Shawn's Law (19 page)

I began to speak with business owners in the area and found falling customer numbers. Subiaco’s reputation was tarnishing, and its inner-city lifestyle failing. There were rising rates, angry residents, annoyed proprietors, and at the apex of all this, a Council that didn’t seem to be listening.

“Dad? Can I look at your finance books for the stall?”

“Why?” my father asked as he peeled bananas for his all-organic, all-healthy milkshake. My dad ate nothing that had chemicals on them and used it to point out he wasn’t dead from cancer since he changed his diet. “We’re doing great. We’re earning more than we did four months ago.”

But he wasn’t. Not really. It took me ten minutes to spot the trend, but it took me two hours to explain it to him. What it boiled down to is that the stall was making next to nothing on the trinkets and knickknacks that Dad bought online. If you factored in the time and effort he put in to sourcing the items, they were a loss. Dad’s carvings were doing well, but he just wasn’t making enough of them. He worked four days at the stall and spent a couple of days and nights sourcing his stuff, leaving him only a few hours a week to carve.

“Then why are we making money?” he asked me.

“Because you’ve sold several big items—Cherie’s big paintings. They’re inflating your figures.”

“Oh.”

Of course, while I was trying to sort out these negotiations and find a solution, Shawn was still managing to give me heart attacks at each turn. During those five weeks of negotiations, he ended up at the hospital, twice.

The first weekend started with a bang. Shawn was refusing to see me, so I stood at his front door and pleaded until he told me that he would spend the day with me only if I gave him a blow job. That set the tone for the next five weeks. I hauled Shawn into his bedroom, and he was coming in less than three minutes. He left me with an awful stiffy and told me it was my own fault for hanging out with Satan. Stubborn little wretch.

Then we piled into the car with his mother and drove to the local lake. It was a great day to spend at the park. The weather was finally cooling, and we sat on the park benches and watched the local wildlife. There were black swans, regular brown ducks, the wading birds, and some intruders. Every now and then people would let their pets go at the lakes, so there were a few domestic ducks, and of course the several hundred seagulls that hung out at the lake.

I spotted a couple heading to the water with a bag of bread and couldn’t hold my tongue. I left Shawn and his mother looking at the swans while I went to explain to the couple how bad it was for the wildlife and the waterways to feed bread to the ducks. I had just finished my lecture on algae blooms and bacteria when an awful sound came from behind me.

“Aaarrgghheeee….”

There was a pounding of feet and a yell that would make a ninja master proud. I spun around just as Shawn dashed past me in a mindless panic. Before I could understand the reason behind his mad dash for freedom, I felt the brush of feathers. A black swan was madly flapping his wings and chasing after my boyfriend, reaching his long neck to peck at his butt. Shawn ran for his life, darting across the lawn and running in a circle before making his way back toward me.

“Shawn!” I gasped in shock and panic. He attempted to jump over a small tree in the garden, but caught his foot and went sprawling on the lakeside path, knocking me off balance as he fell. I took a step backward with the impact of his body against mine, but there was nothing behind me apart from lake. The water was knee deep, and I fell, spread eagle on my back, and splashed into it without hurting myself. But it was cold, wet, and dirty. Birds scattered in fright as I picked myself up with disgust.

“Ow, help, ow, help, ow, get off, ow.”

Shawn was still yelling, and I looked up to see a swan attacking his prone body, pecking at his arms, legs, and face. His mother came to the rescue, using her handbag like a battle-ax, knocking the bird away from Shawn, then swinging the bag in front of the swan’s face until he gave up the fight and retreated to the water.

I climbed out of the lake, dripping and stinking like a sewer. “Shawn?” There was blood on his clothes, and my heart stopped. “Shawn? Baby? You’re bleeding.”

He sat up gingerly and inspected a couple of peck marks on his arms before touching his chin. “Oh, fiddlesticks,” he exclaimed. “I hit my chin when I fell. How bad is it, Harley?”

Still soaking wet, I drove him to the hospital, where Christine exclaimed with delight over his injuries before the doctor slipped in three stitches under his chin. Christine patched up his peck marks and cleaned his grazed palms before we went home.

I helped him prepare dinner and put his mother to bed. He was sore, so I gently laid him on his back and made love to him slowly. It wasn’t exactly how I had envisioned my day ending. Or my night. But with Shawn, you just have to accept it.

The next Wednesday he called me.

“Hello?”

“Harley? It’s Shawn. Listen. I’m sorry to bother you, but are you busy? I think I need to see the doctor. Is it possible you could drive me?”

I froze, a dozen thoughts entering my mind. “Oh, my God. What’s wrong?”

“I got bitten by a redback earlier today, and it’s swelling up a bit, so can you come and get me?”

Now, like every single Australian child, I was brought up to fear the tiny black spider with the red stripe down its back. Everyone knows the bite from the small redback spider is deadly. As deadly as its cousin, the black widow. Parents are constantly on the lookout for the poisonous arachnid, and children are warned to stay away from spiders in case they’re redbacks.

My blood froze, but luckily my legs didn’t. “I’ll be there in thirty seconds,” I told him and raced out the door without locking it.

I
now
know that, although the redback is extremely venomous, thanks to antivenom, there hasn’t been a death from the spider since 1956. But the redback is the most common envenomator to humans in Australia, with thousands bitten and about two hundred and fifty people requiring the antivenom, per year. After meeting Shawn, there are a lot of facts and figures I know about venom. I’ve become the child learning from the book. I guess, in this case, it doesn’t pay to experience it firsthand.

Thankfully Shawn received a lesser bite, but it made him sick for a couple of days. His hand swelled with a painful red lump and he made his way through a packet of extra-strength, codeine-based tablets as he tried to deal with the agony. He had some night sweats, but was mostly better within four days.

My heart was bruised, though. It took longer to recover and jumped every time the phone rang.

The third weekend of negotiation stalemate, I performed my regular blow job so Shawn would actually talk to me—not that I required much prompting from him for that—and then took Shawn and Estelle to AQWA. The state’s largest aquarium, with its underground tunnels, sits nicely on Hillary’s Boat Harbour, so it’s a great way to spend the morning. You can then visit the shops and cafés at the nearby boardwalk.

And it’s a fully enclosed aquarium. How much trouble could find Shawn?

We had done the tunnel three times, and I was chatting with Estelle and looking at a small tank of seahorses, when a blood-curdling scream sounded from across the room. My first thought was that it was a woman screaming, so therefore it wasn’t Shawn. My second thought was that Shawn was no longer at my side. I scanned the crowded room for his black hair and adorable glasses and found him standing next to the screamer—with a shark hanging off his finger.

Oh, I know it sounds dramatic, and I pissed myself laughing when I related the story to my brothers, but only Shawn could get bitten by a shark at a public aquarium. The ear-splitting screamer was an Asian tourist who didn’t shut up for about five minutes. By this time all the aquarium staff had come running, and we had to explain our story twenty times over.

You see, there was a small petting pool where you could put your hands in and touch the fish. The staff of the aquarium apologized over and over, saying that they had been thinking of removing the small reef shark from the display because he was getting bigger, but he’d shown no aggressive behavior. He was actually a hit with the schoolchildren because he seemed to adore being patted. It just seemed that, on this particular day, he took a disliking to my boyfriend. He’d chomped down on Shawn’s finger and refused to let go. Shawn hadn’t been worried about it at all. (I think being bitten by a dugite and a redback spider rather made him invincible). Shawn simply lifted his hand out of the water and tried to flick the little fella off him.

That’s when the tourist spotted him and thought he was being eaten alive. It took Shawn a good two minutes to get the shark off his hand, with a little bit of urging from a helpful staff member. Then we were taken away to have a couple of Band-Aids plonked on the scratches and teeth marks. Shawn had to fill out a dozen forms to say he was okay, and then we were allowed to continue our visit, with free passes in our pocket so we could come back another time.

We laughed over it during lunch. If Shawn had some sort of bucket list, he could now tick off being bitten by a shark.

The following weekend we all went to Rottnest Island—me and Shawn, along with Estelle, Lisa, Brendan, and the three kids. We took the twenty-five minute ferry ride across to the island, then rented bikes and rode to Little Salmon Bay. I was keen to ride the entire island, but Izzy wasn’t big enough to do the long trek, and besides, I couldn’t believe the amount of gear we’d had to bring with us just for five adults and three kids. Lisa rode a tandem bike with Estelle on the back, and Brendan had to struggle with the twins in a child trailer attached to his bike. That left Shawn and me to haul the majority of the bags, loaded down with food, towels, clothes, and cold drinks.

Little Salmon Bay was gorgeous. Clear crystal water, just right for snorkeling, and plenty of pure white sand. There were people around, but not many. We spread our towels and set up a beach tent for Estelle. The bay was perfect, since there was no steep drop-off, which meant the kids were free to splash in the shallows without danger. I dragged Shawn out, and we snorkeled the nearby coral and rocks before returning to the beach to watch the kids and allow Lisa and Brendan to have a swim together.

I slathered suncream on Shawn’s back and received a reprimand for having an erection in front of the clueless Estelle and the innocent children. I rolled my eyes and told Shawn that no one apart from him saw it. He got all huffy—until I reminded him that I’d given him his usual blow job that morning, and I was still waiting for mine. After that, he just went red.

Then Zek yelled “Dog” and we all looked up. He was pointing to the scrubby bushes on the edge of the beach, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when two unconcerned quokkas popped out of the grass.

“Horse.” Vinnie squealed in excitement and made a beeline for the little animal. I scooped him up before he could get too near.

“Not horse,” I corrected him. “Quokka. Can you say quokka?”

“Cock?”

I blinked twice and wondered if he took after his uncle. “Close enough, kid. Now for your first science and history lesson.” I believe in teaching kids from a young age and was eager to impart my knowledge. “A quokka is a marsupial, which means the mummy quokkas carry their babies in a pouch.”

“Pow?” he asked, earnestly.

“Yep. A pouch. Just like a kangaroo.”

“Root?” I blinked again. Yes, this one definitely took after his uncle.

“Yes. A kangaroo. The quokka is just like a tiny kangaroo, and this island is named after them. When Dirk Hartog came here in the seventeenth century, he thought they were rats, so he called this place Rats Nest Island. How mean to the poor little quokkas. Wasn’t that sadistic?”

“Dick?”

I smiled at Vinnie. He was exactly like Shawn. I liked him. “Yes. Now you’re not allowed to touch the quokkas, okay? You just look at them. You don’t feed them, because that will give them a bellyache. They can’t eat human food, just animal food like grass.”

“Arse,” Vinnie solemnly declared.

Lisa and Brendan returned and Vinnie told his father all about it. “Dad. Dick, root, arse.”

“What?”

“Cock, cock, cock. Root, arse.”

I’m still trying to live that one down, years later.

We had lunch in the warm sun before the sight of Shawn in his tight, wet board shorts became too much for me.

“I need the toilet. C’mon, Shawn. Keep me company.”

The poor guy was pretty much clueless about the lustful thoughts in my head. I hoped the toilets might give us privacy, but they were too open and well populated. I waited outside and scanned the vegetation while Shawn finished up. Damn island plants didn’t grow any higher than fifty centimeters, and the bloody area was completely devoid of trees.

“Whatcha looking at?” Shawn asked me as he finally appeared.

“Quokka,” I said, inspiration coming to me as I watched a little furry body disappear into the brush. “C’mon, let’s follow it.”

I grabbed his hand and tugged him across the paved road and into the spiky plants that grew in the salt-laden air of the island. As anticipated, although the plants made the surface look flat, under the bushes, the ground undulated with small sand dunes.

“Harley,” Shawn protested. “We’re supposed to stay on the path. There are signs everywhere saying we shouldn’t go off the path.”

I ignored him and went about twenty meters in before finding a suitable hollow. A quick glance to ensure we weren’t being watched, and I tumbled Shawn to the ground. “Ow! Harl—”

I dropped down beside him and kissed him to shut him up. Then I rolled us under the nearest plant, pulling him on top of me. We weren’t completely hidden from sight, as anyone in a plane or helicopter would be able to see us completely, but it was close enough. From ground height, we couldn’t be observed, and that was all I needed.

I tugged at Shawn’s elasticized shorts and slipped my hand inside. “Harley,” Shawn hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”