Surrender (7 page)

When I opened the refrigerator door he fell out as a jumble of angles, like books spilling from a high shelf. At the same time he seemed boneless, floppy as a rag. He somersaulted on the lino and lay still. His color was blue.

I pulled the cloth from his mouth. His eyes were swollen but not shut. I bit my lip, I shook him, tapped his chest and spoke his name. I knelt on the floor beside him and didn’t know what to do. Small cat-sounds of distress piped up from my throat. I leaned very close to him and willed him to move. The wetness on his face had dried and marked his cheeks with snail trails. His hands and feet were perfect, tinged faintly blue. All around him rose the sweet odor of banana.

I dared not call my mother. I sagged on the floor, paralyzed. I did not want to stay, yet I didn’t dare to leave. I sensed that he was dead, but wasn’t sure if death was forever. It seemed best to stay nearby, in case the chance came to make everything changed. So Vernon and I stayed where we were until my father arrived, but no chance came to change.

It was the first time I’d told the story to anyone. The telling left me drained. I’d been gouging holes into the soft earth and now my fingers were filthy. “Vernon never hurt me, not on purpose. Not one day in his life.”

Finnigan had been snapping thorns from the canes and sticking them with spit to his nose: he had a dozen gray horns sprouting now, and no room for any more. He had also been plucking petals and letting them fall, and now knelt in a ring of crimson. He glanced at me with his hyena eyes. “You didn’t mean to hurt him, either. That was just an accident.”

I nodded. I hadn’t meant it. It was a relief, to be understood.

Finnigan chewed his lip, thinking. “Maybe it was an accident that things died in the fire. Maybe I didn’t mean that, either.”

He glanced at me and smiled hopefully, and I smiled in return. We needed each other’s forgiveness, and gave it. “Don’t tell anyone,” I said.

“No. Don’t you tell about the fires.”

“No, I won’t.”

Finnigan knocked the thorns from his nose and wiped it dry of spit. “Anyway,” he said, “you were just a kid. You didn’t know any better. Your mother — it’s her fault. Your mother’s and your father’s. They should have been looking after him, not you.”

Tiny candles of satisfaction flared in me. It is good to have a friend who thinks the same as you. I said, “If you like burning things, there’s other things you could burn.”

He looked at me with interest. “Like what?”

I shrugged. “Lots of people have things. One boy at school — he knocked me over with his bike. It’s a new bike, it’s nice. He doesn’t even deserve it.”

Finnigan chewed a nail, musing on this. “Some things deserve to get burned.”

“Well, I don’t know.” I looked away. Maybe I had said too much. I didn’t want to be involved. “I just think that if you’re brave enough to burn the forest, you’re brave enough to do lots of things.”

He said nothing, looking elsewhere. He was hovering like a hawk above Mulyan, gazing down on a timber town.

Like an animal he kept his own schedule, and later when he vanished he left behind plucked petals and rose thorns. I did my best to sweep them up but my father discovered the damage, of course, and sniffed the rose scent on my palms. I took five cuts without protesting my innocence — I couldn’t prove Finnigan had been in the yard. More than that, I did not care to speak his name aloud.

Surrender and me head back into town. The forest wafts off my clothes and his fur. Decay and pine, thin freezing air. Mulyan is hushed on this cold afternoon, it’s a ghost-town of houses and roads. Behind the walls, though, there’ll be gossip, the tin roofs will be scorching. There’ll be biscuits and tea and enemies made sudden friends because they’re boiling over with gossip, tripping over their tongues.

Have you heard.

I know they found.

I don’t envy.

They’re saying it’s.

They’ll say
There but for the grace of God go I
, as if murder’s something that gets shared around nice and fair and square.

Mulyan is two rows of stores, one facing the other, rising over a hill that’s the crippler of old biddies and the curse of their pie-eyed sons. The shops get tatty over the rise, locked up, empty, fly husks at the glass. These dead stores say,
This town won’t last
. Well, nothing does.

In the lane behind the shops Surrender and me fossick. We’re just a pair of stray cats, spilling rubbish, prowling round. Whatever we find I put in my shirt, for eating or inspecting later. In the hills there’s many places we call home, hollow trees, wombat holes, shanties I’ve built using timber filched from the tray of the carpenter’s truck. Our booty is brought to these hidden places that even wild animals avoid.

Maybe I give the impression we don’t like company, living like this in the hills. Nothing, however, gives me greater pleasure than having a little chat. Some of Mulyan’s finest citizens have met me, including Gabriel’s mother and father. I don’t know who they thought I was, but they didn’t like my tone. I’ve spoken to the one that Gabriel calls Sarah, who took me in her stride. “Nice to meet you,” she actually said, and held out a hand.

Not everyone’s like that. Gabriel’s doctor, for instance, has no sense of humor. I met him once, years ago, when the angel was hardly ill — when, if he’d wanted, he could have shrugged off this dreary long-winded expiring. “That boy’s malingering,” I said, being funny, but the doctor simply went puce.
Laugh
: I nearly popped. My
favorite
person is Constable McIllwraith — any chance I get, I have a word with him. “Howyoudoin Eli?” I’ll say. Everyone in Mulyan likes him now, but there was once a time when they would have stoned him in the square. Back then they said he wasn’t up to the job, and hexed him when his back was turned. Then, I was one of the few friends he had, but he seems to have forgotten that now.

Plenty of others have heard from me. I’m fond of leaning over a sleeper and whispering in his ear, I like snickering and whispering in the space between walls. The ones warming backsides on the hotel’s hearth and the ones bent over schoolbooks and the ones raking leaves from the lawns — most of these have heard from me, although they couldn’t say exactly how. I’m the voice of reason, of conscience, of spooks. For some I’m the voice that’s little by little sending them mad.

None of this matters anyway, this is a waste of time. Surrender’s watching with his kind copper eyes and I jump up, abandoning fun and games. Now the bones are found, the heat will turn up. The spiders will start crawling down the walls for Gabriel. It’s time, I think, to visit the angel. Come, Surrender. Are you pretty, boy?

They’ll want to speak to me, now the bones are found. That poor simpleton McIllwraith, from whom Finnigan derives such amusement; who knows who else. They’ll come on bent knees to my bedside, furrow-faced and
sotto voce
, breaking the news as if it’s news to me. Already I can smell them in the room, the cloistered reek of damp suits and the mud they’ll track in on their shoes. I see them jostle, knocking elbows, imperiling the jug and tray. They’ll want to get close, to see the look on my face; they’ll want, out of fear of the illness, to keep away. “We’ve identified a female,” they’ll say. “Do you recognize the clothes?”

Suddenly, my lungs seize: ursine claws split my ribs, bow my spine like a hook. Gruesome slugs of blood spit across the floor. I gasp for air, fight for it, my heart thuds with terror. Flame rears inside my throat, bells clang inside my ears; my legs jump epileptically, fighting off my fate. Tears race away from my eyes, my bones are dragged apart. I remember, through tortured blackness, Vernon stuffed with cloth.

Sarah comes running, though I’m too blind to see. Against my sweating face she rams the shell of an oxygen mask. The clear clean plastic is instantly spotted with blood. My body takes minutes to calm down, to slow the thud and still the bells. My mind, though, quietens in moments. In my mind I’ve largely accepted death — it’s only my body that hasn’t. It has a right to protest, I suppose: in the remote likelihood of an afterlife, it knows it isn’t invited.

My nightshirt is dotted and Sarah slips it off. While she rustles in the cupboard for a replacement I look down at my chest. My flesh is the color of watery milk; veins crisscross me like circuitry. My forearms are speckled with puncture wounds, peepholes into my being. Where the spike of the drip invades my arm the skin is tender and pink. My stomach falls away emptily. My ribs are like steps, and I wonder to where.

I want all of this finished — I want them come and gone. I want the questions answered and notes taken and then I want them gone. I don’t want them to be here, if and when she comes.

Unless she has already been. “Sarah,” I say, “has anyone come?”

Sarah shakes her head. No.

“You’d tell me if someone had, wouldn’t you?”

She wraps a hand around my own. She wouldn’t lie to me.

The first time I saw Sarah, I was just a boy, and she was just an image in a black-and-white photograph. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, her dress was fit for a party, and on the wooden fence behind her was a curled, sleeping cat. On the flip side of the photograph a few inky words were written.
Sarah, age 12
. There was a date below the words, and I counted on my fingers: Sarah would be grown-up now, unimaginably old.
Sarah
: she had sent me toys in paper-wrapped parcels, money folded inside birthday cards. Gazing at her image, my heart was filled with warmth. I took the photograph to the kitchen and showed it to my mother. “That’s Father’s sister, isn’t it, Mama?”

My mother plucked the photograph from my fingers. Immediately I realized my mistake. Mother dropped the image into the bin, said, “That’s the best place for her.”

I stared at the smug-mouthed bin. I asked, “What did she do wrong?”

Mother pushed the rolling pin with an angry, silent power. I thought she’d chosen not to hear. Unexpectedly she said, “Your dear aunt Sarah didn’t want me in the family. As if they were royalty! As if I got better than I gave.”

I gazed at her, struggling to understand. Something bad, something about families, something that hurt my mother’s feelings. With a child’s dumb loyalty, I was indignant on her behalf. Yet I could not shake the suspicion that
Sarah
meant good things to me. “She used to send me presents, didn’t she? A car, and other things.”

A corner of my mother’s mouth twisted tight. She ceased crushing the pastry and looked down at me. “Junk,” she said. “Cheap things that always broke. I told her that we did not need her charity.”

I looked at the floor. A worm of pastry had fallen there — in a moment my mother would tread on it. I wanted to say that I rather liked both junk and charity. Instead I put Sarah on a shelf in my mind and shut a glass door over her. She stayed there, ponytailed, perfect: years would pass before I spoke her name again. When I became ill, I begged for her.

The drug is making me woozy. My fingers flutter under Sarah’s hand. “I’m frightened,” I say.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

She smoothes hair away from my face. “Sleep now. You’ll feel better.”

I want to believe her; but I’m not safe. My heart is wrung by memories. My mother and father argued on the day I found the photograph. They argued in knifelike whispers, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. I, the cause of the trouble, had my possessions rummaged through. Trinkets and tidbits I’d amassed were piled into the rubbish.

I shiver under swords of fear. “I don’t want my parents here. Don’t let them in the room.”

“I won’t, Gabriel.”

“They have a key —”

“I know. But I’m here. I’ll keep them away. Now sleep.”

“All right,” I say, “I will,” and she leaves. But nothing brings me peace anymore.

There was no telling what he would do, or when. I was not so bold as to think I had any influence over him, that he was in any way under my control. I felt sorry for the town, which went about its business in its usual dozy way. The people had relegated the bush fire to history. To them, the word
arsonist
signified someone who, having loosed his havoc on our hills, had taken his reptilian pleasures elsewhere.