Gotham (16 page)

Junior's mouth opens—he is not a tandem rider, not here as a helper of princesses—but his father has a hand on his arm and is looking straight at him, willing him to just do it, no arguments, just this once. Junior reads the expression, and glances towards Ariel and back to his father. He knows something is up. He knows it is one of those times. He nods.

Ariel takes my hand to get out of the stroller, then Eugene Junior offers his and leads her
towards the stone steps. He measures his speed against hers and holds back a branch of a bush so it doesn't brush her arm. She waits on the second step while he retrieves his cardboard. He tucks it under one arm and takes her hand again.

Inside the black suit, she is frail, but she is sick of lamb's wool and complete safety and one DVD after another. She is four and must attend to a four-year-old's business, and she must slide today, whatever the knocks. I am afraid for her, for all of us, Lindsey and me, too. There are more steps to the top of the slide than I realised. I have seen her x-rays and her scans and her worst days.

They wait their turn, still holding hands. Ariel studies the sliders ahead of her and every bit of their journeys. Eugene Junior looks over to his father to check that he's getting it right. Smokey gives him a nod.

‘You taking pictures of this?' he says to me. ‘You got an article to write, yeah? I think Batman's about to slide.'

There's just enough time for me to get my camera out. Every article is patched together this week, this month. I could have left this playground without a single image.

‘Here, let me,' he says. ‘You just watch.' He holds his hand out for the camera, clicking his fingers.

I need to watch, and he is giving me the chance. I need to live this, not be its recorder.

He fiddles with the settings, sets up the shot in a second. He knows what he's doing.

Eugene Junior places his cardboard, then helps Ariel into a sitting position on it, one of his hands on the lip of the slide the whole time, one on her. He eases his legs around her. She keeps hers straight but his are bent a little, knees jutting out to take any knocks. He puts one arm
around her waist and she grips it with both hands, like a rail on a rollercoaster. He takes his other hand from the slide's granite edge and pushes it against the base, just behind where he's sitting. They start to move. He gives another push.

They skid forward, building up speed. Ariel's teeth are clenched, but she's smiling. Her eyes are ahead on the slide, anticipating. The two of them swing into the bend, Eugene Junior managing their path perfectly.

Wind buffets her suit. The drop is steep.

The hood blows back from her head, her messy blonde hair spills all around, the red clamp of her tube bobs next to her ear. She lets go of his arm and they wobble, but he corrects. She reaches up. I'm expecting her to grab the hood and pull it back into place, but she ignores it completely and thrusts her arms up in the air, keeping them there all the way down until she is standing in the dust and the ride is over.

‘Again,' she says as Eugene lets go of her and bends down to pick up the cardboard. ‘Please.'

‘Let's see here,' Smokey says, flicking back to the early images as Ariel and his son make their way back towards the steps.

He's found a setting that fired every fraction of a second. We track them from top to bottom, one picture at a time. The hood blows back, the tube appears and my first thought is it won't be hard to photoshop it out. Smokey clicks to the next image, and the next, and then pauses on one.

The sunlight is falling across Ariel's pale outstretched arms, lighting up her wispy hair. She is upright and fearless, and I hadn't seen that. Her hands are bunched into small pale fists. She is flying for a moment. It is, after all, a city of superheroes, of caped crusaders and heroic deeds.

‘Look at your beautiful girl,' Smokey says.

She is staring straight at the camera. She is, I think, willing it to take this picture, record this instant and all its glee and defiance. She wants us to have a good photo, her mother and me. She wants to give us a picture of a good time. Not every minute of our present is to be recorded as diabolical and hard, and something to be endured in the hope of better. She is in the present—this present, between the tube feed and today's treatment—and she has made room for joy in it.

The tube will stay in the photo.

‘LyDell's granddaddy,' Smokey says, ‘he worked at Bloomingdale's. He was an elevator guy. Had a uniform with a cap.' He pauses. ‘This is just us talking, right? Just so you know. He died on the job one day. Heart attack. Just closed his eyes on his stool and he was gone. Bloomingdale's looked after the family real good. LyDell's momma ran wild even so. She was
fourteen, or somethin'.' He glances over to our kids, who are close to the top of the steps again. ‘LyDell's sleepin' somewhere with a smile on his face. I checked in with him around five and he was still talking 'bout those pants he didn't buy. Those Alexander Wangs. That boy…He's just a boy, and it's so dangerous sometimes. I want to help him be a man, you know. We all do whatever to bring our kids up, yeah? Give them whatever. Whatever it takes.'

At the top of the slide, Eugene Junior sets the cardboard in place. Ariel takes her seat, flips her hood back and shakes her hair out. She braces herself to push.

1

GOTHAM

2

VENICE

3

VANCOUVER

4

JUNEAU

5

NOHO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In late 2013, I worked out that my five best and most compelling story ideas would need padding or some other kind of fakery to become novels and would lose something if I tried to trim them to short-story size. I had to write them and they had to be novellas.

Any author can do with a team of like-minded people on their side, and the author of a novella series needs them more than most. I needed people whose response was ‘Yes! Novellas!' with the exclamation mark audible after each word—people who saw 20,000 words as a great size for the times
and had great ideas about what to do with it. So, a big thank you to:

– Meredith Curnow and Chris Flynn for backing me from the start

– Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown for talking me into the idea rather than out, and making the idea even more ambitious

– Kim Wilkins and Bronwyn Lea, in their UQ roles, for their regular wise navigational advice for a new world

– Jane Stadler for the crash course in how to survive there upon landing and Isobelle Carmody for being the ideal fellow traveller

– the
Griffith Review
Novella Project III judges and editorial team for backing novellas in general and mine in particular

– Donna Ward and her team at Inkerman & Blunt for embracing a new approach to novellas with passion, imagination and editorial vigour

–
Georgia Knox and the team at Audible for adding new dimensions to the project from their first email

– Will Entrekin at Exciting Press for being the ideal partner in the ebook world

And a particularly big thank you to Sarah and Patrick for tolerating me all those times when my brain stayed in the story rather than in our lives.

NICK EARLS
is the author of more than twenty books for adults, teenagers and children, including novels such as
Zigzag Street
,
Bachelor Kisses
and
Analogue Men
. His work has won awards in the UK and Australia, among them a Betty Trask Award for
Zigzag Street
and a Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award for
48 Shades of Brown
. His books have appeared on bestseller lists in both those countries and in the Amazon Kindle Store. Two of his novels,
Perfect Skin
and
48 Shades of Brown
, have been adapted into feature films and five have been adapted into stage plays.