The High Places: Stories

Unnecessary Gifts

James is being a sea lily.

‘Look, Dad,’ he says, ‘I’m being a sea lily.’

Unhurried, and with a submarine expression, he waves his small arms backward and forward and drifts around the room.

‘What would you call this kind of movement?’ he asks, waving and drifting.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘How about “undulating”?’

He takes this on board. ‘I’m a sea lily undulating above the ocean floor. I look like a plant, but actually I’m an animal.’

‘You look like an animal to me,’ I say.

‘And when I die, I’ll turn into limestone.’

He’s on the couch now, on tiptoes, and the way his arms wave into the room it’s truly as if they’re long green stalks. Somehow I have produced a child who is capable of pulsing with a creepy aquatic languor.

‘I didn’t know small boys turned into limestone.’

‘I may look like a plant, but actually I’m an ANIMAL. I swim around the ocean with my ROOTS.’

James launches himself from the couch. He spends a fraction of an airborne second transfixed by the compact floating disguised life of the sea lily before landing among the carpet fluff — one arm over his face, one foot through the plywood of the china cabinet door. For this he is sent out to find his older brother. He knows he will be able to find Greg at the Wolfsons’, the Barters’, or possibly at the Carrs’, although Blake Carr has fallen from neighbourhood grace owing to the recent demise of his trampoline.

‘God,’ says Glenda, coming in damp from the kitchen as usual (the kitchen always unaccountably damp, and Glenda always arriving thirty seconds after an accident). ‘Your mother will love this. She hates that cabinet.’

Glenda’s bringing me a gin and tonic. Alcohol plays no part in this story; it’s just that taking the glass from her requires me to lean forward in my chair, and this means I see James out on the street on his one true possession, a bicycle with silver pedals, heading in the direction of the Wolfsons’. This is the last moment I can account for him with any authority for some time, and what I want to do now is re-create those hours after James left the house, a sea lily disguised as a small boy. I want to know what those hours were like for him. It’s not easy. There’s the police report, the security tapes, and Tony’s brother’s statement. These things help. But the difficulty lies in the task of remembering childhood, that busy time of waiting.

Glenda’s back is to the window. She doesn’t see him.

* * *

Glenda gave birth to Greg and then James with the flustered enthusiasm with which she approaches most activities. For some time afterward it was very easy to keep track of their movements. My parents supplied us with state-of-the-art devices intended to attach children to other things: strapped across our chests, immobile in the back seat of the car, bouncing in small buggies that fastened to Glenda’s bicycle. Initially, we functioned as tour guides to their lives, arranging for them to be moved from place to place. It didn’t last. First Greg, then James, acquired additional life. Their tiny bodies seemed designed for the express purpose of running quickly and cannily through department stores. Glenda showed the strain, so my mother took her to a day spa to be smothered in cool creams that smelled of supermarkets.

‘Philip,’ my mother said when they returned from the spa, ‘I’m worried about Glenda. I hope you’re looking after her. She seems subdued.’

Glenda, uncharacteristically immobile with aromatherapy, lay across the couch waiting for my mother to leave as the boys stacked brightly coloured plastic blocks around her feet.

It’s not that Glenda doesn’t get on with my parents. It would be difficult not to get on with them. They’re tanned, wear crease-free clothing, and play sociable tennis. They love Glenda and the boys with the kind of generosity that means they’ll come by for an impromptu visit and, if we’re out, wait in their car until we get home. Glenda will sigh as we pull into the driveway — a small sigh that I can hear but the boys can’t.

‘We were just passing,’ my mother will call, extracting herself from the hot car with the plucky expression of a dehydrated dog. My father’s arms will be full of bread rolls and newspaper cuttings and a book Glenda mentioned she liked the sound of a week ago. Our house feels smaller when they’re in it, more untidy.

My mother has expressed her concern at our practice of allowing the boys out to play unsupervised in the neighbourhood. She once discussed it with me in the garden, where only the magpies and I could hear her.

‘It was fine when you were young,’ she said, with her thin, tanned voice. ‘But things aren’t the same these days.’

‘They never go more than three blocks away,’ I told her. ‘And we have Neighbourhood Watch.’

‘You know I don’t often comment on your parenting,’ she said, looking around the garden, from fence to fence, window to window, as if scouting for disguised dangers about which I know nothing.

The boys’ social life may be confined to two or three streets but it’s still complex, fluid, and frequently involves Glenda and me in unexpected situations. James, then, on this hot afternoon, experiencing the injustice of being barred from home, the humid repetitive earthbound feeling of not occupying the ocean floor: James goes in search of his brother on his silver-pedalled bicycle. As soon as he received this bicycle from his grandparents — for no reason, I might add, it just arrived one day — James customised it with stickers of half-men, half-monsters. Glenda’s reaction to the stickers was: ‘Your grandfather gave you that bike and he isn’t going to like these.’ I couldn’t tell you the exact moment Glenda began living as if my parents were watching her every move through secret cameras embedded in unnecessary gifts.

‘This one is especially gruesome,’ I said, inspecting a particular sticker. It featured something green which appeared muscular despite its delicate tentacles.

‘I know,’ said James, conspiratorial. ‘He doesn’t eat. He photosynthesises.’

This is the bike James rides away on, basically homeless. That’s how his head seems — small and homeless. I look at the china cabinet, then at Glenda.

‘You can take the boys to the hardware store tomorrow,’ she says. ‘They love it there.’

That’s true. Even Greg never fails to be impressed by the number of small shiny things in the world.

* * *

This is what I think happened. James found his brother one street away at the Wolfsons’, and Greg was unhappy to see him. The accumulating sorrow — evicted from home and now unwelcomed by a brother. I know the Wolfsons’ yard well because I’ve negotiated it when tipsy. It’s all paving, swimming pool, and plants in pots. Bev Wolfson holds parties lit by candles and the moist glow of this obstacle-course greenery. Glenda and I wonder if their plants are fake because we’re jealous of their swimming pool, despite the temporary feel of its above-ground installation.

‘Imagine having a swimming pool like that,’ says Glenda. ‘I’d spend all day in it, naked.’

My answer to this is that I would reapply her sun cream.

This is the world of patio foliage and older boys that James has entered, the flimsy pool full of children, water coming over the side like surf. Greg damp but dressed and ready to leave, the brief argument, James sullen and imploring, Bev Wolfson shimmying around with towels and Diet Coke and painted toenails. Greg is unimpressed at James’s arrival because he has plans to meet his friend Tony, whose older brother is a shopping- centre security guard. When were these plans made? Some interior minute we couldn’t monitor. Greg makes phone calls when we least expect it, curling his entire body around the phone, giving and taking quick instructions and behaving afterward as if nothing has happened. He sends emails from my computer. Every now and then I surprise him at my desk, looking like a small efficient workday version of me. At any given moment he could be making arrangements to meet up with a security guard one Friday when we are tired and lax and stunned by the end of the week.

A street away, safely at the Wolfsons’, Greg is shrugging his shoulders and agreeing to let James come along to an empty shopping centre. There are times when he shrugs that way at me too, slouchy and resigned. It’s like I’m literally on his back. Then he shrugs and I’m off.

The bicycle stays at the Wolfsons’ because Tony’s security- guard brother has a car. Bev Wolfson will find the bike later, after the rainstorm, stickers wet and peeling, collapsed among the pot plants in a blur of mosquitoes. The police report doesn’t give the colour of Tony’s brother’s car; let’s say it’s blue. My first car was blue — almost navy. It shook on the highways and leaked in every kind of weather. My parents wanted to buy me a new one, but I insisted on paying for my own. Glenda filled it with apple cores and covered the door of the glove compartment with the fruit’s stickers. Tony’s brother’s car is only minimally insured because the sound system is worth more than the car itself. This is the kind of information you can pick up about a person. Glenda’s sister works in an insurance call centre and we had her check him out. She typed his name into the system with those long pearly artificial nails that make her do everything with the last-minute flicks of a flamenco dancer. Tony’s brother drives his car to work, although he could walk; the shopping centre is only three blocks from his house, through the roundabout at Hughes Road and across the car park. It’s true these places aren’t designed for pedestrians. Who knows what might happen to security guards, leaving shopping centres alone on foot at dawn.

Tony sits up front and our boys climb into the back. They fasten their seat belts without being asked, just as they always do. Tony’s brother looks over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. He’s good-looking, sports promising jowls, grooms a bit of stubble, and wears a zip-up jacket.

He asks, ‘How old is this kid, anyway?’

‘Eight,’ says Greg.

At the same time as James says, ‘I’m eight.’

* * *

The boys have been to this shopping centre hundreds of times, but not when it’s empty and not behind the scenes. They’ll enjoy this, James because he likes knowing how things work, Greg because he likes knowing things other people don’t. Tony’s brother takes the boys into a room and says, ‘This is my office.’ James and Greg both know it isn’t exactly an office. They’ve visited me at work. But there are more interesting things to touch here: switches, telephones, television screens. James finds a map of the shopping centre and walks his fingers around it. He’s particularly good with maps. He brings them home from school and sits at the kitchen table to colour them in. This, I think, is what our table was made for. James enjoys school in the same way that Greg enjoys ball sports. This week he has learned about unusual underwater animals. Dense, dark-water fish with built-in light globes. Poisonous rockpool octopi. Sea lilies.

What if we’d had two girls? Bev Wolfson has two girls, twins just a little older than Greg. Last time I saw them, they were in the kitchen sharing headphones, each with a pod in one ear, jumping up and down in sync. Glenda would like a girl — it’s something she’d like, but doesn’t feel she needs.

‘You know what,’ she’s said more than once, ‘one day your mother will walk in here and give me one, gift-wrapped.’

‘All right, boys,’ says Tony’s brother. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

Now that they’re in the shopping centre it doesn’t matter what time of day it is. The lights are dimmed and for hours it will be evening. The place looks as if it’s just been evacuated after a disaster warning. James is thinking about the time. I know he thinks about it because it’s often a topic of conversation for him.

‘In a minute,’ he’ll say while I’m combing my hair or brushing my teeth, ‘Mum’s going to come in here and tell you we’re late.’

And she does.

Greg is walking up front with Tony’s brother. Tony’s on the loose, stopping and starting, running ahead, falling behind. It’s like he’s playing tennis with himself. He’s one of those kids. He gets nosebleeds, but on him they look macho: blood on his lip, making fists. He’s chunky and quick, checking things out. He’ll exchange a few words with James.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘That huge Christmas tree is hollow.’

They’re in the central court of the mall now, and it’s set up for Christmas. There’s a plush red-and-gold Santa’s throne, looking vaguely degenerate on a stage. There’s tinsel and holly, fake snow, and a bright green three-storey Christmas tree — fifteen metres of plastic pine. I wonder how they assemble those enormous trees, how many pieces there are to them, and where they live for the months they aren’t required. James is wondering this too as he inspects the tree, the globes of red and gold floating in it, the fact of its hidden cavity. His gaze follows it up and up among the shopping-centre levels that are strung together with escalators and boughs of synthetic holly and the cameras whose video screens Tony’s brother is supposed to keep an eye on. And being James he is struck by the tree’s undersea immensity in the half-light. The end of the sun comes through the skylight above them, and it’s like looking up from the other side of water.

Greg is on Santa’s throne. Here comes his voice — girlish and convincing. He’s saying something like ‘I am the lord of all I survey, of half-price CDs and ladies’ underwear and small white fences designed for keeping kids in line while they wait to see Santa.’ Greg is a keen observer of concrete objects and we have high hopes for his sense of irony.

‘James,’ he says. ‘Get up here.’

‘Hey,’ says Tony. ‘Why are all the escalators blocked off? They’re stopped anyway.’

This is when Glenda looks out the window and says, ‘Where are those boys?’

* * *

What’s Tony’s brother doing now? What do security guards do in empty shopping centres? Here are some possibilities: They stroll around with torches, wearing caps and pretending to be burglars. They window-shop. They pluck tiny spiders out of fake foliage. I’ve heard that celebrities sometimes come to malls after hours and things are kept open for them. Princess Diana did, sometime in the eighties, on one of her visits. She strolled and chatted and did some shopping. I’ve also heard that in the eighties, shop mannequins were modelled on her features. It must have been quite a life, shopping amongst yourself in an empty store at night.

Could be Tony’s brother is noticing a lot of things at once. The rain that’s started up — brief, sweaty summer rain, with the sky yellow and no clouds that you’d noticed. Tony fooling with the escalator barriers, trying to swing them back or push them aside. James heading toward his brother on the throne. Something about James is that he’s always neat — no laces undone, nothing creased, never sloppy, like a miniature version of my father. Glenda always says ‘His hair falls in a natural part’ with a kind of subdued wonder, because hers doesn’t. Could be that Tony’s brother is sitting on the raised red stage smoking a cigarette and knowing no one will stop him. He must bring girls here.

‘So, James,’ says Greg, kicking affectionately at his brother, ‘what do you want for Christmas?’

‘A new china cabinet.’

Greg laughs. He has a spooky laugh, man-sized, though he’s not a man. James’s face gets the look it does when he’s made Greg laugh: happy and speculative. There’s always the risk that Greg will stop.

‘Get up here,’ Greg says. ‘I’m Santa.’

James sits on Greg’s knee.

‘Hey,’ calls Tony, halfway up the escalator, ‘this tree’s so big you could sit in it.’

* * *

Glenda makes a call to Bev Wolfson. The rain stops while she dials. Bev says, ‘Glenda! Come for a drink. The boys are probably in the yard. They’ll be among the hordes. Why don’t you come over? Bring Phil.’

Bev’s talking so loud I can hear her. I shake my head at Glenda and Glenda shakes her head into the phone.

‘Do you mind checking, just quickly?’ Glenda asks.

* * *

Where’s Tony’s brother at this moment? Checking out a noise in a loading bay? He may have a walkie-talkie somewhere in his zip-up jacket. The smoke from his cigarette is going up up up.

‘What about you?’ says James. ‘What do you want for Christmas?’

‘I’ve got a list,’ Greg answers. ‘I’ve sent it already.’

This concerns James. He knows, in a solemn and informed way, that Santa Claus isn’t real. He assumes Greg knows this too, but now he isn’t sure. He looks up to the second-floor mezzanine, where a diminished Tony is circling the tree like a compact angel, inspecting it from all directions.

‘Who’d you send your list to?’ James asks.

‘To Grandma and Pop. Who else? They give the best stuff.’

James knows this — we all know this. Even Glenda has buckled under the pressure.

‘Mum and Dad give good stuff,’ says James.

Greg says, ‘Mmm.’ Then he says, ‘It’s all educational.’

Maybe Tony’s brother is right there, thinking about Christmas, the nuts and candles and bad wine, the old people who knew you when they were young. He leans against the stage, removes his jacket, places his walkie-talkie beside him. Tony has finally found himself the perfect position: a bench, the balcony rail, a small step into the tree. He yells down to them, his voice echoing and enormous.

‘I could get into it from here,’ he says. ‘Think it’s stable?’

* * *

Bev hurries in from the yard — imagine her agile steps among the plants.

‘The boys aren’t here,’ she says, and she reports James’s bike. There’s a small moment when you begin to wonder, and in the middle of it, you remain calm.

Glenda finds more phone numbers — the Barters’, the Carrs’. I say I’ll take a drive.

* * *

‘It’s not all educational,’ says James. But he’s scanning through a mental list of every gift we’ve ever given him, and it’s true that there’s always an agenda: Keep quiet! Learn to read! Hand-eye coordination! Ancient cultures!

By now Tony is in the tree. Who but a kid like Tony would think to climb into that tree? He just stepped right into the middle of it — I’ve seen him on the CCTV tape, quiet and at a distance. Tony slightly fuzzy in black and white, stepping into the tree like a chunky Chaplin, slapstick and crazy. He’s got nineteen seconds and he lets out what I’d call a whoop. Some kind of sound that has to do with height and secrecy and finding things out; with disobedience, with being in space — the new view, the absurdity of it. He pockets a bauble, like a thief or a bird, and he’s both, making a place in the tree, rearranging it, shifting things round up there. Tony’s got it — he’s riding that tree, he’s found his footing. What a feeling to be in the middle of all that, a kid like Tony looking around, looking down.

The tree shakes a little, unhappy, like something in a fairy tale waking up.

* * *

I’m driving slowly with my window down, watching pedestrians and making people uncomfortable. Everyone’s out after the rain, walking on the wet grass, following dogs, peering into flower beds. The birds are crazy with the late sun. The houses are transparent and available, curtains open for early Christmas trees, back doors visible through front doors, and pieces of smoke-filled garden. In each house, someone is on the phone. You can hear their phone voices in the street, and it’s as if Glenda has called every one of them, all at the same time. There are small boys kicking soccer balls across yellow front lawns. There are boys climbing trees to retrieve lost objects, and boys at windows pressing their open mouths against cool glass. I wonder when this place got to be so wholesomely full of childhood. None of the boys look like James or Greg, not even for a hopeful moment.

I go through the Hughes Road roundabout twice. The shopping centre rises out of exit ramps and bright banners and the kind of low bushes that can withstand drought and exhaust fumes. There are barriers over all the entrances. In my head, I compose a list of the things I need to buy there tomorrow: a new belt, bulk laundry liquid, stamps. I’ll take the boys for a milkshake before we go to the hardware store. I keep floating the car through our avenues and drives and boulevards and crescents until the streetlights turn on. They say: Nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about.

So does Tony. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

Then the tree comes down.

* * *

It takes forty seconds, at least, for the tree to fall, and for Tony to fall with it, and for the shaking of the knotted branches to subside. The tree settles against the stage and the tiled floor and the columns wrapped with holly leaves — once this settling has taken place, the tree has fallen. It has fallen in two pieces but the star that sat on top of it is hanging in midair, held by an invisible cord, three floors up and circling like a disco ball. There are gold-coloured globes rolling across the floor, speeding down the slope that accelerates shopping trolleys toward the car park. The tinsel and the fake pine needles rustle in a peculiar way, windblown and floor-stunned. The tree is so fake it smells like Christmas, like plastic ribbon and shopping bags and wrapping foil. If you look closely at the branches you can see the way the short brown fronds have been woven into long green ones to replicate the look of a real pine tree just past its perfectly green prime. You can see the way plastic pine cones grow out of the branches like natural accidents.

The tree covers the children. Viewed from above, with the security camera’s eyes, they’re completely hidden.

Here’s Tony’s brother. He’s been hired for a reason: he’s unafraid, highly trained, possibly armed. He knows first aid, and I mean really knows it. He’s assisted more than one old-aged pensioner overwhelmed by the size of the shopping centre. Apparently, this is how he spends his day shifts: crouching next to old men as they lie with their heads on his folded zip-up jacket, waiting for their children to arrive. This is the kind of information you can pick up about a person.

Here’s Tony’s brother finding Tony in the branches. Tony isn’t moving.

Where are Tony’s parents at this moment? Their names are Aldo and Lara. We know them in the abbreviated way that comes of having children in the same year at school. Tony and Greg haven’t been friends for long, so we haven’t yet memorised the angle at which you must back out of their driveway or the smells that emanate from their house just before dinner. Maybe they’re at the supermarket buying steak or oranges. Maybe they’re taking advantage of Tony’s absence and having sex; maybe they’re too tired for sex. Maybe Lara is showering while Aldo walks the dog. Whatever they’re doing, they’re intact.

But Tony, at this moment, isn’t moving. He’s managed, somehow, to keep his grip on the tree’s thick trunk, but his hands are held there by twisted wires and his back against another branch is bent too far. His brother knows not to move him. He’s trained for this, or a version of this. But Tony is his brother.

Tony is not my son.

Tony’s brother calls out to our boys, still sitting on Santa’s throne. The tree has fallen just shy of them, on their right side. Its wide branches form a glade over their heads, and in this forested darkness the boys sit quietly, unsure of how to answer. Tony’s brother has forgotten their names — he calls, ‘Kids! Kids!’ and eventually they call back, ‘Yes?’

James, eight. Greg, eleven.

In a testament to his luck and ball skills, Greg has managed to catch a flying red bauble the size of his brother’s head. James has a lapful of PVC pine needles, and these make scratch marks on his knees. The throne, bolted to the stage, has held back other branches. Thinking of this, the boys in their felled forest, I wonder, Really? Can this be all?

Our boys can see Tony through a tunnel of green, and they see Tony’s brother climbing over him, in the tree.

‘You boys all right?’ says Tony’s brother. He’s dialling emergency.

Greg says, ‘Yeah.’ The boys are pushing now through the branches, which bend away with ease and then spring back. Greg jumps down from the stage and turns to help James do the same. It looks like they’re emerging from the carcass of a monster.

‘You know the way back to my office?’ asks Tony’s brother.

Greg doesn’t.

‘I know your office,’ says James. Then he runs. I can see him running, arms moving backward and forward, good at reading maps, knowing how to find an office.

And Greg follows him, wondering how he knows.

* * *

I know what happens next; there’s no need to speculate. I’m down at the train station when Greg calls. I’ve parked the car and am standing on the bridge across the tracks, looking at the platform and checking the illuminated tops of heads. A train comes as we speak, and it doesn’t stop or even slow, but races through.

‘I’m coming,’ I say. And I go — I drive to the shopping centre, to the loading bay, and there among the lights of the emergency vehicles I see our boys. I haven’t called Glenda yet. I will, when I’ve seen them. I don’t want her to have to wait for bits of news, but to hear it all at once. And I don’t want to go home to her without them. This is how I explain it, later. But the truth is that I don’t think of her, not really, until I see them sitting there on a pile of flattened cardboard. Their poses are identical: hands in fists and placed on knees, and they look up and out beyond themselves, as if waiting for a photo to be taken. They are fine, they are whole, and I wonder for the first time, Really? Can this be all?

It’s dark when we turn into our street. My parents’ car is in the drive, and my father helps my mother out of it. I see the way he holds her elbow as she bends and straightens. Glenda must have called and asked them to come; I know this because they have no gifts, and because she’s waiting there on the lit front steps. They go to her and my mother holds her, my father puts one hand up on her head. There is a day in the future when one of them will fall and find it difficult to recover, when one of them will receive a diagnosis or become forgetful or weak. I wonder which of them will be the first.