Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

  Avery is not one to be ordered about. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re going to the shop, that’s why. You’re coming with us.’

  ‘. . . What about Colt and Bastian?’

  ‘What about Colt and Bastian? ’ Garrick sing-songs. ‘I’m not talking to them, am I? I’m talking to you. And I’m telling you to get your bike and come with us. You’re not staying here with the perv. He can stick his hands down his own pants today.’ Then he swings his heavy head to Colt, and Colt sees in his face the razor-cuts of his rage. ‘You and your brother stay here, so daddy can play with his boys.’

  Colt glances from Garrick to Declan, who is staring at his bike’s shell-less bell. The sun becomes a sudden inferno, claws tigerishly at the nape of Colt’s neck. He looks downhill to his brother and sees the boy is watching him, his angel-face furrowed, on the verge of saying something which doesn’t need to be said. ‘You should go,’ Colt tells Avery.

  Declan doesn’t look up from the exposed innards of the bell when he says, ‘Yeah. Come on, Avery.’

  And Avery the street cat decides that at this moment in these circumstances the smart thing to do is to put the skateboard aside and hoist his bike up from the naturestrip, and, with his eyes low and in a voice like something blown along a lane, say, ‘See you later, Colt.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ says Garrick. ‘You’re never seeing him again. You’re our friend, not his.’ And turning his glare on Colt he says, ‘You prick. You shouldn’t have come here. You should have stayed in the shitheap where you belong.’

  He shoves past Colt, driving down on his pedals so his bike heaves away; Avery follows him, swooping widely over the road. Colt watches them go, the world draining speedily through his fingers: he turns to Declan and says, ‘It’s not our fault —’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Declan spins the pedal into place beneath his foot. ‘But . . . you know.’

  He pushes the bike forward, passing Colt without looking at him; and only then remembers his brother, and looks back. Syd stands with his feet planted either side of his bike, mouth set, cheeks ashen. At Declan he shouts defiantly, ‘I don’t do what Garrick says!’

  Declan circles his bike once, twice. ‘Do what I say,’ he says. ‘Get going.’

  He swings the bicycle and powers after his friends; Syd tears air between his teeth and it is a sob of grief and fury. ‘Fuck!’ he says, and shoves his bike into motion. Avery and Garrick have already disappeared around the corner; Syd catches his brother and in moments they too round the corner, out of sight.

  The street becomes soundless again. The sun blazes brilliantly off cars and the footpath. Bastian comes cautiously closer, hugging the skateboard, his sights fixed on the point where the neighbourhood boys had last been. When they don’t reappear, he looks at Colt. ‘What’s happening?’ he asks. ‘Why is everyone swearing?’

  And Colt can’t make himself say anything, feeling it even as he stands there, held upright only by strings: the smearing of his outline, the thinning of his colours, and it isn’t because he is flying like a javelin – he’s never felt heavier, more summoned to the ground – but because something has gripped him and is peeling him into nothing, some sleek, clawed, yellow-eyed hunting thing which can hear the very thoughts in his head.

  On Sunday Freya tells her mother, ‘No, I’m not going.’

  Elizabeth looks as if her firstborn child has removed a mask which Elizabeth never guessed she’d been wearing: ‘Yes you are,’ she says, but Freya replies, ‘No I’m not, so don’t tell me again. What’s God ever done for me?’

  Elizabeth’s gaze hardens. ‘You sound like your father.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Freya laughs. The heart is wicked. ‘He’s my father. You chose him.’

  Dorrie and Marigold stand goggling, struck by the possibilities that have opened up before their eyes. ‘I’m not going either!’ Marigold pipes.

  ‘You are!’ says Elizabeth, and swats her; before marching away she throws Freya a look meant to cut her in two. It only makes Freya feel more certain. In the last few days there’s been nothing that hasn’t made her feel this way – each dog’s bark and crust of bread and twinge of discomfort and hair fallen in her eyes, every sight she’s seen and sound she’s heard has felt like the imparting of a piece of vital information. She is travelling toward something and although she has no idea what it is she knows in her bones that her path is true. Refusing to go to church would, just weeks ago, have been an act of towering courage: now she’s done it casually, and certainly without apology. If she has spent her life rummaging through a castle of countless rooms, she thinks she must have found the vault at the castle’s core, because inside it there is nothing but her wits. She has pushed aside Heaven and armed herself with reason, and now she is making a stand. She wants to disappoint her mother, because when the moment comes – and she doesn’t know when that will be, but it will be soon, for the wait is never long, the days follow each other in a kind of lurching clockwork – she wants no one to love her, and to love no one. It’s important that nothing make her hesitate.

  When her family has left the house and she’s the only person within its weatherboard walls – although presumably her father is somewhere, in the garage or the bathroom or reading the paper at the kitchen table – she sits cross-legged on the floor and closes her eyes. Outside and inside the house it’s a dry, silent morning. She sits in cotton pyjamas, head bowed, her mousey hair pooling in the angles of her elbows. She thinks over the endless life she has lived, how it reached into the lives of her mother and father before she was born, how it reaches back to when Elizabeth and Joe were children and beyond this, too, to before they were born. She’s lived just nearly thirteen years, but she has been in existence forever. Every twist of history brought her closer to being. And now, today, because of her, there is the weatherboard house; because of her, five children are on their unwilling way to church, bickering, laughing, plotting. She is responsible – Rex Jenson had scoffed and told her she was thinking wrong, and she’s grateful that he tried, but maybe he is too kind to admit or perhaps even see such a bleak truth. She, however, can accept the facts. She was born, and in being so she chained up her parents; and they are miserable for it, and her siblings pay for the misery. This is fact.

  If there is to be a new baby born into the family, so be it: the prospect only makes Freya more determined. With a baby, they can start fresh. The new one will never know what its brothers and sisters have known. When they tell stories, years from now, the youngest member of the family will struggle to believe.

  She opens her eyes, a touch disappointed to find herself still in pyjamas on the floor. On the walls above her hang Marigold’s drawings of foals, cats, big-eyed and wasp-waisted girls. Scattered about are her sisters’ playthings, and Dorrie’s pillow has flopped off the bed. There’s a pattern in the carpet to which Freya has never paid any attention. Red roses on a grey background, and the carpet is scurfy in spots.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m sorry, Dad.’

  Everything will be different, after. She won’t be able to retreat into the rooms of the castle which have kept her protected so far. It is daunting, and she is daunted, but she will not waver. Life is long, and this must end.

  On Sunday afternoon the backyard of the Jensons’ house returns to the birds. Sparrows light on the pool’s white rim and hop forward for a drink. A blackbird flings worms from the churned soil at the base of the bike ramp. A magpie in its feathery tuxedo takes the deck steps one at a time.

  Rex makes no comment on the quietness of the house. Colt watches him, trying to know what he knows. His father could easily decide that all the neighbourhood is busy elsewhere on this particular day. He could believe that the silence is nothing to do with him. And yet: he is not ignorant, he can’t be ignorant. There can’t be calmness inside him, it would not be fair. ‘Colt,’ he says, beckoning his son, and maybe there is a twinge in his voice like something dead receiving a tiny electric shock
, ‘I’ll give you five dollars if you can do this crossword puzzle.’

  Colt looks at the newspaper opened on the table: its puzzle is too difficult for him, he’s tried before and earned only humiliation. ‘No thanks,’ he says.

  Instead of teasing him, his father says, ‘Ten.’

  And there it is, nearly inaudible, the dead-man’s jerk. Colt would like his father to be a dead man, or at least a man he’s never met; he would like to strip from every atom in himself its inheritance of him. ‘No thanks,’ he says. And leaves his father sitting at the blondwood table.

  Outside, the air is warm – this will be a hot summer. Colt walks through the heat with spread fingers and upturned palms. The Jensons sometimes take their holidays overseas, to beach resorts where the thatched huts have few walls and drinks are served in coconut shells and the meals are sliced straight from the flank of a rotisseried animal. Colt, with his olive skin, turns as brown as a local, his hair bleaches gold. His long legs kick aside the heft of an entire ocean. There has been no mention of a holiday this year. The new house has been enough change of scenery.

  He goes to the shed, to where his bike stands; he thinks he’ll go down to the creek. Not to the drain, but further along, following the tumbling water deep into the wasteland. There must be more to that wilderness than just the noxious pipe. There will be tracks among the weeds, caves in the banks, collapsed treetrunks bridging the water. It is time he explored. If he is to be alone, he needs to have places to be.

  He’s wheeling the red racer past the shed door when he pauses, looking back. Inside the shed it’s dim, only a blade of light angling into it through the shunted-sideways door. Big shadows hulk across the ceiling and metal walls. Where the BMX usually stands – where it had been standing yesterday, when Colt was last here – the shadows are greyly empty, like the heart of a ghost. For an instant he thinks Bastian may have taken the bike out on his own, but that is nonsensical. There are some things Bastian does not do. Colt stares around the shed and back to where the dirtbike should be; then he props the racer on the path and walks around the garden. He looks under bushes, under the house, even into the pool. Birds dart from his path, the breeze swills warmly. When he returns to the shed, the bike is still missing.

  Its absence opens a circular wound inside him which grows larger and more contaminating throughout the day. Panic rises and subsides in the wound, threatening to rush over the brim before sinking rapidly, only to rise lagoonishly again. He lurks in the playroom piecing together the train track, much to Bastian’s delight. He makes the geography of the train’s journey elaborate, with hills and tunnels built from books. On another day he might plant the odd suicidal soldier or rig up a landslide of tennis balls, but today his energy deserts him abruptly and he finds himself sitting with his back to the wall, hardly able to lift a hand. The limber black snake of a train runs past his toes and beneath the shelves as Bastian, on his stomach in the centre of the room, wrenches the switches tyrannically.

  Over dinner he listens to the conversation of his parents – the dental surgery is having its gas supply cut off for a day while the pipes in the street are replaced. It’s a massive inconvenience – ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ says Rex, and laughs raucously: ‘Get it, Bas?’ he asks, and the boy doesn’t – but it has to be done. Colt would like to burst from his chair and hurl his plate at his father’s head. ‘That’s a massive inconvenience,’ he would scream, ‘but it had to be done!’ Instead he eats patiently, one bean at a time, and when fear swells inside the wound he draws a breath and lets it out slowly, and the dread doesn’t vanish but it comes under control.

  But as night closes the world in, fear is difficult to evade. It rolls and eddies in his chest. It isn’t bedtime but he lies beneath his sheets, his body flushing hot and cold. There’s a high whine in his head which will only get louder, so he listens while he can to the sounds in the house. Bastian is singing a song that carries past the walls, something he’s learned in music lessons at school. Bastian matters; he is odd and he is useless, more a burden than anything else. He is not a companion, he’s just something to be cared for and worried about, like a hollow painted egg or a delicate captive fish. But there is no meanness in him, and he wants only that everyone should be happy – that’s all he asks for, something as grand and humble as that. Something as idiotic and generous as that. Bastian matters, and Colt breathes until he can breathe again.

  His mother passes the door, and stops at the sight of her son in his bed. ‘Are you ill, Colt?’ she asks, and he tells her he’s just tired. He could tell her about the theft of the BMX, but there is no point. She is not the person to do anything about anything. She is the person whose eyes are closed. He doesn’t know the exact moment when he finally gave up on her – it must have come and gone like a ripple, leaving no change on his life. Tabby will stand by her husband even though he’s someone against whom it’s peri-lous to lean, who will drag her down with him when he falls. He has done it before, but still she clings to him. And Colt doesn’t care if she does so out of fear of her husband or of the future or because she believes in loyalty above everything; he doesn’t care if she’s doing the best she can. He is never going to forgive her for the choice she has made. He says nothing, and soon she goes away.

  Bastian comes to the door, gripping the doorframe with his fingers and hanging his weight off his arm. He is leggy, growing out of his pyjamas; ankles like fine ivory puzzles poke beyond the cuffs. His hair is long, how he likes it, his face the cleanest ever to shine on the world. ‘What are you doing, Colly?’ he asks, and Colt answers, ‘Not much, just lying here.’

  Bastian thinks about this, and finds it inviting. He unhooks his fingers and comes into the room. Colt’s bedroom is a holy citadel for the boy, a place of worship. He looks at the books and medals, precious articles he has no desire to touch. He would inherit them if Colt were to die, he’d keep them in boxes that he would cart with him for the length of his life, long after he’d forgotten the sound of Colt’s voice and the colour of his eyes and even how it was, to have a brother. He drinks his fill of the marvellous things, then turns to Colt and graces him with a smile. ‘Good night,’ he says. ‘Sleep tight.’

  Because Dorrie and Marigold can’t endure the wait one second longer, they put up the Christmas tree. It’s a plastic tree which, dismantled, does not lie tidily in its box, and looks, in pieces, less like a tree than a knot of fossilised, murk-coloured lightning. But when they’ve fitted the trunk together and stood it on its stand, and squeezed the larger branches into the holes in the trunk and fitted, to the branches, the countless barbs of moulded greenery, the thing looks sufficiently like a tree to be worthy of the decorations that pour from their box as a tangled multitude. There are lengths of tinsel, gold, red and blue, and a string of fairy lights. There are matchboxes wrapped to look like gifts, and wooden animals of no discernible species. There are tinny, coloured-metal baubles, most of which have lost their strings. There are five very ancient decorations that Elizabeth bought before the children were born, peculiar people made from a substance like mirrored glass, with ugly painted faces and cuffs of shedding rabbit fur. These mirror people are both entrancing and repellent. The children don’t like the way their mother smiles at them: yet they also wish there were many more, a vast community of the mirrored. They know there was once a sixth of their kind, the luckless one who met its fate in Freya’s toddler fist in a tale which has become a legend.

  The assembling and decorating of the tree should take less time than it does, but squabbling children draw out the job past dinner and into dusk. The tinsel must be hung so as to look casual, not roped about the tree like a measuring-tape around a fat lady. The decorations must be positioned so there is something of interest wherever the eye falls, although the best decorations must of course take pride of place at the front. The angel at the summit will not stand straight, and every Christmas the children complain about the abjectness of this creature. Elizabeth says, ‘Maybe we’ll ge
t some new things for next year,’ but next year never comes, and Syd is beginning to suspect his mother intends to keep the crippled seraph and assorted drab gewgaws forever. He’s starting to see there is history in them: but he is ten, and there are more important things than the past. He finds himself daydreaming about what the Jensons’ tree must look like: something opulent, prob­ably real, high as the ceiling and strung with fat frosted tinsel and lights which flash different colours, and not an angel but a star with silver spikes like cavalry swords. And then he realises he’s in danger of never seeing this splendid tree, just as he might never again visit the playroom, swoop over the bike jump, ride the red-and-white skateboard, or swim alone in the pool. There is a public pool not far away, and he likes it well enough: but the Jensons’ pool had been his. Nobody knew it, but the pool belonged to him. Under the water, everything had stopped. Now, if the pool is gone, it will all go unrelentingly on.

  The decorating of the Christmas tree had cheered him, but now grimness descends. He wanders out to the yard, to where Declan and Avery are kneeling on the path beside a bucket of water repairing a puncture in the front tyre of Declan’s bike. Fixing a puncture is a job Joe does willingly, but Syd knows that his brother prefers to ask the least of their father that he can. The bike stands upside-down, balanced on its handlebars and saddle looking beached and vulnerable. The tube has been prised from inside the tyre to hang like a flaccid entrail, but when Declan screws the handpump to the valve and squirts air through it, the tube pops up like a hoola-hoop. Now is the time to pass the tube through the water and it must be a more difficult task than it looks because Declan wrestles with this rubber anaconda, and water splashes the path and his trousers. ‘Want help?’ Syd offers, because Avery is sitting on his scrawny haunches doing nothing, but Declan says, ‘No, it’s OK.’