'd seen each other. She'd lain on her side, the easel also knocked on its side. It was as though she'd been dancing with it and they'd tripped over together. Her face was compressed against the floor, strands of hair streaked diagonally across it, captured as though in a thrash of passion. Everywhere there was bright cerulean blue paint, the entire floor slick and sky-colored, a centimeter deep, leaching into her arms, her scissored legs, her smock and boots. Her palms were vivid orange.

"Mum," he said.

But she couldn't speak. The blue paint coated her lips – through it he saw the tip of her blue tongue – it matted her hair, enclosed her right eye like a face mask. That eye was open. It didn't blink. You could see. It was nightmare in her head.

"Mum?"

Never – it'd never been this serious. Once before, he'd come upon her slumped on the kitchen lino. Just dizzy, she'd said. She'd made him promise not to tell Dad. He knelt, now, watching her. He put out his hand but it seemed incapable of touching anything. Her eye roved, jerkily, like a puppet's, around the room – to him – away – to him again. She was frozen in the middle of her mangled sidestroke, the paint frothing in front of her mouth. Slowly it hardened into a lighter blue paste. He felt as if he were breathing it as well. Then the footsteps, the bottomed-out growl of his dad's voice – what happened, how long, how long – how long – the dark form crouching down, standing up, crouching down again and cutting off her hair, the crunch of the scissors, then stripping her up, limb by limb, out of the dry blue muck. A long pause.

Come on, Jamie.

Once, he'd seen her in front of the bathroom mirror. She was plunging a bone-gray comb again and again into her hair, as though punishing it. Arms trembling. She caught his eye in the mirror and smiled. Here, she said, holding it out. Help me.

***

He washed the sand off his feet at the outside tap. When he came into the living room she shifted in her reclining couch, in his direction. She looked shrunken, he thought, diluted somehow. The red of her hair slowly ashing.

"I could see you," she said, "at the courthouse." A mischief in her voice, even through its slow woolliness.

He kissed her on the right side of her face. Then he stuck his head out her window, dodging the potted plants and flowers and trailing philodendrons. She wasn't lying. There was a clear view the whole way.

"It was nothing," he said.

"Didn't look like nothing."

"I was fishing with Michael."

"Yes, I know. He came home an hour ago."

An electric saw revved up from the workshop downstairs. Despite himself, Jamie started smiling. Silly with the memory of kissing Alison. He recalled his dad's instructions.

"How're you feeling, Mum?"

"You're avoiding the question. Do you like this girl?"

"Yeah."

No other answer occurred to him. Her illness had had the effect of completely opening up their conversation.

"And she likes you?"

He hesitated. Summoning back the smell of her, the smell on your hands after scaling a wet chain-link fence. He smiled again. Then he remembered her reaction when she smelled his fingers. "I dunno," he said. "It's more complicated than that."

"One more reason for us to stay here." The right side of her mouth edged upward; automatically he gauged the bearings behind the effort. Too much. During the worst spells, her face lost most of its sensation. "Yes," she went on, "I know why you're here."

"Dad said to tell you – "

"Tell your father," she said, "he can stop having his secret meetings." Her breath was coming out serrated now, in little huffs, and he realized she was trying to clear her throat. "Tell him to tell those bankers, and real estate agents, and all those others ..."

She stopped. He wasn't used to seeing her this bad. Speechless – almost entirely immobilized. Not so long ago she'd have never run short of a few choice words for real estate agents. The scum of the earth, she called them. Nor would she have been able to get out of her chair – any chair – fast enough. But she'd already been a couple of weeks in this one. She'd missed his semifinal in this one.

He shook his head. "I'm with Dad," he said. "We'll go to Maroomba and come back when you're better."

"Live with the enemy? You kids."

"They need to know by Friday, Mum."

She attempted another half smile. "Look at you now," she said. She scrutinized him for some time, then turned back toward her window. She said, "It's more complicated than that."

He left the house. Partway down the drive he saw Michael sitting on the bungalow steps. Jamie went over to him and yanked out his earphones.

"Hang out in your own room, will you?"

Michael shrugged.

"Go tell Mum you wanna move to Maroomba."

"What? I don't, but."

"I don't care. Go tell her."

Michael slouched up from the concrete steps, sheaves of hair – he cut it himself, using kitchen scissors – hanging over his brow. He was too skinny and his arms too long and every part of him that bent was knobbly. No way they looked alike.

"I hate Maroomba, they're all posh there."

"Would you rather move to the city?"

Michael jerked his head up. "Do you think she '11 get better if we go?" At one point his voice dipped into a lower register and sounded like their dad's. The earphones still buzzing around his neck.

Jamie tsked impatiently. "Why else would we go?"

"Cale said he'd teach me how to surf."

"Cale won't teach you shit." He instantly felt bad for saying this. "Look, it's not till next year anyway."

Michael put his hands in his pocket.

"Go," said Jamie.

Michael pursed his lips as though readying to whistle.

"Go!"

"Lester saw us. Before – with Alison." He glanced up ques-tioningly. "Just past the service station."

For a moment Jamie felt booted outside himself. His voice spacey in his skull. He heard himself say, "So what? Stop following me around."

Michael shrugged again. "I saw him, and he saw us," he said.

Jamie came at him and punched and pushed him against the doorjamb. "You better shut up."

"Sorry," Michael cried out.

"I mean it."

"I'm sorry I'm sorry."

At teatime, Michael ate by himself in the kitchen. Sulking in front of some TV show. Jamie joined his parents, who'd already started, in the living room. As soon as he walked in he could tell they'd been fighting. His mum sat facing the window under her striped blanket and his dad was angled opposite, feeding her. They ate in silence. A light breeze rumpled the curtains. Jamie watched the dull green of eucalyptus leaves bleed into the darkening sky. His mum started coughing.

"Are you okay?" his dad asked.

Once she'd fetched her breath she said, "Jamie."

"Yeah, Mum."

"You know what no one ever asks me?"

His dad stared straight ahead, over her shoulder. "Ask her," he said.

"What, Mum?"

"Everyone always asks me if I'm okay. No one ever asks me if I'm happy."

The sound from the kitchen TV faded, then amped into the voice-over for a commercial. His dad put down his plate and left the room.

She'd already made her instructions clear. She wasn't timid about these things. She didn't want a machine breathing for her, nor her body grafted into a computer. She didn't want any hoo-hah. She wanted to be cremated and then planted in the soil under the waratahs. Part of this was slyness – they'd be more likely to keep the property. She wanted this, and she wanted his dad to buy back his stake in the trawler. Jamie remembered their conversations, after her second relapse, about moving. Money. Dim voices and lamplit silences. One night he was in the driveway and glimpsed a slice of his dad's face through their bedroom window. It was hard and tear-smudged and sneering with hurt. Then he saw a dark shape flit in front of the window in the next room. Michael. Both of them, sons, watching their parents. One handful, his mum said, she wanted brought to the bluff, where she watched the storms come in, and she wanted it scattered – she said the word cheekily – into the ocean.

She was in fine form when his dad came back in. Teasing Jamie about incredible views at the courthouse.

"Jamie was up there today," she explained.

"Got some free time, has he?"

"That reminds me," she said. "Your holiday job, Jamie – when you get a chance, go talk to John Thompson at the wharf. Word is he's got a spot on his boat."

His dad made as though to say something, but didn't.

"Tell him I sent you. He might even start you straightaway."

"The final's coming up," his dad broke in. "Can't it wait till after then?"

"Fishing and football." She let out a dramatic sigh. "That's all this town cares about."

The room lightened, loudened, as Michael barged in from the kitchen. His expression anxious. "Thirty percent chance of thunderstorms tomorrow," he said. "But higher on the weekend."

His mum looked at him intently. She said, "Thank you, sweetie."

"I'll have your rocking chair done by then," said his dad.

It was dusk outside now – the window a square of black, brooding colors. Waratah shrubs lifting their scent of honey into the room. Hundreds of kilometers away the ocean streamed into itself, careening its mass over and over, sucking even the clouds down.

"Shall we open a bottle?" his mum asked.

"You sure, Maggie?"

"Let's open a bottle."

***

THE NIGHT WAS WINDY. Clouds hung low and fat, lit up by the massive bonfire in the backyard. People were feeding it anything they could toss a couple of meters: furniture, textbooks, beer cans and bottles, even their clothes. Farther back from the fire the darkness was crumbed with cigarette ends, glowing, fading, each time seemingly in different spots. People might have been dancing out there.

Cale quickly ditched him for some surfie mates-the bloke could trace a sniff of mull through a dust storm.

"Hey, Jamie!"

Someone lifted a bottle to his mouth. Jamie hurled his head to the sky.

"Jesus," he said, coughing, laughing as a hand thumped his back. He spun around and saw Billy Johnson – left half-orward flank, an ordinary player, but one of those blokes everyone got along with.

"Hell's that?"

"Bourbon, I think," Billy said, teeth gleaming widely.

"Fuck you," said Jamie.

"Stole it from my sister's room." He held it out like a handshake. "Have some more."

Jamie took another swig. The burning rushed through him, mixing with the fumes from the fire. He felt deeply awake.

"Thanks," he said. "Thanks a lot, man."

"Ready for the game next week?" He tossed the bottle back to Billy. "What game?" he jeered.

By midnight, the party was peaking. She hadn't arrived. He sat in a tight pack with the other Halflead High kids, drowsing in their cheap deodorant. Norsca and Brut and Old Spice. They had the next day off – curriculum day – and everyone was going balls out. They drank. They drank and talked about the upcoming game. Jamie watched the bonfire, gusts of wind playing havoc with the smoke, people gliding in and out of its thrown light.

Cale rocked up, off his face. He started making toasts-to footy, to cunt, to mates, to getting fucked with your mates – each word swerving in the smoke-dark wind. At one stage he threw himself to the ground. Everyone watched as he did a strange, simian dance across the lawn.

Jamie drank. The wind moved through the tall purple grass, sifting the light of an arriving car's high beam. Like the wind was made of light. Next to him one of those UV bug lights thrumming purple above a pit of carnage: skeletal legs, carapaces, wings.

Cale held something up: "Got it!"

Then he saw her. Trying to light a cigarette, her face in the brief flare of a struck match. White skirt and a boob tube. She looked somehow smaller-figured in the night. On an instinct she turned and met his gaze and then, bold as you like, started walking up to the group. Tammie and Laura close in behind her.

He looked away.

"Got a light?"

But she was talking to Cale, the twenty-dollar bill flapping between his fingers. Billy rifling through his pockets, striking, restriking the wheel of his lighter, hands cupped, body swiveling to shield the flame.

The girls waited and then walked off, giggling.

Cale whispered to him: "So?"

But he couldn't speak. His head teemed. It was late and he sensed all around, in the shadows, mouths straining against each other as though to breach, to break through to a clear feeling.

"So what?"

"So you gonna score with her?"

"What, are you stupid too?"

She was waiting out front. Cross-legged on the trunk of an old Holden, cornered by a chaotic blockade of cars and bikes. Someone next to her in the darkness. As he came closer, he saw that it was Tammie: she flicked down a cigarette, whispered something into Alison's ear before leaving. Under the cloud-strained moonlight Alison's skirt was hitched up past her gleaming thighs. Her two legs interlocked.

"You look different," she said.

"You too," he replied. He wasn't lying. Closer up, the light wasn't kind to her face. Makeup moved like a tight gauzy screen on top of her skin.

"Most of these things," she said, "no one even talks to me."

He nodded. Laughter spilled from the backyard. Then the smash of a breaking bottle. He spun around.

"Dory's not here tonight," she said.

He deflected it, the cold edge held up to his warm drunken cocoon. From the house came the rising scud of voices. Then the wind shifted. They were alone again.

"He hates these high school parties."

He said, deliberately, "You can talk to me."

She looked at him without smiling. "You're funny," she said. "But seriously, all me and him do is talk. How his uncle's gonna get an abalone license one day. How he's got friends in Fisheries. Remember that time with the Chinese poacher?"

The chill came back, darting through every fissure in him. He remembered. The young woman's body they found in the swale – within shouting distance of where Dory lived with his uncle. Its blank, salt-soused face. The cops at school, pulling Dory, and later Lester, out of the classroom. After they were released from questioning, Lester had pantomimed the whole thing in the school paddocks. Jamie was too far away to hear anything, but saw the circle of boys reshape itself as Lester knelt down-he was Dory now, straddling the woman's body. Punching the ground like a piston. Dory himself standing aside, watching on without a word.

Alison soured her face. "His uncle – he's a nasty piece of work." She quickly looked behind her, then swung back around. His heart pounding his skull as she considered him. He took a long breath.

"So are you and Dory together or not?"

She bounced her shoulders. "Honestly, sometimes I wonder if he's a poofter. Seriously, Tammie cracked on to him once, the slut. And, you know."

"Yeah?"

"You know. He didn't do anything."

"He didn't do anything."

"I even asked, but you know him. Won't talk to save his life."

Her conversation was like surface chop, trapped in the same current, backing over itself. It made him seasick. He realized she hadn't answered his question. He was about to ask again when he heard her name being called out. The front door of the house banged open and a figure surfaced from the red rectangular glow, coming straight at them, trailing a small wake of commotion.

"Fuck," Alison muttered.

"A – lison." A singsong tug, stretching out the first syllable.

His stomach rose up thick and rancid. He swallowed, breathed it down. Here it came. "Who is it?" he asked, as if he didn't know-as if asking were proof he didn't care. Always there were the rules, plying, pressing in around you.

"Alison?" The voice affected surprise now. Two black shapes – then another two – their shadows scrambling ahead of them across the yard. One by one the faces came into sight. "Dory's been worried about you."

"Fuck you, Les," said Alison evenly.

In response Lester dipped his head and lifted his bottle above it. Then he turned and leered to the person who'd accompanied him out: a tall, lanky mullet-head who'd dropped out of school last year.

A few steps back Tammie tottered against Cale. They seemed engrossed in their own windy drama. Both held their beers out in front of them like candles.

"I'll pass that along," Lester said.

"Sure," said Alison, "once you pop his cock out of your mouth."

Lester's tall mate started snickering. "Slut," said Lester. He was unfazed. "You think you're top shit now? After one fluke goal?"

In a single moment Jamie realized that Lester was talking to him and that Alison was watching. He prepared himself to say something. The words, however, snagged deep inside him.

"We'll see you at training on Monday," Lester went on. "He's gonna fuck you up." He shook his head in amazement. "You're fucked." He turned to Alison: "Remember your old loverboy, Wilhelm?"

Alison stayed quiet. Her face stern, narrowed, like she was trying to light a cigarette. Cale took a step forward. "Come on, man." He sounded unsure – and unsure who he was talking to. Lester's mullet-headed friend watched him steadily.

"Fucked," repeated Lester.

What should he say? He felt sickened by his words – hollow, soggy-sounding – before they even came out. He said, "Whatever, mate."

Lester laughed. "So fucked."

And it was true: each iteration struck Jamie with its truth, drained his body cold. The sick dread soaking and the worst was how familiar it felt. Too late to turn back. You'd think it was too much for one person but no, he'd already made room for it. He was rubbish.

Alison watched, then nodded. "Let's go, Jamie."

"See you Monday," Lester sang out. "Have a good weekend!"

She led him off.

For a while they walked without speaking. There was a shape to the silence between them: unfolding, contracting in the night. At the end of the street Alison reached out her hand. He held it desperately but there was no exhilaration in it. He wondered if she could feel that it wasn't his hand at all – that it wasn't he who was connected to it. They ducked under a fence and then his knees gave way beneath him.

"Sand," she said.

They skirted the edge of a caravan park. Light and music wafted over from the lots, carrying the day-old scent of sunscreen, charred barbecues. Early summer tourists. Finally they reached a shoulder of cliff. There was a steep drop-off behind it, and, behind that, the bay.

"You wanna keep walking?" she asked.

"Okay," he said. A strange formality had arisen between them.

"You know a spot? I'll follow you."

He continued on the same track. Along the headland, abstracted from any thought of direction, through the mulga scrub, and paddocks of wild grass, and fields stubbled up to burn marks delineated by dark trees. Maybe he could just keep walking. Just not stop. And what if he did? Would he want her to follow him? The wind was sharp, and salty, and then there was water on it.

"It's cold," said Alison. She hugged her bare arms. "Where are we going?"

He was dazed, for a moment, by the trespass of her voice. He looked out. In the high moon the water was sequined with light. Muted flashes from the freighters past the heads. Beyond that, stars. But directly beneath him – that, there, was the real shocker. The black stub in the black bay. He'd brought them right to the rock pier.

"You wanna go down there?" Her tone was a little impatient.

"It's gonna rain."

"C’arn," she said. "It'll rain up here too."

She swayed and shimmied down the dark slope. He followed her down and then onto the rocks, almost sprinting across them until they reached the tip of the pier. Water boiling over its edge. Vertigoed, he looked back – saw, across the long darkness, the foreshore thinly threaded with lights. Then, breathing hard, he turned around again and looked out into the deeper black, toward the heads where the water came in strong and deep and broke on the raised table of the reef.

"I haven't been here for ages," he said.

Alison found a curved rock on the lee side, long and canoe-narrow. The pier a heap of shadows in the night. "Lester's just a dickhead," she said. She drew her legs beneath her.

"Yeah."

"You should have seen him when he first met Dory. Talk about arse-licking."

He sat down opposite, shivering. It was like the wind was greased, he thought, it slid right against you, leaving your skin slippery where it touched. The mention of Dory triggered something inside him and he reached for her.

"Come here."

He heard himself say it. He saw his arm stippled by cold. The smell of kelp and metal dissolving on his tongue. She fended the hair from her face as he hauled her in, his hands up and down her body, claiming as much of her as he could. She responded at once, then drew herself upright.

"I just don't get why he hangs out with him," she commented.

"What?"

He rocked back, hugged his shins tight. Looked at her. Her hair silver in the pale spill of moonlight. Her makeup worn down and somehow, in this light, accidental – as though she'd been rehearsing on a friend's face. She looked like a complete stranger.

"I mean. He doesn't even like him."

"Will you shut up?" He realized, suddenly, that it pissed him off: that strange, settled face of hers. "Please? Fucking Dory this and Dory that." Words gushing up in him, frothy and cold, but he couldn't give body to them, not fast enough. "Why were you even with him? Don't you know what everyone says? What everyone thinks?"

Her expression was level. "Go on."

It occurred to him instantaneously that this was her real face, and that it was the same as Dory's – the same blankness of expression – and that that was what had been drawing him in. That was what he wanted to break himself against. As quickly as it came, the heady anger began to seep out of him.

She said, "So what does everyone think?" He didn 't answer.

"C’arn," she said. She leaned into him again, almost aggressively, urging his hand with her own, up over her shoulder blade. Her lips muzzling his neck.

"C’arn." "Just that you could do better than him." His voice came out as if by rote. "Like ... he's slow or something."

She pulled back, teeth flashing, and then she was laughing, liquidly, into the night. He waited, watching her. Sensing, deeper and deeper, how profoundly her laughter excluded him. In the distance he heard metal rings clinking against masts. The creaking of stretched wood. He would stay quiet. He'd say nothing and maybe she'd say something – one thing – that would release him for good.

Alison's face remembered itself. "Sorry," she whispered. She crawled forward on all fours and put her hands on his knees.

"Hey." He was holding her shoulders. Vance Wilhelm had been hospitalized with internal injuries-whatever that meant. Had she crawled on her hands and knees for him? Had he afterward regretted letting her? The pier, buffeted by rising waves, felt as though it was beginning to list from side to side. She looked up.

"I'll go if you want." How she said it – the words running one way and the meaning another. After a while, her mouth opened disbelievingly. "You gotta be joking." She threw his hands off her. "But okay. If that's how it is. You're up for it and Lester Long shit-talks you and then you're going every which way."

The wind grieved louder. Cutting off his every tack of thought.

"All year you're up for it – "

"It's not fucking Lester," he spat, "and it's not fucking shit-talk."

She exhaled, her eyes shining.

"Anyway," he said, fetching in his voice with effort, "you're moving."

"What?"

"Next year. To the city."

Alison ignored him. "Stuff it," she said. "They were right about you."

"We're moving too – but just to Maroomba." He was flustered by her comment. Who? he wanted to ask. Right about what? He said, "It's my mum." Then he stopped himself. Just saying it felt like some sort of betrayal.

"Look," Alison said. Now he breathed in, primed himself for the inevitable questions. But once again she acted as though she hadn't heard him. She said, "You're scared of Dory – fair enough." Her brow knitted together. "I just thought…" She paused. "It's different with you."

He didn't say anything.

"I just thought it'd be different with you." She crouched up, onto her feet. He turned toward her and she was smiling, lips pressed tightly together. Something about that smile. "But I'll talk to him," she said. "He'll leave you alone. Promise." She made a half-choked sound like a chuckle. "Don't worry – Dory listens to me." She held still for a moment, then started across the rocks.

Jamie turned around to face the water. Years ago he'd swum out there heaps – out where the coral was. It was easy to forget, past the reef, that you were on the edge of the great continental shelf until a rip drifted you out and one of those cold currents snaked up from the depths and brushed its slightest fringe against your body. Then you remembered. She was almost out of sight when the recognition arrived. That smile – her smile – it wasn't one-way. There was a question in it.

"Alison!" he called out.

The cry passed his mouth and coursed back into his body. Tons and tons of water moving under you. She stopped. Her body was slim and pale, a trick of light, against the black rocks.

"How's it different?" he said.

"What?"

"How's it different with me?" he shouted.

She stood in the half dark, then shrugged. When her shoulders didn't stop shrugging he realized she was crying. Jesus. He got up and scrambled toward her.

"All that time – you don't know what it's like for me all that time," she said. Her voice sounded older. She lifted her head and searched toward him with her open face. "He likes to hold my hand when he's drunk," she said. Even over the wind he could hear the bitterness. "The rest of the time – you look and you look and there's nothing there. Fucking zilch. With you, it's different."

"Okay."

"It just is."

"Okay."

"I'm sorry." He watched as she stood there, hugging her ribs. You couldn't turn back from something like this. You saw it through and it ruined you.

"Don't go," he said.

***

WHEN HE WAS LITTLE he used to follow his dad down to the wharf. Watched him cast off the hawser, chug out ahead a rimy trail of grease bubbles, the chorus of curses from the wharfies. In time Jamie was allowed, on school holidays, to come along. But usually his dad would be gone by breakfast and it never felt like a missing – more like he brought the sea into their house and it braced the rest of them to know where he was, what it looked like where he was, the sea around him. Before Michael was born, before his mum's sickness. Best was when they went out in the little runabout with the two-stroke, him and his dad, and sometimes his mum as well-she'd be cradling a basket of barbecued chicken and some beetroots, sitting on rolls of butcher's paper as long as her legs – and he'd dip his fingers behind the stern and draw a white gully into the darker water.

Then Michael. When he was old enough they took him along and together they explored the whole bight of the bay. They fished for King George whiting off the southern promontory and snapper and trevally in the deeper waters. His great-grandfather had skippered one of the first trawlers in HalfleadBay: back then he could go out for six weeks over Christmas, dip in, and make enough money to fish for sport the rest of the year. Jamie loved it-the idea of his family having worked that body of water for generations. He caught his first fish when he was six – a mako – he'd never forget its spearlike snout, the long cobalt gleam of its back. His dad's hands cupping his on the reel. They gaffed it twice, behind the gills, and even when its tail flayed his arm he could barely hold in the rapture. Gulping down his dad's praise – Not a bad effort, he kept saying. Not a bad effort, a shark your very first time.

His last time, though. Over five years ago. Early evening: no luck – nothing – they'd only stayed to make it worth the long hike. The rock pier was a tricky spot: you couldn't moor a boat and it was on the undeveloped side of the dunes. No tourists out there. The nearest road was an hour off – you had to cart all your gear along the headland. They'd been about to leave when Jamie's rod bowed forward.

He grabbed it, hauled back until the rod made a tight arc.

"What is it?" asked his dad.

The resistance was strong but even."Snagged, I think."

Michael looked back down, continued packing the tackle away. Jamie reeled in his line. It was getting dark, the sea glass-colored. The tide was coming in fast, too, washing higher against the rocks and leaving a frothy train. His mum, foraging through the lower rock pools, planted her feet – freezing her posture – every time the water surged in, and it seemed to Jamie like a private game.

"Okay," said his dad. "Pull her in and let's go."

Jamie continued reeling in. Then his line jerked hard. He leaned the rod back again-probably the reef, or a bed of sea grass – but then he felt it, there, and there – the unmistakable give and drag of a fish.

"Got one," he cried out.

"You sure?" His dad observed the weight on the line and climbed to his feet.

"Got one," Jamie repeated.

It was fighting now, weaving and twisting. The line went slack. When the charge came he was pulled forward and almost lost his footing. He looked down: browny yellow lichen. Spume churning over his ankles.

His dad grinned. "Set the drag," he said. Jamie set the drag.

They watched over the gray water together. Too dark to see anything. He fought the fish, tracking its every tension, tugging and reeling, imagining its flight through spindling reefs and sand and meadows of sea grass. This was it – this was why you waited. His dad next to him, fired up, talking him through it.

The line went spastic. It convulsed in short bursts. Jamie gripped the rod with excitement – he'd never felt a fish do this before. He glanced at his dad, who was squinting out to sea. Michael and his mum too. The sea was like this. You could wait all day and then, just when you were leaving, it might offer something up – the rubbery back of a whale, the glass-sharp glint of jumping mackerel – something. You wouldn't even know you were waiting till it came and you missed it. In the distance, something disrupted the surface of the glazed water – it was beautiful – beautiful to think it connected to him.

He tugged, reeled, tugged. His mum said, "Oh my God." He couldn't make anything out in the grayness. When she said it the second time he saw it. Wings beating furiously. A seagull. Then he heard the high-pitched screeching. It sounded human, the intonations of a baby girl throwing a tantrum. He continued reeling, the rod stooping lower and lower as he dragged the bird across the water, through the chop and, at last, to the rocks. Now it was quiet.

"Oh my God."

His dad said, "Where's it hooked?"

It had stopped moving. Jamie tried to lift the line but its body was wedged somehow, stuck in the rock scum.

"It's dead," he said.

It was enormous. Blood dyed the top of its plump breast, banded its neck – impossibly red against its white neck. Its webbed feet, limp in the wash, floated like old orange peel. He stepped toward it. The water shook its body. Then he saw, behind it, the sinuous, steely torso of a fish.

"There's a snapper too," he said, twisting around. His mum was staring at him, her face peaked but utterly focused.

"Bob," she said.

"It's on the fixed hook," said Jamie.

"Let him do it," said his dad.

He took another step. Bent down, saw the second hook, the long shanked keeper sunk in above the wing. Barbed into its shoulder and still letting blood. He reached out and suddenly the gull lurched up, screaming, flailing its big wings. Its beak gaped open: he could see right down into its pink, tattered innards. The bird was terrified – leaking something that smelled like dog piss gone off, its shrill squawks corrugating in its throat. He looked into that violent white rush and knew he couldn't touch it. No way. He jerked back and pointed the rod, trying to poke it onto the rocks, but the pliant fiberglass tip spooked the creature even more.

"Stop that," said his dad.

"I'll unhook it," he said, but he didn't move.

Michael stared at the bird, whose cries were tapering now to a dry rattle.

His mum repeated, "Bob."

His dad took the fishing rod from him. He squeezed Jamie's shoulder. "It's suffering, son. You understand?"

He nodded, but he didn't know what he meant by doing that – nodding. The bird's wings were half splayed. He watched it for a long time, churning in the water's guts. He didn't move.

A minute passed. Then he heard Michael digging around in the tackle box, mumbling to himself. He picked things up and threw them back in, metal-sounding. "Nope," he whispered under his breath. "Too blunt." A little later he handed something up to Jamie: a pair of scissors.

His dad watched silently.

So he'd have to hold it. With one hand. Should he hold its head or body? Those huge wings. The fish-flesh writhing behind it. He opened the scissors – so flimsy, with his fingers inside them. He crouched down and then it saw him – the yellow eye with its black heart-and let out a coarse shriek. That smell, that secretion of terror.

"Come on," said his dad.

"I could just cut the line," he said, not looking up.

"You will not just cut the line," said his mum. She said it so scathingly he immediately pictured the bird flying with the nylon leader hanging from one wing, the ball sinker running up and down between the swivel and hook, weighting its body into a sinking spiral.

"For Chrissake, Bob."

"He's gotta do it himself."

"Look at it." "It's his catch." His voice firmed. "He has to do it."

Jamie bent down again. Then he stood up and backed off.

"Jesus," said his dad. There was a weariness in his tone Jamie had never heard before.

"He's crying," Michael pointed out to their parents. His voice was matter-of-fact but his face seemed itself close to tears.

His mum didn't say anything to Jamie. She didn't look at him at all as she climbed down to the water's edge. She bent over and picked up the gull with both hands and laid it on a fiat rock. Then she sucked her lips into her mouth, lifted one of her Blund-stones, and stomped down on the gull's head, once, hard.

***

The morning was blue when he awoke. Alison gone. Had she even been there? Somewhere on the water a radio dispersed its sound. Translucent sand crabs, the size of his fingernails, scurried over his shins. It was a dream. Last night had been a dream-her skin moving against her ribs, so thin over her body he could see the laddering of it. She rocked above him, coaxing her face out of the shadows. The star-drenched sky reeling. I got you, he said, when she slipped.

Now, in the shock of early morning, he was wrenched back into his body. The rocks slimy with moss. The water ice-cold and molecular. Late in the night there 'd been thunder, and heat lightning – all night it had felt like it was minutes away from raining – but it hadn't rained. Already you could feel the day hotting up again. From some dark crevice the smell of a dead animal, rank and oversweet. That evening they'd laid the gull on the water and it was borne out, mutilate, into the gray drift. For hours – every time he'd looked back – he'd seen other gulls, dozens of them, circling in a silent gyre. Making black shapes out of themselves in the dusk sky. Then the light had failed. Here, he thought. He stood up, the soreness returning to him all at once. Here is the saddest place I know.

***

IT WAS AFTERNOON by the time he got home. All morning he'd wandered the dunes and tidal flats – too spent to think – then, strange to his own intentions, he'd set eyes on the courthouse before him. Gone in, sat down in a cool, dim corner.

At home there was a strange car in the driveway, a new-looking four-wheel drive. Out-of-towners. He watched from his bungalow as his dad came around the side of the house with two men. One wore mountain boots and a red polar fleece around his waist and walked quickly, keys in his fist. The other was a suit. His Brylcreemed hair cracking in the thirty-plus heat as he kept pace. They got into their car and did a three-point reverse and dusted down the driveway. His dad still standing by the front veranda. Two beer bottles sweating on the railing. He wore a short-brimmed hat and Jamie couldn't see his face.

Tea was a quiet affair. Every now and then Michael looked at him furtively but otherwise they kept to themselves. Afterward, Jamie plastic-wrapped the leftovers and washed the dishes. Michael dried and stacked. They worked silently, waiting to see if their parents' voices would start up. Michael's studied silence beginning to get on Jamie's nerves. Their dad came out of the living room, grabbed two bottles of wine, and went back in.

"They turned down the offer on the house," whispered Michael.

"Who, Mum?"

"Nah, the buyers."

"Why?"

But he wouldn't say any more. Jamie didn't push. Once, he'd caught Michael at the caravan park, wagging school, and hadn't said anything – he never knew whether it was out of loyalty or laziness. Once, he'd hit Michael in the mouth harder than he'd meant to and broken a tooth. I hate you, Michael had said, blood darkening the arches of his gum. It had only struck Jamie later that his brother might actually have meant it. That he might actually hate him. That he'd have reason. But Michael had calmed down, his face settling into an expression as smooth, cloudy as sea glass. He hadn't dobbed him in. They didn't talk to each other much, maybe, but they kept each other's secrets.

The dishes were done and then there was nothing to do.

At eleven that night his dad knocked on his door. He was holding an open wine bottle. His teeth shone chalky in the dark.

"Your light's on," he said.

"Sorry."

He stood on the concrete steps of Jamie's bungalow, swaying a little. His shadow stretched out long behind him and hung over the acacia shrubs. "Looks like no one's sleeping tonight," he said. "Not your mum either." He looked up the drive at the dark house and smiled broadly. He only smiled like that when he was drunk. "She can probably hear us."

"Dad."

"I thought I might just. . ."he patted the air above the steps, "Do you mind ..." now hoisting his bottle – the staggering of statements confusing Jamie.

They both sat down on the steps. His dad didn't seem to know what to do with the bottle: he clamped it between his two straightened palms, rolling it forward and back, then set it down with a loud chink.

"Big game next week," he said at last.

Jamie nodded. Unbidden, his mind cast back to the school assembly – he'd been onstage – could that really have been him onstage four days ago? That person seemed unrecognizable.

His dad said, "Well, at least you won't have to move."

"Those the buyers today?"

His dad laughed. "We're all set, right? Then she tells them to bugger off. Calls the guy a tight-arse, says they can't even wait another couple of months." "A couple of months?" Jamie regretted it as soon as he said it. You couldn't talk about that. Not without talking about after. There was no after.

"Sorry," he said.

But this time something came into his dad's eyes. "No . . ." he said, "No, you should know." He glanced at the house again, then stared out into the garden. "A matter of months. That's what they told us in Maroomba." He spat on the ground away from Jamie. "It's her kidney. They can map it out like that. They're useless to fix anything but they can give you pinpoint bloody timelines."

Jamie froze – it was as though he'd stalled. He heard his dad's words. He'd expected them-he'd hoarded himself, day after day, against them – but now, when they came, all he could think about, obscenely, was Dory. The black tablet of his face. He hated it. He hated himself for it.

"I thought you should know," said his dad.

He could tell him: Dad, I'm in trouble – it'd be that easy – Dad, it's Dory Townsend. He wanted to, but there was no way. He knew what his dad thought of him.

"Does Michael know?"

His dad shook his head. Finally he said, "It's tough enough for him already."

The smell of wine was strong on his breath. They each waited for the other to speak. How did people speak about these things?

His dad said, "You know you can't work these holidays."

"Yeah, I know."

"I need you around the house." He fell silent. "Good boy."

After a time he said it again. "Good boy."

"Dad?"

"Yeah, son."

But the distance was unthinkable. His dad took a swig from the bottle and patted Jamie's knee. He stood up, teetering with undelivered advice.

"You been fishing."

"Yeah. With Cale."

His dad's face momentarily betrayed his distaste. Then he frowned. "I been thinking. We should do that again. Michael too. Would you boys like that?"

Jamie nodded. He saw, now, how the conversation would spin itself out.

"We could take the two-stroke."

When he was little, he used to run down ahead and start the outboard motor. Turn the water over, pump out the bilge. Good boy. Now, his dad looked dead ahead whenever they drove past the wharf, its silent throng of boats.

"And your mum, she'd probably like us out of her hair."

"Yeah."

"We'll have someone come over." You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either – you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide. The two of you, his mum had told him once, you thought you were so smart – sneaking out on your secret fishing trips. You'd both come home reeking of diesel. Her first relapse had come a matter of weeks after that trip to the rock pier. The seagull. No more time for fishing. After that, Jamie sensed a difference – a dilution – in how his dad treated them; though with Jamie, and to a lesser extent Michael, his attention turned offhand, buffered by wary disappointment. With their mum his behavior took the form of an impeccable courtesy. He moved her studio into the house. He quit his boat, started full-time woodworking. He laundered her sheets. Now, when you looked at him, five years on, and tried to see him without her, there was almost nothing left. What he'd given her, Jamie understood-what he was giving her still-he knew he'd never get back.

***

CALE CAME OVER THE NEXT DAY.

"Tammie told me to tell you," he said. He closed the bungalow door behind him.

"What?"

"Lester said Dory'll meet you after training on Monday."

"Meet me?"

Cale shrugged. "She told me to tell you."

Jamie stood up. It was Saturday: he had two days left. He guided himself, as though measuring distances, all around the small room. He made himself breathe. "I'm fucked," he said.

Cale didn't meet his gaze. "The final's next weekend," he said.

"So?"

"You know," he groped for the right words. "He might. . ." He trailed off.

"What about Wilhelm?"

Cale looked at a complete loss.

"And that Chinese chick," Jamie said. "What about her?"

No charges had ever been laid. No evidence, or the evidence was inconclusive. Some Maroomba authority came down and said so. What no one said was that Dory and his uncle – a notorious flag-waver – had taken recerttly to assaulting Asians in that part of the bay. The town turning a blind eye. This body, belonging, as it did, to a faceless, nameless poacher, was just another case of no one's business. More than anything, what Jamie remembered was Lester's reenactment: the sheer joy of his punches – their appalling regularity.

The conversation faltered. Cale grim-faced. Jamie felt a sudden longing to talk to him, tell him everything – he was three years older, after all, had seen that much more of the world- then all at once he wanted Cale to leave him alone. They stayed quiet for a while.

"She said they weren't even together."

"Yeah," Cale replied instantly. "Tammie said that too."

Jamie hesitated, then said, "What should I do?"

"You're fast. Use your speed."

"What?"

"Throw sand in his eyes. Then get him in the balls when his hands are up."

Jamie stopped, shook his head. The conversation was unreal. "Fuck off. I'm serious."

Cale considered him, his face rough with the effort of understanding.

"I'll do a runner," said Jamie. "Like you. Travel around."

Cale put his hands in his pockets glumly. "Nah," he said. "I don't farkin know." He sat down on Jamie's bed. "You want some mull?"

"Jesus."

Cale puffed out his cheeks, sucked them back in, then said, in a low, hurried breath, "That's why I ran away. My old man used to beat up on me." He brought out his hands, rubbing his knuckles. "And I kept telling myself. That every time he hit me, he was telling me he loved me that much – that much."

Jamie tensed. It clouded him, hearing this.

"Shit, man."

Cale closed his hands into fists. Then, doubtfully, he banged them together. The mattress bounced up and down. "Fark. That's bullshit. He never did. I don't even know why I said that."

Jamie watched on, confounded, as Cale fingered the beads on his necklace. He lumbered over to the window. "Look," Cale said, facing away from him, "I've never been any of those places either."

"What?"

"But my ex did give me this." He added quickly, "She's alive. In Cairns. Shithole of a place. She's a horoscopist or horticulturist or something."

"You're fucking hilarious."

"Easy, big man."

He straightened up and came over to Jamie and nudged his shoulder, the gesture itself ambiguous – neither playful nor solemn. "It'll be over soon, man."

Jamie pushed past, suddenly flooded with an intense rage toward his friend.

"You fucking stink of fish," he said.

Cale chuckled mournfully. "You kidding? This whole town stinks offish."

***

SUNDAY AFTERNOON. All day he'd kept to himself – morning he'd spent behind the bungalow, in a lean-to built against the back wall. Hidden from the house's view. He'd sat there holed up and boxed in by his mum's old painting supplies – oil bottles, brushes, wood panels crammed into milk crates – listening to traffic along the coastal road, chatter lifting from the beaches: the stirrings of tourist summer. He'd stewed under the aluminium sheeting. The fight was tomorrow. The thought almost too much to contain, his mind recoiling between that and the thought of Alison, each contorting – neither providing respite from – the other. When the midday humidity got too much he went back inside and lay down.

Someone knocked.

"Storm's coming," said Michael through the door.

"Where's it coming from?"

"Umm, from the west. I mean, the east."

Jamie opened the door and Michael slouched in.

"Does Mum know?"

He shrugged.

"Let's go get her."

The house was empty. The reclining couch in front of the window unoccupied. "Probably at the bluff," Michael said.

"Is her wheelchair here?"

His brother checked the closet.

"Nope." A stirring on his features: "I'm gonna go look for them."

Alone, Jamie lowered himself onto the couch. The striped blanket crumpled at his feet. He nestled into the indentation of her body – so shallow – and imagined he could feel her residual warmth.

He looked out of the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kays away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.

"It's coming in," a loud voice said.

Startled, he turned to take in the room. No one. Then he sat up, craned his head out of the window. A raindrop as large as a marble plopped on his bare neck.

"Yes." That was his mum's voice. "Thank you, Bob," she said. "It's lovely."

Silence, then his dad's voice: "It's a good chair."

They sounded scrappy, as though coming through radio static. Jamie realized they hadn't made it to the bluff; they were nearer to the house – probably on the shaded veranda below – and the wind was reconstituting the sound of their voices, carrying it to him.

Now their conversation was unintelligible. Then his mum said, "Darling," just as half the sky darkened. "It's coming in," she said again.

And she was right, the storm was coming in – it was streaking in like a gray mouth snarled with wind, like a shredded howl, rendering the land into a dark, unchartered coast. The bay turning black. For centuries, fleets had broken themselves against the teeth of that coast.

"I can almost feel it on my face," his mum said.

Her voice was strangely amplified, then voided by a detonation of thunder – it shook the house; the remaining daylight dipped and then, with a rogue gust of wind that rocked the couch backward, it was raining – heavy and straight and stories high.

Jamie sat by the window. The sky dark yellow through the rain. The baked smells of the earth steamed open, soil and garden and sewage and salt and the skin of beasts. Potted music of water running through pipes, slapping against the earth; puddles strafed by heavy raindrops until in his mind they became battlefields, trenched and muddy. The wind swung westward and whipped the hanging plants' tendrils into the room. Wetting his face. He could hear them again.

"Ask me now," she said.

Sheets of water sluicing the other windows. The wind rattling them.

His dad's voice, so low as to be almost inaudible: "Are you happy, Maggie?"

A breaking of thunder ran through the sky and into the ground. Her answer blown away. Jamie sat in the shape of her body and closed his eyes and imagined the feel of the weather against her numbed face. He felt the sky's cracking as though deep along fault lines in his chest. He tested the word in his mouth: "Yes."

"I'm sorry," someone said. "Forgive me." Whose voice was that?

"Yes," said Jamie, "I'm happy now."

"Oh, you know there's nothing to forgive." He got up from the chair. This wasn't right, listening in like this – he'd go downstairs.

Michael burst into the room, hair pasted on his forehead and streaming with rain.

"Where are they?" he wheezed. "I can't find them."

"They're downstairs," said Jamie.

"But I checked downstairs."

Michael moved closer to the window. Water dripped from his chin, his sleeves, logging at the bottom of his shorts.

"Listen," said Jamie.

Soft, shapeless, their mum's voice wafted up. Michael turned and smiled tentatively at Jamie. "Bet Mum's getting a kick out of this," he said. The storm crashed around them. Michael seemed, in that moment, caught up simply in the anxiety of having Jamie agree with him. Jamie smiled and nodded. He was always forgetting how it had once been between them.

"Come on," he said.

At the door, there came a louder voice – their dad's – broken up by the unruly wind. He was talking about finding something, saying they found something –

Their mum's voice: "That Townsend kid."

Michael glanced at Jamie.

Their dad's voice went on, scratchy and sub-audible. Then the wind lifted the words up clearly. Findings. Findings at the coroner's inquest.

"What's a coroner?" asked Michael.

"Shut up."

"Something wrong with that kid," his mum's voice said.

"I'm worried." His dad's voice. "Know why they call him Loose Ball Jamie?"

The sky raining through the rising wind. Clay pots swaying, tapping against the window frames.

"It means he doesn't go in hard. For the fifty-fifties." A fresh agitation in his dad's voice, laying open the folds of his feeling. "I'm not saying he's gutless – but he freezes."

Jamie turned toward Michael, who shrank back, face already crimped in fear.

"Let's go," he said.

"Don't," said Michael. "Please don't."

Before they left, his dad's voice floated into the room, loud and raw and plain: "You should remember."

In the kitchen he got Michael in a headlock. "How'd they find out? You little shit."

"I can't breathe!"

 "You told them, didn't you?"

"Everyone knows."

"What? What'd you say?" He shoved Michael's head against the sink washboard, forced it along the metal ribbing, then dropped him to the floor. Michael's body shivering. The storm muted in here. Slowly, he felt the remorse bleeding into him. Always it came, immediately afterward. He said, "Everyone knows what?"

Michael curled into a cupboard corner. He lifted his hand to feel the side of his head. He was breathing hard when he looked up, and he didn't look at Jamie's face but at some indistinct point beneath it.

"That you're gonna fight Dory," he said in his deep voice. "And that he's gonna slaughter you."

***

ALL NIGHT HE COULDN'T SLEEP.

He threw on some clothes and wandered outside. The rain had stopped. Branches shuddered the water off themselves. The moon was still bright, caught in their wet leaves.

His mother had fallen asleep on the reclining couch. She was snoring softly. The moonlight poured in from the window and buoyed around her as though to bear her up. It seemed unreal. He pulled the blanket snug beneath her chin. Her mouth dropped open as though its hinges had snapped, and she snorted.

"Darling?"

"Sorry, Mum," he said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

It was as though she were swimming up from some distant pit of herself. The drugs awash in her – he saw it now. With sudden clarity he understood how lost she must feel in her body.

"God, I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was drawn thin. "I was wrong. Who gets to choose where they die?" Her eyes were barely open, one of them darting about quick as silverfish.

"Mum, wake up."

"But the boys love it here. You too." Her face loosened. She said, "You wouldn't believe."

"Mum." He shook her shoulder.

"The things I see now. But my hands."

"Mum." A pulse in her eyes and then her mouth moved. It jerked, then spread slowly into a smile of recognition.

"Sweetie." She fell quiet. They listened together to her breathing. All through her the odor of bleach, bleach sopped and smeared with a used rag.

"What is it?" she said.

A nauseous rush of answers rose up in him but he said nothing.

"The girl?" She didn't wait for his response. "And that horrible boy. Are you scared?"

He nodded.

"You're my son," she whispered. A strange shifting in her eyes, as though grass moved behind them. For a moment she looked lost. Then she said, "My son does anything he wants."

Gradually her head drooped forward. The muscles around her mouth went slack and he realized she was lapsing back into sleep. This was where she lived most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour. He wanted it to stop. When? Monday, after training? What would be enough – what commensurate with his lack? And what if he couldn't? She had come back from the hospital and the first thing she said to him and Michael was, This won't happen to you. I promise. He was rubbish. Whatever he did or didn't do now, he'd hate himself later – he knew that.

A truck raced by on the coastal road, ripping skins of water off the bitumen.

Her head still bowed, she said in a slurred voice, "James?" He slid his fingers into the pouch of her right hand. He'd never before noticed how loose the skin around her knuckles was.

She said, "My wine." After a long silence she said, "Will you pass it to me, please?"

"Mum."

"Your father and I love you very much. No matter what."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

It wasn't until a minute later he realized she might be squeezing his hand. "Okay."

He dreamed he was alone. The glass was cold against his fingers and forehead. He shrank away, went to the next black, steamed window, and the next, calling out as he searched. His voice sounded as though trapped inside some metal bladder. What if the paddocks were empty? And the long white corridors, too, with their waxy floors, and the dark slopes of the dunes he clambered up and down as though drunk? What if he couldn't find him?

The ocean seethed and sighed in the dark. So this was where you ended up, sick in sleep. Your night a beach and all sorts of junk washing up on shore.

***

AT SCHOOL NEWS OF THE FIGHT HAD SPREAD. Monday at last. Everyone watched him and no one looked him in the eye. Even the teachers seemed to leave him to himself, steering their voices around. The semis, the assembly – all of it seemed long gone, preserved elsewhere. He was being quarantined. He'd seen it before. You were dead space, you were off – limits-until afterward. Nothing malicious in it. What made it strange for him was the incongruous buzz around school-everyone getting fired up for the holidays and, in particular, the grand final that weekend. First time in five years, and against archrivals Maroomba too. The tension brinking on hysteria.

Recess he spent in the C-block toilets. What was the grand final to him? He tried to throw up but couldn't.

Lunchtime he saw her. Her friends clustered in the concrete corner of the downball court where, as one, they turned to look at him, opening apart, unfurling like some tartan-patterned flower, and there she was, leaning against the wall with large concentric targets painted in white behind her. She held his eye for a second and then the circle sealed shut. He realized he was holding his breath.

Vague impressions of classes rolled on. Each period ending with teachers saluting the team, rallying everyone for the big game. Jamie felt exhausted. Time pushed him forward. His mind wound out, one point to the next.

"C'arn, Halfies!"

He spotted Dory just before final period. Taller than everyone else. Like a dockworker in his school uniform – shirtsleeves high on his biceps, shorts tight across his quads. His eyes too close together, his hair flaxen, floppy. Like some sick cartoon of a dockworker. The corridor packed and noisy. A few people saw them, made space, straggled, but Dory disappeared into a classroom. Lester was behind him, of course, and from a distance Jamie could see his face, pinched up in anger, yelling something out.

"Fucking retard!" he seemed to be yelling.

Jamie opened his mouth.

"Fucking retard mum!" he was yelling.

Of course he couldn't be saying that. Jamie shook it off – the bog-like feeling that accompanied the thought of his mum. There was his mind again, groping at anything but what was right in front of him. In front of him – wherever he went – Dory. Huge and hard, a thing of horror. He'd been dumped on the beach by his folks. He'd bashed up this guy, hospitalized that guy. He'd killed a Chink with his uncle.

The teacher talked on as Jamie watched the clock.

You had to shut it out. You could see it on players' faces, how they approached him, ready to take damage. You could hear it in your parents' voices. You had to shut it all out, otherwise it would sprout in you like weeds.

The bell rang.

He was headed for the lockers when his geography teacher flanked him, escorted him wordlessly to the principal's office and dropped him off there.

"Go on," said the secretary. She looked up. "Go on. Mr. Ley-land's waiting."

Jamie knocked, cracked open the door.

"There he is," a voice boomed. Coach Rutherford. He was wearing trackies and a Halflead T-shirt, a whistle around his neck. He stood behind the principal's desk. Where was Leyland?

"I was just coming to training," Jamie said.

"Good," said Coach. He waved him inside. Then Jamie saw Leyland – on the couch obscured by the door. With him was Jamie's dad. His mum in her wheelchair. His mum – what was she doing here? Jamie stood in the doorway and didn't move. All these people. All day he'd been waiting-all those days since Thursday night's party – and now it felt as though time had pushed him forward too far, too hard. Everything collapsing into one place.

Coach said, "But today, you get a rest." He smiled curtly and closed his fist around the whistle, shaking it like dice. Jamie's dad stood up and thanked him. He was wearing work clothes, his jeans smeared with oil and sawdust. Then he turned and thanked Leyland.

"Well," said Leyland, rising to his feet, "our students, our business."

Coach left the room. Jamie didn't say anything. He was thinking of Dory, the rest of them, waiting for him on the oval. What they must be thinking. He felt airy in his own body. What they must be saying. He remembered Lester's words in the corridor.

"It's not your business," his mum said quietly, but Leyland didn't hear.

His dad moved to stand behind her chair. "Come on, Jamie."

"It's between the boys. It's not their business."

"Maggie," his dad said under his breath, "we talked about this already."

Jamie couldn't bring himself to look at them. He sensed that to witness a drama between his parents here, now, might wreck him completely.

"Jamie," said Leyland. His voice took on added weight: "I've talked to Dory. He understands – there's to be no trouble whatsoever."

His dad pushed the wheelchair out of the room.

"Alright?" Leyland asked. "It's over."

***

Even from the car he could see Dory. Even at that distance. Tallest in a line of green guernseys, the one moving slower, as though to a separate beat, while the others jogged in place, ran between the orange witches' hats between whistle bursts. Sprint exercises. All the way home Jamie said nothing.

When they pulled up, he got out and unfolded the wheelchair.

His dad said, "Help your mother into the house."

"Bob, I'm okay."

His dad looked at Jamie and then at the house. "I said help your mother."

The front door opened and Michael came out. He stopped – transfixed and tense – as soon as he saw Jamie, staring at him without any of his usual bashfulness. Something like concern, deeper than concern, all through his expression. Then he went over to their mum and took hold of the wheelchair handles.

"I'm going down the jetty," Jamie told his dad.

His mum turned to him with a strange, clear-eyed face. "You're allowed. You're allowed to go. You can go."

***

HE WALKED, ALONE, down to the jetty. It was clogged with tourist families who'd arrived over the weekend. All along the walkway were canvas chairs, Eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water. He found a spot and sat. Someone had a portable radio and music streamed into the air in clean, bright colors. The bay a basin of light.

Could that really be the end of it? Leyland talking to Dory? What would he have said to him? That the school needed Jamie fit for the final? That Jamie's dad had begged Dory to spare his gutless son? That his mum, in that wheelchair, was dying? He sat in the midst of the jetty's hurly-burly, watching and listening. He felt the need of explanation. Here's what he could say to Dory – no, he could say anything, all the right things, and it still wouldn't be enough. Maybe things could be normal again. He'd finish school, run onto the field on Saturday and run off two hours later. He'd take up the job at the fish plant, or, better yet, he'd talk to John Thompson. His dad would take the sheets in. Stop. They'd pot the ashes under the waratahs; leave a handful for the bluff, throw it up and the wind would probably shift and putter it into their faces. She'd like that. No – you didn't think of that.

He got up and started walking. He'd sat there long enough – training would be done by now. He walked down the main street and past the wharf. At the tidal flats he took off his shoes and kept going. He had an idea where he was going but nothing beyond that. Sand spits sank into ankle-deep shoals. The night had been cold and the water chilled his feet. The sky flat and blue with mineral streaks. He passed the rock pier and started picking his way through the sedgeland – sharp, rushlike plants grazing his legs. At every step he dared himself to turn around, but he didn't. He followed a rough trail marked with half-submerged beer bottles, clearings where blackened tins from bonfire rockets were set into the dirt like sentinels.

And Alison. How would he have any chance with her otherwise? He stepped on solid-looking ground and sank to his knees.

The bile rose up in him. Roundabout here was where they'd found the poacher's body. Half stuck, half floating in the marshy suck. No-nothing was worth that. And in that moment he realized, deep as any realization went, that that wasn't what he was afraid of at all. He had to see it through.

He came to the shack in the middle of a muddy clearing. A man sat out front on a steel trap doing ropework. He was surrounded by other traps and old nets, dried and sun-stiffened in the shapes of their failure. It must have been Dory's uncle. He didn't look up.

"Dory," he called out. "One of your little friends is here to see you."

Jamie moved closer. The sides of slatted wooden crates were laid end to end over the mud – a makeshift path – and he stepped onto them. He saw the man's hands, shot with swollen veins and spidery capillaries. The waistband of his shorts cutting deep under his beer gut.

"Dory!"

"I'll come back," said Jamie.

The screen door opened and there was Dory, his body blocking almost the whole space, eyes narrowed in the sun. Hair over his eyes. He was wearing trackies and a stained singlet. He rubbed the bristles on his chin and cheek. Then he came partway down the crate-board path.

"You're here," he said. He sounded surprised.

"Offer him a drink," said his uncle. "And get me one while you're at it."

"We're out," said Dory.

His uncle looked up and chortled, his face orange and unevenly tanned like an old copper coin. Then Jamie heard a whoop from inside the hut. He saw movement behind the boarded-up windows where the wood had rotted off.

"The fuck you doing here?" said Dory in a low voice.

Jamie stared dumbly at him. "The fight," he managed to say.

Dory surveyed the entire clearing behind Jamie. "It's off."

"Why?"

A disgusted look came over Dory's adult face. "Why?" He glanced, almost involuntarily, over his shoulder, then came a step closer to Jamie and said, "You dunno what the fuck you're doing, do you?"

Lester appeared at the door. "This fucker," he shouted, his face splitting into a grin.

"Jamie?"

Alison-that was Alison's voice. She emerged from the hut in her school uniform like some sort of proof. Even here – deep down in this plot of filth – her dress was clean. The mud didn't touch her. She looked at Jamie with an expression of dark intensity.

"I thought. .." He tried to make his voice firm. "There's squid now, down the jetty," he said.

She hesitated, then walked toward him, then stopped beside Dory. Her face still amok. Then she put her mouth to Dory's ear and after a moment he laughed, a deep, throttled hack of a laugh.

"See," said Dory's uncle. He lowered the greased rope onto his lap. "Here's what I don't get."

"Alison," Jamie went on. He spoke only to her. But his voice faltered, undercutting what he wanted-what he was trying to say.

"Don't you boys go to school together? Why come all the way out here?"

"Can't hide behind his retard mum here, that's why," said Lester.

Dory gave out another guttural laugh. Then, turning his back, he said, "Just fuck off, Jamie. Okay?"

It wasn't as though he'd planned anything. He hadn't known exactly what to expect. But this – Alison, her shoulders neatly narrowed as though pinned back, spinning Dory around and hissing into his ear, the old man leering on a crab trap in a crater of mud – this wasn't part of it. He stepped up to Dory.

"Okay then," Dory said.

Jamie held up his arms but the first pain came in his stomach – he could feel the air being forced up, spraying out of his mouth. He cradled his stomach and then there was a heavy knock to the side of his head. He sat down. The ground tramped with mud like a goal square.

"Fuck you up!" Lester hooted.

"Right," said Dory's uncle. "Now I get it."

Alison stared at Jamie with a stunned expression. Then slowly, stutteringly, she started laughing too, a thin, uncertain trickle into the air.

Was that enough? The air felt hot in his lungs. He waited for his breath to come back. He stood up. He looked at Dory and realized he'd never looked at another body – not even Alison's – so closely: the hard-knotted chest, the scabbed shoulders. The face a hide stretched over a seat of stone. When it came, he swung at it but his own head whiplashed back.

Seated again. His throat burning. His vision broken into scales. Stay down. Someone's voice – a whisper – he looked over to where Alison had been standing but she was no longer there. On the rock pier that night, under the hot stars-she'd said it into his mouth. She'd been there with him, watching the water wink, moonlight on the surface and then underneath, too, the glow of shucked abalone shells . . . It's different with you. He could still hear her laughing, and Lester yelling – he sounded angry, too angry – as though by proxy for Dory. When his sight returned he saw Michael drop his bike and wipe the sand from his eyes.

"That's enough!" His dad-breaking through the sedge into the clearing. Of course, thought Jamie, slogging through the mire of his mind – Michael. Michael had followed him.

"Stay down."

But who was speaking? The voice was too soft.

"You alright, son?"

"Just stay down." Jamie twisted around and realized, with mild surprise, it was Dory muttering to him.

His dad arrived at his side.

The only sound left was Alison's laugh, which, somewhere along the line, had turned inside out, into a sequence of hollow sobs.

"Let's go, son."

He searched his dad's face – he was ready, now, to accept all its familiar reproaches. But the face he saw was different: shaken loose from its usual certainty. Frowning, though without heat, Jamie's dad bent down, picked Jamie up. At his dad's touch a tremor ran all through him.

"Boys, ey?" offered Dory's uncle with a smile.

Jamie's dad looked at him flatly, then turned away. "Come on, Jamie."

Alison was still standing halfway down the crate-board path, next to Lester. Her arms were crossed low over the front of her school dress, over her stomach, as though it were she who'd just been gut-punched. Her sobbing had subsided. Jamie half made to approach her when his dad squeezed his shoulder.

"Son," he said in a low voice. He shook his head.

Alison's mouth, her eyes – now turned toward them – seemed slowly to shape themselves into a leery cast. She rushed up to Dory. "Wait!"

Dory said something back to her.

"What I wanted?" she cried.

Dory turned toward Jamie and his dad. The expression on his face – a mask concealing another mask, and behind that – what? Minutes ago, Jamie would have said there was nothing: a dark gale thrown into a room and trapped. Now, he didn't know.

Dory gripped Alison's forearm but she flung his hand off.

"Rubbish is rubbish," muttered his dad. "Wherever it comes from."

"You're letting him off!" She was tiny next to Dory, furious. "You know. You know what he said! What he did!"

Everything became quiet. An ocean wind swept over the swale, heavy with salt, carrying the faint shriek of seagulls.

"I told you," Dory replied. His tone was impersonal. It occurred to Jamie unexpectedly that Dory might be talking to him. He looked and looked at Dory but could no longer induce himself to feel anything.

"Come on," said Jamie.

He reached up to touch his face and the touch came earlier than he'd expected. His face was numb. This was how it felt. His mouth tasted of mud, and blood, and it was smiling.

"Jamie?" murmured his dad.

He felt them all watching him, felt the sun warm on his face. A gold-tinged rope of spit dangled from his lips. Dory squared his body around. His demeanor was slack, drained of intention, like a sprinter's after crossing the finish line.

"I'm still here," said Jamie. "Come on."

It hurt to speak: his jaw felt locked and he was pushing, pushing down on it.

"That's enough, son."

He stepped clear of his dad. "I said I'm still here!"

Dory was stumped, you could tell. It didn't make sense. He took a deep breath and then came at Jamie, his arm outstretched. Something grainy about his face, unfocused. Something sounded like balsa wood breaking and suddenly Jamie's dad was on the ground, lying on his elbow, his face flecked with dirt. Everything froze. Then Dory hit Jamie as well: it felt like pity, and Jamie was down, too, in the midst of the mud and the shattered light. Bursts of color so bright they must speak, surely, for something.

No one talked. Then Dory's blunt, blurred voice: "It was an accident."

Alison's voice started up: "Stupid . . . stupid ..."

Lester: "Shut up, cunt."

"I didn't mean to hit his dad – he jumped in. He just jumped in."

"Jesus," said Dory's uncle.

But what if this was all of it? What if, when you saw things through, this was all that waited for you at the end? He lay on the ground and saw the black line of mud and the yellow lines of sand and sedge and then the bottle-green ocean. How wonderful it would be to be out there on the water. The wind scoured in and stung his eyes until they were wet. He'd watched her paint, once, at the courthouse. It was before dawn and he was half-asleep. Blue and blue-green and then dark blue. A hasty white swath. He watched as she turned the bay into a field of color. Then he looked out and, in his grogginess, saw it all through her eyes – the town, the dunes and flats, the foreshore with its man-made outcrops, the bay, sandbars, reef and deep sea. All of it motionless – slabs of paint, smeared on and scraped off, just so, fixed at a time of day that could never touch down. And here was his father, picking himself up from the black sludge, his face in its old grief. Here was Dory, who, despite everything-his emptiness-seemed uninterested, or incapable, of holding Jamie's hate. Michael, who still could. Alison. Watching from within her immaculate uniform. Only Lester's face brimmed with epiphany – a line had been crossed – and nothing had changed.

His dad got to his feet. He was shorter than Dory but spoke straight up into his face.

"That's enough."

They looked at each other and then Dory looked away. A second later, Alison coughed into her hands and ran inside the shack. Michael waded into the mud and helped pull Jamie up. His face, Jamie realized, bore the same clear, graceful expression Jamie had last seen on their mum's face-his hands on Jamie's wrists surprisingly strong. Again – despite everything – he'd chosen to come. Jamie felt himself falling apart. Now, as Michael hauled him up from the ground, he braced his pain against his brother's strength. His dad held him under the armpits. Now, for the first time, Jamie gave over his weight to them entirely.

His dad tightened his embrace. He said, "You okay?"

Michael, face tracked with mud, went to pick up his bike, steered it around. He wheeled it close by them. Jamie held fast to his dad's shoulder. At the edge of the clearing his dad stopped, turned, as though to kiss him on the head, then said, "You're okay, son." They started the long walk home.