When Michael Sala was a boy his stepfather was an ominous presence in his life. Cross his legs at the kitchen table and he would be kicked. Reach out too soon for food and he would have his ear slapped. Fail to hear his name called and his stepfather would grab him by the hair. "I was very aware of everyone around me," Sala recalls. ''It was hard to relax."
The pushes, the slaps and the name calling are textbook examples of abuse. Least understood is the brooding malevolence of the bully; the bristling tension, the silences and the slammed doors, the irrational temper, the sudden bouts of swearing and arguments that blow-up without cause.
"When you live in a violent household the violence itself might be sporadic but the presence of its potential is constant", Sala says. "It's an intense way to live."
Sala did his best to sidestep his stepfather's see-sawing moods by trying to read the hardness in the eyes and stiffness in the jawline. To this day, Sala can feel the echo of that uneasiness talking on the phone or by email.
"You grow up constantly reading cues. The more information you have about people's expressions, tone of voice, the safer you feel in a way, but not really."
An intensively lived childhood built on observational habit has its upside. The Restorer, Sala's second book, is a slow burning work of fiction that moves with troubling intensity and sensitivity to give an insider's account of a violent marriage.
Maryanne and Roy are making a second go of their relationship after a year's separation and have uprooted teen daughter Freya and eight-year-old Daniel from Sydney to renovate a ruined terrace in east side Newcastle.
Roy is the home renovator of the book's title, a temperamental and ungovernable force much like Sala's stepfather, but a charmer, too. He has a boyish quality about him, a "smile of perfect sunlight and dazzling potential", but is paranoid and jealous. "Why," asks Roy, "do I sometimes feel like this whole family is against me?"
Sala thinks of The Restorer as a book in conversation with The Last Thread, his semi-autobiographical novel which mined the bare facts of his childhood. This quietly devastating debut - featuring the early childhood recollections of Michaelis from 1970s Holland to his family's emigration to Australia - won the NSW Premier's Prize for new writing in 2012 and set him on his current path as writer and academic.
This time he wanted to step away from autobiography and use fiction to "explore complex decisions people have to make and the consequences of those decisions". "I love writing fiction, it's the main thing I want to do in my life," Sala says. ''It feels like you can focus on things without people focusing on you and your life and going, 'Is this true or isn't it true?' Well, does it feel true? Does it feel the kind of situation that could unfold?"
Sala's story takes place in 1989, a turbulent year in world history marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failed Tiananmen Square protests and the Newcastle Earthquake. Hundreds were shot escaping to the West. "There is this kind of argument that says if only you kept your head down and waited everything would have been 'OK', which is, of course, what some people in an abusive relationship think," says Sala. "You can't say they are right but you can't say they are wrong because every situation is unique, there are so many factors at play."
In the Netherlands, Sala's mother had divorced his abusive biological father when he was a toddler, only to fall into the company of an equally dominating and controlling man.
The family came out to Sydney from the town of Bergen Op Zoom when Sala was four. His mother's new relationship lasted about eight years. "In the end, when she left him, he went to Queensland with my youngest brother who was two at the time," Sala says. "He said, 'Follow and there would be trouble'."
Sala remembers his mother closing her bedroom door and crying. Every night. "I think my mum was between a rock and a hard place, she didn't know what would happen if she went and pushed things. On the outside it is really easy to simplify what's happening inside a family and what needs to be done, and I think the reality is there are no easy answers.
"For Maryanne, for example, there is this sense of what a traditional family should be and she feels this sense of failure and vulnerability if she doesn't have this man in her life. There's almost this deep-rooted cultural impulse in her.
"On a deeper level, she feels as though she has failed. If she had done things differently, then Roy wouldn't have been abusive. On the other hand, she reflects on it and says, 'How would he have reacted if I'd not gone back to him?"'
A stepfather and father to four children aged from four to 15 years, Sala has long pondered the generational consequences of violence. The human task of making and remaking ourselves is an undercurrent of The Last Thread. Sala feels the "ghosts of abusive people" in his life. "At times I feel like I suffer from a kind of post traumatic stress."
He adds: "I'm fascinated how things that happen in our childhood become markers for the rest of our lives. Being human that's inevitable but you have to fight against them. You have to examine them and step outside them. They might be a constant in your life, you might never get over them, but you've got to never stop negotiating with them to make you a better person."
At that intersection between a sensitive mind and life experience lies Sala's restless desire to write. Moving between cultures and from place to place as a boy, Sala could never settle. Like Freya, the tensions at home followed him into the school playground.
At high school he would get into several fights a year. "I wasn't a popular high school student. I was always a bit of an outsider. Older boys would single me out because of my accent, and I was tall for my age. There was a lot of bullying and violence at my school, and anyone different was a target. I'd fight back because I didn't trust the teachers to do anything."
Books were Sala's retreat. Initially, he'd write scraps; "evocative pages", which would start but never finish and skated right around his childhood.
"I kept writing stuff that was complete fiction, like some kind of creative blockage where, because I wasn't confronting the things that were most important to me at that time, I was just not finding anything at stake with my writing."
Then, after switching from law, to arts to medicine, Sala piled textbooks around him to complete an assignment and "wrote and wrote, and wrote". After four weeks he found he had the beginning of a manuscript but knew nothing about the anatomy of the heart. "I suddenly had this moment where I thought I would rather fail writing than succeed at anything else. I just knew it would bug me for the rest of my life if I didn't give my writing everything."
The manuscript, Memory Vertigo, was shortlisted for the Vogel Prize in 2007 but never published. Under the supervision of Keri Glastonbury, Sala started a Phd in creative writing at the University of Newcastle and began publishing short stories published in various literary journals and anthologies. He rewrote his unpublished manuscript and when one of his short stories attracted the notice of the literary editor Rebecca Starford, she asked to look at the manuscript . It became The Last Thread.
Writing is less about catharsis and more about an "obsessive quality where you keep on wanting to tell the stories, to push your curiosity further" Sala says. "And that's the challenge and the joy in story telling, there is no end point to it."
Sala seems reconciled to his history: "You've got to kind of learn to see it for what it is, and see past it. In writing the trick is to "simultaneously feel the emotion but not let the emotion cloud your words".
Sala is a lecturer of creative writing at the University of Newcastle. He often runs along the harbor break wall or the coast, his way of processing thoughts before they find their way to the page. From this roost he watches the wind shifts over his hometown of Newcastle.
Dark clouds gather over the heads of Maryanne and Roy. The heat gets heavier and settles deep. Then, as fellow author Fiona McFarlane attests, it "breaks like a summer storm - just as beautiful, just as brutal".
Men like Roy, Sala concludes, "indulge their darkest impulses and run with it". "If you do that over and over again you go further and further."
Maryanne, however, is by no means a passive victim. "It's not at all that it's Maryanne's fault that Roy does the things that he does but I kind of feel like someone in her position may be tempted to provoke the other person because they feel the crisis is coming anyway. It is a way of asserting some sort of control over one's life. Sometimes it is easier to be decisive in a crisis than to try to navigate through the tension of knowing something is going to happen but not knowing when."
The Restorer is published by Text Publishing at $29.99. Sala will be appearing at the Sydney Writers' Festival.
