Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

  Freya does not have a flawless understanding of the origin of babies. Her mother has given her a book which explains the biology of the business in a light-hearted way, and it makes a cacky kind of sense, she’s accepted the science of it: that a mother and a father do something deliberate and precise, and that this action assumes the shape of a baby. Yet in Freya’s observation, babies are imprecise and anything but deliberate, less like jigsaw puzzles than like the weather: uninvited, unannounced, unpredictable, and unstoppable. The parents seem helpless to avoid the advent of another child, and she’s never heard any of them object. It’s as if each family is allotted a certain number of offspring which they must and will receive, and complaining or evading is pointless. The rain will fall, the children will fill the rooms.

  Freya leans her cheek on the scabby bark of a plum-tree branch. It’s uncomfortable, which suits her mood. She has thought and thought, but she can’t think of a way to make her mother’s words mean something other than what they say. There’s always another one coming.

  She has nothing against her siblings: for all their pushy presence, she loves them and doesn’t begrudge their existence. But why, she wonders, must babies be born into a home that can’t afford them, and has no space for them? Why come to a place where they’re not needed? Why keep coming to a family that is so unhappy?

  She bends herself into the smallest shape she can be, ignoring the stabbings of her brutal nest. Her misery is deep, and has no shore. She has lost the faith she used to have in her mother and father. It’s obvious they can’t exert any meaningful control over the world. Once they ruled her life like gods, and in important ways they still do: but it’s clear they can offer their offspring no protection against things becoming worse and worse.

  The boys walk on the road because it’s tough, although on a Sunday afternoon the roads are as deserted as the footpaths. In travelling diagonally across the neighbourhood to the stormwater drain they could take a route which would bring them past the Kiley house, but Declan doesn’t lead them that way – it’s too easy to be seen by their mother, and snagged like fish in a net. They don’t go close to Avery Price’s house either: Garrick says the matter is finished and it should be, but only an idiot would trust Garrick. These constraints leave just one clear path, a peaceful sidestreet down whose short, smooth decline Declan, Avery and Syd have spent hours of their lives wheeling. The boys round its corner, cutting across the naturestrip and sauntering onto the road, and halt as if hooked. They have never seen kids other than each other in this street, but now there are three boys sitting on the low brick fence of a house at the crest of the hill. One of the boys is Avery, his leg networked by burgundy trails. The other two are strangers.

  These strangers notice them immediately, and Avery turns: terror seems to thin him, as if he’d slip through a crack in time. Declan is his best friend, and probably wouldn’t look so calm if he suspected Garrick of murderous intent, but Avery expects nothing of anyone, and certainly not loyalty. He edges backward as his friends approach, torn between standing his ground and resuming a sprint for his life. And Garrick drags out the terror: only when he’s within striking range does he say, ‘Next time, dick, I’ll smash your face in, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ Avery agrees.

  Declan hasn’t looked at Avery at all. On the footpath stand two trim racers, one red, the other green, and lying in their spider-webby shadow is a fine black BMX. Each bicycle shines, the six silver rims glinting. Declan nods. ‘Nice dirtbike.’

  The older boy says diffidently, ‘Thank you.’

  Avery hoists the BMX as if he owns it and would keep it, fingers clamping the handlebars. ‘This is my friend Declan,’ he tells the strangers. ‘This is Syd, this is Garrick.’

  The boy smiles. ‘I’m Colt. This is Bastian, my brother.’

  The younger one, Bastian, is as bug-eyed as if he’s never seen boys before, or at least not gorilla boys like Garrick, not bleeding ones like Avery. Garrick smirks, says, ‘Colt. Bastian,’ in a way that lets them know he will mock them behind their backs. Avery wags his free hand at the house behind him. ‘They moved in here. They live here now.’

  The local boys have been absolutely unaware of the failing health of the woman who’d lived in the red-brick house for as long as they’ve been alive, and for decades before that; they’ve never even known she existed. They did not notice her house go up for sale, nor witness its new inhabitants moving in. It wouldn’t occur to them to pay attention to something so unspecific to themselves, so they take this change to their world effortlessly – appreciatively, for it has brought with it a splendid bike. Syd says, ‘Yeah, that’s a good bike.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Garrick strides in, yanks the BMX from Avery, hefts it by the saddle and handlebar, and bounces it on its fat wheels. The bike springs off the concrete athletically. ‘Pretty good,’ he decides. ‘I’ve seen better, but it’s good. All right if I have a go?’

  Syd knows what he would say if the BMX belonged to him, but Colt says, ‘Go ahead.’ Garrick throws a thigh over the saddle, bucks the bike into his chest. ‘I’m getting one of these soon,’ he says. His friends know he is full of bullshit, he spouts it like an actual bull; if he were to get hold of such a bike it would probably be booty, Syd thinks, from a ram-raid committed by one of his hideous brothers. And whether what he’s saying is true or not, there’s a look on his face which Syd would like to see smeared into the gutter.

  Every child knows the sound of a parent opening a flyscreen door: the noise comes unexpectedly from the red-brick house, and the six boys look up. A tall man in an ivory polo shirt and shorts of a fruity colour such as Syd has never seen a man wear is loping down the driveway on long tanned legs, carrying a white box with a red cross on its lid. ‘Hello!’ he says, when he sees the newcomers. ‘You boys are multiplying. Don’t tell me you all need first-aid too?’

  Syd looks to his brother, who says, ‘We were just walking past.’

  ‘Just walking past, you say! One deduces you are neighbourhood ruffians. Your names, sirs?’

  Declan blinks. ‘I’m Declan Kiley. This is my brother, Syd.’

  ‘Declan Kiley,’ says the man. ‘I believe I met your mother and sisters and brother after church this morning. And you are, mister?’

  ‘Garrick,’ says Garrick.

  ‘Great bike, isn’t it?’

  To admit the admirability of anything is a kind of defeat for Garrick, but he says, ‘Yeah, not bad.’

  ‘Take it for a spin, if you like. We’ll just be here performing emergency surgery.’

  Garrick says, ‘Uh,’ but hesitates – not because he wants to stay, Syd guesses, but because he objects to being told he may go. ‘Sit, Avery,’ the man says; already he’s folded his lengthy body to the footpath and is rummaging in the tin for scissors. Avery sits as commanded, stretching his legs on the warm concrete; and Garrick, suddenly deeming the whole thing ridiculous, pivots the bike and heads out onto the road. It’s a gorgeous machine, and speeds sweetly down the rise; a more polite boy might have stayed within sight, but when Garrick reaches the basin of the hill he loops wide around the corner and disappears. Colt, Syd sees, observes this without protest – indeed, his face shows nothing. He’s the kind of clean, soft-spoken, handsome boy at whom giggling girls throw small objects – but he’s also like a boy pulled from a cereal box, empty-eyed, enclosed in cellophane. He is watching what goes on, but he’s not touching it. If he knew Garrick better, he wouldn’t be so . . . careless . . . about what has just happened. Well, Syd thinks, he can learn the hard way.

  In the minutes that follow there’s silence: the boys watch the man tend Avery’s knee, first adjusting the leg so it’s nearer to him, then squeezing fluid from a plastic vial and letting the liquid course down Avery’s shin taking with it the colour of blood and flecks of dirt. Avery, leaning on his palms, endures without twitching. The fluid drips onto the concrete and evaporates quickly. The man reaches for a paper envelope – he has large, tan, kn
uckly hands – and takes from it a clothy sponge, using it to dab at the frayed edges of skin. He glances at Avery and says, ‘Sorry if this hurts.’ Avery says, ‘It doesn’t,’ and the man says, ‘Well, you’re very brave.’ He sets aside the crumpled sponge and takes up another vial, breaks off the plastic top. ‘I’m Rex,’ he says without looking at his audience. ‘I assume you’ve met Colt and Bastian. How old are you, Syd?’

  The question startles Syd from stupor. ‘Ten.’

  ‘There you go, Bas.’ The man casts a smile to his smaller son. ‘Here’s a friend already. Bastian is almost ten too, Syd. He was worried about coming to a new neighbourhood, weren’t you, Bas? You thought you wouldn’t make any friends.’

  ‘I wasn’t, Dad!’

  ‘Well, Bas, you were, if you remember. You felt unsure; but that’s all right. That’s only to be expected. And see – you’ve made a pal already.’

  Syd and Bastian look at each other, and it’s like a Jack Russell being introduced to a budgerigar: in theory they could be friends, but in practice sooner or later there will be bright feathers on the floor. The boy reminds Syd of nothing so much as a rabbit – it’s all he can do to resist snapping his teeth. When he looks back to the man, Rex has bent close to Avery’s knee, and for a second Syd thinks he is licking it – licking up the ooze and meaty scent. In fact he’s dripping saline strategically into the wound: ‘My goodness, Avery,’ he says, ‘you’ve done a thorough job of this. What school do you go to, boys?’

  The Kileys attend the Catholic primary, catching the school’s pint-sized bus to get there; Avery and Garrick walk in the opposite direction, to the nearby government school. None of them attend the luxurious place of male education into which Colt and Bastian Jenson have been freshly enrolled and to which they’ve fronted up already although the school year is as good as done, dressed as per regulation in pinstriped blazers and navy ties. From this suburb the school can only be reached by car: Colt and Bastian will be transported like princes. Its fees would be an impossible expense for most local parents, its very name – the kind of word that gets bestowed on legendary swords – has been, until this moment, unheard on these streets. ‘So you’ll just be neighbourhood friends,’ the man says. ‘That’s fine. That’s good. Everyone needs a street mate to knock about with.’

  Syd, who will discuss with his brother, later, the legality of strangers inviting themselves into the position of friends, looks at Declan, who says, ‘I guess.’

  Garrick appears from around the corner, riding the BMX in the centre of the road. The man looks up as the bike pulls in alongside Avery, missing the patient’s fingers by a whisker. ‘Enjoy that?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m getting one soon.’

  ‘Is that so? For Christmas? Or have you been saving?’

  He looks at Garrick, and it takes a moment for Syd to realise he’s made a cut in Garrick’s skin, so some of the bullshit seeps out obviously – then patches the leak by adding, ‘You look like a man who gets what he wants. In the meantime, I’m sure the boys won’t mind you using this one now and then.’ He flashes his smile, which is broad and white as a wolf’s, and returns his attention to Avery. The wound is now clean and bleeds freshly, but only a little. The man takes a tube of antiseptic cream and squeezes slugs of its contents onto the knee, flattening them with light tamps of his thumb, before slipping a snowy pad from an envelope and positioning it on the slathered injury. Then he gets out a reel of sticking-plaster and scissors, cuts length after length of brown tape from the reel, and wraps each length snugly around the boy’s leg so the pad is bound immovably to the knee. His hands are big enough to engulf the slim muscle of Avery’s calf, to cradle it in a palm; he smooths the tape to the shinbone with the crafting strokes of a potter. ‘There,’ he says finally, sitting back. ‘How does that feel?’

  Avery’s knee is in bondage. ‘Good,’ he says.

  ‘Keep it dry, if you can.’

  ‘He never has a shower,’ says Garrick, ‘so that won’t be hard.’

  The man ignores this, holding his attention on the patient. ‘The dressing will need to be changed in a day or two. If you don’t have tape or antiseptic at home, come here I’ll do it for you, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ says Avery.

  ‘It’s a very nasty graze, and you don’t want it getting infected.’

  Avery nods solemnly. ‘We don’t have a first-aid box like that at home,’ he admits; which makes Syd realise there’s no such equipped kit in the Kiley house either, that indeed he’s never seen such a thing anywhere except on television. His sister Marigold once owned a family of cardboard dolls that she pressed, along with their various outfits, from the pages of a slim book; the dolls had fragile cardboard stands which did not support them properly, and the outfits with their paper tabs did not cling tight to the cardboard waists and shoulders; inevitably the dolls, having overtested his sister’s patience, were left to wilt where they lay. Something makes him think of those sharp-edged, wafer-thin people now. ‘Then we’ll take care of it here,’ the man is saying. ‘Don’t worry your mother about it.’

  ‘He doesn’t live with his mother,’ Garrick corrects. ‘He lives with his gran.’

  ‘Your grandmother, then.’ Again, the man doesn’t spare the bulky boy a glance. ‘Don’t worry her. We can do it here easily.’

  Syd looks at Colt and Bastian, to gauge their thoughts on this. He cannot imagine his own father volunteering to be a boy’s nurse. But Bastian is wearing his just-hatched-from-the-egg expression, and Colt, though he’s listening and watching, is still behind his cellophane, his face telling nothing, his mouth closed. Syd’s attention snaps back when the man tosses the scissors into the tin and asks, ‘So, what are you boys doing today?’

  ‘We were just going down to the stormwater,’ says Declan.

  ‘The stormwater! That sounds exciting. What is it, a drain?’

  ‘It’s a pipe at the creek. You can walk inside it.’

  ‘It’s good,’ says Avery. ‘It’s scary.’

  There is a moment in which all the boys look down. Then, ‘You can come if you want,’ Declan tells Colt and Bastian.

  Bastian says immediately, ‘I don’t want to go somewhere scary.’

  ‘It’s not really scary,’ says Avery.

  ‘It’s scary if you’re a baby,’ says Garrick.

  ‘No no,’ whines the child, ‘I don’t want to go.’

  Declan looks at Colt. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The boy steps from the fence – he’s taller than Declan, taller than Garrick. ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go, Avery,’ the man tells his patient. ‘A stormwater drain isn’t a healthy place. If a bad bug gets into an open wound like yours, you could end up losing your leg. You can wait here, if you like, and Bastian can show you the toys. An absolute mountain range of toys, these boys have.’

  Garrick says, ‘Toys like what?’

  ‘Oh, everything – you name it, they’ve got it! Skateboards, miniature trains, remote-control boats, who knows what else. It’s probably time someone set up the track for the slot cars, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can do it,’ says Avery.

  ‘And soon, in a week or so, there’ll be something even better than slot cars, won’t there, Bas?’

  ‘Don’t tell!’ Bastian squeaks. ‘It’s a super secret!’

  ‘A super secret?’ The man widens his eyes, which are a strange colour, Syd notes, like the sap where prehistoric beetles are drowned. ‘If you say so. But I don’t think it can be a secret for long.’

  There’s another pause; the neighbourhood ruffians shift their feet. No matter what else they are, they are children – a mountain range of toys gleams in their minds. And maybe the man knows it, because he says, ‘Why don’t you all stay? It’s a hot afternoon to be messing about in a creek. Look, you’re already sunburned. I think there are icy-poles in the freezer, aren’t there, Bas?’

  ‘Pineapple ones,’ says Bastian.

  Colt looks down at hi
s father, who is still kneeling on the footpath. To Syd’s mind Colt has the option of saying yes or saying no, but he looks as if the choice is more difficult. ‘Bring your friends in,’ his father tells him, squinting against the bright sun. ‘Get the trains and cars out. Don’t leave your brother behind so soon. There’s always another day for a stormwater drain.’

  Colt is silent. Then he turns to Declan, Syd, Garrick. ‘We can stay here,’ he says flatly, and not in the least as if they’d be welcome. But the man is rising, skyscraper tall, extending a hand to Avery, who’s never been helped to his feet in his life. Garrick spins the dark nose of the BMX toward the house, and Syd, who wants so much that life might not give him, says, ‘I want a skateboard.’

  The red-brick house is a stranger to Colt: it’s less than a fortnight since the family moved in, and he still feels like a visitor. Despite the new carpet and the repainting, the house stubbornly belongs to the person who used to live here: an elderly lady, his mother has told him, who’d become frail. She left a garden that is un­usual for this neighbourhood, where most of the trees are self-sown oaks and ash, massive things which shade the yards and parch the lawns. The Jensons have inherited a garden of native brush and eucalypts, wispy and whippy, intriguingly untame. Bastian has found a bird feeder, there’s a maze of stepping-stones, and in one tree is a wooden case made for sheltering possums. The house itself is spruce, the gutters clear, the hinges oiled, the flywire tight to the windows. In his bed at night – his own familiar bed, brought from their previous house – Colt thinks about the old woman, how she probably did not want to leave her stepping-stones and sleeping possums and her hand-planted trees. She must have left as heartsore as he had arrived. This is only the second house he’s ever lived in, there’s nothing to say his family will move from here, and surely it’s just the dislocation making him think this way: but he pictures them packing again and again, driven on relentlessly. The ringing of the doorbell, the sour adult faces, the conversations behind doors. The boxing up of all they own, the strange keys on the mantelpiece, the gifting of new possessions. ‘Just leave it there,’ he tells Garrick of the BMX: leave the hateful thing where it falls.