Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

  ‘You’re so lucky.’ Freya glances at Colt. ‘I wish we had a pool.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come for a swim any time you like. It’s for everyone to use.’

  While he’s speaking, Colt’s father has been taking from the first-aid box the equipment needed to refresh the bandage on Avery’s knee and laying it out in order. He peels away the original strips of sticky plaster saying, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ as they tug at Avery’s skin, leaving behind tacky shape-shadows of themselves. The wad of padding, stained and off-colour, is glued to the weepy knee: Rex has a basin of water and a sponge, and steadying Avery’s calf in his palm he presses the wet sponge onto the padding so water floods down Avery’s shin and over the decking and drips through the gaps between the planks into the darkness below, and woozily the pad peels away. Colt watches everything – the press of his father’s thumb into the boy’s calf, the blink of Avery’s grey eyes. Seeing the grotesque injury Freya says, ‘Avery! That’s horrible! How did you do that?’ and Avery shrugs and smiles; Rex says, ‘He’s being very brave about it. You’re being very brave, Avery.’

  You bastard, Colt thinks. You liar.

  His father takes a cloth and wipes the boy’s leg until the skin is dry and only the slats of the deck are still splashed. He dabs the cloth about the wound, which is a sickly plasma-yellow but clean, Colt sees, and not infected. ‘Yes, he’s been brave,’ Rex murmurs, ‘we’re proud of him, aren’t we, Colt?’ and Colt pretends he hasn’t heard. If he cracked open his father he thinks he would find dark, slimy threads running from his father’s feet to his brain. From the garden Bastian calls, ‘Colly? Can we get the BMX out?’ and Colt forces it down, says, ‘It’s your bike too, Bas.’

  ‘He just likes the attention,’ Freya says, and Rex chuckles without shifting his focus from Avery. He smooths antiseptic cream into the wound’s depths, takes a fresh disc of padding and sets it into place, then reaches for the plaster and scissors. While he binds the knee in a network of strips he mumbles quietly, as if it’s an old song, ‘We all like some attention, don’t we? A bit of attention never goes astray.’ And Colt, watching Declan and Bastian wheel the BMX from the shed, feels the uncoiling of something dragonlike in his chest, something he must bite against to keep from flapping, screaming, into the sky. Then Rex claps his hand to Avery’s thigh and gives the boy’s leg a shake. ‘Next time we’ll let it air for a while, all right? You can spend a few hours in the playroom letting the air get to it. In the meantime, no bike-riding or fighting or poking around in drains.’

  ‘But that leaves nothing,’ says Freya.

  Avery tests the swing of his leg within its plaster scaffold. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  ‘You are free to go, sir.’ And Avery gets to his feet, but because Rex is gathering the first-aid equipment and the space between the bench and the crouching man is narrow, he bumps Rex’s crown with his hip. ‘Oof,’ says Rex, and reels dramatically. And Colt actually feels nauseous, his entire body drenched by sickness.

  The sky has grizzled over, but it’s still scarcely dark; the full moon is as soft and circled as a drop of milk. Avery hobbles across the yard to where Declan and Bastian are tooling around with the bike, and from the deck they watch him go. The earth from the pool excavation has been piled near the fence, and Rex tells Freya, ‘I thought the boys could use that dirt to build a jump for the bike.’ And although it’s something innocent enough, every nerve in Colt’s body tightens impossibly more. He needs, with a feeling close to franticness, for his father to cease. He cannot have this in his life, this rangy figure with its helping hands. It’s like living with a tiger, something powerful that doesn’t care if you die. ‘Sit,’ Rex invites Freya. ‘No formalities in this house.’

  She chooses a bench that hasn’t been splashed with water, and Rex, having packed up the kit, takes the bench opposite her. Colt, leaning against the railing, stays where he is. They watch Declan riding round the garden on the new bike, weaving it expertly between the trees. Bastian is running beside him, laughing in ringing bursts, trying either to catch the bike or to avoid it – Colt doubts that even his brother knows which. ‘So where were you Kileys headed this evening?’ his father asks the girl.

  Freya’s hands are twined in front of her. ‘Nowhere. We were just getting away from the house.’

  Rex tips his head to Bastian and his squealing. ‘Too noisy?’

  ‘No.’ She smiles. ‘It’s always noisy at our house. It wasn’t because of that.’ She looks at the table, scratches a fingernail against the wood. ‘Sometimes, my dad . . .’ She pauses, glancing aside, but she wants to say it, Colt sees. She doesn’t want to be cowardly or ashamed. ‘Sometimes he drinks a lot.’

  He’d have thought his father would make some dismissive reply, but instead Rex says, ‘Ah. Some men do.’

  She scratches the table, lifts her shoulders and lets them fall. ‘I don’t know why he does.’

  ‘There are probably all sorts of reasons. But none of them would have anything to do with you.’

  Freya nods, looks over the yard to her brother; she has a pleasant but plain face, as if not much more than the minimum effort has gone into her. She says, ‘Some nights he tells Declan to get to bed, even when it’s not late – when it’s hardly even dark. He never says it to Marigold or Dorrie, even though they’re little. He only says it to Declan.’

  Colt, at the railing, watches his father think about this. He has never known Rex to drink too much, so his idea of drunkenness comes from movies in which men stagger along rainy streets singing, beaming goofy smiles. Occasionally cartoon characters guzzle from a keg and slam down on their faces, always wearing that same goofy smile. But Freya’s face is darkening, a small snarl against the world.

  ‘Sometimes fathers are jealous of their sons,’ Rex says, and without question it is the most astonishing thing Colt has ever heard him say.

  Freya ponders it, and looks up frowning. ‘Why would Dad be jealous of Declan?’

  Colt’s father doesn’t reply immediately, his gaze travelling down the steps and into the garden, past the great oval gouge in the earth still marked by the teeth of the digging-machine, across the mulchy garden beds to where the evening shadows are gathering along the fence and beneath the trees. Declan is letting Bastian get close, then shooting the bike out of reach; Bastian trills with amusement as his grasping hands catch air. Avery is holding onto a tree as if anchoring is necessary to stop him joining the game. The plaster strips make it look as though he’s put his leg through a remedial web. Just as Colt thinks his father won’t answer at all, Rex turns back to the girl. ‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘when your father looks at Declan, he sees someone with his life still ahead of him. Somebody who hasn’t made bad decisions, who hasn’t failed yet. Somebody like the boy your father used to be. A boy who is gone, and isn’t coming back.’

  Freya frowns and frowns as she thinks about this. ‘But Declan is his son,’ she says. ‘He should be happy about him. Proud of him. Shouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Rex. ‘But for some men, love is difficult.’

  The girl gasps as if jabbed; Colt is no less amazed. He has never heard his father speak this way, as if a layer of skin has been shed. ‘Do you think Dad hates Declan?’ she asks, and her eyes are big, her voice hushed. ‘Does he hate us? Does he think we’re . . . a bad decision?’

  Rex tips his head. ‘What do you think he thinks? What does sense tell you?’

  She stares and stares. ‘I don’t know. I hope he . . . likes us.’

  ‘I’m sure he does.’ Rex sits back. ‘I’m sure he loves you. But your father has chosen how he wants to be, Freya. He chose to do what he’s done in the past, and every day he is choosing his future. You can’t do anything about it except learn from his decisions, so you’ll be wiser when it comes to making your own. Perhaps that’s one of the unsung gifts a parent gives a child: lessons in what not to do. What do you think, Colt?’

  And Colt, who is being dangerously lulled by the sight of this new
face of his father’s, suddenly remembers what he thinks, and it’s all he can do not to snort. The girl, though, gazes at Rex in wonder. For Colt it is laughable, contemptible, enraging; but for Freya, he sees, it is as if she has pulled on a weed and the whole world has come up in her hand.

  The filling of the swimming pool attracts them like flies: on Saturday even Garrick is there to watch. The pool has fibreglass walls patterned like timber, and a white, steel-ribbed frame; its gem-blue lining will tint the water a blinding aquamarine. Syd assumed the water would arrive dramatically – trucked in on a lorry and released as a tidalwave – but in fact all that happens is that Rex Jenson drapes the garden hose into the pool and turns on the tap. At first it appears that the filling will happen quickly, for water rushes over the plastic floor and in a few minutes the boys can see their faces reflected in a sparkling pond. Once the hose is submerged, however, time seems to slow within the confines of the pool. The boys spend the morning crafting from the excavated soil a jump for the BMX, and they make regular inspections of the pool, but the water rises slothfully, and sometimes seems to have ceased rising at all. Garrick announces, ‘We need more hoses. Avery, go and get your hose. Not the one in your pants, that’s just a water pistol. You too, Syd – go home and get a hose. Otherwise we’re gonna be here all week.’

  Avery says, ‘But there’s only one tap.’

  ‘There are taps in the kitchen,’ Bastian says helpfully. ‘There’s taps in the laundry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Declan. ‘We’ll just have to wait.’

  Garrick, who’s standing with his head hanging over the rim of the pool, gives the fibreglass wall a boot. He digs his teeth into the frame, snuffles doggishly. Syd sees Colt watching him from the far side of the pool. It’s another sunny day, and sunshine is reflecting off the lining and painting Colt’s face blue. Colt will glide through the water like an eel, Syd thinks; Garrick will bob like a turd. He will delight in pissing in the pool – Syd predicts it with stomach-clenching dread. ‘This is boring,’ declares the turd. ‘Let’s get out of here. Let’s go down to the drain.’ He jabs his chin at Colt. ‘Wanna come?’

  Colt pushes away from the pool. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not me!’ chimes Bastian. ‘I don’t want to go!’

  ‘You can stay,’ says his brother. ‘Avery can take your bike.’

  ‘Bags the BMX,’ says Garrick.

  They hoist the bikes – the BMX and the Jensons’ racers, the dinged mongrels belonging to the Kileys – out of the grass and skim down the driveway, Garrick’s legs pumping to take him into the lead, streaming past the house toward the road. The air is balmy, it’s a perfect day for riding, the kind of soft windless day that can be ridden through forever. As they’re bumping over the gutter the screen door bangs and Colt’s father calls, ‘Hey! Where are you going?’

  Colt loops a circle on the road, foot scraping the tarmac. ‘To the drain. Bastian’s staying here.’

  Syd and Declan and Avery loop back, the wheels wheezing through the grip of their brakes; only Garrick speeds away down the hill. Colt’s father comes out of the house to the end of the porch, dodging to see past the leafy trees. He is carrying the newspaper he must have been reading. ‘Is Avery with you?’

  The Kiley boys turn to Avery, who looks alarmed but scuds the green racer nearer Colt. He dips his head to find the man beyond the branches. ‘I’m here, Mr Jenson.’

  There’s a brief silence. Syd can’t properly see Colt’s father – from where he’s standing, in the centre of the road with his fingers tight to the brake, Avery appears to be talking to the trees, to some malign presence that haunts trees. Then the man says, ‘What did I tell you about that drain, Avery?’

  The tone is familiar to any child, as weighty and as repellent as a wet school jumper. It makes Declan and Syd bridle, and Avery sink his teeth in his lip. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘It’s got germs.’

  ‘And why is that fact particularly concerning for you?’

  ‘Um. Because of my knee.’

  ‘And what have I told you about riding a bike?’

  ‘Not to do it,’ says Avery, crushed, ‘until my knee is better.’

  The boys stand stiffly on the road, their bikes tilted against their thighs. Syd’s cheeks are hot, and he looks away to where Garrick is waiting for them at the bottom of the hill. The boy’s hands are on his hips, and Syd can feel his intolerance; any moment will come the blasted shout. From the man among the trees there’s a ponderous steamroller of silence: the boys squint into it, hardly able to breathe. Then Avery says, ‘Well. I won’t go.’

  ‘Dad,’ says Colt. ‘He wants to come with us.’

  ‘He’s free to do whatever he chooses,’ Colt’s father answers, but the boys hear the impossibility of freedom, the options Avery does not have. ‘I’m not stopping him. I’m just reminding him to be careful. It’ll be a shame to have looked after his knee so well, only to see that effort go to waste.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Avery, squeezing and releasing the racer’s brake, looks lamely at Colt. ‘I’ll just go home. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ says the man. ‘What was that? I couldn’t quite hear you.’

  Avery ducks to call past the trees. ‘I’ll go home —’

  ‘No, you don’t have to go home. You can wait here with Bastian, if you prefer. There’s plenty to do here. But it’s entirely up to you, Avery. Go to the drain, if that’s what you’d rather. But remember it’s you who will live with the consequences.’

  Syd ogles Declan, who murmurs, ‘Bloody hell.’ Colt looks away from his father to the boy beside him. ‘Come with us,’ he says, so quietly, his voice dust on the breeze.

  ‘What are you cocks doing?’ Garrick screams from the bottom of the hill.

  Avery winces. ‘I better not . . .’

  ‘Hurry up!’ Garrick roars.

  ‘I’ll just hang around, it’ll be OK . . .’

  ‘No, come,’ says Colt.

  And then, because they know what it’s like, the unclimbable walls that can rocket up to close a child in, Declan takes pity and says, ‘Just stay here, Avery. We won’t be long. Come on, Syd.’

  Deftly he spins his pedal into place beneath his toes, and turns his wheel downhill. Colt lingers before following as if there is something else he’d say but, unable to remember, has to let it go; and by the time they reach the pit of the hill he is leading on the red racer, flying like he’s glad to be gone.

  The stormwater drain is a massive concrete pipe wide enough for a tall boy to walk through without having to stoop. At its base runs a thin greenish thread of never-drying slime, but high on its walls are brown stains testifying to where water has gushed through the drain shoulder-high to torrent out into the creek which trips past the pipe’s outlet. On all sides of this creek there is wasteland, a long verdant tail-end of ground that cannot be built on because of the waterway. It’s an unlovely, ramshackle place, thrumming with insects, thorny with blackberry and thistle. Rubbish collects here as if called, the trees that slope over the water decorated with debris swept into their branches when the creek rises biblically during storms. Syd, when he comes here, keeps an eye out for a body lodged amid the rocks and scrub. It is his greatest goal, the discovery of a corpse.

  The drain is well suited to this gone-to-seed landscape, the way a headstone matches the graveyard that surrounds it. Most of the pipe is buried, only its wide mouth gulping at the air; a few footsteps down its throat carry an explorer away from the heat and light of the sun, into a darkness so dense and cool it’s like being inside the body of a gigantic leech. On the pipe’s cresting walls are daubs of graffiti, that dong-nosed simpleton Kilroy, a cracked heart dripping a vampiric tear. Once, long ago, Avery had tried to convince Syd that this heart was the secret sign of a gang which used the drain as a hideout, murderers who were watching Syd even as he blinked into the gloom. He tries the line out on Colt, who says, ‘Oh yeah?’ with such complete disbelief that Syd feels foolish a
ll over again. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘only joking.’

  Colt walks into the pipe until the light just mists around the ankles of his jeans. He looks up at the curving ceiling, down at the slimy trickle between his feet. ‘How far have you been through here?’ he asks, and his voice rings as voices do in this concrete underworld, as if they are boys made of hammered metal.

  ‘Miles,’ says Garrick.

  ‘Not far,’ says Declan. ‘We need a better torch.’

  ‘It’s dangerous.’ Syd slaps the pipe’s flank. ‘You never know when a flood will come gushing down. You’ll drown and get torn to pieces if you’re in the pipe when it floods.’

  Garrick says, ‘It only floods when there’s been lots of rain. It’s not raining today, is it.’

  ‘But sometimes it floods when it’s not raining.’ Even as he speaks Syd wonders where he’s sourced this information, and if there’s any truth to it, and if he’s not in fact making it up. ‘Water comes from – other places —’

  ‘From where? Your weeny wang? It’s a stormwater drain. A stormwater drain, got it?’

  Syd subsides resentfully, eyeing Garrick through the muzzy light. The bigger boy is lounging in a square of sunshine, back bowed to fit the pipe’s curve. If Syd ever finds a dead body, he wants it to be Garrick’s. He wants it to be Garrick’s, and he wants it to be cold. ‘I don’t see you going into the drain,’ he says. ‘Not even when there hasn’t been a storm.’

  ‘Shut up. You don’t know what I do.’

  ‘I know you don’t go miles down the drain.’

  ‘Do you want to?’ asks Colt. ‘We could.’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ Syd pivots to his brother. ‘Can we?’

  Declan’s nose crinkles. ‘I wouldn’t go without a torch. Who knows what’s down there.’

  Colt hears this, and nods shortly, but Syd can tell he’s only listening to the advice, not necessarily accepting it, not necessarily making it a rule which applies to him. He isn’t afraid, Syd sees, the way Garrick is afraid, and Declan is afraid, and Syd himself is afraid. He stares at a boy he in no way resembles, and although loyal to the bone to Declan, he knows he has found the boy he’d like to be. He would willingly do anything Colt Jenson told him to do – fight Garrick, jump off a roof, sleep overnight in the drain. Garrick, too, is staring at Colt, his feet planted to take the burden of his bending body. ‘How come your dad’s always carrying on about Avery?’ he asks.