Page 21 of The Sirens

20

JESS’S DIARY

1999

1 January

Happy new year, diary.

I’m writing this in Max’s bedroom, while he sleeps next to me. It’s 5 a.m., and his curtains are open a tiny crack, the sun catching his eyelashes. He looks so peaceful. Almost too peaceful. If it weren’t for the slow rise and fall of his chest, the occasional dart of his eyes beneath their lids, he might be dead.

I envy him, being able to sleep like that.

I tried to draw him but I couldn’t get it right – I couldn’t capture the calm of him, the way he looked so peaceful in his body. I kept drawing his eyes open instead of closed, open and tunnel-dark. His skin scaled, his fingers webbed. I realised then that I was drawing her.

It’s like I’m infected. Possessed.

I do the thing Mr Hennessey taught me, the last time I saw him before the summer holidays. We were having our final lesson for the year, and I felt as if a sinkhole was opening inside my chest. I was copying a Derain selfportrait, but really it was him – Hennessey – I wanted to capture. Capture. It’s the perfect word, isn’t it? You paint someone and it’s like you own them, like you’ve taken their soul from their body and put it right there on the canvas.

I was thinking about the long stretch of days that lay ahead, days that would be hot and dust-filled, which would smell of wool and sound of all the things my parents wouldn’t say. Eight long weeks until I saw Mr Hennessey again.

My hand began to shake and sweat, smudging my palm blue.

I didn’t think he’d notice – he often sits at his desk while I work, marking papers with one long leg folded over the other – but then his soft voice was breaking through my thoughts, asking me if I was OK.

I nodded, but I couldn’t stop trembling. He got me a glass of water from the art room’s clanking metal sink, and while I drank he put his hand on my shoulder, just for a moment. I was wearing a long-sleeved top under my school uniform, stiff and probably stinking of sweat, but I still felt an almost electric charge, as if his bare skin was touching mine. Then he took his hand away.

‘I get panic attacks sometimes,’ he said. ‘They started when I was a kid. My dad … he wasn’t the easiest man to live with. I saw a therapist for a while, and she taught me how to deal with them. Think about your body – from your toes to your fingertips – and focus on how it feels. Breathe in, then breathe out.’

I try this now, sitting in Max’s room.

I feel the cold floorboards beneath my toes, the itch of the rough skin on my shins and knees, my thighs and stomach. I press my lips together, feeling the tenderness, like a bruise. I breathe.

In, out.

What would Mr Hennessey think, if he knew what I’d done?

Max and I always spend New Year’s Eve at his place. When we were younger, his mum would let us stay up until midnight to watch the Sydney fireworks on TV. We’d drink so many cans of Coke and Sprite that we’d form a little pyramid out of them. Max used to call it the Eighth Wonder of the World.

I could hear the soft burble of the TV from the living room as I was getting ready – Mum and Dad were settling in to watch the coverage from Sydney Harbour – and I felt desperate, suddenly, to be safely at Max’s and away from them.

The atmosphere had felt heavy since Christmas lunch. As if the things I’d said then had swelled and swelled until they sucked all the air from the house.

Something had broken in me that day. I’d looked around the table, at the turkey and ham and smoked salmon and so many brightly coloured salads that it looked like we’d robbed a delicatessen. Far more food than three people could ever eat.

Mum had been in the kitchen for two days, and her cheeks were still pink from the stove, her skin still shining with sweat.

I don’t understand what made me so angry. She had merely done something nice – something she enjoyed, not just for the sake of it, but for the pleasure she hoped it would give us.

I think it was this odd feeling I sometimes get with her – like when she calls me ‘sweetheart’, or tells me I’m beautiful, or reaches out to brush my hair from my face – that the love she feels for me is somehow tinged with guilt.

And in that moment, I couldn’t take not knowing anymore. I found I couldn’t swallow, as if the words would choke me unless I released them.

‘Do you think we’re having the smallest Christmas of anyone in Dawes Plain?’ I said. I saw Mum’s face buckle under my words, but it was too late now. I couldn’t stop.

‘Jess, don’t speak to your mother that way,’ Dad said.

‘Seriously, though. How can it be just the three of us? No grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no siblings ’

‘Jess!’ Dad’s fist came down on the table hard.

‘No, Mike, it’s all right,’ said Mum. When she turned to me, her hazel eyes shone.

‘We wanted to give you a sibling, sweetheart. More than anything. But – it just wasn’t possible. Things weren’t straightforward for us, in that area.’

I should have shut up then, but I couldn’t stop myself. I swallowed my mouthful of turkey and then said, ‘Why couldn’t you adopt?’

Mum flinched at the last word and an awful silence settled over the table.

It was Dad who spoke first.

‘We looked into that, love, but it wasn’t an option—’

I pushed back my chair, so roughly that it scraped on the kitchen tiles.

Later, I kept thinking about Mum’s face, when I’d said that word. Adopt. The way she’d jolted backwards, her eyes wide. She hadn’t looked angry, or even hurt.

She’d looked scared.

Maybe I was wrong, about the affair? Maybe there’s another reason why I’m different.

I waited until they had gone to bed, when I could no longer hear Mum’s crying, and the gentle murmur of Dad comforting her, filtering down the hall. The sounds made my heart twist with guilt.

But I had to know.

I went into the study, closed the door before I turned on the light, hoping it wouldn’t wake them. The desk was messy, covered with paper and dust from Dad’s pastels. He’d drawn Mum a rosella for Christmas, serene in pale pink. I didn’t know where all our official documents were but decided to start in the drawers. There wasn’t much. A faded sepia photograph of a man standing in front of a boat – Dad’s father, maybe? – and an even older picture of a stern-looking couple I didn’t recognise. The drawer creaked as I rummaged through old paperclips and yellowed newspapers, making me wince. My fingers brushed a stiff piece of paper, and I pulled it out, thinking it might be something official.

It was a drawing. One of Dad’s, I could tell right away. Not a bird, like he normally draws, but a fish. A poisonous-looking fish, bristling with great banded spikes.

I heard footsteps coming quickly down the hall, and before I could react, Dad burst through the door.

His eyes were pink, like he’d been crying too, not just Mum. All because of me.

‘Give me that,’ he said, pulling the paper from my hands so hard it almost ripped. Before I could stop him, he scrunched it into a ball and threw it in the wastepaper bin.

‘Dad, what—’

‘Go to your room,’ he said, gripping me around the elbow and marching me out of the door. ‘Can’t you see you’ve done enough?’

I apologised and he sighed. ‘Come on, Jess,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long, emotional day. I just want everyone to get some sleep, OK?’

I got under the covers, but once I’d heard the soft thud of their bedroom door closing, I snuck back to the study and rescued Dad’s drawing from the bin.

It’s beautiful. Why would he want to throw it away?

The day after Boxing Day, the two of them went for a drive together. They said that it was to get milk, but I wonder if it wasn’t really to get away from me: Mum’s eyes were red and she avoided looking at my face as she said goodbye.

Part of me hated myself, but I knew I might not be alone again for days. Back in the study, I spent an hour rifling through the contents of Dad’s desk, flinching every time I heard the pop of the corrugated-iron roof expanding in the sun.

But there was nothing – the odd tax file, more of Dad’s art supplies, Mum’s old editions of Birdwatch Magazine.

By the time I remembered the filing cabinet in their bedroom, there was the sound of car tyres crunching up the gravel driveway.

I scurried back into bed and curled into a ball, listening to my Walkman.

I should have known then that the dreams would come. They – the girls – are like sharks. They sense it when you’re weak.

New Year’s Eve was normal, at first. When I arrived, Max stared at my face – I knew I looked pale, that there were shadows under my eyes – but he didn’t say anything. He seemed to know, without being told, that I didn’t want to talk.

His mum was out. She’s started dating someone in Bourke and was going to stay the night, so we had the house to ourselves.

We sat on the beanbag in Max’s room and drank cans of lager, listening to The Cure. I wondered when the cans of Coke had been replaced by alcohol and felt kind of sad, like one day I’d stopped being a child and hadn’t even noticed.

We watched the fireworks on TV, talking about what our lives would look like when we left school and moved to Sydney. Me, a student at the College of Fine Arts and Max a musician. It all seemed bright and real, as if we could reach into the television and grab hold of the future right then and there.

I don’t know what time we went to sleep. Maybe 2 a.m. Max gave me his bed and he slept on the floor.

When I woke up, I couldn’t breathe. Everything was cold, neon blue. I was in water, drowning. My eyes were open and I could see the flail of my own limbs, ghost white, like I was already dead.

And then there was an arm around my waist, pulling, the pain of air rushing into my lungs and the scrape of gravel on my skin.

Only then did I realise where I was, what had happened.

As I coughed up the water, shivering in the night air with Max panting next to me, saying, ‘What the fuck, Jess,’ over and over again, I remembered the dream. The black jaws of splintered wood. White water, pulsing towards me. Somehow, it had pulled me into Max’s pool. It had tried to drown me.

Max wrapped me up in a towel, delicately, like I was a child. He led me inside – I could feel my fingers pruning against his, knew that soon my skin would crack and peel – and made me toast and warm milk.

‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ he said, leaning over the kitchen counter, watching me as I took tiny bites of my toast. His eyelashes were still wet, jewelled with drops of water. I wondered what it would have been like, to have a brother like Max. If I was adopted, then maybe I did have a brother, somewhere out there.

I shook my head.

‘It was just a bad dream,’ I said. My teeth were chattering a little. ‘I sleepwalk, sometimes.’

He looked at me for a while, his eyes scanning my face. Like he was trying to decide what I needed from him in that moment.

And then he grinned.

‘You sleep-talk, too. And once when you stayed over here, you farted.’

I laughed, the sound of it surprising me.

‘You liar!’

‘I swear,’ said Max, laughing too. ‘It smelled like cow shit.’

And then I was laughing so hard that I was crying, my tears mingling with the chlorine from the pool, and then I wasn’t laughing anymore, only crying, and Max had crossed the kitchen and put his wet arms around me.

‘Oh, Jess,’ he said into my hair. ‘Shh, it’s OK. I’ve got you.’

I let him hold me, enjoying the feel of it, the safety of his skinny body against mine.

And then his hand was on my chin, tipping my face to his, and his lips were on mine, soft and warm, and he was kissing me and kissing me and—

Part of me was shocked. But another part had always known that this moment would come. That one day there’d be this fork in the road, friendship on one side and something else on the other.

I didn’t think, I didn’t choose. Or maybe I did.

It was a relief to have another person touching my body, tethering me to the here and now, to the bright kitchen with its smell of buttered toast and warm milk. Maybe I thought Max’s hands and mouth would keep me safely in this world and away from theirs. Away from the sound of wood splitting on rocks and women screaming and the sea roaring. Of men with milk-sour breath.

And it wasn’t just that.

It was the new energy that had grown between us, crackling in the silences. It was the way he looked, leaning against the greenhouse, the adult slant of his jaw. The heat in my skin when he touched my ear.

It was the way he always knew what I needed. The way he had saved me.

And so I kissed him back, followed him when he led me into his room, lay down with him on his bed, where our bodies made the sheets damp and chemical-smelling. I let him see me: the ravaged landscape of my skin, cratered as the moon, along with the part of me that wants to drown.

Now I wish I hadn’t.