by Jane Jago
He felt like laughing.
‘What do you do with yourself?’
‘Nothin’. I just go to the river and read.’
‘Read? Go to bloody school and read, would you? That’s what school’s for.’
Danny thought he might as well quit while he was ahead. He looked blankly at the floor and said nothing.
‘Is somebody giving you a hard time? Picking on you?’ asked his mother, shifting gear. Danny shrugged to create the impression that he didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Gotta stand up for yourself. You get to school tomorrow, no excuses.’ She fixed him with a look and took hold of his chin. ‘If anyone gives you shit, Danny, you tell Damien. He’ll sort them out.’
Danny could stand the pantomime no longer. ‘Shut up, Mum. Don’t be so bloody stupid. If anyone needs sorting out it’s him.’
Fortunately for Graham, it was his father who opened a letter about his unexplained absences – he arrived home an hour before his wife did every night. ‘Jesus, Graham, what’s your mother going to say?’
‘I told you, Dad, if you’re late they mark you absent.’
‘It says here that you were absent three days last week.’
‘I wasn’t! I came home early one day ’cause I was being picked on. I was there all the rest. I was,’ he pleaded.
His father signed the acknowledgement slip at the bottom of the letter, then scrawled, ‘virus’ and ‘temperature’. He handed the form to Graham. ‘Your mother has enough to worry about. Just get your name marked off!’
On the last day of term the boys walked to school together in silence. Graham was actually looking forward to collecting the fired clay pot he had decorated the previous Friday, but Danny was in a black mood. Things at home were getting worse: his mother had struck him across the face after he had sworn at Steve. He didn’t feel like being pushed around all day by teachers at the school.
‘I’m not going,’ he announced, as they crossed the road towards the cyclone-meshed playing fields of Sunnybank Public School. He turned left and began walking away, along the nearby bike-track.
Graham reluctantly followed. ‘Let’s go till after lunch.’
‘Do what you like.’
Graham lagged behind, dragging his bag.
Danny glanced back at him. ‘Well, fuck off, then.’ He walked faster, passing a group of older boys, two on bikes. One of the boys looked disdainfully at Graham as he did a quick shuffle to catch up with Danny.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere,’ said Danny.
Truth was, Danny didn’t know. He just knew he wanted to go somewhere away from people and maybe smash something up.
They walked in the direction of town but clung to the river. On the pier alongside the pulp and paper mill depot they hurled large rocks into the air and watched as the stones plopped heavily into the water, narrowly missing the targeted, filmy-white jellyfish. They peered through a crack between the corrugated steel doors of the depot at the stacks of milled paper inside. Graham suggested they set them alight, but when Danny’s disposable lighter refused to ignite long enough to light even their cigarettes, they gave up on the idea.
On their way to the wasteland, near the Battery Road overpass, they passed the rear of a wrecking yard. A skinny tortoiseshell cat walked across the ground of the neighbouring industrial complex and slunk between two sheds. Danny saw it re-emerge and claw its way through a gap under the wire fence. He stopped and stood very still. ‘Hear that?’
‘What?’
They walked over to the fence and listened. From an outbuilding inside the enclosure came a faint miaow. Looking through the mesh, they saw that the cat was padding furtively across the cement holding a kitten in her mouth.
‘She’s moving her kittens.’ Danny started to climb the fence.
‘What are you doing?’ Graham looked nervously up and down the full length of the yard. Danny jumped down and walked to the area the cat had come from. There, in a storage bay, behind lengths of galvanized guttering, a small dappled shape moved. Danny went towards it. He reached his hand down, little by little. The kitten hissed in fear. He picked it up by the scruff of its neck and cupped it in his other hand. Danny could feel its rapid heartbeat. He guessed it to be about four weeks old. The kitten fitted neatly into his jacket pocket.
Graham watched eagerly as Danny returned to the fence. When he had one leg halfway over the kitten began to wriggle itself free from his pocket. He reached for it and handed it over the fence to Graham, before dropping down beside him. Graham held the kitten tightly in his hand, patting it heavily. Danny motioned to take the kitten back. Not willing to surrender it, Graham turned away.
‘Give it here!’
‘In a minute.’
Danny grabbed at Graham, turning him around and prising his arms away from his chest in an effort to reclaim the animal. Graham closed his hands even more tightly around it. ‘Fuck off.’
They struggled until Graham pulled himself away from Danny. The kitten let out a squall of pain. Danny ran at Graham, who held it out with two hands, as if to throw it away from him. Avoiding Danny, he turned and fell, landing heavily.
The freed kitten attempted to walk away, but its head listed oddly to the right. The impact had somehow disabled it. After a few steps it began to stagger.
‘He’s got brain damage,’ said Danny, appalled.
‘You shouldna took him.’
‘You fucken did it!’
‘No, I never. You pushed me.’
The kitten began to incline its head repeatedly, in some sort of spasm, towards its shoulder. Something was badly broken.
‘Better finish it off, it’s fucked now.’ Danny stood over Graham, who looked up doubtfully.
‘Go on.’
They could hear the bereft caterwauling of the mother cat, now searching for her missing offspring, inside the yard. Graham took hold of a nearby rock and smashed it down on the kitten’s head.
Danny picked it up and carried it with him to the overpass. He waited until the road below was clear of traffic before hurling the small body over the barrier.
The two boys ran to the side of the culvert to get a broader view of the road. They could make out the outline of a tiny bundle near the left-hand shoulder of the motorway and were disappointed to see the wheels of the subsequent cars pass by without disturbing it.
Rachel, 1993
Benjamin Allen’s clear blue eyes grew wide as saucers, tracking the progress of the blazing sparkler that hissed and burnt on top of the cake his grandmother carried into the room. From his vantage-point on his father’s hip, he watched his cousins, as they hovered around the wonder at the centre of the table. He put one hand over his ear and pointed with the other at the dying firework, jiggling his bottom up and down. ‘Boom.’
‘It’s not going to explode, mate, it’s just a pretty one,’ said his father.
The toddler dropped his hands away from his face but held them out in mid-air.
He watched his aunt Jennifer as she removed the scorched metal stick and lit the five pink candles on top of the cake one by one. The room was full of singing. ‘. . . happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Hazel . . .’
‘Everybody ready!’ Ewan Allen stood on a chair, trying to fit all the faces into the Polaroid viewfinder.
Rachel leant in beside her husband and put her cheek to Benjamin’s, smiling broadly. Hazel held herself tall and took a deep breath, exhaling in a long stream as she turned her head from side to side. The orange flames guttered violently before snuffing out, covering the table with a haze of paraffin smoke. The camera clicked and whirred.
‘Happy birthday,’ called Benjamin, bobbing forward, straining against his father’s grip.
‘Yay! Hazel’s five today,’ said his mother, lifting him onto her lap and handing him a piece of cake.
He licked the buttery frosting and pushed the crumbled chocolate into his mouth. ‘I’m three tomorrow,’ he mumbled, through his mouthful, holdin
g two sticky fingers in front of his face.
‘Not tomorrow,’ she said, opening another of his fingers to make the right number. ‘But soon.’
When all the cake was gone, the older children surged noisily through the house, climbing on the furniture, jumping up to reach the strings of the coloured balloons that clung to the ceiling.
Mathew Allen plucked one down and put the silver ribbon in his son’s hand.
Benjamin felt the gentle upward pull against his fingers as he took off squealing, almost jumping out of his skin, chasing his cousins around the table legs. They pretended to be afraid but easily eluded him.
Outside on the patio a gutted piñata hung from the clothes-line. Benjamin collected foil stars from the paving beneath it, playing close to his father’s feet. Pink and white balloons trailed above them as some of the boys leapt down onto the lawn. One of the helium-filled spheres separated itself from the pack and rose into the air, drifting higher and higher. Mathew scooped Benjamin up and lifted him onto his shoulders. Hanging on tight, he craned his neck, captivated by the tiny speck as it disappeared into the ether. Soon all the balloons were in the sky, sailing away in different directions.
‘Hey, Benji!’ Rachel called from the stairs, pointing the camera in their direction. As Benjamin and Mathew turned, she pressed the shutter and waited while the photo paper was delivered. She fluttered the square in her hand and caught a whiff of the rubbery alkaline developer. The detail of the image steadily emerged, revealing a smiling Mathew holding onto his son’s ankles as Benjamin gazed over his father’s head, directly at the camera, framed by an unbroken powder-blue afternoon sky.
Ghosts
‘Without flesh or bones’
Liam, 2008
Catherine placed her hand on Liam’s and directed it over the curve of her belly. ‘There.’
Liam craned his head towards her, concentrating intently. ‘I can’t feel anything,’ he whispered.
‘There!’ she cried again, as the child fluttered inside her.
Liam smiled. ‘I still can’t feel anything.’
Catherine leant back on her pillows and gave up. ‘Well, I can feel him swimming around in there.’
‘I’ll make you some breakfast,’ said Liam, getting out of bed and carefully rearranging the quilt around her. Light from the shuttered window fell in narrow bands across the bed.
‘Here.’ He took a pile of furniture catalogues from the dresser and dropped them on the quilt beside her. ‘Have a look at them. They should send you back to sleep.’ Catherine reached down and picked one up. Liam pulled a sweatshirt on and went downstairs.
After several sessions with Dr Patma his terror of the baby had diminished and he had experienced brief moments of hope and anticipation. Reconciling himself to Catherine’s pregnancy had brought them closer together; he had even confided something of his therapy to her, telling her only that issues surrounding his childhood had left him ambivalent about becoming a parent. Relieved that it was not her he was rejecting, and understanding the shock she had given him, Catherine had rallied to support him, now including him wherever possible in the process of the pregnancy.
Liam’s trust in himself and the relationship was slowly returning. In an attempt to follow the doctor’s advice to see the baby as his salvation, he frequently reminded himself of her words that too many had suffered already. But when he sat beside Catherine as the radiologist passed the head of the ultrasound probe across her lubricated stomach, sliding it backwards and forwards, the sight of the unborn child, squirming on the screen, filled him with dread. According to the obstetrician, everything was normal – mother and baby were doing fine. Given that the child had half his genetic material, Liam wondered what unseen deformity it might carry in its DNA. Propelled by the terror of exposure and resigned to the right of the child to its own future, he vowed never to burden it or Catherine with the truth. He created instead new compartments within himself to accommodate the impending reality of fatherhood, splitting himself off from past events until they were buried even deeper.
Liam set a tray with tea and toast on the bedside table. ‘Hot black tea, just the way Madam likes it.’ Catherine pretended to ignore him as he slid back under the ivory quilt and snuggled close to her. He took her hand and ran his fingers thoughtfully between hers.
‘Look at these.’ She indicated the elaborate nursery suites in the catalogue, then pointed to a majestic woven-cane cot, wardrobe and changing table.
‘I don’t want him to sleep in a separate room. Why can’t we just put a cot alongside our bed, in here?’
Catherine looked up at him; it seemed he had an opinion on everything these days. ‘Because we might want to get a good night’s sleep ourselves.’
Liam sat up against the bedhead. ‘I don’t think you should have to work when the baby’s born.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Not if you don’t want to. What’s the point of having kids if both parents are too busy for them?’
‘I don’t want to work for at least six months, but after that . . .’
‘Even then, why pay strangers to look after our child?’
She eyed him warily and put the catalogue down.
‘I’m serious, Cath. I’ll stay at home and look after him if you don’t want to.’
‘You?’ She laughed. ‘You make more money than I do for a start.’
The offices of Creighton and Davis were cramped, full of tiny wood-panelled booths. For a thriving agency in a real-estate boom, they spent little on appearances. Although they were equipped with the latest computer technology they relied mainly on the hunger of their sales team to directly market their properties and bring people through the door.
Liam had come to the office five years earlier via a work placement, arranged through the private computer college he had attended after school. He had created the agency’s first website and was asked to join the team as a property manager. After two years he had completed a real-estate course and become an agent.
Lately he had been fired with new enthusiasm, keen to sell as many properties as possible and improve his monthly commission. He had almost beaten Colin, Creighton and Davis’s star performer, in last month’s sales figures. Sitting at his desk in his orderly booth, he calculated and recalculated his current figures. If all his contracts went through this month he might be in a position to put down a deposit on a house. He and Catherine already had a sum put away and her parents had agreed to match them dollar for dollar on any deposit they could raise.
He still carried a torch for the property he had stumbled on that day in the country. At $350,000 it was a fantasy, but the farmlet, one of Colin’s listings, had already sold. He still had a copy of the sales flyer pinned to his noticeboard just to remind him of what was possible.
A red light flickered on his desk phone, indicating a call.
‘Hello?’
The woman at the other end wanted to look at a townhouse in a new development. Liam had sold her home for her three weeks before, and she was still wavering between a house on half an acre and a townhouse in the city, between investment and lifestyle properties, between staying with her browbeaten husband or setting up alone with her kids. Liam had already heard most of her life story and had the patience required to show her as many properties as her whims dictated until she made up her tangled mind, usually based on some arbitrary absurdity, like the proximity of a down-market takeaway on a nearby cross-street. He had already helped her buy and sell seven properties in the past three years.
As a salesman he understood that, for some people, certain houses represented an idyllic future where everything would fall magically into place. A solution to all of life’s difficulties, a place where stale marriages would rekindle and hyperactive or jaded children would bake cupcakes and gossip with their friends around a slow-combustion fire. Liam knew better than to dissuade such fantasies, how to stay in the background and never to stand between the dreamer and the dream, but empty house
s didn’t always deliver, and Liam was there, quietly waiting, to sell them the next one.
‘I’m not sure they’ll drop five grand. They knocked back three twenty, and the market wasn’t as strong then. Let me talk to them after you’ve had another look through. One o’clock is fine.’
Catherine appeared in the cubicle doorway. ‘I got this for you.’ She slid a brown-paper bag across the desk. Liam put the phone down. ‘I’ll keep moving,’ she said, holding up a swag of labelled keys.
Liam opened the bag to find a glossy book on pregnancy and childbirth. He laid it on the desk and flicked through a few pages. There was an irritable rapping on the partition and Colin stuck his head round the corner. ‘Have you got the keys to Sheffield Drive?’
‘What?’
‘The fake-brick shit-box behind the joinery? Virtually no kitchen, you know the one . . . I’ve got the perfect prospects, met them in the pub last night. He’s a meat worker at Austco and she’s a throw-back. What’s this?’ He picked up the book.
‘Sheffield Drive is zoned commercial. I think it’s one of Paul’s. Look on the board.’
‘I already did.’ Colin turned a page of the book at random. ‘Jesus! How perverted is that?’ He held it open at ‘Sexual Positions for Advanced Pregnancy’. Liam was mortified by the explicit drawings. Trust Colin. He held out his hand for the book.
Colin continued flicking through the chapter. ‘Whatever gets you off. Rather you than me, though.’
Liam lunged for the book.
‘Here . . . Don’t have a cow.’ Colin tossed it onto the desk. ‘Still coveting that hobby-farm, I see,’ he said, looking at the advertising flyer. ‘Looks like the buyer is dropping out. Contract was subject to finance and turns out they’ve been feeding me a line for weeks. Supposed to get back to me today, but I’m not holding my breath. It could well be back on the market at a very good price.’ Suddenly he was all business again. ‘Surely you and Cath could raise the money.’ His nerve was breathtaking. ‘Great place to bring up kids.’ Liam stared at him. Colin hated kids as much as he despised Liam. ‘You must’ve pulled in close to twenty grand over the past two months. I notice John is kissing your arse. Well, he can kiss mine tomorrow. That farmer you put me onto, the one with the Emporium at Berridale?’
