The Waters

Touching Distance

On his first night in the house, Mark lies on a mattress in the empty living room with all the windows open and listens to the neighbours beating their son. It’s nearly midnight but the temperature must still be up in the twenties. There’s not even the ghost of a breeze coming in from outside to stir the heat.

At first it’s only their TV he can hear. A jingling theme song and some hollow canned laughter. When the ads for post-Christmas sales come on there’s a surge in volume. Then the kid starts up, whiny. Mark can’t make out exactly what he’s saying but he’s clearly complaining about something. He’s maybe eight or nine by the sound of him. Now a woman, screechy as a parrot.

He hasn’t met any of these people yet so doesn’t have faces to go with the voices. The woman – he figures she’s most likely the mother – moves rapidly up through the gears. It’s not long before she’s at full throttle. It’s all ‘You do what I say!’ and ‘Screw you, you spoilt little shit!’ Undeterred, the kid yells back at her over the laughter from the television. Now a man’s voice abruptly kicks in. Short hard sentences. The unmistakable slap of flesh on flesh.

Christ, half the neighbourhood must be hearing this.

Mark rolls over on his mattress, turning his back to the next-door house. Dust rises into his nostrils. He stares at the shadow that is the fireplace. One of the first things he’s planning to do is rip that out completely. If he can be bothered, he might even clean up the bricks, perhaps use them to make a paved area down the back of the garden.

The boy manages to stay defiant for a while. He’s lobbing back the curses and obscenities hurled at him by the man. There’s a crash, the shatter of glass. That’s when the bloke erupts, goes right off. The sound of another harder whack comes through clearly over the shouting, and then more. The boy’s voice fades into choking sobs. Eventually, thank Christ, it fades into silence.

Mark’s straining to hear now. He stares up at the chipped plaster rosette on the ceiling. All he can make out are the sounds of a suburban summer night: the television; a droning alarm that’s been going off in the distance for the past twenty minutes; a police car blatting past over on the main road; the chained German shepherd barking three doors down.

He should try and get some sleep. He’s got a long day tomorrow. It’s none of his business anyway. In a couple of months he’ll be finished renovating this place. He’ll sell it, and be gone. What’s the point in getting involved?

Mark begins to demolish the wall between the living room and the hallway soon after dawn. According to the LIM report, the house, which he bought by tender only the week before, is eighty-three years old. The walls are lath and plaster. His crowbar bites into the wooden batons between the studs as he levers off the dry plaster, scattering chunks across the floor, throwing thick white clouds of dust into the air.

By mid-morning it’s stifling in the room, even with the windows open. He’s wearing an ancient T-shirt, paint-splattered black rugby shorts and running shoes with no socks. As he works he drinks so much water from a plastic Coke bottle that he needs to go to the loo every half-hour. By 11.30 he’s starving. Breakfast was two stiff pieces of Hawaiian pizza left over from last night. There’s no more food in the house. Part of his plan for the afternoon is to take the car down to the supermarket. He needs enough food to see him through the next few days – bread, milk, eggs. Some other stuff he’ll get for the long haul – toothpaste, shampoo, detergent for washing his two pots and three plates. He’s budgeted that the house will take him twelve weeks to do up completely.

He decides to knock off for lunch. As he walks in the sunshine down to the café by the bridge, he rubs his hair to remove most of the layer of dust. The young woman behind the counter is heavily pregnant. Her thick black dreads are piled into a tangle on her head.

‘That’s a bad case of dandruff you’ve got there,’ she says, dark eyes flashing.

‘Yeah, plaster dust.’

He grins sheepishly and brushes at his hair. Habitually, he turns his head when talking to people he doesn’t know well in an effort to hide his wonky eye and the pale latticework of scars around it.

‘Here you are, Dusty.’ As she hands over the food, she gifts Mark a smile that leaves him inarticulate. A creaking ‘thanks’ is all he can manage.

He carries his coffee and pie over the road to the riverbank, where he eats sitting on a bench that is almost completely scrawled over with graffiti. This close to the estuary, the river is shallow, brown and sluggish. The smells are of mud and salt. Someone’s pushed a Countdown shopping trolley off the bank into the mud on the far side, and three wheels poke up out of the slow current. A gull quickly finds him. Soon there are half a dozen on the grass, screaming and posturing for first dibs on any food he might drop.

For the first time in years he thinks about the man who sometimes turned up at their house in New Brighton when they were kids. The same man who’d shout and rant and chase Davey and him around. The best place to hide was among the pines in the domain that bordered their section. The man wouldn’t normally bother chasing them into the pines. Most times they were safe among the trees.

Mark breaks off a piece of hot pie, the mince threatening to slop from the pastry. The largest gull, the only black-back, moves closer than the rest and watches him intently with red-rimmed eyes.

‘Screw you,’ he says and eats the lump of pie too quickly, so that the meat burns his tongue.