Animal Kingdom (6 page)

Still, stepping out into the parking lot, Baz felt a weight lifting from his chest. He didn't want to go out to work one more time not knowing if he'd come home again. He wanted to watch his kid grow up and get married.

And, looking out across the rows of cars, he suddenly had a vision of the way most people lived, and it wasn't the way he sometimes thought about it, when he thought about it at all: sheepish slavery in little boxes, the way the song used to say.
Little boxes, little boxes, all made of ticky tacky
. It wasn't like that at all. It was of quiet dignity and courage in the face of pointlessness. That wasn't a word that came often to Baz's mind, but it did just now as he looked across the parking lot. Instead of evoking despair, the way it sometimes does when you're thinking late at night on your own, it made him feel proud to be a human being. The glint of sunlight on the chrome, the young mothers with their kids going quietly about their business: the ordinary, modest things that fill our lives and give them a touch of brilliance.

Baz was just about to start the car when he noticed the same plainclothes guys from outside his house threading their way through the car park towards him.
Oh, fuck. Here we go
, he thought, hoping Pope had got away. Winding the window down as they stepped up, Baz called, ‘Oh, shit, guys, you just missed him.'

The copper he'd offered the flowers to outside his house just smiled. ‘That's all right,' he said, raising his rifle to head height, ‘I like you better.'

Baz realised he was looking straight down the barrel to hell.

The cop behind shouted a warning. ‘He's got a gun!'

But he didn't. He didn't have a gun at all. They threw one in the car afterwards.

The blast sprayed Baz's brains across the cabin.

He was gone.

People glanced about, not sure what the sound had been. Maybe a backfire. Those who saw quickly turned and hurried away, not wanting to get involved. A kid gawked until his mother yanked him into the four-wheel and took off.

A car alarm wailed in mournful solitude.

On the other side of the car park, Pope turned at the sound of the blast. The inside of Baz's car was red with blood, and you didn't have to be any closer to see that he wasn't walking away.

The cops were standing around chatting like it was just another day.

And it was. Just another day. Just another day in the inferno. And another mate blown to pieces.

‘You spoken to Cath?' Craig yelped to Smurf as he lurched down the hallway, smashing insensibly into the walls, the news blowing his brain apart.

Smurf was on the phone, talking to someone else about it, but, seeing the state he was in, she stood, saying, ‘I gotto go, hon …' Hanging up, she opened her arms to her distraught son. She'd seen it before, the bloodings, but he hadn't, or had been too young to remember it. The deaths, the terrible deaths that had pockmarked their childhoods. Death is only a phase, Smurf knew—the end of one journey and the beginning of another—but Craig was too young to understand that. If he had seen what she'd seen, and knew what she knew, he'd have been able to handle it better.

Because she'd seen a lot. Bitter deaths, hard deaths. The deaths of friends, family, innocent kids caught in the crossfire. Deaths brought down on them like fire from above, and others chosen wilfully, sometimes even freely and with courage, the kinds of deaths that men seek.

And she'd seen beyond death, too. The ghosts who'd visited her, not always in her dreams. There were people she'd sent to hell who'd curse her to her face in the middle of the day, in the middle of a shopping centre, but they didn't scare her, because she knew her life was justified. And her life was her family.
That
was her strength, and if Craig had understood that, and heard the Celt in him that said no-one truly dies as long as the family survives, he would have been strong, too.

All we are are faces of that thing, that spirit, that
genius
, she'd heard it once described by a fortune teller, that lives through us.
There is something in us that is not us or ours alone
, she would sometimes try to tell them,
but it is what makes us who we are
. That was the wisdom they needed to learn.

But they never listened, or thought she was just drunk and out of it, but
she
wasn't the one drunk or out of it; they were. That's why they were beside themselves, unable to understand what was happening, the way they were now.

Craig was distraught, spastic. He hadn't really been that close to Baz, but something was going off in him that she couldn't even guess at.

‘It's okay to cry, honey,' Smurf reassured in the soothing voice she found for her sons when they needed comforting. ‘Honey, come here.'

She knew he was scared, because death is frightening if all you can think of is yourself, and sadly that was all Craig was able to do at his present level of spiritual development. True, he'd asked about Cath, but Smurf knew he was thinking about himself as he wept, about his own death that would inevitably come, swift and black, just as it comes to all of us, and that filled him with nothing but horror.

‘Come here, honey,' Smurf repeated, trying to calm him down.

But Craig didn't want to go to her. Craig didn't want to be comforted. ‘Fucking dogs!' he yelled impotently at the phantom police he felt closing in on his and all their lives. Why couldn't they just leave them all alone? The terrible police murderers waiting in the shadows for them all. He wanted to punch something hard, hurt it, tear the world apart and then do it all over again till the fuckers were dead. But the fuckers would never die; they'd always be there, waiting, because that's the world as it is.

‘You've got to think positive,' she soothed, ‘positive. That's what Baz would have wanted, because everyone's got to move on.'

But Craig didn't feel positive. Not one part of him.

He was acting like the kid he was, filled with grief and fury at the pain he didn't comprehend. Screaming, spluttering, stumbling out across the hall into the backyard, past the cowering, whimpering dog, with Smurf after him, trying to calm him. Grabbing at the clothes rack, he threw it uselessly against the tree, chucking clothes everywhere.

Smurf knew her son, and knew how to handle him. ‘Come on, baby, calm down, come here.'

J had never seen anything like it, not grief like this, and didn't even understand it, any of it. Not the news of Baz's death, not his own feelings of emptiness and numbness, the same numbness he'd felt at his mother's death. He wasn't even sure if he really cared about anyone, he just felt so dead inside. Maybe he didn't. Or maybe the pain was something he had to lock away and forget for a while before it blew him apart the same way it was blowing Craig apart.

Was this it? Was this what life meant? His life, their lives? Something you could laugh about as you ground it beneath your shoe? Was all the rest of it—all the talk about values and happiness—just a lie to cover up the fact that the coppers could just walk up and shoot anyone they wanted through the head because no-one was going to stop them, because they had a uniform and a badge and that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted? And then lie about it, and say he had a gun and the shot was in self-defence?

Was this the truth? That no-one's ever really safe, that all you can ever hope to be is so insignificant that it never occurs to anyone to actually kill you? Was that what it was like to live in this place?

If Craig was showing it, J was turning it inside, where it could do even more damage. He didn't know why it had happened or why it was happening to them, but he knew it wasn't right.

Pope was different: quiet, still, deathly. Carefully pouring himself a glass of water, he stared straight ahead out the kitchen window, his head full of snakes, and when J caught sight of him it took his breath away; he knew there'd be shit to pay. You just had to look at him to see the hate. Someone was going to cop it and cop it bad.

Smurf could see what was happening to her boys. It was like a chemical reaction she'd seen happening too many times before. She'd need to be alert over the days and weeks ahead as she watched these new compounds form and try to take hold of her boys. With luck, they'd all step away from this stronger and wiser. But it could go the other way, and poison them all.

Life is a challenge, she knew that, and this was the biggest challenge she'd had for a long time and the biggest the boys had ever had. Would they be up to it? Who knew? But it was what life had dealt them, and they had to face it.

Baz was dead.

The tired-looking woman sitting in the glow of the computer screen helping her son with his homework was quiet and focused. ‘No, just look,' she was saying. ‘Which one's the hypotenuse?'

At the sound of the garden door sliding open, Alicia looked across from the screen and saw Nicky coming in, followed by her boyfriend. He seemed a nice boy, but Alicia wasn't sure about his family.

‘Mum, is it okay if J stays here for a while?' Nicky asked.

Alicia hated these negotiations more than she could say and longed for the day her daughter would just grow up.

‘It can't happen, Nick,' Alicia said wearily as Nicky's little brother looked uncomprehendingly at her. ‘You're at school; you're in Year Twelve.'

Life hadn't been easy for Nicky, Alicia knew that: she knew Nicky had suffered when Alicia's first marriage had broken up and Nicky's father had moved out, suffered when Alicia had remarried and had her second child with Gus. Alicia had tried to be understanding, tried to be a caring, thought ful mother, but this was too much. She was not going to allow her daughter's boyfriend to move in; it didn't matter what she threatened.

‘He really needs somewhere, Mum; there's things going on.'

J was standing there like a shag on a rock, his future being discussed in front of him without anyone really being that interested in consulting him. Still, that was life. He'd had social workers, Child Service officers, busybodies of one sort or another sticking their noses into his business for as long as he could remember. Mostly they were nice people, kind even, but all he'd ever really wanted was to be left alone with his mum.

No, that wasn't entirely true. What he'd wanted was something like what Nicky had. Somewhere warm and quiet that didn't have a great hole blown in the side of it. A home, that's what he wanted, a place where you could hide and feel safe. But instead of that, the disorder of his world was about to spill into theirs.

‘What things?' Alicia asked, glancing curiously at J.

‘Things,' Nicky said resentfully, as if it was none of her mother's business. ‘I don't know. It'd just be for a while.'

It had been Nicky's idea that J should move in with her after she found out about Baz's killing and saw what a madhouse the Cody household had descended into. But J had found ways of living in madhouses before. He wasn't in a hurry to move, and so didn't know why Nicky was pushing her mother so hard about it.

‘You're still at school,' Alicia said, trying to make Nicky see her point. ‘You're probably going to make a mess of it as it is. And you shouldn't be asking me this right in front of J.'

‘Why?' Nicky shot back. ‘Because you don't want him to see what a bitch you are?'

There was no give in her daughter; she was all attitude.

‘Hey, come on,' Gus said, looking up from where he was making dinner.

But Nicky didn't care what he said: he wasn't her father and he didn't even need to be listened to.

‘Look,' she said to her mother, ‘one of J's friends got shot by the cops today and he's dead, okay?'

J took a quick breath, wondering why she thought it was a good idea to say that.

‘And I don't think it would be that big a deal to let him stay here.'

That was quite a mouthful, and both Alicia and Gus looked curiously at J.

‘I didn't know him too well,' the boy said evasively, feeling like something the cat had dragged in, still flapping helplessly on the kitchen floor.

‘That was on the news,' Gus said.

‘I didn't know him too well,' J repeated, trying to put as much distance between Baz's death and himself as he could. ‘It's just a shock and everything.'

J wasn't ashamed of knowing Baz, because Baz had been one of the best people he'd ever met. But he didn't want to have to explain that to these people. How could he? Nicky's parents had about as much in common with the kinds of people J knew as they had with the man in the moon. That didn't mean anything; it was just the way it was. Some people went to work and built up their super, and other people robbed banks. It might sound mad and stupid, but that was the world. What could J do to change it?

‘Well, I mean, can we do anything? Do you want a drink?' Gus asked, trying to be supportive.

Nicky shot an angry look at him, like
what an idiot
, but she would have got that in sooner or later, no matter what he did.

Alicia was wondering if any of this was actually true. It wasn't that she suspected her daughter of lying; it was just that, along with the high-stakes emotional games Nicky had been playing, Alicia had noticed an increasing recourse to hyperbole and exaggeration that regularly turned the most mundane setbacks and disappointments into
total annihilating disasters of global proportions
.

‘No, thanks,' J said, answering Gus's offer of a drink.

‘That's terrible,' Alicia said, her eyes searching J's face for the marks of these awful events.

But Nicky wasn't listening to anyone any more as she spat at her mother, ‘So maybe you can think about that,' and stalked angrily off to her room.

Alicia really didn't know what was going on with Nicky these days; she was so secretive. But the idea that her daughter was mixed up with criminals getting shot by police was more than enough for Alicia to think about. She turned back to the computer screen as J walked stiffly past, following Nicky, and embarrassed to be the cause of the dispute.