Day Boy (3 page)

I've a year to impress or to disappoint to see if I'm worthy of anything better than
drudgery. It's too much. Too long.

I pull the plug, watch the water drain, and I'm all tired again, and tomorrow's looming.
And I can't help yawning.

A year's all kinds of forever.

You never know when they're coming. But they will come, and they will drink, and
you might drown in all that drinking. People die, and their deaths are whispered.
And their deaths are seen as the consequence.

Their funerals are quiet affairs, with none but family there—if there's family left.

Lot of bodies in that cemetery, and that's just the way it is, I guess. Cemeteries
have a habit of filling up. They always do. Patient bloody things, accommodating
and wide.

This is how Grove tells it. Standing before us all. Face grown to seriousness, and
a deep remembering. He likes to get the words proper and in the right order. You
can see his mind working them, well before his mouth. I reckon we all have a better
memory of it than him. But he still says it.

We all know these stories; they're the stories we tell when we gather in the old
cave—our secret meeting place (as if there were any secrets from our Masters). We
tell these stories with no embellishment. Well, very little. But Grove says it perfect.
The rest of us might change a word, or a scene or a beat in our story. Some of us
might throw in some comedy, who doesn't like a laugh? But he won't have any of that.
This is Egan's story. Egan is his Master, and my Master's enemy, and this was how
he told it to him. So this is how we hear it.

And I remember it still. Word for word.

Egan is old; you all know that, don't you? Oldest, maybe, amongst the New. Why is
he out here in our little town, so far from the heart and the city dark? Whys and
wherefores that's all messed. Don't you all be looking at me. Egan's my Master, but
he don't share much. Just the chores like the rest of you fellows, a bit of learning.
Not that I took to the classroom. Stop your smiling Twitch or I'll clobber you. Stop
it.

But he tells me: he fell in love with the moon.

Back in those days of engines breaking, the sky grown loud and supple and cruel.
Back when the world was bigger and smaller, which is how they put it, bigger and
smaller. That's how the world shook out, I guess.

Back then he fell in love with the moon.

He left his life, his once lovers, why he even left his phone, and they were magical
things with everything in the world in them. He rolled up his swag. Kissed his past
goodbye, and he took to the road. You know them roads. They were threads of black;
they went everywhere, not only east to west. But that's where he went. West. He followed
the moon.

How do you catch the moon?

Course, you don't. It's up there and we're down here. You can't catch that. Once
maybe, but even then they'd lost those great fires, those massive engines that could
get there. All the great fires were burning down and no one cared to blow on those
embers and build 'em up.

So my Master travelled. Threaded his way through all the falling down and burning,
through a night pitched as dark as ever been. He met others, but none could help
him. He might have been mad. Might have stunk with fear. He crossed bridges. He marked
the earth with his blood. He walked through his shoes till his heels found the hard
earth and a time came when he walked barefoot. His feet grown horny and black. Clothes
on his flesh ragged, not much flesh to cover. The road had hardened and thinned him.
He was a shadow: a hungry shadow.

You wouldn't have recognised him. Maybe you would. And he chased that moon.

How do you catch the moon?

Moon catches you. If it wants to.

It led him to the mountain.

You know it. You all see it in your dreams sometime. The whispering mountain where
the winds go. Wasn't no city in its shadow then. Not much but a few shacks.

Others had followed the moon. And my Master was
great in his envy of them. But they
were frightened, bent low by the mountain. Scared of what had drawn them.

It was the Master that went down.

It was him that went into the mountain. It was him that came back and he weren't
like them anymore.

And then of course he met Dain and those two found trouble between them. But Egan
was always the first.

All I remember that makes sense is him.

There's a grey fuzz of memory; a before. No faces. Just a warmth, a smile, the smell
of some summer flower that I can't quite place. But it ends pretty quick.

Dain took me as all Day Boys are took—well, except city boys raised in the Crèche
or the Academy—a fairytale snatching. Dain reads me them sometimes: those stories
Grimm and Andersen. Some child snatched from some distant town, a bed left empty—and
me to never know which one.

Eight years with Dain, first two with Dav as well. He's my youth. The voice of me
growing up. He tended my wounds, you see, they're not just the makers of wounds.
He saw to my tears (and he was more tolerant than most folks would guess; I was a
weepy sort of kid), and he taught me.

Dain liked his lessons. He'd been a teacher once. ‘You learn to think, boy, and you
might get yourself out of trouble almost as much as you get yourself into it.'

Maths, English, bits of science. I found it all too slippery but he never let up
on it. History. The past before the Masters came, the secret past that was there
all along. The crack in the world, and the way deals were made.

‘Everything's a negotiation,' Dain said. ‘The past and a place relative to it. To
live or to die. We all make choices within a greater matrix of choices. Those that
brought this world on us made choices they thought were the right ones.'

‘What do you think?'

‘Everything's a negotiation.'

CHAPTER
4

I'M OUT THE door, stomping my way through a morning that's already getting old, but
lunch is hours off and there's work done and work to be done.

Day's spiking my back with sweat, and I've yesterday's hurt to contend with. I try
not to limp, out along West Street then on to Main where the jacarandas are drooping.
They're all green; they've lost their blooms weeks ago. Out of Sun and into shade,
shirt clinging to my back. I'd ride my bike, but I'm still too sore. The baker's
door is swinging, the heavy screen of the butcher's black with flies, as are the
scabbed corners of my lips. Keep brushing them away, and they keep coming back. Stomp,
stomp: I'm weighed down with the weight of the Sun, and the dead weight of my boots.
This is a day for bare feet, but I'm working. Like Dain says, we're boys not animals.
Come back with the soles of my feet black and a clip under the ear'd be my earning.

Down the dust of Main, past a couple of tired horses,
waiting for their owners to
finish buying supplies. I have some stubs of carrot, kept special: both snuffle them
up. Horses aren't that proud. Feel their wet lips against my palms, the soft weight
of their eyes. Never ridden a horse in all my life, but I know how to treat them
and they seem to know that I know.

When I'm out of carrot, I move on. There's things to attend to.

I turn left into East Street, and he's standing there like he's been waiting, as
I suppose he has, in the middle of the road, his feet bare, stovepipe hat at an angle.
There's a bruise under his chin; that makes me happy at least.

‘Mark,' Dougie says.

I fix a smile on my much more bruised-up than his face. No matter what Dain says,
I can't help it. Dougie holds his botheration inside him. There's a lump of ice
he's chewing on, got a red slick of blood through it like a filament of ruby. The
only ice in town comes from the butchers, shipped here on the Night Train, weeping
as it's carted off.

Dougie doesn't mind the blood. You can't be queasy, not in our line of business.
It's good practice, all that red. I don't have any of that ice for my split knuckles.
Flex my fingers a little.

‘I've work to attend to,' I say. ‘Master's work.'

Dougie takes a long suck of that ice, nods his head. Puts out his hand. ‘No hard
feelings.'

I look down at it, the water that beads a palm as tough and worn as my own. ‘No hard
feelings,' I say, though I'm never going to shake it.

Now it's Dougie that's smiling, like I've given him validation, like he's the bigger
man, and he is: no contest. ‘Fair enough,' he says. ‘We accounted for ourselves.'

‘Some of us more than others.'

Dougie laughs, pops the ice back in his mouth, and then, almost as an afterthought,
he spits back onto his palm. ‘You see that Grove, you tell him that too. No hard
feelings.'

Poor Grove, getting into trouble on account of me.

‘I see him, and I will.'

Dougie nods and gets back to his ice. Those blue eyes staring hard at me.

I leave him to East, get onto Brickell. Walk past Mary's house, there's a piano playing.
Anne. Plays better than anyone in town, and I can't find a sweeter happiness than
the thought of her. I'd sneak a longer listen, but I've work to do. Always the rod
at my back.

Big George is a while answering his door, which means he was out back. But he comes.
He knows who's knocking and you don't make us wait.

He stands there and yawns, eyes still crusted with sleep, pupils still hunting for
the compass points of the day. ‘Morning, Mark.'

‘You all right, George?'

‘Maybe I should be asking you that.' He gestures at my bruises with the slightest
shadow of my Master's disappointment there. We're all echoes of them that rule.

And I give him such a don't want to talk about it look that he shakes his head. ‘Dougie?'

I shrug.

George sits heavy on that bench, lids fluttering a little. The bandage on his wrist
is seeping. ‘The boy's bad news, all pumped up on his own pride. Sobel's never kept
him in line. You keep your distance from him.'

‘Not me I'm concerned with. You all right?'

‘Just weary,' he says. ‘I'll lay myself here and rest. Gets me worse in summer. Maybe
I'm getting old.'

George has years ahead. Still, he looks old today. Smaller. They always do.

I get him a pillow, put it under his head. ‘Sorry I didn't drink with you yesterday.'

‘He tell you that, did he? What I said?'

I nod.

‘Sorry boy. He asked, I had no choice. You know how it is. He comes and he talks,
gentle, but there's no give to him. The blood and the words just flow somehow, and
you're all of a sudden babbling, and he's listening even as he feeds.' His voice
is all dozy. ‘If you'd stayed I'd've saved you trouble, on both counts.' He rouses
a little. ‘Not just me doing the talking, neither. Your Master's worried for you,
your last year of working. You going to go to the city?'

I give a shrug that ducks the question. ‘No need for sorries or worries,' I say,
‘and the bruises would have come anyway, that was something that was coming no matter
what.'

George is snoring. I fetch him a clay jug of water for when he wakes. And then I
work in the yard, clearing and stacking rubbish. His gutters are clogged, so I get
up there and clean those out. Find a brown snake, and there's a little stand-off
before it decides I'm not worth it and retreats, quick and haughty, off the roof.
I win that round. Me and the snakes have an agreement, mostly. I keep away, and they
do too. Dougie, he likes to break their backs. I can't fathom such pointlessness.
Snakes have a beauty all their own.

Up here I can see out to the forested edge of town, and the
ridge that swings up
in the east, first serious rise towards the Dividing Range. West is just farms and
flat, interrupted by the odd low hill that's erupted from the earth, and the dark
thin line of the railroad. I stand a moment in that heat. Enjoy the view. Then back
to work.