Nam Le - The Boat

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?"