Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

  And sometimes he does try to convince himself there is no such thing as the bogeyman – that he’s imagining things which don’t exist, looking at them from the wrong angle, hearing them with a mistaken tone. That the fault is his own. But when he tries to talk himself into seeing things in this simpler, infinitely prefer­able way, he feels his existence thin. He cannot tell lies to himself. His mother is fighting the same battle as he is – he sees it in her eyes, where it moves like clouds – and he understands that she is losing: despite the set of her mouth and the muffled conversations at night, she is losing. He walks into the depths of the stormwater drain, puzzling on this. She’s no fool, his mother. And her husband, Colt reasons, is the pillar of her life. He’s the money, the house, the schooling, the meals. He’s the shirts on their backs and the boots on their feet. They need him to hold up the ceiling. His wife can lose faith in him, but she cannot lose him, because then there’ll be no roof over her sons. So she’s pushing it down, pushing herself down, not blinding but certainly dulling her eyes for the sake of her children. Colt leans against the flank of the pipe, sliding gradually down into the thread of slime. It cannot be easy, and he wonders how she finds the courage to do it – to unknow what she knows, and to do it for her children. To let them take the heavy tail-end of the blame.

  The weather is clear although not hot on Sunday, but Declan, Syd and Avery don’t mind swimming in such weather. Colt has no choice but to join them. There are various toys that Colt’s father has bought – a beachball, a lilo, a swag of gigantic blow-up baseball bats – and the boys plunge through the water with these. The water is cold, and as blue as the sky it reflects; as the boys haul about, it slops over the edge in great slurpy swathes to splatter the ground below, which Rex has now concreted with pavers to prevent mud tracking into the pool and the house. The water lashes at the boys’ smooth backs and naked chests, reaches knifelike for their throats. Colt’s blood is warmed beneath his chill skin. They invent a game which involves bats and territory, and soon there is an exhaustion in him that he recognises from when he used to run around a track, a spentness that is borne like a bearskin while beneath it the muscles, blood and heart itself grow powerful and weightless. There are moments when Colt feels he could jump mountains; that he’s strong enough, when he is happy, to escape the very clutches of time and space.

  Then Rex arrives home from wherever he has been. ‘What’s going on here?’ he asks, grinning from the steps of the deck, and Colt’s heart sinks through the water to the rocks at the earth’s core. ‘Avery, how’s your knee?’ The boys wave and say, ‘Hi, Mr Jenson,’ and Colt’s father repeats his threadbare line and Colt would like to leap from the pool and swing at him not with one of the blow-up bats but with the real one propped in the corner of the playroom, a hard expensive piece of equipment given to him although he’s never had an interest in baseball, never learned to play, never lived near a diamond, never watched a game on TV. Given to him in case he made a friend who loved the game. Mr Jenson is my father. Call me Rex. ‘Syd,’ Rex asks, ‘are you drowning? Don’t drown, whatever you do. Your mother wouldn’t be pleased. How’s the temperature in there? You all look a bit blue around the gills.’

  Colt says, ‘We’re OK, Dad, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried. I’m just wondering if I’ll be able to chip ice off you for my drink.’

  The boys laugh as they are meant to; Colt turns away. The water chops and roils, he’s speckled with goosebumps. He expects the visitors to have lost interest in playing, as he himself no longer cares – but Syd gives a shout and brings his bat down on Avery’s head, and suddenly the air is billowing under the boofy swing of the bats. And Colt, beaten against the pool’s wall, wants to order them to stop, to realise what they are doing, that this is what he’s come to see so they should not show it to him: but it’s an impossible thing to say. It might not be true. And if it is true, it is impossible to say. And for an instant he sees his mother’s reticence in a different light. It is simply unutterable.

  He feels his father’s gaze on his spine; Colt must have the hearing of a dog, because below his friends’ laughter he hears his father light one of his rare cigarettes. He fears he will hear each indrawn breath, every crackle of the cigarette paper, the shrivel of the tobacco as it burns. He’ll hear the smoke travel down the tube of his father’s windpipe and swill inside his lungs, he’ll hear it gust up the gullet and out the smiling mouth to be emitted, stale and shapeless, into the day. ‘Stop!’ he says, dropping his bat. ‘I need to stop —’

  Declan shoulders his own bat. ‘You feel sick?’

  Colt shakes his head: sick isn’t the word. He wants a word which describes the desire to climb to the top of a tree and stay there. ‘It’s too cold,’ he says. ‘I’m getting out.’ But when he works through the water and climbs down the ladder and finally looks to where his father is standing, his father isn’t there, there’s no ash on the deck, no smoky scent on the air. Nevertheless, he feels frozen solid. He takes his towel and rubs his face and arms but he’s colder than he’s ever been in his life. His father was right, he is as blue as if he’s absorbed the sky’s reflection, donned the most torturous camouflage. His bathers cling to his shanks and his jaw judders: if he stands here half-naked he will die, but he hardly dares leave. ‘I’ll be back,’ he calls out, ‘in one minute.’

  In his bedroom he dresses as quickly as his frigid limbs allow, working socks painfully over his feet. He can’t hear Bastian or his mother, and doesn’t know where they are. He can’t hear his father either – it is as if Colt dreamed of him. From outside comes the sound of boys’ voices but his dog-hearing has finished, he can’t make out what they say. When he’s pulled on enough clothes he hurries back through the house feeling marginally repaired – and stops just inside the screen door, invisible behind the flywire mesh, because the boys have climbed out of the pool and are standing, dripping, on the deck, which preserves a pattern of their wet footprints, their irregular, pattering feet. And Colt’s father is there, materialised from nowhere, handing out towels and laughing, as if only laughter will keep the planet turning. ‘Look at you!’ he’s saying. ‘You’re as white as driven snow. How are you, Avery? Let me see that knee.’

  But it is the boy’s fragile head that he takes in his towel-draped hands, scrubbing the cloth so roughly into the blond hair that Avery staggers sideways and Rex must grab him by the forearm saying, ‘Whoops there, hold still.’ He runs the towel over the boy’s throat and shoulders and ribcage, the job done so efficiently it’s like watching a man who loathes what he’s doing but can never stop doing it or thinking about doing it; he crouches and dries Avery’s legs, first the outside then the inside, around the ankles, over the knees, up the childish thighs. Then, with a flourish, he wraps the towel round the boy’s waist, tucking in the corner with a poke of two long fingers. ‘Better?’ he asks, and reaches out to brush strands of hair from Avery’s eyes. ‘Good lad,’ he says. Then he turns to the Kiley brothers, who have been drying themselves druggily while watching this spectacle, and asks, ‘Who’s next?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Declan, laughing a little, in a voice that doesn’t want to touch the ground. ‘It’s all right, Mr Jenson —’

  ‘Your hair is soaking, Syd. You might catch pneumonia!’

  Syd shakes his head rapidly. ‘No, I won’t —’

  ‘Look, come here. I can’t stand seeing a boy with wet hair.’

  And before Syd can flee he is captured, pulled forward, and Rex scruffs the towel so crazily over his head that it’s as if cats are fighting under there, and Syd squawks and his hands come up, flying as wildly as the towel. This is a joke, Rex is chortling, this is fun fun fun. ‘Are you dry now?’ he asks, and Syd cries, ‘Yes!’ And Rex says louder, ‘What’s that? I can’t hear you! Are you under there, Syd?’ and Syd wails, ‘Yes, I’m here, I’m dry!’ But the towel resumes its insane whirling and the boy beneath it veers drunkenly left and right. Rex says, ‘Syd Kiley! Are you alive? Where have
you gone, Syd?’ And Syd, with what’s left of his strength, bawls, ‘I’m dry! I am! You can stop!’

  Rex pulls the towel from Syd’s head and squints at him innocently. ‘There you are! We’ve been looking for you. How on earth did your hair get so messy?’

  He steps back smirking, very pleased with the boy, who lurches off dizzily. He looks, then, at Declan. ‘You need some drying, bucko?’

  ‘No, I’m OK . . .’

  ‘You sure?’

  Declan is reversing, towel clutched to his body. He backs into the railing and stops. ‘I’m dry. I promise.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Colt’s father eyes him. ‘Bone-dry,’ he says.

  ‘You nearly dried my face off,’ says Syd.

  Rex spins, plants a hand on Syd’s shoulder. ‘I think there are party pies in the freezer. Shall I put them in the oven?’

  And as his father strides for the screen door Colt steps into the playroom, pressing his back to the wall. He hears his father go to the kitchen, and the pop of the freezer opening. Through the louvres he hears his friends – they are not talking, but they are laughing, snuffling in a furtive way which makes Colt think of the boys at school who, when the teacher’s back is turned, do whip-quick, cruelly brilliant imitations of that teacher while the other boys smother their giggling. He hears his father moving around the kitchen, filling glasses with Passiona and dollops of ice-cream. He hears Declan, Avery and Syd shushing each other. And Colt tries to tell himself that it’s nothing, nothing, if they’re laughing it can’t be bad, if they’re laughing he is imagining it and it’s not his father who is at fault but only he, himself, Colt, seeing and hearing and thinking everything wrong. But it’s thin as paper, this line. Hands to his face, he prays for the floor to swallow him; he wouldn’t care, he’d go gladly. They would look for him and find absolutely nothing. He doesn’t want to stand up straight, doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stay standing once he’s up. But his father is calling from the kitchen, ‘Who wants a Passiona spider?’ and the boys are pulling open the screen door, and Colt is on his feet before he knows it, moving swiftly, galvanised.

  Freya finds she’s thought of something curious. She burrows into the grass and the stringy shadows beneath the clothesline and asks, ‘Why did you and Dad get married?’

  Her mother is hanging the washing – she has a systematic way of doing so, socks pegged at the mouth, trousers by the cuffs, dresses at the hem, shirts open so their empty arms reach beseechingly for the ground. Freya knows it causes her mother real anguish to see clothes hung another way. It’s a sunny afternoon but Elizabeth does the laundry on every day that isn’t determinedly raining. ‘Oh,’ she answers airily, ‘I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.’

  But Freya knows it wasn’t so long ago. She is nearly thirteen, so thirteen years is a lifetime to her: but she knows her parents bought this house – her white weatherboard house – soon after they got married, not long before Freya was born. Not much more than thirteen years ago. She lies with her nose level with the spikes of the grass, watching her mother bow to the washing basket, choose a garment – one of Joe’s shirts – to suit the available length of clothesline, pluck three pegs from the tin – always three pegs for a shirt – and hang the shirt with heron-like jabs at the line, tweaking it when she’s finished so the sleeves open, the collar jerks straight. ‘I suppose I wanted to marry him,’ Elizabeth says, bending again. ‘I must have liked him.’

  ‘You suppose?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says testily, ‘I suppose.’

  Freya watches her. She can be standoffish and quick-tempered, her mother, known to laugh at her serious, fussy, equally quick-tempered daughter. But Freya refuses to be deterred: she has a right to answers. There’s something hard at her elbow, and she prises a peg from the dirt. It’s faded and snaggle-toothed, a tiny blue crocodile. ‘Was it because . . .’ She pauses, making the crocodile bite. ‘Was it because of babies?’

  Her mother looks at her, and Freya’s gaze skids away: it has always been difficult for her to meet her mother’s eye. In many ways, she thinks, they are strangers. Freya was born, and fast after her came Declan and Syd, and by the time Marigold arrived Freya had shouldered the responsibility of raising herself. She is often called on to help with the children, her mother expecting her to be capable, which she is – but Elizabeth doesn’t keep track of Freya, she doesn’t know what her daughter wants or worries about, and she has no time to find out. And that’s understandable, Freya accepts it. If she is nervous at the prospect of making her way alone through what awaits her, she also knows that she has courage. She knows, too, that her mother’s advice wouldn’t necessarily be the best advice. She, Freya, does not want to spend her life doing laundry.

  ‘Because of babies?’ her mother echoes. ‘Everyone had babies in those days.’

  ‘But is it why you married Dad?’ Freya presses. ‘Because of babies? Did you want them? Did Dad want them? Or did you only want them because everyone else had them?’

  Her mother is easily made cross: she swats Declan’s jeans with the back of a hand. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, Freya. I married him because I wanted to marry him, that’s why. He was nice-looking. He was a good dancer. All the girls liked him.’

  Freya can’t ask, But did you like him – did you love him? because she would choke on the words, love being something never mentioned in the Kiley household, their conversations all being about food and television and Declan’s football timetable and whether Marigold can have a pet mouse. Never the kind of conversation Freya’s had with Rex Jenson on the deck. And even if she could find a way to ask, her mother might answer that no, she never loved him, or that she thought she did and found out too late that she didn’t. It is dangerous to ask questions, Freya sees. And, spooked, she would let the subject die if not for Elizabeth saying curtly, ‘You don’t need a man to be happy,’ which makes her daughter look up and say, ‘What?’

  Her mother is poking through the tin as if somewhere in its depths is the most important peg of all; she’s frowning, irritated. ‘Never think you have to have a man in your life,’ she says without looking up. ‘You don’t. They make you think you do, but you don’t. I was too dumb to know better, back then.’

  Freya is astonished to hear this; and afraid. ‘What about kids?’ she asks. ‘Do you need them?’

  ‘Kids are nothing but a worry,’ her mother replies. ‘You worry about them from the moment they’re born. No, never have children, Freya.’

  Freya feels shocked, almost bamboozled. ‘But Mum,’ she says, ‘aren’t we – good things?’

  Elizabeth straightens to the clothes hoist and spins it expertly, so the clothes flap like dank wings around her. ‘Sometimes you’re all right,’ she says.

  Freya considers her in silence, struggling to understand the moment she is living through. She knows her mother loves her, and that she’s only ever rough because it’s easier and quicker than being smooth; still, she wishes they could talk properly, like proper people do. If they could talk properly, Freya might ask, now they’re speaking of such things, if there’s to be a baby; yet she’s also unsure if she wants to know. She lingers while her mother hangs a few more clothes, then gets up and walks into the house. She has been putting this off, but now is the time.

  In the lounge there is a sideboard, and in the sideboard’s cupboard are the family photo albums. Freya loves the albums, and knows every photograph in detail: she can identify each bald baby even when its own mother cannot. It has been Elizabeth’s sole extravagance, the photographing of her children as they’ve grown. The pictures are a luxury, and Joe resents the expense, so Elizabeth tries to save money by crowding into each photograph as many children as will fit. And here they are, the Kiley offspring in shades of black and white and, more recently, in muted colours that make the photographed world look rather rancid. They’re holding kittens, dressed for parties, standing in a row under the pine tree in the yard, crowding around the big pra
m, sitting at a miniature table on miniature chairs. Here they are at the zoo, the beach, under sprinklers, squeezing dough, posing in oversized uniforms on the first day of school. Freya is photographed as frequently as her siblings, her hair growing longer and darkening from white to fawn, her face growing thinner, gradually beginning to lose the race to stay taller than Declan. She’s the girl holding Dorrie’s toddler hand, hoisting the newborn Peter. There she is, nine years old, astride the purple bike she was given for her birthday, its rear wheel fanned by the elastic strings of the skirt-guard. She used to ride it often, but rarely does anymore. She is growing up, there will be no more photos of her rat-haired and grinning from running under the sprinkler.

  At the front of the album are the wedding pictures – only three, but each is large enough to take up an entire page of the album, and they’re printed on thick paper with the signature of the photographer looped across a corner. Her mother and father stand at the doors of the church, freshly married when the shutter snapped, his suited arm around her ivory waist, and although there must have been guests at the wedding – friends, bridesmaids, Elizabeth’s parents and brothers, Joe’s older sister – they stand alone, a pair, looking at the camera as if it has something to say to them. It’s difficult for Freya to decide if her mother is right – if Joe is handsome. He looks well-groomed, amused around the eyes. Elizabeth is wearing pearls at her throat and in her hair. More than anything, they are young. Freya looks at them, looks past them into their future of the weatherboard house, the rowdy children, the washing basket, the printing machines. Thirteen years ago, her parents knew nothing about this world that awaited them; Freya has never known anything else. If she had been there, a guest at her parents’ wedding, she wonders what she would have told them. You don’t need a man, never have children, you will regret this, the heart is wicked above all things.