The three remaining younger kids jump up and down in front of the sensor until the doors open. They take off.
Tash grabs a towel and tries to wrap it around Mim’s head.
I’m proud of her for moving when I can’t. Can’t move, can’t speak.
Merrick brushes past me and picks up the phone in the kitchen. I hear him talking, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.
The doors burst open again.
This time we scatter. I find a wall to back up against, but it’s the guy who always picks up Mim after her shift. He takes us all in, scoops up Mim like a broken doll and carries her outside, leaving behind dribbles of blood on the floor so bright it doesn’t look real.
Tyres squeal in the car park, and somewhere too far away, an ambulance is coming.
It takes less than two minutes and everything is changed.
We go outside. I’m not sure whose idea it is.
Merrick, Tash and I are standing in a shell-shocked triangle.
‘What just happened?’ Tash says.
What do we do? Start cleaning up? Wait for the ambos? Wait for Macy? Run?
‘Do we wait for the ambos?’ Merrick. ‘Or the police?’
‘I’m kind of on probation.’ Tash.
‘For what?’ Merrick.
She doesn’t answer.
If I speak, my insides might come up. Not just my last meal, but other stuff too: liver, kidneys, intestines, gallbladder, pancreas. Like silly string.
‘We should wait for Macy.’ Tash.
‘Do you think Mim’s okay?’ Merrick.
‘I think she’s pretty far from okay.’ Tash.
Marsellus Wallace, I think.
‘Marsellus Wallace.’ Merrick.
‘What are you on about?’ Tash.
‘Pulp Fiction.’ Merrick.
‘Right. I’d really be quoting Pulp Fiction when I had someone’s brains on my hands.’ She holds them out. They’re shaking. Bloody.
‘Well, you didn’t do anything.’ Merrick.
‘I know.’ Tash.
‘I meant you didn’t do anything wrong, so it doesn’t matter if you’re on probation.’ Merrick.
‘I didn’t do anything.’ Tash. ‘None of us did anything.’
None of us did anything. But what could we have done?
‘What could we have done?’ Merrick.
‘I don’t know. CPR? We should have checked if she was breathing. That guy shouldn’t have moved her. What if her neck was broken? There’s three of us—we should have pulled that crazy guy off her and held him down and, I don’t know, hit him with something. Or something.’
‘We should start cleaning up.’ Merrick.
‘We should go.’ Tash.
I listen to Tash and Merrick, saying everything I’m thinking, out loud, trying to make sense of it all. The sound Mim made when she hit the floor—I’ll never get it out of my head. Like meat. There’s no coming back from that.
‘Nate?’ Merrick says.
What?
‘Nate!’
‘What?’ I shout.
‘He speaks,’ Tash says.
Merrick does his best impression of a blind monkey. ‘I’m just gonna tell them I didn’t see nothing.’
All I say is, ‘That’s a double negative.’
‘Two negatives make a positive,’ he says. ‘So you can suck my big one.’
Red, blue, red, blue, red, blue. The ambulance is coming. The police are, too.
We break our triangle to stand in a line, staring out at the street.
FOUR
Life goes on. I know because everything hurts.
I think it’s nearly morning, but I’m scared to look at the clock in case I’m wrong and it’s still the middle of the night. I suspect I’m going to have one of those days when you get angry if people are laughing about something. Worse, you get sad if they try to cheer you up. Worse still, you get angrier—at yourself—because you know they’re just trying to be nice and you need people like that, but you can’t be around them because currently your emotions are incompatible with theirs. So you shut them out and they get angry and they go away.
The world is ugly.
Otis makes a snuffling sound in his sleep, only when I look down he’s not sleeping. He’s lying on his side, turned away from Jake, one leg slung over the edge of the mattress, foot bouncing on the floor. It’s weird—he’s left space between him and Jake.
Slowly, he turns his head and peers up at me.
O’s eyes sometimes switch between blue and green, like Dec’s. They have the same blankness Nance’s get when she’s unhappy, only his are like that all the time—it’s like he sees you, but there’s something beyond that needs his attention, so they fix for a split second and slide past. Sometimes I wonder if his reality and mine are the same. Maybe red isn’t red in his world, or dogs look like chickens.
Otis’s lashes flutter and his eyes close. One fist uncurls and he stretches his arm, pointing one finger.
I reach down with my own. We’re like that zoomed-in image of Michelangelo’s on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when God created Adam, except we’re touching, and neither of us will be around for that long.
When O opens his eyes again, they stay fixed. These moments never last, but when he’s present like this we have wordless conversations.
Nate. It’s you.
Hello, Otis.
The sun is up!
It’s just the sensor light. Go back to sleep.
It’s the sun! It’s dark at night but the sun comes up every day.
Maybe you’re right, O. Maybe it’s the sun.
He takes his hand away and curls his fist again, tucking it to his chest like a broken wing.
I check the clock. It’s five past six.
‘Sun,’ O says, clear as anything.
The world is beautiful.
For Otis,
They say
a piece of you is missing
and they don’t know why
or where it went
or if it was ever there.
They say you might never walk or use a full sentence.
You won’t be able to tell us what you want
you can’t live a full life
and you might never dance.
But you speak with your eyes
your fingers, your fists.
You’ll never
steal cars
break laws
start wars.
What if you came to show us how to fly,
to teach us a new language?
What if the missing piece of you
is the broken thing in us?
What if natural selection
chose someone like you?
Who cares what
they say.
The next thing I know, it’s after eight and someone is pounding on the front door. I’m already going to be late for school, but the knocking sounds like it means business.
Dec and Nance are scrabbling for their clothes in the next room, whisper-shouting at each other, feet slapping the floor. Dec hops into our bedroom, pulling on his shorts.
I sit up, and he grabs my arm and hauls me off the bunk.
Otis starts wailing, and Jake covers him with his body.
‘Get the door. Don’t let them in. Go out on the verandah, okay? Tell them it’s just you and the boys.’
I’m only wearing boxers. I go to pick my jeans up from the floor, but he puts his hand between my shoulderblades and shoves me along the hallway, into the lounge room.
Nance is sitting on the edge of their bed, palms pressed to her cheeks. ‘Who is it?’
‘Cops,’ Dec says. ‘Just you and the boys, okay?’
I manage to nod, but getting to our front door when you’re still half asleep is like playing hopscotch in a minefield: my eyelids are stuck together, I’m tripping over my feet and Jake’s Lego blocks, which are scattered everywhere. I shove Dec’s bong underneath the couch. The door shakes again.
&nb
sp; ‘I’m coming.’
I turn the deadbolt slowly and stick my face between the gap. Two cops. A young one I recognise, standing behind an older one I don’t.
The older one has his hand on the door. ‘Nathaniel McKee?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Your parents home?’
‘No. Just me and the kids. What’s up?’
‘You witnessed the incident at the youth centre last night?’
Incident. Sounds too much like ‘accident’.
‘I gave a statement.’
‘You also gave a fake address,’ the young cop says. ‘So did your friend.’ He checks his notebook. ‘One Connor Wank-ridge. You know what his real name is and where we can find him?’
I didn’t think to give a fake name. Too stunned.
‘No.’
‘You’re not in any trouble.’ Old cop.
‘Then what do you want?’ Dec exhales through his teeth somewhere behind me. ‘I told them everything I know.’
‘A couple more questions. When you’re accompanied by a parent we can go over your statement and sign it off.’
I shake my head. ‘I’m already late for school. My parents aren’t home. The kids are asleep. I don’t have any clothes on.’ My voice goes squeaky at the tail end.
Old cop breathes in. His nostrils flare.
My heart ratchets up a notch. If I open the door another few inches he’ll see the mould stains on the ceiling outside my old room—it doesn’t matter how hard Nance scrubs them with bleach, they come back like an incurable disease. One step inside and he’ll get an absolute lungful; shortly after, he’ll get out a warrant.
I push past him and close the door behind me. The deadbolt clicks. ‘I can come to the station after school.’ When he raises his eyebrows, I add, ‘I’ve got a test this morning. I can’t miss it.’
Inside, Otis is screaming like he’s on fire.
‘Who looks after the kids when you go to school?’ Young cop.
‘Babysitter’s coming.’
Old cop’s suspicious, but he lets it go. ‘Righto. We’ll see you this afternoon then.’
They saunter off.
‘Wait.’ I follow them out past Clancy’s. ‘Is she okay? Mim, I mean?’
‘Serious but stable, last we heard.’
‘Oh. That’s good, right?’
I jog back to the verandah and bash on the glass panel.
Dec takes his sweet time. He hauls me inside by the elbow.
‘The hell you been up to?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Didn’t look like nothing.’
Nance calls from the kitchen. ‘Coffee?’
‘Someone got beat up at Youth last night.’ I pull away. ‘I saw it.’
‘So you bring them around here?’ He points at my old room. ‘That’s two years right there. What’ll happen to all of you if I’m locked up, hey?’
‘I gave a fake address.’
Dec pulls back his fist and growls.
He won’t hit me. Never has. Doesn’t stop me from flinching, though. The flinch gives me away every time.
‘Coffee?’ Nance says, louder.
‘Hey.’ Merrick jogs to catch up. ‘You didn’t wait.’
He looks as if he’s just crawled out of bed too.
‘Sorry. I thought you’d already gone.’
‘We should ring Youth to see how Mim’s doing.’
‘Serious but stable,’ I say.
‘Cops give you a hard time?’
‘Nuh. But they’re looking for you, too.’
‘We told them everything we saw.’
‘I know.’
Merrick stops to pick up fifty cents from the gutter. ‘Any point going?’
‘To school? Probably not.’ I wasn’t lying about the test, but it doesn’t matter now. By the time we get through security and sign in, it’ll be all over. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Dunno.’
I wish I’d taken the twenty-dollar note Dec left in the plant pot on the kitchen table, but it was too risky. It’s impossible to tell if he’s testing me, or he forgot he’d left it there.
Without speaking, we both take the next right down Harrington Street, heading in the opposite direction from school. It leads to concrete slopes beneath the underpass, the perfect place to go to think about where to go next. The bowling alley closed a month ago, and Merrick’s on a six-week ban from Tunza Fun, the game parlour. We can’t risk going to the shops for the free wi-fi—teachers have truant duty at lunchtime.
I want to ask Merrick how he’s doing after last night. I wonder if he feels tainted somehow, like I do. No, that’s not the right word—grubby, like I’m covered in something that won’t wash off.
When we get to the underpass, we wait for a break in the traffic to get a decent run up the slopes. They’re pretty steep, about forty-five degrees, but there’s a ledge at the top where you can hide behind the girders and smoke, drink, make out, whatever, without anyone seeing.
Merrick and I don’t do any of those things. We kick some cans down the slope and use a branch to sweep a clean space where we can sit on the ledge.
‘Hey, remember when Isaac Renfrew lost his footing and rolled down onto the road? Car missed him by this much.’ Merrick holds his fingers a few centimetres apart. He peers down the slope, plugging in his headphones, except he doesn’t push the jack all the way in and I can hear heavy breathing and groaning coming from his phone in his pocket.
‘Jesus. What are you listening to?’ I push him away.
He laughs and offers me an earpiece. ‘Zombies, Run!’
‘No, thanks.’
‘It’s a sprint training app. You hear them coming up behind you and it makes you run faster.’
‘Why do you bother? All you have to do is open your mouth and you’ve got the real thing.’
He flips me off.
Below, the empty cans clatter and roll in the gutter. The traffic goes k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch as cars pass overhead, the sound amplified in the echo chamber. In the white of a huge eye graffitied on the side of the bridge, someone has written I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world in black Texta.
I copy it into my notebook, do a search and discover it’s a line from a Walt Whitman poem—another dead guy, but I like the sound of it anyway. I type what is a barbaric yawp? First up, I get a weird essay about Whitman being butt-naked in a forest, followed by a Rotten Tomatoes review of a Robin Williams movie about some rich kids at an all-boys’ boarding school, then a Yahoo question from another kid—more clueless than me—who receives an answer from a random dude from another continent saying a barbaric yawp is your battle cry. Sounds reasonable. I assume the kid repeated said dude’s opinion on yawps in his own essay, thus perpetuating the myth that there’s a right answer—that a poem can be understood without asking Walt fucking Whitman Himself. What was Walt thinking? Who knows. It’s all guesswork. That’s the thing about teachers—they want you to tell them what a poem means, but they think they already have the answers. They’re just waiting to catch you out. I reckon a poet could write something that felt true at the time, change his standpoint, then revisit his own work twenty years later, only to realise his most quotable quote doesn’t mean what he thought it meant, or it isn’t something he stands for anymore.
This is the main problem I have with art: art doesn’t mean one thing. It can’t. When Mr Reid asks us to tell him what a poem means, he’s really asking us all to think the same.
I’ll take my uneducated guess—I reckon it’s as good as anything my search turned up:
Yawp.
A barbaric yawp.
A word, curling like smoke, slipping through the cracks in the same way darkness comes and light leaves, interrupting fights and fucks and family dinners, making everybody stop whatever they’re doing, making them whisper—did you hear it, too?
I’m balancing on the ledge, my arms above my head, screaming, and the acoustics are incredible. As usual, Merrick doesn’t wait for
an invitation or an explanation. He just joins in.
For a change of scenery, we go to the skate park.
It’s hidden behind Bunnings on the main north–south freeway, next to Jack Berry Dog Park. A couple of years ago it was a wasteland—now it’s a ‘People, Pooches ‘n’ Play’ recreational space divided by the dog-park fence and a row of scraggly trees. The skate park has one shallow concrete track and a larger one about the depth of a swimming pool, a few ramps and rails, and a lean-to hut with a concrete bench. At night it’s packed with guys who don’t skate and girls dressed up for each other. Daytime is for the real skaters, and for waggers like us.
Merrick flops down on the bench and almost immediately bounces up again. ‘I’m literally bored out of my brain.’
‘You’ve literally been here for, like, two seconds.’
‘Well, it’s dead.’
D&G is the only one here.
We don’t know his real name. He only ever wears the same black Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and he’s got to be thirty-something—an old guy with a mullet riding around on a kid’s bike. He sticks out, but nobody pays him any attention. He rides past school every day at two, like one of those characters in an indie film who doesn’t make it to the foreground and doesn’t speak any lines, but you know he’s somehow pivotal to the plot. It’s like he has a force field around him, or possibly he’s invisible to everyone but me. Most afternoons at about five, D&G cooks sausages on the community barbecue and feeds the leftovers to the ibises.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ Merrick says.
‘Go where?’
‘KFC. I need food.’
‘I’ve got no cash. Anyway, I want to watch for a bit,’ I say.
‘Poseur.’ Merrick wanders off.
D&G tries a wheel spin, but the bike takes off over the rim without him and he lands on his side. He gets up, retrieves his bike and tries again.
I wonder what it must be like not to care what anyone thinks—to do your thing and take the hits and get straight back up again. I wonder what it’s like to have a thing.
I watch for five more minutes and still catch up to Merrick, dragging his feet out on the main road.
‘S’up,’ he says, like we just met for the first time today.
‘I’ve been thinking.’
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