Breathing Under Water

  Also by Sophie Hardcastle

  Running Like China

  For my sisters – Georgia and Gemma

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Sophie Hardcastle

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One: I Wear the Ocean

  Two: Fat Fridays and Vego Pies

  Three: Walk On Water

  Four: Brownie Points

  Five: Any Story

  Six: Like the Sun

  Seven: The Shadow in Between

  Eight: Tandem

  Nine: Indigo

  Ten: A Fairy Bread Sandwich

  Eleven: Blossom

  Twelve: Sunset

  Thirteen: Dusk

  Fourteen: The Grey

  Fifteen: Sasha

  Sixteen: The Shrine

  Seventeen: Blind Dancers

  Eighteen: A Beach Vibe

  Nineteen: Two-Minute Noodles

  Twenty: The Palms

  Twenty-One: The Luckiest

  Twenty-Two: Eighteen Months

  Twenty-Three: Tea and Tim Tams

  Twenty-Four: Young and Tragic

  Twenty-Five: A Performance

  Twenty-Six: Hey, Gracie

  Twenty-Seven: Far, Far Away

  Twenty-Eight: Anything

  Twenty-Nine: Hide and Seek

  Thirty: The Paddle

  Thirty-One: The Legend

  Thirty-Two: Pinch and A Punch

  Thirty-Three: When She Sings

  Thirty-Four: To Swim Again

  Thirty-Five: Time

  Thirty-Six: Home

  Thirty-Seven: Southerly Change

  Thirty-Eight: Pina Coladas

  Thirty-Nine: In the Water

  Forty: Horizons

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Hachette Australia

  Copyright

  ‘People dived into this teeming world and saw how the ocean could be itself.’

  – TIM WINTON, Blueback

  PROLOGUE

  Chilled bones. Red skin. White clouds exhaled as teeth chatter, and the ocean, just waiting for them …

  Beneath a silk veil of silence, feet sprint across wet grass, wet sand, and then lift. Hands grip the rail edges of surfboards and for a brief moment in time bodies fly over a roll of vanilla foam. As torsos land on wax, they stretch arms forward, dig down and draw back, pulling themselves through the cold morning milk.

  White wash approaches and in unison they each lunge forward on their boards, pushing themselves deep beneath the turbulence. They ride up through the dark belly of the wave and emerge through its shoulderblade. With their lungs expanding, a new day is born. New life.

  As they reach the line-up, the cold is pinching every place their wetsuits cannot conceal: their wrists, Achilles tendons, the napes of their necks. They sit up on their boards and, without passing a word between them, float effortlessly. Both have red-glass eyes and cheeks that sting, licked by the tongues of winter tides.

  Across the sea, the sun catches fire on the horizon; he looks across at her and smiles.

  For hours they dance on waves of molten gold, blissfully unaware that today the sun will set at noon.

  One

  I WEAR THE OCEAN

  I feel Ben’s patience wither.

  Rattling the metal bar, unable to release it from its rusty hinges, his cheeks flush pink. Finally, my twin brother kicks the wiry old gate. It flies open and slams into the side of the chicken coop. The sudden bang wakes BBQ and Honey Soy from their sleep, sending them into a frenzy. Laughing, Ben lifts the roof with his spare hand and I bend over to fetch the eggs. Honey Soy kicks up a cloud of dust as I’m sifting through straw. Grit makes my eyes dry, and there’s the foul taste of chickenfeed where the back of my nostrils connect to my throat. I cough, splutter and hear his laugh deepen.

  ‘Shut up, Ben!’

  Moments later, I touch my fingertips to shell and draw three eggs to the surface. Carrying them to the house, they warm my palms.

  Ben takes my board and places it with his in the shed and we dart around the house to the outdoor shower, leaving emerald footprints in the morning dew. Like the first heavy droplets to fall from storm clouds, water rains from a large round showerhead, freckled with orange and turquoise spots of corrosion. Ben pulls a flaking strip of white paint off the house’s outer wall. I slap his hand. ‘Don’t, Dad will get pissed off.’

  Nailed to one of the slats is a shelf made of driftwood with a bar of coconut soap, a bottle of home brand shampoo, a conch shell, a sea sponge and a succulent in a silver teapot. I lay the eggs on the shelf beside the teapot and wriggle my way under the hot downpour.

  We peel off our black skins and my body quakes as the cold air bites my thighs. ‘I’m telling you,’ he says, lathering himself in coconut suds, ‘You’re skin and bone, Grace – you’re making me cold just looking at you.’

  ‘It is cold.’ Shuddering, I wrap my gangly arms around the bones where my womanly hips should be.

  For a few years now, I’ve watched time carve beautiful figures out of prepubescent marble blocks. Polished femininity. I crave the way the other girls’ busts fill bras and bikinis, the way boys second-glance. I crave the curves between their hips and their thighs when they wear their high-waisted shorts. ‘Something to grab,’ the boys say. But most of all, I crave the way heads turn when the other girls enter a room and how conversation seems to slow.

  Dad walks from the shed across the yard with two surfboards beneath each arm. I admire the retro that he has reconditioned. The others are new – two white and one with a psychedelic paintjob on foam – only needing to be sanded back before he can sell them. Walker Surfboards. A family legacy, something to pride myself on. He loads the boards into the back of the old Rodeo, which he has parked oh so neatly, half on our dirt driveway, half on the grass, almost squashing a hedge of agapanthus. ‘Get out of the shower!’ Dad calls over his shoulder. ‘You’re going to be late for school!’

  ‘We don’t have school!’ Ben calls back. ‘It’s a strike today!’

  Dad laughs but then loses the grin. ‘Very funny boy. Turn it off!’

  Ben holds his hands around the shower taps so tight his knuckles turn white, counting, ‘One, two … two and a quarter … two and a half … two and three-quarters …’ pausing before he yells, ‘THREE!’ and twists the taps off. I grab the eggs and we sprint up the steps of the old wraparound verandah. Mum has left towels out, I put the eggs down and we madly rub our limbs as if to rub away the chill of autumn.

  In my bedroom I put on underwear, a singlet and my school dress, washed and ironed for the start of the week. Shivering, I pull my school jumper over my head and wrap a scarf around my neck, but even that is not enough to turn my purple nails pink again or to soften the ache in my lower back.

  When I emerge, Mum is in the kitchen. I slouch over the wooden bench, worn and smoothed by this family like a piece of driftwood worn and smoothed by the sea.

  ‘Oh love, your lips are blue,’ she tells me. ‘Have a bowl of this.’ She hands me a glazed terracotta bowl and fills it almost to the rim with black rice pudding. ‘Your dad was snoring,’ she tells me, ‘so I made a whole pot last night.’

  Noticing her frying pan starting to smoke, she puts one hand up like a lollipop lady. ‘Wait, wait! I forgot the banana.’ With a loving smile, Mum removes her pan from the stove and pours warm coconut milk into the bowl, lifting out the fried banana with a spatula and laying it on top of the pudding. ‘Bon appétit!’ she says in her finest French accent, handing me a Thai brass spoon that is probably as old as the house. Ben strolls up to the bench and pulls up a stool beside me. Mum turns to him, ‘Do you
want some too, honey?’

  He nods and she pours him two bowls of the pudding, serving them with four slices of the spelt sourdough she made the other day, each piece spread with homemade nut butter.

  As I eat, I listen to the two of them chat. It’s as if Mum and Ben speak in another tongue. It’s a language I can almost understand but know I will never speak. Words come naturally to them. No conversation is ever awkward; their sentences don’t just break the ice, they melt it into pools of water, warm enough to bathe in.

  Mum’s in her one-piece swimsuit, the one with the turquoise and purple paisley pattern, a towel wrapped around her waist. Her toes are sandy and she leaves wet footprints on the spotted gum floorboards. I love to watch the way my mum moves, her effortless beauty. Her blonde hair with its few silver strands is still dripping, matted between her shoulderblades. Since she was my age, she’s graced the tides every day at dawn, swimming laps with us inside her, right up until the day we were born. In nothing but her paisley swimsuit, she bears the pain of winter and celebrates the pleasure of summer.

  Sometimes when I was younger I would wander with her down the grassy hill, when the sky was that cool ash shade between purple and blue, and sit on green rocks with my toes dipped in the sea. Waiting for the sun, I’d count her laps as she moved through the water so smoothly it was as if she were a fish born underwater and was living on land by mistake.

  Ben finishes eating, grabs his things and wanders out to stand on the verandah with his skateboard under his arm and schoolbag hanging off one shoulder. He calls out for me to hurry up.

  ‘Yeah, just a minute!’

  I can’t find my sneakers and it’s not until I walk back through the lounge room in odd socks that I realise Monty has taken them. He’s old and doesn’t chew things; he just collects them. I lift his tired legs to retrieve my shoes from his doggy bed. Mum says he collects our things because they smell like us, his family. Our sense of smell is our most powerful sense, she tells me. We commit scents to memory before any sight or sound. We can even smell inside the womb.

  I love the way water slides down my neck in the hours after I’ve towel-dried my hair. I love the way it soaks into my cotton collar. I love the damp.

  I love the way I wear the ocean walking through the hallways at school, standing at my locker, sitting in class. I love the way I carry the morning’s surf on the nape of my neck, the way lovers carry each other’s scent long after they have parted.

  We’re dissecting the first known telling of Sleeping Beauty, The Sun, the Moon and Talia, written long before fairytales were sanitised for children by the Grimm Brothers. I pick at my nails as we read the tale of Talia, alone and paralysed in the forest.

  Suddenly Mia comes rushing in with her head down. She takes the seat I’ve saved for her. Mr Woodlow turns from the blackboard, scowling, and she mouths sorry!

  He turns back to the blackboard without acknowledging her and I slide my exercise book across the desk so she can jot down my notes.

  ‘You’ll never believe what just happened!’ she whispers, although not quite quiet enough. Mr Woodlow whips his head around with sharp eyes.

  ‘Mia Ellis!’ He spits her name across the room like it’s sour food. ‘Don’t make me turn around again.’

  As I write, she shifts in the seat beside me, tapping her hands on the table. Mia is a wild bushfire that consumes, a desert storm that rips. In my peripheral vision, she gathers her strawberry blonde hair, pulling it up into a high ponytail. ‘Hold this.’ Mia passes me a crimson ribbon, before looping her hair tie around thick locks. ‘Thanks.’ She takes it back, fastens a bow, winks at me, and then races her pen across the page to catch up.

  No more than five minutes pass before I’m squirming as her elbow drives into my side. What? I swing my head to see her wearing a pair of paper glasses she’s cut out from a page in her exercise book. A laugh cracks my lips open.

  This time when he jerks to face us, Mr Woodlow’s nostrils flare. ‘Get out!’

  ‘But Sir,’ she begins.

  ‘No buts. Take your books, Mia. You’ll be continuing your analysis of the text in the hallway. Sit where I can see you. I’ll be checking your work at the end of the class.’ Mr Woodlow wipes his forehead with a handkerchief and settles his ruffled comb-over. As he presses on with the class, his chalk handwriting betrays the slight trembling of his hands.

  Everyone knows he would love to drop her to second stream or, better yet, force her to leave extension English altogether, but when Mia spends the occasional lesson in the hallway, and still manages to top every exam, he is a lone firefighter, unable to control the blaze.

  Waiting for Mia at my locker, I exchange my English textbook for one on ancient history. She bounds up the corridor from Mr Woodlow’s room, bumping, smashing, pinning me against my locker.

  ‘Calm down!’

  ‘Have you seen him?’ she cries.

  ‘Seen who?’

  ‘Harley.’

  ‘Harley who?’

  She flaps her hands in the air theatrically, the gold glitter on her fingernails catching the light. ‘I don’t know! I don’t remember. He went to our school, ages ago, like ages ago, as in primary school. He moved away with his family, up north maybe. He was in our class in year one … the one who wet his pants on the oval!’

  Out loud, I ponder, ‘Harley Mathews?’

  ‘YES! Harley Mathews!’

  ‘Shh!’ I giggle, glancing around for onlookers, or worse, Harley Mathews.

  As young girls, Mia gave me one of her old Barbie dolls, one with brown hair. She kept her blonde-haired doll for herself and coloured the hair strawberry pink. She then cut their hair to look like ours and altered their clothing and even cut a surfboard for my doll and a beach towel for hers out of cardboard.

  When Mia went shopping for her first bra, she dragged me along with her, and not because she was nervous. Mia insisted that the shop assistant fit us both, despite the woman’s awkward hesitation when she looked at me.

  ‘We don’t stock cropped tops.’

  ‘We don’t want cropped tops,’ Mia replied, feet planted. ‘We want bras.’

  The two of us walked out of the shop with a gorgeous red lace bra and a modest lavender bralette that we both knew I wouldn’t be wearing anytime soon. When we arrived back at her place, Mia pulled her new lingerie from the bag. The shop assistant had wrapped our purchases in pink tissue paper. Mia tore hers open and held her bra up to the light, explaining that even if she didn’t have a boy yet, it was important to be prepared. She told me her new lingerie was going to make a boy as hard as a diamond one day, and although I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, I agreed. Later, when older boys with P-plates whistled out of their cars, she always assured me they were whistling at both of us.

  Moving faster than everyone else, I love the way she allows me to run with her. Some mornings she comes over before school and shows me YouTube videos she’s found of parrots saying funny things, cats sticking their faces in vacuum cleaner hoses and teacup piglets sitting in pot plants, telling me how they’re so cute that even though she’s a vegetarian, she just wants to eat them! Other nights she reads essays on Plato, or manifestos by early modernists, or her science textbooks cover to cover. She’s read the dictionary, the bible, and completed four Where’s Wally books. Before going to sleep she sometimes embroiders or draws or does Sudoku. In the morning Mia tells me about everything she did the night before. I’m in awe of what she’s accomplished and I’m always left feeling dumbfounded when she pulls out her finished homework and the school captain speech she’s written for the weekly assembly.

  Most of the time she talks so fast her words blur into one and even I have trouble understanding. Her bag is freckled with badges from music gigs or political rallies that she’s gone to with her brother in the city. And whether or not the other kids at school can appreciate the stars she has hand-stitched into the sides of her bottle green Docs, Mia is the wind – the hot, dry western wind. And I am gra
vity.

  ‘Oh my god.’ She nudges me as we walk out into the schoolyard. ‘That’s him!’ Mia points and I smack the top of her hand.

  ‘Don’t make it so obvious!’

  ‘He’s sitting with our friends!’

  Sudden sunlight washes over us as we step out of the dim corridor. I squint to make out Harley among the group.

  They’re sitting under the same tall pine tree we always sit under. Sometimes I think that the boys’ territorial approach is a little pathetic, but I am grateful to be part of the pack. They look out for us, regardless of how often Mia reminds them she is more than capable of looking after herself.

  As Mia and I approach, Jake picks up a handful of cheesy corn chips and throws them at Mia. ‘I hear someone has a crush on Blake,’ he taunts. ‘Could he be the one?’

  Mia’s cheeks flush as she kicks a pine cone at him.

  ‘Calm your farm,’ he says, reclining on the grass, bearing his weight on his elbows as he stretches his legs out in front of him.

  ‘Well I heard about Michaela …’ Mia retaliates. ‘Fifteen? That’s got to be an all-time low.’

  ‘That blondie from Saturday night?’ he says, flicking his Whitsunday white hair to one side as he glances across the yard at a group of girls, teasing them with fleeting eye contact.

  Mia rolls her eyes, arms crossed. ‘Yes …’

  Jake’s laugh bursts from his chest, ‘I swear her name was Amy.’

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Mia scoffs.

  Across the circle, Ben calls out my name. I turn to see him point at me as he explains to Harley, ‘You remember my twin sister don’t you? Grace, Harley. Harley, Grace.’

  ‘Hey.’ Harley’s voice is steady, his lean shoulders relaxed, and when I smile, I’m suddenly unsure if I actually said hi, or if I just said it in my head.

  ‘Toby was meant to be showing him around,’ Ben says, ‘but he was doing a shit job, so I took over.’

  ‘Rack off,’ Toby mutters, his freckly cheeks pale pink.

  ‘Just kidding, man.’ Ben slaps Toby’s shoulder. ‘You know I love you!’