The Promise (14 page)

‘Bullshit story. You sit. You speak. Slow. You tell Theo. I will fix.'

I sprayed and stuttered but got the story out in the end. I started crying when I told him I was afraid to go back to school and face the gang. He patted me on the shoulder and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, the same way that he spoke to the hens.

‘You must go to school.'

I shook my head, furiously, from side to side.

He put a hand under my chin and made me look at him. ‘I make you present for them boys. You feed chooks and I go in shed. We work together.'

I sat in the pen with the chooks until Theo called me.

‘Come.' He was holding a length of pipe in his hand. He handed me a lead marble. ‘Take.'

He pulled a large firecracker and a cigarette lighter from his pocket. He handed me the firecracker. The layers of paper were flaking away and the firecracker was falling apart. I wouldn't have been surprised if it went off in my hand as soon as I lit it. He clicked his fingers.

‘Give me marble.' He dropped the marble into the pipe. He pointed at the cracker. ‘You light. Push in hole. Here.'

He showed me the open end of the pipe. I lit the cracker and shoved it into the end of the pipe.

He rested the pipe gun on his shoulder like a miniature rocket launcher and aimed it in the general direction of his tin shed. I heard a loud bang and a ringing sound. Smoke poured from both ends of the pipe. Theo dropped the pipe to the ground and walked over to the shed. He stuck a finger in the neat round hole in the tin.

‘See? Good job.'

He went back into the shed and came out with a leather bag with more lead marbles and firecrackers inside. ‘You practise, practise. Then boys come and give trouble, you shoot. Send them away.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You no kill any. But you hurt, you frighten, and you free then.'

Theo had gone crazy. Maybe I couldn't kill Israel with the pipe gun but I could take his eye out. And I would be in big trouble. He could see that I was worried.

‘You have choice. Number one, you do nothing. They bully. Any time they see you. Bully. Bully. Again. Fuck again.' He put his hands on my shoulders and shook me, just a little. ‘Number two,' he rested one hand on my heart, ‘you say, “Fucken no more,” and you fight. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

I took the bag home and hid it under my bed. I didn't want to hurt anyone with it but I was excited about trying out the marble gun. The next morning I tucked the bag in the front of my jacket and left home by the back gate as soon as my mother had gone to work. I walked the line to the granary.

I practised loading the pipe with the marble and sticking the cracker in the hole, without lighting it, until I could do it all quickly. I balanced a battered old paint tin on a fence post, took a deep breath, lit the cracker on the ground, shoved the marble in, followed by the cracker and aimed the gun at the tin. The blast popped my right ear. I didn't know I'd hit the tin until it started weeping red paint from a hole near the bottom.

I fired off a couple more shots. I had plenty of marbles left but only two firecrackers. I put everything back in the bag then crossed the tracks and headed home. As I rounded a bend across from our fence, I spotted a boy and girl up ahead on the tracks. He was much bigger than the girl and looked older. He dragged her by the arm. She screamed at him to leave her alone.

‘Stop it, will you? Please.'

She fell on the ground and wouldn't move. He wrapped her in a bear hug, pinning her arms to her side.

‘I'll stop when we're finished.'

He lifted her off the ground and struggled with her, dragging her into a line of trees and scrub. I fell to my knees and crept along behind them. When he reached the trees he threw the girl onto the ground and stood over her.

‘You move, you say a word, make a sound, and I'll kill you.'

I hadn't seen either of them before. He had a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. She was Islander.

He undid his fly, put his hand in his pants and rubbed at his cock. I crept a little closer, as quietly as I could. I tucked the length of pipe under my arm and put a lead marble in my mouth. I stood up and held a firecracker in one hand and the cigarette lighter in the other. The girl saw me and looked up from the ground. He turned around. He was giving his cock a good tug.

‘Hey. Fuck off. Before you cop a kicking.'

When I didn't say anything he laughed.

‘Please yourself, cunt. Watch and learn. What the fuck's that?' He screwed his face at me, seeing me light the cracker.

‘You come near me with that and I'll cave your arse in. And then hers.'

I stood perfectly still for a second and remembered what Theo had said to me. I rammed the lit cracker in the back of the pipe, took the marble out of my mouth, dropped it in the front of the pipe and aimed at his head. I shut my eyes and turned my head away from the blast. He cried out like a dog booted in the guts with a steel-cap. When I looked he was rolling around on the ground, screaming out and holding his hands to his face.

‘Jesus. Fuck. You shot me.'

I hurled the pipe gun at him. The girl jumped up and stopped next to him. She stomped on his back with the heel of her shoe.

‘Dirty bastard.' She kicked him again and ran after me.

I led her to the laneway behind my street. We ran until we reached the back gate. ‘In here.'

I kicked the gate open and bolted it behind me. We were both puffing like mad. She had a deep scratch on her neck and blood on her white skirt. She had chocolate-coloured skin and an Afro hairdo.

‘Who are you?' she barked, like I'd been the one who'd attacked her.

I tried getting my name out – Tom – but couldn't. When we'd both got our breath back she told me her name was Angeline and thanked me for saving her. She said she'd seen the older boy at the station when she got off the train and didn't know he was following her until she heard him behind her when she was taking a short cut across the tracks.

‘What a fucking creep. Wow.
You shot him. He fucking deserved it. Where do you go to school, anyway?'

‘Hu … Hu … High.'

‘I bet you know my older cousin then. Israel. Everyone knows Issie.'

The first day back at school for the new term I stayed away from
Israel
and his boys, until lunchtime, when I noticed them walking towards me, across the school ground to the losers' patch of dirt. Israel sat down next to me, cocked his baseball cap back on his head and put his arm over my shoulder, just like he had the day at the bowling alley. I waited for him to snap my neck.

‘I never thought you'd have the balls to be a shooter, retard.
You saved my cuz, Angel, from that motherfucka pedo.
You a soldier, man.'

He slapped me on the back. ‘You done well. Moses and me, and the boys, we giving you the green light for that one. You know what that is? The green light?'

I shook my head.

‘You don't worry about that, Bro. You don't say nothing much. But you a shooter. Fucken ice cool shooter. The green light is simple. It's like what the big boys do. All them hoods on the TV. It means you get no more trouble from any motherfucka at this school.'

He hugged even tighter.

‘Your shit is Issie's shit.'

He stood up and waddled away, his troops in single-file behind him.

When I got home from school that night old Theo was hanging over his front gate, waiting for me. He looked worried.

‘How you go, little bird? You have trouble from bully?'

‘No,' I smiled.

‘Good.' He clicked his tongue. ‘Bang. Is best.'

KEEPING GOOD COMPANY

A good night's sleep was hard to come by
. I'd get into bed around nine-thirty or ten o'clock and read for a few minutes before nodding off. The problem was that I'd wake a few hours later, around one in the morning. I'd toss and turn for half an hour or so before giving up on sleep and would turn the reading lamp or the radio on to ease my anxiety. That activity would take me through to around four in the morning, when I would abandon the bed altogether and head to the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea and collapse on the battered couch alongside my ageing Staffordshire terrier, Ella, and the stray one-eyed black and white cat I'd recently inherited. I'd rest an arm on the snoring dog, nurse my mug of tea on my lap and wait for the sun to come up.

On the morning of the accident I'd managed to sleep in, if you could call it that. I'd got through most of the night and was woken by a noise in the bedroom around five in the morning. I flipped onto my stomach and buried my face in the pillow. A little while later I heard the noise again; tap-tap, tap-tap. It was similar to a sound from a few weeks earlier, when I'd heard a knock at the bedroom window in the middle of the night. I'd hopped out of bed and drawn the curtains to one side, to see a scrawny cat sitting on the window ledge. When I growled at it to piss off it meowed and stuck a paw against the glass. I then knocked on my side of the glass with a knuckle to shoo it away. Eventually the cat jumped from the ledge and vanished behind a bush in the front garden.

I'd been back in bed for five minutes when the tap-tapping started up again. The cat was back. By the time I'd grabbed my dressing gown and opened the front door it was sitting on the mat. When I tried nudging it off the mat with my slippered toe it defiantly stared up at me, hissed loudly, then skipped by me. I ran after it, down the hallway and into the kitchen where it had already sniffed out Ella's bowl and was getting stuck into what was left of her dinner. Ella spied the cat out of one eye but couldn't be bothered moving from the couch. A few years earlier, when she was young and fit and angry, she would have jumped down from the couch with a vicious bark and driven the cat from the house. These days she was too slow and comfortable to bother. From that night on, Ella and the cat, which I refused to name, hoping to discourage it from feeling at home, negotiated each other from a safe distance before eventually settling for the shared warmth of the couch.

I heard the sound again, lifted my head from the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. We'd had rats in the roof the year before, although the noise they'd made was a scratching. We'd always had rats in the house and around the garden, sometimes a solitary rogue, and at other times an invasive colony. And they'd been impossible to get rid of. The task was made more difficult because my wife, Lois, was a vegetarian and an animal lover. Tired of listening to the rats scamper around inside the roof of a night, enjoying some sort of rat orgy, I suspected, I came home from the hardware store one afternoon with a set of traps, various poisons and other contraptions that promised extermination. Lois was horrified and screamed that she would have me harassed by the animal liberationists who had moved in up the road if I put as much as a sprinkling of cheese on a single trap. Without protest I threw the traps in the garbage, along with most of the poisons. But not all of them.

I waited until she was out one night at a dinner party with colleagues from work. I went into the garage, carried the stepladder back to the house, lifted the manhole from the ceiling in the bathroom and hurled a dozen small sacks of rat bait throughout the darkened roof space. Over the following weeks the sound was reduced to an ever-slowing patter of rat feet that sounded like they were wearing knitted socks. Lois woke me early one morning, claiming she'd heard a whimper coming from somewhere in the roof. We sat up in bed, shoulder-to-shoulder, actually touching, and listened closely. I could hear nothing.

‘You must have had a bad dream,' I told her, feigning some care, before turning onto my side and contemplating the suffering I'd caused.

I listened more closely when I heard the tapping for the third time. It was not coming from outside the front window or in the roof. It was a knock at the front door. I staggered from the bed into the hallway, turned on the porch light and opened the door, shocked to see my elderly next-door neighbour, Jim Egan. He looked in a terrible state, shivering to death and wearing a motley outfit – a woman's floral dressing gown and a muddied pair of work boots. He had a Carlton football beanie perched on his head and a look of fear in his eyes.

Jim leaned forward and studied my face.

‘Matthew? Is that you, Mattie boy?'

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

‘Yeah. It's me, Jim. What are you doing here in the middle of the night? It's freezing outside.'

He looked up at the moon disappearing behind heavy clouds.

‘It's not night. It's near morning.'

I'd lived next door to Jim and his wife, Nora, for more than twenty years. He'd been a remarkably fit and alert ninety-year-old until two years ago when his memory began to fade. Nora died six months later after an innocuous slip in the back garden. Jim's own health, both mental and physical, had deteriorated faster since then. He would have been in a geriatric home by now, if it were not for his doctor, a local GP almost as ancient as Jim himself. He was happy to write whatever prescription Jim needed in order to continue battling along on his own.

A blast of wind lifted Jim's dressing gown, exposing his bony pale knees. I took him by the arm and helped him into the hallway. He rubbed the palm of his hand against his chest.

‘I've got this pain here, and I can't find my heart medicine any place. We need to get going to the all-night chemist and get myself fixed up with some tablets.'

He placed one hand on the wall for support and looked like he was about to keel over. I didn't want him dying on me.

‘Jim, maybe you need to go to hospital? I can drive you. I've still got the VW. Or perhaps we should call an ambulance?'

He shook his head with as much strength as he could summon.

‘We don't need no hospital. The doctors there are all foreigners. They don't know how to look after me. I just need my tablets.'

On several occasions over recent months Jim had called me on the telephone and asked for my help. He would complain that his back had gone and he could not get out of bed and go to the toilet or dress himself. I would have to help him out of bed and walk him around the kitchen until he ‘got up a bit of steam in the boiler', as Jim liked to put it. Once he got his bones moving he would have me make him a cup of tea and a slice of toast, and sit and talk with him at the kitchen table. He usually knew who I was, although he'd mistaken me both for a nephew of his who'd been dead for years, and for the plumber who'd recently unblocked his kitchen sink.

I guided Jim along my hallway and sat him on the couch between the animals and began making him a cup of tea. Either he or Ella let out a long deep fart. They looked accusingly at each other. I noticed that Jim had stopped rubbing his chest and wondered if he'd been faking it. He had a habit of feigning injury or illness for company. I put two sugars in his milky tea and handed him the mug.

‘How's the pain in the chest, Jim?'

‘Oh, a bit better. Maybe,' he added a little slyly. ‘Could come back any tick, though.'

He sipped at the tea and looked around the room.

‘Where's the wife? Got her hidden away?' He laughed.

‘She's gone, Jim,' I answered, without embarrassing him by adding that I'd provided him with the same information many times before.

‘That's no good. My missus, she died too.' He scratched his head, mining for information. ‘Some time back. What took your wife?'

‘Her boss from work, Jim. She didn't die. She left me for another man. Six months ago.'

‘Left you?' He was outraged. ‘The bloody bitch.'

He shook his head in disbelief and patted the cat.

‘What's her name again?'

‘The wife? Lois.'

‘No. Not her. The cat?'

‘Doesn't have one. You can name it if you like. I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. I haven't looked.'

‘Oh, she's a girl, this one,' he smiled as he patted her gently on the side of her neck. ‘I can tell by her mood. The quiet type. Like my Nora.'

I sat opposite him in one of the kitchen chairs and watched as he studied the cat's face and finished his tea. He drained the bottom of the mug, looked across at me, and smiled.

‘Lois, you say? Don't know that it suits a cat.'

He suddenly got to his feet, frightening the cat. It jumped from the couch.

‘What are you doing, Jim? You don't have to go. It's wet out there.'

He walked across the kitchen, with a straighter back than I'd seen on him in months. He stopped at the sink and looked out the window into the darkened garden. He coughed and cleared his throat.

‘Ever get lonely, Matthew?' he asked, with his back to me.

I stood up from my own chair, put my empty mug on the bench and raised both arms above my head, unsure of why I'd done it, except that Jim's question made me feel anxious.

‘Yeah, I do, Jim. Sometimes. Me and Lo— my wife and I were together for more than twenty years.'

‘Nora and me,' he turned around and rubbed an eye with a finger, ‘we both know I forget stuff now and then, but not the stuff that matters. We were married for sixty years. That's a long time.'

I buried my hands in my dressing-gown pockets.

‘It sure is, Jim. A long time.'

He smiled and reached for my arm.

‘You know I haven't got long?'

‘Long for what?'

‘Don't go doggo on me, Matthew. You're smarter than that. I've been on this Earth twice as long as you have. And I'm about three times as crafty. I'm dying, boy.'

‘You don't know that, Jim,' I answered, for no good reason.

‘I know it, all right. That's why I'm going near no hospital. One look at me in there and they'll have the priest and undertaker on standby.'

He rested his hands on my shoulders.

‘Look at me.'

Although his eyes were clouded in an opaque film, a spark of blue remained.

‘I've got a list of stuff I want to do before I go.' He squeezed my shoulder with his right hand. ‘Before I drop down dead. Will you help me with my list?'

‘If I can, Jim,' I answered, with little enthusiasm. ‘Have you written it down, the list?'

‘Not yet. But now that you're in agreement I'm going to get onto it. We best make a start. I could go anytime. Anytime. What will we do first?'

‘I don't know, Jim. It's your list.'

Ella rolled onto her back. The cat jumped onto the couch and sniffed at her belly. Jim walked back to the couch, sat down and patted the cat. The three of them looked made for each other. I thought he'd lost track of our conversation until he raised a finger in the air.

‘Ice-cream.'

‘Ice-cream?'

‘Yep. Chocolate ice-cream. I haven't had it in years. My diabetes. Nora wouldn't let me touch it. Number one on my list.'

He slapped his hands together, startling Ella, who sat up and looked at me for reassurance.

‘That's what I want, some chocolate ice-cream.'

It was a simple request. I felt relieved that I wouldn't have to escort him on some pilgrimage or take him skydiving, or something worse, like a visit to a massage parlour.

‘That's good, Jim. I'll nick down the supermarket later this morning and drop a tub into you.'

‘Later this morning? That's no good. We have to go now.'

‘Now? What's the rush?'

‘Now. I don't want to be a bother, Matthew, but geez, I'd love some of that ice-cream right this minute. I can taste it in my mouth. And,' he shrugged his shoulders and rubbed his chest again, ‘who knows? I could drop off just like
that
.'

He tried clicking his fingers together but couldn't quite manage it.

I didn't want to leave him alone, and there were good reasons for not taking off for the supermarket on a cold and dark morning just for ice-cream, but I couldn't bring myself to refuse him.

‘You'd have to come with me, Jim, in the car.'

He slapped a hand against his thigh.

‘I'm ready to go when you are.'

I looked at his lurid dressing gown and down at my dull and worn brown corduroy number.

‘Maybe one of us should get dressed.'

He was already on his feet.

‘No need for that. We should get going. You never know, they might run out!' He smiled, suddenly full of energy.

Ella's ears pricked up as soon as I grabbed the car keys. The only time I drove the car these days was when I took her for a walk along the river. She hobbled to the door and wiggled her arse about. I took Jim by the arm and walked him out to the car, which was sitting in the driveway waiting for us, its roof covered in a blanket of fallen leaves. I opened the passenger door, helped Jim into the seat and buckled him in. Ella had run out of the house and hurled herself in after him before I could stop her. She worked her body between the front bucket seats onto the back seat. Before I could close the door again, the cat had leapt up from the driveway onto Jim's lap.

‘Good girl,' he whispered. ‘Good girl.'

I reached into the car and grabbed the cat by the neck, ready to throw it out.

‘It will have to stay here, Jim.'

He pulled the cat protectively to his chest.

‘No, she won't. Come on, Matthew. Jump in. She'll do just nice with me.'

‘Jim …'

‘I said, she'll be right with me,' he ordered, as forcefully as he could.

It was raining and I was getting soaked. Jim turned his head away from me and caressed the cat behind its ears. I gave in to his demand, ran around to the other side of the car and jumped in.