Kill the Possum

by James Moloney

  Only once has Kirsty Beal seen her mother get the better of Ian Cartwright. It was the day she came home early and found him in Kirsty’s bedroom. There was no doubt what he intended and in an instant all that an unhappy wife had endured became nothing. Instead, the mother in her went berserk. Cartwright had hit her but she was a wild woman who didn’t feel the blows. He was oddly disarmed, it seemed to Kirsty, who watched in awe through her thirteen-year-old eyes. She’s thought about it many times since and wonders whether there was one corner of his being that knew he was wrong. Was that why he let himself lose that day?

  He fought all the same, with words as much as his hands. ‘It’s not me, it’s Kirsty,’ he wailed, playing the victim. ‘She flirts with me non-stop, Louise. That’s right, as soon as you turn your back. She invited me into her room, she’s the one you should blame.’

  The lies hurt more than anything he had actually done to her. But her mother knew what kind of a man she’d married by then. There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation, not the slightest doubt that could pierce such armoured certainty. The look in her mother’s eyes keeps Kirsty strong to this day. Trust is love. It wasn’t just her father who taught her that.

  The kettle boils but Kirsty doesn’t notice. She makes no coffee, takes no biscuits from the cupboard. She goes back to the lounge room where Dylan watches her all the way to the sofa. There is the heat of outrage behind his eyes, and compassion too, which she needs less than he thinks. How can she make him understand that?

  She picks up her can and fills her mouth with the frothy mixture, wincing as it burns her throat. Dylan is still staring at her. Doesn’t this guy ever look away?

  ‘If Cartwright had… even if he hadn’t actually… why didn’t it all come out at the Committal?’ Dylan uses the word as a standalone now, just as the Beals do.

  Kirsty doesn’t miss this subtle change, but there’s a question out there and she has to answer. ‘Because Mum was trying to protect me. I’d have to talk about the things he had done…’

  She can’t go on. Tilts back her head and drains the can, spluttering when the last mouthful gags in her throat.

  Tim watches, slack-eyed, then turns to Dylan, ‘Mum was always going to get custody, but the Family Court wanted to let Ian have Melanie every second weekend.

  ‘We were worried that he’d start with her, one day, like he did with me,’ Kirsty explains.

  ‘So your mother went with the other stuff, the way he bashed her,’ says Dylan, trying to keep the words rolling. He seemed determined to hear every detail. ‘He’d been abusing her for years, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Of course, but the worst damage doesn’t always leave a mark you can see,’ Kirsty says. ‘It was the fear, Dylan. It doesn’t show up like bruises. You can’t show a policeman the way Ian intimidates you every minute he’s around, you can’t repeat the words he says and make anyone else understand how they hurt. Our own lawyer told Mum right off she had a weak case if it was just the stuff he said. The physical stuff is what everyone thinks of, the black eyes, broken jaws, cigarette burns. That’s what we needed. So Mum went to the police and told them how Ian hit her and to make it sound good, she exaggerated, even made things up.’

  ‘Ian’s lawyer just loved that,’ Tim comments bitterly. ‘He went for Mum like a pit bull, tricked her up on dates and places until she was contradicting herself every time she opened her mouth. It was like another Sunday in that courtroom. In the end she had to admit to the judge that she’d lied.’

  Tim fights his way to his feet and staggers a little way from the sofa. ‘That’s when we started hearing it, over and over. Unreliable witness. Mum was the crazy from the psych ward.’

  He wriggles his shoulders as though he’s walked into a spider’s web. ‘You’ve seen the way he works, Dylan. That mongrel hurt Mum worse than black eyes and broken bones, but she couldn’t make them understand. They’ve never seen it the way you have. By the end she did look mad, and now the police won’t believe a word she says.’

  ‘He’s right,’ says Kirsty, beginning to weep with the fury this story stirs in her. She doesn’t cry because of Ian Cartwright any more, but what that lawyer did to her mother still burns her soul like the tip of a cigarette. ‘It made a real mess out of Mum. She’s never been the same since. Hopeless, bloody hopeless and now Ian thinks he can get away with anything. He’s bloody right, too, the bastard. There’s no way we can keep him away from Melanie. The only hope’s that… well, she’s his real daughter, after all, not like me. I was just something he owned, same as this house.’ She appeals to Dylan, wanting him to agree. ‘He’s a human being, after all.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ Tim seethes from across the room. ‘Not a human bone in his body, no soul, no conscience at all. He’s worse than the lowest cockroach, a bloody animal.’

  The tirade has galvanised Tim and he returns to the sofa, standing unsteadily before the others.

  Kirsty feels herself respond. The rum has worked its way through her now as well, not enough to make her stagger or slur her words but enough to unleash her rage. She rises to join Tim.

  ‘I’ll kill him if he touches her,’ she says from deep in her throat.

  There’s a wonderful liberation in those words. On Sundays, Cartwright keeps them too tightly bound to the past and she can’t break free, but he’s not here tonight and she delights in the ferocity of her voice, the release of a hatred she doesn’t dare give way to when Cartwright’s with them. This hatred is beautiful, clean like the sky after rain, the pristine white of an angel’s wing. She thinks of the kitchen knife in her brother’s hand when he stabbed down into the cutting board.

  ‘I’d put a knife through his heart.’ Christ, it feels good to imagine it.

  She makes a fist with her right hand. Holds it up as though her fingers encircle the knife’s handle. It’s all for show but it brings a rush greater than any drug. Tim is beside her. He becomes Ian Cartwright. She plunges the invisible weapon into his chest.

  Kirsty opens her hand and steps back from her grinning brother, who has enjoyed the charade as much as she, a game to set them free.

  The shock of silent satisfaction takes a long hold on the room.

  Then.

  ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  What! Brother and sister turn their heads. Dylan’s said something. They recognise him as part of this little act, even if he’s not a Beal. What did he say?

  ‘He’d see you coming,’ says Dylan, more urgently.

  They still don’t understand what he’s on about, so he walks them through it. Steps in front of Tim, and raises a clenched fist. ‘If you come at him from the front, he’ll stop you.’

  Kirsty is confused. In her fantasy, Cartwright doesn’t stop her, doesn’t cry out in pain. He is an image conjured by her frustration and gone before steel pierces skin.

  ‘Yeah, he’d see the knife,’ she says, simply to agree. The cleansing rage is dying within her as quickly as it arose.

  But nothing has died in Dylan, not yet it seems. ‘Coming at him from the front is crazy. You’d have to get behind him.’ Balling his own fist, he comes at Tim, stabbing downwards between his shoulder blades. ‘If the knife was long enough, it might hit his heart.’

  Kirsty sees her brother’s face wide-eyed and staring. Has he heard it too? The stiletto in Dylan’s voice? Hungry and ruthless and very, very angry.

  ‘Are you serious!’

  Kirsty sinks into the sofa again. Her eyes take in Dylan. His hands are slotted loosely in his pockets, as though he hasn’t just murdered Ian Cartwright, too. The silence stretches for five seconds, then ten until she begins to laugh. Tim does the same and joins her on the cushions.

  Dylan is the only one standing, the only one without a smile.

  ‘Not,’ he says with a shrug and starts to laugh at himself at last. He falls onto the sofa, making three in a row, Dylan, Tim and Kirsty. This is really funny. They can’t stop. Every time they make eye contact with another, it starts up again, the kind of hy
steria that has no source, that seems separate from the normal reasons, that doesn’t live by the usual rules of laughter.

  7

  Dylan helps out on the roof

  Dylan Kane is looking down on the rest of the world from a perspective he’s never considered before - and what a buzz it is. The trees are a different shape, the backyard he’s played in many times seems smaller and for the first time he discovers what lies over the high wall that separates his grandparent’s property from the neighbours behind. Nothing so special after all, but he doesn’t let this small disappointment ruin the exhilaration.

  ‘Don’t get too cocky,’ says a voice from near his feet. His grandfather is kneeling on the steeply sloping roof beside him, a screwdriver in one hand and a small crowbar in the other. He’s considerably taller than Dylan and lean, like a greyhound. Now that he isn’t teaching any more in that stuck-up boys school, he’s let his silver hair grow longer, even though this means he occasionally has to sweep it back behind his ears.

  Dylan likes coming to this house, usually on a Sunday, like today, but any time is a pleasure really. When he was younger they’d take him on an outing, which was one of the old- fashioned words his grandmother used. (Or maybe that was just the English way of saying things. She and Eric still spoke with a noticeable accent.) Over the years, they’d been to the zoo, the beach a few times and half a dozen Disney movies. Now that he’s too old for that sort of thing, they let him come on his own and since, by one of those convenient quirks of fate, they live on the bus route between Dylan’s house and the city, he drops in quite often to let Eric and Fiona fuss over him. He especially likes the way he gets roped into fixing things, because his grandfather’s always busy, solving problems with his hands. This roof is just the latest in a long list.

  ‘Are you ready? Same as before.’

  They are replacing broken tiles, with three already done and this next pair the last. Roof tiles are laid over one another in an interlocking pattern so to replace one can mean four or five need to be levered out of the way. That’s where the screwdriver and the crowbar came in.

  Eric grunts with the effort. ‘Damn, we’ll have to take a few more off this time.’

  They soon have a gaping hole in the roof that lets the sunlight flood in. Dylan can see clearly all the way down to rafters that hold up the ceiling. His grandfather leans over for a look as well.

  ‘Possum droppings,’ he says, pointing out the tiny black pellets. ‘Had a whole family in there last year.’

  ‘We’ve got one at the moment.’

  ‘Have you! I’ll lend you my cage then. Take it home with you when you go.’ Eric thinks on this for a second then adds, ‘Catching the possum’s the easy part, though. Finding where it gets into the roof is the thing. Once the hole’s blocked up you can just let the possum go out in the yard.’

  ‘How’ll I find out where it’s getting in, though?’

  ‘I’ll come and help if you like, pay you back for helping me today.’

  Dylan hesitates before answering. He can’t answer, can’t find the words quickly enough and so an awkward moment passes there on the roof.

  His grandfather senses his reluctance. ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about it. Maybe you better have a go by yourself after all.’

  Yes, he’ll have to do it himself because there is no way round the facts. Dylan’s mother simply doesn’t like having Eric or Fiona around the house. They aren’t her parents, after all, but his father’s.

  They are slotting tiles back into place when Fiona Kane appears on the back patio beneath them. ‘Here, you two, I want a shot of this,’ and she holds a small digital up in front of her. ‘It’s for the insurance company,’ she calls to Dylan. ‘Your grandfather’s sure to fall off the roof any minute. I can show the neighbours, too, in case they think I gave him the bruises.’

  She laughs at her own joke and waits for them to turn towards her. ‘Come on, both of you, smile for the picture.’

  Dylan sees his grandfather twist his body around to face her but he doesn’t do the same. He’s been hit from two sides at once, first the wordless memory of his father and now this silly joke about bruising a husband. Is that any different from beating a wife? From harassing an entire family? It’s not a joke to the Beals. He keeps his back to the camera and stares instead into the cavernous space still visible through the gap.

  ‘Come on, Dylan, I can’t see your face.’

  No, he won’t turn around.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asks his grandfather.

  ‘You’re going to send this picture to England,’ he calls over his shoulder. ‘You’re always going on about how I look more like him every time you see me. You want him to see it as well.’

  ‘No, that’s not it at all,’ Fiona Kane shouts up at him in dismay. ‘I just want a picture of the two of you working together.’

  ‘No, I don’t want a picture taken.’

  His grandmother waits helplessly below and when he continues to look away, she drops the camera to her side and walks back into the house.

  Eric watches her go and doesn’t turn back to Dylan. The hesitation is his this time and Dylan doesn’t miss it. He feels stupid, childish.

  The last tile can only be fitted into place with Dylan’s help. He sees this and does what he’s learned to do without a word passing between them.

  ‘That’s done then,’ says Eric.

  They climb down the ladder in silence. Dylan knows he should apologise; he can see in his grandfather’s eyes that it’s expected. He wants this man’s approval. Why couldn’t he have been Eric’s son instead of his grandson? ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he moans under his breath. ‘Why do I do this to myself?’ He can feel his hands shaking, and his stomach is churning as though he’s run a hundred metres flat out. Eric walks off, not into the house but around the side and underneath. He comes back shortly after with a rectangular wire cage which he sets down beside Dylan like a suitcase.

  This is a signal that his visit has come to a premature end.

  ‘I’m sorry, Grandad. I was a real prick up there. Get the camera and Grandma can take our photo.’ He moves to the back door and calls into the house, ‘Grandma, Grandma, I’m sorry.’

  Fiona emerges from the bowels of the house and stops halfway across the kitchen. ‘It’s all right, Dylan. The picture doesn’t matter. Come into the lounge room. I’ve made Eric a cup of tea and there’s Coke for you.’

  He doesn’t deserve this after being such a dickhead. He loves them for their patience and discovering that thought inside himself almost brings tears. What’s the matter with him lately, that his mood can swing so wildly? One minute he wants to punch something and the next he wants to hug his grandmother.

  He follows them into the lounge room and sinks into the overstuffed sofa that’s dominated the room for as long as he can remember. Eric joins him while Fiona rests a tray on top of the battered sideboard. It shares the space with a cluster of framed photos depicting the relatives he has never met, and his father, of course.

  The Coke slides down his throat without touching the sides but he refuses the offer of a refill. He has a question for his grandparents and he wants them both here when he asks it. ‘I’ve been thinking about Christmas.’

  ‘That’s a long way off, Dylan. It’s only April.’

  ‘No, I mean last Christmas and the Christmases before that as well. The present I get every year from England, it doesn’t really come from there, does it.’

  ‘No, we’ve explained that to you. Your father sends us the money and tells us what he wants to get for you then we go out and buy it. Simpler that way.’

  Dylan expects this reply, the standard explanation that convinced him easily enough when he was eleven or twelve, but he’s older now, more cynical and suspicious. ‘Why would he bother working out what I’d like for Christmas when for the rest of the year he acts like I don’t exist?’

  ‘Don’t say that Dylan. Peter does care about you.’

  ‘He do
esn’t ring to talk to me any more. Only did it a few times anyway and that was a while ago. A Christmas present is all I get. He doesn’t choose it, does he? You do.’

  After a quick pause and a frown, Eric nods. ‘We see you every few weeks, Dylan. We know the things you’re up to. It’s hard for your father, living so far away.’

  Bullshit! It’s a thought explosion inside his head, not a word. Out loud, he accuses. ‘You pay for it as well, don’t you. England has nothing to do with it at all.’

  A worried glance passes between Eric and Fiona. The hesitation turns into a silence until there is no need for words. His grandfather tells him anyway, because of the man he is. ‘Yes, we do the present. Just us. You’re our grandson, Dylan, and we love you just as we love the others.’ He sweeps his hand towards the framed photographs that Dylan avoids.

  ‘But it was your father’s idea originally,’ Fiona pipes up brightly. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Eric. When he remarried, he sent a letter with money inside, especially for you, asking us to get you something we knew you’d like. He did it again the second year.’

  So Dylan had earned two years worth of his father’s attention at Christmas. His suspicions are alerted now and he sees through this as well. Things have to be said, the truth has to be let out into the open.

  ‘His new wife suggested it, most likely. Probably made her feel gracious.’ When he hears the bitterness of his remark, he wants to snatch it back. He has no beef with the new Mrs Kane. ‘Maybe she’s a nice lady, I don’t know,’ he concedes with a shrug. ‘But after two years she had her own kids, didn’t she, those two little girls, so she was too busy to remind him.’

  ‘Alison is a delightful person, Dylan, you’re right, but you’re reading too much into what happened.’

  ‘Am I?’ He makes no effort to keep the contempt from his voice this time. An anger has hold of him, the same indignation that sparked the night air around him when he walked home from the Beals’ house.

  ‘My father just wants to forget he ever got married in Australia. He’d rather forget me as well. I’m just a mistake he wishes hadn’t happened. His English wife and his English kids are his real life, they’re all that’s ever happened to him. He’s even got a son over there now. No wonder he doesn’t ring me any more. I don’t even want him to, it was awful when he did, finding something to talk about.’