by Karen Foxlee
Titch is there by the front steps standing in a puddle of water he’s made by letting the hose run.
‘Turn that off,’ I tell him.
‘Mum said I could.’ He has on one of his stupid skater caps, decorated with skull and crossbones.
‘You’re wasting water.’
‘There’s no restrictions,’ he tells me. ‘La Niña is in full effect.’
Titch is turning into such a little shit. Where once stood my fun little brother now stands the chrysalis of a bogan smart-arse. ‘Dad home?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, but he’s steaming.’
Bloody hell. Steaming meant that dad’d had a bad day and he wasn’t happy about it. A little while ago he’d come home from work, middle of winter, just after he’d come off compo and was doing traffic work. We were out front chopping wood and when he got out of the car we started laughing because his sweat turned into steam so it looked like his head was on fire. He told us to fuck right off, which was pretty much the only time he swore at us like that.
‘That’s great,’ I say. Dad in a bad mood meant mum in a bad mood, meaning I couldn’t be in the least bit fed up with my stupid boring life without getting a long lecture on the inherent value of something.
Titch sinks further into the mud and I hope to God that he keeps sinking.
Inside the house I can already feel the tension. Dad’s fluoro workshirt is hanging on the chair, a smear of jam on the breast pocket. I can picture him flinging it off before disappearing for a long shower, more steam coming from underneath the bathroom door.
‘Clancy.’ Mum’s standing by the sink, bright new rubber gloves nearly glowing green.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘What’s going on?’
Mum makes that face where her cheeks pinch up towards her eyes: a smile to anyone who doesn’t know her better. ‘I need you to go and get your brother,’ she says.
‘Titch is out the front,’ I say. ‘I’m not cleaning him up though.’
‘Angus. I need you to get Angus.’
‘Why?’ My older brother has left school and quit uni and is only living at home temporarily. The rules are he has to make his own dinner unless he tells mum otherwise. He hardly ever does. He stays out late just about every night.
‘Can you just go and get him?’ Mum’s cheeks have flushed, twin comets against her skin.
‘What’s going on?’ I say it more serious this time, in the voice I use when I’m trying to make sense of people. My feet are already aching in my boots. The last thing I want is to cycle across town looking for my dropkick brother.
Mum turns back to the sink. ‘Just do it, Clancy. It’s really important.’
‘How’m I supposed to know where he is? I have to go out on my bike in the dark?’
‘You know where he’ll be. He can drive you back here.’ The tone in mum’s voice is heavy and unusual.
Even so, I perform a perfect offended pirouette and stormed back out of the house. I’d tried words with my parents, but now I just used silence.
* * *
I steal the light from Angus’s bike and coast back down the hill. I’m always the one who has to do this stuff. Titch is too young and Angus is too unreliable. Still a year before I can drive and I’m the person in our family responsible for getting things done. Dad works weird hours now he’s on the road crew and mum hardly leaves the house. At least there’s no doubt where Angus is at this time of the night. Late evening you can always find him up the top of the observatory, drinking and smoking pot and planning the next stage of his remarkably unambitious life.
I pedal hard down through town and out past the Red Rooster and KFC. When the streetlights stop I switch on Angus’s light and close my eyes down the hills. He’d pay for me having to do this, on top of whatever ragging dad was going to give him. He’d probably parked dad in last night or used up the shampoo or eaten the last of the salt and vinegar chips—any number of things dad would want to haul him into line for. Dad’s job means he gets to stand still for hours at a time in the middle of nowhere, stewing over the smallest indiscretion shown by any of us, but especially Angus, who’s not done much recently to dispel the impression that he’s a complete no-hoper.
Six months ago Angus had quit uni two weeks into his course and come home, complaining that his teachers were ‘biased’. I told him they must have been biased towards people who actually did work, and he moped about that for days, as if I hadn’t just pointed out a basic true fact his laziness. Now when he isn’t on the couch at home he’s out wasting what little savings he has at the Cri or various dipshit gathering points around town, concocting schemes that require intricate planning but little hope of working.
I tap the brakes when I see the pilot light up ahead and coast to a stop at the bottom of the observatory. Despite its name, it’s basically just a tall set of metal steps going up four storeys on the side of the highway. It had some sort of positional significance, if you could ever be bothered to lug a telescope up to the top of it, where you could observe an unusually wide range of the night sky or something. I’ve never heard of anyone going up there for anything else but decidedly un-scientific activities. I ring the bike’s bell at what I hope is an annoying volume and shout up, ‘Angus you gotta come home!’ and I can see him up there with his dufus mates, the lit tip of a joint tracing bobbing paths from hand to hand.
He doesn’t say anything so I get off my bike and kick the base of the metal frame near the stairwell. ‘You gotta drive me home! Mum made me come out here to get you cause dad’s steaming!’ I hear laughter. ‘Angus!’ I shout again. ‘Can you finish jerking off your special friends and get down here?’
I hear the clang of feet on the metal steps. ‘Jesus,’ says Angus. ‘Queen of comedy.’
‘Hurry up.’
He slides down the last set of stairs like a sailor on a submarine. ‘What’s happened?’ he says. His hair’s all messed up by the wind and he’s wearing one of his disgusting tank tops from Dollars and Sense that says Fat Kids Are Harder to Kidnap.
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Mum just says you have to come home.’
Angus rubs his hands together. ‘We’re kind of having a meeting here. Planning the hunt.’
‘That again? Whatever. I’m hungry. Dad’ll probably just give us a talk about hanging the toilet paper the right way round and we can all get on with our lives.’
Angus shakes his head. ‘This family,’ he says with the world-weary tone of someone who has never had to take responsibility for anything his entire life.
* * *
My bike’s bouncing around in the tray of Angus’s ute because he hasn’t got any rope and I keep looking back expecting it to fly off onto the road at any moment.
‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘Don’t you understand basic physics?’
‘Like you do.’
Angus is chewing on like eight sticks of gum. They’re welled up in his cheek and he probably thinks it’s cool because it looks like tobacco or something. ‘How was work?’ he says.
‘Okay.’
Angus bats his eyelids. ‘Venn are you goink to be keeping zee lipstick on darlink? You are zo aztractive!’ I laugh, despite not wanting to. Angus smirks. He says, ‘Is dad actually steaming, or is mum just playing happy families?’
‘Dunno. Didn’t see him when I got home. Mum looked pretty upset though.’
‘Right. Well, let’s hope it’s over quickly.’
‘Gotta get back to the tower? Polish your telescope?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘I hear Pluto’s right up in Uranus at the moment.’
Angus sighs. ‘You think I’m just wasting my time, don’t you.’
‘What else would you call it?’
‘Re-evaluating.’
I put my feet up on the dashboard, which I know he hates. ‘Failing, more like.’
‘Give us a break, Clance. I’ve got my whole life to work out what I want to do. I’ve got plenty of options, plenty of irons in the fire. Can’t stay around here,
drowning in mediocrity.’
‘And The Big Hunt’s going to be your big break.’
‘You won’t be laughing when I’m on the news.’
I don’t dignify this with a response. Every few years some drunk spots a cow in the hills outside of town and says he’s seen a giant cat. Back in the 70s, dad says, is when it all started. Some blurry photograph of what was probably a big rock got everyone obsessed with what the paper called The Beast of Barwen. People went out on weekends to try and trap it but of course came up empty handed. Angus has become obsessed with it since coming back home.
We drive in silence until we reach the centre of town, where Angus is obliged by some unspoken idiot rule to wind down the windows and cruise slowly up Aggery St. There’s a small crowd spilling outside the Cri. I see Buggs’ broken head but Sasha’s nowhere to be seen. Suddenly one of them points at Angus’s car and shouts out, ‘Hey cunt!’ and Angus grins but then Buggs gives him the finger and the rest of them follow suit. ‘Step out of the car, cunt!’ Buggs shouts and walks towards us. Angus slows down but he seems to realise the same time as me that the crowd is not calling him out in a friendly way.
One of them goes, ‘Hey cunt you wanna watch the road!’ and another one goes, ‘Y’old man can’t watch the fucken road!’ and they’re coming right at us and I hit Angus’s leg so he starts driving faster and there’s a scraping sound and I look back as we speed away and see the handlebars of my bike disappearing over the back of the ute. Angus is driving fast and shaking his head like he’s just seen a puzzle he can’t work out.
We get home and mum’s out on the verandah with a torch which is useless because the lights are on anyway. When she sees the car she motions us towards the house.
‘The fuck’s going on?’ says Angus, the first words he’s said since the main street.
Mum comes right up to the window. ‘Get inside,’ she says. ‘Both of you. Right now.’
She pulls us in with one hand on each of our wrists and doesn’t say anything when I tell her my bike’s been stolen. We go through the door and into the lounge room where dad’s sitting on the sofa in his old running shorts with bruises and cuts all down his legs. He looks up at us and we can see from his eyes that he’s been crying and his hair’s still wet from the shower and he hasn’t bothered to dry it.
* * *
The worst part, after it happened, was pretending to go about my life. I became overly aware of the hundreds of movements and decisions I made daily without even thinking about them. My days were consumed by wondering which shoe I always put on first, how many footsteps it was from my bedroom to the bathroom, working out the exact moment the sun swung low so its reflection began to blare off the white news van parked opposite our house for what seemed like a week.
All through the house, it felt like a year’s dust had settled. Because it was school holidays we were all there, and no one wanted to leave. Titch was the only one who didn’t understand it, but he knew enough to realise the silence all through the house meant he had so stay out of everyone’s way. The newspapers were piling up at the front door and we left them there. Then Angus started kicking them, further each day, until our lawn was strewn with them, all those unwanted opinions wrapped up tight in cling-film.
I called Eloise from our lounge room phone, saying with a flat voice that I couldn’t come in to work right now because of a ‘family matter’ and she told me to be strong, with little hint of an accent. She told me that Reeve wanted to know did I need anything and I told her just a little bit of time. My bike turned up in the middle of our driveway one morning, the tyres slashed up and the frame clearly run over by at least one car. I’d wake up most mornings and the smell of paint would be there. I’d find mum outside, scrubbing at the front wall, in her bathrobe, peering up at me, eyes red and unfocused. Whatever they’d written on the door would be a weak and bleeding shape but eventually it stained. Sometimes they could spell murderer and sometimes they couldn’t.
I saw, in my head, Buggs and his boys laughing as they did it. I pictured Sasha in the car, parked across the road, looking straight through the windscreen, her wall of hair obscuring her face. She didn’t approve or disapprove, I knew. She just waited.
Angus stayed out late nearly every night but I knew his mates wouldn’t be hanging out with him. He’d be driving into the hills with a torch and a roll of film, taking out his frustrations on a beast that he’d never find. The only time I’d see him would be in the mornings when he’d get up late and stalk the upstairs landing eating cereal. Fucken STOP, he’d say when he’d see me, Fucken GO. How hard is that to remember? I never knew whether he was talking about dad or the driver and I’m not sure if he did either.
Mum had to go all the way out to Westside for the shopping, going early or late so no one she knew would see her. Eventually the house just smelled of cleaning products and her fingers had stained from caustic soda. Dad spent all his time in the study with the old black-and-white TV he’d dragged in from the shed. It had been a wedding present, he’d told me once, laughing at the thought. The cops had told him that he couldn’t leave town until they were through with an investigation. I knew that dad had a record, even though he thought I didn’t. The cops still treated him like he was the person he was when he was young. He hadn’t said a word since that night he’d sat on the couch and told us, in a slow and weird voice, that things were going to change.
Eventually, after three days, I’d driven myself crazy. I had no bike, no school, no job to go to. Just me and my thoughts. I ran outside when no one was looking and scooped up the newspapers. I locked my bedroom door and unfurled them and read them one by one.
Those Poor Kids. This was what the story had become. The same photos they used over and over. Those two fresh faces, caught in the strained pose of school photos. We’d all had to sit for the photos only a few weeks before, the whole school lining up. The forehead of the driver—a blond, broken-nosed guy, a footy player, a swimmer, a face I’d seen at school but never really taken in—had an acne streak that was nearly purple and traced down to the top of his cheekbone. People said he was ‘a nice guy’, ‘a team player’, ‘a good bloke’. I sat for countless hours reading the same articles over and over, trying to understand who he was.
His one passenger that night, though, she was the real story, the real reason this story sold papers, why newscasters caked on the early evening makeup. Her name, already tailor-made for smooth repetition. Her chocolate-almond eyes. Her wide white smile that no matter of pixilating, of dot-matrixing, could ever diminish. She was—had been—the most accomplished person at our school, always in the paper for athletics carnivals or science camps or quite often both. Front and back pages. She was the real reason anyone cared. She carried with her the details of the story: young love, young promise, young achievement, cut short by ignorance of malice or both.
And the bad guy in this story was Bob Underhill, my dad. The man who’d fought his own battle to be respectable. Whose youthful stupidity had been the catalyst for a life of hard work and respect and love. He’d been happiest when Titch was born, when he’d had a job he liked and a house he owned and maybe he saw the beginning of a fresh part of his life. A new start. He worked as a landscaper with the council and vice-captained the B-team in cricket and laughed so much the creases in his face became a pattern I knew by heart.
But soon enough his own physical and emotional wreckage caught up with him. His back went and with it any hope. After the compo ran out Mum had to dip deeper into her savings and dad took the only job he was offered. Traffic duties. A Lollipop Man during school hours, a Stop and Go Man every time else. He didn’t have the education to let him hide among the bureaucratic white noise of office work or private service or any of the tenured, collegiate careers the terminally injured no doubt dreamed about.
He told us that night. He said he’d zoned out. Standing on the outskirts of town in his reflective vest, propped up on his Stop and Go sign, his only company that huge bla
ckness above him where the stars sat in high-definition. He told us that at that time of night the cars only came past every half hour. He’d switched off his two-way to save power and his sign was swung around to green. Those Poor Kids were coming back from a party two towns over, the driver on his P plates for three days, full of the stupid and glorious and misdiagnosed freedom of youth. Lifting two fingers off the wheel at the lonely guy with the sign by the side of the road, hearing the flap of his orange vest as they sped past him, looking up in one instant to see the back end of a grader lit up huge and white. It had been a thunderclap, dad had told us. All the thunderclaps you’d ever heard all saved up and spent in a single instant.
After the scene was lit up with sirens, after he’d sat in the back of an ambulance with a blanket across his shoulders, after the cops had made him relentlessly dissect three seconds out of his entire life as if it was his entire life, he’d come home with a case of beer and made his way through most of it. He would have been there when I’d left for work, passed out on his bed. Mum would have let him sleep, still in his work clothes, thinking he was just bone-tired, ignoring the pub-stench coming off him. And then, in the afternoon, he would have woken, would’ve had that one beautiful moment when it was still possible that it had been all a dream.
Dad’s work shirt hung on that chair for what seemed like all summer. The stain on his pocket wasn’t jam, of course. He’d tried to lift the car door off after the crash but what little strength his body had left was long gone. Above his pocket was his full name, embroidered on. I focused hard on the council logo next to it, a black squiggle stitched onto the acrylic. Next to the chair, his boots tanned with churned up dust.