I was standing on the footpath outside my house
at twenty to six in the morning. Steve – the boss of the landscaping company I
had recently quit university and moved to Watsonia to work for – was late. A
few wattlebirds were trilling and the sky was so clear and white that it looked
to have had a curtain of muslin thrown over it, the sort scattered around our
bedroom (Sarah bought muslin at op shops to make baby clothes with). The lemon
and apricot saplings in our front yard, which must’ve been planted by the
previous tenants, had begun to flower. I was disheartened to see that there
were weeds in the saplings’ planter boxes and stinging nettles all over the
rest of the garden, and so I resolved to do some upkeep that Sunday. I was
feeling poetic and noticed within myself that combination of power and
impotence that came with waiting for things while being half asleep. It was
nice. You could loll your body around like a slinky while your legs stayed anchored
to the spot, every movement, every perception so unfocused and meaningless. You
didn’t give two shits whether the thing it was that you were waiting for ever
came or not.
My mouth still felt coated by the filmy residue
of Sarah’s cornmint oil mouthwash, which I hated but had used in a rush instead
of doing my teeth. On my work clothes I could smell the shavings of the Mirbau
deck we had been building at a house on Zig-Zag Road the day before, and could
feel the shavings in my pockets and at the heels of my Blundstones. A couple of
cars went past and with them another ten or twenty minutes. The exhaust fumes
the cars put out hung in the cold air a long time. I was on the lookout for
either Steve’s work van – one of those turbo diesel Mercedes rigs that all the
rich young tradies like him got around in – or the Nissan Patrol, on springs as
jacked as a monster truck, that he took pig hunting on weekends. He was never
late picking me up because time was money; I was in no hurry to call him
because I didn’t need the money that much and I was feeling all right where I
was. Before too long, though, the sky had been uncurtained to its full sunlit
blue and I was awake enough to realise that something must’ve happened and that
neither the Mercedes nor the Patrol would be coming that day.
I went inside. The house still had the mood of
sleep; I could hear the fridge motor and the bedroom door was closed. Awake and
washed and fed as I already was, I felt that I was interrupting something, and
left again after having a drink of water. I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t
have a regular walking route – we weren’t dog people and I was usually buggered
after work – but headed downhill for a block and then cut through the biggest
park in the shire, called McKinley. Sarah and I had picnicked there on the
Sunday of our move, that is to say we had sat on a small embankment of grass
eating fish and chips. In the park I saw a few people out walking their dogs,
and a very skinny elderly bloke plodding along the path in clothes that seemed
too young for him and too brisk for the spring air. I saw that the footy oval
was glazed with dew and that the cricket pitch was fenced off and being readied
for competition. The smell of the wet, close-cropped grass sort of rushed at me
on a gust of wind, which I drank in and then gave back out as reluctantly as
possible. I did the same thing with the smell of wet tanbark. I saw that along
the path a lot of the bins were stuffed to the brim with beer bottles, but
didn’t venture as far as the dams at the other end of the park, which was where
most of the teenagers went to get pissed.
*
Pretty soon I had left McKinley; some time
after that I found myself on Lincoln.
It was deserted as usual. My pulse was eager, endorphins were
flowing, I was darting my eyes here and there like a child making its first
index of things, the weather was beautiful – but still the head of my anxiety reared,
fanned, struck. It was a shame that in adulthood I had managed to retain the
enthralling part of being in an empty place but not the enjoyable part. I
quickened my steps and looked ahead. I thought that I would pick a bunch of
flowers from the firewheel tree and then turn left onto Grant and then return
to my street via Madison Parade. I would be going to bed with Sarah within
fifteen minutes because that was what other young couples did, and it would
have been opportune, considering the steps I’d just taken to summarily turn my
life on its head, if we were a little bit more like other young couples. I was
interested in the way she smelt and how profusely she sweated, and in the way I
could fit my fingers in the folds between her hamstrings and her arse cheeks,
or cup her demure pussy in my hand from pubic pone to perineum as if I was its
custodian, and in the way she would put my hand around her throat and roll her
eyes back, and in the way I felt like more of a man when we were fucking than I
felt myself to be at any other time in my life. I was genuinely interested in
all of that. The problem was that I was even more interested in the reasons,
still unclear to me, why we were fucking less and less and why I was all right
about it.
When I got to the yard with the firewheel tree,
I realised that my footsteps and maybe my thoughts had been covering the sound
of a child, or possibly a woman, crying. It seemed to be coming from a few
houses up or down from my position – I couldn’t tell which way. It startled me
at first, before the thought of asking what was wrong, and of saying good
morning, and of breaking my Lincoln hoodoo, filled me with intent. I walked
apace towards Grant but then stopped because the noise was weakening, turned
around and walked back to the tree, where I stopped again. I listened more
carefully to the crying. It wasn’t the acute sort brought on by physical pain,
but more of a low, plaintive moan, a sob. It soon became clear to me that what
I was hearing were sobs, and that they weren’t actually coming from a house on
Lincoln but from someplace on little Wilson Court.
I rushed towards the turnoff. I could see all
the houses in the court fanned around the wheel of asphalt, and close to a
dozen coloured tennis balls stuck in a mat of leaves that was blocking a drain.
A set of metal wickets lay on the nature strip. One of the houses had quite a
high box hedge around its front and sides and a wrought iron gate that was shut,
and I was sure that whoever was making the noise was in there, in that compound.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to see in and was frustrated – almost distraught,
as I remember – until I noticed a section of hedge in the bottom right-hand
corner that was browning and patchy. It was in the largest space between the
foliage that I positioned my head, and saw a boy.
He was squatting on his front porch, wearing a
facial expression of such awful intensity that it made me grit my teeth and brace
my mouth with my hands. His cheeks were bright red and wet with tears, his hair
was matted to his forehead in dark shards. I didn’t know whether to laugh or
cry or throw up at what he was doing, or at the sounds he was making while
doing it, because the hopelessness it all signified seemed to be almost
calculated, numb, as if this person of less than ten years old had already seen
what the world had in store for him and found that it was nothing but despair.
Or maybe it was a sickness, one of the obsessive compulsions, a sick sickness. I
was numbed. At that moment I couldn’t specify what physical position I was in,
how agape my eyes were or my mouth was, because I don’t remember anything but
the senses which attended to that very unbelievable and
very fucked up spectacle. The reason I’ve written his front porch is that after he had pulled up his little green
corduroy pants and had spent a further few minutes with his head in his hands,
pulling at his fine blonde hair so hard that blood must have come up on the
scalp, the boy opened the door with great care and went back inside.
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