Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

  ‘Well, good.’ Joe shifts on the couch and the vinyl cushions creak. ‘You have to feel sorry for blokes like that,’ he says. ‘They’re pathetic.’ Again the adults are silent, and the television noise expands. The program they are watching resumes with a fanfare, and Syd hears his father guffaw. The host of the show talks in a pompous way, his voice like rough-sawn timber. It’s mortally boring, this program, although grownups find it hilarious. Then Joe says, ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do. We’ve got to live with these people, they’re only up the road. I’m not gonna march up there and make a hoo-ha over nothing.’

  ‘Declan wouldn’t have mentioned it, if it was nothing —’

  ‘Well, tell him to toughen up. There’s nothing worse than a crybaby. Nothing worse than a dobber, either.’

  ‘He wasn’t dobbing,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Oh, forget it,’ she says.

  And his father does go quiet, so Syd thinks he might be forgetting it. But then he chuckles and says, ‘God Almighty. Poor bloody bloke. He’s a bit of a dickhead, I agree, but that doesn’t mean he should be stoned in the square.’

  ‘Don’t carry on, Joe. I’m only telling you.’

  ‘We don’t even know if it’s true, do we? The boys could have it all wrong. They probably do, knowing them. You want me to make a fool of myself, bang on his door and accuse the poor sod of something that never happened?’

  Syd doesn’t hear what his mother replies; he moves away from the door and down the hall as if drawn by the arms of a ghost. He doesn’t want to ask his father for anything anymore. His chest feels filled with oil, a contempt that takes the shape of a hooded snake racing through burning grass. He climbs into bed and draws up the blankets, lies staring into the dark. He thinks one word, a favourite of his, thinks it repeatedly as the baleful snake rips across the flames. Chickenshit, he thinks: you chickenshit.

  It’s a word Freya hears him whisper when, a couple of nights later, they are gathered at the window staring wide-eyed through the darkness to where their father is kicking the flanks of Elizabeth’s car. The station wagon absorbs each wallop with a stolid thunk. Marigold is sobbing, her fingers dragging at her cheeks, and Peter in his mother’s arms is crying uncertainly, but the rest of them are silent, watching the performance and waiting for what comes next, until Freya hears Syd say, ‘Chickenshit,’ and she glances at him, and his face is steeped with rage.

  All the lights inside the house are off, as is the veranda light. A blackout might have deterred their father, but all it is doing is throwing a gauzy cloak over his rampage. He moves unsteadily around the car, lashing unpredictably at the plants along the fence, kicking the car in every panel, growling as he goes. He’s a jerking, jolting shape in the night, there’s nothing liquid about him. The station wagon is as solid as a tank, imperturbable: booting it makes their father stumble, arms thrust out rigidly. Then he lurches forward, swings his leg again, and a door takes the impact with a boom. Marigold, at Freya’s elbow, covers her ears and weeps.

  And it might be that he knows they’re watching, for he goes still, of a sudden, and turns to the house, his feet shuffling to keep him upright; he turns a full circle before dropping to a crouch by the front passenger wheel. Freya asks huskily, ‘What’s he doing?’ and in the next instant she knows. The corner of the car doesn’t drop significantly, but the moonlight shifts on the bonnet. Then Joe crabwalks down the side of the car to the next tyre, and as he lets the air out of this too, the list of the vehicle becomes obvious. Two sunken tyres might be enough, but he seems committed to the work now, and scuttles around to the far side of the car. Freya shades her eyes against the window, scanning what she can see of the street. It’s late, not far from midnight, yet surely someone will notice a madman in a front garden and telephone the police. Surely somebody must hear their hearts. Rescue has never come when they’ve needed it, but Freya can’t bring herself to accept that they are alone in this. The world seems to abandon them to their plight at such times, but it shouldn’t – it has no right to. It cannot ignore them, and expect them to forgive that, and forget it – to emerge from neglect unscathed. They have, she thinks, such reason to be resentful.

  Her siblings have, anyway.

  When all four tyres are flat as puddles their father rises up to lean against the bonnet, wiping his palms on his chest. The sight of him spills fresh tears from Marigold, and their mother reaches to her. ‘It’s all right,’ she says: but what is all right about a woman and a clutch of petrified children standing in an unlit lounge room watching a man deflate the tyres of their car so they won’t use the vehicle to escape him – what is all right about that? If she and Declan were older, Freya thinks, they could go out there and knock him down, beat him with something heavy on the back of the head, but she’s not capable of doing it yet, and it will be a long time until she is – a long time of standing here, gripping Dorrie’s wrist, sinking in this stew of fright and guilt.

  He turns to the window, where he must know they are, and shouts, ‘Let me in!’

  That is the cause: the screen door is locked, and he doesn’t have a key. It’s so late, and Elizabeth had thought he wasn’t coming home, or maybe that he didn’t deserve to, so she’d locked the door before going to bed. And now he is sagging, drained, against the bonnet, having kicked the screen door violently and so noisily before attacking the car, and Freya crosses her fingers hoping he’ll drop dead with exhaustion – or not dead, just unconscious, for she doesn’t hate her father, she loves him – but what she’s terrified will really happen is that he’ll hurl a brick through a window, take an axe to the door, rummage in the garage for petrol and set the house alight. They are standing at the window because here are the glass doors through which they can run if they need to, across the garden, over the street, into the parkland and the night. She will clamp her hand round Dorrie’s paw and drag her if she has to, running like a gazelle.

  ‘Let me in!’ he screams, and slams a fist against the bonnet making the loudest noise ever heard in this neighbourhood, a sonic blast which crumples Marigold to the floor. In her mind’s eye Freya sees the house burn, the car explode, the pine tree in the yard become a whooshing candle of flame. If this is the future then they have to let him in. And there’s a confused part of her that might have carried her to the door and unlocked it, some pious piece which solemnly believes that she, Freya, must take what’s coming – except that her father abruptly pushes away from the car and shambles not toward the house or garage but to where his own car is parked messily on the driveway, its driver’s door hanging open. They watch him climb behind the wheel and there’s a drawn-out, soundless minute that is almost suffocating – in his car could be a screwdriver, a crowbar, even, she thinks, a gun – and Dorrie whimpers, ‘What’s he doing?’ and Declan hisses, ‘Shh!’

  Then their father’s car roars and the headlamps glare into wakefulness, spearing beams across the lawn. Oh no, Freya thinks: no no no no. He is going to ram the house. She wants to scream at her family to get back from the window, for the glass when it shatters will be like flying scimitars, the car will surge smoking and screeching into the room, the walls and ceiling will crash down to seal them in a splintery, fume-filled tomb. But none of these words come out of her, because it’s hopeless to flee. The world has been pulled off-kilter, and something horrendous is now running on the loose. Its quarry is she, Freya Kiley. In its fury it has possessed her father and is shaking him to pieces, but it’s Freya whom it really wants. She thinks to tell her family, You’ll be safe, I will go: but then her father’s car rams backwards into the street, comes to a jarring halt as the gears change, and drives, dark as a tumour, away.

  For some time they linger near the window, expecting him to return, although the neighbourhood is quiet enough for them to hear his car burling further and further away. Marigold mops her face and gets up from the floor, and Dorrie rubs her squeezed wrist. When, after a while, he hasn’t returned, Elizabeth tells her children to go to bed. It’s a school night, i
t is late. Freya lies feeling her body float past the ceiling and into the empty sky. Tonight she’s seen the front door bludgeoned from its hinges with an axe, the roof of her house fringed with fire, the trees in the garden swathed in flame, knives of glass twirling around her. She’s seen herself running, running for her actual life, hauling her sister over concrete and road. She’s seen, after all these years, the wraith-like creature that has been thinking about her forever, crouched golden-eyed in the darkness, waiting for its chance. And all there is to show for it are four flat tyres and a few scuff-marks on a car: who, she wonders dully, would believe it.

  Rex: she sits across from him and drinks tea that Tabby has made, and as she talks Freya detects no doubt in his eyes, nothing to show he isn’t taking what she says with the utmost seriousness. She’s here because she had to come, the need to speak to him had been a weight like stones on her ribs. He’d been outside watering the garden as he often does after dinner, but it seemed like he was waiting for her. As she’d approached the house she remembered Declan telling Syd not to go there alone: but Declan should get on his knees and beg to be forgiven. ‘Good evening,’ Rex had said, gathering the hose in loops. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  So she’s sitting on the deck opposite him, her gaze on the spangling surface of the pool, telling him about the beaten station wagon and how, the next morning, their father made no apology: how he’d had, as he always had, nothing to say about the night before, as if he didn’t remember or it had never happened or it had nothing to do with him. He’d cooked pikelets for his children’s breakfast, and as she’d eaten at the kitchen table Freya had studied him when she had the chance. Joe has never seemed particularly interested in her. He lets her help tinker with the cars, but he doesn’t need her; he doesn’t talk to her about the jazz records he buys or what he did when he was a boy, he’s never told her he is a good dancer. If they had a cat, she muses, an animal that ate and slept and crossed one’s path unnecessarily, that cat could be what she is to Joe. Yet for her, because of her, he endures this sour life: going off each morning to the printery, coming home each night to a family he’s allowed to drift into dreading him, a life of blotted bruises and forgotten hours and empty pockets, and years of the same ahead. It’s a life run into a ditch – and her mother’s life is too, the realisation that she didn’t need a husband or children having come too late to save her. The things they don’t want are all they have.

  A leaf has blown onto the surface of the pool, and the breeze spins it like a pixie’s raft caught in a whirlpool. Bastian is rambling on hands and knees among the trees, pushing a metal dumptruck as large as a loaf of bread. His mother has gone into the garden with him, strolling along clearing the truck’s path with her foot as she goes. And Colt, who is wearing his school trousers and shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the tail of the shirt untucked, is sitting on the steps listening as his father listens, soberly and without comment. His hair has fallen forward, there are notes written in biro on his brown forearm. She can’t decide if she’d prefer him to go. It is, despite everything, another beautiful night. ‘I wish they would leave each other,’ she says. ‘I wish Mum would make him leave.’

  Rex says, ‘Some things are more complicated than you imagine.’

  ‘She should try harder —’

  ‘It’s not your mother’s fault, Freya. Don’t blame her.’

  She shuts her mouth, reproof tingling her face. Bastian guffaws as the truck topples head-over-wheels down the BMX ramp. From one of the trees a blackbird lets loose its call, having spotted the neighbour’s black-and-white cat dodging along the top rail of the fence. Colt says, ‘Puss,’ and twitches his fingers, but the cat only stares ponderously at him before moving on.

  ‘I know whose fault it is,’ Freya says. ‘It’s mine.’

  Rex lifts a brow. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Well.’ She stops, it is so awkward. ‘Remember you said they might have got married for babies? Well, they did. I was the baby. I found out what day they got married, and I worked it out.’

  ‘I see.’ He’s as calm as a river. She looks at his hands closed loosely around his mug, and thinks of those hands in flesh-coloured gloves, cradling aching jaws. The drill-sound of unhappiness always in his ears. He sees, yet she feels compelled to explain, ‘If I hadn’t been born, they wouldn’t have got married, and none of what happens would happen. So it’s my fault, isn’t it.’

  Rex smiles as he must smile at nervous children in the chair: as if they’re silly for imagining he’d even know how to hurt them. ‘That’s a foolish thing to say,’ he tells her. ‘You know it is, so I won’t indulge it. None of us are responsible for the circumstances of our birth.’

  She stares into her cup, disgraced, but mulishly determined. Breathing deeply, she looks up to meet his eye. ‘Even if it’s foolish, it’s still a fact. They wouldn’t have got married if not for me. And that makes me . . . guilty.’

  Colt has rested his forehead on his folded arms. His hair catches the setting sun and shines like hot copper. Tabby and Bastian are walking the perimeter of the pool, Bastian in the lead, Tabby pretending she’s secretly plotting to capture him; he squeaks and scurries when she gets too close, then lets her catch up again. The neighbour’s cat has settled on a fencepost and with a droll eye is watching their game. Freya hesitates, but finally says what she’s come to say. ‘I’ve been thinking about something strange. It’s dumb, but I can’t stop thinking it. The other night, when I thought Dad was going to smash the house with his car, I imagined this creature – this monster that’s black and slinky, like a big black lion, with long shiny claws and yellow eyes. It runs really fast, and it has fangs like a shark. And it wants me. It’s been coming for me since I was born, because I wasn’t supposed to be – born, I mean. Me being born . . . messed things up. Other things should have happened, but they couldn’t, because of me. So the monster’s chasing me, not to make things different because it’s too late now . . . but because someone has to pay for things being messed around. And since I’m the one who did it, it’s me it wants, and when it gets me things will still be wrong but they’ll be less wrong, because I’ll have been . . .’

  ‘Sacrificed?’ says Rex.

  She looks up from the table. ‘Yeah. I think so. I won’t die or disappear or anything like that. But I’m meant to be unhappy. It wants me to be unhappy, to even out how unhappy Dad is, and Mum is. And that seems . . . fair.’

  Rex contemplates her, his eyes moving over her cheeks, chin and mouth. He doesn’t reach for her hand as she’d like him to, or even smile at her. ‘Freya,’ he says. ‘Do you think it’s what your father and mother want – for you to be unhappy?’

  ‘No,’ she admits. ‘But the monster doesn’t care.’

  ‘There is no monster. There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as the way things were supposed to be. And you are not responsible for how other people live their lives – you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, although she doesn’t know, not honestly. She says, ‘I know the monster isn’t real. If it was real I couldn’t hide from it, not even for a day. It would see me. It would see me when I was asleep. It would see inside my head and hear what I was thinking.’

  ‘Like God,’ says Colt into his arms.

  Rex glances at his son and smiles; Freya likes it, how he’s a father who smiles. Joe, she realises, never smiles. He looks at her and says, still smiling, ‘For what it’s worth, I’m glad you were born. I’m glad your brothers and sisters were born. If you messed things up, Freya Kiley, I think you messed them up the right way.’

  She grins at the tabletop shyly. She could wish her own father were more like him – generous with affection and wisdom – but she won’t, not if it means having Rex become less special, cool the warm cradle that is his attention. If she has to choose, she chooses Rex. ‘OK,’ she says: and goes home feeling strong, as if she’s been suited in armour.

  Syd and Declan ride their bikes to th
e stormwater drain. The school holidays are nearing, and the promise of them seems to tense and sparkle the air. Syd is not a child for sleeping-in or mooching around home, and he has plans for the holidays. He will ride to some point further than he’s ever been. He will construct a habitat for camping outside overnight. He will explore the drain, having added a torch to his wishlist. And he will master the skateboard which he craves so hungrily now that surely the world must fit itself around him, he can’t possibly be denied. ‘What do you want for Christmas?’ he shouts to his brother, who is speeding down the road’s centre beside him, and Declan shakes his whipping hair and says, ‘I dunno! I don’t care!’ And that is incredible to Syd, that someone should have the chance to receive something for nothing and yet be utterly lacking in greed and grandiosity. Syd will never be like Declan, his brother will forever be a mystery to him: but if he thinks about life without him, Syd sees himself flying off the way screwed-up paper skitters over a table when a door opens and a gale comes in.

  Apart from a woman walking a dog far across the grass, the wasteland is as deserted as always. The creek into which the stormwater flows is stinky with the morning’s warmth, a sweaty, mouldering smell. Along the bank, in every nook of rock and earth, are jumbles of leaves and twigs and rubbish that have been catching in these corners for years. The crusty piles are solid with sludge and time, and don’t budge when Syd kicks them. He likes to inspect the drifts regularly, for the creek is eternally adding to them. Avery claims to have once found a five-dollar note planted like a pink flag in one of the drifts. Syd would be satisfied with cash, but he fantasises about finding a limb. He would like a foot in a shoe or an arm with a tattoo. He would like an entire body, but would not, he thinks, care for just a head.

  The smell of the creek reaches them before they see its glinting water, and as they swing onto the track that weaves through the grassland Syd is riding fast, standing on his pedals, his bike jinking and squeaking under him. The wind on his face is so pleasant that he yelps with the joy of being alive. Summer is here, the season that is the great friend of boys; this year he will amass a collection of cicada shells to rival all previous collections combined. It is a perfect morning for two brothers to be powering their trusty bikes down a stone track with most of the weekend ahead of them and no one around to bother them, and summer is here, and Christmas is coming, and school is as good as done.