Animal Kingdom (7 page)

Most kids have parent trouble, but J didn't. Both his parents were dead, or gone. J had never had a straight story from his mother about his father; for all he knew he was either shot by the police, or in jail, or shot by someone else. He had never really been able to tell with his mother what was true and what was being made up just to get whatever it was she wanted out of him. The truth was his father had never been around.

Still, she had been his mother—someone to hold on to, even if she hurt—but now all he had was Nicky. Of course, he didn't think about it that way. He hardly thought about it at all. He loved her, he supposed. Sometimes she asked him, and he'd say yes. If anyone else was looking at her, he'd feel jealous. Like he did with Craig. He didn't really think about the future, because that seemed stupid. He didn't have a future, not like other people have futures.

People like him weren't going to make plans or try to imagine what the future might be like. Nicky could, J knew that. She could finish school, maybe go to TAFE, do some course. Become a teacher. Sometimes she'd say things like that. That she could be a teacher. She could do it because that's what her mother wanted: she wanted her to be a success, get a job. She wanted her to do good in the world.

And if J had thought about it at all, he would have seen that sooner or later Nicky would find someone else more like her and her mother. She'd move on and that would be that. And if he'd thought about it he might have felt sad, because he did love her, and wished in his quiet, confused way that he could give her the kind of life she deserved. Not this dumb, fucked-up life they all lived here. The drugs and shit and cops shooting you. Not that kind of life. But a life where people respected one another and you weren't worried someone was going to stick a shotgun in your face and blow your head off. He didn't want someone to stick a gun in Nicky's face and blow her head off. He wanted her to be happy. He just wished he knew how to make it right for her.

‘Nicky's beautiful,' Pope said later that night as they all sat slumped and dozy in front of the TV after the main shows were over.

Rousing, J wondered if he'd heard him correctly, and shivered the way his mother used to when she'd say someone was walking over her grave. The only things that Pope thought were beautiful were dead. Dead crims, dead rock stars, dead animals. He was like the King of the Dead, and, now that Baz was gone, he thought he was their king as well.

It wasn't a happy thought, and J only let it linger a moment before he threw it into his memory hole, where he vaporised everything he couldn't deal with. He realised, as he sat there looking at the static on the TV screen, that it was where he was now consigning most of his life. It was like a sudden insight that knocked him back into the cushions of the sofa. It was like he suddenly got it. His life. He'd pulled his own head in so far that he felt like a little ball of fear in the absolute centre of the universe, a black hole of terror dragging everything into it. He felt that he had ceased to be, that's what he thought, and had become a zombie being pushed around and directed by forces outside himself. And that didn't make him feel happy at all.

He wasn't happy, watching his uncle lusting after his girlfriend. Is that what he was doing, or was he mentally slobbering on her, like a spider slobbering over a fly it had caught in its web? A sort of masturbatory devouring, half sex and half ingestion? Uncle Pope didn't love anybody; none of them did. All Uncle Pope wanted to do was hurt.

It didn't last long, the vision. Just long enough to singe its way into his mind and memory. Was that really what he'd become? What they'd all become?

When he woke up the following morning, and remembered Pope carrying Nicky into his bedroom … Was that true? Did that really happen or was it some hallucination, like the spider and the zombies and everything else?

His sense of reality was being eroded, and what would have seemed impossible to contemplate only a few weeks before had started to become commonplace. Perhaps that was the thing that had really frightened his mother about her family: how the mad could become normal. But that's the way the world at large worked as well. A new force enters, and slowly, gradually, the world is changed before our eyes without us hardly even noticing. Till one day we wake up, and the things we thought were true have been turned into their opposite, right in front of us.

‘You know why your mum and I didn't talk for so long?' Smurf asked later as she wrapped a tie around her neck, helping J get dressed for Baz's funeral.

‘No,' he answered quietly, listening.

‘We had a fight about—you know the card game Five Hundred?'

J nodded, but he didn't really. His mother had played a bit, and tried to get him to play sometimes, but he couldn't get the knack of it.

‘She reckoned you could play the joker whenever you wanted in a no-trumps hand.'

J didn't know what she was talking about, but he hadn't heard her talk about his mother that much, so was interested.

‘She was drunk,' Smurf continued. ‘I was drunk too, but I was right. But look what happens.'

She was becoming soft and whimsical now, girlish. J had never seen her like this, and wondered.

‘Years go by,' she continued, ‘and then she's gone and I lose my only daughter because you can't play the joker when ever you want in a no-trumps hand.'

It sounded like some deeply wise thing, but J didn't have a clue what it meant.

‘And I don't get to see you for years,' she said, returning her gaze to him. ‘And that made me sad.'

She looked sad. Was she sad, or was she thinking about something else?

‘But I'm getting to see you now,' she chirped, rousing herself. ‘All the time.'

J thought he understood, but it probably didn't matter. None of Smurf 's stories ever made much sense, not because they were dumb or confused, but because there always seemed to be something missing, some elusive piece of information that would make whatever she was saying clear; but they were never clear and they were about things only Smurf properly understood. That's the way she was: even when she was telling you something personal and important, you could never be sure just exactly what she meant.

And that was the real point: she was the only one who really understood anything.

‘Okay, stand up; let's have a look at you,' she said, having reached some inner resolution about something. Taking the tie off and putting it over his head, she considered him. He was a big kid, tall and lanky, and towered over her when he stood. ‘Sweet,' she said, looking up at him. She added, ‘How do I look?'

‘You look good,' J answered politely.

‘Correct,' Smurf replied, pleased, and she reached up and put her hands over his head to draw him towards her. Pulling him close, she kissed him in the way he'd seen her kiss the others. ‘Beautiful boy,' she said warmly.

He didn't know why she did it, but it didn't feel right. And he wished he hadn't seen the way she swung her hips as she moved off afterwards.

The funeral was as sad and anonymous as funerals are. A bleak suburban church, one of those big halls full of empty pews most of the week and filled with a few ageing stragglers on Sunday. A cross to remind us of something.

The priest said a few things.
Judge not lest ye should be judged
—that sort of thing.
‘Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord.
It could have been worse.

Catherine was sitting on the other side of the church and couldn't bring herself to look at Smurf or any of them, she was so upset. She was going to lose the house, the car, the lot—all their dreams.
Proceeds of criminal activities.
The cops had found the money stashed in the ceiling and knocked it off, so she didn't even have that.

And so there she was with their little girl, her man lying in a wooden box with what was left of his head held together with tape and tissue paper. Hardly anyone else was there apart from the people she hated, because anybody decent enough to feel kindly towards them was too frightened to attend.

Pope went outside for some air and then just stood stock-still, paralysed, as the mental storm that was blowing up inside him swept him away. Pope never knew where he went in moments like this, couldn't remember where they took him or even that they happened. Smurf used to say they were his
absences
. The sound of Craig stepping out for a smoke snapped him back to life, or whatever this is.

The two of them gazed across the road at the cop car. One of the cops was on his mobile, giving a blow-by-blow description to whoever it was that was listening on the other end. Probably a bunch of them roaring with laughter down at the pub.

Journalists huddled behind bushes, snapping photos of them, darting about like scared scavengers. And that's what they were: the jackals and scavengers of this world feeding on the dead and the dying.

Pope could have killed every single one of them if he'd been able to move, but he was too overcome with grief to do anything.

The wake was just as bad: cold and strangled, the RSL hall too big for the few mourners who made their way back.

Catherine left early without even saying goodbye.

The whole thing left everyone flat. There was just too much unfinished business, too much left to be said to properly grieve.

But, later that night, Pope started to say it in the way that Pope so often did. ‘Where'd you get that suit? What's that suit?' he asked, sounding interested, as Darren made himself a sandwich on the kitchen bench.

Smurf was still at the wake, cleaning up, and Craig was slumped in front of the telly, out of it.

‘It's a suit,' Darren said, not interested in Pope's shit.

‘What? Do you think it looks good on you?' Pope persisted.

It was the sort of wind-up Pope got up to when he wanted you to do something for him. ‘Looks gay—are you gay?' he asked.

Darren wasn't up to it. ‘Fuck off, will ya?' he said. Darren was the quiet one, the one who went along with things, and even he'd had enough.

‘It's a serious question,' Pope said. ‘I don't care if you're gay or you're not gay, you know.'

Darren was big enough to thump him, but would never dare, not knowing what Pope would do when he was in a mood like this. And it was dark. Darren knew how dark it was.

‘It's all right if you are, mate,' Pope said. ‘I just want you to tell me about it, you know? I don't care whether you're gay or you're not gay; I just want you to talk to me about it.'

It was like a slow drip eroding your resistance, undercutting you as you tried to ignore it. Eventually you'd throw a punch, you'd be so hurt and angry, and, quick as a flash, Pope would have your arm so far up your back you'd think he was going to snap it off. And then he'd twist it a bit more, just to see you cry.

So Darren resisted, biting his tongue, and opened the fridge to get something out.

‘You making yourself a drink?' Pope asked, seeing another line of attack.

‘Yep,' Darren answered.

‘What is it?'

‘It's a bourbon and coke.'

‘Bourbon and coke's not a very gay drink,' Pope said.

He didn't even need to think about it; it was part of his DNA: he knew which buttons to press.

‘I think—look, if you're a gay man, if you are, and you want to make yourself a gay drink—you know what I mean? This is what I'm talking about, mate. I just want you to tell me things, you know? It just kills me to see you living a lie.'

‘Look, will you fuck off?' Darren said, picking up the drink. ‘Seriously.'

‘What do you think we should do?' Pope asked suddenly, staring straight ahead into the shadows.

And Darren knew exactly what he was talking about, because he'd been thinking about it, too. ‘I think we should be there for Cath,' he said, ‘and the family and that.'

Darren didn't need much encouragement to do nothing, because that was basically his attitude to everything. If the mower was broken he'd just let the grass grow till someone told him to get it fixed. It wasn't that he was either lazy or cowardly, though he had a big streak of both. Mainly, it was that he was the baby of the family and his mother had just never let go. Darren supposed she liked him being the baby because it made her forget she was getting old; that's why he'd never told her about the herpes.

‘What are
you
gonna do, Darren?' Pope asked pointedly, looking straight at him.

Darren knew what he was saying, but how much trouble does anyone want in their life? ‘It's wrong and all that,' he said, ‘but, you know …' He trailed off.

Turning towards him, Pope laid it on. ‘You know, if Baz was still here right now, and we'd just been to
your
funeral, we wouldn't be having this discussion, because he'd have already done something about it.'

That wasn't true. Not because Baz was a coward—he wasn't, and everyone who knew him knew that—but because he was too smart to do something that stupid, a lot smarter than Pope or any of the rest of them.

‘Now, if you don't want to do anything because you're scared,' Pope continued, asking almost as an afterthought, ‘Is it because you're scared?'

He was looking straight at Darren now, so there was no escape.

‘It's all right if you are. I just want you to tell me about it. Just talk to me.'

But Pope didn't want to talk to anyone, and he wasn't interested in what Darren had to say. All Pope wanted to do was hammer the coppers and hammer them hard. It wasn't even because Baz was a mate who deserved revenge.

It was because Pope wanted blood.

J was in the shower the following morning when Pope burst straight in and pulled the curtain aside.

‘Where's Craig?' he demanded.

J was a kid, a seventeen-year-old boy, and here he was, starkers in the shower, with a grown man standing over him asking something he didn't even know the answer to.