The Art of Not Breathing(12)
My father opens the door as I come up the path, tripping over the weeds, breathless and hot in the face.
“Where have you been?” he yells.
“School,” I say, and squeeze past him into the house.
“Don’t lie to me.”
I try to ignore him, but he pulls me back. His face is taut. There are new creases around his eyes.
“School finished an hour ago. What have you been doing?” He breathes noisily through his nose.
“Nothing. Just walking,” I say. “I’m allowed to walk.”
His arm pushes down on my shoulder as he searches my face. “You weren’t at the Point?”
“No,” I say, focusing on a mole on his neck. He doesn’t specifically ask about the harbor.
“Are you sure you’re not taking any drugs? Because if you are—”
“You’re hurting me,” I whine, and wriggle out of his grip.
He looks down the path, confused, and I resist the urge to ask if he’s the one taking drugs.
It’s been months since I last had the dream, maybe even a year. I used to wake up feeling seasick. I would crawl into my parents’ room and slide between them. Mum never asked me what was wrong, but in her sleep she stroked my hair and whispered that I was safe.
When I turned twelve, my father sent me back to my room.
“You’re too old to sleep with us, Elsie,” he said, rising naked from the bed. “Turn the light on if you’re scared, but go back to your room.”
He thought I was afraid of the dark. It never seemed to occur to him that I longed for the dark.
11
ON THURSDAYS MUM GOES TO SEE A THERAPIST CALLED PAUL. Her appointments are in the afternoon, and she gets back just before we come home from school. We’re not allowed to disturb her. Usually by the time my father gets home from work, she has got up and redone her makeup. Over dinner, she says things like “Oh, silly old me, crying again,” but later, after I’ve gone to bed, I hear her shouting at my father—telling him that he’s insensitive and that he should know by now that she doesn’t mean it when she says she’s okay after a session.
Today, I wait an hour before I take a cup of tea up to her. She is lying splayed out on the bed like a rag doll, holding a scruffy teddy that used to be mine. She doesn’t acknowledge me, so I leave the tea next to her. She never drinks the tea. Usually the mug is still full and cold when I pour it out the window later onto the overgrown garden below. There are a few smashed mugs down there too, and I didn’t put them there.
Dillon and my father are not as patient with Mum as I am. She says that they don’t get as sad about Eddie as she does, although I don’t know if this is true. It could be a bit true. I read in one of her books about coping with grief that the mother always suffers the most because she carried the child. The book didn’t say anything about twins, though. I asked Dillon about this once, and he said that I probably had the strongest bond with Eddie, but he also said it was a bad idea to read books about coping with grief. He said instead of reading, Mum should go to back to work full-time and look after her family properly. She works three days a week as a receptionist at a dental surgery, a job that she discovered while she was at school. Instead of finishing school, she stayed in the job to save up for a pair of knee-high boots. Whenever I ask for pocket money, she tells me that those boots were the last thing she ever bought for herself.
There’s a knack to leaving the house quietly. I have to push the glass into the frame as I open the front door and then push it again from the other side so it doesn’t rattle. No one knows I’ve gone. It’s not a conscious decision to go to the harbor. I start walking, and then my brain fills with thoughts of Tay and the way he smokes—so delicately. If it weren’t for the smoke, you wouldn’t even notice what he was doing. And then I think about the man I saw inside the old clubhouse, and the woman in the silver wetsuit.
It’s dark when I get to the harbor. I climb the steps onto the veranda and they creak. I have to press my face right up to the window to see into the clubhouse. The man with glasses leans on the bar reading a newspaper. His hair’s not quite gray, but it’s light and wispy and the skin on his face is loose. He licks his fingers to turn the pages and pushes his glasses back up his nose every now and again. Eventually he looks up. I duck down under the window ledge, but a second too late.
The door opens. “Freezing out here,” he says, smiling down at me. “Come in if you want.”
“I’m okay here.”
He holds a hand out to pull me up, and I take it because I don’t know what else to do.
“I was making tea.”
He goes behind the bar and pours water from a kettle into two cups. He smiles the whole time and moves his head and shoulders as though he’s listening to some music I can’t hear. The barstool is slippery. I hook my feet around the legs but still feel like I’m sliding off.
“Are you the owner?” I ask him when he passes the tea across.
“I am now,” he says proudly. His teeth are so white, I think he could be a Hollywood actor. “My son and I are going to do it up and turn it into a diving club. It’ll be open to the public—anyone can come in and have something to eat or drink—but we’ll also rent out snorkel and diving gear, run dive trips, and eventually hire out boats. I’ve got big ideas for this wee place. See those boats out there? I’ve bought a few of them—they’re almost rotten, but I’ll replace some of the timber and they’ll be as good as new. We should be ready for business in about a month.”