by J. C. Burke
My hands ripped apart the canopy of leaves and underneath, spread-eagled on the ground, was a slab of wet, matted fur. It was too big for a kitten but not yet a full-grown cat. Around its neck was a red collar and two silver bells.
I cupped my hands carefully under its body and lifted it up for a closer look. It was Princess Anne, Mrs Fryes’s new cat. Her head was soft and squashed like an apple that’d been in a schoolbag too long. Her tiny chest puffed up and down so fast it was impossible to count her breaths. But the worst was her stare, the way she looked at me: her eyes all pleading and begging, like there was something I could do. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered. My fingertips brushed across the soft pink skin of her tummy. ‘I can’t help you, little one.’ But I knew I could.
Gently, I placed her back on the ground. ‘If I leave you here like this the birds will come and peck at you, Princess Anne,’ I said, as if hearing the words could absolve me from what I was about to do.
I remember the sobs shaking my ribs as I searched for a rock big enough to finish the job the Marshall brothers hadn’t.
By the time I pushed my bike through the bush and back onto the road, the sun was sliding away and the mosquitoes were feasting on my damp ankles.
I had this feeling. I’d felt it before but I couldn’t give it a name. Actually say what it was. But it started in my fingers. A tingling at the very tips that slowly worked its way up my hands until it was like a tic I couldn’t control, and with it came the urge to wrap my hands around something and squeeze it until it couldn’t be squeezed any more.
That was the day I bought an exercise book and wrote my first list of names. Before I knew it, everything – every rotten feeling – had pooled inside the hand that held the pen. Forming each stroke of each letter, feeling the nib pressing into the paper, seeing their four names before me, lined up one on top of the other, was something I hadn’t expected to feel so good. Today, though, it won’t be enough.
The old girl’s back in bed. She didn’t hear me come home or take a shower. I stand at the bedroom door timing her snores. They’re four seconds in and four seconds out. She sleeps easier when she thinks I’m not here.
I was about eight years old when I started counting Mum’s breath. It was after my father left. ‘Ya goin’ to kill me,’ she’d say. ‘Ya goin’ to be the death of me. One day, son, ya goin’ wake up and find me dead.’
So as long as there was something to count, I figured she was still alive.
When Mum’s boyfriend Archie moved in, her misery and my counting stopped. But the minute he left it was back on, worse than ever.
For a while I lean into the doorway, watching the corners of her pillowcase quiver with each breath. I wonder what she dreams about. I wonder what she’d say to me if I told her what’s just happened.
A fly buzzes past. It circles the room a few times and Mum begins to snuffle at the air, so I creep away.
When Mum finally shuffles out of her room she looks surprised to see me. I tell her I have free study periods this afternoon.
‘Ya smell good.’ She sniffs me. ‘Don’t tell me ya gone and washed ya hair? That’s a first.’
My hand goes to touch my head but I’m so wound up I can hardly move.
There’s a mountain of old mail piled up on the kitchen table. For some reason I’m sorting through it, probably to keep my hands busy. My fingers have to hold the paper tight so I can hide their trembling. If I can keep calm she won’t sniff the trouble.
There are still unopened letters from twelve months ago.
‘Ya father haven’t sent ya no birthday card if that’s what ya afta.’ The old girl’s always brutal with the truth. ‘Wouldn’t matter a rat’s arse to him if you were turnin’ eighteen or twenty-one. All he’d be worryin’ about is me trackin’ him down and squeezin’ money outta him.’
It occurs to me that I could pretend that’s what I’m looking for. But instead I shrug and say, ‘I’m just tidying up.’
The letter to renew my gun licence is in the pile. I pick it up, my focus locked on the word ‘firearms’.
‘What’s that?’ Mum asks, snatching the letter from me. ‘Police department?’
But I can’t speak because what I’ve instructed myself not to think of is rising up in my head like a monster from the lake.
‘Hey son?’
I can’t block it out. Especially not his eyes.
‘It’s about my firearms licence.’ I hear the words catching in my throat. ‘My minor’s one expires today ’cause I’m eighteen.’
‘So?’ Mum passes it back to me. She’s leaning forward in the chair, looking at me. ‘What do ya need a firearms licence for? Ya haven’t gone shootin’ in years. Ya hate huntin’, ya hated that rifle club and don’t get me going on the …’
She’s about to bring up the Year 10 camp when a knock at the door comes. My guts tighten at the sound. We don’t get visitors.
‘G’on and answer it, son.’
My legs feel like jelly, all soft and wobbly and I can’t seem to get a grip on the floor. I stand there a second too long.
‘Open it!’ Mum screeches. ‘Don’t have ’em waitin’.’
I peer around the door but it’s just a courier holding my expulsion letter. He asks me to sign a form. My eyes flick over the road and along the street. All is quiet. After Mum reads the letter she gets me to pour her a bourbon and Coke.
‘A strong’un,’ she barks. ‘And don’t go spilling any on me new carpet!’
The paper rustles as she fans her face with the letter. ‘They can’t kick ya out before ya finals. That’s bloody not on. They complain about ya writing now, they complain about it when ya got finalist in that competition. They don’t know what the hell to do with ya talent. That’s what the problem is.’
Quickly, I take a swig from the bourbon bottle, hoping it’ll settle my guts or stop the shaking. It was no one important at the door. We’re fine for now.
‘It says ’ere I can go and have an appointment with Mr Pascoe. I can afford a lawyer, ya know. A real good’un. Bet he didn’t think ’bout that.’
‘I’m not going back to the school.’
‘Ya got your final exams, Damon!’ she shouts.
‘I’m not going back.’
‘What’s “menacing behaviour” meant to mean anyway? And this protecshun crap for students and staff?’ Mum says, handing me the letter.
I pretend to read it. My eyes flick and scan across the page, then I let it drop to the table.
‘Pascoe, he gone and said it’d be a fresh start after Year 10,’ she whines.
‘Well, Pascoe’s a fucking liar,’ I hiss.
But Mum’s on a rant and doesn’t notice. ‘We stuck to our part of the deal. Ya did the counselling, everythin’. You name it, we done it. That Year 10 camp nearly bloody killed me. It cost me, it cost me Archie …’ His name wheezes up her throat. Whenever she gets sidetracked on the topic of Archie you know an attack’s coming. She’ll holler for her Ventolin. She’ll go back to telling me I nearly killed her. She’ll bury her arm deep into that bag and show me every bit of heartache she’s ever had. Never once thinking that maybe I miss him too.
Mum met Archie through her hairdresser, Pat. He’d been Pat’s brother’s best man and dropped in for a visit on his way back from a hunting trip up north. A couple of weeks later he was still in Strathven and moving into our place. It was good. He made the old girl happy. Archie brought along laughs and decent meals and also his gun collection.
Hunting and guns. It all bored me but Archie was obsessed. I soon learnt that the only way to have real time with him was if I pretended to like them too. Relentlessly I’d bug him to take me away on hunting weekends. Sitting around the camp fire, staring at the flames till my eyes watered, drinking sweet tea and listening to Archie’s stories were the best times and I couldn’t get enough of them. But then he’d wake me before sun-up and that’s when things would go wrong.
As far as a hunter went, I was useless. I didn’t
have it in me to shoot an animal. Not that I told Archie, but every time I cocked the rifle all I could see was the cat spread-eagled by the riverbank staring me in the face. Eventually Archie told me he thought it was best that I stopped joining him on his trips.
The weekends Archie wasn’t hunting I’d sit by my bedroom window waiting to see him stride past the clothesline and into the garage. In a flash I’d be out there, offering to help him clean his guns. It was nowhere near as good as camping but it was better than nothing.
We’d play a game where we made up stories about the people who’d owned the guns before him, what they were like and where they were from. If Archie got out all his guns the game could take all afternoon.
There were antiques in his collection. One was a single-shot pistol with a brass trigger that he’d polish with his spit and a blue cloth.
‘I’ll never know why the gun maker didn’t put his signature on this,’ Archie’d say, when he’d put the pistol back in its box. ‘It’s a beauty, Damon. Look at it. Feel it.’
It scared me. All guns did. But lightly, so I was hardly touching it, I’d run my fingers along the barrel and then smile and nod. That was enough for Archie. He never said he thought I was a sissy. He’d just smile back at me and go on with the story.
Archie also had a Smith & Wesson that looked like it came straight out of the cowboy days. He reckoned it belonged to a card player from the Wild West.
The best was his Remington army revolver from the 1860s. According to Archie it was used in the American Civil War and perhaps even in the Battle of Gettysburg, which claimed the largest number of casualties.
The owner’s name was inscribed on a brass plate. ‘John Cannon. One Country. One Flag.’
Archie would tell me stories about the Civil War. We’d try to imagine what sort of a man John Cannon was and what went through his mind when he held the revolver. That gun gave me the best times with Archie and the worst too.
‘John Cannon was a brave soldier, that’s for sure.’ I remember hearing the spit catch in Archie’s throat when he swallowed. ‘He would’ve been fighting for what he believed in, Damon. Fighting for his land, his freedom, his womenfolk …’ It must’ve been that last bit that lodged itself in my brain because almost two years later, on the morning of the Year 10 camp, Archie’s words were screaming in my face.
But camp didn’t turn out the way I planned. I wanted to come out as a hero but Andrew Parker took the title from me.
Bridie Tebble had class and she was pretty. Not hot – pretty. Like the kind of girl you’d dream of taking to your formal. She was nice too. She never once called me ‘Damoink’, not like the other bitches that swarmed around her.
But that was because Bridie and I had a special bond. We were the best English students in the year. Every day she travelled from Mereton because the English department was reputedly better here at Strathven High.
Bridie was the only one I bothered with. The others were losers, thinking they were gifted because they were in the same English class as me. They never averaged more than twelve out of twenty on their assessments.
Bridie averaged about a fifteen and I usually got between eighteen-and-a-half and twenty.
When our assignments were handed back, Bridie would lean in close to me, peering over my shoulder to see how I did. She was tall and as she spoke her breath warmed the curve between my neck and shoulder. ‘Right Damon,’ she’d say. ‘This is war.’ I never answered. I couldn’t even move. Instead, I’d stand there willing her lips to part so I could feel her warm breath again.
Year 10 was my first attempt at the state writing competition. After lots of coaxing, Mrs Finch got Bridie to enter as well. So Bridie and I spent one lunchtime and one afternoon a week in Mrs Finch’s room planning our work. Sometimes Mrs Finch would only show for the last fifteen minutes. I had all that time alone with Bridie and we became tight.
Bridie was always dying to read each new instalment of her story. It was a piece of melodramatic crap about a sixteen-year-old girl who is raped at a school camp then tries to drown herself.
‘What do you think?’ she’d ask. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Keep reading,’ I’d reply just so I could watch her mouth and the smooth skin across her neck.
One afternoon when it was just Bridie and me, I asked if her story was based on real-life experience. Not that I cared or was interested. It was a test. I wanted to find out if she had any secrets and if she did, would she trust me with them?
I waited, my breath held tight in case one sound would make her change her mind. But when Bridie’s eyes flicked over to the classroom door I knew that she’d passed the test.
Bit by bit, between picking her fingernails and twisting her golden ponytail, Bridie told me how last year, on the Year 9 camp, one of the instructors had got hot for her. He sat next to her for every meal, used her legs for the bandaging lesson and during some nights Bridie swore she saw him wandering around outside her cabin.
For me the Year 9 camp was a total blank – except when Darren Geraghty and Andrew Parker tied Moe to a kayak and pushed it out to the middle of the river because they thought it was time the ‘towel-head’ learnt to swim. I had to dive in and bring him back. It was July and the water temperature sat in the single digits.
Bridie explained that it was after camp, away from everyone’s view, that the instructor started getting really dirty.
He added her on Facebook and posted sleazy comments and rated her and sent her gifts like a g-string and lipstick.
‘I bet you he’s still there, that instructor,’ Bridie told me. ‘I’m trying to think of an excuse to get out of camp but I know my mother will make me go. You’re the first person I’ve told. I’m so scared, Damon. But you can’t ever tell. Promise.’
Was it because of the way she’d said my name? Was it because she’d confided in me? Because from that instant I knew that I was the one to protect her. She had chosen me.
On the morning of the Year 10 camp, while the mattress in Mum and Archie’s room squeaked and moaned, I took the key to Archie’s gun cabinet, smuggled out John Cannon’s Remington revolver and began to plan.
As soon as we got to camp and were assigned our rooms, I went into the bush and marked a spot that had a clear view to Bridie’s cabin.
The first two nights, I took the revolver and my sleeping bag out there and sat up watching, never once taking my eyes off my charge, while inside my mind I would rehearse the plan. The second I spied Bridie’s stalker snooping around her cabin, I’d be up behind him, the revolver nudged into the small of his back.
By the last day, I was getting impatient. Bridie hadn’t noticed me. I don’t mean noticed me in the bush, keeping guard, I mean noticed me at all. She hadn’t even looked my way, not even when the dirty prick made her partner him in one of the ‘trust’ games.
But maybe that was because she knew I was watching for both of us. All that day I reminded myself that I was the one she had chosen to keep her secret. Me. No one else.
That night the conditions were perfect for our stalker. Everyone was tired. The novelty of pathetic knock and run games and sneaking into each other’s cabins had run out of puff. By midnight the only sounds were the night animals and the rushing river. If the instructor had half a brain, he’d know that tonight was the safest night to try it on with Bridie.
I would be there, ready and waiting.
Archie’s revolver was tucked into the top of my undies. But the pistol was heavy and dragged on the elastic around my waist. It felt like at any second it could drop through the leg of my trackie daks and onto the ground. So I shoved it in my pocket and kept my hand tightly over it.
A strip of concrete marked out my new patrol. Nine long strides covered the length of the cabin Bridie slept in. That took me past the first window, the door, the second window, and the ninth step gave me the all-important view along the side of the cabin. After that last step, I’d click my heels together and, keeping my hand firmly on my pock
et, spin around and begin the nine strides back.
It must’ve put me in some kind of trance because I didn’t hear Darren Geraghty and Andrew Parker sneak out of the bush. Not until it was too late and Parker had me around the neck while Geraghty twisted my hands behind my back. Between the tangle of elbows and arms, I saw Bridie step out of the door.
I wanted to call to her but Parker’s fingers were squeezing my throat. The only sound was him yelling, ‘What are you up to, Damoink? You’re a big perve.’
Bridie stood there, staring. Her eyes were wide and glassy and all I could see was that fucking cat, looking at me just like she was now except this time I was the one she was afraid of.
I pulled in my guts and, with all the strength I could find, I ripped myself out of Parker’s grip. The revolver dropped out of my pocket, bounced along the concrete and skidded towards Bridie’s feet.
Bridie started screaming.
It was like slow motion: we stood there frozen, staring at the gun spinning around in circles by Bridie’s pink slippers.
‘Don’t touch it,’ yelled Geraghty, like he was some hero in a B-grade movie. ‘Get inside, Bridie. Get inside!’
Bridie didn’t move.
I waited for her to reach out her hand and take a step towards me. But she didn’t.
Instead, her hands gripped the doorway like it was all she had to stop herself from falling. ‘You’re a – a freak, Damon.’ She heaved each word as though the hate she felt burned her throat. ‘A. Total. Psycho!’
The faces of the other girls in the cabin peered out from behind her. ‘Psycho! Psycho!’ they whispered.
‘No! No, Bridie,’ I started. ‘I wanted to, I wanted to …’
Torch-bearing teachers, camp instructors and students were walking towards us like a pack of rednecks from the hills. They kept coming and coming, ready to lynch me.
‘We got him!’ Geraghty called as he took my arm and twisted it behind my back. ‘It’s Damon Styles.’
Andrew Parker picked up Archie’s revolver, then pasted his body against me. I could feel the tip of the revolver pressed against my groin. ‘I should blow your balls to pieces,’ he spat. ‘They’d probably give me a medal.’