‘You’ve got to think positive,’ she soothed, ‘positive. That’s what Baz would have wanted, because everyone’s got to move on.’
But Craig didn’t feel positive. Not one part of him.
He was acting like the kid he was, filled with grief and fury at the pain he didn’t comprehend. Screaming, spluttering, stumbling out across the hall into the backyard, past the cowering, whimpering dog, with Smurf after him, trying to calm him. Grabbing at the clothes rack, he threw it uselessly against the tree, chucking clothes everywhere.
Smurf knew her son, and knew how to handle him. ‘Come on, baby, calm down, come here.’
J had never seen anything like it, not grief like this, and didn’t even understand it, any of it. Not the news of Baz’s death, not his own feelings of emptiness and numbness, the same numbness he’d felt at his mother’s death. He wasn’t even sure if he really cared about anyone, he just felt so dead inside. Maybe he didn’t. Or maybe the pain was something he had to lock away and forget for a while before it blew him apart the same way it was blowing Craig apart.
Was this it? Was this what life meant? His life, their lives? Something you could laugh about as you ground it beneath your shoe? Was all the rest of it—all the talk about values and happiness—just a lie to cover up the fact that the coppers could just walk up and shoot anyone they wanted through the head because no-one was going to stop them, because they had a uniform and a badge and that gave them the right to do whatever they wanted? And then lie about it, and say he had a gun and the shot was in self-defence?
Was this the truth? That no-one’s ever really safe, that all you can ever hope to be is so insignificant that it never occurs to anyone to actually kill you? Was that what it was like to live in this place?
If Craig was showing it, J was turning it inside, where it could do even more damage. He didn’t know why it had happened or why it was happening to them, but he knew it wasn’t right.
Pope was different: quiet, still, deathly. Carefully pouring himself a glass of water, he stared straight ahead out the kitchen window, his head full of snakes, and when J caught sight of him it took his breath away; he knew there’d be shit to pay. You just had to look at him to see the hate. Someone was going to cop it and cop it bad.
Smurf could see what was happening to her boys. It was like a chemical reaction she’d seen happening too many times before. She’d need to be alert over the days and weeks ahead as she watched these new compounds form and try to take hold of her boys. With luck, they’d all step away from this stronger and wiser. But it could go the other way, and poison them all.
Life is a challenge, she knew that, and this was the biggest challenge she’d had for a long time and the biggest the boys had ever had. Would they be up to it? Who knew? But it was what life had dealt them, and they had to face it.
Baz was dead.
SIX
The tired-looking woman sitting in the glow of the computer screen helping her son with his homework was quiet and focused. ‘No, just look,’ she was saying. ‘Which one’s the hypotenuse?’
At the sound of the garden door sliding open, Alicia looked across from the screen and saw Nicky coming in, followed by her boyfriend. He seemed a nice boy, but Alicia wasn’t sure about his family.
‘Mum, is it okay if J stays here for a while?’ Nicky asked.
Alicia hated these negotiations more than she could say and longed for the day her daughter would just grow up.
‘It can’t happen, Nick,’ Alicia said wearily as Nicky’s little brother looked uncomprehendingly at her. ‘You’re at school; you’re in Year Twelve.’
Life hadn’t been easy for Nicky, Alicia knew that: she knew Nicky had suffered when Alicia’s first marriage had broken up and Nicky’s father had moved out, suffered when Alicia had remarried and had her second child with Gus. Alicia had tried to be understanding, tried to be a caring, thought ful mother, but this was too much. She was not going to allow her daughter’s boyfriend to move in; it didn’t matter what she threatened.
‘He really needs somewhere, Mum; there’s things going on.’
J was standing there like a shag on a rock, his future being discussed in front of him without anyone really being that interested in consulting him. Still, that was life. He’d had social workers, Child Service officers, busybodies of one sort or another sticking their noses into his business for as long as he could remember. Mostly they were nice people, kind even, but all he’d ever really wanted was to be left alone with his mum.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. What he’d wanted was something like what Nicky had. Somewhere warm and quiet that didn’t have a great hole blown in the side of it. A home, that’s what he wanted, a place where you could hide and feel safe. But instead of that, the disorder of his world was about to spill into theirs.
‘What things?’ Alicia asked, glancing curiously at J.
‘Things,’ Nicky said resentfully, as if it was none of her mother’s business. ‘I don’t know. It’d just be for a while.’
It had been Nicky’s idea that J should move in with her after she found out about Baz’s killing and saw what a madhouse the Cody household had descended into. But J had found ways of living in madhouses before. He wasn’t in a hurry to move, and so didn’t know why Nicky was pushing her mother so hard about it.
‘You’re still at school,’ Alicia said, trying to make Nicky see her point. ‘You’re probably going to make a mess of it as it is. And you shouldn’t be asking me this right in front of J.’
‘Why?’ Nicky shot back. ‘Because you don’t want him to see what a bitch you are?’
There was no give in her daughter; she was all attitude.
‘Hey, come on,’ Gus said, looking up from where he was making dinner.
But Nicky didn’t care what he said: he wasn’t her father and he didn’t even need to be listened to.
‘Look,’ she said to her mother, ‘one of J’s friends got shot by the cops today and he’s dead, okay?’
J took a quick breath, wondering why she thought it was a good idea to say that.
‘And I don’t think it would be that big a deal to let him stay here.’
That was quite a mouthful, and both Alicia and Gus looked curiously at J.
‘I didn’t know him too well,’ the boy said evasively, feeling like something the cat had dragged in, still flapping helplessly on the kitchen floor.
‘That was on the news,’ Gus said.
‘I didn’t know him too well,’ J repeated, trying to put as much distance between Baz’s death and himself as he could. ‘It’s just a shock and everything.’
J wasn’t ashamed of knowing Baz, because Baz had been one of the best people he’d ever met. But he didn’t want to have to explain that to these people. How could he? Nicky’s parents had about as much in common with the kinds of people J knew as they had with the man in the moon. That didn’t mean anything; it was just the way it was. Some people went to work and built up their super, and other people robbed banks. It might sound mad and stupid, but that was the world. What could J do to change it?
‘Well, I mean, can we do anything? Do you want a drink?’ Gus asked, trying to be supportive.
Nicky shot an angry look at him, like what an idiot, but she would have got that in sooner or later, no matter what he did.
Alicia was wondering if any of this was actually true. It wasn’t that she suspected her daughter of lying; it was just that, along with the high-stakes emotional games Nicky had been playing, Alicia had noticed an increasing recourse to hyperbole and exaggeration that regularly turned the most mundane setbacks and disappointments into total annihilating disasters of global proportions.
‘No, thanks,’ J said, answering Gus’s offer of a drink.
‘That’s terrible,’ Alicia said, her eyes searching J’s face for the marks of these awful events.
But Nicky wasn’t listening to anyone any more as she spat at her mother, ‘So maybe you can think about that,’ and stal
ked angrily off to her room.
Alicia really didn’t know what was going on with Nicky these days; she was so secretive. But the idea that her daughter was mixed up with criminals getting shot by police was more than enough for Alicia to think about. She turned back to the computer screen as J walked stiffly past, following Nicky, and embarrassed to be the cause of the dispute.
Most kids have parent trouble, but J didn’t. Both his parents were dead, or gone. J had never had a straight story from his mother about his father; for all he knew he was either shot by the police, or in jail, or shot by someone else. He had never really been able to tell with his mother what was true and what was being made up just to get whatever it was she wanted out of him. The truth was his father had never been around.
Still, she had been his mother—someone to hold on to, even if she hurt—but now all he had was Nicky. Of course, he didn’t think about it that way. He hardly thought about it at all. He loved her, he supposed. Sometimes she asked him, and he’d say yes. If anyone else was looking at her, he’d feel jealous. Like he did with Craig. He didn’t really think about the future, because that seemed stupid. He didn’t have a future, not like other people have futures.
People like him weren’t going to make plans or try to imagine what the future might be like. Nicky could, J knew that. She could finish school, maybe go to TAFE, do some course. Become a teacher. Sometimes she’d say things like that. That she could be a teacher. She could do it because that’s what her mother wanted: she wanted her to be a success, get a job. She wanted her to do good in the world.
And if J had thought about it at all, he would have seen that sooner or later Nicky would find someone else more like her and her mother. She’d move on and that would be that. And if he’d thought about it he might have felt sad, because he did love her, and wished in his quiet, confused way that he could give her the kind of life she deserved. Not this dumb, fucked-up life they all lived here. The drugs and shit and cops shooting you. Not that kind of life. But a life where people respected one another and you weren’t worried someone was going to stick a shotgun in your face and blow your head off. He didn’t want someone to stick a gun in Nicky’s face and blow her head off. He wanted her to be happy. He just wished he knew how to make it right for her.
‘Nicky’s beautiful,’ Pope said later that night as they all sat slumped and dozy in front of the TV after the main shows were over.
Rousing, J wondered if he’d heard him correctly, and shivered the way his mother used to when she’d say someone was walking over her grave. The only things that Pope thought were beautiful were dead. Dead crims, dead rock stars, dead animals. He was like the King of the Dead, and, now that Baz was gone, he thought he was their king as well.
It wasn’t a happy thought, and J only let it linger a moment before he threw it into his memory hole, where he vaporised everything he couldn’t deal with. He realised, as he sat there looking at the static on the TV screen, that it was where he was now consigning most of his life. It was like a sudden insight that knocked him back into the cushions of the sofa. It was like he suddenly got it. His life. He’d pulled his own head in so far that he felt like a little ball of fear in the absolute centre of the universe, a black hole of terror dragging everything into it. He felt that he had ceased to be, that’s what he thought, and had become a zombie being pushed around and directed by forces outside himself. And that didn’t make him feel happy at all.
He wasn’t happy, watching his uncle lusting after his girlfriend. Is that what he was doing, or was he mentally slobbering on her, like a spider slobbering over a fly it had caught in its web? A sort of masturbatory devouring, half sex and half ingestion? Uncle Pope didn’t love anybody; none of them did. All Uncle Pope wanted to do was hurt.
It didn’t last long, the vision. Just long enough to singe its way into his mind and memory. Was that really what he’d become? What they’d all become?
When he woke up the following morning, and remembered Pope carrying Nicky into his bedroom … Was that true? Did that really happen or was it some hallucination, like the spider and the zombies and everything else?
His sense of reality was being eroded, and what would have seemed impossible to contemplate only a few weeks before had started to become commonplace. Perhaps that was the thing that had really frightened his mother about her family: how the mad could become normal. But that’s the way the world at large worked as well. A new force enters, and slowly, gradually, the world is changed before our eyes without us hardly even noticing. Till one day we wake up, and the things we thought were true have been turned into their opposite, right in front of us.
‘You know why your mum and I didn’t talk for so long?’ Smurf asked later as she wrapped a tie around her neck, helping J get dressed for Baz’s funeral.
‘No,’ he answered quietly, listening.
‘We had a fight about—you know the card game Five Hundred?’
J nodded, but he didn’t really. His mother had played a bit, and tried to get him to play sometimes, but he couldn’t get the knack of it.
‘She reckoned you could play the joker whenever you wanted in a no-trumps hand.’
J didn’t know what she was talking about, but he hadn’t heard her talk about his mother that much, so was interested.
‘She was drunk,’ Smurf continued. ‘I was drunk too, but I was right. But look what happens.’
She was becoming soft and whimsical now, girlish. J had never seen her like this, and wondered.
‘Years go by,’ she continued, ‘and then she’s gone and I lose my only daughter because you can’t play the joker when ever you want in a no-trumps hand.’
It sounded like some deeply wise thing, but J didn’t have a clue what it meant.
‘And I don’t get to see you for years,’ she said, returning her gaze to him. ‘And that made me sad.’
She looked sad. Was she sad, or was she thinking about something else?
‘But I’m getting to see you now,’ she chirped, rousing herself. ‘All the time.’
J thought he understood, but it probably didn’t matter. None of Smurf ’s stories ever made much sense, not because they were dumb or confused, but because there always seemed to be something missing, some elusive piece of information that would make whatever she was saying clear; but they were never clear and they were about things only Smurf properly understood. That’s the way she was: even when she was telling you something personal and important, you could never be sure just exactly what she meant.
And that was the real point: she was the only one who really understood anything.
‘Okay, stand up; let’s have a look at you,’ she said, having reached some inner resolution about something. Taking the tie off and putting it over his head, she considered him. He was a big kid, tall and lanky, and towered over her when he stood. ‘Sweet,’ she said, looking up at him. She added, ‘How do I look?’
‘You look good,’ J answered politely.
‘Correct,’ Smurf replied, pleased, and she reached up and put her hands over his head to draw him towards her. Pulling him close, she kissed him in the way he’d seen her kiss the others. ‘Beautiful boy,’ she said warmly.
He didn’t know why she did it, but it didn’t feel right. And he wished he hadn’t seen the way she swung her hips as she moved off afterwards.
The funeral was as sad and anonymous as funerals are. A bleak suburban church, one of those big halls full of empty pews most of the week and filled with a few ageing stragglers on Sunday. A cross to remind us of something.
The priest said a few things. Judge not lest ye should be judged—that sort of thing. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord. It could have been worse.
Catherine was sitting on the other side of the church and couldn’t bring herself to look at Smurf or any of them, she was so upset. She was going to lose the house, the car, the lot—all their dreams. Proceeds of criminal activities. The cops had found the money stashed in the ceiling and knocked i
t off, so she didn’t even have that.
And so there she was with their little girl, her man lying in a wooden box with what was left of his head held together with tape and tissue paper. Hardly anyone else was there apart from the people she hated, because anybody decent enough to feel kindly towards them was too frightened to attend.
Pope went outside for some air and then just stood stock-still, paralysed, as the mental storm that was blowing up inside him swept him away. Pope never knew where he went in moments like this, couldn’t remember where they took him or even that they happened. Smurf used to say they were his absences. The sound of Craig stepping out for a smoke snapped him back to life, or whatever this is.
The two of them gazed across the road at the cop car. One of the cops was on his mobile, giving a blow-by-blow description to whoever it was that was listening on the other end. Probably a bunch of them roaring with laughter down at the pub.
Journalists huddled behind bushes, snapping photos of them, darting about like scared scavengers. And that’s what they were: the jackals and scavengers of this world feeding on the dead and the dying.
Pope could have killed every single one of them if he’d been able to move, but he was too overcome with grief to do anything.
The wake was just as bad: cold and strangled, the RSL hall too big for the few mourners who made their way back.
Catherine left early without even saying goodbye.
The whole thing left everyone flat. There was just too much unfinished business, too much left to be said to properly grieve.
But, later that night, Pope started to say it in the way that Pope so often did. ‘Where’d you get that suit? What’s that suit?’ he asked, sounding interested, as Darren made himself a sandwich on the kitchen bench.
Smurf was still at the wake, cleaning up, and Craig was slumped in front of the telly, out of it.
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