The Legend of Kevin the Plumber (12 page)

I hooked the brown seatbelt across my body and
snapped it home. The boat jutted over the passenger's side windscreen like a sun visor.

‘Nice tub,' I said.

‘Thanks,' Kevin said. ‘I've had it since new. It's done two hundred and ninety thousand kilometres.'

‘I meant the boat.'

The engine started first kick.

‘Ah. The kayak. I've only had that a few years and the odometer was busted when I got it.'

‘Do you go out in it?'

‘Every day.'

‘Serious?'

He nodded. ‘I push it out off the head every morning. I like it. It keeps me fit and that.'

‘Every morning? Before work?'

‘During the week. I go out in the afternoons some weekends.'

‘Even in winter?'

‘Especially winter. Can have the whole ocean to myself some mornings. It's good to chuck yourself in the ocean every chance you get. It makes loose things tight and helps you remember that you're part of the food chain.'

‘I'll remember that,' I chuckled.

I noticed a wombat overtaking us as we crossed the Kellep River Bridge. The little bastard had time to moon me as he shot past. Maybe it wasn't a wombat. Maybe it was a snail. I could have ridden home faster.

‘You need a hat to put in the back,' I said, as I dropped my bike onto the footpath in front of our house.

‘Pardon?'

‘You drive like my Grandad. You need a hat to put in the back window.'

Kevin's mouth dropped open. ‘Hoh! That's gratitude for you.'

‘Thanks, Kevin. I had a good day.'

‘No worries, Gary. I'll see you tomorrow.'

I showered and forgot that I was giving Mum and Mario the silent treatment. I remembered halfway through dinner — right in the middle of my glorious oxywelding story. I decided I'd start the treatment after dinner. I'd forgotten about my pay, too, until Mario asked about it. I shot up from the table with my mouth full of mashed potato and grabbed my coveralls off the bathroom floor. I ripped open the envelope and there it was: folds and folds of cash. My money. The start of my ticket to freedom.

M
uz was in the shower when I left on Wednesday morning, getting ready for another short helicopter ride out to the rig for another stint at work and another paycheque.

Kevin was late. The day was already sticky hot and I hid from the early morning sun behind a power pole. Six forty-seven and the ute buzzed around the corner of Marlin Avenue and stopped at the gutter in front of me. I slung my pack in the back and got in. Kevin stared at the road. He'd started driving before I had my seatbelt on. His fingers curled fist-like around the steering wheel.

‘Morning,' I said.

‘What happened between you and my daughter?'

My face got hot. My toes curled and uncurled in my boots. ‘Daughter?'

‘Don't!' he growled, and I jumped. ‘Enough crap. What happened?'

He looked at me for the first time that morning. His lips were pulled tight and his hairy chin jutted at me.

He could kill me, I thought. There'd be enough force in one of his backhanders to crack my skull like an egg. I opened my mouth and closed it again. I was going to feed him some bullshit. Tell him he was full of it and that I hardly knew his daughter. That tactic had worked a thousand times at school and at home, but Kevin wasn't a schoolteacher or my mum. Kevin was big. Much bigger than a schoolteacher and twice the size of my mum. At school I knew where the edge was and I could push the teachers right to it, and if they lost it with me and got nasty, they'd lose their job. Until Mum had flipped and tried to gouge my eyes out, I knew where the edge was at home, too. With Kevin, I felt like I was sitting next to a phantom made entirely of petrol fumes. If I arsed up, he'd blow.

‘It was my fault,' I said.

He stared at the road.

‘I . . . I . . . Vanessa has liked me since we were in primary school. Since I was in grade five and she was in prep. I should have shooed her off then but I didn't. And when she came over for Sharon's birthday party, I could tell she was still . . . you know . . . keen and that. They watched DVDs in the lounge. I went to bed. Vanessa came into my room at about three o'clock. She was terrified. Frightened of the dark. I don't know why she didn't just wake up the other girls. She was crying so I was rubbing her back. Like I would for my sister.'

Kevin showed no signs of breathing.

‘I patted her back and we fell asleep. Next thing it was morning. My sister Sharon and her mates were standing
in my room going “Oh my god” and making up all these stories.'

Kevin looked at me and the fire had gone out of his eyes. I thought about the
other
time I laid down with his daughter. The smell of her hair, her warm body curled into mine, the skin of her tummy. I wasn't going to tell him the whole story. I wasn't telling the other chapter because when I thought about Vanessa's body close to mine, my skin tingled. They weren't innocent thoughts. They were blood-red thoughts and I was an evil kiddy snatcher.

‘I patted her back. She told me I reminded her of her brother.'

Kevin yelped. He made a noise like Trixie does if you stand on her tail. He coughed to cover it, like the sound had escaped from some dark place in him and scared him. He turned and looked at the river flat farmland zipping by his window.

I stared at the back of his head and tried to work out what was going on in there. Studying the predator. Then the yelp and the moment were gone and Kevin stroked his beard.

He nodded. ‘That doesn't surprise me.'

‘Pardon?'

‘That you remind her of Jake.'

There was an ugly hole in the conversation. I'd never heard his name and it rocked me. Somehow it gave shape to a girl's nightmare. Made it more real.

‘Vanessa told me he died in a car accident,' I said.

Kevin shook his head then shrugged. He indicated and turned off the highway to Christmas Bay. ‘He died in a car but it wasn't an accident,' he said. ‘It was in the garage.'

I looked at the big bloke. There was no expression on his face. He looked like a driver's licence photo of himself.

‘Connected a pipe to the exhaust and gassed himself.'

‘Fuck,' I said. It wasn't the most brainy thing I could have said, but I said it. It wasn't the most sensitive thing I could have said either but it just popped out. ‘Fuck.'

‘Exactly,' Kevin said, then sighed and pushed back into his seat.

I wanted to know why. I wanted to know if Jake was big into injectable shit. I wanted to know if Kevin was the reason his son killed himself. ‘Did he leave a note?'

Kevin shook his head and pulled into the car park at P & KL Wasser P/L. The SS ute was there and Homer's shitbox VL.

‘I hope you're telling the truth,' he said as he opened his door.

I nodded but he wasn't looking. I got out and grabbed for my pack. It was stuck. Kevin held one of the shoulder straps from his side of the ute. He was hunched under the roof rack, staring at me.

‘If I find out that you touched my daughter,' he snarled, ‘I'll rip your head off.'

He flashed his teeth. Nice white teeth.

‘Heh, heh, heh. No problems there, boss. She's thirteen. What do you take me for? If I even thought about it, I'd rip my own head off.'

‘Good lad.'

Then my lungs would only half fill and I puffed into my hand as I followed Kevin into the office. I felt sweat trickling down my side. Never again. Never.

We didn't speak again until he'd collected a roll of copper pipe and a cardboard box full of fittings.

‘Grab these, Gary. I'll be out in a minute.'

His minute turned to five. I listened to music in the van but I was itching to get back to the rough-in in the hills.

The van lurched as he climbed aboard.

‘We've got a little job to do in Creston before we finish that rough-in.'

Some time before the pyramids were built, someone in the council got the idea that they'd build a whole lot of government houses on the swamp at the edge of Christmas Bay. Creston. Dicky idea. I hadn't been there for years. I could see, as we crawled along Opal Street, that nothing much had changed.

Kevin checked the address he'd scribbled on a piece of box cardboard, looked up the driveway then looked at me.

‘This is it.'

The grass had flowered around the shell of an old yellow Mazda van with the front stoved in. The windscreen was a cobweb of fractured glass that looked like it had been cracked from the inside by the driver's head. There were bits of polystyrene packaging and an upturned pram at the bottom of the stairs. The flywire door sat against the wall. The front door was missing completely. A TV boomed.

‘Hello?' Kevin yelled, and the dogs in the back yard went off. Big gutsy woofs like a German shepherd or a Rottweiler or something. A blowfly whizzed past my ear on its way out of the house.

A kid appeared in the doorway. Her bed-hair and dirty face did nothing to hide the biggest, brightest pair of brown eyes I'd ever seen.

Kevin squatted. ‘Hello, love. What's your name?'

Her one clean thumb slipped into her mouth and she looked at the wall.

‘Is Mum or Dad home?' Kevin asked.

She shook her head. Her thumb made her lips pop. ‘Mum's gone to get the car.'

‘Is anyone else home?'

She shook her head.

‘When they get back, can you tell them that —'

‘Brakes!' someone squealed from the street. ‘For fuck's sake, Reggie, BRAKES!'

A dinged-up Fairmont, the same model and colour as Grandad's, rolled to a stop just behind the van. Reggie's face was red, his body pushed back into the seat. Looked like he was using two feet on the stop pedal. The handbrake farted and he slowly let his feet off. A heavy woman jogged to a stop beside the Fairmont.

‘I thought you was going to smack into the back of that van, you fucken idiot,' she said. ‘You trying to give me a fucken heart attack?'

‘The fucken brakes wouldn't work. I was pushing as hard as I fucken could,' Reggie shouted through the window at the woman who had just given him a serve. The woman was bent over huffing, so Kevin and I had a fine view of the ample bum crack poking from the top of her green tracksuit pants.

Kevin stepped from under the verandah. Reggie tapped
on the window then pointed through the glass at us.

The woman stood up. ‘What do youse want?'

‘Mrs Hunter?' Kevin asked.

‘Who wants to know?' she said.

Kevin pointed at the van. ‘We're the plumbers. We got a call to check out an oven that wasn't working properly. Did you call?'

‘Yes! Yes, I did. Thank gawd you're here. Jesus, that was quick. I only phoned ten minutes ago. Come in, come in. The oven's in the kitchen. Of course it's in the fucken kitchen, scuse the French — where else do you keep a fucken oven? Come in.'

The little girl darted into the living room as we followed the woman. More blowflies barrelled along the hall and I ducked. One flew into my chest. The house reeked of sweaty bodies, stale ciggies and nappies and something else.

Raw meat.

The kitchen hummed with a whole squadron of blowflies. In the centre of the table lay the skinless, headless, half-butchered carcass of a kangaroo and a bloodied knife.

‘Sorry about the mess. Been a shit of a day already and it's not even nine o'clock. Not even eight o'clock. The oven is just there. It won't get hot.'

The door of the oven was open a crack and part of the butchered kangaroo poked through.

‘Can you smell gas?' Kevin whispered to me.

I nodded.

‘Nip out the front, find the gas meter and turn it off.
Just a ball valve. Turn it until it won't go any further. Hurry.'

The meter was hidden behind a rusted BMX. Gas: off.

‘Right, I'll leave you boys to it. Yell out when you want a cuppa,' Mrs Hunter said.

Kevin had his hands on his hips, looking the kitchen over.

‘Where do we start?' I whispered.

‘Help us drag the table back a bit.'

The carcass wobbled with fresh death.

‘Broom,' Kevin said.

I found a broom leaning against a dead pot plant in the hall. Kevin swept a place in front of the oven. There were piles of dirty plastic plates and pizza boxes, a sock and a perfectly circular drop of dried blood on the torn lino. I helped Kevin move the oven away from the wall so he could squeeze behind it. Everywhere I touched was sticky with grease.

Kevin looked up, his brow red and his cheeks locked full of air.

‘Rock scissors paper,' he said, as he exhaled.

‘What?'

‘Someone has to go under the house. One, two, three.'

I chose rock. Kevin chose rock.

Again. Kevin chose rock, I chose scissors. Rock blunts scissors.

My throat made a pathetic little squeak as I swallowed.

‘Good luck,' he said, and slapped my shoulder. ‘Mrs Hunter?'

‘Yes, love?'

‘We need to get under the house.'

‘Sure. Fine.'

‘Could you please show us where the manhole is? And your dogs. Are your dogs going to be okay with us?'

She stumped along the hallway and opened the back door. ‘Dogs are fine. They might fucken lick you to death but they're fine. Under the house is their kennel. They should show you the way in. Heh, heh.'

They were mongrel dogs. Two big mongrel dogs that barked like they'd summoned the sound right from their ball bags. Ridgebacks crossed with Dobermans crossed with wolves crossed with African hunting dogs. I wasn't going into the yard.

‘Don't worry about them,' Mrs Hunter whispered. ‘They're fucken pussies. They wouldn't hurt a fly but don't tell anybody, hey, 'cause they're great for security. They
look
vicious.'

Mrs Hunter showed me the way under the house.

‘What am I looking for?' I asked Kevin.

‘The gas line to the stove. Three-quarter-inch copper. Go under the kitchen and I'll guide you from outside.'

‘Right.'

I held my breath and crawled on all fours, dodging fleshy bones and piles of dogshit as big as fruitcakes. The house was on concrete posts and there was plenty of room to crawl.

‘Over here,' Kevin called. I could see his hand poked between the timber slats that boxed in sides of the crawl space. The walls of the kennel. I managed to hold my breath for the whole distance and dodged every landmine
on the way. Cobwebs crackled in my dreads. I pressed my face against the timber slats and sucked the air from outside.

‘Right,' I puffed. ‘Now what?'

‘Look up. You should be able to see a copper pipe going in through the floor somewhere there.'

I spotted the pipe and I spotted the problem. It had been pulled away from its brackets until it hung at dog-head height. The copper was a dull brown except for the thirty-centimetre length that had been bent closest to the ground. It shone in scrapes, was pitted with tooth marks and bent to ninety degrees. ‘Found it. The dogs have been chowing down on the pipe. Ripped it away from the house. It's all bent and stuff.'