"I'll do a runner," said Jamie. "Like you. Travel around."
Cale put his hands in his pockets glumly. "Nah," he said. "I don't farkin know." He sat down on Jamie's bed. "You want some mull?"
"Jesus."
Cale puffed out his cheeks, sucked them back in, then said, in a low, hurried breath, "That's why I ran away. My old man used to beat up on me." He brought out his hands, rubbing his knuckles. "And I kept telling myself. That every time he hit me, he was telling me he loved me that much — that much."
Jamie tensed. It clouded him, hearing this.
"Shit, man."
Cale closed his hands into fists. Then, doubtfully, he banged them together. The mattress bounced up and down. "Fark. That's bullshit. He never did. I don't even know why I said that."
Jamie watched on, confounded, as Cale fingered the beads on his necklace. He lumbered over to the window. "Look," Cale said, facing away from him, "I've never been any of those places either."
"What?"
"But my ex did give me this." He added quickly, "She's alive. In Cairns. Shithole of a place. She's a horoscopist or horticulturist or something."
"You're fucking hilarious."
"Easy, big man."
He straightened up and came over to Jamie and nudged his shoulder, the gesture itself ambiguous — neither playful nor solemn. "It'll be over soon, man."
Jamie pushed past, suddenly flooded with an intense rage toward his friend.
"You fucking stink of fish," he said.
Cale chuckled mournfully. "You kidding? This whole town stinks offish."
***
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. All day he'd kept to himself — morning he'd spent behind the bungalow, in a lean-to built against the back wall. Hidden from the house's view. He'd sat there holed up and boxed in by his mum's old painting supplies — oil bottles, brushes, wood panels crammed into milk crates — listening to traffic along the coastal road, chatter lifting from the beaches: the stirrings of tourist summer. He'd stewed under the aluminium sheeting. The fight was tomorrow. The thought almost too much to contain, his mind recoiling between that and the thought of Alison, each contorting — neither providing respite from — the other. When the midday humidity got too much he went back inside and lay down.
Someone knocked.
"Storm's coming," said Michael through the door.
"Where's it coming from?"
"Umm, from the west. I mean, the east."
Jamie opened the door and Michael slouched in.
"Does Mum know?"
He shrugged.
"Let's go get her."
The house was empty. The reclining couch in front of the window unoccupied. "Probably at the bluff," Michael said.
"Is her wheelchair here?"
His brother checked the closet.
"Nope." A stirring on his features: "I'm gonna go look for them."
Alone, Jamie lowered himself onto the couch. The striped blanket crumpled at his feet. He nestled into the indentation of her body — so shallow — and imagined he could feel her residual warmth.
He looked out of the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kays away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.
"It's coming in," a loud voice said.
Startled, he turned to take in the room. No one. Then he sat up, craned his head out of the window. A raindrop as large as a marble plopped on his bare neck.
"Yes." That was his mum's voice. "Thank you, Bob," she said. "It's lovely."
Silence, then his dad's voice: "It's a good chair."
They sounded scrappy, as though coming through radio static. Jamie realized they hadn't made it to the bluff; they were nearer to the house — probably on the shaded veranda below — and the wind was reconstituting the sound of their voices, carrying it to him.
Now their conversation was unintelligible. Then his mum said, "Darling," just as half the sky darkened. "It's coming in," she said again.
And she was right, the storm was coming in — it was streaking in like a gray mouth snarled with wind, like a shredded howl, rendering the land into a dark, unchartered coast. The bay turning black. For centuries, fleets had broken themselves against the teeth of that coast.
"I can almost feel it on my face," his mum said.
Her voice was strangely amplified, then voided by a detonation of thunder — it shook the house; the remaining daylight dipped and then, with a rogue gust of wind that rocked the couch backward, it was raining — heavy and straight and stories high.
Jamie sat by the window. The sky dark yellow through the rain. The baked smells of the earth steamed open, soil and garden and sewage and salt and the skin of beasts. Potted music of water running through pipes, slapping against the earth; puddles strafed by heavy raindrops until in his mind they became battlefields, trenched and muddy. The wind swung westward and whipped the hanging plants' tendrils into the room. Wetting his face. He could hear them again.
"Ask me now," she said.
Sheets of water sluicing the other windows. The wind rattling them.
His dad's voice, so low as to be almost inaudible: "Are you happy, Maggie?"
A breaking of thunder ran through the sky and into the ground. Her answer blown away. Jamie sat in the shape of her body and closed his eyes and imagined the feel of the weather against her numbed face. He felt the sky's cracking as though deep along fault lines in his chest. He tested the word in his mouth: "Yes."
"I'm sorry," someone said. "Forgive me." Whose voice was that?
"Yes," said Jamie, "I'm happy now."
"Oh, you know there's nothing to forgive." He got up from the chair. This wasn't right, listening in like this — he'd go downstairs.
Michael burst into the room, hair pasted on his forehead and streaming with rain.
"Where are they?" he wheezed. "I can't find them."
"They're downstairs," said Jamie.
"But I checked downstairs."
Michael moved closer to the window. Water dripped from his chin, his sleeves, logging at the bottom of his shorts.
"Listen," said Jamie.
Soft, shapeless, their mum's voice wafted up. Michael turned and smiled tentatively at Jamie. "Bet Mum's getting a kick out of this," he said. The storm crashed around them. Michael seemed, in that moment, caught up simply in the anxiety of having Jamie agree with him. Jamie smiled and nodded. He was always forgetting how it had once been between them.
"Come on," he said.
At the door, there came a louder voice — their dad's — broken up by the unruly wind. He was talking about finding something, saying they found something –
Their mum's voice: "That Townsend kid."
Michael glanced at Jamie.
Their dad's voice went on, scratchy and sub-audible. Then the wind lifted the words up clearly. Findings. Findings at the coroner's inquest.
"What's a coroner?" asked Michael.
"Shut up."
"Something wrong with that kid," his mum's voice said.
"I'm worried." His dad's voice. "Know why they call him Loose Ball Jamie?"
The sky raining through the rising wind. Clay pots swaying, tapping against the window frames.
"It means he doesn't go in hard. For the fifty-fifties." A fresh agitation in his dad's voice, laying open the folds of his feeling. "I'm not saying he's gutless — but he freezes."
Jamie turned toward Michael, who shrank back, face already crimped in fear.
"Let's go," he said.
"Don't," said Michael. "Please don't."
Before they left, his dad's voice floated into the room, loud and raw and plain: "You should remember."
In the kitchen he got Michael in a headlock. "How'd they find out? You little shit."