I helped Tony with the dials on his microscope so he could see what everyone else could see. His face lit up with a twinkle of delight. He smiled like a fat little kid with a new toy. I could see the joy Mr Brown must have had all those years ago. It was the look of wonder. A moment of enlightenment as one small mystery of the universe was revealed. That scared the hell out of me. If Tony was capable of experiencing wonder, then he must think. He must feel. He must ponder things. Well, at least bits of moving pollen. I think the world was lucky Tony didn’t make this discovery. Papadopoulosian motion doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
The journey to Tony’s house was a silent affair. We were let out of school early to complete the assignment so Tony had the unusual experience of walking home. His face went red almost immediately and he puffed from the exertion. It was only two blocks. I didn’t mention it, but I now knew his weakness. If Tony ever threatened me again, I’d simply outrun him.
Tony’s house was one enormous concrete brick. It had metal shutters on all the windows to keep burglars out, and the Papadopouloses in. A concrete drive covered the entire front yard. Maybe there was grass there once, but it was now nothing but driveway. Nothing lived there but a solitary cactus in a small pot. It had a bright purple flower, obviously a trick to lure unsuspecting bees to their death. The front yard was secured by a high metal fence with pointy spears on top ready to impale anyone stupid enough not to use the gate.
The inside was filled with antique looking furniture. Everything screamed maximum expense. The lounge was filled with the biggest couch I’d ever seen in my life. Bigger still, was the TV. It was a giant plasma screen more suited to being inside a football stadium than someone’s living room.
Tony’s mother was loud. Actually, everything about her was loud. Her clothes were garish pink and her hair was coated in so much hairspray it looked almost solid, like a permanent fixture. She literally ran to meet Tony and grappled him in a crushing bear hug.
‘My boy,’ she screamed. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’
She clenched his fat cheeks together, forcing him to pout like a baby then stuffed his mouth with a gigantic piece of salami.
‘You must be hungry after your day. Sit. Sit! And who is this?’
She beamed at me as if I was Tony’s best friend she’d been hearing all about but never set eyes on. Her expectation was frightening. I didn’t know what to tell her.
I’m just the kid your son tried to murder, I thought.
Oh, that’s wonderful, she’d say. Do come in and tell me all about it!
Tony looked at me out the corner of his eye. I caught the warning glare and decided to say the bare minimum.
‘We’re doing an assignment,’ I offered.
‘Well, you need energy if you’re going to study!’
Tony’s mother led us to the kitchen. It was a massive installation, designed to produce enough food for a military campaign. She disappeared inside a double door refrigerator so large they could have stuffed me in there behind the milk. Perhaps Tony would stuff me in there after I’d done the assignment for him. His mother appeared back out of the fridge, and promptly laid out a smorgasbord.
Tony ate like a machine. He churned through the cheese and the meat and the pickled vegetables and the olives and the strange little salted fish, leaving dust in his wake. I hadn’t experienced this kind of food before. The smells tugged my body forward. I was eager for salt and sweet. Tony’s mother took my reluctance as politeness and shoved a piece of soft cheese in my mouth.
‘Don’t be shy. You look like you haven’t seen a good meal in years!’
She waited for me to chew, looking on in delight. I let the cheese ooze over my tongue. Usually, something high in fat like this would have sent me into immediate spasms of projectile vomit. Perhaps it was my recent encounters with roast meat and hot chicken rolls, but the cheese went down. Just.
‘It’s good. Thanks,’ I said.
‘Plenty more where that came from,’ she beamed.
She caught Tony motoring his way through half a cured pig and suddenly, quite viciously, slapped him on the hand.
‘Leave some for your friend, boy!’
It was a sudden streak of violence that shook me from my comfort zone. She had me fooled. From her joyful exuberance, I’d taken her for a delightful mother living her life solely to please her family. Sure, along the way she was filling her son’s arteries with chunks of pig fat, but she was doing this out of love. I now saw the other side: she was a woman desperate for admiration.
The house suddenly made sense. The imposing façade, the imported walnut furniture, the gigantic entertainment room, her big hair: everything in the house had the same purpose. It was all to invite envy. Envy of what? I thought. I had no desire to live like that.
Tony sulked silently. He stopped chewing and started breathing hard. His face contorted and his breath quickened. Just as he was about to explode, he pushed the food away and bolted to his room. I was left sitting there with his mother and five kilos of ham.
His mother looked remorseful. I gathered this sort of thing was not unusual in their house. She didn’t go after him or tell him she was sorry, she just quietly went about repacking the fridge.
I thought through my options: leave and fail the assignment; sit with his mother and fail the assignment; or follow Tony to his room, and most probably fail the assignment.
Tony’s room was a cavernous space, more like a converted aircraft hangar than someone’s bedroom. The house seemed to get larger the deeper you went in and Tony’s room was no exception. He sat on his enormous bed staring at the floor. His room was filled with every toy you could imagine. His mother obviously had never thrown anything out. His shelves were testament to his privileged upbringing. I followed his life story on those shelves, from teddy bears to airplane models, to plastic guns to five kinds of gaming consoles.
Tony looked at me with an accusatory eye. I knew if any of this got out, I’d be dead meat. I sat at his desk and started going through the textbook. Tony took a chair beside me and I quietly coached him through two semesters worth of science in under an hour. He was impressed.
‘How do you know all this stuff? I thought you were … you know?’
‘Stupid. Yeah, most people do,’ I said.
He stared at me as if he’d just realised I was human, and not some feral rat he’d brought home by accident.
I was about to leave and had just made it out the front door when a white work van arrived, turning fast into the concrete drive. It pulled up just in front of me. The brakes squealed a little as it came to a halt. Obviously the driver wasn’t used to having a visitor blocking the way.
It was Tony’s father. He was a square man, almost as wide as he was tall. A thick beard masked his intentions. His powerful arms flexed as he slammed the door of the van. A gust of fish and petrol fumes followed him as he moved past. Tony’s father was a fishmonger. He clocked me with a curious eye and questioned Tony who it was who had the gall to stand in his parking spot.
Tony lowered his eyes and I understood his father was just another thug. There’s always a bigger fish, I guess.
I left Tony to his doting mother and his fishmonger father and wondered what their life would be like without all their things. Was that their problem? I wondered. Were they so caught up in having the best of everything that they forgot to say they loved each other? Were their ancestors in the old country happier because they were poor peasants? Or maybe I was just being self-righteous. Who was I to judge these people? They lived their lives differently, according to their own standards. That was all.
Night fell into a moonless abyss. I stirred in my bed against the dark. It was syrupy, the more you peered into it. Shadows overtook the world. The night seemed endless and my head dissolved away. It left my body, headless, in that bed. I wondered what my decapitated remains would look like to an observer, whether there’d be a lot of blood and horrible gore poking out, or if the edge would be clean and b
eautiful, as if my head had just floated away like some kind of helium balloon.
‘She’s coming for you,’ it said.
The dog coalesced from the nothingness. It slunk out of the shadows to appear beside me. I could barely see it in the dark but its eyes shone hotly. It fixed me with a stare that brought with it the red, metallic taste of fear.
‘She wants to be with you,’ said the dog.
It spoke with such a venomous streak I couldn’t bring myself to believe. I knew this creature had a will of its own. It wasn’t there to make my life easier. It didn’t care for me. It didn’t care for anything as far as I could tell. It acted only for itself.
‘You don’t know anything,’ I hissed.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t think she wants you?’
‘Who knows what she wants?’
‘I do,’ it said.
I almost saw it smile. That was impossible. I knew dogs were incapable of smiling. They just didn’t have the facial dexterity to pull it off. They could only bare their teeth, which is never a good sign.
It disappeared back into the shadows to merge with the walls. I peered deeper into the night-time gloom, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever universe the dog had descended into. I stirred from my bed and crossed the room as silently as I could, making only the slightest of creaks on those old floorboards.
The curtain ahead pulsed with movement. That was it, I thought: the portal to the dog’s secret dominion. I pulled back the curtain ready to peer into that deadly nether realm. It would be the kind of place gods had rejected. It would be a universe unseen by the human eye, the only inhabitants either the sinful or the dead. I swept the curtain aside to reveal, instead, a wide vista of intense beauty.
‘Geez! You scared me,’ Eliza whispered.
We were face-to-face, inches from each other through the open window. I helped her inside, our thoughts invisible without light. Instead we relied on our other senses to understand one another. Words limited communication, really. Your body could always tell the deeper truth. She pressed her hands deep into mine. She dropped her forehead to mine. Her breath fell in step with mine. We stayed like that for I don’t know how long. An eternity. A second. Both. I thought of nothing else. I was just there, with her. That is all I wanted to know. Her tears shook me to discomfort. I couldn’t reconcile this with the person I knew. Crying just wasn’t Eliza’s style.
‘You want a cigarette? I could get you one from the lounge,’ I offered.
She sighed in relief, I guess more because I hadn’t asked her what was wrong than the offer of one of my mother’s cigarettes.
‘No. Can I stay here for a while?’
‘Of course. You can stay here forever,’ I said.
I recoiled from my own idiocy. Stay there forever? Who was I kidding?
‘Sorry, that sounded stupid. I didn’t mean it like that,’ I told her.
‘Yeah you did,’ she said. ‘And it’s okay, Monty. I kind of knew that already.’
We hopped into bed and descended under the covers to embrace. We just hugged in the dark, that’s all. I thought of the dog. It was right. Eliza was with me. In my bed. I wanted to tell her how I felt, but I knew that was a waste of time. Words would shatter the moment. They would twist in on themselves and invite mistrust. Better to say nothing, I thought. Best to think nothing. That was seriously difficult though. Me? Think nothing?
The dog told me she wanted to be with me. But I knew it had reasons for telling me this. Perhaps it wanted me to try something? Perhaps that was its plan? It wanted me to ruin things, just as I did with the rose.
We stayed like that, embraced in my bed, for the rest of the night. Nothing happened. I didn’t really want it to, I was just happy to be warm and connected. As the night went on, the strangest thing happened: I slept. We both slept. It was a world of warmth. We were secure, together. We were strong against the night.
Morning broke with the sorrowful cry of a magpie. I woke to find Eliza leaving through the window, disappearing into a halo of sunshine. She looked like some ancient queen surrounded by billowing silk robes as she slipped through those curtains. She turned back to me, I hoped to smile a sweet goodbye, but there was none. Her face was full of sorrow. Our night together had meant nothing to her, I could see. Any connection I felt was entirely one way. I had projected my own hopes and desires onto her. Those feelings were mine, and mine alone.
Mr Rooney droned on about conservation of energy to the class and was suddenly surprised when Tony Papadopoulos put his hand up to answer a question. He couldn’t have been more surprised if a piece of furniture had put its leg up to answer. He looked utterly stunned, as if his entire world-view was suddenly shaken.
‘Yes, Tony?’ he asked tentatively.
‘The total amount of energy in a system remains constant over time,’ Tony said, sounding bored as if the question was so simple it was almost embarrassing for him to ask.
‘Yes, that’s correct Tony,’ Mr Rooney said.
His gaze shifted to me and I caught his delighted smile. He turned back to the board and continued describing the maths. His shoulders lifted and he etched out the equations with renewed vigour. I pictured him running into the teachers’ lounge during lunch. He’d finally done it! he’d exclaim. He had gotten through to his class. Even the thickest of the thick had finally understood his genius. He’d be on a high from this for weeks and would even give up drinking in the storeroom. The simple act of Tony Papadopoulos answering a question would make all the years of ridicule about his pungent breath worthwhile. His choice to become a teacher would be validated. Now he could retire, safe in the knowledge that he was a teacher. A real teacher, just like the ones in the movies that have all those preppy schoolboys hanging on their every word. He had fulfilled his purpose. Now he could rest. I wondered what he’d do next, after having completed his life’s work? Perhaps he’d become one of those motivational speakers, peddling the keys to success, or maybe he’d follow his true passion of fixing up classic cars? Or maybe he’d just continue to be a teacher. After all, you only get a few chances in life.
Tony approached me in the hall. He glanced over his shoulder to check if his friends were around. They weren’t. They must have been outside somewhere, happy with their sheep.
‘You want to come over again after school?’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘If you don’t want to, just say.’
‘I don’t know,’ I told him.
To tell the truth, I really didn’t want to go back there. To me, hanging out with Tony was a one-off. I had done my duty. We had studied together and that was it. I couldn’t bear anything more. I looked at him, wondering if this was some kind of friendship proposal. While I was pondering this, Jordan and Rhys wandered up, thick with the smell of sheep dung.
A crushing weight suddenly rammed against my ribs and I spiralled to the floor. Tony stood over me, asserting the natural order of all things. I guess he took my hesitation for rejection, and this was his reaction. Fair enough, I thought. I didn’t blame him.
Eliza hung out behind the sports shed at lunch, smoking cigarettes with all the other girls. Becky and Pippa were among the hangers-on, giggling as if they were all the best of friends. But the body language told another story. If you took the time to look, you could see the invisible daggers being thrown.
I watched. I kept my distance, not daring to be discovered. Only Eliza sensed I was there: her cat-like senses always on high alert. As I passed by she turned her back to me, making sure she avoided looking my way.
It was a blow more crushing than anything Tony could dish out. His punches were lightweight compared to this. The wind was squeezed out of me and my head quietly imploded.
‘Walk up to her,’ said the dog.
‘I can’t. The others are there.’
‘Don’t worry about them. Look at how far you’v
e come,’ it said.
The dog was right. I had made great progress. Still, it was a risk. Could I really just walk up to Eliza and say hi? Could I be that brazen? Maybe I could. Maybe I had the right? After all, she came to me. I should feel entitled to something, I guess.
‘Do it now,’ said the dog.
‘I’m too weak. I can’t,’ I told it.
‘You can and you will!’
Teeth suddenly flashed towards me. The bite was sudden and painful. The thing held me in its grip and ripped sideways, shaking its head viciously as if I were some easy meal. My arm flung out sideways with the attack. My shirt tore open. Blood splattered down my front. I yelled out in sudden pain.
I found myself lying prone on the ground, holding my torn arm, looking up into the bright sun. Eliza, Becky, Pippa, and the rest of their gang, stared down at me silently. Becky shot Pippa a knowing glance that seemed to infect the group like a virus.
‘What are you doing here, Monty? Spying?’ asked Becky.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just fell over.’
‘Looking for someone then,’ she asked. ‘Who? One of us?’
All eyes darted towards Eliza. Giggles rose then descended into the muffled sounds of derision. It was happening. I was destroying Eliza, right before my eyes.
I ran, holding my bleeding arm. As I left, I looked back and saw the torn sleeve of my shirt stuck to a cyclone wire fence. I realised there was no bite. There was no attack at all. I had merely caught my arm on the fence, the rusted wire the dog’s teeth. Doubt surged through me.
*
I found Eliza later by the art rooms. She was busy tipping out some large buckets of papier-mâché into the long stainless steel tub outside.
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