Surrender (4 page)

“And you remember what you did.”

“Hmm.”

“A bad thing.”

I screwed my face up, pained. “I was only seven. You don’t know any better, when you’re only seven.”

“But it was bad. And you’re sorry.”

I scratched the dust, looked askance.

“You wish you never did it, even though you were only seven.”

“It was an accident!” I barked.

“I know,” said Finnigan.

I blinked in surprise at this, and suddenly liked him more. He looked away, watching the ants collect themselves and find their way back to the skink. His frayed clothes did not fit or suit him, seemed stolen or handed down; his brown skin was made browner by its lacquer of earth. His ears were specked with sand, like seashells, his face and arms ocher with grime. On his chin was a scuffed green stain, from falling hard in the grass. I guessed he was a farm boy, which was something town boys like myself despised as a dirty and ignorant thing to be. Yet Finnigan’s dirt seemed good dirt, like the dirt on a running dog’s paws, and I sensed he knew much — possibly everything. Maybe not spelling, maybe not the days of the week, but everything that a hawk might know, everything worth knowing. A dullard I had never been, but in the presence of this gypsy boy I knew my head to be an empty bucket, my brain a waterlogged sock. I put it to him: “How come you know so much, when you don’t even go to school?”

“You go to school,” he answered, “but you don’t know anything.”

His cleverness sprang a smile to my face, I shuffled a little closer. “Don’t your mother and father
make
you go to school?”

“Nope.” Finnigan’s nose was at the corpse. “They don’t know what I do.”

I marveled at the idea, a life of secrets and decisions. “Don’t you even
want
to go?”

He prodded the reptile with a bitten nail, and the ants fanned out in panic. “What’s so good about school?
You
don’t like it. Everyone there reckons you’re kooksville. No one is your friend.”

I felt my face redden under its skin of sunburn. “If you went to school,” I said, “
you
could be my friend. We could be each other’s friend. If I told someone about you, how you want to go to school — maybe they would let you. My father is a lawyer, everyone listens to him. Maybe, if I asked him, he could —”

Like a spider Finnigan jumped at me, slamming me head over heels. Dust wallowed around us, clouding the hot air. The wild boy’s eyes were close to mine, his dirty muzzle and teeth. Hanks of my shirt were crushed in his hands. “Who hit you?” he yelled. “Who hurt you?”

I remembered the sear of the feather-duster’s handle, but it was Finnigan who terrified me: “I won’t!” I wailed. “I won’t tell!”

“You better
not
!”

“No, no, I won’t —”

“Because if you
do
, I’ll never talk to you! I’ll
never
visit you! You can just be a kook by yourself!”

He released my shirt and I scrambled aside, huddling against the fence. Finnigan swung away and stalked the yard, kicking up clouds of dust. “They’d break me into pieces,” he was saying to himself. “Here a piece, here a piece.” I sniveled and wiped tears from my eyes. I seemed doomed to infuriate those people I most wanted to please, and I cursed and hated myself.

He spun suddenly to face me, and I cringed under his gaze. “No one would believe you,” he said flatly.

I sniffed and nodded; Finnigan gazed at me. “No one would believe you,” he reiterated. “And I would maybe kill you.”

I drew a throttled breath. “I won’t tell. I promise. I’ll keep you a secret.”

Finnigan considered this, glowing gold in the afternoon sun. I said nothing and dared not move. A flock of cockatoos passed over the yards, high in the sea-blue sky. “A secret,” the wild boy said finally, and his tense shoulders fell. “You keep me like a secret.”

He sat beside me in the boxy shade of the fence, resting his wrists on his knees. For a while we said nothing. I was still nervous and ashamed. Finnigan coughed dustily, and brushed ants off his toes. The corrugated iron creaked with the heat; in the shady center of the corral a bush fly flew round and round. Finnigan said, “Whew, it’s hot.”

I nodded loosely. He looked at me.

“You must feel pretty bad about your brother.”

I nodded again, wonky as a doll.

“You must wish you never did such a bad thing.”

I sighed. “Yeah.”

“We should make — a
packet
, or something.” He struggled. “A packet. You swear not to do bad things — never again. From now on, you only do good things.”

I smiled uncertainly, sunburn tight on my nose. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why not? That’s what you wish, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but everyone does bad things sometimes, you can’t help it.”

“I can help it,” said Finnigan. “I’ll do the bad things for you. Then you won’t have to. You can just do good things.”

I stared at him, mystified. “A bit like cops-and-robbers, you mean?”

“Yeah!” His eyes brightened. “You would be an angel! Your mother and father would be happy, if you were like an angel!”

This was true — I imagined my parents would very much relish having an angel for a son. Who, after all, would not? Still, I didn’t like the idea. There was something soul-selling about it: somewhere in its gluey depths, there was a trick concealed. “But what about you?” I asked. “You’d be in trouble all the time.”

He answered with confidence, “I wouldn’t. If I was doing your bad things for you, you’d owe me. You couldn’t let me get caught. You would have to hide me. You’d have to sneak things out for me to eat. You’d have to tell lies, to cover my tracks.”

“But lying is a
bad
thing.”

“Not when you’re lying for me. That wouldn’t count. That would be part of the packet.”

I nodded doubtfully; I did not say “pact.”

“You will only be
good
things — you’ll never get angry or fight. And I will only be
bad
things — I will always get angry and fight. We’ll be like opposites — like pictures in the water —”

“Reflections, you mean?”

“Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins — like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you’ll just ask me, and I will do it —”

“And when you need something
good
done, you’ll just ask me?”

He hesitated, as if doubting such a need would arise. “Uh-huh.”

I thought on this. I did not tell him I’d always considered cops-and-robbers an idiot’s game. I asked, “How would I find you, if I needed you? I’m not allowed out the front gate.”

This flaw in the plan did not faze him. “If you do what I say, you could always find me. I’d be in the trees and under the house or in the coop or on the roof. I’d always be somewhere nearby, I swear. I’d be your best friend.”

I bit my lip and glanced away. Those magical words made my eyes water, so friendless was I. I knew that I’d agree to anything that would catch his loyalty and cage him. I said, “You’d have to be careful. Mother wouldn’t like it, if she saw you on the roof.”

He laughed. “She’d never see me. I wouldn’t let anyone see me — only you.”

His flattery made me smile. I leaned against the spiny yard-post, keeping myself in the shade. My head vaguely hurt. I couldn’t understand how Finnigan had conjured this odd notion, nor what he could do with my promise to comply; I had a strange sense that he’d arranged all this — the coins, the loss of them, the writing on the fence rail, the gritty, flyblown yards — simply to bring us to this moment, to seal this agreement with me. But I thought about what he was offering — friendship to the friendless, protection to the vulnerable, courage for the weak — and it seemed such a small thing, to exchange a word for this. I thought about a life lived in shimmering goodness and wondered if this wasn’t, in fact, the path of repentance, if this was not the truest way of making amends. I looked into his clever face and said, “All right.”

Finnigan kicked with delight, his heels exploding the dust. “Should we swear it?”

I laughed, he was so happy. “How do you mean?”

“Well, we should cut ourselves, or something.”

I faltered. “Better not.”

So Finnigan cut his own skin, having scouted up a splinter sharp enough to pierce his thumb, and I watched as he dug out a seam of blood without flinching and smeared it first across his forehead, then across my own. In a hushed voice he asked me, “What’s an angel’s name?”

Back then I had never heard of Raphael, Zadkiel, Jophiel, Uriel — I knew only the most famous, the mysterious visitor. “Gabriel,” I suggested, and Finnigan approved.

Gabriel
. The blood on my forehead crimped and itched when it dried. I would always be lonely, but no more alone.

My condition has deteriorated to such a state that Sarah thought it best to call the doctor. He arrives big as a bullock, ungainly in this small tidy room; he is full of joviality and newsy tidbits, scolds me lightly for inching closer to the grave. His visits exhaust me — I think I actually hate him. His yellow smile — all of him is yellow — patrols the room like a lighthouse beam, falling on my sandy-beach aunt, on jagged-rocky-outcrop me, on the foaming blankets of the sea, but when he bends his head to commune with my pulse, his smile dims. He puts a paw against my wrist, checks the whites of my eyes. He sticks a thermometer under my tongue and fondles the glands in my throat. He is attempting to talk to the illness, to weasel into its confidence. He hopes to win its trust so it might, for a moment, drop its guard. But the sickness won’t be drawn out by anyone, and treats my yellow doctor with contempt. It is not in the business of folding, but of raising the stakes.

He knows it, and in his muffled smile I see my future. Still, part of me is proud to be dying such a tricksy death.

“He’s restless,” says Sarah. “He kicks off the blankets.”

“Tuck them in tight,” prescribes the doctor. “It’s cold outside. You’ve heard the news, of course. And what they’ve found.”

“Yes.” Sarah speaks quietly. “I haven’t said anything to him.”

I lie in silence like idiot-child, listening to them make a matter of me as if I were not in the room. And indeed my temperature has spiked so high that in some ways I
have
left the room, left the house, left time behind. In some way I still sit with Finnigan in the angled shadows of the saleyard, our lean limbs stretched like flies’ legs, his blood tight on my skin.

Once I’d given my promise I couldn’t take it back: indeed, once the word passed my lips I felt I’d met a moment that had always been waiting for me, that I’d taken a place in which my name was long carved. I understood that this was fate, and that I was fated. In surrendering my right to do wrong I forfeited great chunks of free will, but I have managed without it. It’s true that I, in common with many called on to be saintly, initially viewed my calling with dismay; the prospect of a pious life made me queasy even as Finnigan sucked the blood from his thumb. But I have never gone back on my word; I have kept my side of the packet, as Finnigan has always kept his. I do not think we have ever been a disappointment to each other. We have been, as he hoped, like reflections, twins.

Me and Surrender go into the forest.

Surrender is a big lazy loping hound with a tail that curves like a scythe; his coat is the color of cinnamon. His head is hefty and square as a shoebox, and he carries it slung down. His ears are each as broad as my feet, his paws as broad as my palm. When he runs, the earth trembles. When he barks, the trees bow down.

But Surrender can slink into anyone’s chicken coop and pluck from her roost the fattest white hen and bring her to me without ruffling a feather or even disturbing her sleep. Good dog.

He runs through the forest (he thinks he owns it), never breaking a twig. This part of the forest is mongrel, ironbarks, which belong here, mixed with pine that never would, and now this forest is dreggy, useless, half-breed. It is not the place for picnics, it’s not named on tourist maps. Only creatures come here — owls, foxes, possums, cats, rats, mice, Surrender, me. It’s too shady for snakes and lizards, too close-grown for an eagle to spread his wings. This place is for the lithe and fugitive: this place is fringe.

The dog and the boy pick their way through the forest, surefooted as billy goats. The rocks are black with rotten moss but under the blackness are stripes of color, caramel, woodblood, clay, snow. Beyond the canopy the winter sun glows but down here all is gloom. The air smells clean, like spring water, cold, like a mountain’s mood.

I’m looking for something, my eyes are peeled. I’m listening for something that’s not a possum shifting its chunky rump. All of nature’s my confederate, the weather, the soil, the creatures, the leaves, and they lead the way for me. When we come to a place where the twigs are broken and the earth is scuffed, I know we’re finally here. Surrender lags as I creep forward and the ground says nothing under my weight, the ferns drape veils over me. Thanks to this I am invisible, I’m the shadow of a tree.

What I see makes my eyes smart. The ribbons they’ve used to map out the scene are stinging yellow and red. A blue sheet of plastic makeshifts a tent, which cracks and bucks with the breeze. The collection bags, though crystal clear, are lettered in alarm-bell orange. The digging tools they’re using are silver as werewolf bullets. The colors scream so loud at me that I clap my hands to my ears.