by Zane Lovitt
Hamish sniggered softly, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘That’s not appropriate.’
‘But you wrote it, Sir.’
Students gasped and craned their necks to see the cover.
‘It doesn’t matter who wrote it. James Joyce could have written it. But you don’t use language like that in class.’
‘I don’t understand. I can read it, but I can’t speak it aloud? That doesn’t make sense.’
‘Outside, Thorsten. Now.’
Once Hamish had joined him in the corridor, Scott closed the door. He didn’t say anything for a while, just looked him up and down. He resembled a poster boy for the Hitler youth: platinum hair, pale blue eyes, and that bored, heavy-lidded expression most of the boys sported.
Scott moved close, glad he had a couple of inches over the kid.
‘Try another stunt like that and you’ll be sorry.’
‘Sir?’
Scott leaned into Hamish’s face. ‘Piss me off again, and I will seriously fuck your shit up. Understand?’
Scott was gratified to see Hamish’s eyes widen, just for a second.
‘You can’t talk to me like that. I’ll—’
‘Whinge to your parents? Get Daddy to call a crisis meeting like you did when I gave you a B+? I don’t care, Thorsten. Now get your stuff and go see your Head of House. I’ve had enough.’
*
Scott pushed through the rusting gate and staggered up the overgrown front path, found his keys (yes!), dropped his keys (fuck!), picked them up and stabbed them at the lock until finally he was in, bouncing from one side of the entry hall to the other. Hey Honey, I’m home! No. Quiet. Don’t wake the baby. Never wake the baby. He turned the knob to their bedroom door with exaggerated care. The bed was neatly made, cot empty. A note on the kitchen bench said that Natalie had taken the baby and gone to stay at her mother’s. Scott opened the fridge. A litre of organic milk sat next to a long-neck of Cooper’s Pale.
Just what he needed. A cleansing ale.
*
The rest of the lesson passed uneventfully and when the students left Scott had a merciful free period before lunch. Unable to deal with the staffroom, he decided to stay where he was, guzzling from his water bottle and surfing the net. He opened his email, hoping for a reply to the apology he’d sent Natalie, but she hadn’t responded. There was, however, a message from his old uni friend Dan, who had been trying (and failing) to get published for years.
Dude, you should check out Twitter – you are totally trending! #ScottTallis #Misogyny #Literary Sexism.
Scott pinched the bridge of his nose. Twitter. Honestly. Who was even on that stupid site apart from celebrities and the sad social misfits who trolled them? He deleted the message and another popped up in its place, this one from Wet Ink Press. He felt a momentary thrill – a movie option? International rights? But it was his commissioning editor, telling him that his contract had been cancelled for non-delivery of manuscript. Scott doubted that was the real reason, but before he could hit reply there was a knock on the door. He turned. Bloody Lewis, this time with a security guard in tow and – holy shit – was that the Vice Principal? The three of them walked across the room, shoulder to shoulder like the cast of a low-rent cop show. Hamish Thorsten. Had to be. Too late, Scott remembered that Lewis was Senior School Head of House.
‘I’m going to need you to step away from the computer,’ Lewis said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Just do it,’ said the Vice.
The security guard gave Scott an apologetic look, closed the laptop, unplugged it from the wall and placed it in a bag made of clear, thick plastic which he sealed with tape.
‘What’s going on?’
‘We’ve had a student complaint,’ said the Vice, who looked like the bad guy from a Dickens novel. ‘Pornography.’
‘Entourage?’ Scott was confused.
Lewis cleared his throat. ‘It’s been alleged that while you were out of the room a student used your computer to look something up on the internet.’
‘But they’re not allowed—’
‘And while doing so encountered images of a lewd nature.’
‘That’s bull—’
‘Images of female students,’ hissed the Vice.
‘Lewis,’ Scott implored. ‘You know as well as I do that Hamish Thorsten is trying to get back at me for confiscating his iPad.’
‘I can’t disclose the complainant’s name.’
The Vice pulled himself up to his full height and put on his assembly voice. ‘The Bayside Academy has a duty of care and legal requirement to thoroughly investigate allegations of this nature, and report such incidents to Victoria Police. As outlined in our policies and procedures document, you are to be suspended with pay while the investigation is carried out. The guard and Mr Brayfield will accompany you to your office to collect your things.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Scott said. ‘They won’t find any porn on my computer because there isn’t any. That sociopath is stitching me up.’
‘If that’s the case then you’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Brayfield. ‘The truth will out!’
Scott started laughing then. A high-pitched keening that caused Brayfield and the Vice to share a long, worried look.
In the office Scott swept his mug, stapler, and How to Survive Your First Year of Teaching into a small copypaper box. He cleared out his pigeonhole and handed Hamish’s iPad to Lewis. Giving the room a final, visual sweep he noticed a familiar book on Lewis’s desk.
‘The Drover.’
‘Magnificent. Just magnificent,’ Brayfield nodded. ‘Did you know it’s on the Year Twelve syllabus next year? I saw Phillip Docker speak at Readings last week and got myself a signed copy. Told him I was writing a book myself and he was very generous with his advice.’
Scott picked up the book and opened the dust jacket to inspect the title page.
To Lewis,
You are not given the desire to do something without the ability to achieve it.
Best, Phillip Docker
Scott had to pass through the staffroom to get to the carpark. He mumbled goodbye, but none of the other teachers looked up from their cup-o-noodles. Outside it was cold and clear, pale sunshine highlighting the sandstone walls, oak leaves budding green against a deep blue sky. A new building was being constructed over by the football field and for the first time Scott noticed the sign. Coming soon: The James Thorsten Aquatic Centre.
Scott unlocked the door to his 2002 Holden Barina and chucked the box on the passenger seat. As he started up he saw a flash of navy and turned to see Hamish and Lachlan saunter past, fists shoved in blazer pockets.
‘Check out the shitbox,’ Lachlan said.
‘I’d be embarrassed to – oh – hi, Sir,’ said Hamish. ‘Nice car.’
‘I know what you did,’ Scott said quietly.
‘Sir?’
‘And when they examine my laptop and find nothing you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.’
‘Sure it’s clean?’ Lachlan asked. ‘You’re always ducking out of class, leaving it open. And those naked selfies everyone’s sharing. Ophelia, Ali, and don’t forget the younger girls. Year nine are the worst!’
Lachlan laughed. ‘True, dat!’
‘I know my own computer,’ Scott said.
‘The desktop, sure. But what’s hiding deep in the system files?’
Hamish and Lachlan slouched towards a P-plated BMW convertible.
*
‘Aren’t you worried?’ Lachlan asked as they approached Hamish’s car. ‘I mean, they can work out to the second when a file’s been downloaded. Trace its origin. You can go to jail for that shit.’
‘Chillax, I didn’t touch his computer. Just wanted to make him sweat.’
Lachlan high-fived his friend.
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*
Scott pulled out of his spot, then reversed into a three-point turn. The boys were shooting the shit, leaning on Hamish’s hundred-thousand-dollar car. It occurred to Scott that despite everything, he had done it, he had somehow got through today. Traffic was light this early in the afternoon, so he’d be home in forty minutes. Oh god, how he wanted to be home: lolling on the couch, Tom Waits on the stereo, ice-cold beer in hand. He put the car in drive and was about to accelerate when he heard his phone beep. He braked and fished it from his jacket pocket. A message from Natalie. Finally!
Hi Scott. I think we should take a break for a while. I’m going to stay in the house so I’d like you to be out by the time I get back tonight.
Scott’s head throbbed and vision blurred. His tongue tasted bitter, as though his salivary glands were oozing poison. In front of him, directly across the carpark, Hamish tilted his head back and laughed, flaxen hair gleaming in the sun. He looked at Scott and smiled.
The Barina was a shitbox, but it could still do zero to sixty in ten seconds. As he eased his foot off the brake, he wondered what sound a body might make if it was mashed between two cars. Watery squelch? Bony crunch? Both? A picture flashed in his mind – Hamish doubled over the Barina’s bonnet, eyes wide with disbelief, dark blood globbing from his mouth. The image produced a spreading warmth inside Scott’s chest, like a shot of gin or the feeling he got when he held his baby son. He remembered a news item he had once seen about a man who had tragically mistaken the accelerator for the brake, and run over his wife.
As Scott’s foot hovered between the two pedals he thought of Phil’s dedication.
You are not given the desire to do something without the ability to achieve it.
He put his foot down.
Hard.
The Drover
Leigh Redhead
Saying Goodbye
There are minutes when I hold it together. When the thoughts don’t stray and the clock doesn’t leap. But only minutes.
They are hard minutes. The straining of the will to capture the moments. The ember of hope, burning in my gut. Hope that the diagnosis was wrong.
Too real, these minutes. In my darkened bedroom, my sanctuary, where I’m still aware. Where the memories of my wife gather, the clues of her sometime presence: the scarves still hanging off the wardrobe door; her shoes clustered by the drawers; her paperbacks in the bookshelf above our bed.
So real, these minutes. Heightened in every way. But stained, too, by secrets.
The shadows of the flowering marri outside my window – now a sinister projection that shivers on the venetian blind. The sound of the wind beneath the eaves a ghostly voice. The smell of my decrepitude.
I guard these secrets. Incarcerated by my will. But they wish to be free of me. These ghosts.
The only man who stood by me, my favourite snitch. One more soul I have captured. Benny Jones – an alias among many. Christ knows what he heard, what I let slip, when he made his delivery. Off in la-la land. When I returned to myself, the shock of the real bringing tears to my eyes, the powder was there in a neatly folded sheet of paper – Women’s Weekly I think, lurid colour that burned my eyes – on the bedside table. And a pack of needles. And some plastic bubbles of sterilised water.
I look to the clock, to the page where I wrote the time. It’s been hours. I fold myself over the bedside table and begin to work, a pleasing automation in my actions: tip the powder into the saucer, tear and drip the water into the powder, mix the two with the rubber nub of the first needle.
I must have done this many times before. I can feel the ghosts, their pressure, voices bubbling in my throat. The hotshots I’ve seen. First, Mary Knightshead, in her HJ Holden, parked there by the beach, the sulphur lights of the channel markers winking in the dark. And later, Terry McRae, in his fifteenth-storey bedsit in Johnson Court; watching the sunset over the Indian Ocean, listening to him gurgle, organs haemorrhaging, heart bursting in his chest.
The voices, I can hear them, but I try not to listen. I clamp my mouth shut. But it isn’t Mary and Terry that I can hear. It isn’t a narration of my life or the sins I’ve committed. My four children are here. I have invited them. I can hear them, and their spouses, in the kitchen.
I glance at the clock. Four minutes of lucidity. I dare to hope. And I remember, just like last time, how I dared to hope. And I remember, the time before that – perhaps, if I never leave this room, I will get better.
But I write down the time.
Footsteps in the hall. I cap the needles and scoop them into the top drawer, fall back against the pillows. Four pillows. Uncomfortable. My daughter’s touch, no doubt.
Why did I invite them?
Of course, to say goodbye.
I can feel my thoughts fizz as the ghosts clamour, as the real becomes unreal, the perimeter between the two as unknowable as the boundary dividing sleep and dream.
I must hold on. So I close my eyes. To hold on.
To listen. Just the one sense to strain – one strand of wire to hold.
My daughter, Sharon. And from the tone of her voice, she’s with my youngest son, Greg. Sharon’s voice patient, but pitched high – the effect he has on people. My son the meth-head. At thirty-four. Was a junky before that. Somehow lived, when most of his friends died.
Sharon’s hand on my shoulder, stroking my brow.
‘Ugh,’ Greg says. ‘How can you do that?’
She doesn’t answer. Lifts my left leg onto the bed. At some point it must have slipped off. She holds my dry hand, strokes my wet brow. My only daughter. My beautiful child. Still single. Which I don’t mind.
Then they are all here. Through my eyelids I see the orange flare of light. Six people, gathered around. Sharon and the meth-head. Robert and Felicity. Graeme and Ronnie.
What are they doing here?
I wonder if I’m dead. But then Robert, my eldest, says, ‘Fucking smell in here.’
Graeme agrees. ‘Like he’s already dead.’
Sharon doesn’t say anything, but she’ll be giving them her look, the scathing look delivered across so many dinners, at her brutish brothers.
‘What?’ Graeme asks.
I was hard on him. It bred nothing but weakness. I like his wife better. She’s funnier, smarter, harder. Now she says, ‘Sharon’s right. Show some respect.’
‘Why?’ Robert replies. ‘It’s not like he’s compos fucking mentis.’
Sharon sighs. ‘There are arrangements we need to make. We have to sell this house to pay for his care. I know it’s hard, selling a house full of memories.’
Graeme snorts. ‘Memories of what? Him getting stuck in? Shouting at Mum? The big fucking cop hero. Just a thug. A bagman and bash-artist. A driver.’
‘Four children and no grandchildren,’ Robert says. ‘None of us wanted any children. What does that tell you? It tells me something.’
‘Whatever,’ Sharon hisses. ‘Greg, what are you doing?’
‘Just looking.’
‘Greg, no.’
They all chime in, even the boys.
‘Leave that stuff alone.’
‘It’s not yours.’
‘It’s ours.’
‘Look, he’s crying.’ Sharon’s hand on my brow again.
‘Fucking crocodile tears. Not even. Must be automatic.’
‘He cried when your mother died.’
‘Get out of that, Greg.’
‘The fucking smell in here. Let’s talk in the kitchen.’
‘Greg, for goodness sake…’
And then I am alone.
*
I come back to the world from a place I don’t remember. There was no past there and no future, and therefore no present. There was nothing in that place, not even absence; sweet oblivion, a world without ghosts. I look at the clock and w
here I wrote the time. Three hours have gone.
I remember one thing. I know what Greg was looking for. My guns. Or at least the key to the cabinet in the hall. He will sell them to the goons who keep him supplied, to whom he is surely in debt.
But they’re under the house, buried in a toolbox. With the two pineapple grenades and a claymore mine complete with trip wires.
Buried, because I don’t trust myself. I have the claymore and grenades for a reason, but that doesn’t mean I should keep them on hand, not in my state. I’d kill the postman by accident.
The word is that I’m no longer on the hit-list. Funny that. When my mind was clear, I was a ‘dead-man walking’, or so I was told, so many times. Now I’m not worth killing. A pitiful old man, haunted and alone – why bother?
But that’s just the word on the street. I beat those bastards, the Dingo Jacks, bikie scumbags who’d promised to off me. And they got close. My statesman blown up. A Molotov cocktail put through my bedroom window. A drive-by when I was walking the dog.
I beat those bastards. I survived. On my own.
My own side left me. Officially I’m a dinosaur, a remnant of a wilder time, an embarrassment to the modern force. They spoke of keeping me safe, but their actions spoke louder. They know the secrets I hold, in there with the ghosts in my head. Men who are now at the top of the heap, they learned everything from me. I am not an embarrassment. I am a threat.
And my mind is going. I would talk, but I would not be believed, or even understood. You carry secrets in your gut. I know that because of the ulcers. Buried in the darkness. But it takes will, to keep them there.
My will is gone.
Who am I when I’m absent? A whining fizz? A man who gives it up?
I have seen men make confessions that filled hours of tape. My own would take months. But who will be listening?
They are my shame, those months when I was a dead-man walking. The smell of death in my wake. The old consorter, whose job was to know everyone in the city, every player, every shonk and every hoon. To charm and intimidate, to lubricate the lines of communication. Access for information. I was a powerful man. But after the incident, after the contract was out on me, they all looked on me with pity, or maybe fear. As though the promise of violent death was contagious, liable to spread with a handshake, a nod of the head, a shared drink.