The Last Time We Spoke (3 page)

‘Look, Dad, we’ll talk about it another time. I shouldn’t have brought it up tonight,’ Jack said, suddenly backtracking. ‘On your wedding anniversary and all.’ He turned. ‘Hey, Mum, you still make the best apple pie ever.’

Carla smiled too widely.

Kevin took the cue and said in a gravelly voice, ‘Yes, a great feed, Carl. You know what they say –
Kissing don’t last, good cooking do
. Not that you aren’t a fine kisser too.’ With that, he pushed his chair back and hoisted himself up. He’d kept lean and strong on the farm, but already arthritis had crept into his knees and toyed with his steadiness.

‘How about a port?’

For a moment he looked so vulnerable standing there, his shoulders a little rounder, his conviction threadbare.

‘Good idea. Let’s have it out on the deck,’ she said, unlocking the French doors and inviting the navy night in. ‘It’s so mild.’

‘I’ll stick with beer,’ Jack said, disappearing into the kitchen. Carla followed.

‘You realise you’ve just dashed your father’s dreams?’ she said, coming up behind him as he peered into the fridge.

Jack turned, his face collapsing. The second she’d said it, Carla wished she hadn’t, but the words were out, her disappointment selfishly articulated.

‘They’re all finished,’ Kevin called out from the lounge. ‘You might be lucky to find one in the garage.’

For a moment, mother and son stood staring at each other in the ice-blue light of the refrigerator.

‘He means the beer,’ she said. Then quickly, ‘Jack, I’m sorry.’ But he had already turned and was walking away down the hall.

The moon hung like a Christmas bauble in the sky, silvering the barn’s corrugated iron roof and transforming the drooping branches of willow into lametta. Carla sank into the slack of a canvas deckchair and sighed. Kevin handed her a drink and pulled up the chair opposite. He’d brought a pack of Peter Stuyvesant outside with him. They sat in silence, the still night interrupted only by the haunting cry of a morepork. There was a new intimacy between them, a shared loneliness the day had imported.

‘Twenty-seven years, Carl. A pretty good innings,’ he said, patting her thigh. ‘Remember that first dance at the Freemason’s hall? You arriving late. All eyes on this honey-skinned beauty.’

‘You didn’t look too bad yourself, Elvis,’ she said, forcing a laugh, ‘except for those awful gold bell-bottoms you kept having to hoist up!’

‘Bloody costume was too big,’ he said with a chortle ‘God, how come I got a look in? Reckon it was that disco ball … Blimmin’ hypnotised you.’

Carla leant across and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Your poor dad,’ Kevin continued, shaking his head. ‘Must have thought he was selling his only daughter down the river. Mind you, this rugged Kiwi bloke with two left feet didn’t turn out so bad.’ He laughed, but it was a hollow laugh – a valiant effort to varnish his defeat.

She placed a hand on his. ‘It’ll work out fine, Kev. You’ll see.’

‘Mind if I light up?’ he asked, rummaging in his pocket for matches.

She didn’t begrudge him the occasional cigarette. ‘Just don’t go offering Jack one.’

Kevin inhaled, the red tip glowing fiercely. He flung his head back and exhaled into the black. ‘Do you feel trapped here on the farm?’ he asked, staring at the night sky.

‘Now where did that come from?’

‘Maybe Jack’s right. I mean we’ve hardly travelled.’

‘Stop it, Kev! Our life is good. Really good. You know what our Jack’s like. Always full of crazy ideas. Where’s he got to, anyway?’

Then she felt it, cold on her neck. She lunged forward, shrugging her shoulders to distance herself from it. ‘Jack, you silly boy, I’ll—’

‘Don’t fuckin’ move!’ The voice, rough and unfamiliar, split open the mellow night.

Carla froze.

Kevin’s face was a kaleidoscope of expression – surprise, melting into horror, then fury. Struggling to lever himself out of his chair, he bellowed, ‘Now look here, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ His face was puce, his body trembling with rage. ‘Put that down!’ He lunged forward.

Then there was a dull thwack and Kevin dropped heavily to the ground, his temple glancing off the corner of the patio table as he fell.

‘Kevin!’ Carla screamed, but before her voice could spread across the night, a hand had trapped it. The smell under her nostrils was strange and foreign. She had an overwhelming urge to vomit.

‘Shut it, bitch! Or the motherfucker won’t stand up no more.’

Blood tracked over Kevin’s ear and collected in swollen red spheres on his chin before dripping onto the kwila decking.

‘A one-eight-seven, bro. A fuckin’ one-eight-seven!’

‘No use if we don’t get no dough, man. Check out the rest of the joint.’ Furious footsteps disappeared down the corridor. Doors slammed. Glass shattered. Close to Carla, only inches away, a pair of sneakers with fraying red and black beading, circled, paced, lashed out. The laces were undone. Wiry black hairs thinned into smooth brown ankles.

Carla lay face down on the entrance hall floor, the musty smell of the kilim rug filling her nostrils. Her skirt was riding high; she wanted to pull it down. Bubbles coursed up and down her windpipe, searching for a way out. Her lips were burning where the masking tape had strained and stripped off slivers of skin.

Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four … All she could do was count out the thumping beats of her heart, her mind jammed like a frozen computer screen.

‘Where’s the cash, you motherfucker? The money! The fuckin’ money!’ The voice crashed around Carla – a young voice made bold by a bandanna. Someone had pressed the fast-forward button. Carla couldn’t keep up, couldn’t process the words.

The eyes behind the voice were bloodshot, hyped, wild. ‘Maybe I gotta take payment from someplace else.’

‘No! Leave her alone,’ Kevin cried, fumbling in his pockets. ‘We don’t keep much money at home, you must believe me. You can have anything. Everything! Just don’t hurt my wife. Please—’

Carla could scarcely recognise Kevin’s voice.

Ooof! The pipe wrench swung, forcing wind from his mouth and backside simultaneously. She started to count heartbeats again.

‘Want another hidin’? Now where’s the money, mister? You got a safe?’

Objects rained down around Carla and ricocheted off the floor – her lipstick, her Liberty diary, a packet of tissues, passport photo of Jack …

Jack! He would have been in the garage when the thugs burst in. Hopefully he’d gone for help. Please God! Carla lifted her head, trying to intercept Kevin’s bloodied gaze and caution him not to allude to their son. But Kevin wasn’t looking her way. He was cowering in the corner.

She’d only ever known Kevin to cry twice. After their daughter Gabby died, he’d sobbed softly behind a locked bathroom door. And when Pasha his favourite sheepdog was crushed under the tractor he’d let slip a few tears before putting her out of her misery.

‘Hey, bro, nothin’ more here,’ the other voice shouted. ‘Let’s take the electronics and beat it before the pigs come.’

Carla held her breath, the Lord’s Prayer scrolling through her mind.

‘Nah. I’m hungry for some pussy.’

‘Forget it, TT. Let’s get outta here.’

‘Fuck off, Ben.’

A hand grabbed Carla’s bottom. She screamed, but as in a dream, no sound escaped.

‘No!’ Kevin’s voice resounded through the laughter that filled the endless moment.

‘Settle, boy, we jus’ gonna service the missus. You gotta learn to share. Ain’t that right, bro?’

The cold woke Carla. The terracotta tiles had driven an aching chill through the fibres of the kilim rug into her skin, her muscles, her marrow. Her brain registered only this most basic sensation – cold – otherwise, it was blank, as if a thousand volts of electricity had passed through, deleting neural pathways and wiping all trace of thought and fragment of memory. She tried to cough. Her throat felt stuffed full of autumn leaves.

Squinting downwards, she saw the shadow of her swollen, cracked lips. With her tongue she traced their bloated outline. Dried mucus and crusted blood stopped the fine vermillion creases and filled her nostrils with an alien stench.

One of her eyes agreed to open; the other remained shut.

Something off to the right caught her attention. She turned her head – the action delayed a few seconds behind the intent. The early morning sunshine had transformed a piece of broken glass into a prism and a rainbow of light now arched over the room.

A small clay pot came into view, then receded. Carla screwed up her obedient eye and pulled the pot back in focus. A lopsided sphere of clay engraved with stick figures – a lion, an elephant, a monkey. It was almost familiar … Synapses fought to connect, her mind desperate for an anchor. Then the relief of recognition! It was the pottery bowl Jack had made when he was eight, his first attempt at throwing clay. The bowl had been presiding over the entrance hall for the past decade.

Grasping this recollection served to bridge a chasm, providing thought with a route back into Carla’s consciousness. Like a flash
flood, reality rushed in and she dropped her head back onto the floor, reeling from the information that now placed her firmly back in time and place.

Her body started to convulse with fear and pain. Metallic tears trickled into her parched mouth. Her big toe pointed sharply downwards in spasm. She tried to lift her head again, but the morning leant on it as the sharp light of dawn escaped the confines of the prism to wash over the room.

‘Kevin! Jaaack!’ Carla’s voice lurched into space like a stretched cassette tape. ‘Kev?’

She moved her head to the left. Her good eye scanned the room. It stopped at a twisted mound of clothes and limbs. Kevin – his bruised body at right angles to the wall. Motionless.

‘Kevin! Kev! Can you hear me, Kevin?’

Nothing but the memory of her warped voice filled the ensuing silence. Her eye moved frantically on, searching for Jack. She didn’t expect to find him. He would have been in the garage when … He’d have escaped and raised the alarm. A complete circuit of the room. No Jack. She swallowed, relief sticking in her parched throat.

She had to reach Kevin. But she couldn’t move. Not even lever herself up. Her hands were missing. Where were her hands?

It took a moment to understand that they’d been bound so tightly behind her back she’d lost all feeling in them.

After several false starts Carla managed, like a frog doing breaststroke on its back, to manoeuvre herself haltingly across the room. Her muscles were burning and her arms stinging where the tiles rasped off slivers of skin.

About halfway over her body suddenly seized and refused to obey further commands.

‘Come on!’ Carla cried aloud, writhing on the floor like a dug-up earthworm. Kevin was so close.

Like an Olympic athlete just metres from the finish line, she demanded complete concentration from every part of her body, her pain miraculously dissolving into the focus, and with one final burst she was upon him.

She dropped into the small of Kevin’s back and sank her face into his shirt. It smelt of stale sweat and dried fear. How she loved to snuggle up to him on a Sunday morning, moulding to his craggy contours and helping herself to his toasty heat. Now his body was cold and unyielding.

A heaviness spread across the room like dry ice. Carla lay there under the weight of this new reality, her will to live leaking from her body.

Click
. A distant, but distinct
click
. Then Mozart swept down the corridor and into the room. Mozart? The sound swelled, growing louder and louder until the room was steeped in music.

Panting and perplexed, Carla gave over to it, the notes peeling back her fear to make way for other emotions, and her crying rose from a place she had never visited before.

Four beeps grounded her.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Good morning. This is the five o’clock news on Thursday the twentieth of March
. The radio alarm!

Only when Carla’s sobbing had subsided and her gasps and gurgles were no longer loud in her ears, did she notice Kevin’s chest. Barely perceptible – she had to be completely still herself to see it – but there for certain … the gradual rise and fall of his ribcage as wisps of air threaded into and out of his lungs.

They pulled into a deserted service station. Despite being at least an hour from the action, Ben’s heart was still hammering in his chest, and his head bursting with a crazy cocktail of people and panic. Everything was mixed up – the thrill, the buzz, the bad bits. He felt as if he was inside one of those extreme arcade games.

Through the store window he could see a lone petrol attendant behind the counter. The guy was dressed in his regulation uniform and sporting a twist of white fabric on his head.

‘That dude with the turban,’ Ben said, turning to Tate, who was searching the footwell for the fuel cap lever. ‘He’s a Sikh.’

Tate ground his teeth in reply. The sound – like chalk screeching across a blackboard – made the skin under Ben’s ears crawl.

‘Let’s get us up some pies,’ Tate grunted. ‘I’m fuckin’ starving.’

Now that he thought about it, Ben was hungry too.

Tate got out, leaving the engine running. They’d nicked the Toyota from an Albany car yard, after abandoning the farm vehicle. It was low on fuel.

Ben fiddled with the radio dials, scanning the airwaves until he found something he recognised. ‘Snap Yo Fingers’. He bobbed in time to the beat and chewed on his fingernails. Next minute, Tate
was sprinting across the forecourt, hoodie up, pockets bulging.

‘We’re outta here!’ he shouted, jumping in the car.

So he hadn’t paid.

They sped off, the smell of burnt rubber rising up through the car.

‘Dumb move, bro,’ Ben said, looking back through the rear window at the Sikh already on the phone. ‘Just lost our lead time.’

Tate put his foot flat and the Toyota picked up speed –140, 150, 160 kilometres an hour.

‘You should’ve seen the joker’s face when I walked out,’ he said with a grin. ‘He’s like, “Hey, you forgot to pay, sir.”’ They both laughed.

Then Tate was doing a screeching U-turn and doubling back.

‘What the—?’ There’d been too many surprises. The night had already unravelled way beyond Ben’s expectations.

‘Chill, bro,’ Tate said, swerving into a parking lot behind a public library. ‘We’ll hang here for a while, till the pigs are off our scent.’ Which they did – scoffing pies, drinking cola, and sharing a joint.

Tate was already completely stoned. He’d been on the fries for two days leading up to their big night, and with weed and booze thrown in, it was no surprise when he suddenly crashed, his long, lean body slumping over the wheel.

Ben hung in. He didn’t do crack, and even on marijuana he reacted differently to others. Sure, it rounded off the sharp edges in his brain, but never made him sleepy, just mellow, as if he were travelling on a never-ending sigh. It also made everything super intense and clear, as if his brain had put on spectacles, or someone had shone a bright light into the dark drawers of his mind.

He was twelve the first time he’d tried a joint. There’d been a party at his house and he couldn’t sleep because of the noise. When he got out of bed to go to the toilet, he bumped into a woman wearing pointy cowboy boots, a purple poncho, and shimmery gold Stetson.

‘Wanna try some, kiddo?’ she’d said, offering him a toke.

He did. And soon all the bad things in his head started to shrivel up like weeds after a dose of Roundup. A few puffs of the joint were better than any CYF’s counsellor, and definitely easier than running away from home. He was hooked from day one. It wasn’t cheap, but he always shared what he got with Lily; his sister needed it more than he did.

One time, when one of his mum’s squeezes – Ben couldn’t remember which one it was – had beaten her up really badly and she was lying on her bedroom floor like a bruised grapefruit, Ben had offered her a puff. Though she was nearly out of it, she still managed to be wild at him for smoking the stuff. She gave him a slurred talking to, using big responsible-parent words, then took the joint off him and smoked it all. The two of them had ended up leaning against the bedroom wall laughing and laughing, despite his mum’s lip being split and her nose a bloody mess.

Tate was snoring loudly. Ben looked across at him. The spray of red on his jeans had darkened to a splatter of black. Ben tilted his seat back until he was lying flat. He looked up at the ceiling and traced the thick seam in the roof fabric as it dipped under the sun visor, ran along the edge of the windscreen, and looped over the rear-view mirror. For some bizarre reason he couldn’t stop thinking about the Sikh gas attendant. It was dumb to be thinking about him of all people, considering what had already gone down that day. But the guy reminded him of one of his old schoolteachers. Mr Singh. Ben would have stayed in school if all his teachers had been like Singh. He was a big fellow – over six foot – with a woolly black beard, dark eyes, and a twist of cream fabric forever on his head. Ben smiled when he thought of Singh’s socks. The guy wore the same clothes day in and day out: brown suit, beige tie, brown lace-ups, and then these wild lettuce-green socks.

Rumour had it that Singh had worked in the courts before turning to teaching. You could tell he hadn’t been in the job forever; he didn’t have the same dry expression the other teachers did. His face was as fresh as a full-price watermelon. And he always looked like he wanted to be there in front of his class.

Once, Singh had come upon Ben doodling instead of doing a maths worksheet. He’d picked up Ben’s drawing, looked at it for the longest time, then held it up for the rest of the class to see. ‘You’ve got talent, Ben Toroa,’ he’d said in his deep rumbling voice.

Ben was on a high all day, despite getting a detention, and for a while after that wanted to be a Sikh, although he wasn’t sure about the whole turban thing.

Swearing gives to the inarticulate the illusion of eloquence
. One of Singh’s favourite sayings popped into Ben’s head. He scratched his head irritably. ‘Fuck you!’ he cursed, his voice ricocheting off the inside of the car. Tate stirred.

Then Ben heard the scream of a siren. His breathing picked up and he slunk lower in the seat The noise grew louder, and louder, then started to fade.

‘Hey, TT. TT, wake up, man,’ he said, shaking his mate.

Tate opened his eyes, two milky-white marbles covered in fine webs of red.

‘Time to get out of here.’

They decided to abandon the car and call George, who collected them in a stolen Nissan, and the three of them went for a spin across the Harbour Bridge before heading back to Glenfield just as the grey light of dawn was climbing up over the dying night.