by Tim Winton
It was only a matter of weeks before you could feel the first troubling currents of resistance from the pews. And it came so quickly, that awful Sunday evening when the string-lipped elders froze Nev out, cast him off, sent him packing with his dirty commo outrage to all that was sacred and true. After which, though the times were a-changing, no mainstream outfit would have him. So followed a period when Doris and Nev ran house churches and drop-in centres that were warm and anarchic and better suited to all the Keelys’ gifts and temperaments, and it felt, in retrospect, like the sweetest time for all four of them. Just a few good and happy years before the biker church rumbled into town and everything went sour.
They were a glamorous, sinister outfit, those Harley-riding holy rollers, and their local chapter only lasted a year, but for a few months Neville Keely was their front man, their bighearted dupe. Revvin Nev, riding high, open throttle, steering Christ’s hog down the highway, imploring easy riders not to blow it. Never knowing what he’d signed up to, how the power was distributed. And it was painful for Keely, recalling how fast his adoration had curdled. All through his boyhood the old man had been a moral, physical giant who only grew in stature. He was Christ’s own Viking, all love and thunder. And then, at the cusp of Keely’s adolescence, once this biker thing took hold, his father suddenly looked like another goofy old fart on a Triumph spouting peace, love and understanding. It was Keely’s guilty secret, this creeping shame, relieved only by Nev’s complete humiliation when those octane Jesus freaks turfed him out on his arse and began legal proceedings against him. Nev had discovered and then robustly challenged the bikers’ impervious conviction that they were British Israelites, and must be, therefore, a whites-only outfit. He’d signed stuff he hadn’t even read, heard arcane wafflings he hadn’t bothered to take in. And he didn’t understand that he was dealing with a corporation as much as a church. He fought on like a man who believed justice would prevail. And they ground him down until he’d mortgaged half the house to pay the legal fees. He never surrendered. But he wore himself into a ruin. Keely remembered him in a cane chair beneath the almond tree, praying, weeping, his beard full of crumbs. Soon afterwards the heart attack carted him off. And they were alone, his mother, his sister and him, in debt, bewildered.
A good man, his father, but not always smart. It was only when he was gone that Christ’s puzzling injunction to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves began to make brutal sense. Indeed it became a rueful family motto. To which Doris and Faith had been trying to return Keely’s attention for several years. And they were right. In both marriage and work he’d become more angry than effective, more impatient than observant and more honest than useful. Wal saw him as a chip off the old block. And maybe Gemma did too. But he was just not that man.
Silent and backlit, the boy stood in the doorway. He was no more substantial than a blur. The minute he ghosted into the frame, filling the space with his peculiar static energy, something about this lack of resolution caused Keely’s hackles to rise, as if some unknowable danger hung in the supercharged air about the boy. Keely snapped upright in the kitchen chair, awake now but unsettled. He’d dozed off right there, sunburnt as a ten-pound Pom. Leaving the door open like that. An open invitation to chaos. A week ago he’d never have been so lax.
But it was only him. If indeed he was awake. And if the blur in the doorway was only a child.
He waited for Kai to speak. But the only sounds pouring into the flat were car horns and wattlebirds. A tiny jet of panic. Sudden irrational fear.
Kai?
Keely leapt to his feet. The suddenness of it set off a thud in his head. He was truly awake. He approached the screen door.
Only a boy. Flushed in the face and barefoot. In the ugly little shorts and stretchy polo shirt that passed for school uniform these days. His helmet of hair, fine and fair, riffled in the breeze.
The boy gazed impassively at a point just past Keely’s hip.
So, said Keely, clawing back some calm. How’s school?
Good.
Well. That’s good.
Nan said you’re comin tonight. For tea.
Oh, said Keely. Am I?
The boy pressed his hand against the insect screen and it puckered his flesh in rigid patterns.
Alright, said Keely like a man hypnotized. What time?
Tea time.
Well, he said, recovering a moment. That seems fair. You want to come in for a sec?
I’ve been here before.
Oh. When?
I was stuck, said Kai.
In here?
No words, said the boy in a strange, flat tone. Things didn’t work. I wasn’t feeling right. Something had to take me.
Keely peered at the kid. None of what he’d said made any sense. And the child’s delivery made it queerer still. Kai looked past him, and then a moment later directly at him, only it felt to Keely as if he were looking straight through him, and it rankled.
Just run that by me again, he said, lowering himself to Kai’s eye level.
But the kid backed away.
Kai?
He was gone. Seconds later Keely heard the clack of the door along the way.
* * *
Gemma’s place was smoky and cluttered – a couch, a big TV, some posters on the wall, a potted ficus by the slider, a midden of washed laundry on the coffee table. The layout was identical to his, but her flat felt homelier, more lived-in.
She looked pretty in her denim skirt and sleeveless top, but she was subdued. On the tiny kitchen table Kai had a book on raptors open at a picture and description of the Brahminy kite.
He haunts that library, said Gemma, setting some chops into a pan.
I was the same, said Keely, taking in the third chair pulled up to the table.
Don’t worry, I remember. Always had your face in a book.
No wonder I never noticed anything, eh?
You want a beer? she said as if she hadn’t heard him.
Nah. But you go ahead.
Can’t, she said. I’m workin tonight.
The boy seemed content to leaf through his book undisturbed. Keely watched Gemma cook the meal briskly, without flourish or fuss. He didn’t quite know where to sit or stand, what the evening was about, how he was placed, but he was glad of the invitation, appreciated the brief sense of propulsion it afforded him, and there was something lovely in the domestic fug of this flat: a woman, a child, food being prepared. This was the life functional people lived and he had to guard against it setting things off in him he couldn’t manage. He was nervous. About her more than anything.
He leant against the bench savouring the curve of her butt in its denim skirt. Impersonating a man at his ease.
When the food was ready Gemma set the plates down unceremoniously and they sat, the three of them, around the scuffed little table. Keely made too much of the lamb chops, the mash and the peas. Gemma suffered his praise and directed him to shut up and eat and so they ate shyly, silent but for the low mumbling TV, the burp of the sauce bottle and the scrape of cutlery. The meal was like something from Blackboy Crescent: the three colours on the plate, the dull sheen of Laminex, the mist of sheep fat in the hot evening air.
Keely couldn’t help but observe Kai. The boy segmented his food with precision, aligned it on the plate by size and category, and chewed gravely, consuming his meal with the unhurried method of a lonely spinster, and it was only when he addressed the wicked finger of fat on his chop that he became, in Keely’s eyes, a child in whom he could see himself, a kid – avid, exultant. He tried not to smile, lest it disrupt the boy’s hermitic concentration. The adenoidal snuffle, the hunched wings of his shoulders. Here, surely, was a kid without friends, a boy who was an island of self-possession. He was peculiar. Compelling in a way.
Keely felt Gemma watching, and wondered if he was paying the boy too much attention. He smiled at her. She gave him a thin grin of uncertainty, maybe regret. Was she having second thoughts about this, him, last night? For
here they were. A woman alone. A friendless child. A man adrift.
You had a sister, said Kai.
Keely saw the boy peering his way, as if emboldened to examine him. Perhaps it was the abruptness of the inquiry or the boy’s use of the past tense that left him stranded.
Tom? Gemma said, prompting. Your sister?
Oh, said Keely. Yeah. I do. I still have a sister. Her name’s Faith. Your nan used to sleep in her room sometimes.
I don’t have a sister, said Kai.
No?
No brother, too.
Still, said Keely. You’ve got your nan, though, eh?
The boy nodded but appeared to find this fact unimpressive. Now it was one discomfiting moment after the other.
The kid scratched himself. Gemma’s irritation flared.
Look at you. Wrigglin around.
Itchy, said Kai. In the underpits.
Cause you’re a dirty sweaty little so-and-so.
So-and-so, said the boy. He seemed to be testing the phrase but Gemma took it as mockery.
Into the shower, she said with force.
What about ice cream?
We’re out.
The boy blinked. Once, twice. It wasn’t incomprehension; it was protest. What a thing they had going, these two. Gemma burred up, the kid needling her blankly.
There’s no damn ice cream, orright? So git.
Kai gazed at Keely a moment as if considering an appeal.
You heard, said Gemma.
The boy retreated to the bathroom. Keely squirmed a little, said nothing.
When the water ran Gemma lit a fag and sat back, cradling an elbow in her spare hand. Smoke coiled towards the open slider, grey, sinuous, reeking, and she squinted a little, following its passage in a manner that seemed studied, the way a smoker can make something out of nothing or, indeed nothing at all from something, with a struck pose and a bit of business. Not that you could blame her. Here he was, surveying her, cataloguing her really, from across the table. And sensing this, why wouldn’t a woman arm herself with a little performance? What could she be thinking in the wake of last night, having gone to bed with the ghost of a boy, a wreck like him, out of raw need or the false safety of nostalgia? She had to be wondering what she’d done and how to extricate herself, having him right here in the building. Dinner was probably a gesture of kindness, a gentle kiss-off, the neighbourly thanks-but-no-thanks.
And then as he watched, Gemma’s face was overtaken by a crooked grin.
Underpits, she said indulgently. Bugger me.
He’s a good kid, Gem.
When he was little he had eyebrowsers, too.
Eyebrowsers. I like that.
Keely relaxed a moment. He set his knife and fork together on the plate and sat back. She tilted her head, amused.
Doris taught us to do that.
Do what?
All that table manners stuff. Elbows off, elbows in. Wait for the cook to start, close ya mouth, knife and fork together at the end. May I please leave the table?
Geez, he said. Sounds a bit uptight.
She had standards, mate. Nothin wrong with that. She knew shit. She taught me how to read, you know. And about girl things. Showed me how to plait me own hair, used to brush it for me morning and night. I used to sit in her lap and get dreamy. She smelt like apples.
So did you, he said. It was the shampoo.
Thought you didn’t remember anythink. About me.
Well. There you are.
It was beautiful, my hair. Inside I was rubbish. But on the outside, them golden plaits, I was a friggin princess. And look at me now.
It was beautiful hair, he said.
Nah, it was just trouble. Honey on a plate.
Oh? he said, as if he didn’t know what she meant.
A bloke pulled a hank of it out once. Whole bloody handful. Spose it’s one way to express your undyin love. Couple of times I nearly cut it off meself anyway. Wished I was a nun. Not that God’s any different. All hard feelins from Him in the end.
Keely had nothing to say to any of this. He was not remotely competent.
Gemma stubbed out her cigarette, raked a hand through her faded hair and gathered up the dishes.
I’ll do these, he said. You see to Kai.
Suit yourself.
Keely filled the sink and peered through the curtain. The window could have been his own. Same sink. Same Terylene curtains. Same view of the war monument and the date palms on the hill. The human things were unfamiliar: the cheesy knick-knacks, the Blu-Tacked posters, the potted cactus on the bench, the happy snaps in Kmart frames. But the bare brick walls, the mean, low ceiling, the shifty parquet floor in the kitchen – they were no different. For some reason it made him smile. A totally separate life being lived in exactly the same space. That was the Mirador for you. Ten floors of architectural uniformity. And within it, all these folks resisting replication. The thought gave him a stab of fondness, for people, for shambling, ordinary folks. Yes, for just a moment he loved his crooked neighbours with his crooked heart.
Then it occurred to him as he rolled suds like lottery balls through his fingers that she was right. After all, what were the odds? Of his being him instead of Gemma. And the pair of them, decades later, finding themselves here in identical containers like the tools of some finicky technician.
As he dried and set everything on the bench behind him, he listened to Gemma and the boy in the bathroom. Then closer, in the bedroom. She had a gruff way with the kid familiar from Keely’s own boyhood but no longer approved of in middle-class circles. Kai’s voice was toneless. And Keely wondered what that was about. He could barely imagine the life the boy had endured. Endless uncertainty. Disorder. Probably worse. It’d be cruel for her, seeing her own childhood repeated like this.
On the bench, stood up in a ghastly quilted frame the colour of smoked salmon, was a photo of Kai as an infant in the arms of a girl Keely could only assume was his mother, a pretty-enough blonde partly hidden by the outsized lenses of her sunglasses. The infant Kai stared at the camera as if trying to decide what was necessary. To smile? To stay still? To keep the peace. Looking at him there, with his silky hair adrift, he could have been Gemma in the sixties.
She was sixteen when she had him, said Gemma.
Keely swung about and almost dropped the frypan. He didn’t like to think how long she’d been there. Reading his thoughts, all his social judgements, his anthropological musings.
Gem, she looks lovely.
She was. Once.
Like you, he said.
Gemma grunted, displeased.
His Nibs wants you to say goodnight.
Oh? Oh. Sure.
Keely didn’t need to be shown the way to the bedroom. But he managed to feel a little lost along the way, for it was suddenly strange territory. Harriet had nieces and nephews but Keely hadn’t been in a kid’s bedroom in a very long time. He felt a snag of panic. And sensed Gemma watching from the doorway, doubtless smiling, finding his awkwardness comical.
Given its mélange of boy-things and woman-things – Motocross posters and high-heeled boots, face creams, action figures, bras, boxer shorts – the small bedroom was orderly if not strictly tidy, and it smelt a whole lot better than his own, cigarette smoke or no. There was a queen-size bed. A couple of boxy side tables. The standard miserly built-in robe.
Kai sat bare-chested beneath a sheet. His Bart Simpson pillow lay alongside Gemma’s flouncy shams. As Keely stood wiping his hands anxiously on the back of his shorts, Gemma came in, snatched a few things from the end of the bed and went through to the bathroom.
No nonsense, she said before closing the door. You hear me?
Keely raised his eyebrows mischievously but the boy did not respond. With the door shut and the shower running, he stood a sheepish moment before sitting at the bed’s edge. Perching. The boy smelt of toothpaste. He had a vee-shaped scar just beneath his collarbone. His skin was creamy as if he’d never been outside without a shirt. Perhaps i
t was the way these days. Safer. But it looked foreign, this ghostly pallor.
The boy shifted beneath his sheet, impatient. Keely didn’t like to get too close in case they touched inadvertently. Kai looked over as if assessing him.
Can you tell a story?
A story.
About eagles.
The boy’s face was plump and round and serious. Yesterday’s sun lingered on his cheeks and along the soft bridge of his nose. To that small degree he was comprehensible to Keely. Just this bit of colour made him an Australian child in a way he recognized.
Um, well. Okay. A story about eagles.
I don’t care if it’s make-up.
Well, I used to know a song.
About eagles?
Keely wasn’t sure about this. He was way out on a drooping stalk here. Hadn’t seen it coming. The sudden memory of the devotional chorus; it had to be about this morning, the memories of Nev and Doris and all those fireside church-camp singalongs.
But I don’t know if I can sing it, he said a little desperately. It’s been a long time.
Orright, said Kai flatly, as if accustomed to build-ups that went nowhere.
And it stung Keely, spurred him into croaky song. He just lumbered into it. Like a man pitching himself off a ledge.
We will fly with wings of eagles, he warbled in a key too high to sustain. We will rise and fly away. We will run and not be weary. We will walk and not be faint.
Okay, said Kai.
That was a song I knew when I was a boy, he said, flushing. It just came to me, that’s all.
But have you got a story? asked Kai as if he were prepared to put this embarrassing interlude behind them.
Right, said Keely. Yes. Not a story so much. But I know one interesting thing about raptors.
Nn?