Anger surges through him. ‘Ever watched the bloody news? Heard of Iraq?’ He smacks down a note and some coins on the black rubber belt of the counter.
The boy shrugs, says ‘Huh.’ His and the girl’s eyes meet again in their private joke. Tony rips the clear, staticky wrapper off the cigarette packet and tears out the piece of foil. He glares at the two of them, flicking his fingers to free himself from the clear plastic, letting it flutter to the counter-top.
‘This place is so fucken ignorant,’ he growls, and pushes past the boy into the street.
The Corolla is gone, and the street is now almost empty of cars. Tony gets into his ute and sits for a moment staring out at the street, still hot with anger. Fucking morons. He sniffs. It occurs to him that he might be the only one in the whole frigging town who knows anything about her.
He juts his jaw at the thought.
A green and yellow chip packet flips, in a listless leapfrogging, across the bitumen.
STEPHEN’S ARRIVAL at the back door is as though he has simply stepped in from the rain. He walks in, scratching the back of his neck, and slings an overnight bag to the laundry floor. Margaret turns from the sink, where she’s holding a spiky posy of knives and forks—and then she sees him, and something drains out of her, a tautness escaping her body with a gasp, and she drops the cutlery into the sink, calling ‘Oh!’ and then she begins to cry, squeaking out in gratitude as Stephen steps across the old linoleum squares, red and green as Christmas, to dip his head and bend to put his arms around his mother.
In the grateful, muffled space of this long-awaited embrace, Margaret hears the girls coming in the back door, their yelps of surprise and recognition. And with one look over Stephen’s shoulder at their faces Margaret lays down the law: Stephen’s years of mottled absence will remain undiscussed, unchallenged. For all three women know it could take only a single wrong word for Stephen to step outside the back door as if to hang a bath towel on the line, and then to slip noiselessly into the driver’s seat of his old Subaru ute, close the door with a small thud, reverse down the driveway and out onto the road in a slick pirouette, and be gone from them again.
So Cathy and Mandy stop, wait for their mother to disentangle herself, and then call out to him. Cathy murmurs, ‘Thank you,’ into the rough warmth of their hard, dry embrace, and then turns again to their mother, who is talking already of where Stephen will sleep—in his old room, Dad’s office. As Margaret exclaims, Cathy watches Mandy step around the kitchen table to Stephen. They smile warily, briefly, murmur ‘Hello,’ and bump cheeks in a kiss, their uncertain hands touching each other’s shoulders for a second before retreating instantly to the space of their own bodies.
‘When did you get here?’ Stephen asks her.
‘Yesterday, with Cath. And Chris. He’s—’ she motions toward the street, ‘shopping, or something.’
Margaret is calling now from the hallway, pulling sheets from the linen cupboard.
Stephen says, ‘Have you seen Dad?’
Mandy nods, chews her lip. ‘Not good.’
He looks at Cathy where she stands by the table with her hands on her hips, but she is just nodding too, and biting down on her bottom lip to stop herself from crying. She sniffs then, and wipes her nose with her fingers.
Margaret is still calling to Stephen. He looks from one sister to the other—from Mandy’s shadowed expression to Cathy’s face, smooth and open like an actress’s—and then goes to the laundry, picks up his bag and turns to follow his mother’s voice down the hall to his childhood room.
Chris walks in a few minutes later. ‘Whose car is that?’ he says, dumping the shopping bags on the table. When they tell him his eyes widen.
‘Blimey,’ he says.
WHEN MARGARET has gone from the room—after making up the bed, refusing Stephen’s help as she bent to tuck in the faded yellow floral sheets—he flops down on the single bed, lying on his back and staring around the room. In recent years Geoff has set up a computer and a little inkjet printer on Stephen’s little school desk near the window, and a stout grey two-drawer filing cabinet has replaced the old fake-teak laminate bedside table. Stephen used to stare at its pale, ice-creamy streaks as he fell into sleep at night. The computer on the desk is old: one of those grey, bulbous-screened jobs, the monitor and keyboard grubby with age. The printer is also grey, but newer.
Stephen wonders what the old man actually does at the computer. He can picture him there, peering over his half-moon glasses into the screen, his concerned old face reflected in the glass as the monitor warms up. University of the Third Age is printed on a sheet of paper lying on the desk; notes on some course, something archaeological. He imagines Geoff taking trips out to Lake Mungo with a whole busload of other old coots, clutching clipboards and clamping canvas sunhats to their bald old heads. The desert sun boring down to grow a few more opalescent scales of skin cancer at the open necks of their shirts.
The room smells the same. Or maybe it’s just the sheets, musty with linen-cupboard camphor or lavender or the waxy little lumps of whatever his mother has always hidden in there in the dark among the towels and sheets and other mysterious slabs of folded fabric.
Next to the open door is the same paintworn wooden wardrobe that has always been in here. With a deep and sudden pleasure Stephen notices his old stickers still plastered over its side. He sits up, leaning forward for a closer look: a turquoise diamond with Hey Charger! and the Chrysler logo in black; a three-inch square sticker of an AC/DC album cover. A ‘signed’ poster of Dennis Lillee that he remembers tearing out of the Sunday paper, then rolling thick with glue and sticking to the door, smoothing it over and over, admiringly, with the side of his hand. Near to it, in studied disarray, other smaller stickers of band logos in red and black; all the schoolboy’s pub-rock role models he’d loved—Cold Chisel, The Angels, The Saints.
He flops onto the bed again. Down the hallway he can hear his mother calling to Cathy; the back screen door bangs. He should get up.
On top of the wardrobe is a small stack of board games, the box lids scuffed and worn at the corners. Monopoly; draughts; Ludo; Trivial Pursuit with one blue panel of its lid torn, flapping open. A quoits stick lies on its side, two hairy green rings hooked over it. Tipped crookedly among the quoits and the games is his father’s old straw beach hat, frayed, with a sizable hole in the crown.
When Stephen was a kid Geoff would occasionally dump that hat on his head at the beach. He remembers its humid smell, the taste of its leather chin-strap, the wooden bead rolling in his mouth.
Once, far away when they went visiting cousins at Culburra one Christmas, he and his father took Stephen’s new fishing rod to the wharf, leaving the others at the beach. When a baby whiting flipped at the end of his line Stephen almost dropped the rod in excitement, but his father leaned and steadied his grip, helping him begin to reel in the fish. But then suddenly a seagull dropped from the sky, and swooped the fish, still on his hook, high up into the air above them! They both let out a cry of astonishment and laughter, and for a few long seconds Stephen and his father held a flying bird on the end of a line, the reel whirling and tumbling. Then the gull tore the whiting away, snapping the line, and flew off. The cobweb of fishing thread fell down through the air.
It was marvellous, the word Geoff kept using. Whenever Stephen heard someone say ‘marvellous’ over the years, he thought of that day by the sea far from home, when he and his father held a bird flying in the air on the end of a fishing line.
He lies on the bed, listening. He can hear the television in the living room now. Stephen can’t remember the last time they were all here together. But they are not all here. His father lies hooked to a machine, half-dead, in the hospital.
Suddenly Stephen wishes he had not come. The feeling that had grown as he drove the long hours of highway—that something might crack open the closed feeling he has had for so long about his family—has dissolved in an instant. He should have known it was a mistake to come. He doesn’t wa
nt to see the old man. In the morning he will leave.
But—his mother’s face when he arrived. Her pathetic gratefulness.
He hauls himself upright, pulls off the sweaty t-shirt, bunches it into a ball and tosses it to the floor, then reaches into his bag for a clean one.
‘Wanna beer, Stephen?’ Cathy shouts from the living room.
‘Yeah,’ he yells back, shrugging the t-shirt on.
On his way out of the room he stops by the noticeboard Geoff had made from six cork tiles when Stephen was doing his school certificate, pinning a ‘study schedule’ there in the vain hope his son would take any notice of it. Now the board is pinned with bits of paper, lists of stuff from the old man’s so-called university courses, it looks like, and a large black-and-white aerial photograph of Rundle that hangs off the lower edge. Stephen bends to peer at it, orienting himself using the dark ribbon of highway. The main road’s thin offshoot from the highway, then the grid of the town: the white dots of roof-smudges in rows, some obscured by trees. The tree-dotted wiggle of river, the white-scored outline of the cricket oval. Stephen finds Aurora Street, tracing it with his finger, counting the houses to theirs. An inch away, the stubble of the bush reserve starts. The town really is small, he thinks, taking in the irregular patchwork of grazing land beyond the reserve. Stretching away from the town on all sides, thousands and thousands of acres.
The reserve had seemed so vast when they were kids. Stephen would often labour up the hill to the bush, stomping up the hot street after a fight with Mandy or his father, in tears of rage and self-pity. He would scuff along the wide dirt track, smelling the bush, imagining getting himself lost; his family’s shame and remorse when he didn’t return that night. They would know it was their fault.
The reserve held all kinds of dusty secrets. Once he found a hole filled with dirty clothes. He had hoped it was a grave, or something illicit and sexual, but after a while it looked only like someone’s stolen washing. Jumpers and handkerchiefs. He’d spat on the pile anyway.
Another time he climbed the highest rock up near the ridge, and imagined jumping off, crashing to the boulders and jagged shrubs below. But then he felt a bit sick, so he sat down, and then crawled on his belly over to the very edge of the rock. When he looked down into the valley, a sudden thrill swept over him, making his guts squirl. There, far below, was an enormous, silent compound. He recognised it immediately, fizzing with exhilaration, as some secret industrial lair. Spies, or some other sort of elaborate criminal enterprise. There were several vast, circular pits, each with a clothesline-style apparatus turning slowly through the containers’ coal-black, lumpy liquid. And beyond those, a series of rectangular pools of water, or something worse. The whole compound was fenced and a tiny red-brick building stood at one corner. Stephen strained to focus, and made out a tiny guard patrolling near the compound gate. He had sat up on the warm rock, pulse racing, breathless with the responsibility of his discovery.
He would tell no-one about it. A satisfying wave of superiority had coursed through him. Even Mandy wouldn’t know about this.
Months later, one Sunday after Mass they had driven down a strange street at the far end of town, for Dad to drop off some tools he was lending to a man from Rotary. They passed a large, fenced-off area and Stephen began to feel a confused, panicky recognition in his chest. Then he realised—it was the secret compound! The brick building—and beyond, the walls of the huge cement pits! He looked wildly around for his family’s astonishment, opening his mouth to tell them what he knew—but they were unconcerned: Mandy only gave him her usual scowl, Cathy ogled from her baby’s seat, Mum chattered on, Dad kept driving as if nothing at all was happening.
Then Stephen saw the sign: RUNDLE SEWAGE TREATMENT—WASTE WATER MANAGEMENT PLANT.
Standing here in the bedroom Stephen can’t help but feel again the hot humiliation of that moment. They all knew. Except him. Cathy didn’t count; she was a baby. But Dad and Mandy—even Mum—had known all along, that his secret was nothing special after all, only another bit of Rundle’s ordinary ugliness, like the rubbish tip or the water tower. He looks for the sewage works now on the photograph—and there it is, a series of dark blobs just near the racetrack. He stares at it, recalling the drab shock, the hollow lesson of that day: that specialness had passed him by.
He walks out into the hallway’s gloom.
TO CATHY, the house seems simply to shrug, and realign itself to Stephen’s presence. He is asked no questions. When he comes out of his room Chris strides over to him—‘Mate’—proffering a bottle of beer, and they settle into the safety of handshakes, talk of roads and travelling times, the safety of brothers-in-law twisting lids off beers.
And then, after Stephen’s stroll around the yard, his lavish greeting of Leia—his face close to hers, hands cupping her slavering chin—it is, impossibly, as if he has always been here, as if he has not held himself apart from them for so long, making his parents and Cathy push through the twitchy, twice-yearly monosyllabic phone conversations to confirm he’s still alive.
It is as though their father’s falling has torn in their family an opening through which Stephen might come sidling back.
CHRIS AND Mandy sit watching the SBS news while Cathy and Margaret make dinner in the kitchen. Across the living room Stephen leans into the bookshelves, head tilted to read the spines, a glass of beer in his hand.
Mandy watches the blurred image of the missing journalist Jill Carroll, the tape leached of almost all colour, without speaking. Chris flicks her a look now and then but she seems completely unmoved. The bulletin moves on: the Australian Wheat Board managing director has resigned over the kickbacks; Parliament debates the abortion pill. The health minister’s carved angular face, the stones of his eyes, fill the screen.
Stephen walks along the shelves, head bent, taking in the titles of the books still familiar from his adolescence. He looks up when the kidnapped journo comes on, watching Mandy for a reaction. But she says nothing. He turns back to the books: the Time Life World Library series on different countries, with their thin white spines. The thick hardback novels from the seventies and tightly packed non-fiction paperbacks, spanning the years—Government, Power and Politics in Australia; Who’s Who of Jazz; The Fatal Shore. Then Margaret’s novels—The Plague Dogs, Three Cheers for the Paraclete, a Doris Lessing autobiography, Cloudstreet. There’s a two-volume encyclopaedic-looking set called, simply, Catholicism; some cookbooks; the long shelf of Geoff’s old Isaac Asimovs. Then there are the books attached to Geoff’s various fads—camping, soldering, bicycle maintenance. Stephen tilts one, pulling it off the shelf.
‘Hey!’ he calls in delight. He pulls out two more: The Magnificent Book of Kites, and Kites Across the World.
‘Remember these?’ he says to the air, not looking up.
Mandy glances over her shoulder, then back, attentive only to the television. A visiting American anti-terrorism expert is saying the insurgency in Iraq has demoralised many coalition partners. Onto the screen flick images of car bombs and US tanks.
Stephen plonks himself onto the couch beside Mandy with the books, holding his glass aloft to stop it spilling as he sits. He ignores the television, turning pages.
Cathy comes in and leans over the back of the couch, peering past Stephen’s shoulder at the books in his lap. They are both making little sounds of recognition, of discovery, at this kite picture or that one.
Chris gets up. ‘Anyone want another drink?’ Nobody replies. After a second he blinks, and wanders off into the kitchen to find Margaret.
‘I loved going kite-flying,’ Stephen says, his voice lost and wistful.
Mandy glances sideways at her brother and sister, then back at the television screen. The news has moved on to sport. But there is something tensing in her.
‘You weren’t even there,’ she says then, still watching the screen. The annoyance in her voice makes both Cathy and Stephen look up.
Mandy turns. ‘Well, you weren’t,�
�� she says matter-of-factly. ‘You were a baby.’ She forces a smile; she is being reasonable.
Stephen stares at her for a second. ‘I was there. I’ve seen photos.’
Mandy sighs. ‘Okay. You might have been there, but you can’t remember it. You were just in the pram.’
Cathy rolls her eyes, eases herself up from her elbow-dent in the couch, and leaves the room. Mandy turns back to the television, saying, ‘You didn’t do it, you just always sat in a pram or on a blanket off in the corner. It was just me and Dad.’
She doesn’t know why she cares, why this insistence has risen up in her, but the wearying tide of logic pulls her on. She turns back to Stephen again, who hasn’t answered. He’s staring straight at her, biting his lip. Under her brother’s vengeful stare she feels her face grow hot.
‘You didn’t fly them,’ she finishes flatly.
He’s still looking at her, saying nothing. He takes a slow swig from his glass and swallows. Then he says, ‘Well, so fucking what?’
She licks her lips. ‘So nothing. It’s no big deal. All I’m saying is, you can’t remember doing it, because you didn’t do it. You weren’t a part of it.’
She gets up and takes her empty glass to the kitchen, leaving Stephen sitting on the couch staring at the open book in his lap.
The ruined mystery of the sewage works returns to him and with it the stale, left-behind feeling of his childhood. And now he realises he has always associated this feeling with Mandy, and also with his father—this refusal of the world to offer its grander gifts to him.
Fuck the both of them, he thinks. I’m leaving.
But, but. This silver kite against a blue sky on the page. His mother’s face today, full of stupid love and terror. And his father fallen. And why or how that might turn things inside out he doesn’t begin to know, but as he stares back down at the book he can’t get it out of his head: the day a seagull snatched a fish in the clear blue sky, the moment when he held astonishment in his hands. That marvellous moment only he and his father knew.
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