The Promise (13 page)

‘This is blackmail. I will pay you nothing.'

Vince stood over him and lifted the bottle in the air.

‘Call it what you like. But you'll pay, cunt. Name a price or I'll smash this over your head.'

The professor covered his face with his hands – as a blue swirling light lit the room.

‘The Jacks!' Vince screamed. He dropped the bottle and headed for the back door. ‘Jackie. Buster. Go. Go.'

I followed Vince, Buster grabbed the baby from Juice and ran after us. We raced along the walkway, down the side of the motel and across the road. I dropped the camera and turned to pick it up. A speeding tow-truck was heading for Buster and Florence. Swerving to miss them, the driver ran straight over the camera, smashing it to pieces. I watched his tail-lights vanish into the distance. Vince looked down at the broken bits of plastic and metal scattered across the road.

‘Fuck,' he whispered. ‘There goes the money shot.'

‘I don't reckon he would've paid up anyway,' I tried consoling him. ‘Stubborn prick.'

‘Anyway,' Buster offered, ‘they might be in love.'

‘Love?' Vince spat. ‘They couldn't be in love. She's a prostitute, Buster. Been under everything but the
Titanic
.'

‘Don't matter,' Buster shot back, smooching Florence on the cheek. ‘If there's hope for me, there's hope for all of us. Juice in there. The professor. And you. Yep. There's even hope for you, Vince.'

SNARE

N
othing much moves around here
but the trains.
We're two stops off the end of the suburban
line. The trains come and go every half hour, in both directions. A little longer on Sundays. Forty minutes, sometimes an hour if they're running late. I time them on my watch and write everything down in the notebook I carry around. Then there are the country line and goods trains. They can thunder by the back fence at any hour, rattling the dishes and knives and forks and spoons in the kitchen cupboards. A couple of times we've had pictures knocked off the walls.

We've been here for six years, from when I was eight. My mother ran away from my dad. I don't know exactly why. She's never told me and doesn't want me asking. I remember that the police were often at our house. And he kicked the front door in one time, when she tried locking him out.

That's all I can tell you. Except that she blames him for my stutter and my eyes blinking. Said so to the doctors at the hospital I went to for years. I'm supposed to be on medication. I was for a long time. When I started high school she said I was responsible enough to look after the pills myself, so I stopped taking them. I flush them down the toilet or feed them to next-door's cat. It doesn't seem to mind. I still blink too much now and then and get stuck on words, but not when I write them down. I don't speak much unless I have to.

The first night here we slept on the kitchen floor because the other rooms were full of rubbish and a sort of scratching sound that had to be rats and mice. A diesel going by the back fence shook the house so bad I thought it was an earthquake until I heard the whistle of the train heading for the crossing on the highway.

With some help Mum fixed up the house. We dragged the rubbish out of the rooms, made a bonfire in the yard and burned the lot. Grandpa drove down from his farm and stayed with us for a few weeks, the old van loaded with tools and paint and pieces of wood. He worked hard, fixing windows and doors, and plastering and painting the inside. At the end of his stay I sat on my bed in the freshly painted front room and listened through the open window to them talking, out on the front verandah, holding a glass of beer each. After all the work he'd done he tried talking her into selling the place and moving to the farm with him. When she said no, for the third time, he went into his overalls pocket and handed her some cash.

‘Get the floors sanded with that. I'd do it myself, but my back wouldn't last. We can work on the outside paint job later in the year when it's warm.'

The next week I helped her empty the house of furniture and a man came around in a van with
Sam the Sandman
painted on the side. He took the years of scratches and stains out of the wooden floors with a fearsome machine and varnished them like new. Sam had the quietest voice I'd ever heard and soft curly hair and a beard to match. He came back a couple of weeks later to check that she was happy with the job and then turned up a couple of days after that and started scraping the dry and blistered paint off the weatherboards. When I got home from school that night he was still working, and stayed on for dinner. Before too long he was sleeping over.

Except for the trains it's dead quiet in our street. Our neighbours are mostly old Greeks and Italians. Theo, our next-door neighbour – not the one with the cat, he's on the other side – has lived by himself since his kids left home and his wife died. He gives us vegetables out of his garden. I've been working for him for the last two years. He offered me the job by showing his knotted, bony wrists over the front fence.

‘I have the arthritis. Work my arse off for the factory. My hands are fucked up, all. You clean the chooks couple days a week, shovel shit, hose, water. I give your mother eggs, fresh. Every day. You dig in the garden I give vegetables. Tomato. Beans. Everything.'

So I clean out the chook shed on Sunday and Wednesday mornings before school. I worked out quick that Theo is lonely. He sits on an overturned bucket, watches me work and smokes as he talks.

‘You know, when we were at factory, Aussie boys bludgers. All of them. All the time. Drink, drink, drink. Do fucken nothing. You work hard. You good boy.'

I sometimes try answering him but my tongue won't work and I spit bits of words out like chips of wood. Theo doesn't mind.

‘You get stuck. No worries. I speak. You listen.'

He sends me home with a cloth bag full of eggs. I wash my face and hands then run down to the highway for the bus and ride the half hour to school. I keep to myself, up the front behind the driver. The Islander boys run both the bus and the schoolyard. They take no shit. There are also the Vietnamese boys, and the Africans, but not enough of them to take on the Islanders, even if they joined forces. I have no friends at school and hang out with the losers nobody wants. We don't move far from the patch of grass near the front office, where we can be seen and it's safe.

Six months back Theo offered me a new deal. There's a grain store further along the railway line. It's covered in years and years of pigeon shit and looks like a giant candle slowly melting into the ground. Theo told me that when he was first married and moved out here with his wife he would head down there after work and catch pigeons in a snare he'd made.

‘I break the neck and pluck. My missus, Gloria, she cook straight off. Nice. You like the chicken meat? This is better.'

Theo said he would give me a dollar a bird. He taught me how to catch them, practising in his backyard. He turned a cardboard box upside down and lifted it on one side using a long stick with a line of string tied to it. He put a small pile of rice under the box and made a trail of rice leading away from the box.

‘The bird, she comes,' he explained, with the end of the line of string twirled around his finger. ‘She takes food from the ground.' He bobbed his head forward like a bird would peck at the grains of rice. ‘And then she goes under for the food. You wait. Wait. Pull.'

The stick came away from the box and it closed over the pile of rice.

I found catching pigeons easy and would return to his back gate with a pillowcase full of wildly flapping birds, which didn't please him.

‘You catch. You kill. Quick.'

He showed me how to wring a bird's neck, which I was supposed to do as soon as I had trapped it.

‘Is better for the bird.'

I found that my blinking stopped when I concentrated on a bird moving towards the box, following the line of rice. One day I spilled more rice than I should have and the bird, a grey, speckled with silver, green and purple, headed for me instead of the box. It was at my feet pecking at the spill when I snatched it from the ground. After that I didn't use the snare at all but caught the birds in my hands.

I was soon spending most weekends in Theo's back garden, or at the granary stalking pigeons. When he told me he was going away for a week, to visit one of his daughters for Greek Easter, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had the chooks to look after but no one to talk to and there was no point in catching pigeons, on account of Theo's strict rule – ‘You catch the bird, you eat the bird, same day.' If I went out catching birds while he was away they would be on the nose before he got back.

I got the wanders that weekend, roaming wider than usual. I walked the train line in both directions, trailing through empty factories and bombing stones into the oily channel running next to the line. I ended up behind the abandoned bowling alley across from the railway station car park. It had been locked and bolted
for years. The windows had been nailed over with sheets of iron and the outside walls were covered in graffiti,
mostly tags left by the Islander gang,
xxx
–
rated
was the tag they went by.

I walked around the outside of the building and stopped at a window that had a corner of iron sheeting lifted. There was enough room for me to wedge my fingers between the sheet of iron and the window frame. I pulled on the iron. The rusty nails popped and the iron came away in my hands and fell to the ground. I stuck my head through the window. The air smelled of rotten meat and dirty water.

I looked around to be sure nobody had seen me and climbed through the window, landing on some broken glass. The skylights in the roof made it easy to see where I was going. At the end of the bowling lanes the pins, covered in dust and cobwebs, stood to attention. Bowling balls sat in the racks, ready to go, and a huge disco ball hung from the ceiling above the centre lane. Only the shoe rack was empty. Someone must have taken a fancy to them.

I tried one of the bowling balls for size. It was too heavy. I put it back in the rack and picked up another, a red ball. I'd never bowled before and wasn't sure what to do. I stuck the ball under my chin like I'd seen a bowler do on television one time and concentrated on the pins, in the same way I had done when snatching pigeons. My blinking stopped. I slipped on my run-up and dropped the ball. It crashed to the boards, bounced into the gutter, rolled down the lane and wobbled by the pins. I picked out another ball and stuck it under my chin again. This time I didn't let go until I reached the bowling line, marked by a row of brass diamonds in the floor.

I slung the ball as hard as I could and listened as it rumbled and echoed, over and over and over, before crashing into the pins. Most of them went down straightaway. One of the back pins wobbled from side to side then fell, hitting another and leaving only two pins standing. I was so happy I whooped out loud.

I played every lane until the last pin had dropped and my bowling arm was worn out. I was thirsty and hungry and headed for the vending machines in the foyer. The potato chips, lollies and chocolate machine were covered in rat shit. Empty packets lay in the bottom, chewed to confetti. The soft-drink machine looked a better bet but I couldn't get to the cans without smashing the front of the machine. I picked up a bowling ball, spun around in a circle like a discus thrower and hurled it at the machine. The glass front shattered into bits.

I emptied the machine of drinks, careful not to cut my arm on the jagged glass, and sat the cans on the floor. I counted them up. I had twenty-two cans. I picked up a can of lemonade and wiped the dirt from the top on my T-shirt. I opened it and took a sniff. It smelt okay and there were bubbles. I put my lips to the can and tipped it back, just a little. It was sweet and sticky and warm. I finished the can off and fiddled with the money slot on the side of the machine. I could hear coins rattling around inside but had no idea how to get it open. I whacked the machine with the bowling ball a couple of times. Nothing happened. I bowled the ball across the foyer. It ran down the stairs into one of the lanes and stopped in the gutter.

I knew I wouldn't be able to carry all the cans of drink home, so I lined ten up in a bowling-pin formation and was about to bowl them over when a pin whizzed by my head, bounced off the wall and ricocheted into the side of the lolly machine. I turned to see where it had come from. It was the Islander boys, six or seven of them, standing in the shadows of lane ten. The biggest boy, Israel, was a year in front of me at school and was feared by everyone, even the boys in years above him. He had an older brother in gaol. Everybody knew that one day he would follow him. He had a wild Mohawk hairdo that he'd done himself and an ugly scar below one eye; some said from a knife fight.

The other boys formed a V-shape behind him as he walked towards me. He pushed me in the chest with one of his paws and bent forward, staring me in the eye. My blinking went off the radar. The more I tried to stop it the worse it got, like window wipers at double speed.

‘What you doing here, in our place? You skinny freckle-faced motherfucka skip. And stop your winking at me like some fucked-up spastic.'

When I didn't answer he pushed me again.

‘Fuck you, nut boy.
This belongs to us.
xxx
crew. Say something before I show you some kick.'

‘He can't talk, Issie. He's retarded.'

It was Moses.
Israel's
younger brother. He was in my year.
Israel
spat at my feet.

‘Can't fucken read either. Our brand is swarming this place. You fuck off home, runt.'

He pushed me again. I slipped and fell onto my arse. I cut my elbow on a broken piece of glass. I only cried when I saw the blood pouring out. The boys laughed at me until Moses spotted the blood.

‘Hey, come on, man. He's hurt.'

Israel looked a little worried himself. ‘Get up, retard. You being a bitch.'

The blood ran down my arm onto the floor.

‘Look at the cut.' Moses pointed to it. ‘We're fucked if he reports us.'

Israel whacked him across the face. ‘Shut it. Giving him ideas.'

He lifted me off the ground and put his arm around me, like he was my best friend. ‘You say anything about this and I'll skin you. Got it?'

All I could do was nod my head.

‘Now fuck off home like a cry-baby and come up with a good story.'

I told my mum I fell on the railway tracks. She banned me from going further than Theo's place for a month, which wouldn't stop me getting around as she was always working and had no idea where I got to during the day. As she washed and bandaged the wound she asked me if there was something wrong.

‘I'm worried about you, Tom. You spend more time over at Theo's than you do here. I don't mind. He's a nice old man, but … are you unhappy? With Sam being here?'

I shook my head, ‘No.'

‘Would you like to talk to him? Maybe there's something you'd rather talk over with him? You know, man to man?'

I shook my head again. Sam was okay, but I didn't want to talk to him about anything.

Mum let me miss the final two days of term. I had a little over two weeks before I would have to face Israel again. When Theo came home from Greek Easter and I told him I'd fallen on the railway tracks he knew I was lying.