All the Other Days. Jack Hartley

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      Published by Brolga Publishing Pty Ltd

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      Melbourne, VIC, 8006

      Australia

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      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission from the publisher.

      Copyright © 2018 Jack Hartley

      National Library of Australia

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data

       Jack Hartley, author.

       ISBN 9780648327738 (paperback)

       ISBN 9780987639042 (ebook)

      Cover design by Alice Cannet

      Cover image by Zachery Hawkins

      Typesetting by Elly Cridland

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      Judd

      Day 6295

      I sit in my bedroom, unable to block out the sounds. The yelling, the screaming at each other. Smash! I hear plates being broken downstairs. For just one day, I wish I heard them laughing, or singing, or anything. I wait until I hear the front door slam before I go downstairs to see how my mother is. I walk down the old stairs into the freezing cold lounge. Through the breakfast bar, I see my mother sitting on the faded vinyl, her head resting in her hands, her body hunched over her legs and blood trickling down the side of her fingers. She hears me walking into the room and looks up at me, brushes the tears from her cheeks and smiles.

      ‘Mom, are you okay?’

      ‘We just had a little disagreement. You know how he is,’ she replies, trying to hide her sadness as usual.

      I grab the paper towels off the bench and dip them into some water from the tap. I wipe away the blood from her face and hold her.

      ‘You know this isn’t okay, right?’ I say, trying to sound like the adult around here.

      ‘Trust me, if I had the money, me and you would be far, far away from here,’ she says, looking deeply into my eyes.

      We both sit there on the kitchen floor. I try to make her laugh by putting on my best Northern English accent.

      ‘It’s a bloody mess in here, like. Let’s clean ‘er up.’

      She cracks half a smile and then laughs at my poor attempt to cheer her up. We start cleaning the dishes, and Mom turns on the stereo. Together, we sing along to one of my Mom’s favourites, Here Comes the Sun.

      My mother sings into the soup ladle; I do the back-up singing into a cup.

      ‘Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right.’

      We break down into the drum beat and slap the kitchen counter. She’s smiling, and that’s all I want for her. I don’t know how she does it, day in, day out. My Dad can be a dick, I mean a real dick, to her. We’ve never really got along that well, and I guess that’s because I’ve always sided with my mom. But he’s done little for me to take his side throughout the years. She’s always the one left to pick up the broken pieces and clean up the mess after he has one of his fits and leaves her like this.

      We finish cleaning up the dishes and gathering the broken plate pieces on the ground, and I go to bed.

      ‘Night, Mom. I love you,’ I say as I look at the broken expression on her face.

      ‘Sleep well, Judd. I love you more than you’ll ever know.’ She kisses me on the cheek, and I walk off up the stairs.

      I sit on my bed, leaning against the wall, with my sketch pad and a pencil. I start to draw the outline of a hand on a face and blood trickling down the finger tips.

      I draw a lot. I try to document what happens in my life. I put the happy drawings on one side of my room and the rest on the other side. So far, there’s a lot more sad ones, but it helps me to organise the moments so I can remember them when I need to. When I draw, everything is blocked out and I relive those moments. I don’t mind reliving the sad ones, because I know you can’t escape them in life.

      On nights like these, I often have these weird dreams that stick in my head. I’ve always had weird dreams and I get fixated on them. How my brain creates another world of people I have never seen before, it’s like I have another life in there. I dream of all the things I wish happened, the people I want in my life, and I wake up smiling after them. For a moment, in my sleepy dazed state, I think it’s real. But then, as the sleep is brushed away from my eyes, the coldness of my room swoops over my face, and I’m brought back to the reality of what my life is really like. When they have a big fight like this, my dreams are really horrible and sad, and I wake up in a pool of sweat like my brain is tormenting me even when I’m sleeping.

      I wake up to my alarm blaring in my ear and my face against my sketch pad. I must have fallen asleep drawing last night. I get up out of bed and walk to the bathroom. The pencil lead has stuck to the side of my face, and there’s a big black smudge on the side of my cheek. I scrub the lead off and get ready for school.

      I run down the stairs trying to make up the lost time and to have breakfast before school. My Mom is sitting at the breakfast bar drinking a cup of coffee and having some toast. It’s always us two in the morning because my father has already left for work before we are up. I kind of like that though and I think Mom does too.

      ‘Good morning, sweetie. How’d you sleep?’ she asks. She’s called me this for as long as I can remember.

      ‘I slept well, thanks. No weird dreams last night.’

      As I walk up to the breakfast bar to sit down, I see the other side of my Mom’s face. I can see the bruises starting to form on her cheekbone, the yellow tinge in her skin and her puffy eyes from crying. I put my arm around her and she nestles her head into my shoulder. This is the other side of my father I hate. How he does this and then is never here to see her after what he has done. She tries to cover up the bruises with makeup, and she does a pretty good job. No one knows this happens. Well at least, I hope they don’t.

      I finish my breakfast and put my lunch into my schoolbag. My Mom hugs me goodbye and I walk to the bus stop. The sun is starting to rise from behind the clouds and it leaves an orange tinge throughout the sky. I see the bus up the road, and the distance between me and the stop is further away than the bus, so I run. I run along the sidewalk with my arm waving the bus down, and the bus driver pulls up beside me and opens the doors.

      ‘Good morning, Mr Peele,’ I say, trying to catch my breath.

      ‘Good morning, Mr Judd,’ he replies, giggling at me for running.

      I walk down the bus and find my usual seat next to the window halfway down on the left-hand side. The bus is like a zoo before school. Everyone