TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Corey’s last conversation with his mother had been at his sister’s insistence.

In the seething silence after their fight about America, neither of them knowing quite what to do next, Mirella had mussed up her hair and pressed her temples like she had a headache.

‘Okay. Alright. You’re leaving. Will you at least text Dad?’

‘Sure,’ he’d said, exhausted. ‘Sure I will.’

‘No, but actually do,’ she’d snapped back. ‘And the least you could do is tell Mum in person.’

‘There’s actually a lot more least I could do,’ he corrected and, for want of something to do with his hands, had started putting away the dry dishes in the rack.

They were one of her flatmate’s dishes, technically, but it was the sort of flat where people did nice things for each other; where they carried each other’s burdens. Their kindness shouldn’t have been able to make him angry, but it was so tender, so casually kind, that it cut deep. He stopped clearing them away on principle and lifted himself onto the counter.

‘She’ll miss you,’ Mirella had said, and it was such an egregious misunderstanding, a system error of the way things actually were outside the golden bubble of her hippie Anglican proto-commune, that he’d laughed, and seen her face pinch up.

‘She won’t even notice,’ he said, but he’d picked up his car keys anyway. Psychoanalyse that, he grumped on the way over. Despite his parents, some part of him still needed Mirella to think he was a good person.

There was no creek at Sophia’s Brisbane house. Instead, he had found her up the mulberry tree. And that was the thing, because she wasn’t only distant and cuckoo and mean; she was also embarrassing. It was embarrassing to find your sixty-year-old mother swinging her legs on the lowest branch of a tree, knowing the neighbours had seen her, knowing she didn’t give a toss.

When she saw him, her mouth pressed into a thin line of suppressed laughter. The big mulberry leaves kept batting themselves against her tight plait and loose dress, so that her edges were almost blurred into the movement and shadows of the tree.

‘You’ve come to say goodbye?’

He glanced down at his bare knees, his chino shorts, the way his Converse sank a bit into the dark green, well-shaded lawn, as if some detail of his person had spoken his lines before his mouth. Maybe it was the set of his shoulders, some sense … she was good at reading people.

She smirked – good at reading people – and reached into the pocket of her smock, tossing a card down to him. The Hanged Man. It landed on the grass upside down, which probably meant something to her.

‘America,’ she said. ‘Not very imaginative. But very far away.’

‘Mum,’ he’d said, ‘I’m not going to shout up at you while you’re sitting in a tree.’

‘Who’s shouting?’

But she slipped down anyway, only a short drop, so he was face to face with her.

They had seen each other so little since he’d left home for uni. She looked happier than he remembered. Looser. Enjoying the freedom of a house without him and of neighbours who respected the adage about tall fences.

‘When will you be back?’ she asked.

He shrugged, tried to figure out what, if any, effect this had on her.

‘Well,’ she shrugged back, ‘you will be. And—’

She tilted her head up and to the left, peering into the mulberry foliage like she could scry its green depths.

Corey did something he didn’t remember having done before. He stepped forward, put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. Her hair smelt like pickle brine and sunshine, and he remembered her tucking him into bed as a very small child. Pickle brine and sunshine and garlic on her fingertips. And when he conjured his vision of America – bustle, opportunity, some intangible sense of being made anew – he thought nothing will ever be the same again.

‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Stop trying to tell me my future. I’m leaving, alright? I don’t know when, or if, I’ll be back.’

She looked back at him, blinking, like she’d forgotten he was there.

‘Did I scare you?’

She didn’t act like the question meant anything much, but Corey heard, or imagined he heard, something a bit vulnerable in it. Something maybe actually curious.

‘What, just now?’

‘Now. Or whenever.’

He had remembered, then, when his mother had asked him on the veranda about the boy who’d died at his high school. Stewart. Stewart, who had been in the grade above Corey, who had played in the second eleven, who had slit his wrists in the A Block bathrooms the winter Corey turned fifteen.

When Sophia had asked him about Stewart that night – that pretty, scented Brisbane evening, purple and yellow on the horizon, the flying foxes, the mango trees – she had touched his face like she was surprised at his reality. You knew him, she had said, of course. Of course that makes sense. Corrado, there is something very evil in you.

And he was older and taller, now, and she was older and smaller, and he was a licensed therapist and she was schizophrenic and on antipsychotics, and probably she was traumatised, and he had friends and his sister and the mammoth weight of America grounding him and calling him onwards – he had all of these things and he was still scared.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I got over it.’

‘Alright,’ she said back. Eyes like pebbles. A woman-shaped mystery he did not wish to solve. ‘Take a lemon crisp before you go.’

Corey closed his eyes at this final cruelty, this tiny whisper of tenderness, too late, too small, too buried in everything else between them.

‘Thanks,’ he said. He walked through the house but didn’t stop in the kitchen, and he knew she knew, she knew, she knew everything about him.