‘I’m not going to end up an angry, lonely old man, though, Birds.’ I glanced over. ‘So you don’t have to worry.’
‘Oh?’ she said. ‘You’re not?’
‘No. I just decided. When you said those words. I’m not going to be that. I’m going to get you back, and I’m not going to lose you again.’
‘So what are you going to do, then?’ she asked. She sounded unconvinced. And that hurt so badly I could hardly breathe for a minute.
‘I’m going to learn,’ I said. ‘And I’m going to change.’
She made a little sound. I was too tired and scared to try to figure out if it was an interested, disbelieving or relieved sound. My mind drifted away, led by the call of the creatures out there and the whispering of the nearby river.
EVAN
Iturned right at one of the vast nurseries lining the main road, a lot ribbed with river stone walkways, long steel tables of tube stock in both natives and foreign species. Blood-tipped photinia, wet with dew, moved in the night breeze. The road I took wound through slabs of bush that thinned and became farmland, and all the while as I drove my stomach sank further and further, muscle-memory dread from a thousand different awful journeys down this very path. To perform the obligatory Christmas visit, with its traditional drunken afternoon tantrum. Or to bring a girlfriend for my father’s inspection, with the ride home inevitably spent comforting her as she cried in horror at something Arthur had done or said. The dirt road to the farm was not marked by a milk-urn letterbox or a cute sign with the property’s name but with a pile of junk and lumber and cardboard dark and limp from recent rains. The field leading to the house was a green sea of long grass tossed with rusted car body islands. Broken-down whitegoods, an aviary where Dad had raised and killed ducks for a while before the stink and the upkeep and the rats took the fun away.
I parked where I’d been parking since I got free of the family hellscape at seventeen, and got out. The bullet smashed into the pillar of the sagging car port a foot to the left of my face, showering me with rotting wood, before I even heard the gunshot. I hit the deck as I was trained to do, felt the wet gravel soak my shirt and jeans immediately. Dad was on the verandah, lowering the rifleand laughing. When the panic released its chokehold on my trachea and I was able to breathe and figure out what had just happened, I got to my feet.
‘Fucking pussy.’
‘JesusChrist!’ I wiped mud from my belly with my equally muddy hands. ‘Dad, are you out of your mind?’
‘This rifle is off.’ Arthur slid the bolt forward, popped the casing out of the chamber. ‘I was aiming much closer to your head. What? Oh, give it a rest, will you? It’s only fun and games. I thought I’d get the mood going. Bit of atmosphere, before you come in and tell me all about the shootout. That’s what you’re here to do, isn’t it?’
The shivers were coming in waves. Clouds at the corners of my vision. Adrenaline dumps. I walked up the stairs to where the old man was standing in the pre-morning gloom. ‘Put the fucking gun down. Now.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Better get inside. Before the jackass neighbours join you in a chorus of hysteria. Make us coffee, will you?’
Nothing major had changed since the last time I had visited maybe a year earlier. There were pieces of furniture in the main room of the cottage that had been around when I was conceived: a mid-century floor lamp, once a jaunty orange, tobacco-stained now to a beer-bottle brown. A buffet cabinet stuffed with figurines that had been my mother’s, the cherub-cheeked girls and boys swimming so deep in dust only their little sticky heads were visible. Tar was everywhere, coating the timber veneer walls, adhering to the light fixtures in the ceiling, making rivulet patterns on the walls of the kitchen where the steam periodically loosened it. I washed the mud off my hands and made the coffee, because doing what I was told here without question was as natural as breathing. The kettle on the stove gave a loud and pained squeal like a thing being strangled. The instant coffee granules leapt off the spoon as my hand shook. I reminded myself that this was far from the first time my father had fired a gun at me.
Arthur took the leather recliner, so I sat on the end of the floral couch. The fabric was glossy in parts with filth. I tried to rinse the tobacco taste off my tongue with the coffee. It didn’t work. When Ididn’t start speaking immediately, Arthur gave me a sharp, impatient shrug.
‘Will you get on with it?’
‘I will, I will,’ I said, my mind racing, fifty steps ahead, wary of the rifle still leaning against the wall beside Dad’s chair and the whisky in the greasy glass on the fold-out table beside him. ‘I’m … I came here to talk to you about the shootout, like I said on the phone. But I’m also on a bit of a side mission. Chris is into this, ah, ancestry stuff. I don’t know if he told you, but his friends got him a genealogy kit for his birthday.’
‘Weird, all of that.’ Arthur shook his head, looked out the grimy windows towards the yard where the sun was trying to rise. ‘It’s your artist wife that gives him this kooky side that he’s got. You know that, don’t you?’
‘He wants some old photos. I know you have a box lying around somewhere.’
Dad made a throaty sound, thrust his arm towards the back room. I started telling him, yelling over my shoulder, about the shootout. The box I was looking for was at the bottom of a huge pile of junk: folded camp tents, some half-sanded dining room chairs, boxes of machinery parts dripping grease and oil. I brought the box out to the living room, still carrying on with the story. The dread, the sense of foreboding, was creeping up my throat like bile.
There were about a hundred photographs in the box. Old Polaroids of my mother and father, people I didn’t recognise; friends of theirs, back when they had friends. The farm was newer and less chaotic in the pictures, the grass mown and the buildings cleanly painted, the water tank freshly installed. My mother’s smile began disappearing and her eyes hollowed out, and then she was carrying a roly-poly, frowny-faced baby around with her in the images. I was desperately avoiding looking at Mum, and Dad, and my brother, and the pictures of my tiny self that then began to appear: playing with a kitten on someone’s verandah, sitting in the grass sucking my thumb. It was the raw sadness of it all, but also a diverted focus. I wasn’t looking at the people. I was looking at the cars.
‘Women’s underwear?’ Dad snorted from somewhere across the room. ‘What was he doing with it all? Why was there so much of it?’
I flipped through the photographs faster and faster, specifically searching for shots of the farm. The yard cars. Barely listening to my father. ‘Dunno.’
‘I arrested a guy like that when I was posted in Campbelltown.’ Dad’s voice was a muffled buzzing in my ears. ‘Early days. Maybe one year in. Still a constable. He’d steal the underwear, take it home, do things with it. Then he’d mail it back to them. What was his name? It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
The photo was the second from the last in the stack. It was of my father sitting, lighting a cigarette, on the edge of the verandah, his cheeks sunken in as he sucked at the paper tube. He looked like Russell. Broad. Muscular. Healthy. Over his shoulder, parked by the first barn in the row, sat the back half of a mustard yellow Ford Capri with a black racing stripe.
A cold rush fell over every inch of my skin. It was like being plunged into a winter lake.
‘Carlton?’
‘Huh?’
‘Carlton. I think the guy’s name was Carlton.’
