by Steven Lang
‘So,’ she said. ‘What’s all this about?’
‘What?’ he said.
‘Don’t shit me, Kelvin.’
He found a small level space and sat with his hands hanging loose between his legs. He did not want to be interrogated by her. He was still caught up with these new memories. If she’d been open to it he would have liked to have told her about them. When he had given way to impulse and spoken to her about his father he had been prepared for anything but anger.
‘I want to know why you felt you had to lie to me.’
The rock was broken and serrated and she couldn’t find a place for herself to sit that was close enough to speak to him yet far enough away to express her outrage, so she remained standing, twisting this way and that in the wind.
‘Come on. I want to know who you are.’
Her anger made it just too hard.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.
She turned away, turned back. ‘Well fuck you then. Fuck you.’
He looked up. For a moment he thought she was going to leave and for an instant of that he didn’t care. He was overcome by a profound exhaustion.Who did she think she was?
‘Listen Kelvin.You want to hang around with me, you have to talk to me. Ask me anything you want, I’ll tell you. What you see with me is what you get. I’m a real person. I might not be all I want to be but I’m not a fabrication, I’m not something I made up to get people to like me.’
‘You didn’t tell me about you and Carl.’
She had not expected that. He saw that. She had thought she had him cornered. She fumbled for words, he could see her thoughts racing, trying to figure out how he knew about this, and what that meant.
‘I would have told you if you’d asked.’
‘But I didn’t know to, did I?’ He surprised himself with the viciousness of his tone, as if it mattered a damn what she’d done with Carl. ‘I didn’t think the first day we met you’d take me to visit your ex-lover. And set me up with him.’
‘I didn’t set you up with him. He’s a friend. I didn’t think it was important.’
‘Well I didn’t think it was important that I was born in Eden. You never asked. What’s so fucking significant about it anyway?’
‘You were born in Eden?’
‘I didn’t tell you that?’
‘No.’
‘Well, there you go then.’
She doesn’t know what to do with her body. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere to put it while her mind tries to digest this information. Some part of her is aware that her fury stems from what happened in Nadgee: the fire, the Forestry, the sheer ignorance and ugliness of it all, and that these feelings have somehow got caught up in what’s happening here. She feels, at the same time, horribly exposed out on this shelf, as if not only are her footings collapsing beneath her, but that everyone on the beach can see her falling apart. She hasn’t even had time to think about what he’s told her, just the lie, and, she supposes, inherent in that the failure of everything she’s been dreaming about for the last few weeks. It’s only her anger that stops the disintegration. But Kelvin’s not talking, he’s not even looking at her. If this goes on much longer she’ll have to leave. Just go. Let him sort it out for himself.
This beach was where it had started.The other people camping had all been families: mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, uncles and aunts, you name it. He and his mum were the only ones without a dad. They’d had to borrow other dads to help. Kelvin would’ve liked to have been able to manage it himself but some things were just beyond him. Even as they were unpacking the car, the first afternoon, when she was dragging the heavy canvas tent out of the back a man offered to lend a hand. ‘Here, I’ll get that,’ he said, stepping in between them and the car so Kelvin had to stand back, a man dressed only in shorts, Bob or Barry or Ray, his chest covered in coarse hair that extended down onto the arms; Barry pulling out the tent with ease, slinging it up onto his shoulder, saying, ‘Now where do you want this?’ Kelvin confused by the extraordinary rush of emotions this simple event inspired; admiration, envy, annoyance, but also awe, because he saw, suddenly, his mum, beside the man, how small she was, his mum, small, separate from him, her hands in the pockets of her shorts, short shorts, the tails of her shirt tied in a knot below her breasts, her belly showing, trying to be something. So often, it seemed, she tried too hard. She didn’t really know what she was supposed to do, as a mother, or even as an adult. As if she was making it up as she went along, like she was a little girl the same age as him and it was all a game in which they took turns to play the grown-up. Except that he knew the truth, he was the one who had to keep up the pretence, to run into the water after her so that no one would notice she was acting. But this time was different. She was the reason why Barry was there. Bob, Barry and Ray, other people’s dads, wanted to be there, gathering firewood, lighting fires, carrying water because of her. He was old enough to see that, and, at least on some level, had known why. That holiday had been both the summit and the end of the golden time. The time when his mum was well and it was just the two of them, that time after his father had left and before Rick came.
He’d always believed he’d run away after the fight with Rick. He’d completely forgotten about the day in the truck with his dad. Rick had been drunk. The twins were crying. This was a long time later. The twins had been born by then and the sickness had come back. Rick and his mum were arguing. Kelvin was standing in the doorway of the little brown kitchen. It was night. The twins were screaming in a room behind him, some noise had disturbed them, probably the same thing that had woken him. Rick had hold of his mum and he was shaking her. She wasn’t responding. She looked frail, lifeless, her dark hair hanging over her face.The only reason he knew she was alive was that she had a tailor-made cigarette smoking between her fingers. Kelvin went in and grabbed Rick’s arm. He didn’t think, just did it. Rick hit him. Smacked him right in the face so that he thought he must be broken, hit him so hard he went down and his mum screamed so he got up again and came at him a second time and this time Rick told him he was a useless piece of shit, just like his father, and pushed him away across the room, into the television set, knocked it right over so it smashed. He’d got cut on the elbow by the glass, had to go to hospital for stitches. He remembered that day clear enough but somehow he’d managed to forget about the day in the truck. It wasn’t that long after the fight. He’d had this fantasy about his dad being better than Rick. He’d had this fantasy about his dad since long before Rick even came on the scene. But it wasn’t so, his dad was worse, that was what he’d been scared of in the truck, that was what had been wrong with Daphne’s house.There’d been no place for Kelvin, no safe place.
He looked up at Jessica. She was still standing in front of him, her arms crossed. He wanted her to stay. But he wasn’t sure he could make her. He had that same impossible sense of never being enough for anyone who ever mattered to him.
seventeen
‘See those people down at the mill,’ Carl said, over dinner, ‘they’re like the dogs here: the only thing they understand is a force of equal or greater measure. Your little demonstration don’t count for shit with them. What you did was based around the idea that someone cares. The owners don’t even know it happened, they probably don’t even know where Nadgee is. It’s that insignificant. They’re not interested in negotiation, they do, others talk. Talk is weakness for these guys; if you want to talk they know they got you beat.’
Kelvin ate his meat and potatoes. They had finished the fence that day, even though it was the last thing he’d felt like doing; stringing the wire out through the holes that they’d drilled in the posts with a great steel auger attached to the chainsaw. Winding up the tension with fence-pullers. It didn’t bear consideration.
‘What you need,’ Carl was unusually talkative, as if Kelvin’s distance was drawing the words out of him, ‘is an economic argument. The mistake the hippies make is thinking this has some
thing to do with ideology. Hell, it hasn’t even got to do with wood-chipping.You’ve got to learn to take the ideology out of it.Wood-chipping just happens to be where the money is today, and it’s only there because it gives a good return on capital. Soon as that stops happening they’ll take it somewhere else.’
If Kelvin was listening at all it was only from the point of view of how such an argument would work against Jessica, how it would sound when he said it to her, what her arguments would be in return. She was bound to have some. He’d say what Carl had said, believing it, and then she’d cite another dozen examples he’d never heard of about effective nonviolence in India or Norway, or in Tasmania for God’s sake, and he wouldn’t have a hope. After the weekend he wasn’t sure he had a hope anyway, and under normal circumstances that wouldn’t have mattered – if someone, if a woman, for example, didn’t like what she saw, there was no reason to hang around. There were plenty of others, just look at the pretty one at the demo. Except this time it did.
‘What y’all have to do, if you want to stop this shit, is make it unattractive in an economic sense. Now, you can do that by regulation, or by direct action, those are your two choices, but whichever you choose it’s gonna be slow, a matter of attrition, you’ve got to be in it for the long – ’
‘Carl,’ Kelvin said, ‘do you think you should tell anyone everything about yourself?’
Carl made a kind of snorting sound, interrupted midsentence. It was his turn to sit. He constructed a well-proportioned serve on his fork, plastering the potato on top of a piece of meat before putting it in his mouth. He raised his eyes to Kelvin and dropped them again, went to cut some more meat, stopped, finished what was in his mouth.
‘So this is what’s up? You’ve been as much use as a racoon all day. Listen, it depends on a lot of things, doesn’t it? Depends on what you got to tell, depends on who you’re telling it to and why. What is it you don’t want to tell her?’
‘Just stuff.’
‘And?’
Kelvin had been about to tell Carl. As if having once broached the subject it had suddenly become common property and everyone could know, which wasn’t the case at all. He’d almost blurted it out. He’d wanted to.
Instead he said, ‘I know about you and her.’
‘What about us?’ Carl replied, frowning, in a tone which suggested that perhaps in this case attack wasn’t the best tactic for defence, that what had worked with Jessica wouldn’t work here.
‘That you had a thing.’
‘And?’
Carl stood up from his side of the table and Kelvin thought he might have been about to come around and hit him, or pick him up and throw him out the door. Instead he went to the kitchen and reached up to a top shelf where there was a bottle of whisky.
‘D’you drink this stuff?’ he said.
‘From time to time.’
He poured a half-inch into two tumblers, and handed one to Kelvin. He clinked the two glasses together and drank.
Kelvin took a sip and swirled it around his mouth, savouring it, then knocked the rest back in one gulp, feeling the heat radiate out from his chest.
‘I already figured you knew. I near enough told you myself.’
‘Is that why you hired me?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was with her.’
‘Does it matter? Listen, if you hadn’t been with her you wouldn’t have set foot on the place, it’s as clear as that. Did she ask me to hire you? No. I could’ve used some help on a fence. You were there.’ Carl poured another shot into their glasses. ‘You know, just because she’s into that, doesn’t mean you have to be.’
Kelvin thought about that, ‘Yeah, but I like her.’ He took another drink of the Scotch, slower this time. ‘I mean, I really like her.’
‘Can it be that bad?’ Carl said, and laughed, the kind of laugh which is meant to diffuse the situation, but when Kelvin looked up at him whatever was on his face killed the laugh. Carl tilted his head to the side, curious. Kelvin swirled the last bit of Scotch in his glass.
‘Listen, there isn’t anything you could have done that I haven’t done worse,’ Carl said. ‘I mean it.’
He offered him the bottle.
‘I was born and raised in Eden,’ Kelvin said.
‘This Eden, here?’
‘Here.’
Once he’d started it wasn’t so hard, the story simply unravelled itself, not only the bit where he ran away and met Shelley; that much he’d told Jessica. But what happened after that. What happened when they went on the street, Slattery, the whole thing.The whisky helped but really it was just good to talk, to let it out. Carl was a good listener. He didn’t interrupt but he was there and Kelvin could feel the attention drawing out the words.
He was in the flat above the shop when they heard the banging. There was often noise from the street, drunks falling asleep in the doorway, the odd demented customer who believed they needed after-hours service. But this was persistent. ‘It’s a fucking second-hand bookshop,’ Slattery said, ‘not an outpatients. ’ But he went downstairs and Kelvin heard the bolt being drawn, then a female voice. Shelley. Worried.
She was in her work clothes, a tight skirt and top, calf-high boots, rushing up the stairs, her lipstick mussed. ‘You have to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Daz’s coming.’
Slattery coming up behind her, small and plump in corduroy pants and baggy jacket, semi-blond wig like the pelt of a cat, saying, ‘It’s your little friend,’ seeing the expression on Kelvin’s face, ‘Here, what’s going on?’
‘He’s on his way now. Lola told him.’
She was speaking very fast, standing in the middle of what was probably the living room of Slattery’s flat but was, in fact, just an extension of the greater collection of magazines and newspapers and books he gathered around him, only with sofas included. She was slurring her words. Several times he had to ask her to repeat herself. She’d told Lola about Kelvin seeing Slattery. Lola was in trouble with Daz because of a boy she’d been seeing so she’d told him about Kelvin to get herself off the hook and now Daz was on his way to sort Kelvin out.
Slattery was panicking, ‘Who is this guy? What does he want? What’ve we done? What’s he going to do to Kelvin?’
‘He’s found out Kelvin’s been fucking you and not cutting him in on it and now he’s going to cut Kelvin,’ she said.
It all seemed horribly clear. The stories Shelley told about the violence used against whores by their pimps had never seemed to refer to him, they were just some sort of street lore. Now the compartments he’d had neatly separated were bleeding into one another and the outcome had the force of certainty. He found it hard to move. There was nowhere to go, he may as well stay where he was and take whatever was coming. Shelley was urgent, however, hustling Kelvin down the stairs.
‘We’ll go out the back way.’ She turned to Slattery.‘We need money. How much have you got?’
‘Money,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘You must have some. We need it, to get away.’
He was scared, all in a dither. ‘What will he do to me?’ he asked.
‘Depends if he finds you.You’ve got a car, haven’t you? You can drive us to the station. Lock up. Go somewhere. Call the cops for all I care, tell them your shop’s being burgled. Just don’t tell them you’ve been fucking little boys. How much money can you give me?’
‘There’s the float.’
‘How much is that?’
‘About a hundred dollars.’
‘That’ll do.’
‘A hundred dollars!’
‘We need it, we have to go now. He’s watching our place. I’m saving your life.What’s a hundred dollars?’
Kelvin had never seen her this wild: deeply intense, almost manic, her eyes large, her face drawn. He wondered if she was on something. If so then she was holding it well. When she turned her focus on Slattery he was unable to resist. He took out his wallet and seemed to have no difficulty f
inding the money, but he drew the line at driving them to the station.
‘I can’t leave the shop,’ he said. ‘They could damage it.They could set fire to it.’ He put a hand on Kelvin’s shoulder. ‘You will be careful, won’t you. It’s my books you see … I have to stay. You understand, don’t you?’ He closed the door behind them. Then opened it again, pulling Kelvin back towards him. ‘You will call, won’t you?’ he said.Then he closed it and locked it, turned out the lights.
They were left in the narrow passage between the door and the tin fence with only a distant streetlight to guide them across the back yard, stepping over its rubbish, under a broken Hills Hoist. Shelley took his hand. Her skin was cold, he thought he could feel her fear through his fingers.
‘Quickly now,’ she said.
Out in the street, under the lights, with people around, it wasn’t so bad. Shelley waved down a cab and told the driver to take them to Central. He asked to see their money first.
Kelvin wanted to know where they were going, but she wouldn’t discuss it. ‘What about our things?’ he said.
‘You can’t go back there.’
‘But the money,’ whispering because the taxi driver could hear. They’d been saving a little, not much, because money seemed to just disappear.
‘I’ve got that,’ she said, patting her boot. ‘That’s all we need.’
It was only when they were on the train, going north, when they’d passed out of Sydney, when out in the dark they could see trees, the Hawkesbury River, that she started to laugh.
