Wrath (18 page)

As the teams jostle for position, the opposing team's goalie moves close behind Archie, and we see him punch Archie hard in the small of the back. Archie stumbles forward but doesn't lose the ball.

“Ump!” we shout, leaping to our feet, but both umpires have moved back with the rest of the players, waiting for Archie's kick, and they can't see what has happened. We sit there, powerless.

Archie's kick is beautiful, and the boys start playing like professionals, using the tactics Mr Robinson has taught us—but the other team are just as determined to stop us any way they can. Always with an eye to where the umpires are, they ‘accidentally' crash into our boys, and from where we sit, we can see elbows and knees gouging under cover of the writhing boys. We scream ourselves hoarse, and the umpires split up a bit more, realising what is going on. Within a couple of minutes, two of the opposing team's players are sent off for foul play.

They are booed as they run back to their bench, and play goes on a bit cleaner, but as the minutes tick by and we score more goals, the game gets even rougher. It's Archie they're concentrating on now. There's a solid core of three of their team always on him, shoving him, running into him, bending close to him and spitting words as they run past. We see him shake his head as though flicking away flies, but he's exhausted and angry-looking by the end of that quarter.

Only a few points separate us as the siren sounds. Mr Robinson runs to meet the boys, signalling us over to joining them. We leap up, fresh and raring to do battle.

“I don't need to tell you how dirty they're playing,” Mr Robinson says. “Archie, take a break for 10 minutes.” We groan. “Don't worry, I'll put him back on. The refs know what's going on, but it's not easy to catch the offending players.”

“It's not just that, sir,” one of the boys pants. “They never stop with the comments, especially to Archie.”

Mr Robinson snorts derisively. “You're not a bunch of girls. Let 'em go. It means they're rattled. Just keep on your man and don't let them put you off your game. Remember, you're out there to win, fairly and squarely.”

The siren sounds, and we run to our spots. Last quarter. Got to beat these pricks.

“What ya in for? Raping a gran?” It's the idiot again. I open my mouth to say something and then snap it shut. That's what he wants. I take off to where the game is, and he's a breath behind me. Then I'm down—he tripped me as he ran past. “Sorry, mate!” he laughs, landing heavily on my outstretched hand with his boot, the sprigs gouging between my knuckles before he's off.

I scramble to my feet, pressing my hand hard into my leg and racing after him, and then I stop. I'm in the clear with no one near me. Archie spots me and boots the ball in my direction. I leap into the air and pluck the ball from the sky, the pain in my hand a strange counterpoint to the joy in my heart. Then I turn and kick the ball straight to Brown, who grins, his pointed teeth zigzagging familiarly across his bottom lip. His great lumbering body shakes off two assailants like they're insects and then he boots it straight through the goals. I run up and slap him on the back then go back to my position.

I grin at Pizza Face, giving him a quick bird as he scowls back. “You'll be grinning on the other side of your face in a minute, bum boy.”

“Winners are grinners, mate,” I laugh and turn away. I feel him grab my shoulder and spin me around. Then he hits me—it feels like a train, a runaway horse, a cannonball. His knee comes up with all his weight behind it and powers into my stomach and chest. My breath bursts out of my mouth, and I fall to the ground, writhing in panic as I try to inhale. The pain in my chest! I have to suck air, but it's agony, as if iron bars are squeezing my lungs. I take tiny sips of air and then see him raise his boot, almost in slow motion, to stomp on my face.

Then he's gone, knocked aside by a roaring, red-faced cyclone. It's Brown! Brown grabs my attacker as he falls and then his knee lifts, not to the boy's stomach or chest but right between his legs with such force that the boy jerks backwards, his body curling in agony, tears gushing down his pimply face. I see Brown surrounded, four boys all trying to get in as many kicks and punches against him as they can, and then I see him go down under three of them as the fourth one lifts his big, hairy leg back and aims it straight at Brown's face. I close my eyes, but nothing can stop me from hearing that horrible crunch as his boot connects.

By the time I open my eyes, the umpires are there, and the boys have scattered, leaving the three of us lying there with the stretcher carriers fussing around us. Brown's nose is bleeding so badly I can't see the bottom half of his face, but as he's lifted onto the stretcher, he opens his eyes, winks at me and grins, a gory grimace of victory. Instead of his sharpened teeth, however, there are just bleeding gums. His teeth are gone. I try to grin back, wincing as I struggle to breathe, and he reaches out and pats me awkwardly on the arm. Then I'm jolted painfully off the ground and into the sick bay.

“Couple of broken ribs, I reckon, laddie,” says a familiar voice. I nod weakly—there's not enough air to waste on talking—and then everything goes dark.

*

I awake to the sound of muffled whispers and try to sit up, but the pain in my chest knifes through me, and I fall back, gasping.

“He's awake!” says Archie jubilantly, and the door pushes completely open. He, Aaron, Tim and a couple of other kids tiptoe in with Mr Robinson behind them. I twist my head and see Brown—head thrown back, mouth wide open and nose taped—snoring softly in the bed next to me.

“Looks like the King Brown's had his fangs pulled,” says Aaron quietly, “but it took a mob of them to do it!”

“He saved my neck,” I answer, talking in gasps. “That kid had already trodden on my hand and kicked me in the ribs, and he was about to stomp on my face except that Brown stopped him.”

“Stopped him thinking about girls for a long time too!” sniggers Tim, and they all laugh softly. I try not to. It hurts too much. My hand throbs a bit, and I see that it's bandaged.

“How do you feel?” Mr Robinson asks.

“Not bad. I can breathe now at least. Who… Who won the game?”

“We did!” Mr Robinson's eyes twinkle. “Not exactly the best example of AFL I've ever seen, but you played well. The other coach was pretty embarrassed about it.”

“They weren't expecting us to be any good, sir. They wrote us off as losers.”

“You played better than them, that's for sure,” he nods.

We hear a snuffle from Brown's bed, and he grins, his missing teeth and puffy face making him look like the ugliest baby in existence.

“How's the face feel, Brown?” Mr Robinson says.

“Better than hith ballth, thir,” Brown lisps, and everyone roars with laughter, Mr Robinson's bass as loud as any of us. I can't help but laugh this time even though I'm gasping with the pain of it.

“Keep it down in here, can you?” a gruff voice growls at the door. “Sorry, Robbo, didn't see you there.”

“No, I'm sorry, Doc. We'll go now and leave you in peace. Young Brown's the man of the moment.” We turn and applaud. Brown reddens, but his gappy smile is wide. “Come on, boys, let's leave the wounded soldiers to get a bit of rest.”

They file out, waving at us both as they go. The door closes and the room is silent.

“Thanks, mate,” I say.

“No worrieth.” And we lean back on our pillows, battered and sore but happy.

Brown and—to a certain extent—I get a fair bit of attention over the next few days. Brown becomes an object of congratulations and praise instead of one of fear and dislike, and the change in him is total. He even walks differently. The aggressive strut is gone, and despite the gaping hole when he smiles, his face softens.

After he comes back from the dental clinic in Perth with new teeth, he even looks pretty good. He is never going to have anyone bashing at his door to make him the next James Bond, but now he looks like a big, hefty bloke with a face like a fairly friendly bulldog. I can't really pinpoint what flicked his switch from aggro-head to okay bloke, but I don't care. I owe him. He hangs around Archie a fair bit now, and me too, when we're in the gym. We still eat at our own tables, but the atmosphere has changed and we joke around like old friends.

*

The routine is pretty much the same every day. The boys in the cottage accept me as a kind of stray dog that wanders in every morning; they're nice enough to me and happy to have me around, but they make it clear I'm not meant to be there.

Maths and Science are pretty straightforward, but English is my weakest subject. I can spend ages working on an assignment and scrape through, or I write something in a hurry that I think is a pile of rubbish and it gets a good mark. There seems no plan to it, unlike the other subjects where everything is straightforward—either wrong or right.

The term ends, and we have a short break from classes, but study goes on. On Friday, Mr P says to me, “Give your normal work a rest for a week or so. I just want you to read and think and write about anything that comes to you. Or not.” He grins crookedly. “Here, start with this. The title might give you a laugh.” He hands me a battered old red book that is leather-bound with gold inlaid letters,
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“Very funny, sir.”

“Thought you might like it,” Mr P calls over his shoulder as he closes the door.

I have the choice of joining my old class with Mrs Shiels for the break or staying in my cell for the morning and studying. I choose my cell. I've gotten used to working on my own, in silence. I sit at my desk that Monday and open the book to the first page. Someone has written in it in Polish, and though I can't read it, I imagine it might be Mr P's mother.

The thought of Mum slices through me, and I remember sitting on the kitchen table with Mum putting on my shoes for me, her soft hair bent beneath my nose, the faint smell of shampoo and, well, just Mum—fresh and clean with her endless supply of white T-shirts and dark-blue jeans. I shake my head, get rid of those thoughts and start to read.

It starts off in that old-fashioned, wordy way, but within a few pages, I'm hooked. Man, those Russians can write. They have a way of creating another world, a world that pulled me into it so that when I stopped reading, I almost felt disoriented for a while—as though I was still living in the land of the story.

Anyway, this guy Raskolnikov is a young student who owes money and is really poor. He gets it into his head that a greedy old pawnbroker who charges very high interest on the money she lends out to all the students should die. His reasoning is that this crime, wrong as it might be, would be far outweighed by the good her death would do; all those students, including himself, would be freed of their debts and able to continue their studies and do great things, contributing to society rather than feeding off it as she had done. So he kills her and steals her money. It's a bit of a bummer, but her sister turns up at the apartment while he is still there, and he has to kill her too.

The rest of the book revolves around his argument that there are two kinds of people in the world: the ordinary and the extraordinary. Raskolnikov believes the extraordinary ones have a duty to break the law under special circumstances in order to benefit humankind, so what he has done is—to him—completely justified and almost a noble, heroic thing.

I think about this. It's a bit of a jolt to think like that, although I guess if any of those plots to kill Hitler had actually worked, no one would have jumped up and down and screamed, “Murder!” It would have stopped the war, and millions of people, including the Jews, wouldn't have suffered and died. Anyone can see that would have been a good thing.

Was this book saying I had done the right thing in killing Reid? I know he was no Hitler, but how long had he been hurting Katy? How evil a thing was that? What if it hadn't been stopped? Katy might have run away and turned into a druggie or even killed herself. My head is buzzing with these thoughts, but underneath, as hard as I am arguing with myself, there is that familiar black pit inside me—that terrifying knowledge that I killed two human beings. How can I argue that away?

Raskolnikov was having a lot of trouble with it too. He kept fainting and getting sick. His argument might be fine at an intellectual level, but it seems to be having a bad effect on him. He's afraid of being caught but acts in such a weird way that it's obvious everyone suspects him.

We still go to the gym every afternoon, and after we work out, we usually buy something from the shop and sit around and talk. My mind is still buzzing about the book, so I say—pretty hesitantly because our conversations don't usually get too deep and meaningful—“I'm reading this book at the moment.”

Aaron, Archie and Neil are leaning back against the wall in the rec, knocking back Coke and chips and looking pretty shagged from the gym. I press on and tell them about it. Funnily, they sit up and listen, so I feel like a teacher at story time. When I finish, there is silence.

“Well, what do you think?”

Aaron speaks first. “No, I don't think he's right. You'd have everyone running around and killing people they saw as stopping them from getting what they want. You could kill your boss who was going to give you the sack and justify it by saying that if you lost your job, your family would suffer, you'd lose your home and car, your kids wouldn't have a good education and so on. Maybe I could rob a bank and kill someone but justify it by saying I'm going to use that money to help people.” He frowns and shakes his head. “No, that's a crap idea.”

“What about you, Arch? What do you reckon?”

“Aaron's right. I didn't think of it that way, but of course if everyone thinks they're above the law—or what did that writer say? ‘extraordinary'?—there'll just be a bloodbath. Like it was before there were any laws.” He pauses and looks me straight in the eye. “It's never right to take someone's life. If they attack you, you defend yourself and maybe they get killed. That's another thing. You can't go out and cold-bloodedly knock someone off just because it suits you.”