by Brown, Honey
It was afternoon. A couple of the neighbourhood dogs were barking. Our cats, confined to my mother’s spare room, were lying in the full-length window facing the garden and the hedge. Summer was sitting with them, the lace curtain up over her shoulders.
My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Steven was shut away in the dining room, on his computer. Bruce went down the hallway. He stopped at the spare room and knocked before opening the door a small way and squeezing through, mindful of any escaping cats. I saw, though, that Summer had left the room and was now outside, crossing the lawn, moving herself away from the house now that we were in it.
‘The kids might take some time,’ my mother said, walking up behind me, seeing how Summer had left the house.
In the past, whenever I’d been asked who Summer was most like out of Bruce and me, I’d never known how to answer. I’d sometimes said that she was most like me, because I related to her willingness to try different things, her search to be inspired. Watching her walk away now, I thought that, in fact, Summer was most like her father. She was a stickler for the rules. And she always blamed herself.
I went into the spare room to find Bruce sitting on the floor with his back against the foot of the bed, staring at the wall. I sat down with him. The room smelt of tinned cat food.
‘I don’t think she’s ever going to look me in the eye again,’ he said.
‘She will.’
I settled in close beside him, felt his warmth, wrapped my arm around his arm and pressed against him. The cats seemed to know to leave us alone. A dog would have come over and gotten all excited that we were down at its level, but the cats stayed on the windowsill, not even acknowledging our presence.
Dad’s old shed had a dirt floor. My father’s things had long been passed on, sold or packed up and stored away. The dusty light globe struggled to illuminate the empty wooden shelves and bare benches. The lawnmower and the fuel can beside it were the only two things that gleamed; everything else absorbed the light. I thought about my father and what he would make of what had happened. I believed I would have told him. If anything, he would have played it down. It was intense enough on its own. I sat down on the mower and I sobbed, out there where no one would hear me cry. I didn’t stop when my mum came in through the door. She reached beneath the bench and dusted off two foldout chairs. We sat down on those, her chair close enough so that she could rest her hand on my shoulder, sometimes gently rubbing. Mum thought we were leaving town to make a fresh start in general, that our marriage had encountered a rough patch after the mugging. It had.
‘The mugging’ would come to be a code, and perhaps, too, a crutch in our family, a way to avoid the shocking nature of the truth. It was the fairytale version of events, an age-old reminder of the way humans have always devised stories to help lull the mind into accepting what is ugly. This story was fittingly invented in the town I had grown up in, and it started in earnest in my father’s shed on this, our last night in Delaney. Mum was one for traditions and she was good at bedding down the new ones. She embraced the story and didn’t question the gaps in it.
I’d not moved past that day, I’d not yet left the gallery, because that was where I was – upstairs, the glass sculptures around me, the surge of the sea, the helplessness – while Bruce suffered in a room below.
I started there, and, under the guise of detailing the mugging, went through each thing that had terrified me. I was able to say a lot – about being separated from Bruce, about not being able to see, about the violence, about the fear of dying. Most importantly, I was able to say how I felt, the fear, and how it had changed me, and how hard it was to forget. In my mind I saw the gallery. In Mum’s mind she saw an alleyway, or … I’m not sure what she saw. Maybe she knew more than she was letting on.
When I was finished talking, she said, ‘I’ve cooked you that cheesecake you loved when you were little. I told the children not to touch it.’
We’d grown cold in the shed and it was time to go in.
30
Our last stop on the way out of town was Bruce’s parents. It wasn’t unusual for us to leave them until the end. Bruce had called in to see them once or twice during the last few months, always in a rush, though, never with the time to sit down or stay, no need for hugs, best wishes or goodbyes, unlike this time. Just as I’d taken Summer as my tactic to keep the conversation light when I’d first seen my mother after the attack, Bruce took all of us along for this visit. The house smelt of cold tea leaves and burnt toast. We filed in, through the front door and down the narrow passageway, past the framed photographs of Bruce’s brothers on the walls, in their army uniforms, at official events and also snapshots sent from while they were on duty. The photos of Bruce were on a different wall, around the corner in the lounge room. It was, sort of, understandable – the hallway photos had a theme: military regalia and combat. To put Bruce in amongst the berets and camo gear would look odd. In Bruce’s photographs, he was in King Gee pants and work shirts, or shorts and T-shirts, there was always a patch of green lawn in the background, a section of blue sky, a wheel-barrow or a saw horse.
If I felt the images of his brothers pressing in on either side of us, then Bruce must have felt it doubly, tenfold.
In the kitchen, Joan was on the phone.
Rex had let us in and followed behind us. ‘Shh,’ he said. ‘It’s Todd.’ Todd was the eldest son, the one who’d lied about selling his pushbike and had a gun aimed at his head for it.
We sat down at the table.
‘Nah, Rex hasn’t got it,’ Joan said down the line.
‘Rex’ was how his children referred to him. He was rarely ‘Dad’. Looking at him now, you could see the man he’d been – nuggetty despite his age, bullet eyes, a flattened nose, even his hair was refusing to recede and was holding out against the grey. He’d retired early due to an injury no one in the family ever spoke of. All Bruce knew was that it was something to do with his spine. It had happened during a training exercise – the secretiveness came from the shame of that. If it had been an injury sustained during battle I imagine every detail would be known. Joan looked older than Rex, although she wasn’t. Her hair was to her shoulders and parted in the middle; it was the hairstyle she’d had the entire time I’d known her, dyed coppery-brown. She dressed youthfully, in jeans and tops, and gave the impression of wanting to retain her girlishness, but the sparkle needed to pull it off wasn’t there.
She continued to talk on the phone. Rex had turned to the window and was looking out into the backyard, his way of telling us to stay quiet so he could listen to Joan’s half of the conversation.
‘Oh yeah … okay, yeah …’ she said.
There were only four chairs at the table. Steven had pulled over a stool and propped on that. Bruce gave a small and disappointed shake of his head when it became apparent that Joan would make no attempt to wind up the call or take it to another room, or even signal that she saw us there, crowding her kitchen. We were the invisible family. Steven and Renee began to fidget. Summer roamed her gaze around the room and spent time looking at her Pop, taking the opportunity, perhaps, to study him. Her eyes travelled right down to the soles of his lace-up boots and lifted slightly to linger on his double-knotted shoelaces.
Then Joan said, ‘Bruce is here, I’ll put him on.’
My husband tensed.
‘Here,’ Joan said, ‘it’s your brother.’
Bruce swapped places with Joan, standing beside the fridge, taking the phone and turning his face away, towards the window, a view of the backyard and the clothesline, a Hills Hoist; those steel contraptions would perhaps outlast all of us.
‘G’day, Todd,’ Bruce said.
Rex and Joan looked at one another. Rex sucked his teeth and seemed uninterested in the particulars of the conversation now. The fact that the two brothers were talking was entertainment enough for him. He grazed his knuckles back and forth beneath his chin and snorted softly, laughed quietly.
‘We’re renting until we find a
place to settle,’ Bruce was saying. ‘I don’t think we’ll end up too far away from Delaney. Somewhere close enough to the city so we can have a choice of some good schools for the kids. But how are you?’ he said. ‘I’ve seen a couple of things on the news and it looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.’ He was quiet while Todd spoke. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment, ‘not like that when you go out for bread and milk here.’ Bruce swallowed and nodded while he listened. Todd must have gotten off the topic of peacekeeping and onto fishing, because the next thing Bruce said was, ‘Oh yeah, mackerel … yeah, no, never.’ Bruce was silent for a stretch, before nodding and saying a quick, ‘Oh, right, okay, yeah, you too. No worries.’
Bruce hung up and returned to sit at the table.
‘What did he say to ya?’ Rex said.
‘Told me about some fishing he’d done, said things aren’t too bad over there. He sounds like he’s doing all right.’
‘Of course that’s how he sounds,’ Rex said harshly. ‘What do ya reckon he’s gunna say in a five-second conversation?’
Bruce was silent.
‘I’m just glad you didn’t tell him how you’ve sold your twenty houses and you don’t know what to do with your time.’ Rex sniffed, looked at the children, a twinge of guilt perhaps for not holding back in front of them. ‘He’s been through some shit,’ he muttered. ‘Put on the kettle, Joan.’
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ Bruce said, ‘unless Trudy or the kids want a drink?’
‘I think we’re all pretty good.’
‘We can’t stay long.’
‘I’ve written the boys’ numbers down like ya wanted,’ Joan said. She took a piece of paper from beside a stack of messy paperwork and handed it to Bruce.
‘Do me a favour, though,’ Rex said. ‘Don’t ring ’em to tell ’em you can’t decide what European car to buy next, will ya? Use your head.’
‘I’ve already got their numbers,’ Bruce said, placing the note down in the centre of the table. ‘I’ve called them recently, a couple of times actually. But I don’t think they’ve got my number, because they don’t return my calls. Let’s go,’ Bruce said, getting up.
Rex shrugged as if to say – that was how you wanted it; you chose not to be one of us. ‘That’ll be that, then,’ he said, ‘won’t it.’
‘I guess it will.’
Pale green leaves covered the branches of the trees. New growth was everywhere. Magnolia trees were in flower. The poplar trees were less whimsical with their flush of vibrancy. Brick homes and the sound of lawnmowers gave away to the small industrial estate, and then that petered away and we turned onto the freeway. Bruce was driving. He was leaning forward with his forearms resting on the steering wheel, glazed-over vision, slow breaths, no chatter, the kind of introspectiveness that usually accompanied the last leg of a trip, not heading off. We merged onto the freeway and left Delaney behind.
Epilogue
Bruce and I own a vineyard now. It has a winery and restaurant. We call the place All Seasons Winery. Don’t hold it against us. We needed a degree of honesty, some half-acknowledgement of what we’d done. We also thought it was a good name because it implies that we are open for business all year round. And we are. We never close. Bruce gets up early each morning and comes to bed late each night. In between, he sweats and toils and burns up all his energy. He crams his head with harvest dates and irrigation strategies, weather forecasts and ways of controlling the birds. He is always busy trimming, pruning, boom spraying and netting. He’s recruited men experienced in winemaking to help him learn the basics. All he wants is to make a decent drop. He doesn’t care about winning awards.
We hoped by buying a place with a restaurant we might reignite Summer’s love of cooking. And it’s worked. I’m in charge of the front of house. I kept on the old kitchen staff. The chef is experienced and capable, and she’s taken Summer under her wing. It’s a toss-up as to which my daughter is more passionate about, the head chef or the food. Fifteen now, Summer has ‘found the love’ on a couple of levels. Of my three children, Summer was the last one I would have picked as bisexual or gay. It seems she’ll forever surprise and warm our hearts.
Steven’s maturity – we’ve discovered – comes and goes. He’s given up basketball and is taking an unspecified break from studying civil engineering. He works, sporadically, in the vineyard with his father. He’s made friends with the two farm-hands, and they go off together surfing most weekends. Renee tells me that the three of them smoke too much dope, and that Steven is sleeping with a single mother. Bruce is forever pulling him aside and imploring him not to overdo the drug-taking, and not to get a girl pregnant. He’s almost twenty, and there’s not much else, as parents, we can do.
Renee has paddocks for her horses, and is doing well at uni. She’s studying to be a vet. Her aversion to blood is her only stumbling block. She’s exposing herself to as much blood as possible, as a strategy to overcome her fear. It seems to be working. Each time there’s a knife accident in the kitchen, a comical situation ensues – Renee is called, and she drops everything and sprints to the restaurant. Some of the staff are kind enough to hold off getting their finger, or fingers, bandaged, so that Renee can get her dose of self-prescribed treatment.
The house we live in now is large and modern. The furniture is spaced out – I like big areas, clean surfaces, no clutter. The kids are home less frequently, and when they are, it’s as though they’re only passing through.
Attached to the house is a granny flat. Mum has moved in there. She doesn’t spend as much time over at the restaurant as I thought she would. The efficiency of the kitchen unsettles her, makes her feel outdated. Small food in a big kitchen, I heard her mutter once. Summer goes to cook with her on occasion. It’s no surprise, though, that the bigger, faster restaurant draws Summer more, and the sexier chef.
Sometimes I wish I’d listened to the recording; that way I might have a better understanding of who Guy Grant and James Ackerley were. Then I remember that the recording is a few rushed minutes of their lives, and it wouldn’t be a true representation, just as the recording of Bruce and me from the night at Finn’s isn’t a true representation; after listening to it on Bruce’s phone, we deleted it. We will never really know what happened to us that night. I will never really know what happened to Grant and Ackerley to turn them into what they were. In some ways Ackerley is easier to understand. It seems to me he gave in to the brutality, let it become his life. And he did that thing artists so often do – he mined the darkness.
We still have Finn’s things. No more desecration. Bruce and I would hate to think we’re in denial about what we did. I put the box in the study, with the other tax boxes, on the second shelf of the long bank of cupboards that run the length of the room. The box fits neatly in the row. I find it comforting that some order is achievable.
We found my sim card, by the way. It was below the four-wheel drive’s front passenger seat. Flicked under there, I think, when I’d taken up the bloodstained mat from beneath Renee’s feet. It must have fallen from my broken phone. It was upsetting to put the card into my new phone and have all my old contacts and details appear before my eyes, all my photos, too. There was one of Bruce and me with our arms stretched wide on the muddy and vacant Cove Street block, big grins on our faces. The couple in that photo makes my heart contract with hurt, for what I know is waiting for them just around the corner. I miss them like you’d miss a primary school friend – you know the beauty and innocence of that friendship and that time are now irrevocably gone.
Bruce and I are doing all right, though. We’re coming up to our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We don’t have sex as much as we used to, but that might be because we’re almost fifty and our libidos were due to slow. The sex we have is fine; I don’t cry, the steel file doesn’t start up in my head. The octopus has found a place in the bottom of my brain. He lurks about down there, semi-settled, sometimes restless.
We don’t talk about what we did. But it’s alwa
ys there between us. It’s intimate and tender, horrible and bleak. I can’t say we’ve come to terms with it. Although, more and more, there are times when we do feel like any other couple. Normal. Just recently, Alan, the police officer from Delaney, came with his wife to eat at the restaurant. Bruce and I went over at the end of their meal and sat down to share a bottle of wine with them. They filled us in on everything that had been happening in Delaney.
As I sat beside my husband, and he rested his arm on the back of my chair, I realised that feeling between us, the fear, the shame, the unsettling energy, had gone. It had been replaced with something different: synergy. We drank our wine and spoke easily and looked into one another’s eyes. I smiled at Bruce, and in my smile I incorporated everything that had happened, even the bad. In that moment we were stronger than we had ever been. It felt less like we were surviving and more like we’d survived.
1
No coincidence that Zach Kincaid takes the bus seat next to her on the last day of first term, during the trip home, when there are only the out-of-towners left, the kids that stare glassy-eyed out the windows, not watching as he kicks his bag towards her under the seats – as though to herald his imminent arrival, all hail King Kincaid – and heaves himself up from where he is positioned dead centre in the back seat, not listening as he slides in beside her and starts with the taunts.
‘Bark for me, Beccy,’ is his favourite, and what he says after a moment of staring at the side of her face.
‘Woof.’
‘We both know you can do better than that.’
Rebecca closes the book she’s reading and drops it into her open school bag. She zips up the bag and pushes it with her foot until she feels it nudge up against his bag. She can smell him. It’s a familiar scent, as much in his clothes as on his skin. The Kincaid family scent. Fresh linen best describes it, but even that’s not right. It’s unnerving but not unpleasant. It stirs up memories of his house, the hushed rooms and dusted sideboards, clean carpet, the hum of electrical appliances. She hopes her family scent is well hidden under a layer of Impulse deodorant – none of the damp smells that no amount of airing can dislodge from the rooms of her house, none of the dog smells, the garage degreaser smells that seem to have worked their way into every porous surface within a one-kilometre radius of her father’s shed and into the weave of every cushion and every curtain in the house. If Zach can smell her, if he smells her as acutely as she smells him, she hopes it’s just the sweetness of the deodorant.