The Boy Under the Table

Nicole Trope

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781925576016
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction

Tina is a young woman hiding from her grief on the streets of the Cross. On a cold night in the middle of winter she breaks all her own rules when she agrees to go home with a customer. What she finds in his house will change her life forever. Across the country Sarah and Doug are trapped in limbo, struggling to accept the loss that now governs their lives. Pete is the local policeman who feels like he is watching the slow death of his own family. Every day brings a fresh hell for each of them. Told from the alternating points of view of Tina, Sarah, Doug and Pete, The Boy Under the Table is gritty, shocking, moving and, ultimately, filled with hope. A harrowing glimpse into the real world behind the headlines, this is a novel of immense power and compassion-one that will not fail to move all who read it.

Tina

Work would be impossible. There was no way she was leaving the kid by himself and an eight-year-old boy would not exactly be good for business. Oh, there would be some who liked the idea. The world was full of freaky wankers.

They divided the last of the food, Tina giving Lockie the lion’s share. When it was time for bed he snuggled right up to her just like she was the mother koala. She rested her arm over him even though she knew she shouldn’t think about him as anything except a burden.

It felt strange to be going to sleep so early, but Tina was exhausted. She didn’t hear Mark and the boys come in.

There were no dreams that night. Tina fell asleep to the feeling of Lockie’s ribs moving up and down. It felt strange to be touched by another person. She had not been touched by anyone for two years. Well, she had been touched, but those were the touches that burned your skin and made it crawl.

Tim had been a big one for cuddles. He liked to sit on her lap and rest his head on her shoulder. When he was a baby and he couldn’t sleep she would walk up and down holding him so her mother could get some rest.

In his sleep Lockie pushed himself further against her and grabbed her hand. Tina felt her eyes sting with the sweetness of it. She sighed into the air and brushed the thought away. She had to get this sorted out so she could get back to her life. She had to.

Lockie was up early. It was just beginning to get light. Tina hadn’t seen the sunrise for a good couple of years. Lockie was working his way methodically through the empty McDonald’s bags, looking for anything he might have missed.

Tina sighed. She had forgotten that kids needed to eat all the time. All she wanted to do was roll over and wait for sleep again but the kid was obviously starving.

‘Okay, kid, let’s get you to the bathroom.’

‘Can we get some food?’ he asked hopefully.

‘I don’t want to spend any more money so we may have to . . . wait a second, I know where we can go.’

‘Where?’

‘The Chapel. They serve breakfast. I used to eat there when I first got here.’

When I first got here. When I was starving and terrified and excited all the time. When I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, at least I could count on breakfast at the Chapel. In those days I could count on Ruby, but now there’s just me. Just me and some screwed-up little kid who is counting on me. How did that happen?

How did I become this person?

Once she had entered the Cross she had been determined to leave everything she had been behind.

She had phoned home only once.

After the first time. The First Time.

The twenty dollars had been warm in her pocket. Ruby had cheered and clapped like she had won some sort of prize. Mark had just touched her lightly on the shoulder.

Tina had almost backed out. The guy Ruby had found for her had taken down his pants and Tina had been so completely revolted that her stomach had cramped and she knew she was about to throw up. She wanted to get up off her knees and run until she was home again and safe in her own bedroom. She could imagine how horrified her mother would be if she told her what she was about to do. And Jack? Jack would tell her it was a terrible sin, a sin that would be punished. Jack’s God was big on punishing you for your sins. Tina had looked up at the pathetic man with his pants around his ankles and known that nothing could be worse than losing Tim. So how exactly could she be punished for this ‘service’? She had cleared her mind and got on with it.

It wasn’t a step she had taken easily. She had tried at first to find a regular job, any job. But no one wanted someone without references. They wanted an address and a home phone number. They wanted to know where and what and why, and Tina had come to the Cross to get away from the questions and the discussion. She did get one job, waiting tables at a café staffed by backpackers, but everyone wanted to be friends. They wanted to drink and laugh and visit the bloody beach. Tina couldn’t stand it. Her anger kept rearing up and forcing words out of her mouth. They fired her for yelling at a man who gave his kid a quick smack on the leg. Tina was not fit for normal people. She knew that. When she watched people milling around the Cross talking and shopping and eating they seemed strange and foreign. How could they not know about Tim?

How come they weren’t hurting when the world had lost such an amazing little soul? Didn’t they know?

Logically she understood that everyone had something they were hiding, some hurt they kept deep inside, some reason why they were not really normal either, but she didn’t understand how they functioned. She didn’t understand how they got out of bed every morning or breathed in and out without the hurt weighing down their lungs.

Ruby had waited patiently until she was ready. Until she had exhausted all her other options. Until she was desperate enough to join the others who were not fit for normal people.

She couldn’t quite believe she had become one of them. Her life had been so very different from theirs. She had never experienced the fear that Mark alluded to, that she saw flare behind his eyes in moments when he thought no one was watching, in the moments before he managed to cloud it all over with nothingness. She had never been mistreated in the way that the others had been mistreated.

Before she had walked out the door and out of her life she had spent hours on the computer haunting the chat rooms of the grief-stricken. One piece of advice stuck fast. A woman who had lost her young husband had written: You may find yourself behaving in strange ways and doing strange things.

Tina couldn’t think of a stranger place to be or of a stranger thing to do.

This was not who she was supposed to be. Despite everything that had happened, this was not who she was supposed to be. And yet she could not change it. There was always the choice to go home, but Tina could not see how to make it happen. Her feet would not walk in that direction. The anger kept her stuck where she was. The anger and the grief and the impossibility of ever feeling normal again.

When she called after the first time her mother had answered the phone and the words had stuck in Tina’s throat. How could she explain what she had just done and what she would do again? Her mother lived in a different world now—not that she’d ever been in the same place as Tina.

Christina, is that you? Oh, please come home. Come home to me and Jack and God. Come home to us and we can help you embrace the Lord. We can help you heal. Please Christina, if you knew the glory of God you would be so much better. Please come home to us. You’re only hurting yourself by being away. You need to come home and finish school. I’ve seen the truth now, Christina—Jack has shown me the truth and you need to come home. I want to share my life with you—we want to share our lives with you. Tim wouldn’t have wanted you to shut us out of your life, Christina.

Tina had hung up the phone then. How would you know what Tim would have wanted?

They wanted her home but Tina never saw them in the Cross. If she was a mother it would have been the first place she would have looked. Maybe standing around and wringing your hands at your runaway daughter was easier than actually finding her. Her mother was free to start again. Tim was gone and now that she was gone her mother could take the same approach her father had. Family? What family?

‘Okay,’ said Lockie, breaking into her thoughts. Breaking in and breaking down.

Tina was pleased she had remembered about the Chapel. Getting food would be easy, although there was always the problem of questions. Everyone got suspicious when they saw a little kid. With enough makeup on she passed for much older than seventeen. Lockie could easily be her kid.

She made him brush his teeth again before breakfast and they made their way to the Chapel.

There was a line of people waiting for the doors to open. They stamped their feet in the cold. It wasn’t the kind of line that people got chatty in. Mostly everyone looked at their feet. Funny how human beings stop looking at each other when they are ashamed of themselves.

The strong astringent smell of alcohol was in the air. It clashed with the smell of dirty clothes and dirty bodies.

Tina looked down the line at the shabbily dressed men and women. Everyone looked like they were wearing everything they owned. The older ones were fans of Jack Daniel’s. The younger ones liked anything they could shoot, snort or swallow. There were some new ones as well now. Whole families who couldn’t quite believe that they were in the Cross waiting for a free breakfast. You could almost see them wondering what the fuck had happened. Where did my big TV go? the GFC people whispered to one another but in the Cross there had always been a financial crisis. Whatever was happening on the stock market would never change that.

The first time she had come to the Chapel for breakfast Tina had known instantly that she did not belong with these people. There was no way she was going to turn into them. The free breakfast was just until she sorted herself out. When she thought back on it now she managed a smile at her arrogance. She had been fifteen. What exactly was she going to do? Open a shop?

The people in the line scratched and twitched and jumped depending on whether they were on their way up or down. They all wanted brea...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• TINA
• DOUG
• TINA
• SARAH
• TINA
• PETE
• TINA
• MARGIE
• TINA
• DOUG
• TINA
• SARAH
• TINA
• PETE
• TINA
• PETE
• DOUG
• TINA
• SARAH
• TINA
• DOUG
• LOCKIE
• OTHER BOOKS BY NICOLE TROPE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS