An Astronaut's Life (19 page)

I paused at the final face in this sad line-up. So this was Ramon? I took in his
neat haircut and grown-up shirt. The boy's photograph had been adorned by an actual
wreath of flowers woven into the wire of the fence. The effect was touching, if a
bit fancy.

I returned to tidy up Felix's pile and I looked in at his wreathed face and wondered
if his colour had begun to fade in the sun.

Back on my bench, I skimmed the front-page headlines. ‘
Vaccine Months Away
', ‘
Teachers
Not to Blame.
' On page-two was a portrait of Ramon and
beneath it the words
gifted
and charmin
g. Then a larger picture. Ramon with his mother. A single parent, Karen
Simons worked two jobs to provide for her boy, as well as studying online in the
evenings in order to fulfill her dreams of becoming a forensic accountant, putting
to use the natural numerical ability she had also passed on to her only child.

I studied Ramon's photo. Likeable and mysterious, with wisdom beyond his years. When
I considered the wreath of actual flowers, and thought about that boy with his multilingual
skills and advanced numeracy, even I wanted to make a tribute to his life so cruelly
cut short.

I turned back to my newspaper. At the bottom of the page were three inset photos:
Felix, another boy, and then Max, the owl. I was relieved my son still rated a mention,
until I caught sight of the quote from Ramon beneath. ‘
None of the boys will play
with me
,' it read. ‘
Max is my only friend
.'

As a father, I found this heart-wrenching. As Felix's father, I felt a different
kind of tightness in my chest. Felix had never spoken about Ramon, but I knew he'd
never liked the owl. In fact, we'd recently joked about how Felix had taken to poking
Max with sticks. I recalled,
with an unhappy sense of parental responsibility, how
we'd high-fived Felix's latest series of practical jokes involving the belongings
of a number of less popular students and the bird's droppings, or ‘faecal matter',
as I'd preferred him to say.

When I called the
60 Minutes
producer, I hadn't decided what to tell her.

‘You're still coming in for the interview?' she wanted to know.

I looked down at the article. A quote part way down the second column caught my eye:
‘
Ramon was a stoic victim of systemised bullying who hid away in an imaginary world.'

‘I'll be there,' I said. ‘But there's something I need to tell you. It's a very serious
matter.'

In my mind I heard Felix shout: ‘A faecal matter!'

I remained on my bench until well after dark, reflecting on my record as a father,
and also as a man. I had thoroughly prepared for my upcoming interview by imagining
a series of difficult questions about my own chequered past and rumours of my son's
disruptive school record.

We hadn't had it easy, I would say, but we were
learning as we went, and that's something
we'd been committed to doing together. We were self-made men, but now all that we
made together is gone. Then the lights would go down and they'd play a montage and
that Cyndi Lauper song—the sad one.

Satisfied with my preparations, I folded my paper and was set to head home when I
caught sight of a figure cutting across the school oval. Given recent experience
of the questionable behaviours of some grieving individuals, I steadied myself for
the possibility of a confrontation, but then a sound reached through the shadows
and settled my nerves—the clip of high-heels along the path.

The woman who took shape was dressed for work, with a light shirt against a dark
suit, a get-up too serious to be any of the school's teachers. She stopped at the
fence and I watched her lean in to adjust the flowers woven into the fence around
Ramon's face. She did this for some time, flattening and stretching them before she
stood back, giving the whole fancy wreath a long and mournful look. Then she reached
in again, this time to caress her fingers against the photograph of the boy's smiling
face.

I knew from harsh experience just how this would
feel: like shiny paper.

I must have rustled my newspaper or cleared my throat, because the woman sensed me
looking on.

‘Who's that?' she called.

‘Just me, over here on the bench,' I waved to her. ‘Sorry, I just like to sit here.'

She found the shape of me and unfolded one hand in a wave.

‘You're a parent too?' she said.

‘I am.' I pointed to the image of Felix fixed to the fence and she came over to the
picture of my son.

‘That's him. Felix,' I said. ‘You've probably seen him?'

She made a slow nod at the
face of my boy. Right then I had no way of knowing just how much Ramon's mother knew
about us.

‘That wreath really brings out the colour of his eyes,' she said.

‘Thank you for saying. I think it does too.'

I stood and offered my hand. Close up I could see the resemblance to her son, the
round face they shared, and chestnut hair.

‘I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.

‘And I am for yours, too.'

‘Would you like to sit? Or I can leave you, if you
want time alone with your son
and his tributes?'

‘No, that's fine. We can share it,' she said.

So the two of us stayed on my bench for a while, looking over at that line of faces,
but instead of making it easier, the company only doubled our feeling of loss.

‘How are we supposed to make any sense of it?' she said.

I shrugged.

‘How a tiny genetic mutation turns a cold into, what, a super bug?' she went on.
‘How it sneaks into a class of children and takes them down, one by one?'

‘I know,' I said. What else could I say?

I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder to offer comfort. Maybe I was only
a sad grieving guy looking for hope, but as we sat together like this, in our own
thoughts, I was sure a different mood started to swell between us. Ramon's mum reached
up and touched the back of my hand. I looked at her to see what this meant, and the
next thing we were kissing, a desperate, hard kiss of lips and tongue, and teeth.

When she began to unbutton her shirt, I held out a hand to say,
Ramon's mum, let's
take it easy
, but she showed no sign of doing that. Instead her breasts came out
of her bra and I looked around for a more private
location, somewhere the two us
could lose both our heavy hearts and our clothing.

Afterwards, Ramon's mum rubbed her big toes with her hands. ‘Bunions,' she said.
‘It's these shoes.' She put them on anyway and pulled her skirt over her hips and
into place, turning back into a business woman, only now one with her shirt untucked
and the branch of a small bush poking from her hair.

We dressed in silence after that, exchanging only sad smiles at the thought of returning
to our quiet homes with their children's toys and pantries lined with lunchbox snacks.

When I arrived at the studio the next afternoon, I was rushed into makeup where they
combed my hair and poured cups of tea. Once they were done, the producer took the
cape from my neck and led me into the hallway. She kept her voice quiet.

‘We've corroborated your story. There's another parent who knew about this disturbing,
ah, revelation.'

‘There is?'

‘Yeah, he's in the green room. There are probably others, we're ringing around. Our
experts are saying
this behaviour could have contributed, a lot, to the death toll.'
She sighed. ‘All those little children.'

‘Have you said anything to the boy's mother?'

‘Not yet. She'll be here soon.'

She led me into the green room. There were biscuits on the table and an electric
urn in the corner.

‘You won't be here
long. You two know one another?'

Krystal's dad was sitting in
one of the plastic chairs brewing a cup of tea on the table.

We nodded and the producer went on.

‘Look,' she said, ‘I know this is difficult. You're very brave to come out with this.
Ramon had a difficult life, but no one would have imagined he was capable of it.
To snap and do something like this.'

‘In their lunchboxes!' Krystal's dad whispered. ‘Owl crap.'

‘Faecal matter,' I corrected.

The producer left, closing us in. Krystal's dad nursed his tea in his lap. The urn
boiled some more water and we waited. I was picturing the two of us, me with my hair
combed flat and Krystal's dad with his almost-crossed eyes, side by side in the studio,
hot lights shining down on us. I pictured Felix's intelligent face projected behind.
I pictured us saying the words,
It was Ramon
who was unnaturally close to the bird.
He caused all of this.

Outside I heard the clip of high-heels along the hallway.

I closed my eyes and took a long, slow breath.

The producer appeared in the doorway. ‘Ready?'

On our way down the corridor we were careful not to make eye contact, but I gave
Krystal's dad a firm pat on the shoulder. He nodded, as if to say he was sure we'd
made the right decision. We were even now. Just two bereaved parents, regardless
of tributes or past indiscretions. There were hot lights on us, but now we were in
it together.

AN ASTRONAUT'S LIFE

The shopping centre is crowded with families desperate for Thursday-night groceries
and updated wardrobes, so it follows that parking is a nightmare. Eddie predicted
this, but Alexis figured, like everyone, that the shopping plaza, with its dependable
movie theatres and department stores, might be the only place they could escape the
rain.

They park right at the back and unwrap umbrellas for the trek to the entrance.

‘Look out, don't step in puddles,' Eddie says to their three daughters.

Twelve-year-old Meghan strides ahead without concern for water or wet sandals.

‘See, a builder did this carpark, but look at it,' Eddie says to Alexis. ‘It's the
ground around here. Always moving.'

‘The ground is moving?' the youngest, Maddy, says.

‘No, it's not darling,' says Alexis.

‘Dad said it was.'

‘That's what bad builders say when they make a bad driveway.'

Maddy looks to Catherine, but even she offers only a hand and hurries her dutifully
towards the entrance, umbrellas trailing.

The shopping plaza is not the haven they imagined. Hundreds of muddy feet have trailed
prints across the tiles and the polished surfaces of the department store have been
marked by dripping umbrellas. The sports-shoe shop has sprung a leak and the buckets
and towels lined up along the back wall are a constant reminder that things are not
business as usual.

But the mood inside the plaza is high anyway, and there's a spirit of survival, as
if everyone is on a camping trip, everyone in the whole town. When neighbours pass
one another, someone will wink and say, ‘Hanging in there?' And the answer is yes,
because no one has
seen this kind of rain before, but they've seen a lot of other
things, and this is only rain.

Alexis takes Meghan to buy the bikini she's been nagging them for, while Eddie leads
the younger girls up to Electronics so they can play video games as they wait. He's
had it in mind to buy Catherine a camera, something to take her mind off her worries.
Alexis has already said it's not something they can afford, because a camera for
one daughter will mean its equivalent for the other two, but he hasn't put it out
of his mind. His cursory research suggests the falling price of digital cameras has
been more than outpaced by the rising cost of teen bikinis.

Up on the fourth floor, Catherine and Maddy line up for a turn on a video game while
Eddie browses the latest technology. There's an entire shelf of night-vision goggles.
He isn't sure what he'd use them for but they're appealing anyway. He watches Maddy
step up to take the controller, but her turn is over as soon as it begins—she's walked
into a snake. Eddie can tell from the way her shoulders tense that she's about to
cry.

It's one of those games where you have to collect coins and jump over holes in the
ground. It's a game for kids, and because Catherine's been watching she seems
to
have a handle on how to play. By the time Eddie reaches them, Maddy's in tears, so
he kneels down beside her and wipes her cheeks with his fingertips.

‘It's okay,' he says. ‘You can have another shot. Don't be a bad sport.'

‘But it's just.' She pauses for breath. ‘I'm not big enough.' Her words break apart
as she says them.

‘You will be,' he tells her. ‘You'll get bigger. Catherine and Meghan were small
too. Even I was.'

He holds her as she catches her breath. It's true she's small for her age.

Catherine falls into a hole full of crocodiles, but she's made it most of the way
through the first level. She looks over to see if Eddie is watching. He gives a thumbs
up.

‘Hey,' he whispers into Maddy's ear. ‘You'll grow up, too.'

She's stopped crying.

‘But Catherine says I don't have time.'

When they ride the escalator down to the women's section, Eddie has a large box under
his arm and Maddy is jumping beside him.

‘Hold on,' he tells her. She reaches for the handrail.

‘Who's it for?' she says.

‘It's for all of us.'

‘Can I use it?'

‘We can all use it. It's a family telescope.'

‘Dad? Can we see shooting stars with it?' Catherine says.

He explains it—that a shooting star is really a meteoroid entering Earth's atmosphere.
‘It's dust and rock,' he says. ‘And it burns up too quick to follow with the telescope.'