T
hey walked the way they’d come, to a sports oval they’d passed earlier. Billy was unsteady by the time they got there. They found a patch of shade behind the clubrooms. Bushes sheltered them from the sun. They settled in. Billy lay on his side and closed his eyes. Adam could see under the clubrooms. The building was raised on stumps. Mesh barriers stopped people from getting under there. A wooden ramp to the back door was beside them. Fixed to the corner of the building was a tap.
Adam mixed them some cordial in the drink bottle. He opened a packet of chips.
Cooling gusts came through the bushes. Two sparrows fossicked close by.
After a while Billy struggled up. His exhausted expression didn’t change, though. Sounds of cars on the roads started returning. A bee buzzed and hovered around a sticky icy-pole wrapper caught in the grass. Billy dragged the backpack closer to him. He popped two tablets from a packet, swallowed them. He re-counted the money.
Adam lay on his back. He put his hands beneath his head and looked up at the overhang of green leaves. He thought about the house cat, the tail-up swagger of the tabby compared to the low-to-the-ground stagger of the caged cats. Who’d willingly put their hand up as having come from that? What the house cat had displayed was a complete and utter lack of fear. It didn’t know to feel fear, because it had never felt it. Adam closed his eyes.
Sleep came like water, cooling Adam’s thoughts, eddying away the whispers; it lifted him up, took him, solid, steady, certain.
Clouds had gathered in the sky: thick white ones billowing and building. Billy took a banana from the backpack. He peeled it and tossed the skin down by the mesh. He saw Adam was awake.
‘What’s the story with the gun?’
Billy had re-bandaged his arm. The T-shirt strips were a blood-soaked pile beside him. He’d taken out the weapon. It was in the grass.
When Adam didn’t answer, Billy said, ‘You’re pretty shit at explaining things.’
Adam sat up. Billy finished the banana and took out the chocolate. It had melted and stuck to the wrapper. Billy licked the chocolate from the foil. He offered Adam some when he saw the way he was watching him; Adam declined, shook his head.
Billy tried again. ‘Did Joe show you how to load it? Was it a game? Was it for real? Was he testing you? Was it a way to spin you out?’
‘I think so.’
‘A way to spin you out?’
‘Yes.’
‘He let you load it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he tell you why?’
‘He made me think I couldn’t leave the house, or be seen by anyone. He told me I’d be taken away. He said he was the only one who could look after me. If anything happened to him I’d have to kill myself. He showed me how to do it.’
‘He was messing with your head, all right.’
‘Do you know cracker nights?’
‘Yup.’
‘He used to let me watch them.’
‘The bonfire nights across from his place?’
‘Yes. Every cracker night he’d take me out into the yard. He’d put down a rug and we’d have takeaway. The last time, he made me sit right up the back of the yard. He didn’t have a rug or any food. It was dark. I couldn’t really see. When the fireworks lit up I saw he’d sat me in a hole. A hole he’d dug. I saw him take the gun from inside his jacket. He pointed it at me. He put it right against my head.’
Billy stopped licking the chocolate wrapper. ‘And?’ he prompted after a moment.
‘He couldn’t do it. He said it was my fault because I looked at him.’
Billy wiped his lips clean of the chocolate, threw away the wrapper and took out a cigarette. Lit the smoke. ‘Fucken hell.’
‘I realised later that he chose that night, the fireworks, to hide the shot. He was going to bury me in the hole. He must have drugged me too, because I wasn’t thinking properly, I wasn’t acting right. He just led me back inside and I fell asleep . . . I’d had the gun all those times when he’d taught me to use it and I’d never pointed it at him. I don’t know why. After that night he didn’t bring the gun out anymore. I was hardly allowed out at all. If he did let me out of the backroom, he’d tie my feet, he’d hit me for the slightest thing. He’d tie me to the table to eat dinner, tie me to the chair to watch TV. After that night he got much worse.’
‘Yeah, because he knew
you
knew. The game was up. When there’s a line in the sand, when you’ve worked out it’s you or them, then they can’t lie no more or play their games. They know you’re not gonna believe them. Put the gun in your hand then and you’ll know what to do. You won’t even think twice about it; you’ll cross the line without even thinking. But up until then you didn’t know.’
School must have got out. Shouts and laughter carried in the breeze. There were some older voices too, some swearing. On the other side of the bushes was a fence and behind that was a walking track. The sound of the children got louder. Some scuffed their way along the gravel and others skipped and ran.
Adam waited until they’d passed.
‘He knew how much I like the fireworks. It was a night he was always nice to me. But he wasn’t being nice to me. He was setting it up.’ A waver had crept into Adam’s voice. He swallowed it. ‘I’d had the gun and I hadn’t used it. I had other chances and I didn’t take them. I should have screamed when I was outside, all the times he’d let me stay in the front rooms, I should have known to run away.’
‘You thought he was your father. Give yourself a break.’
‘I should have tried harder.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. You were trying hard.’
‘For so long I believed the things he told me.’
‘Heaps of people spend their lives believing crazier things. You were little – kids believe in the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy. Don’t even get me started on the shit adults believe. You did nothing wrong. You gotta know that. Of course you did nothing wrong – you’re here, right? You’re alive. You see? That tells you. Everything you did led to you being alive right now, sitting here with me. They might have been shit things you had to do, but they got you here, didn’t they? That’s all that matters.’
‘No one will understand.’
‘Nah, they probably won’t.’ Billy inhaled and held the cigarette a little way in front him. He looked at the burning tip. ‘Chances are they’re never gonna be sitting in a hole on Guy Fawkes night with a gun pointed at their head, so . . . yeah, we’re all a bit alone like that. You might not understand half the things I’ve done. You’d have to go back and be me, to understand them, and even then we’d probably see it different and do it different. Some things no one is ever gonna get. But what I can understand is how you hate the things you had to do and you wish you hadn’t had to do them. If other people have lived any sort of a life, they’ll understand that too.’
‘What do you wish you hadn’t done?’
‘Plenty.’
‘What would you go back and change?’
‘What wouldn’t I?’
‘Did they lie to you?’
‘Different lies, I guess.’
‘I think I remember something, Billy.’
He glanced across.
‘The man in the shed, I think I remember him. I think I remember a river and a market.’
Billy licked his lips and looked away.
It hadn’t been school getting out. The children who’d come down the track had gathered out the front of the building. Adam could hear them laughing and talking. There was the sound of a car arriving. The gun remained in the grass. Adam looked at it. He looked at Billy. Billy put out his cigarette, got up and crept down alongside the clubrooms. Adam returned the gun to the backpack, closed the zip. Billy came back, shaking his head and pointing down. Adam moved lower, closer to the mesh. Another car arrived.
They had to wait. Footsteps and voices came from inside the clubrooms. Heavy things were being dragged about. Sports equipment was carried out onto the oval. If not for Billy’s arm they’d probably push through the bushes and climb the fence; if not for his arm they’d probably make a dash across the quieter side of the oval. Cars dropped children off. Kids were in shorts and T-shirts. All ages. They ran around in bare feet. Activities were set up for them. Billy and Adam sat side by side, knees up, chins resting on them. They didn’t return to the conversation. Too much talk took too much getting over. Adam sensed that in Billy too. Truth was best in bouts. Time in between to let it settle. It was there between them, though, what they’d talked about. It was like the money and the gun – another thing they’d collected, something that could, maybe, bring them undone. Or save them. It was tucked away for now. A whistle was blown. Watching through the mesh, Adam had a view of one of the outdoor activities, made up of mats and a springboard and a tall padded bench. The kids ran up the springboard; they either jumped with their legs apart over the bench or they did a handstand or they cartwheeled. One boy didn’t touch the bench at all and managed an airborne somersault. The whistle signalled a shift from one activity to the next. The closest Adam and Billy came to being discovered was when a man came to the corner tap and plugged in a hose. He was so close they could hear his breathing. It was dusk now.
Billy whispered, when he was gone, ‘A cop. They all are. They run these things.’
The police weren’t in uniform. They were dressed in tracksuit pants, white T-shirts and white sneakers. A sprinkler was turned on and the kids played under it. The moon was out early. Children’s bare arms and legs glistened in the light from the clubroom windows. When one of the policemen ran through the water, the children cheered and chased him. Billy pointed out two older kids who had separated from the group and were over near the goalposts. A girl and boy. It was possible to see them holding hands, just possible to see them kissing. Billy lifted the backpack and held it out for Adam to take.
‘They’re gonna start looking around for stragglers.’
It had grown dark enough to go.
Barbeque smells drifted from backyards. Some houses hadn’t closed their doors. Children were playing in the shadowy yards. Mums and dads sat on porch steps or watered their gardens. It had a cracker-night feel. It felt familiar to Adam for that reason. The moments leading up to the bonfire being lit, the noises in the street, people out, the smells, always on the other side of the fence, spilling over into Joe’s yard, only ever a sense of it, never in it, not like this.
Adam looked up at the stars. There were footsteps on the path behind them. Two girls were talking. As they caught up to the boys they stopped their conversation, giggled and overtook. The tallest girl glanced back. Her eyes and teeth gleamed.
‘Wanna know the trick to them?’ Billy said, when the girls were out of earshot.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t pretend you weren’t checking those two out.’
‘No.’
‘
No
? Really? Fair enough then. I won’t tell you. You don’t need to know.’
‘Okay,’ Adam conceded after a few more steps.
‘You gotta walk somewhere with them,’ Billy said. ‘That’s all you need to know. Girls love walking places. It doesn’t have to be somewhere fancy. Those two girls, all they’d be doing is heading off to the corner shop, but you’d never guess it going by the way they’re swinging their backsides. Yeah? They love going places. Take them somewhere, walk down the road with them, down the street, to the corner shop, walk around the block, anywhere. Do that and they’ll reckon you’re the most romantic guy they’ve ever laid eyes on.’
Adam thought about it. ‘Okay.’
Billy shouldered him. ‘Dag.’
‘Do you like girls, Billy?’
‘Hmm, let’s just say I don’t get nervous around them.’
‘How come you know the trick to them?’
‘When you don’t go to pieces it’s easy to see how they work.’
‘Does Scotty?’
‘Does Scotty what?’
‘Get nervous around them.’
‘Nah . . . he doesn’t get nervous or go to pieces . . . he goes to fucking
water
. There’s someone you
don’t
wanna go taking girl advice off. He’s hopeless. It’s painful, watching him with a chick. I’m not kidding you – you groan.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Well, for starters, he forgets how to speak, makes the lamest jokes, drops stuff, walks into stuff. I’ve seen him fall backwards over a kid’s bike, hit his head getting in
and out
of a car . . . seen him get tangled in an annexe door and almost hang himself on a clothesline.’
Adam could picture it. He smiled.
‘You think I’m kidding.’
‘Has Scotty had a girlfriend?’
‘Yep.’
‘Have you?’
‘No, kid.’ He sounded amused by the question. ‘But I’m not saying that people like us don’t have girlfriends. You’re gonna, no problem. It’s about jumping in there and not worrying about the knockbacks. Those girls, don’t worry, they were scoping you right back. The only thing you gotta be careful of is people telling you how they reckon you should feel, or taking a person’s fucked-up reaction as the way you should feel. When you’ve been through a bunch of shit like us, people think all sorts of stuff.’ Billy sliced his hand through the air. ‘But for me it’s like – what I do with someone and what was done to me, two different things completely. There’s the good game, and there’s the bad game, and, take it from me, the good game ain’t
nothing
like the bad one. Look at it like this – it’s like being punched in the face or touched on the cheek. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty clear on the difference there, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
*
On a high section of road Adam and Billy stopped and looked over the blanket of suburbs to the city lights in the distance. Billy lit a smoke. Adam sat down on a low brick fence and waited while Billy got his bearings.
‘How the fuck did we manage to get all the way out here?’
Adam got to his feet. He assumed they’d walk to the city. He thought they’d walk all night.
But they only went as far as a wide and busy street.
It had pubs and clubs. Low-slung rumbling cars cruised up and down the road. Music thumped inside the vehicles. Drivers waiting at the traffic lights revved their motors. Somewhere further off, a car’s tyres squealed.