He shook his head at the memory, looked across the table at India-May.
‘And were you?’ she asked him.
‘Was I what?’
‘Having love-affairs with lifeguards.’
‘No.’ He smiled. ‘She didn’t understand the bond. We were close, yes, but it was like brothers.’
India-May nodded slowly, tipped some ash into a saucer. ‘So you had to carry all this alone. Couldn’t you talk to anyone?’
‘There wasn’t anyone.’
There was only one person apart from Dad, and that was Georgia. She’d just turned thirteen. She wore her hair greased back and hung out a lot. Espresso bars, mostly. Sometimes he had to go and pick her up. He always rang the place first and told her he was on his way. He didn’t want her losing face with her friends just because her old man worried too much, and anyway he liked the air of conspiracy. He’d lean against a wall on the other side of the street and watch her. She’d be sitting at a table, gum tumbling in her open mouth, smoke rising from her hand, as if she was a puppet and that wavering blue thread controlled her every move. In her own time she’d slap some money on the table and then she’d kind of unfold, and the faces of the others would tip to hers. She’d push past some guy and his chin would tilt and his eyes would follow her as she left. She’d stand on the sidewalk, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets, and Nathan would jerk his head, to tell her where the car was, and she’d walk down her side of the street and he’d walk down his, and it was only once they were in the car that anyone would’ve realised they were connected in any way, and by then it was too late, because nobody could see them. They’d always played games, this was just the latest.
But she was only thirteen. How could he tell her anything? All he could do was sit by and watch as she caught on.
He remembered her first outburst. It was lunchtime. He could still see Harriet putting her fork down and heaving a sigh of relief. ‘Well, at least Rona will be normal,’ she said, and turned to Rona who was knocking her spoon against her plastic bowl, ‘won’t you, darling?’
Dad frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’
Harriet seemed surprised that he should ask. ‘You told me about Kay. You know, the madness in that side of the family. Poor woman,’ she said, ‘it must’ve been awful.’
Georgia threw her knife at her plate. A chip of white china hit the wall the same way a reflection does. ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘I’d rather have her blood than yours,’ and then, shoving her chair back, she said, ‘I’m not hungry any more.’ She stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
‘Georgia?’ Dad’s face paled. His hands fastened round the arms of his chair.
Nathan couldn’t bear to look at him. Suddenly Dad was stumbling about in a kind of no man’s land. In the place where he was he couldn’t possibly win. From now on there were only different ways of losing, different kinds of pain.
Without meeting Harriet’s eye, and in a low voice, Dad said, ‘I think you went a bit far, Harriet.’
Later that afternoon Nathan heard Harriet shouting in the bedroom. ‘Why don’t you ever stand up for me? You always stand up for them, never for me. Why don’t you stand up for me?’
And Dad was shouting too. ‘Stop it, Harriet,’ he was shouting. ‘Stop it, stop it.’
Nathan listened at the foot of the stairs. He was the toy soldier of all those years ago, but he hadn’t toppled over, he was marching from room to room, marching from the kitchen to the hall, the hall to the study, the study to the hall again, he didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t go upstairs and intervene, nor could he leave the scene of what felt like a crime, he was shaking with this terrible indecision. Those jets were flying again, tearing the air inside his head, he could only think one thought: He’s going to die. She’s going to kill him.
He saw the whole thing as a plot. The clothes Dad liked, the hair Dad liked. It had been so easy. A short skirt, a fringe, no make-up, and she was in. Then she could set to work. Wearing him down, wearing him out. Wearing him away to nothing. She was that dream of his come true, she was the planes made human. He imagined her standing in Dad’s bedroom at night, Dad asleep behind her. He watched her looking in the mirror. He saw her face begin to change. The whine of the engines, the slow turning on that one front wheel.
Upstairs Dad was still shouting. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it.’ He said it thirteen times, Nathan was counting, and then he couldn’t listen any more. He ran into the kitchen and pulled the cupboard open. He was doing everything as loudly as possible. He didn’t want to hear anything else from upstairs. Inside the cupboard was a stack of new light bulbs in their cardboard jackets. He stacked them in his arms and took them out into the yard. One by one he stripped their jackets off and hurled them against the outside wall of the house. A flat pop each time one exploded. Then a faint tinkling as the fragments of glass showered to the asphalt. Dad never said anything about the missing light bulbs. He simply put them on the shopping list the next Friday. ‘8 light bulbs,’ he wrote, ‘40-watt.’ Previously he’d always bought 100-watt bulbs, but 40-watt bulbs were cheaper and it didn’t matter how bright the bulbs burned if they were just going to be hurled at a wall.
They were still living in a sort of 40-watt half-light when Nathan followed Dad into the sitting-room one day and asked if he could speak to him alone. It was after lunch. He waited while Dad took his usual array of pills: first the flat white ones, then the round bronze ones, then the lozenges, half red, half black.
‘Have one of these,’ and Dad handed him a dark-green capsule the size of a pea. ‘It’s good for you.’
Nathan smiled and swallowed it.
‘So what is it?’ Dad said finally. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I’m going to stay with Yvonne for a few weeks.’
‘How long will you be gone?’
‘I don’t know. I think maybe after staying at Yvonne’s I’ll move on up the coast.’
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
Dad took off his half-moon spectacles. He leaned his head back and stared up into the corner of the room where the two walls joined the ceiling. ‘This is your home too, you know. I don’t like to think that you’re being driven out.’
‘I’m not. It’s just something I want to do.’
He was lying, of course, and they both knew it. Sometimes he thought of all the lies stored in his head. Or not so much lies, perhaps, as the truth held prisoner.
Dad brought his eyes down from the corner of the room. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said in a low voice, and quickly looked away.
Nathan broke off. He wasn’t crying exactly. It was just that there were tears dropping from his eyes.
India-May put her hand on his. ‘It’s all right, Nathan,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’ She went to the sideboard and poured a brandy. ‘I know you’re clean and all that, but I think maybe you could make an exception tonight.’
He drank the brandy down without a word.
Later he said, ‘You know, when I worked in Moon Beach, we used to make bets with each other, bets on who could get through the spring tides.’ He stared at the glass in his hand. ‘Those waves are high, you try and get through, but they’re hitting the beach and chewing it up, you dive, you come up, you dive again, you come up again, you’re getting nowhere, it’s hard water, it keeps knocking you down and pounding on you, but you can’t stop, if you stop, you’ve lost it, it rolls you right back to the shore, it throws you out on the sand like an old tin can, you’ve got to keep diving, that’s where your fitness counts, you dive, you come up, and those waves keep pounding on you, and then, finally, you come to the big one, you get under it, and you’re safe, you’re on the other side of the water.’ He laughed softly and said, ‘The other side of the water,’ and shook his head. ‘Next thing is, you see a nice wave and you think fuck it, I’m going to take that wave, and you take it all the way in, and you get out, and you hold out your hand, someone owes you, and everyone’s watching because the red flags are up and there’s nobody in that surf, nobody.’ He turned the empty glass in his hands. ‘Sometimes you come out of that water and you lie down on the sand and you’re so tired you just fall right off to sleep.’