ELTON’S NIGHTLY mission had started exceptionally well.
‘You can actually taste stuff on the net!’ he informed Jess.
‘You what?’
‘Taste stuff. Scientists have created a Digital State Interface so you can taste food on the internet.’
‘Taste digital food …’
‘Yes! Soon you’ll be able to share meals electronically. And they’re working on a digital lollipop that won’t rot your teeth.’
Elton and Jess had started skyping. At a predetermined hour, both faced off to their computers and conversed. Elton always dressed formally whereas Jess perched on her bed in T-shirt and underwear. Their computer screens were back-to-back with just the party wall between them. It’s a virtual window, Jess had declared, and Elton replied, How’s that! Your signal goes to a satellite and ends up right back here on my side.
‘Elton. The taste thing. It isn’t real, you know.’
‘Are you kidding? Of course it is.’
Jess rolled her eyes and stuck her thumb over the computer’s eye. It was a way of dissing him.
‘It’s cyberspace, Elton. Why don’t you just like it without pretending it’s real?’
Elton flushed.
‘Who says it isn’t real? Is music real? Is my Atreyu CD real?’
‘I can hold it my hand, Elton.’
‘The music, I mean; the music on it. You saying that’s not real because it’s digital? You think all the people are going crazy over some random thing that doesn’t exist?’
Jess sighed. ‘Like I said, Ello, most of the stuff we think is real, doesn’t exist. It’s just in our heads. It’s all bullshit, to take your mind off the fact that nothing means anything and no one cares. We invent all this stuff: music and video and all the laws and principles. Don’t you get it?’
‘Fuck you’re morbid sometimes. Tell me what’s real then?’
‘Not much.’ She paused for a second and averted her eyes. ‘Pain; pain is real.’ Involuntarily she touched her forearm. She had decided long ago that the reason for tattoos was for the ritual, to experience the violation of flesh; the subsequent design merely bore witness to the primary reality of pain, though that basic truth went right over the heads of most people who just wanted the ‘look’. They chose to be decorated with a bird or butterfly or Chinese characters, just as businessmen chose their ties, believing themselves to be individual but, in reality, they’d never conceived an original thought in their fucking lives.
She had not come to any of these conclusions lightly. During the dark times when the blood had flowed, she’d kept a diary, as most girls her age did. But while others obsessed about their fantasies and objects of desire, Jess wrote about reliability – that is, what it is and what it isn’t – trying to fix in her mind some grounding system equivalent to the hook that stops fighter-planes from overshooting the deck of aircraft carriers. Blood and pain did it perfectly, pulling everything up with an emphatic jolt.
But if pain is real, pleasure is too, the well-meaning psychs had imperiously tossed back at her. But Jess did not respond, preferring instead to fix her eyes on some infinite point beyond the therapist’s grey carpet. No point arguing with adults twice her age who were paid to deliver the conventional wisdom that she herself could easily source from the internet. No point trying to explain that pleasure, in all its vague forms, was just a kind of loose encouragement and had none of pain’s resounding certainty. Pleasure promises, pain delivers, Jess could have said, but why bother?
She was drawn back to the present by Elton’s animated visage on her computer screen; he had clearly thought of something to add.
‘I’m looking at you, Jess, that’s real.’
‘No it’s not. You’re not looking at me. Don’t you see?’
Focussed as he was, Elton did not notice his mother standing in the doorway behind him, her arms folded, leaning against the architrave. She studied her son’s shock of carefully disarranged hair. How could he act like this now, how could he dismiss the recent events so easily?
‘Your uncle is dead,’ she said flatly and Elton turned. ‘And your aunty is as well. Both burnt to death in a bushfire. That’s reality.’ She moved away and Elton slipped from the chair onto his bed. He fell back on the pillow and placed his forearm across his face. Fucking world. Always there to screw up your life, to ruin things, to cause misery and every other kind of horrible complication. No wonder Jess cut herself.
WHEN ADELE opened her front door, the boy was standing on the footpath holding what appeared to be a thick exercise book. Behind him the van was being unloaded – the possessions his parents had saved.
‘Hello, Shaun.’ She knelt down to hug him. He’d definitely grown. He stood squarely, for a small boy, and his strong, lean frame and sober expression seemed to demand from her, a respectful approach. She studied him, recognising a certain dignity, despite the awful circumstances.
‘Can you take me home?’ he said.
His aunt hesitated; what could she say? ‘Shaun, you’ve come to stay with me for a while. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘I want to go to my place; they wouldn’t take me.’
‘Shaun … the fire –’
‘It’s all burnt, I know. There isn’t anything. But I want to see it.’
‘Let’s go in and talk about it.’
She took him through to the kitchen while the Salvos lumped his things on the living room carpet. Elton was waiting, as edgy as a cornered rodent.
‘Hi Shaun,’ he mumbled.
‘Hi Elton. You look bigger.’
Elton glanced at himself. ‘Was the fire awful?’
‘Elton!’ his mother glared at him. ‘I think that’s a subject for another –’
‘It was awful. I don’t think there’s very much left. I wanted to go down to the creek but they wouldn’t take me. Maybe the trees didn’t burn down there, maybe some of it was saved. I wanted to see if … to see if …’
The boy’s eyes welled and Adele went to him. He pressed his face into her cotton shirt. She pulled him tightly to her stomach which helped to contain own feelings. Clear evidence of smoke still emanated from his clothing and Adele was immediately assailed by a vision of her brother screaming in the front of the Forester, everything alight. What did Shaun know of it; what had they told him?
Elton flushed and fidgeted. He felt a little disconnected, as though the exotic other was before him: the look of the boy, the boots he wore, the penetrating eyes, thick black hair, the walnut complexion. When Shaun settled, Elton said, ‘Want to see some new apps I got? They’re free.’
‘Okay,’ said Shaun. He pressed his eyes with the palm of his hands and followed Elton up the carpeted staircase.
ROSETTA FROM Social Services had given him the news. His parents would not be returning, she said. Shaun lay face-down on a mattress that had been placed in a room off the side of the Kilbana Hall. They had gone back bravely but the fire was too much, the woman told him. His mother and father would have passed peacefully; the smoke would have overtaken them; they’d have no knowledge of it – she wouldn’t lie to him. Shaun had accepted it all, though he wondered how she could possibly know. She wasn’t there.
When she was gone he’d turned to the wall and there in the varnished skirting he’d seen a different woman arrive. She was beaming. Sorry Shaun, she said. It’s been a big mistake. Your parents extinguished the fire and came driving out of the smoke! He saw the media cheering. There was a big photo on the front of The Age. His father was behind the wheel and showing all his teeth the way he did and his mother was waving to the gathering throng.
That first night in the tiny town he’d cried silently in the dark, then dozed, only to be woken by the sound of urgent voices in the hall. The second night he’d lain awake, spending a considerable portion of the time in front of the class explaining how native plants and animals have ingenious strategies for dealing with fire. The following morning he was driven to the city and delivered to his aunt.
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He would not return to school until he had resettled, until he can deal with things, they said; learn to adapt. Adele organised the back room for him. Now all three would sleep upstairs: Adele at the front, Elton in the middle and Shaun to the rear, where a window faced onto the backyards of the three adjoining properties. Over the next few weeks it was here that Shaun regularly positioned himself, looking out to the small signs of greenery: the distant domes of suburban foliage, ivy on a paling fence, weeds around a downpipe. He noted the birdlife: sparrows, doves and Indian Mynas. Two of them turned into kookaburras and flew straight up to his ledge. Then they flew off, well ahead of the blaze.
The three yards below him were divided by wooden fences and paved entirely with concrete, except for a stony path in his aunt’s property. The yard to the left contained a self-seeded ornamental cherry and an old gas barbecue against the fence. A wheelbarrow leaned on the palings to the rear which was gated onto the laneway. Otherwise that yard was empty. Their own backyard had a shed the width of the block which had a flat tin roof dinted and irregular where people had walked upon it. The yard on the right included a bungalow where an older boy lived. Shaun looked down from his second storey window and each night he saw his neighbour marching past the yellow glow of the window. He never seemed settled; he would arrive home in the early evening and leave again when it got dark. Shaun would watch until the man’s lights went out and then he’d see his dark form enter the back lane on a pushbike and slip away in the street shadows.
One night, Shaun opened the exercise book he always carried and wrote: Man next door. About 19. Does not like to sit still. Does not sleep much. He is not happy either.
ADELE SOON realised that Shaun needed to return to the scene. The idea appalled her but the boy required it. It came to her at the funeral after which his parents were to be cremated, a state they had already approached. The boy did not cry, but others did – more for him than for the deceased; they could not endure the look on the boy’s blank face as he mouthed the hymns and prayers. Through her own blurred vision, Adele watched Shaun attentively observing the coffins of his parents as they disappeared through the curtains and she realised he needed closure, as everyone did. He needed to see that his past life was gone and that a new one would need to be created.
But it was weeks before she could take him to the site. The forensic teams had to finish their work, roads had to be cleared and reopened, trees, burnt fencing and animal carcasses needed to be removed. Adele hired a car for the two of them – Elton refused to go. Still, his mother rationalised, it was the boy’s moment, no one else’s. And when their car huffed over the white ash that was once their driveway and rolled down through the procession of scorched tree-trunks, the boy’s eyes widened. They could not get far; an ancient gum had fallen across the drive, a tree that Shaun knew well. Its bark had once housed a pair of Peron’s Tree Frogs, and higher up, Eastern Rosellas had regularly nested in a well-worn hollow. That hole was now face-down in the blackened earth. The pair stepped around the massive trunk, crunching through the ash, their boots coated in white powder.
Adele breathed deeply and her stomach turned; she would rather be anywhere else. For her, the fire was a deplorable experience, but for Shaun it was much more than an event, it was the total erasure of his life. The boy stood on the charcoal square where his home had been and assessed the crumbled ruin: clay bricks turned to dust, twists of metal, gas bottles still leaning, a tangle of netting where the chickens once lived, gobs of melted glass draped over a stone figurine. His father had found the carved statue in a flea market but his mother refused to have it in the house. All of Shaun’s life it had stood on pavers under his bedroom window. He saw a frying-pan on the blackened stove coated in pale ash and briefly envisaged eggs sizzling in a spoonful of olive oil. He found the blistered frame of his bike standing against the embankment exactly where he’d left it, where the back door used to be. He wanted to go down to the dry creek and Adele let him walk by himself.
By the time he reached the pebbly channel his eyes were welling but he pressed them dry. He peered up at the tree where the koala had once slumped peacefully. It was now just a carbonised stick like all the others. Yet the fire had opened up the terrain and in the distance he could see green, a region that had been spared. Could his animals have gone there? Shaun saw them all gathered, hundreds of them: koalas, kangaroos, wombats, gliders, cuckoos and kingfishers. And his kookaburras, all lined up on a new branch.
From a distance Adele watched him standing in the ruins; a small solo figure amid the grey of the ground and the black of incinerated bushland. She watched him returning and, as he neared, Shaun’s look of despondency pierced her heart. Somehow she contained herself, aided by a wad of tissues shoved up her sleeve. She knelt in the ash and held the boy. He opened his mouth to speak and she heard it, that small biotic pop in the deadening silence, a faint exhalation rafting onto the still waters of the child’s despair.
On the way home Adele gave him a gift. Shaun unwrapped it and took out a new smartphone. He thanked his aunty.
‘Better than the one you lost?’
‘Yes, I guess so,’ he said.
‘Keep it with you at all times, Shaun. And phone me any time you feel like it, okay? Any time of the day or night, no matter what.’
The boy sat in the passenger seat holding the gleaming object. He saw flashes of sunlight licking across it and pictured his other phone lying somewhere under ash and earth, its messages from his mum and photos of his family still saved.
Back in Melbourne, Shaun went immediately to his room and dragged out the bags packed by his parents. He unzipped the first and found it was filled with their clothes. He took out a brown jumper and put it on the bed. It was the one his father often wore, raw wool that had been spun and knitted by his mother. Further in he found socks, underwear, his mother’s bra, two towels. A second bag contained photo albums, a box of jewellery, a biscuit tin filled with papers: certificates, policies, bank details. A shoebox contained letters and, beneath them, a journal written in his father’s hand. As he replaced it all, a pile of loose snapshots slipped to the floor. Shaun singled one out, a blurry Polaroid of his parents in the sun. Both were naked and his mother held a garden hose aimed at his father who was pointing a finger back at her. They seemed very white against a backdrop of dark trees. Who had taken the photo?
Shaun put everything back as it was, except for his father’s brown jumper.
ELTON HAD been very helpful lately, staying in while his mother worked, making dinner when prompted, talking to the boy; he’d negotiated pocket money for doing so. But he would not take Shaun to Merri Creek. Apart from being close to greenery, there really was no point to it. He told his mother, there’s nothing there.
‘Take your cousin out, Elton. You both need a bit of exercise.’
So did she for that matter, but right now that was off the menu. Two days earlier, while pumping along Grey Street in white Reeboks, she’d run into Stefanie coming the other way. Should she say something? As they passed, she nodded courteously, but her neighbour maintained a blank expression as chilly as a walk-in freezer. Then yesterday, a letter had arrived addressed to Stefanie Mitchell at 44. Was that her surname? Simon went by Warner. She took the letter next door, slipped it through the slot in the door and heard it tap onto the polished concrete. She hesitated, and uncharacteristically pressed the letter slot open again, stooped down and peered in.
‘Can I help you?’
Adele turned abruptly to see Stefanie standing behind her.
‘Oh! … Hi. Just dropped a letter for you … the postie put it in our mailbox by mistake.’
‘Get away from my fucking door.’ Stef’s words were delivered flatly and inflected with such venom that they seemed to propel her neighbour backwards towards her own apartment.
The following morning, the scene was still haunting Adele: that acerbic look, the frost in her words. It wouldn’t hurt to stay in today, catch up on some emails
– while Elton took Shaun out for a while.
‘Can’t he go by himself? He’s old enough. Lots of kids –’
‘Would you deny the boy a bit of company?’
‘He doesn’t like company.’
It was only when Elton recognised some reward in the mix that he relented. Inexplicably, he’d been thinking about Jess. Since the day the wall collapsed, he’d only seen her skyped on the computer. It was safer that way, though lately he’d begun to think about her in the flesh again, her actual physical presence, but how could he arrange it? He felt uncertain about offering another hundred dollars, but now he had a reason to see her. He slipped his mobile out of his pocket.
Hi, it’s me. Elton. Next door … We got a kid living with us … Yeah … My cousin … His parents got burnt to death in that bushfire … Yeah, I know. It was terrible. Now we have to look after him. Want to meet him?
Jess turned him down: it wasn’t her responsibility. And it isn’t mine either, Elton replied. He told her he’d been asked to take the boy to the park near Merri Creek, to show the kid around, and he thought she might like to come. The phone went quiet, giving Elton time to concoct an added incentive: he offered her twenty dollars which the girl promptly rejected. Still, what did she have to lose?
JESS EMERGED when Elton knocked and the pair assessed each other, familiarising themselves with the person they’d come to know via the computer’s digital eye. Elton paused while his mind adjusted to Jess’s vast clutter of kooky embellishments that testified to her aberrant disposition, and Jess briefly reviewed Elton’s tidiness. She did not look at the small boy.
The Colour of the Night Page 12