Kill the Possum

by James Moloney

  Dylan says all of this directly into the air in front of him, his eyes open but not seeing the room. Movement to his right brings him back a little and he looks up to see the horrified expression on his grandmother’s face.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry. How embarrassing would that be.’

  He isn’t taunting them. He loves them too much ever to cut them down so savagely. He’s not wallowing in self-pity, either, and he wants them to know that.

  ‘I’m just working out where I stand,’ he tells them, pleased by the measured tone he can hear in his own voice. He wants them to see how calm he is, how reasonable, because he has more to say and he doesn’t want it to come out like a rant.

  ‘It’s not right, you know, that he can make such a mess of things and then just walk away. It’s not right that he goes off to England and has a whole new life for himself as though nothing happened back here in Australia. My father’s a pathetic excuse for a human being.’

  ‘No, Dylan, it’s not true,’ says Fiona Kane, then glances away towards her husband, desperate for rescue.

  Dylan’s said what he had to say so he waits to see what gets batted back towards him. All eyes are on Eric. The man is good with his hands and his heart, but he’s not so handy with his tongue. Instead he resorts to a raw honesty.

  ‘The fact is, and you should know this, Dylan…’ He looks towards his wife as he forces out the next words, ‘Your grandmother and I were ashamed of Peter when he ran off to Europe. Bad enough that he walked out on your mother, with you still so young…’

  ‘He didn’t even stay for my birthday.’

  ‘We know, Dylan. It was wrong, he shouldn’t have done it. Then to gallivant around the Continent without a care while Rosemary struggled to raise a little toddler… that wasn’t how we’d brought him up. We expected better. You and your mother deserved better.’

  Eric stops and looking at his wife, says, ‘We wish… well, we wish you could know him now, don’t we Fiona.’

  ‘He’s so different, Dylan. Not the feckless person you think he is. Not now. He was too young to get married. Only twenty when they got engaged. We tried to make him see that, but he was so in love with Rosemary and of course you were already on the way. He wasn’t ready to be a father back then but that was a long time ago, Dylan. We’ve been to see him in England twice now, once for the wedding and again after Alison had the twins. He’s a good husband and a very good father. We’re proud of him again, aren’t we Eric.’

  Dylan doesn’t expect this from his grandparents and he doesn’t want it either. His trust in them is unshakeable, so where does that leave him? The forgotten son of a good father, the boy who shouldn’t exist.

  ‘You’re just making excuses for him, like it’s all right to make the worst mess you can as long as you make up for it later on, to someone else, not even the people you mucked around in the first place.’

  ‘Dylan, no! That’s not what we’re saying.’

  So what are they saying? A terrible thought comes to his mind. Maybe they’re right, maybe Peter Kane really is a good father to his twins and his new little boy. This fear stings his throat, his eyes, his heart more than anything he’s felt today.

  When he doesn’t speak, Fiona takes the initiative. ‘You’re being very harsh on your father. When you’re sixteen, everything seems black and white…’

  ‘Fiona,’ Eric says gently, opening his hand like a tentative traffic cop amid the grid-locked emotions of their lounge room.

  His grandmother hasn’t quite given up, though. ‘You’ll be old enough to travel yourself before much longer. You might go to England one day and once you’ve met Peter, you’ll see him differently.’

  Go to England! It’s too late for that. He’s too angry. He doesn’t want to change his mind about his father. Peter Kane is weak and worthless. He should have been there, Dylan wants to shout, to watch me grow up, that’s what fathers are supposed to do. They’re not supposed to leave a trail of misery after them.

  Oh shit! He was thinking about Cartwright now. No, no!

  He feels a sudden panic and stands up, abruptly. ‘I’ve got to go home.’ And although Eric offers to drive him, he insists on taking the heavy cage on the bus.

  8

  Kirsty is visited in her room

  Kirsty Beal is almost asleep when the door of her bedroom opens suddenly. Before she can stop herself, she pulls her knees up close to her chest. Her conscious mind tells her it’s a woman’s silhouette outlined in the light from the hall, her mother home from night-shift and checking to see that everything is all right. Kirsty knows this, but it takes a moment to make her body believe.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  Kirsty moves closer to the wall to make a space for her mother to sit down. ‘Yes. How did it go at the servo?’ she asks in a whisper. They don’t want to disturb Melanie.

  ‘Like always. Should be thankful for that,’ comes the reply. Mrs Beal is grateful for the smallest things. ‘It’s Sunday night,’ she says after a pause. ‘We’re past the halfway mark.’

  Only another Beal could understand how they measure their lives in fortnightly cycles. In the days after Cartwright has been, each hour allows the agony to recede, but after the next weekend, each hour counts down the clock until he comes again.

  Kirsty squeezes her mother’s hand and says, ‘It won’t be so bad next time,’ even though they both know it probably will. She regrets the way her body reacted when her mother first came to her bedside. There’s been so much to endure and most of the pain has fallen on Mrs Beal.

  Yet, in the middle of this compassion a new flare of anger betrays her. Yes, her mother works hard, she endures, only just, but she doesn’t protect them from Ian. She can’t. Kirsty has had to learn how to do it for herself. That’s bad enough, but Tim… she’s not so sure and then there’s Melanie.

  The flare becomes a fire. Last night on the sofa, after her brother returned, they spoke of the Committal. What a disaster that was, what a mess their mother made of the whole thing.

  Does Mrs Beal sense the change in her daughter? Whatever the cause, she stands up, muttering, ‘You must be tired. I’m keeping you awake.’ She slips soundlessly through the door and this time the silhouette shows the stooped outline of a woman who looks much older than thirty-nine. That’s all she is, Kirsty reminds herself, not even forty years old.

  It’s not anger that assails her now but a terrible guilt. How could she rail against this woman after what happened at the Committal? Kirsty was there to see it, just as she’d watched her mother’s life slowly disintegrate after her marriage to Ian Cartwright. But the Committal had done the most damage. Louise Beal had been torn to shreds.

  ‘Say that again, Mrs Beal. Speak up, the court wants to hear your answer.’

  That was the way the lawyer, Murphy, spoke to her. The words seem harmless enough. But his stance, his movements, his facial expressions were hateful and demeaning. Like Cartwright, he probed for her weaknesses, and they weren’t hard to find.

  ‘I want you to be heard, too, Mrs Beal, because every answer you give proves to the court even more that you’re a liar. You’ve made up all these false allegations, haven’t you Mrs Beal, out of spite.’

  He went for her, ruthlessly, relentlessly, as though he’d been born with no heart in his body and while Kirsty sat there watching her mother dissolve into something less than human, she knew that it should have been her.

  That was the source of her guilt. It should have been Kirsty who gave evidence before the Committal. What she’d told Dylan had only skipped across the surface. She couldn’t tell him what their lawyer had described, how Kirsty would be hounded on the witness stand. She’d have to answer questions over and over again about everything Cartwright had done to her and separate them from the things he’d tried to do, horrible things that she’d have to repeat before dozens of people. Cruel men would make her out to be a little slut.

  Suddenly Kirsty becomes aware of her body stretched ou
t beneath the sheet, a young woman’s shape that was already beginning to emerge by the time the Committal took place. She didn’t look like a little girl any more. On the witness stand, the lines of her body would have given her away. She’d brought it on herself because of the way she looked. She couldn’t bear the thought.

  So a loving mother had taken the stand instead, armed in part with lies and when those lies were exposed, they swallowed up the truth she tried to tell. Worst of all, they lost their chance to protect Melanie.

  ‘If he touches her, I’ll kill him,’ Kirsty says aloud for the sense of power and vengeance it brings, but she knows even as the words linger above her in the darkness, that she would never do it.

  Tim starts a list

  Tim Beal spends Sunday nursing a headache in front of the TV, then sleeps until Monday morning spits him out.

  ‘Do you want any breakfast?’ his mother calls through a door she no longer opens without his permission. He plays possum and she goes away. No school today, he decides, rolling over to face the wall. The house makes its morning sounds. Tim ticks off his family’s preparations for the day until finally the car doors slam under the house and an engine cranks reluctantly into life. Just the silent Kirsty left now and she understands, doesn’t judge, doesn’t bug him about school.

  Then he realises. If he doesn’t go to school, he won’t see Dylan Kane.

  He showers quickly and makes the bus with Kirsty. At recess he stands under the tree until a voice calls from behind him, ‘How’s the hangover?’

  ‘No worse than a day at school,’ he answers without turning around.

  Dylan arrives at his side, hands in his pockets, to stare across the fence at a disinterested world. ‘The skinful you had inside you could’ve lasted for two days.’

  ‘Yeah, well, might as well be here. If I was feeling great, I’d stay home.’

  They share a chuckle at this and somehow things link directly to their laughter on the sofa on Saturday night.

  ‘That was so funny. Kirsty and the knife thing. She gets so angry about Cartwright, I swear she’d do it, you know. And then you, you mongrel, saying how we’d have to stab him in the back. How crazy’s that?’

  ‘Yeah, think of the blood.’

  ‘Of course, the blood. Who’d clean it up, eh? Shit, the stuff would go everywhere. Be like the killing floor in an abattoir.’ Tim flings his hands wide, extravagantly, enjoying himself like he hasn’t done for years.

  ‘A messy business, killing someone,’ says Dylan with mock authority. They sit down with their backs against the rough bark of the tree. ‘How many ways are there to kill a human being, then?’

  ‘Jeez, I don’t know. Must be hundreds. There’s shooting, of course, that’s the one you always hear about in the news.’

  ‘And stabbing.’

  ‘That’s a spur of the moment thing, don’t you think? Crime of passion,’ says Tim, wondering where he got the expression from.

  ‘Don’t forget the blunt instrument.’ Dylan drops his voice into a newsreader’s tone. ‘The victim was hit over the head with a blunt instrument.’

  ‘Where do you reckon you get one? I mean, is there a shop, a department store? I’d like to buy a blunt instrument, please.’

  They’re giggling like Saturday night. This conversation is so ridiculous.

  ‘There’s poison, too, and bombs, that’s a good one. No body to bury then.’

  ‘Fire,’ says Tim, ‘and running someone over with a car.’

  ‘Not much use if you can’t drive.’ But Dylan seems determined to keep them on a roll. ‘Drowning, suffocation.’

  Tim has stopped thinking up more entries for the list and encourages Dylan instead. ‘Yeah, that’s a start. Got any more?’ It feels good to hear the ideas tumble out of someone else. The fog that so often hovers about him under this tree has lifted.

  ‘How many do you think you could come up with?’

  Their game has become like a television quiz show. Guess the ten most popular. ‘There should be a book,’ says Tim. ‘A Hundred and One Ways to Kill the People You Hate.’

  ‘If there’s not, we’ll write one, eh? And make a squillion bucks.’

  9

  Kirsty tries to explain

  The rest of the school week shuffles by. On Saturday morning, Kirsty goes with her mother on the twenty minute ride through the suburbs to deliver Melanie. They park in the street and walk her down the easement to the ramshackle place Cartwright is renting these days, a highset house like their own that backs onto sloping bushland.

  ‘His car’s there,’ Kirsty points out, nodding towards the Commodore which pokes its boot out from under the house. Sometimes when they come for the hand-over he isn’t home and they have to come back in the afternoon, or wonderful, wonderful, he doesn’t take her at all that weekend.

  But otherwise, there’s never any trouble on Saturdays. Once he appears, they send Melanie up the stairs and turn on their heels, back to the car, back to the house, back to waiting for Sunday afternoon.

  That’s how it is for Kirsty’s mother, but Kirsty’s got other plans. Dylan’s coming round.

  By late afternoon Kirsty’s swinging a wide circle around a bus stop pole, letting the momentum push her body around one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s such an easy freedom, leaving her slightly giddy. She goes around again to celebrate her escape from the house.

  This is the bus stop where she waits for a ride to school each morning, but she and Dylan are heading into town this time.

  ‘Your mum looked pretty glum,’ he says.

  ‘Always is when Melanie’s with Ian.’

  ‘I can guess why.’

  Kirsty looks at Dylan and tries to suppress a frown. Of course he can guess why, so why mention it in the first place? She doesn’t want to think about her mother. Kirsty’s wearing the new top she bought during the week, the first new piece of clothing she’s had in… Christ, she can’t remember. She knows she looks good in it and she wants him to tell her, or ask if it’s new. Anything.

  But Dylan is plugged into what’s happening, that’s why he mentioned her mother. He seems edgy this weekend and Melanie isn’t even his sister. Something stirs in Kirsty which she can only push aside if she meets Dylan head on.

  ‘Mum gets into more and more of a flap the closer it gets to Ian coming round again. She wants Melanie back as soon as possible but she knows she has to go through… well you saw it. That ritual. Always a Sunday, you see, like a religious thing. You know, pay for your sins, the price of having Melanie back.’

  ‘Isn’t there a way she can be returned without all that crap? Can’t you keep the doors locked, make him leave Melanie on the front porch and piss off for another fortnight?’

  ‘She’s not a package, Dylan! Besides, we’ve tried. You’ve got no idea how determined he is, or how tricky. He looks forward to those Sunday afternoons like other guys get excited about a footy game. It’s his entertainment, his drug. If we lock the doors, he won’t let Melanie out of the car until we open them. And anyway, he lives for the way people get in his face. The more you defy him, the more vicious and relentless he is.’

  ‘But your mother. She’s the one he goes for. If she wasn’t there…’

  ‘And how would that look at the next Family Court hearing? Week after week there’s no mother waiting when the little girl comes home. You can bet Cartwright’s lawyer would let them know. He might even ask for permanent custody. Besides,’ says Kirsty with as much pride as despair, ‘Mum might look weak when Cartwright treats her like that, but she’s not a coward. She’d never let Tim and me face him alone.’

  ‘And that’s why the pair of you are there when he comes, isn’t it. To help your mother.’

  No matter how much she gives him, he always wants more. The earnest concern in his face overwhelms her and she snaps at him. ‘Dylan, I don’t want to talk about it, all right!’

  She regrets her outburst even as it leaves her lips, but she doesn’t regret its effect. Th
at look is gone from his face, replaced by shock and shame.

  ‘I’m sorry. Oh shit, I have been going on about it, haven’t I. I’m really sorry.’

  The apology is clearly so genuine that Kirsty feels even worse. Thank God, the bus is here, she thinks, as they board. Dylan falls silent in the seat beside her and she suddenly feels hemmed in between him and the window and everything else she doesn’t want to name.

  God this is awful. Maybe she should say she’s feeling sick and ask him to take her home. Chloe and Byron are meeting them in town but Dylan’s got a mobile.

  No, it would be too obvious. Probably end their relationship, and except for the way he goes on about Ian Cartwright, Kirsty likes him. Why should she give up a boy who likes her, the first one to put his arm around her and hold her close? That bastard has stolen enough from her already. A granite determination settles into her abdomen. She can beat this.

  But the silence lingers painfully all the way into town and she realises that she’s not alone, that she needs Dylan to understand her way of beating Ian Cartwright.

  The bus pulls into the kerb at the edge of the CBD and the driver calls, ‘End of the line, folks,’ like someone who’s finished his last route for the day. Most of the passengers are on their feet already, eager for the doors to open, and as they fold back a dam-burst of bodies spills onto the footpath and hurries off through a park towards the high-rise. Kirsty steers Dylan off the path to a bench under a poinciana tree.

  ‘What’s the matter, are you okay?’ he asks, confused, although he seems glad to have something to break the excruciating silence between them.

  Kirsty makes him face her on the hard wooden seat. ‘Look, you know what’s going on in my family, right. It’s pretty ugly, but the thing is, I don’t think about it all the time. I have to forget about it as much as I can or I’ll go crazy. Do you understand? So I block out that ugly part of my life, put it away in a little box where I don’t have to look at it every minute of the day. It’s not easy. I’ve had to teach myself how to do it, but I’m not going to let the life slip out of me like it has for Mum.’