Golden Boys (16 page)

On Sunday afternoon the backyard of the Jensons' house returns to the birds. Sparrows light on the pool's white rim and hop forward for a drink. A blackbird flings worms from the churned soil at the base of the bike ramp. A magpie in its feathery tuxedo takes the deck steps one at a time.

Rex makes no comment on the quietness of the house. Colt watches him, trying to know what he knows. His father could easily decide that all the neighbourhood is busy elsewhere on this particular day. He could believe that the silence is nothing to do with him. And yet: he is not ignorant, he can't be ignorant. There can't be calmness inside him, it would not be fair. ‘Colt,' he says, beckoning his son, and maybe there is a twinge in his voice like something dead receiving a tiny electric shock, ‘I'll give you five dollars if you can do this crossword puzzle.'

Colt looks at the newspaper opened on the table: its puzzle is too difficult for him, he's tried before and earned only humiliation. ‘No thanks,' he says.

Instead of teasing him, his father says, ‘Ten.'

And there it is, nearly inaudible, the dead-man's jerk. Colt would like his father to be a dead man, or at least a man he's never met; he would like to strip from every atom in himself its inheritance of him. ‘No thanks,' he says. And leaves his father sitting at the blondwood table.

Outside, the air is warm – this will be a hot summer. Colt walks through the heat with spread fingers and upturned palms. The Jensons sometimes take their holidays overseas, to beach resorts where the thatched huts have few walls and drinks are served in coconut shells and the meals are sliced straight from the flank of a rotisseried animal. Colt, with his olive skin, turns as brown as a local, his hair bleaches gold. His long legs kick aside the heft of an entire ocean. There has been no mention of a holiday this year. The new house has been enough change of scenery.

He goes to the shed, to where his bike stands; he thinks he'll go down to the creek. Not to the drain, but further along, following the tumbling water deep into the wasteland. There must be more to that wilderness than just the noxious pipe. There will be tracks among the weeds, caves in the banks, collapsed treetrunks bridging the water. It is time he explored. If he is to be alone, he needs to have places to be.

He's wheeling the red racer past the shed door when he pauses, looking back. Inside the shed it's dim, only a blade of light angling into it through the shunted-sideways door. Big shadows hulk across the ceiling and metal walls. Where the BMX usually stands – where it had been standing yesterday, when Colt was last here – the shadows are greyly empty, like the heart of a ghost. For an instant he thinks Bastian may have taken the bike out on his own, but that is nonsensical. There are some things Bastian does not do. Colt stares around the shed and back to where the dirtbike should be; then he props the racer on the path and walks around the garden. He looks under bushes, under the house, even into the pool. Birds dart from his path, the breeze swills warmly. When he returns to the shed, the bike is still missing.

Its absence opens a circular wound inside him which grows larger and more contaminating throughout the day. Panic rises and subsides in the wound, threatening to rush over the brim before sinking rapidly, only to rise lagoonishly again. He lurks in the playroom piecing together the train track, much to Bastian's delight. He makes the geography of the train's journey elaborate, with hills and tunnels built from books. On another day he might plant the odd suicidal soldier or rig up a landslide of tennis balls, but today his energy deserts him abruptly and he finds himself sitting with his back to the wall, hardly able to lift a hand. The limber black snake of a train runs past his toes and beneath the shelves as Bastian, on his stomach in the centre of the room, wrenches the switches tyrannically.

Over dinner he listens to the conversation of his parents – the dental surgery is having its gas supply cut off for a day while the pipes in the street are replaced. It's a massive inconvenience – ‘It's no laughing matter,' says Rex, and laughs raucously: ‘Get it, Bas?' he asks, and the boy doesn't – but it has to be done. Colt would like to burst from his chair and hurl his plate at his father's head. ‘That's a massive inconvenience,' he would scream, ‘but it had to be done!' Instead he eats patiently, one bean at a time, and when fear swells inside the wound he draws a breath and lets it out slowly, and the dread doesn't vanish but it comes under control.

But as night closes the world in, fear is difficult to evade. It rolls and eddies in his chest. It isn't bedtime but he lies beneath his sheets, his body flushing hot and cold. There's a high whine in his head which will only get louder, so he listens while he can to the sounds in the house. Bastian is singing a song that carries past the walls, something he's learned in music lessons at school. Bastian matters; he is odd and he is useless, more a burden than anything else. He is not a companion, he's just something to be cared for and worried about, like a hollow painted egg or a delicate captive fish. But there is no meanness in him, and he wants only that everyone should be happy – that's all he asks for, something as grand and humble as that. Something as idiotic and generous as that. Bastian matters, and Colt breathes until he can breathe again.

His mother passes the door, and stops at the sight of her son in his bed. ‘Are you ill, Colt?' she asks, and he tells her he's just tired. He could tell her about the theft of the BMX, but there is no point. She is not the person to do anything about anything. She is the person whose eyes are closed. He doesn't know the exact moment when he finally gave up on her – it must have come and gone like a ripple, leaving no change on his life. Tabby will stand by her husband even though he's someone against whom it's peri-lous to lean, who will drag her down with him when he falls. He has done it before, but still she clings to him. And Colt doesn't care if she does so out of fear of her husband or of the future or because she believes in loyalty above everything; he doesn't care if she's doing the best she can. He is never going to forgive her for the choice she has made. He says nothing, and soon she goes away.

Bastian comes to the door, gripping the doorframe with his fingers and hanging his weight off his arm. He is leggy, growing out of his pyjamas; ankles like fine ivory puzzles poke beyond the cuffs. His hair is long, how he likes it, his face the cleanest ever to shine on the world. ‘What are you doing, Colly?' he asks, and Colt answers, ‘Not much, just lying here.'

Bastian thinks about this, and finds it inviting. He unhooks his fingers and comes into the room. Colt's bedroom is a holy citadel for the boy, a place of worship. He looks at the books and medals, precious articles he has no desire to touch. He would inherit them if Colt were to die, he'd keep them in boxes that he would cart with him for the length of his life, long after he'd forgotten the sound of Colt's voice and the colour of his eyes and even how it was, to have a brother. He drinks his fill of the marvellous things, then turns to Colt and graces him with a smile. ‘Good night,' he says. ‘Sleep tight.'

Because Dorrie and Marigold can't endure the wait one second longer, they put up the Christmas tree. It's a plastic tree which, dismantled, does not lie tidily in its box, and looks, in pieces, less like a tree than a knot of fossilised, murk-coloured lightning. But when they've fitted the trunk together and stood it on its stand, and squeezed the larger branches into the holes in the trunk and fitted, to the branches, the countless barbs of moulded greenery, the thing looks sufficiently like a tree to be worthy of the decorations that pour from their box as a tangled multitude. There are lengths of tinsel, gold, red and blue, and a string of fairy lights. There are matchboxes wrapped to look like gifts, and wooden animals of no discernible species. There are tinny, coloured-metal baubles, most of which have lost their strings. There are five very ancient decorations that Elizabeth bought before the children were born, peculiar people made from a substance like mirrored glass, with ugly painted faces and cuffs of shedding rabbit fur. These mirror people are both entrancing and repellent. The children don't like the way their mother smiles at them: yet they also wish there were many more, a vast community of the mirrored. They know there was once a sixth of their kind, the luckless one who met its fate in Freya's toddler fist in a tale which has become a legend.

The assembling and decorating of the tree should take less time than it does, but squabbling children draw out the job past dinner and into dusk. The tinsel must be hung so as to look casual, not roped about the tree like a measuring-tape around a fat lady. The decorations must be positioned so there is something of interest wherever the eye falls, although the best decorations must of course take pride of place at the front. The angel at the summit will not stand straight, and every Christmas the children complain about the abjectness of this creature. Elizabeth says, ‘Maybe we'll get some new things for next year,' but next year never comes, and Syd is beginning to suspect his mother intends to keep the crippled seraph and assorted drab gewgaws forever. He's starting to see there is history in them: but he is ten, and there are more important things than the past. He finds himself daydreaming about what the Jensons' tree must look like: something opulent, prob­ably real, high as the ceiling and strung with fat frosted tinsel and lights which flash different colours, and not an angel but a star with silver spikes like cavalry swords. And then he realises he's in danger of never seeing this splendid tree, just as he might never again visit the playroom, swoop over the bike jump, ride the red-and-white skateboard, or swim alone in the pool. There is a public pool not far away, and he likes it well enough: but the Jensons' pool had been his. Nobody knew it, but the pool belonged to him. Under the water, everything had stopped. Now, if the pool is gone, it will all go unrelentingly on.

The decorating of the Christmas tree had cheered him, but now grimness descends. He wanders out to the yard, to where Declan and Avery are kneeling on the path beside a bucket of water repairing a puncture in the front tyre of Declan's bike. Fixing a puncture is a job Joe does willingly, but Syd knows that his brother prefers to ask the least of their father that he can. The bike stands upside-down, balanced on its handlebars and saddle looking beached and vulnerable. The tube has been prised from inside the tyre to hang like a flaccid entrail, but when Declan screws the handpump to the valve and squirts air through it, the tube pops up like a hoola-hoop. Now is the time to pass the tube through the water and it must be a more difficult task than it looks because Declan wrestles with this rubber anaconda, and water splashes the path and his trousers. ‘Want help?' Syd offers, because Avery is sitting on his scrawny haunches doing nothing, but Declan says, ‘No, it's OK.'

It's Monday evening, and the brothers haven't spoken much since Saturday, when, with Garrick, they'd met Colt on the road, and left him standing there. The silence between them has caused Syd some pain, but it's important that Declan understand how angry and disappointed Syd is with him. Nevertheless, he has only one big brother. It is time to reopen the lines of communication. ‘We finished putting up the tree,' he says.

‘Hmm.' Inch by inch Declan is feeding the tube through the water, having the hang of it now.

‘So Dorrie can stop pestering Mum.'

Declan frowns: a bubble has risen but it is difficult to tell if it came from the puncture or was merely a breath of trapped air. Avery murmurs his opinion, and Declan's search resumes. Syd scrapes the footpath, presses flat a leafy weed growing from a crack. From the house behind him comes a thump, a child's incensed squeal. ‘Nice night for a swim,' Syd remarks.

‘You're not going up there,' his brother replies.

Syd stares at him – at both of them, Declan with his fringe over his eyes, Avery with his scabby knee. At school all the girls love Declan, he is so gallant, a sheriff from a midday movie; no one moves through life with more nonchalance than Avery. Syd has always been inexpressibly proud to have Declan for a brother and Avery for a friend: but on that Saturday morning, when they'd cruised away from Colt, he had been ashamed. ‘It was mean,' he blurts out, ‘what we did!'

A flotilla of pinpoint bubbles shivers in the water, and Avery says, ‘Mmph.' Declan clamps the hole and lifts the tube from the bucket. He drapes it across the concrete and, taking up a cloth, carefully dries the punctured place. Without looking at his brother he says, ‘Avery had to come with us. No one can be there alone.'

‘You could have stood up to Garrick.' Syd feels fervid and aggrieved, he can't speak fast enough. ‘You could have said that we'd stay with Colt, and made
Garrick
go away.'

Declan hunches to inspect the tube, the puncture that's a mi­­nute dot. He has their father's repair kit flipped open at his side, and he picks from it the metal file. Wrapping the tube around his knuckles, he scuffs the punctured area just enough to ruffle the rubber, and wipes the grit away. ‘I couldn't,' he says. ‘Garrick is our friend —'

‘No, I hate him!'

‘— and what Mr Jenson does is wrong.'

Syd clamps his mouth shut. He watches his brother squeeze glue from a tiny bottle onto the scuffed place on the tube, then take the patching piece that Avery offers and press this into the glue. Syd wonders where he's recently seen something so painstaking and clinical, and remembers the man tending Avery's knee. ‘How long does the glue take to dry?' he asks, although he knows from experience it's no time at all.

‘A few minutes.' Declan looks at Avery, who agrees, ‘About.'

Declan lays the tube on the footpath and sits back, surveying his work. With one hand he tips the bucket over, and water washes into the grass. It's still light, but if Syd were to look away for three or four minutes he would look back to find that night had arrived. ‘Colt is our friend too,' he says, but lamely, the fight going out of him. ‘You like Colt, Deco. You like him more than you like Garrick.'

‘Yeah.'

‘So you should have remembered whose side you're on.'

Declan probes the patch with a fingertip, and it shifts fractionally. He frowns, adjusts the patch back into place. ‘I'm on your side, Syd,' he says. ‘Who else's side would I be on?'

And Syd doesn't say he's supposed to be on the side of the weak, because standing in the still yard with the upturned bike and the waning light it suddenly seems that everyone is weak, his sisters with their plastic tree, Syd with all his wishful dreams, Colt alone in the middle of the road, even Garrick Greene with his brutal brothers and surly mind and the money he needs to keep the friendship of his friends: they are, all of them, bumping along as helplessly as the silver balls in a pinball machine. And Avery, who's the most helpless and unmoored of them all, yawns and says, as if it's the most casual thing, ‘Garrick's stolen the BMX.'

The Kiley boys look up. ‘What?'

‘He stole it on Saturday night. It's under his house. I've seen it.'

‘Holy shit!' says Declan.

The news makes Syd clap his hands to his head. The insult – the very thought of it, Garrick's grubby paws groping that beautiful bike – makes him almost dizzy. ‘Why?' he asks, although as he asks he discovers he knows perfectly well why: ‘Because of what the man did?'

‘I guess. And because of Colt.'

‘Because of Colt? It's not Colt's fault —'

‘Nope.' Avery shifts on the concrete; there's no fat protecting his bones. ‘But Garrick is in love with Colt. That's what's
really
making him mad.'

The Kiley brothers goggle: Syd feels his brain tumble like a pup running after something it can't catch. Then Declan laughs. ‘What do you mean, he loves Colt?'

‘Don't you reckon he does?' Avery smiles beatifically. ‘He always wants to be around Colt. He's always asking where Colt is, what he's doing, when he's coming home. He goes to Colt's house all the time, even though it's not the kind of place he'd usually be. He loves him.'

Declan thinks about this, and says again, ‘Holy shit!'

‘He doesn't
want
to love him. He hates Colt, because he loves him. And now he hates him even more, because if it wasn't for Colt then he wouldn't be anywhere near Colt's dad. So it is Colt's fault, see? So he has to make Colt sorry. He wants to be the boss of Colt, not for Colt to be the boss of him. He wants everything to be the way he's used to it being. So he stole the bike.'

Declan goes to answer, but no words come out: he spreads his hands in wonder. Syd, too, gapes at Avery, who sits with his bare arms looping his knees, skinny and slightly grimy, innocent as grass and as shrewd as a leprechaun. All Syd can manage to ask is, ‘How do you know?'

Avery's ashy eyes glance at him and Syd catches sight of it fleetly, the scarred and slick side of a world he'll never live in. ‘It was just there,' says Avery.