The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  There were the barbed ends of spears as we were jostled one against the other. Sweating and afraid, I saw another soldier’s hairy leg and foot, in its dusty leather sandal, shuffle next to mine. Metal against metal, wood against wood, the clat and brush of bodies flung together. The sound of children singing through a wooden wall.

  I moved the joystick forward. The horse moved, with me inside it. I turned it sideways until I reached what felt like my spot against the clinkered wall, the spot in which to sink down, and wait and watch, voyeuristic traveller from the future.

  So many. No mercy shown to children. Those sweet voices just outside.

  My head and sinuses ached, and there was this feeling of being sucked along. My throat felt as if it was being pulled from the back, somewhere near my tonsils.

  I realised that I was crouching against the padded leather hoop. I wasn’t aware of getting myself into this position, only of the need to find my special spot inside the horse. The leather gave under my fingers, moulded itself to my cheek.

  Everything was upside down. The blue moulded leather was barbed and splintered, new-felled wood that no carpenter had had time to smooth. Solid substances were changing places quicker than an adult human sense could follow. A boy might slip between the cracks. A bearded Peter Pan.

  I took the helmet off, knowing that I could never walk into Ivan’s room and see that stationary silver disc, the cage really nothing more than two parallel hoops of expensive leather joined by vertical struts—I knew I could never again look at them and see them as simple objects. And they were just the props.

  I felt a need to understand the program Ivan must have written, the nuts and bolts of it, to unravel and comprehend it in a practical, mechanical, human way, and set this against my fear.

  ‘It’s not finished yet,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Let me try! It’s my go!’ Peter shouted.

  Ivan was asking questions with his eyes.

  I said, ‘I didn’t want to be there.’

  ‘It’s just a game, Sandra. Don’t go all huffy on me now.’

  Ivan turned away from me to help Peter with the helmet. I watched him move the joystick to and fro.

  My hands were very cold and I rubbed them roughly, feeling once again surrounded by the rumbling, dim, hot insides of the statue. The glint of a companion’s spear next to my bare thigh when we were thrown from one side to the other. That terrible unknowing song as the Trojans hauled on their ropes and pulled us through the city gates.

  In Ivan’s kitchen, I found bread, cheese, margarine. I made a sandwich and put the kettle on, waiting till I felt calm enough to tell Ivan it had been too much for me, to make him listen.

  ‘Got a great idea for what to do next!’ Ivan called out through the open door.

  I found some biscuits that were almost fresh. I felt I had to eat, though I wasn’t ordinarily hungry, but heart-empty, hollowed out and dizzy.

  Ivan stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, frowning at the sight of me scavenging in his kitchen.

  ‘Peter doesn’t need an ancient battle foisted on him as a form of entertainment,’ I said stiffly, as I cleared a space at the table and sat down.

  ‘Anything you do the first time can be a bit of a shock.’ As though the risk, the shock, were necessary.

  ‘How can the insides of a wooden horse help anybody look out there?

  Ivan seemed interested rather than annoyed.

  ‘It’s a journey,’ he said. ‘Not all of it needs to make the kind of sense you’re after.’

  ‘Until you get there?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

  Peter called from the other room for someone to help him off with the helmet, and Ivan said, ‘Be back in a minute,’ as though I was about to run away.

  ‘What’s it about?’ yelled Peter, running in. ‘I want to know!’

  ‘Here.’ I handed him half a sandwich, and he began to eat.

  Ivan told him the story of the horse. ‘They were just so sick of the siege, of hanging in there, I guess,’ he said slowly, watching Peter munch his sandwich, avoiding my eyes. He took nothing for himself, but sat with his hands flat on the table.

  ‘I mean being walled up in a town with enemies all round. The Greeks weren’t having a picnic either. Between a rock and a hard place. The Trojans—food’s short, but at least they’re at home. You know, sometimes the best ideas come when you’ve reached the end of your tether—’

  Peter chewed, considering this, as Ivan began warming to his story.

  ‘You’re just about to give up and some joker says, “Hey, man, why don’t we—” And at first you think—nah—the sun’s got to this dude. Fried his brains.’ Peter giggled. ‘But then you think about it, and you can’t stop thinking about it, because, jeez man, there’s nothing to do but think!’

  Peter glanced at me. I knew he sensed that Ivan was going to tell him something wrong, a wrong thing to do, and he wanted to hear it, especially when he could see I disapproved. At the same time, he was keen not to give himself away.

  ‘And then you say to yourself after a while—why not? Hell, man, why not? Fried brains.’ Ivan grinned and touched Peter lightly on the arm, as though he felt that this small contact was all he could allow himself.

  Peter wriggled. ‘But who won?’

  ‘The Greeks, of course.’

  Peter considered this for a long moment, then he said, ‘I’d rather have a dog.’ He went back to the workroom.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked Ivan.

  He gave me a long look as if to gauge whether my question was an open one, or whether I planned to squash his answer as soon as he’d offered it.

  ‘Just grabs me, that’s all. I’ve loved that story ever since I was a kid.’

  I wanted to leave, but I knew that if I walked out then, took Peter home, I’d never go back to Ivan’s house again.

  Ivan said softly that learning anything requires an act of faith. And with the technology we were talking about, maybe more faith was required, not less. I called him a magician, thinking it would make him angry, but he said there might be something in that.

  ‘You have to get the incantation of the spell exactly right, and it’s all illusion anyway.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘If you make even a titchy mistake in the program, the illusion’s spoiled, it’s obvious that the whole thing’s a make-up.’

  ‘So you’re like that wizard.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten his name. In The Wizard of Oz.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Kind of, yes.’

  Ivan was right. An act of faith was required—this was what frightened me—an imaginative leap that neither he nor Peter seemed to have any trouble making. A leap taken in trust and joy, without seat belts or life insurance.

  I felt dirty and dull and sorry for myself. Yet I would have found it easier to believe that there were spirits nattering in the blond grass outside the windows than to toss myself in faith, just then, through Ivan’s window of the mind.

  . . .

  When I handed Peter his dinner that night, he looked at me indulgently. Don’t grow up too quickly, I thought with a sudden stab of panic.

  ‘Ivan’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ I answered carefully.

  ‘Kinda weird too, but.’ Peter grinned the fey, childish grin that I was afraid he might soon abandon. ‘Y’know,’ he giggled, ‘y’get Ivan talking, and he forgets we’re s’posed to be practising my reading.’

  We washed up our dishes together, companionable and calm.

  Peter had a bath, put on clean pyjamas, and sat up in bed to read to me.

  For the first time, I saw the words as he’d been seeing them; only with this difference, that he was beginning to come out of it, the way a baby comes out of crawling, only much more deliberately, with conscious courage, because he had already faced the black cliff-edge of failure.

  Peter’s eyes were clear, though the familiar frown
was there down the middle of his forehead.

  I saw each letter of the words he was required—condemned—to read, not as clear curves and straight black lines, but as nervous flutters, raw fragile moth-ends, a soft filigree stretching into greyness, and a stab at meaning, the way he had grabbed hold of a stick when he was younger and speared a live moth, a Bogong, blown off course into the house.

  The small boy’s anger when I took it from him. Still there.

  ‘You’re going well,’ I whispered. ‘Great.’

  Peter looked at me with clear eyes, and continued reading aloud in a sing-song voice quite unlike his own, running a finger under the lines, not jabbing at the words the way he used to, but with a smooth continuous movement.

  ‘Who suggested that you read like that?’ I asked, after he’d finished the page and I’d said, ‘Well done!’

  ‘Ivan.’

  Peter got to the end of the story without making a mistake, though the meaning his gamelan voice gave to some of the sentences was very odd.

  I felt cold, afraid for him, grateful. ‘Do you read like that at school?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Peter said carefully, flicking the last page with his finger. He wasn’t mocking me, but I stood corrected.

  Then he looked at me as though I’d asked for a sweet from his hoarded bagful, and grinned and said, ‘G’night Mum.’

  I wanted to unburden myself to Peter then, to recall and explain, to lay out between us my version of our years of fighting over his reading, now that this long miserable time might be coming to an end.

  Instead, I picked up the book and switched off Peter’s bed-light. I bent to kiss him goodnight, and he let me. The last thing I saw was the courage in my son’s eyes, and faith in this new method that he and Ivan had concocted between them, a peculiar knowing and adult gallantry.

  Peter and the Wolf

  Dianne Trapani pulled out another cigarette. Her brother Tony gave her a sideways glance, his full lips set in an expression of extreme ­discomfort.

  I’d been going to spend my lunch hour doing messages when Di waved me over.

  ‘What’s up?’ I’d asked. It was obvious that something was bugging her more than usual.

  Now fifteen minutes had passed, and I’d given up my plans to shop and go to Medicare. I munched a leaky salad roll, while Dianne told me the story of her brother’s troubles at the university.

  The head of ANU’s computing department was convinced that Tony and his friends had been pinching time on his Internet account.

  ‘Have you?’ I asked, looking straight at Tony, annoyed at being stuck there, between him and his sister.

  Tony shook his head and moved the froth around on the top of his cappuccino. He had his sister’s blue-black eyebrows, and the hair to go with them.

  Di blew a smoke ring, exchanged another glance with her brother, and said, ‘If Mum and Dad find out, they’ll stop paying his fees. Poor old Tone’ll be out on his ear.’ She coughed and picked at a spot on her black dress with long purple fingernails. The light of the travel centre seemed to squash objects rather than illuminate them. Her dress looked worn and dusty, her dyed and carefully mussed-up hair more like a wig than ever.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘One of our assignments.’ Tony’s voice was soft and shy. ‘A question’s got a mistake in it. Like, two, actually. I point them out to Prof. Bailey, and he argues with me. He leaves the question as it is, so no-one gets it right. Some of the guys complain, and he takes it out on me.’

  ‘But someone’s been using the Professor’s account? Is that correct?’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s not to say we did it. It could be anyone.’

  Tony glanced at Dianne from under thick black eyelashes. The connection between them was momentarily so strong it was like a fourth person sitting at the table. I finished my roll. I still felt hungry, but I didn’t want to waste time in a queue of bus travellers.

  It may have been the lighting and her purple nails and lipstick, but the whole of Dianne’s face looked flat. I tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to have her for a sister.

  ‘Bailey?’ I said, feeling a cog slip in my memory. ‘What’s his first name?’

  ‘Lionel,’ Dianne replied, managing to fill the word with a weight of sarcasm fit to sink a Sydney harbour tug.

  ‘I think I know him. One of his kids goes to the same school as Peter. Peter’s my son,’ I added for Tony’s benefit. ‘There’s some sort of school fund-raising thing coming up. Would you like me to try and talk to Bailey? If he’s there? I might be able to find out a bit more about what’s going on.’

  . . .

  That evening, as I drove across Commonwealth Avenue bridge to pick Peter up from his new friend Kester’s, I decided that if I was going to speak to Bailey on Tony’s behalf, I needed to speak to Tony again first.

  I recalled Dianne’s face, her look of astonishment when I’d offered to try and intercede for her brother. I was beginning to wish I’d kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t as though Bailey was a pal. I’d only met him at a couple of school concerts, a bush dance where he mashed my feet in Split the Willow.

  I’d plunged back into full-time work, into a project I cared about that a new government might axe, and that, with Rae Evans gone, had no-one in charge of it, no-one to steer it through. I was a single parent for a year. Surely that was enough. But I realised that I was determined to defend Rae somehow. And I’d just offered to plead for Di Trapani’s brother. What was happening to me?

  I looked up and saw the Parliament House flag hanging motionless on its giant mast, steam from the boilers rising underneath it. I thought about how it’s wrong to say evergreen trees have no seasons. From June onwards, the wattle is getting ready to flower, from a distance a dull yellow haze against the leaves. Blossoms slowly swell under the green skin of acacias.

  . . .

  Coming back from a lightning trip to Civic next day—I’d had to do two days’ messages in one and all I’d had to eat were three mini spring rolls while I jogged across to Medicare—I saw Tony Trapani at a corner table of the bistro sharing a coffee with a boy about his own age. The boy was smoking and scowling into what looked like an empty cup. I noticed that his black leather jacket had two perfectly round holes on the left side, as though someone had shot at him, or perhaps a former owner of the jacket.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  Both of them looked up, Tony surprised. The other boy’s scowl barely shifted.

  Tony smiled and said, ‘Have you seen my sister? She was supposed to meet us down here.’

  ‘I’ve been doing some shopping,’ I told him, ‘but she was upstairs when I left.’

  I held my hand out to the boy in black and introduced myself, then pulled a chair out and sat down, deciding that I’d risk being a few minutes late.

  ‘I was going to phone you,’ I said to Tony, ‘before I talk to Professor Bailey.’

  Tony blushed, glancing mutely at his friend.

  ‘Bailey sucks,’ the boy in black said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’ I found it hard to keep my eyes from the lethal holes in his leather jacket.

  ‘Mad bomber. Opens fire for no reason.’

  ‘You mean in lectures?’

  ‘All to do with quotas. He told us at the start he was gunna fail a third of us. The whole system sucks.’

  ‘Nobody likes him.’ Tony’s voice was gentler, but his condemnation in a way was more severe.

  ‘Know what some of the guys did once?’ the boy in black went on. ‘Had all calls to his office switched to Rosie’s. That’s like a brothel out in Fyshwick.’

  ‘That was you two, was it?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘It was just a joke,’ Tony explained. His friend rubbed the rim of the cup as though more coffee might magically appear and said, ‘Bailey’s dishonest, he’s sloppy and he hates students. He’s the best argument for getting rid of tenure that I know.’

  When it came to understanding
male adolescents, I had it all ahead of me, but I saw Peter in Tony Trapani, in his look of slyness when he was trying not to smile, when his lips just wouldn’t hang a straight line, in the swing of his fine black hair, darker than Peter’s and much longer, his skin soft as the first morning without frost.

  ‘Do you have any other brothers or sisters?’ I asked him when his friend got up to buy more coffee.

  ‘No, just Di and me.’

  ‘How did your sister get the job at DIR?’

  Tony looked surprised, then said, ‘Di knows heaps about statistical modelling, all that stuff.’ After a moment he added, ‘Evans wanted my sister, so she had to take that whatsername as well.’

  ‘Bambi, you mean? You know Bambi? You’ve met her?’

  ‘Nah.’ He blushed. ‘Well, I’ve like seen her in the park.’

  ‘Ateeq’s incredible,’ Tony went on. ‘His folks are from Pakistan. You know he never had a Christmas present till I gave him one?’

  Ateeq came back with a single cup of coffee. Following a routine that was clearly well established, he sugared the coffee, swallowed a large mouthful and handed it across to Tony.

  Tony thanked him and said, ‘You know Ateeq runs Black Snake.’

  ‘That’d be the way you hook up to ALTOS?’

  Tony took his turn to drink, while Ateeq stared at me without answering.

  I’d done a bit of homework. I’d phoned Dianne and asked her why she thought Bailey suspected her brother. She’d explained that Tony and a few of his friends had been spending their nights dialling up ALTOS, a German bulletin board. According to Di, who seemed to know about these things, it was famous as the hangout of the Chaos Computer Club. Ivan had told me that in theory anyone with a computer and a modem could access any bulletin board anywhere in the world, but in practice you had to be accepted first, become a member. Some boards were public, others very private. The main point seemed to be that the nightly entertainment Tony and his friends were into was expensive.

  ‘Why don’t you go to one of your other teachers?’ I asked Tony. ‘Or the student counsellor?’