I fit the aluminium arrow to the bowstring, draw back and aim. Then it’s gone, glinting once, before burying itself deep into the hay. The thwack of the string echoes flat in my head.
‘Nice,’ Evan says.
The arrow has hit close to the centre, which I call the bullseye, but Evan doesn’t, because he knows the rules of archery. Not that either of us could give a stuff, but anyway.
‘She’s got a little sister,’ he adds. ‘Saw ’em walkin’.’
One reason why me and Evan are friends is that I always know what he’s talking about, even if he comes back to something two days later. We have this understanding. I fit another arrow, a target arrow with a point like a pencil and plastic feathers for accuracy. Evan also has hunting arrows, with big V-shaped broadheads, for cutting bone and flesh. And a proper, compact, camouflaged hunting bow.
‘Ought to take a look.’ I aim and shoot. Not bad.
‘Could do.’ Evan nods.
We go to the target.
‘Saw their mother,’ he says.
‘What’s she like?’ We collect the arrows and walk back to the old table. Evan picks up the bow.
‘Zombie.’ He fits an arrow and draws back, his voice pressurised as he sights. ‘Stoned, maybe. Something, anyhow.’
‘Ah, well,’ I say, waiting.
Evan releases and it’s almost a perfect shot. The arrow slots into the centre black ring like a key in a lock. I hand him another.
‘They’re doing it tough,’ he adds.
I’d say Evan’s right, because Evan’s not often wrong. A reliable witness, as they say.
‘A cool girl, though,’ I say. ‘A cool girl.’
We walk down Raleigh Road to check out Ariel’s house. I know the place – it’s had a For Sale sign on it for so long the writing’s faded, making it even less believable that you’re looking at a welcoming family home. It’s nothing but a sick little grey shack, brick cladding peeling off the corners, and downpipes hanging like busted legs. In the driveway an old Holden station wagon kneels over a flat front tyre, a rusty hubcap next to it like a begging bowl.
‘Ah,’ Evan says. ‘Yeah.’
We keep walking, because it’s kind of embarrassing to look at a house so bad you know the people living in it are in deep shit.
‘I think so,’ I add.
Ahead of us a guy is pushing an old pram and putting catalogues into letterboxes. He’s not looking at us because he knows it’s not a great job for an adult to be doing. But I get it – when you need money, bro, you need money.
There’s no point walking further so we turn, the back of Sky Point across the reserve rising like a concrete cliff.
‘Not great,’ Evan says, as we pass the little house again.
I have to agree. The place hunches over its ugliness like a spider protecting its eggs. The roof sags, there’s a fishpond choked with grass and an old chrome decoration on the front door that’s supposed to be fancy but now looks like the sign of the devil. I hate to say it, but the whole place is stuffed.
Bulldoze it.
Evan’s mum, Mrs Batlow, is a lot different to most of the mums around here, mine included. She’s part Sri Lankan and she kind of floats around the house like a princess, her hands out like a dancer. She wears long earrings, long dresses and slim-fit shirts, whereas my mum just wears jeans and hoodies.
In fact, my whole family just wears jeans and hoodies. In fact, just about the whole freakin’ suburb does, making me wish I had invented them, because they’re never going out of style in Templeton. And they get free advertising on Crimestoppers, too, because every armed robber in Victoria wears one.
‘Going in the lounge,’ Evan tells his mum, and we leave the kitchen, carrying hot chocolates and biscuits.
I also don’t get how Evan’s house is so neat and the furniture so good. When Evan’s dad left I thought, there goes the dough. But the couch is leather, or something as good as, and the cushions are silk. It’s like Mrs Batlow can find stuff in the shops that is invisible to everyone else. Man, most of the furniture at our place is that old heavy pine shit that’s ugly, but actually pretty comfortable.
Mrs Bat doesn’t seem to miss Evan’s dad, Ray, too much, although he seemed okay to me. He was small and funny, and always wore his Oakley sunglasses on top of his head. But obviously he must’ve been a bit of a prick, because he took off with some big blonde chick who lived three blocks away. Evan doesn’t talk about it, and I don’t ask, because he isn’t the kind of guy you ask anything much at all.
‘Never seen the sea.’ Evan points the remote at the screen. ‘Amazing.’
It is amazing. I picture Ariel – and boom goes my heart.
‘Yeah, it is.’ I laugh, and put my mug on a magazine on the coffee table. ‘Unlike us surf cats.’ Now that I’ve seen her house, I can believe that beach holidays and world travel probably aren’t a family priority. ‘We could take her.’
‘Could.’ Evan watches TV like he watches everything else – with few words. If he does comment, it’s like he’s been thinking about it for an hour. ‘Remember that Anglesea camp? We could go there.’
Last year Evan and me were sent on a summer camp. It was our parents’ idea and not a good one. This camp was at the beach; we slept in huts, and had a leader called Linda. She didn’t get it that Evan and me didn’t need ordering around – that we did our own thing in our own way, because we are the boys from the west. Instead of cutting us a bit of slack, she jumped on us at every opportunity. This was not helpful.
Then when Evan whacked this guy at the beach for flicking his hat off, Linda thought we were thugs and everything went pear-shaped. The male leaders stepped in, forcing us to fight fire with fire because we’re like the mighty fighting Western Bulldogs, and forgiving and forgetting are not our strong points. They took us out on fifteen-k night-hikes and tried out a couple of full-contact basketball matches – but just like in the movies, they could not break our spirits!
‘Camp Chaos and Linda,’ I say. ‘We won.’
Evan smiles at our victory of toughness over dumbness, of right over wrong, of poor over rich.
‘Yep. She didn’t like the boys from Temple-town.’
‘She did not.’ I remember her straight streaky blonde hair, smooth tanned legs and big shoulders. She was a state swimmer, evidently. ‘I could’ve liked her,’ I add. ‘If she’d have just backed off a bit.’
By backing off I mean given us some respect. By respect I mean simply staying out of our faces. Then everything would have been fine. We would’ve been on her side. Man, that sort of thing just makes sense – even dogs know it. But Linda didn’t know it, and instead of making friends, she made enemies.
Bad move.
We have long memories around here.
I walk home from Evan’s, watching the cars. Templeton is a Commodore suburb. Of course, there are other cars, but in Tempy, Commodores rule. There’s everything from old VLs right through to tricked-up V8 utes and SSVs. My brother Slate’s got a white sedan. It’s older but nice and clean, with a good set of mags and Yokohama tyres. Of course, it freakin’ goes, with a note to it like an angry lion.
Slate’s years older than me and about twice as big. He’s got these huge arms, square shoulders and a height to him that’s just daunting. He’s funny, though, if he wants to be – he’ll pick my mum Jude up when she’s cooking and just carry her off into another room. He also likes crushing the wind out of the old man, because Bobby-boy thinks he’s still pretty strong. But hey, compared to Slate, he isn’t in the race.
Then Slate’ll go quiet, as if he’s running some long problem through his mind like a computer and not finding any answer. He was smart enough at school, but he let it slide. Now he just works at Arcon pipe factory.
‘The writing was on the wall,’ he told me once. ‘But I didn’t see it. So you make sure you join the bloody dots.’
‘What dots?’ I asked.
‘The invisible ones,’ he said, and walked off, leaving
me as confused as ever.
Slate’s saving to buy a house, but he split up with Naomi, who he’d been going out with for two years. No reason given, but that’s Slate all over. My guess is he sacked her not because he was sick of her, but because he was sick of himself. Dropping her sure didn’t make him any happier, and now he’s on his own.
I turn into our house. Yeah, I get that it’s no mansion, but we don’t fight that much, which counts.
‘We’re lucky,’ Mum says. ‘You’ve just got to look around.’
She’s right and wrong about that, I reckon. It all just depends on how freakin’ far you want to look. But it is all right here, despite what Slate thinks. Especially when I see a house like Ariel’s down there at the wrong end of Raleigh Road.
That’s a whole world of pain right there.
I don’t know what to think about school. My folks and Slate tell me to stay there because they don’t want me doing the kind of jobs they do. And I can see their point.
Bobby-boy is a plasterer and it’s knocked him around heaps. On a cold morning he can hardly move. It’s boring and hard, too. I’ve done it, helping him hang those massive sheets that smell like dullness. He manages to get a laugh from it, but he doesn’t really like it.
‘Keep yer head down,’ he says. ‘Eye on the ball, boys, that’s the story.’
‘And watch those pipes,’ says Slate. ‘Or they’ll roll right over you.’
Slate hates making pipes. He’s like a supercharged V8 caught in the traffic. He can’t use his speed or power to get out. And it’s double bad, I reckon, because he knows it’s pretty much his own fault. After Tempy Secondary he didn’t study anything, just took the gig at Arcon because it was the only thing going, and still is. Not many jobs out in the west. Not good ones, anyhow.
Trouble is, like a few blokes around here, the only thing he might do now is just get more tatts, and get tougher and nastier until no one can even look at him. Mum’s worried, but she can’t say anything because Slate won’t listen. He’s got to find his own way, she told me. One day it’ll just click.
I hope so.
Jude liked her job. She worked in the Gateway Garden Centre until it went broke. She still buys garden magazines and watches backyard makeover shows. We’ve actually got a garden, which is more than I can say for most of the houses round here. Mum planned it and got us guys to help. I still look at the rock wall Slate and me built. Not bad for a couple of amateurs, even if I say so myself! Speaking of Jude and gardening – I’ve developed this wonderful theory that it’s easier to see the direction that other people should go in instead of your own. Me, I don’t have a direction. I don’t even have a compass. Perhaps I might find one over at Sky Point?
You never know.
After school I head over to Knifepoint to see if Ariel’s in the surf shop. I didn’t tell Evan everything about her. I certainly didn’t tell him that I got that deep-down, time-stands-still, I-like-your-face-more-and-more feeling that spells out that something real is going on. I mean, Evan and me are cool, but there are some things you can’t even tell your mates.
It feels weird to be in Sky Point on a Tuesday. The vibe is wrong and I can’t relax. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are pretty much the only days I go there – unless it’s school holidays. In school holidays mall time runs 24/7, smoothing out every sight and sound until you don’t even hear the music. It’s life in a bubble, baby, everyone just floating along. And they say smoking weed is bad for you!
I take the long way round to the surf shop, giving myself time to work out how I’m going to approach this. Keep it simple, I reckon. Either Ariel will want to talk to me or she won’t. But I want to talk to her, that’s a definite.
I want to hear what she says and thinks. I want to look at her face and see into her eyes, because she’s smart, she’s cool, she dresses fresh – and she’s living in a shitbox house. And normally those things don’t add up. Or not to an even number, anyhow.
I walk through Kealoah. It’s a big shop, designed to make you think you’re a surf-type of person, even if you’re not. Of course, it’s a con, but it sort of means well – as though you are part of it, even if your name is Ryan Lanyon, and you’ve never been on a surfboard in all your freakin’ life.
‘Hey,’ I say to Josh, who’s working on a laptop at the counter. He wears bracelets, some coloured, some made of leather, dark and waterworn, as if they’re from another life. ‘How’s it goin’?’
‘Great.’ He stops tapping keys, but his eyes stay on the screen. ‘What’s up?’
I dive straight in. ‘Could you tell me if Ariel’s around today?’
He looks through the glass doors and out into the mall. ‘She’s on her break, bro. Out there somewhere.’ He drops his gaze back to the laptop. ‘Should be back in about fifteen.’
I say thanks and walk out, heading for the food court where most shop people take their breaks. I actually hate the food court. The place stinks, it’s messy, it’s plastic, and the noise gives me a headache. People just sit there chewing like cows, staring into space. It’s a disgrace.
I flash through, before heading for Brew Italia, where I draw another blank. Then I just wander, suddenly seeing her sitting on a blue plastic seat outside the pet shop. She’s just watching the escalators doing their thing, holding a bottle of water, looking laid-back in jeans, a check shirt and a mauve ski vest. I go and sit next to her, just like that.
‘Hey, Ariel,’ I say, thinking she smells soapy – clean and flowery. ‘Ryan, remember? I saw you on Sunday. I went lookin’ for you in Kealoah. Josh said you might be out here. How are you goin’? I haven’t seen you around before.’
She looks at me, doesn’t move the water bottle away from her lips, the twittering from the pet shop adding a certain nutty level to the conversation. I can see baby rabbits in the window, a hay bale in a red wheelbarrow, and a black mouse on a little plastic house.
‘I’m from the country,’ she says. ‘We just moved here. I live somewhere over there.’ She waves the bottle in a circle, as if she doesn’t know where she lives. Or care. ‘Out there.’
I nod. ‘I know. You live down the same road as my mate, Evan. I saw you walking home.’
She looks at me, her skin so smooth all I can think of is brown eggs. Her eyes are green and gold and clear and bright, but they don’t show what she’s thinking, except that perhaps she’s running through her options of closing me down.
‘So what don’t you know?’
‘Everything,’ I say. ‘Which is why I came looking for you.’
And that is what I call putting your cards on the table.
Ariel’s a sharp girl who doesn’t smile. It’s almost like she expected me to turn up, sit down and say what I’m saying, even if she doesn’t seem that interested. I’m sure what she tells me is true, but it’s like she’s reading from a book.
‘I don’t mind it,’ she says, when I ask if she likes working in Kealoah. ‘I don’t have to think and I don’t have to care.’
I hit the anchors right there. One of my great observations of the working world is that not thinking and not caring about what you do is what makes work crap. You don’t care, it don’t care and you turn into one unhappy pipe wrangler like Slate. I must say it’s true that it would be difficult to give a stuff about concrete pipes, I’m on his wavelength there. Or plasterboard. At least my mum liked plants. She cares about them a lot!
‘A pity you don’t like it,’ I say.
She looks at me like I’ve almost, but not quite, guessed the password.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re smart.’ I can tell she’s smart – she’s got a smart face, smart eyes and a smart voice. Even her hands are on the alert. ‘Why don’t you wanna think?’ I look around the shopping centre. The glass ceiling is high over us like we’re insects in a jar. ‘You gotta out-think this place. Otherwise it’ll do your head in. That’s how it works.’
‘I don’t want to think.’ She turns away. ‘I’ve got
too much to think about as it is.’
Smack. It’s like an overhand right from Muhammad Ali.
‘Fair enough,’ I say, and stand. ‘Sometimes you gotta let things slide. Too much can be too much.’
She looks at me differently, as if it occurs to her that I may be okay, that she may have overreacted.
‘Is this a dangerous area?’ She draws another little air circle with her bottle. ‘Like, the suburb?’
Dangerous? I picture her walking along the back of Knifepoint, among the bushes, at dusk. I think of the kid who was buried under the powerlines out on the open ground. And there are those rumours of the Night Stalker out stalking behind the houses, in the dark.
‘Can be,’ I say. ‘If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I imagine Templeton from above, a grid of lights in between two freeways. ‘You have to think about where you go and when. But it’s all right. Most of the time.’
‘I saw you the other night,’ she says. ‘Walking your dog. The big black one.’
I saw you, too, I want to say, but I don’t. Instead I let the proud feeling of having Dee Dee swirl to the surface. It’s funny, but I think Ariel and me are getting somewhere, although I have no idea where.
‘Yeah, she’s a Doberman.’ Dobermans were used as war dogs. They still are in America. ‘You got a dog?’ I doubt it; I would have seen it the other day, or heard it.
‘I had one.’ She sips water. ‘It died.’
‘Bad news,’ I say, knowing I can remember every dog we’ve ever had – Dingo, Rusty, Jedda – all buried in the backyard, even if the crosses got lost. ‘Dogs are cool,’ I add. ‘Cooler than a hell of a lot of people.’
She appears to think about that, but not for long. ‘I’d better go.’ There’s something flat in her voice. It seems to come from a long way down. She stands, not as tall as me. ‘Duty calls.’
I want to tell her I like her clothes, that she looks cool and kind of unusual. And that I can’t stop looking at her, even if she seems unhappy. But I don’t go there.
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