Golden Boys (9 page)

Bastian jerks to life. ‘Yeah!'

‘A hero. A hero. Goodness me. I've never thought of that.' Rex, chuckling, drops the mutilated bread onto his plate and smears his fingers on a tattered serviette. ‘Although one thing I do know, and I'll tell you this, Joe: if I was a hero, I'd charge a lot less money. Or maybe a lot more? One or the other.'

His guests laugh and laugh enthusiastically. Freya laughs too, though nothing is funny. Colt, she sees, hasn't looked up from his feet, but he has gone still. He must have been listening after all – listening to Freya's father prove himself as mean as she told them he was. It should make her feel better, but she's washed with dismay. ‘Is it too soon for dessert?' asks Tabby as the amusement fades. ‘We don't want to keep you forever, shall I serve dessert?'

There's a rush of chair-shunting, plate-stacking, table-clearing, door-swinging. Desserts are brought out, fruit salad and cake and ice-cream and pavlova, and the younger children jostle jealously at the table for their share. ‘You must have been cooking all day!' marvels Elizabeth, and Tabby says, ‘Oh, I bought the pavlova, I only did the cream and passionfruit.' Marigold shivers and says, ‘I hate passionfruit,' and Freya could thump her, her whole family is monstrous, she can scarcely swallow the cake. She begs for the night to be over, and her life with it. The boys eat hurriedly and then move back into the garden, Garrick grabbing the BMX but not before he has taken a cleansing plunge in the pool, bombing off the top rung of the ladder, splashing Bastian when the boy comes within reach. The plaster on Avery's knee is black, petalling at the edges; he and Declan and Colt ride the skateboards down the driveway. Syd, who waited for Garrick to vacate before slithering into the water, claws his way around the bottom of the pool like an otter exploring a river. Joe stands at the rail watching him, and when Rex comes to stand beside him the men glance sideways at each other, and Freya feels sick with trepidation. But all Rex says is, ‘What do you know about building, Joe? I'm hoping to extend the deck around the pool,' and although Freya has never known her father to build anything, never even seen him swing a hammer, he answers as if he knows exactly what he's talking about. And Rex, instead of being angry, laughs and nods and asks questions, and changes his plan to encompass Joe's idea: and Freya is completely confused all over again about the way the world works.

As soon as the cake and ice-cream are finished, Peter finds reason for grizzling: Elizabeth says, ‘We should go.' All the adults decide to leave at once then, though it's hardly late: everybody stands up as if there's a race to get out the door. Salad bowls and sandwich trays are rinsed and returned, and Tabby gives Dorrie a little purse of clingwrap containing the sugar flowers from the cake. ‘You coming?' Avery asks Garrick, who is still haring about on the BMX. ‘I don't have to leave just 'cause you are,' he answers, but Declan says, ‘Yeah you do, everyone's going home.' Garrick says, ‘Bloody hell!' and throws down the bike. Freya looks at Colt, who quirks an eyebrow, and she finds with surprise that she's not cross or fearful or hurt, just as Rex had not been – that, in fact, her heart is fizzing. And she cannot understand what is happening, why the world keeps changing every time she thinks she has a grip.

They're drifting down the driveway with Bastian trotting round like a chatty satellite when they notice someone is missing: Syd hasn't come out of the pool. ‘I'll get him,' says Declan, and Colt and Freya follow him back up the driveway to the side gate. ‘Come on, Syd!' Declan calls, but their brother answers with only a rude splash. ‘Go and get him,' Freya tells Declan, but Rex, who's appeared behind them, says, ‘I'll do it, you two get going.' He saunters across the yard, clapping his hands for the boy's attention, crying, ‘All water babies out!'

Syd's head pops up, streaming, gummy-eyed; the water is cold, and as he climbs down the ladder in the glare of the outside lights he looks bleached to the bone. His towel is on the path, wet and bundled like a drowned cat, but Rex holds out a dry one, something plush which must belong to the family. He drapes it around Syd's shoulders and with his big hands dries the boy's arms and chest and legs, not slipshoddedly, as Syd might dry himself, but thoroughly and with order, as if it's a job to do properly or not at all. He wipes Syd's tummy, his ears, the drips that run down his face. Syd, feather-light, is knocked this way and that, but he doesn't resist, so it's all done in moments; then the boy grabs his clothes and runs to his siblings, wearing only his bathers. ‘Wait for me,' he says, as if they weren't already. Declan says, ‘Get going,' and shoves him in the direction of the street. Freya, as she goes, waves a hand at Colt. ‘Bye,' she says. And he looks at her swiftly, but says nothing.

Their father has drunk just enough to do what, for the children, is the most exciting thing any human being could possibly do: he rummages in the garage for the tin of petrol, and as Elizabeth retreats into the house saying, ‘You're crazy, you'll kill yourself,' he clears back his audience, swigs a mouthful of petrol, and, as the children watch in bitten-lip awe, holds a lit match to his face and blows out a streak of flame. Spectacular, impossible, their own private circus: the children cheer like savages. Marigold screams, ‘Do it again, Dad, do it again!' and he does, brightening the fair heads of his offspring with dragon-fire. He takes another mouthful and blasts at the sky a spear of orange fire, and they hear its ragged breath, feel its brawny punch, catch its brilliance in their eyes. ‘Again, again!' shouts Dorrie, but Joe gags, ‘Oh no, that's enough,' and staggers indoors, half-poisoned, spitting as he goes. The sky is dark, and the air is much cooler, but Freya lingers in the yard after Avery and Garrick are gone and her siblings are all inside, remembering how this day started, and the points at which it pivoted from ordinary to appalling to unforgettable.

Colt helps his mother bring the last plates in, then folds up the deckchairs and lugs them to their corner of the laundry. The bicycles and skateboards lie strewn about the yard, and he wheels the bikes into the shed and wipes down the skateboards before returning them to the playroom. Never in his life has he left a possession outside to be ruined by the weather. Bastian is more careless, and Colt walks around with a bucket picking small abandoned vehicles out of the mulch. There are scraps of food dropped about, and he throws them deep into the garden. The earth surrounding the pool is muddy from Syd's splashings, and the muck sticks to Colt's bare feet; he washes them clean under the tap. He looks around but there is nothing left to do outside, and the sky is purple now, overcast by night. Through the window he sees his father moving from fridge to drawer to kitchen counter, his face with its shapely jaw and halo of mahogany hair very calm, quite expressionless, as if the drawer and fridge contain nothing, and nothing was what he expected to find. Even when he opens his mouth and makes some reply to Bastian who must be at the table or in the hall, his face is as empty as something never used. He lives within his body, Colt thinks, like a frightened person might live behind a strong wall. But Colt had seen him rattled tonight, and he knows that, inside, his father will still be shaking.

He brushes his teeth at the bathroom sink, staring as he does so at his reflection in the mirror. He looks a great deal like his father. He has the same heavy hair, the same black-lashed eyes. His nose, like his father's, is square at the tip. He snarls at the mirror, sees his father's white teeth. Even the hand around his toothbrush, with its oversized knuckles and flat fingernails, is the same. It is as if he is being dragged remorselessly to a place he'd rather not go. He spits in the sink, turns the tap off tight. There's nothing he can do about how he looks.

Bastian is in bed, proclaiming like a roosting bird his final thoughts of the day. ‘Mum, will I have a tuckshop order tomorrow?'

His mother answers from her bedroom, something which Colt, drying his face, doesn't properly hear. ‘Did you write I get a doughnut?' Bastian asks. ‘A strawberry doughnut? Is it the one with jam? Can you make sure? Last time they gave me the one without the jam.'

Again his mother answers, something soothing, and Bastian subsides. Then his voice lilts out: ‘Colly, where are you?'

Colt sits on his bed, facing the trophy boys. They are always running, running, striving to be somewhere. Most of them have one raised foot which will never touch the ground. ‘What, Bas.'

‘Will you help me carry my bag in the morning? It's really, really heavy.'

Their faces are blurred and sightless, their mouths sealed with gold. Already he is losing the memory of what his old friends looked like. ‘Yeah.'

‘What?'

Colt lifts his voice. ‘I will.'

‘Uh. Colly?'

‘What?'

‘I don't like it when Garrick rides the BMX. He's too rough.'

Colt slips his t-shirt over his head, reaches under his pillow for his pyjamas. ‘The BMX will be all right.'

‘He's going to break it.'

‘No he isn't.'

‘If he breaks it, I will kill him. I will stick him with a knife.'

‘Bastian.' Their father speaks from the front room. ‘Quiet now. School in the morning.'

He is not a child who requires two tellings, and goes silent. Colt steps out of his jeans and underwear and into his pyjama trousers. He checks his schoolbag, which is packed and ready, his homework long done. He excels at school, is a clever and diligent boy who has never brought home a bad report card, and never will. He doesn't know what he will do with his life, but he knows what he won't do. He zips the bag, goes to the door and draws it almost shut.

He reads in bed for a while, trying not to think. The television is on in the front room, his father watching alone. Eventually Colt switches off his bedside lamp, and the room goes dark. Shortly after, he hears the television likewise turned off. He hears his father walk down the hall to the bathroom, where he brushes his teeth and uses the toilet and washes his hands as if they're covered in soot; then he tours the house, checking the doors and windows, switching off the last lights. He goes to the bedroom he shares with Tabby, and Colt is surprised to hear the mild voice of his mother. She could have been asleep by now; she could have pretended to be asleep.

She says something, and Rex replies. There are many walls between the bedrooms, and Colt can't clearly make out the words. He hears just the tone, something like the shush of waves. Normally he wouldn't listen, wouldn't want to listen, but tonight something had happened that doesn't usually happen. Joe Kiley had seen something less impressive than what he was supposed to see. Colt sits up on an elbow, and it seems to help: he hears his father say, ‘I'm not in the mood to discuss this.' Tabby answers, and her voice has a pulled thread: Rex replies, and his voice has a spine. Tabby speaks again, and Rex answers sharply, almost endlessly: ‘I'm puzzled as to why you'd even mention it. Puzzled and disappointed. I'm extremely tired, and I wish to go to sleep. I was under the impression you were on my side, Tabby. Please let me know if that's not the case.'

It's a tone Colt has heard his father use before, a kind of arrogant whine, the sound of some frustrated night-hunting animal or an accused prince. It drags Colt back to the old house, the knock on the door which came without warning one evening, the faces in the hallway like concrete masks over faces he knew. The hung heads, the rubbed jaws, the ones who didn't look up from the carpet, the others who stared like snakes. He'd taken Bastian to his room and they'd sat on the bed, and although he couldn't answer Bastian's questions he had known what was happening the way a body knows it is mortally ill. Now, in this new room, he curls up on the bed, drawing the blankets to his shoulders and the pillow over his face; but the sense of a nightmare follows him under, like a song he cannot shake.

For a couple of days Syd becomes obsessed with Christmas, having caught the fever of imminent gift-getting from his sisters. He and Marigold and Dorrie make lists of things they want. Dorrie's requests run to plastic babies and fluffy animals, as well as to shoelaces, which is odd. Marigold wants polka-dot bed linen, which is also odd. When Syd thinks of what he wants, he pictures the Jensons' playroom but writes one word:
skateboard
. ‘How long until Christmas?' the little girls ask, and Syd unhooks the calendar from the kitchen wall and shows them. Only the flip of a page, yet still it is weeks, box after box of days. Marigold magnets her wishlist to the fridge, but Dorrie, disheartened, throws hers away. A page is a lifetime to her.

His mother tells him he can't make a pest of himself by visiting the Jensons during the week, and while he obeys he does so in suffering. It is possible to feel summer in the breeze, and he longs to go into the water, to sweep the heavy liquid between his fingers and have the arch of his feet knock against the ungiving floor of the pool. The water will be cold but the prospect is inviting, the way pressing a bruise feels nice. He will stay underwater as long as he can, ignoring his body's protest against the chill and the absence of oxygen. He had discovered, at the barbeque, that he likes swimming for the solitude of it: although in no way an antisocial child, he had found tranquillity in that water. He'd been aware of the world beyond the pool's walls, but he had been cushioned from it. In the water there were no words he couldn't spell, no broadbeans he had to eat, no hand-me-downs that were all he had to wear. There'd been no tight-lipped school principal, no shrivelling before the leather strap, no girls in the playground whispering to each other as he walked by. No maths tests returned with a wrathful F inside a circle. No silver balls disappearing, with his pocket money, down the gutter of the pinball machine. No stink-breathed bullies, no interrupted television shows, no sisters disappointed on Christmas morning. No waking already weighted down by what lies between that moment, and when he can sleep again. The only place he knows that might be the pool's equal as sanctuary is the stormwater drain, but that's too far away for a school night, so all he can do is wander, each evening, round the corner and up the hill to the vicinity of the red-brick house in the hope that the Jensons will see him, sense his longing, invite him in. What actually happens is that he sees Mrs Jenson close the lounge-room curtains, and he sees the man briefly through what must be the parents' bedroom window. He sees, in addition, Avery's banged-up bike in the front garden. It is there, on the driveway, on Monday evening, and it is there, by a tree, on Tuesday. Disturbingly, on Tuesday not only is Avery's bike in the garden, but Garrick's is too. There's no evidence that either of them is swimming in Syd's pool, but the thought of Garrick Greene polluting the blue water with his body literally makes Syd feel queasy, and give up.

Late on Wednesday when the children are in bed and it seems the night will pass uneventfully, the car turns into the driveway and the light of headlamps sweeps across the ceiling of the boys' bedroom. Syd hears Declan shift beneath his blankets, and the brothers listen in silence to the slamming of the car door, the unlocking of the house door. Their father's tread is heavy for a lightly-made man. Their mother is in the lounge room, ironing; the boys hear, between their parents, a curt exchange of words. They hear their father move to the kitchen, the dinner plate rattling off the oven's wire shelf.

Syd is aware he isn't breathing, that he had more air under­water than he has now, in his bed, in his room. He listens, and the house has stopped breathing. When the crash comes he knows exactly what it is – the plate hitting the wall. He knows exactly what he will see when he runs to the kitchen – the plate in many pieces, food across the floor. Declan throws aside his blankets and runs for the door. ‘Stay here,' he tells Syd, and disappears. Syd, sitting up, sees Freya rush past, and already the shouting has started, his father's cursing, his mother's rage. After a moment he jumps from bed and charges down the hall pursuing his siblings. He cannot stay behind.

The kitchen is lit fluorescently, too harshly for its size; his father rampages in this cell of whiteness, ignoring the woman and children who crowd the doorway. He has knocked the pile of junkmail from the counter, and the catalogues have slipped under the table and lodged among triangles of shattered plate. Now he's swaying before the refrigerator, one hand gripping its open door, pulling from the shelves one item after another, swearing and weaving as he does so. Onto the floor goes a carton of milk, a bundle of ham, a bowl of leftover bolognaise. Milk glugs from the carton's spout, spaghetti slops from the bowl. The margarine skids thickly across the linoleum. ‘Dad!' cries Freya. ‘Stop!' but he doesn't look to them. A jam jar hits a cupboard as loudly as a bomb. On the wall above the table is a smear of mashed potato. The table is splattered with gravy, beaded with peas. Their father wrenches open the crisper, pulls from it a sheaf of carrots and hurls this over a shoulder. The orange spikes and green stems pinwheel under a chair. Any other time, the sight would have made Syd laugh. Now there's a stink in the air, and his heart is racing. His wrist is grasped and he looks up at his mother, and when he looks back to the kitchen his father loses his hold on the fridge door and stumbles sideways onto the floor.

For an instant Elizabeth's hand moves to cover Syd's eyes. ‘Come away,' she tells her children. In the lounge room Declan hurries to the glass doors and opens them, and the evening air billows in. Syd sees stars and, in the street, the glowing orb of a streetlight. From down the hall they hear a plaintive cry and Elizabeth says, ‘Sydney, go to the girls.' He doesn't want to, but already she's steering him to the door by the wrist she still holds painfully. ‘Hurry,' Declan says, and Syd goes. Passing the kitchen he glimpses his father on his knees among the torn papers and strewn food. He runs into his parents' room and Peter is awake in the darkness, climbing from his cot; he lifts the child over the bars cooing, ‘Baby boy, baby boy,' and jostles down the hall with his brother squeezed to his hip. At the furthest room he flicks on the light to find Dorrie and Marigold on Dorrie's bed, bunched up in blankets and nighties. Dorrie is weeping into the hair of a doll, and Marigold, white-faced, has fingers in her mouth. He shovels Peter between them, begging, ‘Quiet, Dorrie, it's all right, I'm here,' but his sister's mouth sags woefully, she buries her face in her doll. ‘Is it Dad?' asks Marigold. Syd's heart is still racing, hitting at his ribs; when a howl comes from the lounge room, a sound not of pain but of indignation, it whips him round to the door and spills tears down Marigold's face. Peter groans and claws at her, trying to fasten himself to her neck. They hear Freya's strident voice over Elizabeth's angry cries, and Syd heaps the blankets around the children frantically, trying to bundle them into place. ‘Stay here,' he tells Marigold. ‘Don't come out. Look after Peter and Dorrie.' Peter's arms wrap her like pythons, but he meets her blue eyes and she's smart, she understands. Dorrie collapses howling, but Syd doesn't wait.

His father has found his way into the lounge room and stands with his back to the door. There's a dark stain down his trousers which halts Syd like a chain. Joe is weaving as if he's been hit, and perhaps he has been: Elizabeth, in the centre of the room, has the clothes iron gripped in her fist. Declan and Freya flank her like young wolves, Freya shouting at Joe, ‘What's wrong with you? Get out, we don't want you! You stink, you're disgusting! Go on, get out! Get out, get out, get out, get out!' And maybe it's the sheer force of her fury that drives him away, because she's small and so swattable, yet their father is going. He's swearing at her, sneering, yet he's going, shifting backwards with his arms up, feeling his way into retreat. Syd sidesteps into the kitchen as his father backs past, harried as he goes by his offspring who dash at him, snarling and yelping, always beyond reach. Hissing with defeat, their father turns and makes for the front door and bangs through the flyscreen. Syd runs to the lounge windows to see him get in his car and haul the door closed – but the engine doesn't start, the headlights don't come on, and for moments the four of them watch breathlessly, Elizabeth still holding the iron. Then she says what the children have realised: ‘He's fallen asleep. The stupid fool.'

Only now, in safety, do they look at each other, and look around the room. Syd sees what made his sister so incandescent: the clothes which their mother spent the afternoon ironing have been torn to the floor and trampled by boots that have left their imprints in gravy. His father's workshirts are among the wreckage, as well as the girls' school dresses. Syd is frightened and wide-awake and still half-dizzy with dread, but it is the sight of all that wasted work which brings hot tears to his eyes.

And then Marigold and Dorrie and Peter have rushed in, weeping wetly, hanging off their mother's arms. Freya kneels and hugs Dorrie. ‘Don't cry, stop crying,' she says. ‘There's nothing to cry about.' But Freya herself looks blanched and ill, and when she lets go of Dorrie her hands are shaking; she gouges her eyes and says, ‘Oh.' For a minute they stand around stupefied, but in truth this is nothing they haven't seen before. Marigold wipes her face, looks at the ravaged ironing and says, ‘Phew, what a mess!' She and Declan pick up the clothes, hang them on doorknobs and over the backs of chairs. The kitchen needs mopping, broken things must be binned. Syd and Freya clean the floor and walls, but soon Elizabeth sends them to bed.

Lying once more in the dark in his bedroom, the sheets beneath him cool but not cold, Syd marvels how it's possible to think it was a dream. He was in bed before, and he's in the same bed now. He is Syd, as he was before. They will wake in the morning and the world will be just as it was but for the absence of a few inconsequential bits including a white china dinner plate, and Syd thinks he will find one that looks exactly the same as that lost one, and give it to his mother for Christmas.