"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."