by Jane Jago
Was it fair, he thought bitterly, that while he was ‘rehabilitated’ in protective custody, treated by specialists for dyslexia and educated, Adam had had the shit beaten out of him because of who his brother was? Was it fair that he, who had taken a life, had been released after seven years in a secure unit, while Adam, a heroin addict, had got five years for a series of break-and-enters – not a counsellor in sight – had been beaten and fucked up the arse in jail, and had killed himself before he could die of AIDS while he still lived and breathed?
He looked at the clumsy chain-stitch on the heart that spelt out his sister’s name: Olivia. Addicted to smack herself since she was fifteen. None of it was fair. It never had been.
Danny, 1992
The boy shrank into the chair as the buzzing clippers made another pass above his left ear. The crooked teeth bit roughly into the skin at the base of his skull. ‘Ow!’
‘Sit still.’ His mother wouldn’t pay for a haircut, said they were worse than a waste of money. ‘Do you want me to do it or not?’ she asked. Danny straightened up. The instrument vibrated violently across his scalp. ‘That’ll have to do.’ She shut off the clippers, reeled in the cord and began to sweep up auburn hair from the cement landing.
Danny ran his hand across the soft stubble on his head and looked at his brothers, Damien and Adam, shorn only minutes ago themselves. He held up a cracked hand-mirror and mournfully observed the uneven quarter-inch ‘shave’, marred, here and there, by several ugly, hairless patches. The whole Simpson family had been branded with the one brutal haircut; even Danny’s softer features could not lessen the impact.
At school Danny’s teachers saw only another bullet-headed Simpson. They noticed that he was quieter and less outwardly aggressive than the two older brothers who had preceded him, but they thought him sly and manipulative, capable of setting up another kid to take a fall. This was the unfair legacy of being a Simpson. And in a way it was true: he was sly. He had to be. Danny Simpson had been ducking punches all his life, even in his mother’s womb.
He had been born a month premature, and his mother had barely been able to look at him – the new male animal in her life – without turning away. For a few days the nurses had brought him to her to feed, but with two broken ribs from her husband’s farewell punch, and her ambivalence to the infant, their efforts had been to no avail. An experienced foster-mother had been found, and it was she who had called him Danny.
When he had finally been returned to his mother, so deep was Debbie Simpson’s depression, so numbed was she by alcohol and anti-depressants, that she didn’t even hear him crying as he lay in a bassinet at her feet. Soon the crying had become a defeated sob and then a whimper. Finally it had stopped altogether.
By the time she had begun to pick him up more often, it had been too late: Danny was an ‘unresponsive’ baby. Debbie had always suspected it was the six weeks without her that had done the damage.
Danny brushed his teeth, picked up a damp towel from the bathroom floor and tried to wipe a stain off the front of his school shirt. He walked up the short stairwell of the cramped flat and stood at the bedroom door. He pushed it open. A naked man lay face down on the bed beside his sleeping mother. He began to back out of the room. The sleeping man stirred. Debbie Simpson opened her eyes. ‘Danny?’
The man lifted his head. ‘Don’t you know how to knock?’
It was his father. His face was swollen and red. Danny recognized the signs and could smell the alcoholic vapour.
‘I’m going to school.’
The two figures on the bed remained inert.
‘I haven’t got any lunch-money.’
‘Jesus, Danny. Tell them I’ll pay later.’ She shielded her face with a pillow.
Danny slowly closed the door.
His mother’s handbag hung on a coat hook in the hall. He slid his fingers inside, pulled out her purse and helped himself to a ten-dollar note, then looked at the remaining twenty dollars. He considered taking that too – she wouldn’t know the difference, wouldn’t know how much she’d blown at the pub last night or how much his father had taken. After all, that was the only reason he ever came here.
He decided against it and instead emptied the copper coins from the bottom of the bag. Why not? It was his tenth birthday. He should have known that his mother would never keep her promise to pick him up early from school and take him to Birkenhead Towers to buy a set of Viking figures, the ones you could paint yourself. He should never have believed her in the first place. He stuffed the coins into his pockets and hoisted his backpack over his shoulder, taking care to close the front door quietly behind him before he headed off to school.
The front of Adam Simpson’s black T-shirt was covered with fine white powder. He popped another tablet from a pharmaceutical foil onto the pile of pills accumulating on the table-top, scooped them up and dumped them in the bowl of the coffee-grinder. On the screen of the portable TV suspended from a bracket in one corner of the kitchen, Oprah Winfrey held up a book: ‘Some things are almost too hard to talk about. It takes real bravery to open up and publicly admit that you were wrong.’ The sound of the grinder drowned out the talk-show host and sent angry lines of static across the screen. ‘If you don’t recognize my next guest from that description then I don’t know what else to tell you!’ He tipped the powder into a measuring jug.
A string of bells on the front-door handle jangled noisily as Danny came in and threw his backpack to the floor. Adam leaned instinctively forward across the table, obscuring his processing operations from view. ‘How come you’re home?’ he said, before pulsing the machine a few more times. Danny watched him silently. Adam now crushed the resistant core of a tablet between two spoons. ‘I said what are you doin’ here?’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘What?’
‘That’s not what you said.’
Adam looked confused, as if his brain had missed a few steps in a complicated equation.
‘I forgot my sports kit.’
He poured the powder into a large envelope, then used a funnel to deliver the codeine and paracetamol into a two-litre soft-drink bottle.
‘What’s that?’
‘None of your fucken business.’ He filled the bottle with water, screwed on the lid and shook it vigorously.
‘What have you gotta do that for?’
‘It gets rid of the shit.’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Where d’ya reckon?’ He swung his head upwards in the direction of the stairs. ‘Leave her alone. I don’t want her down here.’
Danny dug through the dirty washing, searching for some shorts and his regulation sports shirt. The school was a ten-minute walk away and if he got back by the end of lunchtime he’d be able to go on the bus to play soccer at the sports centre. He hated sport because he was no good at it. The kids who seemed to be built for games and came alive in the presence of a ball, shouting and hooting to one another across the field, made him feel fat and stupid, but the sports centre, with its foyer full of video games, held other attractions. He stuffed the unwashed items into his backpack and shrugged it on.
‘Hey, Danny,’ called Adam, wrapping the cord around the grinder. ‘Don’t tell Mum about any of this stuff, okay?
Danny nodded. Adam was volatile, and although he would never want to cross him, it was out of loyalty that he kept his brother’s secrets. Unlike his oldest brother, Damien, Adam had never hurt him.
*
A fist thumping the other side of the bedroom wall roused Danny from his Saturday-morning lie-in.
‘Damien!’
Danny opened his eyes and looked across at his brother’s bed, unmade and empty. A crooked venetian blind above it masked the bright morning light. The underside of the bed was crammed with CDs, boxed Game Boys, items of tagged clothing and skateboard magazines. Damien rarely slept at home now but the pile of booty under the bed kept growing. Their mother never commented on it and was under strict instructions not to touch
Damien’s things.
Danny eyed the items covetously but knew better than to set Damien off on any score. He still had the bruises on his back from when he had walked in on him straddling a naked girl across the bed. He hated sharing a room with Damien. His brother was a pervert and a sadistic bully. He was relieved the bed was empty and hoped that Damien never came home again. In fact, he wished that Damien would die – violently, at the hands of someone as vicious as himself. Yes: Danny would like to be there to see that.
Damien’s temporary absence from the flat created a power vacuum and an uneasy peace that could be reversed at any time.
‘Damien!’
‘He’s not here.’
‘Danny!’
‘What?’
When Danny got to her room his mother was in her knickers, kneeling on all fours, running her fingers through the nylon shag-pile, like a blind woman. ‘I dropped a Valium in the carpet and I can’t find the other packet.’ Danny stood at the door, indifferent to her dilemma.
‘Danny, I think Damien’s taken my box of medication.’ She stood up exposing her long blue-veined breasts, pulled back her thin, bleached hair with both hands and stared at him wildly.
‘What do want me to do about it?’ He turned away from the spectacle.
‘I can’t find my pills, Danny.’
‘Which ones?’
‘The ones the doctor gave me . . . All of them! What do you mean “which ones”? The whole box, Danny. It was under the bed.’
‘The ones you take with vodka?’
She opened a wardrobe. ‘No, Danny.’
‘You got about fifteen boxes. You put them in the cupboard behind the fridge.’
She looked at him warily for several seconds, then pushed past him. In the kitchen she began shouldering the refrigerator sideways across the linoleum to access a small utility cupboard. She pulled out a large Tupperware box and opened it. The box was full of prescriptions, each written in a different hand, and stuffed with tablets, diazepam, codeine and Xanax. She pulled out several empty sleeves marked ‘Vicodin’.
‘Where’s the Vicodin? Fuck. Fuck!’
‘What’s it for?’
‘Pain, Danny. Pain . . . Does Damien know where I keep this box?
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you see him or Adam with any of this stuff?’
Danny picked up a foil of pills from the box marked ‘Aropax’. ‘What are these ones for?’
‘Jesus, Danny, stop asking stupid fucking questions, will you?’
She sat down at the table and popped two generic Valium out of a half-empty foil. Danny opened the stranded fridge. ‘We got no milk.’
‘We got no milk,’ she repeated. ‘What do you expect me to do about it in my condition? Just eat something at school – tell them you forgot your lunch.’
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘Oh, God, Danny. I’m going back to bed. If you turn the telly on, keep it quiet, okay?’ A satin robe hung on the back of a kitchen chair. She pulled it on and closed it around her breasts. ‘Make me a hot-water bottle and bring it in, will you?’
Danny filled a pink rubber bladder with boiling water from the kettle. He put it inside a fleecy bag and carried it up to his mother.
After the Valium she seemed less agitated. ‘I’m sorry I bit your head off, Danny, but you don’t know what’s it’s like for me.’ She cradled the hot-water bottle and covered herself with the duvet.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing, Danny. Just let me sleep for a while.’
‘There’s nothing to eat.’
She sat up angrily and began rummaging through her bedside drawer. ‘Here, get some takeaway somewhere.’ She handed him a ten-dollar note, hesitated, then handed him another. ‘Take yourself to the arcade.’
Danny quickly pocketed the cash.
‘There might be someone coming over later, a friend of mine, so take your time.’
Danny rolled his eyes. She’d had a lot of ‘friends’ over since his father had stopped coming around. ‘How come we never do anything on the weekends?’
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno . . . Go to the beach or up to Toy Kingdom.’
‘Danny, that shit costs money.’
‘So? Why don’t you get a job?’
She appeared injured. ‘It’s not like I’ve never had a job, Danny. I was halfway through my hairdressing apprenticeship when your father got me pregnant . . .’ She gave him an indignant look. ‘If I had a job, who’d be lookin’ after you now, huh?’
Danny looked around the dingy room, then down at his feet. ‘Dad said he’d take me to the greyhounds one weekend.’
His mother laughed bitterly. ‘Is that right? You might be waiting a long time, kiddo.’ She scratched a match across the side of a box of Redheads and lit a cigarette. ‘He hasn’t got the guts to tell you, Danny, but he’s going inside for a couple of years.’ She sucked some more life out of the cigarette, all the while watching his face for a reaction.
Danny’s face reddened. His ears felt like they were on fire.
‘I’m sorry, Danny. Things don’t always work out the way you want them to.’
‘Shut up! I don’t care.’
The following Saturday night, after five happy-hour cocktails at the Lions Gate Hotel, Danny’s mother met Steven Parry in the public bar.
When Danny took his mother a cup of tea on Sunday morning, it was Steve’s hand that reached out and took it.
‘Good service round here, eh, Deb?’
It wasn’t the first time he’d found a stranger in his mother’s bed and, as far as he knew, it wouldn’t be the last. He tried not to think about it. At least she was home and in a good mood.
But Steve was still there a week later, sitting on the couch in his boxer shorts, and passing on orders. ‘Fix your mum a sandwich, will ya?’ Helping himself to her handbag, groping around for money or cigarettes. ‘You got no fags left, Deb.’
‘Go and get me a packet of Winfield, will you, Danny?’
‘Go on, you heard her.’ Steve’s right arm was covered with a sleeve of tattoos, a spiral of thorny vines that travelled from the wrist to his unnaturally white shoulder. Inside the vines a red heart was gripped by the eight legs of a fearsome black spider.
Danny found it hard to take his eyes off the artwork. He noticed Steve had a habit of swinging his elbow out and craning his head to examine it closely, as if he had never taken a proper look at it before or was checking that it hadn’t somehow altered itself overnight.
Pretty soon Steve was making demands: ‘Turn that bloody noise off! I’m watching the news here, if you don’t fucken mind.’ After a month it was as if he had always been there, a poisonous black cloud, just like their father.
Rachel, 2008
A series of gentle waves lapped quietly against a distant jetty. Rachel turned away from the light and buried her face in the quilt, awake but still dreaming, dozing, drifting off again. The piercing cry of a lone seagull brought her back to consciousness and the unfamiliar room. She sat up, resting on her elbows. Her eyes turned immediately to the bunks at the far-side of the L-shaped cabana. Crumpled white sheets were thrown back and the beds were empty. Across the room in the kitchen nook David wiped a glass at the sink.
‘Where are the boys?’ She got to her feet and threw a robe over her shoulders.
‘On the beach. I can see them through the window.’
‘Where?’
He put his arm around her and steered her to the doorway. There they were, less than fifty metres away, kneeling on either side of a shallow trench, digging in the wet sand. Thomas scooped up the slurry from the bottom of the channel and drizzled it over a growing sandcastle. Martin supervised the operation, occasionally buttressing the sides with pieces of driftwood.
David held out a mug of tea. ‘Just relax.’
The deck in front of the cottage jutted over the sand, like the prow of a ship. On one side the view stretched all the way to the
rock wall, a series of large basalt lumps that fell away into the sea and curved protectively around the bay. A ribbon of shell-covered beach unfolded in the other direction, leading to the rotting pier. The nearest shack was a white matchbox that barely broke the line of a shrubby horizon.
The boys chased the retreating waves of the outgoing tide, dragging antlers of stranded kelp behind them. Thomas swung a piece high in the air over his head, letting it fly with a spray of sand in his brother’s direction, then charging into the water when Martin turned to chase him, dunking his head in a wave.
Their mother watched them move up the beach away from her, wet bodies glistening, running now, bounding towards the boulders. Laughing breathlessly as they pursued each other, quickly becoming tiny shapes that moved across the silhouette of the rocks, dropping in and out of sight.
‘Perhaps we should take our towels and sit in the shade of the rocks.’
‘They’re fine, Rache.’ He dropped a warm pastry into her lap. ‘Have a croissant and shut up.’
‘No butter?’
‘You packed the Eski . . . I can go to the Co-op later, if you want.’
On the beach three other children filed down the sandy trail that wound through the knee-high spinifex. Rachel saw them first and dropped her half-eaten croissant onto her lap. David turned to look. Thomas was clearly visible on the rock shelf poking in one of the pools with a long stick. Martin had pulled himself up onto a ledge. A boy in an orange T-shirt ran ahead of the other strangers. Martin jumped down onto the sand in front of him.
‘It’s just some kids,’ said David.
All of the children now squatted, hands on knees, around the pool, captivated by something that Thomas was probing with his stick.
‘Martin!’ shouted Rachel, above the wind.
‘Don’t spoil their fun.’ He sighed. You were going to try – remember?’
Martin looked up.
David answered him with a wave. ‘Just let them be.’
‘I’m only letting them know we’re here’
‘No, you’re not. You’re doing what you always do,’ he snapped.
She looked shocked.
‘They’re not babies. Martin’s thirteen going on thirty-five, thanks to us.’
