No More Boats Read online

  Ahmed had leaned back on his chair balancing on just one chair leg with his foot up under the table precariously keeping him hanging there. He looked up at her and scrunched up his face so that it became hard and sour and said ‘No.’

  At that moment one of the girls in the back of the class got up and started to cry. The three cool girls sitting near her smacked lip gloss across their mouths and laughed. The crying girl made a run for the door and the pudgy girl no one liked got up and ran after her.

  ‘Get back in your chairs,’ Clare had yelled but no one listened, and then Ahmed began to laugh. She lunged forward and grabbed the hat off his head and he fell backwards hitting his head with a thump on the table behind him and then a crack as it hit the floor.

  Later, after the ambulance had been called and they’d found three of her missing students smoking in the alleyway behind the school, she was sitting in the principal’s office in the naughty chair where he spoke to misbehaving students. He wanted to know why so many students had left her class and why she was letting them lean back on their chairs and why they weren’t following her directions. She wanted to say ‘long division’, but she knew he wouldn’t accept that as an answer. She looked out the doorway where the three lip-gloss girls were trying to listen in. What were their names? She couldn’t remember.

  ‘I’ve spoken to some of the kids in your class. They’re saying you might have pushed him? I know you’ve been having a hard time…but…did you push him, Clare?’ She was never, even to this day, sure how he meant it. He seemed fed up, not just with her but because he was tasked with the job of investigating such things. It was obvious this issue had been shoved into a long schedule of meetings, with kids who showed up late to school, and a boy who had thrown an apple at someone else in the playground and the school secretary who was always on the phone to her mother, and Clare was just another nuisance, someone to whom he was obliged to ask a bunch of questions that both bored the shit out of him and made him feel uncomfortable. He straightened himself up again and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and repeated, ‘Did you push him, Clare?’

  She had looked at her handbag sitting next to the chair, looked back out into the hallway where the lip-gloss girls were edging closer to the door and smiling mischievously. She picked up her bag, walked out the door, walked through the hallway and out of the school gates, crossed the road to the train station and didn’t stop until she was back in Surry Hills. That was it. She didn’t return phone calls, never looked back. She still had the letter of termination they sent her underneath her bed.

  Two shelves away from where she was standing at the counter, Paul was taking out the travel guides and showing them to a customer. The customer was young, twentyish, with jeans that had holes cut in them. She played with her nose ring while Paul opened up the books and showed her passages.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This is the nicest place in Vietnam. Đà Lạt. It’s in the mountains, it’s like the Blue Mountains of Vietnam. It’s cooler there, they have really nice gardens and markets and you can cycle all over the place. There’s lots of students and universities. It’s very French, they even have an Eiffel Tower and you can have French-Vietnamese food there. The French colonised it a long time ago, their houses are still there in the mountains.’

  Clare watched the woman take a little notebook out of her purse. She wrote down what he was saying and said, ‘Thanks, thanks so much,’ before she left without purchasing anything. When she had gone, Paul looked at Clare and smiled.

  ‘It’s not a library, Paul. The aim is to get them to buy the books.’

  His smile wavered into a nervous frown. ‘I was just being helpful. I can’t help it if they don’t want to buy anything.’ He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his pants and fussed over the display in the front window, straightening up books that were already straight.

  ‘It’s just that, that’s how we make money you know, selling things. If we don’t sell things, we don’t have a job, we don’t get paid, I can’t feed my cat.’ She didn’t have a cat. She was trying to get herself out of that feeling that she had made someone feel bad again but she was just digging herself in deeper.

  She changed the topic. ‘So when was the last time you went to Đà Lạt?’

  He straightened himself up and looked at her like someone who was ready to fight the schoolyard bully. ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never. My parents are from there. They told me about it.’

  ‘Oh. Have you ever been to Vietnam?’

  ‘No. My mum came here when she was pregnant with me. They escaped, you know, after the war. My dad was an interpreter with the South Vietnamese army. When the war ended he was put in a re-education camp for a few years, after that they were in a refugee camp in Thailand, then here.’

  ‘Oh right.’ She smiled. It made something in the right side of her face itch. She dusted the clean counter with the cloth they kept beside the register. ‘You should go there one day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul let go of a small laugh. ‘Maybe. My parents want to go back but they’re always working and there are so many family members needing money. Maybe if I sell some more books I can take them there?’

  ‘Or maybe with the salary you earn when you finish that law degree you’re doing?’ She curled her hands into tight fists. It wasn’t a good joke.

  ‘Or maybe you could go there on all those holidays you teachers get.’

  She released her fingers and laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe. You know that’s all we do, teachers, just have holidays.’

  She was glad, now they were both liars, that it allowed for this little secret between them. It was something, some way to connect. In her handbag behind the counter her mobile phone was ringing. It took her a few minutes to realise what was making all the noise. Her father had bought her the phone. She didn’t think she needed it but it made him feel safer about her living in Surry Hills. She’d only recently taken to carrying it around, using it occasionally, but it cost a fortune. When she answered, her mother was on the line.

  ‘Quick,’ she said, ‘call me back on your landline,’ and hung up. Her mother thought it was too expensive too.

  She waited a few minutes before she called back. Where was she supposed to say she was? It was late in the afternoon. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t supposed to be at school at this time anyway. She picked up the shop phone and called her mother back at home.

  ‘Where are you?’ was the first thing her mother said when she picked up the phone.

  ‘Out, just out in the city. I’m at a pay phone.’

  Paul looked at her curiously, walked over to a customer who had just entered the shop and said loudly, ‘Can I help you? What books would you like to purchase?’ He looked back at Clare and smiled.

  On the phone her mother was saying, ‘I need you to come home, now.’

  ‘I can’t come home right now. I’m busy. How about tomorrow afternoon?’ But her mother kept insisting, now, she needed to come home right now. There was something wrong with her father. The first thing Clare thought was heart attack.

  ‘What? Is he sick?’

  Her mother kept changing her mind, ‘Yes he is sick, but no not like hospital sick. Another kind of sick. You should see what he’s painted on the concrete in front of the house.’

  Her mother’s voice on the phone was distant, sad.

  ‘What exactly is wrong with him?’ Clare kept saying, but her mother couldn’t explain it.

  Then she began to cry, softly down the phone.

  Clare didn’t know what to do so she said, ‘Okay. It’s alright. I’ll come home. Soon. An hour or so. Can you wait an hour or so?’

  There was a pause on the phone. She could hear her mother steady her breathing before she replied. ‘Yes, alright, an hour. Just come home. Your father needs you.’

  Clare hung up the phone. Looked at her hands. Her mother was usually a calm person. It was her father who was prone to fits and outbursts. She didn’t know
what was going on but her mother wasn’t usually one to make demands. She stood still, tried to think. The shop needed to stay open for another three hours and she was the one in charge of locking it up. She couldn’t leave Paul. He didn’t know how to count up the till at the end of the day, didn’t know how to lock everything down. She picked up the phone again and dialled her manager but she didn’t get an answer.

  Paul walked triumphantly up to her holding out a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and put it on the counter in front of Clare with a giant grin.

  ‘This lady would like to make a purchase. Here you go. Clare will ring it up for you.’

  He stood beside the woman as she pulled twenties from her purse. Clare rung it up twice before the correct number came up on the screen. She took the twenties from the woman’s hand. She couldn’t find the brown paper bags so she just handed it over.

  ‘Enjoy your book,’ she said out of habit as the woman walked out the door.

  Paul kept standing there. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I need to go. I’ve got a family emergency. I need you to take over the shop. Can you call Ben? I can’t get a hold of him. Tell him you’re in charge. I had to go. I have an emergency.’

  She took the keys out from behind the counter. ‘I can’t leave you with these I don’t think. Or maybe you could just lock up and take them over to my place later. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I need them to open the shop in the morning.’

  ‘It’s fine. Clare. It’s fine. I can shut up the shop. I’ve watched you do it a couple of times now. Your family doesn’t live that far from mine do they? I can take them there later. Whenever you want. I’m not in tomorrow. But I can take back the keys. No problem. I’ll call Ben. No problem. You just take care of whatever you need to do.’

  She picked up her purse. Tried to think of more instructions. There were more instructions she should give him, she was sure, but she needed to walk out, just like she did that day at school. She needed to be somewhere else.

  ‘Go. You need to go.’

  Right. Good. She picked up her handbag. She needed to go. She walked out of the shop. Paul stood there at the doorway.

  ‘Go,’ he said again. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll bring the keys back to you.’

  16.

  There were too many cars on his street so Francis parked his ute two blocks from home and walked back. The words in the concrete underneath his feet said the same thing every few metres, Jesus Saves. He practised not stepping on cracks like he did when he was a child (step on a crack, break your father’s back!).

  Now he was turning the corner. Now he was looking towards his home from across the street. Now he was noticing that a large piece of the white picket fence had fallen down and was lying on the pavement. Now he was slapped in the face by that giant image in blue paint that took up every inch of the concrete lawn in front of his house. No More Boats. It was written in shaky letters in the middle of a circle with a slash through it. On further inspection Francis saw that a little sail boat was drawn in there too underneath the lettering, in case someone didn’t get the message.

  Sometimes he felt like shit only happened at his place, and as he stood there on the other side of the road where all the houses were quiet and still, he knew it had to be true. Some other things that were beginning to grab his attention: two kids, fifteenish, standing on their skateboards in the gutter throwing pebbles at the windows of his home; an older man in khakis taking photographs of the house with a giant black camera; the builders from the site next door hanging over the fence, pointing and arguing, flicking their cigarette butts over onto the driveway. Also, the noise, nothing distinguishable, just a kind of low buzz around the place like things were about to start happening. SUVs and bashed-up Hondas drove by, slowed down, people stuck their heads out car windows and pointed. An old man from the retirement home down the road was sitting on his white plastic chair at the very corner of its lawn so that he could watch all the action with his arms folded across his lap.

  And so, because he couldn’t think of a better plan, Francis crossed the road, looking straight at the side of the house like something important was waiting for him there, and just kept going, even when he felt the hard flick of pebbles hitting the back of his head.

  Around the side of the house there was a tin of paint knocked over. Its blue insides crept into the bushes next to where a paint brush had been left to dry. He made his way to the back and through the sliding glass doors on the porch. Inside, after all the business of the outside, there was only silence.

  In the kitchen: no one; in the living room: no one. In the bedroom his father was lying underneath a sheet, snoring, his bare shoulders poking up over the top. Francis realised he had not been inside his parents’ room in years. It was something of a shock to see it now, to realise it looked the same, to be so close to his father lying barely clothed underneath a sheet. There were the pictures of him and Clare as children sitting on the bedside table. There’s Clare – always with that look on her face as if she knows everything that’s coming – her hair in tight braids on each side of her head, standing at attention, waiting to be praised. Francis stood right next to her, his face knitted together with frustration, maybe because his sister was leaning her hand on his head or maybe because the world had already become so hard to understand and he hadn’t yet discovered all the mind-altering substances that would make him think he did get it, even if only for a short moment. Those ugly paintings of flowers his mother bought at a garage sale years ago were still on the wall, the bright yellow of sunflowers, faded now to the colour of mustard vomit.

  He went to the window and peered through the venetians. Outside, the kids on skateboards had gone but the cars were now slowing down to a stop. Two Islander-looking women got out of a purple ute and took photographs of each other in front of the house. He looked back at his dad – still sleeping. The man before him was old now, he could see, older than the image he had of him in his head. His father’s hair had turned completely white and sat in sparse clumps. He’d gotten old and mad, or maybe he’d always been mad and had just started getting old. That rotted statue of St Francis had made its way from where it had shown up in the living room and was now sitting on the table beside his bed.

  And now? What do I do now? He turned around and walked back into the kitchen where he knew his mother kept her little address book in the drawer. He found the number for the mobile phone his dad gave his sister and did something he never did, he called her up. It was Clare who asked the first question straight after he’d said ‘hi’.

  ‘Do you know what your father did?’ she asked as if she had no part in the family. That question. It was always coming back at him like someone throwing a rock at his head from behind. Before he could find anything to say he looked up to catch the back of his father as he walked towards the front door, his silent movements aided by the fact that he was wearing no shoes, no clothes, nothing but his underwear. The silence only made the opening of the front door even louder. Francis dropped the phone. He caught up to his father just as half a dozen eggs came flying into the house. When Francis slammed the door shut, it sounded as though another dozen hit the door with a wet thud. His father didn’t move. He just stood there with arms folded, staring at the door like he was ready for a fight but didn’t know where to find one.

  Francis held his father’s elbow gently and guided him towards the couch. He didn’t resist, he just sat down in that same space where the indent in the cushion said he’d been many times before.

  Francis swallowed hard and spoke softly. ‘What are you doing, Dad?’

  ‘Me? What are they doing out there? Too many people. So much fuss. All those boats. Too many boats.’

  His father looked confused and tired. The white cotton of his underwear was stained with egg yolk and it was threadbare, so that it had become almost see-through, exposing the outline of his flaccid penis beneath. Francis couldn’t bear to look at him. From the kitchen he heard his sister
shouting through the phone he hadn’t put back on the receiver.

  17.

  And so, shortly after her brother hung up on her, Clare’s black patent-leather pump emerged from the door of a taxi and placed itself firmly on the bitumen across the road from her childhood home. On the pavement to the right of the house an ancient man sat on a plastic chair with a picture of Pauline Hanson resting against the lower half of his legs. He looked up at her, smiled, as if to say, ‘welcome to the show’.

  And what a show it was! Two kids in backwards caps stood on the sidewalk, barely trying to hide the eggs that they were carrying in plastic bags behind their backs. Three cops in lycra and fluorescent vests leaned against their bikes and watched the kids, waiting for them to make a move and disrupt the tableau of Socialist Alliance protesters with their not-from-around-here piercings and vintage clothes on pale skin, and the families who had come out to stare, mums, dads, grandparents, with their I-am-from-around-here pressed saris and knock-off Hermes headscarfs, too much lipstick and Nike shoes.

  Clare clutched her purse under her arm. She couldn’t quite see the image her mother had tried to describe on the phone. From the apartment building next door two construction workers stood on the unfinished balcony and casually threw cement powder onto the front lawn.

  The teenage boys from down the road were making paper airplanes with the Socialist Alliance pamphlets scattered on the ground and flying them into people’s hair.

  She did not know if she could move forward…It was impossible, she thought, to cross over that small expanse of concrete lawn and make it into their house, so she did what her mother did when she was overwhelmed and bypassed the house altogether, stepped onto the front porch of Lucy’s house next door and knocked.

  In the window to the left of the door she saw Lucy’s face and then her mother’s, peeking through the blind. It was her mother who opened the door slightly to let her in and then closed it with a sharp thud behind her.