by Lisa Henry
Matt was silent.
“I went through a lot of foster families when I was younger.” Hayden rubbed the packet between his thumb and forefinger. The sugar was as gritty as sand. “Then I stayed in a bunch of group homes until I aged out. And I can count on one hand the number of people who thought I might be sitting somewhere like this today, with someone like you, instead of in prison or dead. Plenty of people told me those were my only options when I was fifteen.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not some tragic back-story,” Hayden said, and paused when the waitress returned with their breakfasts. He unwrapped his cutlery from the serviette. “I wasn’t flogged or touched up or anything.”
People expected horror stories, but Hayden’s time in care hadn’t been like that. Some of the other boys had been violent at times, and Hayden had learned how to take a punch before he’d learned how to fight back, but those incidents had been few and far between. Hayden’s childhood hadn’t been a horror story—it had been Robinson Crusoe, and Hayden had been the castaway trapped in exile, learning to endure. He had received perfunctory attention from the carers who rotated through the place; they’d had their hands full with the other residents. The sort of trouble Hayden had got into back then—smoking, drinking, shoplifting, wagging school—had flown under the carers’ radars. It was what it was. Some kids had it worse, and some kids had it better. It was the luck of the draw.
But people always expected horror stories.
“I don’t talk about it because there’s not much to tell.” Hayden sprinkled pepper on his eggs, and then took a mouthful, almost closing his eyes in pleasure as the taste of it burst over his tongue. Yeah, that was good. Worth staying awake for. He looked at Matt. “How was your shift?”
Matt cleared his throat. “It was fine. Busy, but nothing too crazy.”
“That’s good.” It was good that Matt hadn’t had any shit jobs. Good that he’d taken the hint to change the subject too.
“Yeah.”
They ate in a silence that Hayden hoped was companionable. A myna bird hopped up to their table, its head on a curious tilt, and Hayden waved his hand at it to make it skip away. It chittered at him angrily, so Hayden relented and tore a corner off a piece of crust and tossed it over toward one of the garden beds that ran along the top of the low wall separating the outdoor eating area from the street. The myna bird followed it.
When Hayden glanced at Matt again, he was smiling. “What?”
Matt snorted. “I’ll bet you feed seagulls too, don’t you?”
“Well, you can’t just say no to seagulls,” Hayden said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “They won’t stand for that sort of behaviour.”
Matt’s eyes danced. “That’s true.”
They fell into easier conversation after that, lingering longer than Hayden had expected over breakfast. When they got up and went inside to pay and Hayden checked the time, it was past eight-thirty.
“Wow.” He stretched. “I thought I’d be asleep by now. Monique’s got a study group or something today, and they can get loud. I hope they don’t come over too early.”
“You could come to my place,” Matt said. “The guy came around to put the split system in on Friday. No more window rattler. And Grandad’s pretty quiet.”
Hayden tucked his wallet back into his pocket, and nodded. “Okay. I’ll, um, I’ll follow you there?”
“Yeah.” Matt brushed the back of his hand against Hayden’s as they walked outside into the bright sunlight again. “That sounds good.”
Hayden blinked himself awake hours later, unsure of what had woken him, and took a moment to orientate himself. A cream ceiling in need of a repaint, a pillow that didn’t smell like his and…oh, right, Matt lying beside him. Matt was lying on his side, one arm wedged under his pillow, with his back to Hayden. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, and the sheet had slid down to his hip. Hayden touched a hand to his cool skin, following the map of his tattoo over his shoulder blade.
Then, from the floor beside the bed, came the noise that had woken him again: a long drawn-out sigh.
The bedroom door was open.
Hayden leaned over Matt carefully to confirm his suspicions: Charlie had nosed his way inside to sleep in the air conditioning. He was wedged with his head under the bed, as though he was working on the theory that if he couldn’t see Hayden and Matt, then they couldn’t see him either and they couldn’t throw him out. His tail thumped guiltily against the floorboards.
“I see you,” Hayden whispered. “Bad dog!”
Charlie’s tail thumped a little faster.
Hayden needed to piss. He climbed out of bed, then walked around it and poked Charlie with his toe. The dog wriggled.
“Yeah, you’re so invisible, aren’t you?” Not wanting to risk running into Joe in only the worn rugby knit shorts he slept in, Hayden helped himself to a t-shirt out of Matt’s drawer, and pulled it on before leaving the room.
From the living room, the television played at a low volume.
Hayden rolled his shoulders to relieve the ache in his neck from sleeping in a strange bed, and headed for the toilet.
“Matty?” Joe called from the living room when he made his way back. “Is that you?”
Hayden wiped his hands on Matt’s shirt as he walked down the hallway. He leaned in the doorway of the living room. “Hey, Joe. It’s me. Matt’s still asleep.”
“Hayden. How are you, son?” Joe’s craggy face split with a grin, and he curled his gnarled fingers around the frame of his walker, and Hayden wondered if he was in pain today, or if he used the walker in here because it was easier to lever himself out of his armchair with it.
“Not bad,” Hayden said, stepping forward to offer Joe a hand up. “How are things with you?”
Joe hauled himself to his feet with Hayden’s help. “Oh, I’m falling apart a little more every bloody day, but that’s life, isn’t it?”
“It sure is.”
“I’m about to make lunch.” Joe pushed the walker in front of him. “You want some?”
“It’s the middle of the night for me,” Hayden said, “but a cup of tea sounds good.”
They went to the kitchen. Hayden turned on the kettle while Joe made a series of trips to the fridge and back, carting a collection of what looked like ancient Tupperware containers to the table. He set a loaf of bread and a tub of margarine down on the table with them, and then peeled all the lids off the containers. There was a container of cheese slices, one of beetroot, one of lettuce leaves, one of grated carrot, one of shredded ham, and one of sliced tomato.
Joe pulled up a chair, and set about assembling a sandwich.
“Did you want a cup of tea as well?” Hayden asked.
“Yes, thanks.”
It felt odd how easily Hayden was able to move around this kitchen—around Joe—even though he hadn’t spent much time here. Maybe a part of it was thanks to his job; the same way he had learned to walk into a stranger’s house—the bedroom, or the bathroom, at any time of day or night—and not be thrown by whatever he saw there. And he was good with the oldies.
It felt different with Joe though. Hayden was used to breezing into someone’s life and out again, kind, sympathetic, and professional, but here he was tired and worn out, hair mussed up and face creased with sleep, wandering barefoot around Joe’s house like he lived here or something.
There was an intimacy here that he found difficult enough to navigate with Matt. Who got a boyfriend and his grandad at the same time?
“How’s that new air conditioner going?” Joe asked, crunching down on his ham and salad sandwich.
Hayden set a cup of tea at his elbow, and then sat across the table from him. He curled his hands around his own mug. “It’s good. Really quiet.”
“So it bloody should be, the amount it cost.” Joe slurped his tea. “Still, if that’s what Matty wants to waste his money on.”
Hayden hid a smile. Like a q
uiet air conditioner was some sort of luxury, not a necessity for a shift worker in a Townsville summer.
“Place won’t be the same when he’s finished with it,” Joe grumbled, but there was a glint of pride in his eye when he said it.
“I like old houses like this,” Hayden said. “There’s a lot you can do with them.”
“Oh, it was old even when the wife and I bought it,” Joe said. “We got it as a starter place. Always figured we’d get a bigger house when we had a bunch of kids, but Irene couldn’t have any more after Kelly—that’s Matty’s mum—came along. So this place was big enough.” He gazed around the kitchen as though seeing though the years. “I don’t know how old the place is exactly, but when I got the roof redone the blokes said that whoever wired it up first had carved his initials and the date into one of the trusses. 1929.” He smiled. “The neighbourhood must’ve looked a hell of a lot different back then, hmm?”
“Yeah.” Hayden thought of everything the house must have withstood in all that time. Just a typical little worker’s cottage, with tough bones. How many cyclones had smashed over it since it had been built? How many floods had swept through in that time? And here it was, still standing on foundations that went back generations.
Hayden rubbed at the unexpected tightness in his chest.
“Are you sure you don’t want a sandwich?” Joe asked him, gesturing to the open containers with his butter knife.
“You know,” Hayden said, leaning forward, “I think I could manage a sandwich.”
Joe didn’t seem to want too much conversation as they ate, and he didn’t seem to mind when Hayden lapsed into silence for long periods at a time. Hayden blamed it on sleep deprivation, but the way his thoughts kept coming back to Matt, and back to the fight they’d had, he wasn’t sure that was entirely true.
Half an hour later, when Hayden climbed back into bed, Matt rolled toward him and blinked awake. He smiled slowly at Hayden before mumbling something nonsensical and closing his eyes again.
Hayden watched him for a while, suddenly afraid at how close they’d come to throwing away this thing they were building. How close he’d come. Because Matt had been the peacemaker, hadn’t he, with his steady gaze and his calm negotiator’s voice? It had been Matt who had said he could let it go, while Hayden had been ready to tell him to go fuck himself.
He could see Matt’s point. He could see what the incident with Isaiah had looked like from the outside, and why Matt, who was trained to think in terms of worst-case scenarios, had gotten angry about it. But he didn’t know Isaiah like Hayden did. Whatever warnings came up on the system beside Isaiah’s name didn’t tell the full story. And Hayden wasn’t an idiot. He was capable of making judgement calls too. He was good with people, and he was good at his job. No, why be modest? He was more than good at his job. If he made a call on the best way to approach a situation, his judgement was worth just as much as Matt’s. Hayden had been prepared to tell Matt to fuck off if he couldn’t support him. He could see Matt’s point—objectively—but it hadn’t been Matt’s call to make. Hayden knew how to do his job.
Matt’s hair was messy. It was stuck down in some places like it had been ironed flat by the pillow and stuck up in others. His mouth was open a little. There were creases on his cheek from where he’d been lying on his other side for hours, and Hayden resisted the urge to trace them with his fingertips.
If Matt hadn’t been the one to step down at breakfast, there was no way Hayden would have been lying beside him now. No way his pride would have let him be here in this moment. The realisation was dizzying.
It was a long time before Hayden drifted back off to sleep.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Summer didn’t technically start until December, but nobody had told North Queensland that. By early November it was already stinking hot, and Matt felt like he spent half his shifts drenched with sweat, and the other half dripping with rain. The rain, when it came, was only a brief respite against the humidity: as soon as it let up, the heat pushed back in and brought mosquitoes with it. The change in temperature brought snakes as well and, living so close to scrubby Castle Hill, Matt started leaving a shovel by the back door just in case, although the only snake he’d seen so far was a tree snake that had still had the chickens rushing about in a panic.
Grandad took to spending more time in the garden now the soil was good and wet, checking on his passionfruit vine and pawpaw trees. Charlie, showing more sense than Grandad, slumped in the shade of the kitchen doorway and supervised from there.
The change in temperature also brought the first Cyclone Watch, and Matt hauled Grandad’s generator out of the shed and checked it was in working order. They could at least keep the fridge running if they lost power, which was Matt’s main concern. The tropical low hadn’t developed into a cyclone in the end, but the Watch was a reminder to get things in order around the house for the wet season. There was every chance that he’d be called into work in a cyclone—that’s how it had always been up in Ingham—so he wanted to have everything in order for Grandad to be able to sit it out easily. For certain values of easily.
He and Hayden had somehow muddled through their difference of opinion over that incident with Isaiah, and nobody at work gave Matt surprised looks when he referred to Hayden as his boyfriend anymore. They were no longer new and gossip-worthy. They were an established couple—how the hell had that happened? As far as Matt could tell, they were a one night stand that had gone horribly wrong.
Hayden had laughed uproariously when Matt had told him that.
They’d talked about maybe heading up to Mission Beach for a few days, but when Matt had suggested stopping at Ingham on the way to meet his family, Hayden had deflected.
It became more apparent to Matt how skittish Hayden was about stuff like that. He was friendly, outgoing, funny, but that was all surface stuff. Someone could spend hours in conversation with Hayden Kinsella, and walk away still knowing nothing about him. Most days, Matt was that someone.
Hayden’s silent moments were Matt’s though. Hayden dropped his guard in those times—just watching a movie, or sharing a takeaway, or walking along the beach at night—and allowed himself to be quiet, to be still. Matt grew to love those moments the most, because he knew not many other people got to share them with Hayden.
Those quiet moments were recompense for whenever it all went to hell.
There were days in Matt’s job, and in Hayden’s, that were shit. And sometimes there was a run of them, when every job they went to was just another punch in the gut. Just another dose of someone else’s pain and hatred and misery and fear and loss. Sometimes Matt and Hayden got to see people at their best, but most often they saw them at their worst, over and over again. It could be hard not to take that onboard. Hard not to bring it home.
Matt and Sean were first on the scene at the stabbing in South Townsville on what was supposed to be a dull Wednesday morning shift. Their priority was the offender, who was still armed with the knife, and waving it around in the front yard. His shirt was covered in blood.
“That fucking bitch!” the man screamed. “That fucking whore!”
“Put the knife down!” Matt called, advancing with his gun drawn.
He was aware of Sean beside him, gun also drawn.
Upstairs, someone was screaming.
“Put the knife down and step away from it!” Matt called again.
The guy dropped the knife.
“Get on the ground.” A beat. “Get on the fucking ground!”
Sirens wailed nearby. Backup.
The guy got on the ground.
Matt and Sean moved in. Matt kicked the knife out of the way, and knelt on the guy’s back while he cuffed him. The sirens grew louder, and cut out with a squeal of brakes. Upstairs, someone was still screaming.
“Got him?” Matt asked Sean.
Sean nodded, holding the guy down as he swore and bucked into the dirt.
Linda and Rawiri joined Ma
tt as he raced up the stairs.
The victim was on the living room floor, blood pooling around her. There was a teenaged girl with her: the one screaming.
It was the work of moments to check the house was clear, and then Linda went outside to wave the ambos in. Matt knelt on the floor with the teenager, checking she was putting pressure on the woman’s wound. Boots thumped on the steps, and then Hayden was crouching beside him, pushing him out of the way.
His blue gloves were bright against the woman’s blood.
The woman’s breathing was shallow and desperate. She closed her bloody fingers around Hayden’s wrist, and he unpeeled them carefully.
“You’ll be okay,” he said, his voice steady. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Matt headed back outside and down the creaking stairs.
The woman’s husband was still screaming into the dirt about how the slut deserved it.
Later, up at the hospital, Hayden said to Matt in a quiet tone, “Do you ever wonder how that happens? How they can hate each other so much?” And then he snorted and shook his head. “I hate people sometimes.”
Matt knew that feeling all right. He took Hayden’s hand and squeezed it. “You want to get Thai for dinner tonight? And eat it in bed in front of the TV?”
“Seems like a recipe for disaster,” Hayden said, and flashed him a quick smile. “I’m in.”
And then Matt’s radio blared and drew him away.
They didn’t eat Thai that night. Hayden ended up picking up overtime, so Matt made toasted chicken, cheese and asparagus sandwiches for himself and Grandad instead, and they watched some home renovation show on TV.
“Why the hell do all these people put windows in front of the bathtub?” Grandad asked. “Scaring the bloody neighbours like that.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for if I ever get around to a bathroom reno,” Matt said, texting Hayden to see how his overtime was going.
