Golden Boys (6 page)

She goes to his room and is surprised to find him buckling on sandals. ‘Where are you going?'

He taps the shoe into place and stands up. ‘Not to bed.'

She knows he feels his responsibilities, as she does: they are the eldest. ‘Don't leave. He'll fall asleep —'

But he shakes his head and she sees it then, the damage their father does, a kind of quicksandy pit her brother can only run from. ‘I'll come with you,' she says.

They go down the side of the house that's not overlooked by the lounge-room window. The evening is mild, a few birds still poke around the naturestrips. The gardens they pass are empty, but curtains are open to catch the last of the light and from some houses comes the sound of television, the closing-credits music of the program the Kileys had been watching. There is no evidence of children living in these houses, no tricycles on the lawns or chalkmarks on the paths – Freya likes this about these streets, how they make her uncommon. It's mild and meek and safe here, any one of the people in the houses would help her if she went to their door. She can go from house to house and sign up swathes of sponsors for a readathon. Yet in their silence and goodness they must hear the sounds that come from the Kiley house on the very worst nights – and they keep their doors closed to that. She wonders how anybody could do it.

They have no money to play the pinball at the milkbar, and it is too late to go to the stormwater drain. A few blocks away is a park, a wedge of leftover land with swings and a see-saw standing in a field of silvering tanbark, and they head for it, but when they arrive they find the park occupied by a man sitting alone on a swing, which seems something no grown man should do. He levels on the children an unnerving stare, and the siblings reverse to the footpath. It leaves them nowhere to go, but a destination has become important: they must be going somewhere, not fleeing something. Kids without money aren't encouraged at the milkbar, but Declan says, ‘We can watch someone play.'

So they turn back and walk in that direction, and after a time Freya asks her brother, ‘What would you do if Mum had another baby?'

‘Nothing.' He is wielding a stick as if it's a blind man's cane, the tip pinging along the footpath. ‘What could I do?'

‘Wouldn't you be angry?'

‘Why would I be angry?'

She rolls her eyes. ‘Well, for a start, we haven't got anywhere to put a baby.'

‘We'd find somewhere. A baby's not big.'

‘But they grow bigger.'

‘Not for years,' he says; and when the only answer his sister gives is an ominous silence, he asks, ‘Why? Is Mum having another baby?'

‘No. I don't know.'

‘She doesn't look like it.'

‘I don't know,' she says again.

They round a corner like this, Freya dwelling moodily on something Declan is already forgetting, and almost collide with Avery Price in the company of Colt and Bastian Jenson and their father, Rex. All four are eating ice-creams, the expensive kind coated in chocolate and studded with nuts. ‘Hail, young Kileys!' Rex raises a saluting hand, and that is in fact what he reminds Freya of, a centurion from a matinee movie. He looks the type who would carry a spear and wear a helmet.

Beyond this, she notices several things immediately: that Avery has an elaborately bandaged knee, and that he seems very at-home in the company of these strangers. The younger boy, who looks like some kind of collectable doll, says, ‘Hi, Deco!' with a friendliness and familiarity that's both affronting and disorienting. And the older one, Colt, again manages to make her feel peculiar, as if her cheeks have become sandpaper and her limbs slightly stretched, without even saying a word. She wants to stay close to him – abnormally close, sort of
gripping
him – while also wishing to erase herself completely from his mind. ‘Hi, Mr Jenson,' Declan says, and Mr Jenson replies, ‘The name's Rex, remember? Mr Jenson is my father,' and it amazes her to realise Avery and her brother and the new neighbours are already good friends: she feels unbalanced, excluded, wonders why she wasn't told about this, and what it all means. ‘You haven't got ice-cream,' Rex Jenson observes. ‘Shall we go back and get the Kileys some ice-cream?'

‘Sure!' yips Bastian.

‘You don't have to,' says Declan.

‘But we want to, don't we, boys?'

So the Kileys fall in with them, Rex leading the way like a ship's figurehead, Freya dawdling at the rear. The little creature, Bastian, chats at Declan: ‘Where's Syd? Did he go to school today? Did you go to school today? Did you have fun? What's your favourite thing? My favourite thing is art. What's Syd's favourite thing?' She looks between them to Avery, to the blond back of his head, walking in Rex Jenson's shadow, committed to his ice-cream. Her fingers skim the palings of a fence and she lets herself slow, to see what will happen. What happens makes her blood race: Colt glances back. He waits until she catches up to him. ‘Hi,' he says.

She wants to strike him, push him on the road or into a tree; she wants to wrestle him to the ground and pin him, she's strong enough. ‘Hello,' she says dourly.

His ice-cream hasn't left a smudge on his lips; he carries the stick and wrapper bound together in one hand. ‘Sorry about my dad,' he says.

‘Your dad's OK,' she replies. ‘What's wrong with your dad?'

Colt says, ‘He's so . . . ' and doesn't bother to say so what, taking for granted she will understand how a parent appears in the eyes of their child. Perhaps he is not an alien or a robot or a person from the cover of a knitting magazine. ‘Which ice-cream did you have?' she asks, and when he unfurls his palm to show her the wrapper she says, ‘Oh, I've seen them on the ads. Was it nice?'

‘Pretty nice.'

‘Maybe the peppermint one would be better?'

‘I like caramel. But I like peppermint too.'

‘Yeah, me too,' she says.

Which is followed by a silence that would have been scorching hellfire had the milkbar not been luckily and finally right in front of them. Rex waves Declan and Freya past its door and tells them to choose, from the picture panel on the wall, any ice-cream they want, and when the siblings hesitate to select the most expensive he says, ‘What about this one, the same as the ones we had?' so they agree that they'll have that one too. And when they come out of the shop, the evening air is beautifully mellow and the boys are waiting like friendly dogs, Colt smiling when he sees she's chosen the same flavour he had. Rex is already talking as he rarely stops: ‘We were just on our way home to change the bandage on Avery's knee. You Kileys are welcome to come with us, if you're not otherwise occupied. I'm sure Tabby would love to see you again, Freya.'

In her normal life Freya would baulk at this, because there's no possible reason Tabby Jenson would love to see her again: but on this night things have become imprecise, as if she's stepped through a door of the castle and found herself in a room where the floor drifts like a raft. The crawling unease that her father brings home has been replaced by a heady sense of possibility. Her mother and brothers and sisters are trapped at home without her, and Freya should feel guilty and she does, but Joe is surely asleep on the couch and her mother and siblings can't see her here, it's pointless to feel bad . . . in truth she doesn't know
what
to feel. She never knows, and can't imagine a time when she will know, and worries that this confusion is destined to get worse and worse, and often she wishes there were someone reliable who could take over her living for her.

The Jenson house is one she's passed countless times but hardly noticed; she can't think why, because it suddenly seems an interesting house, built of burnt-red bricks with a garden full of plants she's never seen before. Inside, the walls are a modish beige, not the lilacs and roses of her own house. There's a television in the front room, a hulking thing standing on four shapely wooden legs, but it isn't switched on: Tabby Jenson is reading a book on a bottle-green corduroy couch. It occurs to Freya that she's never seen her own mother reading, not a novel or a cookbook, not even a magazine. Tabby sits up at the sight of her, says, ‘Oh, hello again, Freya.' And as Declan and his friends move off on the lazy tide which seems to carry boys through life, Freya finds herself standing alone in the glassed double doorway, presented to this woman like a gift she hasn't asked for, on the evening of a weekday when – according to Elizabeth Kiley's rules of polite behaviour for children which include no phonecalls after dinner and no following one's host around like a sheep and no answering questions in monosyllables and never, ever, ever entering a parent's bedroom – no unrelated adult should have to endure the presence of somebody else's child. Standing before Tabby Jenson she realises that everything is wrong. She should be at home with her family. ‘I'm sorry to disturb you,' she says.

Tabby smiles. ‘You couldn't help it. Rex is the Pied Piper.'

‘I guess,' Freya says, although in her recollection the Piper was something like a monster – presumably Mrs Jenson doesn't mean it that way. She casts about for conversation: there are no toys thrown across the creamy carpet, no records lying like black puddles on the floor, no plates of chewed crusts or upended schoolbags spilling balls of plastic wrap. There's a real flower in the vase on the mantel, and in the corner is a junglish houseplant in a dimpled silver pot. There's a glass-topped coffee table and on it is a thick book about painting. Freya would never have guessed a house in her suburb could be so swish. ‘Do you like your new home?' she asks.

‘Very much, thank you.' Tabby's thumb is marking her place in the book. ‘We'll be happy here.'

Freya nods. How drear it must be, she thinks, to be a lady, if conversation must always revolve around whether or not everyone is happy. ‘What are you reading?'

Tabby glances at the book clamped on her hand, then holds it up for Freya to see. It's a history of a queen who is wearing, on the cover, a white dress positively dirty with jewels. ‘Are you interested in history?'

‘Oh. Not really.' Freya is barely conscious of it. From where she stands, with only a dozen years behind her, even the previous month is infinitely past. Her grandparents, uncles, aunts, parents and teachers are about as old as the moon. ‘I like dinosaurs,' she says, and hears herself, and winces. ‘That's a bit dumb.'

‘Not at all.' Tabby smiles; she looks even prettier, on the corduroy couch, than she had in the church carpark. Her skin is smooth and her dark hair is groomed into waves, and she's wearing lipstick in the house. She doesn't seem much like a mother – it's impossible to imagine her wiping clean a baby's clagged-up bottom. Any sandwiches she would make for her sons' lunches would be healthy, compact and, above all, placed tidily into their lunchboxes. Freya wishes her own mother were more this kind of person, someone in control of her life. ‘If dinosaurs aren't history,' Tabby says, ‘what is?'

‘Yeah,' says Freya, and dredges, ‘My brother Syd is always looking for bones and dead things. He loves stuff like that.'

‘Boys seem to, don't they?'

‘He found a dead rat once, and boiled it in a saucepan to get the fur off. It stank up the whole house.'

‘How awful.' Tabby laughs.

‘Mum was mad.' Freya bites her lip. There's a large painting above the mantelpiece, it looks like tins of blue paint have been upended on the canvas and swept by a broom. The picture above the mantel in her own house is a landscape of a country lane, which to Freya's mind is preferable, but she can accept that this blue painting is what she should admire more. She wonders what it's like to live in such a house, where everything is new and nothing speaks of what's gone before. She flaps a hand at the hallway down which her brother has disappeared. ‘I'd better go and find the others.'

Tabby Jenson nods; when she smiles, her hazel eyes smile also, which strikes Freya as pleasing. ‘Don't stay out late. Your mother will wonder where you are. Tell Avery to go home, too. He shouldn't worry his grandmother.'

Freya scoffs. ‘Avery's grandma doesn't worry about him.'

‘That's what he says. I'm sure it isn't true.'

‘It is.' And because she knows more about Avery Price than anyone in this family could, and because she's eternally indignant over the way he is being raised, she says, ‘Avery and his sister only live with their grandparents because their mother wasn't feeding them or taking them to the doctor or sending them to school. So Mr and Mrs Price have them, but they're old and cranky. It's all right for his sister because she's sixteen, she looks after herself – but she doesn't look after Avery. Nobody looks after him. His clothes never fit him properly, he's always wearing t-shirts when it's freezing cold. They never make his lunches, just give him money for chips. His hair isn't cut, he's never clean, if it rains he gets wet because he doesn't have a raincoat. Nobody ever knows where he is or what he's doing. It's like nobody owns him.'

Tabby looks down at the queen on the book's cover. ‘Poor boy,' she says. ‘It's not easy, raising children. I'm sure his grandparents do the best they can.'

‘Nope,' says Freya adamantly, ‘no one cares about him.'

‘I think you do,' says Tabby.

It makes Freya clamp her mouth shut and something blocks her throat. She can't remember when Avery first appeared in her life, this boy her brother must have befriended in the usual way but who seems like an animal that lives in the trees and occasionally chooses to descend. There's a possum her father feeds with bread and jam, and Avery is like that: a lawless being which will overcome its instincts for the smallest taste of sweetness. Under his good cheer, he's a desperate thing. ‘Nobody proper,' she says.