Down on the corner at the unlit Esso station a match flares in a panel van as you pass. It’s the wild boy, the one they call the bomber, slouched behind the wheel, just a shadow again behind a heat-ticking engine.
By morning someone else is dead. At breakfast, still in his tunic, smelling of sweat and smoke and Dettol, the old man tells about the boy found hanging in his own wardrobe. You don’t know what to say. When he gets up from the table, leaving you and your mother blinking at each other, he empties his cup into the sink. On the way to the shower he stops a moment to run his fingers through your hair that’s still tacky with spray, and you know quite suddenly and certainly that he’s had the dead boy in his arms, that he’s seen things he can’t ever explain.
At school a kind of hysteria goes through the class. Girls weep ostentatiously outside the library and kids are pulled left and right from the classroom. A teacher takes you aside to quiz you about syringes at the gym but you just blink, speechless with confusion. You must know something, she says in exasperation. You of all people. But you don’t know anything and there’s something about her look that sets you against her.
You go back to lying awake at night, wondering what you do know, listening hard again at the wall for something to explain your disquiet. They talk in whispers in the other room. It’s a kind of torture, like a dripping tap that you wish would stop, but you find yourself straining for it in anticipation. You know you’re waiting so intently for trouble that you’re making trouble happen.
The things you hear solve nothing; they’re just nasty bits of information you could have done without, specks and splashes of dirt that puddle and pool in your head, things about the parents of kids you know, news of teachers, things you aren’t meant to hear, stuff you shouldn’t be listening to. Adulteries, bashings, robberies, a trawler fire, the boy hit by the school bus, and that kid’s name over and over again, the one you still see now and then in his sheepskin coat and his Holden van. Not him. It’s always him. The old man whispers it in the kitchen. Not him, I know it, I just feel it.
The old man looks blue around the gills. Your mother’s face is closed. There’s a creamy scum at the corners of his mouth. Their tea goes cold. Your mother peels potatoes almost vengefully.
You can’t sleep at night. With the earpiece stuffed deep in your head you listen to the radio but all the chat is stupid and the music old enough to make a pensioner wince. When you read with a torch beneath the blankets the words slide and tremble on the page. Only a few weeks ago you were seized by fantasies of the girl with the strawberry birthmark and now you can summon neither face nor body at will. After school, weary and angry, you break mallee roots with a sledge and spike until your hair hangs in strings and your head hums.
Two kids drown. There’s a rollover on the coast road. A girl has her stomach pumped. On the wharf a man is bashed until his nose comes away from his face. Then a rash of overdoses, of needles, of nighttime calls. There’s no days off for the old man, no fun, no respite, no weekends away or drives out to farms to ping tins off tree stumps.
You never show up for basketball training so the team gives you the flick. When winter descends you ride to pass the short afternoons. Down in the harbour one day, wheelstanding and swooping along the wharf where the tuna boats are tied up and ice trucks parked askew, you come alongside a reeking boat when a bloke in a beanie steps out from behind a one-tonner and tells you to piss off right now if you know what’s good for you, and as you wheel around in surprise, all but tipping yourself into the drink, you see a plain, dark car ease up. Rain begins to fall. Behind the water-streaked glass, four heads. You swerve and pedal away and like a cold runnel down the back of your collar, a chill of recognition leaks into you.
Out on a lonely beach some tourists find a boy with both legs broken. It’s the bomber from school. After dinner the oldies go outside to talk. You watch them retreat from the rain into the woodshed. The dog capers about their shins. The old man hugs himself in his civvies, kicks the tin wall.
Walking home from school you have cars slide up beside you and hang at your elbow a while but you know well enough to keep tooling along as though you haven’t noticed. Some people roll the window down to ask directions. A carload of girls throws a naked Barbie doll at your feet and squeals off. And there are some who idle beside you, obscured by flaring glass, who seem merely to watch.
At the coppers’ picnic where the air is blue with barbecue smoke, the old man flips snags and chops alongside his workmates – pasty blokes in titty aprons and tracky dacks – but it’s obvious he’s not one of them. His smile is as mirthful as a baby’s wind-grin. Dragonflies hang over the river. You watch the grownups in their floppy hats and floral frocks and hopeless Keyman jeans and notice every glance and guffaw and wiped mouth. The detectives are easy to pick. Around a ute piled with ice and beer, behind their wraparound sunglasses, they laugh like kings. You carry your sister through a knot of mouthy primary schoolers and see your mother stranded amongst the wives in the shade of the rivergums. She sees you too, winks, and pulls her hair back with a nervous yank. You walk down by the river until your baby sister nestles into your shoulder and sleeps. You wonder what it’d be like to have a girl do that, a real girl like the one with the marked face, to sit by the river on a sunny winter day and doze warm-breathed on your neck.
At the end of every shift, after pulling into the drive, the old man sits in the car a while. You watch him chew antacids and flip his keychain. He’s never home on time. Your mother doesn’t mention it. You wish you knew what he was thinking, that someone’d say something.
And then comes the sudden transfer, a temporary posting a hundred miles away. When he tells you at dinner you push back your chair and barrel out into the yard, the crack of the screendoor like a gunshot in your wake. The dog bounds at you stupidly and you kick it down in tears. You stand in the woodshed and he finds you there.
You have to look after your mother, he says. I’ll be back every two weeks. Just keep away from the wharf.
Why? you ask fiercely. Why?
I don’t know, he says. Forget it. I just need you to be responsible. You’re a good boy.
Before dark he’s gone and your mother has left your dinner on the stove and gone to bed. You bathe your sister and put her down and eat your dinner cold and wipe out the high chair. In the night your mother cries quietly until the radio goes off the air.
A day later a constable comes by with a trusty from the prison farm. It’s been teed up, he says. This bloke’ll chop wood for you. Can’t leave yez in the lurch. You see the skinny cop looking your mother up and down. She hasn’t cried all day; it’s as though the night’s weeping has dried her out. She shrugs and shows the men to the woodshed.
There’s something very close to a smirk on the young cop’s face, as though he’s emboldened by your father’s absence, and you’d like to wipe it off with the axe handle.
As the cop is leaving, a truck pulls in and dumps two tons of mallee roots outside the fence and you and the prisoner look at each other a moment before your mother goes indoors and you cart the gnarled firewood by barrow and armload to the woodshed.
The trusty works unhurriedly. He’s wiry. His arms are blue with tattoos. His sideburns curve down from a puffy slick of Elvis hair.
Is this a reward, you ask, or a punishment?
This, says the trusty, is Saturday.
You retreat to the back step to sit with the dog. Behind you, in the laundry, your mother wrestles with the twin-tub. All day you sit there keeping watch and the trusty ignores you.
Next day there’s another one, an Aborigine. He’s leery of the dog but works without pause all day, refusing even the tea and cake you’re sent out with. That evening you beg your mother to make them stop sending trusties. You swear you’ll do all the yardwork yourself – it’s what the old man wanted – and besides, you tell her, you need the exercise. You don’t say anything about the coppers coming to the house with their smug looks and hair-ruff
ling. You want to say more, to talk about the transfer and everything going awry around you but it’s enough that she agrees, so you leave it at that and begin each day early by lighting the stove for breakfast and hot water, then feed the dog and split pine for tomorrow’s kindling before you fill the box with a day’s supply of slow-burning roots. School happens at a distance – you’re there but barely present – and afterwards you come home to mind your sister or break roots until sparks fly and your muscles burn. You eat dinner without saying much for fear of saying everything and afterwards you stack records on the turntable – Tom Jones and Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass – so your mother can listen while she irons.
Every night at dusk a paddy wagon cruises by. You stand, unwaving, at the kitchen window. You dry the dishes, jiggle your sister, do your homework and lie awake sore and heavy-lidded.
Some nights you’re sure there’s someone in the garden beneath your window. When you get up there’s no one there. Other nights you just can’t bear to look.
Nobody visits, but the patrol car rolls by at all hours.
You chop wood, you totter, you see spots, but when the old man calls you stand jangling and upright by the phone while your mother goes foggy and soft on the line so long that by the time she puts you on you’re all wooden and formal and the old man sounds puzzled, even hurt, by the strange gap between you. But you have to clench your teeth so hard against sobs and silly laughter. You’re only a second away from begging him to come home or take you with him.
Somebody steals your bike from the verandah but neither you nor your mother calls the police. Then one night there’s a splash of glass out the front. You sit up in bed, startled as much by having found yourself asleep as by the sound itself, and you snatch up your torch, race through the house and throw open the door to see nothing more than a shattered beer bottle seething in a rime of bubbles on the path. When you flash the torchbeam around the yard and up and down the street, there’s nothing. The town hunkers, half lit, in the valley below. As you head inside for the dustpan and broom your mother appears in the doorway. Stay inside, she says. Don’t run out like that again.
But I had to see, you say.
Don’t ever do it again. You hear me?
You look away and nod.
You’re a good boy, she says.
And you are a good boy. You keep an eye out. You do your homework. You break two tons of mallee roots and your hands are leathery as a man’s. The woodshed is full and the excess is piled against it like a drystone wall. In the afternoons your mother walks to the shops. You offer to go for her but she insists. Most times she takes the baby in the stroller and while she’s gone you keep a look-out.
The rifle bolt lives in the old man’s bedside drawer between the Bible and a book of knots and splices. You take it out to turn it over in your hands, and even though you love the slick action of it sliding down the breech, you resist the temptation to slip it in. That doesn’t mean you can’t nurse the rifle and hold the bolt in the palm of your hand. Without a bolt a rifle’s not even a weapon.
From your parents’ window you look out on the strange town. Down there people are quietly stealing, cheating, lying. They’re starving their pets and flogging their kids and letting them hang in their wardrobes and burn in cars and choke to death in beachside toilets. And when legs are broken nothing happens, no charges are laid. It’s as if things like this are suddenly ordinary. You can’t believe how close you came to fitting in here. Everything you know and all the things you half know hang on you like the pressure of sleep.
You wait for your mother to appear in the street again, track her progress to the relative safety of the block and begin setting things back in their places before she reaches the gate.
You look so tired, she murmurs.
How many more weeks? you ask.
Four, she says. Four weeks.
You say nothing. But four weeks is impossible; you’ve already lost count and it feels like someone’s just adding weeks now to see you suffer or else the old man’s gone for good and no one’s got the guts to tell you. But he’d never do that. You know he wouldn’t.
Back from school one afternoon, you find the dog out by the woodshed, coughing, whining, turning in circles. Your mother leaves your sister with you while she walks it, drags it, carries it to the vet. You take the baby to your parents’ room and bounce her on the bed for a while to calm your nerves. Without your old man’s pillow the bed looks deformed. And your mother’s gone so long.
You put your sister on the floor, let her totter around for a while. You take the rifle from the wardrobe, stand by the window and stay calm. But the baby goes from sucking on the corner of the bedspread to hauling on the curtains and you have to leap back from the window before anybody sees you.
The house is naked up here, a bare box in a square of lawn. The front fence is barely waist high. There’s just not enough security, no protection. You open the bedside drawer and take out the bolt and slip it into the rifle. You check the breech, work the bolt and check twice more for safety, for piece of mind.
Finally your mother appears, hauling the dog up the hill.
Constipation, she says.
But you lie awake that night listening to the whimpering, writhing dog until you can’t bear it any longer and go out to the laundry to lie down beside it. You think about the dressing table in the oldies’ room with its barrettes and brushes and the single bottle of perfume which smells of the city, of frangipani and your old life. Across the table from your mother’s things, in the shadow of those filmy curtains, is a conglomeration of cut-glass jars full of bits – silver uniform buttons, butterfly nuts, ballbearings, cloudy marbles, the spare keys to the handcuffs, some bitsy gemstones and a few bullets. There’s a box of ammunition somewhere in the house but the only rounds you can locate are those three strays salted amongst all that crap. Trouble has found you and you’re ready for it.
When your mother wakes you at dawn the dog is dead beside you. She goes straight to the phone but the vet doesn’t answer. At the old man’s new posting nobody picks up. Your mother is angry now but you’re just tired. You dig a hole for the dog beside the shed where your two tons of wood stands like a wide, grey cairn. You declare that you’re not going to school. She doesn’t argue. She drinks coffee while you stoke the stove.
After an hour or so a paddy wagon pulls into the drive. Your mother goes out and you watch her talk to the smirking constable by the gate.
I have to go, she says coming in, straightening her hair with her fingers. I’m gonna sort this out. Your sister will be awake in a minute. Remember, Vic, you’re responsible.
How long will you be? you ask.
Long as it takes, love.
When she climbs into the cop car and is swept out into the street, you lock all the doors and windows. You check the baby in her cot and get the rifle and slide the bolt into it. For a few moments you stand behind the sheer curtain in your mother’s room and survey the town. There’s a southerly blowing. Ragged lines of spume streak the harbour. Steam and greasy smoke pour from the cannery stacks and clouds mottle the pale fingers of the silos. A shift whistle. A ship’s horn. Townspeople make their way up and down the hill. They pedal and jog, steer their bawling trucks, their glossy cars and mud-spattered utes, easing by as though you’re not even there. This window is an excellent vantage point. They don’t know how ready, how alert you are.
You work the bolt in the breech. Check and check and check again. You cock the weapon and listen to the cold click of the firing pin when you pull the trigger.
Now your sister is awake.
You turn to the dressing table. You fish three shells from the cut-glass jars and stand each of them in its tarnished casing on the lacquered surface of the table. In the mirror your features are grave. There are great smudges beneath your eyes.
Your sister whacks and rattles in her cot across the hall. You load your rifle. In the gunsight you watch the strangers of your town take their dirty secre
ts from place to place. Beyond the glass their lips move but you can only hear your sister beginning to wail.
You can’t leave the window. You’re not sure what to look for but you know you have to be ready. From here you have a long, clear view. Responsibility is on you now, formless and implacable as gravity. You’re just waiting for them to make a move. Let them. Yes, let them try.
The stock of the weapon warms your cheek, keeps you steady. You can’t look at the bed for fear that you’ll lie down and sleep. You can do this. You can hold out for as long as it takes to have everyone home safe, returned to themselves and how things used to be. You cock your weapon.
Reunion
It was Christmas Day and hot. There were only the three of us and lunch was sumptuous but without children it wasn’t particularly festive.
Over coffee my mother-in-law, Carol, made an announcement.
They’ve asked us over to Ernie and Cleo’s, she said.
What? said Vic, putting his cup down carefully.
Your grandmother will be there.
When did they invite you? I asked.
Us, Gail, said Carol. All of us. Cleo rang last night.
Our eyes locked for a moment in an odd, appraising stare.
Bloody hell, said Vic. That’s a turn up.
So why don’t we leave the dishes till later?
You’re actually going? I asked.
I don’t see why not, she said with a smile. You have to give people the benefit of the doubt.