Friday Brown

by Vikki Wakefield

  Silence tore into the room. He headed straight for the corner and slumped against the wall, bleak-eyed, staring. His skin was grey, his breathing rapid. There were bits of grass and leaves in his hair. His mouth was wide open—he looked like he was screaming but there was no sound.

  I gathered my wits enough to go to him but he pushed me away.

  ‘He needs his inhaler,’ Carrie said. ‘Where is it?’ She rummaged through his things, scattering underwear and toiletries all over the floor.

  I reached under his pillow and pulled out his notebook. I offered it to him.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong? Are you hurt?’

  I handed him his pen but he dropped it. He was shaking too much to write.

  Joe shambled in, rubbing his eye with a fist. ‘What’s going on?’

  Carrie tossed me the inhaler. I slipped the nozzle between Silence’s lips and cupped the back of his neck, the same way I’d seen Bree do it. It took four blasts before he took some in.

  ‘Talk to us,’ Carrie whispered. ‘Where’s Arden?’ Louder. ‘Say something!’ She reached out and shook him.

  At her touch, or on hearing Arden’s name, Silence stared at the doorway.

  As if she’d been conjured, Arden appeared wearing her commando-style garb, black beanie bulging with her dreads stuffed underneath. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but still so direct they burned.

  Her voice didn’t waver. ‘Get some sleep,’ she said to Silence. ‘The rest of you—pack your things. Get something to eat. Keep the noise down. I’ll tell you what’s going on later.’

  ‘What about him?’ Joe said, pointing to Silence.

  He looked semi-catatonic, but when Arden strode over and hauled him up by the front of his hoodie, he struggled.

  ‘Get it together!’ she hissed. She shook him, hard. ‘Stop it!’ Then—slap—across his face.

  Silence crumpled. Not because of the slap—it wasn’t that hard—but because his legs wouldn’t hold him up.

  Arden turned to me. ‘Keep an eye on him. Stay with him until the rest of us get some things sorted out.’

  ‘Why me?’ It wasn’t the looking after Silence part I objected to—it was the way she kept barking orders.

  ‘Because there’s nothing else you can do.’

  ‘But…’ Silence grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I opened my mouth to say more but the pressure increased.

  Carrie nudged me. ‘I’ll go get him a drink of water.’

  Arden pulled off her beanie and shook her hair free. For a few seconds it resisted, a knotted halo of snakes, then it unwound and fell down her back. ‘It’ll be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.’

  I wondered who she was trying to convince.

  In the kitchen, AiAi sat in a corner on a crate, looking lost.

  ‘It’s all right, mate,’ I reassured him, not because I knew what was going on but because he needed to hear it from somebody.

  Arden kept going with the orders. ‘Darce, go find Bree, will you? She needs to be here, too. I need everyone back here as soon as possible. Like, yesterday.’

  Darcy nodded. She bolted upstairs.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Arden said, not looking at me. ‘Everything’s good to go.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  She ignored me and sat down at the table. She placed her black box next to her and opened the padlock, pulled out a pen and notebook and started writing a list.

  Carrie walked in. ‘Is this it, then? We’re really going?’ she said.

  Joe, Malik and AiAi came to stand alongside her, a row of disciples.

  Arden slammed down the pen. She was like a cobra, hissing and weaving. ‘We have to leave. I need money, whatever you have stashed. I know you all have a stash, but we need it now. And your phones. Leave them here on the table.’ She glared around.

  I lingered around the edges, catching scraps of hushed conversation.

  ‘Friday. Are you coming?’ Arden followed me with her eyes.

  The others stopped their pocket-searching and stared.

  I shook my head but I couldn’t find my tongue. ‘I can’t,’ I said eventually. I hated my voice and the smallness of it.

  ‘Suit yourself.’ She went back to her list, wrote a few words, then looked back at me. ‘And Silence is coming with us.’

  ‘What if…?’

  ‘Ask him. We talked about it. We’ve been together for two years—he’s not about to run off with someone he’s just met, is he?’

  She was right. We hardly knew each other. I had to get out of there.

  Silence was lying on his side, on my mattress, facing the window. His shoulders were heaving.

  Quickly, quietly, I shoved all my things into my backpack. I rolled up my swag.

  I sat by Silence for a while. I held my hand on his shoulder until his breathing slowed. When I left him, he was asleep. He drew shuddery breaths and sighs leaked from him, the kind that come after crying so hard there’s nothing left. But he was asleep, and peaceful, his face streaked like a dirty window after rain. I covered him with my blanket and left him.

  In the confusion, nobody noticed, nobody saw when I crawled out through the cellar window with my stuff, nobody stopped me when I let the trapdoor swing shut. I avoided the usual route through the maze of alleys, afraid I would run into Darcy or Bree. I felt immense relief when I hit the main road and followed the flow of traffic into the heart of the city.

  It made sense not to care too much. Once I’d scraped up enough for a bus ticket, I would leave the city. I wrote it off as a wrong turn: Silence, Arden, Wish, all of it. Wrong turns just added more to who you are.

  I didn’t know that they also add to the toll you must pay to go back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I found a pristine patch of footpath outside Parliament House. I turned my back to the morning sun, chose a purple stump of chalk and honed it to a point on the kerb. A man in a suit gave me a dollar for nothing but being there.

  I lifted my face to catch something of the morning, a sound or a feeling, just a couple of words to start, but I got stuck on Silence’s desperation. It was catching, I should have known. When he grabbed at me like I was some kind of saviour, I saw Vivienne. Her last clutch at life, and my retreat, scrabbling backwards in horror, in case she took me with her. It had leached into me anyway and it was stuck to my hair and my clothes and my skin.

  He was fine, I thought. Snoring still, probably. He was better off with them. Safety in numbers and all that.

  I tilted my chin, closed my eyes. Spring. The cool breath of it, the damp edges. I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think was that Silence had said he liked autumn best, when the leaves let go. He’d liked to cover himself in fallen leaves in the Botanic Park, then leap out at tourists.

  I smiled to myself.

  A flurry of pedestrian traffic. A woman pushing a pram invaded my space and I ducked left. My head thumped against a man’s leg. A piece of chalk was crushed and dragged, then thrown out from behind a heel like a hit and run victim. I was invisible. It must have been so much worse for Silence, without his voice.

  The thought of leaving without telling him why I had to go was more than I could bear. Maybe this time I could stand a little desperation.

  I packed up, leaving the footpath unmarked.

  I hopped on the free loop tram but the driver kicked me off because I wasn’t wearing shoes, so I jogged the rest of the way.

  At the top of Jacaranda Lane, I realised that something was happening. My mind had been elsewhere and there were signs I had failed to notice.

  People were walking in the same direction as I was. More than I could consider a fluke. Dozens. Shielding their eyes against the sun and looking up. Murmuring in low, shocked voices and shaking their heads in disbelief, like a scene from the Apocalypse. Two police cars flashed past, lights strobing, sirens switched off, followed by a fire engine that scattered the crowd with a booming honk.


  I was caught in the current, blending with onlookers. Running scared, but not away from the terrible thing, towards it. The air was acrid, a warm, dense layer. My throat was full of it. One man had a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth like a surgical mask. I was shaking with terror so swift it arrived minutes before comprehension.

  The squat was burning, exhaling twin plumes of smoke up into the sky. Dragon’s breath.

  I knew it was deliberate. I didn’t know if anyone was still inside.

  When I got closer the smell was overpowering. The old house was lit up from the inside like a Halloween pumpkin. The firemen’s hoses were aimed at the houses on either side, as if they’d decided the squat was past saving.

  ‘Was there anyone inside?’ I gasped to a female police officer.

  She shook her head—but only as a warning not to go further—and spread her arms wide. ‘Move back. All of you, move back, please.’

  The police had cordoned off the middle section of the street with barricades. I couldn’t get through. I backed away from the growing crowd and legged it back down the street to the alley. The narrow access had blocked any vehicles but there was a lone fireman wearing a mask, wandering through the haze at the far end.

  He spotted me and shouted something I couldn’t make out, but it was clear he wanted me to go back.

  I dropped my stuff at the end of the alley and pressed forwards, pushed my hands against the trapdoor, felt the rush of heat as air sucked through the opening. Coughing, choking. I put my hands over my face and breathed through my fingers. I had to see for myself. If I could just look through the cellar window. If the pile of stuff under the tarpaulin was gone, I’d know for sure that they had got out.

  I was no closer than the pond before the radiant heat was too intense. My skin felt as if it was shrinking and peeling. The smoke was too thick, my eyes were watering, vision was almost nil. I stepped back, spun around and tripped over the edge of the pond. Something slick and slimy writhed against my leg. A black eel, lying stricken on the singed grass, gills flapping. Four bloated, dead fish were floating on top of the green water.

  I crawled backwards but the eel’s flat, shark-eyes were staring at me. I sucked and held a lungful of breath. I shuffled back and picked up the eel, sinewy and pulsing, felt its dying weight, slung it into the water. It sank without swimming.

  Just as I realised that one breath was not enough—too much smoke and not enough oxygen—strong hands gripped under my arms. The fireman dragged me through the trapdoor and dumped me onto the ground.

  He tilted his mask and yelled in my face. ‘You crazy kid! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Then, ‘Are you okay?’

  I coughed and nodded. ‘My friends were in there.’

  ‘There’s nobody. We checked. It’s unoccupied.’

  ‘No, street kids. Homeless kids.’ I was crying, but I knew they weren’t in there. Arden wouldn’t have torched the place without an escape plan.

  ‘There’s nobody. It’s empty. You need to get checked out. Let’s go.’ He hauled me up and handed me my swag and backpack.

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’ I shrugged him off. ‘I’m leaving. Promise.’

  He looked at me doubtfully and slipped his mask back on. ‘Get out of here before the whole place comes down.’ His voice was muffled.

  The fireman gave me a five-finger countdown and I took it. I headed off, rubbing my stinging eyes. My hand came away streaked with black.

  I picked up my things and walked away.

  I had a long shower at the Y, ignoring the pacing time-Nazi, letting the warm water flow until it finally ran clear. When I got out I was jittery and dizzy. I sat down on the cool tiles until it passed, wrapped in a threadbare towel. I dressed slowly, mechanically, and even though I was clean on the outside I could still taste smoke and ash.

  ‘Do you have a spare bed for the night?’ I asked the woman.

  ‘Full,’ she said. ‘Try the youth hostel on Brixton Street.’

  Standing outside on the footpath, feeling lost, hungry and afraid, I remembered Wish.

  He would pull up outside the squat later and find a taped-off square, a heap of charred remains where there’d been a house. Would he know with the same certainty that the fire was deliberate, or would he think the worst? How could I find him? I searched my exhausted mind for an address, a direction, any lingering memory from the taxi ride to his house, but all I could remember were fragments of useless detail.

  This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be alone. To keep moving.

  People passed, cars honked, traffic lights beeped—the incessant beat of life on fast-forward when I was stuck on pause.

  I wandered past a café and smelled burnt cheese. It turned my stomach even though I hadn’t eaten in ages. My body felt impossibly light—I must have lost three or four kilos in those few weeks—but my thoughts were becoming clearer. I decided to go back to the squat. I would wait for Wish, and when he came we’d go for a drive as if we were still on the brink of something new and the last few hours had never happened.

  I started walking.

  Vivienne once told me that I came out sideways with a monkey on my back and screamed non-stop for the first year of my life. Then, one day, I stopped. I slept for fourteen hours straight and during that time she didn’t check on me, not once. She said that she went through the five stages of grief in that time—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—but not once did she check to see if I was still breathing. Because even though she was imagining the worst (only the most dire of circumstances could have kept me quiet for so long, she presumed), for her own sanity she had to delay the moment that either a) she found me choked to death by the curtain cord, or b) I opened my eyes and my mouth and recommenced screaming. Those hours were the most tortured yet exquisite she’d ever experienced, she told me.

  I never really got her reasoning until that moment.

  The squat had been razed. Only a section of interior wall was still intact, lying flat but whole. The clippings were smoke-stained but hardly singed by the fire. Everything else was gone. A fire engine was parked outside but the firemen were leaning against the truck, swigging from thermoses, chatting. The hoses were wound in coils, put away. A few residents were arriving home. They stood in a huddle across the street and stared in shock at the aftermath. A man pointed at me and I wondered if they knew we’d been hiding in there at night, while they were eating three-course meals, tucking in children, staying warm.

  I walked a lap of the block. The rear alley was drenched; my feet sank deep in the sodden leaves and clumped ash. When I got back, there was a flimsy strip of tape strung between two stakes along the council strip. The firemen had left. It was almost dark.

  I filled up my water bottle from a garden hose and sat on the kerb outside the neighbouring house. Everything was still and empty.

  An hour passed. My legs were stiff and my fingers numb. I put on an extra layer of dirty, ash-grey clothes even though they stank. With every car that passed my heart beat faster, and when it wasn’t him, I felt the sudden dip of disappointment like my stomach was leaving through my feet.

  Another car crept past. I shrank into myself. I stopped hoping. Part of me didn’t want him to see me like that. I breathed on my hands and tucked them under my armpits to keep them warm.

  Then, at the far end of the street, I noticed a figure. Heading in my direction. Features in shadow, but with that familiar, loping, alley-cat stride. So tall, longlimbed, with a smile that could make the whole world seem different when nothing had really changed. When the figure was close enough, I could see that smile, and I felt relief so sharp it hurt. I blinked back tears.

  ‘Hey, you knew I’d come. Didn’t you?’

  I didn’t. But you have to get on the first boat that sails past, Vivienne always said. You never know when the next one’s coming.

  ‘I knew I’d find you here,’ Arden said and slung a long, pale arm around my shoulder. ‘I knew it.�
�

  PART 2

  DUST

  Thoughts become words,

  words become deeds,

  deeds become habits,

  habits become character,

  and your character becomes your destiny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Carrie told me later that it took Malik under an hour to steal the car and switch the plates. They were waiting a few streets away, engine running—it was a Toyota troop carrier with big steel racks on top. It had obviously been off-road—sweeping arcs of mud, dried to a dusty crust, were sprayed up the sides and someone had written wish my wife was this dirty with their finger in the film obscuring the rear window. A caged trailer was hooked to the back, stacked full with stuff. Inside the car it reeked of diesel and cigarettes.

  When I got in, Carrie screamed, ‘Road trip!’ then chattered on like nothing much had happened, filling in the blanks since I’d left without pausing for breath.

  Bree reached over the seat and brushed the back of her hand across my cheek. Silence gave me a slow, sad smile and clapped his hands. The two gestures didn’t go together and gave me no clue how he was really feeling.

  ‘Found her,’ Arden said. ‘Don’t say I never give you anything.’ She winked at Silence.

  She tried on a Keep on truckin’ cap that she found in the glove box, then pulled it off and sniffed it. Disgusted, she lobbed it out the window and did the same with a few CDs that didn’t meet with her approval. She took off the crucifix necklace I stole for her and hung it from the rear-view mirror.

  Malik had tied down as many sleeping bags as would fit and they’d crammed the rest into the space in the back. All the other gear sat on our laps or under our feet.

  Silence hung his head and picked at his fingernails. I tried to catch his eye but he wasn’t looking. We sat four across on the back seat: me, Darcy, Silence and Carrie. Three in the front: AiAi straddling the gearshift, Malik driving and Arden in the passenger seat. Joe and Bree hid in the back, lying low.

  The first hour was quiet and tense as Malik drove too slowly and too carefully out of the city. When we hit the open road, Arden wound one window down just a crack. We were doing over a hundred and the air throbbed through the opening, giving me an earache. I pressed a hand to my ear to relieve the pressure.