Page 22 of Summer, in Between
‘You’re so right.’I’m almost bouncing off the walls from half a day of bad weather.I can only imagine how hideous it must be for the people trapped in caravans and tents and mouldy old holiday houses playing endless card games.When it’s cold, wet and windy, the days feel so freakin’ long and oh so boring, like the days after I finished school, but at least then I could go to the beach.I want some sunshine, pronto.I want this wind to blow its way back out to Antarctica so I can walk on the beach without feeling as though I’m pushing through quicksand.I’m sick of the books sitting on my desk, gloating, swollen with information I’m in the wrong headspace to access, let alone absorb, and I’m sick of worrying if the missing ones will arrive in time for me to read them before school starts.‘Hey, Tommy, if it clears up tonight, do you want to go watch the sunset from top of the Bay?’
It’s something we’ve done together since he was little.Tommy loves to watch the colours shift through the sunset as much as I do.He grins up at me and I stick a finger into his rib, tickling him.He giggles and scoots back down to the living room.
Mum’s playing karaoke with Matty.Oh, the horror of my mother playing air guitar, bellowing alongside my brother.Cats all over Batter’s Cove could take up the chorus and still hold a better tune.I make Dad a coffee and escape downstairs.
The garage door’s open, as it always is whenever anyone is home.It’s empty.Mum’s car is in the driveway and Dad’s is parked on the street in front of the house.Tommy and Matty’s bikes are in a jumble at its entrance.Dad’s categorically told us not to use it while he’s working on his Taj Mahal of cellars.It’s a big garage, I suppose; it’s basically the bottom level of our house and is the frame on which half the house sits.It fits two cars easily, and Dad’s wide workbench extends along the back wall.Above the workbench Dad built shelving and hooks for his gazillion tools.A full length of cupboards lies along a side wall.The doors are closed, but I don’t need to open them to know they are on the brink of exploding.Mum’s a bit of a hoarder.She still has all our baby clothes and the toys we stopped playing with long before we even moved here.
‘Dad?’I call out from the middle of the garage.I can hear him banging around behind the wall beside me.‘I’ve made you a coffee.’
He backs out from the manhole at the side of the garage, and I’m greeted by the lovely view of his tradie’s cleavage.A small triangle peaks his chest, tanner than the rest of him from wearing an unbuttoned shirt all day.
‘You’re a good one, you are!I knew you’d come in handy eventually.’He takes the coffee from my hands.He’s filthy with cobwebs and the strange, pale coloured dirt we have here at Batter’s Cove.
‘You’d be a good one too, if only you took advantage of modern life.There’s this new invention, you might have heard of it, it’s called a belt?’
‘A belt’s the least of my problems,’ he says.‘I need to get this wall open so I don’t have to crawl in and out.I’m too old for this.’I crouch down to look through the manhole.The space under the house is cavernous, easily the size of our kitchen and living room combined.It’s such a big space, used up until now as an undercover junkyard to keep lengths of timber, flooring, bits and pieces of building who-knows-what, hidden out of sight.Dad likes his garage pristine.For all these years it’s only ever been accessed by the small manhole, the height of my thigh, wider than it is tall.‘Go in, take a look,’ Dad says.
I shuffle through the manhole, my hands above my head as a buffer against the thick beam of its opening.There are spotlights set up, lighting every angle.
‘This is supremely cool, Dad,’ I step carefully over the piles of timber.‘How’s it all going to work?’He talks me through the plans, showing me where the new walls will go, the plumbing paraphernalia that’s been here since we built which will become a bathroom and a kitchen.Begrudgingly, I can see why he needs help.There’s more timber stacked against the far walls.They’re stark in their newness and the space has a strange smell, a mixture of timber and earth and stale air.He’s spray painted a giant W against a wall.It looks like Nonna’s new living room is going to have a view directly into the garden.There’s a narrow section marked out the opposite far corner, where the house meets the hill.‘Is this “the cellar”?’
‘Yep,’ says Dad, ‘and it is a cellar, so you don’t need the air quotations, Miss Smarty-pants.But just so we’re clear, this is a room you are prohibited from entering.Last year, you ate four hundred dollars’ worth of salami by yourself.’
Each July at Nonna’s house, we have a day, an annual festival if you will, to celebrate all that is freezing cold and nauseatingly gross in our culture.Salami Day is its official title, but I prefer to go with Annual Vegetarian Hell Day.Yes, it’s a cliche, but we spend the day up to our elbows in pork flesh that we mince ourselves.We fill the intestines of an unfortunate, recently-wallowing-happily-in-mud pig with its own flesh.
We start before dawn, or Dad and Nonna do, when they go to a local farm to collect a newly indisposed pig, butchered to Nonna’s precise instructions which must make the farmer want to take to his own intestines with a blunt and rusty boning knife.The worthy sacrifice is one that Nonna would have chosen the week before, selecting which among them to grace our grazing platters for the year ahead.The next eighteen hours are then spent freezing in Nonna’s shed and arguing over salt and chilli ratios.We finish up late at night, the fruits of our labour hanging over laundry airing racks, and the smell of dead animal firmly wedged in our nostrils and in the very fibres of the clothes we wear.In fact, a change of clothes is mandatory packing before we leave home in the morning and Mum won’t let us in her car until we shower and scrub the living bejesus out of our every pore and follicle in Nonna’s tiny bathroom.
‘No offence, but you can be a bit of a smartarse yourself, Dad,’ I say.He’s right though.I do love Nonna’s salami, and I have no issue eating it three times a day; with eggs for breakfast, on crackers and cheese when we get home from school and in a frittata for dinner.My arteries are probably more clogged up with cholesterol than a sixty-year-old chain smoker.
‘What’s that around your leg?’
I look down, and there’s fishing line wrapped around my leg in a tangle.I’ve dragged metres of it through the manhole and across Nonna’s future home.I follow its trail to an old reel in the corner of the garage.Dad drinks his coffee, and I sit on his workbench, untangling the fishing line and rewinding it on the reel, swinging my legs.It’s raining again; water runs down the driveway in tiny rivulets.We’re laughing about the rock concert coming from the living room above our heads when a voice calls from the garage entrance.
‘Hello?’
It’s Paul.
