‘Poor bugger,’ Dad nods. ‘You okay, son?’
Robbie winces. ‘Shane’s a mess. I’m okay. I’m just shocked. I just need some fresh air, honestly.’
‘Don’t forget Natalie, love,’ Mum says.
‘Course I won’t,’ Robbie says. He kisses Mum on the cheek. ‘Love you guys.’
He shuffles off in his bathrobe.
I’m going to throw up. Or scream. Or both at the same time. I push my plate away and slide my chair out.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Mum says.
‘I have to go,’ I say, my ears buzzing. ‘I need to get outside.’
‘We’re in the middle of a conversation,’ Dad says. ‘We’re worried about you. Sit down.’
His voice sounds like it’s coming down a long, empty tunnel. An echo of a father.
‘Not now.’ I get to my feet. ‘I have to get to Charlie …’
Unexpectedly, it’s Mum who stands up. ‘Zeke, I forbid you from seeing that boy ever again. He’s dangerous.’
‘You can’t stop me,’ I say. ‘Without making a scene, at least. You don’t want to do that, do you?’
Dad leans back in his chair. The corners of his mouth turn down like he sucked a lemon.
‘Disgraziato,’ he says.
It’s the harshest thing he could say. It means his anger is beyond swear words. I’ve committed a mortal sin. I have shamed him more than can be tolerated by a Sicilian man.
For weeks, my bones have wanted out of my skin. My blood wanted to flood the flesh and wash the sickness out.
But this morning, suddenly, my bones and blood are at rest.
This time it’s my muscles that are alive. My calves are pounding with blood, ready to run a race; my core is tensed and humming; my arms tingle with energy, biceps ready to knock down anything in my path.
I look at my parents, and in an instant, I no longer see my mother and my father. I see two people who are too small to keep me here anymore.
‘You know what?’ I say. ‘Vaffanculo. Both of you. Vaffanculo!’
Dad roars to his feet. ‘Take that back!’ he screams. ‘We are your parents!’
I stare at them levelly as I back away from the table. ‘Not anymore, you’re not.’
And then I run, and the collective, horrified stare of every single person in the restaurant doesn’t burn like Saint Lawrence’s fire.
It feels like warm sunlight.
23: Adam’s Song
Charlie
Fitzy’s ex-wife crashed her car in Ballajura while high on meth last night. Mum and Fitzy left the house early to go to the cop shop. They want to make a case for custody of her two brats. Those little bastards are fucked either way, really.
While they’re out of the house, I turn my music up to eleven, until the throb hurts my eardrums. I lay on my bed and feel the bass pump through my chest. I imagine what would happen if my body could vibrate in the exact same frequency as the music. Would I dissolve? Would I become pure music? Would I float into the ether and there’d be nothing left of me?
I’m screaming along to Dave Grohl, holding up a can of Lynx Africa to my mouth like a microphone, when I glance up at the doorway and see a shadow there.
‘Jesus! Zeke!’ I hit pause. The silence rings in my ears. ‘How the hell did you get in?’
Zeke’s olive skin is flushed with red, like he sprinted all the way here. His black eye makes him look like more of a delinquent than me. He runs a hand through his sweaty curls and sits down on the end of my bed.
‘Your door doesn’t lock,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah. Fitzy broke it the other day.’
‘I can’t imagine how you’re feeling,’ Zeke says. He looks like a condemned building just before they detonate the explosives. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I think you copped it worse than I did last night.’
‘I mean with Matt … I can’t …’
‘It’s just a break up, dude. I’ll survive.’
Zeke chokes on a sob. His charcoal smear eyes suss me out. ‘Oh God. You don’t know?’
His pupils widen as he stares at me. It’s like he’s waiting for me to hand him a piece of a puzzle I’ve never seen.
‘Zeke, what’s going on?’ I prod. ‘What about Matt? Did he say something about me?’
Zeke’s two front teeth scrape the little tuft of facial hair beneath his lip.
‘Charlie …’ He swallows, eyes searching the ceiling for something he can’t find before he says, ‘Matt’s dead.’
I screw my face up at him for saying something so fucking stupid. ‘No he’s not. I just saw him yesterday.’
Tears form a silver trail on Zeke’s face. ‘He killed himself last night, man … I’m so sorry.’
Suddenly, I can’t feel any of my limbs. I can’t feel anything at all. My body is pins and needles.
‘He wouldn’t do that to me,’ I say, picking up my phone and scrolling through my playlist. ‘You must’ve heard wrong.’
Zeke’s shoulders are shaking. ‘He hanged himself in his dad’s shed. It’s all online. Everyone’s heard about it now.’
I keep scrolling, faster and faster, songs flicking past on the screen, until the skin of my thumb starts to chafe and burn and I ditch the goddamn phone at the wall and scream, ‘How could you! How could you!’
And then I die a sixth and final time.
I scream like Dave Grohl, but not to music.
I scream to the beat of the agony in my blood.
I scream like a hurricane.
And I tear through my room like a hurricane, too. I destroy everything in my path. I tip the chest of drawers over. Smash the mirror. Tear my posters off the walls. Beat my guitar against the carpet and ditch it at the window when it refuses to break. Even the dinosaur figurine Dad bought for my fifth birthday gets smashed.
When I finally run out of stuff that feels big enough to break, I press my palms against the wall and use them to brace my body before I slam my skull into the painted brick.
‘No!’ Zeke screams behind me.
The crack of pain cuts my skull, and at the same moment, sweaty arms wrap around my chest and tackle me. Zeke holds me from behind and wrestles me onto the bed. I fight, kicking and flailing my arms to hurt him, until Matt’s face swims into my mind’s eye and I realise I’m never going to see that lopsided, toothy smile again. I’ll never hear him mispronounce something as ‘somefink’. I’ll never hear that donkey-bray laugh. I’ll never see those pained but innocent eyes looking back into mine.
And I’ll never kiss him again. The last time I saw him, yesterday, I pulled away from him. Blocked him. His lips had landed clumsily on my hand instead of my mouth.
Did he know, then? Was he kissing me goodbye? Did I deny our last kiss?
That’s what gets me crying. Crying the way I did when Dad left me. Zeke rubs my back as I fall apart. It does nothing at all, but at the same time, I would die if he left the room.
A long time passes. I’ve run out of tears, but my body still spasms here and there.
‘He didn’t say goodbye,’ I say. ‘He didn’t even leave a note.’ My voice is croaky. ‘I want to die.’
‘Well, you can’t,’ Zeke says matter-of-factly. ‘I need you too much.’
‘I should have known,’ I say, empty. ‘I could have saved him.’
‘He didn’t want to be saved. He’d made up his mind.’
‘Not last night,’ I say. ‘I mean, the first night I met him. I could have saved him then.’
The farm boy’s maroon sedan smells of dust and sweat and a rich aftershave.
‘I’m Charlie,’ I say. ‘What’s your name?’
The farm boy smiles. He has messed-up teeth coming out at all angles but shit, somehow it just makes his smile more adorable. ‘Nice to meet ya, Charlie. I’m Matt.’
‘I’ve never been here before,’ I confess. The dark shapes of the wheat silos loom above us. ‘Is it busy, usually?’
Matt drums his fingertips on the s
teering wheel. ‘Depends on the night. Weekends are the only time worth coming here for, but even then you gotta wait an hour or so, most times.’
‘So you just come here and wait for guys to rock up?’
‘Yep. That’s not what I was looking for tonight, but. Typical.’
I raise an eyebrow at him. ‘You don’t wanna hook up?’
Matt smiles wryly. He folds up a piece of scrap paper and tucks it into a map. He reaches across me and puts the map away in the glove box.
‘Sitting here too long can mess with your brain,’ he says, with that painted-on smile. ‘I was starting to wonder what would happen if I drove up over the kerb and went straight into the water.’
‘Well, you’d drown,’ I say, deadpan. ‘Not a rocket scientist, are you?’
Matt shrugs. ‘Nope. Just a farmer with too much time to think.’
I lean forward and tap the head of the little green army man on the dashboard. ‘That’s cool. Where’d you get it?’
Matt’s eyes mist over. ‘Someone important to me gave it to me, years ago. I keep it there to guard the car, I guess.’
‘Sounds like the car needs guarding if the driver’s thinking of plunging into the ocean.’
‘You talk a lot,’ Matt says.
‘No kidding,’ I say. ‘Someone told me that the other day. Can’t shut me up, apparently. I’ve always been like this.’
‘No, it’s good,’ Matt says. ‘Most guys just sort of fuck and run. I kind of like the talking. I can imagine what it’d be like to have a boyfriend.’
The warm February breeze blows through the open windows of the sedan.
‘Why imagine?’ I say, flashing him a confident grin. ‘We’re both single, right?’
A genuine smile curls his mouth. Before he can say no, I lean over the gearstick and handbrake and kiss him.
Matt kisses me back. He tastes like fried chicken. I’m guessing that’s what he ate before he drove down here. But he’s got more passion in his tongue than I would have expected from a repressed farm boy.
‘What about it?’ I say, pulling away from him. ‘We could go out, couldn’t we? Be boyfriends?’
Matt looks at me cheekily, like he’s a little kid doing something he knows is against the rules.
‘We could be secret boyfriends,’ he says. ‘I could never survive coming out.’
‘Secret boyfriends it is,’ I agree.
I am so starved for love, I miss that second part altogether.
24: Reversal
Hammer
I wake up to the sound of crying. It’s kind of a surprise when I realise the sound isn’t coming from me.
I shift in the hotel bed and blink against the sunlight. Dad’s on the foot of Doug’s bed, his fat, brown thighs spread out like pancakes against the bedspread. He’s holding a box of tissues and looking out the window as Doug sobs beside him. Doug’s doubled over, his back twisted into a curve as his body shakes.
‘What’s happened?’ I ask. ‘Is everyone okay?’
‘Orright, that’s enough,’ Dad says to Doug, thrusting the tissue box into Doug’s lap and folding his tattooed arms. He glances up at me. He’s red-faced and his eyes are bloodshot; he must’ve taken full advantage of the hotel’s mini bar.
‘What happened?’
‘One of Doug’s cricket mates killed himself,’ Dad says.
‘Oh. Jesus.’ I flop back on the pillow a bit. ‘Who?’
‘Matty Jones. Star batsman for Northampton.’
Electric heat rushes to my cheeks. Charlie’s boyfriend topped himself. I’m pretty sure only three people in the world knew he was gay, and I’m one of them.
‘Oh.’ I take a breath, but it doesn’t get any more air into my lungs. ‘Fuck. Why?’
Dad unfolds the weekend newspaper from the nightstand, smoothing a rough hand over the front page. ‘No one knows.’
Doug blows his nose hard, then pivots to face me. I haven’t seen him cry since he dislocated his shoulder. His eyes are puffy; the acne on his face red and angry. He’s ugly.
‘Apparently he was, like, depressed, but nobody knew,’ Doug says, wiping his nose with aggression. ‘Fuck, poor Matty. I wish I knew. I coulda helped him.’
‘Silly kid,’ Dad grunts, flicking through the sporting pages. ‘Selfish. What about the parents?’
‘He couldn’t help it, Dad!’ Doug cries. ‘He was so fucked up, mentally, he thought that was the only way out.’ He scratches his eczema. ‘Kade, do you think Zeke and Charlie are alright?’
Adrenaline rushes to my brain. ‘How the hell would I know?’
‘Because of what happened at the wedding last night. I think Zeke’s got issues with his family. And Charlie’s had a hard time since he was outed, right?’
My heart is pounding. They’re going to hear it and its guilty, unstoppable beat.
‘I try not to get too close,’ I say. ‘Don’t want Charlie Goth getting the wrong idea.’
Dad snorts, a cheeky smile spreading over his leathered face.
Doug’s face falls. ‘Does that seriously bother you?’
I shrug. ‘You’d always be on guard, wouldn’t you?’
‘One of the city councillors is a horse’s hoof,’ Dad says suddenly. ‘He got interviewed for some magazine and actually came out and said it. Said he knew he was gay when he used to look at all his mates’ hairy legs in the change room and get a stiffy.’ Dad screws up his face in revulsion. ‘Can you imagine? Having your mate perve on you? And getting turned on by this?’ He twists his fingers through a thicket of his own grizzled leg hair and pulls on it lightly. ‘Gross.’
‘Yuck,’ I say.
‘You can’t trust ’em,’ Dad goes on. ‘It’s like they stopped growing into men. They got halfway there. They got the look of a man, but there’s no grunt in ’em. No horsepower. Like a shiny new V8, then you pop the hood and there’s just empty space where a motor should be. Something off about ’em.’
Doug shakes his head, shuffles in his suitcase and produces a pack of smokes and a pastel-blue Bic lighter.
‘Whatever,’ he says. ‘I’m not that bothered by it. I just want to help them. It can’t be easy being like that. I don’t want Charlie or Zeke to do what Matty did, that’s all.’ He shakes a cigarette loose from the pack and points it at Dad. ‘I’m going outside for a ciggie. Don’t care what you say.’
Dad lets him go. ‘He’s had a shock. One smoke won’t kill him. Stupid kid.’
I get up to pee, but as I pad across the hotel’s grey carpet, Dad cries out behind me, ‘Christ, Kade. Your back.’
Shit. I forgot about Zeke clawing at my back last night. Before I can turn around, Dad’s on his feet and claps his hands on my shoulders, spinning me around to face him. He’s got a sly grin on, like he just drunk-drove through a booze bus stop without getting pulled over.
‘Doug told me,’ he says. ‘Hooked up with some bird last night, ay?’
‘Yeah. Waitress.’
Dad’s grin broadens. He peers over my shoulder at the scratch marks Zeke left. ‘She was a bit wild, ay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Franger?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good. Don’t wanna knock some bird up now and ruin your life.’ He claps my shoulder again. ‘I ever tell you about how important honour is when it comes to sex?’
‘Nup.’ This is the most we’ve ever spoken about sex. I wonder what he knows.
‘You get on ’er, and you stay on ’er,’ Dad booms. He cracks up.
I laugh with him. It’s not that funny. But I laugh really hard.
Dad jabs his thumb at the newspaper on the foot of Doug’s bed as he goes to leave. ‘Have a read of that,’ he says. ‘They’ve profiled the new full-forward for the Demons. Reckon you could be just like him in a couple of years. Similar build. Big hands.’
‘I’ll check it out,’ I say. ‘Did I tell you I got twelve goals the other day?’
Dad doesn’t look impressed. ‘Doug did. But it was a scratch m
atch in PE class, son. You can’t count that. What’s your best score in a real game?’
‘7-2.’
‘That’s impressive enough on its own. You make that happen again when they come looking for draft picks, you’ll shit it in.’ He rubs his nose. ‘Buffet’s open. Meet us down there.’
As soon as he shuts the door, I take the paper with me to the hotel dunny and spread it out on the white tiles between my bare feet. I can’t read a single word about this new full-forward. All I can think of is Matt. Matt is dead. He couldn’t hack it either. He looked like he had it all together but he didn’t. He was even more messed up than me. And being gay killed him. The thought cycles in my brain and spirals upwards, like a waterspout rising from the ocean. I think about how I finally had proper sex with a guy last night. I crossed the invisible line. I’m gay now, aren’t I? Will it kill me, too?
I think about kissing Zeke. How I’d tasted his blood in my mouth. Oh God. His gay blood.
And suddenly, my heart is racing. My throat dries up and closes over. My head spins.
It’s happening.
I’m dying.
The Geraldton Regional Hospital is a two minute sprint from the Mercurial Winds Hotel. Mum, Dad and Doug are at the buffet with Robbie’s parents, talking about the boring wedding. If I’m quick enough, they’ll never know I was gone.
A nurse triages me. I get grilled for why I’m in the Emergency Department. I get grilled for why I’m there without a parent or guardian. I refuse to give my parents’ names or phone numbers to the nurse. I think they’re gonna kick me out, but they eventually agree to put me in the queue. I think it helps that I keep saying I can’t breathe.
I watch old cartoons on a silent black TV set mounted on the wall. People get called through and nearly half an hour goes by before some grim cream-coloured doors slide open and a woman calls, ‘Kade?’
The nurse is a brunette, stocky and tired, early thirties. Her hair is deliberately bunched up at the back of her head but stray hairs spill onto her pale face. She has an Irish accent. She takes me into a tiny consulting room. The walls are all the same grim cream colour as the rest of the hospital. Everything smells like lemon disinfectant.
Invisible Boys Page 28
