Blood

by Tony Birch

  ‘What?’

  ‘She sucks him off. “Rings old Mr Bell’s bell”, as Beryl puts it. He sits on the end of the bed and gets a head job. Must think it keeps him half holy or something. Jesus Christ, what a trick. He goes to all the trouble to get her up here and pay for it. He might as well fuck her. Wouldn’t you think?’

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘I really dunno.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. You’re too young.’

  He took out his wallet and pulled out the five he’d shown me earlier. ‘Here. You done a good job. Put that in your pocket.’

  ‘You said ten.’

  ‘Well now it’s five. Sorry, kid. It’s all I can afford.’

  I’d earned the money and didn’t want him ripping me off. ‘I want my ten.’

  ‘What are you gonna do, throw the furniture back in the pool?’

  I hadn’t thought so, but it was a good idea. ‘I just want the ten you promised me.’

  ‘Arrgh, fuck. This world’s gonna suck me drier than the minister’s prick.’ He shoved the five back into his wallet and pulled out a ten. ‘Take it. But you see any shit in the pool when you’re in here swimming, you get rid of it for me and there’s another five for you. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  As I walked back upstairs I thought it would be a good idea to throw a banana lounge in the pool now and then, and make myself some money. I passed a woman on her way down. She was holding a pair of high heels in her hand, the top buttons of here dress were undone, and an akubra hat sat back on her head. She winked at me and put a finger to her lips as she walked by.

  Gwen and Ray woke late that morning. We had breakfast in the dining room next to the pool. Some of the other guests were already having lunch. Gwen couldn’t stop laughing long enough to shove food in her mouth. She was still high, and had a love bite on her neck. She nibbled at Ray’s ear while he tucked into his bacon and eggs. He acted like she wasn’t there. She finally got bored with him and pulled her tarot cards out of her pocket, shuffled them and started laying them out on the table. He put his knife and fork down.

  ‘I’ve seen this before. Russian bird I knew from a mining camp out in the desert. Made a quid with the cards of a day. On her back of a night. Pick out a card for me, babe. Tell my future.’

  ‘Don’t work that way, Ray. This isn’t a pick-a-card trick. I have to lay them out and tell your story.’

  ‘I don’t have time for my story. Anyway, I already know it. I’m gonna kick on, big time. Let me pick one. I’ll go with that.’

  She picked the cards up from the table and shuffled them again. He picked one and threw it down on the table. It was The Hanged Man, lynched to a tree, swinging upside down by his feet. Ray wiped grease from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the card. He wasn’t happy.

  ‘What the fuck does it mean?’

  ‘Like I said, it don’t matter on its own. It means nothing.’

  I crossed my fingers under the table and wished as hard as I could that it meant just what it looked like.

  Ray whispered something to Gwen. As they got up to leave, he handed me a fifty-dollar note and told me to take Rachel and buy the two of us bathers so we could have a swim. I bought myself a pair of striped board shorts and Rachel picked out a pink swimsuit with tiny diamonds sewn into them. With the money we had left I let her buy some lip gloss and hair ties and got a pair of goggles for me.

  We hung around the pool for the rest of the afternoon, shoving as much food into our mouths as we could without being sick. I went in for a swim but Rachel said she was tired-out and lay down on a banana lounge. I told her to get off her bum and come in. Not that she could really swim. When she did go in the water she just splashed around and kicked a lot.

  The next morning Ray was nowhere to be seen. When Rachel asked where he’d gone Gwen said he had a job on and had taken off early.

  ‘He’s got a big pay day coming up,’ she sang, wagging her head from side to side. She closed her eyes and ran her fingertips across her lips. ‘I got something to tell you both. Something you’re gonna love. Ray’s asked me to marry him and I’ve said yes.’

  She told us they’d come up with the idea when she’d read that Adelaide was called the city of churches. Later in the day they were going to take a drive around the city and decide on which church to be married in. She could see I was giving her a dirty look.

  ‘Ray’s gonna be your stepfather, Jesse, so get used to it. I’m gonna have someone to look after me for a change. And help me with you two. He’s a good catch for us.’

  She held Rachel by the hand and talked about how she would be the flower girl at the wedding. ‘You’ll have a pink satin dress, little miss, you love pink, and fresh flowers all through your hair.’

  I wasn’t going be left out. It would be my job to give her away, she said. She reached across the table and tried touching my bottom lip.

  ‘I’m gonna get you a suit, Jesse, a pinstriped suit. You can have a flower in your lapel, a carnation, and a silk tie. You’ll look like a real man then.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I have to be an adult, twenty-one or something, to give you away?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. If you can’t do it we’ll get someone else and I’ll find another job for you. You can be the usher or something. Ray’s got friends all over the city. One of them can give me away.’

  I didn’t want Ray Crow being a stepfather to Rachel and me, but I wasn’t too worried that it might happen. Gwen had sprung wedding plans on us before and nothing had come of them. I didn’t expect it would be long before things soured between her and Ray and one of them would shoot through.

  They went hard at it over the next week, out on the town, partying and banging around in the next room at all hours of the night. We left them to sleep during the day and caught the bus into the city. Gwen didn’t know where we were and didn’t care as long as we were back at the motel by night-time. While we were exploring the streets we came across an op shop. I bought a backpack for a dollar to put our stuff in: the bathers, goggles, and two fluffy white towels we’d borrowed from the motel. We caught the bus back from town in the late afternoon and went for a swim in the sea. And when we’d finished we bought hot chips and sat under the pier eating them until it was close to dark.

  ‘Are we on a holiday?’ Rachel asked me one afternoon as we were throwing soggy chips to the seagulls fighting each other for them on the beach.

  ‘Suppose so. Gwen always said she’d take us on one. It’s not Disneyland, but it’s pretty good. Be better if Ray wasn’t around. I don’t trust him.’

  ‘If Ray wasn’t with us, we’d be in the caravan with no money.’

  ‘I don’t care. There’s something bad about him. You stay away from him.’

  ‘Bad, how?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, but I just know he is.’

  On the first day we wandered through the city we found a cinema in one the shopping malls. There were enough films showing to watch a different one every day. But Rachel fell in love with the movie we saw on the first morning and begged me to take her again the next day.

  The story was in England in olden times. It was about a girl who has to go and live with her relatives in an old house in the country because her dad is in the war against the Germans and where they live in London is being bombed every night. The girl’s mother can’t go to the country with her because she promised the dad she would leave a light in the window and wait at home for him to come back from the war. The girl has a terrible time in the country because she is lonely and cries herself to sleep every night. In the end she gets back with her mother. A grenade has blinded her dad and when he comes home from the war he doesn’t know his wife until she calls his name over and over at the train station where he’s waiting for her. They lived happily ever after, of course. It was just the sort of movie
Rachel loved. I didn’t like it much on the first day, or the second. And by the third day, I’d had enough.

  We ate hamburgers, pizzas and, one day, a Chinese meal in a sit-down café. We also took photos of people standing in the street or sitting on the bus, with a throw-away camera that Ray had given me. He made a big deal of handing it to me in front of Gwen and said it was a present from him. And maybe it was but I knew he hadn’t paid a cent for it. I’d seen him steal it from a supermarket around the corner from the motel. Rachel said we had to take a photo of every dog we passed in the street. The camera had thirty-six shots and we used most of them up in a couple of days. When we got down to the last shots Rachel asked that we not take any more.

  ‘I want to keep them for best,’ she said.

  ‘For best? What about when we see another cute pup on the beach? I bet you’ll want to take a picture then.’

  ‘No I won’t. I want to keep them for, you know, a special . . . special . . .’

  ‘Occasion. A special occasion, Rachel.’

  ‘Yep. A special occasion.’

  We walked by a shop that printed photos and stopped for a look. In the window were t-shirts and cups and even jigsaw puzzles that you could make out of photos. And different size photos, from ones you could stick in your wallet to posters that would cover half a wall.

  On the bus going back to the motel Rachel asked, ‘Do you think you could you get one of those posters made for me, from one of the pictures we’ve taken? With the money you have? I’ll pay you back. When we get our own place, not a caravan or a motel, a house, I can put the picture up on the wall. Gwen says that when her and Ray are married I’ll have my own room. And no matter what the colour is when we move there, she will paint it pink for me.’

  She looked out the window at a row of houses we were rushing by. ‘And a dog. Gwen’s going to buy me a dog.’

  She was the happiest I’d seen her in a while, so it wasn’t the time to remind her that Gwen was bullshitting to her again.

  On our next bus ride into the city I told Rachel I wanted to find another movie. ‘I’ve had enough of the girl and her sad mum. Let’s see something different.’

  We went to a café next to a bus stop, ordered milkshakes and went through a newspaper we found on one of the tables. When she brought our drinks over the waitress asked what we were looking for. She was the oldest waitress I’d ever seen. Her face was all wrinkled and her hair was snow white.

  ‘We’re going to a movie,’ Rachel said. ‘But we don’t know which one yet.’

  ‘Well, I saw a great movie when I knocked off from here yesterday, at the old picture theatre just round the corner from here. Shows old black and white movies.’

  ‘My brother don’t like black and white.’

  The waitress looked at me as she spoke to Rachel. ‘Oh, I think he’d like this one. The two kids in it, a boy and a girl, they’re not far off your age.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

  ‘Why don’t you take a look and find out for yourselves.’

  She gave us directions to the theatre and we walked there in five minutes. Rachel waited out the front while I bought us tickets to see To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Like she said, the movie was in black and white and I didn’t think I’d like it, but I did. I liked the boy and girl, Jem and Scout, and how they played with each other and their friend Dill and the trouble they got into. But most of all, I loved the father, Atticus. He looked after his kids and he never got angry, even when he had to use a gun to shoot a crazy dog. He reminded me a little bit of Pop. Rachel loved the movie too and talked about it all the way back on the bus. Her favourite was Scout.

  ‘I liked it when she found the presents in the hole in the tree that the man next door who wouldn’t come out of the house had left there for her.’

  She was still raving on about the film when we got to our stop. ‘Jesse, did you see how they called their dad by his first name?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Well, it’s like us and Gwen, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything like that.’

  We were about to go into the fish and chip shop when I saw Ray, standing in a phone box on the street. He could have easily used the mobile he carried or the phone in the motel room, so I wondered what he was doing there. He had a knife in his hand and was scratching something into the wood while he spoke. I disappeared into the shop before he saw us.

  We sat underneath the pier again to eat our hot chips. Rachel coughed a couple of times, the way she did when she wanted to ask me something.

  ‘What bit did you like best of all, Jesse?’

  I didn’t want to upset her and tell her that I liked it when Atticus shot the mad dog, so I said, ‘All of it. I liked everything in the film,’ which was true.

  She dropped a chip, picked it up and brushed some sand away. ‘Can you guess which bit I liked best?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you then?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘I like Scout when she doesn’t want to wear a dress on her first day at school and she fights the boy in the schoolyard. I think she’s brave.’

  ‘Do you think you could be like her?’

  ‘Like how do you mean?’

  ‘Be brave, like when she stands up to that creep who wants to hurt her when she’s coming home in the dark.’

  ‘But the man from next door, Boo, he saves her and Jem.’

  ‘He does. But she was brave walking through the woods in the dark. She knew the baddie was coming for them. Could you be like her, if you had to?’

  She frowned and thought about what I’d said. ‘I can try to be.’

  The next morning Ray got Gwen up early. She looked miserable sitting at the breakfast table. He couldn’t take his eyes off a woman sitting at the next table wearing short shorts and a singlet. Gwen tried getting his attention by leaning across the table and talking about some dress she’d seen in a shop window that she wanted him to buy for her. He grunted a couple of times and kept looking at the blonde. When she got sick of being ignored she jumped up from the table and went upstairs. Ray moved across to Gwen’s chair and finished off her breakfast. He looked across at Rachel.

  ‘Come here and chat to Ray.’ He slapped his knee. When Rachel didn’t move he spoke a little louder. ‘Come on, sweetie.’

  Gwen had left her cigarettes on the table, almost a full packet. Ray was too busy giving his attention to Rachel to spot me picking them up and putting them in my pocket. When she didn’t move Ray shifted his chair next to Rachel’s, put his hands on her shoulders and massaged them as he whistled a tune he never let up on; the only song he seemed to know.

  I stood up and pushed my chair into the table, as hard as I could, spilling his coffee over him.

  ‘Hey, watch what you’re doing, awkward arse,’ he yelled.

  ‘Rachel. We got to be going.’

  ‘What’s the hurry, outlaw? We’ve plenty of time. Your mother’s probably gone back to bed. I kept the old girl up late.’

  ‘Rachel. We can’t miss the bus or we’ll be late for the movies. I wanna see the new one,’ I lied.

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Can’t remember. It’s starts today. Come on.’

  ‘Can we see the mockingbird again instead?’

  ‘Sure. Let’s go.’

  As I walked away from the table, she wriggled free of Ray and chased after me. Up in our room I sat Rachel on the bed.

  ‘You’re not to do that again.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘With Ray. Get close to him.’

  ‘I can’t help it. He grabbed my neck and it hurt.’

  ‘Just stay clear of him.’

  ‘How am I gonna do that?’

&
nbsp; I didn’t really know what to tell her.

  We went to the movies again that day and they went out as usual that night. I sat on the bed while Rachel acted out some of the scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird. She forgot some bits but made others up, which was fine by me. We watched some TV but none of it was as good as the movie.

  I was woken by a knock at our door later that night. It was Gwen. She was drunk and couldn’t talk properly and held onto the door handle to keep herself from falling down.

  ‘Give us a smoke, will ya, Jesse? I left a pack on the brekkie table.’ She stuck her jaw out. ‘You take them?’

  I lied and added, ‘Maybe one of the waitresses picked them up. Or Ray. He’s probably got them.’

  ‘You don’t have them? My ciggies?’

  When I told her again, she waved her hands around in front of her face, like she was trying to shoo a fly away and staggered back to her room. I was just getting back into bed when I heard a thud from her room. She must have fallen over. I felt a little bad for stealing her cigarettes, so I wriggled under the bed and took three cigarettes from the pack I’d hidden in one of my shoes.

  When she didn’t answer her door I went into the room. She was alone. The bar fridge door was hanging open and Gwen was lying on the floor. She had an opened bottle of beer in one hand and a chocolate bar in the other. She was tearing at the wrapper with her teeth.

  I showed her the cigarettes. ‘I forgot these. Ray left them on the table in our room the other day. Where’s he gone?’

  She bit at the chocolate bar, right through the wrapper.

  ‘Don’t care. Ray can fucken fuck hisself.’

  She grabbed at the bedspread and pulled herself to her feet. As she snatched the cigarettes from my hand she fell backwards onto the bed and bounced up and down like she was on a trampoline. She started laughing, stuck a cigarette in her mouth and raised both arms in the air