by Tim Winton
You know what.
What happened tonight?
Five minutes, Tom. It won’t kill ya.
Why?
Old times’ sake.
Why now?
Cause we can. And I got the car, Tommy. I don’t care what that little shit Stewie says. I got the car. I can drive where I like. C’mon.
The skater boys flipped their boards warily, waiting for the old folks to get out or drive away. With one of them in the front and the other in the back Keely knew they probably looked dodgy. He wheeled the car around and a minute later they were on the four-lane east.
I remember this, said Gemma. I remember when it was a limestone track.
Keely said nothing. He recalled it well enough. Wished she would shut up.
When he pulled into the old street he felt uneasy. Why couldn’t he have tooled along the river, somewhere neutral? He hadn’t been back in thirty-five years; he wasn’t sure he wanted to do this tonight. Maybe another day – alone, on foot, in daylight. But he was here now. And he could smell wild oats and lupins from the empty lot on the corner. He remembered this, the smell and the patch of dirt, from all those long treks to school. He thought of bikes with banana seats, boys in desert boots, hot tar.
In the back Gemma twisted and gasped.
Christ, she muttered. They’ve changed the name. Grasstree Crescent.
Grasstree? he said as evenly as he could manage.
I’ll bet it’s to keep the Abos happy.
Keely let it go. But he felt the twinge of loss, despite himself. He eased down the hill in first, struggling to get his bearings. The road was the same; he remembered when this too had been limestone. The crescent curved down towards the swamp, so strange and familiar. But few of the old places were there anymore. The modest uniformity of the original neighbourhood was gone and with it the sense of egalitarian plainness, the peculiar comprehensibility it once had. The quarter-acre blocks had been subdivided, the small brick-veneer bungalows replaced by two-storey triplexes pressed together without eaves or verandahs. On nearly every roof sat an air-conditioner and a satellite dish. Where there had been picket fences, high brick walls. No families out on porches watching TV, no cars sprawled across front yards, no lumpy aprons of buffalo grass.
Neither he nor Gemma spoke until they reached the swamp, now a recreation precinct of bicycle paths, pine-log gazebos and mown lawns under floodlights.
Fuck, she said.
Yeah.
Go back, she said. Chuck a u-ey.
A little dazed, Keely swung about and headed uphill at a crawl. Number 14 was gone. He idled out the front of a shrunken Tuscan villa behind whose wrought-iron gates stood a Chinese 4x4.
I don’t care about ours, she said. But I wanted yours to still be there.
Well. It isn’t.
A sensor light came on. He pulled away, heard her counting houses. But in the end they didn’t need to count. For there it was, unmistakeable.
Wouldn’t it rip ya? she said quietly.
The old Buck place had every light on, curtains askew, music pounding from open windows. On the parched front lawn a slew of vehicles, some on blocks. A dog flew out, flashing its teeth. From the porch a woman called it back with a foul stream of imprecations.
That’ll be why they changed the name, said Gemma. So more boongs could move in.
Stop it, he said, pulling away.
I wish we hadn’t come.
Well, we did.
It’s all different.
No, he said with pleasure. Your place is still the same.
Fuck you, she said lighting up a fag. Go fuck yourself.
He drove homeward in the stormy silence and as the lights of the container terminal rose before them he heard her weeping in the back.
Instead of settling for budget-brand muesli, Keely sat in Bub’s and ordered his morning usual. While he was waiting he fired up the newly charged laptop for a casual look at what needed doing. And a single glance was sufficient. He slapped the thing shut with so much force a woman cried out at the next table and all he could offer was a grimace of apology.
Keely thought he’d seen porn but he’d never encountered anything quite like this before. When breakfast came he ate it blinking dumbly at the battered Acer which had suddenly taken on a radioactive aura. Between that and the nervous glances from the poor woman alongside him, he wasn’t inclined to linger and the outing was an expensive washout.
Once he got the machine home he found the software was registered to Carly M. Fairlight, but he doubted she was the gonzo-porn enthusiast. He spent the rest of the day dumping files and running clean-up programs. He wondered about Gemma’s mood last night, whether she’d stumbled on this cache – or worse, found Kai with it. That was an ugly thought. But no. If she’d seen that shit she’d have pitched the thing off the tenth floor already, wouldn’t she? Maybe he was a resentful puritan – wasn’t that how the shock-jocks portrayed him? But that stuff was foul. He wished he hadn’t seen it.
Eventually he got the computer running smoothly, and for good measure found he could pirate other folks’ wireless networks right here in the building, and by way of exorcism or whatever sacrament applied to soiled machines, he wiped it down, inside and out, with antibacterial handwash.
In the afternoon he left the front door open but nobody knocked. He made a fiery and extremely cheap vegetarian curry and ate it at dusk in a virtuous sweat.
At eight the phone rang. He was expecting his sister or his mother, but it was Gemma. She was subdued; she sounded hoarse. Kai was being difficult. She had a shift to do. Would he mind coming over for an hour?
He met her on the gallery. She was dressed for work, made up a little too vividly. She looked wretched and spent.
You could have come by, he said.
I didn’t think I should, she murmured shakily.
It’s fine, Gem.
I’m just a stupid bitch.
What did he do, that bloke? What’d he say to you?
Somethin nasty. Somethin a bloke’ll say.
You won’t tell me?
She shook her head.
Last night.
It doesn’t matter.
I just needed somethin nice, she said. Somewhere I could remember bein happy.
It took some absorbing. After everything she’d told him, everything he’d seen for himself, Blackboy Crescent was where she’d been happiest? He didn’t say anything. She looked too tired.
Just sit with him, will you, Tom? Don’t make him do anythin. Just be there.
He nodded. She gathered herself, pecked him on the cheek and went.
Inside 1010 the TV was off but the flat was a mess. Kai was in bed flipping through the raptor book. As if his being difficult were directed at Gemma alone. Keely greeted him but the boy did not respond. There were blue pools like bruises beneath his eyes. Keely resisted the urge to natter brightly at the kid. He did only what Gemma had asked, pushed her pillows against the wall and sat with him.
The boy closed the book and sank deeper. He tilted the thing up on his chest and surveyed the cover. It was a close-up image of an eagle’s eye – black-rimmed, stark, the iris a web of yellow-bronze – and Kai wasn’t merely glancing at it but peering deeply, chewing his lips, wheezing in fervent concentration. Keely tried not to stare but it was difficult. The kid seemed to mesmerize himself, sink into the interlacing layers of the bird’s iris.
Eventually the boy’s eyelids began to droop and flutter. He seemed to struggle against sleep as if stalked by it, and this skirmish went on for a minute or so, until the book began to waver. At the last moment, as if to save himself from falling, the boy reached aside and took Keely’s arm. And was gone. Keely caught the book with his spare hand. Saw him down. Tried not to hold his breath. Watched him sleep.
He woke on the floor in his own place with the slider open to the baking wind and his legs stippled with mosquito bites. His face hurt, his mouth was woolly, but he didn’t remember drinking anything. In the ba
throom mirror he saw what amounted to a shiner. He had no memory of hurting himself. But there was still an eerie sparkle behind his eyes. A sequin fizz. It took a full minute to unscramble the label on the toothpaste.
In the café Bub raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Keely drank one coffee only and paid with shrapnel. He was turning to leave when Bub sent down a double-shot on the house. He waved in sheepish gratitude and tried to savour it. But he thought of the boy, his dry little hand on his arm. And the bird’s yellow eye. And the troubling fact of the wide-open door.
After a few moments Bub emerged from the kitchen and slid a tall glass of apple juice onto the table.
Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel’s cookie.
I am that. And thanks.
Tom, said Bub, smiling at the black eye, you’re not the fighting type.
You think?
The kitchen bell chimed. Bub clapped him on the shoulder and headed back.
They gave him thirty bucks for the iPod and ninety for his laptop. He suspected that without the shiner he’d have gotten more, but he was content enough afterwards, trolling op-shops with cash in his pocket, looking for something to please the boy. He started at Save the Children, moved on to Oxfam, then the Vinnies. But they had nothing he was after. Then at the last stop, closest to home, he scored. He walked out of the Good Sammies with a perfectly serviceable game of Scrabble and change from a fiver.
At home, tucked into the grille of his security door, was a fair pencil rendering of a mudlark. He pulled it out and went on to Gemma’s. At his knock he saw the tiny moon of the peephole flash a second. She pulled the door back on its chain and peered out warily.
Just me, he said.
Christ, what happened?
I walked into a cliché, he muttered.
I’m serious.
It’s nothing. Really. And look, he said, holding up the battered box.
The whole Scrabble business was a mystery to Keely. Kai had the Nintendo, after all, and kids were supposedly addicted zombies after only a day or two’s feverish toggling, but although the boy seemed to enjoy murdering thugs and aliens, and often shouted disconcertingly at certain leering villains, the excitement wore off after the first mad binge. He never completely forsook Super Mario, but tended to lose energy after half an hour or so and drift to the laptop whose charm lay in the keyboard as much as the screen. As far as Keely could tell, Gemma had never played Scrabble with him. Perhaps he’d seen something on TV – he didn’t say and Gemma couldn’t recall, didn’t find the question nearly as intriguing as Keely did. The boy was in his first year of school and yet he could already read extremely well and write after a fashion. Keely wondered who’d taught him. It didn’t seem possible he could have absorbed it all himself. He got simple words arse-about, and certain letters as well. It was strange to watch him hunched at the computer, wheezing slightly, experimenting – building words with cautious pecks at the keys, consciously or inadvertently creating lists that plunged down the screen like ratlines.
Keely was excited at the prospect of teaching Kai to play, but he wondered how the kid would fare. It wasn’t the raciest board game invented. But from the outset Kai seemed less interested in scores than in the words themselves. Games might begin in a spirit of boyish competition, but Kai seemed to fall into a trance, rousing now and then in a momentary shiver of recognition. Keely imagined the syllables emerging from chaos. He recalled his own childhood, how words hid as if aching to be found, transformed by his gaze, reaching out to meet him. He was fascinated by the way the boy handled the tiles, how he turned them over in his hands, running the tips of his thumbs across their faces as if tempted to slip them into his mouth like milky chocolates. His fingers twitched, tantalized, over the board, as he breathed upon his row of letters on their little pine plinth.
Kai was an exacting playing partner. He did not like tiles to fall out of alignment on the board. And there was no point making conversation or daggy jokes between moves because he’d stiff you. The only time he tolerated noise was during the initial shaking and shuffling of pieces in the box lid before the game commenced. Then he seemed like any other kid. He liked to rifle through the tiles like a miser with his loot – Scrooge McDuck in the vault – but once he settled down it was all sober concentration. He did not enjoy the letter Q. And blanks, letters that were mutable, seemed to cause him anxiety; they had to be marked laboriously with a pencil before he could accept them as real, and even then they troubled him, as if there were something untrustworthy about their nature. But defeat didn’t bother him. And thankfully he was bored by the tedious endgame. Like Keely, he had no interest in plugging holes with two-letter words or suffixes, scrounging points in endless rounds of lexical puttying. Once the rich pickings were gone he began to fidget and Keely was only too happy to concede a comradely draw and start afresh.
They played afternoons and evenings all week; it became a routine. And apart from his morning swim this was soon the thing Keely most looked forward to. Something to digest, really, the knowledge that a game of Scrabble with a six-year-old had become the highlight of his day. But there was weird pleasure in it, something he’d been missing for longer than he cared to think.
Often as not Kai came straight from school bearing a new sketch – a wattlebird, a kingfisher, a heron – and Keely sent him home for his fruit and biscuits and lime cordial before he returned with the Scrabble box pressed to his chest. Around five Gemma came by to dragoon the boy into showering and Keely followed them up the gallery to 1010 where she’d already have the makings for dinner on the bench. Evenings settled into a pattern of school notes fixed to the fridge door, and reading before bedtime. Their conversation became desultory, as if the adults were partners in a faded marriage. It amused him, and he was grateful for it, but often he yearned for more. Not high conversation, nothing taxing. But he would have liked to know things, to press her for details, facts about her life and Kai’s. He wondered about her sister, Baby. There were so many gaps, years and relationships, disasters and hurts he was left to infer. And there were moments, too, when Gemma’s physical proximity caused him pangs.
Even so he felt that his life was different, that it had finally tilted towards something coherent. The headaches seemed more bearable. He could suffer Gemma’s diffidence because of Kai. At day’s end, he and the boy played their games of Scrabble and Super Mario, talked birds and habitat, rifled through the dictionary, googled odd facts in a long and pleasurable postponement of bedtime. The nightly challenge was to present the kid a story, like a cat dragging in a rodent. As Keely perched at the bedside, waiting for any flicker of inspiration, the boy noted the progress of his shiner as the contusion flared, morphed, and began, thankfully, to fade. It was kind of charming – flattering, really – having him catalogue every change of colour.
You like this shiner, he said to Kai.
No, said the boy. Just makin it go away.
* * *
The kid had tropes and sayings, things that stuck in Keely’s head.
At the start of a game: Seven tiles, he said, almost chanting. Seven letters. Like seven days. 7-Eleven. 24/7. Always seven. Gotta be seven.
Then at bedtime: Wattlebirds. They eat spiders. If there’s too much spiders there’s too much poison. In the world.
When Keely’s jokes wore thin: No, Tom. No falling.
At dusk: Look. The lighthouse. Counting the night.
During an episode of Friends: Eagles. They’re killers. Do they get to go to Heaven?
In Keely’s flat: Really, but. Where do words come from?
* * *
At home alone at night, he sat up late resisting all temptation, exhausted but unable to rest his mind. He tried re-reading Catch-22 and marvelled that he’d found it so mordantly funny in his youth. Now it was too distressing. He wanted to shout at the novelist: no more, no fooling, no falling.
Mostly, though, he felt okay, more or less functional. Just bubbling with thoughts that kept him
from sleep, watching the Parker Point lighthouse measure out the darkness.
He thought a lot about Kai. Especially the way he resisted sleep. As if it were something to fear, not a release. Except for those final moments, the slipping away, the kid avoided physical contact. Keely had to police himself, refrain from tousling the kid’s hair or shoving him playfully in passing. As a boy he’d loved being monstered by Nev, rolled on the floor in a headlock, tickled until he was blue. He liked to be overwhelmed by him and then have at him with camel bites and knee jabs – just to feel and make himself felt in return. But Kai could find space where there seemed to be none; he could sidestep any well-meaning pat or squeeze, as if his body anticipated yours, as if he were monitoring your every movement.
The boy retreated into silences, reveries, fugues. During which he was impassive, unreachable. He could blink you away, delete you from his presence, and these silent lockouts sent Gemma into furies. There was so much Keely didn’t understand. It was as if he’d stumbled into a play halfway through the show. And he wondered if he’d ever catch up.
But he adjusted to some things rapidly, even if he didn’t know what they signified. Like the bedtime ritual, which he came to need as much as the boy. There was something about that period of potent, dreamy calm between the pair of them, the intimacy of the whispered story and the long silences that ensued. The way Kai drifted beside him in the shafted gloom, unmoored from the day and his defended self. Every night came that moment of panic before surrender when the boy made solid contact, seizing him, the arm shooting out like a baby’s startle reflex, the hand gripping Keely’s shirt as if he were steadying himself before finally letting go.
I knew you, said Kai one night. I knew you before you had a face.
I don’t understand, he murmured. What do you mean?
But the boy was silent, perhaps asleep already, and Keely was left to turn it over in his mind, the thought that Kai had been waiting for him, lying alone in the flat night after night while Gemma worked, waiting for someone to keep him safe. The idea was intoxicating. It made a man feel enormous and substantial. That he might be necessary.