This is How We Change the Ending

by Vikki Wakefield

  It’s warm in the sun, but I have goosebumps all along my arms. I’ve been conditioned to believe the cops are the enemy since I could walk.

  ‘Prior record. Two years, minimum. Dec won’t make it inside—he’s too pretty.’

  Nance cracks a smile. ‘He is pretty. But he’d better let us in soon—I’m getting sunburnt.’ Her smile disappears. ‘What prior record?’

  ‘Assault,’ I say. Dec will kill me for telling her. ‘It’s okay, it was just a brawl with some mates. It was way before you. Stuff this. I’m going in.’ I knock lightly on the front door.

  Nance hisses, ‘Wait—they’re coming out.’

  One officer makes his way down the steps carrying an ancient computer.

  ‘Child exploitation,’ Nance and I say at the same time.

  I know she’s thinking about the times Jake runs around outside without any clothes on.

  ‘I hate this place.’ As she says it, the sun slips behind a cloud.

  I laugh because the cloud has perfect timing, but Nance’s expression only gets darker.

  I grew up here. I don’t know any different. I hate it too, but some part of me has always believed I’d turn eighteen and that would be it: I’d be free to go to a better place. It would be as simple as closing a door and stepping through another—everything would be cleaner, brighter, more predictable and more controllable. I never realised an expectation so ordinary might be out of reach.

  Or that you could go to a worse place, like Nance did.

  The cops take more things. Barry doesn’t make an appearance. Whatever they’ve pinched him for, it can’t be too bad.

  When the cops drive away, Nance bashes on the window and Dec unlocks the door.

  Nance opens it and shoves him hard with both hands. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ She pushes past him. ‘I need a shower.’

  Dec clutches his chest in mock horror. ‘I love it when she’s angry.’

  He still looks like an ex-MMA cage fighter when he’s not wearing a shirt, but the layer of fat around his middle is growing. Too many beers and parmigianas with chips, hold the salad.

  Jake marches in and swings a limp punch at Dec’s thigh. ‘I’m angry, Dad,’ he says, and Dec pretends it’s a knockout and falls to the floor.

  The scene would be heartwarming if it wasn’t so screwed up.

  Dec opens one eye. ‘All right, Nate?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I go to put my bag in the bedroom. Nance brushes past me on her way to get a towel from the hall cupboard. I feel like giving her a high-five for balls but I know that’ll tip the balance—her small victory was only because Dec let her win.

  Ten minutes pass before we remember we left O on the verandah. Luckily he never gets far.

  Merrick has new kicks—a pair of Yeezy Boost 350 V2 in semi-frozen yellow. I know because I’ve just seen him take them out of his backpack and put them on outside our place. Then he tied the laces on his old ones together, raised them to the sky, one in each hand (giving thanks to the God of sneakers?), wound up and let go. Hooked them over the power lines.

  People think a pair of shoes hanging from the power lines indicates a drug house. It’s an urban legend—more likely it’s just that a kid got new shoes and wants to commemorate the occasion—but people still believe it.

  This is a major breach of protocol.

  It’s nearly ten o’clock. Dec went out earlier and he still isn’t home. Nance and the boys are sleeping.

  I pull on a black hoodie and climb out the window, into the shadows. I’m starting to think shooting out the sensor light was not one of our greatest ideas.

  The Yeezys looked legit. If they are, it means Merrick has crossed off number two on his current wish list (last time I checked, the Evo was still at number one). If he’s confident enough to wear three-hundred-dollar shoes without worrying someone will boost them—and suddenly successful at wish fulfilment—it means he’s up to something.

  It’s not hard to catch up. First, I don’t have Jake hanging off me, and second, those shoes are positively radioactive. I pull my hoodie over my face and keep out of sight by walking on the opposite footpath.

  Merrick’s heading towards Rowley Park. It’s been two weeks since he’s come to school, and this is only the second time I’ve seen him. Either he’s avoiding me and the places we usually hang out, or he’s turned nocturnal.

  We’re at the main road. He stops briefly to check his phone before darting between two cars, jogging along the median strip, and crossing the lanes on the other side. He looks back once, but I wait behind a huge commercial For Sale sign until I know which direction he’s going to take.

  When he darts down a side street, I cross the main road and jog to catch up. Half the street lights aren’t working and the road is riddled with potholes. He must be heading for the warehouses on Smith—there’s nothing else out here— unless he’s cutting through to the estate on the other side.

  Just when I think I’ve lost him, I spot movement behind a section of temporary fencing near the end of the road. Merrick checks both ways and enters a narrow, cobbled driveway between two warehouses.

  I tiptoe around broken glass and turn the corner.

  Merrick is facing me, in the middle of the driveway, legs apart, thumbs hooked in his front pockets, like he’s ready to draw pistols.

  ‘Nice Yeezys,’ I say. ‘Do they make those for men?’

  ‘Stop following me.’

  ‘That’s my line.’

  ‘Seriously, Nate. Fuck off.’ He hoists himself onto the top of an industrial waste bin. ‘I’m not going any further until you do.’

  ‘And I’m okay with that.’ I lean against the bin. ‘You could have chucked your shoes somewhere else. I mean, come on—anywhere but our place.’

  He shrugs and checks his phone again. ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘Did you know Youth might be closing?’

  ‘That sucks. We had some good times there.’

  ‘Yeah. We did.’ I point to my chin. ‘Look, give me one for free and we’re even.’

  ‘Not even close.’

  ‘I just snapped, okay? Come on. We’re mates.’

  ‘We were. You treat me like I’m your annoying little brother.’

  ‘You are annoying.’ I climb up next to him. The bin stinks like cabbages and dead rodents. ‘Barry Pierce got raided today.’

  Silence.

  ‘Is it true? You’re rolling with Tuwy and Fallon? Tuwy stopped coming to school the same time as you.’

  Nothing, but his mouth twitches.

  ‘DeVries wants to see you.’

  He picks a grass seed from his shoelaces.

  ‘Why did you make out you were barely passing at school?’

  He snorts. ‘Why do you reckon?’

  ‘Since when do you ever listen to anything I say?’

  ‘All. The. Time.’ He jumps off the bin. ‘But that’s all you do. Talk. So I got a few A pluses in a row. So what? What good are they? They don’t make my old man talk to me any nicer. They don’t put money in my pocket. They sure as hell don’t impress you.’

  ‘I am impressed.’

  ‘No way. You say that now, but you’re full of shit. You know what the best part of my day is? It’s when I crawl out my window and remember I don’t have to knock on yours out of loyalty anymore. You did me a favour, man—I’m flying solo. You’ll be fifty years old, still ranting and raving and telling everyone what’s wrong with the world, but doing nothing to fix your shit.’ I laugh. ‘You’re freestyling now? You totally just flipped the Chuckie scene.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Whatever. I’m offski.’ He digs around in his pockets for a cigarette.

  ‘Where are you going? To fix your shit?’

  He turns. Slowly, he reaches behind his back—I think he’s about to pull out his slingshot and use my face for a target, but he’s twisting something around to the front. A tool belt.

  I crack up. ‘You’re seriously fixing shit? I didn’t think you meant
it literally.’

  His ears are bright red. ‘It’s my shift. I’m going to work.’

  ‘Here?’

  He gives a vague wave in the direction he’s headed. ‘Look, I’ll see ya. I’m gonna be late.’

  ‘What about the shoes?’

  ‘Work it out. You know everything.’

  ‘What about school?’

  ‘You go.’ He gives me a wave. ‘But don’t bother trying too hard. You were right about that.’

  FOURTEEN

  Many species have evolved to form social groups and hierarchies. This structure affords group protection against predators and allows animals to pool resources, share territory and divide labour, such as finding food and raising young. Some species live alone, guarding a territory and only coming together to reproduce. Predators often make successful solitary animals—they’re able to claim a food source as their own and defend their territory. Prey animals, however, increase their chances of survival by clustering together and keeping their predators on the fringes, often sacrificing the weaker animals for the good of the group.

  See, this is where the evolution of Homo sapiens is messed up. Our predators are the same species. They look the same, exhibit similar social behaviours, move through our clusterfuck of a social group undetected and, as long as their big reveal doesn’t involve being strapped to a backpack full of nails, they’re guaranteed promotion within its ranks. Leader!

  Left to itself, I reckon evolution would have sorted this problem out. Then again, I may already have been picked off. Merrick, too, except it’s possible he’s now masquerading as a predator.

  I guess that makes me a solitary prey animal, in which case I’m dead.

  Nance has asked me to watch Jake and Otis while she’s outside taking the washing off the line. She said she smelled rain. She set them up on the kitchen floor with a packet of bow tie pasta, a saucepan each and two spoons.

  O is lying on his stomach, passing his spoon from fist to fist, staring at it like it isn’t the same implement he just saw at breakfast. Jake has already filled his saucepan and now he’s topping it up with O’s pasta.

  This Biology assignment is due in two days. I have the information in my head, but making sense of it all on paper is near impossible when I’m trying to pretend O hasn’t just loaded his pants. If I had a laptop I could copy, paste and camouflage the syntax by adding unnecessary conjunctions and adjectives, like everyone else does.

  I don’t mind Biology. Facts are facts—hardly any original thought required—and we all present the same information, more or less. We’re only being tested on our ability to parrot information, and I could do that in the middle of a tornado with cows flying past. Writing or typing in peace is my problem. If I can just prepare these notes, I’ll type them up on a laptop at Youth later and scrounge some coin for printing from Nance’s jar on the windowsill.

  Nance’s head pops through the back door. ‘All right, bub?’

  I give her the thumbs-up.

  What I really want to do is tell her no, it’s not all right, and this is why I plan never to have sex with anyone other than myself.

  ‘I might dash to the shops and grab some milk and bread. Pass me the jar?’

  Thanks, universe.

  Jake helps himself to something from the fridge. I have some sentences ready, so I don’t bother to tell him off. O is still quiet; I’m good to go.

  Some species are known to invest heavily in trying to give their young the best chance of survival.

  The Sumatran orangutan carries her baby on her back for several years, and infants aren’t fully weaned until around eight years of age. After weaning, young orangutans remain part of the social group, often visiting their mothers, who continue their education even when there’s a new sibling on board.

  Meerkats are considered one of the true teachers of the animal kingdom. Meerkat parents have been documented killing scorpions before showing their infants how to feed. As the infants progress they’re given live scorpions, but mortally wounded and with the stingers removed. Finally, when they’ve passed their apprenticeship, the young meerkats are ready to kill and eat their dangerous prey without falling victim to the scorpion’s lethal sting…

  ‘No, O!’

  Otis has rolled as far as the hallway, and now he’s trying to eat pasta off the dirty carpet.

  ‘You’ll choke and die.’

  I hook some pieces from his mouth with my finger and roll him back.

  ‘Don’t let him get that far,’ I tell Jake, who’s still sitting on the floor, chewing whatever he found in the fridge.

  Typically, animal mothers are the primary caregivers, however there are several examples of exemplary fathers. The male emperor penguin is the sole incubator of the egg, withstanding a harsh Antarctic winter and shedding up to half his body weight to protect the chick and ensure his progeny lives long enough to leave the nest. (The female penguin takes off on a leisurely cruise, returning to regurgitate food forthe chick only when the male is weak from fasting and exposure.)

  Animal parents who raise a single infant have lower mortality rates, and their progeny are proven to be longer-lived and more successful in continuing the lineage. But there’s more than one way to pass on genes successfully. Some species don’t educate or care for their offspring at all—they simply procreate in large numbers, leaving the strongest to survive and the weakest to die.

  I look up just in time to see Jake scoop a spoonful of pasta and shove it in O’s mouth.

  ‘Hey! You little—’

  I flip O over and smack him between his shoulderblades to make him spit it out. Then I whack the back of Jake’s legs with one of the spoons and yell at him to go to his room. I pick up O and try to calm him down by whizzing him in circles. I’ll keep going until he shuts up, or one of us throws up.

  He’s finally quiet. I stop spinning. O’s eyes are flickering from side to side as if he’s watching a tennis match. I worry I’ve shaken more loose.

  Jake peers around the kitchen door.

  ‘Get back in your room!’

  O’s eyes fix on mine and slide past. He recommences screaming.

  The last specialist told Nance that the reason Otis screams all the time is because his mind wants to go places his body can’t take him, so we should work on his fine motor skills. I’m not so sure. I think the sooner we teach him to speak, the sooner he can tell us what he needs himself. But the problem is the words we give him are names for things he already has. We need to give him the words for the things he wants—except what he wants is one of life’s great mysteries.

  I sit down and bounce him on my knee, holding his stiff body with one hand, trying to write with the other, yelling the words as I write them down so I can hear my thoughts above the noise.

  Cannibalism and infanticide are common among many species. Perhaps less well known is the practice of fratricide—animals who kill their siblings to ensure their own survival. Most predatory animals, such as cats and dogs, are born without teeth; no matter how strong the instinct for survival, the infant cannot establish dominance until its teeth have developed. However, some baby animals seek to eliminate competition from birth: hatchling birds will eject siblings from the nest, a baby mantis’s first meal is often a sibling, and the embryos of the grey nurse shark begin killing other embryos and unfertilised eggs until there is only one survivor left in the womb.

  I think of Jake’s bump and O’s dent. Maybe they weren’t joined at all and it was an epic battle for supremacy.

  I seem to have strayed off-topic.

  When Nance gets back the boys are playing happily again, but that’s because Jake knows I’m watching. I tell her I’m going to Youth and ask if she has any spare change for printing.

  She disappears into the bathroom and comes back holding a ten-dollar note. ‘You can have this.’

  I know it probably came from her secret stash for medical emergencies. If there’s one thing we never go without in this house, it’s pain relief.


  ‘No, it’s okay. They might let me pay later.’

  ‘Bub, take it.’

  I do, but I feel guilty. It gets worse when Nance has a close look at the spoon-shaped mark on Jake’s leg and makes no comment.

  ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘But I will.’

  ‘It’s our money,’ she says, pointing at me, then herself. ‘Us.’

  Like Nance predicted, it’s starting to rain. First rain + hot tar + dry grass = the memory of running through the neighbour’s sprinkler, and lining up for Jerry’s Ice Cream van with fifty other kids, a few dollars in my pocket, trying to decide between sprinkles or Flake. Good times.

  Or were they? Here’s what really happened.

  The neighbour’s kids didn’t want to play with me because I kept turning the sprinkler off. I was worried it was wasting water. I had enough money for a plain cone, not sprinkles, Flakes weren’t even a thing, and the ice cream had a gritty texture as if it had been melted and re-frozen a hundred times.

  Nance thinks I write things down because I want them to be different. It’s not only that—I write them down because I want to remember exactly how it feels to be me, right now. Otherwise my brain plays tricks—it changes things, normalises things that aren’t normal. I don’t have the data, but I’m willing to bet nostalgia is the brain’s way of protecting itself, making sure you only remember the good stuff. By the time we’re eighty, our entire memory bank is probably some kind of utopian alternate reality. That’s why old people only tell you stories about the good old days.

  Not me. I’ll remember everything.

  I stop at the main road to wait for traffic.

  I cross roads all the time and I’ve never been hit. Crossing a road safely is probably survival instinct, but I had to learn how, the same way a meerkat has to learn not to mess around with a live scorpion. And I’m trying to remember who taught me: Mum, Dec or neither. I decide it was more likely a few near misses and a school excursion to the Road Safety Centre in Grade Two.

  Look right, left, right again. I cross.

  Something about Youth is different. It’s pretty obvious when I finally figure it out: the graffiti mural on the wall has been painted over.