Slights (13 page)

  "I saw Gramps dropped in a hole in the ground," Peter muttered in my ear. "I had hamburgers, and fish and chips and Chinese. I got to stay in a hotel and watch TV all night. I got cups of tea with three sugars. I got to go in Uncle Mike's car and he told me jokes. I got to have a sip of Daddy's beer. I got to get some new clothes and I still haven't eaten all the lollies I got given."

  "Lucky you," I said. I would never tell him what I had done over the three days, no matter how he begged me.

  That night we had one of our nice evenings, where everyone wanted to cheer everyone else up. I did my doggy impersonation, woofing, growling, pretending to eat dog food. I didn't mention how I had seen Nadine in this position not forty-eight hours earlier.

  Peter told jokes; he was always very good at that. He loved to act the part if the words were there for him, and he made us all laugh with his clever mimicry.

  Mum and Dad told the funny family stories. When Peter was five and he wanted to be a fireman, so he built a fire and even lit it and when everyone came to look he put it out by hosing it with wee. And when I was only six months old and loved the nurse who came to help Mum. I loved her giant nose. I kept grabbing hold and not letting go.

  "And it was such a huge nose," Mum said, "that no one ever dared mention it."

  "It was huge!" said Dad.

  And the time Mum and Dad had gone to the policeman's party and both got silly and on the way home they were singing to each other and they got arrested! They got taken to the police station Dad worked at!

  "And the reason silly old McCarthy didn't recognise me, apart from the fact that he was too blind to be on the street anyway, only there because everyone else was at the party, was cos I was dressed as Jack the Ripper," Dad said.

  I loved that night. And they told the story of my name. It was a good story.

  "Little Stevie," Mum said. "Never had another name, have you?"

  "No, Mum."

  "Because your Mum believed all the superstitious fools that you were going to be a boy. No doubt about it," said Dad.

  "No doubt about it," said Mum.

"But you're not a boy."

"No, you're not."

  "But the whole time you were in your Mummy's tummy we wanted to talk to you."

  "We did it for Peter, too. Little Pete."

  "We talked to both of you. Morning, little Stevie," we'd say. And we asked your opinion on things – you chose the wallpaper in the lounge room, by the way – when you were still in Mummy's tummy."

  "And by the time you were born…"

  "And you were a girl, not a boy…"

  "You were already Steve to us."

  "Why didn't you just call me Stephen?" I said.

  "People didn't do that then," Mum said.

  That was the end of the story about me.

at twenty-one

Dougie Page told me his findings two months before my 21st birthday. He said, "You're going to be pleased with this news."

  "What's that?" It'd been so long, I barely remembered asking him to find out who the house had originally belonged to. The bone pile was building up.

  "Well, ownership doesn't leave the Searle Family. The place is a hundred years old. Your great-great grandfather built it as a testament to family and God's love."

  "Precisely those words?" I didn't like his mocking tone.

  "Ooh, yeah. Made the news and all. Seems he used a bit of ground not up for grabs. Somewhere no one else considered building."

  "Some sort of burial ground?"

  He laughed. "You could say that. Nothing quite so romantic, though."

He paused, wanting me to beg him.

  "I'm not paying you by the hour, you know," I said.

  "You're not paying me at all. It was a dumping ground. A tip. White settlers found it that way, all shellfish and bones, and used it until Old Daddy Searle thought he'd cover it with dirt and build on top of it. Sorry to disappoint you. I know it's not the answer you were looking for. You were looking for some kind of romance, some kind of message."

  He stayed for a while, and we drank beer. He asked me about Dad, was curious about what sort of father he'd been.

  "He was the best father anyone ever had," I said. "The only thing that makes me angry is that he left without saying goodbye. He went off and died, and I don't know why. I don't even know what happened. There's a great mystery about it, and you'd think I'd be able to figure it out, but I can't."

  He said, "You haven't got the resources, Steve. That's all it is. Do you want me to look into it for you? I can do that. Expenses only, what'd'ya say?"

  What could I say? I took his offer.

  I wrote Fuck you in invisible ink on the thank you note I sent him. What makes him think he knew what I was hoping for?

  What the news meant about my backyard bones, I wasn't sure. There could have been visitors, couldn't there? People sleeping over and leaving bones behind?

  Knowing this ground had always been ours made me more determined to uncover the secrets of the back yard, so when Samantha appeared at my door wanting to move in, it seemed like very bad timing. I couldn't dig if she was there, and I'd have to keep my finds hidden in the shed. Samantha came to our school in Year 9, the only new girl that year. Everyone liked her. She had messy hair when everyone else was fly-free. Her skirt was centimetres shorter than everyone else's, sparking a craze which froze our bums all winter.

  Of everyone, she picked me. At first because I was the one who had a spare seat next to me, then because she liked all the things I said in class. We started a comic book together; she was an excellent drawer, and I wrote the jokes.

  Peter was in Year 11, then, one of the big guys. Samantha thought he was pretty cool; I had to tell her otherwise. Peter started hanging around with us, and his mates, too, and suddenly I was popular, because I hung out with Year 11 guys. Next year they would be Year 12 guys. Samantha and I made good jokes together, and she helped me put make-up on, though it brought me out in blotches, and she laughed when I was funny so the guys did too.

  In class we always sat together unless we were separated, and even then we made jokes across the room. Other people wanted to sit next to me and I always turned them down.

  I felt part of the world for the first time. And when we had our first fight, that clinched it. Girls came up to me wanting to know what she'd done and I told them, but I didn't go all out. I'd seen it a hundred times; you fight, you bitch, you get back together. If you bitched a lot, your friendship was damaged. If you only bitched about the fight, nothing was hurt.

  I think she might have told a few of my secrets. People had forgotten how my dad died; while most of them had been at primary school with me, it was a kids' memory. High school memory said I only had a Mum, but they didn't know why.

  Samantha told them what had happened. I don't know why they thought they could be cruel about it; it had nothing to do with me. They called me "bullet-catcher", then "BC", for the rest of high school.

  Samantha and I made up after every fight. I don't remember what a single one was about; they seemed to occur like a cyclone, a whirling mass which sucked me in and threw me out naked and bruised. I was not good at fighting like this; a good hard punch-up did it for me. Grudges and slights seemed foolish and dull. She was a good friend to have, though; always had great parties, I heard. Her mother threw her a surprise party once, invited everyone from school. I was very sick so I couldn't go, and that's what did happen. I couldn't stop shaking, vomiting. Mum tucked me into her bed and we read comics until the party was over.

  Things were always fun. Science class was so dull Samantha and I talked all the way through. Ian Pope, who ended up a science teacher himself, tutt tutted like an engine running down.

  Things changed when I left school to work and she went on to finish close to the top. I didn't see her much; I was learning about the real world and she stuck to gossip about school and the assignments she had.

  When she came knocking at my door a month before my twenty-first birthday, I hadn't seen her in three years. Not since Mum died.

  She wanted to stay for a while, because her boyfriend Murray kicked her out and she couldn't stand to live with her mum. Her brother Perry was there, the loser. Her sister Meredith was respectable, like Peter. Meredith was a lawyer, lived on her own and, so Samantha and I said, paid men to fuck her.

  We had a great few weeks living together. She didn't care about the mess and the place got worse.

  The first weekend after Samantha moved in, I had plans. We'd get up early and go shopping together, buy household things, because she knew about that sort of stuff. We'd buy sandwiches and beers and have lunch on the front porch where everyone could see us. Then we'd do something else. The pile of shit out the front; we'd ignore it.

  But the fucking bitch wouldn't get up till after one. I had to eat left-over pizza.

  "Time to get up, Samantha," I said one Saturday. It was 8.30 in the morning, a good sleep in. I was sick of waiting for her.

  "Fuck off, Steve," she said, so I left her a bit longer. Ten o'clock I tried again, and eleven. At twelve I said
Fuck it
, and went out by myself. She was up when I got home at 1.30.

  "Let's get one thing straight. I don't get woken up unless there's an important phone call, and it better be life or death," she said.

  "Well, I won't be keeping quiet in my own house just because your sleep patterns are fucked."

  "Yeah, well, just see if you can keep it down a bit, all right? Save the shouting for the afternoon."

  "Morning's the best time for shouting," I said. Fucked if I was going to change my habits for her.

  Peter came round to visit three times while she was there, without Maria. He even ignored the fact that he hates this house. We sat around the kitchen table and laughed at old times. Sometimes it was things I hadn't been involved with; things I didn't remember hearing about.

  So we had a good time, though she could have been more discriminating with her friends. I have never seen a more appalling bunch. She had them over for dinner, eight plus Samantha and me, then another showed up and took my place! I was left in the kitchen eating leftovers. I did some cooking as well; added spice to this and salt to that. Quite an imaginative cook.

  "She lives here," I heard Samantha say. I can always rely on her to stick up for me.

  Sometimes Samantha and I didn't flush after a shit. We farted all the time. We ate takeaway. We only had the two of us.

  Then, after a month, right in the middle of a great midnight horror movie (I don't remember which) she said, "Look, Steve, I can't stay here any more. It's been great, but I really have to get back to some kind of normal life. I'm twenty-one years old."

  So was I, as of midnight.

  "You probably want to get back to normal too," she said.

  I shrugged. "Yeah," I said. "Where are you going to live?"

  "Murray said he forgave me for fucking that guy. Isn't that great?"

  "Yeah, great," I said. I didn't know what to do. We had been living the most normal life I'd ever lived over the last month.

  I cleaned out Samantha's stinky room and found an empty diary of hers, no message for me.

  I stashed it with my other precious things.

  I stood by the house. I looked around me. What was it about this place that Dad had loved so much? Why did he care if we left?

  I called Lee. He hadn't been over while Samantha was there. I think she scared him. We went out dancing, and we drank a lot as well. He always liked me to keep him supplied with a bit of dope; said it benefited both of us.

  I got a bit carried away on the dance floor; span him round and round and round then let go. He went flying into the wall, I crashed into a table full of drinks.

  In the process I gashed the back of my hand, a most impressive blood bath. Lee panicked when he saw it splattered on his own clothes.

  "It's not your blood," I said. "You're not even hurt." He shrugged. He was hoping for an injury to justify his terror. He looked at me as if I was crazy, and he said, "I'll find my own way home."

  Pathetic.

My Mum would never have forgotten my twentyfirst birthday. Every year she'd have a huge cake, even when it was just the two of us. We'd play music loud and I'd run about, and it always felt like there were plenty of people there. That's what should have happened.

  With Samantha gone, and Lee mad at me, and Mum dead, and Peter too busy to see me, this is what did happen:

  Pills. Peter found me. It's so crazy, the way a floppy body can kill you. Take the pills, slip into a coma, your head drops. Your air is cut off. If you vomit you die on that, or you die because you can't get any air. Or you fall down the stairs and break your leg.

• • •

  I awoke in the room, my limbs heavy. The clicking was louder this time. Crickets in summer, the hoardings at a home game.

  Peter's was the first face I saw; he smoked, blowing the smoke into the air, never taking his eyes off me.

  "Help me, Peter. Find me." Clinging to him was Darren, still there. It was very smoky. Everyone smoked, all the faces I knew and didn't know. I was being smoked, mummified while I was still alive.

  Some guy with a pipe,
puff puff
, keeping it alight while I got drunk with my detective.

  I couldn't breathe, his smoke was noxious.

  And a woman with her hair in a bun so tight she… the woman from the theatre. How did she even remember me?

  The room was crushed with people, click click and the smell of them. I looked for Samantha in the dark room, but she wasn't there. I meant nothing to her, then; I had no effect on her life.