Breathing Under Water Page 4

  Four

  BROWNIE POINTS

  He doesn’t even like eggs that much, yet he can poach and top them with hollandaise better than anyone else I know. I can’t compete with him in the kitchen, can’t last five minutes without setting off the fire alarm, having incinerated the contents of a pot. Even on the barbecue, I turn the outer layer of a steak to charcoal while the inside remains blood raw.

  The culinary skills that both Dad and I so tragically lack are compensated for by Mum’s and Ben’s fluid movements between stovetop and chopping boards. I sit and watch the speed at which he can slice carrots and capsicum, tossing to me tail-end pieces to munch on. I marvel at the way he creates by taste, not a single recipe in sight. Dipping the end of a pinky finger into a soup, or pulling back the lid on a wok, he judges spice and flavour through a single drop of liquid, a sudden cloud of steam. He nourishes everyone around him, energy from the sun nourishing the earth.

  Ben lays my poached eggs down in front of me on a slice of toast, and I get stuck right in. ‘I swear if you didn’t have me around you’d starve.’

  I laugh with egg yolk oozing down across my chin and he passes me a cloth. ‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘I’d still have Mum.’

  ‘My poached eggs leave Mum’s for dead.’

  Mia bursts through the front door in her usual fashion, rays of sunlight streaming in behind her. In her bathing suit, with a towel over her shoulder, she plants herself down on the wooden stool beside me. ‘Morning!’ she grins, picking at my breakfast.

  I slap the top of her hand.

  ‘What?’ She giggles. ‘We all know how slow you eat. Work’s in half an hour – if I don’t help you eat we won’t even have time for a swim.’

  Ben interjects. ‘What time do you start?’

  ‘Ten.’

  I glance at the clock: 9.20 a.m.

  Mopping up a pool of yolk with my slice of spelt toast, I thank Ben. He winks, says he’s going to meet Jake, grabs his wallet and ducks out the back door, his skateboard under his arm. From out in the yard he shouts, ‘Have a good day, Gracie, and tell Margie she’s a sex bomb!’

  Ignoring him, I wash and dry my plate, gazing through our sun-drenched living room across the verandah and through our lush garden to where the wire gate opens to the grassy hill, rolling down to the sand … the sea.

  ‘Come on, Grace.’ Mia stands at the dining table holding up a pair of my bathers. When I get close she throws them.

  Although there is no one around but the two of us, I am slow to remove my top. ‘It’s okay, you’ll grow,’ she promises.

  ‘And what if I don’t?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say your babies will be very thirsty!’ she teases.

  ‘Yuck!’ I wriggle into my swimsuit as she places her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Seriously, Grace, it doesn’t matter – you shouldn’t care so much.’

  Our ocean is a sapphire stone liquefying in the sun. Waves are small and gentle, they kiss the shore. There is a boy with board shorts and a black wetsuit top, unzipped at the front, sitting on a smooth, wooden plank. Swell lines ripple on the sea and he lies down. He strokes his arms deep into the water and as the wave picks up his board he takes to his feet in one fluid motion. The old board slides down the blue face and he kneels, leans against the wall of water, rises, placing one foot in front of the other until he has walked the plank and is standing with ten toes hanging over the nose of the board. He glides, effortlessly. It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and it is not until he kicks off the back of the wave that a breath caught in my throat is released into the sky.

  It’s Harley.

  I let slip, ‘Wow.’

  Mia giggles as we wade out of the sandbank. She prods me in my side, ‘You do like him!’

  ‘Do not,’ I argue, splashing water at her. ‘I just didn’t know he could ride a longboard – that’s all.’

  ‘He used to live at Ivory Point. Grace, I can hardly surf and even I know that is where any longboarder dreams of surfing …’

  ‘Okay …’ I blush. ‘I didn’t know he could ride like that.’

  ‘Oh my god!’ Mia sprays me with water and I freckle with goosebumps. ‘Grace has a crush. Grace has a crush!’ she sings.

  ‘Shut up!’ I protest, legs turning to jelly.

  The next wave of white wash knocks my feet out from under me and I plunge beneath. When I surface, coughing, laughing and spluttering, Mia calls out to Harley.

  Sitting on his board a hundred metres away, out behind the rocky point, he calls back to us, a smile stretching his lips. I hold my breath and dive under the next wave.

  If it weren’t for our dripping ponytails, we might have gotten away with being five minutes late, but Margie is tired, having been up baking since the dark hours of the morning while the rest of us slept. She smiles politely as she hands a man his paper bag of scones and then rounds on us as he turns away. Following us out back, her words are a prod in the arse. ‘We don’t all have time to swim in the sea. Some of us have to work.’

  It’s a busy morning and we’re rushed off our feet and by two o’clock, Margie looks as if she’s about to fall down. ‘Go down the road and get a coffee,’ Mia suggests. ‘There’s a lull in customers now anyway – it’s after lunch.’

  Cat-whisker wrinkles around Margie’s eyes smooth as she sighs, and her face softens. ‘Okay,’ she says, picking up her handbag and dusting off her hands. ‘See you soon. I’ll go to Angelo’s on the corner so you know where to find me.’

  ‘No worries, enjoy!’

  The little bell rings above the latch as the door shuts. Once we’ve watched her cross the road Mia turns to me, winking. ‘Brownie points.’

  I softly tap my hands together, offering a silent round of applause. ‘More points if someone’s sitting out front with a dog,’ I add, picturing the hopeless way Margie turns to butter when she stumbles upon a cute dog, how her voice jumps an octave.

  ‘Even better … a puppy.’

  ‘A sausage dog.’

  ‘A puppy sausage dog!’ Mia lines the top shelf of the display cabinet with croissants. ‘Fingers crossed. With that many brownie points we’d probably get an early mark.’

  The bell rings. A familiar voice says, ‘Speaking of brownies.’

  We look up to see Jake and Ben stumble into the shop. Observing their red-rimmed irises, I know any brownies they’ve been eating haven’t been legal ones.

  Behind them, one of our regulars, Janine, makes her way through the door. She’s a slender woman with a long grey braid and a colourful shawl who swims some mornings in the ocean pool with Mum. She tells me she placed an order with Margie a few days ago and I ignore the banter tossed over the counter between Mia and Jake, focusing instead on the orders booklet. I find Janine’s order, write out her receipt, and then fetch her box from out back. At the counter, I open the box to check the contents with her. ‘Perfect,’ she says with a warm smile. ‘My youngest granddaughter, she’s turning five today. She’s having a mermaid party in the ocean pool.’ Janine holds up one of the cupcakes from the box. Little mermaids made from gummy babies and M&M’s swim in blue icing atop each cake. ‘These are wonderful, thank you so much.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  As she walks out of the store, I think of how many birthday parties Ben and I hosted in the ocean rock pool.

  ‘I also placed an order …’ Ben says, leaning against the counter.

  ‘Oh yeah, and what did you order exactly?’ Mia grins, her hands on her hips.

  ‘Two firm, round buns.’

  Jake cracks up behind him as Mia teases Ben, ‘I’ve got samples, would you like a taste test?’

  Ben nods, closes his eyes, letting his tongue slide out of his mouth and reaches blindly over the counter toward her.

  ‘I’d like to finger your bun …’ Jake slurs in the background. ‘Oops, I meant I’d like a finger bun.’

  Consumed by their own hilarity, the boys sink to the floor.


  Suddenly Mia snaps, ‘Get up!’ and as I follow her gaze across the road, I see Margie with a coffee in her hand, waiting for a gap in the traffic.

  The boys look for a moment as if they’re about to stand, but then crumple to the floor again, as if their limbs are failing them.

  ‘Ben! Jake!’ I beg, ‘Get up, she’s coming back!’ but our demands only make them laugh harder.

  Dashing around the counter to the front of the store, Mia drives her foot into Jake’s shinbone.

  Still laughing hysterically, they crawl onto their hands and knees. Jake uses the edge of the bread stand to haul himself upright, then, before either of us have time to react, he leans over and plucks a jam doughnut from the cabinet.

  ‘Mmmmm! Oh, baby,’ he groans. ‘Firm bun. Sweet, gooey inside … This here is wife material.’ He holds out the jam doughnut in front of his face. ‘Kiss me, sugar!’

  ‘That’s the closest you will ever get to a wife!’ Mia says, throwing her weight against him in an effort to push him out the door but he just stumbles sideways.

  ‘Aw, come on, cupcake!’ Jake bats his eyelashes and puckers his lips, glazed red with jam.

  ‘Uh oh.’ The words slip off my tongue as I watch Margie make it through a break in the traffic.

  ‘Piss off, Ben!’ Mia slaps him and I notice that he has taken a meat pie.

  Biting into the pie, he moans. ‘That’s how I like my girls … chunky.’ Jake and Ben drop to the floor again, rolling around on the tiles, laughing as though their sides are about to split.

  All of a sudden, Mia has a loaf of bread that Ben pulled off the stand and is hurling piece after piece at the two of them. Slices fly all around as the bell above the door rings.

  I don’t know if the boys shutting up would help at this point, but they don’t.

  I just stand there.

  Margie is frozen in the doorway, taking in the mess on the floor – slices of bread, several pastries and two boys, high as kites – and Mia standing there with the bread bag in her hand.

  ‘Get. Out. Of. My. Bakery.’

  To my horror, Jake rolls onto his back, spreads his arms and legs wide like a starfish and says with a smile, ‘No thank you.’

  Bright red blotches appear on Margie’s face and neck. She rolls up her sleeves.

  Ben, still caught in a fit of laughter, wipes tears from his eyes and rises to his feet.

  ‘Boy, I’m warning you,’ she says, nostrils flaring.

  ‘Okay, okay!’ Jake stands up with his hands raised. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot,’ he snickers as he stumbles out the door.

  When both boys are outside on the pavement, Margie looks at us and says, ‘I meant … all of you.’

  ‘Pricks!’ Mia kicks a rock along the footpath. It tumbles into the pole at the base of someone’s letterbox, stone on metal rousing a dog behind a wire fence. The ball of white fluff bounces and yaps.

  ‘Oh my god. Shut up.’ Mia rolls her eyes. ‘What do you think the person in that house says when someone asks them if they have any pets?’

  I shrug.

  ‘I don’t know either,’ she says. ‘You’d be lying if you called that a dog.’

  My chuckle is short lived. ‘Do you think we’ll get another job?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah,’ she loops her arm through mine, ‘and I won’t get another one until we find another together. Besides, I reckon it sounds kind of bad-arse … We got fired.’

  ‘I guess so.’ I squeeze my arm tight in the loop. ‘I would have totally freaked if I was by myself.’

  ‘Probably … but you’re not by yourself.’

  I lie down on Mia’s bed beside her toy kangaroo. Mia slides open the glass doors to her garden, and a line of feathers strung up between her bedposts begins to flutter. Kookaburra, cockatoo and budgerigar all take flight.

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’ she asks.

  I nod, ‘Yes please,’ and she leaves for the kitchen.

  Rubbing my hairline with my sleeve, I wipe off a fine crust of flour and dried sweat and gaze around the room. Like Mia, her bedroom is a constellation of stars, impossible to recreate, impossible to absorb. By my head, on her bedside table, there’s a notebook with a sequined cover, like scales of a rainbow fish, a piece of rose quartz, pawpaw cream, Japanese manga comics and a buttermilk candle in a marmalade jar. I reach over and light it with her Hello Kitty lighter, and as flames warm wax, heavenly smells soften my limbs and I seep into the mattress.

  Above her desk, which is stacked with books, are several photos pinned to a corkboard. My favourite is a washed-out picture of the three of us – me, Ben and Mia, with me in the middle – at the steps to the kiddie end of the ocean pool, three years old, sandy and naked with goggles sucking our faces. Even then I was half a size smaller than both of them.

  Beside the photo board is a poster of her favourite book, The Lorax, and I think about all the environmental protests Mia’s attended with her brother Jackson in the city, how she always saw the very real, adult message in the story of the Lorax, while the rest of us were just children, delighted by Dr Seuss.

  ‘Here.’ Mia hands me a banana she has rolled in hundreds and thousands and then skewered with a kebab stick. ‘A fairy wand.’

  I sit up and tap the tip of my wand against hers. ‘Here’s to happier days.’

  She laughs. ‘To dolphins and guys that know how to kiss girls!’

  I sink my teeth into the magical rainbow creation, drawing it off the wooden stick, and grin like a child. Colourful beads of sugar crunch and pop as creamy banana mashes against the roof of my mouth.

  On the shelf, I notice a glass bottle filled with foreign coins and notes. ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘Jackson, he’s down for the weekend. Sleeping now though, I think. He visited twenty-six countries – how insane is that!’

  Mia’s phone buzzes. The plastic kitten mobile accessory she bought from Chinatown when she was last in the city lights up as the phone vibrates.

  Checking her phone, Mia gasps. ‘Wow!’ she says, and holds the fairy wand out, examining it with one eye shut. ‘I knew these were good but I didn’t know they were that good.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’ I flop back onto the bed.

  ‘The wand …’ Mia passes me her phone, ‘Look at this. Here is a guy that I bet already knows how to kiss … from the bonfire, remember?’

  I take the phone and glance over the message on the screen.

  If you’re free tonight, my friend is having his 21st in Port Lawnam.

  I pass the sparkly mobile back.

  Mia punches the keys and a minute later the handset buzzes again.

  ‘It’s a house party!’ She beams. ‘With DJs and a band. Will you come with me? He told me to bring a friend. Please, Grace!’

  When I don’t answer, she taps her half-eaten fairy wand against mine. ‘Please.’

  ‘Okay, but I want to drive.’

  ‘Fine by me! We’ll take Gran’s car,’ Mia says. Her grandma’s old Corolla has been idle in the driveway since she moved into the retirement village behind Marlow’s public school.

  ‘Sweet,’ I say, and she bounces onto the bed, crushing me with her embrace.

  ‘You never know. Tonight could be your night …’ She grins. ‘He might have a friend for you!’

  Like father, like daughter. I watch the way they peel the lids off their pies, scooping out and devouring the spiced lentils. They finish by lifting the empty pastry shells and eating them like biscuits. William, lean and silver haired, wears glasses with wooden frames, loose white trousers and an open cotton shirt. He works from home building software, does yoga and moves slightly out of time with the rest of the world. In that way, he moves in sync with Mia.

  We eat on cushions on their back deck, and when I’ve finished, William says there are more pies that he can heat up if we’re still hungry. He tells us how he had popped into the bakery this afternoon to say hi after a swim and taking Oatley for a walk, only to find us missing i
n action. Upon learning the reason for our absence, he’d started sweating, toyed with his wallet, rolled back onto his heels, and before he knew what he was doing, he had purchased all eleven vegetarian pies off the shelf.

  ‘Sympathy shopping … You’re hopeless under pressure,’ Mia giggles, then reaches across his lap to collect his plate. ‘So you’re not mad?’

  ‘Honey, a baker needs to be patient and exact with measurements. Let’s just say I knew you were never quite going to cut it.’ He lies back on his cushion. ‘Plus it sounds to me like those boys are largely to blame.’

  ‘They’re completely to blame,’ Mia says and I suppress a grin, recalling her flinging slices of bread like frisbees.

  ‘I’m sure Mel will have a word with them.’ William picks up his book and takes out the bookmark Mia made for him – a feather with a string of colourful beads dangling from the shaft. With his index finger, he raises his glasses slightly on his nose. ‘You will need to get another job.’

  Mia leans down to kiss him on the cheek and says, ‘I love you.’ I cannot help but wonder how different my dad’s reaction will be.

  We rinse the plates and cutlery as Jackson stumbles out of his old room, now converted into a guestroom. ‘Something smells good,’ he says.

  ‘Lentil pies, just heat one up,’ Mia says.

  Wearing odd socks, boxers and a loose singlet, he rubs sleep from his eyes. ‘Still haven’t gotten over this bloody jet lag.’ Then he notices me. ‘Grace!’ Embracing me with long, wraparound arms, he scruffs my hair. ‘How you been?’ Loosening his grip, he steps back. ‘I swear you’ve gotten taller!’

  ‘Really?’ I blush.

  He chuckles. ‘No, not really, but you’re looking good.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Indescribable. The best and worst days of my life.’