How It Feels to Float Read online

  About How It Feels to Float

  ‘Every now and then you pick up a novel and you know you’ve found something wonderful - a glorious voice, a character you adore. Helena Fox’s novel delivers. It is exquisite. Read it.’ Cath Crowley

  Biz knows how to float. She has her people, posse, her mum and the twins. She has Grace. And she has her dad, who tells her about the little kid she was, and who shouldn’t be here but is. So Biz doesn’t tell anyone anything. Not about her dark, runaway thoughts, not about kissing Grace or noticing Jasper, the new boy. And she doesn’t tell anyone about her dad. Because her dad died when she was seven. And Biz knows how to float, right there on the surface – normal okay regular fine.

  Contents

  About How It Feels to Float

  Title page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Part 2

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Part 3

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Part 4

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Acknowledgements

  About Helena Fox

  Copyright

  For Anna

  At three in the morning when I can’t sleep, the room ticks over in the dark and all I have for company is the rush of words coming up fast like those racehorses you see on television, poor things, and when their hearts give out they are laid on the ground and shot dead behind a blue sheet.

  At 3 a.m., I think of hearts. I think of candy hearts and carved-tree hearts and hummingbird hearts. I think of hearts in bodies and the rhythm inside us we don’t get to choose.

  I lay my hand over mine. There it is.

  It beatbeats beatbeatbeats skipsabeatbeatbeat

  beatbeatbeats.

  A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand. Squeeze. It wants what it wants. It can be made of gold, glass, stone. It can stop anytime.

  People scratch hearts into benches, draw them onto fogged windows, tattoo them on their skin. Believe the story they tell themselves: that hearts are somehow bigger than muscle, that we are something more than an accidental arrangement of molecules, that we are pulled by a force greater than gravity, that love is anything more than a mess of nerve and impulse—

  ‘Biz.’

  A whisper.

  ‘Biz.’

  In the dark.

  ‘Biz.’

  In my room.

  I open my eyes, and Dad’s sitting on the edge of the bed.

  ‘You need to stop,’ he says.

  What? I squint at him. He’s blurry.

  ‘The thinking. I can hear it when you breathe.’

  Dad’s wearing a grey sweatshirt. His hands are folded in his lap. He looks tired.

  ‘You should sleep like you did when you were small,’ he says. He looks away, smiles. ‘Your tiny fingers, tucked under your chin. There’s a photo . . .’ Dad trails off.

  Yeah, Dad. I’ve seen it.

  ‘The one of us in hospital, after you were born—’

  Yeah. The one just after Mum got her new blood and you fainted and they gave you orange juice. The one where Mum’s laughing up at the camera as I sleep in her arms. Yeah. I’ve seen it.

  Dad smiles again. He reaches across to touch me, but of course he can’t.

  That photo has been on every fridge door in every house I’ve ever lived in. It sits under a plumbing company magnet and beside a clip holding year-old receipts Mum can’t seem to throw away.

  The photo was taken an hour after I came bulleting out of Mum so fast she had to have a transfusion. In the picture, I look like a slug and Dad looks flattened, like he’s seen a car accident. But Mum’s face is bright, open, happy.

  All the other photos are in albums on our living room bookshelf, next to the non-working fireplace. The albums hold every picture of me Dad ever took until he died, and all the ones of me Mum took until smartphones came along and she stopped printing me onto paper. I’m now partly inside a frozen computer Mum keeps meaning to get fixed, and on an overcrowded iPhone she keeps meaning to download.

  And I’m in the photos friends have taken when I’ve let them and the ones the twins have taken with their eyes since they were babies. I’m in the ocean I walk beside when I skip school and in the clouds where I imagine myself sometimes. And I’m in the look on my friend Grace’s face, a second after I kissed her, five seconds before she said she thought of me as a friend.

  I blink. Dad’s gone again. The room is empty but for me, my bed, my walls, my thoughts, my things.

  It’s what—four in the morning?

  I have a physics test at eight.

&nbsp
; My ribs hurt. Behind them, my heart beatbeats beatbeatbeats beatskipsabeat

  beatbeat beats.

  My name is Elizabeth Martin Grey, but no one I love calls me that.

  The Martin is for Dad’s dad who died in a farm accident when he was thirty and Dad was ten.

  I was seven when Dad died. Which means I had less time with Dad alive than Dad had with his.

  There’s never enough time. Actually, there’s too much and too little, in unequal parts. More than enough of time passing but not enough of the time passed.

  Right?

  Ratio of the time you want versus the time you get (a rough estimate)—

  1 : 20,000.

  Ratio of Dad’s time as the son of Martin : as the living father of Biz : as my dead dad, sitting on the edge of my bed telling me stories—

  1 : 0.7 : ∞.

  Monday morning, seven-thirty, and it’s so hot the house feels like it’s melting. Cicadas scream through the windows. The dog pants on the kitchen floor. I had a shower five minutes ago and already I’m sweating through my shirt.

  ‘Ugh,’ I say, flopping over the kitchen counter, crumpled uniform on, shoes untied.

  Mum reads my face and sighs. She’s making breakfast for the twins. ‘Be grateful you get to have an education, Biz.’ She waggles a spatula. ‘Not everyone’s as lucky.’

  I peer at her. ‘You might have read me wrong, Mum. Maybe I meant, “Ugh. How I wish school lasted all weekend, I have missed it so very much.”’

  I’m a month into Year 11, which is ridiculous because I am nano and unformed but I’m still supposed to write essays about Lenin and Richard III and urban sprawl. Year 11 is a big deal. We are only seconds away, the teachers say, from our final exams. The teachers can’t stop revving us up about our impending future.

  This is a big deal! say the teachers of English, science, art, maths, music, geography, and Other Important Subjects in Which We Are Not Remotely Interested But Are Taking So We Can Get a Good Mark.

  You need to take it seriously!

  You need to be prepared!

  You need to not freak out, then have to go to the counsellor because we’ve freaked you out!

  I open the fridge. ‘I’m going to sit in here, okay? Just for a minute. Let me squat next to the broccoli.’

  Mum laughs. She’s making banana pancakes. Billie and Dart drool over their waiting plates. The twins have the morning off school. They’re going to the dentist! They love the dentist—it’s where Mum works, so they get extra toothbrushes, and as many little packs of floss and toothpaste as they can carry in their hands.

  ‘Are they ready yet?’ says my brother, Dart, six years old.

  ‘Come on, Mum! I’m starving to death,’ says my sister, Billie, nineteen minutes younger than Dart.

  ‘Give me a second,’ says Mum. ‘A watched pancake never boils.’

  She flips one over. It looks scorched. Mum doesn’t love cooking.

  I can’t see how she can be anywhere near a stove in this heat. I grab some coconut yogurt and grapes out of the fridge.

  ‘Did you study for your test?’ Mum says.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I say, and it’s true, if you count watching YouTube videos and listening to music while reading the textbook studying. I don’t know if I’m ready—there’s the lack of sleep thing, and the not-having-spoken-properly-to-Grace-since-I-kissed-her thing, which makes today impossible and complicated before it even begins.

  I hug Mum goodbye and smooch the twins’ cheeks as they squirm.

  I grab my bike from the shed, ride it for thirty seconds before I realise the front tyre is flat.

  Ah, that’s right.

  When did the tyre go? Friday? No, Thursday.

  Shit, Biz! You had one job.

  A magpie laughs from a nearby tree. His magpie friend looks down, then joins in.

  I could ask Mum to drive me but I know what she’d say: ‘Do I look like a taxi, Biz?’

  I could skip school, but then I’d miss my test and ruin my impending future.

  I shove the bike back in the shed. And start walking.

  I live with Mum and the twins in Wollongong, in a blue-clad house on a street wallpapered with trees.

  We moved here a couple of years ago, after moving to a lot of other places. We’re one and a half hours south of Sydney. The city is not too big, not too small; it’s just right for now, says Mum. The city sits beside the sea, under an escarpment. The sea pushes at the shore, shoving under rocks and dunes and lovers. Craggy cliffs lean over us, trying to read what we’ve written. The city is long like a finger. It was a steel town once.

  There, that’s the tour.

  When I was seven, Mum, Dad and I lived up north, near Queensland—in the Australian jungle, Mum likes to say. She says the mosquitoes were full on, but I don’t remember them.

  I remember frogs click-clacking at night in the creek at the bottom of the hill. The house was wooden; it had stilts. The backyard was a steep tangle of eucalypts and ferns and figs and shrubs.

  You could see hills like women’s boobs all around. I’d wake up and hear kookaburras. Light would come in through my curtainless windows and lift me out of bed. I’d run in to Mum and Dad’s room and jump on them to wake them up.

  I had a puppy. I called him Bumpy.

  Our street is flat now. It goes past a park where I walk the dog and he sniffs the shit left by other dogs. I can walk to school in fifteen minutes or I can walk straight past it and go to the sea. Or, if I want to be a total rebel, I can go the opposite direction and in fifteen minutes end up in a rainforest, under a mountain, gathering leeches for my leech army.

  On the walk to school, the cicadas keep me company. They scream from one huge gum tree to another. I pass the community centre. I pass the park. I get to the end of the cul-de-sac and wait under the bleaching sun to cross the freeway.

  Traffic bawls past. I can feel my skin frying. I can feel cancer pooling in my freckles. I can feel the road tar melting under my feet as I scurry across the road.

  Past the freeway there’s a vet, a pub, and a train station. Every day I have to cross the train tracks to get to school. Every time I think, What if the signals are wrong, and a train comes out of the blue and hits me as I cross?

  A woman walked against the signal once. Not here, but close enough it might as well be here. She was in a rush, they said; she ignored the ringing bells, the dropping barrier. She got halfway and thought better of it. She turned back. The train came.

  Every time I cross the tracks, I think of her and try not to think of her.

  I’ve traced and retraced her last moments in my head. I have googled her and I know the names of her family, the job she had, the music she listened to, and the last concert she saw before she died. I can feel the tightness of her skin when she saw the train, and how sweat sprang up a moment before the train hit—

  step

  and how our pupils widened

  step

  and turned my eyes to black

  step

  and in that infinite, molecular moment, I can’t remember if I meant to cross, or have paused on the tracks and am waiting here—

  ‘Hey, Biz.’

  I turn my head. Dad’s walking beside me, barefoot, in his running shorts and KISS T-shirt.

  ‘Do you remember your first train ride?’

  No. I don’t remember that, Dad.

  ‘It was a steam train. You were four. We went through a rainforest! We went really high up a mountain, and visited a butterfly sanctuary. And you flapped around like a Monarch. You were beautiful.’

  Is that right, Dad?

  ‘You should flap around. Try it, Biz; it’ll shake off the frets.’

  I look down. I’m over the train tracks and past the station. I’m on the path; it opens in front of me, green grass on both sides, the
sun beaming.

  I think of butterflies. I think of flying.

  Dad laughs.

  He’s gone by the time I reach the school gate.

  I walk into physics just as Ms Hastings is handing out our tests. Ms Hastings gives me a young lady, you’re late look. I give her a tell me about it and have you noticed I’m swimming in a pool of sweat look. Ms Hastings raises an eyebrow. I sit at my desk.

  Ms Hastings lays our tests facedown. She does the regular threats: ‘You must not look at anyone’s work!’ and ‘Put away your phones!’ and ‘Your time starts now’.

  We flip our pages over.

  Turns out, I am ready for the test. My brain fires up and the neurons make my hand move and the formulas come out like good little ponies at a show.

  Most of my tests are fairly easy, which isn’t me boasting; it’s just a statement of fact. Mum says I might have a photographic memory, which is good for Mum because she often forgets her pin numbers and passwords.

  Mum could be right. All I have to do is look at something and it sticks. Sometimes, the image repeatrepeatrepeatrepeats, like a GIF I can’t turn off.

  The room fills with the buzz of numbers. Pi scuttles over our papers, theorems talk to themselves. Ms Hastings looks at her phone—probably at some friend skydiving or snorkelling in the Bahamas, while she’s trapped in here with us.

  The bell rings.

  ‘Time’s up!’ calls Ms Hastings. We hand in our tests. Next class is English.

  I don’t chat or dawdle in the corridors; I slip between the crowds, a fish weaving. In fifty-five minutes I’ll have to speak to Grace. Just keep swimming, Biz.

  Mr Birch stands like a flamingo in front of the class, one foot scratching the back of his leg.

  ‘Okay, everyone,’ he says, ‘today we’ll be writing about the ego. That is, your alter ego. Consider your readings over the weekend, and the work of Plath in this context.’

  A collective groan from all of us. We’ve done Plath now for three long weeks and no one is a fan. I mean, we all ‘feel’ for her, but at this point we’ve read her and analysed her and discussed her and it’s like peeling an onion until there’s no onion left.

  ‘I want you to write a description of your alter ego, due at the end of the day,’ Mr Birch says, ignoring our protests. In case we don’t remember what he’s just said, he writes it on the whiteboard, his blue pen squeaking. He then sits at his chipped desk behind his PC, doing paperwork.