We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  I sensed the boy at the counter move. I looked to him again. He had grabbed the electric knife, the one used to shave meat from the spit. That was when the man from out back appeared, the one going crazy. I saw him from the corner of my eye. I turned. He was sweating. It was Altona North on a Sunday night. Bush smoke was in the air. A small strip of shops, most of them closed. Shutters down. The sun gone. The concrete of the footpath still warm. I could feel sand on my legs, my arms. Dried salt. We’d been fishing.

  The man from out back of the shop went straight at Fuzzy. He had a gun. In a souvlaki shop. I had seen a gun before. Grandpa Jack had used a rifle out on the farm. When we were even littler we’d walked out into the field between the house and the creek one damp evening and watched him fire shots at rabbits. I hadn’t seen that gun since he died, but the sound of those shots as they boomed around the trees and bounced back from the hills was a sound like shock, like just its sound could restart your heart, or stop it.

  Grandpa Jack shot a rabbit dead that evening and Eden and I retrieved it and its fur carried drops of water and its body was warm and I’ve hated guns ever since.

  And yet that slender rifle of Grandpa’s was a beautiful grey thing in comparison to the short fat ugly gun attached to the fist of this man. This was a bruised ego of a gun, torn like a muscle, sawn. A gun in a small room seemed different to a gun in the outside air. I was so alert then, my heart beating at such speed, that I could hear a buzzing noise, like the blood was moving so fast in my head that it rattled.

  And then, right at that moment, as the man charged at Fuzzy, the electricity in the shop and in the street outside went out. Everything suddenly was pitch. It must have caused the man to hesitate, even stop, because no sound followed and it should have. This prompted Fuzzy to yell, ‘I told you kids to stay out.’ This prompted me to think there had been an accident and that it must have knocked the power out. I thought someone might have crashed their car into an electricity pole. The dark held everything in jelly, though in it I heard the bell on the door jingle, and then the electricity snapped back on. An oven timer beeped. And then as the man gathered speed again and my eyes adjusted to the light I saw him raise the gun and level it at Fuzzy’s head. It made me squint. It made Eden reach out and touch me; his hand was suddenly on my arm, protective, as if he was bracing me. We waited for the shot.

  The gun was so close to Fuzzy’s head when it went off that they’d find burn marks from his neck to his chin to his cheekbone. Fuzzy had a chance to duck or run or even to charge at the man before the gun went off but he did none of those things. The light came back on and Fuzzy stood firm or, if anything, taller. The man hesitated and Fuzzy tried to talk but he couldn’t and there wasn’t time so he quickly motioned with his hands to Just Calm Down. But the man jumped forward as if hesitation could be hurdled and the distance between them vanished. He used the gun like it was the hard edge of his fist and smashed it straight into Fuzzy’s face. As he hit, the gun went off. We all heard the strike land and we all heard Fuzzy’s head crack. We all watched and saw his legs fail as if they were made of loose sand. Fuzzy thudded to the ground as a light-fitting broke from the roof and smashed. We heard the echo of the gun, as if everything we had just seen and heard had its own distinct place in space and time and could be watched, heard and felt as different tracks. Fuzzy had been down on the floor a few horrible seconds when the pepper shaker broke from his hand and rolled.

  I remember thinking that this wasn’t really happening and that we’d already seen enough.

  Bobbie had once asked me whether she should still call herself Bobbie Hardacre or whether she should go back to her maiden surname. ‘Never stand between the heart and the mind when the bell goes,’ she had said. ‘If you value your safety.’ I remembered this in the bizarre disorder of my thinking at that moment when Fuzzy went down.

  Fuzzy lay still on the souvlaki shop floor. His hair was so frizzy, but so flat where it touched the hard floor, that it looked like bubbles resting on a sink.

  Eden still had hold of my arm. He grabbed at a tablecloth with his free hand and slowly gathered it towards him. ‘We are going to pick him up,’ he said to the man with the gun.

  ‘Get the fuck out of my fucking shop,’ the man yelled back at him.

  ‘We’re not leaving him,’ Eden said. As a nine-year-old. To a man holding a gun.

  And then there was movement behind the man and the movement was a girl. And we knew the girl.

  It was Carmelina. Her hair was wet and uncombed. This was her house or her parents’ business. In my mind I knew Carmelina better than I had a few weeks earlier because I had imagined a series of conversations. But when I saw her appear at the back of the shop, beside the kind of man I had never known, I crashed back towards reality. We were strangers. The fact that this was her place was incredible to me. Blood rolled out from the back of my head and onto my spine. I felt unsteady.

  But what Carmelina then did was more incredible still. She bolted. She ran straight through the restaurant. Towards me. She had thongs on but one broke or tripped and she left it and continued with one thong only. It made a rubbery clipping sound. I kept thinking that none of this was really happening but it was. Carmelina then stood beside me on the other side from Eden though slightly behind us both. I listened for a siren from outside but there was none. ‘Melina!’ her father yelled as if issuing an order. He pronounced her name as if he had cut it with a sharp knife. He lifted the gun then and I knew that he would shoot. He aimed it at us. I knew nothing of guns and rounds and ammunition. I thought he would shoot me and Eden and Carmelina and maybe his wife. I thought of Mum and Dad and how we would now join them and that this girl Carmelina would come with us.

  Carmelina grabbed at my shoulder then as if to pull me away but her hold didn’t take. She turned and made for the front door of the shop. Her father’s aim swung with her but she moved quicker and so his aim lagged. In fact I thought then that I saw the gun shake, as if his energy had suddenly ebbed. He yelled Carmelina’s name again. I grabbed at the tablecloth, the one Eden was holding, and as twins we lifted it so that it might block his line of sight. I called out ‘Run!’ Eden did too. It got more confusing then. The bell on the door jingled again. Eden and I flapped the tablecloth upwards but the end must have been caught or been held down with a clip because we had to yank at it and as we did we lost hold. The tablecloth swung into the air like a flag or a spinnaker and as it did the gun went off again and there was a sound I can’t describe but as the tablecloth fell to the ground the man who had been holding the gun, Carmelina’s dad, was lying on the floor near Fuzzy. Fuzzy was moving again because he had been knocked out but now he was conscious. But Carmelina’s dad looked dead. The bell on the door again and Carmelina came back in but she wasn’t running or bolting now and so along with her we all got to take it in slowly. She walked to her discarded thong and, almost carefully, put it back on. That’s what she did: she walked to her thong and tried to put it on as if this was her first priority. She didn’t get the thong on first go but she persisted. Fuzzy was still on the floor but he edged away. Carmelina continued towards her father then. She was not loud or rough at school but she appeared to be a rock in a crisis. Her mother did not come screaming out. Her brother did not move. Carmelina’s was the only decisive movement. As she walked towards her father her speed increased as if he was the wall and she needed to make good time. When she reached him she rushed her arms to her stomach as if she’d suddenly felt pain. When she turned she jolted. Eden and I moved towards her.

  ‘I can smell beer,’ Eden said.

  ‘It’s not beer,’ I said.

  Fuzzy yelled at us to stay where we were.

  Carmelina stopped and said to the room, ‘We’ll call triple zero.’ She was short even for her age but she was in unbelievable control.

  Her mum emerged then from around a corner. She moved at the speed of a tremble. A siren sounded finally but far off. ‘Melina?’ she managed. She wore a headband c
oloured earth or red though the insect light made it look purple. The strap on her shoulder was ripped. When she spoke Melina’s name the ‘e’ sounded missing.

  Throughout these moments the blue insect zapper, the one up near the ceiling, buzzed so loud that it must have got splashed.

  *

  We didn’t have mobiles or know Bobbie’s number and so they didn’t know how to contact her. We told the police that Eden had gone missing a few weeks earlier in Flowerdale and that the police there might know. ‘Where’s Flowerdale?’ the policeman asked. ‘Up the bush,’ we said. We waited at the police station at Altona North. Fires carpeted the state but we soon felt cold, partly because we still had our wet undies on under our pants but mostly because we were scared. Carmelina came in and out of the station but she was with her mum. Nectar had gone to the hospital with Fuzzy. When Bobbie finally arrived she asked if we’d eaten. We’d left our food on the tortoise-shell seats of Fuzzy’s car but a police officer had given us each a packet of chips. We turned onto Millers Road and the glow of the refinery flare dominated the sky and threw orange light in rolls across the dash of the car. ‘Salt and vinegar?’ she asked.

  Eden and I looked at each other and as we did the orange light panned down his face like a sunset moving too fast.

  ‘Honey and soy,’ I said.

  ‘Modern classic. Doners or souvlakis?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘No one knows,’ she said.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Eden said.

  ‘We’ll be getting season passes to the coroner’s court,’ she said.

  ‘I feel like scribble. Like a piece of scribble,’ I said, frayed. My words came out so fast that it felt more like slipping than talking.

  ‘You can tap that,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘Tap what?’

  ‘Anxiety. It’s like a battery.’

  ‘Are we still doing squad in the morning?’ Eden asked.

  ‘Do we just carry on as if nothing’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘You kids must be starving hungry,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘I’m still going,’ Eden said.

  ‘Nothing will be open now,’ Bobbie said. But then added, ‘Are you too pure for Maccas?’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.

  ‘The diet can suffer in its jocks,’ she added.

  ‘Some days are too real for colour TV,’ she kept on.

  ‘Will Fuzzy be okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Won’t be in great nick,’ she said.

  ‘We should buy him a Golden Rough,’ I said.

  ‘Maccas is the other way,’ Eden said, noticing that Bobbie was about to turn down Mason Street.

  We got out of the car at McDonald’s. I looked at all the people in the line and sitting at tables, their faces stark white in the artificial light, and wondered what they were doing and what had happened to make them be out this late.

  ‘We’re not doing takeaway,’ Bobbie said. ‘Food doesn’t travel,’ she said, answering my eyes.

  ‘Are the wraps good for you?’ Eden asked.

  ‘You can afford to lose a bit of paint at your age,’ she said. ‘Calories are different at this time of night anyway.’

  We sat down then to shiny Laminex. We dipped fries into strawberry milkshakes in ultra-bright light as workers mopped the tile floors. I blinked and squinted as if these lights were flaring straight off my eyeballs. ‘Wish,’ Bobbie said, ‘they’d start asking if I’d like wine with that.

  ‘I bet it was horrible,’ she said into the sound of eating. She paused as if wondering whether it was the right time.

  ‘Fuzzy probably saved that woman’s life,’ she said.

  ‘That man is dead,’ Eden said.

  ‘Fuzzy stood up when no one else could,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘We’re all the CEOs of our own lives,’ she added.

  I’d hardly eaten any burger but a layer of gunk already coated my mouth. I felt like rinsing and spitting. I reached for the milkshake but the straw missed my mouth on my first two tries. I put my burger down.

  Almost all the other customers were staring down at their phones. ‘I don’t know what everyone’s hoping to find in those things,’ Bobbie said. ‘But whatever it is, it’s not in there.

  ‘Sometimes I think of the offices I used to work in,’ Bobbie then said. She looked for the darkness outside but all we could see was our reflection. ‘The desks and the people at them. And wonder if they’re still beavering away there without me.’

  I blinked then and put a hand to my face to shield it from the light. Eden said to Bobbie, ‘You said you were going to build our lives around roast chicken and apple pie.’ He pushed my burger back towards me as if he wanted me to listen.

  Bobbie still looked at the window. ‘Did I say that?’ she said.

  ‘What Fuzzy did,’ she started, as if this explained something. But she stopped and didn’t finish.

  ‘You look pale,’ she said to me as she stood up. ‘I should have bought you an Appletiser or something.’

  *

  I heard footsteps in bed that night. I listened and wondered at first if they were Bobbie’s and I knew that they weren’t though I still wondered. These steps were not outside our room, they were inside it. I wanted to reach out for Eden but I thought that the person walking around our room would see me move and would target me. I thought these things through a layer of smoke. Every time I moved or lifted my head the steps stopped as though I was being watched. I knew that I was awake but I wondered if it was dreaming or if it was a ghost.

  *

  Next morning before Eden got up I headed through the back room at Newport into our bare bones garage and stood by myself in the half-dark. Even in the garage there was the smell of smoke, dirty and stale. I thought of Carmelina and of her dead father. She’d acted solid when she had good reason not to. I saw a frame then on the windowsill of the garage, the kind you might have in the kitchen for holding saucers or teacups or sugar, except on this frame our mum had at some time placed flowers or plant cuttings. These cuttings were all dead and dried but Mum’s hand must have been the last to touch them. No one now would dare move the dead, dried-out flowers. I remembered a day then when Eden and I were smaller, when there was heavy rain on the garage roof and we all four were in the garage and were laughing at something, laughing so hard you could hear our laughter ring above the rain, but only just, so that what was loud seemed faint. I wondered then what it might feel like to touch one of these old faded flowers and what Mum would think if I gave one to Carmelina.

  I got down on the garage floor then and began doing push-ups. I got to twenty and then kept going for as long as I could, until my arms could no longer lift me, until I lay flat and panting. When I’d recovered I started doing squats. I did them until I could no longer lift my legs. I did them like panic was fuel, like I’d built up so much of it that I had to let some out.

  Bobbie was up when I walked back to the kitchen. She was always up. She had her back against the sink and was sipping coffee. My breath had not yet returned to normal. ‘I don’t want you to tiptoe your way around,’ she said, not moving as I tried to get water from the sink tap.

  ‘We still going to squad?’ Eden said, walking in.

  *

  That night, the second in a row, I heard those same footsteps. I listened as closely as I could. Every time I moved or even turned my head the footsteps stopped. I was petrified. After a long time I realised that they were not steps at all. The sound I’d heard these past two nights was the sound of my eyelashes as they flicked across my pillow. I was the cause of my fear. Every time I’d blinked I’d felt terrified.

  *

  Carmelina wasn’t at school that week though I looked for her each day. I thought people would be all over what had happened but that same weekend people had died all over the state in bushfires. Everyone’s attention was diverted. Every day when I came home I scanned the breakfast bench and the fridge and thought of Fuzzy and Geri next door. I hadn’t seen e
ither of them since Sunday night, though Nectar had been at school since Wednesday. On Friday he’d let me in line at the canteen and we didn’t talk about the souvlaki shop but he said how he’d been in his dad’s caravan and even the honey now tasted of smoke.

  ‘There’s no Golden Rough if that’s what you keep looking for,’ Bobbie said, missing nothing.

  ‘I’m not going to Flowerdale tomorrow,’ Eden said.

  ‘Just me and Jon then.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll come,’ he said.

  We went to the farm after squad on Saturday and a lot of forest and property was now devastated and black. Fire had burned through swathes of the state and through Flowerdale too though our square of farm was safe. The smoke was mostly gone but you could still smell it; it was in the couches and carpet, the curtains, our pyjamas on the line and even in Eden’s Puffle. Bobbie thought the smoke might have got into the skin of her grapes. She went out to taste and came back spitting black.

  We dipped in the grey creek and pulled against the weak current but we didn’t last long because ash got caught in our throats. We came out with black streaks down our legs. Bobbie told us to find a bag and make sure that our most prized possessions were packed and in one place. Eden and I grabbed Mum and Dad’s watches, his Puffle and my Deltora books. We put them below the picture of Mum on the wall, the one where she looks like the sun. Bobbie went outside to pick apples and to pull garlic from the garden. I peeked into the plastic bag she had packed. She had a picture of her and Grandpa Up The Bush leaning against a shiny teal-coloured car. She also had framed pictures of Mum and Dad and Eden and me. One of these pictures was of us on our first day of primary school, standing side by side with our hair both wet and fresh-brushed. Our school tops looked much brighter in colour than they did now. I studied this picture. I spotted Mum’s reflection, just visible in the window behind, beaming or maybe crying, I couldn’t tell.

  *