Kill the Possum

by James Moloney

  Dylan knows these two aren’t married. This is Cartwright’s new girlfriend. They have no family, no children together. He knows this, but he can’t block the relationship out of his mind. A man stretched out beside a woman. Not his first wife. He can’t see the woman’s face, but he can picture her features and strangely he can give her a name - Alison.

  Everything has changed now. The woman isn’t part of this and any thought of killing Cartwright has gone. He has to get out of here, too, as silently as he entered so that they never know he was here. Dylan is suddenly terrified that his finger will twitch involuntarily on the trigger. There’s something else stalking him in this room, watching him, ready to take hold. Slowly, with more deliberate caution than he has ever done anything in his life, he removes his finger from the trigger.

  Even then, panic sweeps into his chest. This time he can’t control his fears with deep breaths. Out, get out. The images in this room have become ghosts that rise off the corpses before him and chase him from the room.

  They’re not corpses, they’re still alive, he wants to shout, but the desire to escape undetected is too strong, even for ghosts, and he keeps silent. The gun is carried across his chest now, soldier style. He makes it through the lounge room, then the kitchen and out through the back door where finally his footing gives way and he stumbles.

  The safety, the safety’s still off, he realises in that horrible moment after his hands let the gun slip. When it hits the ground, will the jolt…

  Relief. There’s no explosion, no harm done. The rifle rolls in the dusty grass, barely making a sound.

  Tim’s seen him and comes out of the bush. ‘What happened? I didn’t hear a shot,’ he whispers.

  Dylan has retrieved the rifle without thinking but finding it in his hands again, he’s revolted by it. He shoves it into Tim’s arms and staggers on until he reaches their hideaway.

  Tim follows close behind, waiting until he can speak straight into Dylan’s ear. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me what happened.’

  By now Dylan’s ghosts have too strong a hold. ‘My father,’ he gasps and doesn’t know why.

  ‘Your father! What are you talking about? Your father’s in England.’

  ‘What?’ he says, confused. But he’s been asked to explain. He has to try. ‘There was a woman beside him and…’

  Suddenly words are impossible for Dylan. He can’t even explain to himself what happened in that bedroom. The blood’s been drained from his body and replaced with a dark oil of dread that’s eating at his soul. He can’t bear to sit here so close to the house, he can’t stay here another second. He sees Tim stagger backwards to avoid being knocked aside, sees the gun in his hand. He was going to shoot the man in the bed, he had the gun trained on him, his finger on the trigger. The woman beside him, a family in England.

  Dylan bolts headlong into the darkness of the hill behind them, unable to see a thing, doesn’t care, doesn’t feel the scratches to his arms, his face. Can’t stop. Oh God, what was he doing in that house? Who was he trying to kill?

  18

  Tim takes over

  Tim stares into the darkness where Dylan has disappeared. He can’t see him, but he can hear him thrashing about wildly in the bush. What’s got into him? What happened in the house to frighten him like this? That’s what he’d seen in Dylan’s face, as much as he could make out, anyway. Sheer horror.

  He has to go after him and get them both along the ridge and down to the highway. Dylan was his guide on the way in. Now it’s up to him.

  He’ll have to carry the bag as well and only when he leans forward to pick it up does he realise that he’s still holding the unwanted rifle. Can’t leave it here. He heaves the bag over his shoulder and carrying the gun in two hands as he’s seen soldiers do, climbs uphill through the undergrowth until he can pick out Dylan in the torch light. He’s going at the bush like a madman as though slapping and clawing at it with his hands will make a path open up for him.

  Got to get him home, Tim says to himself, and the words become a goal that he latches onto for strength. He doesn’t have to face Ian to do this, doesn’t have to give him a thought.

  Another minute and he’s close enough to whisper. ‘We have to find the track along the ridge.’

  ‘I’m looking,’ Dylan snaps without any effort to keep his voice down. ‘Ow,’ he calls suddenly, holding a hand to his face. A branch has caught him near the eye. At least he’s stopped and Tim can finally catch up.

  Tim hasn’t lost his bearings completely. They came down the slope to their right. He grabs Dylan by the loose sleeve of his track suit and, fighting the bulk of the bag over his shoulder and the weight of the rifle in his other hand, keeps them going up the slope for what seems an age until they strike level ground and soon after, the track itself. Dylan follows. The injury to his face has taken some of the frenzy out of him. From here it’s an easier walk until Tim recognises a thick gum tree that marks the place they must start the downward journey. This is much harder and Dylan is no help.

  ‘Wait, stop for a second.’

  His companion complies as though he no longer has a will of his own.

  ‘Can you hear the traffic?’ says Tim. ‘We’re getting close.’

  Not long after he can see the flicker of headlights in the distance. When they’re hidden behind only the shrubs screening the highway, Tim stops again. ‘We have to change back into our real clothes.’

  Dylan’s stare shows that he’s not taking it in.

  ‘Your clothes,’ Tim insists, pointing at the bag he’s slung to the ground. But Dylan looks only at the rifle in Tim’s hands then blunders out through the bushes onto the roadside.

  ‘Dylan, Dylan!’

  Tim takes three steps after him then remembers what he’s carrying. He can’t charge into the open with a gun in his hand. He can’t leave it here, either. Returning to the bag, he opens the zipper along its full length but before he’s even tried he knows the rifle is too long to fit inside. What’s he going to do? The screech of tyres and the angry blare of a car’s horn brings a new dread. He looks through the bushes in time to see Dylan reach the other side of the highway, still upright, still alive. He’s got to go after him.

  An idea comes. The clothes! Working quickly, he pulls off his tracksuit top, ties the end of the sleeve and pokes the barrel in as far as it will go. The butt of the rifle goes into the bag, leaving the camouflaged end to stick out. Then he crashes through the bushes, dodging cars until he’s across the highway.

  Dylan is hurrying along the footpath a hundred metres away. Tim sprints to catch up, reaching him just as they draw level with a bus shelter. Light from the shelter shows the damage to Dylan’s face, especially one of his eyes. His hands are cut and bleeding through the remnants of the rubber gloves. Tim realises that he’s still wearing his own gloves, too.

  ‘Sit down here,’ and when Dylan doesn’t obey, he drags him into the shelter and onto the cold aluminium bench. Even through the tracksuit pants, the chill of its surface against his sweaty skin comes as a shock.

  ‘Let’s get these gloves off.’

  ‘What? No, we can’t leave any prints,’ Dylan protests.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. None of that matters any more.’

  Tim gets his own ragged gloves off and manages to tug what’s left of Dylan’s free as well, discarding them under the seat. He sucks in a breath when a bead of blood seeps onto Dylan’s cheek from the damaged eye.

  Then a stroke of luck. A bus appears out of the night. It pulls into their stop and Dylan lets himself be bundled aboard without argument.

  ‘What’s happened to your mate’s face?’ the driver asks.

  ‘A fight,’ lies Tim. ‘I’m trying to get him home.’ That part is not a lie and the driver doesn’t even look at the stiffened sleeve protruding from the bag. The bus is empty except for an old bloke asleep in the back seat and a woman three rows in front of him. Tim guides Dylan into the fourth row behind the driver and easing in bes
ide him, pushes the bag out of sight beneath the seat.

  The tell-tale protrusion is pointing towards the driver so for safety, he shifts it a little to aim more at the windscreen. Then it hits him - the safety. Dylan simply handed him the rifle in the darkness of the backyard and he hadn’t thought to check it. All the time they’d staggered through the bush, while he was stuffing the barrel into the track suit sleeve and now here on the bus… oh shit!

  He can’t exactly open the bag now. It will have to stay that way until they’re off this bus and out of sight somewhere.

  Then Dylan begins to cry. His head is flopped against the window and a hand raised to his face to mask out the world, but there is no mistaking the sound and the jerking of his shoulders.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t know why this is happening,’ he moans. ‘It’s like something’s got hold of me and won’t let go. I feel awful, so awful, in here,’ he says and he stabs a forefinger into his hair, making it bend against the natural angle of the knuckles. The sobbing becomes louder and to deaden the sound, Dylan tries to pull the neck of his tracksuit top over his head.

  What a mess, what a bloody mess.

  Movement near Tim’s shoulder. He turns around to find the woman from the back of the bus. He thinks she is coming past to reach the door and sways his shoulders inward a little, but she stops level with him.

  ‘Your friend’s crying. Is he okay? He seems pretty upset. I saw cuts on his face when you got on board.

  ‘It’s all right. He’s like this when he gets drunk.’

  The woman stares down at him while she considers this. ‘How often does he get drunk?’ she asks. ‘You two don’t look much more than fifteen to me.’

  Tim screws his face into a pathetic shrug of agreement, as though this is what fifteen-year-olds do these days. ‘He’ll be all right when I get him home.’

  ‘I’m sure his mother’ll be pleased to hear it,’ replies the woman, openly disapproving now. She goes back to her seat. The rifle doesn’t shoot out the bus’s windscreen. What a mess, what a bloody mess.

  They have to switch buses at the interchange. In the toilets, he locks himself inside a cubicle and finally turns the safety to on.

  Dylan has stopped crying at least, although he’s now become listless, like a rag doll. There’s no way he can go home on the bus by himself so Tim leads them aboard for a second time and sits with him. ‘I’m so sorry, Tim,’ he whispers, as he starts to come to himself at last.

  Then a setback when they pull up at a bus stop halfway home and Dylan stares at a house across the street. ‘Eric,’ he says and the sobbing returns. They get off the second bus and reach Dylan’s house. By this time he’s more in control.

  ‘I’ll be all right now. All I want to do is sleep.’

  Only when Dylan is gone does Tim feel the weight of the bag tugging at his shoulder. Too late to give the gun to Dylan now. He walks the three kilometres to his own home, along well-lit streets, picked out in the headlights of a dozen cars and under the surveillance of the stars every step of the way. No one seems to care that he’s carrying a loaded rifle over his shoulder because no one knows it’s there.

  19

  Kirsty tries to track down Dylan

  ‘Hello. Rosemary speaking.’

  ‘Hi, Mrs Kane. This is Kirsty Beal. I’m… sort of a friend of Dylan’s.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I drove him round to your house one night.’

  ‘That’s right. He was supposed to come round this afternoon actually. We were going to do something, but he didn’t turn up and I haven’t heard from him. He’s not even answering his mobile…’

  ‘He’s in hospital, Kirsty.’

  ‘Hospital! What happened?’

  ‘I don’t even know myself. Couldn’t get much sense out of him, but he did something to his eye last night and it’s turned nasty. I took him up to emergency before lunch and they had to operate straight away to fix the damage.’

  ‘That’s terrible! Can I go and see him?’

  ‘Not tonight. Probably not for a couple of days. The doctor’s keeping him sedated so his eye doesn’t move around.’

  Dylan has a dream

  A nurse in starched white enters the dimly lit room in the ICU. She has a procedure to follow, checking machines and making marks in the ring binder which hangs in a sleeve on the end of the bed. She doesn’t take much notice of the body lying motionless under the sheet until these mechanical checks are done.

  Then, finally, she turns to the patient, a teenage boy, although this detail barely registers. She slots a thermometer in his ear and notes the condition of the bandage over his left eye. She sees only the outside of him, of course, satisfied that there is no movement, as prescribed. She can’t see inside his mind, doesn’t know what goes on in there. It’s not her job to observe such things about the patient.

  But in his mind, Dylan Kane is drifting and dreaming between what he wanted to happen and what might have happened, knowing dread and relief and confusion. What’s real among the images he sees? In dreams all thoughts are the same and only when you wake do you discover which of them are truly yours to keep.

  He sees himself with a gun raised to his shoulder, yet at the same time he is looking down the barrel. He’s in a dark room that has nothing to do with the ICU. This room is far away. Is it invented or did he actually go there? The question brings an unwelcome dread.

  There is a man in the room, lying full-length before him. Beside him, half obscured, lies a woman. Are they dead? He has a gun in his hands. Did he kill them? There’s something in the bed between them but it’s too dark to make out what it is.

  The man sits up suddenly, so he can’t be dead. That’s a relief! He hopes the woman is alive, too, although he can’t tell. The man swings his legs from the bed and onto the floor. Stands up and comes closer, into the light that somehow illuminates the space between them. A face from a photo. Where did he see it? In Kirsty’s bedroom, perhaps? Or was it on the sideboard at his grandparent’s house? The man turns back to the bed long enough to pick up the unnamed object that lies between him and the woman. When he turns back, Dylan can see that it’s a little boy nestled tenderly in his arms. The baby clings to him like a possum gripping its mother’s fur, wide eyes, perfect circles, staring out at the world.

  Confusion now as Dylan is assailed from all sides by an intense anger and with it, so closely entwined that he can barely separate the two, a longing just as intense. He wishes someone would take away the ache he feels through his whole body.

  Kirsty tells Dylan about the ghost gum.

  On Wednesday afternoon, the Beals, brother and sister, take a bus from outside the school gate, not the usual one that delivers them to their street but one that carries them into town, to the hospital where Dylan is recuperating. After his mother, they are the first to visit him.

  ‘Is your eye okay now?’ Kirsty asks as soon as she settles into the chair beside his bed. There’s no kiss, no hug. He still looks half-asleep, poor guy, and there’s a bulky bandage covering the top left corner of his face.

  ‘Yes, no permanent damage. That’s what the doctor told Mum anyway,’ he says in a laboured, listless voice.

  ‘What happened? Your mother didn’t say.’

  Dylan stares at her with his one good eye. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Yes, how did you hurt yourself? God, it sounds terrible, a deep cut right into your eyeball.’ Kirsty shudders involuntarily. ‘I can’t even think about it. Urgh. How did it happen?’

  ‘I was coming home on Saturday night.’

  ‘Saturday night. I thought you had to stay home. Your mum said you were going out too much. That’s why you could only come over on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Yeah… er… yeah, she said that. I was at home most of the night, but I went out for a walk.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  Dylan looks confused about his own story now. Must be a bit dopey from the drugs, Kirsty decides. She sees him glance
towards Tim who hasn’t said a word since they arrived, but that’s not unusual. Her brother has gone back into his shell since the weekend, not as bad as when he wouldn’t even take a shower but he’s definitely lost the spark of last week. She knows why, too, and hopes she can do something about it this weekend.

  ‘Yeah, it was dark, but there was no milk, no milk for breakfast in the morning so I walked up to the BP on the main road. They’re always open late. Then on the way back, I walked into a tree branch. Didn’t see it. Went straight into my eye, I suppose.’

  Kirsty cringes again. At least his story makes sense now. She’s excited about her own news but doesn’t want to come gushing out with it just yet. They talk about school, Chloe, the girls.

  ‘Hey, you know that old tree near the fence? They put barriers all around it yesterday in case a branch falls down or something.’ She pushes her brother playfully in the shoulder. ‘Tim has to sit somewhere else now.’

  Okay, she’s put it off long enough. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she confides in a low voice as Dylan, the cyclops, watches her warily. ‘I should thank you for it, actually. That time after Ian brought Melanie back and I phoned you to come over…’

  She senses Tim beside her and stops abruptly. ‘You know, afterwards, when we sat on the sofa. You said that we shouldn’t sit back and wait for Ian to stop, that survival wasn’t enough, we had to do something, well you were right. It’s Chloe, you see, she’s going to lend me…’

  Again she stops. If Tim hears about her plan now he might look in the wrong direction at the worst moment, might alert Ian to what she’s up to. No, better to keep the details to herself for now.

  It’s time to go. She ignores the bandage and her brother watching so closely and kisses Dylan on his uncovered cheek. He flinches as she does it, which isn’t the reaction she’d hoped for, but he’s not himself. The drugs, mostly likely.