‘What’s he done?’
Garrick bends double, his hands on his knees, blowing like a bellows: Syd stares in revulsion at the flesh bunching at his neck. At school he’s read a book about medieval farmers, and Garrick could have posed for the picture of the farmer’s leather-aproned son. His limbs are weighty, over-stuffed, equal parts lard and muscle. His black hair is thin and floppy, groomed into greasy strings. His deep-set eyes are skidmarks left by the tyres of a crashing car. His hands are remindful of the vice bolted to a bench in the Kiley garage. Certain factors make Garrick Greene worth knowing – he sometimes has money, he has no respect for the law, he’s as strong as he looks, and he looks like a bull – but to Syd’s mind these virtues are rarely reason enough. Garrick, however, is a neighbourhood boy, he comes with the territory and he’s impossible to avoid: being his friend is smarter than not being his friend. He hasn’t yet caught enough breath to speak, is huffing and puffing into his thighs, and Syd throws a jeering smile at Declan, who ignores it. Garrick heaves more, then straightens, swiping a wrist across wet lips. His gaze jumps around the brothers as if he’s never seen them before. ‘He called my sister a bitch!’
Declan says, ‘What?’
‘He called my sister a bitch!’
A yelp of laughter would escape Syd, but he wisely keeps it imprisoned. Garrick is the youngest of a large family, each member of which has a toe-curling reputation. The brothers can guess which of his many sisters is in question, a terrifying girl of sixteen who, wishing Declan to step aside at the milkbar counter one day, flicked her finger against his temple so hard it made him cry. She is either lying about the name-calling, or Avery has gone insane. The Kileys know that Garrick has no particular fondness for his sister, upon whom they have heard him bestow descriptions far worse than bitch – indeed, Garrick never shies from exposing much about his sister that the girl would presumably prefer to remain unpublicised. He tells them when a tampon has been fished out of the box and when she has a particularly gross pimple, he’s shown them a love letter she had written, at the bottom of which the admired boy had printed, Get lost mole. He once stole a bra from her drawer and jiggled it in his friends’ faces. ‘So what?’ Avery had said urbanely. ‘I see bras on the clothesline every day.’ And it is true that Avery has a sister too, a willowy, rarely-seen girl just as slatternly as Garrick’s sister, but beautiful as a swan. Her bras would make laundry buckets of Garrick’s sister’s underwear. Garrick had jammed the garment into his pocket in silence and it was never seen again. Something creepy happened to it, Syd is sure.
Declan asks, ‘Why would he do that?’
‘Who knows?’ snarls Garrick. ‘What difference does it make?’
‘He must have had a reason —’
‘Who cares about a reason? He’s not allowed to do it. But he did, and now he’s gonna pay!’
Syd looks to his brother – his thoughtful, wily brother – and sees Declan considering the situation. It’s important never to show fear with Garrick, he’s told Syd that before. ‘You call her a bitch all the time,’ he says.
Garrick’s eyes bulge, his hands fly. ‘That doesn’t mean he can say it!’
It’s an argument which makes sense to Declan and Syd, who come from a large and quarrelsome family themselves. The rules, they know, are different for insiders. Declan’s blue eyes scan the treetops, the clouds, the silent houses on both sides of the road. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Teach him a lesson!’ Garrick shouts. ‘Punch him in his smart mouth!’
The noise makes a bird whisk out of a tree, a dog bark from behind a closed door. Declan nods at the news. Somewhere in the world, Avery is still running; Syd pictures him lurching, exhausted, stumbling on, a trail of blood behind him, eyes spinning in his head. Either he will need to keep running forever, or this matter must be sorted. The boys live within streets of each other, their paths will cross for years. ‘Punch me,’ says Declan.
Syd swings to his brother. ‘Deco!’
‘Huh?’ says Garrick.
‘Punch me,’ says Declan again. ‘You’ve got to hit someone, so it might as well be me. Me – instead of Avery.’
Garrick takes a leery step back from madness. ‘Nah, it doesn’t work like that.’
‘Yeah it does – why doesn’t it? A punch is a punch.’
Garrick stares, his tongue probing his lips, and then he shakes his head. ‘I’m not gonna hit you, Declan.’
‘Why not?’ Declan lifts his chin. ‘She is a bitch, your sister. I call her a bitch every day. Every time I see her, I say, There goes that bitch.’
‘Shut up, Deco!’
‘She should get it tattooed on her forehead: I’m a big fat bitch.’
Garrick is smiling, but his mouth is crooked. ‘I know what you’re doing, Declan —’
‘I’m telling you she’s a bitch —’
‘You’re an idiot —’
‘So punch me instead.’
‘Deco!’
‘If you want me to, I will.’
‘Go ahead. Stop talking and do it.’
‘If you don’t shut up, I’m going to.’
‘I’m telling you to do it!’
Garrick throws his arms out. ‘You want me to? You really really want me to?’
‘Declan!’ wails Syd, but the two older boys ignore him. Garrick assesses Declan, who stands casually, a cowboy, hands open at his sides. He is finely-made and lean, not tall, no competition for Garrick, except that he’s a million times cleverer and more admirable. ‘I could punch you in the stomach,’ Garrick offers.
Syd bleats, but Declan says, ‘Then we’ll be even, right?’
‘Yeah,’ says Garrick, ‘I guess’: then abruptly he’s reneging, as if another personality has stepped in just as an unfair deal was about to be sealed. ‘Nah – I’ll hit you, but I’ll still want to hit him. I’ll have to do it, Deco.’
A look of disgust crosses Declan’s face, and he turns away as if from a waste of his precious time, and Syd’s heart bounds joyously – and Garrick says, ‘OK, OK, I promise! I won’t hit the little shit as well. Jeez, Deco.’
Declan turns to face him. ‘All right, do it.’
‘It’s a pretty shitty deal, though. I was looking forward to bashing that turd.’
‘Do it or don’t do it,’ says Declan coolly. ‘I’m not waiting around here all day.’
‘Deco!’ Syd protests, but as usual he is ignored: Garrick rolls his shoulders, Declan plants his feet, and Syd watches in disbelief as the bigger boy steps forward and drives a fist into his brother’s guts. Contact makes a thick, dire, deadened sound: Declan clutches his stomach and bends like a bow. Syd stares a moment, his mouth dropped open: then he leaps like a mongoose at Garrick, spangling with fury. ‘You shithead!’ he screams. ‘You prick! You arsehole! You ape!’
Garrick swats him aside with hardly a glance, studying his victim, who is bent double with his arms clenched round his body. ‘Shut up, Syd,’ Declan croaks through gritted teeth. Garrick and Syd watch as he recovers, wincing and coughing and swearing and unfolding cautiously until he is standing straight, then wiping his eyes and pushing back his brown fringe and smiling gingerly, with relief. ‘Phew,’ he says, and chuckles.
Garrick asks, ‘All right?’
‘Yeah, good.’
Syd turns on Garrick. ‘You didn’t have to hit him so hard!’
‘I could of hit him harder.’
‘Forget it, Syd . . .’
‘Yeah,’ Garrick tells the boy, ‘do what your brother says. It’s done. The little weed survives another day.’ And because he does in fact like and respect Declan, he says, ‘You sure you’re all right?’
Declan nods loosely. ‘You throw a nice punch.’
‘Yeah, but you’re pretty tough,’ Garrick replies graciously.
The three boys loiter on the footpath, their shadows ironed behind them, the problem dealt with and already history for Garrick and Declan but never for Syd, who stores it in the chest of m
any grievances he keeps unlocked inside his head. ‘What do you wanna do?’ asks Garrick; and Syd, who would rather that he and his brother went one way and the oaf went another, preferably to his death, nevertheless accepts in silence the bigger boy’s attaching of himself to them, and looks on the bright side. Garrick might have money; there’s a chance Garrick might be talked into doing something that will get him sent to a children’s home. ‘Where were you going?’
Declan lies and says, ‘Nowhere.’
‘Wanna go to the stormwater?’
‘Yeah.’ Declan looks at Syd. ‘You don’t have to come.’
‘I’ll come,’ says Syd.
Walking away, Garrick pokes a thick finger into Syd’s spine. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Tiny-dick. Call me a shithead again, I’ll knock your block off.’
Syd stays lordishly silent, as if he’s heard and felt nothing; but inside his head he tends the chest of grievances, in which there’s plenty of room.
In the space between the garage and the back fence is a high pile of branches and pulled weeds, stashed there out of sight until the next time Freya’s father can be bothered lighting the oil-barrel incinerator. Freya sometimes comes here, like a cat, in search of mice she never finds, and because it is one of the few places around the house where she can find solitude. No one except herself, as far as she knows, comes here with any frequency. No one else, as far as she can tell, hankers for privacy with the fretful, ceaseless restlessness that she does. So the wasteland behind the garage is her special alone place, but conveniently it’s not so disconnected from the house that she can’t sense what’s going on in there. She’s available to spring into action whenever the tyrannical command of an eldest child is required. Her siblings all fear her, even Declan: that’s as it should be, as it needs to be. Crouching among the pikes of branches and the swags of parched leaves, she’s telepathically aware of Dorrie raiding the kitchen in search of sugar, which she will spoon into her mouth as white mountains on a teaspoon; of Peter zooming down the hall on the wheeled walking-frame he has outgrown; of Marigold in the lounge room, sighing and sniffing over her homework; of the absence of Syd and Declan, who seize any opportunity to be away from the house. She senses her mother, nearby but distant, maybe in the front garden. Her father is beyond the reach of her powers. She’s never been able to imagine where he spends his time.
The television is off. There is nothing in the oven. Across the kitchen table is spread a rattle of colouring pencils. The washing machine is churning through another load, its third for the day, because sunshine should not be wasted. Already the line is crowded with clothes, from Peter’s stubby socks to Marigold’s ladybird nightie to the workshirts of her father spread like wide blue wings. Even so, there’s a hillock of garments growing stale beside the machine.
The Kiley house is a white weatherboard with black guttering and a red tile roof. Its floor plan is simple, its construction of mediocre quality. The land on which it stands is spacious without being generous. There is a big garage and a smallish shed, both made from fracturous fibro. The house is one of countless similar properties in the neighbourhood, not aged but growing tired, the trees in the yards and surrounding streets just reaching their full height. Freya’s father, Joe, had bought the house only a couple of months before Freya was born – it’s a piece of family lore, how Elizabeth had worried that they wouldn’t have a proper home for the first baby. More lore is this: that Joe had wanted to buy a house miles away, on the outskirts of the city, practically in the country. Elizabeth recounts it like a horror story, but Freya thinks she might have liked living in the wild. She could have owned a pony. She might not have had to retreat, for seclusion, to the airless shadow of the garage.
When there had been only her parents and herself, the white house must have been roomy: there are three bedrooms, and Elizabeth says they made a nursery of the dinky middle room. The third room was for sewing, for books, for nothing. But then Declan was born and then Syd, then Marigold and Dorrie and Peter, siblings arriving like jetsam, like kittens to a barn, and now the three girls share the third room, and the older boys have the middle one. Peter sleeps in his parents’ room, in a cot he’s already too big for, but the middle room is too small to hold him and his countless accoutrements. Even the sisters’ bedroom isn’t large – Marigold and Dorrie must sleep in a bunk. The little girls don’t mind sharing, they don’t complain if Freya keeps her radio or reading-lamp on. They try to follow the rules of the room laid down by their dominant sibling. Nevertheless their clothes drift, their toys spill, their knick-knacks and crusts and shoes and ribbons and xylophones and schoolbags and books and hairbrushes and Barbies and Barbie clothes and Barbie shoes and naked Kens and homework and nail-clippings and drawings and tissues and hand-puppets and plastic jewels and sandwiches and singlets and chewy-wrappers and glass horses and bangles and hair-ties and teddy bears and pencils and cordial bottles and so much, much more clutters every surface and crowds across the floor. Regularly Freya flies into a rage over this mess and the extended mess, the mess which finds its way through the house like the ratty hem of a juvenile junkyard. Yet when she implores her mother to tell Syd, Marigold and Dorrie to tidy up after themselves, Elizabeth always answers, ‘Why? They’ll just make more mess tomorrow.’ Which is the most infuriating and not-funny argument Freya has ever heard. In the past she’s tried to enlist Declan to help enforce neatness on their siblings, but Declan, who owns the least of any of them, looked at her pityingly and said, ‘It’s only stuff.’ He never seems to worry about anything that keeps Freya awake.
Mostly she worries about money, and the family’s lack of it. The Kileys are not starving, and certainly not bleakly poor: but the tightness is always there, blandening the taste of things, sucking vibrancy out of the air. Everything a child might want is inevitably deemed too expensive to be purchased on a whim, from an ice-cream cake to a tin of Derwent pencils to a proper pair of Levis with the patch-of-leather brand. Such luxuries must be reserved for special events, birthdays or Christmas, or they must be arduously saved for with pocket money. Freya’s pocket money, received each Friday afternoon, buys, each Saturday morning, enough cara-mel buds to last the journey home from the shop.
The children look forward to Thursday, which is supermarket day; preserved in their collective memories are those occasions when there’s been a jam log for them to chop up. Their hearts beat hard each shopping day, they pour through the front door. Usually, they are met with disappointment. Usually the haul consists of staples: white bread, oranges, sausages, potatoes. There have been days when the sight of these has so dispirited Freya that she’s run to her hiding-place and cried. The only time they eat takeaway is when their father brings home a parcel of fish and chips. The children flock to the feast like bare-legged vultures, endure patiently Joe’s ramshackle divvying of the meal. If they’re lucky he will also have brought home a bag of Jaffas, which are not the children’s favourite but are gobbled anyway. The younger children love these evenings, but lately they have been sticking in Freya’s craw. Joe only buys fish and chips when he comes home late, rheumy-eyed and smelling of smoke, drawling his words and hungry. He spends whatever change he finds in his pockets and orders without thought, so there are never enough dim sims for everyone to have one to themselves, never enough fish for more than a bite or two. He wastes money on scallops, which everybody hates except he. All the vultures will get something, but it won’t necessarily be what they’d prefer. Their mother will eat nothing, she and the children having already had their dinner of chops and potato, a plate of which had been set aside on the kitchen table for Joe. Now that meal will go into the fridge, to be eaten by Joe for breakfast, or by nobody. The children won’t whine about their father’s bounty, as they’d complained about their mother’s. Elizabeth’s resentment of all this won’t go unnoticed by her husband, and beyond waste and guilt and unfairness and greed, this is what the feasts have come to represent to Freya: the simmering lack of love between her father and h
er mother.
It’s taken a long time for her to recognise that her parents hate one another. For most of her life she’s never given the situation any thought. The world was one way and, right or wrong, that was the only way it would be, and it simply never occurred to her that it could be another way. But now she is stepping through the amazing castle and she’s beginning to see that life is much more intricate than she’d realised. Everything is part of a chain, each link locked in place by all the other links. Everything that happens is shaped by what’s already happened, and shapes what is to come. Her mother and father haven’t been her parents since time immemorial. They must have met at some point when they were younger, strangers, before their children were born, and they must have loved each other then, because only love would make them marry. She has seen the black-and-white wedding photographs, and both Elizabeth and Joe are smiling. In one of the photos Joe has his arm around Elizabeth’s waist, which is something Freya can’t imagine him doing. They never touch now – she’s never seen them kiss. Since that smiling, black-and-white day, something has surely gone wrong. Maybe things go wrong for everyone – maybe all grown people are unhappy in the way her parents are, or maybe just the married ones, or maybe just the ones with children, she doesn’t know. Maybe it’s not even wrong, this mysterious metamorphosis – maybe this is how it is meant to be. All she knows for certain is that in the wedding photographs her mother and father seem happy, but that’s not how they seem anymore.
Freya is hunched against the fence, squeezed into a gritty space between lopped branches of the plum tree. Although the garage shade falls across her, it’s oppressively hot. She isn’t unwell, but she feels she should be. Strands of long hair are sticking to her throat, her eyes are as dry as eggshells. It’s uncomfortable and lonely but she feels driven here, penned into a last place of dubious safety. She could crawl into the branches and die here, like a homeless thing come to the end of its sad life.
Golden Boys Page 3
