by David Thorne
“His name wasn’t Cletus, it was Roger.”
“Really? What were you and Roger up to while everyone else was doing chores?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm. Well, I’m killing Roger. And his mom. Fuck them, it means more veggies for us. ”
“You can’t just kill the people who save us and give us shelter.”
“Call the police, I don’t give a fuck. It’s their own fault for being so trusting. I’m killing them both. Then it will just be us and Samantha.”
“Who’s Samantha?”
“The old lady’s twenty-four-year-old daughter.”
“There’s no daughter.”
“Yes there is. She’s Roger’s much better looking sister.”
“Well I’m killing her too. If anyone asks, we’ll just say zombies got them.”
“That works. It’s good to have a plan for this type of thing. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“We should get them to help with the fence first. And show us around so we know how everything works.”
“Yes, it would be good to know the Netflix password and where they keep the extra towels.”
“Netflix would be down. But we could play Scrabble. We haven’t played Scrabble in ages.”
“I hate Scrabble.”
“Roger liked Scrabble.”
Gypsies
“Oh my god, you are terrible at this game,” Seb stated, “it’s like playing with a two-year-old. Why are you standing in the corner spinning?”
“It’s the controller,” I replied, “I’m not used to using a controller, I need a keyboard and mouse. Like in Quake. Remember Quake?”
“Yes.”
“You looked around with the mouse and moved with the arrow keys. If you saw the other player, you clicked the mouse button to send a rocket in their direction. They’d explode if you hit them. First one not to explode ten times won. That’s it. There weren’t forty-eight different things to remember. How did you know I’m in a corner?”
“I’m looking right at you. Just follow me out of the building.”
“Okay, but don’t kill me. Where are you?”
“Oh my god, I’m standing right next to you on the ledge. Look up, see? I’m jumping.”
“How do I look up?”
“Oh my god, use the other stick.”
“Oh right... ”
“What did you kill me for?”
“Sorry, it was an accident. I pressed the wrong button.”
“Bullshit.” Seventeen thousand miles away in Australia, Seb exited the game.
I used to be able to beat Seb at all the games we played. Quake, Unreal Tournament, Need for Speed Most Wanted. Then he hit puberty. And I left him. For love, for sanity, for a dozen reasons logical and not. Moving countries meant the opportunity for Seb to travel though, to spend quality time together rather than every second weekend and a few nights between at my small apartment - Seb’s mother and I never saw eye to eye about much. It also meant stretches where I wouldn’t see him at all, where I would worry and miss out on things and long to hear his voice. The thought of him being seventeen thousand miles away was pushed back daily. Sometimes I couldn’t push it back and I would spend days, weeks, angry and depressed. We’d message and Facetime and play games online but every time I met him at the airport he was taller. This year he was taller than me.
He’s also better looking than I was at sixteen. Smarter and funnier. Or, perhaps all parents just think their offspring are smart and attractive. It’s possible he may be retarded and have a face like a smashed crab but I simply can’t see it. I thought he might be gay for a while, assumed actually, but I’ve seen his Internet history since. I should probably talk to him about that, ask him for a list of good links or something. Apart from basic biology, I never had ‘the’ talk with Seb. I never filtered his Internet search settings either though. I figured he’d work it out. There was no Internet when I was his age. I’d never heard of rimjobs or creampies or pancakes. What I did know came from secondhand exaggerations and my father’s hidden magazine collection. My very first love and loss was Miss Penthouse 1980, she liked campfires and hiking. I lost her when the carefully removed centrefold went through the washing machine in the back pocket of my jeans. I’m lucky my mother didn’t check the pockets or I’d not even have had the mushy folded lump to remember her by. I kept it for a while, tried to dry it out, you could still make out one of her ears and a bit of the mosquito netting. My second love and loss was a woman named Natalie, I was Seb’s age. She was forty-something and worked as a gardener for the Tea Tree Gully Golf Club. She told me I looked like Simon Le Bon. I don’t know if Seb has had sex yet. If he has, I hope it wasn’t behind a hedge. Perhaps he’s too busy playing The Modern Black Ops.
My third love and loss slept with a furniture deliveryman when Seb was four. I won’t go into that except to say the delivery man’s name was Stuart and he liked the band Journey. They dated for a while after I left, she’s had eighty or ninety boyfriends since then. Before our paths diverged, Seb had regime, a set bedtime, healthy food triangles.
After becoming a part-time father, I didn’t want the limited time he was with me further limited by rules. There were no healthy food triangles; we ate McDonald’s and pizza. There was no set bedtime, as I didn’t want him to go to bed. Sleeping was time he wasn’t spending with me. There were no regimes at all. I realize it’s not an award-winning parental model but at least I never molested or beat him. I did threaten to sell him to the Gypsies on occasion, and once to send him to boarding school, but they weren’t actual options.
“What’s a Gypsie?”
“People that travel around the country in caravans.”
“Like Nana?”
“No, Nana has a house. She travels around the country in a caravan for fun. Gypsies don’t have houses. They live in the caravan full-time, travelling from town to town, buying children apparently.”
“What do they do with them?”
“I have no idea, probably sell them on at a profit.”
“How much would they pay you?”
“For you? Not much. There’s not a huge market for kids who draw shit on the walls with a Sharpie. What’s it meant to be anyway? Is it a penis?”
“No, it’s an arrow.”
“You should have made it more pointy then. Why did you draw a giant arrow on the wall?”
“So people know the way to my room.”
“Right, because we get a lot of people wandering about lost, wondering where the fuck your bedroom is. At least when the Gypsies come I can tell them, ‘Yes, he’s in his room, straight through and down the hall, just follow the huge fucking arrow.’ Do it again and I’ll send you to boarding school.”
“What’s boarding school?”
“Same as normal school but you get molested and beaten. Then they sell you to the Gypsies. We get half each.”
There were days when I had to work. Lots of days really. Days when I had to meet deadlines, days he came to client meetings, days he sat in front of the Playstation. He survived. We went away a few times a year, camping and house-boating mostly, but more hours than not were spent inside a small concrete box. Between client changes and emails, we played War of the Monsters and Ratchet & Clank, Unreal Tournament and Quake.
I spotted him easily amongst the crowd of tired faces pouring through the exit. A full head height taller than most, his designer haircut added another four or five inches.
He grinned, slid his bag across the polished tiles towards me. I hugged him hard.
“Are you shrinking?” he asked.
“It’s these shoes,” I replied, “they have thin soles.”
“My soles are thin too.”
“Not as thin as these, I can’t even walk on gravel with them. How was the flight?”
“Long. Fifteen hours long.”
When Seb was six, he walked to the corner shop by himself for the first time. It was December of 2005 and he was with me for a full week of the holid
ays. I’d bought him a mini-bike for Christmas on the Internet. It wasn’t a brand name like Yamaha or Honda, it was a Chinese knockoff called Zoomyou, or something like that, and I think it was made of cast iron. It was delivered the week before Christmas and I hid it in the garage under a sheet. Our concrete box, identical to twenty other concrete boxes in the Cul-de-sac, consisted of three stories with the living areas above the garage and bedrooms at the top.
Around 2am Christmas morning, I climbed out of bed and checked on Seb. He was snoring. I closed his book, turned off his bed light, and shut his door quietly. Making my way down two flights, I uncovered the mini-bike and rolled it to the doorway leading upstairs. My intention was to carry it up to the living area so that when he awoke in the morning, he’d discover it besides the Christmas tree. I bent over, and lifted.
It felt like someone had tazed me, frying every nerve from my tailbone to my eye-sockets. I dropped to my knees, unable to move. I’d never experienced a thrown back before. Afterwards, just sneezing or getting a teaspoon out of the dishwasher was enough to throw it out but before that moment, back problems were ‘old people’ problems. The doorway was blocked by the bike and even if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have made it up the stairs. Every movement, every slight twist, produced white flashes of pain. I called out for Seb but knew it was pointless; he was two levels above with his bedroom door closed. With my knees and head on the concrete, doggy style, I waited.
Seb awoke and ran down to the second level excitedly. There were no presents under the tree and I wasn’t anywhere in the house. He sat on the couch and cried. I heard the sobs, tried to time my calls for help between. Eventually he investigated.
After doting over the mini-bike, he fetched painkillers from the upstairs bathroom cabinet and, after a time, I was able to inch up the steps on my hands and knees. With help I made it into a leather office chairs on wheels. From there, I watched him climb up on the kitchen counter to reach the cupboard where his other presents were hidden, watched him make me a coffee for the first time, prepare his own breakfast.
Christmas in Australia is in the middle of summer and it’s a common tradition to spend the day at the beach. Some people set up tables with prepared dishes, some eat fish ’n’ chips cross-legged on the sand. Seb and I didn’t go to the beach. We didn’t visit family or friends. We played Need For Speed and had pizza delivered. It was the first time Seb ever answered the door and paid for the pizza by himself. For five days, he wheeled me from in front of the television to the bathroom and back. He made snacks, took the rubbish out, vacuumed the rugs and walked to the corner shop to buy milk for my coffees.
Seb tried out his mini-bike a few weeks later at a grassy picnic area beside a river. He forgot where the brakes were and ‘bailed out’ at speed by jumping off the back. The bike kept going, cleared the riverbank by at least fifteen feet, and disappeared below the murky brown surface with barely a splash. Seb and I stood on the bank, watching as a few smokey bubbles broke the surface. “Lucky I jumped off,” he said.
“You can sleep in the car on the drive home if you’d like.”
“No, I slept a few hours on the plane. I wouldn’t mind stopping at a Starbucks on the way though.”
“We can do that. Do you want to drive?”
“I don’t have my license yet.”
“After we get out of the parking lot then. Just be careful near rivers.”
“Hmm.”
“Because you might drive into them.”
“Yes, I get it. It just wasn’t very funny.”
“Yes it was.”
“Fine, for the next six weeks, I’m going to say, “Remember to lift with your knees” every time you pick up something.”
“Hmm.”
“You know, because you hurt your back ten years ago.”
“Yes, I get it. There’s no way you’d be able to keep it up for more than a few days though.”
He managed to keep it up for almost a week. It was annoying after the first hour. It’s actually surprising how many times during a day you pick things up. I ended up wearing cargo pants just so I could keep things in my pockets.
“Remember to lift with your knees.”
“You can’t say it after asking me to pass you something. That’s entrapment. There needs to be rules. ”
“Picking up something is picking up something.”
“Right, well no then, I won’t pass you the fucking remote control. It’s going in the fourth pocket down, left leg, with the brass hose fitting and ATV keys.”
“Oh my god, you don’t have to say where you are putting things every time.”
“Yes I do. It’s an aide-mémoire. Ask me where something is.”
“Where’s Zambia?”
“Something that’s in my pockets.”
“Fine. Where are your reading glasses?”
“Second pocket down, right leg, with your laser pointer, a Snicker’s bar, and six lighters.”
“It’s not exactly a special talent, is it?
“No, not really. ”
“Can I have the ATV keys, please?”
The ATV had been delivered two weeks early. It was meant to come the day before Christmas. I was pretty annoyed at this as it meant having to get Seb another present for Christmas morning. You can’t have everyone opening their presents and carrying on while one person watches television or scrolls 9Gag. He had a sock with his name hanging over the fireplace but it only had a packet of raisins and two used glow-sticks in it.
“Look Seb, Holly got me a patio heater. That’ll come in handy.”
“Huh, yeah.”
“You’re not eating your raisins?”
The ATV purchase made sense. Our property has a few acres of wooded land with creeks and a river nearby. It backs onto the George Washington National Forest. There’s a fat lady who lives in our area that rides her ATV everywhere. I’ve seen her at the supermarket, the bank, and going through McDonald’s drive-thru. I sat behind her doing 25mph on a single lane road for ten minutes once. She was eating an ice-cream. Another time, she sat at the traffic lights in front of me with a police car in front of her. She waved to them and they waved back. I have no idea what’s going on, it’s as if the law simply doesn’t apply to her. She has no indicators. I’m pretty sure that if I rode an ATV to the supermarket even once, I’d be pulled over and told to stop being a dickhead.
“You’re going to go for a ride now? I thought we were going to TJ-Maxx to buy thick socks?”
“I can just wear two or three socks over each other. It’s the same thing. I’d rather finish the ATV trail.”
“Alright. Maybe Santa will bring you thick socks.”
By anyone’s standards our trail was pretty pitiful. It was steep in places, dangerously steep in others. Sides of hills had been dug into with a shovel and pickaxe just enough to allow crossing on slightly less than a forty-five degree angle. Leaning was essentially the key to not rolling. We’d built a small bridge over a creek but it was less scary to ride around it. The trail ended abruptly at the top of a hill where you had to make a five point turn and head back the way you came. To extend the trail further, along a ridge and back down to where it could loop back on itself, we needed to remove a pine tree blocking the way. Seb attached the chainsaw to the front of the ATV with straps, hopped on, and revved the engine. He patted the seat behind him.
“Why do I have to be on the back?”
“Just get on.”
“You go too fast, let me go on the front.”
“I won’t go too fast. I promise.”
“I’m not fucking around, Seb. If you go too fast I’ll never trust you again. I get that it’s hilarious to slide around corners and take jumps at speed but I know a guy who broke his neck mucking about on an ATV. ”
“Who do you know that broke their neck?”
“Just a guy I know.”
“What’s his name then?”
“... Bradley.”
“Bradley what?”
&
nbsp; “Cooper.”
“The actor?”
“No, a different Bradley Cooper. Brad Cooper. He’s an accountant. He was riding on the back of an ATV and the guy driving flipped it on a bend.”
“Who was driving?”
“Just another guy.”
“What was his name?”
“...Daniel.”
“Daniel what?”
“Radcliffe.”
“The guy who played Harry Potter?”
“Goddamit.”
“Just get on.”
“Fine.”
I’d never cut a tree down before. I’ve seen people doing it on television but it is an entirely different matter when you are standing at the base looking up. I vaguely recalled an Alaskan bushman cutting a V shape but I couldn’t remember if that meant the tree would fall with the V or away from it. The initial plan of ‘just cutting it down and stepping away from the direction it falls’ turned into ‘cutting into it a little bit and running away in case it falls’. We repeated the process a dozen times until less than an inch of wood remained. Neither of us wanted to be standing under the pine when it fell, especially with a running chainsaw, so we tried pushing it. It wouldn’t budge.
“How is it even possible that it’s still standing?” I asked, “It’s against all physics.”
“Just cut it the rest of the way through. It’ll be fine.”
“Why don’t you cut it then? It’s probably not as big a deal as we are making out to be, we’ve just fed each other’s apprehension until it turned into one.”
“I’m not cutting it.”
“What we need is a good strong breeze.”