The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories

by Cameron Raynes

  The bandanaed bikies moved to a pool table in the far corner. The taller of the two picked up a pool cue and inspected the tip, then tightened it between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Engineering.’ He stared into his beer. ‘Got talked into it. Taught me always to trust my gut.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. The other bikie slammed in the mechanism of the pool table and the balls thundered into its belly.

  ‘Couldn’t hack it. The maths. Fourier equations. Jesus!’ One of the bikies cracked the balls apart. Hastings looked at me again. ‘How many jails have you seen?’

  ‘Just the one,’ I admitted. One was enough. ‘Yatala. They gave me the tour.’ I picked at a chip.

  ‘What’d you think?’

  I shook my head, remembering the smell of disinfectant and the vacant expressions on the faces of warders and prisoners.

  ‘I am gonna have to work on you,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘You’re the sort who thinks jail’s not the answer and you’re right,’ he continued, leaning in, ‘but for the wrong reason.’

  I stared back at him.

  ‘I bet you think jails can’t rehabilitate men like that.’ He pointed over his shoulder at the bikies. ‘That all they can do is deter.’

  I nodded.

  Hastings placed his knife and fork neatly on his plate. ‘You gotta understand the psychology of these pricks.Control freaks, bullies. Jail’s a dream-come-true for them.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, some of them, anyway.’

  As far as Alice was concerned, I’d sold out. Sold out my principles, though God knows what they were supposed to be. The principles she thought I should have? The same ones she thought we shared? A fair go for all; individual rights tempered by the social contract; open, transparent government. Somehow, none of that seemed to fit with my new job.

  I dangled my legs over the edge of the wharf, where a tatty twin-deck cruiser disgorged tourists. A cloud of diesel smoke wafted by and I held my breath, felt a wave of nausea come and go.

  ‘See any dolphins?’ someone called out from the wharf.

  Maybe it was some sort of pre-midlife crisis. Thirty-eight. No kids. I’d been comfortably employed as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Adelaide. Classic redbrick art-deco buildings, a leafy campus, the museum, gallery and library just a few hundred metres away on North Terrace.

  One of the cruiser stewards strolled down the gangway and onto the wharf, a can of Coke in hand.

  Of the path my life was taking on North Terrace I had begun to think Why this? and then its corrosive corollary, Why not something else? Once you begin that, it’s hard to stop.

  So I threw it all in for a job at the Port Adelaide police station. Intelligence analyst. Senior intelligence analyst, coordinating the gang-related-crime taskforce. I always knew I’d be good at this, interpreting statistics and finding patterns in qualitative data. Could do it with my eyes closed.

  I suspected Alice was struggling, as I was, to maintain an interest in life with no prospect of children. What does it mean that the sweetest, brightest memory I have is of eating a hamburger on the coarse, granitic sand at Port Elliot as a twenty-year-old with Alice beside me and the bay washed an early-evening purple? That I can no longer find a simple pleasure that fills me the way that did?

  Anyway, the social contract between us never included the pills she’s been taking for the last eighteen months to deaden the pain. The pills have made her closed up, remote. I didn’t sign up for that.

  When I got home from work I noticed the Robinsons had put an old blackwood dresser on their verge for council collection. I mentioned it to Alice as I rummaged in the pantry for the instant coffee, finding it behind a litter of herbal teas. ‘Thinking of bringing it in,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Thought I might do it up. Could put it in the spare room.’

  Alice didn’t reply.

  I found the fieldwork fascinating. The day after a raid on a property, after the labs had been busted, the guns seized, the cannabis stashed for destruction, Hastings and I would drive out to Adelaide’s northern struggle-belt of $120,000 houses, baked earth, three generations of long-term-unemployed living under the same roof, a pitbull chained to a star picket banged into the middle of a leafless backyard that would turn into a quagmire in winter.

  A week after the Colac Hotel, Hastings took me on a ‘mopping-up’ exercise out to Smithfield Plains, past the market gardens and sewage works, the morning sun hazing the window. Constable Dale Simpson rode in the back seat. She reminded me of one of my social work students – a plain girl who’d dropped out halfway through her degree. There was a restlessness about her that you don’t often see in a woman.

  ‘This is the one,’ said Hastings, pulling up outside an ugly, besser-block house at the end of a dead-end road. Its windows were lined from the inside with alfoil. The carcass of a mid-eighties Commodore festered in the front yard, its axles resting on bricks, a kid with a buzz cut and army trousers on the doorstep. He turned when he saw us, rapped on the door, yelled out, ‘Mum. Pigs are here.’

  Constable Simpson and I barely said a word to each other on the drive to my house. She stared straight ahead the whole way. I was so distracted I mounted the kerb trying to park and then the clank and grind of gears and the screech of kerb on hubcap, but I didn’t care, didn’t care and the key in my hand and my hand on the handle and my shoulder against the door and the bare boards of the hallway glistening with end-of-day light and Simpson on the floor with her skirt awry, legs apart, amid the gain and give of finger, lip and tongue.

  And the terrible afterward. The slack, damp skin. A red-rimmed, raw unhappiness.

  Alice’s eight-year-old nephew, Brad, is having a sleepover. He’s a nice kid, but bemused as I am about his presence in our quiet house. We’re on our best behaviour and our happiness feels forced. There’s a gravity to our lightness.

  After dinner the three of us play cards in the kitchen until the phone calls Alice away. I teach Brad the significance of pairs, straights and flushes and we get in a couple of games of poker before Alice comes back, the exhaustion of talking to her mother written all over her face. She sees the matchsticks we’re using as money, gives me a ‘Really!’ and a raised eyebrow and bustles him off for a shower and bed.

  When he’s safely asleep I go into the spare room to watch him breathe. It’s a warm night. The Robinsons’ dresser is against the wall, near his bed. A shadow moves on the wall above Brad’s head and I step forward, see it’s a red-back, and squash it with one of his bedtime books.

  Alice is horrified.

  ‘Can you give me a hand?’ I ask, and she comes into the bedroom with me. We each take an end and carry the dresser out the back door and into the garage. On the way back to the house, on our perfectly square little patch of lawn, I stop and pull her to me. ‘You’re shivering,’ she says. The night sky is as clear and hard as china-black lacquer. A billion stars burn away indifferently and I have a feeling that something bad will happen soon, or perhaps has already begun.

  The Eight-Hundred-Dollar Cat

  Small acts of rebellion. It was the creed his grandmother had lived by. Dead ten months now, she’d turned up to all the meetings of the Port Adelaide Heritage Trust, written dozens of letters to the local paper, and handed out bumper stickers at the Art at the Hart Festival: ‘Save our Port’.

  But none of it had come to anything. The developers had moved in, aided and abetted by the heavyweights on the Labor front bench, and the result was there, staring Ian in the face as he surveyed the harbour from the Birkenhead Bridge.

  Late afternoon. The light was perfect. High cirrocumulus to the west in a fine, herringbone pattern. A golden day, late spring. Ian quickly set up his tripod, shot another roll of the wharves, the two old tugboats nuzzling alongside the bridge, the yachts mirrored in the glassy water. Beside him his younger sister, Rachel, leant on the railing of the bridge.

  ‘Nanna’s anniversary in six weeks,’ sh
e said, watching him as he swapped camera bodies, preferring Kodachrome 64 to capture the tones of the light-washed harbour, the sun pissing away its golden bounty on the shabby buildings.

  ‘Why the fuck do you still bother with film?’ she asked. Rust-coloured hair, red lips, a mouthful of perfect white teeth. She’d inherited Nanna’s disposition – her default position was anger. Ian sometimes felt like his default was to default. His teachers had told him he was slow, but the world had always seemed to press in on him so firmly that he had to shut most of it out. He preferred to focus on the aesthetics of things.

  ‘Nothing beats film,’ he said. ‘When they make a twenty-five megapixel camera I can afford, I’ll change. Until then …’

  Ian’s new client, Jonathan, wanted ‘a visual reminder’ of his efforts to develop the Port – a trophy to commemorate the obscene wads of money he’d made.

  Their first meeting was on the wharf alongside Hart’s Mill, the gloriously dilapidated structure towering over them. On the other side of the river, the man-made mountains of apartments – concrete and steel and stained pine masquerading as Western red cedar. The apartments sold to speculators with no intention of actually living there, with no intention of doing anything but selling at a profit. Bedrooms without windows. A suburb without people.

  ‘They’ll cook in those dog boxes in summer,’ Ian said as they looked across at Jonathan’s achievement, testing him.

  ‘Fuck ’em,’ Jonathan replied, a watch the size of an ashtray glinting in the sun.

  Jonathan was specific about the artwork. He had a space on the wall of his sitting room that would be perfect. He gave Ian the exact measurements and then, on an impulse, invited him to his Burnside mansion.

  Jonathan poured whisky into heavy crystal glasses. ‘Browns, blues and an overall golden cast,’ he said as he poured. ‘I want you to capture the way it looks in early-morning light.’ He passed Ian his glass, took a sip from his own. ‘So that it matches the decor,’ he added, gesturing with his free hand to take in his chesterfields and polished hardwood floor.

  A smoky, yellow-eyed cat walked into the room and rubbed itself against Ian’s leg.

  ‘He doesn’t usually do that to strangers,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘I feel very privileged.’ Ian screwed up his face. He didn’t much like cats.

  ‘You should,’ said Jonathan, missing Ian’s tone. He picked up the cat and stroked it. ‘Cost me eight hundred dollars.’

  Ian worked from photos, building layer upon layer of pigment and beeswax onto the canvas. ‘Urban Monstrosity in Morning Light’ became his private title for the work, but he tried to find beauty in the botched architecture, in its naked insistence, in its grand failure to concede anything to its surroundings.

  Halfway through the project his lover wrote something on a scrap of paper and stuck it to the wall, beside the canvas: ‘Poverty is a straightjacket, made to order.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Figure it out yourself.’

  He arrived ten minutes early on the day of installation. Knocked on the imposing twin five-metre-tall black-lacquered doors. Jonathan’s wife opened the door and propped it open. Tracksuited, dead-straight hair, fifteen years younger than Jonathan, she smelt faintly of sweat.

  ‘Working out,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘He’s in there.’ She pointed, curved her finger backwards to indicate he should turn right at the end of the hallway. ‘The living room.’

  Ian went back to his van and returned with the canvas, stretched and ready to hang. He found Jonathan sitting on one of the chesterfields, glass in hand, talking on his mobile. He waved for Ian to place the canvas on the ground. Ian saw that the space he’d thought was his had been taken over by a monstrously large, flat-screen television. He propped the canvas against the wall, below the screen. Jonathan kept talking, waved him out of the room.

  In the hallway, Ian looked at the back of the house and saw a deck through the floor-to-ceiling glass, a backyard beyond it. He walked out. Before him, an impossibly neat garden. Everything that could be standardised – roses, lavender, lilly pilly – had been. In the distance, the Adelaide skyline. Beyond that he could see, faintly, the twin towers of the Torrens Island power station. The Port itself was difficult to make out. But not for much longer, if the plans he’d seen for the third stage of development were correct. It would ruin the Port.

  He looked down. Jonathan’s eight-hundred-dollar cat, curled asleep on the second tier of decking. It was the anniversary of Nanna’s death tomorrow, and the family would gather at the Semaphore Hotel to drink a beer or two to her memory.

  Ian unzipped himself and felt the cool, clean Burnside air on his penis as he began pissing on the cat.

  You Matter to God

  He swung the big car slowly into the church car park. At this empty, quiet hour, the gravel crunched under the wheels as he pulled the Falcon around and parked in front of the sign. YOU MATTER TO GOD! Someone had scribbled beneath it in black, BUT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOUR A FUCKWIT! Next to him, in the passenger seat, the woman sighed and he wondered what she was thinking.

  He stared ahead, her profile on the edge of his vision, and thought again of the image Robert had shown him. The way it flipped from young girl to old woman if you concentrated on it. He knew exactly how that felt. It wasn’t long ago that he could flip from hero to zero in the space of a day. Wake up knowing he was renowned in the district as a fearless surfer and footballer (retired), then drink himself to sleep knowing he was a useless bum, pissing his days away.

  ‘Do you ever wish,’ he asked, ‘that things had turned out better?’

  She wound her window down and the smell of eucalypt, astringent and warm, swamped the car. ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,’ she said. ‘Really, there’s nothing wrong with you. People want to like you. You should let them.’

  For a minute or so he said nothing, then reached across the vastness of the Falcon and took her hand.

  The scrape of wood against floorboards woke me and I lay there until a rattling noise came from the kitchen. Geoff, the old bastard, helping himself to my coffee.

  I propped myself up, dragged the curtain across the grey morning and let it fall back into place. It had been a bad night. The first call-out had come at two am, the second around three, and sleep not until five or so. And here I was, my clock radio figuring 7:13 and another overcast Victor Harbor day to deal with.

  I got out of bed, threw on a tracksuit and my denim jacket over the top and stumbled into the kitchen. Geoff was at the knotty pine table, hunkered over a large mug of coffee. I could smell the sugar from the doorway; he must’ve put half the bloody jar in.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, and he grunted back. Geoff was a cranky bugger at the best of times. The rumour was he’d thrown away close to a million on a get-rich-quick super schemethat turned out dodgy. Buggered up his retirement plans.

  ‘Heard you get in,’ he said, cradling his mug to keep his hands warm.

  I flicked the kettle and put a large spoonful of coffee into one of the ‘God’s Waiting Room’ cups I’d nicked from the footy club. ‘Sorry. Tried to be quiet.’

  I’d sublet the front room to Geoff three months ago, not by choice. I had responsibilities now that Josh’s mum, Julie, was sick. I was aiming to save enough to put a deposit on a house for the two of us. Me and Josh. Julie too if she’d have me back. Something simple. A weatherboard cottage in Goolwa perhaps.

  He was a miserable bastard but he didn’t drink or talk much, which suited me fine. And he kept an eye on Josh while I was working nights. I stirred a big spoonful of sugar into my coffee and sipped the bittersweet brew.

  ‘How was Josh?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine. Not a peep.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Fuck this house is cold.’

  There was nothing new to say to that. I took my coffee into Josh’s room, his face unblemished and pure in the weak morning light. The room reeked of piss. I groaned and gently rocked him awake.
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  ‘Josh,’ I said. ‘Get up mate. You’ve wet the bed again.’

  While he had a shower I stripped his bed and dumped everything in the laundry.

  Dr Ferguson had prescribed Tofranil for the bed-wetting and nodded when I told him Josh was having problems fitting in at school. He handed me the script and said, ‘This should help with that too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. He had bushy eyebrows, a red bowtie, and a way of holding himself as if he was expecting a television crew to appear from nowhere and turn him into a celebrity. He was about my height – six-one, but slack-shouldered, flabby. Wouldn’t last thirty seconds on a footy field but what did that matter. I was on his turf.

  ‘You’re a single parent household?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, so what?’ Josh was eyeing off the bowl of jellybeans on Ferguson’s desk. He hadn’t offered, and I hoped Josh wouldn’t take one uninvited.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We just see a lot of that around here.’

  ‘His mum’s got cancer.’ I hadn’t wanted to say that, but there it was. My lower lip trembled.

  He frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not looking at me.

  I looked at the script, keen to change the subject. ‘Tofranil. So, why should this,’ I squinted at the prescription, ‘help with school?’

  ‘It’s an antidepressant.’

  ‘What does he need that for?’

  He looked at Josh and in front of him, right in bloody front of him, said, ‘He’s got what I would call a sad brain.’

  I felt like punching him.

  I never felt comfortable in the schoolyard but the mums had been and gone, so I sucked in the dread, parked the Falcon and walked Josh to his classroom, a demountable surrounded by scraggy paperbarks and tea-trees. I leant down to give him a kiss and he said ‘See ya Dad’, then slid his bag under a bench and walked slowly inside, where the teacher was calling the roll. Arriving after the mums made it difficult for Josh, who rarely got invites to other kids’ houses, but at least I didn’t have to put up with them not looking at me, not acknowledging me, all of them knowing who I was, the family I came from, and how far I’d fallen.