‘First time for everything.’
Ben kicked dirt into the air, squealed like he was being chased. ‘Raf! There are so many ants! Do you think they’re termites?’
‘Could be,’ Raf called back. He rolled his head to the side and kissed my cheek. ‘Got something special planned for when I get back.’
‘Sounds scary,’ I said.
‘Could be.’
Ben dropped to the ground on Raf’s other side. Raf pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna miss the bus.’ He went to kiss me, looked at Ben, changed his mind. ‘Cheer for us. Loud, so we can hear you on the other side of the Gulf.’ He scrambled to his feet.
‘Bye, Raf!’ Ben said. We watched him run, footy bag bouncing. When he was out of sight, Ben said to me, ‘He’s nice.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Have you ever been to the tip? It’s over the other side of the block and I went there once after school and found a TV.’
‘A TV? What’d you do with it?’
‘It was too heavy to carry so I left it behind. But there might be other cool stuff there.’
‘Okay, you lead the way.’
The morning was warm and humid. He skipped through it, swatting flies and pulling tiny black ants from his arms. Sure enough, behind the empty block was a rotten old tip, piled high with people’s junk and the junk’s junk. Ben had found – or cut – a hole in the fence and he slipped through it.
‘The TV was this way,’ he said, and I followed behind.
We found all kinds of stuff. Nothing good, but everything with its own story. A food processor with worms living in it. A suitcase with MACPHERSON stamped on the front. Mugs and plates smashed into pieces. Piles and piles of tyres. Ben opened the door of an old fridge and something scuttled out.
‘A scorpion!’ he shrieked, ran behind me like I could protect him from it.
‘Want me to step on it?’
‘No! Don’t kill it!’ He stared at it until it disappeared under the rubble. ‘Their bodies glow, you know. Yiannis had a pet one and his dad bought him one of those black lights and it looked like it was glowing in the dark.’ He reached for my hand and we walked together. ‘I think they have live ones at the museum. Maybe they can show us how they glow, when we go there.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said.
‘They probably have other things too, like centipedes and spiders.’
‘Gross.’
‘Maybe bird-eating spiders. They don’t eat birds but sometimes they eat lizards.’ He let go of my hand and ducked through the hole in the fence again. ‘Pretty much all omnivorous animals eat lizards.’
I slid through behind him. ‘That was fun,’ I said. ‘Disgusting, but fun.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fun things usually are.’
We were halfway home when we heard Murray barking. He was really going for it, loud and throaty barks and deep growling. People in the other houses had come out to look, standing on their porches and peering down the street, as though the dog were a spectacle, something exciting to watch.
Ben looked at me with his eyes wide. ‘That’s Murray,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
He raced ahead of me, pockets jangling with all its trinkets as he went. The people on their porches watched him go, looked back to me, looked in the direction of the barking.
‘Everything okay?’ said one of them.
‘I don’t know,’ I shouted.
I went after him, running harder than I could ever remember running, just throwing everything I had into getting back to the house. The front door was wide open. Mum stood in the hallway with her face red and blotchy and her fingers in her ears and I shook her – ‘What’s going on?’ – and she blinked a couple of times and pointed towards the yard.
And then Ben’s screaming.
Howling. Like the sound was being forced from his body. I ran to the back room, Mum trailing behind me.
Ben: on his knees, his face on the floor and the screaming echoing against the lino. Body shaking. I ran to him. ‘What is it? What’s going on?’ and he pointed without looking to the garden.
Mum: standing in the doorway with her face half-painted and her robe coming open, sighing.
And Jason: beer in hand, laughing, kicking the homeless tortoise back to the dog, and the dog sniffing for it, blind, barking at the air, barking at the ground. Picking up the tortoise and its broken shell and crunching it in his jaws and all of us hearing it, the crunch amplified as though he’d hooked up surround sound just to make sure we all knew what was happening. Crunch.
I rocked Ben back and forth and he pulled out his toy cars and started throwing them at the glass door. Jason spun around and yelled at him: ‘You want to fucking pay for it?’ and Ben just threw them and then picked them up and threw them again, until he finally made a tiny crack in the glass and Jason came storming in.
And grabbed him.
Grabbed him by his throat, just picked him clean off the floor.
Mum gasped.
Jason shoved Ben against the wall and he kicked his legs and his knee had a graze where he’d fallen on the nature strip and he kicked and kicked and Jason held him there, put his face very close to him: ‘You don’t keep animals in this house.’ Ben’s little legs went like mad, like he was riding a bike up a very steep hill, and with his hands he pulled at Jason’s hands, grabbing and scratching. Murray screamed and yanked on his chain and the Hills hoist groaned and moved in its concrete footing. I felt paralysed. Couldn’t make my legs go over there, couldn’t make my hands slap the shit out of him. I just stood there like a useless prick, doing nothing and saying nothing.
Mum moved in my peripheral vision, a step forward and then a step back. Jason’s eyes flicked over to her.
‘You understand?’ Jason said, to both of them at once.
Ben nodded, a bit, as much as he could nod with the hands around his throat, and Jason dropped him. He gasped for air, tried grabbing it with his fists and shovelling it into his throat. Then I could move again. I ran to him and did all the things I knew to get him restarted. Rubbed his back, rubbed his head, held him and rocked him and picked up his toy cars so he could smash them into each other.
Mum kept standing there with her robe open and her face red and her eyes wet, but she didn’t say anything. Jason looked back at Ben.
‘Be a man,’ he said. He took Mum’s hand and they went to his bedroom and closed the door, the soft pads of her slippers down the hallway and his steel-capped boots on the lino.
I grabbed Ben’s shoulders and looked right at him. ‘You wait here for two seconds, okay?’ His neck had come up in red welts, finger-sized beginnings of bruises. ‘Okay?’ He moved his head minutely, up once and down once.
I got a towel and opened the back door a centimetre at a time. Murray snapped at thin air, dancing on his three good feet and his one bad foot. His chain whipped against the metal of the clothesline, clunked and rang with each step he took.
‘Murray!’ Nothing. ‘Murray, stop!’ He kept on pulling. His clouded eyes showed no signs of anything. Anger. Sadness. Regret. It was just his body, his determination to get off that chain. And then what? Jason would run him down with his own car.
Inside I found a bit of meat in the fridge, brown at the edges, four dollars a kilo marked on it in my own handwriting. Murray sniffed at the air, lifted his nose towards the bit of carcass. ‘You want it?’ I said. ‘Go get it.’ I chucked it across the yard and he went after it, right to the end of his chain.
I couldn’t look at Bilbo. Tossed the towel in the general direction and scooped him up in it. For a second, his legs moved under my fingers. But the shape of him was all wrong, with the towel wrapped around him, like tectonic plates shifting.
Ben grabbed the towel right out of my hands and held it close to his chest.
‘We have to go to the vet,’ he said, his voice coming out in ribbons.
‘Jason said the vet’s not in.’ The tortoise b
ound in the towel. He couldn’t breathe in there, even if he wanted to.
‘Maybe Raf knows.’
‘Raf’ll be on the bus already. Are you okay to walk?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Listen,’ I said, very close to his face. ‘I’m going to grab some things. I want you to stay exactly right here. Don’t move a muscle.’
‘I have to move my chest muscles to breathe,’ he said.
‘Just those then.’
I grabbed our school bags and shoved in everything in reach. A change of clothes for him. A change of clothes for me. Shoes, socks, undies. The picture he’d drawn of us and Mum and Bilbo on a leash. The blacksmith book. The cars he’d thrown at the window. A rock with You rock! written on it. My phone and wallet were in my pocket. I went to the kitchen and took muesli bars, a block of cheese, half a loaf of bread.
Things we could eat on the train. Things we’d need in Adelaide.
Jason’s door stayed closed. We went out the side door, through the laundry, and clicked open the gate to the street. The people who’d been out before had mostly gone inside; the same woman who’d called out earlier was still there on her porch, drink in hand. She watched us go but said nothing.
We walked across the empty block to the other bus stop, where we could wait without anyone seeing us. He sat on the kerb. I sat next to him. The warm concrete pinched the backs of my thighs. Ben put his hand inside the towel, snapped it back like he’d been bitten. Quick breaths, in and out.
‘Tortoises aren’t supposed to feel like that,’ he said. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ He began to open the towel. It flapped in the afternoon breeze and bits of shell came away with it, green and brown. Ben’s body shrank away from mine but he said nothing until the tortoise was exposed to the air, when he let out a whimper, then folded it all up again. ‘He is dead,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’
‘He might not be.’
His voice was wet with sadness. ‘Yiannis says chickens can live without their heads. And cockroaches. He says cockroaches can live for a month without their heads because they breathe through holes in their body.’
I put my arm around him, squeezed him close to me.
‘He says they can just keep on surviving without their heads until they starve to death or a bird gets them. And,’ he said, and I heard the breath rushing in and out of him all at once, ‘their heads can survive on their own, too. If you feed it, it might even live for a whole day.’
‘Gross,’ I said.
He nodded, patted the towel again. ‘Not tortoises. Tortoises just die.’ He stood. ‘We have to bury him.’
At the end of the empty block we found a bit of earth soft enough to shovel with our hands. Ben got down on his knees, dug into the ground until his fingernails were black and red. I picked through the dirt pile, found spiders and centipedes and threw them as far from Ben as I could. The towel didn’t move. It was crisp along the edges where blood had dried.
‘You okay?’ I said to the back of Ben’s head.
‘Do you think this is my fault? Because I said the thing about Galápagos tortoises being delicious?’
‘Oh Ben, no. No. Of course it isn’t.’
‘It’s just I said Murray might think he was delicious and it turned out Murray did think he was delicious. I didn’t have to say that. I could have just said, Galápagos tortoises are delicious, and not said the thing about Murray.’
‘It’s not like he could hear you,’ I said.
‘I guess.’ He took the towel and folded it around itself a few more times to make a package. He was gentle, placing it in the hole he’d dug with as much delicacy as he could muster.
‘Do you want to say anything?’ I said.
‘No.’ He pushed the dirt pile back into the ground until the towel had vanished. We stood there a while longer, Ben staring at the ground and me watching him, the way his body had curved forward and his brow shoved down.
‘Do you want to get an ice-block?’ I said.
‘Okay.’
We walked into the afternoon. Ben’s throat had turned vicious shades of pink and violet. I pulled out my phone. Claud’s number stared back at me.
‘Skye?’ she said. ‘Rafferty’s already left.’ I waited for a second, tried to make my own voice solid and even. Coughed. My chest was so tight behind my ribs.
‘I know,’ I said finally. ‘Can you come and get us?’
*
We waited on the gutter. Ben touched his hand to his throat, touched it again, again. Rings of purple, red veins where the skin had torn. We played noughts and crosses with a stick in the dirt. It was getting close to dinner time. The sun sat low across the spinifex block and I strained to see into the shadows it threw. A couple of kids kicked a ball around; their shouts carried loud across the flat road.
‘It’s not okay, what Jason did to you. You know that, right? You didn’t do anything wrong.’
Ben said nothing.
It was less than ten minutes before Claud pulled up. She jumped from her car, gathered Ben and his trinkets into her arms. He let his head drop forward and she gasped, buried her head in his soft hair. He crouched into her like she was a nest.
‘Get in, Skye,’ she said. Her face was so dark, eyes furious and bloodshot. I climbed into the back seat and she bundled Ben in after me.
She set each of us up with a bowl of ice-cream and we sat in front of their huge TV and watched Trey play on his Xbox. I ate Ben’s. After the ice-cream was finished, she made us ham and cheese sandwiches cut into little triangles, brought them in on a tray with flowers on it. Ben didn’t eat any of it. She sat next to him and put her hand on his knee.
‘Bad day, huh?’
‘My tortoise got eaten by a dog.’ He was so quiet, like someone had put him inside a box.
She whistled through her teeth. ‘That doesn’t sound too good.’
‘I watched him. He picked him up and he crunched him like a lolly.’
‘That’s awful, sweet pea.’ She pulled him into her lap and he curled up in there, a baby possum in its pouch. He closed his eyes. After a few minutes, his breathing had eased into a steady rhythm and he was asleep. Trey went outside and his car started up.
Claud turned to me, spoke in a low voice. ‘So?’
‘Mum’s boyfriend.’ I didn’t know where to start. At the apartment? Snapping my bra strap in the hallway? Telling Ben he talks a lot of shit?
‘What did he do?’ she said. ‘Are these marks his?’ She pointed to Ben’s neck, where the bruises were flowering.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll kill him.’ Ben stirred. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t . . . I can’t remember.’ The tortoise and the dog and Jason laughing, Mum watching from the door, Ben with his feet in the air. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he touch you?’
‘Not this time.’
‘Skye. Oh, darling.’ She picked up her phone. ‘I have to call the police.’
‘No! You can’t.’
She pulled me close. ‘They’ll make sure you guys are safe.’
‘They’ll take him away.’
‘Who, Skye?’
‘Ben. They’ll take him away from me.’
‘I promise they won’t. Just let me call them, okay? We’ll see what they say.’ She held the phone to her ear. I heard the muffled grunting of a person at the other end. Claud nodded a couple of times. I tried to breathe, could only think of Ben without me. Me without Ben. ‘Okay then,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your help.’ She put the phone down.
‘What did they say? Are they coming to get him?’
‘The guy’d left for the day.’
I let out my breath. ‘Oh.’
She grabbed my hands. ‘Stay here tonight. I can’t bear you kids going back to that monster.’
‘Thanks.’
‘The guy we need to speak to will be back in the morning and I’ll call again then. Okay?’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Everything will be al
l right.’
Ben hiccuped in his sleep, breath shuddering out like he’d been crying.
After dinner I used Raf’s computer, brought up the train website and booked two tickets – thirty-five dollars each, the cheapest ones they had. When they’d printed, I checked my internet banking. Twelve hundred dollars. Half of what I’d hoped to leave with, barely enough to cover us for a week. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough.
I closed the laptop. It would have to be enough.
16
SOMETIMES DAD WOULD pick me up from the flat and take me into the central train station. We went on Sundays and stood under the flickering timetables with our tickets in our hands. We always caught whichever train was leaving next. Sometimes we ended up in Belair and sometimes at Gawler.
Once, there had been a fair on – the signs were everywhere – so we walked and walked to find it but it wasn’t anywhere, and then the last train was leaving.
My alarm went off at three fifteen. I listened to Ben sleep for a full minute, standing over him like I thought I was his guardian angel. He was smaller than yesterday, tucked up in Raf’s sheets, a soft snore choking out of him. My need to keep him safe wrapped tight around my lungs.
‘Time to go,’ I said.
He rolled to face me, eyes closed. ‘Go where?’
‘Home.’
He blinked a couple of times, looked at me with his eyes puffed up. ‘To Jason’s? No thank you.’
‘Not to Jason’s. On the train.’
He frowned, took a second just swirling the idea around in his head. Then he jerked upright. ‘But Mum’s not here yet. She’s not here yet. We have to wait for her.’ He scrambled out of bed. ‘I’ll go and get her. You can stay here and I’ll go and get her.’ His bruises stood out black and angry in the light from the street.
‘I had to change the plan a bit. It’s okay though, Mum will understand.’ Standing in the hall with her dressing-gown flapping open. ‘She’ll catch up with us. Okay? I’ll call her from the train and she’ll get the next one and we’ll all meet up in Adelaide.’
‘Why can’t we wait until she’s ready?’ He stared at me, so bleary-eyed, trying to connect whatever he’d woken from with the strange room.
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