The Children

by The Children (retail) (epub)

  ‘Maybe the tail’s too long,’ Stephen says.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ says Tony, grinning.

  ‘You have to get the tail the right length.’

  Stephen trudges back across the hill to the car, takes the scissors from the plastic bag, cuts the tail a few inches from the end, letting the bright fabric bows fall. Tony looks on with his arms folded, bored now.

  ‘You dunno what you’re doing.’

  Stephen doesn’t reply. He hands Tony the kite, and he walks off again across the grass, head down.

  This time the kite does not rise as high, and the swinging gets worse; it speeds around in a spiral twice, three times, before hitting the ground again, harder this time. When Stephen picks it up, one of the paper edges, despite the reinforcement with masking tape, has begun to tear.

  They move to a more sheltered side of the hill. Stephen tightens the bow-line, then loosens it. They take turns holding the line and the kite. But each time the result is the same, or worse. The kite lifts thirty feet and then plummets. And with each attempt, the men’s exchanges become tenser, more exasperated.

  ‘Hold it up, for Christ’s sake,’ Stephen yells. Tony glares at him, muttering something, and when the kite plunges again and breaks its spine he laughs.

  ‘I’ll have to have another look at the book,’ Stephen says eventually, running his finger along the kite’s battered edges. ‘Maybe it’s the bridling.’

  Tony stands apart with his arms folded, sulking. Then a nasty smile comes on his face. ‘Shoulda got your sister to do it. She’s better than you.’

  Stephen feels sweat at his hairline, on his back. He meets Tony’s eyes.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he mutters.

  He shoves the broken kite and the plastic bag of stuff behind the driver’s seat, and then gets in and slams the door. The ute’s interior is quiet and still; it is a relief to be out of the wind. He turns on the ignition, waits for Tony to open the passenger door. But then, in the rear-vision mirror, he sees that Tony is at the tower—and is inside the fence. He stands there on the ground beneath the tower, looking straight above him.

  ‘Jesus,’ breathes Stephen. He waits for Tony to begin climbing. He swallows.

  But Tony only stands there, hands in his pockets again, his thin, tilted body unsteadied now and then by the wind, staring up above him as if it’s the sky, not the tower, he’s interested in. As if the tower is only stairs into the sky, as if he’s thinking, up, up and away.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘WHERE IS everyone?’ Stephen has come home to the silent house.

  Mandy looks up. ‘I don’t know.’ It is the first time Stephen has noticed how dark are the circles beneath her eyes, how her cheeks sag.

  The living room seems dark. He wants to say something to her, about last night, about Tony.

  Then she says, ‘Oh, shit. Celia’s thing is on, at the park.’

  Stephen looks at his watch. ‘Come on.’

  As Stephen’s Subaru pulls into a parking spot half a block from the park they can hear the thumps of an electric bass, a guitar grinding out the chorus of ‘Addicted to Love’. A woman singer is missing the higher notes.

  They don’t speak, but Stephen raises his eyebrows at Mandy. They each allow the beginning of a smile.

  A sagging banner at the entrance to the park says Rundle Festival of Art and Living. ‘Oh yeah,’ murmurs Stephen, spotting the sausage sizzle, where women from the Lions Club push sweaty hair away from their foreheads, attending to a line of customers.

  They eat the sausage sandwiches as they walk between the stalls, in the cool shade of the park. Another stall has a handwritten sign, Turkish gozleme, and two women wearing small white headscarves work industriously over a grill and large mixing bowls. The next stall is stacked with ugly, polished wooden carvings in vague bulbous shapes suggesting yin and yang, or Buddha. There’s a second-hand CD stall, and Stephen wanders to it, lingering while he chews.

  Mandy stands apart, watching a gaggle of women dancing in front of the stage, their arms waving above their heads. One wears a grey jersey dress, which clings to the small rolls of fat around her bra and underpants as she twirls slowly one way, then the other. Middle aged, Mandy thinks, then realises straightaway the woman is her own age, has her body. Stephen is beside her again, shaking his head.

  ‘Twenty-two dollars for fucking Rod Stewart!’

  They keep walking, past a small collection of native plants being sold by a tall, anorexic-looking girl with violent black hair, buzz-cut short. She has a pierced eyebrow and wears a black t-shirt, tiny, bright green boy’s football shorts and a pair of enormous black motorbike boots. Her t-shirt says, in small white capitals, I SWALLOW. ‘The only punk in the village,’ says Stephen into Mandy’s ear, making her laugh.

  Next along, a tired-looking woman is sitting on a stool with a brown suede bum-bag in her lap, holding a fistful of sticks with coloured ribbons folded into loops at the ends. All around the park children have these ribbon-sticks, twirling and swirling them in graceful arcs.

  ‘How was the kite?’ Mandy says, staring at the children.

  Stephen sniffs. ‘Didn’t work.’

  Mandy turns to him then, sees his boy’s disappointed face. He glances at her, then blinks, shrugging away her sympathy. But she thinks it is possible he is grateful anyway.

  They keep walking.

  They pass the Volunteer Bush Fire Brigade display, small boards on easels, dotted with blurry snapshots of fire and smoke with typewritten labels beneath each one. Two women sit beside the pictures, rocking back on their director’s chairs, wearing thick orange overalls with reflective arm-bands and big black boots. One has a long blonde ponytail sticking out from her black baseball cap, and reflective sunglasses. Further along is a woman at a table piled high with carrots, demonstrating a vegetable peeler, little streamers of carrot skin a flurry in the air around her.

  Mandy and Stephen walk in silence in the slow, cool chaos, glancing around the park for their mother and the others. Once they realise there is no sign yet of the choir, they do not hurry. Stephen thinks he can sense Mandy’s mood shifting, lightening. They come to a stall which has a framed sign in painstaking, curlicued gold lettering: Baby Memories. Beneath it a display board is hung with other framed things, dark little blobby sculptures behind glass. As they move closer the sculptures become plaster casts of babies’ hands and feet, spray-painted gold, mounted on white boards and framed with thick gold wood.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Stephen at their ugliness.

  Some frames contain a set each of both hands and feet, with a soft-focus picture of a sleeping baby between them. Mandy and Stephen move along the line, stopping here and there to read a mawkish poem stuck between the casts. But some frames contain a single hand or foot, painted a dark, faintly glistening greenish colour meant to look like bronze. The hands are curled into little blackened fists, severed at the wrists.

  ‘Jesus,’ Stephen says beneath his breath. He leans in, staring, and then turns to Mandy to say something.

  But she’s not smiling anymore. She is breathing deeply, and Stephen sees her bloodless face.

  ‘I have to go,’ Mandy whispers, wheeling away, walking fast through the park, away from the severed hands, the wailing and the smell of burning meat.

  ‘Wait,’ Stephen calls. He jogs after her as she strides off through the green light. He catches her, puts a hand out to her arm. ‘Wait, Mandy.’

  She tries to shrug off his hand, breathing hard, but he grips her arm, turns her, and says, ‘Just wait, okay.’ She stops, staring at the ground.

  ‘I can’t–’ she says, tears in her eyes. She is dragging in broken breaths. ‘I can’t—explain–’

  But Stephen holds her arm tight, won’t let her go. ‘It’s okay,’ he says then, kindly, softly. Then adds, ‘Look.’

  Near the children’s playground a large group of women has gathered in an arc around a little brass band, sitting in two rows of plastic chairs on th
e grass. The women are almost all grey-haired, dumpily dressed in dark elastic-waisted trousers and electrically bright cotton blouses—hot pink, yellow, orange, purple. Along with a small audience, the women look on, silent, while the band creaks along in a sluggish version of ‘You Are My Sunshine’. A crumpled cotton banner hanging from a music stand says Rundle Town Band in blue lettering beneath a blue treble clef. The band has two clarinets, two trumpets, a tuba, a pair of trombones. Most of the players are old men, except for two teenage boys—one with a trumpet and the other the tuba—and a young girl, hair pulled back in a thin plait, her pink lips gripping the mouthpiece of a clarinet.

  Stephen holds Mandy close beside him, pulling her closer to the band, squeezing her arm; she stares at the musicians without looking at him, still breathing deeply but a little more easily now. She watches the men, intent on their music books as they play. A couple of them are purple in the face, yet still they don’t have the collective breath to raise the volume of the music above the onlookers’ conversation. At the end of the song the men drop their instruments into their laps, panting. The crowd claps without enthusiasm. The band heaves into life again, starting ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’. All the while, the electric-bloused ladies wait their turn, some staring with glazed expressions at the ground, songbooks closed flat over their chests. A small clutch of them bops along in an exaggerated way to the music.

  At the end of the song, a thick-set, hearty man—the choirmaster—moves to take up his position. The women stand to attention; they clearly love this man, their faces alight with excitement. Mandy looks around and sees her mother in the little crowd, beaming. Margaret’s friend Celia is in the middle of the women, frizzy dark hair above her pink face. There is a large collective intake of breath then, and the women begin to sing. Mandy doesn’t recognise the tune until the chorus. The choirmaster turns to the audience, swinging his arm wildly to encourage them to join in. Stephen sings along with gusto, raising his eyebrows at Mandy as he bellows out, grinning all the while,‘I am, you are, we are Austray-liunn.’

  Mandy rolls her eyes, but Stephen makes her stay, through ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘What About Me’. Mandy watches the women, all singing in their high, whiny voices, jubilant with the occasion, with pride. Despite the size of the choir—they must have come from all around the district—there has been no attempt to separate the voices into parts, or to do anything clever or original with the songs’ structure or lyrics. Occasionally an individual’s vibrato is noticeable, but mostly the voices are of ordinary pitch, trying to hit the same notes; it reminds Mandy of mumbling out the national anthem at school assemblies on November the eleventh.

  She looks around the audience to identify the women’s family members, to search for pride on the onlookers’ faces. But apart from her mother—who has seen Mandy and Stephen now and is beaming even more—the other watchers stand back, expressionless, their arms folded across their chests, or squinting unsmiling into the sun. Mandy begins to feel embarrassed for the singers, plugging on in the face of this blank boredom.

  ‘It’s so lame,’ she says into Stephen’s ear. ‘Let’s go.’

  But he is smiling ear to ear as he turns to her; apart from their mother, he appears to be the only one in the crowd having a good time. ‘One more,’ he whispers back during the applause, now no more than a few bored claps.

  The choirmaster turns to the audience. ‘And now we’re going to sing about something that is very close to all our hearts,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘It’s in our hearts and our minds, on our shores and across the distant seas.’

  He’s enjoying this chance for oration; Mandy wonders if he is a priest. The women jostle and giggle. Mandy can’t bear to look at them anymore, with their lunatic smiling. She is shamed to her boots for them all. The little blackened knobs of the hands come back to her, won’t leave her. She forces an exhalation, closes her eyes, trying to listen to the choir, but she can’t make out the words.

  But when she opens her eyes again she sees that the women have stopped their clowning and smiling. Some of them seem to have caught a glimpse of something important, and dignity begins to fill their expressions, rippling through the choir. They are singing, a hymn she doesn’t recognise, slow and languorous, ‘Blessed be the hungry and the thirsty,’ they sing. A few people around Mandy are humming along, and she thinks of what the choirmaster said. And then as the women sing, with their backs straight and their gazes clear, Mandy’s shame and the little fists fall away and the boy, Ahmer, comes back. Blessed be the reviled and the harmed, and there he is, sitting in the grit and the dirt with his blood soaking the ground; the pure of heart, and the morgue attendant turns his body again and again.

  Blessed be the peacemakers.

  The song finishes with a long, perfectly held note suspended in the air.

  Stephen turns to Mandy—and she’s standing there with tears running down her chin. ‘Oh, Mand,’ he says. He puts both his arms around her and pulls her to his side, shielding her from the stares of the other people, from their mother’s concerned face craning through the crowd.

  He guides her body, jolting with silent sobs, back through the park. He does not understand his sister, has never understood her, but he knows now that he loves her, whatever she has become, whatever the world has done. Tears of his own are stinging as they walk, and now he must bend his head close to hers, to try to hear what Mandy is saying through her tears into her hands.

  ‘What?’ he says, bending to her.

  ‘Why are you hanging around with Tony?’

  Sadness surges over him. ‘I dunno,’ he says simply. His voice is kind, soft. After a moment he says, gently, ‘But why do you hate him so much?’

  Mandy inhales deeply, her breath catching again in the high final gasp of a sob. She shakes her head, sniffing. ‘I don’t hate him,’ she says, in the quietest voice Stephen has ever heard.

  She cannot say it. Even now, here, with her brother’s warm arm firm around her shoulders, she can’t say, I am terrified. She cannot say, I’m coming undone.

  ‘I don’t hate him,’ is all she can whisper, again.

  * * *

  CHRIS FINISHES his beer and puts the empty glass on the bar. It’s five o’clock. He has been here for four hours.

  The taste of the beer is thick in his mouth; his movements are glazed as he reaches to the bar, feels the damp red bar cloth beneath his fingers.

  He watches the screen above him, waits for the end of the over. When the list of detailed scores appears on the screen he stands up, and walks slowly out of the bar.

  He walks across the park. Only a few people are left, taking down banners, packing up microphone leads. He walks past the deflating jumping castle, folding in on itself, its orange turrets sagging inwards. Somewhere a kid is shrieking; the high, hysterical liquid screaming of too many lollies.

  He follows the path past the duck pond, smells its rank sewery stink. He goes to the fence and leans on it, hitching his armpits over the wire, watching the ducks sliding across the water. He likes their sudden direction changes, the seamless gliding. He should go back to the house. But the idea of Mandy, of going back, the hospital, all of it, fills him with an enormous weariness. He imagines instead getting in the car, driving up the main street, ignoring the turn towards Aurora Street, just keeping on driving out along the highway. If he kept going, where would he end up? Broken Hill, maybe. Or Lake Eyre. It fills with rain sometimes and comes alive. Little creatures slurping out of the mud. He hears a clang from the park, a van door sliding shut. He stands up, untangles himself from the fence, pushes himself off.

  He thinks of the dead lake, wonders how a person might know when it would come to life again.

  MARGARET COMES in the back door at six-thirty, as Stephen and Mandy are setting the table in the dining room. They greet her in low voices. Chris is slumped asleep on the couch in the living room; the cricket drones from the television.

  Margaret has been at the hospital. She puts her
things down on the sideboard, then walks stiffly across the room.

  ‘How is he?’ Stephen says, dropping knives and forks in a heap on the table, plonking the pepper grinder down.

  Margaret doesn’t answer for a moment. She says, ‘Where’s Cathy?’ There is a croak in her voice that makes Mandy and Stephen look up.

  ‘In her room.’

  Margaret says, ‘Oh,’ and looks toward the hallway, as if she is not sure what to do next.

  ‘What’s happening, Mum?’ Stephen says slowly, as Margaret steps to the table, putting out a hand to its surface. Cathy has heard her come in and now appears at the living-room door. All three wait for the words to come out of their mother’s mouth. She looks about the room, dazed, eyes bright in her pale face.

  ‘They said that in the morning,’ she says, staring around at her children’s faces, ‘they want to turn him off.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  OUT ON the farm night is falling and there are bats wheeling against the sky between the big trees behind the machinery shed. Tony hears the bats squealing up there while the dogs hurl themselves at their dinner bowls.

  He goes out and stands beneath the trees, his head craned back to watch them crossing back and forth between the branches, circling and whirling, maybe fifty of them. The bats swoop and swish and you can hear their wings like a dog’s panting breath. Squeaking too, making little chikkuting noises to each other while they fly, back and forth, around and around, as if they’re on strings. And all about him the bats’ piss falls in a quiet patter on the dirt, in little raindrops on the leaves above. A sprinkle hits his shoulder and he jumps, says ‘Fuck.’ His voice is loud in the twilight.

  He brushes at his shoulder as he walks back to the house, sniffs his fingers. It stinks. You can get diseases from bats. From bat piss, maybe, from bat shit. Or maybe it’s that sort of lice you get, like from birds. Vermin, her brother said this afternoon. You could get diseases from vermin.