Kill the Possum

by James Moloney

  Kirsty doesn’t know what to say now. Every question seems to draw more bitterness from him. Better to keep quiet.

  When she does, he notices and lets his body relax at last. ‘Oh, look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like that. It’s just, well, you asked. Fathers aren’t a big thing with me.’

  He falls silent and an awkward moment follows, the type they haven’t experienced since their first time out together. Dylan puts the sunglasses back on, trying to mask it. ‘Ferris Bueller, eh. You picked it first go.’

  But it’s not working and he pulls the shades from his face. ‘I thought we should do something this weekend. Go somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kirsty, glad of the change. ‘Oh, but I’ve got to babysit on Saturday night. Mum has a late shift.’

  Around them people are moving reluctantly in response to the bell.

  ‘Maybe I could come round anyway, watch a movie or something.’

  ‘Sounds great. Bring a pizza, I’ll get the DVDs,’ says Kirsty, relieved. The sourness is draining rapidly from Dylan’s face, leaving a subtle joy that she’s said yes. I like you, that face says, and she likes him, even if he has a moody side. Who is she to complain about that?

  Tim thinks of frying pans

  Tim waits under the dying tree all through morning recess but no one comes to speak to him. May as well have stayed at home, he thinks but he’s been ticked off on the roll now and Jorgensen would hear about it if he skipped the rest of his classes. Expectation builds again in the period before lunch and he goes straight to the tree with his peanut-butter sandwiches. He’s never been one for crusts and leaves them for the birds, although few bother with this tree any more.

  Then a body crosses the bare ground to join him. Doesn’t say anything in greeting, just sits down with his back against the harsh trunk of the tree.

  ‘I hear you’re a Ferris Bueller fan,’ says Dylan.

  ‘Kirsty told you that, I suppose. Great movie.’ Tim wonders what else his sister has told Dylan. He stands and follows the shadow made by a leafless branch above him until he reaches the end. Turns around.

  ‘I don’t stutter, you know, not like on Sunday.’ He holds his arms out, a bird airing its wings, inviting Dylan to point out the hesitations in anything he says now as though they would be feathers visible on his body. ‘It was only while Mum was married to Ian. Whenever he got mad at me…’ Tim aches with his own helplessness. ‘After the divorce, Mum took me to this woman named Libby and it went away.’

  ‘He hit you, didn’t he.’

  ‘Only when Mum wasn’t around. Mostly he didn’t leave a bruise and if he did, he’d explain it away. Ian Cartwright’s the best liar you’ll ever meet. Mum believed him, until he started belting her. The thing about Ian is there’s two of him, one for inside the house and one for outside. Lots of people quite like him, can you believe that? Because he never lets them see the inside Ian Cartwright.’

  Except that one person has seen it. That’s why Tim has come to school today.

  ‘You think I’m gutless, don’t you,’ he says, pulling back suddenly from the incision he’s made into his pathetic life. It’s not too late to stitch the wound shut.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The way Ian made a mess out of Mum. I should have stopped him, shouldn’t I.’

  ‘How? You’re half his size. He’d belt the crap out of you and still do what he wanted to your mother.’

  Tim knows it’s true, but he needs to hear someone else say it. Tears well at the rims of his eyes and he feels ludicrously grateful to Dylan Kane. Yes, someone else has seen what happens on Sundays. A relieving breath eases out from his lungs that’s been waiting years for release. He looks away from Dylan to hide the evidence of tears and wonders if the world he sees outside the chain wire fence despises him as much as he’s always feared.

  ‘Sometimes, I think about what I’ll do next time he comes. Like, we’ve got this old frying pan, you know, hanging on the wall near the stove. Cast iron, takes two hands to lift it. I’d get it down off the hook and hit him with it, smack on the back of the noggin.’ He laughs, making a joke out of it. ‘I’d keep bashing him with it until he’s on the floor and begging me to stop. I’d hit him, again and again until he’s crying like a baby and that’s when I’d make him promise to leave us alone.’

  He turns back from the road, the dampness around his eyes burned away. ‘I don’t want to kill him,’ he assures Dylan Kane. ‘I just want him to stop.’

  6

  Kirsty murders Ian Cartwright

  On Saturday night, Kirsty opens the door to Dylan Kane and makes a big thing of inviting him inside. She pretends he hasn’t been here before and he goes along with it until the matter becomes a joke between them. They’re laughing lightly, anyway. It’s a good start.

  Dylan’s carrying a litre of Coke in one arm and two flat cardboard boxes balanced on the other. ‘I got two pizzas in case Tim was here as well.’

  ‘He’s gone out, but Melanie eats like a sumo wrestler.’

  ‘I do not!’ the girl protests from in front of the television, but she’s the first to grab a wedge when Kirsty flicks back the lids. ‘Umm, Meat Lovers.’

  They eat, three in a row across the sofa, covering the coffee table with a mess of greasy cardboard, plates, glasses and a crumpled tea towel used as a serviette. Perched between boy and girl, Melanie leaves the crust of her first slice uneaten and starts on a second. They scold her together and move away in disgust when she protests through a mouth full of shredded beef. She is the perfect foil for these early minutes.

  Later, though, she’s in the way. With Melanie between them, they watch all of the first movie, an action thriller Kirsty chose with Dylan in mind. His right arm stretches out along the back of the sofa. When she finds him looking across Melanie’s head at her, she pushes her own arm across the sofa’s back until their fin-gertips touch. Their hands stay loosely interlaced until the movie ends.

  ‘Time for you to go to bed.’

  Melanie protests as usual so Kirsty suggests a game. ‘Dylan will give you a piggy back,’ and Melanie falls for it, whooping like a cowboy all the way into the room she shares with Kirsty.

  ‘Wow, pink,’ says Dylan as he enters at a gallop.

  ‘If you want boy colours, try Tim’s room. It’s an attractive shade of dirty underpants.’

  Melanie slips down onto the bed where Kirsty takes over to see her under the sheets. When she straightens up and looks for Dylan, he’s bending over her chest of drawers, looking at a photograph.

  ‘That’s my father, with Tim and me, before he was diagnosed. Mum calls it the possum picture.’ She goes over and picks up the frame so he can examine it more closely. ‘See how I’m clinging to Dad’s back and Tim’s tight in against Dad’s chest. So little, his eyes take up half his face, don’t you reckon? Staring out at you, so cute.’

  ‘I don’t think he’d like you to say that about him now.’

  ‘S’pose not. That’s one of the few pictures we’ve got of the three of us. Ian threw out all the pictures from before Mum married him.’

  ‘Threw them out!’

  ‘Yep, put ’em in the bin one day without telling her. Said he was the husband and father in the house now and we didn’t need them. After the divorce, Mum asked people who’d known us back then for anything they had. That one came from Grandma Beal down in Melbourne. There are a few others but Mum stopped seeing her old friends after we moved over this side of the river.’ She sniffs, thinking more about friends than photographs now. ‘Ian wouldn’t let her make any new ones. We hardly know anyone around here.’

  The photograph goes back into its place among Kirsty’s treasures.

  In front of the television once more, she fetches a blanket from a heavy wooden box in the corner. Beneath it their thighs touch.

  The second movie is slower and Dylan is not showing much interest. His arm snakes along the back of the sofa, then slips down loosely onto her shoulde
rs and finally down around her waist. Kirsty shifts a little to help it sit comfortably. His hand is resting naturally on the naked skin above her hip, but if it wanders towards her breast, or downwards seeking elastic, she’ll retreat to the end of the sofa.

  Dylan is as cautious as she is, though, and Kirsty begins to relax. Under the blanket his hand is warm and so is she. This is good, this is how she wants to feel with a boy.

  Not all guys are like Ian Cartwright, she tells herself. He’s the exception, not the rule. She’s been telling herself this for more than a year. She knows it’s true, like she knows dates for History and recipes in Home Ec, but she has to teach her body to believe it.

  She basks in a boy’s touch, she luxuriates in it and thinks of a time when affection was part of her every day. She was younger than Melanie then, small enough to be lifted off the ground by a giant whose strength never hurt her. Touching came with laughter in those days, always her own mixed with the deep purr of a man she trusted utterly. When you’re five years old, trust is another name for love. She misses her father with an ache that can hollow out her chest if she thinks about it for too long. Not tonight. Tonight she’ll fill that emptiness with something more than the memory of her father’s love-warmed cuddles. She wonders if Dylan will try to kiss her. She wonders whether she will let him.

  At ten-thirty, with Dylan’s hand still warm and welcome on Kirsty’s skin, there are footsteps on the front stairs. The house begins to shake. Dylan sits up suddenly, his face a mixture of fear and anger and Kirsty realises he’s thinking of Sunday.

  ‘It’s Tim,’ she says quickly and the frown slips from Dylan’s face as quickly as it appeared.

  A key scratches inaccurately at the lock until it finally slips into place and the door opens. Tim Beal is weighed down on one side by a plastic collar holding three dark-skinned cans. The other three are already inside him with some more besides.

  ‘You’re lucky Mum’s not home,’ Kirsty says, knowing full well that if their mother was here, Tim would stay out until he was sober.

  Tim flops into the sofa, cradling the load in his lap as though it were a puppy. ‘I knew you’d still be here,’ he says to Dylan and detaching one of the cans from the collar, he holds it out.

  Dylan hesitates and looks towards Kirsty.

  ‘Come on,’ says Tim with a contemptuous frown, still holding the can towards him. Full of booze he’s free of himself, full of confidence. When Dylan accepts, Tim forces one on Kirsty.

  ‘Sit down,’ says Tim, patting the cushions and with no reason to refuse, they oblige, sipping from the cans. The liquid is lukewarm and bubbles threaten to invade Kirsty’s nose, but its sweetness helps it down her throat. She remembers the feel of Dylan’s hand on her belly and looks at her brother slumped exactly where Melanie was sitting earlier.

  They watch the second movie until it ends. Tim is still between them, the last can inside him. Dylan and Kirsty have half of theirs to drink but the early mellowing effects of the rum have kicked in.

  ‘I don’t understand the legal stuff,’ says Dylan. ‘What did you call it, a court committee or something?’

  Kirsty thinks he’s speaking to her until she turns and finds him waiting on Tim for a reply. It’s only then that she realises these two have discussed Sunday without her. At school, of course. She’s not sure how she feels about that. Better to leave Sunday alone. Dylan hasn’t been here before, right? That’s the game they played when he arrived.

  But Tim is here now. Matters aren’t entirely in her hands any more.

  ‘A Committal hearing,’ Tim corrects Dylan. ‘It’s like a mini-trial to work out if there’s enough evidence to do the whole thing with a jury and stuff.’

  ‘Enough evidence!’

  Kirsty steps in. If there’s going to be an explanation, at least she’ll be the one to tell it. ‘It’s not like you see on television, Dylan. The evidence isn’t always clear. Sure, Ian used to hit us, made a real mess of Mum sometimes, but just as often it was like what you saw, all words and threats and put-downs like we were a pile of shit. Just remembering is enough. He knows he can frighten the crap out of us without lifting a finger. You saw the way he works. Imagine that happening every day, year after year. Mum cracked up in the end, tried to kill herself. They put her in a ward with all the crazies. It was horrible.’

  Kirsty watches a painful sympathy lurch across her boyfriend’s face. His hatred of Ian Cartwright is plain to see, too, forging new boundaries at the edge of his own universe. It was how she’d felt herself once, until she found a better way to survive.

  ‘The social workers knew what was going on. They helped Mum organise the divorce, made sure we got the house.’ She hesitates, looking towards her brother whose face forms a silent question. How much are you going to tell him? She has to explain what happened at the committal and maybe it’s not so bad to share this part of the story, even if some of it is going to be a lie.

  ‘The social workers said we should take it further. Ian should go to gaol for what he’d done. Mum wanted it, too. We all did. So Mum went to the police and he was charged. That’s where the committal hearing comes in. Tim told you what it is, like a mini-trial. Trouble was, it didn’t work and the case was thrown out.’

  ‘How could that happen though? After all he’d done to you.’

  Tim breaks in, his words are slurred but the meaning is still clear. ‘Because Mum lied, that’s why. And once she was caught out, the judge wouldn’t believe us. Unreliable witness. How many times have we heard those words since then?’

  ‘That’s why we can’t get an AVO against him,’ says Kirsty, trying to shut off the story so Dylan wouldn’t ask any more questions. ‘Every time Mum tries, Cartwright’s lawyer reminds the cops what the judge said about her. Then there’s his brother, the policeman. He’s spread the same kind of stories around all his mates, that we just want to keep Ian from having Melanie on weekends.’ She drops her voice and says as a bitter afterthought, ‘That’s the only true thing that ever came out of those hearings.’ She winces at this, but Dylan doesn’t pick up on what she’s let slip.

  ‘Why did she have to lie?’ he asks instead.

  ‘It’s complicated, all right,’ she snaps, hoping to kill off his questions, then groans at how futile the old cliché sounds. And Dylan just keeps coming. Like a clumsy Labrador.

  ‘Why did your mother lie about it? Wasn’t the truth bad enough? Even if he didn’t go to gaol, you would’ve got your AVO.’

  ‘An AVO wasn’t enough,’ says Tim forcefully to the debris on the coffee table.

  ‘What do you mean, not enough? I looked it up on the Net. It means a guy can’t come near you, can’t even ring up on the phone.’

  ‘You know all about it, do you?’ shouts Tim. ‘You’re a lawyer now, is that it? Listen, smart arse, it’s not about Mum, it’s about Melanie.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ snaps Kirsty and she’s already on the move into the hallway. She knows how much Melanie loves to listen from the shadows, a proper little spy and nothing draws her more than the promise of hearing something about herself.

  But there are no footsteps retreating down the hall. Kirsty goes back to the lounge room where the story is going in directions she can’t control.

  ‘The whole Committal thing was about Melanie,’ Tim rages on. ‘An AVO wouldn’t stop Ian from getting her on weekends, but if he was in gaol he couldn’t touch her.’

  Kirsty stifles a gasp and watches Dylan. The rum has dulled his thinking but Tim’s words spilled hints like an overfilled bucket.

  ‘Why’s it so important to keep Cartwright away from Melanie? He doesn’t hit her too, does he? She didn’t seem afraid of him at all on Sunday.’

  He hasn’t guessed. Kirsty looks towards her brother who is staring back with the same weary pain in his eyes, despite the anaesthetic booze.

  ‘Don’t tell him. Please Tim.’

  Sober, he might have heard the need in her voice, but he has four cans of rum and cola
inside him. ‘It’s because of what Cartwright did to Kirsty.’

  Dylan’s face shows the horror. No actor in a slasher flick ever nailed it so perfectly.

  ‘He didn’t do what you’re thinking,’ Kirsty tells him quickly. She leans forward as she speaks, looking past Tim so she can appeal directly to Dylan. He has to understand this. ‘It never got that far.’

  ‘Only because Mum came home in time to stop him,’ says her brother.

  ‘That’s enough. Don’t say any more Tim.’ Kirsty is on her feet, shouting down at her brother. ‘Dylan doesn’t want to hear any more. It’s none of his business. Nothing really happened, and that’s all that matters.’

  She doesn’t look at Dylan. Can’t look at him. ‘I’ll make us a coffee,’ she says and then realises she has no idea whether Dylan drinks the stuff. ‘Or something,’ she adds, letting her voice trail away as she moves.

  In the kitchen she puts on the kettle and leans over it until each breath comes easily. She can survive the memories as long as the images aren’t fleshed out. Her body shudders involuntarily. There will always be tremors that scutter unwanted across her skin. She’s not a statue, and memories can be so wilfully disobedient.

  Dread and shame stand at her shoulder, eager to touch her as Ian Cartwright did. It mostly happened inside these walls, even in the kitchen where she stands remembering, no matter how much she doesn’t want to. If only her mother could understand how she feels about this house. They fought so hard to keep it, something solid and essential in their lives, but she hates it. She longs for them to go some place else, anywhere else, so this house can be part of a history receding from them, instead of the living memory that grips her like a fist.

  She even sleeps in the same bedroom, for God’s sake, the very room where Cartwright slipped in to wish her goodnight. She’d duck under the blankets but the shape of her body was still easy to make out. He liked to trace its curves with his hands.