Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,31

someone do that? Why would they lie?

Why does anyone lie?

To hide the truth.

Eight weeks before the storm

Mason tasted blood.

He rolled his tongue along his teeth to check none of them were loose, and his tastebuds found that sharp, metallic tang. His front tooth must have gone through his lower lip when Darren Foster’s fist connected with his chin. Admittedly he’d let Foster get in a few good punches. If anyone had been watching they’d probably wonder why Mason had stopped defending himself halfway through. It wouldn’t make any sense if he told them it was because, deep down, he believed he deserved it.

You’re empty.

He couldn’t remember how old he was when the numbness started creeping in. It had compounded over the years, a gradual deadening, until Mason wondered whether he’d ever really felt anything at all. He could pinpoint the exact moment he was taught to be ashamed of himself though, by someone other than his mother. He learned that being honest about who he was would only make life harder.

It was just after Wayne left and Ivy was on one of her downward spirals, not bothering to go into work and spending large portions of the day in bed with the curtains drawn. Mason was eight years old and had come to the realisation it was his stepfather who’d been doing most of the shopping and cooking for the last four years. Dinner around the kitchen table had now turned into home-delivered pizza on the couch, then baked beans on toast, then tinned soup if you were lucky, or half a box of dry crackers if you weren’t. And when the cupboards were really empty, mealtimes became whatever cereal they could shake out of the hollow boxes littered all over the pantry.

One afternoon, when their mother complained of a headache and slept on and on until night crept in, Mason fed his brother slices of plastic-wrapped cheese with tomato sauce because it was the closest thing he could find to a meal. The next day at school, Mason’s Year Two class did an exercise about the food pyramid where they had to illustrate their meals from the previous day. Mason’s desk mates created colourful texta dinners of roast lamb and pumpkin, and spaghetti bolognaise with garlic bread. Mason had to explain to his teacher what a yellow square with a red splotch depicted. Mrs Kruger was unimpressed. She folded that drawing in half in one smooth action before placing it in her pocket.

Don’t make things awkward with your pitiful situation, that gesture said to him now. Fold shame in on itself and pretend it never happened.

‘Try again,’ Mrs Kruger had told him, providing a fresh sheet of paper.

So Mason lied. He wasn’t exactly sure why he couldn’t tell the truth about what he and Henry had eaten for dinner while his mother slept the evening away in another room. He created an elaborate drawing of chicken schnitzel with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy, a meal Wayne had once cooked for Ivy’s birthday.

‘Oh, yum,’ his teacher said approvingly. ‘How delicious!’ There was a hint of relief in her expression. Play along and we will too.

It became easier to pretend. Until the pretending caught up with you and you realised you were nothing but an empty shell, letting a meathead from your English class get a few good punches in just so you could feel something.

Mason hadn’t provoked the fight, though. Despite how bleak things felt, he wasn’t a masochist. Getting the crap beaten out of him wasn’t his idea of a good time, especially in the rancid school toilets with the stench of piss and urinal cakes tainting the air. He shifted his weight now on the tiled floor beside the sinks, his back supported by the cold concrete wall. The wave of nausea had almost passed, leaving behind a dull ache in his lower abdomen.

Foster was built like a tank, but he obviously wasn’t as tough as he thought he was. He’d resorted to kneeing Mason in the balls to gain the upper hand. Or maybe he thought he was sending Mason some kind of message, considering what went down moments before the scuffle.

‘Whattaya think you’re looking at?’ Foster had said when he stepped up to the urinal right beside Mason’s. Mason hadn’t even been aware anyone had entered the toilets. He was staring at an illegible sentence of graffiti etched into the painted concrete wall, thinking about the Geography homework he hadn’t done.

He narrowed his eyes at Foster’s