Golden Boys (4 page)

Garrick asks, ‘All right?'

‘Yeah, good.'

Syd turns on Garrick. ‘You didn't have to hit him so hard!'

‘I could of hit him harder.'

‘Forget it, Syd . . .'

‘Yeah,' Garrick tells the boy, ‘do what your brother says. It's done. The little weed survives another day.' And because he does in fact like and respect Declan, he says, ‘You sure you're all right?'

Declan nods loosely. ‘You throw a nice punch.'

‘Yeah, but you're pretty tough,' Garrick replies graciously.

The three boys loiter on the footpath, their shadows ironed behind them, the problem dealt with and already history for Garrick and Declan but never for Syd, who stores it in the chest of many grievances he keeps unlocked inside his head. ‘What do you wanna do?' asks Garrick; and Syd, who would rather that he and his brother went one way and the oaf went another, preferably to his death, nevertheless accepts in silence the bigger boy's attaching of himself to them, and looks on the bright side. Garrick might have money; there's a chance Garrick might be talked into doing something that will get him sent to a children's home. ‘Where were you going?'

Declan lies and says, ‘Nowhere.'

‘Wanna go to the stormwater?'

‘Yeah.' Declan looks at Syd. ‘You don't have to come.'

‘I'll come,' says Syd.

Walking away, Garrick pokes a thick finger into Syd's spine. ‘Hey,' he says. ‘Tiny-dick. Call me a shithead again, I'll knock your block off.'

Syd stays lordishly silent, as if he's heard and felt nothing; but inside his head he tends the chest of grievances, in which there's plenty of room.

In the space between the garage and the back fence is a high pile of branches and pulled weeds, stashed there out of sight until the next time Freya's father can be bothered lighting the oil-barrel incinerator. Freya sometimes comes here, like a cat, in search of mice she never finds, and because it is one of the few places around the house where she can find solitude. No one except herself, as far as she knows, comes here with any frequency. No one else, as far as she can tell, hankers for privacy with the fretful, ceaseless restlessness that she does. So the wasteland behind the garage is her special alone place, but conveniently it's not so disconnected from the house that she can't sense what's going on in there. She's available to spring into action whenever the tyrannical command of an eldest child is required. Her siblings all fear her, even Declan: that's as it should be, as it needs to be. Crouching among the pikes of branches and the swags of parched leaves, she's telepathically aware of Dorrie raiding the kitchen in search of sugar, which she will spoon into her mouth as white mountains on a teaspoon; of Peter zooming down the hall on the wheeled walking-frame he has outgrown; of Marigold in the lounge room, sighing and sniffing over her homework; of the absence of Syd and Declan, who seize any opportunity to be away from the house. She senses her mother, nearby but distant, maybe in the front garden. Her father is beyond the reach of her powers. She's never been able to imagine where he spends his time.

The television is off. There is nothing in the oven. Across the kitchen table is spread a rattle of colouring pencils. The washing machine is churning through another load, its third for the day, because sunshine should not be wasted. Already the line is crowded with clothes, from Peter's stubby socks to Marigold's ladybird nightie to the workshirts of her father spread like wide blue wings. Even so, there's a hillock of garments growing stale beside the machine.

The Kiley house is a white weatherboard with black guttering and a red tile roof. Its floor plan is simple, its construction of mediocre quality. The land on which it stands is spacious without being generous. There is a big garage and a smallish shed, both made from fracturous fibro. The house is one of countless similar properties in the neighbourhood, not aged but growing tired, the trees in the yards and surrounding streets just reaching their full height. Freya's father, Joe, had bought the house only a couple of months before Freya was born – it's a piece of family lore, how Elizabeth had worried that they wouldn't have a proper home for the first baby. More lore is this: that Joe had wanted to buy a house miles away, on the outskirts of the city, practically in the country. Elizabeth recounts it like a horror story, but Freya thinks she might have liked living in the wild. She could have owned a pony. She might not have had to retreat, for seclusion, to the airless shadow of the garage.

When there had been only her parents and herself, the white house must have been roomy: there are three bedrooms, and Elizabeth says they made a nursery of the dinky middle room. The third room was for sewing, for books, for nothing. But then Declan was born and then Syd, then Marigold and Dorrie and Peter, siblings arriving like jetsam, like kittens to a barn, and now the three girls share the third room, and the older boys have the middle one. Peter sleeps in his parents' room, in a cot he's already too big for, but the middle room is too small to hold him and his countless accoutrements. Even the sisters' bedroom isn't large – Marigold and Dorrie must sleep in a bunk. The little girls don't mind sharing, they don't complain if Freya keeps her radio or reading-lamp on. They try to follow the rules of the room laid down by their dominant sibling. Nevertheless their clothes drift, their toys spill, their knick-knacks and crusts and shoes and ribbons and xylophones and schoolbags and books and hairbrushes and Barbies and Barbie clothes and Barbie shoes and naked Kens and homework and nail-clippings and drawings and tissues and hand-puppets and plastic jewels and sandwiches and singlets and chewy-wrappers and glass horses and bangles and hair-ties and teddy bears and pencils and cordial bottles and so much, much more clutters every surface and crowds across the floor. Regularly Freya flies into a rage over this mess and the extended mess, the mess which finds its way through the house like the ratty hem of a juvenile junkyard. Yet when she implores her mother to tell Syd, Marigold and Dorrie to tidy up after themselves, Elizabeth always answers, ‘Why? They'll just make more mess tomorrow.' Which is the most infuriating and not-funny argument Freya has ever heard. In the past she's tried to enlist Declan to help enforce neatness on their siblings, but Declan, who owns the least of any of them, looked at her pityingly and said, ‘It's only stuff.' He never seems to worry about anything that keeps Freya awake.

Mostly she worries about money, and the family's lack of it. The Kileys are not starving, and certainly not bleakly poor: but the tightness is always there, blandening the taste of things, sucking vibrancy out of the air. Everything a child might want is inevitably deemed too expensive to be purchased on a whim, from an ice-cream cake to a tin of Derwent pencils to a proper pair of Levis with the patch-of-leather brand. Such luxuries must be reserved for special events, birthdays or Christmas, or they must be arduously saved for with pocket money. Freya's pocket money, received each Friday afternoon, buys, each Saturday morning, enough cara-mel buds to last the journey home from the shop.

The children look forward to Thursday, which is supermarket day; preserved in their collective memories are those occasions when there's been a jam log for them to chop up. Their hearts beat hard each shopping day, they pour through the front door. Usually, they are met with disappointment. Usually the haul consists of staples: white bread, oranges, sausages, potatoes. There have been days when the sight of these has so dispirited Freya that she's run to her hiding-place and cried. The only time they eat takeaway is when their father brings home a parcel of fish and chips. The children flock to the feast like bare-legged vultures, endure patiently Joe's ramshackle divvying of the meal. If they're lucky he will also have brought home a bag of Jaffas, which are not the children's favourite but are gobbled anyway. The younger children love these evenings, but lately they have been sticking in Freya's craw. Joe only buys fish and chips when he comes home late, rheumy-eyed and smelling of smoke, drawling his words and hungry. He spends whatever change he finds in his pockets and orders without thought, so there are never enough dim sims for everyone to have one to themselves, never enough fish for more than a bite or two. He wastes money on scallops, which everybody hates except he. All the vultures will get something, but it won't necessarily be what they'd prefer. Their mother will eat nothing, she and the children having already had their dinner of chops and potato, a plate of which had been set aside on the kitchen table for Joe. Now that meal will go into the fridge, to be eaten by Joe for breakfast, or by nobody. The children won't whine about their father's bounty, as they'd complained about their mother's. Elizabeth's resentment of all this won't go unnoticed by her husband, and beyond waste and guilt and unfairness and greed, this is what the feasts have come to represent to Freya: the simmering lack of love between her father and her mother.

It's taken a long time for her to recognise that her parents hate one another. For most of her life she's never given the situation any thought. The world was one way and, right or wrong, that was the only way it would be, and it simply never occurred to her that it could be another way. But now she is stepping through the amazing castle and she's beginning to see that life is much more intricate than she'd realised. Everything is part of a chain, each link locked in place by all the other links. Everything that happens is shaped by what's already happened, and shapes what is to come. Her mother and father haven't been her parents since time immemorial. They must have met at some point when they were younger, strangers, before their children were born, and they must have loved each other then, because only love would make them marry. She has seen the black-and-white wedding photographs, and both Elizabeth and Joe are smiling. In one of the photos Joe has his arm around Elizabeth's waist, which is something Freya can't imagine him doing. They never touch now – she's never seen them kiss. Since that smiling, black-and-white day, something has surely gone wrong. Maybe things go wrong for everyone – maybe all grown people are unhappy in the way her parents are, or maybe just the married ones, or maybe just the ones with children, she doesn't know. Maybe it's not even wrong, this mysterious metamorphosis – maybe this is how it is meant to be. All she knows for certain is that in the wedding photographs her mother and father seem happy, but that's not how they seem anymore.

Freya is hunched against the fence, squeezed into a gritty space between lopped branches of the plum tree. Although the garage shade falls across her, it's oppressively hot. She isn't unwell, but she feels she should be. Strands of long hair are sticking to her throat, her eyes are as dry as eggshells. It's uncomfortable and lonely but she feels driven here, penned into a last place of dubious safety. She could crawl into the branches and die here, like a homeless thing come to the end of its sad life.

Freya does not have a flawless understanding of the origin of babies. Her mother has given her a book which explains the biology of the business in a light-hearted way, and it makes a cacky kind of sense, she's accepted the science of it: that a mother and a father do something deliberate and precise, and that this action assumes the shape of a baby. Yet in Freya's observation, babies are imprecise and anything but deliberate, less like jigsaw puzzles than like the weather: uninvited, unannounced, unpredictable, and unstoppable. The parents seem helpless to avoid the advent of another child, and she's never heard any of them object. It's as if each family is allotted a certain number of offspring which they must and will receive, and complaining or evading is pointless. The rain will fall, the children will fill the rooms.

Freya leans her cheek on the scabby bark of a plum-tree branch. It's uncomfortable, which suits her mood. She has thought and thought, but she can't think of a way to make her mother's words mean something other than what they say.
There's always another one coming
.

She has nothing against her siblings: for all their pushy presence, she loves them and doesn't begrudge their existence. But why, she wonders, must babies be born into a home that can't afford them, and has no space for them? Why come to a place where they're not needed? Why keep coming to a family that is so unhappy?

She bends herself into the smallest shape she can be, ignoring the stabbings of her brutal nest. Her misery is deep, and has no shore. She has lost the faith she used to have in her mother and father. It's obvious they can't exert any meaningful control over the world. Once they ruled her life like gods, and in important ways they still do: but it's clear they can offer their offspring no protection against things becoming worse and worse.

The boys walk on the road because it's tough, although on a Sunday afternoon the roads are as deserted as the footpaths. In travelling diagonally across the neighbourhood to the stormwater drain they could take a route which would bring them past the Kiley house, but Declan doesn't lead them that way – it's too easy to be seen by their mother, and snagged like fish in a net. They don't go close to Avery Price's house either: Garrick says the matter is finished and it should be, but only an idiot would trust Garrick. These constraints leave just one clear path, a peaceful sidestreet down whose short, smooth decline Declan, Avery and Syd have spent hours of their lives wheeling. The boys round its corner, cutting across the naturestrip and sauntering onto the road, and halt as if hooked. They have never seen kids other than each other in this street, but now there are three boys sitting on the low brick fence of a house at the crest of the hill. One of the boys is Avery, his leg networked by burgundy trails. The other two are strangers.

These strangers notice them immediately, and Avery turns: terror seems to thin him, as if he'd slip through a crack in time. Declan is his best friend, and probably wouldn't look so calm if he suspected Garrick of murderous intent, but Avery expects nothing of anyone, and certainly not loyalty. He edges backward as his friends approach, torn between standing his ground and resuming a sprint for his life. And Garrick drags out the terror: only when he's within striking range does he say, ‘Next time, dick, I'll smash your face in, all right?'

‘All right,' Avery agrees.

Declan hasn't looked at Avery at all. On the footpath stand two trim racers, one red, the other green, and lying in their spider-webby shadow is a fine black BMX. Each bicycle shines, the six silver rims glinting. Declan nods. ‘Nice dirtbike.'

The older boy says diffidently, ‘Thank you.'

Avery hoists the BMX as if he owns it and would keep it, fingers clamping the handlebars. ‘This is my friend Declan,' he tells the strangers. ‘This is Syd, this is Garrick.'

The boy smiles. ‘I'm Colt. This is Bastian, my brother.'

The younger one, Bastian, is as bug-eyed as if he's never seen boys before, or at least not gorilla boys like Garrick, not bleeding ones like Avery. Garrick smirks, says, ‘Colt. Bastian,' in a way that lets them know he will mock them behind their backs. Avery wags his free hand at the house behind him. ‘They moved in here. They live here now.'

The local boys have been absolutely unaware of the failing health of the woman who'd lived in the red-brick house for as long as they've been alive, and for decades before that; they've never even known she existed. They did not notice her house go up for sale, nor witness its new inhabitants moving in. It wouldn't occur to them to pay attention to something so unspecific to themselves, so they take this change to their world effortlessly – appreciatively, for it has brought with it a splendid bike. Syd says, ‘Yeah, that's a good bike.'

‘Let me see.' Garrick strides in, yanks the BMX from Avery, hefts it by the saddle and handlebar, and bounces it on its fat wheels. The bike springs off the concrete athletically. ‘Pretty good,' he decides. ‘I've seen better, but it's good. All right if I have a go?'

Syd knows what he would say if the BMX belonged to him, but Colt says, ‘Go ahead.' Garrick throws a thigh over the saddle, bucks the bike into his chest. ‘I'm getting one of these soon,' he says. His friends know he is full of bullshit, he spouts it like an actual bull; if he were to get hold of such a bike it would probably be booty, Syd thinks, from a ram-raid committed by one of his hideous brothers. And whether what he's saying is true or not, there's a look on his face which Syd would like to see smeared into the gutter.

Every child knows the sound of a parent opening a flyscreen door: the noise comes unexpectedly from the red-brick house, and the six boys look up. A tall man in an ivory polo shirt and shorts of a fruity colour such as Syd has never seen a man wear is loping down the driveway on long tanned legs, carrying a white box with a red cross on its lid. ‘Hello!' he says, when he sees the newcomers. ‘You boys are multiplying. Don't tell me you all need first-aid too?'

Syd looks to his brother, who says, ‘We were just walking past.'

‘Just walking past, you say! One deduces you are neighbourhood ruffians. Your names, sirs?'

Declan blinks. ‘I'm Declan Kiley. This is my brother, Syd.'

‘Declan Kiley,' says the man. ‘I believe I met your mother and sisters and brother after church this morning. And you are, mister?'

‘Garrick,' says Garrick.

‘Great bike, isn't it?'

To admit the admirability of anything is a kind of defeat for Garrick, but he says, ‘Yeah, not bad.'

‘Take it for a spin, if you like. We'll just be here performing emergency surgery.'

Garrick says, ‘Uh,' but hesitates – not because he wants to stay, Syd guesses, but because he objects to being told he may go. ‘Sit, Avery,' the man says; already he's folded his lengthy body to the footpath and is rummaging in the tin for scissors. Avery sits as commanded, stretching his legs on the warm concrete; and Garrick, suddenly deeming the whole thing ridiculous, pivots the bike and heads out onto the road. It's a gorgeous machine, and speeds sweetly down the rise; a more polite boy might have stayed within sight, but when Garrick reaches the basin of the hill he loops wide around the corner and disappears. Colt, Syd sees, observes this without protest – indeed, his face shows nothing. He's the kind of clean, soft-spoken, handsome boy at whom giggling girls throw small objects – but he's also like a boy pulled from a cereal box, empty-eyed, enclosed in cellophane. He is watching what goes on, but he's not touching it. If he knew Garrick better, he wouldn't be so . . . 
careless
 . . . about what has just happened. Well, Syd thinks, he can learn the hard way.

In the minutes that follow there's silence: the boys watch the man tend Avery's knee, first adjusting the leg so it's nearer to him, then squeezing fluid from a plastic vial and letting the liquid course down Avery's shin taking with it the colour of blood and flecks of dirt. Avery, leaning on his palms, endures without twitching. The fluid drips onto the concrete and evaporates quickly. The man reaches for a paper envelope – he has large, tan, knuckly hands – and takes from it a clothy sponge, using it to dab at the frayed edges of skin. He glances at Avery and says, ‘Sorry if this hurts.' Avery says, ‘It doesn't,' and the man says, ‘Well, you're very brave.' He sets aside the crumpled sponge and takes up another vial, breaks off the plastic top. ‘I'm Rex,' he says without looking at his audience. ‘I assume you've met Colt and Bastian. How old are you, Syd?'

The question startles Syd from stupor. ‘Ten.'

‘There you go, Bas.' The man casts a smile to his smaller son. ‘Here's a friend already. Bastian is almost ten too, Syd. He was worried about coming to a new neighbourhood, weren't you, Bas? You thought you wouldn't make any friends.'

‘I wasn't, Dad!'

‘Well, Bas, you were, if you remember. You felt unsure; but that's all right. That's only to be expected. And see – you've made a pal already.'

Syd and Bastian look at each other, and it's like a Jack Russell being introduced to a budgerigar: in theory they could be friends, but in practice sooner or later there will be bright feathers on the floor. The boy reminds Syd of nothing so much as a rabbit – it's all he can do to resist snapping his teeth. When he looks back to the man, Rex has bent close to Avery's knee, and for a second Syd thinks he is licking it – licking up the ooze and meaty scent. In fact he's dripping saline strategically into the wound: ‘My goodness, Avery,' he says, ‘you've done a thorough job of this. What school do you go to, boys?'

The Kileys attend the Catholic primary, catching the school's pint-sized bus to get there; Avery and Garrick walk in the opposite direction, to the nearby government school. None of them attend the luxurious place of male education into which Colt and Bastian Jenson have been freshly enrolled and to which they've fronted up already although the school year is as good as done, dressed as per regulation in pinstriped blazers and navy ties. From this suburb the school can only be reached by car: Colt and Bastian will be transported like princes. Its fees would be an impossible expense for most local parents, its very name – the kind of word that gets bestowed on legendary swords – has been, until this moment, unheard on these streets. ‘So you'll just be neighbourhood friends,' the man says. ‘That's fine. That's good. Everyone needs a street mate to knock about with.'

Syd, who will discuss with his brother, later, the legality of strangers inviting themselves into the position of friends, looks at Declan, who says, ‘I guess.'

Garrick appears from around the corner, riding the BMX in the centre of the road. The man looks up as the bike pulls in alongside Avery, missing the patient's fingers by a whisker. ‘Enjoy that?'

‘Yeah. I'm getting one soon.'

‘Is that so? For Christmas? Or have you been saving?'

He looks at Garrick, and it takes a moment for Syd to realise he's made a cut in Garrick's skin, so some of the bullshit seeps out obviously – then patches the leak by adding, ‘You look like a man who gets what he wants. In the meantime, I'm sure the boys won't mind you using this one now and then.' He flashes his smile, which is broad and white as a wolf's, and returns his attention to Avery. The wound is now clean and bleeds freshly, but only a little. The man takes a tube of antiseptic cream and squeezes slugs of its contents onto the knee, flattening them with light tamps of his thumb, before slipping a snowy pad from an envelope and positioning it on the slathered injury. Then he gets out a reel of sticking-plaster and scissors, cuts length after length of brown tape from the reel, and wraps each length snugly around the boy's leg so the pad is bound immovably to the knee. His hands are big enough to engulf the slim muscle of Avery's calf, to cradle it in a palm; he smooths the tape to the shinbone with the crafting strokes of a potter. ‘There,' he says finally, sitting back. ‘How does that feel?'

Avery's knee is in bondage. ‘Good,' he says.

‘Keep it dry, if you can.'

‘He never has a shower,' says Garrick, ‘so that won't be hard.'

The man ignores this, holding his attention on the patient. ‘The dressing will need to be changed in a day or two. If you don't have tape or antiseptic at home, come here I'll do it for you, OK?'

‘OK,' says Avery.

‘It's a very nasty graze, and you don't want it getting infected.'

Avery nods solemnly. ‘We don't have a first-aid box like that at home,' he admits; which makes Syd realise there's no such equipped kit in the Kiley house either, that indeed he's never seen such a thing anywhere except on television. His sister Marigold once owned a family of cardboard dolls that she pressed, along with their various outfits, from the pages of a slim book; the dolls had fragile cardboard stands which did not support them properly, and the outfits with their paper tabs did not cling tight to the cardboard waists and shoulders; inevitably the dolls, having overtested his sister's patience, were left to wilt where they lay. Something makes him think of those sharp-edged, wafer-thin people now. ‘Then we'll take care of it here,' the man is saying. ‘Don't worry your mother about it.'

‘He doesn't live with his mother,' Garrick corrects. ‘He lives with his gran.'

‘Your grandmother, then.' Again, the man doesn't spare the bulky boy a glance. ‘Don't worry her. We can do it here easily.'

Syd looks at Colt and Bastian, to gauge their thoughts on this. He cannot imagine his own father volunteering to be a boy's nurse. But Bastian is wearing his just-hatched-from-the-egg expression, and Colt, though he's listening and watching, is still behind his cellophane, his face telling nothing, his mouth closed. Syd's attention snaps back when the man tosses the scissors into the tin and asks, ‘So, what are you boys doing today?'

‘We were just going down to the stormwater,' says Declan.

‘The stormwater! That sounds exciting. What is it, a drain?'

‘It's a pipe at the creek. You can walk inside it.'

‘It's good,' says Avery. ‘It's scary.'

There is a moment in which all the boys look down. Then, ‘You can come if you want,' Declan tells Colt and Bastian.

Bastian says immediately, ‘I don't want to go somewhere scary.'

‘It's not really scary,' says Avery.

‘It's scary if you're a baby,' says Garrick.

‘No no,' whines the child, ‘I don't want to go.'

Declan looks at Colt. ‘What about you?'

‘Yeah.' The boy steps from the fence – he's taller than Declan, taller than Garrick. ‘I'll come.'

‘You shouldn't go, Avery,' the man tells his patient. ‘A stormwater drain isn't a healthy place. If a bad bug gets into an open wound like yours, you could end up losing your leg. You can wait here, if you like, and Bastian can show you the toys. An absolute mountain range of toys, these boys have.'

Garrick says, ‘Toys like what?'

‘Oh, everything – you name it, they've got it! Skateboards, miniature trains, remote-control boats, who knows what else. It's probably time someone set up the track for the slot cars, isn't it?'

‘I can do it,' says Avery.

‘And soon, in a week or so, there'll be something even better than slot cars, won't there, Bas?'

‘Don't tell!' Bastian squeaks. ‘It's a super secret!'

‘A super secret?' The man widens his eyes, which are a strange colour, Syd notes, like the sap where prehistoric beetles are drowned. ‘If you say so. But I don't think it can be a secret for long.'