by Judy Nunn
Tim had everything worked out. He even intended to fire the revolver into one of the big chaff bags of chicken feed to deaden the sound.
He carefully loaded a bullet into each of the six chambers. ‘See,’ he boasted as he snapped the cylinder closed, ‘told you I knew how.’
Holding the revolver in both hands, he pressed the muzzle firmly against the chaff bag and, with both index fingers, he eased back the trigger.
There was a muffled crack, not unlike the sound his cap gun made, but Tim was far from disappointed. The weapon kicked thrillingly in his hand, the air was filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder and there was a neat hole in the chaff bag.
It had worked. Tim’s heart was thumping with excitement and adrenalin pounded through his body, but he looked to Lexie for his ultimate reward. He wasn’t disappointed.
‘Wow!’ Lexie breathed out a long, gentle sigh as he stared down at the chaff bag. He squatted beside it and tentatively poked at the hole. ‘Wow!’ he marvelled again.
‘Want a go?’
His eyes as big as saucers, Lexie looked up at Tim and nodded.
‘Use both hands,’ Tim instructed. ‘And ease the trigger back,’ he said. ‘Don’t jerk it.’
Lexie did exactly as he was told. He pressed the revolver against the bag and, with both index fingers, he pulled on the trigger. It was harder than he thought. Far from ‘easing’ it back, Lexie had to muster every ounce of strength he had before he felt the trigger move at all. But finally it did and he too felt the power of the recoil as the gun kicked like a living thing in his hands. Lexie was overwhelmed. It was awesome! It was thrilling! To feel such power …
He stared down at the second hole and again knelt to examine it. Then he lifted the side of the bag to peer at the damage underneath.
‘Watch it, Lexie,’ his brother warned, taking the weapon from him. ‘You’ve got to be careful with guns.’
Lexie wasn’t listening. ‘Look, it’s gone right through the other side.’ Chaff started to pour out of the hole. ‘It’s making a mess.’
‘Doesn’t matter. The feed bin needs filling. We’ll empty the whole bag in when we’ve finished.’ Tim grinned. ‘Dad’ll be pleased with us.’
But Lexie wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the chicken he’d watched his father kill for Christmas dinner two months before. ‘I wonder what it’d be like to shoot something real.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tim asked.
‘Remember when Dad killed the chook?’ Lexie did. He remembered vividly the suddenness of it all. One minute a squawking bird, then nothing but a carcass. Imagine having that power! He shivered at the thought.
‘Kill one of the chooks? You’re joking.’
Lexie stared back at Tim for several seconds. Then he shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said flatly, ‘we’ll stick to the feed bag’.
Tim wondered why the idea was so shocking to him. He’d seen his father kill several chickens over the years and it had meant nothing. With the exception of Ted the rooster and several layers, the rest of the brood was destined for the table anyway. They didn’t even have pet names. No, it was the idea of killing one himself that was so shocking. Shocking enough to be thrilling.
‘That hole in the chookyard where Ted got out isn’t fixed up too good,’ he said thoughtfully. He could feel Lexie’s eyes on him again, the younger boy looked as if he was holding his breath. ‘We could say they got out and we couldn’t catch them all.’
Lexie nodded, still hardly daring to breathe.
‘OK.’ Tim made the decision. ‘We’ll shoot one of the chooks.’
‘Agatha’s bigger.’
It was a breathless suggestion and Tim wasn’t sure if he’d heard correctly. ‘Agatha? Kill Agatha?’
‘She’s bigger.’ The bigger the victim the greater the power, calculated Lexie.
But the idea of slaughtering the pet goose they’d fed by hand was repugnant to Tim. ‘We’ll do one of the chooks, OK.’ It was a command rather than a question.
‘OK,’ Lexie grudgingly agreed.
It took them ten minutes to catch the right bird. Lexie insisted on the fattest one.
‘That’ll make Dad even madder—she’s just about ready for eating,’ Tim grumbled, but he clasped the bird’s wings against its back and told Lexie to latch the gate behind him. ‘We better not forget to rip that hole in the fence,’ he said as they returned to the woodshed.
Tim had decided that they should shoot the bird against the chaff bag. ‘There’ll be blood,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Lexie nodded. ‘There’ll be blood.’
Between them they dragged the feed bag to the corner of the shed and propped it up. Tim made sure he had the chicken firmly pinioned against it with one hand, then he gestured to Lexie.
‘Give us the gun. Watch it,’ he said as Lexie fumbled the exchange.
As Tim turned the gun upon the bird, he must have loosened the grip of his left hand. Or some instinct might have warned the bird of its fate. Whatever the cause, the chicken let out a demented shriek, twisted between Tim’s fingers and had escaped out of the woodshed door in an instant.
Tim whirled to clutch it, there was an explosion, a thump and then nothing but the squawking of the chicken as it headed for the river.
Lexie stared down at Tim. He was sprawled against the chaff bag, his fingers still curled around the gun. His head was flung back, his eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open.
‘Tim?’ Lexie knelt beside his brother and examined him closely. He was still breathing and he appeared unmarked. Except for the powder burns and the bullet hole in the chest pocket of his denim shirt. Lexie wondered if it had gone right through the other side. Maybe even through the chaff bag as well and into the floor.
He leaned forward on his hands and knees and peered at Tim’s mouth. His breathing had a funny rasping sound to it and Lexie wondered whether he was dying. But if he was dying, why wasn’t there more blood?
Then he saw the pool of red seeping from beneath the chaff bag and he watched as it grew and grew until it became a bright red river channelling its way to the door. Yes, Tim’s dying, he thought. And he stared at his brother with the utmost respect. It was Tim’s ultimate feat and Lexie was lost in admiration.
He had no idea how long he knelt there. Tim’s face grew whiter and the rasping turned to a gurgle. With each gurgle blood bubbled from his mouth. And still Lexie didn’t move.
It was near the very end, when the gurgles were barely audible that he heard his father’s voice. ‘Tim! Lexie! You there, boys?’
Silence. Then the slap of the flywire door as it swung closed.
Not long after that the gurgles stopped. Tim’s face was white as white and everything about him was so wonderfully still that Lexie hardly dared move for fear he’d lose the moment. It had happened. Death. He savoured it for a full five minutes.
Then he rose to his feet. That was it. It was over. He crossed to the door, carefully avoiding the blood, and started up towards the house.
‘Dad,’ he called.
As she crossed her legs she felt his eyes linger on the expanse of thigh exposed by her miniskirt. She had a horrible feeling she knew what he was thinking.
‘You’re very young,’ he said.
Oh hell. She’d been right.
‘I’m eighteen.’ Maddy wasn’t lying. People always took her to be around fifteen. Because she was blonde and petite she looked very young and delicate and she constantly had to show her driver’s licence at hotels and discos.
Maddy had come to the conclusion that there were two basic categories of middle-aged men: the paternal sort with kids her age at home, and the lechers who lusted after schoolgirl flesh. The fact that a lot of the lechers also had kids her age at home had come as a shock to her. Despite the last hard, fast few months of growing up, her protective boarding school background had left her prone to disillusionment.
‘I see that you only just scraped through your final exams.’
‘Yes,’ Maddy nodded, ‘I wasn’t happy in my last year at Loreto.’ She tried to look contrite.
Jonathan Thomas wasn’t watching. He cleared his throat and fixed his attention on the papers before him. Oh God, he thought, she saw me. He couldn’t fail to notice Maddy’s response to him. It was the same response he received from every teenage girl he was confronted with and, as one of the directors of the most prestigious drama school in the country, he was confronted with many teenage girls. They all thought he was a creep, he knew that.
He tried desperately to check his reactions but it was impossible. How could he fail to notice that glorious expanse of youthful flesh as the girl crossed her legs? And those firm, ripe breasts beneath the flimsy silk shirt? Without a bra, of course. His eyes were drawn to them like a magnet and try as he might to avoid them, he found it physically impossible not to flicker a glance now and then.
He meant no harm. He never touched the girls. God forbid, he’d be too frightened. Jonathan’s sex life was non-existent. He wasn’t a paedophile or a defiler of young women. At worst he was a lonely middle-aged fetishist who occasionally masturbated cleanly over the toilet bowl with a copy of Dolly magazine or Teen Vogue in his other hand.
It had, therefore, come as a terrible shock when two years before he’d been suspended pending investigations into a claim from a seventeen year old student that he’d interfered with her.
Questioning revealed that many of his female students accused him of perving on them. Jonathan was shocked. He was sure they hadn’t noticed.
Things were not looking good for Jonathan Thomas until it was discovered that the student who had claimed ‘interference’ worked three nights a week in an up-market brothel in Surry Hills. The investigation took a different turn and, shortly after, when it was also discovered that Jonathan had recommended she be dropped at the end of first year, he was reinstated.
But it had undermined what little confidence he possessed. He had lost standing with the other directors and members of the teaching staff and he now knew the students considered him to be a joke. Try as he might to concentrate on his work—and he was a good teacher—Jonathan was not a happy man.
He cleared his throat again and looked up from the desk, willing his eyes to go directly to Maddy’s and not to linger over her breasts. He failed.
‘And why do you feel you want to be an actress?’ he asked.
A perve on the board of NADA, Maddy thought, a lecturer and director of the National Academy of Dramatic Art, no less! Tough as she’d tried to make herself over the past months, Maddy was deeply shocked. Oh well, she supposed they were in every walk of life, and she certainly didn’t want to jeopardise her chances of getting into NADA.
She smiled and took a deep breath, which Jonathan couldn’t fail to notice. ‘I’ve wanted to act since I was ten.’
Nobody took her seriously when Maddy made the announcement shortly after her tenth birthday. ‘I’m going to be an actress. In the theatre.’
‘Of course you are, darling.’ Her mother was pleased. It was so beautifully normal. Every little girl who didn’t want to be a ballet dancer wanted to be an actress.
‘I’m going to act at the Theatre Royal,’ Maddy declared. Her mother was a subscriber to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust seasons and Maddy had been to the Theatre Royal many times. ‘And then I’m going to act in London.’
Helena smiled at her husband. ‘I think we’ve got a star on our hands, Robert.’
Robert McLaughlan smiled back and returned to his paper. He was very fond of Maddy, just as he was very fond of Helena. They both conformed happily to the lifestyle he provided for them. Which couldn’t have been too difficult—after all Robert was a generous provider.
The only son of Scottish immigrants, Robert had been the pride and joy of his hardworking parents: worth every penny they poured into his education.
Even as a child he had the uncanny ability to decide upon his course and apply himself to it with a tunnel vision amazing in one so young. It was therefore no surprise when Robert became one of the youngest orthodontists ever to set up practice in Sydney. Certainly it was no surprise to Robert; he’d planned on becoming an orthodontist since he was fourteen. There weren’t too many of them around then and there was big money in dentistry, especially orthodontics.
Robert hadn’t been wrong. Orthodontics had provided a harbourside home, the latest model Mercedes and most of the things that money could buy.
It was exactly the life that Helena’s parents had wished for her and, indeed, that Helena had wished for herself. She’d merely switched harbourside homes, really: from Mummy and Daddy’s to Robert’s. And Daddy was an orthopaedic surgeon with consulting rooms two blocks from Robert’s practice in Macquarie Street, so they had a lot in common.
Like her mother, Helena worked tirelessly for charities and was one of the most featured faces in the magazine society pages. Occasionally Robert would accompany her to the special race days, award nights or gala premieres but he was more than happy to contribute generously to the cause while she attended with a ‘celebrity’ escort.
The one issue in their marriage which could have become a bone of contention was fairly easily resolved. Helena’s parents, being Protestants in name only, weren’t too upset about Robert’s insistence that any children be brought up strictly under the guidance of the Catholic Church. Robert didn’t even insist that Helena convert, which was surprising, really, given his devout beliefs.
It was an exceedingly comfortable marriage and far from disrupting it, Maddy fitted in perfectly. She arrived on the due date at the convenient hour of four pm, Helena suffering only minimal discomfort during the birth. And when she was taken home from the hospital Maddy slept at the right times and cried only when Nanny was around to tend to her. In all, she was the perfect baby and grew into the petite, devastatingly pretty child Helena had always wanted.
Robert was content with his life and his ‘two favourite girls’, Helena was content with her social life and her good works, Maddy was content with her dolls, her secret harbourside cubby house and the fantasy world her parents didn’t know about. So when did it all start to go wrong?
For Maddy it was when they sent her to boarding school. It wasn’t the nuns, although there was one strict disciplinarian she could have done without. It wasn’t the heavy-handed religious instruction which pervaded every waking hour at the convent. It wasn’t her dormitory mates or fellow students. It was plainly and simply the lack of privacy.
At the age of twelve, having been left to invent and explore her endless realms of fantasy, Maddy was totally unprepared for the lack of space allowed her at the convent. And she rebelled. For five years she rebelled.
Finally, at seventeen, when she’d just managed to scrape through her final exams, she looked back on the whole ordeal and saw it as nothing but a blur. What a waste of five years, she thought, and decided then and there to make up for lost time.
‘I want to go to drama school,’ she announced to her father.
For once Robert was unforthcoming. Apart from their bewilderment at Maddy’s low school marks, and the frustratingly repetitive report card comments—‘could do better if she concentrated’—he and Helena were unaware of just how unhappy Maddy had been at the convent. ‘It’s puberty, dear. She’s restless,’ Helena had said time and again and it seemed a satisfactory explanation.
Now, try as she might, Maddy couldn’t get through to her father. He refused to discuss it. If she wanted to go to university and study something sensible like Law or Medicine, of course he was right behind her. Why not orthodontistry? With his help she’d be assured of a bright future there. But acting? The theatre? It was a foolish profession for which one certainly didn’t need training.
‘I don’t mind if she dabbles in some amateur stuff for fun,’ he confided to Helena. ‘But it’s ludicrous to treat this acting business as if it’s a profession. Just a lot of silly people dressing up and making fools of themselves.’
&
nbsp; Much as she loved the theatre, the opera, the ballet, the splendid opening nights and the glamour of it all, Helena didn’t defend the performing arts. She liked to think of herself as a serene woman and she never made waves.
That was it. The die was cast: no drama school. So Maddy ran away to share a flat with two art students in Kings Cross.
The very expensive private detective Robert hired found her within a week but it didn’t do any good. Maddy was adamant. She was going to make it on her own. She had enough money in her personal account to see her through for a while, she said. Then she was going to get a job and she was going to audition for NADA, she said. And then she was going to drama school the following year, and that was that.
‘But what if you don’t pass?’ Robert asked as he squirmed uncomfortably in the beanbag. There wasn’t a chair in sight and he was beginning to wish he’d opted for the camp bed in the corner.
‘Then I’ll keep auditioning till I do.’
‘Your mother’s very upset.’ Robert looked around at the room which, although large, seemed unnecessarily cluttered. Posters covered every inch of wall space, a fringed shawl hung from the central lamp and beanbags and cushions were strewn about the floor.
A kitchenette arrangement of sink, stove and cupboards ran along one wall and two tattered bamboo screens stood at the far end of the room.
‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.
‘There.’ Maddy pointed to the camp bed.
‘And the others?’
‘Behind the screens.’
Robert nodded. The room smelled of mould and he was beginning to feel a little queasy. ‘I might just pop to the bathroom, dear,’ he said. But the beanbag was a very sloppy one and the more he tried to get a purchase on the floor, the more horizontal he seemed to become.
‘Do you want a hand?’ Maddy offered, jumping out of her own beanbag.
‘No. No, thank you. I’m fine.’ Robert eventually had to roll over onto his stomach and struggle up from his hands and knees. He took a deep breath of the damp air before he could trust himself to speak. ‘Where is it, dear?’ he asked.
