The Complete Stories (59 page)

His father was eating toast, snapping clean rounds out of it with his teeth and devouring the
Sun.
Michael was on the floor with the comics. Only Julie, all in white for tennis, her shoulders brown and bare, was sitting up straight and eating the way people were supposed to eat; and doing it beautifully as she did everything.

She was sixteen, two years older than Luke, and did not know how extraordinary she was. Her presence among them was a mystery. It had always amazed him that they were of the same family, especially in the days before Michael when there had been just the two of them. People were always proclaiming in that silly way, "What beautiful children!” But they had meant Julie. Any likeness between them was illusory, and when Michael appeared and was such an ugly duckling, Luke had felt easier, as if a balance was restored. He had a special fondness for Michael's batlike ears.

“Well, are you coming out or aren't you?” his father demanded.

“No. I promised to see Hughie.”

His mother made a straight line with her mouth. Hughie was the son of the man who had made the sails for their boat. She didn't approve of that. It was all right when they were just kids at primary school, but now he was supposed to have other friends. He did not.

“But you said you would,” Michael wailed. “You promised! I don't want to go either.”

Michael was eight and still said exactly what he felt. It embarrassed Luke that Michael was so fond of him and did not dissemble or hide it. He felt Michael's affection as a weight that he might never throw off. He hated to hurt people, and was always doing it, whichever way he turned—Michael, Julie, his mother.

“I can't,” he said again. “I promised Hughie.”

Michael turned away and his mother gave him one of her looks of silent reproval: he was so selfish.

He had in fact made no promise to Hughie, but ten minutes later he came round the harbour path with its morning glory vines and its wall
of moss-covered, dripping rocks to where the Hutchins's house was built above the water, with a slatted ramp beside it. The walls of the house were of stained shingles, and at night you could hear water lapping below and the masts of pleasure-boats tapping and clicking.

Luke had known it always. It was a big open house full of light and air, but since Hughie's mother died, six months ago, had been let go. There were cartons in the hallway crammed with old newspapers and boating magazines that no one had bothered to move, already cob-webbed and thick with dust. In the kitchen, away to the right, flies buzzed among open jam-jars and unscraped plates where T-bones lay congealed in fat and streaks of hardened tomato sauce, a bottle of which, all black at the rim, stood open on the oilskin cloth. It was all mess—Luke didn't mind that; but beyond the mess of the two or three rooms where Hughie and his father camped, you were aware of rooms that were empty, where nobody ever went. They gave your voice in this house a kind of echo—that is what Luke thought—and made Hughie, these days, a bit weird. As if all those empty rooms were a part of him he could no longer control. “Is that you, Luke?” he called now, and his voice had the echo. “C'mon through.”

He was the youngest of three brothers. The eldest, Ric, was a panel-beater. He lived in the Western suburbs with a girl who was just out of school. The other had got in with a drug crowd, and after a period of hanging round the city in a headband and waistcoat, had gone to Nim-bin and was raising corn. Hughie was the baby. Spoiled and petted by his mother when she was alive, he had been drifting since. He spent his days in front of the TV or up at the Junction, barefooted in boardshorts, with the Space Invaders.

An excessively skinny kid, always tanned but still unhealthy-looking, he was sprawled now on the vinyl lounge in front of the TV, wearing the stained blue boardshorts that he never changed and with his fist in a packet of crisps. He took his hand from the packet and crammed a fistful into his mouth, then licked the salt from his fingers before it dropped. “Want some?” he asked through the crunching.

Luke shook his head. “Why do you eat that stuff?”

“Because I saw it on TV,” Hughie answered straight off. “And because I'm dumb and don't know any better. Besides, it beats ice-cubes.”

A few months back there was never anything to eat in this house
except ice-cubes. They used to suck them in the heat while they watched the cricket. “There's a choice,” Hughie would tell him, "icecubes boiled or fried or grilled. Take your pick.” That was while Mrs. Hutchins was still dying in the next room. “I figure,” Hughie told him now, "that if I eat all that stuff they eat on television—you know, potato crisps, Cherry Ripe, Coke, all that
junk,
I'll turn into a real Australian kid and have a top physique. Isn't that what's supposed to happen?”

“Maybe you'll turn into a real American kid and stay skinny.”

“Y’ reckon?” Hughie's hand was arrested in mid-lift.

“Maybe you'll just get spots.”

“Nah! Nunna the kids on TV get spots. Look at ‘em. They're all blond ‘n have top physiques, and the girls are unreal.”

“They've got spots. That's why they use Clearasil.”

“I use Clearasil.”

“Does it do any good?”

“No, but that's because I pull off so much.”

“So do the kids on TV.”

“Y’ reckon?”

He leaned out, flicked to another channel, then another, then pushed the off-switch with his big toe.

“Maybe you'll just turn into yourself,” Luke said, "only you'll be too full of junk to see what it is.”

“But that's just what I
don't
want. You ever see anyone on TV looked like me? I wanna be a real Australian kid. You know—happy. Sliding down a water-chute with lots of other happy kids, including girls. Climbing all over a big ball and making things go better with Coke. That's why I'm into junk food. Junk food makes you tanned and gives you a terrific physique. It's pulling off gives you spots.”

“No. It doesn't do anything.”

“Yes it does. It turns you into a monster.”

Hughie jumped up, made jerking movements with his fist, and turned into a pale skinny version of King Kong. He hopped about on flat feet with his knees bent, his arms loose, and his tongue pushed into his upper lip, grunting. Luke jumped up, made the same motions, and was Frankenstein. Laughing, they fell in a heap.

“No,” Luke said, sitting upright, "it doesn't do any of that. They just tell you that because they can't sell it on TV.”

Hughie went back to munching crisps.

“So what'll you do?” he said, returning to a conversation of several days back.

“I don't know. What about you?”

“My dad says I can leave school if I want to and go in with him. There's a lot of money in sailmaking. You know?” He said it without enthusiasm. “Everyone wants sails.”

“I want to do Japanese,” Luke said, moving to the window and looking across to the marina, where half a mile off, among a crowd of Sunday craft, he could see
Starlight
just beginning to make way. He was thinking of a time, a year back, when with his grandfather as guide he would go crawling about in the strange light of the sea off Midway, among the wrecks of the Japanese carriers
Soryu, Kaga, Hiru,
Admiral Nagumo's flagship the
Akagi,
the heavy cruiser
Mikuma,
and the
York-town.
"My grandad says we might have been better off,” he said reflectively, "if we hadn't won the Battle of Midway after all and the Japs had come instead of the Americans. I don't know, maybe he's right. He says winning all those wars was the worst thing ever happened to us.”

“Is this your grandfather who was in the Wehrmacht?” Hughie enquired.

Luke giggled. “No, you nut! They lost all
their
wars. My dad's father. The one who was in the AIF.”

Hughie, still hugging the carton of crisps, got up and went to the other side of the room.

“Listen Luke,” he said seriously, "I've been meaning to tell you. If you need any money I've got stacks of it.”

“What?”

“Money. Com'n look.”

He was standing over an open drawer.

“My dad's got this woman he goes to, and every time he goes off and leaves me alone I get ten dollars. I mean, he
gives
it to me. I'm making a fortune!” The two boys stood looking at the drawer full of bills. “He feels guilty, see? I ran into them once, up at the Junction, and they were both so embarrassed. She's a sort of barmaid. I had to stop myself from laughing. I feel like I'm living off her immoral earnings, ten dollars a time. If you want any of it, it's yours.”

Luke looked at the drawer and shook his head. “No,” he said, "I get pocket money, they give me pocket money. Anyway, all I need now is ninety-five cents for the train fare.”

“I dunno,” Hughie said before the open drawer. “Why does ‘e do it? What's ‘e scared of?” He looked sad standing there in the boardshorts, so buck-toothed and skinny, peering into the drawer full of bills. They had called him Casper at school. Casper the ghost.

“My parents,” Luke said, "are scared of all sorts of things.” And at first to take Hughie's mind off his problem, but soon out of a growing contempt and bitterness of his own, he began to list them. “They're scared one of us will go on drugs or join the Jesus freaks or the Hari Krishnas. Or grow up and marry a Catholic. My mother's scared of being poor, the way they were in Europe after the war. She's scared my father's dad'll get sick and have to come and live with us. She's scared of cancer. My dad's scared the tax people will catch up with him.” He turned away to the window, and
Starlight
was just moving down towards the point opposite. He could see his father amidships, in his captain's cap, directing: "There's only one captain on this boat,” he would be saying. “Most of all,” Luke said, "he's scared of my mother. He thinks he's not good enough for her.” At the prow was Michael, a lonely child, dangling his legs on either side of the bowsprit. Luke could see one dazzling white sneaker.

“Listen, I'll tell you what,” he said, "why don't we go out and fly the kites? We haven't done that for ages.”

“You really want to?”

“Yes, it's
just
what I want.” He hadn't thought of it till this moment but it was true. “It's what I came for.”

Last year when they had both seemed so much younger they had spent hours flying the kites, two big box-kites that Hughie's father had made with the same craftsman's skill he brought to his sailmaking. They were beautiful machines, and for a while Luke had liked nothing better than to be at the end of a string and to feel the gentle tugging of the birdlike creation that was three hundred feet up under the ceiling of cloud and gently afloat, or plunging in the breeze—feeling it as another freer self, almost angelic, and with a will of its own. No other activity he knew gave him such a clear sense of being both inside his own compact body and far outside it. You strained, you held on, the plunging was elsewhere.

Hughie was delighted to drag the kites out of the back room where they had been gathering dust for the past months and to check and re-wind the strings. He did it quickly but with great concentration.

He tied the sleeves of a light sweater round his waist and they were off.

Twenty minutes later the kites with their gaudy tails were sailing high over the rocky little park on the Point and far out over the water. Luke too had removed his shirt and was running over the grass, feeling the kite tug him skyward:
tug, tug.
He could feel the sky currents up there, the pure air in motion, feel its energy run all the way back along the string into his gorged hands. It took him to the limits of his young strength.

“This is great,” Hughie was shouting as if they had suddenly stepped back a year. “Feel that? Isn't it unreal?”

They let their animal selves loose and the great kites held and sustained them.

“What really shits me,” Luke said later when they had drawn the machines in, wound the strings, and were lying stretched in the shade, "is that no one has the guts to be what they pretend to be. You know what I mean? My father pretends to be a big businessman. He makes deals and talks big but it scares the hell out of him, and at the weekend he pretends to be the skipper of a boat. He gets all dressed up in his whites and does a lot of shouting but all the time he's terrified a storm'll blow up or he'll ram someone or that Michael will fall in and get drowned. People are all the same. You can see it. Scared you'll call their bluff. It makes me puke.”

Hughie looked puzzled. Luke worried him. Most of the time he was just like anyone, the way he was when they were flying the kites: then suddenly he'd speak out, and there was more anger in what he said than the words themselves could contain.

“So?” he said.

“So someone, sometime, has to go through with it.”

“How do you mean?”

Luke set his mouth and did not elaborate, and Hughie, out of loyalty to an old understanding between them, did not push for an answer.

They had known one another since they were five or six years old. It was, in terms of their short lives, a long friendship, but Hughie had begun to perceive lately, and it hurt him, that they might already have grown apart. There was in Luke something dark, uncompromising, fanatical, that scared him because it was so alien to his own nature. He
was incapable of such savagery himself, and might be the shallower for it. His mind struggled to grasp the thing and it hurt.

“Listen Luke,” he began, then stopped and was defeated. There was no way of putting what he had seen into words. He swallowed, picked at his toe. Luke, hard-mouthed and with brows fiercely lowered, was staring dead ahead. “Hey, Luke,” he called across the narrow space between them, and knocked the other boy's shoulder, very lightly, with the heel of his hand.

“What?”

“I don't know, you seemed—far away.” He screwed his eyes up and looked out across the burnished water. The idea of distance saddened him.

“Thanks,” Luke said softly after a moment, and Hughie was relieved.

“For what?” he answered, but it wasn't a question.

They grinned, and it was as if things between them were clear again. Luke got up. “I'd better get going,” he said. “I'll give you a hand with the kites.”