Fiction

The man asks questions the boy cannot answer. Sometimes, such as now, on the highway late at night returning home from Sydney, it’s like playing Tetris in one’s head. Dangerous against the oncoming traffic.

My heels and toes pressed into barnacled rocks, sharp grey edges poking into my yellow feet, as I waited for flickers of colour to pass through the rock pools. I squatted down, my breath heavy and slow. Cold salt water drooled down my soaked braid and along my sun-warmed back.

What is left behind in his room? his books? no, someone else’s books, nothing of importance, that only he could find use for, no clothes to speak of other than the coat, the boots on his feet, where have they come from? if there are more, where are they now? being preserved for prosperity?

I’ll tell you about Brit. She is medium build, tall, likes her hands but feels that her feet don’t live up to her height. For many years she wore her hair cropped short like a little helmet and dyed a glossy black.

It took a few days for Martha to notice the little silver hatchback. People were always leaving their cars or trailers in the dead-end beside the small reserve, sometimes for weeks, or dumping rubbish in the small hours of the morning, brazen under cover of darkness. Martha, who lived opposite, would wake to see a cheap broken cupboard or a pile of worn tyres or an old fan, say, lying like a silvery corpse in the grass.

Riding his pushy fast out of town, really upset after arguing with his best friend, Angus almost rides into a bloke with a shotgun. Watch where you’re going kid, says the large man. He’s wearing a jacket that isn’t suited to the burning hot day, a green peaked hat that looks crisp and shiny, a bandolier and shotgun broken open and crooked over his arm. I’m doing some shooting here, he says.

The Hawks are running hot, that’s three goals to one in the third quarter and the lead’s been cut to five. Ball goes up in the middle, Ripley taps down, Walker has it, quick handball to Jones, then over to Richards –
Smooth as butter, T. B.
Certainly is, Keggo – Richards back to Walker again and Walker sends a long, long raking punt into the empty paddock of the forward pocket, and now the footrace is on.

Occasionally he addresses his subjects in their towns or villages, smiling down at them from the stage. He is struck – during a speech at a well-manicured park – by a young child clutching a placard adorned with his official portrait. Their eyes meet and they chuckle at her clumsy attempt to clap while holding the sign – a dimple forming on just one of her perfect little cheeks. He is far, far away by the time the girl sees the sponge block the sunlight from her town.

It’s pizza Friday and Saoirse won’t be here. The neighbours are coming, so we need to double the batch of dough. Dad says there are four of us and three of them after Mum comes home. But actually not, because Saoirse won’t be here. There are seven pieces of dough. Dad says there will be one piece of dough left. “Such a waste,” he says, as the bin drawer rolls to a close. Suddenly Saoirse walks down the stairs in Mum’s red boots.

I had forgotten the name of the park, and its general location: neither of those had mattered much four years ago. There was the jolt of recognition when I pulled up, though, a scree of it over my next movements, unloading the boys from the back seat and their enormous cricket bags from the boot, walking them across the dew-damp oval where two coaches, barely more than adolescent themselves, stood waiting beside a pile of stumps. I stood back while their mother did the talking, wiped wet blades of grass out of my sandals.