Nam Le - The Boat

***

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.