Invisible Boys

by Holden Sheppard

  ‘Right. Okay. Well. Bye.’

  ‘Catchya. Good luck. Don’t die.’

  Charlie slides the visor over his face, gives me the thumbs up, and turns the key in the ignition. The motor rattles and hums. He revs it a few times for dramatic effect. I give him a quick wave and step through the glass sliding door before I have to watch him leave.

  The air conditioning of the hotel foyer envelopes me. My parents are at the concierge desk, my mother arguing about some item on the bill. My father’s arms are folded and his face is dark, like he just lost a bet.

  Disgraziato. Finocchio. Stronzo.

  The Five Families saw me dance with a boy at Robbie’s wedding, and that stain will never be removed, though that won’t stop my parents from trying. What’s in store? More church. Confession. Forced set-ups with girls: Sabrina Sefton’s family will be invited over for dinner. Forced rosaries for penance each time I slip up. Shock therapy? Conversion therapy? Or will they give up before things get that extreme? Send me away, disown me, pretend I never existed. Make up a story about me living overseas, so they never have to deal with it. I bet they’d add in some embellishments. Our second son, Zeke, yes, he lives in Rome. Good Italian boy. Wanted to go back to the old country. And his wife is a catch – a Sicilian girl, too. She is stunning!

  So, who will win? Will my parents eventually break me down? Or will they just break me?

  I think about that little field mouse I had to crush to death with a brick. Could I do that to myself, if it came to it? If my life reached its natural conclusion of becoming an unbearable hell, could I have that degree of mercy and strength to just end it myself?

  Those poor little mice. How desperate do they have to be to actually chew off their own feet to try to escape the glue traps? They would have to literally reach the point where living for the rest of their life with only three legs became a better option than certain death in the trap.

  I swallow as my heart bounces.

  I take a long look at my mother and her rigid back and hawkish chin.

  I take a long look at my father and his dark frown and closed body.

  And then I chew off my own feet.

  I’ve never run so fast in my life. Straight out the sliding door, into the heat, across the car park, my shoes slapping on the bitumen as I race down the slope for the exit to the road.

  ‘Charlie!’ I scream, pelting down the footpath. ‘Wait for me!’

  The scooter pauses at the traffic lights. I wave my arms, shouting to get his attention.

  The light goes green.

  But the scooter doesn’t take off.

  Panting, I reach Charlie, my whole body throbbing with exertion.

  He tips his visor up. His eyes are lit up. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  I laugh with sheer relief that he heard me. That he saw me.

  ‘I don’t want to end up like Matt,’ I pant. I can taste tears. ‘I want to end up like you, man. I want to come with you.’

  Charlie’s bright eyes clash with his furrowed brow. ‘Dude, I have nothing left to lose. But you’ve got a lot going for you.’

  He’s right. Images flash before my eyes. Brother Murphy naming me Dux of the College at Speech Day and a heap more gold medallions to be crammed into my safety-glasses case. My parents clapping me on the back when Sabrina Sefton and I start dating. My name on the school honour board for achieving the highest uni entrance rank ever. Years at uni, a useful degree that makes my parents proud. Father Mulroney marrying me and Sabrina, naming Robbie and Natalie godparents of our first born.

  ‘I do have a lot going for me,’ I say finally. ‘And I don’t want any of it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure this is the craziest thing I’ve ever done,’ I say, laughing despite the fear. ‘But I know it’s now or never.’

  Charlie’s mouth twitches. ‘You’ve gotta buy your own bus fare, you know. I’m not rolling in it.’

  I pat my pockets, arms tingling with fear and adrenaline. ‘I’ve got everything I need.’

  Charlie smirks. ‘Well, you’re holding up traffic, dude. Get on or go home.’

  I scramble onto the back of the scooter and clap him on the back.

  ‘Gun the engine, you massive poofter!’ I shout, not caring who hears.

  Charlie laughs and revs the motor, the scooter’s 50CC engine making a buzzing rattle that draws the eyes of everyone in the street. I wind my arms around his waist and hold on tight as the scooter roars down the road to the bus station. The thrill as we run the amber light is nothing compared to the thrill that I have no idea what tomorrow will look like.

  There’s so much to brace myself against – the glare of the morning sun, the sand sting of the Geraldton sea breeze, the throb of my black eye – but I still manage a smile as Charlie speeds up.

  Because we didn’t die.

  These two mice got away.

  Acknowledgements

  When I was in year twelve in Geraldton, I entered a short story in our town library’s Randolph Stow Young Writers Award. My story placed second. At the awards night, the guest speaker – a grey-haired author they had trucked in from Perth – delivered a lamenting address to us bright-eyed young’uns, advising us that writing was a terrible, lonely profession, and if we were serious about pursuing it, we were going to have to get used to being terribly lonely people for the rest of our days.

  I remember watching him say this and thinking, ‘No way. I refuse to be a lonely writer.’

  As I sit down to write these acknowledgements, I am reminded of that moment, because I now realise I have done my teenage self proud. I am not a lonely writer, and I have an enormous number of people to thank for helping me bring this novel into the world. That said, I’m shit-scared that I’m gonna forget some of them, but here goes.

  Firstly, thank you to the writing organisations that have supported me: the whole crew at the Australian Society of Authors, especially Laurine Croasdale; the team at the KSP Writers’ Centre in the Perth Hills – Shannon Coyle, Elizabeth Lewis and Lisa Wolstenholme; and everyone at the Centre for Stories, especially Caroline and John Wood, Robert Wood, Sisonke Msimang, Jay Anderson, Logan Griffin and Claudia Mancini.

  Thank you to the Australia Council for the Arts for the ArtStart grant I received in 2015, which helped me kick my writing career into the next gear.

  Thank you to the team at Varuna, the National Writers’ House: I will never forget the amazing week I spent there as part of my residency in the Blue Mountains in early 2018.

  Invisible Boys won a few accolades before it was published, so thank you to the groups that made those accolades possible: the Koppe family, the Australian Society of Authors, the Copyright Agency, the City of Fremantle and Fremantle Press.

  A huge thanks to my mentors over the years – Julia Stiles, Garry Disher, Dr Ffion Murphy and especially to my ECU Honours supervisor and friend, Dr Marcella Polain.

  Thanks to my amazing agent, Haylee Nash, for your advice, insight, sharpness, guidance, support, kindness and friendship. Thanks to the whole Fremantle Press crew, especially Jane Fraser, Georgia Richter, Cate Sutherland, Claire Miller and Jen Bowden. Thank you for believing in my book!

  Thank you to the journalists, librarians, booksellers, festival programmers and other supporters who have helped me to share my story with audiences: I am profoundly grateful.

  Thanks to all the writers, readers and supporters I have met on social media and in person. There are too many of you to name, and if I start, this acknowledgements section will be as long as the novel itself, but please know that you all mean a great deal to me: finding my tribe has been one of the great joys of life. That said, I will acknowledge those in my #5amwritersclub, including Louise Allan, Michael Trant, Rebecca Freeman, Alicia Tuckerman, Samantha House, Jess Gately, Raihanaty A. Jalil, Emily Paull, Melinda Tognini, Lana Pecherczyk and Donyale MacKrill – thank you.

  Thank you to my counsellor, who helped me through the perils of sobriety and the onslaught of
trauma that erupted when I wrote Invisible Boys.

  Thank you to my year twelve English teacher, Robyn Gummery, for seeing something in me early on, and for always championing me and my writing.

  Thanks to my friends, workmates, bosses, family members, gym buddies, footy mates, and miscellaneous vague acquaintances – basically everyone who has cheered me on. Thank you to those who helped me in sometimes ineffable ways, without even knowing.

  Thank you to my parents for raising me to believe I could do anything I wanted if I put my mind to it and worked hard enough. I did it. Thank you to my mother for reading so many picture books to me when I was little, and to my father for always telling me stories when we’d go for a drive in his truck or his backhoe or his troopy.

  Thank you to my siblings and their families. Thank you for the laughter, the support, the wounding and the healing, the group chats and the Spaceballs quotes. I love you guys.

  The biggest thanks goes to my beautiful husband, fellow author Raphael Farmer. You are my biggest champion and supporter; my first reader; the one who uncurls me from the foetal position after rejections; the one who makes me coffee when I am in a writing frenzy. Merci beaucoup mon homme. I can’t wait for the day I see your first novel in print, too. Je t’aime.

  A final thanks to you, the person reading this. Thank you for picking this book up and for spending time with these characters. Though fictional, Zeke, Charlie and Hammer are all fragments of my own self, and I hope that in sharing this story, I might be able to help others like them – those who have felt invisible before, or who still do. If this is you, please be kind to yourself; if this is someone you know, please be kind to them; if this isn’t anyone you know, be kinder still, because the person who needs that kindness has made themselves completely invisible to you because that’s the safest thing they can do right now.

  Lastly, I want to acknowledge two younger versions of myself. My seven-year-old self, who sat down one day and started writing a book with pen and paper: you finally made it, buddy. And my teenage self, who, for a long time, didn’t want to be on this planet anymore because he was a gay bloke. Good on you for staying alive, you resilient bastard. Turns out you were good just the way you were.

  Holden Sheppard

  May 2019

  About the author

  Holden Sheppard was born and bred in Geraldton, Western Australia. His debut novel, Invisible Boys, won the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, the 2019 Kathleen Mitchell Award and the 2017 Ray Koppe Residency Award, and was highly commended in the 2018 ASA Emerging Writers’ Mentorship Prize.

  Holden’s novella ‘Poster Boy’ won the 2018 Novella Project competition and was published in Griffith Review. His other writing has been published in page seventeen, Indigo Journal, Ten Daily and the Huffington Post. He graduated with Honours from Edith Cowan University’s writing program and won a prestigious Australia Council ArtStart grant in 2015.

  Holden has always been a misfit: a gym junkie who has played Pokemon competitively; a sensitive geek who loves aggressive punk rock; and a bogan who learned to speak French.

  He lives in Perth with his husband.

  Instagram @holdensheppard

  Twitter @V8Sheppard

  Facebook @HoldenSheppardAuthor

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