Colt turns, and particles of sun brush his face, and the blackness of the tunnel hulks behind him. For a moment he doesn’t answer, and Syd has the odd idea that he’s about to backflip spectacularly away into the darkness. But when he speaks, he’s as ordinary as they are. ‘Dad’s a dentist. That’s kind of a doctor. He worries about germs.’
Garrick sniffs. ‘Germs should be worried about Avery.’
Syd says, ‘Avery will go into the drain with you, Colt. He’s not a scaredy-cat.’
Garrick’s snake eyes dart to him. ‘No one’s scared. We just need a decent torch.’
But Colt is stepping out of the stygian gullet of the pipe, passing Garrick and Syd and Declan, into the fullness of the light. He stands with his toes on the brim of the pipe, looking at the tawny creek and its slouched earth walls, looking into the shabby trees that line the creek’s bed. His hands are in his jean pockets, his naked elbows bent. ‘It’s good here,’ he says.
‘Did you have a stormwater drain where you used to live?’
‘No. That wasn’t a place like this.’
‘Were you rich before, and now you’re poor?’ Syd asks. ‘Is that why you came here?’
‘They’re still rich, cocko,’ says Garrick. ‘Look at all the stuff they have.’
‘I don’t know why we came here,’ says Colt. ‘I don’t know what difference it will make.’
He says it in a thoughtful voice, and the boys glance at each other: it is clear that Colt Jenson is of a breed other than theirs, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. ‘Have you joined an athletics club yet?’ Declan asks.
‘No. I’m not going to.’
‘Why not? You shouldn’t give up.’
Colt shrugs. ‘It’s only running.’
‘But you’ve won all those trophies. You must be good at it.’
‘I reckon I’d be faster than you,’ says Garrick.
Syd guffaws. ‘As if !’
‘I could be – if we ran here, along the creek. I know the – the terrain.’
‘The terrain!’ Syd’s bray of laughter bounces down the pipe. In his mind he sees it, Colt sprinting away like a cheetah, Garrick lurching like a cork.
‘He’s had more training than me,’ Garrick concedes, ‘so I’d have to get a head start. That’s fair. But apart from that: be close.’
Syd springs off the wall. ‘OK, let’s race!’
‘Are you mental?’ Declan asks Garrick.
‘Why wouldn’t I win?’ demands the big boy stubbornly. ‘You haven’t seen me run. I’m fast.’
Without turning to look at them, Colt says, ‘I’d beat you.’
‘Maybe,’ says Garrick. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Let’s do it!’ Syd dances about. ‘A long race, or a sprint? Cross-country, or on the path?’
Garrick says, ‘I didn’t say I wanted to race, I was just saying what would happen if we did.’
‘Ah! Gutless! I knew it!’
‘I’m not gutless. I just don’t want to embarrass him.’
‘Embarrass him!’ Syd shrieks. ‘You’d eat his dust!’
‘Shut your face.’ Garrick pushes off from the wall.
‘Chicken!’ Syd crows, brave to the last. ‘Bawk, bawk, bawk!’
But it’s certainly true he’d never have guessed that someone as bulky as Garrick could move as fast as he does: he lunges across the pipe like a python, smacking his palm into Syd’s forehead so the boy’s skull ricochets off the concrete with a thunking, searingly painful sound. Declan, Colt and Garrick watch impassively as Syd, clutching his head and sucking his agony in, slides without struggle into the slime at their feet. ‘Serves you right,’ says Declan.
On Sunday, Freya decides to go to church after all. She still doesn’t believe in God – she’s attending for devilish reasons. The heart is wicked: it makes her laugh, and Marigold looks at her. Freya is finding that sometimes, when she opens a door of the castle, she’s confronted by a startling but not disagreeable new version of herself.
From her place at the end of the pew she can see the family: Tabby in a slim dress the colour of a lime leaf, a pink cardigan slipped over her shoulders, Bastian looking drugged and warbling through the songs druggedly. When Colt bows his head it’s tempting to plunge her hands into his hair and see them vanish to the wrist, to shake him in her teeth until he rattles. It genuinely shocks her, the things she imagines these days. Some cackling goblin seems to have taken over her brain. When she’s sufficiently composed to look again, her sights glide past Colt to his father. Rex’s hair has been brushed back tidily, an iron has left a crease down his sleeve. At one point he reaches over and wipes a curl from Bastian’s face, and Freya catches her breath. She can’t believe that Rex believes in God. Someone who sees the world through such clear eyes would know that God is a fairy story. She stares across the church at him, willing him to glance at her, anticipating the scramble of her heart if he does; but he doesn’t.
When the service ends she’d like to cleave to them, but there are too many people around; she wants a planet where only she and they exist. Miffed, she stalks home alone, sulky not with the Jensons but at the entire intrusive mass of humankind. Maybe, she tells herself, it was for the best. Maybe she would have been stupid, and come away hating herself. Probably: and yet, she craves them. She could have been given the chance.
At home she wriggles under her bed, which is the only place inside the house where she can get some privacy, the bed’s valance enclosing the caskety space between floor and mattress pleasingly. Lying with her temple pressed to the carpet, she hears Dorrie come into the room whoo-hooing the music of Doctor Who. The little girl rummages in her schoolbag and finds what she’s searching for, and skitters off like something twanged from a catapult yelling, ‘Mum!’ Minutes later she hears her father’s footsteps coming down the hall, the unlocking of the side door to let the afternoon air circulate. Joe likes fresh air, open windows, his children to be outdoors. Freya considers what he would say if she stuck her head past the valance and told him, ‘I’m hiding under the bed.’ He wouldn’t ask why, was she troubled, was she sad? He would say, ‘It’s a nice day, go out and play.’
After lunch he is working on Elizabeth’s station wagon: there’s often something wrong with the car, it leaks oil, it sweats fluid, its motor makes a dire regurgitating sound. Its bonnet is forever yawning open on the prop of a metal stick. Drifting up on bare feet, Freya tells her father, ‘This car is a bomb.’ Joe, bent over the engine, doesn’t look up; he says, ‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’ It shouldn’t be, but it is.
She likes to watch him working on cars, she’s learned a great deal by doing so. Carburettor, alternator, radiator, plugs; if the engine won’t catch make sure that the radio and headlights are off; you can’t push-start an automatic. She likes it when he needs her to turn over the ignition while he listens to the motor. ‘Give it some juice,’ he’ll tell her, which means she must press the accelerator, and it’s unfailingly thrilling, the beastly roar that is the vehicle’s response to her touch. Her father has a cloth that he uses to wipe his fingers but the grease never completely cleans away and she admires how this doesn’t trouble him, it seems the right way a man should be. ‘Shoo, shoo.’ He waves her aside, and she retreats to the shade slanting off the side fence to await his next command. She thinks about asking him if there will be a new baby, but the question simply won’t assemble itself in her mouth. Instead her mind wanders to something bizarre: how her father, leaning over the vehicle, is like a dentist. A car dentist, poking around clunky teeth.
Declan glides up the driveway on his bike, casting only a glance at his father and sister. The workings of automobiles do not interest him. ‘Where have you been?’ asks Freya.
‘Colt’s.’
The word is a zap. ‘Where’s Syd?’
‘He’s there too.’
Declan dumps his bike on the path and goes into the house and comes out a minute or two later, and deigns to stop by the station wagon on his way across t
he yard. ‘There’s a barbeque at the Jensons’ tonight,’ he tells them. ‘Everyone’s invited – you too, Dad. Mum says we can go.’
Their father doesn’t lift his head. ‘Who are the Jensons?’
It’s incredible to Freya that anyone could be unaware of these people who are so effortlessly taking up so much space in her life. Excitement romps through her, she wants to jump and squeal: then she remembers sitting on the deck and telling Rex that her father drinks too much. The secret had spilled out of her like some low-slung thing, and she hadn’t expected the relief it would be, to speak it out loud. But standing beside her father, seeing the grease on his hard-working hands, she feels her disloyalty. She loves him, but she’s harmed him. The heart is wicked. ‘New neighbours,’ she says, ‘up the road.’
He says, ‘Hmm,’ and straightens, staring into the engine with his thumbs either side of the fierce hook which keeps the bonnet down. His son and daughter gaze at him. In some way or another they are always gazing at him, always struggling to be one step ahead of what is coming. Joe is not a sociable man, and he keeps his world small. His workmates at the printing plant and a few friends he’s known since childhood are enough for him. So when he says he will come to the Jensons’ barbeque, it is completely surprising, and Freya can’t work out why he has agreed. Maybe, she thinks later, it is to ensure the new neighbours won’t think of him as the bad man of the neighbourhood.
They’ve been told to bring nothing except an appetite but Elizabeth makes a potato salad, and they walk up the road as a family for the first time in Freya’s memory, Dorrie swinging her mother’s hand, Joe wheeling Peter in his stroller, and Syd trotting ahead and returning like a hound. It’s dusk, not yet night-time, because the Jensons know the Kileys have young children and also that it is a school night. Freya’s both hopeful and worried that they will be the only guests, so she’s disappointed and relieved to see strangers on the deck, the neighbours who live either side of the Jensons and a shy-looking woman from over the road. Rex is discussing wine with this shy lady when they arrive, so Freya stumps down into the garden to where the children are, to where Colt is: and the strange and witchy thought comes to her that she hopes Rex regrets it, watching her go.
Though they’ve lived in the brick house for just the shortest time, already it is a boys’ backyard: a bike track serpentines between the trees, around the pool and over the earth jump, and the garden beds are scattered with crashed Matchbox cars. Freya’s sisters, however, swoop down on it like seagulls, and easily seize control. The BMX is wrested from Bastian by Marigold, and Avery limps alongside her as she ploughs round the earthy course while Garrick says, ‘OK, that’s enough, you’ve had enough, it’s not a bike for girls,’ each time they sail past him. It’s a cool night for swimming but Syd jumps into the pool, his chest snowy-white and his arms sleeved with sunburn, pencil legs sticking out the mouths of too-big shorts. At the end of the yard, where the scrub is thick, Colt and Declan are messing about with the bike jump, packing dirt into the hillock; they’re talking together in a private way which makes Freya demand, ‘What? What?’
Declan says, ‘Nothing. I was just wondering why Garrick’s here.’
Freya likes Garrick as much as anyone does; he has no charms to offer a girl. She looks across the yard to where he’s saying to Marigold, ‘It’s a boys’ bike – see that bar? That’s called a dick bar. Girls don’t have dicks. That’s what makes it a boys’ bike.’ And Declan, she realises, is correct: a family barbeque is not the place she’d expect to find the neighbourhood lout, and his presence is suddenly offensive beyond telling, a stone in a bowl of cream. ‘Why did you invite him?’ she asks Colt.
‘I didn’t.’ Colt smiles. ‘He invited himself. He wanted to come. He was the first to arrive.’ He turns to the jump, stamps a foot on its rump. ‘He brought a packet of biscuits.’
The sheer gall of it is outraging; she glares through the trees as Marigold jounces past and Garrick says, ‘You’re gonna hurt yourself and start crying, you know!’ Beyond them she can see, on the deck, Rex offering his guests a platter of flesh-coloured morsels pierced by toothpicks. Bound by politeness, he would have accepted Garrick Greene’s biscuits with the same grace as he’d greeted Elizabeth’s salad, for which Freya had peeled a dozen potatoes. To Colt she says, ‘You don’t like him though, do you? I don’t. I hate him. I really hate him.’
And Colt, to her horror, replies, ‘I don’t hate him,’ as if Garrick and Freya are scarcely different in his eyes, the way shop-bought biscuits are just as good as homemade salad: if anything, Freya feels herself judged the lesser of the two. She looks to Declan to back her up but instead of denouncing Garrick as a pest and a fool he says, ‘He’s OK, don’t worry about it.’ And she feels suddenly drained, heart-broken: surrounded by misunderstanding, she turns and walks away.
Syd is swimming along the bottom of the pool, worm-sleek, arms scything, his hair a silver cap smoothed perfectly to fit his skull. His legs seem lengthened, and hinged like a cricket’s. Freya stops, pretending to watch him. Behind her eyes are tears like prickles. No one thinks about her, takes notice of her, or cares if they’ve hurt her feelings. Everyone has a friend or something to do, but she has nothing and no one. She wishes she were home, curled up reading in her bedroom, and considers saying she feels sick and leaving, but that’s not the solution she wants. She keeps her sights fixed on the glinting water until the tears have seeped away; then she squares her shoulders and heads for the deck, to where the adults are. She can only be the person she is: brave, honest, clear-eyed. Not a child. Passing Marigold on the BMX she snaps, ‘You’ve had enough now, give someone else a go.’ And is infuriated, looking around, to see that Garrick has in fact lost interest in claiming the bike, and is over at the jump instructing Colt how to pile the earth higher.
On the deck her mother is talking to the people who live beside the Jensons, and her father is standing on the outskirts, by the rail, a glass in his hand and his sights rested on nothing. ‘Hello, Freya,’ says Tabby Jenson, and Freya says, ‘Hello.’ There’s something about the woman, Freya then and there decides, that she doesn’t like. Her mind is moving freely now, slashing and burning as it goes. Bastian Jenson has climbed the pool’s ladder and is screeching for Syd to come up for air. The boy is more like a rodent than a child, the kind of nervous pet whose company wears thin after a few ammonia-tinged weeks. Cruel Colt, fake Tabby, mad Bastian: she feels sorry for Rex.
‘Freya,’ he says, startling her. She hadn’t seen him come close. ‘Are you all right?’
He’s wearing an apron which says KISS THE COOK – it looks ridiculous, but he doesn’t care. ‘I’m OK,’ she says, and magically is: grumpy Freya is stuffed aside and the cheerful version jack-in-the-boxes out. ‘Are you sure?’ Rex asks, looking closely at her. ‘You seemed a bit upset. Were those boys giving you a hard time?’
Her chin wibbles, she’s so touched. ‘I’m OK,’ she says again, and she doesn’t want to remember being any other way. He flashes his white smile, lets the subject go. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘come and get something to eat.’
And it’s lovely to step across the deck with him, lovely to be the subject of his concern as he prods the barbeque meat with tongs, presenting its best face to her. Smoke rises from the grill, dots of fat ping and fly. From the steaks and sausages and onion rings as well as things she’s never seen cooked on a barbeque – corn cobs, chicken wings, slices of eggplant and capsicum – she chooses one of the flat burgers that her family has contributed to the feast, the kind which comes in an icy box from the supermarket freezer. Rex says, ‘That one? That’s all? Some eggplant – no? All right, that one’s got your name on it.’ It needs a few more moments on the heat and he moves it aside with the tongs, it now being too special to mingle. He fills a glass with ginger-beer, passes it to her and says, ‘Cheers!’ She smiles and lingers, sipping her drink, entranced by his nearness, which is like that of a strong animal that’s had its teeth and claws removed. Smoke and th
e scent of burnt honey come from the cooking, and now and then flames jump through the grill to lick the meat. There’s a tape recorder by the back door, and the music is just loud enough to keep a conversation private. Because she will not behave like a child around him, she asks, ‘Did you meet my dad?’
‘Joe? I did. He’s a printer, is that right?’
She watches her father from the corner of her eye. ‘He’s the foreman. He used to work the machines, but not anymore, now he’s the foreman. But he’s still a printer.’
‘Then he’s just the man I’m after.’ Rex shovels up a steak and flips it; bands of char mark it like surgical scars. ‘I want some brochures printed for the surgery. Have your teeth fixed by the fantastic Doctor Rex! With pictures of people looking either delighted or terrified, I can’t decide. Your dad’s got just the expertise I need.’
She looks at her father, standing alone by the rail with a fresh glass of beer. She’s never thought of him as a man with expertise. He is watching Syd swim; when his son bobs up he calls, ‘Use your legs to push off from the wall, Syd!’ but Syd doesn’t hear or simply refuses to, which makes Joe shake his head and tell nobody, because nobody is talking to him, ‘He’d go much faster if he used his legs.’ And Freya feels the ache which always lives below the surface no matter what else she feels for him, and must look away: and finds that Rex, too, has paused, the greasy tongs closed on air. ‘He seems like a decent man, Freya,’ he says. ‘I’m sure it’s what he wants to be. Your hamburger’s ready, if you’d care to bring a plate.’
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