Golden Boys (5 page)

There's another pause; the neighbourhood ruffians shift their feet. No matter what else they are, they are children – a mountain range of toys gleams in their minds. And maybe the man knows it, because he says, ‘Why don't you all stay? It's a hot afternoon to be messing about in a creek. Look, you're already sunburned. I think there are icy-poles in the freezer, aren't there, Bas?'

‘Pineapple ones,' says Bastian.

Colt looks down at his father, who is still kneeling on the footpath. To Syd's mind Colt has the option of saying yes or saying no, but he looks as if the choice is more difficult. ‘Bring your friends in,' his father tells him, squinting against the bright sun. ‘Get the trains and cars out. Don't leave your brother behind so soon. There's always another day for a stormwater drain.'

Colt is silent. Then he turns to Declan, Syd, Garrick. ‘We can stay here,' he says flatly, and not in the least as if they'd be welcome. But the man is rising, skyscraper tall, extending a hand to Avery, who's never been helped to his feet in his life. Garrick spins the dark nose of the BMX toward the house, and Syd, who wants so much that life might not give him, says, ‘I want a skateboard.'

The red-brick house is a stranger to Colt: it's less than a fortnight since the family moved in, and he still feels like a visitor. Despite the new carpet and the repainting, the house stubbornly belongs to the person who used to live here: an elderly lady, his mother has told him, who'd become frail. She left a garden that is un­usual for this neighbourhood, where most of the trees are self-sown oaks and ash, massive things which shade the yards and parch the lawns. The Jensons have inherited a garden of native brush and eucalypts, wispy and whippy, intriguingly untame. Bastian has found a bird feeder, there's a maze of stepping-stones, and in one tree is a wooden case made for sheltering possums. The house itself is spruce, the gutters clear, the hinges oiled, the flywire tight to the windows. In his bed at night – his own familiar bed, brought from their previous house – Colt thinks about the old woman, how she probably did not want to leave her stepping-stones and sleeping possums and her hand-planted trees. She must have left as heartsore as he had arrived. This is only the second house he's ever lived in, there's nothing to say his family will move from here, and surely it's just the dislocation making him think this way: but he pictures them packing again and again, driven on relentlessly. The ringing of the doorbell, the sour adult faces, the conversations behind doors. The boxing up of all they own, the strange keys on the mantelpiece, the gifting of new possessions. ‘Just leave it there,' he tells Garrick of the BMX: leave the hateful thing where it falls.

Colt and Bastian each has his own bedroom – they have never had to share. Heading down the hallway they stop first at Bastian's door, and the boy flings into the room and bounces on the bed. For all his fussiness he is an untidy child, his bed unmade, his books piled in jutting stacks, the wardrobe door hanging open so some shoes are tilting out. His countless
Star Wars
people are strewn across the floor, mixed in with their weapons and spacecraft and puggy beasts as well as with Bastian's extensive fleet of Matchbox cars, all these small things combining to make an arena more vicious, to the bare foot, than a bull-ants' nest. ‘This is my favourite, Jawa,' Bastian says, retrieving from the prone population a tiny figure and holding it up glowingly for their appreciation and envy. Bastian is vague, flighty, a puff of air; to Colt he is a cause for concern. He wishes his brother had been born a girl, a little lady content to be at their mother's side. It's too hard on Bastian to be a boy, there's no place for boys like him. He holds out the Jawa and the visitors stare as if he's mad, as if they'd bite their fingers off before touching that fawned-upon toy. And the awful thing is that Bastian doesn't notice, his happiness doesn't falter, he keeps smiling his foolish smile. ‘Come on,' Colt urges, and Bastian cries, ‘Wait!' because they've hardly spared his treasures even a minute of their time; but as they walk away he's with them, chirping and fluttering, a territorial bird.

Colt's room is organised: he could not have rested until it was so. It's a larger room than Bastian's, and the boys fan out within it. Mostly Colt owns books, a library ranged neatly across dustless shelves. Captured between the volumes is a gang of golden children frozen in positions of dash atop plinths inset with engraved plates. There are gilded cups, frilly rosettes, shield-shaped plaques, curling ribbons, metal medallions. Declan steps closer to read the words etched into the plates. ‘You're a runner?'

Colt shrugs modestly, but it's obvious he runs like the wind. There are some silvers and bronzes, token splashes of red and yellow as if to acknowledge that nobody is perfect, but the collection has its basis in gold and blue.
First, fastest, champion
: before they'd shifted to this house, into this world where he knows no one, Colt's closest friends, the ones with whom he'd had most in common, had been boys from the local athletics club. They would visit his bedroom and peruse the trophies just as Declan is doing, shifting through them as other boys shuffle football cards, reliving each moment of each race, quoting times to the millisecond. On Saturdays when he wasn't working the weekend shift at the surgery, Colt's father would watch the meets, and sometimes drive three or four of Colt's friends home afterwards. Usually he would detour to the bakery and buy softdrink and pies which the boys would eat around the Jensons' kitchen table, thin arms poking from their flimsy singlets, socked feet hooking the bars of the chairs. He'll never see any of those boys again, Colt knows. ‘I used to be,' he tells Declan. ‘I'm not sure if I'll do it anymore. I was in a club, but – it's a long way from here.'

‘We lived miles and miles away,' Bastian explains. ‘But not in another country.'

‘There must be an athletics club round here,' says Declan, and frowns at Avery and Garrick. ‘Isn't there?'

‘Avery should know,' says Garrick. ‘He's always running.'

‘I probably won't do it anymore,' says Colt.

Books and trophies are not what was promised, and Garrick blows air dismissively. ‘Where's all the good stuff? Where's the slot cars?'

Bastian hops excitedly from foot to foot; Colt knows he wants to clutch the big boy's arm the way he might want to carry the leash of a dog, but doesn't dare. ‘This way, hurry, I'll show you.'

At the end of the hallway, tucked behind the kitchen, is a slope-ceilinged, sunlit room with a long row of louvred windows that look out over the rear garden. The old owner of the house probably read or dozed in here, Colt imagines: it was a room for peace. Until this minute, peace has reigned. ‘Bloody hell,' says Garrick at the doorway.

His parents call it a
playroom
, but that's a word Colt would rather choke on than use. There'd been a similar room in their other house and, as children, he and Bastian had played in that one. But at some point their father had begun to buy his sons everything they wanted and so much they didn't ask for as well, and the room and its contents became less about playing and more about owning in abundance things which others wish for and do not have. And as the boys crowd at the door catching their breath in amazement, Colt sees it all, suddenly, for what it is. His father spends money not merely on making his sons envied, but on making them – and the word seems to tip the floor –
enticing
. His father buys bait. And Colt is engulfed with such disorienting shame that he has to move away quickly, striding the length of the room as if he's spotted something about to topple. In the corner there's a basket of tennis balls capped by the greater orb of a soccer ball, which he picks up and holds stupidly, having no idea what to do with it, having never played soccer in his life. He looks back over the distance he's travelled – past the cricket bats and tennis racquets and boxes of Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo, Operation and Ker-Plunk!, past the footballs lolling against the skirtingboard, all of them scarcely-scuffed Sherrins; past the record player with its twin mesh-fronted speakers, the podgy vinyl beanbags slouched on the floor – and his heart is beating like it must burst. There are a trillion pieces of Lego and Meccano, model cars and aeroplanes and tanks in packages yet to be opened. There are plastic soldiers in their hundreds flung into a bucket grave, and fine painted lead ones preserved in velvet-lined trays. There is a wad of larger warriors, G.I. Joes in ill-fitting camouflage, and a pair of Six Million Dollar Mans with tunnels drilled starkly through their manly heads. There's a miniature train in countless pieces, the assembling of which will require a weekend of work. There are radio-controlled vehicles of various makes and sizes. There is the slot-car set, bought from a specialist store and lifted down from the highest shelf. They had had difficulty fitting the box into their father's car. In all this trove, not one thing is broken or outmoded, no parts are loose or lost: Colt knows that every puzzle possesses its exactly required number of pieces. The textas in their plastic slips are not running low on ink. Anything that feeds off batteries is dutifully fitted with them. And if by some strange intrusion of harsh reality something happens here as it happens elsewhere – something snaps, drops off, wears away, if the punching clown is punctured or the player starts chewing up tapes – then that broken thing is not repaired or driven, lamed, into further service, but thrown away like a disgusting thing, and replaced by a flawless example of its kind.

It's less a playroom, Colt thinks, than a place which trills with nerves.

‘Oh, this is ace.' All the cynicism that keeps Garrick motoring has fallen away. ‘Oh, this is really ace.'

‘Look, look!' Bastian pushes past, dashes randomly around the room. He picks up a wooden case and proffers it to Avery: ‘Look, a microscope!'

Syd walks to where the skateboards stand wheels-up against the wall, crouches before them and turns them over as reverently as if they were infants in their cradles, the broad red-and-white striped one, its sleeker jewel-blue pair. The slot cars have caught Garrick's eye and he seizes the great box with both hands, wrestling it away from the wall. ‘Where can we set it up?' he wants to know, and Bastian starts booting the beanbags aside, piping, ‘Here, I'll help you, Colt and me will help!' And Colt will help, but first he must fight down the urge to order them out of the room, out of the house, away from the whole street, he'd close up this room like a pharaoh's cursed tomb until the toys had crumbled away. His heart is still pounding, he feels he's turned grey, and he goes to the window as if something unusual out there has caught his eye. A warm breeze slides between the louvres, scurfs locks of hair across his forehead. His fingers dig into his palms, and he commands himself not to panic. He can't hear them, but he's aware of his parents in the house somewhere, his father speaking in his nothing-ever-goes-wrong voice, his mother answering with murmurs which quieten into smiles and then into nothing.

The back garden is a sparse forest of rocks and scrub and eucalypts. Some of the trees close to the deck have been daubed with yellow paint: these are the ones with only a day or two left to stand. When they and the scrub around them have been grubbed away, a clearing will be opened in the yard, and from this window the view across it will be excellent. By this time next week, give or take a couple of days, the clearing will be occupied by a swimming pool. Not an extravagant, sunken pool – merely the above-ground, fibreglass-walled kind, which isn't as fancy but is quicker to install and which will still be impressively large and deep. A swimming pool of their very own: Bastian's super secret, impossible to keep.

Wednesday is payday, and at the printworks the men are paid in cash; it's a great temptation, that fold of bills, and it's a tradition for the men to finish Wednesday evening at the nearby hotel. They set themselves no limit to how much of their wage they may spend, but if they are smart they will first tuck, into an unpillageable pocket, the amount required by their wives for the housekeeping. Not all the men are smart, and even the clever ones aren't consistently clever, but Joe Kiley usually manages to bring home and place on the kitchen table the thin pile of notes which must keep his family through the coming week. His daughter Freya sees the money with relief. There have been times when her father has been light-fingeredly separated from his earnings, and he's been as sullen about it, at home, as if one of his children were to blame. But tonight the money is there, and Freya gathers it up when Joe turns to the refrigerator. She knows he's been drinking. ‘How was work?' she asks, but he doesn't hear. She is holding her breath but even when she tries to relax and breathe properly, she can't do it. ‘Your dinner's in the oven,' she tells him; she's told him this already, but Joe says, ‘You could have told me, Frey,' and swings the fridge door closed. As he retrieves the plate from the oven she sees he's sporting a mean black cut across his left thumb: the printworks is a dangerous place, men have lost fingers to the razoring machines. A tiny part of her is permanently given over to dread of such an accident befalling her father. It would tear her heart to pieces, she thinks.

She slips from her chair and goes into the lounge, where the rest of her family are watching television. Anyone looking through the wide window would see a woman at ease with her children, because Dorrie and Marigold are sprawled on the floor, their faces tipped to the TV, and Peter is lying between them feeding plastic animals into a shoebox, and Syd is curled in one armchair and Declan is lying loosely across the other, and their mother is standing at the table folding the washing but following what's happening on the screen. The watcher beyond the window wouldn't know how closely they are listening to the man in the other room – the peeling back of the foil from the plate, the opening and banging closed of the sticky cutlery drawer. The watcher wouldn't feel the thinning of the air.

Freya gives her mother the housekeeping money, and Elizabeth says, ‘Oh, thanks,' so casually, as if it doesn't mean much to have those notes closed in her hand. Freya would help her fold the washing but the basket is nearly empty, its contents transformed into a small township over the table. Each pile has its destination: the linen press, the tea-towel drawer, the hallway cupboard, the inadequate chests in the children's bedrooms. She hasn't asked her mother about any baby that may or may not be on its way – it's a tricky subject to approach, mortifying in the deadliest way – but Freya thinks of the clutter a baby brings with it, the nappies, the bibs, the cloths for sponging the ceaseless purge. The township of clothes is already crowded, the table simply not broad enough for another inhabitant to exist there.

She sits on the couch, separated by the telephone stand from Syd in his armchair. Syd is small and as neatly-made as a cat, cat-faced with his wide blue eyes and small nose and whiskery hair, and he curls on the chair like a cat, his temple on the padded arm, his hands woven under his chin. There's a noise from the kitchen – a knife dropped onto the floor – and his feet in their droopy socks flex. Moments pass and there's another noise, their father's chair dragged on the lino: like a cat's tail twitching, Syd's feet churn again. Across the room, Declan's gaze is unflinchingly on the screen. There are glass doors set into the lounge-room window, they open onto the veranda and the front yard and freedom; they are open now, and the air comes in, lifting the pages of Marigold's schoolbook. It's early evening but the sky is light, the clocks having been pushed forward for daylight saving. Only the faintest haze of evening stains the clouds milk-grey.

They hear the shoving of his chair, his tread across the kitchen.

Her father is not a big man, but he's the biggest person in the house: he seems to fill the lounge-room doorway right up to the top of the frame. Marigold and Dorrie lift their heads like flowers. ‘Hi, Dad,' says Dorrie.

‘Hi, girls. Hello, Peter. Hello, Sydney. Hello Declan. Hello Elizabeth.'

‘Hello, Joe,' says Freya's mother.

He slaps his thigh. ‘Come here, Petey-boy, give me a kiss.'

Peter's silky head sinks, and Marigold says, ‘He's busy, Dad. He's playing with his animals.'

Joe comes into the room: he's not unsteady, but they can see it and smell it, the glasses he's drained, the foam on the glass. A Christmas card stands on the sideboard and he pinches it up, peers into its depths. ‘Who are Joan and Jack?'

‘Next door to my parents.'

‘Who?'

‘The people who live next door to Mum and Dad.' Elizabeth sighs as if every word is pain, and the children are quiet because they can hear it, everything that is coming.

Joe pouts. ‘Isn't it – November? That's not Christmas. In a hurry, are they? Think it might be their last one?'

Freya chuckles obligingly, but Elizabeth says nothing. ‘Funny people to send a Christmas card,' Joe decides. ‘We don't even know them.'

‘I do.'

‘What?'

‘I know them.' Their mother's voice is an ice floe. The folding is done and she's jamming the piles in the basket, and Freya wants to beg,
Please, Mum
. There is no point being angry. It makes things worse and he never seems to care.

Joe sets the greeting-card down, moves further into the room. ‘What are you watching, kids?'

Everyone waits for somebody else to answer. ‘Just a dumb show,' says Marigold.

‘If it's dumb, why are you watching? What's it about?'

None of his offspring look away from the screen, on which people in drab clothes are grouped in a cold-looking kitchen. ‘Just stuff,' says Marigold vaguely.

‘Stuff? What is stuff?'

‘It's a serial,' says Syd.

Joe says, ‘A serial killer,' and Freya laughs again. She, like all Joe's children, has inherited his blue eyes and fly-away fisherman's hair, his pale skin and lightly-made frame. None of them have their mother's farm-girl colouring or sturdy build; they cleave to her, but belong to him. ‘What's it about?' he asks again.

‘For God's sake, Joe!' says Elizabeth. ‘Let them watch in peace.'

But there can't be peace, not now. ‘It's about these people,' says Syd. ‘It's hard to explain. You haven't been watching it —'

‘Doesn't matter if I've been watching it or not. You've been watching, and I'm asking you.'

‘Leave them alone!' says Elizabeth, and Freya feels everything sliding.

‘It's about people in the war.' Declan speaks curtly, without looking up. ‘It's boring, Dad.'

‘It's boring, yet you're all sitting there like monkeys staring at it. Turn off the TV and I'll tell you a story. Would you like that, Dorrie doll?'

‘Yeah!' Dorrie scrambles to her knees.

‘When the show's finished, Dad,' Syd groans. ‘Sit down, Dorrie, your head's in the way . . .'

‘Turn it up,' says Declan, and Marigold crawls over her book to twist the volume knob. Joe makes a sound which suggests his children disappoint him. Elizabeth has stacked the basket and the stack is precarious, but she doesn't carry it away. Leaning on the back of Declan's chair Joe observes the program in silence, and no one else says anything, so Freya hears it clearly above the yawing of the television: the low hum that is their wish that he would leave. She wishes they could be glad he's here – it's what he would like, it's what any child would choose – but it has never been that way, and it tests her imagination to believe any other way exists. ‘Hey,' says Joe, and the pressure is a hand pushing down on Freya's chest. ‘Hey girls, Petey, let's set up the Christmas tree.'

This catches the attention of the youngest ones: Marigold looks up with interest, and Peter says, ‘OK!'

‘No,' says Elizabeth, ‘not tonight.'

‘Mum!' cries Dorrie.

‘You're having a bath when the show's finished.'

‘I don't want a bath!' The little girl is instantly on the edge of hysteria. ‘I want to set up the Christmas tree!'

Freya finds herself speaking. ‘It's too early for the tree, Dorrie. It's a long time until Christmas. All the decorations will fall off and get broken.'

‘We've already got a Christmas card,' Joe points out.

‘They won't get broken, Freya!'

‘Turn up the TV,' murmurs Declan.

‘Mum said you can't —'

‘Dad says I can! I want to! I want to!' And Dorrie throws back her head and bawls.

‘Turn up the TV!' Declan hisses.

‘Don't, Marigold!' barks Freya.

Elizabeth says, ‘For God's sake, Joe, why don't you go to bed?'

Marigold rounds on her sister and thumps her, shrieking, ‘Shut up, you stupid idiot!'

‘I want to set up the Christmas tree!' howls the child; and Peter, in the crossfire, slumps to the carpet and weeps.

‘Look what you've done, Dad!' cries Syd. ‘We were trying to watch TV!'

‘She wants to set up the Christmas tree!' Joe laughs like he's innocent and amazed. ‘That's not too much to ask, is it?'

He flops on the couch beside Freya, seeming to forget, as he does so, all about Christmas and his traumatised children. Over the storming of their grief he asks her, ‘What's happening on this show?'

‘Dad!'

‘All right, all right! Don't tell me.'

He settles into the couch and closes his eyes, and the outcome of the evening wheels like a compass needle. A smell rises from him, broken glass, stained tiles, ashtrays, ill-care, the worst smell the children know. Marigold turns the volume down, and, ‘Stop crying!' Declan snarls at Dorrie and Peter, who struggle to gulp down their misery, chests jerking, faces drenched.

Freya glances at her father's pockets, where money sometimes falls out.

Then he opens his sea-blue eyes and the first thing he sees is Declan, lying with his legs hanging over the arm of the chair. ‘Sit up,' he says unpleasantly, in a voice that is and isn't his own. ‘A chair's for sitting on. Not sprawling all over like a dog.'

‘Oh, shut up.' The words sound as if Elizabeth has breathed them from glowing coals. Her husband, if he heard, disregards her, watching sourly as Declan shuffles upright. ‘About time you were in bed, isn't it?' he says. ‘There's school tomorrow.'

‘Leave him alone,' says Elizabeth. ‘Don't start, Joe —'

‘School tomorrow, Declan.' Joe jerks his chin. ‘Time to get to bed.'

Declan does not look at his father, stares fixedly at the TV. Its images change every few seconds; nothing else does. When he doesn't move, their father says more fiercely, ‘Declan, what did I just tell you?'

‘Dad,' says Freya quietly, ‘it's not even dark.'

But they know what he's like. He's a recording of something dreadful, which loops and starts again. ‘Declan Kiley. Get to your room. I will not tell you a second time.'

Elizabeth snaps, ‘Why don't
you
get to
your
room! No one wants to listen to you!'

He turns his face to her, a blotched mask recognis­able only because they've seen it before. There is no kindness in it. Before anything else can happen, Declan gets to his feet. And this is new – usually his father's chivvying drives him deeper into his seat – and alarming: Marigold's bitten fingers fly to her mouth. ‘Ignore him, Declan,' their mother orders, but in a dull voice Declan answers, ‘I'm not watching it anyway.'

He walks from the room, a barefoot boy who looks small when he passes his father. Joe's gaze follows him right to the door.
Why do you want this?
Freya would like to know, but it's an impossible thing for a child to ask her father. Their brother has gone, and that can't be changed. His leaving has knocked the corners off the peril they were in. She glances at Syd, who sags desolately in his chair. Say nothing, do nothing, behave as if you are unharmed and this is normal, this thudding heart, the acidic air, this evening bitterly torn. ‘Come here, Petey-boy.' Joe pats the space between himself and Freya. ‘I'll tell you a story. I'll tell everybody a story.' In a few minutes he will be snoring.

She gets abruptly to her feet, refusing to pretend she can listen.