The Children

by The Children (retail) (epub)

  He thinks of the mynahs strutting around the verandah at her mum’s place; thinks of Stephen’s violent kick at the birds. But they were only birds. An Indian bloke in the hospital told him once that mynahs mate for life. And that the name came from some word for ‘girl’.

  He trudges in the back door and crosses the kitchen to wash his hands at the sink, craning to inspect the bat piss on his shirt. Filthy, fuck it.

  He hears the television news theme from the bedroom as he gets changed, and comes out in his socks, pulling on a t-shirt.

  ‘More Cronulla rioters turn themselves in,’ says the woman with the news headlines, over the pictures of a kid walking up some steps to a cop shop, or courthouse. The news music still underneath the pictures, the kid turning his face from the camera. And then the picture changes, to a dusty street, a blasted shopfront with people yelling and wailing. ‘And yet another attack in Iraq: officially the most dangerous place on the planet.’

  Tony stands in his socks, feet apart, watching. The newsreader’s talking about some politician now, about roads in Sydney, so he goes and gets a beer from the fridge and twists off the lid. He sits down to peel the spuds at the table, where he can still watch the TV through the doorway.

  A couple more riot kids have turned themselves in after the cops put their photos on the Internet. He looks at the kids walking in and then out of the cop shop. Ordinary kids with their dad or some other bloke, shamefaced and downcast, trying not to look at the cameras.

  They didn’t care in December, cameras or not. Tony watched it all, every bulletin, read every paper he could on those hot long days before Christmas when Sydney went ballistic. He takes a big gulp of the cold beer, and then another, waiting for it to slip cold over his brain like a sigh.

  That week before Christmas he watched the Cronulla days unfolding, unrolling like a threat, like the fizzing rumour of a schoolyard fight. He watched how it spread, with the same hungry crowd always standing around, wanting it like a circus. On the television he saw how they chased for it, running in their thongs on the bitumen, the noise of their panting breath in the sound recordist’s gear. He watched them gulping down their need of it with the beer and the sun, the moment growing and growing. He saw them sweating and red-faced, bawling, Fuck off Lebs! Fuck off kebabs! Screaming, Go home you fuckin’ filthy cunts, and he saw WE GREW HERE YOU FLEW HERE, and he knew their need of it, the longing like their balls would break, and then they burst through the roof of the moment and it was all exploding relief—everywhere, even on a train, all the arms and legs and the jackhammer speed of punching.

  He gets up from his chair and pulls some chops out of the freezer, tosses them in a dish and puts it in the microwave.

  Watching it all, Tony had wished he was there, for the warm relief of being swept along in the human need of others, of belonging to it, to the running and the panting and all that hot revenge. And he wanted to be driving through the dark with them, with bats and nails and knives, smashing every window you could for the almighty fucking magnificent release of it all.

  The microwave pings and he takes out the chops. They’ve started to cook at the edges but are still frozen in the middle. He bends the lump of them with his fingers, back and forth, to soften the frozen part, and then he breaks them apart and throws them on the grill tray and pushes it in. He puts the peeled potatoes into the water and sticks the lid back on.

  Afterwards, on the TV he had watched the ones that did it, the Lebs and the Aussies. He watched them, surly and sulky, saying none of them done anything wrong of course, all the guts and glory gone with the new black eyes and the cops on the warpath. But in the middle of all the we done nothin’ and the backsliding there was something Tony understood like a stone dropped into water. It was about the women. When they said what if it was your mum, your sister, who couldn’t walk around without nobody to protect them. And when they said that about their women they straightened themselves up, sharp and hard and proud again, and Tony understood the power of their rightness.

  He goes back to stand in the lounge-room doorway now, swigging from his beer while the Arabs on the screen wade through rubble and glass and broken window-frames from another bomb blast in Baghdad. It’s a bloke reporter there now, and he’s listing casualties. Then at the end, he says, ‘Sixty-seven journalists have now been killed in Iraq since the USled invasion in 2003.’

  Tony licks his lips, goes back to the stove.

  And suddenly he knows something new, staring into the bubbling, milky potato water. It is Mandy, walking around without nobody protecting her—from Baghdad, from terror, from the old man’s gunna die. Nobody else knows her; not the useless brother, the poofter husband.

  Iraq officially the most dangerous place.

  Understanding arches over Tony like a clear night sky. He has saved her once before, and he feels like a soldier for it. They’re the same, they both recognise it now: only he knows her gruesome language, only they know what witnessing is. And only he protects her—this is the purpose of his life, he knows it now. She’s come back, and it’s an omen, and it’s so simple it circles round and round him, graceful as a dark bat against the night.

  THAT NIGHT they all come into the room as Chris sleeps heavily beside her. The old woman with the deformed back, the nurse shaking, the oiled and perfumed Kosovar girl. The earth full of faces, the boy Ahmer, the bushfire and the burned corpse.

  Mandy sits up, breath hurting against her ribs. She tries to breathe quietly as panic dries her skin. Her ribs will crack.

  She drives through the dark streets. The hospital car park is almost empty. Mandy walks the long fluorescent corridors and pushes the buzzer at the door of the ward. Through the door’s small glass window she sees the nurses look up, and they let her in. As she enters the ward they take in her tangled bed hair, her tracksuit, give the briefest of sympathetic smiles and look away again, saying nothing as she walks past them to her father’s bed in the gloom.

  She sits down beside him. A light glows somewhere a few beds away. She can see the outline of his head and his face. The machines still blip and peep; she hears the same slow mechanical rise and fall of his chest. She hunches there in the chair, her hands around her knees. His slack jaw, the tape over his skin. She reaches out and draws one of his fish-limp hands from beneath the tight sheet, holds it in hers. She knows he can’t feel anything, but she pulls down the pyjama sleeve where it has rucked up, in case he is cold.

  She holds his hand to her own dry lips, and whispers to it, Hello Dad. And now all the days and years of swallowed fear and sorrow are merging into a single river, of grief, of never again being able to hold her father’s hand in the night. She puts her forehead to the cool back of his hand, and with her free hand she fingers the lumps of a balled-up tissue from her pocket, wipes her dripping nose. A nurse’s feet squeak towards her then, and a handful of clean tissues falls silent into her lap and the footsteps squeak away, and this kindness is the breaking of a final, cobwebbed thread, and in the near dark of her father’s finishing life Mandy begins to cry, at first trying to stop and then letting it take her, her whole body croupy with the noise and breath of it. She cries that she can neither run from this nor save him, and her tears and snot run down the birdleg bones of her father’s hand, her own two hands open beneath his like a beggar’s, and she cries and cries and cries.

  ‘WHEN ARE you going back?’

  Her mouth is dry, her neck aching when she hears the voice. It wakes her, this question nobody has asked. She stares at him, stares around her. She can see no-one else awake in the ward now; the two nurses are somewhere else. It’s just her and him, and the motionless bodies in the beds. She closes her mouth, bites down on the dry air, swallows. It must be nearly morning. Grime in the corners of her mouth.

  She shakes her head a fraction, moves her lips but makes no sound.

  Tony clears his throat. ‘It’s just. I’ve got something to say.’ His voice quiet and steady, all eagerness gone, a shy, new certainty in its
place.

  She looks around for the nurses again, but the station is empty. She folds her arms across herself, draws her legs beneath her chair. Her sickened pulse begins, and time spreads out thin as gas, and her mind reels across years to a boy she sat next to in fourth class. Robert Cox, the boy she shared a desk with for a term. At nine years old she had the capacity to despise this boy for his hands with their blisters and warts. Robert Cox fought with other boys in the playground and he could not read, but lumbered over syllables, pointing at each one with his stubby finger. She was made to sit next to him as punishment because she once laughed to herself when he stumbled over a simple word. It was punishment for knowing she was better than him, with his spitting and fighting and swearing. And she knew he hated her, everything about her. For weeks they sat as far apart on their shared bench as the space would allow, not a sound passing between them. She did her silent reading from the Scholastic comprehension cards: she was up to olive, just one away from gold, while Robert Cox was still on blue. She read and read, hating the way he breathed through his mouth, hating his filthy hands. And then, over the weeks, something happened. Once he was rummaging in his bag for a pen and couldn’t find one. The teacher scowled across at him and she could feel his body, across the space of the bench, could feel his fear. She pushed a pen across the desk to him. They didn’t speak, but he grabbed the pen and she knew, without looking at him, his gratitude and his surprise. Another time she had a runny nose, but no tissue or hanky, and as the panic rose—she had to sniff, her nose dripped once—Robert Cox produced for her a handkerchief, perfectly blue, perfectly clean. In the playground they would never look at one another, nor speak, but if they saw one another in the street, outside school, their eyes might meet and they might exchange a glance. And there in the classroom, the space of their shared desk took on the air of a marriage, of sorts. A mistaken one, to be sure, but not without kindness, not without dignity.

  Robert Cox and the intimacy of a school desk pass through her mind in an instant, but now she is an adult and alone, and Tony Warren has something to say. He turns, and she turns too, to see her father, to listen to the ventilator’s low motorised noise. Then she turns back to face him, standing there with his hands in his pockets beside the bed in which her father lies dying, and she waits for him to open his mouth to destroy her.

  ‘Have you got an iPod?’ Tony asks.

  And Mandy’s breath comes rushing back.

  She almost faints with it, this rushing familiar elation of survival—that Tony Warren is only a fool, that he is nothing at all. She breaks free of this moment and his beautiful, stupid question.

  ‘No,’ she says, in a voice cold as death, and she stands up to finish him. But Tony cuts in, nodding, eyes shining.

  ‘I thought I could get one. For us to listen to when—’ he pauses, eerie with his knowing, certain smile: ‘I’m coming with you when you go back. To look after ya.’

  She cannot believe what he has said.

  And now he’s standing so close to her with his horrific smile, and the stale waft of his breath and his waiting life enters her nostrils, throat, lungs. There is no escape. Dread surges up through every limb, seizes her, thrusts her backwards and she hears her own shouting, she is tripping and shoving chairs, trolleys, there is the tinkle of drip stands. ‘. . . get AWAY FROM ME,’ she is shrieking, raising her hands before her. And all the while through her raised arms she can see his face—the shock, the disbelief—and he’s grasping at her, as if trying to fathom his way through her dread that is unfathomable, and he’s calling ‘but I know you’ and ‘protection’ even while the nurses and a security man appear to clamp down his flailing arms.

  WHEN THEY have led him away with their calm, loud voices a nurse returns to Mandy, puts a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry. He’s a bit—you know.’ She tilts her head. ‘He doesn’t mean anything bad, he’s just sort of . . .’ She looks at Mandy’s shaking hands. ‘But he’s been told about harassing people.’

  Mandy blows her nose again, shaking her head. ‘I’m just so tired,’ she says, as the breath catches at her ribs, sending her voice up into the start of another cry.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse says, rubbing her shoulder.

  When she has gone Mandy tries to stop her jittering hands, sitting with her father, and the burned man, and Tony, and the thudding of her heart that will not stop.

  CAST OUT in the car park in the near-dawn Tony can think of nothing. He is all breath and his brain is panicked, drowning in not understanding, in her not understanding. He cannot grasp it, the meaning of her looking at him with that face, the horror in it.

  He stands there alone in the electric light of the car park, sweat all over him, his legs shaking. The doors have been locked behind him. They called security. He shakes his head hard, quick, for a second. He’s gotta try to understand. He walks to his ute, gets in and drives through the dark streets. Keeps driving, licking his lips, trying to figure his way through. The floundering of his mind. Slow down, but his thinking sloshes and flails. Driving and driving, grinding the gears. When he finds himself at home it’s like he’s never left it, like none of it happened. But something happened. He turns off the ignition, hears his own panting breath. He wants a drink.

  In the back of the kitchen cupboard there is one half-empty and one full bottle of rum. He grabs them, clinking, and goes back out to the ute, throws the bottles onto the passenger seat. He goes into the dark shed and comes out again, knowing only faintly what he is doing as he moves in the grey light. The dogs shift in surprise and one barks once, soft, at his approach, and then they shake themselves awake, confused and whining, at the sound of the feed hitting their bowls. He cannot think but his body knows where he’s going, knows what to do.

  When he comes back to the ute he falls into the seat, starts the ignition again and drives back down the rutted road, shuddering the vehicle along the track, driving and driving and grinding the gears.

  When he finally gets there he stops the ute, turns off the ignition. With the lid off the first bottle, its sickly sweet stink fills the cabin. He swigs a big, long drink, and tries, again, to think. But all he can see is her backing away with her arms up, dragging things, a chair, a trolley, between them. He drinks again, and now the alcohol prickles warmly at his brain, in his sinuses and his chest. His breathing begins to slow down. Something begins to emerge out of the dreadful spangling noise in his head.

  He shoves the car seat back as he drinks some more, staring out at the grey diagonal bars of the transmission tower. The tower is cool, taut and elegant in the moonlight. Something gets clearer, and then a word crystallises out of these last few days with a final, throttling shock.

  She thinks that he is vermin.

  He cries out in the dark.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Day six

  THEY SIT and stand, a still life gathered around Geoff’s bed. Margaret is in the chair nearest the head of the bed, leaning forward, her legs crossed beneath the chair. Her palms are open in her lap, and she turns her wedding ring around and around with the third finger and thumb of the other hand. She’s not ever looked at it this closely; the thin gold band is scuffed with the tiny marks and scratches of all the years.

  Cathy stands next to her, one knee resting on the padded mauve arm of the chair, and her hand lies along the squashy vinyl of its headrest. Now and then she squeezes the soft pad of it beneath her fingers, watching it compress and slowly expand. Stephen is at the foot of the bed, rocking back and forth on his long legs, hands in the pockets of his jacket. Mandy and Chris are on the other side, Mandy leaning with her elbows on the bed’s rails, Chris standing behind her, a hand on her back.

  They are all watching the battered body of their father, as they have watched him for a week. A minute ago they stood outside the curtain while the nurses pulled away the tubes, removed the sticking plaster. They heard the sound, then. A switch, and then the stopping of the ventilator’s breath that has
muttered beneath all their moments in this room for the long last days.

  Then the curtains drew back and now here he is, unburdened, breathing his own breaths, asleep. It is as though he is, suddenly, going to live. As though this moment is the beginning of his life.

  ‘You know,’ says the young nurse, her face serious, ‘that this can take a long time. Days, possibly.’

  They nod; their glances skitter around the bed at each other. The nurse moves away, wrapping the tubing in a quick, graceful figure of eight and then with a single practised movement she shucks off the latex gloves which now contain the tubes, and she lets the white rubber bundle fall with an arc into a yellow bag as she passes.

  They stand and sit for an hour, shifting their weight, absorbing the silence, watching their father’s oxygen come and go. The sounds of work and life take place behind them, rising and falling. The sound of working footsteps, of telephones, the hydraulic door opening slowly, pshhhh. There is a nurse’s murmured greeting. Then there is the sound of the same voice risen in shock. There are high drawn breaths, and something dropped, and to Mandy these are old, old sounds, and even before she turns around she recognises them, in the passing of that long slow second, as the sounds of death.

  All their faces turn and then there he is, and all the days, all the years have been gathering towards this moment of Tony standing in the room, naked but for the blue tracksuit pants hanging off his skinny hips, barefoot. He stands on the cool linoleum with his face collapsed into drunkenness and some terrible grief, and he’s rocking on his feet, cradling a shotgun in his arms, his skin goosefleshed with the cold and what he has come here to do.

  Stephen speaks. ‘Tony.’ His voice all breath.

  Tony raises the gun with one hand, and points it straight at Stephen.