Yellow (12 page)

That night, I dream of being trapped in the guts of the sand dunes, and electricity caused by touching fingers, and murder weapons, and speeches where I'm standing there naked, in front of all the politicians in town.

‘Lark!'

The sound escapes me in that ghost space between sleeping and waking, but only the frogs call back. I lie there awake, with the night pushing heavily on top of me, when I hear a crash inside the house.

Shit.

I pad cautiously down the hallway to see the bathroom light on, and I stand in the doorway to see Mum, in her filthy pyj­amas and fairy-floss hair, sitting on the bathtub and scrubbing at the ring finger of her left hand. It's bleeding, but she's still scrubbing. A gin bottle lies empty and shattered at her feet – the culprit of the crashing sound.

‘Mum!'

I race over to her, doing my best to avoid the glass, and I try to pry the scrubbing brush out of her hand, but she hits me away.

‘What are you doing?' I scream at her. But I know what she's doing. There's no sign of Lark in the house anymore – she's binned all the photos, and all the make-up she'd bought from Desiree was flung and melted into the front yard. The only thing that proves Lark was ever here is the untanned skin where her wedding ring sat. She's scrubbing that skin right from her hand.

‘You have to stop this!' I scream. I make a grab for the scrubbing brush again, and I snatch it this time, and I throw it down the hallway. She's stunned into silence. I jump into the bathtub and run the cold water, and I take her left hand, which is smaller than mine, and I run it under the tap to wash the blood away. She winces. I don't soothe her, I just grip her so tightly that my knuckles turn white. She loses balance and slides down into the tub with me, blocking the drain, and we sit there, getting wetter, as the water rises and her bloody hand stares angrily back at us.

I can't do this anymore.

I've never visited Boogie at night. Mum is passed out; I wrapped her hand in a bandage and watched the blood bloom like roses through the white gauze. She was asleep by the time I'd finished patching her up, slumped on the toilet seat where I'd perched her, head lolling back. The only sign of life was a small whistle, not quite a snore. I had to bite my fingernails, because I wanted to take her nose between my thumb and forefinger and squeeze that whistle right from her nostrils. She was too drunk, still, to be roused by the click of the front door closing behind me.

I race down the street, night cloaking the town. Even the sounds are muffled – the night birds, and frogs, and the sounds of creatures you never see because they skulk in the dark. I hold my breath when I pass the Bakers' wire fence, but the dog stays sleeping, dreaming of tennis balls, and possums, and the taste of the slack-jawed child who taunts him with a stick. I reach the park, and the only light now is a half moon, staring sleepily down through its shadowed eyelid. I've always liked the moon best. Everyone else in this town worships the sun, offering themselves on the beach every day with a devotion that would rival the ancient Egyptians. With the moon, it's more subtle, and it reminds me of myself, the way part of the moon is almost always hidden. It takes time for the moon to show herself.

My hair snags on branches as I feel my way through the bush track. I'm glad the trees here are pathetic things, so that the stars still wink every now and again through the salt-bitten canopy, and the moon still keeps me company. Finally, I reach the booth. I pick up the receiver.

‘Kirra?'

My eyes swim with tears as I loop the cord around my fingers. This is the second task I've failed. I really should scrap being an assistant to the undead from my list of possible future career choices, I'm obviously pretty unsuited to it. I imagine telling that to the careers counsellor the next time I see her – as though she didn't think I was weird enough as it is. I think of the three things I've asked Boogie to help me with, and wonder whether he'll help me anymore, seeing as though I really haven't lived up to my end of the bargain. I realise that I don't really care about number one anymore. If being popular means that I have to become like Cassie, and being unpopular means laughing so hard with Willow that I get the hiccups, I think I'll stick with being unpopular. But number two matters.

It really matters.

I want my parents back together with such a heaviness that my soul sinks outside of myself, down to my feet, and scrapes along the ground with my shadow. Mum's always been a drunk, but not like this.

Not like this.

A girl's pretty desperate when her only hope is a dead boy who lurks in a telephone box.

In a torrent of words, I tell Boogie about how Mum is a drowning beetle, and how she hurled her make-up off our front patio with the neighbours watching on. I tell him about the school social, and how she tossed eggs at Lark in the grocery store, and I tell him of bleeding fingers, and how I can only stand there and watch most of the time, all po-faced and silent as the bottles crowd the liquor cabinet. I tell him about her haunted eyes, and how the world doesn't dangle in front of her nose anymore, and how I wonder where it all went wrong.

Boogie cuts me off, his voice breaking in that pubescent way of his which is completely unsuitable for a ghost.

‘You have to stop her harming herself!'

I laugh, a broken kind of laugh that sounds more like a cough.

‘Really? I was about to hand her a scalpel and blast depressing music on repeat.'

‘No, don't do that!'

‘No shit, Sherlock. Why do you think I'm here, risking the fangs of red-bellied black snakes at two o'clock in the morning? You have to give advice better than that!'

‘Stop her from drinking . . . get her help.'

‘Oh gosh, why didn't I think of that? Should I just ask her nicely over a cup of tea and some biscuits?'

My soul is dragging even heavier now, pinioned under my feet and stomped against the urine-stained floor of the booth. Boogie isn't helping. He's useless and I've never felt as alone as I do right now.

‘Can't you tell an adult?'

‘Again. Such sage advice. I'm so glad I made a pact with the undead to hear those pearls of wisdom, because I'd never have thought of that myself. Oh wait. I did. Lark doesn't want to hear about it, and I'm pretty sure the rest of the town is all too aware. Remember the egg incident? Besides which, as much as foster care sounds like a treat, no one else actually seems to give a damn! Just forget about it.'

I bang the receiver against the wall three times in frustration. Returning it to my ear, I hiss at him, ‘And just to let you know, I tried to dig in the dune today, and it almost collapsed on me. I can't help you there, so it looks like we're both pretty useless.'

Boogie's voice sounds caked in desperation now. ‘Drag her to get help. Chain her up. Scream at her.'

I start to laugh, a manic sort of laugh that wakes the birds and makes them jump up from the canopy. I'm glad that what clawed itself out of my throat was laughter, because I wasn't quite sure what was going to come out, and I half feared it would be something like a scream.

‘You're making me risk my life for you in return for advice like that? Jesus, I don't even know anything about you! You say that McGinty killed you . . . Why the hell should I believe you? Who even are you?'

‘I told you, it's hard to talk about . . .'

‘Oh, is your ghost post-traumatic stress disorder so bad that you can't even give me a clue as to why I'm risking my bloody life for you?'

There's silence on the line, and I think he's hung up on me. Just before I give up and drag my slumped soul back towards home, I feel a jolt course through me; that cold jelly feeling slips in and settles around my bones. Memories flash before my eyes, mingled with Boogie's thoughts.

Boogie shows me everything. Who he was.

Who he is.

‘Cheeky bastard!' the adults called Boogie, but with an amused, charmed lilt to their voices. He was hauled by his lapel to the principal's office for liberating the tick-riddled ram from the agriculture department, but avoided punishment just by flashing his excessive dimples. And they were excessive – he had three, one in each cheek, and one in his chin – and he flaunted them shamelessly. Girls were mad for him. A couple of them surrounded him at recess and pretended they needed to settle an argument.

‘Tanya says her tan line is the darkest, but she's so full of it,' they said, pouting and flicking their hair. ‘I reckon mine is way better. You're going to have to judge, Boogie, and tell Tanya she's wrong.'

Then they giggled and lifted their school shirts for him to judge, revealing taut, brown bellies, and they lowered their skirts down just an inch to show the white skin that their swimmer bottoms usually covered.

‘Virgin skin,' said Tanya.

‘Not bloody likely!' laughed the others, and they threw flirty, knowing smiles Boogie's way.

He had gypsy-black hair that grew unrulily down to his collar, and the kind of green eyes that were made for bewitching. He walked with an easy sort of slouch, caused by years of ducking low through the barrels that run down into Rainbow Bay, sharing the waves with surfing legends Rabbit Bartholomew and Peter Townend. The husk of adolescence was falling away, and he hoped that the man who stepped out from it would be like those legends. He was fourteen and six months, and with all the confidence of the charmed and the charming, he couldn't imagine that he might not be anything he wanted.

That he might always be fourteen and six months.

He wasn't perfect – far from it.

‘See these grey hairs? They're all because of you!' the teachers told him, but behind their scowls you could tell they secretly liked him best.

While bobbing on the horizon between sets, an older surfer spun him tales of the waves down at Bells Beach, near Melbourne.

‘It's fair dinkum, the closest thing there is to dancing cheek to cheek with God, those waves,' promised the man.

That weekend Boogie hitchhiked down with a snaggle-toothed truck driver, and slept on the beach for a week while the adults pulled their hair out. He wasn't what you'd call an easy child, but he was an easy child to love.

It was 1979 when Boogie was fourteen and six months. The age of disco music.

‘Your name is Bobby!' insisted his exasperated mother and teachers, but the way he spilt his groove on the dance floor had earned him the nickname ‘Boogie', and that's the only name he answered to.

He could move.

He lived in a house a block back from the beach. It wasn't much of a house, a one-storey red-brick thing, but it had a giant jacaranda that presided over the front yard and dwarfed all the buildings in the town. Boogie would swing up the branches and sit there on the highest bough, perched like a panther, and he'd watch the ocean over the rooftops to figure out whether the surf was good enough to skip school.

Most days it was.

When he was fourteen and five months he was sitting in the tree while the branches danced softly beneath him, and when he looked over to a nearby, parallel bough he had a fit of whimsy. He imagined making a platform up there, just a few pieces of wood between the two branches, and he could sleep there some nights, with the wind rocking him like a cradle, and the first shards of daylight waking him up to illuminate the waves of the day.

That's what brought him to McGinty's.

McGinty and Boogie were no strangers. There was the time that Boogie stole the principal's underpants from his clothesline and hoisted them up the town's flagpole. And of course, Boogie's habit of hitchhiking across the country without letting his frantic mother know. She'd filed missing person reports so many times that the local station had a ready-made template for her. Boogie stood respectfully while McGinty waved his purple birthmark in his face in an attempt to put the fear of God in him, but Boogie hadn't learnt how to be afraid yet, and that made the other side of McGinty's face turn almost as purple in frustration. Although McGinty disliked Boogie, that wasn't enough of a reason to make him a murderer, otherwise, half the teenage boys in the town would probably have had their throats slit. It all had to do with Margery.

Margery McGinty was the superintendent's wife. She had a beaky nose and eyes like shrivelled sultanas in a doughy face. Her thin lips were used to pursing, and when they weren't pursed she was shouting in that shrill voice of hers. She was the kind of woman who was born so plain, and looked so unfortunate, that nobody ever took any notice of her, or bothered to be kind. Even if she was born with a sweet soul, it had been ground away by years of bitterness, and her temperament was now just as unattractive as her features. She wouldn't survive McGinty either.

It was a day in April, one of those Indian summer days, as though the weather hadn't got the memo that it should be cooling down by then. It was a dry sort of heat, and as Boogie trekked through the bush on his way to McGinty's hobby farm to pick through the scrap wood, the sun sucked on his skin like a child with a mango. He was thirsty as all hell. The pickings were pretty good. Boogie tossed aside some broken chairs and rusted corrugated iron to find a few planks of wood that weren't too rotted. They were the right length, and with a bit of sanding and some nails they would make a perfectly functional platform to drag a sleeping bag up to, and fall asleep with the sounds of the crashing waves floating to the top branches of the jacaranda tree. He had the wiry strength of a kid who was always swimming, running, surfing and wrestling about with the other town runamoks, and he could easily lift the planks and balance them on top of his head to make the trek home. Except he was thirsty. That was his mistake.

Boogie sauntered over to McGinty's house, tossing his black hair out of his eyes. He didn't feel like facing up to old Plum Face, but the kitchen window was open, revealing a linoleum floor, appliances that could do with replacing, and a blessed tap that Boogie could stick his head under and drink from without ever bothering to take out a glass. He was steadying his hands on the windowsill, and was just about to leap up, when he heard a shrill shout from the living room, followed by a crash. Boogie's eyes glinted wickedly, and he forgot his thirst as he ducked along the side of the house to spy on the domestic row going on through the living-room window.

This is what he saw. A smashed vase, the pieces scattered next to a wall that was dented from where the porcelain impacted. McGinty was crouched, picking up the pieces, while Margery stood at the other side of the room, next to a coffee table that looked as though it once was the resting place of the now utterly broken vase. Her face was a blotchy red, and her voice could be heard from through the thick windowpane.

‘I don't give a damn about the vase, you worthless piece of shit!' she shrilled.

‘Quit it, Margery.'

McGinty's voice was edged in malice as he continued to pick up the broken porcelain.

‘I won't quit it. You'll listen to me if I have to rip that ear off your ugly purple face!'

McGinty's eyes were bulging now, especially the one that peered imposingly through his birthmark.

‘I said, quit it.'

Margery waddled over to him with the heavy footsteps of a woman who looked like someone had taken her thumb between their lips and blown her up like a balloon. She started pounding at his ears, at his birthmark. He stood, flinging the pieces of shattered vase from his hand, and pushed her backwards. Her mouth swung open in shock.

‘You worthless piece of shit!' she repeated, and she charged at him, with all the force of her obese frame, clawing at his skin. McGinty gripped her shoulders, tipping them both onto the couch with a thud. She continued to hit at him.

‘You make me sick. My parents told me not to marry you, and it's not like you'd ever find anyone else with that face of yours. I should have listened to them, every day I wish I'd . . .'

Margery stopped then. Or rather, McGinty stopped her. He gripped his stubby fingers around her neck.

‘I told you to shut up!' he roared.

Margery kept hitting him.

She was hitting him, and hitting him.

Until she wasn't.

Boogie held his breath.

McGinty released his grip, his face ashen. He stared at his fingers, as though they were strangers and weren't attached to him at all, then he shook his wife.

She didn't move.

He wrestled his arms around her bulky frame and shook her. Her head lolled lifelessly back, all floppy, like dough before you bake it. He banged his head against the cane frame of the couch in a primal sort of gesture, and then shook Margery again so violently she fell off the couch and lay face down on the floor, heavy and still.

Dead.

Boogie's heart was thumping so fast he was sure McGinty could hear it.

Still ducking low, Boogie walked backwards towards the junk pile, eyes fixed towards the window, but nobody returned his stare. Not looking where he was going, he kicked a piece of corrugated iron.

It clanged.

The sound of it echoed through the silence of the bush.

Boogie's heart jumped right up into his mouth, and he felt like he could taste it. Springing like a cat, he jumped behind a pile of old wood and peeked through a small gap, just large enough to press his eye against it. McGinty's head peered through the living-room window, all jittery and wild-eyed. Boogie stayed hidden. After a few minutes McGinty sprang from his spot at the window and headed in the direction of the front door. With all the ease of a kid who's used to running, Boogie sprinted. He sprinted past the clearing and into the bush, and with a few swings he climbed high up the branches of a nearby tree. From this vantage point he could see McGinty bluster out the front door and stand, looking around for a moment, ear cocked, before he slowly stalked his way towards the scrap pile. In jagged movements he pulled the pieces of wood off each other. He circled the pile, picking at old pesticide barrels and tractor wheels.

Nothing.

After a good fifteen minutes, when the pile was utterly scattered, McGinty stood there, chest heaving, sweat gleaming off the bald patch at the top of his head and trickling down his birthmark, so it looked like grape juice had been thrown onto his face. He scanned the trees with a furious intensity, but he never bothered to look up. He just stared at the brush with his eyes squinted for another few minutes, before he slowly turned on his heels and walked back inside.

Boogie stayed up that tree for an hour. He'd had practice staying up trees, and slowly, once he was certain that McGinty wasn't coming back out, he swung down and then made his way through the track in that quick, quiet, panther-like way of moving he'd cultivated over the years.

That should have been the end of it.

The town was filled with whispers that Margery had had a heart attack. This is what the papers said in her obituary. McGinty played the part of the grieving widower, and Boogie held his tongue and let the people talk in sad, hushed voices, and bring casseroles over to McGinty's house. Weeks passed, and Boogie's life went back to normal. He continued to swim out past the bombies, kiss girls, and skip school whenever he felt like it. He continued to climb to the highest branches of the jacaranda tree, and the longing to make a perch up there grew stronger and stronger. That was his last mistake.

He was fourteen and six months when he decided to brave McGinty's scrap pile again, swelled with the knowledge that McGinty hadn't seen him. Except he had seen him. In the moment he jumped behind the mound of old wood, McGinty had seen his black, tousled hair and lithe frame, and McGinty had had enough encounters with Boogie to know that boy anywhere.

It was dusk. Boogie had spent the afternoon surfing, and he still had salt crystals dried stiff on his skin. He trod carefully through the clearing, and he noticed the wood he wanted, buried deep beneath the other scraps. Leaning low, he wriggled the planks to force them out. He hunched down, and had almost set the first one loose when he felt it.

It was like a punch, but sharper.

Much sharper.

Right between his shoulderblades, which were jutted outwards as he leant over the wood.

McGinty had stabbed him.

Boogie didn't die straight away. When McGinty wrenched the knife from his back, Boogie spun around to spit in his attacker's face. He'd never forget that face. It was wild, behind the purple smear. He would never forget McGinty's expression as he raised the knife to slit Boogie's throat.

To kill him.

It was unlike the look he wore when he strangled Margery.

There was a hint of triumph in his eyes.

A flash of primal violence.

McGinty liked it.