The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories

by Cameron Raynes

  The sky was spitting. I turned to go and saw one of Josh’s classmates running towards me, followed by his dad. The boy threw his bag and it slid five metres into the side of the classroom, settling perfectly under the bench. I raised an eyebrow to his dad, a short, stocky man with a thin stubble on his head and something Arabic tattooed on his forearm. He shook his head and we both laughed. He had a shirt with ‘Do I Know You?’ in big letters across it and, below that, two cartoon dogs, one sniffing the other’s arse. I wondered what the Arabic meant.

  ‘How’s he going?’ I asked.

  ‘Brayden?’ He screwed up his face, shook his head. ‘Doesn’t like it much. What about yours?’

  ‘Josh? He’s alright. Finding it a bit hard to make friends though.’

  We chatted about teachers and mums and how neither of our boys had been invited to a birthday party this year. I looked at his shirt again – no surprises there. So I invited him to drop Brayden over for a play the next day. ‘Too much on my plate today,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’ He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Work,’ I replied. ‘Night-shift security. Rental properties, holiday homes, businesses.’ I hesitated, thought, Fuck it. ‘And I’ve got a meeting with my probation officer this afternoon.’

  He nodded, didn’t blink. Passed the test.

  I pointed the Falcon at Goolwa, twenty kilometres to the east. At Middleton I stopped at a cafe and bought an iced coffee and sat at a scuffed-up plastic table as a Greyhound bus pulled up. A pudgy little bloke in a green and white checked shirt got up from the next table as the passengers clambered out, all stretches and groans. He stood there, waiting, and then a girl came out of the bus, about twenty, no hips, skinny as a rat. She went straight for him, hugged him, and belted out a smile that could save your life. And here’s me, wishing I was him. That quick.

  I got back in the Falcon and kept going. Goolwa. A flat little tick of a town, its head buried in the bank of the River Murray. Inside Vanessa’s office, I summoned up enough of my old charm to wink at the new girl behind the counter and she smiled back, hesitantly. She’d probably already heard half a dozen stories about me from the bad old days.

  ‘Vanessa in?’

  She nodded and I poked my head around the door of my sister’s office and gave her a ‘G’day sis’. My younger sister and only sibling.

  ‘Hi Mark,’ she said off-handedly, sitting at her desk, a manila folder thick with papers in front of her. She was tapping some numbers into a calculator, one eye on the phone. ‘How’s Josh?’

  ‘He’s fine.’ I stood there, wanting to ask for another ten grand, my share of our father’s inheritance. At least that was how I saw it. He’d cut me out of his will when he’d dropped in unannounced one day and found me climbing the walls, drenched with sweat, fighting the DTs, right in the middle of a three-hour rant about kissing God and wanting to die. It was too much for him. He’d always been a religious man, my father. And it probably didn’t help that he knew he was dying.

  He’s been dead two years now. When do you stop wishing you could undo things that have been and gone?

  ‘And Julie?’ Vanessa stopped what she was doing with the calculator and brushed some lint off her jacket.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘She’s got cancer. Not that well I guess.’

  Vanessa shook her head, partly in sympathy for Julie; partly, I suspect, in disapproval of me. I caught a glimpse of a portrait of a woman propped against the wall behind her. The face resembled Vanessa’s.

  ‘Here’s the list,’ she said, and the right moment to ask the ten-thousand-dollar question was gone. Down to business. I checked through the list of unattended properties I’d have to drive by that night. Alongside a couple there were instructions like ‘water the front lawn’ and ‘replace cracked louvre in bathroom window’. Goolwa Realty offered a complete service. I took the list and left.

  On the way home I stopped at the chemist and picked up the Tofranil. Then back home for some breakfast and a retreat to bed to make up what I’d lost the night before. The doona was cold at first against my skin. I drifted off, thinking of Julie.

  I picked up Josh from school and we walked up the hill to the Baptist church where Robert, my probation officer and counsellor, had his office. Alongside the old sandstone church was a newer, low-roofed building with a concrete access ramp already fretting at the edges. Inside, it had the feel of a third-rate gym, with a concrete floor and two table tennis tables set up in the middle, a doubles match taking place on one of them. Two girls – one with braces, the other with pigtails – playing a couple of skinny, pale boys.

  At the other table, another young lad was playing Robert. The ball flew off the table and Robert cut it back with such spin that his opponent’s return fired into the base of the net. Robert put his bat down on the table, spun the wheel of his chair and rolled over to where Josh and I stood.

  ‘Have a game if you like,’ he said to Josh, who said ‘Okay’ and picked up the bat and hit the first one straight into the net. Robert turned to me, shook my hand, said, ‘Good to see you, Mark’, like he meant it.

  He glided into his office and I closed the door behind us. Robert had been a big man once and still had presence, even in a wheelchair. It was about a year and a half now since the crash that had killed his wife, left him paraplegic, and saw him pensioned from the police force and turning to God. ‘You know,’ he’d said on our first meeting, ‘that was probably the only time that week I wasn’t pissed while I was driving,’ and he’d shaken his head in disbelief and stared straight ahead and I’d wondered how this was going to work. A God-fearing, remorseful, depressed ex-cop to counsel me.

  But somehow it had. He was off the grog now and I hadn’t touched anything stronger than coffee with a shot of rum since I’d given up the hash and the speed and the rest of it when I was picked up at a random breath-testing station last July and busted for possession.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked. He had grey hair, cut short, and eyebrows like steel wool. In front of him was a sheet of paper and a manila folder with my name written across the top in thick black texta. He was tapping the folder with a pen and the simple action made his forearm ripple with muscle and tendons. Wheelchairs were good for that, at least.

  ‘Alright,’ I said. We talked a bit about Josh and his mum and about my plans to buy a cottage one day. I didn’t mention Vanessa and the money I felt she owed me.

  ‘And what about the AA meetings?’

  I shrugged my shoulders, avoided his gaze. It was a condition of my probation that I attended meetings in Goolwa. I hadn’t gone at all last month. Seven or eight earnest, older men, sitting on plastic chairs in the community hall, sharing their pain. ‘It’s not for me,’ I said at last.

  Robert nodded his head. ‘I tried it myself,’ he said. ‘As you know.’

  My turn to nod.

  ‘I couldn’t get it to work either,’ he continued. ‘The constant vigilance …’ His voice tapered off. A shriek of laughter came from the other room, then the sound of a bat striking a table.

  ‘They were always telling me addiction is a disease,’ I said. For some reason, I found it easy to talk to Robert about this stuff. Maybe because he was older than me. It was nearly fifteen years since I’d done my knee and had to give up footy. Fifteen years since I’d had a coach and a captain, older men taking an interest in my game.

  ‘That’s what you’re supposed to think,’ said Robert. ‘But it’s more than that. Addiction,’ he said, ‘is a symptom.’ He paused and looked at me and I could see he’d been thinking about this, thinking about what he was going to say. From the other room came the steady click-click, click-clack of a rally.

  ‘A symptom of what?’ I asked.

  He gripped the arms of his wheelchair as if he had forgotten his injury and was set to raise himself up. ‘A thousand squandered opportunities to develop your character.’ A faint tremor rippled across his face as if a bomb had gone off somewhere deep inside him and then he leant bac
k in his chair. ‘There,’ he said, almost apologetically. ‘I’ve said it. That’s what I’ve been thinking lately.’

  I realised then that he needed me as much as I needed him. Or perhaps it was just the role he needed – to be mentoring someone. And what he’d just said was exactly what a born-again ex-cop who’d accidentally killed his wife in a car crash would say to someone like me. But that didn’t mean it was wrong.

  Robert asked me what I wanted to do with the next ten years of my life and I told him how I’d actually been pretty good at school. Believe it or not. Not a top student, but I’d excelled at sport, enjoyed biology. I was going to be a park ranger when I left school. Would’ve loved that – knew the Coorong like the back of my hand. The lagoons, the birds, the beaches. Still did.

  ‘You know you could still do that if you wanted,’ said Robert, and it almost sounded like he was jealous. There are worse things than not having qualifications. Not having legs, for instance.

  ‘I suppose I could,’ I said, almost off-handedly.

  Towards the end of our session Robert handed me a black and white image on a card. A young woman if you looked at it one way, an old woman if you stared long and hard enough.

  ‘Get anything from that?’ asked Robert.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  I’d had enough. I was thinking again of the Tofranil and sad brains and how I’d have to take some of those pills to test them before I gave them to Josh. I flicked the card back at him and it spun in the air and landed on his desk. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  He sat there, wanting something more from me.

  ‘What do you get from this?’ I asked him, but he didn’t get what I meant and began talking about how the mentoring had helped him to shift the focus away from himself after his wife had died, and I said, ‘No, I mean, what do you get from all this?’ And I swung my arm around to include the room we were in, the church next door, the picture of Jesus on the wall.

  ‘One day,’ he said, ‘I’ll read you something from the Bible.’

  I grimaced. ‘Won’t work on me.’

  He laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. It’s like the warnings they give on diet plans – conditions apply.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Results may vary.’

  After a dinner of Josh’s favourite, sausages with white bread, mashed potato and sweet corn, I took one of Josh’s anti-bed-wetting, anti-sad-brain pills. A tiny, sky-blue thing. I flicked between the current affairs shows, hoping for light relief. By then I was feeling slightly dazed, as though the world were covered in cottonwool. Dr Ferguson had said two pills a day.

  After I’d put Josh to bed I put on my work clobber, grabbed my steel-cased don’t-fuck-with-me torch, took the second pill and said goodnight to Geoff. ‘Call me if you need me,’ I said. He grunted, eyes glued to the screen as some American cop in an expensive suit lifted up the corner of a tarp and gagged.

  I pointed the Falcon at Goolwa for the second time that day. I always began my patrol in Goolwa, working my way slowly back home through Middleton and Port Elliott to Victor Harbor.

  I drove in a daze, jolting into North Goolwa when the road banked the River Murray and its sounds and smells washed over me through the open window. The great salty drain of inland Australia. At school we’d known the Murray-Darling as one of the world’s great river systems. We’d done a class project – had stacked up its length, catchment area, annual discharge and so on against the Nile, the Mississippi, the Amazon and the Yangtze. The Murray-Darling had come last in every category, but that didn’t matter, it was ours. Anyway, we were used to coming last.

  My job was simple. I had to drive by each of the unattended holiday homes and businesses on my list, stop outside each one, do a visual check for intruders. Unexplained lights, broken windows. Get out only if necessary. Break and enters were reasonably common in the off-season and you could get squatters any time of the year.

  The first house on my list was a kit home, all HardiPlank and aluminium windows on a narrow block near the river, flanked by empty houses managed by other estate agents, owned by Adelaide people who came down only when the weather was good. There’s no Neighbourhood Watch in a holiday town.

  I killed the engine and listened. The second pill was beginning to take hold, the cottonwool getting thicker. The listening turned to slack-mouthed staring until something jolted me and I started up the car and headed for the next property on my list.

  By midnight I’d done all of Goolwa and Port Elliott and the seaside part of Victor Harbor and my face was numb. I didn’t give a fuck. It was like someone had removed that part of my brain with all the soft bits, like the bits you use when you look at your son and want to hold him close so that all the bad things that got hold of you won’t get hold of him.

  My mobile rang and I pulled over. A call-out. 18 Dennis Drive, Port Elliott. I pointed the car to the east.

  I knew the house well. Young and rich, the owner came down from Adelaide on weekends and threw all-nighters with plenty of girls and drugs. There had been complaints and I’d been involved once or twice. Didn’t like the prick.

  I parked outside his house. Two-storey. Near new. Across the road from parklands and his million-dollar view of Horseshoe Bay. I sat there with the engine off and the doors locked, just in case. There was no sign of torchlight, no trees to hide behind, so I wound down the window and listened.

  When I was sure there was no one around, I called the security company and told the woman who answered where I was. ‘Probably just a false alarm,’ I said.

  ‘Well, be careful, love.’ I could see her sitting in an office somewhere in Adelaide, a blanket draped over her knees, a crossword and a hot chocolate beside her.

  I let myself in the side gate and the back door was ajar. Bad sign. I stopped and listened. Nothing. I clicked my torch on and held it in the overhand grip, ready to pivot it down on someone’s head if I needed to. I walked quietly through the downstairs rooms, turning on each light as I went. Then upstairs and into the main living room. It was a mess. The cleaner hadn’t been in since the last party. I moved slowly, just in case. Room by room, leaving each light on as I went. Nothing.

  I returned to the living room and to the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling glass doors that looked out over the ocean. I wondered how it would feel to own such a house. Would it make you stand taller, straighter; would it allow you to look more people in the eye?

  The floor and coffee table were covered with empty Crownies and wine bottles and the stale beer smelt like my youth and the football club. I sat down and felt something hard beneath me. An iPod. Josh would love it. I rubbed the smooth cold case between my fingers.

  Just inside the glass doors stood a telescope. On a clear day you’d be able to see the Coorong from here. Something about that filled me with a sadness so deep and swift that it cut through the Tofranil. I let the iPod drop to the floor. Josh would soon be old enough to see me as I was.

  After that I must’ve gone on autopilot for a while because I found myself approaching the car park above my old surf beach, Waitpinga. I parked overlooking the water and the Bluff loomed behind me. The swell looked mean. I closed my eyes and, even with the drugs gripping my brain, shutting me down, the roar and crash of the surf filled my head. I was being tossed about by massive, dark walls of water. And I wanted to be out there, at the edge of the break, my skin burning cold, the waves thumping the drug out of my system. In the state I was in, I knew I probably wouldn’t survive.

  And then I felt something, almost with the force of memory … that I was empty. That there was nothing left inside me. It scared the shit out of me. I wound down the window, stuck my head into the wind and the darkness and shouted, ‘My name is Mark South’, over and over.

  I stumbled out of the Falcon with the bottle of Tofranil, leaning into the wind. I threw up into a bin, then unscrewed the lid of the bottle and upended the lot. Back in the car, I turned off my mobile and headed for home. My night was
done.

  The next morning I dropped off Josh and went for a drive with Julie, past the bare hills, to the north of town. We drove mainly in silence. As I approached the outskirts of Para West

  I swung the big car slowly into the church car park.

  Girl, Reflected

  You wake up with terror surging through your veins and you don’t know why. There was a dream: something to do with high school friends and how you lost them, one by one. You’ve erased most of it from your mind. You had to cut yourself off – you hated who you were and you knew they’d never let you be anyone else. You’d always be their fool. They needed you for that. At least, that’s how it seemed at the time.

  The train crosses the river. You keep an eye on the water. The boats and their reflections, the derelict boat yards, an occasional dolphin cruising the murky waters of the Port River for prey, slumming it with the lead-addled bream.

  You’re still reeling from the news.

  She stands in the aisle of the train and light reflects from her in every direction. Visual messages encoded in photons, streaming away. Some of them shoot out into the dark huddle of early morning. They hit the window of the train at exactly the right angle and reflect back at you and there she is, projected against a dark factory wall, now ghost-like against the grey sky, now bright against a row of pines. Bright … ghostly … bright … the train rushes on.

  You pretend you’re looking out at the wasteland hurtling by but your eyes are fixed on her face. She’s staring out as well, and it’s as if she’s looking right back at you. You know you’ll see her again in the evening on the 5.13 from Adelaide to Glanville.

  Two rows behind you, Bill sits among his fellow citizens, wearing the six-hundred-dollar suit he treated himself to when he was promoted to Manager, Customer Services. The public service has been good to him. He’s looking at the girl standing in the aisle. He takes her into his mind, slowly undresses her, turns and bends her this way and that. After a while he tires of it, lets her go, opens a book.