Kill the Possum

by James Moloney

  ‘I’d give evidence.’

  ‘What did you see then?’ she asks. She doesn’t want this, doesn’t have the energy right now but she’ll have to show him anyway, show him how nothing works for them. ‘Come on, what would you tell the police? You didn’t get here until it was over. You just saw the aftermath and that doesn’t count.’

  ‘I could tell them what I saw last time.’

  ‘And what did you see then? Did Ian actually touch any of us? Listen to me, Dylan. Don’t ever get into a witness box. I’ve seen what they do to you. Cartwright’s lawyer would carve you up with your own words. Murphy’s his name. He’d turn you into a liar in three seconds flat.’

  Kirsty knows she’s going over the top but he has to understand if he wants to be one of them. In his innocent face she can see dismay at her attitude. Beaten before they’ve even started, he’s thinking. He’s a boy. He thinks you have to do things when sometimes you just have to survive.

  She’s not surprised when he starts throwing out wilder and wilder suggestions.

  ‘Couldn’t you get someone to be here, an adult, someone who’d be, I don’t know, a witness?’

  ‘He’d see them, know what was going on. Ian’d be nice as pie, for that visit, anyway.’

  ‘Then why don’t you have someone here every time?’

  ‘Who?’ Kirsty demands. ‘The bloody social workers were embarrassed by the way our case fell apart. They don’t want to know Mum now. All our relatives live down in Melbourne. We can hardly ask a neighbour to sit around here for hours every second Sunday, ’cause we’re never really sure what time he’ll bring Melanie back.’

  ‘What if a policeman hid in one of the bedrooms?’

  He was being ridiculous now. ‘They don’t do things like that, Dylan! And besides, you have to see the way Ian works, not just hear him. What he does is so intensely personal, someone in another room wouldn’t even be aware of it. He’s in Mum’s head and Tim’s too,’ she says, stabbing a finger into the side of her skull. ‘That’s where he hurts you.’

  Dylan runs out of suggestions. Using his silence, Kirsty tries to explain. ‘We have to hold out until he gets tired of it. He doesn’t really care about Melanie. A man with no heart can’t love anyone, even his own flesh and blood. He’s got another kid, you know, over in Perth. He’s forgotten all about that one. It’ll be that way with Melanie if we’re patient. He already skips the odd visit. One day he’ll think, why bother? She’s just in the way of what he wants to do with his weekends. Until that happens, all I can do is help Mum through it.’

  She hopes he understands. She doesn’t need his suggestions, but there is something vital he can give her. She stretches full length along the sofa and puts her head in Dylan’s lap, as she had seen Tim do. Did Tim even know what he’d done? Perhaps he thought it was Kirsty. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d comforted her brother in that way. Now it’s her turn. She could lie like this for hours, has no plans to shift a single muscle, no need of the television and even more words.

  Dylan goes silent and she begins to relax until above her there’s a sniff and then a painful intake of breath. She wonders for a moment whether she has finally surrendered to tears without realising. But no, it’s not her. Kirsty sits up and finds tears streaming from Dylan’s eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He’s embarrassed to be caught out like this. Turns his head away and won’t look at her. Pretends it’s not happening while at the same time struggling to contain a convulsion of his chest.

  ‘Tell me,’ she whispers gently.

  He makes a jumble of sounds she can’t decipher, as Tim had done on the floor of his room. He tries again. ‘So bloody helpless, all of you. I can’t… I just can’t…’ His hand waves in defeat and he turns away again.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ He’s on his feet instantly and through the front door before she can say a word.

  11

  Dylan deletes the evidence

  Dylan isn’t sure why he’d embarrassed himself in front of Kirsty on Sunday night. He remembers feeling intensely angry at what Cartwright had done, especially to Tim. That wasn’t enough on its own, though, was it? The frustration, maybe that was it, when Kirsty blocked every one of his ideas like she was playing French cricket. In the end, he’d felt he couldn’t defend himself any better than the Beals. But against what? Cartwright wasn’t threatening him.

  That night he couldn’t sleep. Cartwright filled every corner of Dylan’s mind with his special brand of havoc, not just on that Sunday, but all his life, it seemed, because tonight he heard about an earlier child, growing up in Perth. He pictures a little boy in nappies walking on unsteady legs towards an unhappy mother left to rear him alone.

  Neither Kirsty nor Tim are at school on Monday morning and he’s relieved. Had enough of them, hasn’t he, yet he sits in class like a statue while the teachers mouth words he doesn’t hear because he’s listening instead to the soundtrack from Tim’s room.

  I’m going to kill the bastard.

  At home, after the light has faded, Dylan fills his room with the sound of insistent gunfire. He doesn’t have to use the earphones on Monday night. His mother’s gone to choir practice. He taps at the mouse with his index finger, then moves the whole thing expertly to get a better view of the battlefield. There, behind the fuel drum; he blows the goon away in an extravaganza of blood red and yellow.

  He stops to think about the same thing that’s been on his mind all day and the break in concentration gives the enemy a jump on him. Before he can recover, it’s game over. Virtual pain. He doesn’t care. In moments he can be back in business.

  He doesn’t click for a new game, though. Exits the screen instead and when the gruesome images of battle disappear, he’s left with the lines and boxes of a blog he’d found earlier. No familiar names here, no talk of renewables or burning forests. He reads a brief post from Dogstar:

  It’s right that the jury found him guilty. It doesn’t matter that he was trying to save his daughter from being a druggie, he didn’t have to kill her boyfriend.

  And below this, Aristotle_In_A_Bottle writes:

  I agree with Dogstar. No society can let this sort of thing happen. Doesn’t matter what the motives were. There are ways that father could have helped his daughter without shooting her boyfriend. If he was beating her up, he could get the cops in. If boyfriend was giving her drugs, then take her away where he couldn’t find her or put her in rehab or something like that.

  Suddenly Dylan sits up in his chair and stabs frantically at the keys until he has nine lines on the screen. Errors everywhere. He moves along the lines fixing them and then reads what he’s written, his finger poised over the Enter key.

  I don’t think that Dogstar and Aristotle_In_A_Bottle understand how hard it was for that father. What if he had tried the things Aristotle_In_A_ Bottle says and the cops wouldn’t do anything? What if he had no money for rehab and couldn’t leave town with his daughter because of things we don’t know about? Society doesn’t always help the way it should and what do you do then? That father was forced into what he did, don’t you think? It was the only solution he had left to save his daughter and besides, if the boyfriend got her into drugs in the first place, that’s the same as trying to kill her, so he probably got what was coming to him.

  Dylan’s hesitation turns into a lengthy delay and he moves his right hand away from the keyboard. The more he thinks about it, the more dangerous these words seem, not because of what they mean but for their permanence once he presses the key. Computer geeks can trace all sorts of stuff. Maybe they could trace this entry to him. Shit, and he’d almost pressed Enter.

  He highlights the nine lines in reverse. Gone.

  The memory of what he’d written is not as easy to delete. Solution. What had he said to Tim last night? The perfect solution.

  Then a noise. Dylan’s heart instantly doubles its beat and he searches around frantically in case an intruder’s eyes have seen what
he’d written. There’s no one at the window, and the sound didn’t come from along the hall. There it is again.

  ‘Bloody possum,’ he murmurs, feeling his entire body relax. He looks up at the ceiling. ‘Heading out for a feed, are you? Well, you’ll find a little treat waiting for you when you get back.’ Dylan closes the blog altogether and goes off to cut an apple into possum-friendly pieces.

  Dylan rings the Beals’ house

  The school week continues its relentless march the next morning, but without the Beals again, it seems. On Tuesday night, Dylan rings Kirsty.

  ‘It’s Mum,’ she says in a whisper. ‘I couldn’t leave her yesterday.’ There’s a pause while she moves to somewhere private (Dylan guesses the front verandah by the sounds of a heavy latch turning). She talks to him again, ‘She’s better today, though. Going to work tomorrow, so I’ll be at school normal time. I wish I could get Tim to come as well.’

  ‘How’s he doing after… you know.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. He’s hardly been out of his room. Could be a bloody caveman in there for all I know.’

  ‘Can I speak to him?’ asked Dylan.

  ‘Sure, you can’t do any worse than me.’

  Tim’s plan

  Tim catches the bus to school on Wednesday morning along with Kirsty, who’s pleased that he’s coming too. She didn’t have to use words to tell him that, just a look is enough to know what she’s thinking. When she does speak to him it’s never about the things he wants to talk about. It’s all about how he’s coping and about their mother who might get fired if she misses another shift. She doesn’t talk to him about what they’re going to do, how they’re going to end this nightmare. That’s why he’s going to school. Dylan rang last night.

  Normally the bus ride depresses him because of what’s waiting when he shuffles through the school gate with the rest of the bleating sheep. Not today, though. There’s a fire in his blood that burns away everything else.

  At recess he sits with his back against the gnarled gum tree and watches a figure with hands in his pockets cross the yard towards him.

  ‘How you doing?’ says Dylan as he folds himself among the roots a little around the trunk from Tim.

  ‘Fine,’ he says, sticking to the formula. Someone watching from twenty metres away couldn’t be sure they were even connected. But Tim feels Dylan’s presence and finds a promise in it that Kirsty can’t give him despite all her careful coaxing.

  ‘Jorgensen nearly ch…ch…choked when he saw me,’ says Tim. Every hesitation, every time he has to stop and take control of his tongue reminds him of Sunday and every Sunday before it, right back to the beginning of time. He has to fight to remember how he felt last night after Dylan’s call.

  ‘Are you serious… what you said last night… you’re really going to help me?’

  More silence until Dylan asks, ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘Bash his brains out.’

  ‘Yeah, but how? Remember when Kirsty pretended to stab you, like you were Cartwright? Remember what I said? He’s not going to stand still while you come at him with a baseball bat.’

  Tim was thinking of the frying pan, but he takes Dylan’s point. His mind’s sparking like a storm cloud. ‘We could drug him first, so he’s asleep. Yeah, Mum’s sleeping pills.’ He rolls onto his hands and knees and squats in front of Dylan. ‘I know how to get them into him, too. He’s a chocolate milk fiend, drinks it out of the carton, straight from the fridge. That stuff’s so sweet, if we crushed the pills into a powder, he’d never taste it.’

  Dylan considers this coolly while he shreds the withered flesh from a leaf with his fingers. ‘Come home with me this afternoon. There’s something in our garage that might help.’

  Tim murders Ian Cartwright

  Long before Rosemary Kane bought the house, a carport was built, attached to one side, but in a corner of the backyard the old garage is still there. One of the fibro panels is broken and when Tim is led through the back door and into the yard, he can’t spot a perfect right-angle anywhere in the sad little building. He’s not surprised when Dylan has to force the door with his shoulder before standing back grandly to let him through first.

  There’s a noise in the corner. Something small, an animal is moving about, trying to hide before they see it. ‘You’ve got rats in here,’ says Tim.

  ‘Nah, a possum. Caught it up in the ceiling with a trap my grandad gave me. I’ve got to find where it’s getting in before I can let it go.’

  Tim wanders over to look and finds gnawed chunks of apple scattered around a sturdy cage. The possum retreats from him as far as the grey wire will let it.

  ‘I thought you just took them out in the bush.’

  ‘My grandfather says that cruel. Other possums attack them, drive them out of their territory. Poor things slowly starve to death,’ says Dylan while he rifles through a pile of junk against the opposite wall. He tosses a metre-long length of water pipe into the centre of the dim garage where it clangs loudly on the concrete. ‘Come here, help me get this out.’

  ‘A dummy,’ says Tim when they’ve tugged the thing free to lie beside the length of pipe.

  ‘A mannequin, if you don’t mind. Male, too,’ Dylan points out. One arm is missing and the whole thing is squared off mid-thigh with a single chrome rod protruding where its legs would be.

  ‘Talk about having a broomstick shoved up your arse,’ Tim comments and they chuckle over this as they stand looking down at the dusty body.

  ‘Mum brought this home from a church sale when I was only little. Don’t know what she was going to do with it. I used to pretend it was my father. Been gathering dust for ten years.’ He wipes a grimy rag across the face and chest to reveal the flesh tones beneath.

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’ Tim asks, intrigued. The mannequin’s features are handsome in the conventional way but its eyes are dead.

  ‘Okay, this is the deal,’ says Dylan. ‘You’ve crushed up your mother’s sleeping pills and put them into a carton of chocolate milk. Cartwright comes home, swills the lot and goes deeply asleep in front of his telly.’ Stooping briefly to pick up the pipe, he offers it to Tim like a crusader’s sword. ‘So smash his skull open. Let’s see some brains.’

  Tim can’t speak. Stares at the weapon in his hands, stares at Dylan’s face. The shock is intense yet it falls away quickly leaving him clear-headed. This is too wonderful to feel confused about. The pipe isn’t a heavy frying pan, maybe, but he knows what to do with it. He’s lived this moment many times, in the kitchen at home, in bed late at night, most of all under that leafless tree in the days before Dylan came there to sit with him. He grips the pipe hard with both hands, raises it high and swings it down onto Cartwright’s head.

  That first blow opens a ten centimetre crack in the hard plastic of the dummy’s forehead. The satisfaction is immense.

  ‘Come on, he’s not dead yet,’ Dylan tells him calmly.

  Tim was never much good with a bat and ball but he can’t miss at this range, and fuelled by the rage that lives close under his skin, he’s hitting sixes. He doesn’t stop to inspect the damage after each hit, and quickly loses count. Soon he’s panting and his arms begin to ache but it’s an exquisite pain. There’s never been a feeling like this in his whole history. Year after year, Sunday after Sunday, he pounds into the skull and when there’s nothing left of it, he starts on the torso, until the two boys are standing amid what looks to be a massive pile of egg shells.

  Tim takes a step backwards to look at what he’s done. The pipe is still in his hands as he begins to laugh. An ecstasy has hold of him, laughter feels the same as tears. Through the entire murder he hasn’t made a single sound but now he is leaning over, his mouth wide open as long, delicious noises gush up from inside him. Aargh! Aargh! Aargh! Tim Beal is floating above himself, elated and utterly, fantastically free.

  Slowly, his breathing returns to normal and he becomes aware of Dylan watching him. ‘That was unbelievable.’


  ‘Thought you’d like it. Jeez, you were getting into it.’

  ‘Healthy exercise.’

  ‘Upper body strength. You’ve got more power in those puny muscles than you realise.’

  ‘I’ve got a whole gym hidden in my room.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Awesome, absolutely awesome. Felt like I was really doing it, you know, the real thing.’ Tim waits for Dylan to shoot another quick line at him but it doesn’t come. Dylan’s staring with that long-faced look he gets when he’s serious. What’s brought this on, then? He thinks back over what he just said. The real thing.

  ‘You don’t think I can do it, do you?’

  The long face breaks into a reluctant grimace as Dylan’s hand sweeps through his hair, finally taking hold at the nape of his neck. ‘You tell me, Tim. I thought this mannequin would help, but all it’s done is make me realise what it would be like. We’re talking about a human being.’

  ‘He’s not a human being, he’s a freakin’ animal.’

  ‘Look, I haven’t got any argument with you about that. The guy’s a monster. World would be better off without him, but to actually do it, this way or whatever, have you really thought what it would be like?’

  ‘Of course I have. Every day for two years.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe you thought how good it would feel, revenge for all the things he’s done to you and your mum and Kirsty, but to stand over his body, to see blood on the floor… I’ve only just thought about that part myself.’

  Dylan breaks away and goes to the window where he looks out through the grimy panes. Anything but look at Tim, or the remains of the mannequin. Tim’s not afraid to look. This is the scene of his greatest triumph. The silence that follows doesn’t bother him and when it’s broken by the metallic vibrations from the far corner, he barely notices.