Golden Boys (18 page)

‘It's probably better if you went —'

‘Is it? Is it, mate? How are you gonna make me? Fight me?'

Rex gives a short tight laugh, and then he takes it, just a tiny step backwards, his shoes never leaving the carpet: but Freya feels a canyon open around her. ‘I'd rather not. I'm a friend, Joe. I don't mean you any harm, there's no need to be unpleasant. But I would advise you to either leave the house or go to bed. It's best for everyone, yourself included. I'm going to stay here until you do one or the other.'

Joe appears to muse on this, his eyes rolling to the ceiling. Dorrie has stopped whimpering and the only sound comes from the yacking television. Then: ‘Rex.' Joe wags a finger at their neighbour. ‘I remember you.'

‘I hope so.' Rex smiles. ‘I need you to help me build the deck.'

Joe grins in return, and it is unnerving. He grins and says, ‘Yeah, I remember,' and points his finger like a pistol. ‘You've been touching my kids.'

Freya feels it like a punch to the face. ‘Dad!'

‘I beg your pardon?' says Rex.

Joe jabs his finger, standing straighter now, smiling his wire smile. ‘Yes, you have. Been touching my kids. You come into my house, tell me what I should do, telling lies, threatening me, acting like some kind of
hero
 . . . and you've been touching my kids!'

The men stare at each other across the kitchen, and the air between them could burn. Elizabeth makes a muffled noise and turns away, but Freya's brothers and sisters are as mute and still and wan-faced as children in an ancient painting. Rex, too, is very still: then, ‘Aha,' he says, and gives a slight bob of his head. He squares his shoulders and says stoutly, ‘I think you've been misinformed, Joe.'

Freya's father answers instantly. ‘No, I don't think so. My boys say you can't keep your mitts to yourself.'

Rex goes to speak, but is silent; then says, ‘I'm not exactly sure what you're implying, but whatever it is, it's simply untrue —'

‘Calling my kids liars, are you? A bloke like you?'

‘Now, Joe,' says Rex, ‘let's not get insulting. Let's not get out of hand —'

‘Declan!' Joe shouts. ‘Sydney! Come here!'

‘Dad,' mutters Freya, ‘please don't —'

Joe, if he heard, disregards her, banging his palm on the table. ‘Declan! Sydney!'

The boys, in the lounge room, look at their mother, who shakes her head and murmurs, ‘Ignore him.' And Syd does, edging nearer her, wrapping his arms tighter around Peter. But Joe hammers the table, calling, ‘Declan! Deco! Declan, come here!' and Declan comes warily forward, stopping in the doorway beside Freya. His hand is still clutching the throat of the vase; he is as white as a boy in a tower. ‘What, Dad?' he says.

‘Deco. Declan.' Joe grins at him, and his pistol of fingers comes up again. ‘Mr Dentist, this is my son, Declan. Declan, take a look at that man there. He's calling you a liar.'

Rex, for the first time, looks at Declan: and reaches out a hand to grasp Declan's shoulder, and seems to stand taller for doing so. To Joe he says deeply and calmly, ‘I know Declan, Joe, and I would never call him a liar. I think extremely highly of him, and I'm also very fond of him. I know he's a good boy, a credit to you and your wife. So, with respect, I'd like to hear what Declan has to say from his own mouth, not from yours, Joe. Declan,' he says, and pulls Declan slightly sideways so he can look down into the boy's face, ‘your father has just made a very unpleasant claim in your name. Now I would like to ask you: have I ever, in any way, behaved in a manner that's caused you concern? Have I – as your father puts it –
touched
you?'

Rex looks down with his honest, amber eyes, but Declan only glances up at him before his gaze slides away, passing Freya to find Colt in the shadows. Colt, discovered, does not flinch or run. Declan stares at him; then his sights lurch back to Joe. He looks at his father, and later Freya will wonder if, in these seconds, he's remembering the times Joe has commanded him to get to bed because the very thought of the unspoiled life ahead of his son is hateful and enviable and riling to Joe: or if it's some other reason completely that makes him answer as he does. ‘What was that, Deco?' Rex says, giving the boy's shoulder a gentle shake. ‘Could you speak louder, please, so your father can hear?'

Declan's face, which was bloodless, is now blazing, but he speaks again obediently, louder and more clearly. ‘No,' he says, ‘that's not true.' Then he slips from Rex's grasp, out of the cramped junction of the doorway, and Rex lets him go. To Joe he spreads his hands imploringly, as tall as the ceiling now: the television sounds abruptly maddening, the house crowded to the hilt, and their father, beside the table, has blurred around the edges. He blinks at Rex, grasping and ungrasping the back of a chair. ‘Well done,' he says. ‘Nicely done.'

Rex, all confidence, says, ‘This situation is of your making, Joe.'

‘Is it. Is it. Is that what it is.' Joe smiles. ‘What was it,' he says, ‘that I am supposed to do? I've forgotten.'

‘Just go to bed, friend. Sleep it off.'

Joe nods and smiles, squeezing the chair. ‘Big hero,' he says.

‘Someone has to be,' answers Rex.

Joe shoves the chair away. ‘Fucking superman,' he sighs. Maybe, Freya will think, he could have fought harder, but he pushes off from the table and walks out the back door without another word. And the sorrow her heart eternally carries for him flames devastatingly, so she almost cries out: she rushes to the window to watch him cross the yard and thinks,
Oh my dad, I'm sorry
. She watches until she hears his car drive away, and when she turns she sees that Rex has crouched beside Elizabeth and is inspecting her damaged face: Elizabeth is mumbling, ‘Thank you, Rex,' and he's replying, ‘Oh, happy to help, glad I could be of help.' And Freya sees it as if fluorescently lit, how he has them in his clutches now, that whatever he wants they must give him. She sees their future – the walks to church, the saintly smiles, the beige wall, the blank screen, the silvery instruments in his hands – and feels herself rusting inside. The yellow-eyed monster with its slinky black limbs has chased her right into her home.
I'm sorry
, she pleads to whoever might hear.
Help me, please, I'm sorry
.

Colt stays inside when he comes home from school, playing cards or doing more homework than he's been assigned. Outside is no longer part of his domain. Outside, on the street, he might cross the path of the neighbourhood boys, and that would be more than he can tolerate; moreover, outside risks putting the thought of the BMX into his father's head. He can't keep the bike's disappearance secret forever. His father is not the sort of person who forgets – he's always going to take an interest in the bike. So Colt stays inside, killing time, wondering if this is what his life will be: a bedroom, a bookshelf, a window.

And sometimes the unfairness of it makes him wonder why he's keeping the disappearance a secret at all: it's not Colt who made the bike go missing. He should tell his father, and then tell him why. But since the moment Declan said that word
no
, Colt has watched his father swell as if he's unhinged his jaw and swallowed a massive, fleshy meal that he's been hungering to eat. His father will say Colt is mistaken. He'll say Colt's lack of faith is more hurtful than that of anybody else. Then he will demand the names of those who knew where the bike was kept, and he'll feel the need to summon each of these to a suburban inquisition in the kitchen, charging no one with the crime but explaining how the theft has spoiled the memories they share. And if he does this, Colt must die. His will to live will drain away, and he will die.

And something else could happen, something which is pos­sible because it's happened before. His father won't recognise when enough is enough, he'll joke and chuckle and pleasantly, politely, inescapably insist until somebody stops laughing, and then the loss of the bike will be nothing compared to what comes next. The knock on the door, the sheltered conversations: and the Jensons will leave, and at the next house there will be a cascade of toys to smooth over the dislocation and the distress, and to help them make new friends.

So he's cloistering himself to keep the bike's vanishment a secret, and to stop someone's patience wearing thin.

In the three days since he went with his father to the Kileys' his thoughts have returned obsessively to the white weatherboard and the children gathered around their mother in the lounge room. He had never been to the Kiley house before, and he keeps finding details that have snagged in his memory. The photographs hung in the hallway, their frames mismatched and inexpensive. The aluminium biscuit tin on the kitchen counter with its wonky green bakelite knob. The field of crumbs beneath the toaster, the cord frayed where it met the socket. Grey carpet, sparse in the passage where they must walk, patterned with ivy and blotched roses. The butter-yellow vinyl of the dining-table chairs, to one of which a child has taken a biro and drawn a crackle of blue. Standing in the hallway he'd concentrated on this scribble for minutes at a time, because it had been unbearable to look at Elizabeth and the children. He can't imagine looking at Declan ever again. It would be a kind of insult, and Colt has no wish to insult him more.

He had left the house unnoticed that night, and walked home alone through the tepid evening. His mother had been waiting anxiously by the window, and Bastian had been weeping without knowing why. To distract his brother, Colt had told him about the scribble on the yellow chair. Bastian had been shocked. ‘Bad children!' he'd said.

His mother had kept asking, ‘Is it all right? Colt? Is it all right? Colt?'

And when his father had come home not too much later he had been full of bravado, stuffed to the gills with the fleshy meal of satisfaction. Tabby had sat on the edge of the couch while Rex strode around the lounge room. ‘It was nothing!' he'd told her, almost shouting. ‘Really, it was a huge fuss about very little. He's comparatively harmless. The problem is that people don't appreciate how bad things can truly be.'

Tabby said, so angrily, ‘That girl needs to learn that the world doesn't revolve around her.'

‘Oh, come now, she's only young. Still, I've no doubt they provoke him . . .'

‘So it's their problem then. Next time they must sort it out themselves. Don't go looking for trouble, Rex.'

‘Well,' said Rex, ‘we'll see.' And Colt had wished that Joe had raised a workingman's fist and slammed it into his father's face with the force of a freight train.

Now, on Saturday afternoon, he's sitting at his desk working on a list of places he'd like to go when he hears the familiar ting of a bicycle bell as tyres bump down the gutter. He sets aside his pen and hesitates, but he understands he is being invited, and he wants to go. First, however, he detours to the playroom and scoops up the red-and-white skateboard.

Syd is riding round randomly, as if there's a mouse on the road he wants to squash. Colt comes down the driveway, and Syd looks up. ‘Oh,' he says. ‘Hi.'

Colt can't believe how delighted he is to see the boy, but all he says is, ‘Hi.'

Syd glides a circle, his eyes on the road. His glance goes to the skateboard, flicks away. ‘What have you been doing?'

Colt can't say he's been waiting, so he says, ‘Nothing.'

‘Me neither.' Syd stops his bike before he sails past Colt again, plants his feet on the road. He looks up at the red-brick house, down to the flaking chrome of his handlebars. ‘How have you been?' Colt asks.

Syd shrugs. ‘OK.'

‘What about Declan?'

‘Yeah, he's OK.'

‘Can you tell him . . .' Colt pauses; it is difficult. ‘Can you tell him I said sorry?'

Syd crinkles his nose. ‘You don't have to be sorry. It's just life, isn't it? That's what Deco says. You've just got to live with it.'

Colt says, ‘I guess.' And because he's sometimes found himself thinking about her he asks, ‘How's Freya?'

‘Hmm, the same.'

But Colt doubts this. ‘Will you tell her I said hi?' he says, and when the boy nods easily, adds, ‘Don't forget.'

‘I won't. But you can tell her yourself the next time you see her.'

Colt smiles, looking away. The breeze rubs his face, the sun strokes his arms. He would tell the boy how he's craved to see him and all that he means, and Syd might say the same. Instead they contemplate the road as if it will speak for them, and what Syd says is, ‘The BMX. Garrick's got it.'

‘Oh,' says Colt. ‘OK.'

Syd eyes him. ‘Aren't you mad?'

Colt doesn't know how he feels – he doesn't think he's mad. He thinks he's always known Garrick Greene had the bike, and why. ‘Thanks for telling me.'

‘I can try to get it back for you.'

‘No, I'll get it back.' And then, recalling the skateboard in his hands, he holds it out to Syd. ‘Here. You can have this.'

Instead of seizing it and haring off, the boy baulks. ‘Why?'

‘Well . . . It could be a reward for telling me about the bike.'

Syd scowls. ‘I don't need a reward. I hate Garrick. I don't care if it's dobbing. It serves him right.' But his eyes linger on the board, its stripes of blood and bone, and he licks his lip. ‘Maybe, after Christmas, if you still don't want it, I'll take it.'

Colt shoulders the board. ‘OK.'

Syd draws a steadying breath and smiles. ‘How's Bastian?'

‘Oh, you know. Bastian.'

‘Tell him he better keep practising those slot cars if he wants to beat me.'

There's a silence, the song of a bird. The boys look along the length of the street, at the closed-tight doors and windows, the cars that never leave. Syd twiddles idly with his bike's bell, casts a sidelong glance at the skateboard. ‘Anyway, I better go,' he says. ‘I'll see you round, Colt.'

‘Yeah, see you,' Colt says, and the boy pedals away. And Colt, who has grown so tired in these past cluttered weeks of bikes and pools and barbeques and drains and skateboards and ice-cream and sheds and wounded knees during which he's only ever been falling, falling, feels an anchoring sense of relief to finally be given a price he can pay.

So when, the following day, he watches Garrick ride up the driveway, he goes to the door and opens it before the boy can knock. He feels no fear, only a gratitude that Garrick should have chosen a public path. It's Sunday, and the afternoon is drowsy. ‘Hi,' he says, and Garrick replies, ‘Are you looking for your bike?'