Tom Houghton (5 page)

I threw the bread over the fence and went to the lemon tree. It was smattered with bright yellow fruit and smaller green ones. I picked a rock-sized, under-ripe lemon and squeezed it in my fist. As the chooks raced about their pen pecking at their pieces of morning bread, I waited patiently for the angry bird to have her go at the placid ones. I didn't have to stand there for long. The bird pecked violently at two other chickens, shooing them away from the bread. I squeezed the lemon tightly again, waited until she'd bent her neck and then pelted the fruit at her with all my might. I connected not with her ribs as I'd intended, but with her right foot. The surprise of the blow affected her more than its sting and she gave one loud squawk. The bird raced back towards the safety of her covered box.

‘I love the smell of lemon in the morning. It smells like victory,' I said to the other chickens. ‘Enjoy your breakfast.'

On my way back to the house, I stopped at the lounge where the activity had so entranced me last night. I bent down to study it closely, to see whether I could identify anything, as a detective might. I was disappointed to find that it just smelt like outside – grass and soil and air.

It was a non-school type of day. Sometimes, if I was unable to sleep during the night, or if my mum was especially loud when she got home from work, it was okay for me to take some
sanity leave,
as Mum called it. She didn't usually mind me taking a day to get my head back together. It wasn't like I wouldn't be able to catch up on my schoolwork; I was far enough in front in most subjects anyway, consistently getting bored, waiting for the other kids in my class. I spent the morning in my pyjamas, sitting at my desk, reading every word of my new magazines and stopping only when a new piece of information needed to be added to one of my index cards. I knew if I was quiet enough, and kept my door closed, no one would even bother to wonder whether I was still in the house. On average, a good magazine added over forty new facts to my makeshift encyclopaedia. Birth names, places, dates. Marriages, divorces. Family tragedy, education. Films, cameos, television appearances. Awards and nominations. Photographs. Every piece of information was colour-coded so that at a glance I was able to summarise an actor's career.

I heard my grandfather get up and go outside – he spent almost every waking hour of his life in his garage tinkering away with this machine or that, having never been able to let go of his engineering career. Once Pa was safely out of earshot, I heard love-making sounds coming from my mother's room next door, the same as last night, only louder. I stopped what I was doing momentarily and listened. It sounded well rehearsed, just like it did on the silver screen, as choreographed a scene as any with Astaire and Kelly had been. My mother was moaning like a puppy, high-pitched, rhythmic beats that got higher in timbre the longer Steve pounded into her.

‘It's all make-believe,' Mum once said to me. ‘Those two actors up there don't really love each other, they're not really touching each other as husband and wife do.'

‘But sometimes the actors fall in love in real life too,' I'd retorted, feeling rather clever. ‘So they must have felt something real while they were acting.'

‘It's hard to explain,' she said, ‘but sometimes when you pretend, it feels real. Like how you might pretend to be on a TV show when you cook, sometimes, and you can almost see the camera focused on you, and you become someone else and you know all the right things to say about the food. You know how you do that?'

‘I guess,' I said, though I couldn't really make the connection.

When the funny breathing stopped – and it was pretty comical when you actually listened to the strange sounds grown-ups sometimes made – I heard my mother and Steve make their way into the bathroom. They drew a bath and climbed in together; I heard a splashing sound and Mum laughing, perhaps at the way the water overflowed the edge. They stayed in that bath for a ridiculously long time, talking a lot (though I could not quite hear what they were saying).

Eventually it came time for Mum to get ready for her day job, so she said goodbye to Steve and told him to close the door behind him when he left. I sat motionless, listening to Steve open and close cupboards and drawers in my mother's room then jump around on the bed a bit. If Steve dared come into my room I would run at him like a cornered lion and pounce, finding strength I never knew I had to protect my mother's dignity. He probably didn't even like her, and then I, once again, would be the one to help wipe away her tears.
I wonder why this time,
she would say, or
I knew it the second I met him.
Another time she had asked,
What is wrong with me?
and I had answered,
Not a single thing in the world, my Lana Turner, you are as perfect as any screen goddess who ever lived.
And she said,
That's not what they say
, throwing a thumb over her left shoulder at a past of disappointing men united against her. On days like these I would pray to invisible gods, begging to keep her away from one of her spirals.

•  •  •

When Mum got home from the butcher shop later that day she asked: ‘Didn't you go to school today, Tom?' To my surprise, there was disappointment and irritation in her voice.

I was still at my desk, in my pyjamas, flicking through my A–C shoebox looking for the right card. I never tried to hide my truancy from my mother. She was pretty cool when it came to writing me a note the following day, sometimes enjoying the game of what excuse to come up with.

‘It wasn't my fault, honest it wasn't, Mum,' I said, making my voice sound as infantile as I could.

‘Have you even bathed?'

‘No . . . but I got heaps done, Mum. You bought me all these things for my birthday and, well, I couldn't sleep last night and then there was just so much for me to do I wouldn't have been able to concentrate at school, no way.'

‘So I heard you met Steve this morning?'

‘Yeah,' I said, relieved that her change in tone made everything all right. ‘He farted himself awake.'

‘Thomas Houghton!'

‘Well he did, Mum, I was there. It made me throw cake in the air.'

‘
And
you had cake for breakfast? Tommy, honestly, what am I going to do with you? You didn't . . . well . . . you didn't scare him off, did you?' She was standing in my doorway wearing her work uniform which made her look, in that moment, like a teenager. A pencil was still stuck behind her left ear and it held back the hair from that side of her face.

‘So you do like him then?'

‘He seems nice enough. Still early days, but.'

‘Is he coming around for dinner?'

‘Ease up, mate! Give me a chance.'

‘I just thought –'

‘You and your Hollywood head, Tom. Honestly. Get out of your pyjamas and come and help me prepare dinner. Pa will be hungry. My shift at the pub starts in under an hour.'

We pottered around the kitchen pulling together the ingredients for chilli con carne. Though it was hot outside and we'd usually have salad, chilli was Pa's favourite and we made it for him at least once a week. The one time Mum tried to skip it, she'd heard about it for months.

Pa came down from the garage, smelling of grease and oil, his hands and arms thick with muck. He made his way into the laundry and scrubbed away at his flesh with a cake of Solvol. The medicinal scent worked hard to overpower the cooking smells.

‘How was work?' he said to Mum.

‘You know how it is, Pa, you've bagged one steak, you've bagged them all.'

‘Still don't know how you do it,' he muttered. ‘At least you're making an honest living and not afraid of a bit of hard work. In my day, hard work was the yardstick everyone was measured by. None of this fancy car rubbish to measure a man's worth.'

‘I try my best,' she said, distracted by the cooking.

‘And how was school, Tommy?' He knew I had wagged it and this was just his way of getting the facts out on the table. He'd lecture me, as usual, and give my mum looks of disapproval, making her promise not to let it happen again, which she would inevitably renege on.

I looked at my mother and squirmed. ‘Mum?'

‘Don't look at me, buddy, you made your choice.'

‘Not again? Lana, the boy has to go to school, it's the law. Tom. Tom, listen to me. It's not natural for you to be inside all day, you need to be out with kids your own age.'

‘Well, you know what Rosie said to Captain Allnut about nature, Pa!'

My mother tried to stifle a laugh but Pa was having none of it.

‘Tom! Your fancy lines don't work on me. All nonsense. Everything spoken in code is going to drive us all insane. You're under my roof, boy-o, remember that. As you are, Lana. A man should be able to make some rules in his own home and expect his child and grandchild to follow them. Is that too much to ask?'

‘No,' Mum and I said in unison, barely audibly.

‘Promise me you'll go to school.' It was not a question.

‘I do go to school, Pa. It was just one day.'

Pa shook his head and walked slowly from the room. Over his left shoulder he said: ‘See to it, Lana. For god's sake, just see to it.'

Mum and I looked at each other and both raised our eyebrows.

‘Make sure you wash your hands after chopping that chilli,' she said. ‘Tom?'

I stopped what I was doing and turned to look at her, apprehensive about what was to follow.

‘There's nothing wrong at school, is there? Something you're not telling me?'

There was a lot wrong at school but I didn't want her to be sad or worried, so I'd made a pact with myself never to tell. At night I lay in bed crying before she got home from work, forcing my body to get all that sadness and frustration out before Mum would be able to detect that it was in there. Thoughts of her throwing her arms around me to help soothe my pain were pushed violently aside, as I pinched at my folds of fat, often until I bruised my own skin. Lana could not be dragged into this, she had enough problems of her own, and who in the world was I to add to those? Kids were predictable and now it was my turn to be the brunt of their jibes. The first time it happened, I'd been legitimately shocked. Surely they weren't speaking to me? I must have misheard, or they
must
be mocking someone else. Is that how the world saw me? My only hope was that, soon enough, they'd move on. I just needed to be strong for a bit. It wasn't that hard to ignore them if I just pretended to be someone else. An actor in a play, perhaps. They were just saying their lines by memory and none of it was actually about me, Tom Houghton – I was just a character. The real Tom Houghton would be respected, no,
revered
; everyone admired the real Tom Houghton.

Simon Harlen thought he ran the school. He was one of the biggest kids in my year. His voice was already deep, hair grew thick along his arms and legs and a black caterpillar lay menacingly across his top lip. It wriggled every time he spoke. His parents had taken him out of school for six months to travel around Europe and that
never
happened to a kid from Seven Hills. The European holiday meant that Simon had repeated a year and he revelled in being more mature than all the other boys. Those legs of his were all hard and wiry with fur, and all the other boys marvelled at them, but I'd asked him whether I could touch them and this had begun the name calling and teasing. He'd let me touch them, though – that was the thing I could not understand. The sensation was foreign, like those boxes at the animal farm you're asked to stick your hand in, never knowing what you'll find hidden in the darkness.

Since they all turned against me, I generally liked to keep to myself outside of class. At lunchtime I chose one of my obscure places to pore over a magazine or book, usually taking notes, scribbling away in my torn and tattered notepad, which I made sure I kept secret from the other kids. My favourite spot was behind the wall at the far end of the concreted area. Kids pelted balls against the bricks and tried to catch or hit them back again, or tossed marbles, hoping the hard ground would not conspire to make them roll further than they should. But on the other side of the wall there was a small space between the bricks and a wire fence and if I chose my moment just right, there was enough of a gap for me to squeeze into and disappear for the remainder of the break.

I would go to just about any length to avoid Simon Harlen. I would walk the long way round if I saw his group sitting on the row of wooden seats that connected the infants and primary schools. I'd made that mistake only once. ‘Tom-girl,' Simon had called relentlessly. ‘You a boy or girl, kid? Coz I wouldn't know. Hey, Fitz! Check out this kid!' And all the others in the group had laughed heartily to encourage him to go further, delve deeper into his bottomless barrel of taunts. Their yelling had been so confronting that a small amount of urine had escaped from my penis and I panicked for the rest of the day that I smelled like piss and they'd turn even harsher against me.

During sport, it wasn't uncommon to have a ball smack me in the back of the head, or have a strategically placed leg stuck out in front as I ran, so I fell flat on my face. For weeks they'd done the old one-kid-crouches-behind, other-kid-pushes-from-in-front scenario. I just picked myself up, dusted off my hands and the seat of my pants and walked away. What was the point in standing up to them? I couldn't fight with fists, I knew that. No man was around to teach me how to defend myself and Pa was too old, or else didn't care enough about it. These kids were stupid, so there was no point in reasoning with them. I had no choice but to walk away, pretend they were not affecting me, and hope desperately they were unable to peer beneath to my truth. In short, every day caused petrification but I knew I just had to be patient.