Golden Boys (2 page)

Freya Kiley has started to see things she hasn't seen before. Until recently she has lived as every child must: as someone dropped on a strangers' planet, forced to accept that these are the ways of this world. Being a child, she thinks waftily, is like being in rough but shallow water, buffeted, dunked, pushed this way and that. If it is sometimes alarming, there is always the sight of the beach. There's always the sand under your feet.

The problem, however, is that sand is sand. From where she sits she can almost feel it, the way the water sluices the grains away from heels and toes. It's stupid to put your trust in sand. And when you're a child, that is what you are: stupid.

When she was younger – nine, ten – Freya had tried to be holy. Piety was one of the rare things which the nuns at school approved of in a child; more than that, it seemed to be something she had no choice about. Certain traits characterised this world: the sun rose, dogs chased cats, and God lay underfoot everywhere like a clammy carpet. So Freya had tried to love the lamblike Jesus with his flowing hair, she'd strained to feel the presence of her guardian angel. She'd dwelt upon the cloudy Heaven awaiting her at the end of her hardly-begun life. If it had always been an effort, if her thoughts had repeatedly roamed, she'd assumed it was because religion was nerve-wracking. Talking snakes, toady plagues, corpses walking, people drinking blood. A mutilated man nailed to planks, his brow pierced by infectious-looking thorns. And, overseeing everything, a vile-tempered ghost, an emaciated and rebukeful old man in a hospital gown, watching and waiting to notch up a girl's smallest mistake. A God who was always harsh and rarely fair, who would hurl even an infant to Hell.

Now she's older and smarter, and she's starting to see that the world is a castle, and that a child lives in just one room of it. It's only as you grow up that you realise the castle is vast and has countless false floors and hidden doors and underground tunnels; and that the castle is haunted, and that the castle scares even itself. And as you get older, you're forced out of the room, whether you want to go or not. Freya wants, with urgency, to go.

Already, through the first doorway, she's discovered this: the reason the angels and Heaven and the old ghost have never stuck with her is not that they're nerve-wracking, but that they are not true.

There was no particular moment of realisation: it is more like something she was born knowing, and the knowledge has been slowly making its way like a splinter to the surface, and now it has finally arrived. It's come accompanied by a sense of shame and hurt, as if she has heard at last a snigger that's been skulking behind her back. Freya glances around, and sees plain faces. No one is laughing, yet she hears it.

She sits down, because the time has come to sit. When the priest has finished talking, she'll stand. Her fingernails carve crescents in the polished pine of the pew. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,' the priest says, reading from the Bible which is a great gilt-edged slab, a monster book full of monstering: when Freya looks at the congregation, it doesn't seem wicked to her. Wicked would be interesting, but everyone looks dull, half-asleep, slightly angry. Her brothers and sisters are kids, and they're not wicked, only irritating, and if God were here she would tell him that nobody has her permission to say nasty things about them. The church is recently built from cream brick and too much glass, so the air is thick and overheated. It has hard-wearing brown carpet and teal-blue trim. It is meant to be modern – the crucifix above the altar is made from beams of industrial steel, so intimidating that Jesus has absented himself – yet the priest is reading the same old lines from the same old book. Freya's nails dig into the pew as if she'd screw the place up and throw it away.
This is the last
time
, she swears. She will never come here again. She is not going to tell herself lies, nor accept the lies of others. From now on, she will do things properly.

And when it is finally over, the priest bowing before the altar and trudging off with his duckling row of boys into the private room where girls are not welcome, the morning is done as if packed into an elderly person's wardrobe, but at least she is free to leave. Freya would like to sprint away kicking her heels like a pony, but that's not what can happen. The aisle clogs with parishioners and she gets hemmed in, has to worm through gaps while her siblings and mother disappear out the doors. Distance stretches like toffee, for a moment she thinks she will never reach fresh air: at the door she's caught in a blockage that has congealed in the hope of seeing the priest as if everyone hasn't seen him just minutes earlier and can't also see him in the milkbar buying cigarettes and see his underwear, too, if they so desire, hanging on the line in the yard of the presbytery, and it amazes her that with these signs they don't see he's just a human, a man of baggy elastic and bad habits, and by the time she's dodged and wriggled her way into the sunlight she feels scorched with contempt for every last living thing.

Only to find that her mother, too, has been snagged, and is stopped on the path beside the carpark with Marigold and Dorrie sagging beside her and Peter in his stroller arching his chest against the straps, and she's talking with an awkward smile to a man and a lady and two boys Freya has never seen before. The sun is warmer than when she'd last been under it, the heat drawing fumes from the bitumen; cars are reversing, people are standing about, children are beginning to cry. She tries to slip past unseen but her mother catches her – actually lunges sideways to grab her – and tells the strangers loudly and eagerly, as if only enthusiasm keeps her heart pumping, ‘This is another of my daughters, this is Freya.'

‘Another!' marvels the man. ‘Quite a tribe!'

‘Oh, yes.' Freya's mother shakes her head with a kind of amused hopelessness. ‘There's always another one coming.'

Already, after ten seconds, it is unpleasant to be waylaid in the shadeless carpark, people slamming doors around them, starting the engines of cars. It is fumy, gritty, over-warm. Peter, having tested the strength of his bindings, has subsided in calculation: time starts ticking to the moment he'll start to scream. Freya smiles unendearingly. ‘Hello.'

‘Freya's the eldest,' her mother tells the strangers. ‘She's – how old are you, Freya?'

‘Twelve,' she says. ‘You know.'

‘Hello, Freya,' says the woman.

‘Hello.' She doesn't care that the word sounds booted out of her.

‘After Freya there's Declan, then Sydney, but . . .' Elizabeth Kiley scans the crowd, ‘I can't see them.'

‘They're gone,' says Marigold blandly.

‘And who's this fine chap in the pusher?' asks the man.

‘This is Peter. He's the baby. Well, he's nearly two.'

Peter looks up beseechingly. ‘He's adorable,' says the lady.

‘He breaks my stuff,' says Dorrie.

‘That's what baby brothers do, don't they, Colt?' The man gestures at the boy beside him, who stands in pristine silence. ‘Colt is twelve, the same as you, Freya.'

‘Uh.' She's already looked at this silent boy – he's taller than she is, and more beautiful – and looked swiftly away. ‘I'm nearly thirteen,' she clarifies.

‘I'm five,' submits Dorrie.

‘I'm seven,' says Marigold.

The man, who is tall and quite conspicuously handsome, who looks like an action-movie actor and whose presence only makes sense if the carpark is in fact a movie set, smiles radiantly and says, ‘Well, we're delighted to meet you. I'm Rex Jenson, and this is my wife Tabby, and these are our sons Coltrane – Colt – and Bastian. We've moved into a house around the corner from you. It's so nice to meet new neighbours.'

Freya and her mother smile as if they agree it is very nice; in truth such friendliness is disconcerting, a gust of too-strong wind. Freya has never been introduced to adults by their Christian names, and it's as startling as hearing a swear-word. ‘It must be exhausting, shifting house,' says Elizabeth, grappling. ‘I don't think I could do it.'

‘Well, it's not easy,' the man agrees. ‘Nothing worth doing is, is it? But it will be worth it. It doesn't hurt to shake your life up a bit. Change is always good.'

‘Oh, yes,' says Elizabeth hazily. These people are too elegant, too assured: Freya knows they are making her mother nervous. She's shunting the pusher back and forth so Peter flops like a fish.

‘It seems a lovely neighbourhood,' says Tabby, the wife.

‘Oh, it is,' Elizabeth says, and flounders on: ‘A few palings get pulled off fences sometimes. Some kids were going around smashing letterboxes – remember that, Freya? When was that? People were waking up to find their letterboxes all over the footpath.'

‘Ages ago,' says Freya.

‘It was a while ago. A year or two ago.'

‘You get that kind of thing everywhere,' says Rex. ‘It's usually just kids.'

‘Bad kids,' says Dorrie.

‘Kids letting off steam.' Rex smiles. ‘Kids growing up. What's a letterbox? It's nothing. Something you can replace.'

Freya and her family gape at him, this man so kind and cavalier that he could forgive an awful act of vandalism. Freya's been taught about forgiveness all her life, but she's never actually met anyone inclined to practise it. She glances at the sons, Coltrane and Bastian, who stand beside their mother as placid as giraffes. Their father's attitude must be wasted on them, they look incapable of committing any kind of crime. It is not possible to imagine them racing off to play the pinballs, which is undoubtedly what Freya's brothers have done. The Jenson boys look like they should be etched into stained-glass windows, Sebastian pierced with arrows, the arrogant child lecturing the learned men. And suddenly Freya feels overcome, unreasonably hot and testy. It's time to go, but they stand as if paralysed beneath the man's beneficent smile. Elizabeth asks, ‘What do you do, Rex?'

‘I'm a dentist,' he replies.

‘Ook,' squeaks Marigold, and Freya likewise shrinks. There's nothing worse than that sprawling chair, that tray of dainty tools.

‘Our dentist gives us lollies,' says Dorrie.

‘He yelled at me for crying,' says Marigold.

‘People must talk to you about teeth all the time,' says Elizabeth.

‘I don't mind,' Rex answers. ‘I like teeth.'

‘Mum's got false teeth,' Dorrie informs him.

‘Dorrie!' Elizabeth gags, but Freya notes that the man's expression does not alter even minutely, that he's deaf to anything someone doesn't want him to hear. Freya herself can't help smirking; glancing away, she meets the eye of the tall boy, Colt. He's a slighter version of his film-star father, with the same thick chestnut hair – a
mop
of hair, like the lush pelt of an animal – worn long around his face, the same cheekbones and eyebrows and perfect nose. The younger boy has the same mahogany curls but his face is like his mother's, a pink girly mouth, a small chiselled chin. Both have their father's amber eyes and olive skin. They are well-dressed but the sense of quality goes deep, as if they are burnished right to the bone. Dorrie's revelation has brought a smile to Colt's face – Freya's heart is just starting to be stirrable, and it stirs now. He's smiling to
her
, and no one else in the world knows it. It sets her cheeks on fire, makes her head feel as if it's not reliably where it used to be. She looks for help to the last cars moving past on slow-turning wheels, to the priest standing at the church doors with the remnants of the flock, his altar boys nowhere to be seen. There is nothing to do except flee. ‘I'm going home,' she tells her mother. ‘Do you want me to take Peter?'

‘I'll come!' says Marigold.

Elizabeth says, ‘We're all coming, we're leaving now —'

‘I'm leaving
now
,' says Freya.

‘Nice to meet you, Freya,' says the man, the dentist, Rex Jenson. ‘Hopefully we'll see you again soon.'

‘Uh,' says Freya. And almost runs.

The church isn't far from their home, which is the only good thing about it. Marigold skips to keep up with her sister, and the street streams past them as lines in the footpath, gates in fences, telephone poles planted in naturestrips. Jogging along, the girl tells Freya, ‘I liked that lady with a name like a cat.'

‘
Tabby
.'

‘Tabby.' Marigold meows.

They pass a pole and a pole and another pole before Freya slows down. She wrinkles her nose, shakes her hair. ‘Those people were strange.'

‘How come?'

‘Well. He talked and talked, but the lady hardly said anything, and those boys just . . . stood there.'

‘Rude?'

‘Not rude,' Freya judges. ‘Just strange.'

Marigold flies her palm above the peaked top of a brick fence, thinking about this. She's young, but she is clever. ‘They were like those people in Mum's knitting magazines.'

‘Exactly!'

‘Robots.'

They have reached Freya's favourite house, which has a population of repellent concrete gnomes arranged in its front yard. Normally they'd slow or even stop, but Freya marches on. ‘Not robots. More like . . . aliens. Aliens trying to be humans.'

‘Creatures from the black lagoon,' says Marigold, a movie fan.

‘They wear skin to look like people, but they don't know how to
be
like people. They're learning it.'

‘Strange!' agrees Marigold. ‘Spooky.'

‘They
are
spooky. I mean, how did they know we live around the corner from them?'

‘They saw us walking to church. That's what the man said, that they were walking behind us.'

This is plausible, which is disappointing, but Freya's mind catches on the thought of Colt walking behind her, seeing her without her seeing him. She wishes she could go back in time to hover over that oblivious girl, tweak her hair, do something. She'd given Dorrie a cuff: knowing he must have seen it makes her feel harassed. ‘Well, why did they come here?' she asks hotly. ‘Dentists are rich. They make lots of money. So why are they here?'