Nine Days (25 page)

That’s it. I am without a doubt the biggest moron in the history of moronness. My entire life is completely fucked.

‘Nah,’ I say. ‘I got shit to do.’

Like quitting school and giving away all my possessions and joining an Antarctic expedition where I end up freezing my dick off and eating my own dog.

‘Westicle,’ says Tim. ‘Surely you jesticle, testicle.’

‘Busy,’ I say.

‘One-time offer, Westie,’ says Cooper. ‘Get in the car now or forever be known as a piker.’

Yep. Fucked. For. Ever. Thanks, Charlotte. Thanks Grandpa. ‘Thanks anyway.’

‘You are such a fucking loser,’ says Cooper. They all lean out the windows near me, doing the shape of Ls on their foreheads.

‘Can’t argue with that,’ I say. ‘Have a nice time.’

I wave as they hoon off. An empty beer can zips out of a back window, hits me square on the knee and clatters against the tram stop. The dregs dribble out on the cement. I watch the car hum and throb and all the way to the lights, the heads of people on the street spin to look as it passes. It is the most alive thing in the whole street, the whole suburb. For a long way before they turn, I see the crimson paintwork reflected in puddles on the road and it’s like, for a second, there’s a real car and a ghost one, both of them speeding down Bridge Road, leaving me and the photo far behind.

At the maximum security facility for the ancient and infirm, I have to punch a number in to the keypad near the door like it was an ATM. Please enter your six-digit PIN and select the gerie you’d like to withdraw. Your remaining gerie balance will appear on the screen. What fucked security, I think, because the number is printed out on a laminated sheet stuck right to the front door. Anyone who could read the number could get in. And then I realise: it’s meant to stop the demented old buggers getting out, because presumably they can’t read and/or punch numbers.

That. Is. So. Shit. I feel so sad for Grandpa and Grandma and even Uncle Frank. Mum looked for months to find a place they could stay together, and this was the best she could find, but they’re not demented. It’s close to us and it’s the best place for them, Mum said. We can’t separate them now.

At the front desk they ring up to Grandpa’s room then send me up. He’s standing in the doorway in his pyjamas, waiting.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. I thought I’d hang with you guys for a while. I hear there are lots of single chicks.’

‘You wouldn’t last five seconds.’ Grandma appears in the doorway behind him, hair in rollers with a net over the top. I thought no one did that in real life, that rollers were only in old movies. How does she sleep in them? It’d be like having acupuncture all over your scalp. ‘They’re barracudas,’ she says. ‘They’d eat you alive.’

Grandpa says, ‘They can smell tender young flesh. You should run while you still can.’

I lift the backpack off my shoulders and take out the tin. ‘Plus I thought I’d drop this off.’ I open it, take it out of the envelope, hold the photo carefully with both hands.

‘Oh dear.’ Grandpa puts both hands to his face and sways a bit. For a moment I think he’s going to faint. ‘My sister.’

‘Kip. You can’t have forgotten Connie.’

‘I must have. I didn’t even realise she was missing.’

Wait,
what?
What did he say? He didn’t even know she was missing? I turn down a road trip with the guys and ruin my entire life for all eternity, I haul myself all the way over here, two tram rides, thinking he’d be frantic, and he didn’t even know she was missing? I could be eating pizza and drinking beer by now. Fuck, fuck
, fuck.
I smack my head against the door post.

‘You’re a good boy to drop her back.’ Grandma kisses me on the cheek, then takes her from me and cradles her in her
arms. ‘What’s wrong? Do you have a headache? Do you want an aspirin? Come in. Have some tea. We have Monte Carlos. It’ll just be between us. We won’t breathe a word.’

‘Thanks anyway. Colonel Klink is waiting.’

‘One cup,’ says Grandpa. ‘One biscuit. Two minutes.
We see nussink. We hear nussink.’

What the hell. I could go home and watch a repeat of
Veronica Mars
on the couch with Libby, or I could go in. The whole apartment smells of old person but I don’t mind that. I not only have one cup of tea, I have two goddammit. And four proper biscuits from a real plastic packet. Before long, Grandma goes to bed and I sit up with Grandpa, just talking. He tells me about the old days, about some horse he used to have, about the trouble Uncle Frank got up to when he was my age, but he also asks lots of questions about school and art. He’s ace, actually. He understands what it’s like for a brother to be outnumbered by women. The whole time he’s talking, he has the photo of Connie in his hands. He never once puts her down.

I imagine what it would be like never to see Libby again, never have a chance to say goodbye to her. As much as she utterly shits me, that would suck. While Libby is alive I know I’ll never really be alone. All the things I remember, everything about my life, our family, my childhood: it’s all real because Libby knows it too.

The stuff he’s talking about, though, the people-disappearing-never-to-be-seen-again stuff? That only happened back in the olden days. War and shit.

I can justify it all I like, but on the way home I suddenly
realise: I just spent Saturday night sitting in a retirement home with an old man in his eighties instead of being on the beach at Rye with my friends. The guys are right. I am a fucking loser.

‘Alec!’ Mum yells, as soon as I turn my key in the lock. ‘Where in God’s name have you been? You should have been home hours ago.’

I thought she’d be way asleep by now, but she’s standing in the hallway in her daggiest pyjamas staring, because apparently I have to account for every second of my time. Why doesn’t she just get me an electronic ankle bracelet? She could significantly reduce her contribution to global warming by not asking where I’ve been every two freakin seconds.

I start to say
You know where I’ve been, to Grandpa’s. You sent me.
My friends—in fact my ex-friends, past tense—my friends are down at Rye, sitting on the beach, eating pizza and drinking beer and I’m right here, but before I know it she’s holding me. She’s stretching up and she has her arms around my neck and she’s gripping me for dear life, like she’s drowning. I start to complain. I try to pull away. I’m sixteen years old, I’m not a baby. Then all at once it hits me:
my mother is smaller than me.

She’s tiny. I don’t know the last time she held me like this, but I could reach down and wrap my arms around her and pick her up. So I do, for a moment, just to see if I can. I lift her right off the floor and she’s dangling in the air. I’m hit
with this dizzy feeling that throws sparkles in front of my eyes. Fuck. I’m bigger than her. It’s kind of terrifying. I’ll be bigger than her for ever now. She’ll get smaller and smaller like Grandpa until she dies and then she’ll be gone and I won’t have her anymore.

‘Alec, sweetheart.’

‘Shh, Mum. It’s all right. I’m here.’

She’s hardly letting me breathe. She’s holding me so tight, pulling my face down to her neck so that I only have vision from one corner of my eye.

‘There was a horrible car accident on the late news,’ she’s saying. ‘Young boys, on the Monash freeway. Two dead, three critical. I just felt so sad for their families. They’re only your age. I thought about what would happen if I ever lost you. And then I couldn’t stop crying.’

I hug her again and she makes a big sigh. And it’s only then, from that corner of my eye, that I see the crimson.

On that old-fashioned television, in that shabby house where I’ve lived all my life, being held by my tiny mother, I see that exact shade of crimson on the flickering screen.

I raise my head and she lets me go. I walk over to the TV.

‘Alec. What is it?’

I drop to my knees and reach forward and touch the screen with my fingertips, like I could reach through the glass. Crimson is the colour of the wreck, the colour of what remains of the car’s panels where they’ve wrapped around the light pole. Part of it is covered by a tarp but there it is: that colour, the mags, the twisted shape of it. And I see the police gathered around the crumpled metal, the lights flashing, the
fire truck a deeper red in the background. A policeman is being interviewed now, about the tragedy, about drinking, speeding, P-plate drivers, suspected stolen cars. About the senseless loss of young lives, about the devastation it will bring to the families who will never hold their sons again. My mother is speaking now and so is Libby, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. My fingertips touch the dark grey of the bitumen and the white blankets that are covering the mounds on the ground, the mounds that once were people.

Then the picture disappears and we’re back to the studio. The newsreader looks sad, which is her job. Soon there will be a happier story and she’ll perk up again. For her, this is just another accident among the hundreds she’ll report every year. It means nothing that these people have vanished into thin air and will never be seen again. The names of the victims, the newsreader says in her professional way, have not yet been released.

THE RAIN IS coming. It’s a mild night for winter but I can feel it even through the cold. The air is heavy, the way it laps against my skin. I raise my arms and it feels like I’m swimming in deep, still water instead of lying on my bed. Any minute now the weight will be too much for the air to hold and it will fall out in fat drops on the roof. Already there’s a grassy, dewy smell. A distant memory of the ocean, a lingering of salt. Tonight this house doesn’t even feel like Richmond. I could shut my eyes and be in St Kilda, or somewhere even further. Perhaps I did drift off for a little bit. It takes me a moment to remember where I am.

Ma does not notice the feeling of the air. I peek around the wardrobe and there she is in her bed, lying in the same
position as she fell asleep in hours ago, a mound under her blankets, her hands in prayer under her left cheek. She sleeps like a child. It’s a blessing, that type of surrender. One I have not been granted. All night my mind races, my feet wriggle. Even when I stretch out I can’t seem to lie still.

I reach under the bed for my slippers. It’s useless lying here, twitching and kicking. In the hall, I pause outside the boys’ room. Francis is snoring and I can’t see Kip’s face: he’s wedged a pillow over his head as usual. I open the front door to smell the air. It’s freezing. There is a figure across the road under the street light. A tall man, leaning, thinking. It’s Jack Husting.

I shut the door and turn back down the hall. In our room, I stand beside my bed, brush the back of my hand against the sheets. They’re cold. It’ll be light in a few hours and I have a big day at work tomorrow. Today. I should really get some sleep. I almost fold the sheets down and climb back snug inside. Instead I lift my nightgown over my head and slip on the dress hanging on the back of the door.

This time when I open the front door I feel his eyes on me. He watches as I walk closer, his head nods a fraction with each step I take. I look each way before I cross the street: a silly gesture. At this hour there’s no one about but him and me.

And now here we are, together in the dark, me in my coat and slippers, him in trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. How he’s not shivering I
don’t know. He’s a good six inches taller with the five o’clock shadow of a grown man before shaving. We are quiet for a long time.

‘Are you really here?’ Jack says. ‘Or are you sleepwalking?’

‘I’m not sure. I feel like part of me is asleep and part is awake. Does it matter?’

‘Too right it does.’ His voice is a raspy whisper, low and soft. He digs both hands in his pockets and looks up at the stars. ‘If you’re awake I’ll take a bit of care about what I say. Don’t want you to think I’m a dill tomorrow.’

‘And if I’m asleep?’

‘Then odds are you’ll forget all about this by the morning. And I am free to make a fool of myself.’

I smile. Jack Husting is not the kind of man who would ever make a fool of himself. ‘Then I’m asleep. Besides, it doesn’t matter what I think. Your leave’s over. You’re off tomorrow.’

‘That’s true.’ He rubs one hand down his arm like he can feel it too, the pressure in the air. ‘Tomorrow I’m off.’

In our houses, just a few dozen yards away, our families are sound asleep. We’re alone out here in the dark. Just for now, it’s a separate world we’re standing in and we’re the only two alive in it. The street lamp throws a circle of light. Perhaps that’s as far as our world extends.

‘How did your mum take it, you signing up?’

‘It’s hard for her. She’s not coming to the station to see me off. Dad neither. Took them by surprise, I suppose.’

‘That’s the difference between men and women.’ I watch his face, tanned and angular under the light. There’s a tension
in the way he holds his arms. He’s pretending to be relaxed. ‘We women do what’s expected. You can do almost anything you care to think of.’

He shakes his head. ‘I reckon that depends on the woman, and the man.’

I feel a drop on my cheek. The air can’t hold the water anymore.

‘Oh no.’ I hold one hand out flat, fingers pressed together, to give the sky a chance to change its mind. ‘I’m not ready to go in yet.’

Ready or not, before I finish speaking, thousands of drops are smacking against us, against the street, the houses and the fences. Sheets of water, all let loose. Loud too. My coat is wet through already, my cotton dress is sticking to my shoulders and thighs.

‘Come on.’ Jack has to shout and before I know it he is holding my hand in his bigger one and we are running, pelting across the street and around the corner and down the side of the shop, threading our way down the narrow concrete path, past the azaleas and the camellias that line the path. Their leaves are glossy and dark. Our palms are slippery from the rain. In the backyard, he lets go of me and I wrap my arms around my middle and shiver while he slides open the door to the stable. Inside, it’s dry and warmer than I’d expected, though the sound is even louder on the iron roof. The torrent is like a glass wall in the open door.

‘You need a blanket.’ He rifles through a pile at the back on top of the hay.

‘I’d rather be wet than smell of horse.’

Charlie gives a mild snort and looks at me with liquid eyes. ‘You’ve offended him.’ Jack scratches his nose. ‘She didn’t mean it. You smell delightful.’

‘If you think that, you spent too long on that station.’

‘I did spend too long. I should have come home years ago. If I’d known about the neighbours, I would have.’

‘Is that so?’ I say, and it’s all I can do to stop my hands from shaking. ‘What is it about the neighbours that would have brought you home? They’re a shady lot, I suppose? Perhaps you didn’t think your parents were safe?’

‘I’m the one who’s not safe, Connie,’ he says. He runs his hand along the side of Charlie’s face and Charlie nuzzles him back.

I take off my coat and squeeze the water out, then I fold my arms and look out the window at the rain. ‘Yet tomorrow you’re off. Enlisted of your own free will, did you?’

‘It seemed a good idea.’

‘I’m sure it was. I’m sure you’ll have all kinds of adventures. See the world, fight for King and country, all that. You won’t have time to spare a thought for us at home.’

‘You’ll be busy soon, as well.’ He turns away from Charlie and faces me, arms folded just like mine. ‘Your ma is telling anyone who’ll listen that you’ll be engaged to that newspaper man any day now. What’s his name again? Bored?’

‘It’s Ward. And she’s getting a bit ahead of herself, if she’s said that.’

‘Ah,’ he says, like I’ve just explained the workings of the internal combustion engine. ‘Like that, is it?’

The rain seems not so heavy now, a dull background hum.

‘It’s eased up. I’ll make a run for it.’

‘Don’t.’

‘You can’t give me orders. I’m not one of your soldier boys.’

‘You’re right.’ He walks over and stands right in front of me, inches away. ‘Don’t, please.’

It’s time to go back to my own bed, to the room I share with Ma. It really is. Time to go.

‘You’re still wet.’ With one hand he lifts the sleeve of my dress up to the top of my shoulder, then he runs the flat of his fingers down my arm, a gentle even pressure. He stops at the elbow and flicks off the water. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘Jack.’

This time he reaches both hands out and holds my dress at the waist, a hand at either side. He scrunches it in his brown fists so that it’s tight around me, he squeezes the fabric. Two tiny trickles of water fall to the ground.

‘It’s you I think about,’ he says. ‘Every night when I can’t sleep, when I walk the streets. Tonight it’s like I’ve conjured you up.’

I look in his eyes and it’s a mistake. They’re soft, the colour of dark honey. There are all kinds of thoughts buzzing, things I should say, should do, but I can’t move. I just look, and then it feels like falling.

He pulls the dress now, little movements but strong. I can see his forearms tense, the muscle firm under the sodden white of his shirt, and I move towards him. Tiny steps, in my slippers. My arms are limp until I’m right up against him, pressing against him down to my toes. Then my traitor arms lift and rest against his chest.

‘Just let me kiss you, Connie. I’d die a happy man.’

I barely move my head. He leans down closer, closer. He brushes the side of his face against mine—it’s rough, it stings and prickles. I feel his open mouth on one side of mine, feel his wetness and his breath, and I try to be still but it’s more than I can bear. Before I know it I’m on my tiptoes, arms around his neck. I’m kissing him back.

This kissing. The smell of him, the taste. I’m in Jack Husting’s arms and he’s holding me and there’s a fierceness I’ve never felt before. I can’t get enough air but it’s not air I’m wanting. He’s twisting me to my side, cradling me. He kisses the side of my mouth, the line of my chin, the space behind my ear and my mouth, over and over. I raise my head when I feel about to topple over and he puts a hand behind to steady himself. We start to sink and he sits on the floor, back against the wall, and I’m across his lap.

‘Connie,’ he says, into my neck. ‘I’ve got to send you back to your own bed.’

‘Yes.’ He raises his head and I find his throat with my teeth. ‘That’d be for the best.’

‘It just won’t do.’ He brushes the side of my breast with his hand and when I say nothing, only draw air into my lungs in a whoosh, he cups one breast and it’s heavy and full in his hand, the perfect shape to fit there. ‘It’s not right, Connie. We should wait.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Wait.’ My teeth close over his skin.

With his right hand, he undoes the buttons at the top of my dress. One. Two. Three. He slides his hand inside and he bows his head as he does it, like a man praying. His thumb
darts across my nipple, flicking the nub of it. Jesus Mary and Joseph. So this is what it is. What men and women get up to in their beds at night. He moves us a little so I’m resting against the hay.

‘This far and no further,’ he says. His voice is all crackles and sighs.

But it will not be
this far and no further.
I will not let it be. Inside of me there is a heat. I want his hands on the inside of my thigh, I want to see them there, I want to feel it. I want, I want. I can hardly breathe for the wanting. It seems that all my life I’ve had nothing I’ve desired and I’ve given up having desires at all. Now I know what it feels like to want and I will give anything to have it. I can hardly form the thoughts but there’s a wetness at my core and a hardness at his and I feel a rush of something I’ve never known: a power. I am queen of a distant land and everything is at my command. I slip my tongue in the corner of his mouth and he groans like pain. I push my whole body against him and part of me watches him search for control but I know he will not find it, not here, not now. I tug his shirt from his trousers and he closes his eyes and tilts his head back. The world is mine.

‘Jack,’ I say.

He is helpless before me. I touch his belt and my nerve falters but he follows my thoughts and does it himself: he unbuckles, readies himself, slides my dress up to my waist and I feel the air on myself down there. He is staring at me yet it’s his body that’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. As he closes in on me I feel a sudden panic, a fear of pain, and yes there’s pain but it’s sweet and sharp and it
fades into more wanting and more and he’s still as stone for a while. And soon, again, the stillness is unbearable and it’s my wanting that drives us. I see now the closeness between these words: ‘wanting’ and ‘wanton’. I move my hips under him, circle and thrust. I cannot help it. There is simply nothing else that can be done.

‘Connie,’ Jack says. ‘Be still for God’s sake,’ but I will not. I raise my hips to meet him and together we plunge and grind and his face is a contortion of losing himself in me and for a few blessed minutes we are utterly together, meeting one another with our limbs and our mouths and our skin and our sweat and our breath. The feeling is impossible, astounding. No other living soul has ever felt this way.