Surrender (3 page)

Dizziness wobbled through me. I said, “I can’t say.”

Mother gazed at me, her face a tomb, her body a pole. “Did you steal them?”

“No —”

“Did you take them from my purse? From your father’s wallet? My God — from someone on the street?”

“No!”

She grabbed my wrist like a snare grabs a fox. I jumped backward, a snared fox, and her grip tightened. Her body piked down so her eyes were at mine. “Because you know you are a thief,” she said. “This whole town knows what you are. They whisper about you.
Look at the little beast
.
What a burden for his poor mother
. Look at me, with your lying face, and tell me the truth!”

“I didn’t steal it.” Fear sang like violins. “I swear —”

She wasn’t listening. Her fingers crushed my wrist. “You want to make a fool of your mother. You want your mother to die of shame. You want to kill your mother.”

“No!” I yelped, and struggled madly, leaping like a fox. “I don’t — I didn’t!”

“Then
where
did you get it, Anwell? Answer me!”

I pressed my lips together; I would not tell a lie. My mother, staring into my face, made a sound like a dog or a bird. Clutching my wrist she rushed me down the hall, bursting into her bedroom like a gale. Her black bead handbag lay on the bed and from its maw Mother pulled her purse, twisting its clip as if breaking bones. I retreated stumblingly, till my shoulders knocked the wall. Rosebuds cascaded from the ceiling to the floor. Mother stared with satisfaction into the purse, her skull pressed hard against the flesh, her throat swallowing sourly. She looked at me, her face crumpling. “How could you?” Her eyes like axes. “How could you?”

I caught my breath. “Mama, I —”

“You terrible creature. How could you?”

Tears dashed down my cheeks, each one quicker than the last. I leaned against the wall and sobbed, struggling to swallow back the terror because she hated tears, they enraged her. She lowered her shattered self to the bed, crumpling the purse in her hand. She gazed at the wall, white-eyed. “All the dreadful things you’ve done,” she whispered, from somewhere in the clouds.

I stood miserably beside the wall, a thread of tears making the short plunge from my chin to the floor. I longed to beg her forgiveness, but my voice would not come. The icebox odor of my mother’s bedroom made my empty stomach clench. My socks were bunched inside my shoes, my tears greasing the floor. I still had the toy car hidden in my shirt. A disjoined part of me fretted over the loss of Finnigan’s coins, and worried about what he would say.

My mother finally looked at me. “Look what you do to poor Mother,” she sighed.

I licked my salty lips. “I’m sorry.”

“You know I must tell Father.”

“But I didn’t —”

“Anwell,” she said, “I despise you when you lie.”

We were both quiet. The afternoon light was netted by the lace curtains; no color came into this room. “Maybe you don’t have to tell him,” I suggested.

“I won’t be a liar like you.”

So we waited, me with my shoulders to the cool rosebud wall, and she, upright as a churchgoer, propped on the end of the bed. I kept my thoughts anchored on the word carved into the fence.

Me and Surrender fishhook round the town. Already it’s darker, though it isn’t noon. I can smell snow on peaks miles from here. The sun’s like a coin that’s been buried for years. As we walk, warts of moss sprout. The footpath is covered with wet, grisly leaves. The wind blows at my back, drives eucalypt bark clattering into the gutter. It sings to us a triumphal song. All the world is a stage, for me and Surrender.

And it’s cold cold cold; in winter you would never guess that Mulyan burns so well.

I know all that goes on in the houses we pass. I tell Surrender about it as we trundle along. Everything here belongs to me: I reign; I infect this town. I’m the unexplained noises, each mislaid bit and piece. I’m the murmur, the shadow, the creaking floor. I’m the blackout, the echo, the scratcher-at-the-door.

In this fibro shanty lives Mr. Rich, who gives what he has to the poor. Down the lane from him lives Mr. Pomfrey, who went blind during the war. Over the way, there’s Mr. Sinjay, who can hear like any canine; upstairs from him is Ms. Silvestri, who dabbles in the Black Arts. Mr. Hall dines alone since his wife became famous and took her own life; Mrs. Click has teeth of shoddy fit and ignores the blemish that’s bloomed on her skin. Oh it’s cold, cold. Miss Tucker has filthy habits that are best not spoken of; Mr. Lee’s a closet quiffer, and so’s his wife and son. Mr. Darling, from number five, collects women’s magazines; behind that fence lives Mr. Pye, otherwise known as the Human Sludge. Miss Hooper, who lives alone, curls into her pillows at night and cries because her life is stillborn; Mr. Mead, two doors away, has three grown daughters and an adoring wife, but he sits in his potting shed most afternoons and quietly weeps at the wall. There’s no pleasing some people.

I’ve touched them all: I’m like the plague. I’ve shared a bed with the best of them; I’ve shared their finest meals. I’ve listened to their rumors and the sounds they make at night. I have stood beside their children’s cribs while they sucked their thumbs and dreamed. Tonight I’ll share the schoolteacher’s fire, having hissed the resident vixen from her place beneath the floor. Before dawn tomorrow I’ll have drawn a wet lamb into the world and have dragged its fat cousin away. The icing on the bakery’s buns will preserve, come morning, the imprint of my fingers. Surrender and I eat well.

Before then, though, there’s a few things to do. See the bones for myself. Grace McIllwraith with my presence. Pay a long-time-coming visit to that dying creature on a bed.

I remember how keen I was to assure him it wasn’t his fault, that I didn’t blame him for the scarlet welts striping the back of my knees; I remember how my skin prickled to see him, how I flew to the fence at the sight of him swaggering along the street, unkempt and unshod as he’d been two days earlier, leggy as a jackal. I had feared and feared he wouldn’t come, had traced his name with my fingertips hoping to cast a returning spell. I had chewed my nails to the quick.

When I confessed to him the loss of the coins, Finnigan wasn’t angry. “Show us your knees,” he said, and leaned past the pickets to inspect what remained of the thrashing. We stood in the shade of the ash that grew by the roadside and overhung our garden and peppered the lawn, each spring, with arrowheads, to my father’s horticultural ire. Clutching a handful of shrubbery, I hoisted my trousers and showed him the marks on my knees. Finnigan squinted and smiled. “Hurt?”

“Mmm.”

“What’d he use? Belt?”

“Feather-duster. The stick. The handle.”

My visitor whistled. “Quick or slow?”

I reflected. “Quick.”

“Quick stings but it’s finished faster.”

Mulyan boys were whipped routinely and made comrades of each other in the comparing of war wounds, but I knew my parents wouldn’t approve of me profiting from my punishment this way. I smoothed my trousers down. “I’m sorry about the money.”

Finnigan shrugged, and I understood that he thought himself fairly, even pleasingly, compensated by my pain. The shade moved among hanks of his hair. I noticed, when he stood straight, that he was exactly as tall as me. “Let’s go to the cattle yards.”

I shook my head regretfully. My mother was taking her afternoon nap, her curtain drawn against the heat and light; my father was in his study, where he passed hours over petals pressed and tagged and dried. This was the time I was safest, and yet I never felt safe. “I have to stay where I can be seen.”

His eyes scanned my face. “Kooksville.”

“I can sit on the footpath —”

“Kooks,” he said chillingly. “That’s what everyone says you are, and that’s what you are.”

I pleaded for understanding. “Mother won’t let me —”

“Don’t ask her.” He smiled gamely. “Then she can’t say no.”

“But . . . I’ll get thrashed.”

“You’re a kook
and
a chicken.”

“No!” I squawked. “Don’t say that!”

“Why not? Only a
baby
does what he’s told.”

I gawped at him, shattered. Leaves tumbled along the path, pushed by the parched north wind. The leaves scratched past Finnigan, flickered and clickered away. I clutched my fingers in despair. He wouldn’t waste time on someone tethered, like me — already I could feel him drift. I prayed for salvation to fall from the sky. Finnigan picked a scab and studied the bauble of blood. He glanced at me with his predator’s eyes. “Sometimes you get a thrashing even when you try to be
good
.”

I caught a breath — until I heard him speak those words, I’d never known that other boys also suffered in this way, that
every
boy feels he has some mischief owed to him, restitution for the times he’s been punished without fair cause. I went to the gate slid the bolt stepped over to the other side, before I could change my mind.

The cattle yards sprawled over a distant corner of the town and we walked through the sunburned streets without talking, me giddy with excitement, Finnigan dragging a broken stick. Shadows made the footpath black then white, black then white. Distantly we heard cheering as a bail tumbled from its perch. Dogs barked as we passed their gates, rabble-rousing the canine town. Tea towels draped on veranda rails blew horizontal on the wind. The applause of a TV audience rode the stuffy air. We passed no one, and I was relieved. Each footstep carried me away.

The cattle yards were deserted, for this was not a sale day. We slipped between strings of rusty wire and only sun skinks watched us weave our way between the post-and-rail pens; a king snake slid shyly behind corrugated iron and seven ravens flapped away. Cattle ghosts were there, though, in the rich fawn scent of their hide, in hair snagged on fence palings and hoofprints preserved in hard mud. There was no sadder sound in Mulyan than the moaning of the cows, which, every other month or so, were crowded into these yards, smacked and spooked and harried and jostled, and offered up for sale. Separated from their companions and calves, they would call chestily to each other until the mountains reverberated with their sighs.

That afternoon I followed Finnigan with humble adoration, astonished that this boy who was as wild as a hawk should look so kindly upon me. We poked around the loading ramps where countless Christmas beetles dangled from spider webs, their brilliant carapaces flaring in the sun. We climbed the iron ladder to the top of the great gray tank and stared solemnly into the water at quaking images of ourselves. We hung our weight from butcher’s chains and raced in circles until our feet lifted from the grassless ground. Finnigan found a severed calf’s tail, and flies came off it like rain. His walk was confident as a rooster’s and although he rarely looked at me and hardly spoke at all, I sensed that he had not forgotten my presence, that he was guarded as a dog with a bone. We crouched in the shade of a corrugated roof and watched ants mill over the corpse of a skink. “Where do you come from?” I dared to ask him. “Where’s your home?”

He waved a wrist to somewhere distant. “Over there. The hills.”

“Do you have a family?”

“A mother and father. Like you.”

“And brothers or sisters?”

He found a twig and touched the skink and the ants ran haywire. He looked at me, his chin on his shoulder. “No.” A whiff of danger rose from him; I saw the hyena again. “What about you?” he asked. “Do you have brothers or sisters?”

Some of the ants sprinted across my fingers. “No.”

“. . . But you used to. You had a brother.”

I said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“What was his name?”

The subject always filled me with something like tar. The word stuck inside like a splinter, had to be drawn out of me. “Vernon,” I muttered. “I can’t talk about it.”

He let a moment pass, pondering. “Do you think about him? Do you remember what you did?”

I stared fretfully at my interrogator, flies seesawing in front of my eyes. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. My mother says.”

“Baby. Chicken. She’s not here.”

There was nothing for it but to answer. “Sometimes he’s in my dreams. That’s all.”