Gravity (6 page)

‘We did. Especially Simon.'

‘Maybe so, but you coped.'

‘Not really. Not well, anyway. Simon punched Dad in the jaw while we were trying to get him under the shower.'

The sink sucked as the last of the dishwater drained. Mum watched it go.

‘Simon wouldn't shower and then he pooped his pants one night at the pub and Emma Terry volunteered to wash him. She's been washing him ever since.'

‘It's not Emma's job,' Mum growled.

‘Yes but Simon wouldn't let me or Dad . . .'

‘It's
not
Emma's job.'

‘Somebody had to do it.'

Mum razed me with her eyes. She shoved past into her room, hurling the door against its frame. She shouted something at the wall.

I'd managed to crack the eggshell around her heart again. I felt like an oaf. I stood there with my pulse ticking in my fingers and I wanted to drive. Jump in the Suba and continue my search for whatever it was that I was looking for. Some peace. Some direction. A moment's grace.

Bully had been right – I had run from Splitters Creek and my escape had been a success in many ways.

Out of the frying pan.

I slumped onto the couch and waited. I waited for Mum to come back out. I waited for my head to make sense of the moment, but the sense never came. I sat there with my thoughts floating, pedalling at the air until sleep claimed me.

Mum dropped her keys near my head as she left for work the next morning. I swallowed awkwardly, coughed and sat up as she tugged the door closed behind her.

‘Thanks,' I shouted, but there was no reply.

It was a ten-minute walk from Mum's flat to work. I think the weirdest thing about my first day was seeing Harry arrive. He had a girlfriend. She dropped him at the door in her little red Laser with the matching P plates and Harry kissed her before he got out. She was a well-packed unit, too.

You can't pick them.

I worked with Debbie in the paint department. She made sure I had plenty of work to do and had me stand beside her while she was mixing paint. She was patient with me and professional when there were customers about but when the coast was clear, another Debbie appeared. She brushed against me and touched my arm when she talked. She used my name so many times it started to make me cringe.

I sat with Harry in the brew room at lunch.

‘Debbie's amazing,' I said.

‘She's a witch. She's pretty full of herself,' he said, without a smile.

I chuckled. ‘How old do you reckon she is?'

‘I've never asked. She could be twenty-five or so. Maybe younger. She has a dog. She drives a red MX5. She goes to the gym. She doesn't smoke. She and Tony have something funky going on. Oh, and she's married.'

‘Married?'

He nodded and bit into his second shop-bought ham and cheese sandwich.

You wouldn't know, I thought. The gym fitted – she was toned and tanned. The MX5 made sense – flirtatious car. Dog? I could imagine her with something big and fluffy like a sheepdog. And not smoking was another sign of intelligence. But married?

I watched her like a security camera that afternoon. I thought that maybe she wasn't aware that she was flirting. Like that time when Jai Murray was going out with Karen Hegarty – years after Karen and I were an item – and she'd had a few too many vodkas and started flirting with me flat-out. The next thing I knew, Jai Murray's shoving me in the shoulder and accusing me of hitting onto his girlfriend.

Right.

Karen reckoned she didn't know she was flirting. She'd rubbed herself against me more than when we were going out.

Debbie was the same. I was up the ladder and she was handing cans of paint up to me and I was stacking them on the higher shelves. The cans were awkward for her and she
took to grabbing my leg with one hand to steady herself before heaving the can in my direction. She started grabbing me at the ankle but when I got lower on the ladder, she got higher. She was grabbing me above the knee. That, combined with the hot little grunts of exertion as she lifted each can, turned the shifting of paint into an erotic experience.

Debbie knew what was going on.

And when she winked and waved goodbye with one little finger that night, I felt like I'd become her toy. Sure, I'd helped out with the paint spill, but mopping up a little paint wasn't much of a resume or job interview. Debbie must have decided that she wanted me to play with, convinced her boss that I was a worthwhile prospect and let the games begin.

I reckoned I could live with that.

‘G'day, Dad, it's Adam,' I said, as the coins rattled into the guts of the payphone.

‘Adam? Adam? Thank God. Are you okay?'

‘I'm fine. Fine.'

‘Are you right to get home? Do you need any money?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know?'

‘I just wanted to let you know that I was okay.'

‘Where are you?'

‘I'm at . . . a mate's flat. I haven't got my own place yet. When I do, I'll send you the address, okay?'

There was silence on the phone. I thought he'd hung up.

‘Dad?'

‘Cappo told me about your little drink-driving stunt in the ute. I couldn't believe you'd do it and then I couldn't
believe you'd run away from that, but you have. I didn't raise you to . . .'

‘I've run out of coins, Dad. Any minute now . . .'

I hung up, then dialled again.

‘Bully?'

‘Adam! Jeez, mate, where are you? Things are going ballistic up here,' Bully said. He was whispering, but his words came out like a growl.

‘I'm in Melbourne. I've found Mum. I've got a job.'

‘Don't tell me this shit, Adam. I don't want to know. Your dad and Mick Fenton bailed me up after work today and Cappo came around after tea last night. You're fucked.'

‘What did you tell them?'

‘What you said to tell them, that you'd gone to Sydney to look at another car.'

‘Brilliant. Thank you. Even if Cappo's looking for me he won't . . .'

‘Brilliant? You piss off in my car and leave me to deal with all your shit?' The whisper had gone. He was growling. ‘I'm supposed to bullshit for you and cover your arse, answer all their fucken questions. Lie. You're a fucken idiot.'

‘I'm sorry, Bullant.'

‘Bullshit! You knew this was going to happen. Too busy thinking about yourself. Feels like you grabbed at my leg to get yourself out of the shit and you're out now but you dragged me in. This is not my fucken battle.'

There was a long silence. I could hear Bullant breathing and the sound of traffic in my uncovered ear.

‘You're right. It's not your battle. I'm sorry.'

There was another long silence.

‘I fixed the ute,' Bully eventually said.

‘Yeah?'

‘Piece of piss, mate. Had to replace the sump. Jai Murray had an old red motor in the shed. He'd been using it for bits. I had to patch the old gasket with a bit of silicone, but she's back on the road again.'

‘You're a genius.'

He scoffed. ‘Yeah, right. When are you coming to pick her up?'

‘I'm not sure, mate. I don't know . . .'

Bully breathed a huge sigh into the mouthpiece. He asked me if I had an address or anything and I told him he'd be the first to know when I did.

‘Yeah, well, keep in touch. I might have to come to Melbourne and drop the ute off. Have you found any good nightclubs?'

I assured him that I hadn't and he was bitterly disappointed.

Maybe my body couldn't take any more sleep-starved nights. Maybe the flat had become peaceful because Mum and I had stopped talking about anything of substance. Built ourselves little cardboard facades to sit behind and seethe.

‘Nice meal, Adam.'

‘Thanks.'

Maybe the bells and the howling trains had become familiar, but I lay down on Mum's couch after dinner on my first day of work, blinked once, and woke in the painted grey of the next dawn draped in a scratchy woollen blanket. It had been a heavy dreamless sleep and Mum's couch could have been stuffed with clouds. In the bathroom mirror, my naked body was creased and imprinted with the texture of fabric. I don't think I'd moved all night.

I blame the good sleep for my behaviour that day.

I got Mum laughing before she left for work. She remembered the time when I was six and climbed onto the roof of the house and couldn't get down. She remembered the time (I think it was the same year) when I let the hand brake off
in the ute and it rolled across the road and took out Hegarty's front tap. I remembered Si and me when we were little. He loved to push me in the stroller at a trot along the gravel driveway. I remembered him feeding me bits of banana and shooing the flies from my face. I remembered, but I didn't mention, how I found out that you should never borrow Simon's stuff. He found one of his football cards under my pillow. He took the scissors from the kitchen drawer and stabbed me in the arm. He told Mum that I'd fallen over. I never told her the truth and I never borrowed anything of Simon's again.

Mum remembered hearing my seven-year-old voice from the kitchen window as I told Bully my secret. The Big Secret. The secret he wasn't to tell Mum or I'd kill him with a knife. The secret of the road-kill wallaby that we'd dragged under the house so that we could collect the bones after it had rotted. Mum said she'd nearly given herself a hernia pulling the carcase down to the creek. I'd always wondered what happened to those bones.

And at work, when Debbie bumped me, I bumped her back. And when she pelted me with a foam sponge, I crept up behind her and stuffed one down the back of her shirt. She had to do a little dance to get it out and I saw the red shoulder strap of her bra but I didn't say a thing, just laughed. Laughed and tingled in my boxer shorts at the thought of where we might end up. Of what the rest of her bra looked like. In a world devoid of affection, Debbie was fast becoming my wellspring. I wanted to hug her in an uncomplicated way and say thanks, but I realised there'd be no uncomplicated hug with Debbie. We didn't have the
shared history that Tori and I had, the pages and pages of straight story with no hidden meanings, innuendo or grand metaphor. A hug with Debbie was a guaranteed mystery flight. Unknown destination.

I was ready for that.

And she was married?

Tony the boss accosted me after my lunch break. I was getting a can from a top shelf for a customer and he stood with his hands on his hips until I'd made it down the ladder and the customer had wandered off to the checkout.

‘I want you in the timber shed, Adam. When Debbie gets back from lunch, can you go and give Harry a hand? You can work there until Peter gets back from leave, okay? About a month or so.'

I didn't get a chance to answer. I thought he must have been watching the security cameras and decided there was too much fun and not enough work going on in the paint department. Maybe Debbie was his domain?

I poked my bottom lip at her when she got back from lunch.

‘What's the matter?'

‘I've been transferred to the timber shed.'

‘What? Who told you that?'

I pointed to Tony's office window.

Her lips wrinkled. With a defiant shake of her head, she flicked her hair over her shoulder and stormed towards the boss's office.

Timber shed? Was that my curse? I travel a lifetime and five hundred kilometres from the mill in Splitters Creek
and end up lugging the bones of dead trees again. Was I a satellite of wood, or was wood a satellite of me? There was a sense of fatality about it all.

I'd helped a customer find a corrugated roof roller before Debbie returned.

Her lips were still wrinkled. ‘Looks like you'll be in the timber shed while Pete's on leave. You should get a mobile phone so I can text you.'

I dropped my shoulders and Debbie pretended to cry.

‘Not to worry,' she said, a little too brightly. ‘At least we'll probably be able to have lunch together now.'

She hugged me stiffly, patted my back, said goodbye and I went to work with Harry the Pansy.

Harry wasn't having a good day, either. The radial saw had packed it in and he had no way to cut customers' orders to length. I found a little old circular saw under the bench, but he shook his head.

‘That thing is so blunt you could ride it bareback across the Great Divide,' he said.

I laughed. ‘So we get a new blade.'

‘No way. Tony is still pissed off at me for all the stuff we used to clean up the paint spill the other day. The man is such a tight-arse that I think he's lost the capacity to poo.'

I smiled and shook my head. ‘Surely . . .'

‘Okay,' Harry said. ‘What was your name again? I'm shocking with names.'

‘Adam Prince.'

‘I'll tell Tony that Mr Prince needs a new blade for
his
saw.'

‘Good idea.'

I served my first customer in the timber shed and poked at the dead radial saw while Harry was gone. The exhaust vent for the motor was crusted with blackened and melted plastic. Not a good sign. On his return, Harry gave me a new bright-blue plastic-coated blade for the saw.

‘Merry Christmas,' he said, and his phone rang. He wrote on a pad, pinning the phone to his ear with his shoulder, then walked to the racks of timber.

I scratched through the drawers behind the counter, found a spanner for the saw and replaced the blade. Just in time. The phone order that Harry had taken was for one hundred and sixteen lengths of hardwood, all at two-point-one metres. There were six two-point-ones in the rack, three of which were badly bowed and only fit for firewood, so we had to cut most of the order from longer pieces.

Harry marked the timber and I docked them with the new-bladed power saw. Well, I docked the first twenty-five, then the little saw started to smoke. I blew the smoke away to begin with but the motor started to squeal and eventually billowed so much smoke that Harry waved for me to stop.

The blade rattled from side to side like a bearing had fainted. Harry swore under his breath.

‘Are there any more saws? We could get one from power tools,' I suggested.

‘Tony will kill me.'

‘Come on.'

He shook his head. ‘There's a chainsaw.'

‘Now you're talking.'

I followed him to the racks of sleepers and big posts.

‘It hardly gets used. We cut things that are too big for the
radial. Or sometimes when we can't be stuffed carting things over to the bench.'

It was a little Stihl, like my friend Cecil at the mill.

I was fourteen when I met Cecil. Mick Fenton had given me a half-hour safety lecture and demonstration then sent me to work docking logs to length before they were rolled on the skids to the breaking-down saw. For me, chainsaws had come to represent responsibility and power. As a fourteen-year-old, it's possible to fall in love with a machine.

The chainsaw at The Hardware House could have been the son of Cecil and it was in good nick. Plenty of fuel and oil and a nice sharp chain.

‘Have you used one of these before?' Harry asked.

‘Once or twice.'

I started the saw and got Harry to stack the lengths of timber so I could cut a few at a time. Our corner of the timber shed rang and clouded with burnt two-stroke.

Harry dusted the end of the last length and shook his head.

‘Amazing,' he said. ‘I can't cut them that neat with the radial. I think we have a new name for you, Mr Prince. From now on you'll be known as Chainsaw. Chainsaw Prince. Where did you learn how to do that?'

I told Harry the story of my former life while we stacked the timber we'd cut into a courtesy trailer. I told him about sleeping uncomfortably on the couch at Mum's place and how my life was very much up in the air at that moment.

‘Do you like woodwork?' he asked.

‘Yeah. Love it,' I replied, without thinking, and realised it was true.

As true as sunshine.

‘You should come over for a drink tonight and check out my shed. Maybe meet Gordon next door. He's an absolute artist with wood. He doesn't just make tables and chairs, he makes works of art. He's a genius. He has these ideas in three dimensions and sets about bringing them into the world. Brilliant. He's been trying to teach me, but I'm a bit slow.'

I could feel myself getting fired up as he talked. For a minute, my head was swimming with feelings of destiny.

Any of my teachers could tell you that I was an average student. Painfully average in maths, science, English and everything else. Except woodwork. Mr Davidson, my year ten woodwork teacher, wrote a report that was a poem of praise for my woodworking skills. A natural, he'd said. More innate ability working timber than his teacher, he'd said. My weekend and holiday job at the mill was working with wood, but it wasn't woodwork. It was shoving around the icy carcases of big manna gums, their skinless flanks blotched with tree-blood where they'd been resting against each other in the stockpile. It was three lengths of four-point-two and the heady mix of two-stroke exhaust and ferment. No dovetail joints and no dowel. No coping saws or burnishing oil.

It was an epiphany. A bookmark moment. It crept up on me in the timber shed at the back of The Hardware House like a swell of orchestral music. I realised my internal compass wasn't pulling me north; it was dragging me inexorably to woodwork. Timber had been my friend; right then I realised it was bigger than that. It was something I could learn. Something tangible that made absolute sense to me.

Harry and I were still raving when work finished that night. He was quick-witted and sophisticated in a way that didn't exist in Splitters Creek. He couldn't have been much older than twenty, but he knew his world – his city life – and I felt like he'd taken me under his wing. I was standing talking to him on the kerb and I realised we were waiting.

‘Am I still invited for a drink?' I asked him.

His face lit up. ‘Sure. Bonnie will be here any minute. Here she is now.'

It was the red Laser with the P plates that dropped Harry at work. She pulled in to the kerb and Harry and I jumped in. Harry kissed her cheek and she wasted no time pointing the car into the traffic and moving off.

‘Bon, this is my mate, Chainsaw.'

She reached her hand behind the seat and I grabbed it in an awkward handshake.

‘Adam,' I said.

She mumbled that it was nice to meet me.

But the pleasure was all mine. She wore a tight-fitting uniform that made no apologies for the way it hugged her body.

She left the main road and began weaving through the suburbs. I was lost after the first intersection but she continued to brake hard at the corners and floor it along the straights until I felt as if I was in a maze. A convoluted otherworld that I could only escape if they let me. I hadn't left a trail of breadcrumbs and that was a risk I took willingly. It was almost dark when she finally slowed and turned in to a driveway. There was an open carport beside the front door
and the house was brown brick. Native plants obscured the front windows and a large gum tree in the middle of the front garden had covered the ground with discarded bark. The front porch light had automatically illuminated when Bonnie parked the car. We just sat there. It was a nice-looking house.

‘Big day?' Harry asked.

Bonnie sighed. ‘Yeah, shit day. You?'

‘Average,' Harry said, and I heard a dog yelp. Yelp, yap, yap.

Bonnie and Harry smiled at each other.

‘Listen to it,' Harry said. ‘Doesn't exactly sound like the hound of the Baskervilles, does he? Let's go, I'm busting.'

They opened their doors and I followed them, past a tall timber fence that held the yapping dog, to the front door. Bonnie opened the door and Harry bolted for the toilet.

I wiped my boots on the doormat thirty-five times. I could hear them talking but I couldn't bring myself to open the security door and go in.

‘Come in!' Bonnie shouted, and held the mesh door open.

I stepped inside and she scurried along the hallway. She'd kicked her work shoes off near the front door. They lay scattered on the entry tiles like roadkill. I slipped my boots off and sniffed them quickly. They smelled like leather to me, but I could smell cheesy feet. I realised the stink was from Bonnie's work shoes and breathed a sigh of relief. It didn't matter that Bonnie's shoes were a bit off, as long as mine stunk less.