From Under the Overcoat (8 page)

She laughed. ‘No. It doesn’t happen that quickly.’

In the distance, a car disappeared around a corner.

The open homes carried on. At each one, I took my place in the oak tree and watched. I didn’t think the sad man in the suit would come back, but he did. Not every time, but when Mrs Button got another real estate agent to do her open homes. He must have parked and watched, waiting to see who was in charge. He slipped past the agent, not bothering with the kitchen, and wandered in and out of the rooms. Every visit was the same as that first one; a whizz around the house, then into Mum’s bedroom, closing the door carefully behind him. Then, the perfume on the pillow.

SOMEONE DID BUY THE
house. Not the weird guy, and not straight away, but nearly a year on. After heaps more open homes and torture sessions between poor Mrs Button and Mum.

When Mum and I packed everything up, we found some portraits of the original owners of our house. They were big people: stiff, formal. There were two kids in the photo too. My mother was triumphant, holding those photos in one hand, the photos of her own parents in the other.

‘You see, Katie. This was a grand house in its day. Owned by people of great gravitas. Of very high standing in society.’

I realised I had never known exactly why our house was heritage listed. You don’t care about things like that when you’re a little kid. I thought about asking Mum then, as we bundled our stuff into boxes. There were lots of things I could have asked her about, including perfume-man. But by then I had some of my own secrets to hide, some of my own plans in the pipeline. And I guess I’d given up on question-asking as a waste of time. The trouble with specific questions was that they got specific answers. No more.

I found some photos of my father in the bottom of an old packing case. There was one of him reading to me at night — Mum must have taken it. I never mentioned those photos to Mum. I felt panicked, looking at them, frightened that my real memories of him were fading so fast I wouldn’t recognise him again.

I ended up not keeping a lot of my own stuff. It felt as though one part of my life — my kid years — were over and a new start was just around the corner. I had no idea what
the new start was actually going to be, but when Mum and I locked the yellow front door for the last time and walked down the garden path, the photos of my father were in my bag.

WORMS

O
n the way back from the Easter surf trip, Jack Cleveland wrote off his old man’s new Beemer. It was on the tight bend at the start of Pukehina Beach Road, where it meets the main highway back to Te Puke. There’s that old gravel dump on the bend. Cleveland overtook Cru Davis right there, lost it in the loose metal and rolled the car down into the river.

Cleveland was okay because of the airbags but Kyle Henry, who was in the back of the car, got smashed up. His longboard was on the roof and it got munted. Snapped completely in half.

The first I knew much about the crash was the next day, when school went back. The guys on the surfing trip weren’t
there that morning. They’d gone to see Kyle in Tauranga Hospital. But everyone else was talking about the accident.

Someone whose father was in the fire brigade said it’d taken half an hour to cut Kyle from the wreck. The rescuers had to go super slow in case his back was broken. Or he had internal injuries.

Our house is on the main road. I’d heard the sirens both ways. The ambulance went past just after eight o’clock and didn’t come back ’til after ten. It would have been more like an hour to cut him out, I said to a few people, reciting the ambulance times. I liked having a definite fact to contribute. At interval I met Ryan Mishefski at the tuck shop. Ryan was my mate. He and his aunt had shifted to Te Puke a year earlier, at the beginning of year ten. His parents were dead — another car accident — so there was just the two of them. They lived down the road from us.

‘You hear about the accident?’ I said. ‘About Kyle?’

‘Yeah,’ said Ryan. He was kicking a McDonald’s hacky sack. He was a quiet kind of guy. I think probably because of being an orphan, being sick of explaining what had happened to his family.

‘Sounds like Kyle’s pretty smashed up,’ I said.

Ryan was standing on his right leg, holding his arms out from his sides for balance. His left leg was suspended out straight in front of him, the hacky sack in the hollow between his left shin and the top of his shiny black school shoe. He could hold that pose for as long as he liked. Like some sort of skinny origami bird.

‘Kyle’s not the only one who’s going to suffer,’ he said.

‘Meaning?’

‘We’re fucked, too, now, aren’t we.’ The hacky sack flicked off the toe of his shoe, over his head. His eyes followed the ball skywards. He swung his leg backwards and somehow caught it behind him, in the crook of his knee. He was the man at hacky sack. ‘That’ll be the end of the Easter surf trips.’

‘Bullshit, man. One accident’s not going to change anything,’ I said.

‘You wait and see. Cleveland’s stuff ed it up for everyone. The school’ll get involved and it’ll be called off by the parents.’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘They’ll get over it. The next one’s a whole year away.’

‘Bet you,’ said Ryan. He shoved the hacky sack in his pocket.

THE SURFERS HAD GONE
to the hospital in a minibus arranged and driven by Brian Cleveland, Jack’s old man. Brian was the big-shot real estate agent in town. The guys scuff ed back in through the school gates at lunchtime with their heads down, hands in their pockets, not saying much.

During the afternoon, though, details started filtering out around the school. One of the guys would talk to one of the senior girls and she’d go off and tell her girlfriends. The girls met in huddles, had little hugs — you know how girls do that for no reason — going
Oh my God
and having a cry about the precious new sliver of information.

The main story had already gone around. It was to do with Kyle being in the back of the car when he was the only passenger — that was the first thing everyone asked about. Brian Cleveland told some of the other parents this the night before, straight after the accident.

Brian said the reason his son had lost control on the bend was that Kyle had been wrestling him from the back seat.

Brian Cleveland’s version of events was that while the other guys had been packing up at the camping ground on the Monday afternoon, Kyle had decided to drink all the leftover booze from the weekend. He’d sat on an
upside-down
chilly bin and got shit faced. Including half a bottle of mezcal with the worm still in it.

Kyle had drunk the worm
. The words flew round the school like a virus, faster than anything else about the accident. They ripped through our year eleven classes, everyone gasping and going
Holy crap
and shaking their heads, half stunned and half smiling, as though recalling their own experiences of worm drinking. Okay, I admit, I did it too. I had never drunk a worm, or even had mezcal, but I’d heard stories. Anything — the worst things — was possible after you’d drunk the worm.

Everyone was feeling sorry for Kyle, and for Jack Cleveland too. How do you keep a car on the road, when you’ve got someone strangling you from behind? An out-of-it moron who’d drunk the worm?

But once the surfers came back from the hospital, the rumour started to mutate.

Candice Johnson went out with one of the guys. Candice was deputy head girl. She was the kind of chick that everyone liked, teachers included; she’d got some sort of award for the spirit of leadership.

Candice came out of one of those girl huddles all staunch. She started putting it out there that all the guys finished off the booze, not just Kyle. They’d packed up their camping
gear and taken the last of the piss down to the beach. They’d watched the left-hand break and talked about one final surf, but the boards were on the roofs of the cars by then and the wetsuits packed away. There was just a mouthful of mezcal left in the bottle which Kyle did happen to drink, but there was no worm.

‘Tell everyone that,’ Candice said to me. She stopped me in the hallway in D Block, grabbed me by the jersey. ‘What’s your name? Paul, eh.’

I nodded. She knew my name. The way she was pulling at my sleeve made me go … you know … well, it was awkward. I could feel the warmth of her hand through the wool. I tried to concentrate on what I had to tell everyone.

‘There was no worm, okay? Someone else already drank the worm earlier.’

‘Sure. I’ll tell everyone,’ I promised. I would have promised her anything.

‘Or there might not have actually been a worm in that bottle.’

I nodded, frantic, uncomfortable.

‘There’s not always a worm. Not in every bottle.’

Later on, more information oozed out. The texts were flying and a lot of phones got confiscated, but it still spread quickly.

Kyle had been loading gear into the back seat of Cleveland’s Beemer when Cru Davis had dared Jack Cleveland to a race back to Te Puke. Apparently Cleveland jumped in the car, revved the engine and took off. Kyle was hanging out the back seat, still shutting the door when Cleveland hit Pukehina Parade. The camping ground’s right at the beginning of the
parade, so they were off there, onto Pukehina Beach Road, more or less straight away.

The beach road’s okay at first, reasonably straight, but then, as you approach the main road, the curves are pretty sharp. And what did Jack Cleveland do? Well, here’s what he didn’t do.

He didn’t overtake Cru on the metal dump corner, like everyone first thought. He’d actually driven on the wrong side of the road all the way from the camping ground to the highway turnoff. That’s about four ks. He’d actually been racing Cru neck and neck, right next to him. With his headlights off.

Though some of the guys did say the last bit was bullshit.

IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE
everyone knew about the visit to the hospital. Kyle was conscious, but drugged up. He had a broken hip and a fractured skull and bruising around his spine. His head was wrapped in a bandage.

The word was that Kyle had asked straight away whether his longboard had survived the crash. No one knew what to say. Old Man Cleveland launched in, saying the longboard was fine, so one of the things being said was that the Clevelands were replacing Kyle’s board with a new one.

Kyle told the guys he didn’t remember the accident. The only thing he remembered was tying his board onto the roof of the car, pulling the straps down hard, checking there was no movement.

On the way home from the hospital, Brian Cleveland told the guys that it was pretty normal for someone in an accident not to be able to remember the actual moment. It was the
brain’s way of coping with trauma, he said.

The story went that the whole minivan trip from the hospital to the school had been awkward. Brian Cleveland kept whistling, then casually bringing up little things like how Kyle had always been trouble, though not
trouble
, but that Kyle never knew when the joke had gone too far, when to pull his head in. And stuff like how the guys shouldn’t blame Kyle for the accident, because it could have been any of them skylarking around, wrestling Jack from the back seat. Apparently, when he said that, it went deadly silent in the van because no one actually knew whether there was any wrestling going on or not. Other than Jack, of course, who said nothing.

The guys told the girls that it was as though by saying it, over and over, Brian Cleveland was forcing the wrestling to be a fact. Most of them were already in the shit over the alcohol. The whole thing was a mess, too hard to think about. They reckoned it was just easier to sit there in the minivan, say nothing, let Old Man Cleveland rave on.

The only bit that really freaked them out was when Jack, who was sitting in the front next to his father, tried to change the radio station. He was reaching over, fiddling with the knobs, and Old Man Cleveland said
Leave it alone, you little fuck
. It was the way he said it. He just added it on to whatever he’d been saying beforehand. He never took his eyes off the road, never even raised his voice.

JUST BEFORE SCHOOL FINISHED
for the day, the final rumour started.

Drew Bristow told Kelly Donalds in biology. Kelly was
so blown away she just got up crying and put her books in her bag and walked out. Mr Tennie the teacher was saying
Excuse me, what’s wrong?
and
Get back here now
and shit like that — she just walked. Everyone looked at Drew but he had his head down, pen in his hand, working. It was the last period and by the time the bell went the text had gone around and the whole school knew.

During the hospital visit, Drew had been standing at the foot of Kyle’s bed drinking a cup of tea. Someone had knocked his elbow and he’d spilt the hot tea on Kyle’s right foot, which was poking out from under the sheet. Kyle didn’t even look in Drew’s direction. Drew had pulled a hankie out of his pocket and wiped the tea off Kyle, off the bedding.

Kyle hadn’t felt a thing.

Everyone down that end of the bed was freaking out. There was a conversation going on about missing school and a fair bit of laughing too, and, Drew said to Kelly, they all just kept talking, staring at Kyle, pretending there was absolutely nothing happening to Kyle’s foot while the mess was being wiped up.

IT WENT ON FOR
weeks. Maybe in other places, cities, it’d be different, but in Te Puke nothing else happened to replace it for conversation. The stories kept coming, changing just a little here and there, a fact left out of one account, replaced with an assumption by someone else and hey presto — a whole new version of events. It was like that game we played when we were little, Chinese Whispers; the rumours kept feeding themselves.

Part of it was because of who was involved, I reckon. It
wasn’t like it was the town losers, you know? These guys were the school heroes, the ones who would go on to university, to better things. Even when the guys themselves had had a gutsful of talking about it, their parents wouldn’t let it rest. It was like the person who had the last say would be the one to record the official version of events.

You would have thought that the Clevelands, Jack and his old man, would have backed off, once Jack’s story was put into doubt. But when any adult talked to Brian Cleveland about it, he just closed his eyes and shook his head, with one of those
boys will be boys
looks. It was natural, he kept saying, for all the guys to close ranks around Kyle, make up a story to protect him. Heck, he would have done the same thing himself at that age.

In the end, it was never really cleared up. The cops interviewed a few people but no charges were laid. Some of the other parents brought up the question of whether Jack Cleveland had been breath tested at the scene of the accident. Just among themselves, though, and they backed away from that one when they realised there’d been heaps of piss drunk by their own kids that weekend.

Maybe the cops just got fed up with chasing their tails trying to work out what exactly had happened. Cru Davis couldn’t help. He said it was dark, his eyes were on the road, and all he knew was that the Beemer had appeared on his right-hand side, then disappeared over the bank. It didn’t help that Kyle couldn’t remember the accident.