Gravity

by Scot Gardner

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I really am. You’re right, I should have realised. I’m sorry that I let you down. I’m sorry for everything, not just the keys. I’m sorry I didn’t help around the house . . . with Simon . . .’

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted, and covered her ears. ‘Just stop it. I don’t want to hear it. It’s too late.’

  She charged into her room with her hands still over her ears and kicked the door shut.

  I could hear her crying then, bawling into her pillow like a child, and I stood there dazed like I’d been slapped.

  Slapped for saying sorry.

  I listened to her crying and it all seemed too weird. I’d never heard her cry. Not when her parents died when I was four, not when her son was mangled in a car wreck. Never.

  They were very old tears.

  And they were not easy to listen to. One part of me wanted to sit on the edge of her bed and rub circles on her back like she’d done for me as a kid. Another part of me didn’t know what to do. I felt like I should be doing somehing.

  The phone in my pocket beeped and vibrated. It took me a minute to work out that I had a text message.

  Hey, sorry if I was a bit weird this afternoon. A bit distracted. C U

  There was no name but only one person knew that I had a phone. I committed her number to memory and thought about replying but couldn’t think what to write. Couldn’t think. I found a pen and wrote a note to Mum instead.

  I really am sorry. I’ll call around tomorrow, but if you need me, ring me.

  I had to search through my phone to find the number, then sung it to myself until it was committed to memory as well.

  I sat in the comfortable dusty-oily pong of Bullant’s Subaru and collected the broken shells of my thoughts. When Mum had ordered chicken and chips, I thought she hadn’t changed. I was wrong. The changes were deep, tectonic. While the surface was still chicken and chips, Mum was starting to erupt and, as scary as that was, I knew she’d find something else under that lava. I knew it was wussy, but I didn’t want to be in the danger zone while she boiled. I didn’t even want to be conscious while she steamed. I phoned Harry and gave him my new number. I told him I needed rum. He was still at home and said that things really didn’t heat up at the pub until after eleven anyway. He said he’d wait for me.

  The car wouldn’t start.

  The battery had certainly lost its edge.

  One of the Asian dudes from the flat opposite Mum’s had been under the bonnet of his car with a torch while I wound the Subaru until the starter would only click. He offered to help get it going. He wore a blue singlet against the cold, his arms encircled with tribal tattoos like Bully’s. His car was a black Toyota Celica with a rusted dent and flaking paint on the passenger side front-quarter panel. He parked next to the Suba, left the engine running and linked the batteries.

  ‘Just give it a couple of minutes to charge, then kick it in the guts,’ he said. Language that would have been at home in the bar of the Splitters Creek Hotel.

  I waited the recommended couple of minutes and the Suba started first try.

  ‘Thanks heaps, mate,’ I said. ‘I’m Adam.’

  He shook my hand. ‘Dave. No worries, champ,’ he said, as he packed up his jumper leads. ‘Might be my rocket that needs a jump next time, hey? Cheers.’

  Harry flung open the door but didn’t offer a greeting. ‘Come on.’

  I followed him along the hall to his bedroom. The king-size bed was decked in dark tartan. The room had probably once housed a loving couple but now the sliding mirror-door robe was packed with Harry’s clothes. There were more clothes in that wardrobe than there were in our entire house in the mountains.

  ‘You’ve got a great body,’ Harry said. ‘We’ve got to find you some clothes that show it off.’

  I looked at my jeans and work boots in the mirror as Harry flicked intently through the hangers of pants and micro-fibre shirts in all the colours of the rainbow. He guessed my size as the same as his own and handed me some black pants. They slipped through my fingers like plastic shopping bags. He gave me shirts with collars like little aircraft wings. I tried them all on – like a good lad – and Harry nodded approvingly.

  I had my own fashion consultant.

  Even the shoes were a good fit, softened by a hundred wears on the inside, with a new-looking shine on their exterior.

  I felt like a knob. All I wanted to do was crawl back into my crusty jeans and poke my toes into my work boots.

  I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to be a city boy.

  Ten

  Splitters Creek had nothing like the lids at the pub that night. It was a hat-fest. White ones and fawn ones and black and ivory with feathers and badges. Indoor hats. A sea of indoor hats, check shirts and leather boots.

  So, this was country.

  Harry’s hair was a gelled mohawk and he drank vodka and lemon. They had Bundy and cola on tap and at half past eleven, when Lee Kernaghan finally made it onto the stage, the joint was whooping and whistling and I was hammered. I had to take a leak and the bloke next to me at the urinal sang to himself and nodded his felt-hatted head.

  ‘Good night, hey mate?’

  He nodded harder.

  ‘Did you have to come far to get here?’

  He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Yeah, I live out in the sticks,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ I said, and burped. ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Out Boronia way.’

  I nodded. He tucked himself away and I shook my head. I’d seen it on the map. Boronia was probably thirty minutes’ drive from that pub. I realised that I wasn’t ‘country’. Country was a style like goth or punk or homeboy and when I pushed back into the crowd, I felt lost in a way that I never had in the bush. The sort of lost where a map won’t help. An inside lost that made me feel like I should have stayed at the flat and patted Mum’s back. Retreated to the edge of my known and rocky universe.

  I spotted Harry and pushed in beside him at the bar. So many unfamiliar faces. On a big night at the Splitters Creek Hotel or even at the Catalpa Arms, when it was shoulder to shoulder and stinking of armpits and ciggy smoke, if I looked along the bar I might spot one or two faces that I didn’t recognise. For one confused moment, I felt like I needed to escape that pub and all the fake country, but then Harry had his arm on my back, shouting in my ear.

  ‘See!’ he lisped. ‘I knew you’d fit right in.’

  He slapped my shoulder and his arm fell away. I drained my glass and ordered another round. The woman who served me was wearing a tight black T-shirt and I had to haul my eyes from her chest to her face. Her forehead shone under the bar lights and she smiled as she cupped ice into fresh glasses. She was a city girl. She wore make-up and her dead-straight bottle-blonde hair framed her gorgeous face. She took my money and slapped the change on the counter beside my outstretched hand, still smiling.

  I liked city girls.

  I slid Harry’s drink along the bar and scanned the crowd. So many beautiful women. In ten minutes I’d gone from feeling like a fish out of water to feeling like I’d arrived in the proverbial sea with the plenty more fish.

  Between sips, Harry’s head pumped in time to the music and when he’d drained his glass, he motioned with a single finger and I followed him into the grooving part of the crowd. He moved with all the grace of a black dude on a video clip and I felt like a dick standing beside him with my hand in my pockets, dancing from the neck up. In the tiny mumbling gap between the whistling applause for one song and the beginning of the next, I heard Harry squeal. He squealed like a little kid and wrapped his arms around a woman I didn’t recognise. They jumped and hugged and then jumped again. I saw Bonnie behind them. She smiled and held out her hand. I took it and she dragged our heads together.

  ‘Like bloody little kids,’ she shouted, and kissed my cheek. ‘You look nice.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Harry’s got a shirt the same as that . . .’

  I leaned in close. ‘This is Harry�
��s shirt.’

  I smelled her hair. Flowery shampoo silk.

  She laughed and held my hand at arm’s length. ‘Pants? And shoes!’

  I nodded.

  ‘You did all right.’

  My skin tingled and I wondered where Jeremy was. Bonnie danced and before long I was dancing with her. From the neck down. She moved tantalisingly close and ran her hands over my chest then span away. The flirting went on and it added a welcome heat to the confusion in me. What did Bonnie want? Wasn’t she with Jeremy? It was all happening so fast and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The mini and the lace-up calf-high boots definitely weren’t country, but they were steamingly hot on her.

  We drank and danced until Harry let his woman go long enough to introduce me to her: Nadia. Nadia and Bonnie headed to the toilet together and Harry slapped my back.

  ‘We’re heading off,’ he said. ‘You going to be okay?’

  I nodded and raised my glass. ‘Thanks. I really needed tonight, hey.’

  He smiled and danced at the bar until the girls returned. He hugged Bonnie and kissed her goodbye. Then, with his arm on my shoulder, he kissed my cheek. He was still smiling as he left and I rubbed where his stubble had scratched my face. Then Bonnie was under my arm, hot and soft. She slipped her hand inside the waistband of my jeans, inside my boxers and dug her nails into the flesh of my bum.

  I jumped and stared at her, open-mouthed, half shocked, half delighted.

  She drew me into a proper hug, her free hand locked around my neck, bodies exchanging heat.

  ‘I think I’m just about ready to go, too,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got . . . my car’s outside.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  She hung on tight as we stepped into the car park. It had been raining and we giggle-jogged together to Bully’s Subaru.

  ‘This is it?’ she said.

  ‘Um . . . yeah.’

  ‘There aren’t any spiders in there, are there?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I opened the passenger door for her and she had a good long look before lowering herself into the seat. I let myself in the driver’s door, started the engine – first try – and cranked the heater to the max.

  ‘What are you doing? You can’t drive,’ she said. ‘There are cops everywhere.’

  ‘No. No, I was just starting the car to run the heater.’

  She crossed her arms.

  I swallowed. My head was swimming. ‘We could jump in the back.’

  She took a tiny phone from her skirt pocket. ‘I had fun, Adam. Great night.’

  ‘The swag’s comfortable.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll call a taxi.’

  Eleven

  My brain felt bruised when I woke on Saturday morning. The disorientation forced me to focus and I was fully awake by the time I worked out that I’d slept in Harry’s clothes, in the Subaru, alone, at the back of the nightclub. It was early but there were cars parking around me. I needed to piss.

  Emergency.

  I patted my hair and slipped on Harry’s dress shoes. I could see that the cars parked around me weren’t all recent arrivals. Some were still there on nightclub business – utes with damp swags in the back and station wagons with fogged windows. I followed a family over the road to a grassy park that had been transformed into a market while I’d slept. I dashed past the trestle tables and food vans to the red brick toilets. I bent at the urinal and tried hard not to moan with pleasure as the waves of relief washed through me.

  Something bumped my leg. A kid, scarcely taller than my kneecap, stood beside me. He had his pants pushed around his ankles and he sighed as his stream hit the stainless steel. He looked up and smiled.

  I shuffled to give him some more room and smiled back. ‘Bet that’s better.’

  He nodded.

  The kid shook himself before he’d quite finished and I felt drips hit the leg of my pants. Harry’s pants.

  And I didn’t care.

  Wasn’t the first time I’d been caught in the splash zone of a little kid.

  I washed my hands in cold water and was still shaking them dry when I walked into the squint-bright sunshine and spotted the boy who had peed beside me. He stood there with his arms by his sides as the crowd moved around him. He scanned the faces that were passing him, his movements becoming sharper as the panic took hold.

  I squatted beside him. ‘G’day mate,’ I said, and he jumped. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘I can’t find my mum and my dad. They’ve gone and I can’t find them.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you find them?’

  He nodded and his mouth trembled.

  ‘Do you want to hop up on my shoulders so you can see further? You know, shoulder ride. Does your dad give you shoulder rides?’

  He nodded and I wiped my fingers on my pants before hoisting him aloft. He was so light and his piss-damp fingers clamped intuitively across my brow.

  And I didn’t care.

  I held his thighs and scanned the crowd. ‘What do they look like?’

  The boy didn’t answer.

  I strolled.

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Mum and Dad and Christie,’ he said, and I smiled.

  We’ll find them, I thought.

  The market seemed to go on forever and while the panic seemed to fade from the child, every solemn face that passed us by sharpened the edge of my own concern. The boy had been on my shoulders for fifteen minutes when we passed a stall loaded with brightly coloured toys and a man with a money pouch at his waist was making huge soap bubbles with a plastic ring on a handle. I kept moving and the boy craned to watch the bubbles wobbling into shape behind us.

  ‘Leigh!’ called a voice. I felt the boy’s thighs tighten against my neck.

  ‘Leigh,’ the voice called again.

  ‘Mum?’ the boy shouted.

  I made a bee-line in the direction of the voice and eventually traced it to a full-bodied woman in a Day-Glo yellow parka, urgently wrestling a stroller over the grass.

  The boy on my shoulders began to jiggle and I swung him to the ground. He sprinted as fast as his little legs would carry him and clung to his mother’s knee. She scowled and patted his back.

  ‘Where have you been? You can’t just walk off like that. I thought you’d gone for good! Silly billy.’

  The woman sussed me out, and then smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed.

  A man with a severe crew cut swept in and hooked the boy into his arms. He looked him over then held the back of his head as the boy buried his face into the crook of his neck.

  ‘Came riding in on the shoulders of this nice man,’ the woman said.

  The man was incredulous. He took a second to check me out, then strode towards me.

  His face split with a smile and he stuck out his hand. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ I said.

  The family walked past and after two steps I turned to watch them go. The beautiful things about the city, I thought, are all the people. And the scariest things about the city, I thought, are all the people. How could you keep a kid safe and not squash them with your fears? How would you ever know when it was time for them to fend for themselves?

  Leigh’s head poked above his father’s shoulder, and he waved.

  I picked among the market benches and the people, marvelling at the shit that had been packaged up for sale. Biscuits that looked burnt, five-year-old National Geographics, rusty garden tools and snack food that had only just passed its sell-by date.

  ‘There he is,’ I heard.

  I turned to see Leigh struggling with a bunch of flowers. The freshest flowers I’d ever seen – a melee of colour that had somehow managed to capture the smile of winter sunshine.

  With his father’s hand at his back, the boy came up to me. I crouched and he handed me the flowers.

  ‘For me?’

  He nodded and I took them.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For
nothing,’ the boy said, and his dad chuckled.

  ‘For being such a nice man,’ Leigh’s dad added.

  ‘Gosh, they’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that I deserve . . .’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Leigh’s dad growled.

  I stood and he shook my hand again.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I made it back to the car before the flowers felt completely awkward in my hand. I rested them on the passenger seat. I started the car and wondered what I’d do with the posy. A couple of hours on the seat and they’d be wilted and ugly. I tried to remember how much I’d drunk the night before and I smelled my breath. I changed into my jeans and boots and T-shirt in the back of the Subaru.

  I grabbed the flowers and locked the car.

  I took a train to Mum’s.

  Just to be on the safe side.

  The closest thing Mum had to a vase was a white plastic mixing bowl. The flowers slumped and the bunch looked a bit threadbare, but Mum loved them. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d given Mum anything. I’m sure I’d given her things on her birthday and we honoured Christmas with gifts, but I couldn’t remember a single one. Admittedly, I hadn’t paid for the flowers, but that didn’t soften their intent.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she growled.

  ‘But I am. You’re right. I have been selfish and ignorant and all that. I should have done more. I should have . . .’

  ‘Stop it!’ she snapped. There was real anger in her tone.

  ‘What? I’m not even allowed to apologise?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s too late for all that.’

  ‘Too late? How can it be too late?’

  Her breath came faster, as if she was bracing against a storm surge of emotion. Inside, she was tearing the washing off the line and stuffing it in a basket.

  ‘How can it be too late?’

  She spoke through her teeth. ‘I’ve made my decision.’

  ‘What? What decision did you make?’

  ‘I left.’

  ‘But you needed a rest. A break. I understand that. Dad understands that. We didn’t do enough. If you came home tomorrow, it’d be different. We’d be different.’