The Beauty Is in the Walking

For RJ Mitte

Sue Kibble was having a good day until she saw the crows circling. She'd set out after lunch to check on Missy, the horse she'd ridden in gymkhanas years ago, until she got more interested in boys and she'd left the mare to live out her days roaming the property. Years later, Sue went roaming herself, to Palmerston first and then the coast, returning only on rare visits, like today.

Her dad had saddled a young gelding for her and, wondering why she didn't do this more often, she let the eager beast carry her up the slope to where a single gum tree anchored a cloudless sky to the straw-gold earth. There she'd planned to stop a while and enjoy being alone for a few peaceful minutes, but, now with a knot in her stomach, she continued across the rise without pausing. For an instant, she caught a glimpse of houses and the massive white wall of Palmerston's meatworks in the distance, but her eyes sought a scene closer to hand and, with the cawing of the crows to guide them, she quickly found it.

‘Missy,' she sighed.

Her heart must have given out at last and she had simply laid down to let the end wash over her. Poor thing – the crows would be after her eyes. Only when Sue was close enough did she see the trickle of blood. She guided the gelding in a wide arc to inspect the dead horse from the other side and there she halted, staring wide-eyed, while her fists tightened around the reins.

She tried for a signal on the mobile she carried out of habit. Yes, she was in luck.

‘Dad, you'd better come,' she said when he answered, and now the tears came. ‘Someone's had a go at Missy.'

Her father spoke briefly, until she cut him off. ‘No, not a gun. A knife by the look of it. Maybe you better call the police. There's a nut case on the loose.'

I touched my hands lightly to the bar, careful not to add any weight as I helped Tyke guide it onto the half-moons of steel at the top of each stand. Between the stands stretched a blue padded bench and on the bench lay my brother, red-faced and lips drawn back over his teeth like an angry dog while his arms straightened into muscular columns that would hold up the sky.

‘Okay, down,' I said.

With the bar steady Tyke sat up, avoiding a crack on the skull with a duck that had long since become second nature. Blowing hard in long greedy breaths, he hung his head between his shoulders and watched his own sweat drip onto the oily concrete. I looked over his head and out through the garage doors to his ute in the driveway, red as a razor slash and gleaming after I'd washed it for him. Mr Guiglio leaned on his horn in admiration while he dawdled by in his clapped-out station wagon. Tyson
O'Leary was home from Brisbane and showing off what a footy contract could buy.

Tyke stood up stepping lightly on the ankle he'd injured in the finals. Side by side, my brother and I were tree trunk and twig, although I sprouted more at the top end – dark brown hair that I let fall over my eyes and gather in nests round my ears with just the tips of them poking through, like a hobbit. That's what Mitch called me once, and I've been called a lot worse. If sweaty t-shirt and footy shorts were Tyke's uniform, then mine was jeans that sit on me like an empty duffle bag.

I shuffled round the end of the bench with my usual cat-like finesse, which prompted him to ask: ‘How'd you go in the hundred metres on sports day? Did you beat your PB?'

‘Don't know,' I said flatly.

‘Didn't you get Mitch to time you like last year?'

‘I've given up on that crap,' I told him. ‘The whole school thinks I'm a hero just for lining up. That's enough, isn't it?'

Tyke answered with his eyes, making me resent the shame my brother's glances could draw from me as freely as sweat. Timing me on sports day had been his idea and, every year until he'd left town, he was the one who secretly clicked the stop-watch button on his wrist as I finished sixty metres behind the rest, aching and exhausted, but eager to know how I'd gone. This time, I'd loped the whole distance, waving at the cheers that joshed me along in good fun. What was wrong with that?

‘Your turn,' said Tyke, nodding at the padded bench.

This was payback for taking it easy on sports day. ‘Me! No, I'll bloody kill myself.'

‘I'll reduce the weight to whatever you want,' said Tyke, already loosening the nuts that held the heavy discs on the bar. ‘Fifteen kilos on each side. Sound all right?' When he was done, the discs looked puny and they couldn't be bothered clinking together, metal on metal, the way they had for Tyke.

I sat on the bench and, with my arms, lifted one leg to the other side. Actually, it wasn't so hard until I pushed the last rep above my head to rest on the stands while Tyke hovered close, ready to take the strain if he had to.

‘Do that for a week then add more weight. Build it up gradual and in no time you'll look like Arnie in
Terminator
,' said Tyke.

We both knew I wouldn't, but Tyke never pushed too hard. He was twenty years old, not particularly tall, nor handsome for that matter, if you simply showed his photo around. Without wanting to sound full of myself, I thought my face was better looking, but in the flesh people took to my brother in a way they never would to me, no matter how much I worked on my abs and biceps. That went double for girls.

‘Are you still with Courtney?' I asked.

Tyke looked pleased that I'd remembered. ‘Yeah, it's still Courtney. She's nice.'

‘Nice! And I'm the one who gets in trouble with my English teacher.'

‘All right, she's better than nice,' said Tyke. He could have redeemed himself with the predictable stuff – awesome, hot – but instead he sat again on the bench, taking a few moments before he looked my way, his features softened by thoughts of his girlfriend. ‘This one's not like other girls, Jacob. She does something for me that none of the others . . .'

He stopped, worried at how that might be taken and the look on his face was enough to make me laugh out loud. I mean, here was this buff footballer who was practically an NRL regular and he was worried about insulting a girl he cared about. I didn't laugh, though; I just filed it away with all the other reasons I loved it when my brother came home to visit.

‘S'all right. I know what you're getting at. When are you going to bring her home again?'

‘Soon, maybe. I was thinking about her all the way here last night, wishing she was riding shotgun so I could hear her talk. I ring her some nights after training, just to hear her say what she did at work.'

‘You're in love.'

‘Bullshit.' Tyke laughed, pushing at me half-heartedly. He thought about what I'd said, though, then turned his whole body to face me square on. ‘Maybe,' and in my brother's tentative smile, I found a vulnerability I'd never glimpsed before and wondered if love left you open like that. I knew a lot about being vulnerable.

He stood up, careful not to let me see any more in his face. God, how I envied Tyke's easy movement, hampered
for now by the strapping, but still graceful and gloriously free compared to mine. My envy went beyond obedient legs, but these other jealousies didn't fester into rage. Tyke was too good to me for it ever to be that way, but that didn't make it any easier to cop the new jump the rest of the world was getting over me. Courtney was hardly Tyke's first girlfriend, while here in Palmerston your basic kiss was still theory to me.

I didn't want to get down on myself that day, really I didn't. I'd liked the expression on my brother's face while we'd shared the bench, yet it hurt to wonder whether others would ever find that expression on mine. Somehow I'd given myself away, because Tyke came right out and asked, ‘How's Amy? You talked a lot about her last time I was home.'

‘Did I?' I replied, without committing myself. How much
had
I said? ‘That was because she was in such a bad way. Just been dumped. The bloke treated her like dirt and the rest of us had to watch while she threw herself at him.'

I found my fists clenched even then at how powerless we'd been.
I'd
been.

Tyke became serious. ‘You'd have treated her better, wouldn't you, if she'd been with you, I mean.'

Had Tyke tapped into my fantasies, somehow? Of course I treated Amy better in my dreams and in that homemade world she laughed and came running to me and I took her hand, touched her cheek, put my arms around her. I never sullied the dream with anything
more because all I wanted was what lay just out of reach. Typical! I could hear Svenson marking my romantic daydreams the way he marked last year's report card.
Jacob's work lacks imagination and ambition
.

It was starting to get to me. I wanted to know if I was disabled in the boy–girl thing as well. Not sex! That's what Tyke was telling me about Courtney; that look on his face said the playful intimacy was the best part. I wanted to be close to a girl like that, to share things, little secrets, just the two of us, and to touch her, yes, touch her, all soft and warm like girls are.

While I'd been silently grumbling all this to myself, Tyke had been waiting for me to answer him. He saw I'd missed the question and spoke again. ‘She's over it by now, though?'

‘Yeah, laughs at herself for being such a ditz.'

‘Why don't you make a move, then?'

Okay, so I'd seen it coming from the first mention of Amy and if I'd let Tyke get this far there had to be a reason, although my mind dried up now that the seed had sprouted.

‘We both know why.'

My brother stared me down.

‘It's their eyes, Tyke. I can't help seeing the doubt, the hesitation.'

I was speaking quickly by then, with more energy than I'd put into the barbell and one word began to stumble over another. I concentrated, manhandling the words to make them do what I wanted without spit flying
everywhere, the way the therapists had taught me. ‘It's not there when I talk to them about everyday things, but if I look at them in that way, you know what I'm talking about, the way other guys do, that's when I see it.'

‘It's not like you to feel sorry for yourself,' said Tyke matter-of-factly and he took hold of me with the same gaze he'd conjured up when we'd spoken about the hundred metres.

‘Get off my case,' I said.

He was my brother; he should have backed off like he was supposed to. I'd worked damned hard not to resent the way I was and I'd come to terms with it long ago. It wasn't fair of Tyke to accuse me like this because of girls, when plenty of guys were shy around them and slow to get going, and they weren't chained to the starting line like Jacob O'Leary.

‘Just trying to fire you up,' said Tyke, in a gentler voice and offering a smile now to smooth over the little ruffle between us. ‘Sometimes you've got to show some mongrel – and that's not my footy coach talking. There's mongrel in you, little brother, more than you realise.'

True or not, hearing my brother say things like that was more precious than gold.

‘Make 'em laugh,' he said.

‘Who?'

‘Girls. They notice when you say funny things and they think, hey this guy's great to be with, even if you can time his hundred metres with a sundial.'

‘Very funny.'

I knew about making people laugh, but that was hard among those who didn't know me and my little problems, who saw the saliva at the corner of my mouth and straightaway thought I must be a halfwit. I wondered what I would choose if the fairy godmother who went AWOL at my birth turned up to make amends. Okay, Jacob, she'd say, what's it going to be, normal legs or a mouth that doesn't dribble from one corner?

‘I can get a laugh out of kids at school, and Amy's part of that,' I said to Tyke. ‘But that's playing the clown. Making jokes about my legs. I'm getting pissed off with that.'

I'd made things awkward now and neither of us quite knew what to say for a few moments. The silence was filled by Dad calling inside the house; he couldn't find something. Mum's voice, higher and fainter, told him to do his own searching.

‘Stick up for them, that's another way,' said Tyke. ‘It's modern-day knight in shining armour stuff. Girls like a champion who looks out for them.'

Me, a champion!

Tyke shifted the barbell and the stands against the wall so he could return Mum's Astra to the garage. Once it was done, so was our heart-to-heart about girls.

‘Have they found the bastard who killed that horse?' he asked.

‘Not yet. S'been a month and no arrests.'

‘Won't find him now then. Be long gone. But who . . . I mean, what sort of twisted mind . . .'

‘Prob'ly some psycho from the city, out of his skull on crystal meth.'

‘Sounds about right,' said Tyke. ‘Couldn't be someone who grew up round animals, could it? I bet he saw some actor feed apples to a horse on telly. Lured the poor thing close enough, then used a razor or something.' He shivered at the stories that had gone around and put a hand to his own belly, part sympathy, part protection.

‘Bugger that,' he snapped, and went outside to soothe himself under the evening sky.

When I joined him he said, ‘I miss the stars. Not as many in the city. You've got to come out here to see how many there are. It's like someone climbed up on a ladder and painted all those white dots on the inside of a dome. What was that movie where the guy was trapped in a sort of giant studio from birth? Didn't even know he was a prisoner.
Truman Show
, that was it. Jim Carrey.'

‘Never seen it,' I had to confess. I stood beside him, enjoying the comfort of our shared silence and a view of the stars I hadn't appreciated earlier. ‘You look happy,' I said to Tyke.

‘Yeah, I am. What about you?'

I couldn't answer as quickly as Tyke. Something was bugging me – not just the girl thing – stuff I couldn't put words to. Tyke didn't want to know that, though.

‘Yeah, everything's good.'