Golden Boys (15 page)

Syd quavers, but he does not budge. Never in his life has he been as bold as he wants to be: never, until this minute. He says, ‘My dad was kicking my mum's car the other night. He was yelling, swearing, calling us names. He comes home drunk and he punches the walls, he slams doors, he's smashed all Mum's favourite things. My sisters cry because they're frightened, they hide under their beds. One time he pulled my mum's hair, and he pulled out such a chunk that her head was bleeding. He gives her Chinese burns, and he spits on her. When we hear his car come home, we feel sick, wondering what's going to happen – if he's going to fall asleep telling some story, or if he's gonna kick the cupboards in, or throw a glass at Mum, or hold his fist in Declan's face and tell him to get to bed. But no one cares about any of that, do they? No one says he should have his hands stuffed down his throat.'

He stops as cleanly as if he's run into a ditch. Declan has long looked away. They know that Garrick's father is a hard man, and that the boy will understand – will know the sound of a door swinging with force into a wall. ‘It's not the same,' says Garrick, but weakly, and Syd barks like a fox, ‘It's worse, isn't it? But I don't see your tough brothers doing anything about it.'

‘Leave my brothers out of this —'

‘I will if you will.'

Garrick snorts, smiles darkly. He scrapes the sole of his runner down the pipe, making a coarse crumbling sound. In the quiet that follows they hear water dripping deep inside the drain. Garrick wipes his nose and looks at the brothers. ‘You must both be homos,' he says. ‘Your dad and that man – it's not the same.'

‘It's not the same,' Declan agrees, ‘but it's just – life, isn't it? So just live with it. Just stay out of his way —'

‘Oh, I'm going to! He's not getting his hands on me again —'

‘Well, good.'

‘— but this shit has to be paid for, Declan. I don't care what you say. He can't just get away with it – that's not right. It's just not right!'

Declan nods slowly. ‘What about Colt?'

‘What about him? What about him? It's his bloody dad. He should have been there – if he'd been there, it wouldn't have happened!'

The boys size each other up: none of them will budge, and it is pointless to argue further. ‘What are you going to do?' Declan asks, and Garrick snaps, ‘I dunno. Something.' Silence follows, and the situation settles snowily around them, cold and bright-white. Garrick picks up a pebble, examines it, and pings it with accuracy at Syd. It hits the boy's elbow and zings away. ‘Call me a crybaby again,' he says, ‘and I will break your arm. Got it?'

Syd, clutching his arm, doesn't answer. ‘
Got it 
?' says Garrick.

‘Yeah,' says Syd.

Declan steps to the brink of the pipe and stands gazing over the water with his hands in his pockets and the morning sunshine lacquering his cheeks. The paper bag which is like a balloon has rolled and bumped its way a fair distance downstream. ‘I've got money,' Garrick says eventually. ‘Let's go to the milkbar.'

Colt sits astride his racer, watching Avery teach Bastian to ride a skateboard. Both boys are light-footed, but Avery, the street cat, places his feet exactly where they're needed, while Bastian – his poor brother who'd have been better off being born a girl or maybe a canary, something pretty and safe in a cage – is as awkward as a baby giraffe. Colt watches him trundle along the road, pips of bitumen almost shaking him from the board, each tentative paddle of his toes against the ground eliciting a nervy grimace. Avery says, ‘Don't stand in the middle of the board, Bas!' and Bastian, as is his way, shouts, ‘I know, I know how to do it!' and moves his foot from the centre to the very end of the board: and the skateboard's nose lifts like a sniffing dog's snout and swings violently toward its master's ankle. The boy jumps clear, hands flailing, and the board starts to escape downhill. Bastian looks back helplessly: ‘Go and get it!' Colt urges, and the child gallops away. Colt's gaze follows him, and he wonders where on earth his brother will go.

Avery perches on the gutter, the red-and-white board across his thighs. Its chunky wheels are flecked with small dents from the road. Colt props his wrists on the racer's handlebars. ‘I thought you didn't have a skateboard.'

‘I don't.'

‘So how did you learn to ride?'

Avery shrugs. ‘Sometimes you just know what to do, I guess.'

Colt thinks of how he used to run, his body knowing how to do it without wondering how it knew, his coach often telling him that he had great natural style, relaxed but controlled, that he ran the way a javelin flew, with no energy wasted. Lately he's begun to yearn for that feeling again – not just the fast feel of the track under his toes, but the certainty that, lining up against a rival, he will win. In general he hates to see others fail or be hurt, yet on the track he had known a kind of mercilessness. He'd had no friends, no brother, nothing to which he was obliged. He looks away from that past – he'll never run a track again, never crouch, with beatless heart, before the gun, never look into the stands to see his father there, knuckly hands between his knees – but maybe he can run these hilly streets alone. He feels that solitude will suit him. He looks down at Avery, at the knee which is patched with a scab like a swatch of buffalo leather. The wound must be itching as it heals, because occasionally Avery rubs it with a palm. He is wearing a t-shirt that has a long split in the seam, and Colt has the peculiar thought that he could give everything he owns to Avery Price – toys, clothes, books, bed, pool, the racers and the BMX, the footballs and the tennis racquets, the school uniform and the school and the excellent report cards and the home-cooked meals, the ribbons and the trophies, the mother and father and brother – and take off running. Unburdened, he would achieve a speed that would first blur him and then stretch him into fine wire-lines of colour which would spool out into invisibility.

Bastian hasn't returned, and Colt lifts his head. His brother is halfway down the street, in the middle of the road, the skateboard cradled to his chest, staring down the hill to where Declan, Syd and Garrick have appeared on their bikes. They are moving up the road slowly, the older boys slightly ahead of the younger one. They have seen Colt and Avery and Bastian, had seen them before being seen. In the gutter Avery straightens, and Colt adjusts his hold on the handlebars. He tells himself there's nothing particular to fear – nothing he doesn't know already, nothing changed from how it was five minutes or even five seconds ago – yet his blood has started to surge. He would call Bastian to him but some instinct tells him that not only would this be summoning his brother to a place of greater danger, but that the child's slightest movement will set the approaching boys running like wolves. So the three of them remain where they are – Avery in the gutter, Colt astride his bike, Bastian marooned in the sunny centre of the road – as their friends cruise uphill, and it's only when they are near enough for Colt to read the fraying stickers on the frame of Garrick's bike that they stop, Syd hanging back, lurking in shadows that aren't there. Garrick's face shows nothing, he doesn't even look at Colt. He frowns at Avery and says, ‘Get up. Grab your bike.'

Avery is not one to be ordered about. ‘Why?'

‘We're going to the shop, that's why. You're coming with us.'

‘. . .  What about Colt and Bastian?'

‘
What about Colt and Bastian? 
' Garrick sing-songs. ‘I'm not talking to them, am I? I'm talking to you. And I'm telling you to get your bike and come with us. You're not staying here with the perv. He can stick his hands down his own pants today.' Then he swings his heavy head to Colt, and Colt sees in his face the razor-cuts of his rage. ‘You and your brother stay here, so daddy can play with
his boys
.'

Colt glances from Garrick to Declan, who is staring at his bike's shell-less bell. The sun becomes a sudden inferno, claws tigerishly at the nape of Colt's neck. He looks downhill to his brother and sees the boy is watching him, his angel-face furrowed, on the verge of saying something which doesn't need to be said. ‘You should go,' Colt tells Avery.

Declan doesn't look up from the exposed innards of the bell when he says, ‘Yeah. Come on, Avery.'

And Avery the street cat decides that at this moment in these circumstances the smart thing to do is to put the skateboard aside and hoist his bike up from the naturestrip, and, with his eyes low and in a voice like something blown along a lane, say, ‘See you later, Colt.'

‘No you won't,' says Garrick. ‘You're never seeing him again. You're our friend, not his.' And turning his glare on Colt he says, ‘You prick. You shouldn't have come here. You should have stayed in the shitheap where you belong.'

He shoves past Colt, driving down on his pedals so his bike heaves away; Avery follows him, swooping widely over the road. Colt watches them go, the world draining speedily through his fingers: he turns to Declan and says, ‘It's not our fault —'

‘Yeah, I know.' Declan spins the pedal into place beneath his foot. ‘But . . . you know.'

He pushes the bike forward, passing Colt without looking at him; and only then remembers his brother, and looks back. Syd stands with his feet planted either side of his bike, mouth set, cheeks ashen. At Declan he shouts defiantly, ‘I don't do what
Garrick
says!'

Declan circles his bike once, twice. ‘Do what
I
say,' he says. ‘Get going.'

He swings the bicycle and powers after his friends; Syd tears air between his teeth and it is a sob of grief and fury. ‘Fuck!' he says, and shoves his bike into motion. Avery and Garrick have already disappeared around the corner; Syd catches his brother and in moments they too round the corner, out of sight.

The street becomes soundless again. The sun blazes brilliantly off cars and the footpath. Bastian comes cautiously closer, hugging the skateboard, his sights fixed on the point where the neighbourhood boys had last been. When they don't reappear, he looks at Colt. ‘What's happening?' he asks. ‘Why is everyone swearing?'

And Colt can't make himself say anything, feeling it even as he stands there, held upright only by strings: the smearing of his outline, the thinning of his colours, and it isn't because he is flying like a javelin – he's never felt heavier, more summoned to the ground – but because something has gripped him and is peeling him into nothing, some sleek, clawed, yellow-eyed hunting thing which can hear the very thoughts in his head.

On Sunday Freya tells her mother, ‘No, I'm not going.'

Elizabeth looks as if her firstborn child has removed a mask which Elizabeth never guessed she'd been wearing: ‘Yes you are,' she says, but Freya replies, ‘No I'm not, so don't tell me again. What's God ever done for me?'

Elizabeth's gaze hardens. ‘You sound like your father.'

‘Why shouldn't I?' Freya laughs. The heart is wicked. ‘He's my father. You chose him.'

Dorrie and Marigold stand goggling, struck by the possibilities that have opened up before their eyes. ‘I'm not going either!' Marigold pipes.

‘You are!' says Elizabeth, and swats her; before marching away she throws Freya a look meant to cut her in two. It only makes Freya feel more certain. In the last few days there's been nothing that hasn't made her feel this way – each dog's bark and crust of bread and twinge of discomfort and hair fallen in her eyes, every sight she's seen and sound she's heard has felt like the imparting of a piece of vital information. She is travelling toward something and although she has no idea what it is she knows in her bones that her path is true. Refusing to go to church would, just weeks ago, have been an act of towering courage: now she's done it casually, and certainly without apology. If she has spent her life rummaging through a castle of countless rooms, she thinks she must have found the vault at the castle's core, because inside it there is nothing but her wits. She has pushed aside Heaven and armed herself with reason, and now she is making a stand. She wants to disappoint her mother, because when the moment comes – and she doesn't know when that will be, but it will be soon, for the wait is never long, the days follow each other in a kind of lurching clockwork – she wants no one to love her, and to love no one. It's important that nothing make her hesitate.

When her family has left the house and she's the only person within its weatherboard walls – although presumably her father is somewhere, in the garage or the bathroom or reading the paper at the kitchen table – she sits cross-legged on the floor and closes her eyes. Outside and inside the house it's a dry, silent morning. She sits in cotton pyjamas, head bowed, her mousey hair pooling in the angles of her elbows. She thinks over the endless life she has lived, how it reached into the lives of her mother and father before she was born, how it reaches back to when Elizabeth and Joe were children and beyond this, too, to before
they
were born. She's lived just nearly thirteen years, but she has been in existence forever. Every twist of history brought her closer to being. And now, today, because of her, there is the weatherboard house; because of her, five children are on their unwilling way to church, bickering, laughing, plotting.
She
is responsible – Rex Jenson had scoffed and told her she was thinking wrong, and she's grateful that he tried, but maybe he is too kind to admit or perhaps even see such a bleak truth. She, however, can accept the facts. She was born, and in being so she chained up her parents; and they are miserable for it, and her siblings pay for the misery. This is
fact
.

If there is to be a new baby born into the family, so be it: the prospect only makes Freya more determined. With a baby, they can start fresh. The new one will never know what its brothers and sisters have known. When they tell stories, years from now, the youngest member of the family will struggle to believe.

She opens her eyes, a touch disappointed to find herself still in pyjamas on the floor. On the walls above her hang Marigold's drawings of foals, cats, big-eyed and wasp-waisted girls. Scattered about are her sisters' playthings, and Dorrie's pillow has flopped off the bed. There's a pattern in the carpet to which Freya has never paid any attention. Red roses on a grey background, and the carpet is scurfy in spots.

‘I am sorry,' she says. ‘I'm sorry, Mum. I'm sorry, Dad.'

Everything will be different, after. She won't be able to retreat into the rooms of the castle which have kept her protected so far. It is daunting, and she is daunted, but she will not waver. Life is long, and this must end.