"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.