The Best Australian Stories 2010 (11 page)

—Where are you going? your mother asks.

—Outside, you tell her.

Rodney sits on the stone stairs over the footpath, in a tattered blue bathrobe and a pair of fur-lined ski boots. He plucks a cigarette from his mouth and reveals his purple gums, a blister glistening on his lower lip. He grimaces, as if seeing you has saved him from some terrible fate.

—Hey there, Captain, he says.

You don't stop to talk to him. He smells like piss. Down this street and another that runs for miles, you come at last to the place where dead cars are piled up in rusted hills. Vincent and Jerome are waiting for you there. The three of you stand around with hands thrust into pockets. None of you know how to begin.

—If they catch you, they torture you, Jerome says.

—Like what? you ask.

He glances into your eyes and his tone hardens.

—Like they make you lick a woman down there.

Somewhere in the city at your back, a truck horn blasts. The sound drifts and unravels on a wind that kicks up around you.

—They fucking do, I tell you. Jerome scuffs his feet on the ground. His freckled skin is pale. His cheeks are blushed with cold. It happened, yeah, to this kid I know.

—Who? Vincent asks.

—Just a kid, yeah, Jerome says, staring out to the piles of dead cars.

You decide that if they catch you, if they try to make you lick a woman down there, you will scratch and claw like a frenzied cat, you will do anything to get free. But you know that Jerome often lies. You will ask your brother when you get home.

Jerome picks up a rock and flicks his arm. The rock hits the bonnet of a car and bounces. The crack falls away into the stillness. A rock balances in your own hand, the grainy surface covered with black dirt, as if it has been excavated from a tomb. It is part of a shattered brick, and you think of how Jerome once lost his temper and threw a brick at your head during a fight.

With a swing of your arm, the rock leaves your hand. Your breath comes out in a whistle. The three of you are throwing now, lost in the rhythm, grinning, the emptiness filled with
thonk
,
thonk
,
thwat
and laughter, when one stone comes near a window. Your stone is the first to hit a windscreen. The rock fists a hole in the glass and makes the rest puff into shattered white.

—I win, Jerome says, but you don't have time to answer because a car swings around the corner, as dead looking as those that are piled before you, but kicking towards you on the dirt road, and you catch a glimpse of a man with wild hair and steely eyes hunched over the steering wheel, before you turn and run with the others into the trees.

When you come home a police car stands out the front of your house. The radio drones down the street, and you slow, and feel your balls pull up into your guts. You don't stop completely. It would look bad if anyone saw you, and you are already coming up with a plan, an explanation, and emptying your mind, making yourself believe from the outside in, that here is a boy who did nothing wrong.

*

—Where are you going? your mother asks.

—Outside, you say.

Your father has always been there. Now he is not. Your house fills with people and most of them are strangers. Marjorie, who usually sneers at you for kicking balls into her backyard, mops at the tears and mascara blackening the cracks of her face.

—It's on your shoulders now, she says. No helping that. You'll have to be the man in the family.

She is not talking to you. Your brother holds her stare, like the sheriff of some lonely town. Marjorie turns away and hugs your mother again. You head for the front door.

Outside, you begin walking. You've forgotten your gloves but you don't go back. Fingers curl into fists and find your pockets, and you follow your feet along the pavers. You stay away from the cracks. Bad luck in the cracks, worse luck if you fall through.

You think of the last time you saw your father angry. It was the last time you let him down. In anger, he never touched you, and rarely shouted, but his voice, his soft, dark, clinging voice, would come down like a drizzle that seeps into bones; a voice that made you regret everything.

Now you cannot remember that talk without knowing that it was the last one. At the end, he said:

—I feel as if you've learned nothing from me. As if you'll never learn
anything
.

Those words left behind, washed up with the waves. Your father dropped his shoulders and walked off. It was the sense of defeat in him that moved you. And now it is impossible not to wonder whether he knew all along about all those other things you got up to. The delight you took in hiding them.

*

Your brother is the new man of the house. One day, when you are playing in the backyard, he corners you against the back fence. He gives you that empty, appraising glance as if he is not even there, as if you are simply looking at yourself, bound to condemn yourself, then begins punching you. Not in the face or the neck, but the arms, the ribs, the belly, the places where this thing can stay between you and him.

*

The only you place you have, where you can breathe, is outside. As you walk down the steps, past Rodney, he coughs. You keep on walking. He calls your name. You turn to look at him.

—How are you, Captain? he asks.

You tell him fine.

—I know you're a busy man. He smiles when he says this, and when he smiles he looks afraid. I'd like a moment of your time though.

Knees flexed, the cold air settled on your neck, you stare back up at the house. If your brother were there, if you were walking out the door beside him, you would walk on without a backward glance. You would follow him, and he'd toss back comments like scraps to a dog, that Rodney is a fag, that he has a fag disease and should be left to rot. But your brother is not here, and you feel trapped enough by pity to follow Rodney inside.

The house reeks of incense and underneath it a soft, treacly smell like vomit and shit and urine all mixed up. There are all sorts of tablets on his dining table, arranged in packets and dishes between newspapers and stubbed-out cigarettes. You draw shallow breaths and feel your lungs pull at your chest.

—I know how you feel, he tells you. I know how you feel. I have something for you. Have to get rid of some of these things, yes. They'll just get thrown out anyway, you know. Been meaning to give it to you for a while. It's right here. Right here somewhere.

Ash drops from his cigarette as he searches through his bookshelf. You see trails of ash on the table, the arms of chairs, as if these are the places where shadows come to rest. He does everything quickly, with a nervous flick of his fingers and a strange womanly toss of his head, and he never quite stops moving, as if he is afraid that he will break apart if he stays too long in one position. He finally pulls free a book.

—My father gave this to me when I was about your age. My father wasn't like yours. This is the only time that he wasn't a cunt. I'm sorry. I'm fucking sorry for putting it that way. Fuck. God. Maybe they all are.

He appears out of breath and winces. He waves something away from his face, the smoke, but it drifts around him like a web, something so thin that it simply reforms around his fingers. He offers you the book. His nails look powdery and brittle against the faded cover. On the front, there is a picture of a boy in a scout's uniform grinning as he bursts out of a forest with a snake dangling from a branch over his head. In yellow, above the coils of the snake, it says
Adventures for Young Boys!

—This is how I escaped, Rodney says. This is how. It worked for me. Maybe it'll work for you.

—I can't, you tell him. It's yours.

The truth is that you don't want to touch an object that he has touched.

—I won't need it. Rodney offers that thin, scared smile. I'm just in the waiting room, you know.

The book feels moist and you get outside as quickly as possible. The air has never smelled so sweet. In your own backyard, where you are sure that he cannot see, you put the book in the garbage.

*

At the threshold of your house, you pause, like a surgeon about to put his hands on someone's heart. Your mother is crying and blowing her nose, and her grief is like damp that rises from the floorboards into the walls and makes the door swell up and impossible to close.

—It is a terrible thing, Marjorie says, her voice ringing through the house, a terrible thing to do to you and the children. Terrible and
selfish
.

Marjorie comes around too often, as if the space left by your father has pulled in a body of equal weight. Marjorie carries herself like a rock for your mother to lean on, but you think of her as hard and brittle, and the inward tug of her lips makes your gut tighten. She has her dark hair pulled up, so that you can see the wrinkled slab of her neck. They both turn to regard you. Your mother glances at Marjorie and you see a warning in her eyes.

—Well, heavens, it needs to be said, Marjorie says. Don't you think so?

When you are alone with your mother, you think of touching her, but you are afraid that any gesture will disturb her.

—He didn't do it because of us, she says, as if finishing off an argument.

The words hang in the quiet. Your mother will sometimes lie, to make you feel better, like the time your cat was run over and she claimed that it had simply run off. The thing is, you nearly always know when she is lying, but you pretend not to, because it makes you feel better for the lies you have told her. Your mother is staring down the hallway, out to the small, overgrown garden beyond it, but she is not seeing any of it. The long, pale fingers of her right hand move along the line of her jaw, a light, floating motion, back and forth, back and forth, and you know that it is not her hand at all.

—He didn't, she says again. It was never us.

—I know, you tell her.

She looks at you then, startled, as if she didn't even realise you were there, and you hug her, because it is better than staring at her face.

*

After school you ride down to the cliffs overlooking the sea. You climb over the fence and walk on the grass. If your mother saw you, she would have a fit. You stand there, and the grey, dark sea swings from one edge of your gaze to the other. You wonder what he was thinking when he came to this place, whether the bottle was in his hand, whether he was singing in the place deep in his throat without opening his mouth, the pipe clenched between his teeth. This is what they brought back of him; the pipe, black remains in the chute, from the last knot of tobacco he teased to fiery life and slowly drained.

Your mother went to the hospital to see him. They spoke about
him
, but they meant his body. At home with your brother, you stupidly asked if your father would be okay, and at first he appeared not to have heard. When you asked again, your brother's eyes slid across your face. He studied your features, forehead, nose, mouth, as if he were reading a difficult book. He lifted his right hand and dropped it again.

—Don't you
get
it? he said.

*

At the funeral, you felt as if you should have cried, for the sake of everyone else, and that made it harder. Your mother cried, and so did some of your aunts and uncles. You sat there and felt as if you were being buried alive, your brother's face as polished as the fake panelling on the walls of the funeral home, the electric falseness of the organ and all those wooden seats in rows, like an awkward imitation of a swell rolling in from the sea towards the lacquered darkness of the coffin. They did not have the lid open.

*

Now you stand here alone. A breeze runs across your back, over your neck and flows out over the lines of swell rolling inwards, feathering the breaks with spray. The rocks below split the motion of the sea. A hawk hovers nearby. The subtle ripple of its wing feathers keeps it motionless.

They used to say you looked like him, but not these days. Not even your mother. You face yourself sometimes in the mirror, and hold his picture alongside. The same wide mouth with the fine edges, the long, slightly curved nose with an uneven turn at the end. The eyes, sunken, heavy and blue. How much of him is inside you?

*

In the classroom, you sit right at the back. On the first day back, most kids avoid you. Jerome comes up at lunch. His flat eyes flick onto yours then fix over your shoulder.

—Hey, what was the funeral like?

The way he stands over you twists something in your stomach.

—None of your fucking business, you tell him.

He looks stung. You've never seen him caught off balance before, but he recovers quickly.

—You don't even seem upset.

You don't answer him.

—You should be upset, yeah. But you're smiling. Freak.

—Fuck off.

The grin cuts between your cheeks. You don't know how this has happened. You know that he wanted to say something nice, and that you should have helped him.

—At least I had a father to start with, you say.