Happy as Larry (15 page)

‘It's . . . it's just not real for me yet.'

‘Not real? How real does it need to be? Should I be vomiting on
you
in the morning instead of the bathroom sink?'

‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘I'm not being ridiculous, Mal, I'm trying to prepare.'

‘You're counting your chickens.'

Larry didn't understand what chickens had to do with it.

Denise knocked a plate to the floor as she charged past her husband. The plate shattered but she didn't stop. She slammed the bedroom door and it made Larry jump. He looked to his father. Mal shrugged, then bent to pick up the pieces of the plate.

Larry, his heart drumming, helped Mal collect the shards.

‘Would you like an egg for dinner?' Mal asked.

‘Yes, please.'

‘I probably should . . . can you make it yourself?'

‘Yes. I'll be fine.'

His dad tentatively entered the bedroom.

Larry thought, as he successfully cracked the egg into the pan, that if Guillermo came for lunch again, he could make egg on toast for him. No meat.

He washed and dried his dishes and got himself ready for bed. He could hear his mother sobbing through the bathroom wall. He could hear his father's soothing voice but couldn't make out what he was saying. He heard a knock at the front door.

It was Vince. Vince with an enormous bunch of flowers from his garden. ‘Hi, Larry. Is your mother in?'

‘Um, yes. She's in her room. With Dad.'

‘Oh.'

‘Are the flowers for her?'

‘Who else?'

‘I can give them to her if you want. They'll cheer her up for sure.'

‘Would you? That would be great,' Vince said. ‘Is everything okay?'

Larry could only be honest. ‘I don't know.'

‘Is there anything I can do? I mean . . .'

‘Dad's with her. I think she'll be okay.'

Larry took the flowers and Vince said goodnight. He turned on his heels, and then stopped. ‘I hope everything's okay.'

Larry nodded and closed the door.

But everything wasn't okay.

Denise started bleeding early on Saturday morning.

Mal called Stan's brother and told him he wouldn't be making any deliveries that day. Vince looked after Larry while Mal and Denise took a taxi ride to the hospital. Denise didn't come home that night, or the next, or the next, and deep in the starless night of Tuesday 11 September 2001, the baby was born. Months before its time, without struggle, without life.

Malcolm held his wife's limp hand. There was no rage left in her. No tears. No fight. She sat up in her hospital bed and stared at the TV mounted on the wall. Mal wanted to leave her there and get a taxi home to free Vince of his babysitting duties. The old man was as faithful as ever – simple, honest, reliable. He was also nearly blind. But Mal couldn't let go of his wife's hand. What if the universe really was so fragile that his comment about Denise counting her chickens before they'd hatched had tipped the balance? What if his momentary lapse of faith was enough to topple the house of cards?

‘I'm sorry,' he whispered.

If she heard him, she didn't respond.

The ads were interrupted by a bulletin showing footage of a smoking building. Somewhere in America, a light aircraft had crashed into a high-rise.

An elderly woman in the next bed asked Mal – the only visitor left at that hour – if he would please turn up the volume.

New York. Not a light aircraft but a commercial passenger jet. One of the iconic towers of the World Trade Center was on fire.

The old woman in the next bed began talking to herself. ‘That wasn't an accident. There is no way that was an accident. Some crazy individual with a . . . Oh, my goodness.'

As they watched, another aircraft ploughed into the burning building's twin. Pieces of the plane seemed to go straight through the concrete and steel and spin off into obscurity like vast skimming stones. A fireball so big that it seemed to ignite in slow motion swallowed the top of the building. It flashed sun-bright and gold and left in its wake a baleful black cloud.

A single fat tear idled down Denise's face and plipped onto the bedclothes.

The world would never be the same again.

BRANDY

P
ART OF
D
ENISE
died with the baby. Perhaps it was the timing of the loss – more than three thousand others died godless deaths that September day – but it hit her in ways that the miscarriages before Larry's birth had not. The grace drained from her life overnight. She couldn't bear to be touched. Her emotional spectrum became a palette of greys. Mal and Larry lived under her cloud and hungered for sunlight, spoke in whispers and were happiest at work and school.

Denise made lunches and washed clothes; she couldn't laugh but couldn't cry either. Sympathy cards arrived from Mary Holland and two of the church ladies who scarcely rated as acquaintances. She put the cards together on the top of her computer monitor but quietly resented the fact that her most private grief had been shared around like chocolate cake.

Vince drank tea with her and barely said a word for three days in a row. He didn't pretend to understand or try to jolly her along, but his comments about the garden and the weather gently bathed her wounded heart.

‘Vince?' she called, as he was leaving on a scented afternoon.

He propped with one hand resting on the gate and stared expectantly but vacantly towards the house. He could feel her heavy steps on the path, then her shadow was there in front of him.

‘Thanks,' she said.

He felt for her hand and squeezed it.

In the angry days after the attacks on the twin towers, the world appeared to be fraying at the seams. There was talk of war. Somebody posted letters containing anthrax to media and government officials in the USA, and some died as a result. Malcolm Rainbow, for the first time in his life, began to question the safety of his job. He wore leather gloves and handled airmail letters and parcels no more than he needed to. He played his music loud in his headphones in an attempt to drown out the maelstrom of inky thoughts in his head. He came home from work exhausted, but home offered no respite. The news showed a world with its jaws clenched, and Mal's tiredness grew.

Scarcely a month after the baby and the twin towers died, the USA and Britain began dropping bombs in Afghanistan. It looked like war on the little screen and Larry couldn't watch it. He had to leave the house at news time. News time became run time – with Vince or Gilligan, along the inlet.

The end of the inlet was miles from home and from the drip-feed of horror coming from the computer and the television and his parents, but a good run was still less than an hour and the news found him in other ways. Everybody seemed to have a creative idea about what to do with Osama bin Laden once he was caught. Except Guillermo. Guillermo wasn't convinced they were getting the full story. Why, he asked, were they bombing Afghanistan if the men who hijacked the planes were mostly from Saudi Arabia?

‘And why would those hijackers waste their lives attacking freedom and democracy in another country as President Bush has suggested? That would be like paying the ultimate price while trying to blow holes in the ocean. Futile. America has been stung by a wasp . . . but I think she may have been kicking the nest for many years.'

‘How can you say that?' Jemma argued.

The three of them were lolling on the swings in the park after church.

‘Those men were violent and evil,' she said.

‘Violent, no doubt. Evil is a matter of perspective.'

‘You sound like your mother,' Jemma scoffed. ‘Don't let Mrs Kennedy hear you say that.'

‘Why?'

Larry knew what she was talking about. ‘Mrs Kennedy's second cousin was killed on September eleven.'

Guillermo shrugged. ‘So were three thousand or so others. Innocent people. Knowing America, I'd say ten times that many innocent people will die on the other side. That's what happens when you sting the tough guy.'

As if on cue, Clinton appeared, skulking like a seagull hunting food. He hadn't worn an eye patch for a long time and his eye itself seemed completely normal, but the purple-bubbled skin on his face and neck was hard to ignore.

He threw and caught a white golf ball. ‘Anyone for a game of brandy?'

‘I'll play,' Guillermo said. ‘What is brandy?'

‘No!' Jemma squeaked, and grabbed Guillermo's arm.

Clinton chuckled. ‘It's where you run and I throw my golf ball at you.'

‘Sounds like fun,' Guillermo said. He got out of his swing seat and rubbed his hands together.

‘Don't be stupid,' Jemma said.

‘What's the worst thing that could happen?'

‘I could hit you in the head and kill you,' Clinton said.

‘Is that all?' Guillermo said. He put his fists on his hips. ‘I've had worse.'

He darted off like a rabbit, ducking and weaving towards the road. Jemma squealed and ran after him, her hands clamped around her head.

Clinton gripped the ball.

‘Don't,' Larry growled.

Clinton took aim, but before he'd got a shot off, Guillermo disappeared behind the power pole. Jemma, still squealing, hid with him.

Clinton swore under his breath.

There was a commotion at the power pole and Jemma's squealing turned to manic laughter. When they reappeared, Guillermo had hold of her from behind, an arm locked around her waist. He lifted her off the ground.

Clinton bent close and whispered in Larry's ear. ‘Guillermo's hot for your girlfriend.'

Larry frowned and stepped out of his swing. He walked towards the power pole, offended and more than a little confused. Jemma was a girl and she was his friend, but she wasn't his girlfriend. Guillermo wasn't Larry's boyfriend, either. But Guillermo and Jemma seemed more complete every time Larry was with them. Sometimes, even when they were just talking, it was hard to break into their bubble. When they were together like that, Larry wanted to change the channel.

Larry felt Clinton's golf ball whiz past his ear. It cracked into the power pole and ricocheted down Condon Street.

Larry froze.

Clinton laughed smugly and jogged after it.

Mal ached.

The baby had been too small for a name or a grave but it left a grief stain on its mother as big as a continent. She didn't shed a tear or crack a smile. She stopped going to film club and couldn't face church. The bombings of the Taliban government and Al Qaeda camps continued in Afghanistan, and for a while the world at large and Denise's small world were both stuck, playing the same painful story day after day.

The same violent footage from Afghanistan appeared on multiple channels, and the food on the Rainbows' table seemed loveless and made in monochrome.

Mal offered to cook but Denise refused his help. He brought her flowers and chocolate, massaged her feet and made cups of tea – all of which she thanked him for, but the flowers died and the tea grew cold.

Early in December, Mal found an empty chocolate box in the bin and two tea-stained cups on the sink.

‘You have visitors today?'

‘Just Vince,' she said.

‘How is he?'

She shrugged and watched the news.

Mal stared at the cups and felt his world shifting. She still drank tea with their neighbour. She ate chocolate with Vince. Did she talk with him, too? Did she laugh with him? Maybe the pain that kept them apart was less about the baby and more about his lack of faith? Perhaps it wasn't grief that pinned her heart closed? Not grief, but unarticulated rage.

That night the news told of the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

‘It's not that simple,' Denise told the screen. ‘It's never that simple.'

Mal looked at her. There was a glimmer of something in her eyes. Hope? Fight? Something other than the all-consuming shadow that had hung there since September.

She caught him staring. ‘What?'

He took her hand. ‘Are you okay?'

‘Fine,' she said, and muted the ads.

‘You don't have to do this alone, you know. There are doctors . . .'

She snatched her hand away, her eyes all concrete and steel like a prison.

‘I know what's wrong with me,' she said.

‘What?' Mal pleaded. ‘What is it?'

He knew that if she said the words – it's the baby, it's my father, my mother, this marriage, this house, whatever – they'd both be lighter for it.

Her eyes didn't soften. She stared until he had to look away, then she left. Put herself to bed without saying a word.

SANTA

T
HE
C
HRISTMAS OF
2001 – Larry's eleventh – was a turning point in his life. He discovered the true meaning of unhappiness.

Clinton slew Santa.

‘I know what you're getting for Christmas,' he whispered. ‘What?'

‘A telescope.'

‘How can you know that?'

Larry had already written to Father Christmas, as he'd done every year since he could write. He'd ignored the rumours that Santa wasn't real, and many of his wishes had come true. That year he
had
asked for a telescope. It had been his father's suggestion, and with it he knew he'd be able to discover amazing things, maybe even life on other planets.

‘I found it,' Clinton hissed.

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's hidden in your Dad's shed. Under the bench with the red vice on it.'

‘How can you know that?'

‘I saw him bringing it home. I climbed the fence when nobody was there. I found it.'

Santa died and Larry's black-hearted mother decided to ruin his life.

On the first Saturday of the school holidays, it was thirty-two degrees Celsius by lunchtime. Guillermo and Jemma arrived at the door all loud and drunk on a new summer, Guillermo naked from the waist up, with a trail of fine hair showing below his navel, and Jemma wearing shorts and a red bikini top that boasted she was more woman than girl. Denise answered the door, and by the time Larry got there the atmosphere was heavy and tense the way it was when his family sat around the dinner table. ‘What's the matter?'