Luka, page 13
The teacher got out of the pool, dripping. The pelican continued to paddle slowly around a couple more times, then it ruffled its feathers and hopped out. It looked up and down the front row, then, using the asphalt as a runway, lifted itself up into the air, circling the quadrangle before heading off in the direction of the ocean. I craned my neck backwards, watching it disappear.
Ms Nielsen was now standing beside the pool, the basket of white lilies in her hand, asking families who’d lost loved ones to come forward and throw a lily into the water. She said the lily represented those who had lost their lives. That we were to imagine the lily was being dropped into the ocean and pulled on the tide, out to sea. A leaving of one shore and setting sail for another. She told us the flowers would allow us to farewell those who had been taken away. As if a flower thrown into a kiddies pool was going to solve our problems.
I sat there stuck in my seat, watching the families get up and walk towards the school principal. Some seemed keen to place a lily into the pool. Others were slow and hesitant, not looking up at Ms Nielsen when they took the lily with its long green stalk from the basket. Some people kissed the flower before they threw it into the water, others hugged it to their chest and then sent it gently adrift, like someone might push a small boat they didn’t want to sink.
It took Dad a few minutes to notice that I was still sitting in my seat. He came back and put a shaking hand on my shoulder. ‘Come and put a flower in the water, Luka.’
‘No.’
‘You have to, mate, it’s what your mum would have wanted, and Jazzie.’
‘I don’t think so. And I don’t want to, Dad.’
‘You have to.’ He put his hand out. ‘Come on.’
Reluctantly, I put my hand into his. It was stupid, and Mum would have thought so too. My legs were weak from standing up there in front of the whole school. My body ached as if it was about to come down with a bad flu.
Ray and Uncle Scott went first, picking two flowers each out of the basket. Uncle Scott let the flowers drop as if he were dropping them off a cliff into the ocean. Then he stood there, his head bowed and eyes closed, before going back to his seat. Ray looked lost standing in front of the pool. Two lilies hung loosely from his hand, as if he wasn’t sure how they’d got there or what he was supposed to do with them. But when Dad reached out and lightly touched him on the shoulder, Ray let go of the long thick stalks and let the lilies drop headfirst into the water. Then he turned and went back to his seat.
Dad was next. Slowly and awkwardly, he got down on his knees in front of the pool, like an old man getting ready to pray. He brought one of the lilies to his lips and kissed it, his eyes closed, his face contorted in pain. Then he gently pushed it out to the centre of the pool. He did the same with the next lily and then stayed kneeling there, watching the lilies drift and then sink to the bottom of the pool.
The lilies felt awkward in my hand, long and top-heavy. I didn’t know whether I should hold them by the end of their stalks so their heads pointed up to the sky or if I should cuddle them the way a mother might cuddle a small child. In the end, I held them down low next to my thigh, halfway along their stalks so they could balance easily in my hand. I waited for Dad to uncurl his bent body and stand up.
When he moved away, I walked over and stood beside the pool, looking down at the lilies, some of their heads bobbing on the water, most of them at the bottom of the pool. It was ridiculous to think the simple white flowers could represent the devastation of all the families sitting in the front row. My fingers squeezed tight around the thick stalks. I leant forward just enough so that when I let go of the lilies they landed with a splash in the pool. As my two flowers found their place in among the others, despite the stupidity of it all, I started to cry, no longer able to hold it back.
I thought it was Dad standing next to me with his arm around my shoulder, but it wasn’t: it was Uncle Scott.
Eleven
After the ceremony, Dad went straight to bed, shutting the blinds and pulling the covers up under his chin. And that was it. He stayed there. He didn’t get out of bed until six in the evenings, until he seemed to know when Uncle Scott was just about to walk through the door.
Uncle Scott had moved back to his own house, but he ate dinner with us every night, helping us get through the meals Mum’s friends kept bringing around. He’d sit there and tell us about his day at work, about what was going on in the outside world, as if we were marooned on some island and no longer had any idea of reality. He told us how there had been a big drug bust on the Gold Coast, the biggest drug operation in history, 150 people arrested, 400 charges, a Surfers Paradise nightclub involved. How they’d found bones in the seaway up at The Spit – human bones, they thought.
Then, nearly every night, he would tell us the latest on the bombing, what the news on TV was saying, what he’d read in the newspapers and if he’d had any updates from the police. It seemed like the police were as lost as everyone else. Just as Ray had said.
While he talked, he eyed Dad, clearly noticing the way he didn’t eat his food, the way he didn’t look up from the table, the way he never said more than one or two words at a time. It was obvious Dad wasn’t coping, obvious that he was falling apart. I thought Uncle Scott would say he was moving back in, or that he’d turn up one night with a mate who also happened to be a counsellor, someone that could make Dad feel better, make him get out of bed in the morning instead of spending all day in his dark bedroom. But Uncle Scott didn’t do either of those things, he just kept coming every night after work, staying for dinner, talking to us about things we didn’t want to know about and then going back to his clean and tidy house.
One night when we were sitting around the table, almost three weeks since the bombing, Uncle Scott asked Dad when we were going to go back to school.
‘Later,’ was all Dad said.
Which suited me just fine. I didn’t care if I never went back. The last thing I needed was the kids at school looking at me with big sad eyes, whispering behind their hands, ‘there goes the boy whose mother and sister were killed’. I wasn’t interested at all.
Uncle Scott rested his fork on his plate and stared at Dad. ‘Don’t you think it’s time? It’s been … what … nearly three weeks now, hasn’t it?’ Uncle Scott asked.
‘No, I don’t,’ Dad said.
‘What’s the school saying?’
Dad shrugged his shoulders.
‘Nat, it’s not good for them. They need to know that life goes on, they need to get back into things, they need to start thinking about something else besides Jazzie and Kate.’
Dad shoved his chair back from the table, letting his cutlery clatter onto his plate. ‘No, they don’t, Scottie, they don’t need to start thinking about anything else.’
‘Nat, they’re kids, kids with friends and school, with surfing and skating. Kids with a life.’
‘They’re kids with a dead mother and a dead sister.’
‘So what? You think they should spend the rest of their lives sitting here in this house, slowly going to pieces? Do you think that’s what Jazzie would have wanted? What Katie would have wanted for her boys?’
‘Get out,’ Dad said very softly, his eyes steely, never leaving Uncle Scott’s face.
Uncle Scott wiped his mouth slowly on a serviette and stood from the table. ‘So,’ he said, in a voice that was cool and calculated, ‘you’re falling apart and you’re going to take the boys with you.’
Dad pointed a finger towards the front door, still staring straight at Uncle Scott. ‘Out.’
Uncle Scott moved over to the door. ‘I don’t know what to do, Nat. You won’t let me help. You won’t go and see a counsellor. You won’t let anyone help. It’s not fair to the boys.’
Dad’s face was so red that I thought he might burst a blood vessel and drop down dead in front of us, but instead he strung together the most words I’d heard him speak in weeks. ‘They’re my kids: not yours, mine. Don’t you dare stand there and tell me what’s best for them!’
Uncle Scott walked past Dad and picked up his briefcase. ‘She was my sister, Nat, my sister.’ He turned and walked out the front door.
Uncle Scott stopped coming for dinner after that. I thought maybe Dad’s argument with him would spur Dad on, make him get out of bed, pull him out of whatever abyss he was sinking into, but it didn’t. All it did was give him the excuse to not even get out of bed for dinner.
School wasn’t mentioned after that. There were a couple of phone calls from the principal, wondering where we were at, when we were coming back. But when Ray walked the phone down to Dad, Dad said, ‘when they are ready’, and hung up.
The house was quiet with Dad in his bedroom and Uncle Scott gone. Ray and I spent that first week after Uncle Scott stopped coming shuffling around each other, taking food into Dad, trying to encourage him to eat, trying to entice him out of bed. But nothing worked. He would pick at the food and roll over, telling us he was tired, that he needed to rest.
Every time I walked down the hall with a plate of food balanced in my hands, I had to walk past Jazzie’s room. Uncle Scott had slept in there while he was staying with us, his clothes neatly piled up on Jazzie’s drawers, the door to her room always open. But now that he was gone, the door was closed.
I didn’t know whether Uncle Scott had closed the door when he left, or it had been Dad or Ray trying to lock Jazzie away. Or if it had just blown closed.
There was something about the door being closed though that changed the whole feel of Jazzie’s room. It was hard to imagine all the pinks and purples that were hidden behind it, the big swirly butterflies on Jazzie’s quilt. The door seemed heavy and old, all sucked in on itself. I became convinced that if I reached out to touch the handle, it would be cold and clammy, like something that had just crawled up from the bottom of the ocean. It was as if the door itself had decided to keep us out, decided it didn’t want us to witness the process of the room slowly caving in on itself.
I thought about opening it, flinging it wide and letting the air of the hall rush in. But I wanted to ask Dad first, to make sure it wasn’t him that had closed the door. Him that wouldn’t cope if it was opened.
I sat on the edge of Dad’s bed while he lay there under the blankets. It sounded stupid, but I told him Jazzie’s room was dying, told him it needed the air from the rest of the house to live, to breathe, told him we needed to open the door. Dad closed his eyes, clearly pretended to be asleep, then, when I went on and on like a panicked three-year-old trying to get their point across, he rolled his back to me and said he was tired.
In the end, I decided I would open the door anyway, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. For a whole week I couldn’t do it. I told myself I was a baby, called myself every name under the sun. I told myself Ray would eat my gizzards for breakfast if he knew I was scared of opening a stupid door. But I still couldn’t do it.
Ray went out most mornings. He would stick his head in on Dad early, give him some breakfast – which I would take away at lunch time without any of it being touched – then, without saying goodbye or telling me or Dad where he was going, he would leave the house. He never asked me to come with him again. I figured it was something to do with Leah or Mathew Jacobsen, and I knew I should care, but with Dad not getting out of bed, I didn’t have the space to worry about anything else.
After a week of walking past Jazzie’s door and not being able to open it, I promised myself that the next time Ray was out, I would do it.
The next morning, I waited in bed, listening to Ray take breakfast up to Dad, hearing his muffled voice through my bedroom wall, then his footsteps back down the hall, the click of the front door and his car as he pulled away. I went through the routine of getting dressed, eating breakfast and going and sitting with Dad for a while before I made myself go and stand in front of Jazzie’s door.
I took three deep, long breaths and then reached out and touched the handle, telling myself there was nothing to fear. That there was nothing behind the door except for what had always been in Jazzie’s room – her bed and drawers and dressing table, the soft toys that she used to take to bed every night, her clothes and endless hair ties.
The handle was cold. Not the cold clammy cold I’d been expecting, but instead a crisp, detached coldness. I twisted it slowly and pushed the door open, letting it swing silently back on its hinges. Nothing jumped out and grabbed me, nothing said ‘boo’. Jazzie wasn’t even there bouncing on her bed like I thought she might have been. Everything looked the same as it always had, except the light in the room was grey and sad and there was a musty, stale smell, like winter blankets just taken out of the cupboard.
I walked over and opened the blind. The room seemed to sigh as if it was annoyed at being disturbed.
Uncle Scott must have stripped the bed before he left. The sheets and pillowcases were gone, leaving the mattress and pillows exposed. Jazzie’s butterfly quilt was neatly folded in a rectangle at the end of the bed.
The room was exactly what you’d expect a three-year-old girl’s room to be. A mess of pinks and purples, swirls and frills, a wooden dolls’ house in the corner and a bookshelf filled with all Jazzie’s special things. Porcelain fairies with their wingtips broken, a teddy bear clock that had never worked, a framed picture of Jazzie building a sandcastle at the beach, and a small pile of her favourite books – The Pigeon Needs a Bath, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Where’s Spot, Magic Beach – most of them hand-me-downs from Ray and me. And there was Nan’s old dressing table.
When Nan died, the dressing table came to our house. It sat in the garage for ages. Mum said there was nowhere for it in the house; Dad said it would fit best down at St Vinnies. But Mum wouldn’t get rid of it. She said she’d find something to do with it.
Then, when she fell pregnant with Jazzie, she knew exactly where it would fit. She spent Jazzie’s pregnancy in the garage. Ray and I would come home from school and Mum would be out there sanding away. We’d grab a glass of cold milk from the fridge and a piece of whatever cake or cookies she’d left out on the table, and then go and sit on the cold concrete floor, our backs pushed up against the old fibro wall while we told Mum about our day and watched her work on the dressing table.
She sanded it back to bare wood, unscrewed the handles and the doors, took all the drawers out and lifted the round mirror off. We deliberated with her for days over what colour the dressing table should be. She thought a pale pink might be nice. But both Ray and I said no. Ray said not all girls liked pink. I said no because I hoped it was a boy, and boys definitely didn’t like pink.
In the end we decided on white.
So now Nan’s dressing table sat crammed between the bookshelf and the wall in Jazzie’s room. Unlike the bookshelves, there was hardly anything on it. Mum had told Jazzie at the start of the year that her dressing table was only for very special things, like her jewellery box and the brush and comb set she’d been given as a birthday present last year.
The jewellery box was pink with white and green circles. Inside was one of those ballerinas that twirled when you opened the lid, tinnie music playing. Jazzie had stuffed it full of plastic jewellery, but right at the very bottom was a gold bangle that Nan had given Mum when she was a little girl. I reached in under the tangle of plastic until my fingers found the coolness of the gold.
The bangle was smooth and round except for two small dents where someone had banged it up against something hard. I ran my fingers across the glossy surface. Nan had given it to Mum. Mum had given it to Jazzie. A cold, hard circle that linked all the women in our lives. The women who were now dead. I squeezed my fingers into the bangle, but it wouldn’t go over my first knuckles. I closed the music box and sat the bangle on top. It didn’t seem like the right place for it, underneath all of Jazzie’s plastic jewellery.
I thought about spending the day in Jazzie’s room, sitting on the floor and sorting through her things. Reading her books, putting on the voices I used to use when I was reading to her, the voices that made her laugh, made her ask me to read it again. I could sort out her craft boxes and fold her clothes, put everything away neat and tidy. But it didn’t seem right: it felt like I’d be packing Jazzie away.
That night, when I got up to pee, the house was quiet. All the lights were off except for the toilet light. Jazzie had always insisted on the toilet light being left on, in case she needed to get up in the middle of the night. According to her, dark toilets were the best places for monsters to hide. All types of monsters: sock monsters, hair-pulling monsters, the type that liked to nibble on your toes while you were sitting on the toilet, swinging your feet. If the toilet light wasn’t on, she would rather wet her bed than walk down the dark hall.
I can’t stand the toilet light being left on at night. I can’t stand any light coming into my room when I’m trying to go to sleep. I need it to be pitch-black, to be able to sleep easily.
When leaving the toilet light on became a new Jazzie rule, I told Mum it wasn’t fair, told her while Jazzie was having all her monsters chased away, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Mum said the answer was simple: all I had to do was close my door. She said I could even roll up a towel and put it against the bottom of the door if I was worried about the light coming under. I told her that I got claustrophobic with the door closed, that I needed fresh air. She told me to open the window. ‘And what?’ I said. ‘Let some axe-wielding lunatic climb in through the window and chop me into pieces?’
Mum hadn’t laughed. Dinner was late that night, and she had a pile of work sitting on the kitchen table that she had to get through before going back to the office the next morning. Standing at the stove flipping meat patties for burgers, Mum sighed and said, ‘Luka, you’re fourteen, your sister’s three, don’t you think you can at least act like the big kid? Let her have the light on so she doesn’t get scared and wee her bed?’
