Ferocious Animals 3dg5a

“From the confusing world of childhood, to the regret-fuelled world of adulthood, via the dysfunctional state of adolescence, in Ferocious Animals Luke Johnson probes what it means to be part of and yet feel apart from others, those close to you as well as the rest of the world. Playful and inventive with voice and language, stretching the boundaries of realism, but always snapping back to an uneasy familiarity, these stories are compelling and memorable, every single one of them.”

Debra Adelaide

“Luke Johnson’s Ferocious Animals introduces a refreshing voice working with the art of the short story. The stories gathered in the collection are written with wit, comion and a dedication to the craft of writing. I love the emotional heart at the centre of Ferocious Animals. It is a book of great energy and tenderness.”

Tony Birch

“Reading Ferocious Animals made me want to walk out into the street and cry on the shoulders of strangers. Johnson’s collection offers readers a series of encounters with the short story at its most profound and affecting: capturing those moments of unendurable heartache and ecstasy that punctuate ordinary life. Each of the thirteen stories in this collection are testament to the power of finely-wielded short fiction to transmute immense evocations of loss, grief, brutality and tenderness into the very ‘shocks and flashes’ we readers need to keep us sane. Australian short fiction should be this good more often – more Australians would read it.”

Luke Carman

“The stories in Luke Johnson’s Ferocious Animals are a joy to read. They are so skilfully crafted that you are moved by the seemingly ordinary, punched in the gut by the banal. Then you realise that it’s what Johnson doesn’t tell us that make the stories powerful. A story about horses is really a moving meditation about masculinity; a story about childhood is really about the moment before the knowledge of inescapable grief. Johnson lucidly, deftly, offers a few narrative breadcrumbs, enticing the reader to immerse themselves in the interior lives of his characters, until there is nothing to do but to finish each story at all costs and then to wish that this book would not end.”

Roanna Gonsalves

“Johnson’s meticulously wrought prose evokes a world that is by turns tender and harsh, both haunted and bathed in a sharp hallucinatory light. These stories of childhood, lost lives and missed opportunities can shake you to the bone just as easily as they move you with their restrained lyricism. This is a deftly executed set of stories that, for all their stylistic variety, never lose sight of what matters most: the complexity of human nature.”

Anthony Macris

“At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the stories in Luke Johnson’s collection are marked by restraint, the hallmark of the finest short-form writers. While the reader lives on the edge in these stories, Johnson wields the narrative with the steadiest of hands. This is an ACE collection, alive with characters and scenes that become ingrained in the reader’s memory.”

Julia Prendergast

Ferocious Animals

Recent Work Press

Canberra, Australia

Copyright © Luke Johnson, 2021

9780645009071 (paperback)

9781743822036 (ebook)

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover image: © Kristielle Gibbons Photography, 2020

Cover design: Recent Work Press

Set by Recent Work Press

recentworkpress.com

For Mara

Contents

When We Were Eight Together

The Names of Dead Horses

When You Fuck with a Fowler

The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Conditional Past

Ferocious Animals

Matrimonial Property

Three Cheers for Homo Erectus

Bass Minx

A Gift Unwrapped

Serious Things

Looking Both Ways

The Secret Spot

When We Were Eight Together

I should have known straight away, the second I spotted him in the doorway. He was dressed in his dirty blue mechanic’s overalls and standing very straight. He never stood this straight. Mum was always chipping him for slouching. ‘Maybe if you got off my back,’ he used to joke. On this day, he didn’t look very jokey. He looked tall and confused, like a student who’d been sent to the classroom on an errand but couldn’t what it was.

‘May I help you with something?’ my teacher asked him. Her name was Miss Smiley, but we all called her Miss Scowly. Not because she was mean or angry or anything, but because it struck us as clever. We were eight.

He stared at Miss Smiley and then at me and then back at Miss Smiley.

‘I’m Michael’s dad,’ he said. ‘Michael’s father.’

It seemed to take all the air in his chest to say just these few words. After saying them, he looked like he was going to collapse. Or start crying. He put his hand out and touched the door handle to steady himself. His knuckles had grease on them. He was not the kind of man to cry. I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry.

He stepped back into the corridor then and the teacher stood up from her desk and went out to speak with him in private. One of the good girls in the class stuck her hand up in the air and said, ‘Can I be in charge while you’re gone, Miss Smiley?’ In those days, being in charge meant writing the names of any misbehaving classmates on a piece of paper and giving it to the teacher when she returned. Miss Smiley didn’t answer the girl. She just walked across the room and through the door, smoothing the creases out of her skirt with her palms as she went.

It was bedlam the moment she was gone. Most of the focus was on me, like I was some kind of hero for organising my dad to show up during class and distract the teacher. ‘You should tell your dad to come when there’s a spelling test on,’ a boy at my table said. I didn’t feel like laughing, but everyone at the table laughed, so I laughed too. A table of laughing eight-year-olds. How bright and happy we must have looked through the glass in the door. The boy went off to a different table then to repeat his funny joke.

Less than a minute later, the door opened and Miss Smiley stuck her head back in.

‘Michael, would you come out here, please, sweetie?’ She seemed unperturbed by all the rowdiness. Most of the students were out of their chairs, but she didn’t say anything about them being out of their chairs. ‘Just leave your stuff at the desk and come out here, please, sweetheart.’

I stood up and went out into the corridor where my dad was waiting by the window. He’d pushed one of the s open and was trying to light a cigarette with an orange cigarette lighter. It was the middle of June and the sunlight coming in through the glass was bright and heatless.

‘Michael, sweetheart, your dad’s going to take you home early today,’ Miss Smiley said. She put her hand on my shoulder and then up to my face. With her thumb, she rubbed my cheek. ‘Okay, sweetheart?’

She was the prettiest teacher in the whole school, Miss Smiley. Everyone thought so. Even my dad. He’d seen her picture in the school newsletter one time and said he might just have to start attending parent-teacher interviews after all.

‘You wish,’ my mum had told him.

My dad put the unlit cigarette and lighter back into his pocket and held his hand out for me to take hold of. I was eight. His hand was shaking. I held onto it and we walked to the end of the corridor, down the stairs and out onto the playground together. Some pigeons were scavenging through a bin that’d been knocked over by a basketball at lunchtime. The ball had missed the ring completely and knocked the bin over by accident. We’d spent the rest of our lunchtime making a game of it, standing the bin up and knocking it over on purpose.

‘How come you’re picking me up, and not Mum?’ I said.

‘This way,’ he answered.

He led me out through the gate and onto the dirt footpath along the bottom side of the playground. He’d parked the van right in front of the school, in the spot meant for buses. I don’t think he’d ever picked me up before that day. He didn’t know the rules about where you could and couldn’t park.

‘Jump in,’ he said.

I stepped down off the footpath and onto the street and pulled up on the handle. The door fell open against the gutter. It almost knocked me over. Through the front windscreen, I saw him wince at the sound of it banging against the concrete. I waited for him to say something to me from across the van. He didn’t say anything.

I threw my bag up and climbed in. I tried shutting the door behind me but the angle was too steep and the door too heavy. I was just eight. I let go and it bashed into the gutter a second time.

My dad winced again. Using the steering wheel as an anchor point, he leaned across and pulled the door up off the concrete gutter and slammed it shut.

‘This isn’t where you’re supposed to park anyway,’ I told him. He turned his head to the side and looked at me. ‘You’re meant to park over there.’ I pointed to the bay on the other side of the crossing. ‘Where Mum parks,’ I said to him.

He closed his mouth and breathed out through his nose. He opened it again.

‘I didn’t know,’ he said quietly. ‘I didn’t know about the parking. I’m sorry. Okay?’

I nodded. His face was close to mine and smelt like beer. He could be very funny when he’d been drinking beer. One time he put his chair up on the table and ate his dinner on top of the table with the plate balanced in his lap. He asked Mum to him the salt and she ignored him, so he picked the shaker up between his big toe and second toe and sprinkled salt all over her meal. She couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Listen, Michael,’ he started.

I waited for him to say something more. His mouth hung open in front of mine.

He sat up straight and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. There were lines on the backs of his hands I’d never noticed before. Tiny hairline fractures in his skin. Each one carefully traced with grease. He put both hands on the steering wheel and then took them off and rubbed his palms against his knees like they were itchy.

‘Listen, Michael, there’s something I have to tell you,’ he said to me.

‘Is it about Mum?’

He nodded his head and touched the steering wheel with both hands once more.

‘And Miss Smiley too?’ I said in a slightly silly voice.

His hands fell as he turned to face me.

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘Because Miss Smiley’s prettier than Mum,’ I said.

‘What? Why would you say that?’

‘Because you said it once and then Mum got cranky at you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That isn’t true.’

I smiled because it was true. I thought he was making one of his jokes. I thought it was a funny thing for me to say. I was eight. He grabbed hold of my arm above the elbow.

‘Did you hear me?’ he said. ‘Don’t ever say that. It isn’t true and don’t ever say it because it isn’t true.’

He wasn’t joking. I stopped smiling and looked down at the backpack on the floor in front of me. Inside its front pocket, I’d written the name of a girl from my class whom I was secretly in love with. On the outside, in the same black marker, was the name of a rugby league player whom I loved less secretly, though no less ionately. I was still just a child. I didn’t yet know about love, how narrow and how circumstantial it is.

The two of us sat quietly for a moment.

‘Here, put your belt on,’ he said next.

He let go of my arm and grabbed hold of the buckle hanging from the wall above my head. He pulled it down over my shoulder and chest, and connected it to the bottom latch piece. The spring in the mechanism was old and stiff and when he

let go, the belt didn’t retract like it was supposed to, but hung loosely across my front. I tried feeding it back in and it bunched at the opening before dropping down again.

‘I think it’s broken,’ I said.

‘Forget it,’ he told me.

He turned the ignition and the van started with its usual shudder.

‘Dad?’ I said.

‘I said just forget it,’ he said.

I closed my mouth.

He spun the van around in front of the school and drove to the end of the street. Instead of turning left over the bridge toward our house, he turned right and we went up past the hospital and the old Mercy Care centre and the cemetery at the edge of town. When we were past the cemetery, he wound his window down. The air flapping in through the gap was loud and cold.

We drove south for two or three minutes with neither of us saying anything. When we came to a dirt laneway on the left, he slowed the van and turned off the main road and we made our way up a hill between two cherry orchards. The

cherry trees were bare and the laneway narrow and dusty. At the top of the hill, we pulled over in front of an old gateway. My dad cut the engine and unclicked his belt. I unclicked mine.

‘Can we hop out?’ I asked.

‘Let’s just sit for a bit,’ he said.

It was a nice spot to sit, with the van tucked between two grassy banks and a clear view all the way back to town. In front of us, an iron gate hung between two log posts. The rain and the dust had worn the gate posts smooth and grey and there was a misshapen circle engraved on one.

After sitting quietly and looking out the window for a bit, I turned toward him and tried to guess what he was thinking. He must have felt me looking at him. He closed his eyes and opened them again.

‘Tell me how old you are,’ he said.

‘Eight,’ I told him. On the other side of the gate, at the bottom of a slope, there was a dam with a willow tree growing on its bank.

‘Eight,’ he repeated. ‘Eight is a good age.’

I smiled.

‘Do you like being eight?’ he asked me.

I told him I did.

‘Good,’ he said.

I thought he might start crying again.

‘Do you when you were eight?’ I asked him.

‘Some bits,’ he said.

‘Did you like it too?’

‘Some bits,’ he said again. He smiled then and I smiled as well. Both of us were smiling. How bright and happy we must have looked sitting between those two grassy banks with our seatbelts off.

‘And did you like it when you were nine?’ I asked.

But the moment had ended. He stopped smiling, looked at the gate post and

didn’t say anything. There were some letters carved inside the circle and they were almost unreadable.

‘Dad?’ I said.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Can we go and get Mum?’

He closed his eyes. He was not the kind of man to cry. I was just eight and don’t think I’d ever seen him cry.

‘Michael,’ he said to me.

The Names of Dead Horses

None of them moved. They might have bolted at the sound of the train braking and then hitting. Pushed through the fences and escaped into the surrounding mountains even. But they didn’t so much as flinch. They stood motionless and fearless as antique furniture. Dressers and wardrobes and grandfather clocks stowed away in a vacant mansion somewhere, with sheets thrown over the top of them for protection against the dust. The polished, muscled legs and walnutveined necks protruding from beneath their big canvas sheet-coats were the only visible signs of the workmanship that’d gone into shaping them and bringing out their excellent patinas. They were racehorses, these. Trotters. Animals accustomed to the smack of leather and screech of steel, to the rigidity of human involvement and catastrophe of its machines.

Inside the train carriages, it was a very different story. The emergency brakes sent them all moving. Forward-facing engers sprang upright and into the laps of their rearward-facing companions like swimmers reacting to the sound of some horrible starting pistol. A young man returning from the amenities launched off the balls of his feet and into the laneway like a champion backstroker. Even those who managed to remain seated threw their arms and papers up into the air like excited grandstand ers.

‘We must have hit something,’ an older woman told her husband. She was the first to speak in their carriage. She told him like it was a fact she’d confirmed merely by saying it aloud. And like he was the kind of idiot who needed to be told these sorts of things. Which is how it went in their marriage. For forty-five years it’d gone this way. Her the teller, him the idiot listener.

‘It didn’t feel like we hit anything,’ the husband muttered in the most nonargumentative way he knew how. Both of them were holding onto the handrail still. Neither had been injured or tossed about too badly.

‘They don’t just put the brakes on like that for no reason, Neville,’ she insisted.

‘Maybe we almost hit something,’ he said hopefully. ‘They might have pulled us up in time.’

The woman scoffed. ‘It didn’t feel like they pulled us up in time.’ She let go with one hand and pressed her cheek to the window in an attempt to see all the way to the head carriage.

It was a four-car train, with an upstairs and downstairs compartment in each car. Their downstairs compartment was quite empty. Besides them, there were three schoolboys sitting together, all of whom were laughing now and re-enacting the involuntary flight paths they’d taken a moment earlier. Toward the middle of the carriage a man wearing a suit but no tie was gathering and repacking the contents of his leather satchel.

‘You know what I bet it was?’ the older woman put to her husband, pulling her cheek back from the window and looking further up the mountain.

‘No, what?’ he asked.

She brought her index finger up in front of her face and tapped lightly on the glass. Her husband glanced past to see precisely what she was pointing at. Unlike her, he was still holding onto the rail with both hands, expecting perhaps for the train to start up again all of a sudden and stutter forward.

‘I bet one of them got onto the track,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll bet you that’s what it was alright.’

The husband considered the horses standing about in the paddock with their big heavy coats draped over their backs. He knew his wife well enough to understand that the discreet voice and restrained finger-tapping actions were indications of assuredness rather than self-doubt. She spoke in the same hushed tones when looking through the kitchen window at the neighbours showboating around in the front yard with their new caravan, or when she was expounding some other scandalous and libellous theory involving people she couldn’t help comparing herself to.

‘Just you wait,’ she continued. ‘I’ll bet the driver comes on and tells us that we’re going to have to sit here until they can get a forklift or something to move it out from under the train. Neville? Did you hear what I said?’

‘Maybe,’ her husband said. He’d stopped listening and begun counting the horses, giving each a nod of his head to indicate its place in a series of silent numbers that was already up to twelve. He might have been the owner of the horses, counting to himself like this, looking to determine whether one was missing. But, of course, he wasn’t. He wasn’t the owner of much, in fact. As a younger man he’d been the owner of a -beating shop and an opinion and he wasn’t even the owner of those anymore.

‘Maybe? You’re kidding me right, Neville? You don’t go slamming the brakes on like that over nothing. Maybe we hit something, he says. Ha! I thought you were supposed to know a thing or two about collisions.’

‘It didn’t feel like we hit anything,’ he paused the counting to explain his response.

His wife scoffed again. ‘You think you’re going to feel a thing like that all the way back here? Use your brain, Neville. Actually, you know what? I’d like to see what the owner has got to say for himself when he sees the kind of trouble he’s caused. Letting one of his stupid animals get out onto the track like this. That’s what I’d like to see. You don’t just get away with a thing like this. Costs hundreds of thousands just to get one train up and running on time. God, read the newspapers if you think I’m exaggerating. Probably got more money than sense, this guy. Anyone who owns that many horses has got to have more money than sense, if you ask me.’

On the low side of the train line, the gaping national park stretched out to the Pacific Ocean. For the horses in the paddock and the people on the train, the sun had disappeared behind the back of the mountains, leaving the air cold and damp. Out over the ocean, though, it was still high enough to be giving the water a bright, warm-looking swell, like corduroy rubbed against its grain.

Before retiring and moving to the South Coast, Neville had spent his career working in a small country town out west, where there was never any shortage of kangaroo-damaged bonnets to be straightened out, smoothed in with pink epoxy filler, and repainted at a fee only slightly above cost. Occasionally, a more serious accident would occur on the major highway that fed into the town from the east, and a crumpled car would be towed into his yard so that he could determine whether it was worth repairing at all. If somebody had been killed in the accident, then the car would be towed or carried by flatbed truck to the enclosed storage yard at the back of Neville’s shop. This yard was the property of the local council and was not to be accessed without direct permission from the police sergeant. The sergeant had given Neville a key to the yard’s gate and would often phone to ask Neville if he wouldn’t mind going across and unlocking it, so as to save the sergeant a trip. Usually, it was to let some insurance assessment agent in, or some sunglasses-wearing relative of the person killed in the accident. Other times, it was to chase out a group of schoolboys who’d been seen climbing the fence.

Neville found that he too had a curiosity for those vehicles that had facilitated a death. There was something that compelled him to stand peering through the windscreen, wondering whether the congealed blood on the upholstery wasn’t keeping the spirit of the person sealed in. Or whether the angle of the steering wheel wasn’t a sinister trap prepared by the ghost of the victim – something to catch him if he ever dared to open the door and sit down in the death seat. If he came upon a group of tresing boys who’d done just that, as a way of better experiencing the car’s haunting, he’d lean in through the window and ask them if they knew the name of the person whose seat they were sitting in. He’d tell them the name then, saying it aloud, as seriously and morosely as he could manage. In truth, it frightened him as much as the boys to announce the name of the dead person while hovering over the very place they’d died. But then, like the boys, it also excited him. He’d walk away feeling too afraid to look back and the boys would follow him closely, not wanting to be locked behind in the yard with a ghost whose name they now knew.

Not too many years before he retired from -beating, closed the shop and brought his wife to live where she’d always wanted to live, Neville had been called up on a Thursday afternoon. Some kids, still in their school uniforms, had left their pushbikes at the gate and squeezed themselves underneath the fence – probably hoping to get a look at the car that’d done the Cartwright girl in the day before. A year or so earlier, the fence along the front perimeter had been raised with two lines of barbed wire, and there hadn’t been the need for Neville to go down there and chase away tresers in quite a while. On this day, though, the whole town had been in a state of hypersensitivity, and just the sound of the phone ringing in his workshop had been enough to signal to him that the ghost of the dead girl was being disturbed.

The Cartwright girl, whose family was as well-known as all the other families in the small township, had been struck by a four-wheel-drive vehicle while riding her horse along the roadside. Neville had learnt all about it the day before, during his lunch break. His wife had come down to the workshop specially. She’d explained to him the way the girl had been out early, riding her horse

before school, when some out-of-towner had come up alongside her without being aware of the way a horse is prone to spooking from the rear. Listening to his wife talk about this business of spooking from the rear, Neville had found himself wondering why he’d never heard of it before. He’d asked his wife where she’d learnt of it. Instead of answering, though, she’d gone on to inform him that this out-of-towner hadn’t been an irresponsible teenager or imive male either – as you might have expected – but a mother herself. For Neville’s wife, this had obviously been the most impossible part of the whole story. Much more impossible or unheard-of than the spooking from the rear stuff. And like most of the women running around town that morning, she’d been at a total loss to explain what this mother could possibly have been thinking, coming up alongside a young girl on a horse like that. That the woman was from out of town had seemed to be the only thing giving the situation any sort of comprehensibility.

After hanging up the phone, Neville had taken the key from the wall of his office and stepped out into the bright sunlit yard, blue metal crunching beneath his boots as he made his way toward the gate leading into the enclosed lot next door. Handling the heavy brass padlock, he’d had the uncomfortable image of wrestling another man. It’d almost been enough to make him forget about the kids and go back to the car he’d been beating into shape before the sergeant had called. Peering in through the gate, though, and seeing the four or five boys and two girls crouched behind the beige-coloured four-wheel-drive, a strange sense of duty had taken over and Neville had found himself unable to turn away.

It’d been grotesque to Neville to think that kids so young – thirteen, maybe fourteen – were being forced to face up to the responsibilities of death. Yet, it’d been clear to him that this was exactly what was happening. The kids had not gathered there in morbid fascination like the boys he’d chased out so many times before, but instead had been drawn in by the obligation of having known the girl before she died. Approaching the group, it’d occurred to Neville that the most frightening thing about death was the utter decency it evoked. The maturity and pragmatism it imposed upon those who, till such time as they were forced into direct , were prone to treating it so sacredly and so fearfully.

‘Hey,’ Neville had said to the group of kids squatted in the dirt. They’d squinted up at him. One of them had been drawing circles in the dirt with a stick. ‘The police says you kids can’t be in here.’

One of the two girls had smiled. ‘Do you know what her name was?’ she’d asked.

‘Cartwright,’ Neville had answered. ‘She was the girl Cartwright. I know her parents well enough.’

It was then Neville had noticed the big swipe of blood and hair that started at the front enger-side blinker and went almost as far back as the rear engerside door handle. It’d looked like carpet burn against the skin-coloured duco.

Smiling up at him still, the girl had shaken her head. ‘Maggie Girl,’ she’d said. Neville hadn’t known what this meant, but he’d nodded anyway. The girl, still smiling, had seen that he hadn’t understood properly and had shaken her head again. ‘Her horse’s name was Maggie Girl,’ she’d explained. The words had hit Neville very hard and very crudely then, like a man punching another man in the gut. ‘And they had to put her down too. After she saw what happened to Melissa and everything. Look,’ the girl had said, putting her hand up on the smear. ‘The car didn’t even hit Melissa. It hit her horse, Maggie Girl. And now both of them are dead.’ The girl had stopped smiling then and begun crying.

Neville had reached out and put his hand on the spot where Maggie Girl had come into first , the spot just behind the blinker. The streak had been hard and gristly, baked on by the hot sun.

After Neville had touched it, the kids had all taken their turns too. They’d left together then, Neville holding his breath and tensing his stomach muscles as he’d padlocked the gate behind them.

Just as Neville’s wife predicted, it wasn’t long until the driver’s voice came over the speakers to say something about why they’d stopped so suddenly and what was to happen next. The driver spoke with what sounded like a Scottish accent and didn’t say anything about the horses. Just that the train would not be moving for quite some time. He asked that everybody remain seated. And said that anybody who’d been injured should make their way to the front carriage. He said he was very sorry then and repeated the part about injured engers making their way to the front car while everyone else remained seated. This second time he said it, Neville recognised the accent for what it really was: the intonation of somebody trying not to cry. A grown man trying not to cry.

‘God, you’d think it was Phar Lap,’ Neville’s wife quipped loudly enough for the three boys sitting in front of them to wonder who or what Phar Lap was.

And then again, an hour later to the female police officer helping them disembark the train by the rear carriage. ‘This way, please, ma’am,’ was all the officer could say in return.

It wasn’t until Neville and his wife had been led down the steep basalt bank, across a paddock, through an already opened gate, and up onto a bus with all the other engers, though, that a different police officer, a man this time, came aboard to inform them that it hadn’t been a horse that’d caused the driver to apply the train’s brakes with such vigour that the track beneath them had physically buckled, but rather two small girls. An eight-year-old and a ten-yearold. The pair had wandered down from their uncle’s barn to play in the spillway, but for some reason had climbed up onto the tracks instead. Both of them had

been killed instantly, which, as Neville’s wife took it upon herself to explain to the boys now sitting directly opposite them, was something to be thankful for at least. As the boys nodded their sensible young heads in agreement, each as unable and at a loss as Neville’s wife to explain what the girls’ uncle could possibly have been thinking, letting the pair out of his sight like that, Neville closed his eyes and began re-counting the beautiful, motionless racehorses, whose names he hoped never to have to hear.

When You Fuck with a Fowler

Amy Fowler was a girl I went to school with. She lived at the bottom of my street in the housing commission area. Her family was poor. Mine was poor too, but hers didn’t even own a car. They used to carry their groceries home from the supermarket in plastic washing baskets. One basket for every two Fowlers. There were six of them in total, and if I was out riding bikes with my stepbrother and we saw them coming along, then we’d race down to the vacant block, hide our bikes in the stormwater pit and wait for them to come past so we could peg dirt clods from across the road. The only time we ever felt too guilty was when one of us got a direct hit. Then we felt both guilty and proud of our superb marksmanship.

I this one Friday afternoon, we were in the driveway playing a game called skimmies. It was a sort of made-up game where we’d ride around in tight little circles trying to rub each other’s back tyre with our own front tyre – the object, of course, being to make the other person fall off. I’d just been knocked off my bike for the ninth or tenth time straight when Amy’s family appeared at the bottom of the driveway with their week’s groceries.

‘Oy, youse them little fuckwits that’s been chuckin’ rocks at us!’

It was Amy’s mum. She was sharing a basket with one of Amy’s little brothers. We’d been distracted and hadn’t noticed them coming. They’d noticed us, though. I froze. My stepbrother, who was older and more heroic than me, stood up on his pedals and continued circling my fallen body.

‘Nah, wasn’t us,’ he sang back.

There was something in the way he said it, though, which, coupled with the

cocky way he was riding, suggested he was more than happy for her to know this was bullshit.

‘Yeah, like fuck it wasn’t,’ she spat back at him.

My stepbrother let out a laugh.

‘Jeez, you’re a charmer, aren’t you?’

The veins that ran up the insides of her skinny forearms pulled as tight as her vocal cords.

‘What’d you just say to me?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I pleaded with him under my breath.

But he wasn’t interested in taking my advice. He gave me a quick wink before beaming back at her.

‘I said, is that the same mouth you suck your old man’s cock with?’

He’d grown up without a mum, my stepbrother. His mum had killed herself when he was very young, a baby really. After that it was just him and his dad for

the next twelve or so years. Then his dad started dating my mum and the two of them came to live with us. A short time after that, his dad and my mum got married. My older sisters couldn’t stand either of them, our stepdad or our stepbrother. They thought they were complete dickheads. Which, in the case of our stepdad, was probably true. I didn’t mind having my stepbrother around, though. Being the only boy, I’d never had the opportunity to share a room before, and at nights we’d lie awake on the bunk and talk about the female school teachers we would and wouldn’t do, given the chance. I was thirteen and had never even kissed a girl at that stage. My stepbrother was fifteen and claimed to have fingered some girl from the year above him who’d since dropped out and moved to Canberra.

It was Amy’s dad who came strutting forward next. A skinny-looking guy wearing a baggy singlet and baggy tracksuit pants. He was sharing his basket with Amy. He dragged her up onto the edge of the gutter with him.

‘Think you’re a clever little cunt, do ya?’

I felt the chop of air as my stepbrother’s back wheel made another tight of my face.

‘Cleverer than you,’ he responded smartly.

Amy’s dad nodded his head a couple of times. To himself. Like he was trying to decide whether to be amused or enraged by my stepbrother’s antics.

‘That so, is it? Why don’t you come down here, then? See how clever you are down here.’

‘Yeah, c’mon,’ Amy’s mum chorused. ‘Open the gate and see how fuckin’ tough ya are down ’ere. Fuckin’ little smartarse.’

‘Don’t need to,’ my stepbrother replied. ‘I can smell you both from up here.’

He was quick, my stepbrother. No doubt about that. Never short of something smart to say. Nor the gall to say it. I guess it was the difficult upbringing, coming of age in a womanless house with a tough father, that gave him his bravado. Me on the other hand, I’d been raised in a household full of women, and it was all I could do not to piss myself over the concrete.

Amy’s dad stopped nodding and ran his tongue across the inside of his bottom lip, making the whiskers flex outward like echidna quills. When he spoke again his tone had changed.

‘Alright, then. Let’s see how you like getting rocks chucked at your fuckin’ head, then.’

Still gripping onto the basket, he lunged forward and scooped up a handful of dirt and stones from the footpath and hurled it in our direction. I ducked as the debris scattered across the driveway in front of me. The few stones heavy enough to bounce made tinging noises as they struck against the frame of my bike. My stepbrother swerved to avoid being hit and, in doing so, ran over my ankle. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t dare look up. I kept my head down and waited for the second spray.

To my surprise, it didn’t come. What came instead was the sound of my stepbrother laughing and slapping his thigh.

‘Nice work, retard!’ he hooted. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’

I peered over the top of my forearms to see what he was laughing at. Amy had fallen over backwards, the basket yanked clean from her hand. Unwashed potatoes oscillated back and forth on the bitumen around her as a dinted tin of Homebrand beetroot rolled down the gutter toward their house at the bottom end of the street.

‘Fuckin’ good on ya!’ Amy’s mum said as she stuck her foot out to stop it.

I assumed it was Amy’s dad she was scolding.

He must have assumed so too.

‘Wasn’t my fault!’ he tried arguing back at her. His voice had changed yet again, so that it sounded more pathetic than menacing now.

Bending over, she picked up the can and tossed it into the basket.

‘Yeah, and I wasn’t talkin’ to you, neither, was I, ya drongo,’ she told him.

I supposed this meant she was having a go at Amy. It was hard to see how any of this was her fault. Still, I didn’t wait to find out. Seizing the opportunity, I pushed myself up off the ground, grabbed my bike by the handlebars and made a break for the backyard.

Turning up a few of the loose stones with his back tyre, my stepbrother did likewise.

‘So long, Foul-ers!’ he yelled as he rounded the corner of the house and disappeared into the safety of the backyard just ahead of me.

‘Yeah, you’ll keep,’ a voice called back at him.

Back at us.

We didn’t have to wait long for Amy’s dad to make good on this threat. It was the following Tuesday and we’d just got off the bus and begun making our way up the hill when he stepped out of the phone booth at the bottom of the street.

‘Hello, and who’ve we got here, then? Coupla Terry Tough Cunts on their way home from school, is it?’

He wasn’t alone. He had his dog with him. An ugly-looking thing with short white fur and a head shaped like somebody’s poor attempt at papier-mâché.

We weren’t alone either. We had Amy and two of her brothers with us. The bus stop was halfway between our houses. The littlest one, a scrawny shit who was constantly being told to sit down in his seat by the bus driver, darted forward to give the dog a pat and was swatted at and told to piss off home by his dad.

‘Why do I have to go home for?’ he complained.

‘Cos I fuckin’ told ya to,’ his dad responded.

Amidst their squabbling, my stepbrother grabbed me by the arm.

‘Quick,’ he said, attempting to usher me off likewise.

Amy’s dad wasn’t having any of this, though.

‘Where the fuck do you think you two are going?’ he said, forgetting about the little brother and coming after us. He gave the dog an extra foot or two of lead, so that it came right up to us and sniffed at our backpacks and pockets. It had pink eyes like an albino and a black studded collar around its neck.

My stepbrother sprang back, pulling me with him.

‘Get your dog away from us!’ he tried insisting.

Only, Amy’s dad must have heard the same thing in his voice that I heard. The bottom third of his face widened into a whiskery, narrow-jawed grin.

‘What’s the matter, big boy? Don’t you like dogs?’ Bending forward, he took hold of the metal clip connecting the end of the lead to the dog’s collar and jingled it about, like he was going to undo it. The dog recognised the sound and started jerking forward, eager to be let off. ‘What d’ya reckon, Bullet? Ya hungry, fella? Ya feel like chewing the tough out of a coupla Terry Tough Cunts?’

I felt my stepbrother’s hand tighten around my arm.

‘We’ll call the cops if you don’t leave us alone!’ he said, raising his voice in an unconvincing effort to take control of it again.

Amy’s dad didn’t appear too concerned by the threat. Letting go of the clip, he stood up straight again and twirled his wrist a few times to take back in the excess lead.

‘That’s not a bad idea, that.’ Taking a step back, he gestured toward the phone booth. ‘In you get, then.’ He was taller than I ed from our previous encounter and had a tattoo in the web of his thumb and forefinger, which I’d not previously noticed, a little scribble of ink that looked like a spider.

Neither my stepbrother nor I moved. We stood rooted to the spot in our grey school shirts and grey school shorts and grey school socks. My stepbrother was fifteen and I was thirteen. My stepbrother had grown up with a no-nonsense father and I’d grown up in a house full of women. My stepbrother had stories of

sexual conquest, while I still hadn’t even kissed a girl.

‘C’mon, whatchyas waiting for?’ Amy’s dad goaded while his sons smiled on in anticipation.

I followed his finger across to the phone booth. Its glass windows were covered in graffiti, some of it drawn on, some of it scratched right into the laminate coating. AC/DC. Samantha sux dick. I waz ’ere. The bright-orange receiver inside had been vandalised too, blackened and partly misshapen at the ear end from where somebody had held a lighter to it. It still worked, though. I knew this from experience. My stepbrother and I had used it to call a porno hotline not that many weeks earlier, after finding nine dollars in change at the bottom of the styrofoam milk esky on our front veranda. What a disappointment that experience had been. When the money ran out after just two and a half minutes of prerecorded smut, the voice on the other end still hadn’t even removed its bra.

I turned back to Amy’s dad.

‘Look, we’re sorry, alright? We didn’t mean to.’

‘Sorry, are ya?’ He was wearing footy shorts, thongs and a singlet, and his skinny legs were covered in thick black hair. ‘Funny, that’s not what I hear. I hear you’re a coupla big-noting world-beaters. Isn’t that right, Amy?’

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what’d happened here. My stepbrother had bragged to everyone on the bus the day before about how we’d escaped our first encounter with Amy’s parents, embellishing the triumph to the point of total fiction, and rather than pulling him up on the boasts, I’d gone along with them

because I figured they made me look good in front of his older friends. Never mind the fact that Amy and her brothers had been sitting just a few rows ahead, listening to everything we were saying.

I spun back the other way.

‘Amy, we were just joking on the bus,’ I tried reasoning. ‘You know we didn’t mean it. Tell your dad we were just kidding. That we’re sorry.’

Amy didn’t respond. She didn’t even look up. With her two curtains of straight black hair hanging forward past her ears and cheekbones, she kept her eyes fixed on the space between her shoes. It was the exact expression she wore on the school playground. While the boys from our grade played handball in the quad each recess and lunch, and the girls lolled about beneath the peppercorn tree, plaiting each other’s hair, Amy sat alone on an aluminium bench seat beneath the science lab window. Totally unreachable. Not that anyone wanted to reach her, mind you. If a stray tennis ball ended up at her feet, there was an argument over who should have to go and fetch it. That person would be teased for the rest of the day then, accused of having looked up her skirt while he was bending over to collect the ball, accused of being in love with her and the bushy vagina we imagined her to have, accused of wanting to marry and have children with her. Mongoloids, we joked. Which was cruel, of course. Even then we knew it was cruel. But what did we care?

Before she could respond to my plea for help, her dad smacked his hand against the side of the phone booth, rattling its perspex roof.

‘I’ll give ya fuckin’ sorry! In here! Now! The fuckin’ two of yas!’

Whether he’d planned on corralling us into the booth all along, or whether he was merely calling my stepbrother’s bluff, it was clear he intended to see the threat through. With his dog snouting ahead, he began moving forward.

‘You can’t make us get in there,’ my stepbrother protested.

Hearing him say so, I hoped to God it was true. He couldn’t really make us get in there, could he? It was like some child molester ordering a couple of schoolgirls into the back of his van. Only, we weren’t schoolgirls. We were teenage boys. In just a few years we’d be men. We didn’t have to do what he said. We could just refuse. Or make a run for it. Or flag down a ing car. Or fight him, if worst came to worst. Jesus, what were these fist-shaped things attached to the ends of our arms anyway?

Only, as is so often the case, what was good in theory proved not to be so good in practice. With Amy’s dad bearing down on us and the dog getting itself wrapped around our legs and the school bus farting its way up the hill somewhere in the unseeable distance, it all became too much for my stepbrother, and rather than fighting or running or calling for help, he simply pissed himself. Down the inside of his legs and into his socks it ran. The dog was the first to notice, licking at the stream as it trickled out of his shoes and soaked into the patch of dirt where people had extinguished their cigarettes while talking longdistance on the phone. A second later, Amy’s dad noticed.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ he coiled back. He started laughing then. A revolting, hyperbolic kind of laughter. ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo! Big boy’s pissed himself! Quick! Get a look at this! Big boy’s pissed his pants! Big boy’s pissed his pants!’

Amy’s little brothers ed in. They couldn’t have been any older than five and seven, and there they were, laughing along at my fifteen-year-old stepbrother

who’d just pissed himself in broad daylight.

With his socks squelching inside his black school shoes, my stepbrother took off. Not in the direction of the house as I would have done had it been me who’d disgraced myself like that, but across the road and into the vacant block. The half-full drink bottle rattling around inside his backpack the only sign of him once he’d pushed through the first couple of metres of shoulder-high grass.

‘That’ll give ya something to crow about on the bus tomorrow morning, big boy!’ Amy’s dad called after him. He turned to his sons then. ‘You see that, boys? That’s what happens when you fuck with a Fowler.’

I didn’t say anything. Really, what was there to say? I just stood there and watched as the bastard set off for home with his wrong-headed dog and his two wrong-headed sons, and Amy, his wrong-headed daughter.

It didn’t take long to catch up to my stepbrother once they were gone. Crossing the road and following his tracks through the grass, I soon reached the stormwater pit at the far end of the block. The pit was really a sort of concrete junction box where three different drains merged into one. In area, it was roughly the same size as the single mattress we’d found on the footpath and pulled over the top for a roof; while, in depth, it was shallow enough that we had to crouch to avoid hitting our heads on the mattress once we were inside. Usually, we were smoking cigarettes and ogling porn magazines, so we’d leave the mattress slightly ajar for the sake of ventilation and light anyway. Only, that isn’t how I found it on this day. On this day the mattress had been pulled all the way across, completely concealing the opening, so you wouldn’t have even known the pit was there.

‘Oy, open up. It’s me,’ I hissed.

My stepbrother didn’t respond. I could tell from the slight impression in the centre of the mattress, though, that he was inside. By threading a piece of rope through a hole in the centre of the mattress and then tying the other end to one of the metal drain grates, we’d come up with a pretty good way of barricading ourselves inside.

I beat my hand against the top of the mattress a few times.

‘Come on, I know you’re in there. Stop being a dickhead and let me in.’

‘What do you want?’ he said, his voice both echoey and muffled at the same time.

‘I want to come in.’

What the hell did he think I wanted? I waited a moment for the centre of the mattress to pop back up – a sign he’d untied the rope – and then slid it across and poked my head inside.

The smell was bad. I pulled my head back out and lowered myself in feet-first. It’d been a long time since we’d had any decent rain and the bottom of the pit was covered in a crust of dry silt.

I slid my bag off and used it for a cushion. My stepbrother didn’t say anything. Or even look at me. He was nursing his bag in his lap. It made me think of the

night he’d first come to live with us. He’d been scolded by his dad for refusing to eat the baked cauliflower my mum had served with dinner. Right there in front of us all – his new family. My mum had tried intervening to say that it was okay, she didn’t mind. But this had only made his dad all the more angry with him. Finally, he’d been sent to his room. My room. Our room. When I ed him an hour and a half or so later, it wasn’t his dad he’d wanted to talk about, though, it was Cassie Mandelhurst – a girl from his class. Lying on the mattress above me, he’d claimed to have snuck her schoolbag into the toilets with him earlier that day and frigged off inside of it. He’d told me this like I was supposed to be impressed with his audacity or his prowess or something. I was still in primary school and had no idea what frigging off even was. ‘You know – pulling yourself,’ he’d explained. In the dark bedroom with my covers drawn, I’d put my hand inside my pyjama pants and tried to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Did you just grab hold of it and pull? And then what? Let go again, so that it flopped back into shape like a saggy, overstretched piece of elastic? What was the point of that? It made no sense to me whatsoever. Confused as I was about the logistics, I hadn’t for a moment considered that he might have been lying to me altogether.

I knew it now, though. Sitting opposite him in the stormwater pit. He hadn’t frigged off into Cassie Mandel-hurst’s schoolbag, just as he hadn’t fingered some dropout from the year above him, just as he wouldn’t have had the faintest idea of what to do with the teachers he’d been boast-fucking in the bed above me each night over the past eighteen months. All of these sexual conquests of his amounted to the same thing: utter bullshit.

I picked up a piece of dry silt from the concrete floor and rubbed it between my finger and thumb, turning it to powder.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked him.

He shrugged – not like he didn’t know whether he was okay or not, but like he

didn’t know why I was asking in the first place.

If that’s how you want to play it, I thought.

We sat there a moment longer without speaking. A dog barked in the distance and I wondered if it was Bullet.

‘Maybe we should go home,’ I suggested.

He tightened his arms around the backpack and sank further into the wall.

‘Whose home?’ he said.

‘Home. Our home,’ I answered.

‘Your home, you mean.’

In nearly three years of living with us, it was the first time I’d heard him speak like this. Usually, he went a mile too far in the opposite direction, acting like he owned the place, like there was no reason anyone should take pity on him or his situation. He was glad his mum had killed herself when he was still just a baby: she was a schizo fuck-up and he was better off without her in his life anyway. He’d make you feel like the one who needed pity just for asking.

‘It’s your home too,’ I said.

He didn’t respond. I could see by the light coming through the gap in the ceiling that he was on the verge of crying. Whether this was because he believed me or didn’t believe me, I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t sure whether I believed myself. He was definitely welcome in the house, as was his dad, but did this make it their home? Hard to say.

I stood up and heaved myself back out of the pit. Slinging the backpack over my shoulders again, I thought to ask whether he wanted me to fetch him a clean pair of shorts but decided against the idea.

‘I’ll see you back up at the house, then,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he responded, the syllable disappearing into one of the drainpipes like a bad smell.

*

At half past six, he still wasn’t home. I’d managed to buy him the extra hours by telling my mum that he’d got after-school detention and was going to have to walk home, but even with after-school detention and a long walk up a steep hill, he still should have been home by a quarter past five at the latest.

‘I’m going to give Jenny a ring,’ my mum said, taking the phone up off the dresser in the hallway. Jenny was the school secretary and one of her close

friends and had her beak in everything. A call to her would undo my cover story in about two seconds flat.

‘No,’ I told her. ‘There’s no point. He probably just stopped at one of his friends’ on the way home. Skuzz’s probably. I can go and get him.’

My mum looked at me like she didn’t believe me, which was not an uncommon way for her to look at me. Deciding the trouble of finding out the truth was more effort than it was worth, though, she put the phone back on the hook.

‘Just make it snappy, please. I’d like to serve dinner before midnight if that’s at all possible.’

After stopping off in my bedroom to shove a clean pair of shorts up my shirt, I went outside and jumped on my bike. It was growing dark, but the air was warm and the cicadas still deafening. Sticking to the footpath where I was somewhat concealed by overhanging branches and fence shadows, I set off down the hill.

Less than thirty seconds later, I arrived in front of the phone booth at the bottom of the street. It was lit up now. Its orange-domed roof had become a beacon for flying insects, while the area my stepbrother had pissed himself had become a beacon for ants. What did they want with his piss? I wondered as I chained my bike to the nearby telegraph pole and made my way into the vacant block for a second time that day.

The path I’d taken before was still detectable, with the tall grass either pushed forward or lying completely on its side. I followed it down along the dented Colorbond fence, until I could see the mattress just off to my left. It remained

pushed aside, as I’d left it. I had a brief moment of wondering whether my stepbrother would even be there. Almost three hours had ed. What had he been doing? Just sitting there with his bag in his soggy lap all this time?

Guessing he’d be about as happy to see me now as he had been earlier, I covered the final few metres like a crab, quiet and low, staying out of his line of sight for as long as I could. It was strange, but in the time since last speaking to him, a certain resentment had begun growing inside of me concerning the things he’d said. True, it wasn’t his home, I’d found myself agreeing. He was right about that. And yet we’d gone out of our way to pretend that it was – me most of all, sharing my bedroom and behaving toward him as I imagined one brother would behave toward another. Didn’t he owe us the courtesy of accepting our act at face value? I’d given him the courtesy of accepting all of his bullshit, of paying deference to his age and bad family situation, hadn’t I? Why the hell was I down here trying to cover for him? I could be damn sure he wouldn’t have bothered doing the same for me.

I was just about to turn and leave without him when I caught a faint humming sound coming from inside the pit. Inching closer, I transferred my weight onto my hands, leaned forward and, with my breath held, peered in over the concrete edge. Sure enough, my stepbrother was still there, stretched out asleep on his back now with the schoolbag propped beneath his head for a pillow and his sodden pants nowhere to be seen. Despite the two of us sharing a bedroom, it was the first time I’d ever seen him naked and the sight of his manhood shocked me. So much so that I almost didn’t the girl lying there beside him, humming her gentle lullaby into his ear. Her dark hair had been pushed behind her ears and her pants had also been removed at some point. Growing up in a household of women, I’d heard it noted many times that girls developed faster than boys. It wasn’t until she looked up at me and raised her finger to her mouth – to make a shoosh sign against her lips – that I understood the meaning and the magnitude of this simple fact.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

It was past midnight and the two of them were sitting opposite each other at one of the small tables in the bar area of the hotel. The man was drinking a bourbon and the girl was poking at the serving of pancakes the man had insisted on ordering for her when she first arrived. As the man had discovered earlier in the evening, you could have the kitchen bring all your meals to you in the bar if you were so inclined. It didn’t matter what time of day it was either. The only thing that ever changed was the menu, and the pancakes were on the all-day list, which meant they were available right through till closing time.

‘What, are you allergic to flavour or something?’ the man said. He’d been watching the girl push the same triangle of pancake around her plate for several minutes now and, judging by the tone in his voice, he’d had about enough.

‘Baby, I told you, I gotta look out for my figure,’ the girl replied in the same vaguely cheeky, vaguely tired kind of way she’d replied when he first suggested the idea of dessert.

The man grinned and, responding as he’d responded earlier, said, ‘And I told you to let me watch it for you.’

It was a Wednesday night and the man had arrived at the hotel earlier that afternoon after catching a taxi from the airport. Going by the green and yellow logo embroidered on the chest of his chambray shirt, he worked for a subsidiary company that distributed broadacre pesticides and herbicides. A rep no doubt. Someone whose job it was to drive around regional Victoria, making sure that wholesalers were well-stocked with the company products and that whatever front-of-shop space they were paying for was being used to promote the products as per the and conditions of their agreements. Someone for whom a trip down to head office was a once-a-year affair, an opportunity for a bit of fun in the big smoke.

‘Well?’ he said after watching the girl pierce the bit of pancake with her fork, dab it in the puddle of melted ice cream and syrup that’d begun forming a moat around the outside of her plate, put the whole lot in her mouth, and draw the cleaned prongs back out from between her closed lips. ‘Was I right or was I right?’

She raised her eyebrows between chews. ‘Mmmm’, she said. ‘They’re delicious,’ she said. ‘You were right,’ she said.

The man smiled. ‘Bet your mum never made pancakes like that.’

The girl shook her head.

‘I didn’t think so. Mind you, that’s an eighteen-dollar plate of pancakes you’ve got sitting there. Bet you don’t get to eat eighteen-dollar pancakes too often.’

The girl shook her head again and the man leaned back in his chair. He seemed pleased with himself for making this point. Taking his drink up off the table, he held it out in front of him like he was going to raise a toast to the girl’s having never eaten eighteen-dollar pancakes before and to his having made it into a point. Instead, he tipped what was left into his open, waiting mouth and swallowed. The liquor made its way down his throat like a piece of unchewed bug going down a lizard’s throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and over to let it .

When the liquor was in his stomach, he put the glass back down on the table and

ran his tongue over the front of his teeth. He paid particular attention to the canine with the gold capping, polishing his tongue over it like he was checking for food. His lips and eyes were moist from the drink and his hair was wet from having showered before coming down from his room. He tapped his ring finger against the side of the empty glass a couple of times, sporadic Morse-like beats, as if he was trying to convey some kind of message. The gold band below his knuckle made a chinking sound.

‘So,’ he grinned.

The girl swallowed what was in her mouth and laid her fork carefully down on the plate next to the pancake stack. She picked the knife up off the table and sat it beside the fork just as carefully, like she was arranging flower petals on a pillowcase or serving oriental tea or something. Slipping her foot out of her shoe, she reached beneath the table and drew her big toe along the man’s calf. She was wearing a white see-through shirt and turquoise-coloured bra. Her darkbrown hair had been scooped around in front of her shoulder so that it hung over the left cup in a single heavy mass.

‘So,’ she smiled back. ‘How about you show me your room?’

He looked to be in his late forties, this man, while the girl could not have been any older than twenty-one or -two. After pursing his lips together for a few seconds, like he was trying to decide how best to apply his business nous to the girl’s suggestion, he turned away from the girl and toward the waitress who was standing over by the beer taps. She was the only other person in this part of the hotel and must have felt his eyes on her because she immediately stopped looking up at the TV on the wall and met his stare. He raised his empty glass toward her to signal that he wanted another drink.

‘What’s your rush?’ he said, allowing his eyes to return slowly to the girl. ‘You got somewhere better to be or something?’

The toe made its way toward his thigh.

‘Not me, baby. I just got other things on my mind, that’s all.’ The girl bit down on her bottom lip and the man couldn’t help but smirk.

‘Good answer,’ he said. ‘Good fucking answer. I bet you’ve got all kinds of clever answers, though, am I right? What other clever things do they teach you?’

The girl took her turn at glancing over in the direction of the bar. The waitress was busy pouring the man another drink. The girl turned her head front-on again toward the man. She let her foot drop away from his leg as she came forward in her seat. Without taking her eyes off his, she reached behind to unhook the bra beneath her shirt. The bright-blue cups slipped forward at the front as the straps came loose at the back. She wriggled her right shoulder just enough to make the cup fall forward another half inch or so.

The man stopped tapping and tightened his fingers around the glass’s hexagonal base.

‘And where’d you learn that trick?’

‘Do you like it?’

‘It isn’t bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen better. But it isn’t bad.’

‘That’s just a warm up, baby. I save the real tricks for the bedroom.’

The man snorted. He seemed to like the way things were progressing. Before he could make another clever addition to the conversation himself, though, the waitress arrived at the table with his drink. She was wearing a white shirt with a satin vest over the top, and her hair, which was a much lighter shade of brown than the girl’s, was tied neatly at the back. She sat the drink down on the table and took up the man’s empty glass before addressing the girl.

‘And how about you, ma’am? Would you like me to get you something to drink?’

‘She’ll take a double,’ the man quipped.

The girl smiled and shook her head to show the waitress that the man was joking. The waitress smiled back. The plate of pancakes seemed to catch her eye then. The knife and fork were sitting side by side and the ice cream was all but completely melted.

‘Would you like me to take these away for you?’ she asked.

‘Thank you,’ the girl nodded.

The waitress reached for the plate at the same time as the man reached for it. Both of them got a hold of it.

‘Hang on a second now. What’s going on here?’ the man said.

The waitress let go and stepped back, bumping into the table behind her. There were fake candles on all the tables, little battery-operated things that flickered away inside these opaque tumbler-sized cylinders. The jolt propelled it from the centre to the very edge of the table.

‘I’m sorry,’ the waitress said. ‘I thought the lady said she was finished.’

‘Lady?’ the man said. ‘What lady would that be?’

The waitress’s eyes flashed sideways to the girl and then back to the man. ‘The, the lady,’ she said as if she didn’t quite understand the man’s question.

Extending his pinkie finger, the man pointed at the girl sitting opposite him. ‘Her?’ he said, wagging the digit in the girl’s direction. ‘This one just here? You call her a lady, do you? Jesus, makes me wonder what sort of place they’ve got me staying in.’

The waitress’s expression changed. She was understanding perfectly now.

‘I’m sorry, sir. I was only trying to clear some room. I thought your companion

said she was finished. It’s my mistake. Please accept my apologies. Can I offer you another drink on the house?’

‘You can offer me a double,’ the man said, directing the finger away from the girl and toward the bar. ‘Like I already told you.’

‘A double. Yes. Okay, then. I’ll be right back with your double.’ She turned and headed off to the bar then.

The man waited until she was pouring the second drink before letting his hand come to rest on the table.

‘Baby,’ the girl said. She reached for his wrist and he jerked it away.

‘Don’t give me that baby shit,’ he said. His jaw muscles were tight beneath the skin. The smile was really gone now.

‘Baby, you’ve got to relax,’ the girl said. With her foot, she reached beneath the table again. ‘It wasn’t her fault, baby. I told her it was okay.’

‘And who put you in charge of the table?’ the man said, kicking her foot away. ‘Think having tits and a pussy puts you in charge or something, do you? Doesn’t even put you in charge of the tits and pussy … baby.’

The girl brought her foot back across to her side of the table. She lowered her

eyes toward the plate of pancakes in front of her. The melted ice cream was marbled with streaks of gold-coloured syrup. She breathed in and back out through her nose and blinked slowly a couple of times as if she was the one being required now to locate and put to use what business nous she might have had lurking inside of her.

‘Maybe you’d prefer it if I left?’ she suggested a moment later.

The man took a sip from his bourbon and glared at her. In the minor scuffle, the aqua-coloured cup had slipped right forward, so that the dark circumference of nipple showing above the brim looked like some burnt-out, petrified sun hanging out there over the horizon. A lump of carbon with just enough mass to keep the system in orbit for another evening.

‘No, I can’t let you go just yet,’ he said. ‘You haven’t finished your eighteendollar pancakes yet, baby.’

*

It was a few hours later when the girl closed the door softly and started back down the hallway toward the elevator. In one hand she held the small clutch purse she’d brought with her and in the other her shoes. She carried the shoes with a finger hooked in the heel of each one, so that they swung back and forth as she tiptoed along on the carpet.

She pressed the down button and waited for the elevator. When it arrived, she stepped inside, pressed the ground-floor button and turned to look at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks and chin were blotchy, like they’d been rubbed against

something coarse. She slipped her shoes on, opened her purse, took out a little round powdering kit and began dabbing it at her face.

The foyer of the hotel was empty when she stepped out of the elevator. Even the front desk was unattended. She made her way past two big gold pots and along the glass wall separating the foyer from the bar area where she’d met the man several hours earlier. She stopped at the entrance to the bar area and peered inside. The TV was still on. It was set to the sports channel and was showing the award ceremony for a Formula One race. The winner of the race was spraying champagne over the second- and third-place getters as well as the girls standing on the podium behind him. The girls clapped and tried to protect themselves from the spray by shielding their faces behind their arms. It was hopeless, they were being soaked. All of them had big smiles on their faces. They were dripping with champagne. The driver whipped the bottle up and down like he was ringing a church bell. Or flogging a horse.

‘Hello?’ the girl called.

Nobody answered. It was dark inside now, with just the lights above the bar turned on. Three little spotlights angled toward the bottles of spirits that sat on a mirrored shelf. The neon sign, which spelt out the name of the bar in the shape of a city skyline, was turned off. The girl stepped forward and stopped, like she expected an alarm to go off. Nothing happened. She stepped further inside.

The table where she and the man had been drinking was clear now. It smelt as if the whole place had been wiped over with disinfectant. The timber floorboards shone and the bar mats had been removed from the bar and were lying in a pile next to a bucket with a mop sticking out of it. The water in the bucket was grey and soap residue floated on the surface like fermenting yeast.

The girl sat her purse down on top of the bar and turned her head in the direction of the elevator again. It hadn’t moved since she’d stepped out. She looked across at the reception desk. There was a vase of yellow flowers sitting next to a little silver bell. On the wall behind it were several clocks, all of them showing different world times. She picked her purse up again, made her way around to the service side of the bar and opened the cash .

It was a weeknight. She took the notes from under the spring-loaded clips, folded them and slipped them into her purse. On the wall ahead, the TV was showing highlights of the race itself. A lot of tight corners, with four or five cars trying to be the first around each one. Whatever gaps opened up on the straights quickly disappeared at the corners. This seemed to be the way the race had been run, with none of the drivers caring too much about where they were placed on the straights, just trying their hardest to come out of the corners ahead of the others.

Stepping back over the pile of dirty bar mats, the girl went out of the bar area and into the foyer. She made her way quickly towards the exit, her shoes clicking against the cream-coloured tiles as she went.

She was about to push through the revolving door and step onto the street when somebody called out. She spun around. The foyer was empty. She heard the sound again and this time it was like somebody calling to her from inside one of the big gold-coloured pots over by the elevator. She looked toward the elevator as if it was some kind of trick. On the third go it didn’t sound so much like someone calling to her as someone being sick into a toilet bowl. She approached the reception desk.

‘Hello?’

There was no response. She dinged the bell and heard the sound of a toilet being flushed. A moment later the waitress came through the staff door. She had tiny sweat beads along the tops of her cheeks that looked like goose bumps. Her hair was still tied neatly at the rear.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know there was somebody out here.’

‘I was just leaving,’ the girl said.

‘Did you want me to call a taxi for you?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes. I don’t feel very well. That’s all.’

The girl looked in the direction of the elevator again. She folded her arms across her front, tucking the purse between her forearm and chest. ‘Are you here by yourself?’ she asked.

‘Just for another half hour or so. The cleaners will be in soon.’

‘Oh,’ the girl said. She looked up at the middle clock. Both of its hands were on the four. ‘Maybe it was something you ate.’

The waitress smiled. ‘No, it’s morning sickness.’

‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Are you pregnant?’

The waitress nodded. ‘Just a couple of months. We haven’t told too many people yet. We’re waiting to make sure everything’s okay.’

The girl’s arm loosened a little at the front and the hand holding the purse slid down to her side. ‘Is that—your husband, do you mean?’

‘My boyfriend, yes.’

‘Oh, your boyfriend.’ The girl nodded to herself. She looked down. She’d been wearing stockings earlier. Now, her feet were bare inside her shoes. She stared at them like they were somebody else’s feet.

‘Did you enjoy the pancakes?’ the waitress asked.

The girl stopped staring at her feet and lifted her head. ‘I wasn’t really very hungry in the first place.’

The waitress smiled and didn’t say anything.

‘He isn’t my boyfriend or anything,’ the girl said then.

‘I know that,’ the waitress said.

The girl looked at her shoes again. Or maybe she was looking at the first and second toes poking out of the opening at the front of each shoe. Her nail polish was the same colour as her bra.

‘Did they really cost eighteen dollars?’

‘Twenty-two, actually,’ the waitress smiled. ‘There’s a four-dollar surcharge after midnight.’

‘A surcharge?’ the girl said. The waitress nodded. The girl turned her head and looked at the elevator again. The glowing red said G for Ground. ‘Okay. Well, I’d like to pay for them anyway,’ she said. She pulled the purse out from where it was tucked away beneath her arm and unclipped it at the top.

‘They’ve already been charged to your friend’s ,’ the waitress told her.

The girl thought for a moment. ‘But couldn’t I pay for them anyway?’

‘Why not let him pay for them? He’s the one with the company credit card.’

‘I guess so,’ the girl said. She half shut the purse, before changing her mind again. ‘Only, I’d really like to pay for them myself. Couldn’t you take them off his credit card so that I could pay for them? I mean, if I gave you the money for them now? Couldn’t you take them off without him even knowing?’

‘I suppose I can. It’s your money, right? Makes no real difference to me what you do with it.’

‘Yes, please,’ the girl said. She took the fold of notes from her purse and offered it to the waitress. It was all the money from the till. A few hundred dollars.

‘I said twenty-two, not twenty-two hundred,’ the waitress laughed. The girl didn’t say anything. The waitress linked her hands across the front of her belly and stepped back. ‘You must be very good at your job.’

‘It isn’t his,’ the girl said. ‘It’s mine.’ She put the money down on the counter next to the vase of flowers. The notes unfolded like petals.

The waitress moved her hands from her belly to her hips.

‘Then maybe you should keep it. So that you don’t have to come to places like this so often.’

The girl frowned at her. ‘What’s wrong with this place? It’s a nice hotel, isn’t it?’

‘It’s okay,’ the waitress told her. ‘I could think of better places to be.’

‘Well, then maybe you should get a job somewhere else.’

‘Sounds like a good idea. Perhaps you could recommend me?’

The girl didn’t respond. She looked at the waitress. Then at the clocks hanging on the wall behind the waitress. Then at the elevator off to the left. She took the money up again and stuffed it back inside the purse and snapped it closed.

‘Good luck with your morning sickness,’ she said. And left.

The waitress was sitting at the kitchen table eating pancakes when her boyfriend came up from behind. He was wearing pyjama bottoms, but no shirt. He linked his right arm over her shoulder and across her chest and gave her a kiss on the left cheek as she put another piece of pancake into her mouth.

‘Anyone would think you were eating for two,’ he said, bringing his left hand around as well.

The waitress turned her mouth up in the shape of a smile. The globe above the stovetop was the only light on in the apartment. The sun would be up soon. It would appear between the two chimneys just beyond the kitchen window. For now, though, it was the exhaust fan light.

The boyfriend stood up straight and rested a hand on each of the waitress’s shoulders. He began massaging them. He was a young man – mid-twenties, by the look of it, while she appeared to be in her mid-thirties.

‘How was your shift?’ he yawned.

‘Work’s work,’ the waitress shrugged.

His hands dropped away and he made his way across to the stove. On the bench top next to the stove was a plate with pancakes piled on it. The waitress had cooked up a full batch. Much more than any one person could possibly eat.

‘Did they make you stack the chairs again?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

‘You should tell the union about that. That’s OHS, that is.’

She nodded and didn’t say anything.

The boyfriend picked one of the pancakes up off the plate and took a bite out of it.

‘Bit rubbery,’ he said. ‘We got any syrup?’

‘Check the fridge.’

The boyfriend pulled the fridge door open and scanned the shelves in front of him, leaning back against the door handle to check the lower shelves rather than bending his knees. It was one of those fridges with a blue light that makes the items inside look like the items inside a fish tank, objects to swim past and be amused by when you’re more bored than hungry.

‘A girl came in,’ the waitress said then. Her eyes were still fixed on the halfeaten pancakes in front of her.

‘I can’t see any,’ the boyfriend responded.

‘Check the door.’

‘The door?’ He put his hand on the bottle of syrup. It was between the jar of green peppercorns and baby capers. ‘What do you mean a girl?’ he said, holding the syrup up in the fridge light. It looked cold and delicious, with its brightly coloured maple leaf on the label, and a handle no bigger than the handle on a doll’s teacup.

‘You know,’ the waitress told him. ‘A hooker. Or prostitute. Or whatever you call them.’

The boyfriend smiled. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. He bit a piece out of the pancake, tilted his head back and poured syrup straight from the jar into his mouth.

‘Do you have something against plates?’ the waitress asked him.

He started laughing – muffled laughs that sent bits of pancake flying out over the fridge door.

‘You’re disgusting!’ she said.

‘What? I’m just trying to save you from having to do more washing up!’ he responded. ‘That’s all.’

The waitress turned toward the sink. Whether she’d noticed all the dirty plates before or not, she glared at them now like it was the first time. ‘And why’s it my job to clean?’

‘’Cause I’ve got to go to work, baby. I won’t have time.’

‘You could have done it last night,’ she told him.

‘I forgot.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll forget.’

The boyfriend shrugged. His hair was shaved. Hers was tied neatly at the back. He put another piece of pancake and swig of syrup into his mouth.

‘So, what happened with the whore?’ he said between chews. ‘Was she hot?’

The waitress stared at him. She watched him chew. His jaw went up and down. He seemed to be overemphasising the action, as if he was teaching somebody who’d never eaten pancakes before how to do it. There’s nothing to it, just move your teeth up and down like this.

Finally, she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She was really quite gorgeous,’ she said.

The boyfriend coughed again. Perhaps he’d not been expecting this answer. He put his hand on his stomach and gave it a scratch. He was younger than her and in good shape and had one of those stomachs where the skin is so tight the belly button is almost non-existent.

‘Yeah, and what’d the guy look like? I bet he was Asian.’

The waitress shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t Asian. He was from the country.’

‘He wasn’t? Was he fat, though?’

She turned her mouth up and gave a slight nod. Her eyes were very still. Her hair was tied at the back and she seemed composed.

The boyfriend laughed. ‘Jesus, how would you like that, hey? Having to pork fat Asians for a living. Fuck me.’

The waitress opened her mouth to speak, like she might have been going to correct him on a point or two. But then changed her mind and closed it again.

‘Probably makes shitloads of money but,’ the boyfriend said as he swallowed down the final piece of the pancake. ‘Asians are loaded.’

‘Three hundred and eighty-five dollars,’ the waitress responded. Although, it was more like she was responding to something she’d put to herself than something he’d said.

The boyfriend smiled cleverly. ‘What, are you her pimp or something?’

‘Colleague,’ she said to him.

She pushed her plate into the centre of the table then and stood up.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ the boyfriend said.

‘It means I’m going to throw up,’ the waitress answered.

She left the room then to go and be sick some place discreet.

The Conditional Past

It would have started the usual way, with a squabble over who got first go at hiding and who had to count. My older brother Cam would have used his age to pull rank on me, and I would have complained that it wasn’t fair because I couldn’t get away with doing the same to our younger brother. At just two and a half years of age, though, Robbie would have been too little to be left in charge of counting. Too little for counting, too little for seeking, too little for anything more than jumping out and exclaiming, ‘Found you!’, as though the very object of the game was to surprise the person who’d come looking for him by finding them first.

After being forced to accept my lot as middle child yet again, I would have left my brothers and gone off to the counting spot beneath the kitchen table. I would have sat there with my eyes closed and palms against my ears, calling the numbers loudly enough for the two boys to hear from the backyard. The tempo and volume of my counting would have increased the closer I drew to twenty. It would have excited me to imagine the panic I was causing, as my brothers scrambled to conceal their skinny bodies behind the peppercorn trunk or garden shed – or the hot-water heater, if they were game enough to risk the redbacks.

‘Ready or not!’ I would have called at last, pushing my way back out through the wooden chair legs.

My mum, who would have been standing at the sink washing dishes or peeling potatoes or pulling frozen chop bones apart for our dinner, would have ed some comment about being sure to give my little brother a fair chance, and I would have mumbled something back about the point of him playing in the first place if he wasn’t allowed to be found.

‘I mean it, Julia!’ she would have called after me as I went racing down the hallway towards the back door.

Rather than bowling straight out onto the veranda, I would have stopped at the end of the hallway to survey the yard from behind the flyscreen gauze. I would have held my breath as I strained to hear over the hum of the big chest freezer that sat immediately outside the door. I would have been seven years old and listening for clues of my brothers’ whereabouts: the scrape of a shoe on concrete, the ding of an elbow against the side of the house, the hiss of someone being reprimanded for breathing too loudly.

With nothing more telling than the sound of the freezer’s vibrating compressor motor, I would have turned the handle and stepped out onto the veranda. The smooth concrete would have felt cool against the soles of my feet. Waiting a second or two for the strut at the top to collapse back into itself, I would have eased the door closed and made my way past the freezer and down the steps.

It would have been December. The paddocks surrounding the house yard would have been dry and the crickets harrowing as they screamed themselves hoarse beneath the magnifying glass of cloudless white-blue sky.

ing the edge of the veranda, I would have been met by Jessie the retired sheepdog. She would have come out from beneath the house smelling of the cool dirt she spent these hot days burrowing herself into. She would have nosed my hand a couple of times, hoping, I suppose, to convince me of going back to the freezer to fetch some frozen chop bones that she could spend the afternoon pulling apart.

But there would have been no chance of that. I would have hated that freezer. It would have terrified me even then, calling to mind something I’d overheard my mum telling my dad two and a half years earlier. This was a story from the hospital where Robbie was born and where, if I’d eavesdropped correctly, they kept the stillborn babies in some sort of giant refrigerator type thing, so that the

mothers could continue spending time with them in the days after their failed births. I was four years old at the time and didn’t really know what a stillborn even was. Listening to my mum describe the way the most affected of these women took warm clothes to the freezer each morning to dress their lifeless babies, though, it was hard not to imagine the same thing every time I was sent to fetch a parcel of frozen meat for our dinner. Standing on my tiptoes, I’d fumble around inside with my eyes closed, praying my hand should strike upon the half a kilo of mince or bag of chop bones first, and not some prettily dressed dead baby.

Pushing the image out of my mind, I would have batted Jessie’s wet snout away with the back of my hand and tried cutting her a deal. ‘First you have to help me find them.’ She would have looked up at me, mouth agape and rubbery gums on full display. ‘Like this,’ I would have explained, scrunching my nose and making sniffing noises to show her what I meant. ‘See?’ Sniff. ‘See?’ Sniff.

Instead of leading me straight to my brothers, though, like one of the crimesolving dogs from our afternoon TV shows – a Scooby-Doo or a Lassie or even a Benji – Jessie would have blinked a couple of flies away, edged forward and tongued me again, on the knee this time.

‘Gaw, come on then, you stupid dog,’ I would have said, slapping my thigh so that she would know to quit licking and follow after.

It would have been mid-afternoon when we set off. The sun would have been high in the sky and the wheat dust would have tickled my throat as it did every harvest. It would have been a busy, distracted time of year on the farm, with our dad and his team of contractors working around the clock to get the grain stripped before it could be ruined by fire or rain or locust or whatever other Abrahamic curse might be hurled down at us from above, and our mum doing her best to keep on top of all the extra cooking that came with this influx of workers.

In an effort to keep us kids out of harm’s way, our mum would have issued my brothers and me with very clear instructions as to where we could and couldn’t play. These instructions would have come accompanied by terrifying tales of other children, disobedient children, who’d ignored their mothers’ warnings and suffered fates far worse than the mere sore backsides we were promised. There was the toddler bitten by a brown snake after wandering off through the stubble, for instance, and the girl who was squashed into a waffle while playing in the machinery shed, and the little brother found floating in a dam after one of his older siblings forgot to latch a gate and, worst of all, the group of three siblings who’d thought that climbing into a silo full of wheat would be a fun thing to do. One after the other, these three fictitious children had sunk to the bottom, their ears and eyes and mouths filling with grain as they went. Her attempt at frightening us into obedience might have made for a none too subtle approach, but that wouldn’t have made it any less effective. Not as far as I was concerned anyway. With their puffy eyelids and swollen larynxes, those drowned, bloated children would have terrified me every bit as much as the stillborn I was sure we kept in the freezer on our back veranda.

After five or so minutes of taking turns at leading each other around the house yard, ticking off all the usual spots as we went, Jessie and I would have arrived back at the place where we started. The temperature would have been unbearable and the air unbreathable by this stage. I would have had enough of looking for my stupid brothers too. They could find themselves for all I would have cared. As a last-ditch attempt, I would have cupped my hands around my mouth, filled my lungs with air and called out from the bottom of the steps.

‘Robbie? Where are you, Robbie?’ I would have baited my voice with the sort of suspense that I knew his silly two-year-old brain couldn’t resist. ‘I know you can hear me, Robbie! No laughing now, Robbie!’

I would have paused then, as I waited for this trick which had been known to work in the past to work again. One heartbeat. Two heartbeat. Three heartbeat.

Nothing. No giggling younger brother unable to keep from giving himself away. No brothers at all, in fact. Just the far-off rumble of the combine harvester in one ear and the hum of the compressor motor in the other.

Turning on the balls of my feet, I would have left Jessie on the concrete path at the bottom of the steps and marched my way across the veranda, past the freezer and down the hallway again.

‘Cam and Robbie aren’t playing fairly!’ I would have declared from the kitchen entrance, the final word punctuated by the screen door clapping shut behind me.

My mum would have been standing by the stove now, side-on to me. She would have been wearing her apron, its thin blue cord wrapped right the way around her waist and knotted at the front. ‘That sounds an awful lot like dobbing to me, Julia,’ she would have responded without bothering even to look up.

I would have shut my mouth and thought for a second. You could get in a lot of trouble for dobbing in our household. Sometimes more trouble for dobbing than committing the act that begot the dobbing. Placing my hands on either side of the doorframe, I would have anchored my position and pressed on regardless. ‘But they’re supposed to hide somewhere where I can find them.’

‘And?’

‘And I can’t find them anywhere.’

She would have sighed. ‘Well, have you looked?’

Even at seven I would have recognised this for the accusation it was.

‘Yes, I looked everywhere.’

‘You looked everywhere?’

I would have nodded my small round head as vigorously as possible, causing the thin blond strands of hair that refused parting or tying back to swish across my cheeks and forehead.

‘Well,’ she would have shrugged, ‘I guess that means they win, then.’

It would have struck me as a very typical thing for her to say. For any mum to say, I suppose. That tiny shard of wit they permit themselves every so often as a means of making it through another week of tiresome kids and suffocating house chores.

Letting my hands fall away from the timber frame, I would have stepped forward into the kitchen.

‘Can you help me find them?’

‘Julia, please.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because I’m busy, that’s why.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing,’ she would have snapped, turning to face me properly for the first time since I’d come back inside. She would have been thirty-eight years old, a mother to three children. The neckline of her white t-shirt would have sagged between her collarbones from being worn too many days in a row. And I would have hated her for it. For everything. As only an irrational seven-year-old can.

Narrowing my eyes into the thinnest slits I could manage, I would have lifted my gaze and concentrated all of my anger into the blackness of her pupils, holding it there for as long as I could, until the whiteness surrounding them was like a whiteness surrounding me, an entire sky of it, cold and heavy and impossible to escape. And just when I had all but decided that the only way to show her how unjustly I thought she was treating me would be to hold my breath and out stone cold dead in front of her, Jessie would have let out one of her excited highpitched barks from the yard.

‘There, that’ll be your father wanting his lunch,’ my mum would have broken the standoff. There would have been an endless procession of men wanting their lunches or their dinners or their breakfasts. The time of day would have held no correlation to who was arriving for what meal during this hectic period. ‘Now, unless you want to explain to him why you can’t do as you’re told, I suggest you

skedaddle, young lady.’

‘Fine,’ I would have huffed. And not fine as in Fine, I’ll do like I’ve been asked, but fine as in Fine, I wouldn’t want to be around you anyway! And with that, I would have about-faced and stomped my way back out of the kitchen and down the hallway, flinging open the door at the end as violently as I thought I could get away with.

It wouldn’t have been like I was expecting, though. The corner of the yard where Jessie went to announce the arrival of vehicles, barking at the trails of dust that came up the road as a way of proving to everybody inside what a good and useful and chop-worthy dog she still was, would have been empty. The road too. Instead, the barking would have been coming from somewhere else.

I would have scuffed my way over to the edge of the veranda and shouted her name and she would have yelped her over-enthusiastic response, like the sound she made when there was a snake in the yard, or when she’d been put on the chain to stop her from following my dad down the paddock on the motorbike – the sound of her trying to get at something she couldn’t get at. Craning my neck, I would have followed the sound from the corner of the yard, past the metal swing set our dad had welded and over to the gateway. It would have been a steadfast rule, ever since Robbie had been old enough to toddle, that the house gate remain latched at all times. Cam and I would have been taken out there and made to show our mum what a latched gate and an unlatched gate looked like – tested, to ensure we understood the difference. She would have marched us down to the dam at the bottom of the surrounding paddock then, made us count the steps aloud as we went, so that our stupid childish brains could compute just how easy it would be for our little brother to end up face-down in the middle of that enormous brown puddle of water were we to leave the gate unlatched for even one second.

That entire pantomime for nothing. The gate would have been unlatched. A gap

just wide enough for a dog or a child to fit themselves through. I would have thought to call out to my mum then and there, I’m sure. If only her previous scolding had not been so fresh. Instead, with the rebuke still ringing in my ear, I would have dropped down off the concrete lip and started towards the opening.

I would have moved slowly at first, waving the flies away from my face as I went. Approaching diagonally, I would have spotted Jessie just inside the carport, with the front half of her body wedged in beneath the station wagon and the back half wagging and wheeling around madly in the dirt. Ah-ha! I would have thought, squeezing myself through the space between the metal fence post and metal gate, and racing towards the spot where she was thumping away.

‘I found you! I found you!’ I would have proclaimed as I dropped to my hands and knees next to the front enger-side wheel.

It would have been him alright. Not him Robbie, but him Cam, lying flat on his stomach with his right cheek facing up and his mouth turned into the same scowl I’d served my mum just a short time before. It wouldn’t have mattered that the carport was outside of the yard and therefore out of bounds. Not to my cheating older brother, it wouldn’t have.

‘No, that doesn’t count,’ he would have argued as he began manoeuvring himself out from beneath the vehicle using his elbows and hips.

‘Yes, it does! It does so count! I found you first and now you’re in!’

Emerging heels-first, he would have stood and wiped the dirt from the front of his t-shirt and shorts. The hair on the right side of his head would have been

covered in a finer dust from where it’d rubbed against the underside of the vehicle.

‘No, because you didn’t find me. Jessie found me!’

I might have been two years younger than him, but I would have been wise to this sort of trickery. Anything to avoid taking his turn at counting. His usual tactic would have been to stash Robbie in some place more obvious than his own hiding spot, so that I’d be sure to come across him first. Forget the fact that Robbie was too little for counting and too little for seeking, that we weren’t playing against him so much as looking after him while we played against each other; if Cam thought there was an opportunity to rig the outcome, he’d take it. The number of games that had ended because I refused to be in for the second or third or tenth time straight must have been somewhere in the squillions.

Not on this day, though. On this day, I would have found him fair and square. And be damned if I was going to let some made-up rule about retired sheepdogs rob me of my victory.

‘I’ll tell Mum,’ I would have threatened.

‘Fine, be a dobber,’ he would have responded. ‘See if I care.’

Once again, I would have found myself thinking about the trouble you could get yourself in for dobbing, how rarely vindicated you were for bothering her with your childish complaints, how deadly boring it was to be sent to your room or given a job like folding all the socks and underpants as punishment.

‘Mu-um,’ I would have tested, not quite loudly enough for her to hear from the kitchen, but loudly enough for him to believe I was serious.

He would have jutted his chin out and made a disdainful face. ‘God. You’re such a baby!’

‘Cameron’s cheat-ing,’ I would have sung a little more loudly, a little more confidently.

‘Alright, alright,’ he would have conceded. And for a brief moment, gullible idiot seven-year-old middle child that I was, I would have believed that I’d beaten him, outplayed him.

The first sign that I hadn’t would have been him running his tongue across his bottom lip, slickening himself for the getaway he was about to make.

‘But you have to catch me first!’

And like that the bastard would have been off.

Past the out-of-bounds machinery shed, across the out-of-bounds clearway where the grain trucks reversed up to the auger, and all the way down to the outof-bounds silos, one-two-three-four of them, lined up like silver rockets in front of the tall cypress pines which, needless to say, were also out-of-bounds. Being no smarter than a stupid retired sheepdog who finds it impossible not to set chase

when it sees an animal, human or vehicle tearing away like this, I would have gone with him, yapping his name the entire way.

He would have been that much older and faster, though, my brother Cam, that by the time I arrived at the first silo along, he would have already scaled the skinny ladder attached to its side and perched himself on the domed roof overhead. With my hand visoring out the sun, I would have tilted my head back and squinted up at him.

‘What’s the matter? Scared?’ he would have called down at me.

Jessie would have been standing with her front legs against the silo’s side and her dusty brown tail pointed straight at the ground. She would have opened her bottom jaw and tried barking him back down, the way she tried barking crows out of the sky when it was too hot for her to bother with anything else.

I would have done similarly. ‘I’ll tell Mum, if you don’t come down!’

But we would have been too far from the house now, too out of earshot, for Mum to be of any real concern.

‘Ooh-ahh!’ he would have teased.

‘I’m not joking, Cameron!’

‘I’m not joking, Cameron!’

‘I mean it! Get down here!’

‘I mean it! Get down here!’

‘Argh!’ I would have stomped my foot in the dust, thrown my hands against my sides even, while he beamed back at me like some smart-aleck sun who’d been cast into the sky to taunt me from the moment I woke each morning, right through to bedtime.

Enough would have been enough. Disregarding everything I’d been told about those silos, all the warnings my mum had given me, all the terrible made-up stories she’d frightened me with, I would have grabbed hold of the side rails and hauled myself onto bottom rung of the ladder and started climbing.

Cam would have reacted immediately, jeering and banging against the roof in an effort to return me to the ground. I would have paid no attention. Blocked it out. And the first couple of rungs would have been easy too. I would have felt the bits of chaff falling from the bottoms of my feet as I moved higher and higher, the air getting thinner. And then thinner again. So that by the time I’d reached the midpoint, barely a metre and a half off the ground, it would have been impossibly and unbreathably thin. I would have noticed it in my muscles first, the way they began to quiver and shake from the lack of oxygen. Then in the way I could barely get a breath in, my lungs panicking the rest of my chest into a severe tightness. It would have been enough to stop me in my tracks.

Gripping the metal bars with my toes and my fingers, I would have pleaded with

him. ‘Stop it, Cameron! Stop it!’ The thinness in my voice bouncing off the silo’s metal side and right back at me. Enough to put me off balance. ‘I’m serious, Cameron! I’m falling! Stop it!’

He wouldn’t have cared. Of course, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have been nine years old. A boy. A child. Like me. With an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and an overdeveloped taste for stupidity. The panic attack he could see happening below him would have made the whole thing all the more enjoyable. ‘Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo.’ His voice would have been like the ambulance’s siren wailing and wailing and wailing as it came up the road half an hour later, Jessie barking and yelping and spinning circles at the trail of dust to show how useful she still was, and no one paying her any attention at all.

But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Because at that moment, with the two of them beleaguering me from opposite ends of the ladder, so that their wooing and yapping and yapping and wooing was like a single sound now, flattened thin as water, I would have tried reversing the entire process, that is making my feet and arms go in a downwards but not together and not upwards but one at a and not at the same time but left arm and right leg and right arm and left leg all while holding and gripping and never on but never letting and. Go.

Yes, go.

Down go.

Earth go.

Sky go.

As unceremoniously as a falling gum branch that stirs up the dust and chaff when it hits. And hit it does. All the wind knocked right out of me so that for I don’t know one-two-three-four-five-six yes six full seconds I wouldn’t have been able to get a breath but would only have been able to lie there looking up and watching my brother scampering back down the side of that enormous drum and in those six seconds I would have known what it felt like I suppose to die like that so desperate for air and height.

But then it would have come rushing back into me. All of it at once. A great stream of it. So that the in-stroke would have been like the sound a calf makes when wailing for its mother. And the out-stroke, well, the out-stroke would have been like the mother cow bellowing back for its injured girl child.

‘Holy shit!’ Cam would have announced as he alighted sole-by-skull next to my bleeding head. Not that I would have known it was bleeding. Not until he announced it with the next words out of his mouth, the holy-shit-there’s-bloodcoming-out-of-your-hair words.

This would have set me off even louder, of course. Like an entire mob of calf girl bawlers, mooing their agony for all the other farm animals to hear and take pity.

‘Wait here, I’ll get Mum!’ he would have said.

He would have been away again then. Jessie too. She would have been away, thinking what a brilliant human game this was that she’d been invited to play. Both of them would have been away and I would have been left there with snot all down my cheeks and blood coming out of my scalp.

Rather than waiting for them to arrive back, I would have pushed myself up onto my feet and begun hobbling my way toward the house. I would have been careful to walk in the most injured-looking way I knew how, with my bloodied hand held out in front of me like it was covered in sheep birth or cow birth or the human birth I’d seen all over my little brother Robbie two and a half years earlier. He’d almost been one of those prettily dressed babies, in fact, the cord wrapped around his neck so that they had to cut an emergency opening in the belly wall of my mum. On that occasion, though, she’d sensed his trouble in time and my dad had got her there in the nick of by driving through three barbed wire fences. Not stopping but ploughing them over with his foot on the accelerator as Cam and I cried our unseatbelted lungs out in the back.Not so fortunate forever, though. Not so endlessly lucky with time.

I would have been ing by the front of the carport as they emerged from the house.

‘Quick!’ I would have heard my brother say to my mum.

I would have been rounding the side of the house then, my pretend hobble dying middle child gait at near perfection.

Not enough to fool my mum, though. She would have been a mum three times over. She would have known a truly injured child when she saw one, when she heard one. Taking one look, one earful of me, she would have turned straight away, back to my brother Cam, and said, ‘Where’s your brother? Robbie! Where’s Robbie?’

Before Cam could answer, though, which is to say, before he could point to the

freezer positioned right there next to him and say, ‘I hid him in here’, Robbie, our sweet little beautiful little Robbie, would have jumped up from inside and exclaimed, ‘Found you!’ as though it was the very object of the game, as though too long and breathless a period had not already ed him by.

Ferocious Animals

My dad woke me early to go down town and buy streamers. It was 1989 and our team was in the grand final for the second year running. I was eight. The year before we’d been in the grand final against the Bulldogs and had been beaten 24–12. It was a hard loss for a seven-year-old. This year we were in the grand final against the Raiders. I didn’t think we could lose, since in our house the Raiders were made fun of for looking like Milo tins. This was my mum’s contribution to the footy, deciding what pantry items the teams’ jerseys most looked like. We were a traditional household in this way.

My dad and I started decorating as soon as we got home from the newsagent’s. I held the pre-torn pieces of sticky tape on the ends of my splayed fingers, while he wound crêpe paper around the veranda posts and swigged from his beer bottle. There were four posts at the front of our house and we moved from left to right, turning them into black-and-orange barber’s poles as we went. People beeped their car horns as they drove past and somehow it was possible for my dad to tell whether they were ive or non-ive beeps. For the ive ones, he raised his bottle and swigged as if he were toasting the victory to come. Otherwise, he took a longer swig, wiped his lips with his forearm or the back of his hand and said something like, ‘We’ll see just how many big-shot horn blowers are left at full-time.’

As we were finishing up with the last post, my mum came to the front door. She was pregnant with my sister at the time and was wearing a pale-blue t-shirt, pyjama pants and slippers. Her hair was tied in a ponytail and the loose strands were tucked behind her ears.

‘Are the men ready for their breakfast yet?’ She had spatter marks over the front of her shirt from the bacon fat and her forearms were marked by little red splotches.

‘You bet your life they are,’ my dad told her. ‘Aren’t we, Tiger?’ I felt his hand come to rest on top of my head. ‘Breakfast of champions,’ he said, giving my hair a ruffle. ‘Isn’t that right, Tiger?’

I nodded and felt his hand slide down the back of my head, past the spot where I’d had the number 13 shaved the day before. It was the number of my favourite player. My dad had taken me to the barber’s specially. Against my mum’s wishes he’d got the barber to shave a figure 8 into his own head. His hand settled at the base of my neck now and he gave my shoulder a light squeeze.

‘Well, come on, then,’ my mum said. ‘Before the flies get in.’ She held the screen door open for us. It was a warm morning, late in September. The ornamental plum trees along the footpath were just beginning to blossom and the tin on the roof made a ticking sound as the sun heated it.

We’d just begun moving toward the front door, my dad with his hand still at the base of my neck, when a yellow Falcon sedan slowed on the street directly out front. The driver pressed on his horn: five short blasts, with the sixth flattening into a long dead note that must have lasted a good four or five seconds. All three of us turned.

‘Great, so now we’ve got to put up with idiots like this all day, do we?’ my mum said.

I felt my dad’s hand lift away from my neck and, when I looked up, he was sticking his middle finger up at the driver of the car.

‘Go on!’ he yelled. ‘Rack off back to Canberra, ya parasite.’

‘Rodney!’ my mum said.

The driver let out another blast as the car ed by the bottom of our driveway, this one even longer than the previous.

‘Ringworm!’ my dad yelled. He stumbled forward then, like he’d been shoved from behind by some drunk, invisible friend, and hurled his bottle in the direction of the car. It sailed out from beneath the veranda with beer spiralling from the open top like petrol from a Molotov cocktail and exploded on the road just behind the car.

‘Rodney! What the hell are you doing, Rodney!’ my mum said.

The car’s brake lights came on.

My dad didn’t answer back. His nostrils were drawn together as if he were sucking in a great amount of oxygen. His blue eyes looked pale and hard.

‘Quick,’ my mum said. ‘Inside. Now. Before you really start something.’

But my dad wasn’t having any of it. He stood his ground, the vein in the side of his neck bulging like a garden hose with a kink in it.

The car’s reverse lights came on.

‘David, over here now,’ my mum said to me. ‘Quick smart.’

I was standing next to my dad. He had his hands on his hips and I put my hands on my hips too. We were both wearing our jerseys. We both had our favourite players’ numbers shaved into the backs of our heads. On my bottom half, I was wearing the team shorts, black with an orange stripe down each leg. My dad was wearing jeans and thongs. The other team wore white shorts with a yellow and blue stripe on each leg. Their jerseys were the colour of Milo tins, while ours were black and orange, the colour of ferocious animals. Neither my dad nor I moved.

‘David!’ my mum said again. ‘Over here. Right this minute!’

I heard the screen door clap shut behind me and the scuff of her slippers on the polished concrete. She took me by the arm. I tried grabbing hold of my dad’s hand, but she yanked me clear of him. She held me just above the elbow, gripping me tightly with her long fingers.

On the street out front, the yellow car stayed where it was. A white car heading in the same direction slowed as it came up alongside our front gate and the woman in the enger seat craned her neck to look up at the decorations on our veranda. She waved excitedly and pointed through the windscreen at the little black and orange flag attached to the aerial of their car. We had one on our car too. As did half the people driving around town. The other half had Raiders flags. They were giveaways with Saturday’s newspaper. For a moment it seemed as though this second car was going to come to a stop behind the yellow one. But it pulled slowly out onto the other side of the street and continued on, the woman peering back at us with an apologetic look on her face.

Speaking very softly, my mum said, ‘Rodney, think about what you’re doing.’ She placed her free hand in the middle of my dad’s back then, like she were calming a horse or something. She said his name again. ‘Rodney? You haven’t had anything to eat yet. Come on, Rodney. Come inside and have your bacon and eggs. Before they get cold. I’ll put the kettle on, Rodney.’

My dad didn’t budge. It was grand final day. You didn’t mess around with coffee on grand final day. Even I knew this. Not when you’d waited a whole year for this day to come about – the opportunity to make right the previous year’s loss.

My mum tried shifting her hand up onto my dad’s shoulder. But he shied away from her. I felt her fingernails dig in above my elbow.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘That’s just fine, that is.’

She began marching me towards the front door, her left hand wrapped around my left arm. It was an awkward way of moving and I stumbled as she dragged me along, half beside her, half in front, and I kept tripping over my own feet, over her feet too, but she moved me on regardless, and when we got to the door she opened it and pushed me in ahead, before finally letting go. She came through herself then, forcing the door closed against the will of the strut at the top.

‘Stay out there, then!’ she called back through the door. ‘See if I care!’

She began making her way down the hallway towards the kitchen. I could feel

her nails digging into my skin even after she’d let go. She used the wall to help her through the narrow gap where the telephone table stuck out on one side. At the kitchen doorway, she stopped and pivoted all the way back around. It was like a car trying to perform a three-point turn in a narrow laneway. When she was right around, she took her hand away from the wall and pointed her index finger at me.

‘And as for you and that ridiculous haircut—’

I didn’t wait to hear what she had to say next. I grabbed the handle and pushed the door open to get back out there with my dad. His hair was darker than mine and, from where I was standing, the whiteness of his scalp showed the number 8 as if it were written in chalk on a blackboard.

‘David!’ my mum smacked her hand against the wall, causing a photo frame to jump off its hook and slide down the plasterboard. It was a picture of the two of them on their wedding day. My dad wore a velvet bowtie and her a big floppy, see-through hat that looked like something a beekeeper might wear. ‘Back! Now! Right now!’

I waited for my dad to turn around and issue some overriding command, like he’d done with the haircut, laughing about it with Morry the barber while my mum sat furiously in the seat by the door. His attention was on the Falcon now, though, not me. And so I had no option but to do as she told me, stepping back into the hallway until I could no longer see my dad on the veranda. I made sure I could still see the Falcon, though. It hadn’t gone anywhere. It was sitting in the middle of the road with its reverse lights on and its tail end blocking our neighbours’ driveway.

‘Keep coming,’ my mum said, drawing me further back into the house. ‘Idiot

wants to ruin grand final day for himself, well, that’s up to him. But he can do it by himself. Do you hear me?’ she raised her voice. ‘I said, you can do it by your bloody self!’

That’s when he came into view again. He’d jumped down off the veranda and was making his way across the front yard, paying no attention to my mum whatsoever. His arms swung stiffly by his side. When he reached the dirt path that ran from the centre of the veranda to the front gate, he lifted the gate’s latch and went to step through. My mum let out an incomprehensible scream, causing him to swing his head back over his shoulder. I don’t know how much he could have seen as it was very bright outside and I was standing in the darkened hallway behind the flyscreen door, but I raised my hand to him like I were toasting some great victory that had or hadn’t yet occurred. I wanted him to know that I was with him either way. My mum grabbed hold of my hand on her way past and threw it back down against my side.

She bundled herself out onto the veranda then, slamming the door behind her with enough force that it skipped its latch and bounced open again. I caught it on the bounce, holding it slightly ajar. She was eight-months pregnant and carrying a lot of weight. With each step, the heels at the back of her slippers flattened out and turned white. I stood with my nose pressed against the flyscreen. It smelt like bacon fat mixed with dust. Using one of the decorated posts for , she lowered herself down off the veranda and onto the pathway.

Dad, look out! I thought to yell. But when I opened my mouth nothing came.

As it turned out, she wasn’t going for my dad anyway. She barged straight past him, kicked the gate the rest of the way open and tramped out onto the footpath.

It was my dad who went after her then. She moved quickly too, like the

pregnancy was nothing. When he caught up, he tried putting himself between her and the Falcon and she hit at him with the flat of her palm. The hair that’d been tucked behind her ears a few moments earlier hung over her face now. It hung in her eyes. She hit my dad in the cheek. She was like a front-row forward, palming defenders off as she went. My dad moved sideways to block her again. She stumbled down off the lip of the gutter. I thought she was going to fall right over, but she managed to stay on her feet. One of her slippers came off. My dad bent down and picked it up and handed it back and she hit him with it. He put his hands up to protect himself. All the while, he kept looking back over his shoulder to see what was going on with the yellow Falcon. Nothing was going on with the yellow Falcon. It stayed right where it was. I stayed right where I was.

When it finally became clear to my mum that, despite her best efforts, she was not going to get past my dad, she hurled her slipper in the direction of the car. It landed on the car’s boot.

‘Get away from here!’ she yelled. ‘Get away from our house! Leave us alone!’

The car’s reverse lights went out.

‘Go, I said! Go on, go! Get out! Get out!’

The brake lights disappeared then and the car began moving off. It moved slowly at first. After two or three houses, though, the driver dropped his foot and squealed the tyres. My mum’s slipper lay motionless in the middle of the road, like somebody’s flattened cat.

Rather than going to pick it up, she circled back around. She was breathing heavily and on the verge of tears. My dad reached out to put a hand on her belly, as if to make sure she was alright. She slapped it away. Her foot was bleeding from the broken glass all over the road. She didn’t bend to pick the pieces out. Instead, she march-limped back along the footpath, through the gate and toward the house. When she got to the veranda, she reached out and took hold of one of the posts and used it to pull herself up onto the cement. I pushed the screen door open and held it for her.

Just as she was ing me, a ute with an orange and black flag attached to its aerial came up alongside my dad. He was still standing in the middle of the road where my mum had left him. The enger, a young man with a can of beer in his hand and no shirt, leaned his bare torso out through the open window so that he could high-five my dad on his way past.

‘Up the Tigers!’ he cheered, foamy beer spilling from the top of his can as their palms slapped together. The ute sped off again then, with the young man still leaning out of the window.

With his hand raised high in the air, my dad stayed where he was until the ute had made its way to the bottom of the street and turned off. Slowly, he lowered his arm again and looked back toward the house. I don’t know how much he could see from down there, but I stood inside the doorway looking out at him with my hand at the back of my neck. There were bloodied heel prints all over the cement, and an orange streamer, which had come loose as my mum was pulling herself back up off the dirt path, lay coiled in a heap at the bottom of its post. A sign, I suppose, of the disappointment that was still to come.

Matrimonial Property

It’s a Sunday night and you’re holed up in your classroom re-reading the letter your wife’s solicitor sent you. You’re wearing your work clothes. Not the shirt, slacks and lace-ups you teach in during the week, but the t-shirt, shorts and Dunlop Volleys you wear to do jobs around the house on weekends. It’s been several months since you were last dressed like this. That’s because it isn’t your house anymore. Well, it is and it isn’t. You’re still expected to line up at the bank and post office each fortnight to pay the mortgage and service bills, but are typically only allowed on the actual property itself now when dropping your twin boys off. And even then, you’re prohibited from spending any more time than it takes to sit the overnight bag on the veranda, request a last high-five from the hapless pair, and skulk back up the driveway like a dog that’s had the hose turned on it after being caught rummaging through the garbage bin.

Needless to say, the person wielding this metaphorical hose isn’t your wife anymore either. Or rather, like the house, she is and she isn’t. What you mean to say is that the only person publicly using the phrase your wife these days is this dickhead solicitor she’s hired to take care of the separation. He begins all of his letters the same way: We act on behalf of your wife, Jacqueline Ward, in relation to family law matters. If the mockery of your wife isn’t bad enough, he also uses per centum instead of per cent, matrimonial property instead of house, and dependants instead of sons. Reading his letters makes you wonder whether you shouldn’t be hiring a dickhead of your own, someone to scour the thesaurus for snide exactitudes on your behalf.

You skip the first couple of pages and go straight to the part concerning access to the so-called matrimonial property. You’re looking to see what it says about breaching the of agreement. You know today’s slip-up is going to cost you, but just how much you aren’t sure. Your fear is they’ll use it to cut your paltry one Saturday a fortnight to an even paltrier one Saturday a month. Or, worse still, no Saturdays a month. Pretty much everything that’s been decided in of spending time with your boys relies on you abiding by the rules your wife and her dickhead have set. Rules you agreed upon, ittedly. Although, what were you supposed to do? They had you bent over a barrel following the caravan park

incident. You’d have said yes to a prostate examination with a barbecue brush at that stage.

You stop reading at the phrase legal proceedings and push your way over to the row of windows on the far wall. It’s hot in here. Airless. You need to cool down. To breathe. Conveniently, your chair has wheels. Little roller-skate-sized things that whiz you from one side of the room to the other without you even needing to stand. Somewhat less conveniently, all the windows are equipped with these ridiculous handle-wound chains that prevent them from being opened any further than the five or so centimetres some over-zealous safety inspector has deemed compliant. No sooner do you arrive and start winding than the first handle seizes up. You jerk it back and forth a few times, but it refuses to go any further. You try lifting a leg then and bashing it with your heel. But this is no good either, as each kick just sends you swivelling around in your seat.

Placing your hands on the timber sill, you hoist yourself up out of the chair and onto your feet. Some smart-aleck student has used the pointy end of their com to engrave the lacquered surface with a love heart containing two sets of initials: yours and Miss You-Know-As-Well-As-They-Know-Who-Else’s. The way things get around in this place, you think. And not just this school either, but this town, this community, this fucking cosmos. It’s enough to leave you feeling light in the head. And not for the first time today. In an effort to steady yourself, you lean forward and press your face to the glass in front of you. It isn’t as cold as you’d like it to be – or rather, as you need it to be – but you’re grateful for the all the same. You almost died today.

It happened while you were standing on the top rung of the ladder, painting the gutter along the rear-side of the house. The aluminium brace ing the two front legs buckled on the uneven ground and sent the apparatus stumbling forward like a giraffe with a gunshot wound to the neck. Dropping the brush and four-litre tin of Solagard, you managed to keep the lanky creature from going over completely by grabbing hold of the nearby downpipe and clinging on for dear life. Which, for the next minute or so, is how you stayed. Too embarrassed

to call to the neighbours for help and too weak to haul yourself up over the eave and onto the roof. No option but to close your eyes, grip on tightly, and pray your wife wouldn’t arrive home ahead of schedule to kick the final leg out from under you.

But you’re being unfair now. Even you have to it so. You’re not saying you’re thrilled with the way your wife’s been treating you of late – far from it – but she didn’t just boot you out of the house for no good reason, did she? No, she didn’t. Rather, she found out about the affair you were having with the twentytwo-year-old home economics teacher brought in on a maternity-leave contract back in February. A girl fresh out of university and capable of turning you from bandy and keen to withered and regretful in less time than it used to take the microwave sitting at the front of her classroom to shrivel your lunchtime leftovers. And now, on of this indiscretion, she’s decided she wants the house on the market by Christmas. Your wife, that is (the substitute hasn’t spoken a word to you since the morning after the caravan park incident when you called her a vampire and accused her of ‘really fucking things up for you this time’). Hence the reason you were permitted back on the property this weekend: a moratorium on your ban to satiate the real estate agent she’s hired to take care of the sale. According to this slightly different breed of dickhead, cosmetic improvements make all the difference, which, as far as aphorisms go, doesn’t do nearly enough to for the tightness of his pants nor the half a bucket of gel he uses to style his hair. But then, as has been made perfectly clear to you on multiple occasions, it hardly matters what you think now, does it?

Disregarding the agreed-upon time of 9:30 a.m., you arrived just after eight o’clock yesterday morning to discover the place deserted. You’d been hoping to discover your wife and sons still busy getting their things together for their weekend away in the big smoke (where else would she be taking them but to spend the night with her psychologising sister and her psychologising sister’s artistic director girlfriend?). The perfect opportunity for you to swoop in and put on a dashing demonstration of husbandly congeniality and fatherly know-how. Nothing more devious than accidentally mixing up your times.

Only, it wasn’t to play out like that. Sensing your plan, your wife had made an even earlier getaway, leaving you with nothing but an empty driveway and envelope sticky-taped to the back door. Slipping your pinkie in behind one of the sealed corners, you splayed it open to reveal a key to the garage along with a list of outdoor jobs needing to be taken care of. Beneath the list – and separated by way of sternly underlined capital letters and not one but three exclamation marks – was a final, emphatic instruction: DO NOT ENTER THE HOUSE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!!

Like a good soon-to-be-ex-husband, you spent all of yesterday doing as you were instructed. You weeded the garden beds, pressure-washed lichen from the roof tiles, gouged moss from between pavers with a flat-head screwdriver, whipper-snipped along the driveway and fencelines, scraped flaking paint from the gutters and fascia boards in preparation for a fresh coat today, and all WITHOUT ENTERING THE HOUSE!!! You weren’t even tempted. God’s honest truth. Not the slightest bit.

That was yesterday. Today, though. Today, things went differently.

After almost breaking your neck on the ladder, you found yourself seized by this sort of reckless, dread-type, who-gives-a-fuck sort of feeling and decided you’d go inside after all. Whose name was it on the mortgage anyway, huh? Let the solicitor have his ever-efficient secretary make a note of that small but not inconsequential detail so that it too might be officially documented and filed away up his arse for posterity’s sake.

Using your thumbnail to turn the little button-shaped lock, you entered through the single-latch sliding door separating the garage from the laundry. Past the washer-dryer combo and into the hallway you crept. The curtains were all drawn. The toys all basketed. Even the walls looked packed away – bare but for the dozen or so brass-plated hooks showing the spots where the most precious of your family memories once hung. You wondered if this was the real estate

agent’s doing as well, or whether it was part of some husband-cleansing ritual your wife had undertaken at the expert advice of that all-knowing, know-alling sister of hers.

No time for speculation, though. You were here for facts, for details, for information – for your wife’s diary, ultimately. Forget her dickheads and their carefully worded correspondences, the diary was the key to understanding the situation as it truly was. Or, at least, as your wife believed it truly to be. From her deepest disappointments to her highest elations, there was no experience so emotionally perilous that she wouldn’t return to it during these nightly ruminations of hers. You used to read such entries without her knowing all the time when you were still together. It was how you kept abreast of things, navigated those tumultuous marital seas, so to speak. And you never once felt guilty about it either. You figured it was something all married couples did. Almost like a kind of intimacy thing. But this was most definitely not that. This was something altogether different. The time for intimacy had ed. Your wife had made sure of that. This was purely strategic. Targeted. A reconnaissance mission to find out what she knew, what she didn’t know, when she knew it, and what she planned to do with all of this acquired knowledge.

A short shoe-shuffle later and you were standing at the doorway to your old bedroom. The paint was beginning to coagulate in the hairs along your forearms and calves now, while at the crown of your head, the blood had twisted the curls into tight little, spiky little tufts that pulled at your scalp like stitches. You’d taken a bit of a spill alright, bringing the gutter down with you as you crashed through the potato vine-ing latticework on your return to earth. All things considered, though, you were alive and thus in relatively good shape.

Easing the door open with your right hand, you reached for the light switch with your left and illuminated the room.

For a second, you thought you’d entered the wrong house. Things were not as

you ed. Sitting smack-bang in the middle of the room, for instance, was a piece of furniture you’d never before laid eyes upon. An expensivelooking piece of furniture too – what, with its dimpled upholstered headboard and gold-coloured feet and ruffled satin quilt cover. Certainly a far cry from the pine-framed variety it’d replaced, that was for sure. Not to mention, an even farer cry from the springless, PVC-protected rectangles of foam they’ve used to deck out the cabins at the caravan park where you’ve been staying of late.

So, this was where your child- payments were going, was it? On lavish spending sprees down at the new Harvey Norman store? Just what exactly was she taking you for, this so-called wife of yours – some sort of never-ending trust fund that she could publicly relinquish only to continue drawing from in private whenever it so suited her? The duplicity of it, you thought as you stepped forward into the room. To demand total honesty from you and then turn around and do something like this herself. Because that was exactly what you’d given her in the end, by the way: total honesty. My word you had. Confessing (against your better judgement) that not all of your dalliances with the substitute had taken place in the home economics classroom during lunch and after school as previously testified. But rather, that on one regrettable occasion, a Friday morning when you knew she and the boys were at playgroup, you’d smuggled the twenty-two-year-old in through the automatic garage door during a free period you both shared – damn near accelerating through the brick wall and out the other side of the house when she leered up at you from the front engerside floor space and told you she wanted to be taken inside and fucked like a schoolgirl on lunchtime detention. Had your wife thought it was easy for you to detail such behaviour? To subject past ions to the sort of postmortem procedures that would reduce even the most hot-blooded copulater to a mere blue-lipped cadaver?

Crouching at the bed’s side, you slipped your paint-spattered, blood-spattered hand into the space between the bottom of the mattress and the fauxleatherupholstered side rail and began feeling around. Sure enough, there it was: the diary. Pulling it out and flipping the pages open, you began reading:

July 4: I suspect my husband is cheating on me.

July 5: I suspect my husband is cheating on me.

July 6: I suspect…

What it lacked in novelty, it made up for in accuracy. You closed the cover again and sat down on the edge of the bed. It may have been the trauma of your neardeath experience intermingling with the diary’s content, but the whole expedition suddenly felt more invasive than intimate. Almost like your being there in the first place, inside the house you’d been explicitly told not to be inside, amounted to nothing more than another breach of trust. At which point, there was nothing for it but for you to lie down and cry. Sobbing your big shameful tears into her new pillowcase so that she might smell the dried-up regret in her sleep and go on to have sympathetic, forgiving dreams about you.

You must have drifted off fairly quickly after that because the next thing you knew it was dark outside and you could hear the squeal of the automatic roller door opening. Your first thought upon waking was an irrational one: the substitute! What the hell was she doing here? In your house! On a Sunday! Was she crazy? Out of her fucking mind? It was one thing for her to be showing up at the caravan park in the middle of the night to lure you away from the cabin where your boys were sleeping and over to the communal shower block, creating a situation where Marg and Barry, the park’s operators, had felt the need to call the police, who, were ‘just following protocol’, when they’d likewise felt the need to Child Services, who, not wanting to miss out on the fun – because why give up the opportunity to kick someone when they’re down? – had subsequently felt it necessary to inform your wife of the situation so that she might feel the need to organise for her dickhead of a dickhead to draft up this Australian Child Custody Agreement document thing that you had no option but to sign, which is about as far as you got with this irrational line of thinking. Because no sooner did the image of the substitute appearing in the bedroom

doorway dressed in a tartan tunic two sizes too small pop into your head than she was forced back into hiding by the more rational sounds of a four-cylinder Toyota Camry being driven into a garage, a handbrake being pulled on, and a roller door squealing closed again.

It was the echo of shoes on polished concrete after that. Then, briefly, shoes on ceramic tiles. Before, finally, and more mutedly, shoes on short-weave woolblend carpet. You could tell by the weight and rhythm of the steps that your wife was not going to be very happy to find you lying on her new bed covered in blood and paint with her diary still tucked under your arm. And you were right: she wasn’t. Naturally, you tried explaining. First about the accident and the way you’d just lain there, for a good thirty seconds or more, staring up at the sky and not knowing whether you were alive or dead, but secondly and more importantly …

Only, she wasn’t interested in your explanations or excuses. Not any of them. She was interested in snatching the cordless phone from its charging dock at the end of the hallway and racing back out to the garage to lock herself in the car with your two sons. In refusing to unlock the door no matter what you threatened to do with the garden utensil in your hand. In calling the police and speaking loudly and hysterically enough for you to hear every word she was saying to them. Using stock phrases like ‘Out of his mind!’ and ‘For God’s sake, hurry!’ At which point you realised that, like the evening of the caravan park incident, she was beyond reason. That the only sensible thing for you to do in response was to put the spade down, collect your car keys and depart the matrimonial property.

Which brings you more or less to now: holed up in your classroom on a Sunday night with your work clothes on and your hair full of blood, questioning whether she even had them on the phone in the first place or whether it wasn’t just a big bluff to get you out of the house. Because if that’s what it was, then you have to hand it to her, this so-called wife of yours, she’s a cunning bit of gear alright – a real operator. Certainly capable of getting by without this grab-bag of dickheads

she’s gone and got herself involved with anyway, that much is for sure.

Three Cheers for Homo Erectus

It’s recess and the boys are hanging around outside the Year 8 homeroom, throwing Cheezels at one another. The girls are sitting nearby. Naturally enough, the boys are trying to impress the girls by seeing who can pull off the most ridiculous catch using only their mouths. One of the boys, the boy who is me, is midway through a reverse spin-catch when he spots the boy they all dislike plodding across the quadrangle. He sounds the alarm: ‘Arses to the wall, Homo Erectus on the crawl!’

The boy they all dislike has been their classmate since kindergarten and, nine years on, they’re still inventing new ways to make fun of him. Homo Erectus is just the latest instalment.

To cut a long story short, the boy they all dislike got an erection while dancing with one of the girls in P.E. Of course, he’s not the only boy who gets erections when dancing with the girls in P.E. The boy who is me gets them too. And not just when he’s dancing with the girls in P.E. but at all sorts of inopportune moments, such as when he’s sitting on the school bus, or when he’s staring at the naked woman on the cardiovascular poster in the science lab, or when he’s listening to the teacher read lewd ages from Looking for Alibrandi in English class. Really, the only difference between the boy who is me and the boy they all dislike is that the boy who is me has been clever enough to figure out how to hide his erections by tucking them into the waistband of his shorts. If the boy they all dislike isn’t smart enough to do the same, then he deserves to be made fun of, thinks the boy who is me.

The other boys must think so too. Without a moment’s hesitation, they chime in with the refrain. ‘Arses to the wall, Homo Erectus on the crawl! Arses to the wall, Homo Erectus on the crawl!’

More often than not, teasing like this is enough to send the boy they all dislike

running to his hiding spot in the library or, if the library is closed, then to the disabled toilet which can be locked from the inside or, if the disabled toilet is being used by one of the non-disabled cleaners, then to the bench beneath the staffroom window where he is protected by the invisible force field of aggregated teacherly mass. Not this day, though. On this day, something gets into the boy they all dislike and, changing direction, he begins marching towards the other boys. He doesn’t stop until he’s standing just a metre or so from where the boy who is me has backed himself up against one of the brick pylons.

‘Careful,’ a boy taking refuge on a different pylon warns, ‘he might try poking your eye out with that thing.’

All the boys, including the boy who is me, laugh.

‘Oy, no pole-vaulting in the quad,’ a different boy calls.

All the boys, including the boy who is me, laugh again.

The boys are thirteen and fourteen years old and very good at amusing themselves. Even some of the girls sitting nearby can’t help themselves and begin sniggering along. The boys can never be too sure about the girls. One minute they find the teasing every bit as funny as the boys do, the next they’re feeling sorry for the boy they all dislike and trying to defend him.

Seeing the smirks on their faces now, though, is all the encouragement the boy who is me needs to throw in with another jibe.

‘What’s the matter Homo Erectus? You look confused. Has all the blood left your brain and gone to your dick again?’

The boy they all dislike’s jaw tightens and his neck muscles stiffen.

‘That isn’t my name,’ he says, his vocal cords as taut as the rest of his body.

All the boys including the boy who is me make a woooo sound as people often do when they’re pretending to find something scary that isn’t the least bit scary.

‘I’m not joking!’ the boy they all dislike stamps his foot. ‘I’ve had enough. Stop calling me that now. Or else!’

But reactions like this are the reason the boys like making fun of the boy they all dislike so much in the first place. What does the boy they all dislike not understand about this very simple principle? wonders the boy who is me.

Of course, the boy who is me could use this opportunity to help the boy they all dislike by taking him aside and explaining this fairly simple fact of life. But why should he? He’s not the boy they all dislike’s father. If the boy they all dislike can’t figure this out for himself, then he deserves to be made fun of, thinks the boy who is me.

So, instead of helping the boy they all dislike, the boy who is me continues making fun of him.

‘Or else what?’ he says. ‘Or else you’ll infect us all with your Homo Erectus stiffy?’

It’s a moment of unscripted genius for the boy who is me. The rhyming of infect us with erectus. He can’t believe his luck. For this gift of poetry to have come on so unintentionally and so publicly. Today must be the boy who is me’s day, thinks the boy who is me.

The other boys take to the rhyme like fish to the dish. ‘Homo Erect-us trying to infect us! Homo Erect-us trying to infect us!’

Perhaps this would be a good point for the boy who is me to leave off. To step back into the fold and let somebody else take their turn. Bask in the glory of his artistry. Be celebrated as the legend who coined this brilliant refrain.

But the boy who is me does not step back. He’s never been the most popular boy in the group. Nor the best at coming up with insults – a skill that is prized very highly by the group. There are others who have a natural flair for such things. A gift. The boy who is me’s gift has always been ing these others, whooping and laughing at their abilities, encouraging them to reach new heights with their insult-making. Which, in itself, is an important component of the group’s dynamic, the boy who is me intuitively understands. At this moment, though, the boy who is me can’t help but think that maybe this is about to change. That maybe this is the moment at which he’ll ascend to some higher, previously unattainable order of popularity.

Enjoying his newfound confidence, the boy who is me responds to the call. He puts his hand in the front of his shorts and, with his forefinger pushing out against the underside of the shiny fabric, performs a crude imitation of the boy they all dislike. The other boys caw and slap thighs. The girls shriek and point at

the outward-poking digit. What a comedian, what an entertainer, is this boy who is me.

Needless to say, this only makes the boy they all dislike angrier. His shoulders begin heaving up and down with his breathing. He reminds the boy who is me of the machine that explodes at the end of every mad-scientist movie ever. The one that starts overheating and bursting its pipes, steam whistling from its broken valves as people evacuate the building in a panic, screaming, ‘Run for your lives! It’s gonna blow!’

Dropping his shoulder, the boy they all dislike charges at the boy who is me like somebody charging at a door they want to bust down. The boy who is me manages to jump out of the way – just – as the boy they all dislike crashes into the schoolbags hanging from a line of hooks on the wall.

All the boys, except the boy who is me and the boy they all dislike, make a woooo sound. Only, this one is different from the one before. The one before was tactical, a conscious attempt to antagonise the boy they all dislike. This one is spontaneous and unmediated, a primal reaction to the sudden escalation in drama. Things just took a serious turn, understands the boy who is me, as the possibility of a fight rings through the air with all the excitement of a fire alarm.

The boy who is me has never been in a fight before. For the boy who is me, the trick has always resided in knowing just how far to push the boy they all dislike before ing the baton onto one of the other more popular boys. The truth of the matter is that he’s afraid of fighting, this boy who is me. What if he gets punched? What if he has to punch the other person? But of course he will have to punch and/or be punched. He’s seen other boys in fights and can’t recall a single time when they didn’t punch and/or be punched. But what if he’s not as good at it as them? But of course he won’t be as good at it as them. He knows what he’s good at, and that’s cheering on the other more popular boys. So why can’t he just go back to doing what he’s good at? Why?

Because the other boys don’t want him to, that’s why. They want to see a fight. Listen to them: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’

Fight! Fight! Fight! is the worst possible thing they could be chanting, thinks the boy who is me. He knows, from first-hand experience, the magic of this word. Repeated over and over and over again, in this particular rhythm, the word fight can make something of nothing. Turn the most innocuous slur into a wrestling match that the female duty teacher can’t dismantle without sending for help from the male P.E. teacher. It’s a thrilling and miraculous word when you’re the one using it to shove the drama along. But a terrifying and subsuming one when it’s you who’s being shoved along by it.

‘Smack him in the face,’ one of the more popular boys yells.

Yes, thinks the boy who is me.

‘Kick his faggot arse,’ a second popular boy yells.

Huh? thinks the boy who is me.

‘Quick – before the teacher comes!’ a third popular boy yells.

But the boy who is me wishes, more than anything, that the teacher would come. He scans the playground, hoping to see the teacher, but she’s nowhere in sight. His eyes fall on the boy they all dislike again, who appears to be gearing himself

up for another shoulder charge.

It shouldn’t surprise the boy who is me to find himself in this predicament. Every six months or so, the boy they all dislike gets sick of running from his tormentors and decides that his only option is to stick up for himself. Typically, such decisions end very badly for the boy they all dislike. But only because, unlike the boy who is me, the boy they all dislike has almost no sense of his own capabilities, of whom he should and shouldn’t be fighting. He doesn’t stand a chance against the more popular boys he usually ends up fighting. The reason they’re popular in the first place is because they’re physically superior. The boy who is me knows this. His position and acceptance within the group is predicated upon acknowledgement and respect of their physical superiority. Was he, even for a second, to behave like he was unaware of his secondary status, then he too would find himself being heckled from across the quadrangle, goaded into fighting by them. For the boy they all dislike not to understand this makes him deserving of their mistreatment, thinks the boy who is me.

But …

‘Wait a minute!’ the boy who is me hears himself cry. This trembling fear that has taken over his voice and his breathing, he wishes he could push it back down inside himself, tuck it into some sort of emotional waistband where the others couldn’t see it. But he can’t. ‘No, I don’t want to fight!’ he tells them.

Needless to say, the others no longer care what he does or doesn’t want. They only care about what they want. And they want a fight. Not the avoidance of a fight. The avoidance of a fight is the last thing they want in this feverish state of theirs. They’ve willed this moment into existence through sheer collective desire. For it not to happen because of the boy who is me’s fear would be a devastation, an emasculation, a castration of the group’s spirit.

With the boy who is me doing his best to ruin the moment for all the other boys, the group has no option but reconsider their allegiances and apply their efforts elsewhere.

‘He’s chickening out!’ one of them says.

‘Pussy!’ another of them says.

‘Get him, Homo Erectus!’ a third throws in.

The boy who is me cannot believe what’s happening to him. He’s never been the most popular boy in the group, true, but he’s always been loyal and deferent to those who are, those at the top. He’s stood by them and ired their physical superiority. Done what little he could to facilitate their physical accomplishments. Chuckled and cheered and chanted as they’ve taken their turns, one by one over the years, at beating up this boy they all dislike. Such beatings have become a veritable rite of age. And while the boy who is me has never wanted to be the one aging, he’s ired them all the same for their commitment to the enterprise. And this is how they repay him, by turning on him?

I don’t deserve this, thinks the boy who, as their circle begins to close in around him, is me.

Bass Minx

‘Sorry? What’s that you were saying?’ she says as she reaches into her makeup bag for the tube of shimmer cream. ‘That you don’t like me parading myself, was it?’ She has to speak loudly just to hear herself over the stereo. It’s a song she taped off the radio by the new artist Bass Minx. It’s called ‘Pound Me with Your Bass’ or something like that. Its main refrain goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. It’s catchy as fuck. She gives the tube a good shake in time with the music to force what’s left down to the capped end. It’s expensive, this shit, but she’s tried the cheaper one and it was fucking useless, so what’s she supposed to do? Squeezing a good glob out onto her hand, she begins rubbing it over the area above her tits. She has B-sized tits, but by pushing them together and forcing them into an undersized bra like she’s done, she can make them look like Cs – or Ds even, depending on the lighting. ‘And why’s that, I wonder?’ she continues on. ‘Is it because you’re jealous that you can’t have me?’ She tosses the tube back into the bag, steps away from the mirror and turns side on. ‘Yeah, well, guess what, arsehole?’ The singlet top is sparkly, the tits are sparkly, the skirt and boots are sparkly; the whole thing is just how she wants it – sparkly. ‘I couldn’t give a fanny full of fucks what you think!’

At about twenty past nine, the phone rings. She sits her drink on the carpet between her feet and picks up the receiver.

‘About time! Where the fuck are you already?’ she says. There’s no response. Her expression changes. ‘Go swallow yourself, Tim!’ she yells into the mouthpiece. Then quickly hangs up.

Less than ten seconds later it rings again. She stares at it this time, letting it go for five or six rings, before slowly lifting it to her ear and holding her breath and not saying anything.

‘Hello?’ the voice on the other end says. ‘Kat? Are you there?’

The muscles in her shoulders loosen. ‘So, it’s you after all, you bitch.’

‘I don’t know what happened. It dropped out. Must have been a crossed line or something.’

‘Where the hell are you? It’s already after nine. Now we’re going to have to pay. I told you I don’t have any money. Why can’t you ever be on time?’

‘I had to stop at the servo and get fuel. Then I ed I didn’t have my licence and so had to go back to Tony’s. I’m just leaving Tony’s now. I’ll be there soon, okay? I’ll beep when I get there.’

‘Yeah, whatever. Just hurry the fuck up, would you?’

She puts the phone back on the hook. It’s Simone, not Tim. She’s relieved it’s Simone and not Tim. Tim’s a real prick. And not in a ha-ha way either. Like, one time, he went ballistic and poured bleach all over her clothes while she was at work because he found out about her talking to some guy outside the kebab shop after the pub closed. Another time, he found out about a guy she’d been with when she was still in high school for fuck’s sake! and rang her parents from the phone booth outside her house and told them what a slut she was, yelling it loud enough that she could hear everything.

Picking her drink up, she goes into the bathroom, drops her underpants and sits

on the toilet, swigging from the bottle as she empties her bladder. She’s been waiting for Simone for almost an hour now. Jesus, that bitch Simone is always late, she thinks. Holding the bottle neck between her teeth, she scrunches a fistful of toilet paper together, dries herself, hoists her underpants back up and flushes the toilet. There’s a pair of fluffy pink slippers lying on the floor next to the overflowing hamper of clothes. They look like pink monster feet or something. She kicks one of them on her way back past into the lounge room where she collects her keys and purse and leaves through the front door.

It’s cold outside. The radio said it was supposed to rain, but it isn’t raining. It’s just cold. Fuck the radio, she thinks. Fuck Tim and fuck the radio.

Not long after, Simone pulls up in front of her flat.

‘So, there you are, you bitch,’ she says.

Simone beeps the horn as if she hasn’t already spotted her.

‘Yes, yes, I see you. Hold your fucking horses.’ She drinks the last mouthful from the bottle and tosses it into the bush separating her place from the neighbour’s place. She high-heels it down the steep driveway then and gets in the enger side of Simone’s car – a red 1.8L job, with a sticker on its back window that says, You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine. Simone’s her friend from work. They’ve been working together in the same crappy Big W store for two and a half years. She hated Simone when Simone first started, but now she thinks she’s okay. Better than the other fuckwits that work in their department anyway, that’s for sure. Fucking Stephanie and fucking Donna, those two fucking piss flaps.

‘Where’ve you been, you bitch?’

Simone waits for her to pull the door closed before responding. ‘For some reason, I always think it’s the one on this side, with the cactus out the front.’

‘What? I said, where the fuck were you? You said you were going to be here at half past. It’s already after nine for fuck’s sake. Now we’re going to have to pay to get in. Not to mention I thought it was Tim ringing me. I swear to God I almost called the cops.’

Simone turns the stereo down. ‘I forgot my licence,’ she says. The stereo is playing the same song Kat was listening to on repeat in her flat while she was getting ready. Something along the lines of ‘I’m Throbbing for You to Pound Me with Your Bass’, with a chorus that goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. It’s one of those songs where there’s really nothing but chorus. Simone goes on: ‘Then I had to go to Tony’s and get it and him and Chris had just done a bowl and he didn’t want me to leave. He wanted me to stay there all night with him instead. He kept saying, “Don’t go, babe, don’t go.”’ She laughs at her own deep-voiced impression of Tony.

Kat doesn’t laugh. Kat says: ‘Jesus, tell that arsehole Tony to suck his own dick.’

Simone laughs again. ‘He was too stoned to suck his own dick. Believe me.’

‘Good. Tell him to suck his own dick stoned. Tell him it’s a t. Tell him to get stoned sucking his own fat reefer dick so that he’ll leave you alone. Maybe you’ll get here on time then.’

Simone stops laughing and goes serious. ‘No, but he was really stoned. Like really, really stoned. I don’t think he would’ve even known which end to suck on.’

Kat scowls. ‘You should be careful of Tony, you know.’

‘Why? Tony’s alright.’

‘Yeah? And what about when he goes ballistic?’

‘He doesn’t do that anymore. He only used to do that when we both got stoned together. And that was only because he hated seeing me stoned. He reckoned it made me look stupid.’

‘You are stupid. What’s your point?’

‘I am not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

Simone presses her lips together sourly and doesn’t say anything.

‘I’m joking for fuck’s sake. Jesus, get a fucking sense of humour, would you?’ Kat says. ‘And besides, saying that doesn’t make him not an arsehole, just so you know. Tim only used to do it when I was too tired to give him any or when he was drunk or stoned, as well. But that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t an arsehole.’

Simone opens her mouth again. ‘What’s your problem? Did you and Tim get back together and then break up again or something? You’re acting kind of shitty.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Well. I’m just saying.’

‘Yeah, and so am I just saying. Besides, I already told you. Jesus. Anyway, can you just stop talking and drive? I’m sick of listening to you. And also I need to stop at the ATM machine. I’ve only got a hundred bucks between now and next Tuesday and I’m supposed to be paying my rent with that – so thanks very much.’

‘Why’s that my fault?’

‘Because you’re always fucking late!’

‘Well, why don’t you get your own car, then?’

‘Well, why don’t you shut your cockhole and just drive us there, already?’

Simone pulls away from the gutter without saying anything more. They drive to the end of the street, up over the hill and then back down the hill in silence. At the bottom of the hill, they go around a bit of a bend. There’s a Mobil service station at the end of it. Simone pulls into the servo too fast, crunching the bottom of the car against the concrete lip of the driveway. Neither of them says anything. Kat hops out and goes inside to get some money from the ATM machine. She gets out eighty bucks. The balance on the receipt says $19.12. The guy sitting behind the sees her looking at the receipt and says, ‘Hey, do you know Tim Gibbo?’ ‘Why?’ she says, turning to look at him. The radio in the servo is playing the same song that was playing in Simone’s car. A song called ‘Just Hurry the Fuck Up and Plug Me with Your Bass, Big Boy’ or something, that goes Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. He shrugs and doesn’t say anything more. She balls the receipt up like it’s a chewing gum wrapper and tosses it in the little plastic bin next to the ATM machine and goes back out and gets back in the car.

‘Is that Nugget’s brother who works in there?’

‘Nugget who?’ Simone says.

‘Fucking Nugget Nugget.’

‘You mean Nugget Mackenzie?’

‘I don’t know what his fucking surname is. Nugget who used to have the shaved head and used to drive around with Loppy’s older brother all the time and who

everyone used to reckon had a nugget-shaped dick.’

‘Oh, that’s Nugget Smith. Nugget Mackenzie has sort of more longish hair. Or he used to. But I think he’s shaved it too now. I’m not sure.’

Kat grabs the adjustment handle at the side of her seat and pushes the back part back another couple of inches.

‘Yeah, well, whichever Nugget it is, is that his brother that works in there or not?’

Simone dips her head and peers in at the guy sitting behind the counter. He’s eating a Mars bar and watching TV. She lifts her head again.

‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not actually sure if Nugget Smith even has a brother.’

‘Well, then, who is it, then?’ Kat says.

Simone shrugs. ‘I dunno. Why do you want to know anyway?’

‘Because he’s a fucking retard, that’s why. Whoever he is.’

‘Why? What’d he do?’

Kat pulls the lever and makes the chair sit up straight again. Like someone trying to get comfortable while lying in bed but who can’t. ‘He didn’t do anything. Did I say he did anything? Why does everyone have to do something? He’s just a fucking retard. I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about that.’

‘I don’t know why you’re getting pissed off at me. You’re the one that brought it up.’

‘Yeah, and now I want to drop it.’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Good. Fine by me too.’

They leave the servo and drive onward to the main street in silence. The main street’s pretty full. Mostly P-platers sitting on the bonnets of their cars. But some older guys too. She spots an older guy she knows sitting on the bonnet of his silver Commodore with his legs wrapped around some skank she doesn’t know. She makes an unpleasant sound, then reaches down and turns the stereo on Simone’s car up. It’s playing the new Bass Minx song called ‘Don’t Ever Stop Rupturing Me with Your Bass’ or something, that goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass.

There are five pubs in this shit town. Three of them are shit and two of them are okay but still pretty shit depending on how many people are there. The one they’re going to is located at the bottom end of the main street, opposite Video

Ezy. It’s called the Colonial and has a picture of a windmill on it. It didn’t used to cost anything to get in on a Saturday night, but since everyone started going to the Statey first and then showing up to the Colonial afterwards, it now costs five bucks to get in if you arrive after nine, which is bullshit. The two of them have gotten in after nine before without having to pay the cover charge, but tonight there’s some hard-on that they don’t know with a tucked-in polo shirt and a torch working the door and he makes them show their licences and pay the cover charge before stamping their wrists and finally letting them through.

It’s more crowded inside than usual. Even the front area is crowded, which it hardly ever is. They go straight through and out to the back area where the DJ is playing the same song that was playing in Simone’s car on the way in – a song called ‘Obliterate My Arse with Your Bass’ by Bass Minx that goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. A group of girls dancing together on the dance floor, that look about seventeen years old at the most, pretend to obliterate each other’s arses from behind in time with the song. Kat recognises one as this slut that gave Tim a blowjob when they were broken up last time. The girl’s too busy pretending to fuck her other friend’s arse to notice Kat looking at her as they push past and take a seat on one of the vinyl lounges beneath a fluorescent sign on the wall that says DANZ FEEVA.

‘I fucking can’t stand that slut,’ Kat says.

‘Huh?’ Simone says.

‘I said, I fucking hate that fucking cock-polishing slut, Janessa fucking Hislop or whatever her fucking name is.’

‘I can’t hear you,’ Simone raises her voice.

‘What?’ Kat says.

Simone puts her hand to her ear to gesture she can’t hear her properly. ‘I can’t hear you. It’s too loud.’

‘Just forget about it,’ Kat says.

‘What?’ Simone says.

Kat makes an annoyed face and shakes her head.

The two of them sit there for a while. Kat looks around. She sees a guy she knows from Tim. He’s a total fuckwit. She leans across to say something to Simone about him, about what a fuckwit he is. As she’s doing this but, the guy spots her and makes this signal Tim and his friends all used to make where you put your forefinger and middle finger in a V shape over your mouth and then stick your tongue through the gap. She leans back away from Simone without saying anything. She tries ing the guy’s name. She can only his nickname. His nickname is Wristy. For the life of her she can’t what his real name is but. The only real name she can think of is Ricky or Ricko, but she knows this isn’t right because Ricko is this other fuckwit friend of Tim’s whose mum used to sell them weed.

She hits Simone on the thigh with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s go the bar and get a drink,’ she says.

‘Huh?’ Simone says.

‘I said, let’s go to the bar and get a drink,’ she says, raising her voice and making a drinking motion with her hand.

Simone nods.

They get up and go back through into the front area. Normally no one but the old drunks sit in the front area. The old drunks sit in the front area, drinking beer and pissing in their seats and making bets on the TAB. Obviously they don’t all piss in their seats, but some of them literally piss in their seats while sitting at the bar because they’re too fucking fucked to stand up and go to the bathroom. Tonight but, there’s heaps of other people in the front area because of how full the back area is. Who knows what’s happened to all the drunks. Kicked out probably.

Simone and Kat push their way through the crowd to the bar.

Kat sees who’s working behind the bar and says, ‘I fucking hate this slut. She always tries to ignore me whenever I come here.’

It’s a bit quieter in this front part of the pub. Simone responds, ‘Is that the top you got on sale at work?’

‘What?’ Kat says.

Simone grabs the sparkly fabric and rubs it between her fingers. ‘It makes your boobs look enormous,’ she says.

‘Do you like it? Do think it makes my tits look big?’ Kat says.

Simone looks at her like she hasn’t understood or hasn’t heard properly.

After finally getting served by the slut that always tries ignoring Kat when she’s in here, they take their drinks back out into the back area and sit down.

At about one o’clock or something, Simone leans across and says, ‘Do you think I’m stupid when I’m stoned?’

Kat says, ‘Huh?’

Simone says, ‘One time when Tony was jerking himself on me, he was that stoned that he didn’t even know he’d cummed and he just kept on jerking and then when he looked down and saw it all over me he started laughing and called me stupid.’

Kat shakes her head and says, ‘I still can’t fucking hear you.’

Simone doesn’t say anything, she just starts crying.

Kat says, ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you? You’re acting like you’re fucking stoned or something.’

Simone wipes her eyes and doesn’t say anything.

At about two o’clock or something, Tim’s friend Wristy comes over and sits down on the lounge next to Simone. He’s had his eye on Kat for the last couple of hours. She’s been watching him watch her. But not in an obvious way, obviously. Just a quick glance whenever she takes a sip from her glass to make sure he’s still watching. Not so subtle that he wouldn’t notice either but. But more just sort of like normal. He leans across Simone who’s asleep now with her head tipped back and says, ‘Where’s Tim?’

‘What did you say?’ Kat says.

‘I said, where’s Tim?’ he yells.

The DJ is playing the same Bass Minx song from before, a song called ‘Fuck My Tight Arsehole with Your Gigantic Bass Cock Until I Can’t Take It Anymore’ or something, that goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. In a way, it seems like he’s been playing just this same song pretty much all fucking night. The girls that were dancing when Simone and Kat got here are gone now. Probably they got kicked out or something. Fucking underage skanks. The only people on the dancefloor now are these football fuckwits who are moving around the perimeter of the dancefloor in a scrum formation like as if they were playing football. One of them is pretty hot. The rest of them look like a pack of fucking faggots.

Kat says, ‘What the fuck do you want, Wristy?’

Wristy leans further across Simone and, yelling right into Kat’s ear this time, says, ‘I said, where’s Tim?’

‘Tim who?’ she says.

Wristy nods at her with a sort of blank look on his face, the stupid prick. She can tell he has no idea what she said. She watches him trying to think of something else to say. He’s wearing a white t-shirt with the number 22 written across the front. It’s from Big W. They come in all different colours, but they all say 22 on them. 22 what, for fuck’s sake? Who would know? Something happens to the fuckwits on the dancefloor and they all fall over. The hot one yells something out, but she can’t hear because of how loud the music is.

‘I heard you and Tim broke up,’ Wristy finally comes up with. He’s leaning across with his elbow on Simone’s chest for . Simone has no tits whatsoever. Flat as a pancake. Which is why she can’t get anyone better than Tony. Wristy’s breath in Kat’s ear and on her face smells like the dregs in the bottom of a glass of rum and Coke and his eyebrows are all sweaty looking. He’s not as ugly as some of Tim’s other friends, like Ricko for example, but he’s not exactly what you’d call good looking. Tim’s good looking. He’s got a blackened tooth at the front, which he got from a punch-up with his brother Thomas when he was fifteen, but that’s the only thing wrong with him in of looks. Wristy’s nowhere near as good-looking as Tim. Even with his blackened tooth, Tim’s still way better looking than practically all of his friends.

‘Why the fuck are you still here, Wristy?’

Wristy stares at Kat with a happy look on his face. Clearly he doesn’t know what he wants. He tries figuring out what he wants by taking a sip from his schooner glass, but it’s empty. Which seems to confuse him. His head drops forward real suddenly then in a sort of involuntary way, like he’d just nodded off in the middle of looking at his empty glass. The suddenness of it startles him and makes him whip it back up into position again. Some of the sweat in his eyebrows flicks onto Simone’s face. But she doesn’t wake up or anything. At least Kat knows now why she was really late, the stupid bitch.

‘I’m gonna get another drink,’ Wristy says. Or screams really. Because it comes out way louder than anything else he’s said since coming over. With his elbow driven in against Simone’s chest, he pushes himself back up onto his feet. He tries leaning in then but can’t quite coordinate his neck and his knees. He ends up putting one of his hands on Kat’s tit just to keep his balance and the other one, the one holding the empty schooner glass, on Simone’s tit. Or the area where her tit would be if she had any tits anyway. Wristy putting his hand on Kat’s tit seems to catch the attention of the hot guy on the dancefloor. He looks in her direction. He has blonde strawy hair and is wearing pointy boots that go up to his calves like what a cowboy would wear. He does the same signal that Wristy did earlier, with his tongue between his fingers, then starts laughing. It means eating out your pussy, the dirty fucks. She feels the sensation beneath her skirt. His friends are all on the ground, wrestling over the top of one another. Wristy burps, but swallows it. ‘Did you want me to get you one too?’

*

Simone stops the car and lets the two of them out opposite Kat’s place. It’s about four o’clock in the morning or something. Who the fuck would know? Simone shouldn’t even be driving. Even though she’s sobered up she’s probably still too high. She seemed pretty fucking high. Wristy tries picking Kat up and putting her over his shoulder, but he’s too weak to get her off the ground properly and both of them just stumble forward, slamming into the side of Simone’s car.

‘Owww,’ Kat says, putting her hand to the spot on her head that’s just bashed against the car’s door handle.

‘Are you alright, Kat?’ Simone says.

The neighbour’s staffy starts barking at them through the gap between the bottom of the gate and the concrete driveway.

‘I fucking hate that FUCKING DOG,’ Kat responds.

‘Wristy puts his hand on her back. ‘Fuck, are you okay?’ he says.

She stands up straight, her hand still covering the spot on her head.

‘Did you hear me?’ she says. ‘I said, I HOPE YOU GET HIT BY A FUCKING CAR, you barking fuck.’ She bends forward and sticks her head in through the open enger window then. ‘Simone,’ she says. ‘I need you to do me a favour. I need you drive really fast through the neighbours’ gate and run over their FUCKING DOG.’ She starts laughing. Already there’s a lump on her forehead. It’s pretty bad. ‘I’m serious,’ she says. ‘I fucking hate that fucking fuck.’

Simone’s car has a subwoofer in the boot area. The Bass Minx song called ‘FUCK MY TIGHT JUICY ARSE-HOLE WITH YOUR HARD THROBBING BASS COCK LIKE I’M SOME NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOUR BITCH DOG YOU WANT TO RUN OVER IN YOUR CAR YOU FUCKING SLUT FUCK’

or something is playing through it at top volume. It’s making the whole street shake. The road and the houses and everything. It goes, Pound me from behind/ Pound me face-to-face/ Pound me on the dancefloor/ Pound me with your bass. And it just keeps going with that same refrain over and over, so loud that even Kat’s molars hurt from the loudness of it and the over-and-over-and-overness of it. Or maybe they’re hurting from where she bashed her head into the side of Simone’s car. She can’t be sure but she can feel a lump beneath her hand where she’s pressing. Or maybe that’s just from the pounding music. She shuts her eyes and falls asleep with the top half of her body leaning in through the engerside window of Simone’s car.

‘Kat!’ she can hear Simone saying. ‘Wake up!’

She is awake. It takes her a moment to realise. Not to mention Wristy’s decided to help out. He has his arms around her waist and a leg either side of her legs and is trying to tug her back out through the open window like someone trying to win a tug-of-war against a tractor. It takes a few tries because she doesn’t realise he’s trying to get her out at first and because he’s too skinny and weak to budge her on his own. Finally she realises what’s going on and she puts herself into reverse gear and lets herself be pulled back out through the window like it was nothing all along. They both fall over backwards onto the footpath. Wristy’s onto her immediately then, slobbering over her face to start with and then into her shimmery size-B tits that look like size-Cs or -Ds because of how she’s squeezed them into this undersized bra: A+B=C (or D) – a trick she picked up from nobody. Because nobody ever does a fucking thing for her. But she doesn’t care about that because of how into the music she is. It’s this new Bass Minx song, called ‘Tim’s Gonna Go Absolutely Fucking Ballistic When He Hears About This’. It doesn’t have any words in it, just the sound of two animals eating each other alive or something, sampled over the top of this insanely fucking heavy bass track.

A Gift Unwrapped

They’ve been broken up for less than a fortnight when she spots him through the window one evening. Sitting across the road with the headlights dimmed and his eyes fixed straight ahead, he looks like some sort of would-be criminal trying to psych himself into an armed holdup. Her first thought is to phone the police. Only, running through the call in her head, there doesn’t seem any way of having it without going into the whole messy backstory. They’ll want to know why she didn’t call the night of the breakup then. They might even become suspicious she’s making it all up – some bitter ex-girlfriend trying to get back at the guy who screwed her over or something like that. They must get a million of those. Reluctantly, she takes the phone into the bedroom and calls her dad instead.

‘It’s me,’ she says.

There’s a brief pause.

‘Yeah?’

‘I need your help.’

It’s not the word she intended to use, help, but it’s the word that comes out. She waits for him to respond again. Another unimpressed yeah? perhaps. The only sound, though, is the sound of his breath. It comes out his nostrils, down the phone line and into her ear.

‘Wayne’s here,’ she continues unprompted. ‘Across the road. I spotted his ute through the bushes.’

Her dad sniffs. ‘Good for him. What do you expect me to do about it?’

She closes her mouth. It’s not the response she was hoping for either. It’s not the word and it’s not the response. She doesn’t know what she was hoping for, but this isn’t it. Clearly, he’s pissed off with her still. She could have guessed as much. He was pissed off with her for dating Wayne in the first place and now he’s pissed off with her for breaking up with Wayne. She gets it. Wayne was his mechanic before he became her boyfriend. And to be fair, not just any mechanic either. The two of them seemed to think of themselves more like father and son than employer and employee – what with their yearly trips to Bathurst and Phillip Island, and their darts and snooker competitions every second night of the week. The relationship put an end to all of that. Trips to the races turned into weekends down the coast, pub comps into movie nights, time with him into time with her.

‘I’m scared,’ she says.

‘Of what?’ he returns. ‘Of having to actually deal with one of your messes for a change?’

She’s sitting on the end of her bed with her ankles and knees pressed together. Her hair is wet from the shower she was taking when Wayne arrived. She’s been taking so many showers lately. Seeing how hot she can get the water before she has to jump out of the way has become a game for her to play against herself.

‘Well?’ her dad presses.

‘Of what he might do,’ she answers meekly.

He scoffs at her. ‘Jesus, give it a rest, would you, Josie? This is Wayne we’re talking about here. Not some escaped bloody serial killer.’

She crosses her free hand over her chest, tucking it up under her armpit. She’s wearing her fluffy pink dressing gown. She squeezes down on the hand.

‘Can you come around?’ she asks.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

She doesn’t say anything.

‘No, thanks,’ he says. ‘I tried that once already in case you don’t .’

She re. It was the morning after her fight with Wayne. He showed up during his smoko break, searching for his missing mechanic, and she wouldn’t even open the door for him. The place was still such a mess. She was still such a mess. She didn’t want for him to see her like that. She yelled at him through the door to leave her alone and he yelled back at her to stop acting like such a spoilt brat and open up. It was a standoff. Eventually, with his smoko break almost over and an understaffed garage, he had no option but to fold. The sound of his ute bottoming out at the end of the driveway might have counted for a last word, but she didn’t care, she’d won where it mattered – she’d kept the door locked. Which, after her night with Wayne, felt like no small victory.

‘I was upset,’ she tries to explain.

‘Yeah, well now I’m upset,’ he cuts her off.

She doesn’t need to be sitting next to him to see just how upset he is either. She can picture the exact expression. The devastating eyebrows, the enflamed nostrils, the unforgiving bottom lip pressed against the unforgiving top lip.

‘It was a mistake,’ she tells him. ‘I don’t know what more you want me to say.’

‘How about apologising? That thought ever cross your mind?’

She shakes her head and feels the strands of wet hair move slowly across her face, a throbbing feeling at the roots that goes all the way into her skull. She thinks she might cry. She hopes she doesn’t. It’s the worst kind of betrayal. She cried the night of the breakup and it’s the part she regrets most. More than any of the things Wayne did to her, it’s what she did to herself, allowing herself to fall apart like that, that she most wishes she could take back.

‘Well?’ her dad says.

Lowering the phone away from her ear, she presses the hang-up button and places it down on the mattress beside her. She uses the sleeves of her dressing gown to dab at her eyes, the right sleeve for the right eye, the left sleeve for the left eye, like she was applying concealer with a blotting sponge. She rests her

hands on her knees then and looks at herself in the wardrobe’s mirrored door. With the lights turned off and the blind angled shut, she’s nothing more than a silhouette on the end of her bed, the bruise-coloured shadow of a person she could stare at for the rest of the night without ever being sure she was looking at herself.

It started with an early Christmas present. They’d been at the pub drinking all night and it seemed like a romantic thing to do, to exchange a gift before going to bed. Wayne’s idea, not hers. It didn’t take much paper-tearing to see what he was up to either: the black satin and white lace, the half-smile on his face, the hard-on showing through his jeans.

‘What do you reckon?’ He was lying on the bed next to the still-unwrapped present she’d picked out from under the tree.

‘It doesn’t look very comfortable,’ she answered.

‘It’s not meant to be.’

‘Right, so what is it meant to be, then?’

‘What do you mean? It’s not meant to be anything. It’s just a bit of fun.’

She walked over to the wardrobe and held it in front of her body to see what she might look like if she was to put it on. The image swayed forward and then back. It made her feel seasick.

‘Come on,’ he encouraged her. ‘At least try it.’

She turned away from the mirror and pointed at the gift on the bed beside him.

‘But what about your present? You haven’t opened your present yet. Don’t you want to see what it is?’

He glanced sideways at it. Then, without sitting up, he reached over, grabbed hold of it and tore the paper away. It was a jar of Nutella with his name printed on the label: WAYNE, it said in big red letters.

‘I ordered it out of a catalogue.’

His mouth twitched to one side. ‘Great,’ he said. It twitched back. ‘I’ve got a good idea of where I’d like to smear it too.’

She gave him a scowl.

‘What?’ he snorted.

‘You know what, Wayne? Screw you.’

He started laughing properly. ‘What’s with you?’

‘You, you pig!’

He pushed himself onto an elbow. ‘What, because I want to have sex with my girlfriend? That some kind of crime, is it?’

She scrunched the piece of lingerie up in her hand and threw it at him. He made no effort to catch it, letting it land across his face instead. She stormed out the room.

‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ he called, setting after her.

But she didn’t answer.

‘Hey, I’m trying to talk to you.’

He was no longer laughing. Neither was she. He followed her to the bathroom where she tried shutting the door on him. Only, he managed to get his foot in between it and the jamb.

‘Hey!’ he said again.

‘Leave me alone, Wayne!’

‘What the fuck is your problem?’

They were both quite drunk. She pushed against the door from the inside, her arms locked straight at the elbows.

‘What do you think my problem is? You acting like a pig – that’s my problem!’

He stuck his hand in through the opening and tried to grab hold of her. She slapped his fingers away.

‘Jesus Christ! Carrying on like you never let me fuck you before!’

‘Oh, so that gives you permission to dress me up like some cheap hooker and fuck me whenever you like, does it?’

‘I wish you were some cheap hooker!’ he called into the narrow gap. ‘I wouldn’t be putting up with this shit, that’s for sure!’

‘Good!’ she screamed back at him. ‘So why don’t you leave me alone and go find some cheap hooker, then, if that’s what you want!’ She tried forcing the door closed against his boot, but it wouldn’t budge. She stamped on the toe with her heel. ‘Move!’ she screamed. ‘Move!’

He was wearing steel-cap boots. No amount of stomping with her bare foot was going to make him move.

‘No, not until you calm down and stop acting like such a goddamn bitch,’ he told her.

‘What did you just call me?’ The door sprung inward as she let all the weight off on her side. She reached over and grabbed a wet washer out of the sink. Lunging forward, she slapped at him with the cloth so that he had no option but to retreat back into the hallway. With his foot out of the road, she was able to slam the door shut, pressing the lock button on the handle as she did.

‘Hey!’ he said, kicking at the door from the outside. ‘I haven’t finished talking to you!’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve finished talking to you!’

He kicked the door again and it seemed to shake the whole room.

‘Open up!’

‘I said leave me alone, Wayne!’

‘Open the door or I’ll fucking kick it in. I swear to God, Josie.’

‘No!’ she told him.

He kicked it again. And then again. A cake of soap slid off the side of the bathtub and down to the plug end.

‘Fuck! Off! Wayne!’ she shouted at him from her side of the door.

And then there were no sides. There was just a door lying on the tiles, with one end propped up against the bathtub. She let out a scream.

‘Are you fucking retarded! What did you do that for!’

He stepped in over the long splinter of timber that’d broken away from the jamb, and she swung at him again. This time, though, he caught the washer mid-swipe. He tried yanking it out of her hand and her entire body jerked forward.

‘Stop it!’ she yelled at him.

He yanked again and she had to let go to keep from falling over. He was holding the washer then. He raised his arm over his head and hit her across the back of the neck with it. She went into a crouching position to protect herself.

‘Owww!’ she howled.

‘How do you like it?’ he said, slapping her across the head this second time.

Her ear turned bright red as she slid further down his leg, onto his calf. He shook her off like he was shaking yesterday’s sock out of the leg of his jeans. He put his foot on her neck then, so that she was pinned to the floor.

‘I can’t breathe!’ she wheezed up at him. ‘I can’t breathe!’

‘Would you fucking get a hold of yourself!’

She clawed at the bottom half of his leg with her fingernails and he pushed his boot in harder. ‘You’re killing me, Wayne.’

He glared down at her like he might have thought this was not such a bad idea. ‘And whose fault is that?’ he said. ‘Huh?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

A second later, he changed his mind, let the pressure off and walked out of the house. It was the last she saw of him.

Until tonight.

Leaving the phone on the mattress, she pushes herself up onto her feet and moves over to the bedroom window. With her index and middle fingers, she makes a small opening between two of the timber slats and peeks through. His ute is parked a house down on the opposite side of the street. He hasn’t moved a muscle the entire time he’s been out there. Half an hour, forty-five minutes, who knows exactly? She came out of the shower with her skin red and stinging from the hot water and there he was.

She wonders what he wants. If he’s here to ask forgiveness, he can just forget about it. He can’t possibly imagine she’s going to take him back after what he did to her. She’d be happy never to see him again. Maybe if she goes and turns the outside light on, she thinks. Maybe that will be enough to frighten him off. She removes her fingers and the slats fall closed again.

She begins making her way over to the door when the phone lights up with an incoming call. She stops dead. He’s seen her. This is the first thing that comes to her mind. He’s seen her watching him through the blinds and now he’s calling her from his car phone. He thinks being seen makes it okay for him to be heard too. He asked her whose fault it was, those were his last words, and now he’s here to tell her whose fault. She doesn’t want to answer. What’ll happen if she doesn’t, though? He’ll be out of his vehicle and climbing the stairs onto the veranda, that’s what. And then? Knocking on the door. Kicking at it with the toe of his steel-cap boot. She knows what happens after that. She grabs the receiver, presses the same button she used to hang up a moment earlier and holds it to the side of her face.

Nobody says anything.

Then he says, ‘Right, so that’s it, then, is it – back to ignoring me?’

It isn’t Wayne, it’s her dad. She feels the boot come away from her throat, allowing her to breathe.

‘I’m not ignoring you.’

‘Funny,’ he says, ‘I could have sworn that was you that just hung up on me.’

He isn’t impressed. Big surprise. He’s never impressed. Not with anything she does anyway. It’d be a different story if it’d been Wayne calling to ask for help. He’d have been around there in a heartbeat. The son he never had versus the daughter he never wanted.

‘What did you want me to do?’ she responds. ‘You’re not interested in helping me. So, fine, then – I’ll take care of it myself.’

She’s out of the bedroom now and heading toward the front door, running her left hand along the wall for a guide. The only light is the little red dot, flashing on and off from the ceiling ahead. The smoke alarm. She lay staring at it the night of the breakup. It seemed so far away, like the sun in some far-off galaxy.

‘You’re a real piece of work, Josie, you know that?’

She feels her way past the splintered bathroom doorway.

‘Thanks. I appreciate you telling me. Now, is that it?’

No, it isn’t it. In her mind’s eye, she’s sees him shoot her mum a look over on the mantelpiece, as if to say, You see what you left me here to deal with? And her poor mum, with no option but to smile back from her spot between the picture of Peter Brock winning Bathurst and the urn containing her ashes.

‘You want to know your problem, Josie?’

She’s standing at the sliding internal door now, the one that opens through to the tiled entranceway. She’s feeling strong. She doesn’t need him. She felt weak before, which was why she rang. But that was only because she allowed herself to believe that he would be the one to help her. That regardless of how fond he was of Wayne, she was still his daughter, and that at the end of the day that’s stronger and more meaningful than any father-son relationship he might have conjured up with one of his mechanics.

‘Do tell me,’ she says, pushing the internal across its runners. Just a few feet of tiles between herself and the front door now. It’s locked – that was the first thing she checked. Mind you, she doesn’t have a lot of faith in doors and their locks these days, not after Wayne’s efforts with the bathroom door. She steps forward.

‘Don’t think of no one but yourself,’ he tells her.

That’d be right. From the man who was more upset about himself and his missing mechanic than the welfare of his own daughter.

‘And who should I be thinking of? You, I suppose?’

‘Say what you like,’ he responds. ‘Don’t take away from the fact, though.’

‘What fact? What are you even talking about? You don’t know the first thing about what happened between me and Wayne!’

‘Don’t I just?’

‘No! Because you only care about yourself and how it affects you. You accuse me of being selfish? So, you’ve got to find a new mechanic? Big deal – I’ve got to find a new fucking life!’

With that she flicks the bottom switch in the line of three. The outside light comes on, revealing the glass alongside the door to be a rippled yellow colour. This is followed by a slight adjustment on her dad’s end of the line, like he might be switching the phone from one ear to the other or sitting up in his chair. With a calmness in his voice as brutal as any boot on the neck, he says, ‘I reckon I might know more than you give me credit for, girly. I seen the way things are.’

She hears a screeching sound from the trees outside.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Flying foxes. They come to town at this time every year to plunder from the surrounding cherry orchards. Her row of ornamental plums must make for a convenient stopover. A welcome palate-cleanser between binges.

‘Means I ain’t blind and I ain’t stupid neither. You wanna hide out over there, making like everyone’s to blame except you – go ahead. But see how far it gets you.’

‘I’ll tell you how far it’s got me,’ she snaps back. ‘Getting pissed all over by arseholes just like you – that’s where it’s got me! You want to defend your precious perfect Wayne? Well, there’s a few truths you ought to know!’

‘Don’t go dragging Wayne into your little tirade. Poor bastard never stood a chance, did he? Not once you got your claws into him.’

‘Ha!’ she says. And for a moment, it’s all she can say. Just, Ha! Then, ‘Is that what you think, is it? You think this whole thing is my fault? Alright, then, since you’re so goddamned sure, you can ask him for yourself. Ask your precious Wayne what happened the night we broke up. Why I didn’t want to open the door for you the next morning. Why he hasn’t shown his piece-of-shit face at work for the past two weeks. Go on! Ask him! See what he says!’

‘I don’t have time for this rubbish,’ her dad responds.

Only, she’s done listening. She’s put the phone into the pocket of her dressing gown and is using both hands to unlock the door. First the deadbolt, then the key

sticking out of the handle. She pulls it open against the wall and charges out onto the veranda.

‘You fucking coward!’ she calls into the warm summer night. The flying foxes drop out of their branches and flap off into the darkness. ‘You fucking womanbashing coward! You think I can’t see you, hiding over there? You think I’m afraid of you? Why don’t you come and show your face, like a man!’

There’s no response. It’s difficult to see into the cab because of the way the streetlight reflects off the windscreen, but as far as she can tell, he doesn’t seem to care. The sight of her standing there in her pink dressing gown, and he doesn’t so much as flinch.

She hops down off the veranda and begins marching her way across the lawn. The grass is dry. Bits of half-chewed plum stick to the soles of her feet. She makes her way along the driveway stained with deep red blotches of fruit and shit.

‘You’ve got something to say to me?’ She reaches back into her pocket then and grabs the phone and holds it up in the air for him to see. ‘You can say it to my fucking dad!’ ‘Are you listening to this too?’ she says, putting the handpiece back against her ear.

There’s no response. The line’s dead. He’s hung up on her this time. Of course he’s hung up! Of course! Of course! OF COURSE! Well, to hell with him anyway! To hell with the both of them!

She strides out into the middle of the road and points the phone at Wayne like

she was pointing a torch. Or a gun even.

‘Did you hear me? I said, I’m not afraid of you!’

Apart from the two of them, the street is empty. All of her neighbours are inside. Most of them still have their indoor lights on. Which is something, she tells herself. If she screams loudly enough, one of them is bound to call the police. They don’t mind turning the other way when there’s a woman having the life stomped out of her inside her own home. But they won’t put up with this, a woman screaming and cursing and making a nuisance of herself out in the middle of the street. They’ll call the police. And good! She wants them to call the police! It’ll be up to Wayne to do the explaining then. Just what he’s doing here in the first place.

She moves closer. Her hand is still raised, pointed directly at the mass behind the steering wheel. She can’t make out his features, it’s too dark, but she can hear the ute’s engine, idling away under the bonnet. Maybe he’s planning to run her over. The headlights will come on, the tyres will screech, and it’ll be her body left lying in the middle of the road. Even better, she thinks. Let them discover me dead! Let them call her dad up and tell him that because of his inaction, his favouritism for Wayne, she’s dead!

‘What’s the matter?’ she bellows. She’s standing close enough now to beat her hand down against the bonnet. ‘Huh? Huh!’

She bangs on the bonnet a third time, with her heel. The dressing gown gapes open. She’s wearing the piece of lingerie that started this whole thing. She’s been wearing it since the night of the breakup. She gets out of the shower, her skin still burning, and puts it on. She isn’t sure why. She isn’t sure of much at this moment. She feels like she’s been worked into this position. Forced to strive for

hardness against every fibre of her porous being. She pulls the gown all the way off so that he can see it in its entirety. Everything he ever wanted to see. ‘You want to fuck me or you want to run me over? Which is it?’

He doesn’t react. He stays perfectly still. Too still, really. Which is when she spots it. The shiny length of hose running from the back of the car to the driver’s side window. The same hose she’s been using to spray the cherry-coloured shit away from the driveway each morning because she can’t bear to look at it. Like a jet of water, it hits her.

Serious Things

My mum is gearing my sister up to think that this is the most serious thing she’s ever been involved with. My sister is only four years old, so I guess it pretty much would be the most serious thing she’d ever been involved with if it were actually true. It isn’t but. Well, some of it is, but not all of it. I know the parts that are and the parts that aren’t because I’m the one who told it to Mum in the first place. It isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in something serious. I’m fourteen and have been involved with tonnes of serious things.

‘Now, Nadine,’ my mum says, which is already a dead giveaway because she practically never calls my sister Nadine. Neither do I. Normally, we both just call her Neddi. Basically, the only time Mum ever calls her Nadine is when she’s getting her in trouble and trying to be all official-sounding. If I’m getting in trouble, which I have to say, is way more often than my sister, then I get called by my full name: Rachel Louise Smith. It sounds weird when she says it too, because since her and Dad got divorced, I’m the only person still with the surname Smith. Mum changed her name and Nadine’s name back to Terry. Because I was old enough, though, I got to decide for myself, and so I chose to keep it as it was, which explains why I’m the odd one out now. Well, except for my dad, obviously. But he’s the even odder one out because he doesn’t even live here anymore. His full name is Jack Cameron Smith and he lives in Perth or Canberra or somewhere like that. When I turn sixteen, I’m allowed to go and live with him if I want. That’s the age when you get to decide for yourself who you want to live with. Although, because of his moods, I probably won’t want to. Or maybe I will – I don’t know, I still haven’t made my mind up yet. At the end of the day, it’s either got to be him and his moods or Father David and his moods, so it’s pretty much take your pick, I suppose.

I watch quietly as Mum continues on.

‘I sent your sister to her room just now because I need to talk to you in private —’

‘Just me by myself without Rachel,’ my sister cuts in, acting all proud that she’s the one being asked the supposedly big important questions for a change. Normally, it’s me standing there getting the grilling and her who has to go off to her room so she doesn’t get badly influenced by whatever it is I’ve supposedly been up to this time. So, I guess it’s no wonder she thinks this makes her all special or something.

‘Yes, just you,’ my mum goes along with her. ‘All by yourself. And I need for you to tell me the truth too. Do you understand? I’m going to ask you some questions and it’s very important that you tell me the truth. Exactly as you it. Do you think you can do that?’

She’s sitting on one of the dining chairs, my mum, and my sister is standing in front of her. They’re both looking right at each other and my sister is wearing her red wig with the tiara attached to the top of it. I’m ducked down behind the kitchen bench and can see their reflections in the oven door. I watch as my sister nods her head in this over-the-top, exaggerated kind of way, so that the hairs on her wig make a swooshing sound against the sparkly material of her mermaid costume. She’s literally mermaid obsessed. Ever since she first saw the DVD of The Little Mermaid at Father David’s house, everything has to be about mermaids. Even things that have nothing to do with mermaids. Like the cat Father David bought her for her birthday, which she called Sebastian. Or like this.

‘Good girl,’ my mum says, cupping my sister’s hands together and bringing them in towards her chest like they were filled with tiny organs and worm guts and whatever else fragile baby birds just fallen out of their nest might be filled with. Right between her boobs she rescues them. She waits a couple of seconds then, before starting in with the usual routine. ‘Can you feel it?’ she asks at last.

My sister’s face lights up. ‘I can feel it going up and down against my fingernails! Like a frog!’ she practically squeals.

I see my mum trying not to laugh in the reflection, trying to stay all serious. I nearly laugh myself. I have to it, it’s hard not to. My mum has made me put my hands on her heart like this a million times and I’ve never once thought of it as being like a frog. I doubt anyone but my sister ever would. The most I’ve ever thought of it being like is a bomb ticking away about to explode. I bite down on the bit of hair dangling beside my mouth to stop myself from laughing. It tastes like pool water, which is sort of like the taste of deodorant if you accidentally get it on your tongue when you’re spraying it under your arms. It’s actually the same trick I use when sneaking out of the house at night. It doesn’t have to be hair, but if you bite down on something – your finger or your collar or something – then, it makes you breathe through your nose really quietly, so that you don’t get caught. I learnt about it on an episode of something. I can’t what, but trust me that it works.

‘Yes, I suppose I can understand how it might feel like a frog hopping up and down in there,’ my mum its. ‘But we need to stop being silly for a second and be serious, sweetheart. Putting on your most serious thinking hat, what do you think it really is, Nadine?’

‘Your heart breath,’ Neddi answers, and I just about crack up again.

‘Yes, that’s right, my heartbeat,’ Mum responds quickly, as if that’s what she said in the first place. No joke, I reckon if you added up all the wrong things my sister says in one day, it would be more than what me or someone else my age would say in a whole year. And I don’t mean deliberate wrong things, like telling lies or whatever, I just mean all the times she means to say one thing but accidentally ends up saying something completely different. Like the time she told Mum that I called Father David a ‘golden fart eater’ when I was saying my prayers beside my bed. This was back when I used to say my prayers still, and

when we shared a room together still. ‘I wish Dad would come back and that goddamned fuck features, Father David, would just frig the frig off,’ was what I actually said. Although, I have to it, it’s about the one time she got something wrong and actually made it better by getting it wrong. Father David: The Golden Fart Eater. I wished that’s what I had said.

‘And do you know why you can feel it going up and down like that?’ my mum asks her now. Neither of them are wearing any shoes and Neddi keeps rocking back and forth between the balls of her feet and her heels in a sort of happy but also annoying kind of way, like when she’s really excited about something.

‘It’s so you tell the truth,’ she rattles off. Only because she’s seen me in the same position a thousand times. Standing there with my hands on Mum’s chest, getting made to do the heart trick. That’s what I call it anyway. It’s where she gets you to put both hands over the spot where her heart is and then makes you answer a bunch of questions to see whether you’re telling the truth or not. If you are, then nothing happens. But if you try and lie, then her heart starts beating faster and you end up getting busted. Supposedly anyway. Really, though, the whole thing is just a tactic for getting you to confess or it to something you’ve done wrong so that she doesn’t have to go to the hassle of figuring it out on her own.

She doesn’t even bother with me anymore. Mainly because she knows that I’m not fooled by it. I’ve known it’s total bull since at the beginning of the year when I swiped the keys to the Gemini while she was at work. She tried using it on me the next morning to get me to own up to where I’d been the night before while she was on shift and I told her that I’d just been at Lucy’s all night. ‘Lucy’s,’ she repeated back to me in this sad, cringy sort of voice that I guess was meant to make me feel all guilty or something. After that, she didn’t say anything. She just kept looking at me without blinking until it got that weird that I pretty much had to come clean and tell her that instead of going to Lucy’s I’d spent the night driving around town with these two boys I know from school. I didn’t tell her any more about what we got up to because, first of all, it’s actually none of her

business and, secondly, I didn’t need to. Just that much information was enough to make her start crying. And I mean real crying too, with snot coming out of her nose and spit stretched across her teeth. Anyway, I don’t know why she bothered in the end, because I found out later that Lucy’s mum had already told her that I wasn’t over at their place like I’d said I was, so she knew I was lying from the start and didn’t need to waste what was probably her best trick up to that point, the heart trick.

It’s a different story with my sister, mind you. She seems to think it’s the best thing ever, getting to stand there answering questions like she’s on a criminal investigation show or something.

‘That’s right,’ my mum says. ‘To make sure you tell the truth. Because my heart will always know if you are or aren’t being honest with me. Do you understand? You may be able to fool my ears, or even my eyes, but never my heart. Never ever. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ my sister agrees.

‘Alright, then. Now, with your best honesty, I want you to tell me, Nadine, what happened this morning when you and your sister were at Father David’s house.’

‘You had to go to work,’ my sister answers.

‘That’s right, while I was at work and you were getting babysat by Father David. I want you to tell me everything. However much you can .’

Mum’s job is looking after old people, which is why we get taken around to Father David’s in the first place. It used to be just Neddi that had to go around there, while I was allowed to stay home by myself and do whatever I wanted. But that was before Mum found out about the keys to the Gemini. After that, she started making me have to go around there as well. It’d be pretty good if Father Fuck Features wasn’t there because the house has got a pool with a slippery dip that goes into it, as well as a home cinema room with foldback chairs and full-on surround speakers and everything. I don’t know what kind of priest gets to live in a house with a pool and a cinema. Priests are supposed to give half of what they get paid to the poor people so they can buy Christmas presents for their kids. Anyway, the other annoying thing is that because Neddi’s there, we have to watch kid movies. And the only kid one she ever wants to watch is The Little Mermaid, which isn’t a surprise. It’s also probably the one out of all of them that I hate the most. I especially hate it when we’re in the pool and Father David starts calling her Ariel and she isn’t even in the water. How can she be Ariel if she just sits on the end of the slippery dip while Father David swims around pretending to be bloody Prince Eric or somebody? Well, that’s why I tried pulling her in by the leg when we were there today. She started squealing at me to stop and Father David slapped me on the hand to make me stop. That’s the real part of the story. I told Mum because I knew I’d get in trouble if she found out off Neddi first. She starting getting upset with me then, saying why couldn’t I ever just behave myself, which is why I came up with the other part of the story – so that she’d stop getting me in trouble for a change.

Then again, I have to it, that it isn’t hard to make her upset. Not since her and Dad split up. They split up pretty much around the time Neddi was born, which is why Neddi doesn’t even him. At first, it was in a less serious way, with Dad having his bedroom out in the garage and Mum still having the main bedroom inside the house. I wasn’t allowed to sleep out in the garage, but I was allowed to go out there in the day and hang out with Dad. He had photos of me and Neddi Blu-Tacked onto the wall next to his bed and all he did was lie on his bed smoking all day. After that, he moved out altogether, which is when Father David came along.

It wasn’t that weird at first because I already knew Father David from school and

knew that his job was supposed to be helping people deal with bad stuff or whatever, so it seemed fine to me that he was there to help Mum get through it with her and Dad. That’s when he still used to wear his priest clothes and they would sit at the table drinking cups of coffee and I would be sent to my room to play but would always sneak back out and listen from the same spot where I am now, crouched down behind the bench, eavesdropping on their conversation.

Thank God it isn’t him in there now. He isn’t even at the house. The only people at home at the moment are me and my mum and my sister. And Sebastian too, if you count cats. He’s walking back and forth along the outside bit of the window, rubbing himself against the gauze and meowing for someone to him some food through the food flap. I’d stand up and get him something from the fridge, except it would be an obvious giveaway. And then I’d be in trouble for not doing something else I was meant to do – go to my room. Who cares? I’m probably already going to be in level-ten trouble when Mum finds out from my sister that I lied to her. I stop looking at Sebastian and focus back on them.

‘I – we got to watch a movie!’ my sister declares. ‘The Little Mermaid!’

My mum closes her eyes and nods her head slowly. This much she knows already. I told her that’s where it happened, in the cinema room. I can see her in the oven, not wanting to open her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she says while still nodding, ‘while you were inside watching The Little Mermaid. I want you to tell me everything that happened while you were watching the movie, Nadine.’

My sister screws her face up. ‘Um, I can’t ,’ she says.

Well, that’s no surprise. What can she ? She can’t even Dad and he’s literally the person who made her. Even if you show her a photo of him,

she doesn’t . She acts like she can, but you can tell that she’s faking. Or more likely, that she just re the photo from the last time you showed her. She probably thinks Father David is her dad. He pretty much will be once he gets out of the priests at the end of this year and marries Mum. He’ll be my dad too then, and he’ll be allowed to smack me on the hand whenever he likes and I’ll have to just let him. True, I could just as easily swipe the keys to the Gemini again and drive me and Neddi over to Perth when that happens. That’s if the Gemini would make it. Which it probably wouldn’t. But still, who cares? I’d rather live in a broken-down Gemini in the middle of the desert than have Father David slapping me on the hand and then trying to make up for it afterwards with me in the pool.

‘I want you to try your hardest,’ Mum says, tightening her hands and pulling Neddi in closer in a way that must be uncomfortable because she suddenly looks like she might start bawling or something. To be fair, she always looks like she might be about to start bawling, Neddi. Either that or start laughing. Which makes no sense at all. Because it’s not as if she ever has to deal with anything serious. I’ve had the cops ring the house because someone told them that they saw me drinking alcohol down the creek with those same boys I went joyriding with in Mum’s car. That’s serious. You can get taken away and put in a foster home if the cops have to call your house and talk to your parents more than three times. That’s what happened to my friend Melanie’s cousin, who lives in Canberra. The cops rang her house three times and then, after that, she got busted again for spray-painting a bus sign and she had to move to a whole other suburb and into a house with six other teenagers and no phone. I’m just glad no one saw what else we got up to down there at the creek, or I probably would be living in a foster home.

‘Were you in there by yourself or was Father David in there with you?’ Mum’s saying now. She’s had enough with going gently.

As for Neddi, she has no idea what any of this is about or how she’s supposed to answer. After I tried pulling her into the pool, she went inside to watch the

movie while I stayed outside swimming. I could see her through the back door the whole time. Father David too. And he didn’t do any of the things to her that I said to Mum he did. After putting the movie on for her, he just came straight back out and got back in the pool with me. He was wearing these toffee apple swimming shorts that he wears. He told me that he was sorry about slapping me. He said that it was just a kneejerk reaction because he thought I was hurting my sister. I told him I would never hurt my sister. ‘What about your mum?’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but I shook my head anyway. He swam closer then and asked me to show him my hand, where he slapped it. I held it out and he took hold of it with his hands. He said he knew a trick for making my hand feel better.

It’s no big deal. I’m fourteen and have been involved with tonnes of serious things.

Looking Both Ways

Each morning Raymond’s father es Raymond on his way through to work. Often, he slows his vehicle down and calls to the boy to hurry along now or to to look both ways. There’s only one road between the house and the school anyway and of course Raymond knows all about looking both ways and not dawdling: he’s seven years old now.

This morning when Raymond’s father leaves for work, he drives from the house right past the front gates of the school without ing Raymond. When he reaches work, he calls the house to tell Raymond’s mother that he didn’t the boy on the way.

‘You didn’t him?’ Raymond’s mother says.

‘I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,’ Raymond’s father says, altering the tone in his voice.

‘God, what does it mean, then, Harold?’ Raymond’s mother isn’t taken in by adjusted voice tones.

‘At most it means you should give the school a call to make certain he’s there. Of course he’s there. That’s all it means.’

‘God,’ Raymond’s mother says. ‘God, Harold.’

‘Look, Anne, I can’t talk. It’s hell in here. Just ring me back if he hasn’t arrived

at the school. Okay? I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. Most likely it means he took a shortcut through the creek again. I’m sure that’s all it means. I can’t talk. It’s busy as hell. Just ring me back, okay?’

Raymond’s father hangs up the phone and leaves Raymond’s mother standing alone in the kitchen with the handpiece rested on the top of her shoulder and her stomach feeling as if it’s full of coals.

It’s no big thing, Raymond’s mother assures herself, putting the phone back on the receiver at her end. Raymond only left twenty-five minutes ago. Twenty-five minutes ago Raymond was standing right here in this very kitchen and surely that counts for something. Harold has it: he’s wandered down through the creek again. You the last time he wandered down through the creek and came upon the carcass of that dead Rottweiler and it was more than an hour and a half before anyone found him. That has to count for something. how you worried that day? And for what? Boys and their curiosities. That has to count for something and that makes two things that count for something.

Raymond’s mother decides that she’ll wait before calling the school. She tells herself that if she calls in a fluster, she’ll only increase her chances of hearing bad news. She sits at the kitchen table instead and puts her fingernail in one of the chip marks Raymond made with a rock from the garden when he was three years old and the table was brand new. Raymond is seven years old now and she’s sure that must also count for something. Three things is enough to stop counting, she tells herself. Sitting at the table, she picks at the chip mark until a little piece of grey Laminex breaks away and cuts open the skin beneath her fingernail. The piece stays embedded beneath her fingernail and the blood drips out through the tiny gap and down the print-side of her finger and she blots it on the table like a child making finger drawings. She decides then that she’ll call the school after all. The blood is a good distraction for her to call the school and not bring bad luck upon the situation, and she recognises this much.

Raymond’s mother has the school’s phone number stored in the phone’s speed dial. It’s stored under Ray’s School. It’s such a tiny piece of paper to have to write on, she thinks. She thinks like this because neither she nor Raymond’s father ever call Raymond ‘Ray’. Their neighbour Mr Langford calls Raymond Ray and the policeman who found him playing with that dead Rottweiler that other time called him Ray, but they’re the only two people Raymond’s mother has ever heard calling him Ray. She feels angry at herself for writing it Ray when she wouldn’t have said it Ray. In future you should write it like you’d say it, she scolds herself. Ray-mond. The fingerprints on the table look to her like paw prints, as if a cat has come in through the window and shot across its surface. She re a story her grandmother told when she was just a little girl, about birds coming in through an open window, and it frightens her now as it did the first time she heard it.

When the phone picks up at the school, it’s not the regular secretary but a woman calling herself Mrs Stokes. Raymond’s mother knows the regular secretary quite well and always calls her Mrs Lamb. Raymond’s mother calls all of her seniors Mr and Mrs So-and-So. She can’t help it. Mr Langford is only seven years her senior and she calls him by his polite title, while Raymond’s father calls him Teddy. Raymond’s mother has never heard of this Mrs Stokes before.

‘May I speak with Mrs Lamb, please?’ she asks.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Stokes says, ‘Margaret no longer works Mondays. I’m her replacement for Mondays and Fridays. I’m sure I can help you all the same. Are you a parent? Is it to do with the new canteen roster?’

‘I’m Raymond’s mother,’ Raymond’s mother says. She feels herself starting to cry then and quickly hangs up the phone. She puts her finger in her mouth and bites down hard until she can taste the blood coming out through the tiny cut beneath her fingernail. The piece of Laminex stays lodged in there and when she

pushes her tongue against the area to taste the blood more strongly, she feels the sharp edge of the Laminex. She makes the tip of her tongue stiff and pushes against it, thinking that it will either pierce through the tip of her tongue or be pushed far enough down into her finger that nothing will be able to touch it anymore anyway. Neither happens and finally she takes her finger out of her mouth and is surprised to see that there isn’t any blood on it. The piece of Laminex looks clean, like a shard of fibreglass, and she easily picks it away by pinching it between the thumbnail and index fingernail. When she has pulled it away, the finger starts to bleed again and the blood is thin and bright.

She calls Raymond’s father back at work then. She knows it isn’t good luck to be calling around like this, in this state, with her finger bleeding like this. She thinks, though, that any hope of putting herself out of this state seems distant and so she calls him anyway. She thinks if she squats herself down low to the ground, where she’s better balanced, then the newfound balance will make up for something that is lost. ‘What’s lost?’ she asks herself aloud. She’s trying pragmatism. Pragmatism is what Raymond’s father would call it. He would say, ‘How about a bit of pragmatism?’ or something like that. She says, ‘What’s lost, Anne? Huh? What’s lost?’

Waiting for Raymond’s father to pick up, she wonders why she let him convince her that it was okay for Raymond to walk to school by himself when he’s only seven years old. Even if there is only one road to cross. One road is still one road. Pragmatically speaking. She wonders why she let herself get convinced so easily over such an important matter and why she always calls Mr Langford Mr Langford except for when Raymond’s father is around calling him Teddy and then she feels pressured to start calling him Teddy too, and she wonders why she keeps letting herself get pressured like that, why she doesn’t stand up on her own two feet. Just as she’s wondering this, she sees a crow unbuttoning a school shirt with its black and lacquered beak. Right in through her mind’s open window it comes. She puts her other hand on the top of her head and thinks of her dead grandmother, the one who told her the story. She died when Raymond’s mother was just a little girl – not much older than what Raymond is now. It was Raymond’s mother who discovered her too, lying stiff on top of her iron-frame bed. Raymond’s mother considers the scratching sound a crow’s claw would

make against the iron of that old bed. Against the old woman’s tissue-paper skin. She’s low to the ground now, Raymond’s mother. Which is a good, pragmatic position for her to be in while entertaining such thoughts.

After nine rings, Raymond’s father answers the phone at work and Raymond’s mother tells him what has just happened. She tells him about this Mrs Stokes woman, whom she has never even met, and she tells him about the way she started to cry and the cut on her finger and her dead grandmother and she can hear her own voice and knows the way it must sound, and she says, ‘Why did I let you convince me that it would be alright for him to walk by himself when he’s only seven, for God’s sake, Harold?’

Raymond’s father listens to her and assures her that it probably isn’t at all like she’s making out and that everything is probably quite okay, quite alright. He tells her that if she’s still worried – and it sounds that she might be – then she should call the school again and speak with this Mrs Stokes a second time. He says ‘damn carburettor’ right in the middle of saying this to her and when she asks him what damn carburettor is supposed to mean for God’s sake, he says, ‘Just hang on a second, Anne, would you? I need somebody to get this damn carburettor over to Clarke’s in the next twenty minutes!’ She asks him if he’s talking to her and he says, ‘Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s hell here, Anne. Literally hell.’ She repeats the words to herself with no sound, just moving lips. Literally hell. Literally hell. Literally hell. Her top lip scratches against her bottom lip, making a sound like claws on metal. Black claws on black metal. Raymond’s father says, ‘I’m sure this Mrs Stokes is a shipshape woman. You should give her a call, Anne, and then give me a call back when you know something for certain. Alright?’

Shipshape is the expression Raymond’s father used the time Raymond was lost in the creek for an hour and a half, playing with that dead Rottweiler. Shipshape police constable. Find him in no time, Anne. You’ll see. Everything will be shipshape, Anne. Slap.

After speaking to Raymond’s father this second time, Raymond’s mother puts on her cardigan and shoes and goes out of the house. She doesn’t put socks on her feet and her shoes are the kind that can be pulled on and off without needing to untie laces. As she walks along the footpath toward the school, the same footpath Raymond was supposed to have taken, she keeps the cardigan pulled closed across her front with one hand, so as to hide her nightshirt. She starts to cry again before long and walks faster, like she’s trying to outpace the tears. There are lots of cars driving along the road beside her, or perhaps it is just the one car driving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, but either way, they or it are driving much too fast for this time of morning and this area.

And so, at the vacant block, she stops. She looks to the back of the block where the corrugated iron fence has been kicked in and one of the s is missing altogether. Then she looks back to the road. The road is empty now, which seems more promising than before when it seemed busy. She worries that if she sets off again, it will become busy like before. So, she enters the block. It’s full of rubbish. Most of it has been set fire to. Not recently. But recently enough. There was a house on the block once and it was set fire to by a lightning strike. Lying midway between Raymond’s mother and the missing fence is the skeleton of a burnt mattress. The black springs make it look like something used for trapping animals. The missing fence is the entrance to the creek. Raymond’s mother re now. Staring past the mattress, she pictures that dead Rottweiler, dumped with its insides coming through the side of its belly, dumped in the creek because dumping fees at the local tip were too high, or because the person who was driving the car felt too guilty to try and find the owner so that it might be put to rest beneath a favourite tree or ruined flowerbed. It was Raymond who found the Rottweiler and then the police constable who found Raymond.

It was the same day Raymond’s father hit Raymond’s mother with his closed hand. But he only hit her when she wouldn’t stop crying and then, when he hit her, everything was fine and the shipshape police constable found Raymond just like Raymond’s father said he would and everything became fine just like he said it would and Raymond’s mother smiled and the constable smiled too, standing at the door, and Raymond still had the dog’s blood on his hands and on

the knees of his tros and everything was fine that day and even the bruise that ed the corner of her mouth to her ear was fine once Raymond had been found and returned home by the shipshape police constable who said nothing about the bruise, just smiled.

Raymond’s mother puts her right leg through the gap in the fence first, then steps through with the rest of her body. She keeps the cardigan pulled closed in front even as she’s stepping through and the wind makes the bent piece of iron move up and down along the remaining section of fence. It’s loud and grating and Raymond’s mother brings her head through last and thinks of a dog waiting on the other side, ready to latch onto the side of her face, like a scrap-metal guard dog.

From this spot, Raymond’s mother can see along the creek all the way to the school now and, pragmatically speaking, there’s no dog to speak of. Not today. Today, the oval at the bottom end of the school backs directly onto the creek and Raymond’s mother can see all the way to the oval and the oval is empty. At first she doesn’t see Mr Langford, since he’s hidden behind the rise in the creek bank. And when he comes out from behind the rise, he’s no more than thirty metres away from her and he sees her standing at the top of the slope and he waves to her with a worried look on his face. She doesn’t wave back and she watches him until he’s standing right in front of her.

‘Hello, Anne,’ he says.

She doesn’t say anything to him. Her eyes are red still and her cheeks are tight where the wind dried her tears before they could reach halfway to her lips even. She looks at Mr Langford and at his hands and she keeps her cardigan pulled modestly across her front.

‘Another dead dog,’ Mr Langford says to her, shaking his head in a sad sort of way. Mr Langford is seven years older than her and he has very white hair and a small round head. His hair is very white and his cheeks are red and his mouth is small even for his head. He bends down and wipes his hands on the grass next to his shoes and when he bends he keeps his back straight and his hands only just reach the ground either side of his feet. ‘Do you the day Ray found the Wainwrights’?’ he says, motioning to his hands with a small nod of his small head. ‘Bad street for dogs. Busy. Always busy,’ he says, shaking his head side to side. His knees are bent. His head is small. Like the head on a coin. Really no bigger than the head on a coin.

‘The policeman,’ Raymond’s mother says back to him.

‘That’s right!’ Mr Langford says, perking up. He looks directly at Raymond’s mother then and, as he does, she starts to cry again and when she tries to step backwards through the hole in the fence, he takes hold of her wrist and her cardigan falls open and she begins to really cry.

‘Anne,’ he says. ‘We’re only talking now. It’s you and me, Anne. Me and you.’

In the distance, a group of children come running onto the bottom oval like creatures coming in through an open window. One of them kicks a football and it sails over the fence into the creek. Mr Langford lets go of Raymond’s mother’s wrist and disappears through the hole in the fence himself. He runs straight out onto the road and is hit by a car. Right there in front of the block. There’s the screech of tyres followed by a thump, and then his body slamming against the asphalt. His head is almost non-existent. Much smaller than the head on a coin. Much smaller than any head Raymond’s mother has ever seen. Frighteningly small. She sits down very low to the ground and wishes Raymond’s father was there to hit some sense into her with his shipshape hand.

The Secret Spot

At night-time, the river is like a dozen lanes of blackest highway bitumen. The speeding and constant flow of heavy-vehicle traffic drafting so closely not a single taillight shows through the trees lining its edges. Only the occasional glint of the rolling silvery undertow: a log being swallowed, a kid being knocked down and pulled to his death, a fish taking a Christmas beetle from the surface and swiping away again.

The drowned kid is a fiction invented by the boy’s father to keep him close by when they go to check on the setlines and rebait any spoiled hooks. They have a system of walking one after the other too, carefully stepping on all the exact stones to avoid stirring the ghost of that dead river kid. His father always goes in the lead and takes small half-sized steps and often turns to point out the precise steps using his torchlight. If it’s a complicated move from one stone to the next, then he pauses before taking it and says, ‘Watch how I do this now, Anthony,’ and Anthony watches and tries his best to replicate the pivot or leap with the same precision and carefulness. His father is precise and careful and Anthony is still only a boy but recognises that it’s the kind of care that says something about a father and about his level of resolve, if nothing of the sanctity of fiction and all its tragically deceased.

When they’ve checked the lines a final time each evening and returned to the campsite, Anthony’s father settles with his back towards the pines and his face to the fire and recites all the familiar stories while drinking beer from short-necked brown bottles. Many of the stories are about rivers and about handling fish, and some are about marriage and about handling oneself in life, and almost all of them are in some way about men who drink and converse drunkenly with themselves or with other people. Anthony likes best the ones where the men are soliloquist drunks and the rivers are indifferent and full of easy-to-catch fish. There are lessons in these stories, and the lessons seem to Anthony as familiar as the stories, which are familiar to the point of being visibly worn through.

After a dozen or so stories, Anthony’s father takes to cursing and spitting

mouthfuls of his beer onto the campfire, making the coals hiss and fall down from the stack like broken kiln bricks. Anthony thinks his father is protective and cautious always, except for late at night when he is utterly defeated and drunk and narrating loudly for himself and anyone else to hear. When he is like this, he is pitiful and loquacious and as marvellous to listen to as all the other downtrodden soliloquists scattered throughout the stories, be it the absconded soldier waiting to be picked up by the military police or the bankrupted criminal lying on his bed waiting to die. Anthony has befriended and made heroes of them all and thinks they would often be better off without the women who accompany them through the scenes and who speak perfect sympathetic English, though who choose to remain loyal to their own despondency.

In real life, the women are the visibly worn through ones who have not left the house or slept in the same bedroom as their husband in more than a year. They rise and dress in the afternoon, unlocking the door to the spare bedroom and coming out into the living area, resembling wearied Sigrid Thorntons. They don’t speak a great deal more than their fictional counterparts, except to make occasional announcements like, ‘It’s raining outside,’ or to ask silly questions like, ‘What day was it the day after tomorrow please, Anthony?’ They pronounce their son’s name with disdain. They resent their son now like they resent the morning and all first-born things.

When the women are in good moods, they stand in front of the vanity mirror playing with their loose hair, messing the strands forward over their eyes, then flicking them back again and asking, ‘What do you see now, Anthony?’ When it’s a good mood and vicious mood mixed together, they forget about the hair and about their son and follow their husband around the house, calling him Saint Bartholomew as they go. Bartholomew is their husband’s derisive confirmation name. Anthony thinks these women look very pale and very crazy, dressed in their black chemises and pearls, tiptoeing about the house and calling people by their confirmation name. At the same time, he thinks the husband looks very tired and overly tanned from working out in the sun all day, chipping burrs and erecting barbed-wire fences and checking his hands for splinters out of simple habit and periodic frustration. Anthony’s father is the kind of man who has never been able to work indoors, only out in the open where it feels natural to him to

be uncomfortable and hot. ‘If you can work through the heat, telling yourself it’s all coming at you from some far-away place like the sun, then you can work through anything,’ he tells his son.

When fishing for trout, it’s necessary to awaken before sunup and be positioned by the water before full light and to put everything from the previous night behind you. Setlines left baited and unattended are one thing, often returning small adolescent trout – or carp more likely. To take a decent-sized rainbow or brown, though, requires skill and participation and a willingness to forget completely and wholeheartedly and begin anew.

Chasing along in the dark of morning with his rod held out in front and his left hand keeping the satchel about his waist from rattling and rousing the spirit of that mythical drowned kid, Anthony thinks that the river belongs to him and his father alone and that the two of them are exclusive title holders to all of its stocks. If between them they landed four decent-sized trout only yesterday, and all four were gutted and scaled at the edge of the river before being threaded through the gills with the one length of tie wire so as to be carried back and cooked in aluminium foil over the grill plate and eaten with fingers not forks on laps not tables, then there’s a great deal to forget and put behind today.

Using his rod for balance, Anthony’s father squats at the edge of the river and looks across. There’s a pre-dawn light playing on the surface and the water has lost its oily sheen from the previous night. It seems less dangerous. Anthony squats beside his father. He can smell the heat rising out of the damp soil along the bank. It smells as metallic and premature as the blood which rises ghost-like out of the car’s upholstery on the most humid days.

‘I think we’ll be able to cross by this time tomorrow,’ his father says to him. ‘Maybe even late this evening. Provided they don’t open the dam wall some time today, of course.’

His father has talked over their chances of wading across the river and fishing the secret spot since arriving, and has made the feat of lowering the water sound like a delicate religious trick. To Anthony, it’s a benevolent and sporting god who permits a river to be turned on and off like a tap for the sake of improved fishing conditions. He’s been dreaming of such conditions and such a god since hearing the story for the first time.

‘What’ll happen if they open the dam wall while we’re on the other side still?’ he asks his father.

‘We’ll need to keep an eye out for that too. We’ll put a stick at the edge of the water, and if the water creeps up over the stick we’ll know it’s time to leave. It doesn’t come on so fast that we’ll get caught out.’

‘Did the water creep up over the stick last time we were here?’

‘I don’t ,’ his father says.

The last time they were here, Anthony’s father still called Anthony’s mother Glory. This was before she moved her pillow into the spare bedroom and returned to the earliest, most extended version of herself that she could : Gloria Louise Carter – her maiden self, that is. It frightens Anthony to have to speak to her now and he only does so when she’s sitting down and he’s sure she won’t be bothered to stand up and come towards him. She’s pale and thin and her eyes are like dull coins. The times she is bothered to respond, she comes right up and stands over him and tells him to put his hand on the spot where there is still a raised scar. If he shakes his head and refuses, she puts her thumb in her mouth and goes, Mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum-mum, sucking

and teasing until she has succeeded in making him cry. She laughs then and forces him to touch the scar anyway. The consecutive mums is a joke only to her, and the scar feels hard and raised beneath the black silk chemise, which she wears with pearls and without variation.

‘Can you when I was still little and you had to put me in the landing net to carry me back across?’

Anthony and his father are moving downstream now, with the river on their left and the campsite behind them and to the right, Anthony ing all the fondest bits and his father keeping a close eye for signs of rising, feeding trout.

‘I . I was trying to catch a giant trout and thought I needed a giant worm,’ his father says without taking his eyes away from the water.

‘No, it was because the water had crept up and I was only little and didn’t know how to swim yet.’

‘Oh, is that why it was?’

‘And also because the drowned boy was trying to pull me under, to make friends with me.’

This is a new detail.

‘I don’t think I knew about the drowned boy the last time we were here,’ his father responds. ‘Maybe I knew. How old are you again?’

Anthony ignores the question to which his father already knows the answer. They are here, after all, in fulfilment of a promise made when he turned seven, nine and a half months earlier. The faux coonskin cap, cut and sewn from a second-hand fur coat, is the part of the promise that was given to him on the actual day, in late April. As is the new fishing rod. The fishing rod had his mother’s name printed on its card. Though Anthony knows it was his father who went out and bought it and who wrote her name there, and who sewed the cap also.

At the first setline, Anthony’s father leans his own rod against a bough and sits his torch on top of the bough and begins reeling in the line. He can tie half-blood knots in the dark when he has to, but with a torch he can tie them precisely enough that they don’t need so much as a millimetre trimmed off their tabs. Anthony can tell by the smooth spooling that there’s no fish attached to the other end this morning, not even a poor-sighted carp allowing itself to be dragged sideways through the mud. His father casts out again and they keep moving along.

‘I think all of the stupid ones have been caught already,’ his father announces after he has stripped the worm from the fifth unsuccessful hook in a row and thrown it back into the river.

‘The stupid ones don’t know about the secret spot, do they?’

His father says nothing for a moment, busy replacing the waterlogged worm with a fresh tiger taken from the beetroot tin filled with damp soil. Then he says, ‘I don’t think so. Maybe that’s what makes them so stupid in the first place. I

don’t know. I know they’re no good for eating. Maybe we’re the stupid ones, waiting days on end for the river to drop like this.’

‘I forget what the secret spot looks like.’

‘You were very young.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like this spot, only more secret.’

‘But in the stories it looks different.’

‘That’s just because of the way the stories make it look. Besides, the stories are just stories.’

‘How many fish did we catch last time?’

‘You were still very young. You only because I’ve told you too many damned times.’

‘How many?’

‘Hundreds, I think.’

‘How many really?’

‘Seventeen in one afternoon. Your mother caught eleven of them. She was the one who discovered the spot. We carried you across and she was happy, and then the water level started coming up. It comes up much quicker than it goes down. I had to carry you back in a net with your mother holding onto my back. We’ll have to keep an eye on it if we get across. We can put a stick at the edge of the water. Do you it all now, Anthony?’

Anthony thinks it over, crosschecking the details against prior recollections.

‘Was it always like that?’

‘Sometimes,’ his father answers.

‘I wish it was like that now.’

His father says nothing.

‘How old was the boy when he drowned?’

‘Which time?’

Anthony doesn’t specify. He wants his father to think there is only one time and for him to answer truthfully.

‘Much, much younger than you,’ his father eventually answers. ‘Really not even a boy yet.’

‘I’m nearly eight.’

‘That’s pretty old.’

‘The boy didn’t really drown, did he? Not in real life, I mean.’

‘I guess not.’

‘I can swim by myself now.’

‘Eight is not that old. It’s dangerous. Even when it’s low, it’s still dangerous.’

‘I learned when I was five.’

‘Five is a good age for learning.’

‘You taught me.’

‘I showed you and you taught yourself. But that was in the backwaters where the water is calm and there isn’t any current and where the water level doesn’t come up so unexpectedly.’

‘Was he younger than five when he drowned?’

‘Much younger.’

‘Was it his father’s fault really?’

‘Probably.’

‘Couldn’t it be nobody’s fault?’

‘No.’

When the setlines have been resubmitted with their hooks fattened and knots

checked for durability, Anthony and his father find a shaded spot on top of a rock and cast their lines out into the middle. It’s almost six o’clock now. The sun is showing through the trees quite well and the water is blue with definite streaks of light brown. Already it’s very hot.

‘How many days did we have to wait for the river to go down last time?’ Anthony asks.

‘Last time we were lucky. It was down when we arrived. We fished on this side for two days and made camp, and then when we had not caught anything decent we went and found the secret spot. Your mother found it.’

‘And was she still wearing a feather behind her ear, like the little boy in the story?’

‘I don’t think I all the details quite as well as you them, Anthony. You have an excellent memory.’

Anthony smiles. His father smiles too. On the other side of the river a water dragon drops off his branch and disappears beneath the current. It’s the elongated shadows of birds on the water that make the lizards hide away like this. Anthony picks up a handful of pine needles coloured like pencil shavings and throws them out in front. A trick his father has taught him for gauging the wind. The birds and lizards and heat are tricks for other things. The needles float away on the surface of the water and Anthony quickly forgets which direction the wind influenced them and what difference it makes anyway.

At a quarter past eight, Anthony’s father takes the first real strike of the morning.

Anthony sees the fish come on too. The line pulls diagonal and tight towards the centre of the river. The reel’s drag sounds like the tent fly being unzipped, and the water dragon, which has returned to its branch, sits upright, ready to leap again. Judging by the angle, it’s a fish that knows the benefit of lodging in the centre, where the current is strongest and the water deepest. Anthony’s father stands and begins palming and winding and fighting it back toward the surface. He keeps the rod tip high at all times, explaining the methodology of the fight to Anthony as he goes.

‘You have to know when to let it run. If you let it run too early, it’ll make straight for a snag. You can’t stop it outright though. You’ll break it off if you try to stop it outright. You have to know just when.’

‘Can you feel what it is yet?’

‘You can’t feel for sure until you have it on the surface. This one doesn’t want to come up either. I’ll bring it up. If it’s a rainbow, I’ll make it jump. Then we’ll know. You better take the rod, Anthony. If it’s the rainbow of all rainbows, then you better be the one who pulls it in, so that you can be the hero of the next story.’

After eight days of camping and fishing, Anthony is all too familiar with his father’s ability to make an undersize troutling seem like a fifteen-pound fighter just by loading the rod right forward and over-flexing his forearms and talking in disted breathless rhythms. He takes the rod warily, expecting a tadpole-like pull and his father’s laughter, though immediately feels the weight of the fish for himself. He adjusts his stance. It’s real weight.

‘Like I showed you,’ his father says.

Anthony cocks his wrists so that the fish has something to fight against. At the same time, he keeps his elbows malleable to avoid the clean break. His left foot is slightly forward. He has the line tight enough that it shakes the entire rod each time the fish surges into a deeper pocket. It shakes enough that it puts him off balance. He opens his stance, but there’s no effective way to completely brace against it. The shock goes too many ways at once. It rattles down past his knees and makes him hold his breath and lose depth in his shoulders. Somewhere in his imagination he sees a dog trying to win a game of tug-of-war against its owner, two arm-wrestlers with tattoos on their biceps and no shirts. The images are from stories told to him by his father, like the one where the man flogs his son across the backside with the thick, fibrous, plaited skipping rope for playing too loudly during the middle part of the day when his mother is trying to sleep and repair herself.

‘How is he, Anthony?’

‘My back hurts,’ Anthony says.

‘Don’t think about your back. Think of how he will sound cooking on the grill.’

Anthony thinks of the blue Bedford van with the blue tarpaulin and tent fly fixed to its side, of the tie wire running through the gills and out the mouths, of the green and blue sleeping bags lined with leopard-print fabric, in which he and his father sleep side by side, without taking off their shoes. He thinks of colour and water, of that drowned boy holding onto the rainbow trout at the other end, refusing to let it up for anything, and of his mother’s hair. He thinks if they could wait it out and return to the secret spot, then he could tell his mother just how it was and she would say, ‘I it just that way myself,’ and then it would be just that way, and it really could be nobody’s fault.

The fish shudders the line and Anthony begins to cry.

‘Don’t think of it hurting,’ his father says.

It goes again and Anthony undoes his grip and watches the rod topple over the lip of the rock and disappear into the water. It goes over like crane.

‘Your goddamned back,’ his father says, dropping Anthony’s birthday rod and leaping in after his own.

Anthony stands atop of the rock crying. He would like to see the secret spot before they leave, but he knows there’s no chance of his father taking him across now. The river falls much more slowly than it rises and, even then, it can come on again at any vicious moment.

Later in the day, when they have packed up the camp and are driving home together with the windows all the way down, he will tell his father what was really attached to the end of the line and why he had to let go, and his father will say that not everything is about that goddamned drowned boy. And because of the taste of his mother’s premature blood rising out of the seat behind them, flapping and tugging in the breeze like that drowned boy who fights against the current and against the hook and against his mother’s craziness and against everything else that is after him, Anthony will know that this part of the fiction is a lie.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Mara, Tony M., Shane, Penelope, Julia, Debra, Luke, Tony B., Roanna, Maggie, Cath, Shady, Joshua, Chrissy, Alan, Cathy, Hayley, Jen, Emma, Kate, Sam, Ange, Shell and Jim, as well as all the students who’ve shown up over the years to talk writing. I owe big debts of gratitude to the family I was born into as well as the extended families who’ve made me feel welcome in their homes over the past decade and a half or so. I extend my appreciation to the University of Wollongong and University of Technology Sydney for the I received while writing these stories. Finally, and with much love, I thank my four kids – Albury, Harriet, Emile and Ottavio – for the immeasurably positive bearing they have on me and everything I do.

A number of the stories in this collection have been published elsewhere, sometimes under different titles. I’m grateful to the editors and readers of these publications for their hospitality, input and : ‘When We Were Eight Together’ (Island), ‘The Names of Dead Horses’ (Westerly), ‘The Conditional Past’ (Southerly), ‘Ferocious Animals’ (Griffith Review), ‘Looking Both Ways’ (Mascara Literary Review), and ‘The Secret Spot’ (Overland).

Luke Johnson was born and raised in Young, NSW. His short stories have been published in numerous Australian journals and listed for such awards as the Josephine Ulrick Prize, the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the AAWP Chapter One Prize, the AlburyCity Short Story Prize, the Katharine Susannah Prichard Speculative Fiction Award, and two Varuna PIP Fellowships. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Wollongong.