Black Warrior

by Tiffiny Hall

  Art grips the dashboard. ‘Amber means slow down,’ he says, raising his voice.

  Lecky presses her toe onto the accelerator. ‘Or to speed up,’ she retorts as I grip the door handle.

  It’s a miracle we arrive at Hero’s place in one piece. Lecky was more concerned with tanning her driving arm and playing DJ with the car radio than observing the road rules.

  ‘I’ll take it from here,’ Art says, offering to park for Lecky, and squeezes her shoulder. ‘You know, I was scared of driving too. I hated heights and the thought of driving over bridges completely terrified me.’

  We smile at him affectionately, then Lecky shrugs. ‘Totally,’ she says.

  Hero is waiting on a white verandah with his mum. She is wearing a floral smock dress and a pair of trainers with a neon tick on the side. She looks really old, more like a grandmother than a mum; snowy haired and as frail as a scarecrow.

  Art strides up to Hero and offers his hand. Hero shakes it limply. Blood stampedes to my cheeks remembering all the nasty things Hero has said about Art in the past.

  ‘Art,’ Art says, introducing himself.

  Hero doesn’t look up. Art cups his ear and waits.

  ‘Hero, mister,’ Hero says obediently. ‘This is my mum. She likes Grace.’

  Grace smiles kindly, then reaches up and hooks her arm around Art’s neck. He helps her to walk down the steps. She hobbles along the path, then as she approaches the gate, she shouts, ‘Simon! Simon!’

  We look around for a Simon to appear.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ Hero says quietly. He glances at us apologetically.

  I look down at his waist. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him without his black belt on.

  ‘The keys!’ Grace shrieks and tries to wriggle out of Art’s arms. ‘They’re in my purse.’

  ‘Got it,’ I say and run into the house.

  I’m surprised that Hero’s living room is so spotless. The tabletops sparkle and the carpet is all fluffy from a recent vac. I love cleaning, so I notice that all the cupboards have been wiped down and the leather sofa conditioned. There’s no way Grace is strong enough to do all this. A breeze of sympathy for Hero whistles through me. I hunt around the room for Grace’s purse, but can’t see it anywhere.

  ‘Roxy!’ Elecktra calls impatiently from outside.

  A lonely miniature turtle swims over the keys in a rectangular fish bowl on the kitchen bench. Hero’s mum is sick, sicker than I thought. This is a lot of responsibility for a kid. I remember Mr Williams across the road had a stroke, a big one, and his son and daughter-in-law had to move back home to look after him. We went to visit with a basket of oatmeal cookies.

  When I go outside, I catch the end of Elecktra’s conversation as Art helps Grace with her seatbelt. ‘Oi, you better show some respect. That’s my dad. You want me to take over the wheel?’ Lecky threatens Hero.

  He shakes his head, a smile nipping at the corners of his lips.

  We drive to the hospital in silence, Hero’s knees bumping between Elecktra’s tan legs and my jeans. Art tells us a story about the time he dislocated his shoulder climbing out of his home when he was our age. He grew up in a tree house in the bush. His parents home-schooled him. They were artists too. They didn’t take him to the hospital for a whole day because they were convinced his arm would heal on its own with the assistance of Tibetan bowls. Their soothsayer, Ash the Handsome, had taken Art through two hours of healing sound therapy until they finally realised his sore arm wasn’t improving. We arrive before the end of the story, but I’ve heard it all before. Art ends up in the hospital and thinks it’s the best place in the universe because it’s the first time he ever meets a vending machine.

  We help Grace and Hero into the hospital. A doctor arrives in a white-coat-flapping jog and escorts Grace to a wheelchair.

  Hero turns to us. Art smiles and holds out his fist to pound it. Elecktra and I wince at his attempt to be cool.

  ‘Hey, um …’ Hero looks at Art’s fist.

  Elecktra mimics a driving wheel with her hands. Hero swallows.

  ‘Thanks,’ he finally says and knocks knuckles with Art.

  ‘Do you need anything else? We can hang around if you like?’ Art offers.

  ‘No,’ Hero says, a flat, dead response that frays the seconds afterwards with awkwardness. ‘I’m right,’ he adds and tries to smile, but it’s all gums.

  ‘Sure you don’t want a ride with Lecky driving? It’s more wild than FunEscape Park,’ I say. Usually nothing beats FunEscape Park with its mountainous roller-coaster, famous Ferris wheel that is the highest point in our town and the awesome kid-screaming, parent-pestering stuff that you can buy.

  Hero sighs; it sounds like his first proper exhale for days. He smiles properly this time, with his teeth, and shrugs. ‘Nah, wanna live to repeat Year Seven,’ he says.

  Art laughs like an opera singer across an octave. Elecktra and I laugh at his laugh, then Hero laughs with us.

  Driving home, Elecktra adjusts the radio five times to find ‘her jam’, as she gives my seatbelt a workout. I feel like I have whiplash by the time she stops out the front of our yellow apartment and changes seats with Art so he can park. Parking is next week’s lesson.

  ‘Poor kid,’ Art says. ‘Must be hard growing up without a dad and looking after his mum like that on his own — I feel for him.’

  The thought rips through me. I know how he feels. The film of my father, who he was, who he could be, plays relentlessly in my mind and pokes the mental bruises. I never stop thinking about him.

  ‘I’ll wash the car,’ I say.

  Art pats me between the shoulder blades. His shaggy hair always looks a mess, but it has more static after the drive with Elecktra. ‘Thanks, kiddo,’ he says, as if it’s my idea, but it’s on the list of chores that Elecktra and I have to complete since I made it rain inside. Of course, I’m the one doing all the work. Elecktra is MIA whenever it’s time to do a job.

  As I relax into the easy tempo of car washing, I pretend to polish the nightmares from my mind. The simple task shepherds my mind away from all the hard questions. My thoughts drift to Hero and his mum. She wasn’t with it, at all. He must look after her all the time.

  I wax-on wax-off for more than an hour. Cleaning for me is always like sweeping out my mental closets. I can complete a small measurable task with no strings. There is always a peaceful rhythm to cleaning that scrubs away those thoughts with teeth, the ones that bite. Unlike other things, cleaning always makes sense.

  Again, I try to swallow the feeling that something is changing. Not just within me but around me. I can feel it in the breeze, in the shadows, in the peeling of the leaves from the trees and the texture of the darkness. Something is coming. A flock of birds screams overhead.

  Art returns. He is wearing his running shorts and a fluorescent singlet. He has a greasy brow from his jog. He walks a quick circuit around the car, his bum bag bouncing as he inspects the wheels. He yanks on his sandy blond hair and whips up a smile. ‘You’re a machine,’ he says. ‘Now Mum could do with a hand in the garden.’

  For some people their gardens are home, maybe even more than their living rooms. This is the case with my mum. She hardly ever has time to garden, but when she does, it’s the only time you will catch her humming and with a look on her face like she’s left the human world to be a garden spirit surrounded by the senses; beautiful colours and smells. The garden allows Mum to be gentle, away from her kitchen daggers and ninja stars. We have a tiny communal garden out the front of our apartment building. Mum convinced the other tenants for her to take charge. Until now, all the plants were wilting in their plastic containers, but we have been busy for an hour burying them in soft graves of soil.

  Mum sits back on her heels and smiles. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

  I shrug as I set some none-so-pretty seeds into the earth. ‘Everything is weird. The attacks. Cinnamon disappearing. Hero being nice. I dunno, I feel like nothing is normal any more.’

/>   ‘We don’t do normal, darling,’ Mum says.

  We smile at each other.

  ‘I wish I knew what was out there,’ I continue. ‘I wish I could stop it. And I know you know. Probably everything. That night at school, you were looking up in the sky as if you were expecting something. What were you looking for?’

  Mum digs her hole way too deep. ‘I was looking at the stars. Just the stars, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know why you are so allergic to telling the truth. You’re the only one in Lanternwood with a clue and yet you’ll wait until we’re in deep, deep trouble before you do anything!’ The wind curls into my voice. I toss a seed into the hole. Mum rakes the soil over the seed, burying it like she does all of her secrets.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that, Roxy,’ she says, and her voice is a warning.

  ‘Always is,’ I mumble. I pat down the soil over the seed. ‘Why are these called none-so-pretty? Aren’t they pink flowers?’

  ‘They will grow to be fuchsia purple. Their stems have sticky patches on them to catch flies,’ Mum says, holding a seed up to the sun. She bites her lip.

  ‘What’s so special about that?’

  ‘I like them because they teach you a lesson,’ she says, her eyes sliding down to meet mine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They teach you that something beautiful can also be deadly.’ Mum’s eyes glint then darken. She buries the seed.

  A deep voice resonates behind me: ‘Roxy.’

  I turn on my knees and look up. He stands with the sun at his back, so when I squint up at him, his head is haloed and my face is shadowed.

  ‘Hero?’ Mum asks, pulling her fishtail braid to the other shoulder and adjusting her straw hat. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Wicked, Mrs Ran,’ he says.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, standing up. Hero’s arms are behind his back. ‘What do you have there?’

  Hero blushes. He slowly brings an arm in front to reveal a bouquet of hand-picked daisies. ‘Thanks for helping Mum. It was a really sick thing to do.’

  I take the flowers and smell them. ‘Daisies are such smiley flowers,’ I say.

  ‘True,’ he says.

  A comfortable silence settles between us. I ask, ‘So do you want —’

  The James Bond theme erupts in his pocket and Hero fumbles to find his mobile. He looks at his phone. ‘It’s Mum,’ he says. ‘I better bail.’

  Mum smiles up at him and reaches for the basket of plump pears we have been snacking on while gardening. ‘Here, take your mum these freshies,’ she says. ‘And send our love.’

  Hero takes the basket and dips his cap. ‘Awesome, Mrs Ran. Thanks a million.’ He turns to me. ‘See you later?’

  I nod.

  ‘Wicked,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks for the flowers,’ I call after him. I don’t want to admit how grown-up he made me feel. No one has ever given me flowers before. I take them inside to find a vase. Then I sit them on my desk and arrange each daisy so its face can see the sun without being squashed by another. I watch the daisies for the longest time. Hero is like the fly-catching flowers, completely unexpected. Dangerous, but also so fragile he could be blown away by the wind.

  FOURTEEN

  Elecktra sits next to me, her large bark-coloured eyes blinking. She lifts her ponytail off her back and hands me a vial of perfume. ‘Spritz me?’ she asks. Considering the dance was a disaster, Elecktra seems to be managing okay.

  Hero sits across from me with his hooded eyes and his hair a gleaming black helmet. He chews the inside of his cheek as I take the bottle from Elecktra and squirt it twice into the back of her ponytail. She waves the fumes elaborately like swatting flies. The sunlight flutters off her gold hoops.

  ‘Nice earrings,’ I tell her.

  ‘Accessories are what separate humans from the monkeys,’ she says.

  I think of the tiny diamond earrings Mum gave me for my tenth birthday. They were exquisite. I lost them swimming in the ocean on the first day. She was so distraught she spent the week of our holiday snorkelling and sifting sand, determined to find them. My search for my father is seeming like those diamonds in the sand, lost upon lost, into depths of lostness.

  Hero, thick with boredom, pretends to study the menu, then looks up and analyses me. He scratches his jaw, which already has the shadow of growth. The daisies smile at me in my mind. Hero texted me after he came by to say he had something to tell us.

  I’m glad we chose to come to the Gourmet Garage, our local café. Elecktra wanted to go to the blowhole at Mushroom Rocks, but it’s too dangerous. Heaps of kids like to go up to the lookout and stand in front of the corridor of rocks, wait for a big wave, then hold on to the bars of the lookout and weather the blast of exploding water as it surges through the hole. I thought it would be easier to talk here, though. I enjoy nesting among the trills of conversation. The café looks more like our apartment when it was being renovated than a restaurant; Art would say it has the ‘fixeruppera feel’. I love everything about this café, from the hairline fractures in the paint on the walls stringing up to a collection of cuckoo clocks, to the baby floral ottomans that pebble the floor. Dignified chesterfields stand like elephants among the plastic tables, engaging everyone in coffee conversation as they trail in off the street and conscientiously wipe their feet on the welcome mat that says ‘empty’ at the bottom and ‘full’ at the top.

  ‘Croissant?’ asks a cracked-faced woman with a husky voice and the kind of old-lady energy that puts all the lethargic teens slumping over the plastic furniture, thumbing their phones, to shame.

  Elecktra does a little dance and the lady plonks the croissant in front of her. There’s nothing perkier than a fresh croissant. It’s pastry curled in a golden smile.

  ‘Danish?’

  Hero looks up. The lady slides the danish in front of him. There’s nothing more depressing than a danish. They are born looking stale.

  ‘We drove his mum, but I don’t see why we have to hang out with him,’ Elecktra says to me. ‘He tried to kill us. He beats up our friends, screws with our academic careers. Why can’t you ever grip a damn grudge? You’re just like Mum.’

  Hero gives Elecktra a sour smile. His eyes heat me; they are so intense. They glow a shade darker. Something about the way he is looking at me pleads for him to stay, for me to understand him, or to begin to understand him.

  I’ve never been one to hold a grudge. Elecktra, though, never forgets someone who has wronged her. She winds up her injustices into razor-wire knots and dares her enemies to untangle her. She’ll have you wrestle with her emotional barbed wire until your fingers bleed. But Mum and I, we release our problems like doves. They are there, then they fly into the clouds and fade.

  ‘I think with everything that’s going on we should work together,’ I say.

  ‘But he’s a thug,’ Elecktra retorts.

  With a mouthful of danish, Hero says, ‘Yup, I’m right here, guys.’

  Elecktra licks her fingers and dips a corner of her croissant in blueberry jam. I wish I could eat; my stomach is churned up. I also wish Cinnamon was here.

  ‘Jacko would have a conniption if he saw you here with him, sharing pastry like a romantic picnic date,’ Elecktra says.

  Hero rips a corner of the danish with his teeth violently. He stares at Elecktra, chewing, chewing until there is no more food, chewing because he doesn’t know what else to do. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to give me a break,’ he says finally. ‘It’s been a rough week.’

  ‘Not enough Gate Twos to harass?’ Elecktra presses.

  Hero turns to stone. Something pulls him down on the inside, quicksand. I see his face drain. His eyes flood. Not with rainy tears but silent ones, the ones that are hot and burn your eyes. They fall faster than he can swipe them away with his sleeve.

  Elecktra is stunned. My chair scrapes forwards and I offer him a serviette. He mops up some of the tears.

  ‘Is it your mum?’ I ask, reaching out and touchin
g his hand. He looks at me, and for just a breath, I see how lonely he is.

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ Elecktra says.

  I squeeze his hand.

  Hero turns away and when he looks back at me his sadness has disappeared in a blink, a light switching off.

  Elecktra turns to me. ‘So, miss, where’s Jacko boy?’

  ‘Jackson is busy with the Emishi clan, trying to figure out what’s going on,’ I say.

  ‘Too busy for you?’ Elecktra asks.

  ‘No,’ I snap.

  She hums around a mouthful of croissant.

  ‘I want to find Cinnamon, that’s all,’ Hero grunts.

  Elecktra reclines back in her chair and points the last of her croissant at him. ‘And why do you care if we find Cinnamon donut or not?’

  Hero shrugs.

  Elecktra sits up straight in her chair. ‘Freeze!’ she yells in an emergency-room shout.

  The table next to us turns and stares.

  ‘I know that look,’ she says. She leans in to Hero as if his head were a magnet. She scans him with her gleaming globe eyes. ‘I know that look,’ she repeats whimsically. ‘You like Cinnamon. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, hey? You tease to get her attention. You like the redheads?’

  Hero leaps off his chair. ‘No, I don’t, I don’t!’

  ‘Ha!’ Elecktra says. ‘Guys never grow out of being thirteen-year-old jerks.’

  Sweat bubbles on my neck. This could get ugly. I see Hero’s fingers twitch to his back pocket. God knows what weapons he has stashed there.

  Elecktra stands up to face him and leans over the table. ‘You so do like her. Hero and Cinnamon, GF, BF, who would’ve thought? All this time and you could have been double dating with Rox and Jacko. I LOVE this.’ She sits back down proudly. Anyone would think she’d just discovered how the universe works or something. That’s the thing about Lecky, she doesn’t know much in books, but she’ll know you as soon as she meets you. She gets you straight away. Like the time she told me that nothing reveals someone’s true colours more than when they’re hungry at a buffet. We went to a buffet once at a fancy hotel for Mum’s birthday brunch. Sure enough, people were pushing, being rude or greedy while others were patient, considerate and kind. It really was enlightening. Lecky is some kind of people-person genius.