by Ross Watkins
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Godhand?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You tell me.’
Akker got his phone out of his pocket. The screen lit his face.
‘Stop fucking about, Akker. I know you wrote those stories. It couldn’t be anyone else. And the way you described my study was too close to be coincidence. You’ve been around to my fucking house, looking in through my windows, haven’t you?’
Akker put the phone between his legs. Light shone up from his crotch. Adrian couldn’t help but look.
‘Are you looking at my dick, sir?’
‘I’m not looking at your dick, Akker.’
‘But you’re thinking about my dick. I know you are because I see you looking at me in class. Are you a fag, sir?’
‘Akker, my sexuality isn’t the issue here.’
‘Are you going to hit me then?’
‘Jesus Christ, no, I’m not going to hit you. Why would I hit you?’
Akker looked out the side window.
Adrian took two deep breaths and modified his tone. ‘Look, I like you – I’ve always liked you. You’re a good kid with plenty of potential. But these stories …’ Adrian didn’t know what else to say. He’d somehow lost his resolve.
Akker was still facing the window. ‘Do you like the stories, sir?’
Bingo. At least Adrian wasn’t going insane, he told himself. ‘Sure, to some degree. I mean, they’re well written. But I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve with them. Are you reaching out? Is that what this is?’
Right then the older clerk emerged from a door into the car park, switching on an outdoor light which flooded Adrian’s car. The guy put a garbage bag in a wheelie bin and looked over at them. He shut the lid and stood there for a few moments, taking a long look at them. Akker waved two fingers at him, then the guy shut off the light and retreated inside.
‘You’d better go,’ Adrian said. ‘Text your mum.’
Akker picked up his phone and typed. He then slipped the phone into his backpack. ‘She’ll be here soon. I’ll wait out the front.’
‘Sure,’ Adrian said.
As he drove away, he wondered if he’d accomplished anything that night. The more he thought about it, the more he worried he might only have made matters worse.
*
After that night in the car park nothing exceptional occurred for a month or so. Akker laid low in class. There were no further emails. At lunchtimes Adrian saw him and Marley hanging around together more and more. They put their arms around each other in the way teenage boys do. But one day that all came to an end.
Adrian was on lunch duty when a scuffle broke out, and boys from across the oval ran to the fracas, a mob spurred by mayhem. Adrian rushed over and shouted at them to break it up, break it up. The bell went and the crowd slowly dispersed until just six boys were left, trying to separate two more who were still going at it on the ground. It was more like judo than brawling, but Marley managed to jab his fist into Akker’s kidneys several times. At seeing Akker like that, Adrian grabbed Marley by the collar and dragged him aside, tearing his shirt open in the movement. Adrian straightened and looked around, surprised by his own force.
The boys were visibly shocked. ‘Fuck! You’re hardcore, sir,’ one of them said.
‘Get to class,’ he said. ‘All of you. Except you, Marley.’
But Marley grabbed his bag and took off.
Adrian knew he wouldn’t get far. ‘Go on.’
The audience collected their bags and ambled away, occasionally glancing back.
‘Come on, hop up,’ Adrian said, putting his hand out to Akker, who accepted it and stood, clutching his side. Adrian helped him to a bench and let him catch his breath.
‘What the hell was that all about?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
The boy’s face was dusty. He had spit across his mouth. His lips were swollen from being rubbed into the pitch.
‘Nothing, huh? You don’t fight over nothing.’
Akker stood, then looked down at Adrian. ‘You should stay out of other people’s business.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I think you’ve got problems, sir,’ he said, then walked away.
Adrian stayed sitting there for a while, long enough to watch the boy cross the oval and be swallowed by the corridors of the building.
That night another godhand email arrived. The third story was attached.
This story was far more explicit – brutal, almost. Something had changed, the ante had been upped. It was structured like a letter, a boy thanking his teacher for what he had shown him – for the lesson in his car that night, when he’d taught him how to fuck a man. How to dominate. How to transform a man into a sissy, with his floppy dick a long, thin clit and his arsehole a cunt. It was unlike anything Adrian had ever read, or desired, and amid the waves of detailed description Adrian realised the depth of the situation. Things were getting out of hand.
He contemplated bringing it to the attention of the school counsellor, but he knew it would get back to Mr H, and he had to avoid that type of intervention. Akker’s parents would be called in and a meeting would take place, and Adrian wanted none of that. He knew he’d be questioned as well, and the night in the car park would be discussed and eyebrows raised. Akker had cunningly circled the spotlight onto him, Adrian saw, so he was now implicated in a criminal act. There was a witness – the older clerk – who would confirm Adrian was there that night. Other information could be verified too.
No, none of this can get out, he decided that night. Surely there’s another way. Surely this will end some other way.
GLENDA
Over the past year, Glenda had intuited a sense of mounting pressure, as though the immunity of the Pomeroy family wouldn’t last – that sticks and stones would eventually break their bones. One by one they would be broken, her intuition said. Each family member at a time, beginning with Mal and ending with her. For her suffering was inevitable. Her witnessing of each demise was a knowledge woven into the fabric hanging of the Last Supper on the kitchen wall – not that they’d been religious for a long time.
The Pomeroys had somehow always averted trouble. They’d always proven immune to the misfortunes their neighbours endured, beginning with that month of break-and-enters along their street. Adrian was just six at the time, but at twelve Noel was old enough to comprehend the menace posed to his friends and their families: the mates he hung around with, going over their houses to swim in their pools and play video games or football on the front lawn. When they weren’t doing that they were down the creek, building a bush cubby out of scrap timber and tree branches. They’d found convict stone along the creek line and borrowed a wheelbarrow, some tools and Connor’s father to shift the rocks, one at a time, as part of their fortifications. Noel had talked about the project a lot for a while, drawing maps of the bush tracks and diagrams of the makeshift architecture. But that all stopped when the break-ins happened.
Half a dozen houses were knocked off over four weeks, including the places on either side of the Pomeroys, plus the one across the street. The Pomeroy house was an island in a stream of thievery. Televisions, VCRs, jewellery and money were the obvious objectives, but some of the houses were graffitied with offensive messages, and fridges were raided and beds urinated on. Noel and Connor and another friend took it upon themselves to be the neighbourhood watch. They dressed in dark clothes, armed themselves with rakes, broomsticks and torches and sat up on the Pomeroy roof for as long as they could. On and off they lasted about a week. And the break-ins had stopped, perhaps because of the boys’ vigilance. More likely the crook just moved on. Either way, Glenda believed this was what first motivated Noel to become a police officer.
Noel and his mates didn’t return to the cubby for a month or so after that, b
ut when they did they found a mattress inside and plastic bags of clothes and empty food cartons. They talked of the squatter for a while, conjecturing whether it was the burglar, and whether, by extension, they’d aided and abetted him. Glenda called the police and the vagrant cleared out, taking the cubby to pieces before doing so. But after that the trouble in the street only amplified.
First there was a big fire at the housing commission block. It began in one of the ground floor units, where an old man lived. The authorities said he put some chips in the oven late at night and fell asleep in front of the television. Noel said the old guy was dodgy anyway – that he would spot boys riding past on their bikes and ask them inside his unit to show them dirty magazines. The fire made the block structurally unsound, and everyone had to move out until it was repaired.
Then there was the girl found at the creek. Fourteen, and in the grade below Noel at the time. They said she was blindfolded and made to drink from a bottle of vodka until she passed out in the dirt, then the heathen had his way and removed the blindfold and dragged her into the creek to make it look like she’d got drunk and drowned herself. Fingers were pointed at several local boys but no one was charged. Glenda kept a much closer eye on her sons after that, out of fear for their safety. She didn’t like to think about the girl, but wondered why she’d been blindfolded if whoever it was had planned on killing her anyway. She put it down to the guilty coward not being able to look his victim in the eye.
During the years the Pomeroys lived in that street, almost everyone was affected by one hardship or another, and amid these events Glenda watched her two sons grow close. At least for a few years. The boys. Her boys.
When she recalled her boys back then, the picture was forever this: the two of them standing side by side, the six years between them measured by inches of height. Noel’s arm is draped around his little brother, holding Adrian’s shoulder against his hip. Noel owns his blithe smile. Adrian’s is more vexed – a sign of his depth of thought and sensitivity, even then. Still, if either child was a cause for concern, Noel was the worry. Not Adrian. Noel’s smile hid volatility, a sense of force. Noel was more like his father, who was still dogged in his old-fashioned values: marriage was for a man and a woman only, and tattoos were for criminals. But Mal rarely voiced his beliefs now. Noel was moralistic, staunchly defending the black and white of an issue, whereas Adrian saw the grey. Noel was the risk-taker, the one to jump from a height and walk away; Adrian’s hesitation usually meant he’d fall and get hurt. Adrian became a timid boy – not so much weak as reserved, reticent. His introverted nature grated on Noel, who often complained that his little brother was a weirdo because he wouldn’t tackle him properly when they played football.
But they did play well together for a time. Noel condescended to playground games, and took Adrian for swims in his friend’s pool while the family were on holidays. They often mucked about in the granny flat, reappearing a tad startled whenever she called for them, as though they were so immersed that they’d forgotten about everything else. Boys will be boys, Glenda conceded, but she liked to think she had a solid clutch on what her sons got up to, and that her trust was central in defining their relationship with her. The long lead she afforded them meant they were less likely to take advantage of that trust.
Glenda also liked to think that although the Pomeroys were never a well-to-do family, what they lacked in wealth they made up for in love.
*
But now this – this feeling of an end drawing ever closer, heralded by the young upstart at the medical centre ten months ago. Despite the doctor’s wariness to diagnose, she knew he was right. She knew this better than anyone because she was the closest witness to – and common casualty of – her husband’s changed behaviour. Victim was too strong a word, but he had become something to endure.
That day, in the vapid waiting room at the medical centre in Merrylands, she put a car magazine on Mal’s lap and told him to stay while she renewed her prescription. But in truth what she needed was an ally.
The doctor was a young man, there in place of their regular doctor, who was on leave for a few months. She was hesitant to tell him at first – she never had anyone to complain to about her husband’s drinking so she wasn’t in the habit – but the young doctor had a gentle way about him and he coaxed the story from her. It helped that he reminded her of Adrian, although darker-skinned. An utter professional, yet empathetic. She knew this from his hands and his voice.
So she told him everything that had been going on. About how Mal had begun repeating himself, only occasionally at first but almost constantly now, and how he forgot things he’d done. That he found it difficult to plan ahead. That he was hard to motivate – the half-complete kit car beneath a sheet of tarpaulin behind the garage was testament to that. He’d been building the car since the boys were young. The prospect of not completing it had once been an agony for Mal, but lately he’d become apathetic about it, as about most things, and he’d let the grass grow high around it. And sometimes it was like he forgot who people were and what things were called, so she had to remind him.
Glenda worried that the doctor might say these were just symptoms of ageing, that he wouldn’t perceive the gravity of it. ‘My husband is no longer my husband,’ she said tearfully. The doctor didn’t make her explain any further – he seemed to understand. He asked about the possible causes, the specific effects. She said it happened not just when Mal was drinking, and the doctor asked how many units of alcohol he normally consumed each week. She didn’t know. ‘He makes his own grappa,’ she said, ‘and he gets through several bottles – four, five.’ She never really counted.
‘I think it’s best you bring him in,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll need to talk to him before making a diagnosis.’
Glenda thought of Mal’s garage, which was often the subject of neighbourly talk. He liked to keep stuff, especially mechanical or electrical things which might still be of some use, even if damaged. Old televisions, radios, cooking appliances and other mechanisms Glenda could not name. He kept these things and his tools and auto parts on shelves, and at the back of the garage he brewed his grappa in large plastic drums. She loathed the blip, blip, blip those drums made. She could hear them in the house. Sometimes she heard them at night, in bed.
‘Some days I don’t think I can take any more,’ she said.
The doctor nodded. ‘I understand. I need to see your husband, talk to him, make some observations to get a clearer understanding of what we are dealing with.’
‘He’ll tell you what he thinks is true,’ she said. ‘With the drinking especially. And beyond that he doesn’t know what he’s like because he doesn’t remember any of it.’
More sympathetic nodding. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Just from what you’ve said it sounds similar to alcohol-related dementia – the symptoms are consistent with other forms of dementia so it can be difficult to diagnose. Considering your husband’s long-term alcohol consumption, there’s a chance he has some frontal lobe damage. Some practitioners refer to it as wet brain. But again—’
‘Like he’s pickled his brain?’
‘You could put it that way. Yes. But again, I must see him to make a diagnosis.’
That was when Glenda began to slip. She felt herself diminish into the chair. As though it had swallowed some internal part of her. ‘Can he get better?’
‘Depending on how the consultation goes, if ARD seems to be what you’re dealing with, then I’ll refer him to a specialist.’
‘But is it reversible?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
He said what she knew he would say: there was a chance he could recover some of his former brain and physiological function, but it depended on the extent of his alcohol consumption, and he would have to abstain. Glenda knew her husband. Forty-three years of marriage assured that knowledge.
She may have said someth
ing about understanding: she couldn’t recall. She could only remember looking at the photo frame on his desk – with a boy and a girl and a pretty woman. It was taken in a playground. She could see part of a slide in the background on one edge of the photo, and monkey bars on the other. For some reason this calmed her; the knowledge that the young doctor was a parent, that he knew what it was to have that joyful yet grave sense of responsibility, made her feel okay.
‘I’ll bring him in,’ she said, then she stood and closed the door behind her and went back to the waiting room. Daytime television was showing in the corner, the volume low, with old people and a mother with a murmuring baby sitting in the three rows of beige plastic chairs.
Mal was still there, at the end of the first row. He looked up at her with the eyes of a sad dog, the magazine open in his lap. ‘Done?’ he said.
Over the years she had learned to take her husband with a pinch of salt. The man who once brought her down with as little as a good hard stare was now the family labrador. And a labrador who chased his own tail at that.
‘Yes,’ she said, lifting her handbag to her shoulder. ‘All done.’
*
Now Glenda found herself reaching into the recycling bin. She knew he wouldn’t have thrown the brochure away on purpose – he’d never complained about the tickets so she was sure it was just his memory loss. Grappa was just finding new ways to affect their lives. And this one would be her house, no one else’s – they could and would try, of course, but this time it was her time, her luck, because luck is when opportunity meets preparation and Glenda was certainly well prepared. In fact, she’d been priming her luck over the past ten months, making it into something of a hobby. Mal had his grappa, she had her charity prize homes.
At sixty-two, Glenda had given up on buying her own home. It was one of those commitments they had never managed to achieve, because by the time they gained a sense of financial security they were quite beyond entering the pricey Sydney market. They’d lived in the Merrylands rental for a very long time now, after downsizing when Adrian left for university. The owner allowed them to treat it as theirs: small renovation projects were fine. Friends who visited assumed they owned it, perhaps because the house had become an extension of them.