We. Are. Family.

by Paul Mitchell

  ‘My Aunty Jules is a bit of a stress head because of it all,’ he went on. ‘And she’s tough enough to take on lightning in a sword fight.’

  Nick wanted to shut up. He would. Soon.

  ‘Right,’ Bible boy said. ‘It’s pretty honourable your family’s going to the funeral...’

  Nick laughed.

  ‘Nah, mate. It’s not that. They just don’t admit anything. They all act like they’re happy families when they’re a mob of pricks to each other. But once they get on the sauce, Christ, do the feathers fly...’

  Nick sucked on the chocolate bar he’d brought; it had melted in his bag before he’d got onto the bus and the air con.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve had a rough life.’

  Uh, oh, here we go. And Jesus will put me back together.

  Nick thought the night with Fizz would be the end of it. Corinne was due back from Queensland late on the next Sunday. But when Tim got an orgy sorted for the Saturday night, Nick knew he had to go. It was one of those once in a lifetime, bucket-list things.

  Eight blokes and six girls in Tim’s man cave listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The girls were in lace undies and stupid masks. The blokes, except for one who had a leather g-string on, were in jeans and t-shirts. All looking at g-string boy and what he carried in it.

  Which was a lot.

  When it was over, Nick didn’t want to do anything like it again. It was too risky having fourteen people in Tim’s man cave. What if Cynthia had decided, oh, stuff it, I’ll get a babysit-ter and go and watch the bloody State of Origin with the boys? Plus, in the weeks after the orgy, he felt flat as two-week old lemonade. It got so that booze and smokes and, Christ, even Cynthia’s hands on him, when she finally did go for an explore, made him feel nothing.

  But while the orgy was on, and there were moans and shrieks and chomps and chunks and sweet smells rising, it was bloody fantastic. He’d felt something that night he’d only heard on TV shows about India and yoga. He was connected, somehow. In a way he’d never felt. Not when he was a boy, when he’d got married, or when he’d had his kids. It was embarrassing, but in the orgy he’d felt like a warm piece of a body that loved itself, over and over. And it didn’t seem like it would ever stop. Until it did. And they all whacked their pants back on and went home.

  And then he felt worse than shit.

  Nick had been outside the War and Tooth too many times on a Friday night, munted full of beer and kebabs. That’s when dim-witted Bible bashers from Happy Valley or whatever church got in your face, closer than garlic sauce. Told you what a sinner you were, which sounded a bit like they were calling you a shithead, but it didn’t matter because Jesus could save you. Nick would say thanks buddy, but no thanks, and hail a taxi before he gave in to his desire to pop the bastard on his arse.

  There was no taxi rank on the bus so Nick needed to hail some smarts.

  He told Bible boy that, no, he hadn’t had a rough life; his life had been fine, thanks. He told him about giving it to Fizz with his brother and then the orgy. And not only the orgy, but how much he’d liked it. He skipped the bit about feeling as numb later as after a morning at the dentist.

  The bloke sat back for a while. He shifted the Bible here and there on his lap. He might have been trying to hide a hard on. But then he turned and looked at Nick. His eyes were marsh-mallows. Hot ones. Full of goo.

  ‘There’s a search for goodness in everything we do.’

  The bloke was surely a full-blown nutjob.

  ‘Deep down, you just want to belong.’

  Nick felt squeamish. No, much worse. He felt genuinely sick. Like he was getting smashed around the head with something. He couldn’t shake the bloke off. He wanted to belt him. A punch would shock the crap out of him. He’d squeal and his eyes would water. But he let the bastard yabber on. Hallelujah, yabber, yabber. ‘Hallelujah’, the Jeff Buckley version. As Bible Boy spoke, Nick pictured for one crazy second all the blokes and chicks in the orgy singing it.

  He was going out of his scone.

  He was sweating. There were pools of it under his knees. But the air con was making everything icy.

  ‘You want to hit me, don’t you?’

  And now he had a mind reader sitting next to him.

  ‘No,’ Nick lied and plunged his hand into his seat pocket, hunting for his Zoo mag. Where the hell was it?

  ‘Even that means you want to be close to people.’

  Nick felt like he was in primary school and this younger bloke was the teacher. And Nick was the naughty dickhead in class. Again.

  He couldn’t sit there for the next five hours. He raced to the front and told the bus driver he had to get off. Now.

  ‘Are you sick?’ The skinny driver had pen ink tatts on his hand.

  ‘I just want to get off.’

  ‘It desert round here bloke, hey? Nothin for miles.’

  ‘I want to fucken’ get out.’

  The driver yapped on about spirits in those parts, but he eventually gave up and stopped the bus. Before Nick got off, he looked at the road ahead and the bitumen snaking to the horizon. All shimmery.

  ‘Neck town eighty kay. You be right bloke?’ the driver asked as he led Nick off the bus in the screaming wind. He pulled Nick’s gear from the baggage compartment and Nick waved that he was okay. The driver hopped back on and the doors whooshed shut.

  The bus engine revved and it got ready to go. Nick’s forehead was dripping and his case’s handle was slippery. He found himself wanting Bible bloke to get off as well. Maybe so he could belt him. Extra hard. But it was going to be a big-arsed walk. If Bible bloke got off, Nick wouldn’t say anything to him. He could just walk beside him. They’d be quiet together. They’d listen to whatever message the wind was shouting. It was a message, surely.

  But the bus took off. And Nick couldn’t see Bible boy in the window seat where he’d been. Had he moved? There was no room in there.

  6. Peter and Ron Stevenson

  Peter doesn’t know exactly when it happens, but he must be a very naughty young boy. How naughty he is. He must stop being so naughty.

  ‘I said now, Peter!’

  Was it ten seconds later? Thirty-five years? Sometime later. He must stop. Peter must be so incredibly naughty because here he comes; it’s his father. Look at him: he’s wearing his work tie and short-sleeved shirt. He’s going to work at the truck yard office in Corumbul. He’s the manager, his mother has told him, and he’s got pressures. He’s putting his briefcase on the kitchen’s black and white checkered lino and, look now, he’s picking up the knife from the middle of the breakfast table.

  Or is it from the drawer?

  It’s in his father’s hands, his shaking hands, and look how the blade shakes too. Look at his father: his eyes are shiny.

  His father is raising the knife and he’s telling Peter now, ten seconds later, thirty-five years afterwards, that he is a very bad boy. So bad his father’s saying he’s going to kill him with the knife if he doesn’t shut up.

  He’s going to kill him and his brothers.

  Look at his eyes.

  Peter is sure his father is going to kill him.

  They’re very shiny eyes.

  But it’s okay. If they die it’s okay, because the boys have shrunk.

  Peter and his brothers have melted into their seats, through the floor and under the house. They’re never coming out. They’re safe down there. Under the house where they can’t be killed.

  Then Peter’s back. And his father’s standing in front of him, his jaw shaking. Peter’s there and beneath the ground. He’s heading to the earth’s hot core, it’s getting hotter, and his dad and the knife are shaking.

  Do you hear me, son? Never again!

  He must know how naughty he is. So naughty he’s still at the table, ten seconds later, thirty-five years ago.

  And his father has gone to work.

  Peter’s family had moved to Corumbul from Ballarat. But Peter had liked Ballarat. Until he’d
started school. It’d been a nice place before that: spider webs grew in the back garden, all across the azaleas and pom-pom flowers, blue and white. He’d got a t-shirt with Mickey Mouse on it. A prize in a Tip Top bread competition. He’d wanted to win and go to Disneyland. But he’d got a consolation prize. He’d worn his t-shirt, proud and smiling at his nice neighbour and her curly hair, and he’d still thought he was going to Disneyland. Instead, he started school at Ballarat’s Lake Worth Primary School. He’d cried at the gate the first day, but his mum had left him because she couldn’t come in, mothers weren’t allowed in, and it was so hot in the classroom he sweated up his thighs and shorts. Little ponds formed on his plastic seat. So thirsty, he went for the iced drink bottle his mum had given him.

  ‘You don’t drink til recess, Peter! Leave it alone!’

  How did the teacher see him? How did she know his name? She was so far away. At the blackboard. And everyone looked at him. And his drink bottle. He put it back and cried and someone laughed. This was school.

  He doesn’t go to school for months in Corumbul. His mum pulls him out because he’s crying all the time at school and not adjusting. But when he does go he learns that footy cards are what he needs to make friends.

  Before school each morning, his mum sends him on his bike to buy bread at the milk bar, and she lets him use the change to buy a packet of footy cards. The more swaps he makes the more friends he’ll have, so at the counter he holds two footy card packs close together, and pays for only one. Because of this, it must be, he scores two Leigh Matthews. Lethal Leigh is the hardest card to get. Boys mob Peter at recess under the old elm and he swaps a Matthews for a Rene Kink, a Billy Picken and two Peter Moores. He doesn’t need both Peter Moores, but he takes them anyway because Darren is nice, he doesn’t tread on Peter’s toes in the crush, and he believes in UFOs.

  Corumbul is his father’s first post as a yard manager. He’d been an assistant in Ballarat, but now he is an important person. Peter’s mother leaves him at the yard office a few times after school while she goes shopping. His father shows him to the workers behind their desks and they ask who he barracks for. He tells them Collingwood, the mighty Magpies, and they boo with smiles on their faces. Later, he gets to play in his father’s office. He mucks around with what looks like a black Scrabble tile holder. It says Ronald Stevenson—Manager. Peter turns it in his hands, taps it like a drumstick on his father’s rubber desk mat, uses it as a mouth organ, then places it in front of him and pretends he is the Manager.

  He is his father.

  His mum is so happy. Peter has finished adjusting, he is going to school, and he has a friend! The first time Peter asks if Darren can come over and play she says yes, even though she has to prepare for a dinner party while his father is at golf. But she keeps an eye on Peter and Darren, smiling as she stacks cream and diced fruit into parfait glasses. She asks what Peter and Darren want to do together, you two friends? Peter says he wants to get all the liquids he can find in the kitchen—milk, cordial, chocolate topping, water, tomato sauce, orange juice—and mix them into a glass. And drink them. And his mum says yes! But be careful.

  ‘You go first,’ Darren says when it comes time for the taste test. His eyes are bright beneath bushy eyebrows. He has a bowl haircut. Peter knows this is what it is called because his father has told him he has one, too. Peter takes the glass, raises it and gulps.

  ‘Not too much!’ his mum cries. Darren drinks two glasses —and almost throws up. Later, Peter puts him to another test, but he knows he’ll pass: he loves Peter’s Biggest, Smallest, Fastest, Strangest book. It has a red cover with dusky drawings and black and white photos of giant crabs, ostrich eggs, huge pies, the Mary Celeste and, on page 72, UFOs! The main photo of the flying saucer above shadowy power lines and the wire fence is, the book says, a fake. But that’s stupid. Why would they have it in the book if it were a fake?

  UFOs are everywhere. There’s one behind every star that hangs above the Corumbul paddocks at night. They fly around the graveyard on the hill. They are maybe even the voices Peter hears at night, sometimes, when he can’t sleep and he’s thinking of his dead aunty Sheree, still wearing her colourful clothes in her coffin, waiting to wake up on the last day like her church friends said.

  Of course the photo is real.

  And Darren can stay the night.

  The dinner party clangs and glitters in the formal dining room, the one Peter is never allowed into. It’s for the Queen and for people who work for his dad’s company in Melbourne. He and Darren hunt the front garden and then the nearby footpaths for UFOs. He always sees them when he’s by himself, just last week he saw two, but tonight, nothing. None above the darkening tile roofs, none in the distant hills.

  They talk about times they’ve seen UFOs out car windows on long trips, or walks just like this one—damn it, last week!— but Peter doesn’t care. He and Darren run up and down the footpath, laughing at how long the moon makes their shadows, until his dad calls from the porch for them to stop their racket. The boys stand still and their shadows retreat.

  They launch then they fly, those angry thoughts and angry feelings, up and down at night in Peter’s stomach and his head. And the feelings talk. They come at him with blades in his dreams and they tell him they are taking him, there’s nothing he can do. He feels the blades pierce him and when he wakes his stomach is aching and he tells his mum he can’t go to school. But she says, ‘Peter, you’ve been doing well. Come on, buck up, be brave.’ And he goes. But the blade people come in the night again and his father, who hasn’t again said he wants to kill Peter, goes to work in the morning, and Peter goes to school.

  His father whacks and thumps him for being a bad boy but the hits don’t hurt. It’s like his father’s hands and belts are banging on one of the used oil drums in the truck yard. When his father seethes towards him, belt raised and ready, Peter doesn’t care. There’s no knife. Peter’s still under the house and huddled with his brothers. Where he can’t be killed.

  The voices follow him to the classroom. Where he’s not sure if his father wants him alive, and he’s sick of his aunty being dead, and the voices won’t leave him alone. When he gets home, he stays in his room as much as he can. With his UFO book. And the fake UFO that is as real as the hand he uses to turn the pages.

  Is there a place UFOs go when it’s cold at night? he wonders.

  When is it too cold for UFOs to fly? Do they go under their houses?

  One strange day in Corumbul, it snows. His mum takes photos; she’s in a coat with red trim and her dark hair dances on the collar. She could be Santa’s wife. There could be UFOs in the snow, maybe they brought the snow. His father doesn’t get home in time to see it before it melts.

  That night, Peter decides to make friends with the voices. Come and talk to me. Come and take me wherever you are! But they don’t talk or come. Peter’s brothers are asleep when he turns the lamp on and opens his book. He laughs as he draws onto the photo of the UFO a picture of an alien holding a football.

  Peter’s just become a teenager when his family moves to Westmore, a satellite city of Melbourne. They’d had another move before that, from Corumbul to Tarmit, but they’d made it now to Westmore’s redbrick suburb of Hillton. One of the neighbor-ing families is from Vietnam. Peter’s never seen anyone from Vietnam, and now he lives next to people from Vietnam. Westmore is strange, but he’ll get used to it, his mother says, and his father’s gone. Working at a new yard. A bigger one. Peter listens to David Bowie all the time now because Bowie has a red lightning bolt on his face and he sings about stars and men waiting in the sky. Peter climbs naked onto the roof one night when everyone’s asleep. There are fewer stars in Westmore than anywhere he has lived. He hums ‘Starman’ to the sky until his bum’s freezing and he can’t remember why he’s naked or on the roof.

  The Stevensons have a barbecue dinner with the chemist, David Crane, and his family: The Cranes. They’ve just moved to Westmore from Romville, a little town ne
ar Tarmit, the town Peter and his family have just left behind, that he didn’t want to leave behind. He liked Tarmit, like he liked Corumbul, like he’d liked Ballarat. He doesn’t think about Disneyland anymore. He’d had a girlfriend in Tarmit who hadn’t known she was Peter’s girlfriend. She’d sat at the desk in front of him, and half her bum had hung over the side of her plastic seat. It made Peter think of nectarines. He likes them, with ice-cream. But now he’s in Westmore, having a barbecue. Sausages. And the Cranes have only boys to play with.

  The families share broad accents and community minded-ness. Both are struggling, they say, in their new hometown. This Westmore, city slick one minute—traffic lights, a Village Cinema—and a country town the next. If you’ve got red hair you go to school at St James School. If you’ve got a tattoo you live in Corton or East Blemton. If you’ve got a posh accent, a plum in your mouth, darling, his mum and Mrs Crane laugh, you must live in Weeeeeling!

  David’s son, Andrew, he’s got something more like a date in his mouth. His speech is so wide and slow Peter can see cows walking behind him on their way to their evening milking. He tries Andrew on posters and music, but his new friend can’t make sense of David Bowie. He takes him for a kick of football in the front yard instead. The chemist’s balloon-biceped son lands thumping drop punts on Peter’s skinny chest. Only Peter finds out later that Andrew and Cal aren’t David’s sons. The boys’ real father drowned in a fishing accident, in Lake Romville. Their mother, Wendy, so the gossip went, married David before her late husband’s bed was cold.

  There aren’t enough spaces at the dining table. Everyone gath-ers as best they can at the round one near the kitchen bench. The daylight saving sun through the glass sliding doors turns everyone’s faces orange. The chemist has to make sick people laugh, every day, that’s what he says. That’s why he’s a great storyteller! He’s got wrinklier cheeks than Peter’s dad’s but they rise as he tells of his hypochondriac customers. Everyone lowers their sausages in bread, laughing about Westmore people who are city slick but country slow.