Everything in its right place

by Tobias McCorkell

  ‘Steven was on the phone to me just before. He’s pissed, man.He’s looking for him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Ellie know?’

  ‘He’s already tried her. Says she has no idea. Could be lying, of course.’

  ‘Do you reckon he’s okay?’

  ‘Who fucken knows, man.’

  I wanted to feel bad for thinking less of Moose.

  I shook hands with the other boys when we got to the lawn.

  ‘Hey, Ford,’ said Ange, ‘hear about Moose?’

  ‘I just told him,’ said Doug, sounding proud of it.

  ‘Best player’s not showing up to training just before finals.Fucken perfect,’ said Gibbo, chiming in with his typical dry negativity.

  After a quick stretch, our coach gave us a little spiel about our upcoming games, the importance of finishing the season out strong, and the importance of continuing to go hard in the final weeks of training.

  I took my position in the group and, when our coach had counted us in, set off running south past the ovals and fields where people were playing soccer and rugby and footy after work. By the time I was rounding the first corner, past the university, and about to turn left and head north past the cemetery and tennis courts, it occurred to me I wasn’t in the mood for running hard, wasn’t going to finish this one out strong.

  I sank back in the field of runners and let Ange and Vince stride out ahead of me. Without Moose and Steven there, somebody else had a shot at finishing first. But without them there, it wouldn’t be me. I had nothing to race for.

  My lungs felt tight and hot as Doug and I rounded the north end of the park, past the pond, and came into the last straight stretch toward our coach. Ange and Vince were up ahead, neck and neck.

  ‘You reckon Moose’ll be allowed to play this weekend?’ I asked Doug, breathing hard.

  ‘Dunno,’ he panted. ‘Depends what kind of mood Cranky Pants is in.’

  Our coach was screaming at us as we approached, and Doug set off sprinting the last fifty metres to make a show of his efforts. I didn’t bother following. We’d been dragging arse, and it was obvious.

  ‘Ford, what the fuck happened to you?’ My coach was irate. Looking over his scoresheet, he said, ‘You ran 12.08 just a fortnight ago, now you’ve dropped nearly a whole bloody minute each week since then. 14.12! 14.12! For Christ’s sake, you can move faster than that. We both know it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just been feeling a bit flat lately.’

  ‘Flat? What are ya, crook?’

  ‘Nah. Just … Don’t worry. Sorry. I’ll get it back next week.’

  ‘Let’s bloody well hope so.’

  Doug and Vince and Ange were looking at me from their position on the lawn, smirking because I’d gotten chewed out. I gave them the finger then lay on the damp green blades and brought my knee to my chest. My hip was locked up from sitting all day at school, and the run had only worsened the feeling. The sun was low and, looking up at the sky as I lied on my back, I could see dark clouds rolling in far above the treetops. So many clouds. So many seconds and minutes. Rolling in. And on.

  When the pain in my hip had lessened by half, I let go of my leg and stood up.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Doug.

  We shook hands with the boys and made our way back to the carpark, where Mum’s car sat idling between the rows. It was out of place, I thought. As we drew closer, I could hear yelling. I knew it was Mum’s voice. So did Doug. We jogged over to see what was wrong.

  A woman with a pram was scowling at Mum, who was standing beside her car looking worried and upset. Next to the woman was a tall, solidly built man with a grey face: her husband. The couple were young and plainly attractive, a perfect representation of the affluent inner north, dressed in active wear and runners.

  ‘Ya think I’m gunna kill your fucken baby? Get lost,’ Mum was yelling.

  ‘You’re completely out of control,’ said the woman. ‘You nearly backed into us.’

  ‘Fuck you, blonde bitch!’

  The couple scoffed at my mother as she moved back toward the driver’s door.

  ‘Fucken learn how to drive, woman. You’re a fucken nightmare,’ the man said.

  ‘Oi! Shut the fuck up,’ I said, as Dougie and I got close.

  ‘Do you know this woman?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘This lady just backed her car up without looking and almost ran over my wife and kid. Absolutely reckless!’

  ‘Ah, shut the fuck up, cunt,’ said Doug. ‘Nobody gives a shit about your precious fucken baby. Now, piss off.’

  With no way of winning the altercation, the couple muttered their small abuses and left, walking out of the carpark and onto the grass, littered with dead leaves and twigs and gumnuts, and then onto the running track.

  Dougie was fast in choosing sides. There was always a right and a wrong with him, and while I often considered it a personality flaw that he rarely considered the middle ground, I appreciated his allegiance – especially as I was embarrassed the encounter had played out in front of him.

  Mum was doing her best to act composed when we got into the car. But she was shaken, I could tell. I didn’t know whether this was because she’d almost had a driving accident or because she’d been accused of something, whether rightly or wrongly.

  When the last door had closed and we’d put on our seatbelts, Mum said, in a raspy voice, ‘I should’ve backed into all three of them. Done the world a favour.’

  Dougie laughed. ‘Ya would’ve got extra points for that, Mrs Mac. No doubt.’

  Mum grinned, putting the car in gear, and we drove back through the suburbs to the Jacketts’ house without a further exchange between us.

  ‘Thanks for the lift, Mrs Mac,’ Doug said, when he got out. ‘See ya, man.’ He waved to me.

  ‘Bye, Douglas,’ said Mum.

  I waved and nodded.

  By the time we got back to The Compound and had pulled into the carport, Mum was trembling with anger and her lips were connected by strands of saliva. Her unintelligible words were being mumbled into her chest and becoming ever more rapid in their delivery. Soon, she was crying. She began slamming her fists against the steering wheel, cursing and howling. I didn’t know what to do.

  As she started to breathe and slow down, her words became clearer to me. I realised she was cursing the couple from before. She was speaking of a ‘they’ as she slammed her fists once more against the steering wheel, before turning them against the interior of her door. ‘They think they’re so fucken perfect. Fuck them,’ she said, raking her fingers down her face like claws.

  ‘Mum, it’s okay. Forget those people.’

  It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by the encounter – although she undoubtedly was because Dougie had witnessed it – or that she was deeply hurt by the couple’s words. Mostly, Mum was stung by the arrogance that married people exuded: the stability they took for granted, the unity that protected them from the world, harbouring them from the pain of loneliness and the self-loathing that crippled her. My mother knew this could all be erased in a flash, on some unexpected day, at some unexpected time. I wondered if she didn’t secretly nurture a desire to see such disruptions as had ended her own marriage meted out to every woman who assumed she was safe in her union. It seemed, though selfish, were it the case, a not unfair, a not inexplicable desire from someone so brutally wounded and so grounded by her anguish and disappointment. I wouldn’t have blamed her if this was how she’d felt.

  ‘That blonde bitch,’ she said, wiping away her tears. ‘God, women are savage, Ford. They’re feral. Worse than men. Men … well, men are pathetic for the most part. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Still, they’re not cruel the way women can be.’

  ‘I dunno,’ I said. I could not stop looking at her wedding ring, and it would not stop looking at me. ‘I think you’ve gotta stop worrying about what other people think and do, ya know? You can’t keep going on like this.’

  She looked at me. Hard. ‘Oh, d
ry up, Ford. Just dry up, would ya?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But, honestly, I think you bring half this shit on yourself.’

  She struck me then. Across the cheek. ‘Bastard,’ she said. ‘You sound just like him.’

  The slap didn’t hurt, it just made me angry. I shook my head. ‘You’re a fucken idiot. No wonder you still live with your parents. Grow up.’

  I stepped out of the car and walked inside. She didn’t follow. She just stayed in her car crying. She didn’t come in for a long time.

  A Goat

  All of a sudden, the footy season was drawing to an end. We’d won our last four games in a row then entered the quarter and semi-finals, making light work of our opponents, and then entered the Grand Final to play Sunshine.

  I didn’t play too well in the last game of the year, and nor did Moose, who was usually so reliable, but who showed up without a uniform looking like he’d been on a month-long bender. Nobody knew where he’d gotten to in recent weeks. Since the joyride, he’d dropped in and out of our lives, a spectral figure leaving behind a trail of rumour and gossip.

  The night before the match I’d been so amped up I’d hardly slept, and when I got to the ground to warm up this deep exhaustion set in. That it was the final hardly mattered to me. It occurred to me that what I was most anxious about wasn’t winning, but was instead that this match would be it for a while – I would have no excuse to keep my Saturdays to myself, so I’d have to go back to seeing more of my father and Craig.

  Vince Donello and Dom Gaggliatti played insane, the best game of their lives, bagging four and six respectively, and in the end we found ourselves giving Sunshine a drubbing in the last quarter.

  With sweat dripping from our foreheads and armpits and down the backs of our necks, we roared with victory in the centre of the oval, silver-and-gold sunlight basking us in our shared bit of glory. We were going to get ‘royally pissed’, ‘maggotted’, ‘off chops’, and soon we were eager to get out of the clubroom where we stood, dirty, listening to our coach’s speech and our parents’ applause as we accepted our plastic trophies and gorged on the party-sized pies and sausage rolls the club had catered for us.

  But Moose looked dejected by the win, doubly so when Dom accepted Best on Ground, and Vince, Best and Fairest for the season. I might’ve been the only person to notice Mr Mousali and Steven shaking their heads by the trophy cabinet at the far end of that little room, which our stale sweat made all the more musty. Perhaps I was the only one, apart from Moose, to note Steven’s early departure, and I wondered what had gone on in their household since the night Moose had been kicked out.

  Drinks were being held at Gibbo’s house. So, I showered at home and got changed into my jeans, collected my backpack along with the cigarettes I kept stashed in a small wooden box at the back of my wardrobe, and rode my bike over. My pack was filled with the bags of potato chips and the box of Cheezels Mum had bought for me to share with the boys; neither she nor Noonie would allow me to go empty-handed. Pop – whose footy stories included drinking barrels of beer after his games in the country, even after most training sessions – knew what my mates and I were planning and had protested mildly on my behalf, saying, ‘They’re not going off to eat bloody crisps.’ That we were all underage did not cause much concern to anybody; the drinking culture amongst the boys I knew was one our parents and guardians either actively encouraged or turned a blind eye to.

  Like almost everybody on the team, Gibbo lived just off Bell Street. His old man worked for a beer manufacturer and had supplied us with slabs of VB for the win, as had our coach, who would later show up to drink a few quick stubbies with us and toast the premiership, before leaving us to get on with the debauch.

  Gibbo’s dad had converted the garage out back into a games room with a dartboard and two couches and a telly. We sat or stood around sinking stubbies and cracking jokes until the evening, waiting for Ange’s mum to take off for the night shift at the hospital in Moonee Ponds so we could go round and smoke pot and play our music louder.

  ‘Has anyone seen Moose?’ Gibbo was asking.

  ‘Nah, man,’ said Vince. ‘You skips are always worrying about something. Relax, he’ll show up soon.’

  Gibbo and I were the only fully Anglo kids on the team, always a point of mild harassment. At times, being white was synonymous with being beige.

  ‘Fuck off, ya dirty wog,’ said Gibbo, eliciting a chorus of boos from the other boys.

  ‘That’s our Best and Fairest you’re talking to, mate.’

  ‘Yeah. Better watch it! Vinnie’ll come for ya.’

  Vince made some shit karate moves, demonstrating his ability to ‘come for’ anyone.

  Dom, as he had been doing since summer, was attempting to steer conversation in the direction of a girl named Michaela and her possible anorexia and, generally, her body. ‘She’s hot, man. Ya gotta admit it, she’s the hottest fucken chick.’

  ‘Yeah, but does she root, but?’ asked Dougie, who asked this same question in the same way of every girl we’d ever discussed.

  For once, Dom looked taken aback. I was getting the idea he felt something more for Michaela beyond an obsession with her thin frame.

  When we’d drunk the last of the beer, we left Gibbo’s house and set off on foot to Ange’s place further west along Bell Street, not far from the freeway, cutting through the backstreets. But before we left, Ange collected two rolls of toilet paper from Mrs Gibson’s laundry room.

  ‘What’s Ange bringing that for?’ I asked the others. I’d heard of kids in the States throwing toilet paper into the trees of neighbours’ properties on Halloween, but it seemed like a lame act to me. Besides, for that Ange would need more than two measly bog rolls.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said one of the guys.

  After we’d been out a short time, Ange raised his hand signalling everyone to stop. ‘It’s on,’ he said. He took stock of the parked cars along the suburban street, under the branches of gum trees, before he marched toward a sedan so dated it was safe to assume it didn’t have an alarm. He stood up on the bonnet then climbed onto the roof. Everyone was grinning as he placed the bog rolls at his feet before he turned to face the boot directly while remaining close to the front windshield. He unbuckled his pants, dropped his jeans then his daks around his ankles and, with extremely good balance and agility, lowered himself into a squat, his bare arse hovering over the windscreen.

  A moment passed. Then a thick brown sausage emerged from between Ange’s cheeks. Over the next few minutes I watched as long strands of faeces landed on the windscreen beneath his haunches. I watched on as he delicately tore off sheets of toilet paper to wipe his arse, before dumping them onto the windscreen. Then he stood, pulled up his jeans and dismounted the car at its rear.

  But the act wasn’t complete. Ange bundled the remaining toilet paper into giant wads and used them to wipe the turds back and forth until the windshield had been evenly coated in brown icing. The shit-smeared glass was a sight to behold. Ange’s finishing touch was to tuck the wads of paper beneath the wipers, like a bow at the base of some ungodly present.

  Altogether it was a masterpiece, at once delicate and intricate, and violent and ghastly. And it was underscored by an intense and, ultimately, perverse deliberation: the artist had needed to be keenly focused and filled with conviction in order to pull off its ambitious spectacle. I was thoroughly impressed; I’d never imagined that such talent was lying dormant in our midst. ‘Fair dues, Ange-o,’ I said. ‘You’re like fucken Picasso.’

  He was beaming as he looked back on his work before we hightailed it off the street. To my amazement he hadn’t gotten any shit on his fingers – as far as I could tell, anyway, searching his hands in the dark the same way I always tried to locate Aunt Val’s missing finger.

  Ange’s house was empty when we arrived, and Moose still hadn’t turned up. We put on some music – Nas and Biggie and Dr. Dre – and got stuck into more grog, and someone made a bong from a soft-dri
nk bottle, a piece of garden hose and tin foil. We were gone by the time Moose got there, with Dougie and Dom off munting in the bushes out back.

  ‘What’s been happening, fellas?’ Moose asked. ‘Sorry we’re late.’

  We’d all decided there were to be no girls for the night, but Moose had brought Ellie and we were too scared of him to bring it up or question his absence. Why he brought her to that house, I’ll never know. Why, at that hour? And why, given her condition?

  Ellie’s face was not something we were ever likely to forget. The swollen cheeks and red eyes and split lip that she kept running her stick of lip balm over. The way she licked at the crack and, if you looked close enough, the blood that collected momentarily on the tip of her tongue before she drew it back into her mouth, like she was drinking herself. Nor were we likely to forget Moose’s distant stare and the challenge he was posing to all of us by bringing her along. That he wanted us to witness her face made him ever more frightening for the fact it, he, was so obviously mad. We were all wild, yes, sometimes, but this was madness, and we did nothing except bury our discomfort and look longingly and sorrowfully toward Ellie whenever we weren’t the recipient of Moose’s attention.

  He seemed tweaked, not right at all, but I wasn’t sure if it was drugs or what. All I knew was Ellie – there, tortured. I crawled into myself and died. I was eight years old again, my legs tucked into my chest and sitting on the floor of my room in Seymour in piss-soaked pants with only a tortoiseshell cat for company. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t act. The sight of Ellie flushed my guts with hot panic, just like how they’d gone after Ken had pressed his fingertips against the baby fat that clung to my belly beneath the windcheater.

  Truthfully, I was relieved Ellie wouldn’t bring herself to meet anyone’s eyes, especially mine, as she went about reapplying her lip balm, running the stick around her mouth again and again, over and over. We were all betraying her with our silence. I couldn’t imagine the extent of her loneliness. I’d been let down by people who were supposed to protect me as a kid, let down a thousand times by Dad, but this was so much worse, because she’d likely worked out what we were all thinking, the only thought that could stave off our tremendous guilt and shame and embarrassment: You’re Moose’s girl. You brought this on yourself. Worse still was the idea she might’ve been thinking this too. I couldn’t bear it. Not that.