The Hounded

by Simon Butters

  And on and on like that. For years, I took these statements to have some hidden, dramatic meaning. There, in the tiniest parcels of his vocabulary, was the answer to all life’s problems if only I could fathom the deeper meaning. The way he intoned these mysticisms was so deadpan that, for all my keen sense of hearing, I could not detect the slightest amount of emotion. Undaunted, I took to noting them down. When I got home I’d cut and paste the names together looking for a pattern, a secret code that would reveal some universal truth. I’d been fooled. It was simply a list.

  Disappointment is harder to deal with when it’s directed at someone else. Self-disappointment for me was a comfortable set of pants. I didn’t understand it at the time; I had never harboured expectations of my father. He was just there, like an old pile of bricks in the corner of the garden: a solid and continuous presence, cold and maybe covered in a little bit of moss. I was disappointed. My father didn’t think about the world how I did. I guess I’d always hoped that, as I grew older, I’d somehow learn his mysterious ways, or he’d learn mine. I looked upon him with more than my customary fleeting glance. My father suddenly appeared robotic, going about his daily life in such a monotonous fashion I swear all it amounted to was moving around a bit until he died. Perhaps that’s all everyone ever did? No matter what you achieved, you could be president of the free world, discover the cure for everything, walk on Mars, whatever, in the end all it amounted to was moving around a bit until you died. Maybe he did have it right after all? Maybe he had seen a deeper truth and had emptied his head of all the unnecessary stuff of life? Maybe he wasn’t distracted by everything he came across? Maybe he just let things be? Life to him was a list of objects. The thought ­horrified me. I didn’t want to be an object.

  I observed my father, deeper than my usual fleeting glance. His arms were solid and thick. Auto grease had ground its way into his fingers. His face was square, his chin thick with stubble. His hair was parted the same way it had been since he first sprouted a crop on that impervious head. I longed to get into that head. Yet the thought I’d find nothing more than a list of auto parts was more than I could bear.

  Alias: @The Full Monty

  Date: Friday February 15, 2.43AM

  Have you ever seen a coconut?

  @Gutentag

  You mean a breast?

  @The Full Monty

  What? This thing works now? Can you understand me?

  @Gutentag

  I am of thought that you lead disaster with sleeping. Better the cohesion of tomorrow.

  @The Full Monty

  Yeah. That’s what I thought.

  *

  The next morning the black dog sat under a bramble of roses in the backyard. We stared at each other for a while, me from the vantage point of my bedroom window, it from underneath the safety of a thousand daggers. I walked out to meet it.

  ‘You knew about Tony?’ I asked.

  ‘The eggs. Yes. Did they work?’ asked the dog.

  ‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’

  The dog lowered its eyes. It almost looked disappointed.

  ‘Did you see the girl?’

  ‘Have you been watching me?’

  ‘Did you see the girl?’ the dog asked, looking almost as deadpan as my father and his lists.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Did she say anything? About your birthday?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that?’

  The dog looked away, reflective, and I could see the passage of a thousand thoughts behind those dark eyes. The dog reminded me of somebody. Me.

  I’d once seen a video recording of myself, sitting at my desk in school. A couple of arty types from the drama room were making what they called a warts-and-all docu­mentary about the school. I guess I was a wart. They showed the film after school one day. It was pretty dreary stuff. The narrator rambled on about sexual stereotypes, school cliques and underground movements in political awareness. It was wholeheartedly a bore until I suddenly appeared on screen. I had no idea I’d been filmed yet there I was, on the big screen for all to see. The camera wobbled into my classroom, shakily passed a few students, and zoomed in so my ugly mug filled the screen.

  I could actually recall what I was thinking about, during those fifteen minutes of fame. The teacher had been banging on about genetic modification and I was pondering the significance of my own gene pool. I was busy wondering which parts of my mother I had inherited and which parts of my father. Like most teenagers I was sure I was adopted and bore absolutely no resemblance to either of them. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I could see how both their beings were tightly interwoven in me. We were all locked into our own genetic prison. Was that it? Was life just a prison? Are we just a random mix of genes, a list of parts, giving us the mistaken impression that we’re free? Or maybe we just follow a pattern that’s already been laid out for us? We move about a bit, until the puzzle is completed, then expire.

  ‘And here we have the coolest guy in school,’ the narrator giggled. ‘Line up girls! He’s got charm, wit, and such fabulous good looks.’

  On cue, a little bit of drool dripped out of my mouth. About half the school was watching this on a hastily set up screen in the cafeteria. Laughter echoed off the walls. Heads turned towards me. A couple of oranges bounced off my head.

  Now, most people in that situation would feel embarrassed and sorry for themselves. Okay, I did, but that was secondary. What concerned me most was that the filmmakers had got it wrong. Right there, on bright celluloid, my eyes told the true story. They were flitting back and forth, every so slightly, as if I was reading a giant scroll, a stone tablet of such cosmic importance that wiping a bit of drool from my mouth didn’t matter.

  That’s how that dog looked.

  ‘Next time you see her, give her one of these,’ said the dog.

  It turned away and disappeared into the brambles. Its black coat quickly dispersed into the darkness of those untamed vines. I peered in after it and saw a rose. It was so perfect I wondered if it was plastic, like the decorations you see outside hospital wards. I picked the rose and lifted it to my lips. The perfume was light, the petals were soft, but the main thing that struck me was its evenness. Its symmetry was astounding. Each petal was perfectly reflected on the opposite side, like two identical twins fused together.

  Okay, maybe I was making a bit much of the rose but it was a nice flower. It was certainly good enough to give to a girl. But that girl? I was taking a huge chance.

  My mother snapped her thumb over her cigarette lighter. The flame gushed up bright yellow and blue. She shot a quick glance at me as she lit up. Her eyes betrayed an emotion I’d never seen in her before. Annoyance.

  This was highly unusual in our house. Most of the time my mother and I passed each other by like two acquaintances in the street. We would stop and chat, talk about things that concerned us both, but neither judged the other. My mother never told me what to do. She never scolded me. She’d certainly never given me any parental advice. Her sudden attention was unnerving.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought I’d give it to someone.’

  ‘A girl?’

  I nodded. Why did I feel like this was a betrayal? My mother sucked on her cigarette and looked upset.

  ‘I’ll put it back if you want, but I think the damage is done.’

  ‘I don’t care about the rose, Monty. Do I look like I ever cared about the roses?’

  Quite clearly she didn’t. They were as wild and unruly as her hair. She had a hairbrush somewhere in the house, but I hadn’t seen it in years. I pictured it hiding under the floorboards, turning feral from living so many years in the wild. That mangy old hairbrush would swing from vine to vine and strike terror into the hearts of every cockroach under the house. The sad truth was, though, it had just lost its way. It was no monster, and would secretly yearn for the day to brush my mother’s hair once again. Without its true purpose, it had descende
d into chaos.

  ‘Whoever she is, she’s going to disappoint you,’ said my mother.

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the perpetually full ashtray, lit up another, and turned her back on me. I waited for a few moments before I realised that was it and headed out the back door. The dog was gone. This was up to me.

  ‘What the heck is this? Some kind of joke?’

  Eliza glared at me. I’d found her back at the bus stop. I had anticipated sarcasm, humiliation, maybe general ambivalence, but not outright hostility. She came at me. Instinctually, I recoiled and hid my face. I thought she was going to punch my lights out.

  ‘Someone told me to give it to you, I’m sorry!’ I blurted.

  It was weak of me. Confronted by an angry teenage girl, I panicked and blamed someone else. Pathetic, I know. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  ‘Who?’ she demanded.

  An eloquent soliloquy flew overhead but my tongue was a dull rock. I couldn’t tell her about the creature in the roses. I realised how stupid I was. There was no dog. I had made all this up. It was all my own illusion, just like my mother and her strange intruders. I wanted to run and hide in those thorny bushes. Shame is a damaging emotion. Its cousin, self-loathing, is more overt and destructive, but shame chips away at you, breaking tiny bits off you until your insides become visible.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she sighed.

  She tossed the rose away and stood on it. A second before her shoe ground that rose to dust I admired its symmetry one last time. It delighted me, like wondering how a salt crystal knows how to build such a delicate shape, or how a bee knows how to make perfect hexagons when the rest of nature hasn’t heard of a straight line. The rose disappeared, broken forever, and my eyes travelled up to Eliza’s. It struck me right then. She too had perfect symmetry. Her eyes were equidistant, her mouth perfectly reflected, her high cheekbones a complete match. I was an idiot. I was standing there smiling at her.

  ‘Geez, Monty. What the hell is wrong with you? You think this is funny?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it.’

  I lowered my eyes back down to her shoes, where they deserved to be. She paced back and forth for a few seconds, like a caged animal deciding whether to go on the attack or turn and flee. She sighed and her anger dissipated. Maybe I was a complete lobotomy case or just plain deluded. Either way, I was no threat. I obviously didn’t mean any harm.

  Up the road, the school bus turned the corner. A flurry of messages shot into her inbox, making a series of gleeful little buzzing sounds. I wondered how such a cute little sound could hold so much importance. It was the buzz of recognition, the buzz of being noticed. Eliza’s entourage was moments away on that bus. Soon I’d be left alone on the roadside again, covered in dust. She looked to her phone and turned it off.

  It was a momentous act. Not left on silent, vibrate, or just plainly ignored; she had actually turned off her phone. This was an act of pure abandonment. It was sheer recklessness. Anarchy. I don’t think I’d ever seen a girl turn off a phone before. Not on purpose anyway.

  ‘They can live without me for one day,’ she said and moved off.

  I wondered if this was just a statement of fact, or an invitation.

  ‘You coming or what?’

  An invitation then.

  Eliza wasn’t at the bus stop that morning. The bus drove right on past and all Eliza’s friends peered out to see where she’d gone. It was a mystery. A scandal. Texts were sent. Posts were uploaded. A flurry of activity spiked. Eliza’s disappearance was the hottest trending topic online. People knew something was up, but what?

  Nobody knew she was with me, Montgomery Ferguson, the lowest of the low. We headed off, leaving that crushed rose to rot in the dust. So it was that I first got to hang out with Eliza Robertson, the hottest girl in school with a heart of sheer contempt. I couldn’t have been happier.

  Chapter Four

  Middleford was perched right on the edge of suburbia. The perpetual urban sprawl had swallowed this once semi-rural town and turned it into another Lego-land paradise. The place used to be the domain of wild bushrangers and hardened farmers. Now it was filled with cul-de-sacs and rows of identikit houses. There wasn’t much to it, other than the highway. It finished abruptly at the end of civilisation, as if the town engineers thought there was nothing beyond Middleford worth heading for and suddenly downed tools. The furthest reaches of humanity were marked by nothing more than a big mound of dirt, the off-ramp to Middleford. Our house, the ghost house, was the last of its kind in Middleford. I used to wonder if there were any others still like it, hiding in the untamed lands past the suburban boundary. I was about to take my first look.

  Eliza led me beyond the edge of suburbia. The other side of civilisation was a corrugated iron version of the Great Wall. The good folk of Middleford were protected by a battle­ment of identical rear fences, keeping out marauders and feral goats. Over those fences people had hot running water, air conditioning and electric toothbrushes. On the wild side, there was nothing but needle grass and rolling hills. We ventured into the wilderness. Out there, in the shadow lands, we didn’t exist.

  A hot northerly blew dust and flies. The dry desert wind cut through my clothes, searing my skin. Middleford was a thousand kilometres from the desert but on days like this, the inland heat moved permanently south. My sweat evaporated instantly. I longed to stop but I pressed on against the onslaught. Eliza seemed to know where she was going. She didn’t look back, but I guessed she knew I was still there as I took time to curse the needle grass that invaded my socks.

  Those little knights, I thought, had declared war. They were riding hard into battle, thrusting their tiny lances deep into my flesh. I picked them out, like some terrible giant, and tossed them away. Ha! They were helpless against such power. I was king of this forsaken land. I had control over their meagre destiny. I would be a harsh and vengeful god. I’d play games to amuse myself with their fates. They’d send armies into battle. They’d lose entire cities to my whims. I’d stomp them to dust and think nothing of it.

  A sharp sound made me jump back into my body. Eliza had picked up a stick and rattled it against the steel fences as we walked. The stick bounced against the metal corrugations, mocking the world we’d left behind. Dogs began to bark. Soon the entire neighbourhood was filled with their bluster. The sound spread like a contagion. Eliza smiled at the havoc she had wrought.

  She took me to the old park. It wasn’t much of a park really, more like the last remains of some ancient scrub. Giant gum trees stood watch. They were full of possum hollows and magpie nests. In that small remnant of bush, native creatures still clung to life while all their city cousins had been eaten by cats or run over by ice-cream vans. They were rebels against extinction. This was their last outpost. I felt right at home.

  Eliza led me up a small rise to find a train tunnel. A lone track wound its way through the hills. It was the interstate line and was hardly used these days. Only the occasional freight train would rumble slowly through, on its way east.

  The tunnel was deep and cold. As we entered, we left the summer heat behind. The place gave me the shivers, though that probably wasn’t all due to the cold. My eyes reeled at the dark. I stumbled, only able to follow blindly ahead. The tunnel was framed by the opening at the other end. It seemed so far away; a small circle of life amid the gloom. Eliza led us deep into the heart of the mountain. We skipped over the tracks. The occasional scurry in the dark signified we were not alone. There must have been an entire ecosystem of rats down there, living out their lives in the dark, curious about our sudden invasion.

  Deep in that cavern, we found the middle. The light at both ends appeared exactly the same size. We stood half way, in the middle of all things, in the space between space. The light looked close enough to touch, yet far enough away that if you broke into a run you’d never reach it in time.

  It struck me then. If a train came we were gone.

  Fear g
ripped me. The rush was intoxicating. Adrenalin surged into the balls of my feet and I let out a little gasp. I was also certain a little bit of wee came out too, but I wasn’t about to tell that to Eliza.

  ‘Why are we here?’ I asked.

  ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘You’re shivering. What’s the matter, you cold?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I lied.

  I heard her rummage about in the dark. The sound of paper. The crunch of twigs. The rasping hiss of a cigarette lighter. The sound was so loud I could have sworn it was amplified, or something. Yellow flames gathered pace to push back the darkness. Flickers of light bounced around the tunnel. I could see where we were now. Red brick walls reflected sharp, glorious patterns. The flimsy heat offered only a momentary comfort. Eliza looked at me, shivering beside her. She poked my ribs and ran her finger down a few bony notches. Her finger bounced along, just like that stick against the corrugated iron fence.

  ‘Geez Monty, don’t they feed you?’

  I didn’t want to let her know about my theories on food. Self-control meant nothing if you had to blab about it. My guilt had unfortunate timing though. It meant I couldn’t concentrate on the fact that this was the first time a girl had actually touched me. On purpose even. Not the kind of accidental touch you get while pushing for the door at the end of class. This was intentional. Normally, something like this would have sent me into far off realms of imagination. My eyes would have rolled back and I would have lived a whole lifetime of births, deaths, marriages, famine and war. A hundred years would pass in a few micro­seconds. But not now; I was in the moment. Eliza moved away from the fire and fished about in the tunnel. There, in the darkest recesses, was a cache of secrets. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

  ‘Want one?’

  I thought of my mother—the acrid stench, the winter cough that rattled the house—and shook my head.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said.

  She lit up and warmed herself over the fire. I watched her peer into the flames. She regarded it vacantly. There was no sense of relaxation for her. This was a lonely place.