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 schooclass="underline" 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.