Golden Boys (11 page)

Bastian has completely lost patience with his brother and friend; as the cars amble past he karate-chops them off the track. Colt says dumbly, ‘You crashed them.'

‘I crashed them!' Bastian agrees stormily. ‘You've played enough!'

Syd can't look up from the floor; he feels a nauseating sense of exposure, as if they've caught him with a finger up his nose. Abruptly he scrabbles to his feet and shouts, ‘Freya! We can go home now!'

Colt picks up the cars and sits them on the track. ‘It's all right,' he says. ‘Nothing's broken.'

Syd hears this and desperately needs it to be true; he can't have the conversation cost him the BMX, the playroom, the water. He feels himself pouting, being swept down a drain. ‘It's a school night,' he says. ‘We have to go home.'

The red car resumes its stately tour around the curves, along the straights, past the finish line and onwards. ‘Come back on the weekend,' Colt says. ‘We can race again. Now you've learned something.'

Syd looks at him blindly, and cannot speak: ‘Freya!' he barks at the window, ‘hurry up!' And then his sister is at the door: ‘All right!' she says. ‘Don't yell! Jeez.'

They walk home together, Syd with his towel around his shoulders, his mind racing like a rabbit in a paddock. The sky is darker, and streetlights have come on. ‘Why did you tell that man those things?' he asks, because he's always believed – although he can't remember being taught – that what happens in their house on his father's bad nights is something they are supposed to keep to themselves. His mother never says much about it afterwards, and Syd's uncles and aunt and grandparents don't say anything either. Even between themselves, his brothers and sisters, it is not something they discuss. On the mornings after even the worst nights they get up and get dressed, eat breakfast, go to school, and though memories move through Syd like a virus as he assumes they move through his siblings too, no one mentions it, they drive it down. And the reason is that it's embarrassing: it's
embarrassing
to have a father who cares so little about them, it's
shameful
that their family isn't happy. No one must know: and now somebody does. ‘Isn't it – the secret?' he asks.

Freya is walking fast, so he has to hurry. She is much taller than he is, to the degree that he's sure he will never catch up. All his life he's had the greatest respect for her, his infinitely smarter sister, as well as a healthy dose of caution; and he is not so much angry at her as impressed that she could so casually break something he'd believed was ironclad. He thinks she's about to introduce him to a world where the rules are much looser than those which bind him, and he's ready, he's thrilled: so it's disappointing when she says, ‘It
is
a secret. Don't go telling everyone.'

‘But you told
him
—'

‘It's a secret,' she says, and he hears her teeth grit, ‘but not a secret from him. Is that OK, Your Highness? Is that all right with you?'

A pinch or some other asp-like act of violence is close; Syd steps sideways, and doesn't say no.

Avery Price rides his bike at night, around the cricket oval, across the schoolyard, down to the creek, up to the milkbar, and much further afield: past the shops grouped at the tram terminus, along the supermarket carpark, to the train station and the offramp of the freeway, to many places he doesn't need to go. His bicycle carries him easily, he will journey for hours, sometimes two or three hours or more, through the blackest quietest hours of the night. He rides in the centre of the vacant roads, the streetlights repeatedly finding him and letting him go, occasionally swerving onto the footpath where the darkness is thicker and where he finds objects of interest that have slipped free from the daytime world: car keys, a glove, a letter that never reached the mailbox. The wheels of his bike make a steady unzipping sound as they whirl. If he sees people on the street farewelling friends or arguing or smoking against a fence, he changes direction without hesitation and speeds away. He often encounters dogs who've been released into the night and they ramble alongside him for a while, their tongues lightly swinging; he sees cats sprinting over the road or standing, arch-spined, on fences, eyes locked on the face of their foe.

Avery loves these night rides more than anything else he knows. He loves the damp breeze skimming past him, the sound of the tyres on tarmac, the brotherhood of the animals. He loves his bike, his reliable friend. When he cruises around the midnight streets he is the captain of his life, carefree. The sights to which he has been the sole witness are innumerable. The hours he's pedalled through make a dark palace into which he retreats when his teachers berate him, when his sister slams her door, when he imagines what's coming and sees nothing.

Lately he has been thinking about Garrick, who is and always has been a kind of beloved enemy of Avery Price. Garrick insists he is superior to Avery, but everyone knows he is not – even Garrick,
especially
Garrick. They know each other well, these boys from the bottom of the pile; only Garrick bothers pretending that the bottom is the top.

He thinks about Garrick, and Garrick's behaviour of late, which has not been very different from the usual – he's still Garrick; the word makes Avery think of a black mole on the skin – yet there is something strange. Around Colt Jenson, Garrick is changed, but it's tricky for Avery to say how. It is as if there is something inside Garrick which cannot rest unless it's looking at Colt, or forcing Colt to look at it.

Saturday is a momentous day: the bandage comes off his leg. It's been nearly two weeks and under Mr Jenson's care the wound, which had been dreadful, is as neat and clean as a porcelain pin tray. The flesh is sealed with a pale scab, tender and slick in the centre, leathery at the edges. His calf is criss-crossed with greasy remnants of the sticking-plaster. Mr Jenson licks his thumb and rubs futilely at these. ‘You need a good soaking,' he says.

The injury has taken up too much space in his life; it's a relief to be free of the burden of trying to care about it as much as Mr Jenson does. Avery doesn't want to flee the clutches of the Jenson household – a street cat of a boy, he's found good and plentiful food there, warm rooms full of wonders – but he is used to looking after himself, to judging the depth of his own danger. He's used to the freedom of neglect; he likes it.

He's an agile daredevil, a quick learner of every mischievous skill, and flies down the Jensons' driveway on the striped skateboard so fast that Bastian howls. Speed carries him over the gutter, the board soaring as it hits the dip. At first he can't manage it and has to leap for his life: three attempts later he has the hang of it, knows exactly how to distribute his weight and absorb the wallop of the landing. Bastian's shrieking brings Mrs Jenson to the porch. ‘Avery!' she calls, ‘you'll be hit by a car! You'll be killed!' And Avery smiles through the trees to her: he won't get hit by a car.

The boys play together into the afternoon; Avery knows that his friends spurn Bastian Jenson, but Avery doesn't mind him. They are suited to the company of each other, neither of them mean-spirited, both content to while away the day with the mildest amusement. When Garrick appears on the crest of the afternoon he has with him two fat green sticks of bubblegum which, bitten, bleed a sweet pink fluid. One stick has been ravaged, its wrapper shredded away, the gum protruding like the diseased shinbone of a zombie. Garrick plumps down on the naturestrip between Avery and Bastian, chewing loudly. ‘What are you spazzos doing?'

‘Nothing. Sitting.'

‘Sitting here like little birdies. Two little turdy birdies.' He chews and chews, black eyes staring across the road, his jaw working methodically. ‘Where's Colt?' he asks, as Avery has known he would.

‘Out with Dad,' says Bastian, proud keeper of all facts about his brother.

‘Out where?'

‘Out at the shops.'

‘Doing what?'

Even to Bastian the question is silly. ‘Buying things!'

‘When will he be back?'

The boy shrugs. ‘Probably later.'

Garrick rolls his eyes. Chomp, chomp, chomp. ‘This tastes like shit,' he says, plucking the glistening wodge from his mouth and hurling it mightily into bushes on the far side of the road. He's stronger than a boy his age needs to be. He tosses the packets of gum into the gutter as if he never cared about them in the first place. ‘This is shit,' he says. ‘I'm bored with this shit. Let's go somewhere. The pinballs.'

‘Nah,' says Avery.

‘Get the BMX out, then. Why are you just sitting here?'

‘We like sitting here,' says Bastian.

‘You don't have to,' says Avery.

Garrick sneers savagely. ‘Homos.' Only then does he notice Avery's knee, released at last from its swaddling. The scab is interesting – its centre is weirdly translucent, it is possible to imagine strange fish swimming under there – and he asks, ‘Leggy-weggy all fixed now, is it?'

‘Just about.'

Garrick's lightless gaze lingers on Avery's eyes, something like a smile on his face. ‘Did you get a kiss to make it better?'

‘. . .  No.'

‘Are you sure?' Garrick lifts a hand and strokes it heavily down Avery's head. ‘Sure you don't need a kiss? For your poor little bleeding knee-wee?'

Avery shakes away his touch. ‘Piss off.'

‘Piss off? Oh, now you've hurt my feelings. I only want to help you, Avery. I want to take care of you. You're so small and skinny and helpless. You smell so nice I could eat you. I want to stroke your hair and your lovely skin —'

He grabs for Avery's ribcage, and Avery struggles. ‘Get off!'

‘But Avery, I love you!'

Bastian, laughing throatily, says, ‘He loves you, Avery!'

‘Just one kiss, that's all I want!'

‘Kiss him, Avery!'

‘Just a peck! One on the lips! After all I've done for you!'

Avery springs up, spinning away. For an instant he seems about to bolt, a bird taking to the sky. Instead he reels on the road to the giggling boy. ‘Don't laugh at him, Bastian!' he barks.

Bastian swallows his laughter like a rock. Garrick leans on his palms, grinning loosely. ‘Hey, Bastian,' he says. ‘Do you like living here now?'

Bastian turns to him eagerly. ‘I do like it.'

‘What about the bogeyman? Do you like him too?'

Bastian's downy eyebrows dive. ‘What bogeyman? Is there a bogeyman?'

‘Yeah! If you listen really hard, you can hear him.
Bastian! Bastian! Come to me, little boy! 
'

He crooks a finger, beckoning: Bastian shrinks back in the grass. ‘There's no such thing as a bogeyman.'

‘There is,' Garrick says. ‘I've seen him.'

From the centre of the road Avery says, ‘Shut up, Garrick. You're an idiot.'

‘What does he look like?' asks Bastian.

‘Well, you know. Like a normal person. Like a good guy who's actually a bad guy.'

Bastian thinks on this. ‘Where does he live?'

‘Pretty close. Really close. He's probably watching us.'

‘It's not true,' says Avery. ‘Ignore him, Bastian. He's full of shit.'

‘Yeah, just ignore me,' Garrick agrees. ‘I talk about things they don't want you to know. Like about the bogeyman. And about . . .'

‘About what?'

‘Oh, about – you know. The creepy-crawlies. The ones who live in the trees and in the stormwater drain and under your house. They've got big green fangs and rusty nails for fingers, and they love to eat little boys. Can you hear that noise?'

‘What noise?'

‘Listen – it sounds like the wind blowing, or cars driving past. That's the creepy-crawlies talking to each other. They sound like something ordinary, but they're not. They're ugly stinking creepy-crawlies who should be killed. And you know which one is the scariest?'

‘Which one?'

‘
Me 
!' blares Garrick, and Bastian leaps to his feet and runs up the driveway, hands flapping, screaming like a parrot, a boy born for this world only if the world is a stage. Avery, watching him go, grumbles. ‘We'll be in trouble now.' But the minutes pass and no one comes out to scold them, and soon Bastian's face appears at the window half-wary, shyly grinning, and when he sees that Avery and Garrick are still sitting on the naturestrip he makes a bold return to the street. ‘You're not a creepy-crawly!' he cries, jabbing a finger at Garrick, and Garrick says, ‘Nah, I'm only a person. There's only people, isn't there?'

Later, when the afternoon is closing down and the neighbourhood boys have gone home and Colt is in the kitchen making peanut-butter toast, Bastian asks him, just to be certain, ‘There's no creepy-crawlies who eat kids, are there? Garrick said they live under our house.'

‘No, that's not true,' says Colt.

‘What about the bogeyman? Garrick says he's watching us.'

Colt lifts his head to look at his brother. ‘You're not stupid,' he tells him. ‘Don't believe stupid stories.'

And sometimes he does try to convince himself there is no such thing as the bogeyman – that he's imagining things which don't exist, looking at them from the wrong angle, hearing them with a mistaken tone. That the fault is his own. But when he tries to talk himself into seeing things in this simpler, infinitely prefer­able way, he feels his existence thin. He cannot tell lies to himself. His mother is fighting the same battle as he is – he sees it in her eyes, where it moves like clouds – and he understands that she is losing: despite the set of her mouth and the muffled conversations at night, she is losing. He walks into the depths of the stormwater drain, puzzling on this. She's no fool, his mother. And her husband, Colt reasons, is the pillar of her life. He's the money, the house, the schooling, the meals. He's the shirts on their backs and the boots on their feet. They need him to hold up the ceiling. His wife can lose faith in him, but she cannot lose
him
, because then there'll be no roof over her sons. So she's pushing it down, pushing herself down, not blinding but certainly dulling her eyes for the sake of her children. Colt leans against the flank of the pipe, sliding gradually down into the thread of slime. It cannot be easy, and he wonders how she finds the courage to do it – to unknow what she knows, and to do it for her children. To let them take the heavy tail-end of the blame.

The weather is clear although not hot on Sunday, but Declan, Syd and Avery don't mind swimming in such weather. Colt has no choice but to join them. There are various toys that Colt's father has bought – a beachball, a lilo, a swag of gigantic blow-up baseball bats – and the boys plunge through the water with these. The water is cold, and as blue as the sky it reflects; as the boys haul about, it slops over the edge in great slurpy swathes to splatter the ground below, which Rex has now concreted with pavers to prevent mud tracking into the pool and the house. The water lashes at the boys' smooth backs and naked chests, reaches knifelike for their throats. Colt's blood is warmed beneath his chill skin. They invent a game which involves bats and territory, and soon there is an exhaustion in him that he recognises from when he used to run around a track, a spentness that is borne like a bearskin while beneath it the muscles, blood and heart itself grow powerful and weightless. There are moments when Colt feels he could jump mountains; that he's strong enough, when he is happy, to escape the very clutches of time and space.

Then Rex arrives home from wherever he has been. ‘What's going on here?' he asks, grinning from the steps of the deck, and Colt's heart sinks through the water to the rocks at the earth's core. ‘Avery, how's your knee?' The boys wave and say, ‘Hi, Mr Jenson,' and Colt's father repeats his threadbare line and Colt would like to leap from the pool and swing at him not with one of the blow-up bats but with the real one propped in the corner of the playroom, a hard expensive piece of equipment given to him although he's never had an interest in baseball, never learned to play, never lived near a diamond, never watched a game on TV. Given to him in case he made a friend who loved the game.
Mr Jenson is my father
.
Call me Rex
. ‘Syd,' Rex asks, ‘are you drowning? Don't drown, whatever you do. Your mother wouldn't be pleased. How's the temperature in there? You all look a bit blue around the gills.'

Colt says, ‘We're OK, Dad, don't worry.'

‘I'm not worried. I'm just wondering if I'll be able to chip ice off you for my drink.'

The boys laugh as they are meant to; Colt turns away. The water chops and roils, he's speckled with goosebumps. He expects the visitors to have lost interest in playing, as he himself no longer cares – but Syd gives a shout and brings his bat down on Avery's head, and suddenly the air is billowing under the boofy swing of the bats. And Colt, beaten against the pool's wall, wants to order them to stop, to realise what they are doing, that this is what he's come to see so they should not show it to him: but it's an impossible thing to say. It might not be true. And if it is true, it is impossible to say. And for an instant he sees his mother's reticence in a different light. It is simply unutterable.

He feels his father's gaze on his spine; Colt must have the hearing of a dog, because below his friends' laughter he hears his father light one of his rare cigarettes. He fears he will hear each indrawn breath, every crackle of the cigarette paper, the shrivel of the tobacco as it burns. He'll hear the smoke travel down the tube of his father's windpipe and swill inside his lungs, he'll hear it gust up the gullet and out the smiling mouth to be emitted, stale and shapeless, into the day. ‘Stop!' he says, dropping his bat. ‘I need to stop —'

Declan shoulders his own bat. ‘You feel sick?'

Colt shakes his head:
sick
isn't the word. He wants a word which describes the desire to climb to the top of a tree and stay there. ‘It's too cold,' he says. ‘I'm getting out.' But when he works through the water and climbs down the ladder and finally looks to where his father is standing, his father isn't there, there's no ash on the deck, no smoky scent on the air. Nevertheless, he feels frozen solid. He takes his towel and rubs his face and arms but he's colder than he's ever been in his life. His father was right, he is as blue as if he's absorbed the sky's reflection, donned the most torturous camouflage. His bathers cling to his shanks and his jaw judders: if he stands here half-naked he will die, but he hardly dares leave. ‘I'll be back,' he calls out, ‘in one minute.'

In his bedroom he dresses as quickly as his frigid limbs allow, working socks painfully over his feet. He can't hear Bastian or his mother, and doesn't know where they are. He can't hear his father either – it is as if Colt dreamed of him. From outside comes the sound of boys' voices but his dog-hearing has finished, he can't make out what they say. When he's pulled on enough clothes he hurries back through the house feeling marginally repaired – and stops just inside the screen door, invisible behind the flywire mesh, because the boys have climbed out of the pool and are standing, dripping, on the deck, which preserves a pattern of their wet footprints, their irregular, pattering feet. And Colt's father is there, materialised from nowhere, handing out towels and laughing, as if only laughter will keep the planet turning. ‘Look at you!' he's saying. ‘You're as white as driven snow. How are you, Avery? Let me see that knee.'

But it is the boy's fragile head that he takes in his towel-draped hands, scrubbing the cloth so roughly into the blond hair that Avery staggers sideways and Rex must grab him by the forearm saying, ‘Whoops there, hold still.' He runs the towel over the boy's throat and shoulders and ribcage, the job done so efficiently it's like watching a man who loathes what he's doing but can never stop doing it or thinking about doing it; he crouches and dries Avery's legs, first the outside then the inside, around the ankles, over the knees, up the childish thighs. Then, with a flourish, he wraps the towel round the boy's waist, tucking in the corner with a poke of two long fingers. ‘Better?' he asks, and reaches out to brush strands of hair from Avery's eyes. ‘Good lad,' he says. Then he turns to the Kiley brothers, who have been drying themselves druggily while watching this spectacle, and asks, ‘Who's next?'

‘Oh,' says Declan, laughing a little, in a voice that doesn't want to touch the ground. ‘It's all right, Mr Jenson —'

‘Your hair is soaking, Syd. You might catch pneumonia!'

Syd shakes his head rapidly. ‘No, I won't —'

‘Look, come here. I can't stand seeing a boy with wet hair.'

And before Syd can flee he is captured, pulled forward, and Rex scruffs the towel so crazily over his head that it's as if cats are fighting under there, and Syd squawks and his hands come up, flying as wildly as the towel. This is a joke, Rex is chortling, this is fun fun fun. ‘Are you dry now?' he asks, and Syd cries, ‘Yes!' And Rex says louder, ‘What's that? I can't hear you! Are you under there, Syd?' and Syd wails, ‘Yes, I'm here, I'm dry!' But the towel resumes its insane whirling and the boy beneath it veers drunkenly left and right. Rex says, ‘Syd Kiley! Are you alive? Where have you gone, Syd?' And Syd, with what's left of his strength, bawls, ‘I'm dry! I am! You can stop!'

Rex pulls the towel from Syd's head and squints at him innocently. ‘There you are! We've been looking for you. How on earth did your hair get so messy?'

He steps back smirking, very pleased with the boy, who lurches off dizzily. He looks, then, at Declan. ‘You need some drying, bucko?'

‘No, I'm OK . . .'

‘You sure?'

Declan is reversing, towel clutched to his body. He backs into the railing and stops. ‘I'm dry. I promise.'

‘Hmm.' Colt's father eyes him. ‘Bone-dry,' he says.

‘You nearly dried my face off,' says Syd.

Rex spins, plants a hand on Syd's shoulder. ‘I think there are party pies in the freezer. Shall I put them in the oven?'

And as his father strides for the screen door Colt steps into the playroom, pressing his back to the wall. He hears his father go to the kitchen, and the pop of the freezer opening. Through the louvres he hears his friends – they are not talking, but they are laughing, snuffling in a furtive way which makes Colt think of the boys at school who, when the teacher's back is turned, do whip-quick, cruelly brilliant imitations of that teacher while the other boys smother their giggling. He hears his father moving around the kitchen, filling glasses with Passiona and dollops of ice-cream. He hears Declan, Avery and Syd shushing each other. And Colt tries to tell himself that it's nothing, nothing, if they're laughing it can't be bad, if they're laughing he is imagining it and it's not his father who is at fault but only he, himself, Colt, seeing and hearing and thinking everything wrong. But it's thin as paper, this line. Hands to his face, he prays for the floor to swallow him; he wouldn't care, he'd go gladly. They would look for him and find absolutely nothing. He doesn't want to stand up straight, doesn't know if he'll be able to stay standing once he's up. But his father is calling from the kitchen, ‘Who wants a Passiona spider?' and the boys are pulling open the screen door, and Colt is on his feet before he knows it, moving swiftly, galvanised.