by Scot Gardner
Mum mumbled her own apology and, for a second, the room seemed to float. The past hurts and the fears for the future had no bearing on the moment. They simultaneously withdrew their hands, but the feeling lingered.
Hope.
Mum collected her gear from the car. She and Dad retired to the lounge and I should have felt at home. I should have been happy to hear them talking from my room, but instead it made me feel like running. I didn’t want to be a part of their awkwardness or their anger or their intimacy – whatever they found together was theirs. My home still smelled like home but in the week I’d been away it had shifted and transformed inside me until it felt like a relic. A hologram of the place where I grew up.
Like everybody else, Mum and Dad didn’t question me when I told them I had to go for a drive that night. They nodded as though they understood, as though it was a good idea.
I drove to Hargate. To Tori’s house. It was nine-thirty when I got there and thankfully the lights were still on. Todd and Tori looked as though they’d seen a ghost when I arrived at the sliding door on the verandah. Tori squeaked a sad but excited hello and hugged me with all her strength. Todd hugged me, too, his beard alien but soft against my cheek.
‘I was really sorry to hear about Simon, mate,’ he said. ‘If there’s anything I can do . . .’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and pointed to the door. ‘You can nip out and find him if you like. That would be awesome.’
They stared at me, incredulous for a minute, then laughing with disbelief.
‘What do you think happened?’ Tori asked. ‘He’s never done this before. He’s never just walked off.’
I shrugged. ‘Where’s Francis?’
‘In bed, asleep.’
‘Can I . . . ?’ I asked and pointed to his room.
‘Of course,’ Tori said.
The little poo-head was hanging half off his bed, his doona pooled on the floor beneath him. I gently rolled him back onto his pillow and covered him. His tongue clicked and his leg stretched, the toes scratching at the doona. I kissed his forehead.
Tori made coffee and we perched like serious grown-ups around the dining table.
‘I think someone has done something to Si,’ I said. ‘He just never leaves the well-worn path. Not before, not after the accident. He’s a creature of habit.’
‘I suppose there’s always a first time,’ Todd said.
‘If he had a reason,’ I said.
‘Who would do that? Who would do something to Simon?’ Tori asked.
‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’
We talked about woodwork and Melbourne and Harry and Bonnie. And Bully and Harry. I told them that Harry swore blind that they’d just slept in the same bed. Todd laughed so hard that Tori had to shush him to stop him from waking the boy.
‘That’s like the definition of irony,’ Todd said when he’d regained his composure. ‘Bullant, the biggest homophobe in the Southern Hemisphere, wakes up in another bloke’s bed. I love it!’
I told them about Mum coming home and how it didn’t feel like happy families at my house but more like an episode of Jerry Springer – without the host.
‘You’re always welcome at my place, Adam. You know that,’ Todd said, and I thanked him.
Tori jumped up from the table and collected our empty cups.
‘That was last drinks, fellas,’ she said, her face suddenly stern.
Through experience, both Todd and I knew not to mess with that look. The words that I was bursting to say would have to wait. There was a hardness about that look that scared me, too. All my courage and confidence disappeared in its shadow. It was time to go. We took it in turns to kiss our hostess and picked our way down the verandah stairs.
Twenty
It was Dad who called off the search. It had been six days since Simon had disappeared and the hope of finding him alive had faded with the light of each sunrise. The days were unusually bright and warm for springtime, but the nights fell below zero degrees. The passion for the search waned. The SES folks had gone home to distant towns. The chopper was long gone. Bully and the crews from the mill and the National Parks depot had gone back to work.
There were no tears from Dad. Mum cried, but Dad was just hanging there on hope, his emotions frozen by the faith that Simon would eventually turn up. He couldn’t write him off.
I had. Sometime, around the third day of searching, my mind started to wander. I started thinking about the future that was pressing in around me. School resumed the following Monday and the big push for our final exams would begin. Yeah, and the study would feel like a holiday. I’d avoided quiet moments with Cappo, delaying the inevitable. Tori and Francis searched with us for part of every day. I ate with them most nights and found it harder and harder to drag myself away.
Mum spoke to Dad about closure and eventually convinced him to organise a short service and wake for Simon. Father O’Donnell drove up from Orbost. He’d christened Simon; now he had to lay his ghost to rest.
That was when Dad lost it. I watched him clutch at his Bible and fight back the tears. When the floodgates finally burst, the whole church could hear his sobs. They weren’t loud; they just had the soul-wrenching timbre of a broken heart. I put my hand on his back and the tears abseiled down my cheeks and onto my thigh.
I walked from the service to the police station. I slid my licence across the counter to Cappo.
Cappo slid it back.
Dad shouted a round for the bar that night. A retired couple from America who were staying in the hotel got caught up in the proceedings and must have wondered what they’d stumbled upon. The best part of the local population huddled in the bar and told stories about Simon. Emma Terry was inconsolable. She cried so hard and so long that she couldn’t work. Col could only offer her a scowl in sympathy. He eventually snapped at her and mockingly kicked her out of the bar. She slumped next to Mum and Squid slipped behind the bar and pulled a few big-headed beers.
It felt as if we were commiserating the loss of a grand final before we’d finished the game.
Tori had brought Francis into the pub earlier in the night. I propped him on my shoulders and I could see him fanning the ciggy smoke from his face in the mirror behind the bar. Tori drank one rum and cola and the boy slopped lemon squash in my hair. It looked like Tori’s smile was held in place by invisible tape and she left with Francis as soon as her glass was drained.
I wanted to leave with her. I wanted to help her put Francis to bed and I wanted to sit with her and use her sharp wit to help dissect my world. Cleave out all the mess and help me make sense of the whole debacle, like she’d done in Melbourne.
Instead, I stood at the bar and got pissed. I drank rum and had bullshit conversations with people. I had a bullshit conversation with Mick Fenton and he asked me what I was doing with my life. I wanted to tell him about all the things I had seen and done – about finding my mum and my work at The Hardware House, about discovering that I loved the feel of worked timber and finding a part of me that I didn’t know existed. A part that secretly collected hope and wasn’t frightened to say sorry.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry I did a runner from work.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That was out of the blue. Had blokes running around like headless chooks there for a while. Ended up working in the yard myself. Have to say I enjoyed it. Didn’t realise how much my old body missed the work. Mind you, the first couple of days nearly killed me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
‘No worries, Adam,’ he said, and slapped my back. ‘We’re over it now. I’m sorry about Simon. Poor bastard. Makes you wonder what was going on in his head. Maybe he was taking off after his little brother, hey? Maybe he did a runner? Maybe he’s gone up to Sydney to look for a new car? I see you’ve still got your old man’s ute.’
I nodded and part of me was squirming. Those lies had come home to roost. That part of me wanted to run but the part in control was doing other things.
&nb
sp; Fess up. Own up. Take responsibility.
‘Can I buy you a beer, Mick?’
He looked at me sideways and clunked his empty onto the bar. ‘Just a pot of heavy.’
I drove to Hargate with a clear head and a light heart early on Sunday morning. Tori and Francis were already awake and dressed. Tori asked about Mum and Dad and I told her that finally losing Simon had brought them closer together. I thought about all the heartache and unsaid words that had been termiting at their life together and I wanted it to work. I felt they were going to have a go at rebuilding their lives. In steel.
‘You can take some credit for that,’ Tori said.
We were turning over her vegie patch in tandem. High on the mountain, the sun felt closer than it had in a long time and I’d taken my shirt off.
‘How so?’
‘Well, if you hadn’t followed your heart or your head or your dick or whatever it was you followed to Melbourne and found her, your mum would still be there.’
‘Yeah, but we don’t know if that would be a bad thing, do we?’
‘All change is good,’ she said.
I dug two more sods before the injustice of what she’d said hit me. ‘What a crock of shit. How can you say that? How can you say that the changes that happened for Patchy and Simon and you in the accident were good?’
She shrugged. She glanced at my chest and I saw her.
‘I’m here now. Francis is here. Caring for Simon might have been a shit job but it helped shape you into who you are now.’
‘Oh, and who is that, exactly?’
Her face coloured. She shrugged again and went back to her digging.
We both heard the car on the gravel and looked up. Someone was giving it heaps along the road into Hargate. A dust plume chasing a white four-wheel drive.
‘Shit,’ I said, as I recognised the vehicle. ‘It’s Cappo.’
He pulled in at Todd’s place, then saw us standing in the garden. He drove across the paddocks, then pointed and beckoned to me through the windscreen.
I looked at Tori and dragged my shirt on, teeth clenched and heart staccato.
‘Hop in,’ Cappo said.
I struggled to do my seatbelt up as we bumped towards the road.
‘Your dad and mum are on their way. They’ve found a body.’
Twenty-one
Calm. It may have been shock, but I felt no emotion. There was nothing there. No hurt, no sadness, no anger. Nothing.
It took us almost a full hour to travel the fifty kilometres to the place where the National Parks utes and the cop cars had congregated. It seemed like such a long way from home. Mum and Dad weren’t part of that crowd.
‘Squid said your mum and dad are on their way. We’d normally take the deceased to the morgue in Orbost, but we have to wait for the team from forensics. We have to investigate. One of our boys will have to escort the body to the coroner’s in Melbourne. Do you want to wait?’
I shook my head.
‘It probably won’t be pretty, mate. Are you going to be okay?’
I nodded. I’d be fine as long as my heart didn’t break.
I could smell death from the door of the police car. I stopped breathing through my nose and could taste it. Cappo led me through to a sergeant wearing disposable gloves. They exchanged sombre greetings and he nodded to me, but we didn’t shake hands. He gestured with his head into the forest. Cappo cast a glance at me and I followed him.
The still air hummed with the low drone of blowflies. Cappo held a head-high twig so it didn’t slap back and take my eye out. I took it with a shaking hand. I gagged and swallowed hard.
‘Bloody hell,’ Cappo whispered. He stepped off the track and emptied his stomach among the ferns.
And there was my brother, his body cast face-down into the bracken like a stringless puppet, one arm bent awkwardly under his body and his head to the side.
They were his runners. One tracksuit pant leg had ridden up to reveal a blue, death-bloated ankle. The flies around the body were frenzied and every step I took launched a new squadron from their resting places.
‘Simon?’
Death had curled his chubby fingers into a half-fist.
‘Si? It’s me, Adam.’
I crouched beside his head and stared at the dry slit of his eye. The haunting crescent of his iris peeked waxy and lifeless from beneath the engorged lid. Like a doll’s eye. His colourless lips hung open and a fat blue-green fly crawled in and out of his mouth.
‘Shoo the flies, Si. Shoo.
‘What happened, matey? What happened to your world? What happened to your light? My beautiful brother.’
And I was moaning like my father in the church. The sound came coursing from my insides, bringing with it a flood of tears and crushing the air and life from my own lungs.
I felt so incredibly heavy.
Gravity. You spend your whole life fighting it, trying to rise up, to never be brought down, and then in death you finally surrender. I wanted to be dead with Simon. Part of me wanted that release.
Death hadn’t been Simon’s choice. It had been thrust upon him.
A puddle of blood had congealed beneath his mouth on the forest floor. More blood had blackened his shirt and followed the line of his collar to finish as a sticky pool beneath his chest.
His head had taken the force of the impact and had cracked like a melon. It would have been instant. Well, he would have died quickly. Quicker than he’d been dying since his last accident.
In time, Dad came crashing through the bush. Mum stood by the cars for half an hour before she found the courage to see for herself.
Silent tears.
We stood upwind and talked with a female constable from Orbost.
Looked like a car had hit him, she said. Hit and run. The body had been moved off the road. They’d found paint and plastic and flakes of chrome.
Dad sighed, and it spoke volumes.
The how and why were just details.
The immutable truth, the knowledge that both tortured us and set us free, was that Simon was dead.
Twenty-two
Cappo dropped me at Hargate as the last of the day coloured the bottoms of a handful of streaky clouds.
Tori was waiting on the driveway and I hugged her without thought or question and sobbed into her neck. She held me and kissed my cheek, her fingers opening and closing gently in the hair on the back of my head. I could feel her warm breath on my nape and I knew she was the purest soul in my world.
I heard the window open on the police vehicle.
‘Take care of yourself,’ Cappo said.
Tori invited me to stay for dinner. Todd invited himself. We talked in hushed tones while the boy buzzed around in the lounge. Tori sat at the table, shaking her head. There were no tears on her face, just a hard look of disbelief.
‘That’s sick,’ she said. ‘Unbelievably sick.’
‘Yeah,’ Todd said. ‘Who could just leave somebody like that?’
I could, I thought. Not that long ago, I could have made that decision. I could have run from my troubles. Just left the body and pretended it had never happened. I felt sorry for the driver. All of our lives came together in that brief moment. All of our stories, our hopes and our inadequacies were woven and on display for anybody who cared to look. The driver had chosen short-term gain in exchange for long-term pain. I felt sorry for that.
Francis put the shine back into me. He did it without trying, just by being himself, slurping and carrying on with his pesto. He farted at the table and our chuckles turned to proper laughter. After dinner, he showed me his new play-fighting move.
Nipple cripple.
Todd and Tori washed the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen like the parents and I taught Francis a lesson on the carpet like a kid. He squirmed and squealed and laughed and ran and came back for another beating. It ended in tears when Francis slipped off the couch and banged the back of his head on the floor. I hooked his screaming body into my arms, but he kicked and
span until I let him go. He ran to his mum.
Tori kicked us out at ten-thirty. Todd had bumped down the stairs and she and I hugged goodbye on the verandah.
I almost said it.
Almost whispered the words into her neck but she was patting my back too soon and retreating indoors.
Todd was keen to have a session on the port at his place, but I couldn’t sit still. In the end, I propped in the ute and drove to town. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be with my family.
Mum and Dad were calm. Something had happened between them. Some monumental understanding had come to pass. Their peacefulness was unnerving. They held hands on the couch and I told them everything I knew. Everything I’d seen. Everything I’d done. They took turns ripping tissues from the box on the coffee table and at the end of it all, there was just peace. They took it in turns to hug me, and then I wrestled with sleep in my old bed.
Sleep eventually won.
Twenty-three
Dad spent the best part of Monday morning in the lounge with a detective from Traralgon. Mum paced the kitchen while Dad’s voice could be heard rising and falling, variously burning with anger and howling with pain.
Eventually, they shook hands in the hallway and my red-faced father escorted him to his car and thanked him as he backed out of the drive.
‘They’ve caught the driver. Well, they think so. Caught him speeding near Traralgon. He’d been drinking. They found hair, human hair, in the broken grille. It seems like the paint will match the paint found on the road, but they won’t be certain of all this for a month or so.’
It is the lessons that could have ended in tragedy that are the most profound in life.