Stephen shakes his head, amused at this new, borrowed voice of Tony’s. ‘Right,’ he says, setting the kite back down on the table. ‘Who did it then?’
Tony’s face grows very serious. ‘The government.’
Stephen hoots. ‘The government! Of course!’ He reaches for the big swatch of red tissue paper, then looks at Tony. ‘Mate, where did you get this stuff? First of all, all those people saw Bryant—’
Tony cuts him off, his voice louder than before. ‘The government needed a reason to bring in laws to disarm the populace. Simple. Bryant was a patsy.’ He glares at Stephen. Then he folds his arms and looks upward, shaking his head in resignation. ‘The evidence is out there if you want to find it,’ he says.
Stephen begins clearing the table, making space for the sheet of red paper, sweeping bits of cut fishing line and shreds of masking tape into a clump. He can no longer be bothered with the argument.
‘Right,’ he says, and puts the kite skeleton down on top of the paper, then reaches for scissors. ‘We have to cut this into the shape, the diamond.’
But Tony has left the table, is walking around the room with his hands in his pockets. He strolls over to a shelf next to the microwave. ‘That your sister’s wedding?’ he asks, nodding at the framed photograph of Mandy and Chris.
‘Mmm.’
‘How come she doesn’t wear her wedding ring anymore?’
Stephen stops cutting. ‘I haven’t noticed, mate, if she does or not. Can you pass me that glue?’
Tony’s staring now at another photo, one of Mandy with Geoff when Mandy was eight. She holds a kite under her arm, a huge bright bundle. Geoff squints into the camera, his thinning hair blowing against a pale sky.
An hour later they gather up the kite. Stephen carries it, and Tony walks behind, lifting the loops of its long tail, the row of torn-fabric ribbons tied in short, frayed bows, trailing through the house behind Stephen like a bridesmaid.
Stephen holds open the front door for Tony; as he waits, he kicks out a foot towards something on the verandah.
‘Fucking vermin,’ he says to the mynah as it scoots out of his way across the porch.
Tony says, coming out of the doorway, ‘What’s vermin?’
Stephen slams the door. ‘Them,’ he says, nodding at the bird, which has been joined by another. ‘They’re always trying to get in the bloody house. Piss off!’
He kicks his running shoe in the air at them again. But the birds only take a few sidesteps, cock their heads and look at the men. They stand on their spindly, angled yellow legs, unafraid, and watch Tony and Stephen stepping down the stairs.
Tony grunts as he passes them, ‘They’re only mynahs.’
Stephen lifts the kite, opening the back door of the Subaru. ‘Indian mynahs. Bloody pests. They don’t belong here.’
Tony looks over his shoulder at the two birds.
‘They mate for life,’ he says mildly, lifting the tail for Stephen to begin looping it into a plastic bag. Stephen snorts, but says no more. Tony looks up at the birds stepping over the cement of the verandah, striding out. One shits on the cement, and then jumps up to join its mate, staring into the frosted glass door of the family’s house.
INTO THE darkened living room Cathy calls warningly: ‘Don’t forget Celia is in that thing at the park at four.’ Mandy doesn’t reply, engrossed by the television.
Cathy says, slowly and louder, ‘Do you know where Stephen is?’
Mandy shakes her head but still does not speak. Cathy comes into the room and drops into the empty armchair. She has just returned from the hospital with Margaret, and she is heartily sick of her brother and sister but has an iron resolve about them today. They will both come to Margaret’s friend Celia’s dicky little concert in the park, and both of them will be bloody nice about it.
She turns her gaze to the television to see that Mandy is watching a documentary about the Beslan massacre.
‘Oh, Christ.’
On the screen flash images of the parents; women dressed in cardigans and headscarves standing in the Russian street through those dreadful waiting days, their arms folded across their stomachs. Now and then a shot is heard, a bang. A woman puts up both hands, cupping them over her nose and mouth. Another holds the fat wad of a handkerchief, pads her eyes with it, then clenches it in her fist, then puts it to her eyes again. When she turns to look past the camera her eye sockets are carved hollow from crying.
Another scene flashes: a grassed area, stretchers, a sea of near-naked, bloodstained children lying dazed and expressionless, or standing, guzzling water from bottles tipped toward the sky. Their bodies are thin and white and streaked against the dark of the shrubs. The shreds of their underpants hang off them. It is a painting of hell.
Mandy stares at the screen, her arms crossed over her chest; she hasn’t looked at Cathy. The voice-over goes on and on. Cathy reaches for the remote control on the coffee table. She waits, glances at Mandy, and then says flatly, ‘I can’t watch this.’
Still Mandy ignores her. Now a Russian police officer stands looking at a stack of bloodied stretchers, a pile of large, crumpled, clear plastic bags fluttering at his feet, and then there’s a wide shot: of rows and rows of naked young corpses in the plastic bags; a trail of ghastly, cellophaned bouquets lining the street.
Cathy breathes deeply. The kitchen door opens, and their mother’s footfall enters the room, there’s a pause and then her whispered, ‘Oh dear God,’ and the sound of the door closing again.
The television screen is suddenly a luminous, flat green. A cricket field somewhere in Australia appears; the players mill about in their coloured uniforms. A seagull flaps; the soft wash of crowd noise laps over it all.
‘For fucksake.’ Mandy swings around to glare at Cathy, who is slouched back in the chair with one ankle resting on her knee. She stares at the screen, the remote control in one hand, pointed toward the ceiling like a fired weapon. Her mouth is a tight, defiant knot.
She says, her voice barely controlled, but not looking at her sister, ‘I can’t watch that.’ Her face is bloodless. ‘What good does it do those people, for us to see that . . . It’s over a year ago,’ she finishes weakly, turning at last to face Mandy. ‘It’s just—upsetting.’
Mandy throws back her head in a nasty laugh. ‘It’s upsetting!’ she repeats, in a high, sarcastic baby voice. ‘What if everyone just said, it’s upsetting! Try living in it! What if everyone was like you—’
But Cathy bolts to her feet, and Mandy sees that she’s begun to cry. She comes around the coffee table to Mandy, pointing the remote control at her, and then lurches forward, her face close to her sister’s.
‘You know what, Mandy? Everyone is like me.’ She spits the words. ‘Nobody wants to live in it. And nobody wants to watch it.’ She hurls the remote into Mandy’s lap, leans even closer. ‘You’re the fucking weird one. You’re the ghoul.’
Mandy stays sitting in her chair, hears the kitchen door slam, then the back door, her own heart slamming in echo in her chest.
The house is silent again. It is the same as last night. She has turned them all away.
She looks at the remote control in her lap. It is true. She is the weird one; she has always known it. But ghoul.
She picks up the remote, flicks the channel back. The screen shows another series of Beslan body bags, these ones black plastic. A ghoul would savour this—that here and there a zipper is opened to reveal the charred, curled body of a child.
* * *
CATHY RUNS down the back steps, almost tripping with rage. She shouts towards the empty kitchen window, to no-one, ‘I’m going back to the hospital.’
She hurries across the street, past the houses of her childhood; the old red brick bungalows, then the blond- and brown-brick Jennings houses built here and there across the town in the seventies. She passes the houses of families they knew all through her childhood—the McElvogues, the Colmans, the van Kools—with her head down, arms folded.
She hates Mandy. Hates her.
She passes the windblown play park with its globular, early eighties play equipment—the blue spinning spaceship, the red and yellow tubular climbing frames. Once when she was twelve she had sat smoking with Sean McElvogue on the cold metal seat inside the little blue space-ship. She strides down to the corner of Monarch Street with her hands jammed in her jeans pockets, and her adolescence comes swelling up. Mandy’s scathing glances, her bored raising of eyebrows if Cathy ever plucked up the courage to voice a newly minted opinion. She is flooded with righteous rage now, thinking of all the more recent times she has defended Mandy—against Stephen, against other people’s hinting that she is weird. She’s just gutsy, Cathy has often said, fierce in defence of her older sister. People can’t take that in women. But they all are right: Mandy is just a cold, horrible bitch. Cathy walks faster, wiping her eyes and trying at the same time to slow and deepen her breathing, to stop the rising pain of a huge sob in her chest.
A car drives past. Cathy remembers her driving lessons on this road with Dad, driving too fast; he shouted at her to slow down. She had decided to eat an apple as she drove, because that way she wouldn’t look so serious, so frightened. She had seen kids from school in their driving lessons around the car park of the Corroboree Room and was appalled—they looked so desperate, their concentration and fear and dependence so clear on their faces. But when she fumbled the apple out of her windcheater pocket Geoff had shouted—and she’d dropped it clunking down onto the floor to roll about beneath the pedals, while the car swerved into the middle of the road and Geoff cried out.
At the thought of her father Cathy breaks into bitter, self-pitying tears. Her father is not going to wake up. He’s going to die. She stops, and then squats on the side of the road, sobbing and sobbing into her hands.
BY THE time she reaches the blue hospital sign on the corner Cathy has stopped crying. She trudges along, the gravel of the road’s shoulder rhythmic and noisy beneath her feet. She sniffs. Her face is taut and grimy from crying. From here the town has its own special desolation: she can see all the way down the wide road towards the hospital: the petrol depot with its huge gas bottles and its barbed-wire-topped fence; and beyond, the old railway keeper’s house, the matted dry grass growing through the disused railway tracks. She can see the drab telegraph poles studded along the road like grave markers. The awful cellophaned bodies in Beslan come back to her mind, and she’s struck by a fresh wave of rage and hatred for her sister.
She passes the Ford dealership, where the divorced father of a girl she went to school with used to live, in a little cabin behind the building. The girl’s father ran the car yard and when the yard was closed they were allowed to play in the cool quiet of the showroom, between the shining, silent cars. Cathy remembers going into the cabin with the girl once, and the father sat watching football in his underpants, and Cathy suddenly wanted to go home.
She reaches the long, ugly Moonraker Motel, its sign unchanged since her childhood. Once, the son of a family who ran the motel was badly burned by oil in the kitchen, and he had to wear a thick foam suit over his whole body for years and years. Mandy had to take a photograph of him wearing it, for the paper. She had told Cathy it was awful, seeing the boy, who was eleven and ashamed. He had been naked except for his flesh-coloured suit, with its one long and one short leg, and she had to photograph him in his family’s living room so they could raise money for the hospital to get him another suit. The parents told the boy to stand this way and that, and lift his arms, and Mandy had been able to say nothing much but tried to smile at him. His penis was completely deformed, the boy’s father said in front of him.
Mandy had told Cathy it was awful. But now she watches other children being deformed, over and over again, and she makes other people watch it with her, even while their mother covers her eyes and ears, while their father lies dying. Cathy sees now finally that something has gone deeply wrong with her sister, something is irretrievably, horribly broken in her.
A semi-trailer grinds by, whipping Cathy with grit and dust. Up on the hill the sunlight makes a silhouette of the Lutheran Church against the sky, and a leaf blower begins its lurching, repeated moan.
* * *
STEPHEN DRIVES out onto the highway, towards the bare, windy hills where Geoff used to fly the kites. Stephen is quiet, listening to Tony talking about the soccer game he played last Saturday, how the ref was one-eyed, how there is a bye today. They drive up the track to the transmission tower, the ute buffeted now and then by the wind.
When Stephen unlatches his door it’s instantly yanked open wide, bouncing on its hinges. The men get out and the wind is dry and cold in their faces despite the heat of the day down in the town. Their t-shirts flap.
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Stephen into the wind. It shoves at him even as he leans inside the vehicle, and the plastic shopping bag and the paper of the kite begin to riffle and flap from the space behind his seat.
He looks around for Tony, but can’t see him. Turning, he sees then that Tony has walked over to the cyclone wire fence around the grey transmission tower, and is holding to the wire with the fingers of both hands, the toe of his boot resting in one of the holes. He leans into the fence, peering up into the centre of the tower above him.
‘Bet you could see everything up there,’ Tony yells.
Stephen squints, then turns back to the bag, which he now has pinned to the seat with his knee. He lifts out the red paper kite, clutching it at the centre where the wooden sticks cross. The wind takes it immediately, and he has to lift his arm with the gust of air so the kite is not ripped from his hand.
He yells over his shoulder, ‘Can you gimme a hand?’
Tony saunters across the cobbly tussocks, hands in his pockets.
‘I reckon you could see everything up there. Out to the coast even, I reckon. Right at the top, I mean.’
Stephen concentrates on the kite. ‘I have to fix the bow,’ he says. ‘Can you hold this?’
Tony leans in and steadies the kite while Stephen carefully pushes the cross-beam into a slight arc, and manages to hook the looped end of fishing wire over one nicked end of the dowel.
‘Okay!’ he says, and looks up at Tony, grinning. ‘Let’s see if this thing’ll fly. Do you wanna hold the line or the kite?’
But still Tony stares, across the car roof, at the tower. ‘I could climb that, I reckon,’ he says in a soft voice.
Stephen looks at the tower. He snorts. ‘You couldn’t get to the ladder.’
Inside the tower’s frame is a narrow, caged ladder going all the way to the top. But a round steel plate has been padlocked across the opening at the ladder’s base. Stephen doesn’t say anything about the problem of first climbing the barbed-wire-topped fence; he has the feeling Tony has gotten over such fences before.
Tony sniffs. ‘I’d go up the outside.’
The tower is made of diagonally crossed steel bars. Climbing up the outside would mean hanging your body over each diagonal, straddling it without sliding down, and then reaching through the high space for the next bar above you. Stephen has a vision of Tony dangling from one of the crossbars near the top.
‘I suppose. But what for?’
Tony juts his chin. ‘Just to see.’
Stephen squats and holds the kite on his knee, tugging at the line to test the strength of its fastening to each end of the dowel. Seeing Tony standing there, staring upward with his mouth open, hands in his pockets and with his feet planted wide on the ground, Stephen remembers that for a time when he was a kid the worst insult was Piney. The Pine Lodge school was for Down syndrome or retarded kids.
‘I could,’ Tony says defiantly, as if Stephen has challenged him.
‘Whatever you reckon, mate,’ Stephen says. ‘But you’d be an idiot.’
Too late, he hears the dull contempt of his own voice.
Tony drops down suddenly, comes face to face with Stephen.
‘I don’t give a flying fuck what yo
u think of me.’
He hisses it. His face is flushed, his eyes moist with anger. Stephen is suddenly conscious of Tony’s potential wiry strength, of the close grey stubble of his face.
‘Hey!’ Stephen says, forcing a smile. ‘Joke, Joyce! Take this?’
Tony snatches the kite from Stephen’s hands and stalks off across the hill. Stephen watches him moving away. What you think of me. Who’s he talking about then?
‘Okay,’ yells Stephen, and Tony stops, turns around. ‘Just hold it up,’ Stephen shouts.
Tony raises up the kite in two hands, and the wind immediately wrenches it from him, whisks it sideways and up. Both men yelp with delight. Stephen lets the line whirr out from the spool, then holds it steady in one hand, above his head.
The kite is up. It climbs higher. Stephen holds his breath as the kite lifts. And now it’s a punch of red in the blue sky, lurching and tilting sideways on each tiny calibration of the wind, and in those shifting coloured movements against the sky it is a flickery animation, a bird’s moving eye, one marvellous moment, again and again and again. Stephen lets out more line, feels its steady pull, taut as a slid raindrop now, and the kite climbs further still, sailing out into the spare blue distance. It is escape and beauty, it’s the tether and the leaving home. Him and his father, before the fall.
Then out of nowhere the line slackens, the kite dips and swings.
Stephen catches his breath. Don’t fall. He starts running backwards, all breath and begging, yanking on the line with both hands to tighten it, gathering it in. But faster than he can pull it in the kite sinks—a slow, beautiful stone—then goes taut again, zigzags a moment—then plummets point-first into the ground.
Stephen stops running, lets the spool fall to the ground. He leans forward to catch his breath, panting, hands on his thighs, his pulse jittery. ‘Fuckit.’
He sees Tony coming towards him and wishes suddenly that he hadn’t let him come. He walks away across the grass until he reaches the kite. He bends to it, picks it up. Tony has followed him; stands there with his hands on his hips.
The Children Page 18