Eyrie

~ ~ ~

So.

Here was this stain on the carpet, a wet patch big as a coffee table. He had no idea what it was or how it got there. But the sight of it put the wind right up him.

Until now Thursday hadn’t seemed quite so threatening.

It was a simple enough thing, waking late and at liberty to the peals of the town hall clock below. Eight, nine, maybe ten in the a.m. — Keely lacked the will to count. All that stern, Calvinist tolling gave him the yips. Even closed, his eyes felt wine-sapped. He hung on a while delaying the inevitable, wondering just how much grief lay in wait. The tiny flat was hot already. Thick and heady with the fags and showers and fry-ups and dish-suds of others. The smells of his good neighbours. Which is to say the stench of strangers, for his fellow tower-dwellers were alien to him in the most satisfying way imaginable, anonymous and reassuringly disconnected, mere thuds and throat-clearings behind bare brick walls, laugh tracks and pongs he needn’t put a face to. Least of all — and strangest of any — the madwoman next door. In all these months he’d never seen her. All he knew was that she invested a good portion of each day fending off the wiles of Satan. Which was honest work, granted, but hard on the nerves. Especially his. For the moment she was mercifully silent, asleep or maybe holding Beelzebub to a nil-all draw between breakfast and lunch, and God bless her for that. Also for keeping it down while the poisonous afterglow of all that Barossa shiraz had its wicked way with him.

The building twitched in the wind, gave off its perpetual clank and moan of pipes, letting out the odd muffled scream. Ah, Mirador, what a homely pile she was.

He peeled back the lids with a gospel gasp and levered himself upright and bipedal if not immediately ambulatory. Teetered a moment in the bad weather and shapeless mortification of something like waking consciousness. Which was heinous. Though in the scheme of things today’s discomfort was the least of his troubles. He should be glad of the distraction. This little malaise was only fleeting. Well, temporary. Just a bloody hangover. But for all that a pearler anyway, a real swine-choker. Even his feet hurt. And one leg was still intoxicated.

The real pain was yet to stir. A pillar of dust in the distance.

In the bathroom, before a scalding block of sunlight, he tilted at the mirror to see how far the eyes had retreated from the battlefield of his face. Above the wildman beard he was all gullies and flaky shale. Badlands. His wine-blackened teeth the ruins of a scorched-earth retreat.

He took himself hand over hand to the mouldy shower recess, stood under a cold and profligate cataract until all prospects of revival were exhausted.

The towel not remotely fresh. Pressed to his face, it brought to mind the honest, plain, mildewy scent of hippies. Not to be judgemental, comrades. But while definitely on the nose, it hadn’t quite graduated to the full gorgonzola. Life in it yet. If you were a man unmolested by romance. Having let yourself go to this extent.

He tied the rag about his softening waist, sloped into the livingroom with its floor-to-ceiling window, and beheld the unstinting clarity of the western frontier: the shining sea, iron rooftops, flagpoles, Norfolk Island pines. All gathering up their cruel, wince-making sheen in the dregs of morning.

Port of Fremantle, gateway to the booming state of Western Australia. Which was, you could say, like Texas. Only it was big. Not to mention thin-skinned. And rich beyond dreaming. The greatest ore deposit in the world. The nation’s quarry, China’s swaggering enabler. A philistine giant eager to pass off its good fortune as virtue, quick to explain its shortcomings as east-coast conspiracies, always at the point of seceding from the Federation. Leviathan with an irritable bowel.

The great beast’s shining teeth were visible in the east, through the kitchen window. Not that he was looking. But he could feel it at his back, the state capital looming out there on the plain in its sterile Windexed penumbra. It was only half an hour up the Swan River, as close and as incomprehensible as a sibling. For while Perth had bulldozed its past and buried its doubts in bluster, Fremantle nursed its grievances and scratched its arse.

And there she was at his feet. Good old Freo. Lying dazed and forsaken at the rivermouth, the addled wharfside slapper whose good bones showed through despite the ravages of age and bad living. She was low-rise but high-rent, defiant and deluded in equal measure, her Georgian warehouses, Victorian pubs, limestone cottages and lacy verandahs spared only by a century of political neglect. Hunkered in the desert wind, cowering beneath the austral sun.

By God, didn’t a man come over all prosy the morning after. These days he was pure bullshit and noise, just another flannel-tongued Jeremiah with neither mission nor prophecy, no tribe to claim him but family. His thoughts spluttered on, maudlin, grievous, fitful, lacking proper administration, useless for anything more than goading the pain the vicious light had set off already. And, Christ, it was beyond anything the booze could induce. Here it came, the smoke and thunder, the welling percussion in his skull. Like hoofbeats. Two riders approaching. And the wind set to howl.

In the kitchen he scrabbled for ammunition, pre-emptive relief. Any bottle or packet would do. Said the joker to the thief. Lucky dip and rattle them blind from the knife drawer. Gurn them down like bullets. And reload. Or at least stand to. Sprawled against the countertop. Sweating through his soapy freshness in a few seconds. Think of something else.

He reached for the radio. Checked himself. Many, many months now, and he still struggled to master the impulse, as if some ruined bit of him yearned for the ritual of the pre-dawn recce, scouting for bad news before the phone began pinging. Because there’d always be a whisper, a Cabinet leak, a buried press release about another government cave-in, fresh permission to drill, strip, fill or blast. The industrial momentum was feverish. Oil, gas, iron, gold, lead, bauxite and nickel — it was the boom of all booms, and in a decade it had taken hostage every institution from government to education. The media were bedazzled. There was pentecostal ecstasy in the air, and to resist it was heresy. But that had been his gig, to meet the stampede head-on every morning, beginning in the dark, trolling across the frequencies half asleep while the basin filled with shave water and the still functional face took shape in the mirror at roughly the same speed as his thoughts. Part of it was simple triage, belching out soundbites like a spiv’s PR flak. All the while trying to hold to the long view, the greater hopes he’d begun with. Like appealing to people’s higher nature. And getting Nature itself a fair hearing. Which was, of course, in this state, at such a moment in history, like catching farts in a butterfly net.

No easy thing to unwind from. The toxic adrenaline, the ceaseless performance, the monastic discipline. Sucking in trouble every day before sun-up, preparing a full day’s strategy in the shower. Finding yourself in the office at midnight, after the final, five-way phone hook-up, shaking with rage, caffeine and fatigue. But a year’s bitter liberty should have done the trick. Really. For a bloke who was half smart. Getting sacked? That was a mercy, a cold-turkey intervention. For which a man should be grateful. He was well out of it. What had it all been anyway but one long fighting retreat? Mere pageantry and panto. He’d just been something for the cowboys and their wild-eyed cattle to wheel past, a procedural obstacle set in their path while they yahooed on towards the spoils.

So screw it. Don’t touch that dial. Not the radio, nor the telly. Least of all the laptop. Leave it shut there on the table like a silt-sifting mussel beside the mobile. He was no longer relevant. And he didn’t give a shit about any of it now. He just couldn’t. Would not. Didn’t even read the papers anymore. Tried not to, at least. Had no need of more stories about ‘clean coal’. The national daily prosecuting its long war against climate science. Didn’t matter which rag you read, it would be another instalment about the triumph of capital. One more fawning profile of a self-made iron heiress and he’d mix himself a Harpic Wallbanger and be done with it. Just to get the fucking taste out of his mouth. You didn’t even need to look. You knew what to expect. The summer ration of shark stories and prissy scandals about the same coked-up footballer between episodes of soul-searching about shopping hours. Made your kidneys boil for shame.

Nah, the news only upheld what you understood already. What you feared and hated. How things were and would be. It was no help. Neither was the plonk, of course — only fair to concede that. Like the news, drinking offered more confirmation than consolation. And it was so much easier to fill a void than to contemplate it.

Still gnashing at that meatless bone. Let it go. Concentrate on choking down the morning’s free-range analgesics. And stay vertical. Think up.

Well, the upside was he hadn’t died in the night. He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. And he was in urgent need of a healing breakfast. Soon as all his bits booted up. Just give it a mo.

At the sliding door to the balcony he looked down beyond the forecourt across the flaring iron rooftops to the harbour. Cranes, containers on the quay in savage yellows, reds, blues; the hectic green superstructure of a tanker’s bridge. Searing flash of sun on canted glass. Everything vivid enough to bring on an ambush.

The sea beyond the breakwater was flat, the islands suspended in brothy haze. An orange pilot boat surged past the moles and out into open water, twin plumes of diesel smoke flagging from its stacks, the wake like a whitening wound on the skin of the sea. Which seemed all very lyrical and seafaring until you cracked the door a little and felt the red-plain wind. More hellish updraught than pastoral uplift. Harsh, pitiless. Laden with grit sharp enough to flay a baby-boomer to the bone.

Retreat. Snap the slider back in its slot. And stand there like a mouth-breathing moron. In your rancid towel.

Still. The real estate agent was right: it was a hell of a view for the money. That was the upside. Not just surviving the night but waking to this, an unparalleled prospect of the great Indian Ocean. The champagne outlook for a homebrew outlay. The Mirador wasn’t just the tallest building in town, it was the ugliest by quite a margin. You had to smile at the lovely deluded aspirational romance of the name. When local worthies could have just settled for Aqua Vista or Island Vue they plumped for Mirador: bolthole for the quaking matador, the sex-free paramour, sad, sorry and head-sore. Where you had, despite your fears, the unsought luxury of looking out from on high. Out and down. Like a prince. From your seedy little eyrie. On all the strange doings and stranger beings below. All those folks, booted and suited, still in the game. Trying to give a shit. While keeping the wolf from the door. As if that were even possible.

Keely rested his brow against the warm glass of the door. A ship’s horn set the pane thrumming against his skull. The first blast sent a zizz through his brainpan, down his jaw to the base of his neck. The second was longer and stronger, rooting so deeply into him he recoiled and backpedalled with a grunt.

And that was when he registered the strange sensation underfoot. The carpet. It was wet. And not just wet, it was sodden.

The stain was a metre long. It squelched as he stepped out of it. He noted, for what it was worth, that there were two distinct wet patches — one large, the other small — like the elements of an exclamation mark. Like two blasts of a horn, which at least had the courtesy of signifying something.

Keely’s place was ten storeys up, top floor; this was unlikely to be a plumbing issue or an overflowing bath. A leak in the roof? The last time a decent spot of rain graced this city, he’d been in a job and not quite so comprehensively divorced. Anyhow, there were no watermarks on the nasty stucco ceiling. It was low enough to reach on tiptoe. The surface wasn’t simply arid, it felt powdery, left white grit on his fingertips. And the rest of the flat — galley kitchen, bedroom — was normal. Floor, walls, ceiling. Even the kitchen sink was dry. The only other wet surface in the place was the grout-sick shower stall he’d just left.

Keely slumped into the solitary armchair and looked out across the balcony with its coralline aggregations of dove shit. No reason to panic about a bit of damp carpet, he knew that, but his heart knocked like a sick diesel. And it was with him again, that evil shimmer. Fucking head. All these weeks. Mersyndols, codeines the size of bullsharks; they’d kick in soon. Surely. But he couldn’t even feel them in the water yet. Swim, you bastards. It was an effort to think straight, to glance past his hairy knees at the gunmetal carpet and find a reason for such provocation as this wet floor, to reason on it and not panic.

With a single big toe, he dabbed at the nylon weave. Positively marshy. He stood again. Pressed his foot into the disturbing lushness of it. The towel fell away and there he was, naked, flabby, heat-blotched. He was a long way up, but knowing his luck some unsuspecting ratepayer was getting an eyeful. Hoary morning glory, ahoy! He kicked the towel against the wall, swayed a moment from the effort. And then an awful thought reached him, as if on relay. The room swam a little.

What if he’d made this stain himself? Had he done things last night he didn’t remember? Had it come to that? He’d hit it hard lately but he didn’t drink to the point of passing out. Well, not blacking out, that wasn’t his form. He got hammered, not crazy. But who else could have spilt something here in his livingroom? And spilt what, exactly? He hoped to Heaven, and by all that was green and holy, that he hadn’t found a new means of disgracing himself. Couldn’t endure it.

But he had to know.

So he knelt on the carpet and sniffed. He dabbed at the fibres, smelt his fingers — delicately, tentatively at first, and then more boldly — pressing his palms into the dampness, snuffling, rubbing, squinting. Until he thought of the picture he made, truffling about on all fours, date in the air, tackle adrift, whiffing out his own spoor like a lost mutt in full view of whichever bionic parking inspector happened to look skyward at this awful moment. Which — yes — seemed funny enough in its way, just didn’t feel very amusing. Not yet, not while he was trapped in the dread of not knowing, with shame looming behind the flashes of colour in his head. He’d laugh later. Right now he had to make sure.

Safe. All he wanted. Was to be safe. In his flat. In himself. So he kept at it. Until he was satisfied. Reasonably, moderately sure. Unable, at least, to detect a hint of urine. Or faint notes of puke. Or any other bodily fluid.

Thank God. Thank Ralph Nader, Peter Singer — the entire sandal-wearing pantheon. Comrades, he was in the clear. Which solved nothing, of course, but you had to hold onto any little triumph that came your way, didn’t you? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. For three seconds Keely was exultant. Until the thought sank in. There he was. A middle-aged man of moderate intelligence, nuddied up and egregiously hungover. Almost high-kicking and spangle-tossing at the prospect that he had probably not gotten up in the night, off his chops on the fruit of the Barossa, and pissed on his own floor.

So. Elation departed in haste. And dear God. Here it was. Whatever it happened to be. There on the carpet. Evidence that his inner Elvis had surely left the building.

And now, next door, as if feeling his misery in the ether, the demoniac started up for the day. No you don’t, she said through the thin wall. No, you won’t. Never!

No, he muttered bitterly. Probably not.

He was hungry.

He poured himself a bowl of muesli and champed away penitently, not taking his eyes from the stain. Nah, that wasn’t urine. But if he was wrong, on a February day like this, his sanctuary would soon reek like a Marseilles pissoir.

After two spoonfuls of Swiss chaff he gagged and conceded defeat. He required an improper breakfast.

Regardless.

Immediately.

~ ~ ~

Along the open walkway of the tenth floor, on the eastern face of the building, all doors were shut and most curtains drawn against the sun, so there was no one to greet, nothing to be said as Keely made his way towards the lifts in the roasting wind. To steady himself he gripped the iron balustrade. The metal was lumpy from decades of paint, as scaled and lime-caked as the taffrail of a tramp steamer. Hauling himself along it he felt the full span of uprights begin to vibrate in weird sympathy, humming louder with every step until it seemed the building and the surrounding streets were speaking across each other. Down there it was a mash of idling buses, cooling stacks, car alarms and feral screamers. Behind, below, before him, the air sawed and seethed. Good Christ, the heat, the cacophony — they were insupportable. But he had to get out, pull his mind away from what he didn’t understand, couldn’t fix, had to let slide.

At the lifts he hunted a bit of shade, which meant the grungy stairwell. While he waited, the croon and chirp of little kids rose from the convent playground across the side street. Rugrats having at it — this was the sort of noise a man should never tire of. But in truth it was getting old. Even child’s play sounded sinister after a while, something else to steel yourself against.

And now his heart was in his neck again.

And where was the bloody lift?

He wondered if it was possible he’d left his door open last night, just flaked out and left it ajar in the smothering heat. Maybe some nutjob had snuck in for a laugh, to mess with him, give him a fright. No shortage of scumbags in the building. But the door wasclosed when he went to bed. Wasn’t it? Pissed or sober, he was veryparticular about locking up. Anyway, it was shut when he woke. If someone had crept in, seizing the moment, taking advantage of his temporary lapse or possible derangement, they’d pulled the door to on their way out. From what — good breeding, pity, regret? There was no sign of any other mischief. They’d taken nothing. Not that there was much to take. He had no enemies here. That he knew of. He kept to himself. Studiously. No one, not even family, had crossed the threshold. So the thought of a lurker there while he slept, someone hovering in the hot darkness, watching — it went through him like a colonic twitch.

The lift was mercifully empty. He travelled unseen and uninterrupted to the ground floor. Let the lobby doors roll back. Took it full in the face. All that hideous light. Walked out like a halfwit into a bushfire.

He didn’t even know where he was headed. Discovered himself walking the wrong way, for one thing. It was hot enough to kill an asbestos sparrow. The concrete forecourt livid, the street branding, blinding, breath-sucking. Acid light plashed white underfoot, swashing wall to wall, window upon window, and he waded in it a moment, tilting spastic and helpless, so suddenly porous and chalky it was all behind his eyes in an instant, fizzing within his skull until it rendered everything outside him in flashes and flickers. No gentling tones out here, only abyssal shadows or colours so saturated they looked carcinogenic. Keely glimpsed, gasped, fought off the dread and gimped on gamely, but he didn’t see the bodies on the pavement outside the Chinese joint until he’d almost trampled them.

A girl hunkered in the busy foot-traffic beneath an audience of women who bickered with such conviction they had to be relatives. All of them fat and angry, red-faced, sniping. The girl herself was changing a baby’s nappy in the street; a hot, shrieking girl-child on the bare concrete. And as he pulled up, sculling a moment, disoriented as much as obstructed, he felt the clan stiffen, saw them scowl as if preparing to fend him off. He hesitated, sought a course around them, as the oldest, a stout and ugly woman, bunched a Kmart bag and shoved it beneath the infant’s head. In nearly the same moment the squatting mother shot a glance upwards that seemed directed solely at him. It may only have been a glance of shame or even defiance but to Keely it felt like hatred and he turned aside as if struck.

He angled away into an oncoming torrent of pedestrians, all boiled faces and beetling sunglasses, a surge of elbows, phones, smoke-puckers and semi-syllables within a fug of sweat and warring perfumes. He yielded towards the road’s edge where buses shuddered and gulped at the kerb. A skateboarder swept past. The street pulsed and roared as he fought for a bearing. Target, pharmacy, real estate agent, bank. Fuck, he was listing, yawing, hopelessly self-correcting. It was more than he could manage. Any second he’d capsize.

So he lurched into the closest entry. Coles. Safe harbour. Obedient glass doors, airconditioning, muzak. Went deep, headed instinctively for the fluorescent headwaters, seeking cool air and cooler still, until he found himself in the produce section, staring at spears of Peruvian asparagus in slender, uniform lines of pale green. They were only cut vegetables, for Christ’s sake, and cheap imports at that, but there was something lovely and clement about their serried ranks and pastel colour, and now that he noticed it, the entire refrigerated colonnade had over it a misty sheen cool enough to make a Celt weep. Moist, clean, unending blur. Beneath the muzak, a special kind of quiet. Silent gusts of respite. And such calm, such unpeopled order. He caught himself fighting the urge to lie down there in the lee of these wafting cabinets and sleep till dark. Just him and poor Karen Carpenter. Him and the clean pine crates and the Pine O Cleen disinfecant and those vegetables to which clung the last faint odour of something like life itself. He imagined it, thought better of it, then discovered himself on the lino, being stood over by a woman with spectacles and brown fists. She seemed distressed, even angry, but she was being perturbed in a language he didn’t speak yet. She pointed at him excitedly, bleating and toothbearing a little before she began to hammer with some emphasis at the steel cradle of the impressive tomato display. But his cheek was cool against the floor and he couldn’t quite feel the immediacy of her concern. And then she was yanking at him without fear or favour, and he was on his feet, alone.

Maybe this was what it was like to die a little, to feel shriven, rescued, redeemed. Having your collar pulled, your fucking beard tugged by the roots until there you were, upright and guiltless, watching your irritated saviour scuff away in Third World footwear, pushing a loaded trolley.

Becalmed. Adrift. Summoning a bit of puff.

He ghosted through the aisles accompanied by the sad, sweet Carpenters — who he hoped were now both safely dead. For his peace of mind. For their own good.

Finally, for the sake of propriety, to feel in charge of himself once more, he made a few purchases. The steadying force of retail.

This. This. That, whatever it was. Couldn’t afford any but he bought them all.

Going through the motions at the checkout helped a little, but it occurred to him — winked like an oil light on the dash — that he really could be losing his mind. And that couldn’t be all his fault. Surely.

The change. Which he accepted graciously. Along with the girl’s limp smile of boredom.

And there he was, successfully transacted, having paid dearly for his little digression, his minutes of stunned mullethood, hoisting this clammy bag of unnecessaries, suddenly aware again of how eerily hungry he was and why he’d ventured out in the first place.

He craved a couple of Bub’s fluffy double-shots. But he’d never make it to the Strip. He lacked the loins, pure and simple. Only a trek of three hundred metres or so, but out of range today. He was rogered. Unless he chanced his arm somewhere here in the refrigerated mini-mall. There was a nook of sorts beside the Cut and Blow. Yes, here it was. With malarial bain-marie and plastic tables. Open to the polished concourse, so the muzak was free and endless, and the smells of burning cheese and scorched hair roiled like confluences about the vinyl palm tree separating the two establishments. What the hell. Time to experiment. Necessity being the motherfucker of whatever is in its way.

Took a little round table. Pressed his thumbs, like his very own executioner, to his temples. Ordered something that sounded safe enough. And took stock.

Usually — on his standard wasted day — he’d walk an hour, take a swim, lounge at Bub’s and dodge certain faces by judicious use of the menu or a reiki tract left by some wide-eyed chump. All the while convincing himself that despite appearances his days retained a certain functional coherence. That was an effort, and today such feats were beyond him. He felt peeled, without defences. He was not himself, not even the remnant self he’d been yesterday afternoon. Maybe it was just the bad start. The nasty fright. Which, of course, would turn out to have a simple explanation. But the town felt hostile this morning and the world past its modest boundaries without pity. He could feel it pressing hot and breathless against the glass doors in the distance. Or perhaps that was just weather.

Besides, it was pension day. The fortnightly full moon. Twelve hours of tidal chaos. So if he really wanted to press on further from home in search of better fare and more congenial surrounds, then he’d have to run the payday gauntlet between this little granny mall and Bub’s. And that was a lot of crazy shit to get through. For that you needed skin. Ramrod will. And funds. Because before you even got to the corner there were toothless winos and humbugging Aborigines, each with a case to make and a cloud of misery and body odour to drive it home. Once you’d fought your way clear of the bottlo and the junkie park, you’d need to penetrate the phalanx of charity-tin rattlers skulking soulfully in the trinket alleys and shady arcades. And what could you do but honour their efforts, sign their petitions, fork out the shekels while seething? He gave bogus addresses, snail and email, and hated himself for it. Their causes were just but doomed.

Thank God they were all so fresh and endlessly replaceable, these kids, because they almost never recognized him. What could you tell them, these smiley elves from Oxfam, Greenpeace, or Friends of the Forest, what could you honestly say? It killed you, the bright-eyed marsupial innocence of their faces. No. No sir. Not today.

And even if he did make it that far without falling over again or yacking on someone, he’d still have the buskers to deal with. They were worse than any charity picket, more offensive and evil-smelling than any derro or waistcoated do-gooder. These talentless nitwits were the final obstacle between you and a fistful of arabica beans. And by the time you reached them you were already punch-drunk and desperate. Without discrimination or pride. So there you went, most days, creeping past the tattoo dens and incense emporia where they lurked, steeling yourself to stride by solemnly but almost always ending up shelling out like a man envious of the higher gifts. Just to get by, just to be left alone, just because you felt sorry for the same three chords about the usual damage done.

After all that he’d finally totter onto the little avenue of self-congratulation that everyone called the Cappuccino Strip. Fifty umbrellas around which a certain civic pride once rallied. In the seventies the Strip had been a beacon of homely cosmopolitanism, a refuge from the desolate franchise dispensation stretching from sea to hazy hills. But that was before it calcified into smugness. Somewhere along the way the good folks of the port settled in the wisdom that coffee was all the culture and industry a town required. Butcher shops, hardware stores, chandlers and bakeries had steadily been squeezed out and surplanted by yet more cafés, new spaghetti barns. Rents were extortionate, house prices absurd. The city had become a boho theme park perched on a real estate bubble, and behind every neglected goldrush façade and vacant shopfront was a slum landlord counting pennies, lording it over family and bitching about refugees.

Freo, mon amour. It gave him five kinds of sulphuric reflux to think of it. Didn’t know how he could still love it so. Tried to tell himself at least it wasn’t Perth, that pastel toy town upriver. But, Christ, that wasn’t saying much, was it?

No, this sad little caff would have to be it today. He was physically infirm and psychically unable to go any further. He’d sit tight and watch the trolley-boys trundle by, the parched oldsters wheezing in from Centrelink and Culley’s on their walkers, the rat-tailed infants chucking tantrums on the shiny tiles. He could bear this. Couldn’t he? He was here already, he’d made his order. He was all set. And yet he could not rest. For the mind charged on, cataloguing the horrors he’d spared himself. The manky footpath jewellers, the already drunk Irish backpackers, the mouthy schoolkids.

Still, when he beheld his breakfast on its sunny yellow plate, his resolve began to decay. He couldn’t help but think of properly fried bacon, of hash browns and fluffy free-rangers, of a coffee upon whose bronzed crema a spoonful of sugar might wallow, like a cherub upon a cloud. As he struggled with some aberrant species of ham-and-cheese croissant that clung to his gums like denture glue, he began to wonder if he might just man up after all and make a dash to Bub’s. Well, perhaps not a dash. A power shuffle, a wilful creep.

Hell, yes. And he was bracing against the sticky plastic in preparation for a slow-motion getaway when he remembered the time. It was witching hour on the Strip. That meant yummy mummies. Über-matrons. He couldn’t abide them. Or resist them. They’d see him off in a heartbeat. Without even noticing him. Without registering his feeble presence. With their hulking all-terrain strollers and jogging sheen, their kooky ethnic headscarves and gleaming thighs, they were enough to make a man kick a Buddhist. Late morning they ran in packs, descending upon the quarter to circle their wagons and colonize entire cafés for cistern-sized lattes and teeny-cutesy babycinos. There was something loathsome and luscious about their fruity chirrups, their sweet-smelling sweat, their mist of satisfaction. Not content to be healthy and handsome, they had to be cruelly ravishing. And Jesus, even Leni Riefenstahl had spared us lycra.

Keely’s contempt and lust were no match for them. Which was why he usually went early. To save himself the suffering. So that was that. Here he stood. Sat. Wrestling his greasy bolus. Sipping this bituminous brew. Having barely gotten change from a tenner. Let no man say he didn’t keep an open mind.

Nothing for it but to suck it up and beat a ginger retreat.

Home was only forty metres away, sixty at the most. But something of a challenge given the blurred vision and the intermittent sparks of lightning in his head. Twice he needed to steady himself. First against a jacaranda. Then by high-tackling a molten parking meter. And in these restorative pauses he leaned back like a tranquilized pole-dancer to take in the brutal monolith that rose above trees, chimneys and whining wires.

The Mirador. Not much of the winsome Spanish turret about it, that’s for sure. It was a classic shitbox: beige bricks, raw concrete galleries, ironbar railings, doors and windows like prison slots. Hard to credit that fifty years ago some nabob thought it a grand idea, a harbinger of progress. The place had grown old and grim within months of its completion and the subsequent years had not been gentle. Locals despised it. But it had been a haven for old folks, retired lumpers and clerks, invalid pensioners, transients, drunks and welfare mothers. They were still there, many of them, lately joined by the first gentrifying hopefuls and middle-class casualties like himself. Keely looked up at its meagre balconies. The drying mop, the ruined telly, the Dockers flag, the jaunty sunflower in a pot, the wheelchair flashing in the sun.

He swayed against the meter and felt a little flutter of affection for the old hulk. Like him, the building was a product of the sixties. And like him it was too large a mistake to be undone.

I’m not much, he told himself on the caustic forecourt, but I’m home.

~ ~ ~

The lobby stank of laundry soap, fresh paint, and mopped floors. As he entered, Keely fell in behind a woman and child heading for the lifts. He would have preferred to peel off into the laundromat a moment until they were gone, and then go on up alone when the coast was clear, but he was desperate to lie down; he felt faint and the headache was evil in him. Besides, the lift door rolled open as he approached; he’d only look like a wally backing away now. So he followed them in, careful to arrange himself and his morally unflattering plastic bag in the farthest corner of the carriage. When the woman punched the key for the tenth floor his heart sank.

You? she asked without looking his way.

Oh, he murmured. Same.

Neighbours, then, she said with a hint of scepticism.

He grunted. She sighed as if she’d already discounted his presence.

Keely snatched a look at the boy as he laid his head against the woman’s hip. The kid avoided his gaze. As they were hauled up slowly Keely fixed on the woozy stippled pattern of the car’s stainless-steel lining.

No good? the woman asked the boy.

I’m not right in myself, said the kid.

Did you sick up? The teacher didn’t say.

No, said the boy. But I’m not well.

You’re hot.

Yes, hot in the temperature.

The woman made a gentle laughing sound through her nose and repeated it without mockery: Hot in the temperature.

Keely sensed the pale flare of the woman’s face turning his way.

When he was really little, she said, he thought his forrid was his temperature. You know, let me check your temperature and everythin. Little smartarse.

Am not.

Are so.

Keely assembled a makeshift grin but spared himself the eye contact. There he was in monstrous outline, distorted by the shiny pressed steel, radiating fluorescent light from a hundred welts and dints. When he moved, his head swam. God, he thought, all the stoners in the building — do they take the stairs?

He dug a thumb into his temple, closed his eyes.

And now, she said. Now, he’s not right in himself.

Well, said the boy. I’m not.

You never get crook of a weekend, do ya?

I was once.

That was Easter, you dill. All that chocolate. Eyes bigger’n yer belly.

He felt the woman’s attention, the full force of her gaze. It was all he could do not to cringe. Inside his shirt the sweat began to run; he could feel panic rising in him like nausea and only the bounce of their arrival delivered him. As the door opened he lunged forward, hoisting his clammy supermarket bag after him, and took in a hot draught of air. Out on the walkway he stepped aside so they could pass, and the woman brushed by smelling of cigarettes and body spray. But the boy lingered. And when Keely looked back he saw him planted in the gap, fending the closing door off with hip and shoulder like a little half-back. His gaze was intense but removed and without the boy actually looking his way Keely sensed himself being registered, sized up. And it was awkward. Standing there, suspended. The woman waiting beside him with no pretence at patience. As if she blamed him as much as the kid for this delay.

Keely prepared to walk away but there was something about the boy that intrigued him. Perhaps the dark rings beneath his eyes. Or the pale blue irises. Such a round face. And they did something odd, those shadows, made the kid seem older than he was, older than he could be. His hair fell white and straight to his shoulders. He licked his lower lip, which was chapped, and bunted the door away again as the woman jangled her keys. The boy wore a little polo shirt, shorts, sneakers. Just an ordinary Mirador kid trying it on with his longsuffering mother. So what was it that made Keely’s stomach flip, standing here watching him gaze across the rooftops while the hot wind rose from the shaft at their feet? He had no experience with kids; he didn’t know what this was. But it felt a bit like being cased by a dog too wary to come right up and sniff.

When you’re ready, said the woman.

I’m ready, said the kid, stepping out, letting the door roll to.

Hope you feel better, Keely said to the boy.

You too, said the kid.

The woman snorted and fished for something in her bag. She’d been pretty once. In her denim skirt and sleeveless top she seemed puffy, almost bruised. Her dirty-blonde hair was dry and she had the kippered complexion of the lifelong smoker, but any man would still look twice.

You look familiar, she said.

She seemed to be about his age. One of her front teeth was chipped and discoloured, as though it were dying.

Well, he said. Same floor, I guess. Like you said, neighbours.

Where are you again?

It occurred to him she was only being careful, that she suspected him of having followed them up from the street through the security door.

Ten-oh-seven, he said.

Huh, she murmured, taking the serious little boy’s hand. Don’t think I seen you here before. Know you from somewhere, but.

Keely tried to bring it to a close by setting off along the walkway. Well, he said over his shoulder — a little more abruptly than he intended — I keep to myself.

He heard her grunt; it could have meant anything. When he pulled up at his door he saw her strolling along hand in hand with the boy, no longer in quite such a hurry. She was making sure. Which said something about the way he looked, no doubt, so he made a performance of digging out his key like the hunter home from the hill and all. But he was running out of puff now, listing against the gritty bricks, and as he hauled back the security screen and shoved the key in the lock, he saw the kid surge ahead of the woman, dart towards the iron balustrade and mount the bottom rung with a suddenness that sent a spasm of apprehension through him. He fumbled the key, dropped it, but couldn’t stoop to pick it up with the kid perched there on tiptoe, right outside the door, two metres away. The child’s skinny arms were knitted over the iron rail, head suspended in a roasting updraught, hair ripped back like the tail of a comet. As if he were speeding, hurtling, falling already. Brutal silver rooftops, far below. Traffic noise. Playground cries. A ship’s horn signalling imminent departure. Keely didn’t dare take his eyes off him. Too stunned, at first. Terrified he’d startle him disastrously by moving, by lunging, calling out. And then, for two, three, four whole seconds he was convinced his steady gaze was vital, that he was the only force securing the kid to the building. Sneakered heels tipped up, laces snickering in the wind. Keely heard the woman, clocked the peripheral blur of her ambling. Could not believe she was so lax, so sanguine about the child being this close to the edge, ten storeys high with his feet off the mottled concrete. He just locked onto the slight frame with his last fading energy, growing angrier with every slow-moving moment, furious at both of them for being so careless and such a cruel interruption. Until the little boy’s throat began to work and he looked as if he were about to puke. And in the instant Keely tensed himself to spring, to haul him back to safety, when it seemed the kid would retch and lose his grip, the boy hawked and sent a shining gob of spit out into space. And then the woman was there, cuffing the back of his neck goodnaturedly.

Don’t spit, ya dirty bugger, she said. Some poor mug’ll think it’s rain.

One drop? said the kid.

That was a joke, ya knucklehead.

Was it funny?

Thanks a lot.

Keely subsided against his door. Like a badly wrapped parcel, a side of beef on the turn, wrappers sodden, every exposed patch of him livid and unwholesome. Christ, he reeked. He snatched up the key, fell through the door and left the pair of them bantering away as if he’d never been there.

Git down off that, said the woman. Carn, it’s hot.

Keely shut the door, pitched his pointless shopping onto the bench and lurched towards the bedroom. Fell to the mattress like a burning man into a swimming pool.

Thank God. Or whoever. Just, thank you. And in that first flush of deliverance Keely felt feverish relief. Before the blood rushed to his head and the ceiling blurred horribly, pressing down against his eyes, chest, tongue. Nothing for it but to lie there. Taking it. Giving it time to resolve. Willing the distorted sensation to back off enough for him to get his wits together, breathe easy again.

But there was a knock at the door.

Not now! he called.

The rapping continued. The fridge kicked in so hard he felt it in the neck. And a voice, like something through water. Burbling. Ramping up the pain. Every knock at the door was like a thudding heartbeat out of sync, needling through his teeth. For pity’s sake!

He got to his feet seeing double, slammed his hip against the kitchen bench heading for the door and was too consumed by all the competing sensations to even say anything when he reefed it open and saw them still there, backlit into fuzzy silhouettes on the other side of the insect screen.

Tommy Keely, she said.

He blinked. It was nasty, hearing his name uttered. Here in the building. Out in the open. Through his own screen door.

It took a while, she said. But I knew it was you.

Well, he croaked, congratulations. I guess.

It’s you, though, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I?

Maybe. Who cares?

Sorta bloody question’s that?

I dunno. I’m sorry. I’m. I dunno.

Keely sagged against the fridge a moment, his head ready to split like a melon. When he looked back, the boy was gone. The air outside danced with bubbles of light, camera flashes, a violet pulse.

You alright? she asked.

Yeah. Nah. Yeah.

You don’t remember?

Yes, he said. I remember who I am.

Not you, ya fuckwit. Me.

He stared at her through the flyscreen. Saw little more than the flaring nimbus around her head.

I’m sorry?

Blackboy Crescent, she said.

Shit. Really?

I thought you’d remember.

I remember Blackboy Crescent.

But not me.

It occurred to him that this was the point at which he was supposed to throw all caution aside and ask her in, but he’d lived too long in wary isolation. And already regretted admitting who he was. But Blackboy Crescent, that set him back. And where was the kid? What was she doing about the kid scampering somewhere along the open gallery?

Your little boy, he rasped.

Watchin telly. Bloody scam-artist.

He tried to straighten up. He could feel her peering in. Feel her scoping out his entire ruined carcase.

Your sister’s name is Faith.

Okay, he said, pressing against the screen door for a closer look. The woman chuckled. He could not truly see her for turbulent, twitching lights.

Mate, you’re off your chops.

No. Headache.

Right, she said sceptically.

So, he said. So. So, how d’you know Faith?

Same way I know your mum’s Doris and your dad’s Neville.

He’s dead.

Oh. Jesus. Sorry. Fuck. I forgot.

Doesn’t matter.

You look different, she said. Maybe it’s the beard.

I guess so, he muttered, finding the thought distantly amusing, as if it could only be the whiskers that were rubbish and the rest of him was in showroom nick.

She stood there a few moments more in hazy outline. He thought he might fall. For a moment he wanted to be sick. No nausea, just the urge, which was a recent thing and perplexing. Yet he could still feel her disappointment, the sense of something curdling. Blackboy Crescent. The swamp, corrugated-iron canoes, tuart trees, yellow dirt, the engine-oil smell of his father.

Anyway, she murmured.

Right.

I’ll let you go before you fall over.

Okay.

It’s Gemma, by the way, in case you were actually wondering.

Gemma? Gemma Buck? Are you serious?

No, I’m bloody makin it up, what d’you think?

I’m, I —

And then she was gone.

The bed came halfway across the flat to meet him.

~ ~ ~

When he woke it was almost dark. The sea breeze rattled the blinds above his head and the building clanked and gurgled with showering, dinner-making, dishwashing. Weird the way coughs and cries and TV laughter travelled through the bones of the place. Outside, only gulls and the murmur of traffic, everything subdued, as if the fever of payday had broken.

He got up slowly, in stages. He was weak. His headache had retreated to the intensity of a mere hangover and this was as close to relief as he was likely to get. His vision was more or less back to normal.

As ever, somebody was cooking with old-style curry powder — Keen’s or Clive of India — the smell of church suppers, student digs. The junkies would be content, on the nod. And, having peaked early, the drunks sleeping it off at home, on the street, in custody. Everyone else treating themselves to a nice chop, a bit of spicy chook. All was well.

On the kitchen bench in a puddle, his bag of groceries. He slung it into the fridge and tried not to think of salmonella. Over by the sliding glass door there was no longer a visible stain on the carpet but when he walked across it he found the area still slightly damp underfoot. At least it didn’t stink.

He slid the door open and stepped out onto the balcony to feel the briny wind in his hair, his beard. Out over the sea the western sky was all fading afterglow. Beneath him, the melancholy lights of the wharves, warehouses, streets.

Blackboy Crescent. Gemma Buck.

A festive mob of pink and grey cockatoos settled on the date palms behind the cathedral. Galahs, he thought fondly, they were the backpackers of the skies — rowdy, rooting freeloaders, God love em. For a minute or two he watched them preen and dance for one another, and it was calming. Until the slider next door grated open and he retreated inside as someone stepped out to light a fag and hack up a lungful.

Now he was forced indoors, he thought he should eat. His appetite was all over the place. He felt hollow, so maybe food was the thing. Cooking a meal every night was about the only form of self-discipline he’d been able to maintain of late. Apart from keeping his head down. But tonight he was too spent and shook up to bother. He’d nuke the leftovers of yesterday’s stir-fry and make it up to himself tomorrow.

And while the bowl suffered bedspins inside the microwave, he tried to make sense of the Gemma thing. Couldn’t even come at the kid on the rail, that whole freaking thirty-second scene, no, not now he’d levelled out. The idea of her, though. Being outside his door, here in the building. That was already more than he could deal with without burning a circuit.

Gemma Buck. Not a girl at all, but a woman — and a pretty ordinary middle-aged woman at that. He couldn’t get to grips with it. For in his mind she was still a needy urchin with white-blonde plaits. Someone’s irritating little sister.

Inside the machine the bowl of food began to sweat and the flat filled with the earthy scents of shiitake and sesame oil. A reminder that he’d been functional up until the early evening last night, at least. Which didn’t quite warm the cockles, but he’d take it as a small success regardless. The box bleated. He set his wholesome vegies free and plonked the bowl on the bench to let them cool. Which made him wonder why he bothered heating food at all. And then he actually was hungry, too urgently hungry to wait. So he burnt his tongue. Of course. Et cetera.

The Buck girls. From up the hill. They were in the house so often, those kids, like permanent fixtures. And actually lived with them for part of one year: 1971, maybe, or ’72. He could see it crisply, all of them in the lounge, on their bellies, with the TV flashing in glorious black and white. Little Gemma at one end of the tartan travel rug, and his sister Faith beside her. Then him, next to Baby Buck, the older one. The girls in their flannelette nighties, him in his goofy pyjamas. The old man behind them all, chortling in his recliner-rocker. Flip Wilson, who seemed to look blacker in black and white. Everyone yelling in joyful unison: Here come de judge!

Little Gemma Buck. She came to mind along with McHale’s Navy, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, primary school. She belonged to the golden time before his world collapsed. When Nev was still with them. And, man, did Nev love that Flip Wilson.

Keely gave the food another crack, chewing his way back.

Gemma was a mouth-breather, now he thought of it. Cute enough in a Cindy Brady way, but clingy, too. She was completely unlike her big sister. And kind of annoying for always being around. But they were a protected species, those girls; they had problems, trouble at home for which you had to make allowances. Faith and he learned to let a whole lot of things slide in order to spare themselves a Disappointed Lecture from the oldies.

Keely thought of the hundred nights the Buck girls came knocking: summer evenings out there on the porch sobbing in their nylon nighties, the sound of glass breaking up the hill behind them. There was always screaming; their place was bedlam after dark. Fridays were the worst, when Johnny Buck drank his pay right up to closing time and did not care to be admonished by the missus when he came home shitfaced and broke with a couple of brown baggers under his arm and a torn shirt hanging off his back. The beltings were fearsome and public. No one ever called the cops. The girls would just be at the Keely door, whimpering on the porch until a light went on and Doris took them in. Then the old man would go looking for his boots, gathering his wits a moment, muttering some prayer or imprecation, before trudging up the hill to deal with it best he could.

In those days the Keelys didn’t have trouble, they fixed it. By faith, with thanksgiving. And now and then, when the shit hit the fan, with a judicious bit of biffo.

The oldies were careful to shield his sister and him from the carnage in the street, but some mayhem got past the cordon sanitaire. Keely had flashes of recall that would never fade. They were, he supposed, his first experiences of violence. And it was always strange how foreign they seemed, these memories, for all their lurid immediacy, because although they were inescapably from his old neighbourhood they did not feel as if they belonged to his world, not then, not now. But he could still see it, wild and vivid as a nightmare. He saw Bunny Buck. The girls’ mother. Mrs Buck. On her knees on lumpy buffalo grass. In her front yard. Down on her knees with a sanitary pad pressed to her bleeding face. He didn’t even know what a pad was until years later. She had it planted against her swelling jaw as if any form of softness might be a comfort. As shadows flayed her. Two men facing off in the driveway. Johnny Buck in his work duds. Neville Keely in stubbies and a singlet. Plenty of lights on across the road, next door, silhouettes in every front garden, but no help forthcoming. In the porchlight, Nev circling, voice like a horse whisperer, sleep in his eyes and grease in the cracks of his hands. Johnny Buck staggering, squinting to keep him in view. Nev pressing in, smiling, feinting, nattering about Forgiveness, and Letting Go, and Owning Up, and Giving In to Love, a kind of dancing, panting midnight homily brought to a head by a sudden lunge and a half-nelson that had the nasty little prick on his arse in a moment. And it was hard to forget the sight of a big man like Nev blessing Johnny Buck while burying his face in the grass. The faceless neighbours cheered; he remembered that.

So where had he been standing that night? Had he snuck away at last to see for himself, left Faith and his mum and the girls inthe house and skulked his way from yard to yard to witness what it was that bent their nights out of shape? Or were the girls there, too, shrieking, clutching at Doris, imploring the spineless spectators? He didn’t remember. He could only see Johnny Buck struggling and swearing on the grass. His father copping a few in the chops for his trouble. And then Nev abruptly prevailing, kneeling on him, like a man in prayer, pinning the shithead’s arms to the earth until the bloke was weeping. A moment later his wife was at his side to comfort him and call Nev a churchy fuckin bully-bastard who should mind his own bloody business.

It was confounding. And it felt wrong that her humiliated fuck-you should remain as indelible as the violence itself. But even now the memory brought a welter of shame along with the pride.

It was the year Harold Holt drowned. Somehow that fact had stuck in his head. But Keely knew it had been happening since Menzies was prime minister. It went on until Whitlam. It was standard procedure in Blackboy Crescent. When some addled boofhead started playing up the neighbours sent for good ole Nev. He was the holy fool with hands like mallee roots and a heart, while it lasted, as big as a beer keg. Night after night, they sent him out and let him bear it all. And hung back in the shadows, urging him on from a cosy distance.

Keely finished the stir-fry. He was still standing. Not quite as calm as he’d been looking down on the birds. Agitated by the memory. But the weight in his head had lifted a little, the disgruntled passenger was dozing.

He felt odd now. But not so terrible. Better, even. As if Gemma’s sudden appearance had kicked him out of a spin. Something new, unexpected. Okay, maybe old and unexpected. To take his mind off the five thousand things he was frying his own wiring over. It was kind of nice to go on a fresh tangent. To sieve through the memories.

But what could he really remember? About Gemma, specifically? Not that much, actually, now he thought about it. Apart from the sight of her and her sister huddled beneath Doris’s dressing gown, mewling like pups. And those blonde plaits. Not much else at all. Because it was the older girl, Baby, who’d made the impression. She was tough, chubby, kind of clammy, and foul-mouthed. He’d copped a flogging from her once at school in front of a dozen boys; he didn’t remember why — just recalled the laughter and the exploded feeling in his cheek. Baby gave off a strange current. Boys noticed her, said things to her, and so did men. When she lived with them those months, when her father was in prison and her mother still in hospital, Keely noticed her vaguely horticultural scent and the peculiar formality with which his own father addressed her. Nev was not a cautious man, but around Baby Buck he was careful, almost courtly.

The Buck sisters. They were strays who couldn’t be shaken off until the Keelys were gone themselves, swept away by disaster into a new life. For Faith and him those teen years were fogged with grief. The Bucks just fell away with everything and everyone else. After Blackboy Crescent he hardly thought another thing about them.

But had caught sight of them occasionally. Must have been the late seventies when he walked past Baby in Barrack Street one night. Tilted against a wall, one shoe broken. She looked drug-fucked, or just fucked in general. There was an awkward moment of mutual recognition but no greeting. A couple of times he saw Gemma at a distance. At a concert, a pub. Under the arm of one dangerous-looking dude or another. She was all tan and sunstreaked tresses, a leggy provocation, and by then, for the likes of him, a total impossibility. Their gazes met but Keely pretended not to see her. Remembered how his ears glowed for shame.

Last night’s dishes were still there on the sink. The heat of the day had baked stains to a glaze and the purple crust in his wineglass smelt fruity as a bishop. He washed without conviction, buried his bottles deep in the recycling crate and wiped everything down, from restlessness as much as anything.

But he was still a little buzzed. He should bag some laundry. Better still, call Faith. She’d be tickled. Curious at least. Besides, having stumbled into all these memories he felt the need to hear her voice. He looked at the clock. Singapore. Same time zone. He grabbed the landline phone, punched his sister’s number.

Faith answered from within a noisy room, a restaurant by the sound of it. He had to repeat his name twice before she understood who was calling.

Are you alright? she asked. Is it Mum?

She’s fine, we’re fine.

You don’t sound it.

Nah, I’m good.

Have you seen someone?

What?

Did you try those numbers?

Quacks and bankers, mate. You know me.

Sometimes I wonder.

Tell you who I have seen —

Tom, I’m in a meeting.

Okay, sorry. Just that I thought you’d find it… weird.

Everything’s weird just at the present. The world as we know it is choking on a bone.

Yeah?

You actually have no idea.

Well, I get the broad picture.

I doubt it.

Anyway, I’ve got two words for you.

Please tell me they’re not Lehman Brothers.

Funny.

Not that funny. Which words, Tom?

Buck. And Gemma.

Gemma Buck?

You’re quick, sis.

Blackboy Crescent Gemma Buck?

That’s the one.

What about her?

Lives in my building, mate. Same floor.

This is a joke?

Am I that funny a bloke?

Hell. Wow, that’s… weird. So, what does she look like?

Keely couldn’t help but laugh.

What? she asked.

I love that it’s the first thing you ask. If a bloke said it you’d serve him his tripe on a platter.

Aw, boohoo.

Actually she looks a bit ground down.

Wasn’t she a bit of a stunner?

I spose she was.

Listen, I have to go. Can you call me later?

Alright.

Give me another hour, okay?

Not a problem.

I’ll call you.

Don’t worry, he said, I’ll ring back.

Of course you will. Anyway, I can afford it.

I said I’d call. Didn’t I?

Love you, she said with an air of defeat before hanging up.

Yeah, he said to the ether. You too, sis.

For a moment he was buoyed by a fleeting sense of closeness. He thought of the safe mass of her in a sleeping bag beside him in the back of the station wagon. Her asthmatic wheeze, the soapy-vanilla scent of her above the smells of vinyl upholstery and wet grass. The sound of crickets. All those nights parked on front lawns while the oldies ran committees, prayer groups, demo meetings. That wheezy, sweet lump in the car up close. His baby sister, the merchant banker. He kissed the phone like a sap and set it back in its cradle.

Surveyed the empty flat a moment. Snatched up his keys.

~ ~ ~

He sauntered past shuttered shops in the emptying streets, knowing he should phone his mother. He owed Doris a call anyway and she’d probably be delighted to have news of Gemma. But he knew he wouldn’t; he could do without the loving scrutiny, her urging him to see another GP, a new counsellor, some western-suburbs employment guru who’d come highly recommended. He didn’t want the telling silences, her withering patience. For a minute or two he was close, once more, to mental uproar. But he talked himself down, the meeting came back to order.

It was still warm. A smattering of joggers and strollers abroad. There were late commuters out on the pavement, loiterers, lost souls, women thumbing phones to summon taxis. Down the main drag, a couple of lycra-free cyclists coasted by, laughing, God bless them. In their wake rumbled Commodores full of local boys lapping the block, windows down, saying ugly things to women. Girls with tatts and skinny dogs told them to go and get fucked. A bloke tried to fly a kite off the balcony of a backpacker joint but the breeze was fluky between buildings.

The evening air was heavy with salt, coffee, exhaust fumes. The vibe in town was weary and benign. It was the same joint he’d shunned this morning, but tonight it felt easier to forgive. It was a village, with all the virtues and vices of intimacy. And he knew the place backwards, had lived here most of his working life. But he had to remind himself daily that it was quite another town to him now; in his new circumstances he lived in it differently, felt its properties anew. These days he was more at its mercy, it acted on him in ways he hadn’t really experienced before. You could hate anywhere and anyone that didn’t need you. He was skint in every possible sense. Surplus to requirements. But lofting a little this evening, rising as if from a nasty bounce.

Along the Strip Keely bought a beer, drank it quickly and left before he could go on to a soothing second. Felt good about himself a moment, then thought of Doris again.

Under the date palms across from the station, drunks called querulously for taxi fare, train money, two bucks mate. Their goon bags flashed silver beneath the trees, and soon enough those hopeful, matey shouts took on the standard overtone of menace. He pressed on, over the footbridge to the wharf.

Call Doris, he thought, crossing the quay. Don’t be a weasel.

Cars streamed away from the ferry landings. At the dockside, tourists struggled to find their landlegs after the trip in from Rottnest. Others wheeled bikes, suitcases, prams writhing with squalling kids.

His mother was a brick, a saint. Which of course made everything so much worse, especially since she’d had ample time to form a view of his situation. Two years since the break-up. A whole year since his catastrophic brain-snap and all its rewards. Doris was a shrewd old bird. She didn’t miss much. He did not want to suffer her thoughtful analysis a single moment but he was pretty certain he already understood it in all its loving, pitiless permutations. Her view was undoubtedly this: that by now her only son could reasonably be expected to pick himself up amidst the wreckage of his life and make something new happen. She was, of course, canny enough to refrain from saying so. But she radiated it.

Her faithful presence, her restraint, her carefully calibrated attention said everything for her, and even absent she exerted tectonic moral pressure. She was right to be puzzled, justified in her impatience. Yes, yes, yes, fucking yes, these months had been wasted and he probably was a coward getting cosy with his own self-hatred, but he couldn’t get past the suspicion of more to come, that something worse was necessary, or at least inevitable, as if he were not yet properly shriven. But it was only a matter of time. And maybe when he struck bottom there’d be certainty, fresh conviction, a sense of immediacy he could no longer feel. She thought this was bullshit, madness even. Though he hadn’t breathed a word, didn’t need to. Doris could read him in five languages and scan him in Braille. Since his cataclysmic truth-telling, he’d felt the eloquence of her every withheld judgement and longsuffering stare. He didn’t have to guess what she thought of his morose passivity, his bitterness and wounded silence, which is why he’d been avoiding her of late. It was no treat embodying something your own mother pitied, probably even despised. She loved him, her compassion seemed boundless, but her disappointment smarted more than any other humiliation. Problem was she thought he was strong, still judged him accordingly, and did not yet know he was lost.

But he wasn’t going there tonight.

He had to let it go. Doris’s scarifying empathy. The known unknown. All of it.

I have, he told himself, I’ve let it go.

Which was bullshit, really, but he kept thinking it because it seemed necessary.

I’m okay, he muttered aloud.

Which seemed slightly safer as a proposition but hardly sound.

I’m good! he announced to a startled passer-by.

And yet, righteous as he was in his misanthropic way, goodness was something of a stretch. Misunderstood Keely was. Yes. And it was true his intentions were invariably good. But only when he had them. Some days he struggled to even form an intention.

He teetered at the fulcrum of his lighter mood. Darkness sucking at him.

But the evening air was all salty grace. Close to the water it smelt divine, felt merciful. And whatever bollocks he told himself, however feeble and false the positive lingo was once you stacked it up against shitful reality, the lovely, saving night stole up on him. The rest didn’t matter. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, the hopelessness suddenly lost ultimate power over him. As if for a moment the chains fell off and his heart was free. Well, on the lam at least.

He ambled along the wharf past rank-smelling sheds where the Leeuwin rode the tide on creaking hawsers. On deck, beneath the maze of spars and rigging, a dreadlocked kid stood hosing crates, the lights glancing off piercings in his face. To Keely he looked exultant, like a boy unable to credit his own youth and beauty and good fortune. To be there on a tallship as passing strangers took note — that had to be worth something, worth basking a few minutes in the palpable sense of envy and mystery, worth prolonging a simple task like rinsing dive crates. Barely suppressing the urge to huzzah, Keely bore on past families of low-murmuring Vietnamese as they reeled in minuscule yellowtail and fingerling trevally. He turned a forgiving eye to their lard buckets of bloody water teeming with fins and white bellies and hundreds of golden tails. He didn’t stoop to scowl or tut. They were folks catching a feed: tired, shy, suspicious. They didn’t need his purse-lipped concern tonight. The concrete wharf was gummy with pollard, mired with the innards of crushed blowfish, spangled with scales. Bored schoolgirls sat on milk crates, texting, jiggling, hating to be there while their fathers and grandfathers squatted in plastic sandals, grey trousers and white singlets to thread maggots onto tiny hooks and press damp pollard into berley cages. Peaceable, calm, purposeful folks. Keely strolled on — living, letting live.

Out towards the end of the quay, in the lee of the shiny new museum, he rested against a bollard to watch a pair of romancing backpackers share a can of beer. Birkenstocks, topknots, golden limbs. They stared across at the otherworldly light of the container terminal. Their voices were soft and foreign. They sounded Nordic. And they gave off an irrepressible sense of contentment, as if this warm evening at the far end of the earth had been worth the journey. He lingered a moment, riding the swell of the contact high. Until they gave him a look that sent him on his way.

~ ~ ~

When the lift door opened at the tenth floor Gemma Buck stood waiting in some kind of uniform.

Bloody hell, she said. What’s the odds?

Hi again, said Keely as they stepped around each other awkwardly to exchange places.

Out for dinner? she asked, holding the door back with a downy arm.

Just a walk, he said. You?

Work.

In the hard light of the lift’s fluorescent he saw the supermarket logo across the breast of her tunic.

Nightshift?

Packin shelves, she said. It’s real fulfillin.

Keely smiled. Gemma tugged a bag across her shoulder. In her hand was an unlit cigarette. A moment passed and she gave a wry grin. As the door began to close once more Keely stepped into its path and let it butt his hip.

What’d you forget?

Your boy. I mean, I just…

Asleep, said Gemma.

Keely stood there with the door shoving at him, conscious of how much he’d assumed about her with no solid idea of her circumstances. For a moment he’d even thought she was leaving the child unattended.

He’s a nice kid.

Yeah. He is.

Listen, sorry about today.

Gemma shrugged.

I was a bit of a mess.

You reckon?

I didn’t mean to be rude.

Orright.

I guess we’ll talk.

Sorry?

Maybe catch up on things.

Oh. Yeah. Maybe.

Well. Let you go.

Night, she said.

He stepped back and the door finally closed.

For half a minute he stood there as the lift groaned and clanked down the shaft. Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Or call his mother. He wouldn’t call Faith back, either, because it’d only set him off on some melancholy tangent. He’d watch some ancient B-movie and hope sleep stole up on him.

As soon as he’d let himself in the phone rang. He hesitated a moment, then snatched it up. Instead of Faith it was Doris.

What’s up? he asked.

I’m watching Victor Mature. Could you imagine Samson being quite so wet-lipped and doe-eyed? I don’t think so.

So, I take it Faith called you.

Yes, but love set me free.

Very funny, Mum.

I called before, she said.

I went for a walk.

Good idea.

Well, it wasn’t a Eureka moment. But yeah, it was nice.

Faith says you ran into one of the Buck girls.

That’s right. Gemma.

God, she was a beautiful child. Don’t you remember that gorgeous hair?

Hmm.

She was like a little doll.

Whatever happened to them? he said. The parents.

Bunny left him in the end. John died at Port Hedland in the eighties. I used to wonder she didn’t kill him herself. Believe me, there were times when I could have done it for her.

You were good to them. I haven’t forgotten.

Tommy.

I mean, how it was, what you did.

You okay?

Mum, I went for a walk. I’m fine.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to —

Not a problem.

Tom, I’m not worried.

He laughed.

Why are you laughing?

Well, Doris dear, not worrying seems to be a special mum-thing.

Okay, she admitted. Caught.

I give you cause, I know.

You’re fine, love.

Anyway, tonight you shouldn’t fret.

It’ll get better, Tom.

Yeah, he murmured. I expect so.

Let’s have lunch.

No worries.

Monday?

Alright.

Call you Sunday night?

Sure.

Love you.

You too.

When he hung up, Keely realized his mother had barely asked about Gemma. It was unlike her. Perhaps it was a sign of how worried she was. Or how far she’d left the old days behind her. Maybe he’d figure that out at lunch. But his buoyant mood was gone.

He lingered near the slider, flexed his toes in the nap of the carpet, felt nothing and was not much comforted.

Felt a little thump. From whatever. Like an elbow against the wall of his skull. The tenant turning over in bed.

He gobbed a couple of Nurofen Plus. A bit of sandbagging for good measure.

Turned on the telly. And there he was in his loincloth. Victor Mature, looking camp as a row of tents. Soon to be eyeless in Gaza.

Turned it off. Stared at his sadsack reflection in the window. Knew he’d end up back at the knife drawer any minute. For something to kick him over the edge. Tried to stare himself down. Et cetera. And blinked, of course.

~ ~ ~

A wrenching gasp and there he was. On the bed in the foetid room. Every surface dancing and flashing. A streetsweeper droned far below. Blood spritzed in his limbs as if he’d only just come off the boil.

Three o’clock. He’d been dreaming — something awful, something that had mercifully evaporated the moment he woke.

In the bathroom he sluiced himself with cool water, stood dripping a while in the half-dark before reaching for the gamy towel. The dim outline in the mirror moved in sympathy. Not really in sync. An approximation.

But when he turned for bed and stepped through the doorway there was a different form in the bedroom window, a shape too small to be his reflection, too distinct to be any kind of reflection at all.

The size of a child. Naked in the strobing, distant light. Pressed against the screen as if held there by wind-shear alone. Bare arms aloft in benediction or flight. He was calm, those moments he lingered; the boy was calm and solemn and terrible.

Then gone, like an unsustainable thought.

Keely knelt on the bed before the suddenly vacant window. Nothing there but breathless night. When his pulse finally subsided he lay down and tried to sleep. But he could feel it returning. Not the image, but the dream. In wisps and fits and flashes. Settling upon him like a dread familiar.

It was the boy. Gemma Buck’s kid. In the dream he was out on the balcony — Gemma’s, not his. And in the dream Keely was alone, wrapped in a towel in cool, cool air, impossibly cold air, not seeing the boy out there across the way until he moved. The child was three balconies distant. He was bare-chested, squatting on a milk crate, breasting the rail and dipping his head to it. His pale hair shone in the dark as he perched and bobbed, lapping dew off the iron like a thirsty dove.

And that was it. All the dream that would come safely to mind. Even this much frightened him. He sensed that there’d been more than just squatting, but he didn’t want to go there; he was practised enough at shelving what could not be borne. But the logic of something worse beat on in him for minutes until he began to feel he’d assimilated it for what it was, a harmless bit of mental indigestion. He was fine. It was all good and there was juice left in the pills, current enough to tug at him so he felt himself leaching away towards delicious sleep. And yet he could feel the pale glow of the boy there, waiting. In the swamp of his ungoverned country. Perched, pigeon-chested. Too high. Unguarded. Only a straightened leg away from toppling.

Keely clawed back, roused himself. Got up. Dragged on some shorts. Blundered through to the dim livingroom, jacked open the slider and stepped outside.

All along the building the balconies were deserted. A few railings were still illuminated by blue flickers of television, but nobody was out there.

The invisible sea revealed itself in throbbing boundaries — red lights, green lights, the distant pulses of the island lighthouses. The port thrummed, the town itself reduced to echoes and murmurs as the streetsweeper trundled out towards the marina.

He went back in. But was too afraid to sleep. Which should have been funny given how much he craved it, what he’d swallowed to get there, how muzzy and ready he felt. He’d just lie here a while, ignore the leg tremors, wait it out.

~ ~ ~

Dawn. Morning. Day.

Didn’t take the bike out. Didn’t swim. Eyes like hot pea gravel. The flat was roasting but he holed up there all day. The building trembled with the comings and goings of others. All that purposeful Friday traffic. He tooled about on the laptop, googling aimlessly, squinting, holding his scone like it was an IED.

His inbox was stacked with unread emails, most from bewildered or exasperated friends and comrades, though the most recent were many weeks old. By the boldface subject titles he could see solicitude taper away to hurt silence and worse. Two of the last, from people he’d promised vital briefings on the wetlands strategy, were simply headed, WTF? Piled in their aging strata, these unanswered messages were a miserable sort of archaeology, a register of failure. It was absurd and lowering to keep them like this. Sick to pull them up and survey them, scrolling down the list, pausing over one now and then as if daring yourself to open it. It was time to end it.

He got up, strode to the sliding door, looked out at the sea a moment, then returned to the table and closed down the email address, fried everything while he had the will.

Afterwards he felt a glimmer of achievement. But in terms of satisfaction it was hardly more substantial or sustaining than the afterglow of a good shit.

The phone rang twice that day — in the morning, in the afternoon — but he didn’t answer. He scrounged leftovers, ate fruit no longer in the first flush of its youth. Market day, but he wasn’t going down there. Tourists. Earnest local faces. All that friendly stallholder shouting. The heat. The confined cattle smell of his countrymen. Fuck that.

Still ruined from his dream-stalked night, he napped fitfully in the chair. In the afternoon the woman next door cranked up, fighting off powers and principalities with chants and admonitions. He had to admire it, the way she held herself together with language. The longer she went, the stronger she sounded. He envied her. Which was stupid. And frightening.

Late in the day, bored rather than needy, he dug the last cleanskin from the carton under the bed — a flabby grenache he usually resorted to only as a stopgap sedative — and the first glass he poured was hot and calming. He worked through it unhurriedly, savouring the late arrival of the sea breeze, and at sunset he used the dregs to wash down a few Mersyndols and a hayfever tab for good measure, closing out the day with a certain resolve.

Maybe one last moment on the balcony before bed. To make sure of it, confirm it’d all been in his weary mind. He’d get up in a moment, go out. If only he could swim up against the weight of all that tepid water pressing him into the chair.

But hang on. Wasn’t that him? Not even bothering to wait for Keely to doze off. There already. There before him. Just past the pulsing insect mesh of the slider. The kid. Perched atop the rail, braced against a battering sea wind. The boy was motionless. Held there like a kite in the updraught. While the building swayed and rustled like a tuart tree. The sky purple, violent, the child without expression, staring off in profile, hair shining. Keely called out, tried to wave him back to safety, but the kid seemed startled by the sudden movement. Flexed. Pitched forward. And was gone in an instant.

*

He woke and it was dark. Woke. Actually, fully awake. But trusting nothing. He stood outside in his briefs. Gemma’s balcony was empty but he was too rattled to let things go at that. He went back in, unlatched the front door and weaved his way up the walkway to where the dome light burned above the grille at 1010. The door behind the screen was the same dirty beige as his, the warped security mesh furred with corrosion from the salt wind. At the kitchen window the curtain was drawn, but there was a light on inside. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to make sure all was well, but at 11.08 p.m. in his cock-jocks there seemed no easy means of doing so. He lingered, dithering, pressed against the hot bricks.

Down the walkway, a door slammed. A woman in a sari — a deep green sari it was — gathered her keys and handbag. Lustrous dark hair. A bindi red as a camera light on her brow. On that dark brow, that raised face. Which was looking directly his way. Seeing him, recording his semi-nude presence. She stiffened, let out a sudden chirp of alarm, and sent him tilting homeward.

~ ~ ~

He was late getting up, and bleary along with it, but for the remainder of the morning he kept an eye out for Gemma, even broke his own rule and left the door ajar, but she didn’t come by. With the nightshifts he was loath to knock on her door. He paced. He made his grimy bed. Paced a little more.

Flipped open the Mac. Just to pass the time. And then he cracked. Couldn’t help himself. He trolled through the newsfeeds, taking in the headlines. Instantly bewildered. Same-same but worse.

Faith was right. The world was indeed choking on a bone. Obama trying for a bail-out. Everyone covering the bankers’ arses. Which was heartwarming. But here at home hardly a ripple. Endless reserves of mining loot. Safe as houses. Although when it came to bricks and mortar it seemed the good folks of Perth were stunned to learn that their property prices might flatten out, which would be for them, he imagined, confirmation the world really had slipped its moorings. Still, some bloke in Queensland, clearly refusing to surrender to the lure of introspection, had set a new record by busting forty-seven watermelons over his own head. Go, Australia.

After years of professional habit, or maybe just masochistic impulse, he sieved up the environment story of the day. But it was hardly news. In Hobart, evidently fretting about trade relations, the Feds had raided the Sea Shepherd ship, the Steve Martin, or whatever it was this year, Steve Jobs, Steve Buscemi — what did it matter? Anyway, they were back, those wild-eyed buggers, returned from another season of irritating the Japs. Glamour-hounds and donor-hogs they may be but he loved them. All bluster aside, they were doing what government lacked the balls to do. Had it been a gas field down there in the Southern Ocean the Feds would be sending gunboats. But they left it to these cowboys. And then pursed their lips in disapproval. Didn’t seem so long ago those vegan pirates were tied up here at the end of the street. Another petty imbroglio into which he’d been dragooned. Down on the quay in front of the cameras, facing off against the network girlies with their pancake make-up and Darth Vader hair. Calling in a bunch of favours to broker a deal and shame some dingleberry member of Cabinet into letting the vessel refuel and take on fresh celebs. Thankless Sunday morning’s work that’d been.

Anyway, enough. He slapped the laptop shut. Pulling back while he still could. For a clear head, pure mind.

He sat there. Pointlessly alert. And no one came by. Forty-eight hours ago he’d have counted this a blessing, a major domestic success. But now he was unsettled. Fidgeting in gormless anticipation.

It was bloody unnerving.

*

At noon, hungry and twitchy as a numbat, he gave up and went down into the streets for breakfast. Bub’s was only four blocks from home, on a side street off the Strip, but it was a trek getting there, hacking his way through a thicket of sticky tourists and weekend wood ducks. The joint was heaving. Saturday. What was he thinking? The moment he arrived Bub sent him out a sly double-shot and a muffin. Local privileges, that at least was something. And he appreciated it. But the crowd made him leery so he didn’t hang about. It was back to the bat cave for him. Sent off with a knowing hitch of the eyebrows by good old Bub who knew what was what.

A block from the Mirador he came upon Gemma and the boy as they emerged from a sports store. The street was hot and snarled with cars idling for a park. Gemma looked frazzled. The kid clicked along on a pair of football boots fresh from the box. The expression on his moony face managed to combine triumph and solemnity. He glanced back at his own heels and watched himself, slightly startled but pleased, in the shop windows.

G’day, said Keely.

Oh, said Gemma. Hi.

Someone got lucky.

His birthday, said Gemma.

Well then, happy birthday.

I know who you are, said the kid.

I’m Tom, he said. What’s your name?

You had rats, said the boy.

Rats?

Get out of the sun, said Gemma, hauling them into the lee of an awning.

How old are you? asked Keely.

Six, said the kid. We’re having fish and chips. Gonna feed the sea-goals.

Gulls, said Gemma. It’s gulls.

Must be the boots, said Keely.

Both of them looked at him blankly.

Goals, he said. Football boots.

Right, she said with a look of cringe-making forbearance.

Hapless, Keely looked to the kid, not really knowing what he expected — fraternal understanding? Weren’t pissweak jokes milk and honey to a six-year-old? The boy studied him. Shade or no, Keely felt hotter than he had with the sun beating on his skull.

Can Tom come? For chips?

Well, he said, sensing Gemma’s irritation.

Tom’s busy, said Gemma.

But it’s my birthday.

You mind? she asked, embarrassed or maybe just annoyed.

No, he said, of course not.

But it’s your weekend.

Not a problem, he said, startled by the look come over her face. Like she was glad, even grateful.

Not a problem, said Gemma. Your dad used to say that.

Really? I don’t remember, he admitted.

Not a problem. Jesus. That’s Nev orright. God bless him.

Anyway, he said, fish and chips it is.

The kid kicked the air. He glanced at himself again in the glass, brandished a gleaming boot.

Carn then, you two, said Gemma. Come if you’re comin, I’m roastin out here.

No cracks, said the boy, indicating the slabs of the footpath.

Right, said Keely. No cracks.

Crossing town in the direction of the marina, he found it was quite some effort avoiding joins or cracks in the pavement, what with everything else in his head. He was relieved to reach the green swathe of the esplanade, which teemed with picnickers and shirtless youths playing cricket. On the grass beneath the Norfolk pines the boy concentrated on avoiding dog poo, a sport closer to Keely’s heart and of which he was already a grizzled veteran. It was fun. Though he began to wonder if the kid wasn’t a bit compulsive about it. But who wasn’t finicky about dog shit?

Tell about the rats, said the kid as they came to the rail line that formed the last boundary between the town and the water.

Don’t start that again, said Gemma.

But Nan, you said.

Nan, thought Keely. Nan?

Quit bugging him, she said. Tom doesn’t want to talk about rats.

You told him about my rats?

John, George, Paul and Ringo, she said with a grin that was almost shy.

I’ll be damned.

I wanted them rats, she said, shaking out a fag with a laugh. I used to take em outta the cage when you weren’t there.

What sorta name is Ringo anyway? asked the boy.

Dunno, said Keely, straight-faced. It just came to me, I spose.

Gemma snorted.

They were good pets, he said. Good rodents all.

As they stepped over the rails at the crossing, the boy took Gemma’s hand and moved with a peculiar precision, as if the track were electrified. Left and right, people jounced strollers and wheeled bikes across, but the kid concentrated on avoiding all contact. And when they made the path on the far side he returned his attention to paving cracks. Soon they were on the boardwalk whose flashing green slats between planks reduced him to a geisha gait that was comical.

Where are those rats? asked the kid. What happened to them?

Kai, love, yer not gettin a rat, said Gemma. So don’t even ask.

I don’t really remember what happened to them, said Keely.

Maybe another time, Gemma said darkly. Enough about rats.

They’re hard work, said Keely. And they stink a bit. Anyway, they’re no good in a flat, sport.

I could keep em on the outside bit.

The balcony?

Kai, said Gemma, I told you. No rats.

Anyway, said Keely. You couldn’t just leave them out in the weather. Besides, he said, reaching now, but heeding Gemma’s desire to snuff the entire notion, birds might get them.

That’s right, said Gemma, busking it.

You know, like owls, kites, hawks. They all eat mice and rats.

And sea-goals? Gulls? asked the kid.

Nah, but maybe a heron’d have a go.

Heron.

That’s a waterbird. They mostly hunt fish.

But it’s high up, said the boy. Floor ten.

No problem for a bird.

Like… like a eagle?

Exactly, said Keely, beginning to enjoy himself. Or an osprey.

The boy tested the word, seemed to like it. Said it again.

That’s a sort of eagle, said Keely. Swoops down, snatches up something good to eat, flies off to his nest right up high. He’s like, king of the mountain, prince of all he surveys.

The boy glanced up at Gemma for verification. She shrugged, blew smoke sideways as they negotiated the dawdling, icecream-dripping hordes.

Reckon Tom knows his birds, she told the boy. He’s a nature nut. Isn’t that right?

Keely returned the shrug. Keen on birds, are you, Kai?

The kid said nothing.

Keen on givin his nan the runaround.

Osprey, said the kid.

Keely did the arithmetic. Gemma was barely into her mid-forties. So that was how it’d gone.

Around the northern rim of the marina the chippers were packed, their jetties and terraces aswarm with lunching day-trippers, sunstruck Brits, giggling teens. Enormous white cruisers pulled in to moor alongside, bristling with portly folks in deckshoes and sun visors anxious to parade their grand success. It was a kind of western-suburbs ritual, casting off from their enclaves upriver in Perth to steam downstream in their ocean-going craft, and the moment they met the open sea they hurled the wheel hard aport to tuck in here and tie up two metres from dry land alongside the plebs who could gawk and chew, rendered dumbstruck, presumably, by the angelic logic of the trickledown economy.

Doesn’t that pep you up? he said.

What? What’s that?

These floating gin palaces. Give you the can-do feeling, that aspirational awe.

Gemma ignored him, or perhaps she didn’t hear, preoccupied as she was with muscling them into a table by the water’s edge. She lunged, weaved, saw a party get to its feet and pounced.

Stay here, she told him. Kai’n me’ll go inside to order.

Keely obeyed, sat a few minutes in the shade of the umbrella, and breathed in the vapours of fat and diesel and algae. Which were rather homely, now he thought of it. But he felt self-conscious down here with the weekenders, wary of faces too familiar for comfort. Few locals came down anymore, certainly not at the weekend, but there were always the pollies and bureaucrats in their short sleeves and Country Road shorts, the epicene journos relieved of an afternoon’s weeding, and he didn’t want any sudden encounters.

Gemma and the boy returned with hefty paper parcels of fried goods. And he stuffed himself, soaking chips in harsh white vinegar, slathering his wedge of snapper in the sort of ketchup that probably glowed in the dark. He watched the kid. How he gorged on chips and left his fish so long the batter went soggy. Eventually he peeled it back with meticulous care, as if it were a scab on his knee. Then he ate it, grease leaking from the corners of his mouth, and left the fishmeat naked on the paper. Not completely odd. Just a kid doing more or less what Keely would have done at six.

A few metres away a pelican alighted on a jetty pile, sending Chinese tourists into a frenzy of videography.

What about a pelican? said the boy. Would a pelican eat a rat?

I doubt it, he said.

They catch fish, said Gemma. Like that other thing. What was that other bird, Tom?

Heron, he said, wiping fat from his chin.

The kid’s fingers twitched. He blinked. Keely saw him silently count the syllables, then the letters, absorbing the word.

There used to be one round here, said Keely, a heron that pinched my koi, my goldfish. Swooped down, reefed them right out of the pond.

You got a pond? said the kid. At your flat?

No, said Keely with a chuckle. This was when I had a house. Back over there, see? Past the boatsheds, behind the trees.

Gemma turned with the child, looked across the marina to where he was pointing. She chewed, said nothing.

Did ospreys come too? asked the child.

No. But they’re around. Sometimes you can hear them. They have a weird sound, like a whingeing noise they make.

The boy looked doubtful, glanced at Gemma.

What? said Keely.

He thinks you’re winding him up.

But it’s true.

And there’s really ospreys? asked the boy. Here?

He nodded. Maybe one day I’ll show you. And your nan.

He’ll be telling the truth, said Gemma. It’s a Keely thing.

What’s a Keely thing?

Never mind. Carn, you two, I’m as full as a fat lady’s sock. That’s us done.

They left the marina and let the kid run across the little beach behind the long stone mole protecting the rivermouth and the shipping harbour. Riding seaward on the other side of the breakwater a reeking sheep carrier loomed like a slum, the hawser of smoke from its stack coiling back upriver to the wharf. Kai seemed happy enough by himself at the water’s edge and Keely sat with Gemma on the low wall above the sand, taking what little succour the sea breeze offered. They were quiet a while, the two of them, and awkward. Then, unprompted, Gemma told him about her daughter, the boy’s mother. Her name was Carly. She was Gemma’s only child and she was doing a stretch in Bandyup for drugs, assault and thieving. Not her first stint by any means. Kai had been with Gemma, off and on, for much of his life.

You’re good with him, he said, for something to say. He thought of the dreams. Didn’t know why. Tried to focus. Really, he said. You’re a champion.

She shrugged, said nothing.

So what’s it like? he asked before he could help it.

She pursed her lips. Is what it is.

They watched Kai a moment.

You had a house on the water?

Near it, he said.

Posh.

We both had good jobs, I guess.

And?

Had to sell it, he said. Divorce.

And now you’re livin in a one-bedroom flat.

Yep.

What’s that like?

Feeling the rebuke, he looked at her. She blew smoke into his face and smiled.

Tommy Keely.

Yep.

What’s the odds, eh?

~ ~ ~

The studs of Kai’s new boots rapped at the pavement all the way home. Touching neither turd, crack nor rail. The kid was canny. Pedestrians parted before him and if he noticed he didn’t let on. Keely wittered on about ospreys and other birds of prey for the pleasure of the kid’s attention. He didn’t know that much about raptors. Birds weren’t really his thing. Which was cute, given he’d gone down in flames for the sake of an endangered species of cockatoo.

I need a wee, Kai announced as they came into the forecourt.

Litre of Coke, I wonder why, said Gemma.

Keely followed them through to the lifts. Thought of the same sequence from a couple of days before. Their meeting in the dim lobby. And felt strangely cheered. They rode up in a companionable lull and at the top floor Gemma gave the jouncing boy the keys, sent him on ahead.

Is it safe?

Is what safe?

Letting him run like that, letting him go on his own.

She fixed him with a smirk. What are you, a kid expert, too?

He shrugged, a bit stung. In the distance the screen door slapped; the kid was inside.

For Gawdsake, aim to please! she bellowed after him.

They were silent a few moments.

So, tell me, he said, what did happen to my rats?

Ah, she said. Me, actually.

What d’you mean?

When you all moved. You left em with me.

Geez, I don’t even remember.

I was that excited. Almost forgot why you had to go, I was so thrilled.

So how did it go?

Lasted one day. First night I fed em all rum and raisin icecream. Thought I’d spoil em. And in the morning they were cactus. Every one of em. Toes up.

Keely honked with laughter.

Fat as tennis balls, they were. Cried me eyes out.

Oh well. They died happy.

As they reached Keely’s door Kai belted back down the walkway.

How do you spell it?

Spell what? said Gemma.

The eagle bird.

Osprey, said Keely, spelling it out for him. I can show you one on the computer. Actually I know where one lives.

For real?

Yeah. True. I can show you.

Today?

Kai —

Well, today’s a bit hard.

Tomorrow?

You got school, said Gemma.

Nan, it’s Sunday!

Well, Tom’s busy.

Actually I’m not.

Well, it’s your funeral.

It’d be fun. We can all go.

Terrific, she said without enthusiasm.

I’m gonna get ready, said Kai, turning for home.

It’s tomorrow, love, said Gemma with tender exasperation.

The screen door slapped to. Keely bellied up to the rail and looked down at the beetle-backs of the tenants’ vehicles below.

Listen, he said. If you need someone to look after him. I mean, I know you work at night.

We’re fine, she said. He’s used to it.

Sure. And I guess you can’t be too careful.

Gemma stood beside him, forearms on the rail. Her hair luffed against his arm in the wind. She smelt like the mums of the old neighbourhood, of smoke and aluminium deodorant, fried food.

Well, she said. I didn’t go to any uni, but I’m smart enough to trust a Keely.

I don’t even know what that means.

How is she?

Faith? She’s in Singapore.

I mean your mum.

Oh. She’s great.

Must’ve been proud.

Yeah?

I used to see you on the telly.

Oh, he said with a grimace.

In a suit. With them greenies.

Yep. That was me.

You their lawyer or somethin?

Campaigner, he said. Spokesperson.

Spokesperson.

Anyway. Doris is great, he said. I’m calling her right now. About tomorrow.

She’s comin?

What? No.

Oh. Right. Well.

Is ten okay?

For what?

Birdwatching.

Christ, she said. Can’t wait.

~ ~ ~

Years ago an old friend from uni told Keely that only two good things ever came out of Fremantle. And both of those were bridges. He thought of her as the train trundled across the Old Traffic Bridge towards the gilded city. The river shining below for a moment and then the farther shore suddenly beneath him. Melissa was from a stolid suburb of Perth. Wembley, if memory served. She’d gone on to teach history and English. Went back and did a master’s degree. Or maybe it was a doctorate. But last he heard she was up at the mines along with everybody else, flying in and out in hi-viz every fortnight, making four times the dough for half the hours. As a bus driver. Said it was boring as hell but the money soothed all wounds. The way she said it sounded defensive. And that saddened him. As if she expected a crack about her being another cashed-up bogan. What a pious knob he was.

The train eased through the stops until there was no mistaking the tiny but telling territorial differences. The trophy cars. The pouty boutiques. The irrepressible confidence of life in the dress circle.

*

He found Doris in the restaurant courtyard with a glass of something newly poured. She was jotting things in a spiral notepad. In the fading light, beneath the trellised vines, his mother was as handsome as ever, perhaps a little less approachable for the self-possession she projected these days. Against the rough pavers and terracotta pots, she was silvery, slim, more noticeable than a son might prefer. Her thick grey hair was twisted into girlish plaits that flapped against her arms and when she hoisted them across her shoulders and stood to greet him, the ethnic confusion of bangles clunked and chimed chaotically — that maddening, reassuring clangour. They were a nightmare at the movies, those hoops, clanking and rattling at every moment of mirth or dramatic intensity, but they’d become the sound of her. She was a calm, quiet person, often so restrained that without the bracelets and baubles you’d never register the intensity of her excitement or agitation. That was the bit of her he remembered most from his bruised adolescence: the chatter and rattle of bangles as she turned pages and made notes, studying late into the night after he and his sister were in bed.

Well, she said, pouring him a glass. What a good idea. Monday really was too long to wait.

You must know somebody. To get a table Saturday night.

Bollocks, she said. I promised we’d arrive early, eat like pokie machines —

And tip like a Haulpak truck, eh?

Money, she said with a sigh.

They’re right. It talks.

But wouldn’t it be lovely if now and then it had something interesting to say.

Keely smiled, enduring her benevolent glance — yes, he was a ruin — and tried to give his full attention to the riesling she’d ordered. Something from the Porongurups, something new.

Well?

Nice, he said. He swished it round his glass, in his mouth. Beneath its citric charm there was something almost sandy. He felt his temples draw in a little, like windows pressed against their frames by a suddenly opened door. He realized Doris was speaking.

Sorry, he said. What?

Nothing, she said. I was just faffing on about the wine. To impress you.

But her face had fallen and he suspected she’d been talking about something more important. Doris, love, I’m always impressed.

She smiled for him and it smarted.

He drew himself up, took in the rich spillover of kitchen vapours, the briny scent of the river. Saw his right leg twitching waywardly. The house music — some generic World nonsense — was loud. He shot a look at the staff flexing their tatts by the kitchen pass. No use asking them to turn it down; these days restaurant music was not for the paying customer.

Hey, he said into the taut pause in proceedings. I might come by tomorrow and grab the dinghy.

Just in time.

How’s that?

I was getting ready to turf it out at the next street collection.

Couldn’t blame you.

Well, it’s been a while.

I’m thinking of a spin on the river.

Good. Lovely.

Listen — did I sleepwalk as a kid?

I won’t even inquire about that rapid transition.

Sorry.

Somebody once peed in the linen press, if I recall.

Don’t remember that.

Well, she said with a laugh. Then you may have your answer.

But you would have said. If it was one of us there’d be an inescapable family legend.

Probably. But I do recall small bodies ghosting about in the night. Having to steer them back to bed.

Kids from the street, he said. Your lame ducks.

Lame ducks? she said with arched brows.

Doris let him marinate a moment. He saw the irony. Now that he was the chief wounded bird in her life, the least functional member of the family. He raised his glass, all the acknowledgement and surrender he could manage.

I remember a lot of sheets on the line, a lot of wet beds. All those kids you took in.

They had their reasons, she said.

I don’t doubt it.

But, no. Neither of you wandered or wet the bed.

Huh.

A long moment passed. Doris jingled.

Why d’you ask, love?

Keely sipped his wine, tried not to gulp.

Oh. Nothing, really.

She gave a diffident nod but he knew she wasn’t buying it. She hoisted a clacking arm and summoned one of the prowling narcissists for some service.

Keely tried to address the menu but he was preoccupied by her heightened watchfulness. The flash of her specs coming off and on — clunkitty-click. Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt. And he didn’t know what half of it meant. What the fuck was a coxcomb of Serrano solar? Or was he just obtuse? Christ, he was starting to sweat. He was leaving great smudgy fingerprints.

Food, she said. It wasn’t always this stressful.

He smiled. What a lovely, impressive old duck his mother was. By some obscure law of nature he was expected to supersede her, yet in her presence he felt like a flake. It wasn’t really what she said that made him feel wet and feeble, it was just who she was, what she’d done for Faith and for him, and what she’d achieved for herself. A young widow with two kids, she’d gone back to finish high school, studied social work part-time and kept two jobs as well as a home life. After that, the law degree, and all the quixotic social justice causes. Daughter of a wharfie, wife of a diesel mechanic, Doris may look like Julie Christie but her voice was still pure Blackboy Crescent, as broad and dry as the coastal plain.

As if resisting the catalogue of fetishes on the menu, she ordered briskly, almost offhandedly, and he found himself following suit. The waitperson stalked off as if aggrieved by their want of reverence and after a shared chuckle they fell silent. Doris drank her wine, chewed her lip. Keely felt his pulse quicken. He sensed trouble.

Well, she murmured, setting her glass down carefully, turning it worryingly once or twice. Here’s an interesting piece of information I’ve been wanting to share all day.

Oh dear, he said, tamping down his panic. You’re actually looking over your shoulder.

Just being sensible.

You’re running for parliament.

Don’t be absurd.

Then what?

The Crime and Corruption Commission is about to call before it a certain lobbyist.

Keely rocked back in his seat. Placed his hands gently upon the table.

Relating to certain matters involving the rezoning of a nature reserve and a subsequent real estate development.

Old news, he said, feeling the pulse in his throat. Ancient history.

In the wake of statements by a shire councillor and a town planner, now deceased. Along with the lobbyist, they’re hauling in at least one member of parliament and several senior public servants.

Why tell me? he said. I don’t even care anymore.

Some methodical drongo kept files, a diarized record. Documenting at least one payment of seventy thousand dollars to a public officer, an inducement from the developer.

One bit of evidence. Hardly a case.

And phone intercepts.

Shit, he said. They knew all along?

Or at least had their suspicions.

Well, whacko, he said bitterly. Put out the flags.

This is just the beginning, Tom. It’s all going to come out.

This is Perth, Doris. Nothing ever comes out. People keep their heads down. They’re shit-scared and they have every right to be. These pricks will string it out forever; they’re lawyered up till doomsday, they’ll wear the CCC to a nub and walk away.

No. Not this time.

Oh, what does it even matter?

It matters that you told the truth. You were right all along.

Of course I was fucking right, he thought, setting his glass down with monumental care. Had she fallen for the smear like everyone else? Was this why she was so excited, because she’d thought he was the embittered nutter they cast him as?

Tom, are you alright?

Fine, he said through his teeth.

You’ll be vindicated.

Redeemed.

Those words still mean something to me.

Yes, he conceded.

I know it’s been hard.

You’re going to tell me it was worth it?

I wish you could have confided in someone. We could have tackled it strategically.

I spent every day for fifteen years doing nothing else, Doris. But we lose. Not because we’re rubbish at it. That’s just how it works. We’re meant to lose. And campaign and calculate all we like, the bulldozers still arrive, the agencies wash their hands, the media get their little flash of colour and it’s back to business as usual. We’re the soft story wedged in before the sports results. Twice a week in a slow week.

Look, I know it’s hard not to be cynical —

Remember the old slogan? EPA: Every Proposal Accepted. Used to think it was hyperbole, propaganda. But it’s pretty much the truth. Like every other arm of government, it’s a servant of industry, ‘facilitator of ongoing prosperity’. Bribery isn’t even necessary. That’s the real insult. The system works beautifully without it.

But in this instance we’re talking about a prima facie case of actual corruption. And I think it’ll stick.

You really have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Doris blinked. She leant across the table and he knew by the venomous rattle of Third World hardware that he’d crossed a line.

I’m sorry, he said, but it sounded hollow.

Who do you think you’re impressing, some doe-eyed intern in a sarong?

Doris —

You think you’re the only person who has to live and work in this hothouse? I’ve been dealing with this little club of red-faced chancers since you were a schoolboy. You think I don’t know what it is to be traduced?

Really, he said. I apologize.

Anyway, that’s my news. For what it’s worth.

It’s just that being vindicated —

We needn’t talk about it.

There’s no job waiting, no welcome back. You saw how fast we settled. The donors were bolting like rats from a housefire. WildForce couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. And now no one’ll touch me. All for a few trees and fifty birds with faces only a mother could love.

Mothers are like that.

It was stupid. I mean, we’ve lost so many bigger battles, places more important in the scheme of things. When I saw those trees falling I didn’t even feel anything. But that little black cloud of birds. And the wailing hippies and the mums and dads there in their sunsmart hats, and the poor bird-boffin with his specs broken —

Let’s not talk about it.

I just lit up. Like a flare.

I know. We all saw.

And you know, it felt great. Five or six minutes. Like, I don’t know what. Like vomiting hot coals.

Isaiah, said Doris.

He looked at her. Those glittering eyes. The rueful smile. Saw how afraid she was for him, how long she’d kept herself in check. He was ashamed. But angry, too. That there could only ever be one subject.

Oh well, he said, trying to draw this line of conversation to an end. Too late the hero, eh?

Never too late, she said. Never.

To the good fight, he said, brandishing his glass. And all our lost causes.

Doris didn’t reciprocate. She flicked her plaits. A rattle of impatience, irritation.

There was a silence between them. The hectoring music. Falling darkness.

Tell me, she said. Are you married to that beard?

Why, because you used to be?

And what’s that supposed to mean?

Someone said it makes me look like Dad.

Who? Who said that?

Gemma Buck.

Hmm.

You’re not going to ask about her?

Doris shut down a moment, pushing her glass in circles.

I thought there might be more important things to deal with. Before we got all nostalgic.

Like what, for instance?

Faith. She’s worried.

She hasn’t even seen the beard. She’s watching brokers leap from skyscrapers. What I’d like to know is why can’t she get more of them to take the plunge. God knows, we need a cull.

Tom, love.

What?

You’re being a bit of a nong.

I imagine so.

You can always desist, you know.

But here I am, vindicated and persisting.

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned the… thing.

You want me to shave the beard?

Forget the bloody beard.

I’m sorry.

She took up the bottle, but he covered his glass like a man in regal control of his impulses. She refilled her own, sat back and restored herself.

So tell me about Gemma, then, she said with a wan smile.

Not much to say, really. I just saw her in passing.

What does she do? How does she seem?

Dunno, he said. It was just a chance encounter.

Family?

There’s a grandkid. A boy.

Good for her.

He glanced up, saw her appraising stare, felt the lost moment in her false brightness.

I often think about them, Baby and her.

He nodded, wishing he could go back, begin the evening again, but it was hopeless. He lacked the gumption to set things right, he was too accustomed to the logic of defeat. He saw it now, the rest of the meal. They’d eat in fraught politeness and leave the moment the last fork was laid down. She’d insist on driving him home. He’d protest, pile in anyway. And she’d want to come up and see the flat once and for all but refrain from asking. She’d take his kiss on the cheek like a lowball tip and wheel the boxy old Volvo away, looking game as ever, masking her hurt and disappointment as he stood limp and seething on the forecourt.

The task at hand was getting to that final, miserable moment as quickly as possible.

~ ~ ~

Keely was halfway along the open gallery, digging at his temples, when he noticed something flapping in the security mesh of his door. Some civic announcement, no doubt: a plea for a lost kitten, a notice about building maintenance. But when he pulled it from the grille he saw it was a child’s drawing, a crayon outline of a bird. Dumpy, earthbound, like an overfed kiwi.

Once he got inside he clamped the sheet of paper to the fridge with a magnet. At other people’s places — friends from work, people with kids — he’d always looked with an inner sneer at their fridge doors plastered in clumsy daubs. Everything their brats committed to paper was so special, so important it required immediate and prolonged display. The kids probably forgot their work the moment they put the brush down, never thinking another thing of it. And now here he was, chuffed to have it there. This peculiar burst of colour, this lovely intrusion.

He banged down a couple of Panadeine Forte with a chaste swish of apple juice. It was ten-thirty but from his balcony he saw that the lights were on over at 1010. A few moments later he was outside her kitchen window, tapping lightly. The curtain ricked aside. Gemma squinted out, tense, alert, annoyed.

She cracked the door but left the chain on. A gust of fried onions and menthol smoke blew past her. In the gap he saw she wore a faded housecoat. She was barefoot.

Sorry, he said. I know it’s late.

You orright?

Yeah. Just got home.

Right.

We’re all set. Tomorrow.

Fair enough.

Meet you out the front at ten?

Like we said.

Yeah. And hey, I got his drawing.

You what?

Kai’s drawing. Of a bird. It was in my door.

Little bugger. I’ve told him a million times. Jesus. He’s not sposed to wander off.

He’s okay?

Asleep.

You look tired.

Because I am.

Right. So I’ll see you in the morning?

She closed the door on him.

Keely slunk back down to his place. He glanced at the bird on the fridge. Thought of his mother. Knowing Doris, she’d still be up. So he called.

Are you okay? she asked gently.

Sorry about tonight, he murmured. We didn’t really get to talk.

I was talking, she said.

I know. Like you said, I was a goose. A stupid mood.

Doris was quiet.

You’re working? he said.

Reading, she said. Charles Birch.

So, you’re a pantheist now.

After menopause, she said, all bets are off.

Very funny.

If you still need the car, the keys are on the sink. I’ll be in church.

You still go?

You know perfectly well I do.

The Anglicans. It’s come to that.

Well, I am the demographic. Sometimes I’m half the congregation. You should come one day.

What, and spook the poor buggers?

Is this about the beard?

No, Mum, it’s not about the beard.

It does make you look like him. It’s… well, it’s a little unnerving.

I hadn’t realized. To be perfectly honest. It just grew of its own accord.

Tommy, love, go to bed. You’re slurring.

Slurring? I had two glasses, he said truthfully.

My mistake.

But shit, he thought. I’m sober. Slurring?

Tom?

Yeah?

What’re you doing? Are you talking to me or thinking aloud?

I’m going to bed, he said, hanging up, rattled.

But to get off he needed help. A sleeper slug. Just the one. And a couple of Valium to ease past that hunted feeling that lingered of late any time he had to entrust his head to the pillow.

~ ~ ~

It was nine when he woke. So he had to scramble. Burnt his mouth gulping tea. Wasted time searching for a clean shirt. Then, halfway to the station and hopelessly late, he hailed a cab he could sorely afford.

Doris lived in a stately Edwardian weatherboard in a riverside suburb of Perth. From just below her place, at the water’s edge, you could see upstream, past the snaking coils of the river, the thousand-eyed towers of the business district with the shimmering red-roofed plain behind. The hills were shrouded with bushfire haze that formed a dirty yellow rampart against the world beyond. At times Perth really did feel like an island, a country unto itself. This brassy little outpost of digging and dealing tilted relentlessly at the future, but these days it lived on life support — desalinated seawater and ancient shrinking aquifers. Behind the veil of smoke lay the wheatbelt and the salt-ravaged badlands that only a century before had been a teeming woodland half the size of Poland.

Up on Doris’s verandah, however, there was no view, grand or troubling. Her place was much of a piece with its neighbours but for the telltale wind chimes and the signs of a garden run amok. He dragged the dinghy and trailer down the drive, swept leaves from it hurriedly, stuck the bungs in, then hitched it to the old Volvo. Somehow he still had the presence of mind to check the outboard fuel and when he saw the state of it he poured it guiltily against the wall behind the shed. He’d stop in at a servo along the highway.

Stalking back past the house with the petrol tank, he was startled by his mother standing in her nightie on the deck. She held up a coffee mug and he nodded. While she was indoors he checked the motor, the oars, the mouldy lifejackets.

I thought I was going to have to use it as a fishpond, Doris said, handing him a mug.

I thought you were putting it out on the verge. And shouldn’t you be at the nine-thirty?

Late night, she said, blowing across her mug. I’ll go to the eleven o’clock. Uproar at Saint Whatsit’s, no doubt.

Everything alright?

Hope so, she said, without quite glancing his way. She looked a little frail without the armour of her fabrics and bangles. Her silver hair was loose, fanning in skeins at the whim of the breeze.

Keely said nothing, just sipped his coffee. He wanted to say something kind, conciliatory, but he was stranded. She seemed relieved when he finally passed the empty mug and shook the car keys. Gemma looked surprised, even concerned, to see the boat in the street beneath the Mirador, but Kai seemed delighted. Keely drove them down to the riverside ramp and shoved the dinghy off its seized rollers. Neither the boy nor his grandmother had the first idea about boats so just getting them aboard was a mission. He had to wrangle the kid into a lifejacket and once she saw him in it, Gemma decided she needed one too. There were slips, tumbles, a shriek or two as he swept them out into the channel and steered upstream with the wind ahead and the tide behind them.

I thought this was a birdwatchin expedition! yelled Gemma, dashing the hair from her eyes, hunched awkwardly beneath the cumbersome roll of the jacket collar.

It is.

On the bloody river?

Exactly. I’ve got a point to prove.

You blokes, you’ve all got that, she said, bracing against the smacks and bumps.

It was funny, in its way, seeing her scowl and wince, clutching the child in fear, but after a short while he relented and eased off the throttle to slap along sedately. Kai stared at the tiller, the wake, the scum of rotten leaves at his feet. Was he anxious? Keely thought perhaps he could have launched somewhere closer to where he planned to take them. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the jaunt upstream might be a trial. God, he thought, negotiating the slop from a passing ferry, don’t let me make a meal of this.

But by the time he had them round the bend and into the lee of the limestone bluffs of Blackwall Reach, the boy had lifted his head a little and Gemma managed a game smile. Keely pointed to the teenagers jumping from the cliff above them, yodelling as they fell. The water boiled where they speared in.

Keely motored over as a pale youth broke the surface with a hoot and gave Kai a thumbs up. The boy seemed at a loss to respond.

You want to steer? Keely asked.

Kai shook his head.

It’s twenty metres deep here, he said. At night you can hear fish down there, big mulloway, croaking in the dark.

The idea did not seem to appeal to the boy.

Is there really a bird? asked Kai.

We’re getting there, mate.

But is it true?

You’ll see.

You promise?

Hold onto your hat, said Keely, banking out across the channel to the next bay. It’d been months since he’d seen the ospreys he had in mind. Maybe he should have checked first to spare himself a disaster.

Christ, said Gemma. Look at those houses.

Keely grinned. He thought of Balzac’s line — behind every great fortune, a great crime. Where was Jehovah when you needed Him for a good old-fashioned punitive landslide? And, yea, swept were the wicked unto the darkest deeps.

He steered wide of waterskiers and wankers on jetskis, slowed down to take in the terraces and lawns, the swanky boathouses. Gemma turned in her seat, gazed up, wide-eyed, beginning to enjoy herself. He eased them past a chaotic and giggly regatta of little sailboats at Freshie, rounded the point into the next bay. Here picnickers sprawled on blankets beneath the peppermints, dragged kayaks across the obstacle course of fig roots at the bank. Keely didn’t cut the outboard until they were past all of it, deep into the slough where the shore was obscured by a confusion of native cypresses, melaleucas and gnarled gums. Above them a limestone ridge whose brows knitted, hatching everything before it in flickering shadow.

Is everything orright? Gemma asked.

Will be in a moment, he said. Are we looking? Do we have our eyes open?

The breeze wafted them by slabs of stone, blond tablets freshly pupped from the bluff. They lay in a monumental jumble at the water’s edge, misted with dancing insects. There were jellyfish all round the boat, big as pumpkins, and Keely breathed in the estuarine miasma of algae, cypress and invertebrate slime that reminded him of holidays, exam week, summers gone. He watched their faces. Gemma wore a look of heroic forbearance but the kid blinked miserably.

I’m no good at this, Kai said in little more than a whisper.

Keely wiggled his eyebrows in encouragement, but the kid didn’t appear to appreciate the suspense. He caught Gemma glaring at him, face like a spanked arse. Christ, he thought, how many promises had this kid seen come to nothing? He hadn’t thought of that. This better bloody work.

Lie back, he murmured, trying to reassure himself as much as the boy. Both of you. Just lie back and watch.

What for? asked Gemma. What’re we lying down in a boat for?

Just for the view, he said with a brightness that already felt thin. Up ahead, the ancient marri upon which all his hopes rested began to emerge from the shadows, more skeleton these days than living tree, a barkless grey column topped by contorted white limbs that towered out across undergrowth, rocks, shadow, water. He’d come here a lot with Harriet, then alone sometimes when he visited Doris. Back when he actually bothered. You could hike down the scree-slope from the road, but the view from the water beat everything. That tree, he thought. It stood before whitefellas even dreamt of this place. It was here when the river was teeming, when cook-fires and dances stitched the banks into coherent song, proper country. Just to see it was a mental correction, a recalibration.

The boat yawed, the tree hung right over them. And Keely realized he’d been seeing it for seconds already, seeing it without taking it in at all. Thank God. There it was on the outermost limb, the same colour as the bleached and weathered wood, motionless, watching them, plotting their drift, not yet deigning to stir. The bird of his married years, the stolen weekends, of even the long puzzled silences near the end.

Still there. What a bird.

But what was it seeing? Three bodies in a silver boat? Or just background, faunal wallpaper, nothing of the slightest interest?

The raptor unfurled its wings, propped, let out a scratchy cry. Beside him the boy gasped. His face suddenly open.

There!

Look at that, said Keely. I told you.

Will it get me?

Get you? No. You don’t look much like a fish to me.

It’s creepy-lookin, said Gemma.

Nah, said Keely. It’s beautiful.

And it was. A severe, stately bird, watchful, poised, tensing even now.

Osprey, said Kai.

The creature tilted its head, twisted slightly, then gathered itself. It rose, languid, powerful, to reach into the air.

Osprey, said the boy.

It climbed without effort, wheeled up past the supplicant fingers of clifftop trees and retreated to the shadows, leaving only a harsh cry to signal its presence.

Did we scare it? asked Gemma.

Nothing scares him, said Keely. He’s just seen something else, I’d say.

The boat drifted back into the noonday light. The boy blinked skyward. And then the chalky flash blew past them, hit the water in a weltering flare and hauled itself up again, climbing off at a loping tangent with something shining but doomed in its talons.

Keely refrained from commentary. The act itself was enough. The boy and his grandmother craned their necks, watching the sky, waiting for more.

~ ~ ~

By the time he’d taken the others home, returned to Doris’s to park the boat and flush the outboard, left the keys to the Volvo under the mat and caught the train back to Fremantle, it was past mid-afternoon. His exalted mood had decayed somewhat; he was ravenous and the sun had gotten to him, but for all that he felt better than he had in weeks. He showered, gulped a couple of beefy brufens, made a sandwich and sat in his armchair sipping water.

At dusk he was still there. Half the sandwich dry and curled in his lap and the pint-glass capsized on the carpet beside him. He brushed the bread away, glanced an uneasy moment at the new watermark and went out onto the balcony to clear his mind.

Dreams. Feverish sequences. Beyond him now; he didn’t care to recall.

In the mild evening breeze he caught a flash of movement at the edge of his vision. Kai. A few balconies down. Dressed only in shorts. Actually, truly there. He smiled but the kid seemed not to notice. Keely felt strangely self-conscious, anxious that something about his being out here wasn’t quite right. He was dressed, wasn’t he? Awake. And sober. What else could it be unnerving him butthe queasy scraps of dreams? But this harried feeling, why wouldn’t it let go?

It was none of his business whether the kid was out there or not, but he wished Gemma wouldn’t let him do it; it wasn’t safe. And he hesitated, reluctant to move for fear of startling him. But Kai was facing his way. Such an odd, affectless gaze. It felt awkward, even creepy, to just stand there, not acknowledging him. Keely raised a hand. Kai lifted an arm from the rail, returned the wave shyly, and went inside.

~ ~ ~

Keely had promised himself a proper meal that night and he was cooking with the spoils of Thursday’s shopping spree in Coles when Faith rang. Once more she was in a crowded room. In the background there were stabs of noise — announcements, exhortations — as if she were at an airport or train station.

You didn’t call, she said mildly.

I meant to.

A man of grand intentions.

Where are you?

London.

Hell, that’s sudden.

It’s freezing. I’m waiting for the driver. Hey, I was thinking about that canoe we used to have. Was it really just the roof off an old car? Am I remembering that right? We used to push it out through the reeds, across the swamp. Am I imagining all this?

Faith, why’re you in London?

We used to say I was the only Keely without the rescue instinct.

Nah.

And you’re always crapping on about backing the vanquished.

Keely laughed and his sister joined in a moment. She sounded uncharacteristically rattled.

Mate, he said. Has something happened?

Nothing I’m allowed to talk about. I guess it’s just funny, me mounting a rescue package.

I don’t even know what that is.

In my world it’s salvation without mercy.

You okay?

I was just thinking about us as kids, that’s all. And, you know, just wanted to hear your voice.

It was the roof from an old Holden, he said. The canoe.

But the signal began to falter and Faith seemed to be speaking to someone else, her driver, apparently, and the rest was rushed farewell.

In the wake of the call Keely went on fixing dinner. He thought of Faith at ten in her pink boilersuit and Levi’s sneakers. What a game little girl she had been: that measured stare, the straight-cut fringe. Bold as a mudlark, but kind along with it. She’d shared her room with the Buck girls the winter their mother lay in hospital held together by screws and wires and plaster. Maybe she resented it — the sudden disorder, the wet beds, the night terrors, the missing toys. Perhaps his memories of her stalwart decency were not reliable. Because whenever he saw her now, Christmas being the last example, she seemed so cool and withheld. But her world had been flying like shit off a shovel. Tough time. Maybe she needed to project that corporate armour just to survive. And the diffidence? Probably due to the sight of him, dishevelled, maudlin, strangling the festive cheer from Doris’s big day.

Anyway, enough of that.

He mashed potatoes, tooled about with the sauce a while and steamed the snake beans. He put on some music, the Bach fugues Harriet used to like. And it didn’t upset him. In fact he felt a rare buoyancy. Faith’s memory of their hijinks on the swamp, perhaps. Or the day on the river finally sinking in. That bird, the way it watched them, trying to decide what they were. Just the glorious fact of it being there, like an answered prayer. What a deliverance it had been. He couldn’t have borne to disappoint the kid. To screw that up as well. And it was mad, but now he felt like a bloody champion.

He’d only just sat down to eat when there was a knock at the door. He sat chewing a moment, cleaving doggedly to his moment of happiness while it lasted.

Just me, called Gemma.

It was like a soap bubble bursting. The mood was broken. But some slippery film of equanimity clung on as he got slowly to his feet.

He opened the door, still chewing. Freshly showered and in a sleeveless dress, Gemma stood barefoot peering past him.

Everything alright?

Sorry, she said. You got company?

He blinked, shook his head, swallowed.

I could smell it from my place. It’s doin me head in.

What is?

Whatever you’re cookin.

You want some?

I’ve eaten, she said.

Okay.

But, Jesus, she said. Smell’s bloody beautiful.

Keely was stumped. She had such an avid look on her face, almost febrile, and she just stood there, as if waiting to be invited in.

You mind? she asked. Just for a sec?

He unlocked the security screen and when he stepped back she slipped right by him and went straight to the stovetop.

Chicken, she said. Garlic. Bacon by the looks. And the gravy’s what, white wine?

Keely closed the security screen but left the main door open.

Mostly.

Aw, she said, looking at his little dining table. You haven’t even hardly started. Tommy, sit down. Jesus, I didn’t realize.

Sure you don’t want some?

Eat, she said.

He sat back down, resumed eating, but he was self-conscious now.

Little bugger wouldn’t go to bed, she said, leaning on the bench between them.

He’s okay?

Christ, he was that excited.

Keely nodded, his mood lifting a little.

That was a nice thing you did.

Not a problem, he said, smiling around a mouthful.

Not a problem, she said, mimicking him. Hey, maybe I will have some of that.

He motioned for her to help herself and she fished around for cutlery. Paused a moment at the knife drawer, checking out his jumbled pharmacopoeia, which gave him a moment’s anxiety. But she didn’t even seem to register it, so urgent were her movements, so flighty her disposition. He watched as she forked up something from the pan and turned it over in her mouth experimentally before chewing with gusto. He saw her wipe gravy from her lips with the back of her wrist.

Something I can’t pick, she said, hoisting the skillet to the bench as if setting in to polish off the remainder.

Sage, he said. I picked it today at Mum’s.

Doris? You saw her today?

Yeah. That was her car. Didn’t I tell you? I have to keep the boat at her place.

Gemma straightened a moment, oil glistening on her chin.

So you brought us home before you went back to her place?

Well, yeah.

Right.

I caught the train home, he said, puzzled by the cloudy expression on her face. Kai looked pretty worn out. I thought I’d run you home, save you both another hour of farting about.

Fair enough, she said, crestfallen.

I didn’t realize, he said, seeing it now. At least he thought he saw.

I spose it was a long time ago.

No. Really. I should have thought.

Just… I loved your mum. Guess I thought she might like to see me.

Of course she would. I was just preoccupied, that’s all, thinking about the boat, the car, getting you home.

You’re embarrassed. Aren’tcha?

About the car?

About me, you dickhead. Bein seen with me. In front of yer mum.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said, irritated.

Nah, course ya don’t.

Keely bridled at this. He thought of the lengths he’d gone to these past months, for the sake of guarding his privacy, so that no one, friend or foe, could get close enough to commiserate, gloat, accuse, correct, needle or interrogate him. It was the one thing he wasn’t gutsick-depressed about. And here was a woman in his kitchen, this person he hardly knew, eating his food and calling him out as some kind of snob. He was angry with himself, furious he’d dropped the ball so comprehensively, let her into the flat, his head, his fucking life.

Whoa, and now yer sulkin, eh.

No, he said with some effort. I’m just surprised, that’s all.

Well, it doesn’t take much to get you all hot’n bothered.

He pushed his hand through his hair.

Forget it, she muttered.

No, he said, like a twat who’d forgotten every survival instinct he had. What is it you’re trying to tell me?

Gemma looked at her fork, shrugged.

These days you’re just a bit more…

More what?

I dunno. Posh.

Keely laughed; there was nothing else for it. Though it didn’t sound as mirthful or unruffled as he’d hoped.

Fuck off, she said mildly.

Posh? Me? You must be on drugs.

Don’t talk to me about fuckin drugs.

Gemma, I’m unemployed. This is it, he declared, waving at thearmchair, the bookshelf, the TV, the portable CD player, the obsolete iPod. Apart from the battered laptop beside him on the laminated table, there was nothing else to see but a couple of Stanley Spencer reproductions and the Peter Dombrovskis on the wall.

You went to uni and that.

True.

And there you were all the time, on the telly, on the news, in the paper. In ya house by the water in Freo — bet that place had character.

He lifted his hands in surrender.

Just cause you don’t have a job and you look like shit, doesn’t mean you’re not flash.

Alright, he said. I hear what you’re saying. But I think you’ve got the wrong idea. If I’d known, if I’d thought of it — Gemma, it’s not a problem. I wasn’t thinking, that’s all.

She looked unconvinced but after a few moments staring him down she did seem slightly mollified. Whether that was a result of having said her piece or seeing him yield he couldn’t tell.

You really that broke? she asked.

Pretty broke, yeah. I wasn’t very careful with the severance pay.

So, you’re renting this joint?

No, he said. I own it.

She grinned without mercy.

You got anything to drink?

There’s wine in the fridge, he said, knowing it was rude not to get up and pour her a glass, but he was flustered now and would have preferred her to go away.

Gemma cracked the fridge open, examined its contents as if seeking further confirmation of his lofty status and then hauled the bottle out. She held it at arm’s length a moment, found a glass and filled it. She glanced at him inquiringly but he demurred. She sipped at the wine sceptically.

Look, I’m sure Doris’d love to see you, he murmured.

Gemma leant back against the fridge. At her shoulder, pinned to the door by magnets, lay Kai’s crayon bird. She raked her hair irritably with her fingers.

She’ll think you’re on with me. Slummin around.

Don’t be ridiculous. She already knows you live in the building.

She ever come here?

I don’t have anybody here.

Really? How come?

I just prefer it that way.

You really are a bit of an odd-bod, aren’t you.

Yes. I spose.

She gulped the rest of her wine. Keely tried to finish his meal but his appetite had gone. He’d made the effort, that was the thing.

So I’m ridiculous, she said.

Mate, I didn’t mean it like that — I mean, come on.

Wouldn’t have said it when I was younger.

Gemma, I only knew you as a kid.

When we were kids, but, weren’t you interested?

No! Geez, you were a little girl.

Didn’t stop anyone else.

Well, shit. That’s awful. Why are we talking about this?

She propped her elbows on the bench and leaned forward, sizing him up. The tops of her breasts were visible in the vee of her dress.

What about the Snakepit? And the White Sands? We weren’t kids then.

No, I guess not.

Wasn’t ridiculous then.

Keely didn’t know what to say. His nerves were jangling.

Back then we were more the same.

Well, it was so long ago.

And you never even thought about it?

Keely said nothing.

I was always around. I remember being in your room. I got in your bed once, in the night. Pretended I was scared.

I don’t remember that.

But you remember I was pretty.

Gemma, he said, trying to steer clear of this perilous current, I was a kid; I didn’t even notice girls.

I wasn’t the sort you’d notice, then?

Hell, everyone noticed. Later.

So, tell me.

Tell you what? he asked, annoyed at her persistence, the way this conversation was headed, as if she were determined to extract some shred of old glory at his expense. Just because he hadn’t thought to present her to Doris, for God’s sake. It was moronic, fucking banal. And he was getting a treacherous hard-on, despite himself. Gemma was tipsy. He hadn’t paid enough attention; she’d been half cut the moment she arrived.

Garn, she persisted. Tell me what I looked like.

Mate, he said with a resentful sigh, you were beautiful. Alright?

And now I’m just an old boiler.

Not that old.

Well, thanks a lot.

I didn’t —

Haven’t you even thought about it? she asked, cutting him off. Not once?

Bloody hell, what’s got into you?

I dunno, she said. I had a few Baileys, that’s all. It was a good day, Tommy. You know how many good days I get, livin like this?

Fair enough, he said, shamefaced.

You know?

Yeah, it doesn’t look easy. But he’s a lovely kid.

Talks about you, now. Day and bloody night. Thinks the sun shines out yer clacker. Never stops askin questions.

So what d’you tell him?

The truth. What I know, what I remember.

Like what? he said, unable to resist.

I dunno. Just old shit. About you’n Nev.

He looked at his hands, felt his spine slump into a defensive curve. At least she’d changed tack; it was something to be grateful for.

You were the only ones.

The only ones what?

That didn’t fiddle with us.

Shit, he said, shoving his plate across the table. You didn’t tell him that, I hope.

Of course not. But that’s how I learnt what’s what, who to trust and who to steer clear of.

I guess that’s something.

Is to me.

I didn’t mean to sound so —

You musta wanted kids. Of yer own.

Why d’you say that?

University of hard knocks, mate. Instinct. Like I said, who ya trust and who’s trouble. He knows. I can see it.

You’ve lost me, he said truthfully.

You went to a lot of trouble to impress a kid today. And I have to figure out if it’s cause you’re a dirty perv or if it’s just that you wanna suck up to me, to get into me pants.

Keely looked at her. She was completely serious. If he told her to get out now he’d look guilty; one charge or the other would stick. It was insupportable. And he felt the seconds of silence thud by.

I mean, if it was about me I wouldn’t mind so much, she went on. But I’ve had to learn the hard way, if you know what I mean — about blokes. And I haven’t got time for it anymore, tell you the truth. Sorry — I’m just sayin.

Despite his indignation, Keely was trying to imagine the life she’d led since their days as children. He wondered about her scarred hands, the broken tooth, the daughter in prison.

Gemma, there’s no agenda. I’m not that sort of person.

Oh, I know that. I’m just sayin. This is the sort of thing I’ve gotta ask meself.

Okay. I get that. But, really, you don’t have to worry.

Gemma nodded slowly. She looked past him. To what — the ocean lights, the wharf? She chewed her lip a moment.

Pity, really, she said, turning to the fridge.

Keely watched in a snarl of conflicted impulses and competing thoughts as she poured herself a refill. She belted the tumbler of wine down in two gulps and set the glass on the bench with a smack. He couldn’t read her smile. And he wondered about the kid. It was late. He got to his feet, hoping she’d sense the signal. But she seemed oblivious. He squeezed past her, set his plate on the sink.

You should get rid of that bloody beard, she said. Look like a science teacher, for Chrissake.

Well, I was for a while. More or less.

What’d you teach?

Geography. And biol.

Shoulda known. All them books there. Always liked ya books, eh.

Yes.

And ya little orange bible.

That too, he said, closing off despite himself.

Now you’re cranky.

No, he lied.

Don’t be cranky, mate — I just need a break. You know what I mean?

I think so.

Do it all on me own.

Yes, I can see that.

It’s lonely.

Yeah.

I should get used to it. Like you. You don’t even like people, it sticks out like dog’s balls.

He shrugged.

But me, I’m stupid, I still like people.

Nothing stupid about that, he said, trying to sound sincere.

Mind if I close the door?

It’s hot, Gem.

Open door makes me nervous.

He said nothing. She bumped the door closed with her hip and as she turned back her shoulder brushed the kid’s drawing, left it askew on the fridge.

I was thinkin, she said.

About what?

Nothin real complicated.

Okay, he said, feeling corralled there in the narrow galley.

But it’s a secret. You can keep a secret, can’t you?

I guess, he said, alert to her approach. She was fully lit up now. Her limbs seemed slightly unwound. It was hard to discount the shape of her in that little dress.

Why don’t I walk you back? he said, moving slightly towards the door.

But I’ll tell you the secret first, she said, taking his arm as he tried to pass. Here, I’ll whisper it.

She tugged his collar, drawing him in so close her winy breath filled his ear and he was unravelling before she even whispered it. The simple, blunt declaration was like something spearing deep. It found the softest, neediest part of his being and yet he still tried to separate himself as delicately as he could.

Gemma, mate, I don’t think that’s a good idea, he said.

Jesus, Tommy, don’t make a girl beg.

I mean, I’m flattered, more than flattered —

But you want it. I can see that.

Yeah, but why me? Why now?

Because you’re safe, and I’m goin fuckin spare up here. We could both do with cheerin up. Carn, cobber. Old times’ sake.

She slipped a hand into his shirt. He felt her belly against his crotch and her tongue was still cool from the wine. He let his hand fall against the curve of her hip, then her arse. And he didn’t care anymore about how crazy this was. She tasted of garlic and smoke. She kissed with a kind of smile. A friendly fuck, that’s all she said, something safe, and it began that way, awkward and companionable in the slot between the fridge and the kitchen bench, but by the time they’d reached his unmade bed with its grey sheets and its bovine whiff of old spunk and perspiration the upwelling of all that desperation and longing overtook them and they were both fierce, half mad with painful urgency and nothing they wanted or did felt safe.

~ ~ ~

Afterwards he lay in a sheen of sweat and mortification. It seemed weird, even wrong to be thinking of Harriet. Of that night in the reeking village on Sarawak when a week of hurt silence had broken like a bruised monsoonal sky. The sex had been furious, frightening, and in the aftermath, for the remainder of their coastward trek, he was haunted by the growing sense that their belated passion signified an end and not a renewal, as if the force of that night were from a seal finally, fatally blown. But he’d buried the thought; he was like that, he knew it now, he could carry disaster with him, pressing on as if it might wither in the dark if ignored.

That was nice, said Gemma, head lolling against his chest. Better than a visit to the funny farm.

He tried to smile. At himself, at her directness. Here he was with all his tics and anxieties. He should take this for what it was, a bit of comradely relief. That’s all she meant by it. That’s all it could be.

What’s the matter? she asked.

Nothing. I guess I just didn’t see it coming.

You didn’t want to?

It’s not that.

Cause it didn’t feel that way to me.

He pulled her to him, felt her hair spill across him.

Good old Tom. You need to see everythin comin, don’t you? You’re that sort.

And after it’s arrived I’m the kind of sad bugger who has to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Which isn’t a real flatterin way to talk about a girl.

Sorry.

Her laugh was low and inflammatory. He wished they could just stop talking and go back to fucking. She felt it. She reached down between his legs.

Aw, Tommy. Tom Keely.

Stupid, he said.

Who?

Me, he said.

I just suddenly wanted to.

Suddenly?

Well, gradually. And then suddenly. Like a bastard.

Wow.

Nothing wrong with that, is there?

He shrugged.

What?

Nothing.

Jesus, she said. You really, actually wanna know why, like a list of reasons?

Oh, maybe not, he said.

Right, then, she said briskly, as if drawing the discussion to a close.

It was confounding, delightful, having Gemma Buck here, stroking him idly like this as the building rumbled and clanked. It was unimaginable.

I don’t even like birds, she muttered.

What?

Birds.

Oh. Okay.

Like, I had a good day, don’t get me wrong.

But you don’t fancy birds, he said, finding it hard to concentrate with her thigh slippery against his fingertips.

Fuckin hate em.

Pretty common phobia.

It’s not that, she said impatiently.

Well, he said, stuck, aching, distracted.

Shit, you don’t know what it was like for me.

What what was like? he said, hearing the weary tone of his voice.

Blackboy Crescent.

Well, I was there, wasn’t I?

No, she said, letting him go. I don’t think so. Not the same way I was.

What’re you talking about?

Different for you.

Because I moved away? Because I went to university? Geez, Gemma, he said, sitting up abruptly. What is it with you?

You want me to go?

No, Keely lied, pulling away, embarrassed now by his uncharacteristically durable hard-on. This whole scene was just too bloody peculiar; an awful mistake.

I think I’ll go, she said, turning away.

Kai’s alone, he said, as if it mattered more now than it had fifteen minutes ago.

Yeah, she said. Thanks for the reminder.

She reached for her clothes.

Wait, he said. I’m sorry.

No worries. No hard feelins, eh.

What were you saying? What is it I don’t know?

Doesn’t matter.

Please.

It doesn’t. Not anymore. Well, it shouldn’t.

He stretched across to where she sat, fingered her hair in a way that seemed to irritate her. He watched the curve of her back, the heavy tilt of her breasts. She smelt of smoke and sweat and come and now she did not want to be touched.

You shoulda used a condom, she said. Jesus, I need a shower.

Shower here.

I should go.

Stay a minute.

You just want to fuck me again.

I thought we could talk, he said, which was half the truth at least.

No, I’ll go.

Just tell me, he said. This thing. About birds.

She sighed. She was quiet for a long moment.

They make me feel bad. Sad and guilty, sorta thing.

But they’re just birds.

See, when I was a kid, men wanted me.

Yes. It’s… it’s —

Shit, that’s what it is. And it wasn’t my fault. I thought it was just Baby. She was older. She didn’t mind so much. But I didn’t want it. Christ, I didn’t even know what it was, what it meant. They were always touchin me. Even the way they looked was like they were touchin me.

Oh, mate.

In the end you kinda give in. But before that I still had some fight, you know? But it meant I did somethin rotten, shockin.

Who could blame you? I mean, hell.

When I was eight I set fire to somethin. It wasn’t an accident — I planned it. Thought about it for days. Figured out how to do it. In cold blood, you know?

Like a car or something?

It was an aviary.

Keely jerked upright, nearly tipping her off the bed.

Bunker’s birdcage, he said. That was you?

I hated him, that grimy old bastard.

He had a bad leg. No, a club foot.

Caught me in his yard once. Lookin at the budgies and the finches and the cockies. Said he wouldn’t tell no one. He got me by the hair, the plaits, pushed me up against the wire and all the birds are goin crazy, all claws and beaks and flappin. And he says things to me a little girl shouldn’t have to hear. All the time, those birds rushin at me, my face hard in the wire, and he’s got his hand right up me, like a bloke pullin the gizzards out of a Christmas turkey.

Keely’s gorge rose. He sat beside her, close but not touching.

I shoulda told your mum, she said, her voice flat, almost deadened. Nev woulda fuckin killed him. And I wanted him to. But I was embarrassed, afraid — ashamed, I guess. And I wanted to fight, you know? Fix it meself.

But. Eight years old.

I got petrol from the can near the mower. Nev’s mower. Tipped it into a shampoo bottle. Waited till Bunker was out — the races or somethin, down at the pub, I dunno. Went around the back, squirted everythin. Whole cage. Them poor birds goin spare. Just lit the match. And whoof! Lucky I didn’t set meself alight. They were like crackers goin off, all those poor birds. Just flames flyin and screamin. Like Catherine wheels, they were. It was fuckin horrible. I wish I’d done his house instead. Wish I never done it.

That was really you?

I used to wonder if they suspected and didn’t let on. Nev and Doris, I mean. Protectin me. Sometimes I wish they hadn’t. Because afterwards I had no fight left. I just put up with it. Not from Bunker. He didn’t dare. But there were other blokes.

Gemma, I had no idea.

Well, I never told, did I?

We should have known. They should have stopped it.

Back then, nobody was lookin the way they look now. Ya mum’n dad, they didn’t see it. And I couldn’t tell em.

Keely thought of the plume of smoke, the fire engine arriving, the almost festive air in the street, and Faith’s pronouncement at dinner that whoever incinerated those poor birds didn’t deserve to live. Were the Buck girls there at the table?

He died, y’know. Years later. Old Bunker. And I reckon he always knew. I went to his funeral for a laugh. I was as pissed as a rat, but it felt great.

She reached for her dress on the floor, fished around for her ruined knickers but cast them aside and stepped into the dress.

Look at you, she said. Buyer’s remorse.

No.

Doesn’t matter. I got what I came for.

Chicken and sage in white wine.

Yeah, she said with a hoarse laugh. Here, zip me up.

You’re only a couple of doors down; it’s dark out there.

Girl’s still got standards.

This evening notwithstanding.

As she presented her back he felt a pang of lust but resisted the urge to pull her to him. He saw that old man with her hair in his fist, pressing up behind her. Keely touched only the zip and stepped back as she turned to survey him in the crooked light.

It’s alright, he said. I’m still safe.

Safe enough. Anyway, it was a oncer. There’s the boy to think of.

Sure.

But it was fun, eh. I always wondered.

Well, I guess now you know.

She smiled and he followed her through to the door, and heard the bars of the walkway still jangling after she was gone.

~ ~ ~

It was there again. The stain. Or a dirty great blotch just like it. Right in front of the slider. Only a step or so from the balcony, on perfectly dry carpet. A ghostly macula at a distance, but close up there was no missing it. The size of a sleeping dog, curled in front of the smudged glass. Smelt of nothing but nasty nylon carpet, though underfoot it was crisp, almost crusty. Shit a brick, he didn’t need this at the beginning of a new week, staggering bright-eyed and bushy-tailed into the frigging Shroud of Turin. And having woken this early and so clearheaded he wasn’t about to squat here all day scratching his head and reading entrails. Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he’d waste it.

Even though the sheets smelt sweeter this morning, he stripped the bed and bagged them with a couple of other loads he left churning in the laundromat on the ground floor. Walking past the soup kitchens and dosshouses, he considered starting the day at Bub’s where he was safest, where there was less to provoke a flare-up, but he felt sturdy enough to sit out on the Strip and watch the weekday circus stir itself into inaction. He didn’t know if this was confidence or masochism, but he strode along the avenue of coloured brollies and set himself down on the prime corner where the view was good and the coffee decent. He marked his territory with his sunglasses and a Rupert-rag he filched from an abandoned table. He went indoors, as was the local custom, and queued up to order. You had to love it, the way a cafeteria could still pass itself off as an actual café. Well, so be it, he thought. When not in Rome. Et cetera.

Due to the early hour there were only five or six in line ahead of him at the counter and it wasn’t such a long wait by Freo standards. Even at the top of his game, when his social capital was enviable and the glaze of his armour seamless, this procedural ordeal was like being paraded in front of the class, like a perp walk, with the haughty baristas before him and the watchful lurkers at every table behind. Keely focused best he could on the comestibles in their brightly lit cabinets, the delicious oily reek of milled beans. He crabbed his way to the cash register, stood in the receiving line like all the other supplicants, and emerged unmolested with a pretty decent double espresso and a blueberry muffin like a bloated toadstool. His ten-dollar sunglasses were still on the table but the shopsoiled newspaper had been botted by someone else. No matter, it’d served its purpose, which was worth a nod in the great man’s direction. Wherever that was. Now that he was ubiquitous, multinational, omniscient, perhaps even eternal.

The sun was out, the shadows black and deep beneath the awnings. The first suited skateboarders were hurtling by with backpacks and briefcases. Women in pencil skirts and four-inch heels minced their way towards the train station. Keely settled in, nursing his mood as much as the coffee, in order to watch and marvel.

He felt a rare and comradely magnanimity as locals arrived to stretch their yogic limbs and kick off their Berserkenstocks.

Here and there, once his eyes adjusted, he recognized the odd face: a chanteuse fiddling with her manky dreads, a couple of Labor Party grifters, the retired QC and his jaunty little mutt. Across the street at safe distance, a Greens claque conferred behind a stockade of bicycles and to his relief followed their daffy MP into the juice joint in the alley beyond. All around him dogged Aquarians discussed positive energy, bodywork, and the Real Causes of Cancer, and it was nothing to him, water off a duck’s proverbial. Close by, right at his elbow, a spidery Amazon with a shock of henna began to shout into her phone about social evolution and personal transformation. She’d moved on from revolution, she said, but she still believed passionately in radical change. She was rather fetching in her saffron tanktop. Perhaps she mistook his indulgent grin for something untoward, for she snatched up her towering soy latte and stalked off to another table, sallying on without a comma.

By nine almost anyone who did anything productive in this burg had cast off their lines and steamed out to sea or hustled to the station for the express to Dullsville. Which left quite a crew of idlers like himself who seemed to have nowhere to be and nothing to produce. He wondered how many trust funds kept the bustling Strip in business, how much could be attributed to middle-class welfare. The moment he thought it he began to feel his serenity give way to pangs of unfocused guilt and anxiety. The entire scene was a festival of procrastination. And it was amazing how snugly he fitted.

He couldn’t help but think of all the charity kitchens only a few blocks away, the underclass gathered alfresco for a sandwich and an industrial brew. Invalid pensioners, denizens of the dosshouses, park sleepers, wharf rats, outpatients of the failing mental health service. At this rate he’d be joining their number soon enough. He guessed rough-sleepers and drunks had their own resolutions and rituals of deferral. Street shouters were armed with excuses; he’d heard their litanies of grievance and misunderstanding. He’d slot in handsomely. If only he wasn’t so soft. The moment would surely come. And then he’d hit the final barrier, the stubborn middle-class conviction that his was a special case. When really he was just a creepy fuckwit poncing through town full of peace and love because he’d got his rocks off. A tipsy grandma desperate for a root had hauled him into bed and given him a blowsy seeing-to. His triumphal glow was pathetic. And that was nothing when you thought of the aftermath. Her confession. To which he’d listened distractedly, still pawing her, like a grimy priest who couldn’t distinguish her needs from his own. He disgusted himself. In an instant he felt oblivion stalking, crackling, flashing behind his eyes, and he welcomed it, deserved it.

His glass shattered on the pavement. The saucer wheeled inwoozy arcs at the feet of startled loungers. One arm flapped independent of him and as he stood and fled he clawed it into submission with the other, breaking into a shambling run through a wilderness of spots and sparks.

~ ~ ~

Furious blank.

A kind of.

Kind of.

Kind of turbulence.

Suddenly down by the marina. Standing, walking. Sleepwalking, really. With gulls like empty thought bubbles overhead. How many minutes had he lost? Ten? Twenty? Closer to forty. Jesus!

Okay.

Tamp down the panic.

Okay.

Nothing you can do about it. Well, nothing you’ll let yourself do. Being what and who you are.

Alright. Whatever.

So.

Here he was.

The marina. The fishing-boat harbour. Prawn trawlers, crayboats. Yachts. Boardwalks. Finger jetties.

He must have had something in mind. During his little lapse in transmission, while the test pattern flashed on and on inside. Some destination, a plan, a notional refuge that eluded him for the moment. But here he was. The marina. Where, yes, he had spent a lot of time in better days. Their little sloop that Harriet referred to as The Folly. Okay, he thought. This is where you’ve brought yourself. Old circuits firing. So walk. Walk it out, walk it off.

And as he did he let his safer thoughts unsnarl themselves slowly. Could only think of them as coloured wires now. All brittle, everything ginger. Couldn’t get straight, shiny lines anymore, no orderly layout like something fresh from the shop floor. But he could separate them, more or less, even if they were still nested around that awful pulsing void, the dread he’d been hauling about the past few months. It had no size or shape. Its origins obscure. It was his own dark planet. Within him. And there was absolutely no point in giving it direct attention; it was simply there, he accepted it now, thrumming like something about to detonate. But with sufficient will, bending every perilous thought aside, keeping all wires from touching, you could shrink it from something planetary to just a blemish, a fleck, like a tiny bit of shadow-matter tracking momentarily across the sun. Safer, better, not to look. Took such a shitload of energy, though, powering it down by mental force. Just to make some space and turn your thoughts to lesser mysteries. Like how to make a living, first and foremost. Because it really was conceivable that before Easter he could be working on his grimy street tan like those poor buggers lining up outside St Pat’s. If he didn’t pull up, if he didn’t shake this self-pitying jag he was giving into day upon day, it wasn’t just possible but inevitable. He couldn’t let Doris keep propping him up. She’d paid his phone bill. He owed it to her to get his shit together.

He shuffled away from the boardwalk and the tourist traps, tailed by a posse of gulls. Busy little pricks, gulls.

He thought about going back to teaching. Still possible, wasn’t it? If he could tidy himself up, get his nerves in order. It would weird people out, having him there again, considering what he’d been doing. He was too long out of the game. Things had changed. And now public education was like bearbaiting. He’d faced down proxy thugs of all species, from robber barons to the unions. But he shivered at the prospect of being left alone in a room with thirty 15-year-olds. Maybe something non-contact, a support role? Which had its own complications. Given that he’d probably burnt a few bridges in the bureaucracy over the years. There were heads of department who’d make certain his applications were regrettably unsuccessful.

Which left what — gardening, driving a taxi? For all his skills and achievements these were his best chances and he should bloody well get used to it because to the pollies he was poison, too dangerous, too likely to say something uncomfortable. A decade and a half of supreme self-control and in a few minutes he’d rendered himself a rogue forever. In the media he was a heretic, a traitor to progress.

No NGO could possibly risk hiring him. And in the broader environmental movement he would always be the Great Disappointment. The deepest darkest greens thought he was a hero, but their admiration wouldn’t butter his bread.

He wondered, briefly, about the private sector. Consultancies employed all sorts of colourful folks: disgraced premiers, tycoons jailed for massive frauds, sportsmen with blemished records. There was stuff he could do — lucrative, too. But it would be mercenary work.

Of course the resource sector would take him on in a heartbeat. On the quiet. That was his Patty Hearst option — join the revolution. They wouldn’t need to parade him like a hostage; they had plenty already. They’d just pump him for intel. Plans, policy positions, databases. All those establishment donors from the Golden Triangle they could woo back to the fold with a little pressure from old school chums. A few discreet threats of a purely social nature. He’d seen it done. And who knew the who-where-what like he did? But just thinking that way made him feel grubby.

This was what happened now. It was occurring everywhere. People reduced to toting up whatever made them valuable to the market. Which was to say the bosses. They’d approached him, well before the blow-up. A big mining corporation looking to spritz up its greenwash. The bastards had more propaganda money at their disposal than most nation states. For every eco-ad from a cash-strapped NGO they’d publish fifty lavish fakes. Top whack. Full pages in broadsheets and sixty-second prime-time TVCs. They stood some tame khaki naturalist in front of a red gorge or a bit of forest. A few lies, a couple of half-truths and there they were, all logo and soaring music. Australian Miners — nature’s greatest custodians. And not a hole to be seen. At the time he’d pretended not to understand what they were asking of him. Now he was desperate. And he knew they’d come back. There were unopened emails with jaunty subject headings he’d consigned to the ether. But he’d never do it. Anyhow, his value would only last a few weeks. He’d hardly get through betraying himself and his comrades before he found himself on St Georges Terrace with nothing but a cardboard carton and a non-disclosure agreement.

No, he was a fuckup, but not a turncoat. Which was something to hold onto, wasn’t it, Doris? Wasn’t that the upside?

The gulls gave him up as a dud prospect. He wandered past the boatlifters where someone was blasting a hull clean. The noise was like a dentist’s drill. Made his hair crackle. Sent him on to the sardine jetty with its spangly glitter of scales from the morning’s haul. It reeked, but the smell was comforting, homely.

The upside.

Who knew, maybe Doris was right. Perhaps the CCC would vindicate him. He could eventually launch civil action. Years, it would take, during which he’d be grooming his victimhood and paying for the pleasure all the while, and that would be worse than living like he was now. No, let them do their procedural polka — he just sought a bit of order, maybe a low-key job without excitement or stress. A quiet life. As himself. Because he was still largely himself, wasn’t he? Perhaps not the Tom Keely of old, but still within reach of him. His principles were intact. He wasn’t totally threadbare. Not morally. Was he?

He was staring at the blunt, pitted face of a mooring bollard. As if he’d been addressing it. Beseeching it, even. And maybe he had been. Yes, he had. But, glory, look at this thing. It was massive, bovine, the size of Lang Hancock’s head. Like an inscrutable idol shorn of its horns. In the face of Keely’s puny human query the iron plug radiated mineral contempt. It was indifferent. Which was as it should be. After all, it wasn’t fair on hardware, being expected to dish out spiritual advice.

He stepped away. But for a moment he couldn’t walk straight. Too hard to navigate and manage his thoughts at the same time. He settled for a limestone boulder in the lee of a boatshed. Stared at the junk washing against the seawall above the little coomb where the old slipway had been.

No, he wasn’t so sure what he was anymore. Didn’t feel so righteous. Not after last night. It was one thing to have felt favour at last, however brief. What disturbed him was not the sex but the talk. Gemma telling him about Bunker. That was her mistake and he didn’t know how it could be undone. She thought he was safe, as if he’d earnt that kind of trust. But he was just another randy bloke staring at her legs, yearning to touch, and such misplaced trust frightened him. Whole thing was a bloody mess. They had nothing in common, the two of them, just kid stuff and middle-aged loneliness. And now he was stuck with her. Or without her. Whichever. Only three doors from his hideout. Every day from here on in. With the kid. Who set something off in him each time they met.

So now he was doubly bound, trapped like a bug in a jar — addled, livid, dizzy, butting his head and turning circles. Making a damn fool of himself. Wilting in the full shock and awe of the sun, losing minutes like a man shedding dandruff. He should go home, find a hat at least, but he was so restless. And the pain wasn’t terrible. He could see fine now. Better. And the boats were everywhere, beautiful, familiar, diverting.

He got up and walked on through the clutter of docks, sheds, jetties and dealerships into the hardstandings where yachts, cruisers and workboats stood on chocks and hung in slings to be scoured and anti-fouled. The air stank of diesel, grease, paint, fibreglass, and Keely tried not to think of all the toxic crap washing into the sea. Someone else’s fight now.

He sidled between buffed hulls and scrofulous strakes, beneath stepped masts and exhaust-blackened transoms as drills and sanders wailed in the bellies of launches, ocean racers, gamefishers. He suffered a boyish twinge kicking through teak shavings and bundles of rags, cable-ties, trimmed electrical wire, steel swarf. As he thumbed a burnished bronze prop he thought again of The Folly. And was rescued from another sad jag by the sight of Wally Butcher’s clapped-out van.

He hadn’t seen the old rogue to speak to for a year or more. Wally was always in and out of these yards and in better times Keely had enjoyed running into him. Wally was old-school. But since losing Harriet, the boat and then the job, Keely had dodged him guiltily, waving at a distance or faking preoccupation. From shame. Perhaps even vanity. And it was rotten. Ducking the old coot. Because Wally was loyal as a cattle dog. Forty years of hurt and bafflement and not once had he heard the man offer a harsh word about his father.

He’d only been a boy when things went wobbly between Wally and Nev. In the days when most tradesmen were happy to work for the council or a government works department they’d gone into business together, made a go of it on their own. Just a pair of working-class blokes, they were, but they went hard at it, balls to the wall, and had begun to make some headway. Before Billy Graham and his groupies showed up. Before Nev and Doris went all ‘different’. Before Wal was left holding the rag. By all accounts the divergence hadn’t been gradual. Not that it was acrimonious, just bewildering. For the Keelys it was a sudden, radical shift, a total explosion of reality. Happened to lots of people those years, often only a momentary enthusiasm, but for Nev and Doris it was deep and lasting. In the wake of their religious conversion they were fundamentally realigned. And even for Wal, who bore the brunt, whose life was overturned in a manner less joyous, it was impressive — even frightening — to witness.

Nev did nothing in half measures. He was an all-out, open-throttle bloke, and in one blinding ‘Just as I Am’ moment he was letting the dead bury their dead. And the partnership, if not the friendship, was chaff to the winds. He just walked from the business and went out saving souls with Doris. No one could blame Wally for feeling bitter, not after what it cost him to save things singlehandedly and press on. Said it was twice the work and half the fun. He’d survived financially, but without his mate in it with him it was suddenly just work. Nev was lost to Christ. Yet by some miracle of agnostic tolerance the friendship endured. And even if Wal’s teeth were gritted he did his best to give Nev his profane and tender blessing.

Keely remembered him from Saturday afternoons in the garage. His feral sideburns like long streaks of grease as he looked up from the entrails of a Norton. The footy yammering away on the old bakelite radio. Wal was forever urging young Tom to pull his finger, rewarding him with a fart redolent of meat pies and lager. Evenings on the back verandah, the men sat in a pair on the bench seat from a wrecked EH, often speechless in the last light of day. You could sense something solid between them. Despite Jesus. And all the lost Sundays.

Oh, the sight of Wal in church. The only time he ever came. Staring up at Nev in the pulpit. Wal’s face blank and closed like the ex at the wedding. That’s how he’d looked at the graveside, too. Like a man spurned all over again.

Keely angled up to the familiar van. It was parked alongside an old plank riverboat some fool was busy pouring his savings into. Beneath the scaly transom, a midden of tools, rags, oil filter and sump. Between torrents of Wally’s bilious imprecation, snatches of talkback radio rose like the fumes of something noxious from the bilge. Keely stepped onto an upturned milk crate and beheld the hairy arse and the King Gees protruding from the engine hatch.

What’s that in there, a Cummins? called Keely in the blokiest voice he could summon.

Perkins, came the gruff reply.

That’s all a Perkins needs — a greasy one-eyed butcher. Can’t this joker find a proper mechanic?

Wally hauled himself upright and peered evilly over the gunwale. It took a moment for the old bugger’s face to rearrange itself.

Tommy bloody Keely, he said with the makings of a grin. How are ya, son?

Ah, I’m alright.

Christ, by the looks of ya I think you might be kiddin yeself.

Keely laughed. Okay, he said. I’m shithouse. How are you?

I’m old, son. If anyone could find a spare paddock they’d lead me out there and put a bullet in me from kindness.

You don’t look too bad, said Keely. For an ugly old bastard.

Jesus, you look like your old man with that bloody beard. Where you been?

Oh, I’m still in town.

Don’t see you on the telly anymore.

Nah, they rissoled me.

Well, you did call that fat cunt a crook. And on the telly, no less.

I did.

So yer old man was wrong, then. The truth won’t set you free.

Keely shrugged indulgently.

So, what’ll those shit-stirrers do without ya?

They seem to be coping.

Pity, said Wal. Got used to seein ya every other night. In ya fancypants suit. Stirrin the possum.

Constraining our great economy.

Makin us all feel guilty for fuckin the world up.

Traitors to progress, Wal.

Tree-huggin homosexuals, the lottaya. Strippin the hair off a man’s chest.

Keely laughed; the old bugger was only half joking.

Need some work done?

Nah, said Keely with a grimace. Boat’s gone. Only the tinnie left. Just walking past, really.

Once a victim, eh? They get ya, boats. They’re not as much fun, but women are cheaper, son.

I thought you might’ve retired.

Who can afford not to work? said Wally, looking him up and down appraisingly.

Well, some have greatness thrust upon us.

And how’re you enjoyin it?

Don’t ask.

Hittin the piss, by the looks. So, how’s that girla yours?

Keely’s wince was enough.

Well, shit. You are in the wars.

Nah, that’s old news.

Wally wiped his hands on a rag and climbed out over the transom to sit splaylegged on the boat’s marlin-board. He was a short, fat man, bald and speckled with sun lesions. He sported a glass eye. And it was immediately evident he did not favour undies.

No bulldust, with that fluff on your face you really do look like him.

Nah, said Keely, basking a little despite himself.

You know, he’d be as old as me now. Think of that, eh? He never got old.

You’re not that old, Wal.

Well, youth has flown, sunshine. There it is. Unlovely fact.

Keely dipped his head. In this man’s presence he felt about fifteen years old.

Just think of it, but. Last time I saw him he was younger’n you.

Yeah, I do think about it. Too much, these days.

Well. We got that in common, then. That and our good looks.

Keely stood there toeing a ravaged drive belt.

He’s a hard one to live up to, Wal.

But you’re a chip off the old block, son.

No.

Any mug can see it. Out there savin the world from itself. Callin it as ya see it. And gettin ya tit in the wringer for ya trouble. He’d be proud, the mad sod.

Hey, said Keely, trying to break the drift of the conversation. You still ride a bike?

Piles and all.

Never give up the Norton, eh?

’65 Atlas.

Nev swore by the Trumpy.

Hate the Poms, love their bikes, said Wal with a grin. His teeth had not fared well.

Keely felt soft as a chamois, perilously vulnerable. He was suddenly apprehensive about what the old fella might say next.

Your mum orright?

Keely nodded.

Bloody fine woman.

She is.

How old are ya, exactly?

Forty-nine.

Truly, ya do look like him, son. At the end.

Keely felt the jab in his guts.

And I don’t say it to make a prick of meself.

No? he asked, smarting.

As a mate, son.

Really.

Him and your mum — they never went soft, didn’t fake it, never gave up. If his heart hadn’t give out, he’d’ve been up and back at it. That was him, what I loved about him. He had that boilin thing in him. You know: Fuck this, let’s do somethin about it. Of all that churchy talk, son, it was the only thing rung true to me. Like he said, believe what ya like. Think what ya like. You’ll be judged for what ya do. Even if ya cock it up. Die tryin. You were a kid, I spose. You won’t remember.

I remember, Wal.

Well, just bloody make sure ya do.

What’re you saying?

I dunno. What would I know? Just don’t roll over and go soft. Show some family pride and stick it up em.

The old man looked at Keely a long moment, eyes lit up. But blinking, too, as if remorseful. Sensing he’d let himself get caught up and had said too much.

There ya go. Advice on life from Wally Butcher. If ya didn’t look broke I’d send you an invoice.

Always happy to listen to wisdom, Wal, said Keely tightly. Anything else while I’m down here?

Always pay cash. And try not to piss in the shower.

Shoulda brought a notebook, said Keely.

That’s all the nuggets I got, son.

Well, it’s plenty to be going on with.

Wally rooted around in his shirt pocket a moment and passed down an oil-stained card.

Give us a call sometime — we’ll go crabbin.

No worries.

And say hello to your mother.

I will.

Sure yer orright?

Yeah, he lied.

Here, shake a man’s hand, why don’tcha.

Keely shook his big, gnarled, greasy paw and stood gormlessly for a moment until Wally hoisted himself back into the bowels of the boat.

~ ~ ~

His father.

Once more.

Forever.

The father.

Keely walked homeward stung but more or less coherent, as if Wally’s bluntness had momentarily unscrambled him.

Lame that it always came back to this. Faith said he was a man who needed reminding he had a mother, a parent who had not been dead thirty-five years.

Yet there it was. The father-shaped hole in him, hot and deep and realer than any notion he had words for.

Neville Keely. Forever the young bear. How would he have fared, had he survived? This was an era for reptiles, not bears. Would he have faced down the shellacked bump and grind of the evangelical super-church, the evil sugar-drip of prosperity theology? Imagine him taking his stolid, courageous Bonhoeffer into that swamp of co-option and collaboration. Maybe Wal was right. If not for the heart attack he might have still gone out and kicked some iniquitous arse. Or perhaps he’d have moved on to subtler work like his widow. And it was true, Faith was right, Doris had only become visible to Keely once the old man’s gigantic presence was gone. Still, he left a hell of an absence. It was harder all the time to distinguish reality from myth. And he’d known for years that he modelled himself upon a memory. Probably unwise. But impossible to let go, even now.

How could you measure up? There was no longer any grand striding towards justice and equality. In this new managerial dispensation change was incremental or purely notional. Big gestures were extinct. Even on YouTube messianic figures arose and evaporated in hours. And yet he knew his father was not just a man of his time. For all his own triumphs as an activist, the forest coupes spared, the spills exposed and species protected, there’d be no one talking about Tom Keely in thirty years. His father had exceeded the bounds of his class and refused to follow the template of his generation.

He had nine years of school to his name. Married a wharfie’s daughter, put in ten hours at the workshop, four in nightschool, enrolled at a provincial bible college and took theology units by correspondence, then waded untimely into parish affairs, bringing a bit of shopfloor pugnacity to matters of the spirit. The man remade himself, then tried to refashion the entire world around him, which was his making and breaking, Keely knew it — and by comparison he felt like a coaster, the inheritor of another man’s social and moral capital. From his baby-boom standpoint of generational ease, it was hard to credit just how hard Nev had worked, how far he dragged himself, how wildly he swam against the current.

Keely only had to recall how wrong his father looked in church. He simply wasn’t a suit man, wouldn’t even consent to wearing the Pelaco shirt or brown brogues of the true evangelical. Doris said that in his jeans and workshirt he looked like a wrestler impersonating Woody Guthrie. He was for the little bloke, the reject, the no-hoper. He bellowed about saving bodies as well as souls. Keely could remember it vividly: the early excitement in the drip-dry congregation at having this rough beast suddenly among them, the parishioners thrilled at being groovy enough to hire him. And the queer cocktail of pride and shame he felt as a boy hearing Nev preach.

It was only a matter of weeks before you could feel the first troubling currents of resistance from the pews. And it came so quickly, that awful Sunday evening when the string-lipped elders froze Nev out, cast him off, sent him packing with his dirty commo outrage to all that was sacred and true. After which, though the times were a-changing, no mainstream outfit would have him. So followed a period when Doris and Nev ran house churches and drop-in centres that were warm and anarchic and better suited to all the Keelys’ gifts and temperaments, and it felt, in retrospect, like the sweetest time for all four of them. Just a few good and happy years before the biker church rumbled into town and everything went sour.

They were a glamorous, sinister outfit, those Harley-riding holy rollers, and their local chapter only lasted a year, but for a few months Neville Keely was their front man, their bighearted dupe. Revvin Nev, riding high, open throttle, steering Christ’s hog down the highway, imploring easy riders not to blow it. Never knowing what he’d signed up to, how the power was distributed. And it was painful for Keely, recalling how fast his adoration had curdled. All through his boyhood the old man had been a moral, physical giant who only grew in stature. He was Christ’s own viking, all love and thunder. And then, at the cusp of Keely’s adolescence, once this biker thing took hold, his father suddenly looked like another goofy old fart on a Triumph spouting peace, love and understanding. It was Keely’s guilty secret, this creeping shame, relieved only by Nev’s complete humiliation when those octane Jesus freaks turfed him out on his arse and began legal proceedings against him. Nev had discovered and then robustly challenged the bikers’ impervious conviction that they were British Israelites, and must be, therefore, a whites-only outfit. He’d signed stuff he hadn’t even read, heard arcane wafflings he hadn’t bothered to take in. And he didn’t understand that he was dealing with a corporation as much as a church. He fought on like a man who believed justice would prevail. And they ground him down until he’d mortgaged half the house to pay the legal fees. He never surrendered. But he wore himself into a ruin. Keely remembered him in a cane chair beneath the almond tree, praying, weeping, his beard full of crumbs. Soon afterwards the heart attack carted him off. And they were alone, his mother, his sister and him, in debt, bewildered.

A good man, his father, but not always smart. It was only when he was gone that Christ’s puzzling injunction to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves began to make brutal sense. Indeed it became a rueful family motto. To which Doris and Faith had been trying to return Keely’s attention for several years. And they were right. In both marriage and work he’d become more angry than effective, more impatient than observant and more honest than useful. Wal saw him as a chip off the old block. And maybe Gemma did too. But he was just not that man.

~ ~ ~

Silent and backlit, the boy stood in the doorway. He was no more substantial than a blur. The minute he ghosted into the frame, filling the space with his peculiar static energy, something about this lack of resolution caused Keely’s hackles to rise, as if some unknowable danger hung in the supercharged air about the boy. Keely snapped upright in the kitchen chair, awake now but unsettled. He’d dozed off right there, sunburnt as a ten-pound Pom. Leaving the door open like that. An open invitation to chaos. A week ago he’d never have been so lax.

But it was only him. If indeed he was awake. And if the blur in the doorway was only a child.

He waited for Kai to speak. But the only sounds pouring into the flat were car horns and wattlebirds. A tiny jet of panic. Sudden irrational fear.

Kai?

Keely leapt to his feet. The suddenness of it set off a thud in his head. He was truly awake. He approached the screen door.

Only a boy. Flushed in the face and barefoot. In the ugly littleshorts and stretchy polo shirt that passed for school uniform these days. His helmet of hair, fine and fair, riffled in the breeze.

The boy gazed impassively at a point just past Keely’s hip.

So, said Keely, clawing back some calm. How’s school?

Good.

Well. That’s good.

Nan said you’re comin tonight. For tea.

Oh, said Keely. Am I?

The boy pressed his hand against the insect screen and it puckered his flesh in rigid patterns.

Alright, said Keely like a man hypnotized. What time?

Tea time.

Well, he said, recovering a moment. That seems fair. You want to come in for a sec?

I’ve been here before.

Oh. When?

I was stuck, said Kai.

In here?

No words, said the boy in a strange, flat tone. Things didn’t work. I wasn’t feeling right. Something had to take me.

Keely peered at the kid. None of what he’d said made any sense. And the child’s delivery made it queerer still. Kai looked past him, and then a moment later directly at him, only it felt to Keely as if he were looking straight through him, and it rankled.

Just run that by me again, he said, lowering himself to Kai’s eye level.

But the kid backed away.

Kai?

He was gone. Seconds later Keely heard the clack of the door along the way.

*

Gemma’s place was smoky and cluttered — a couch, a big TV, some posters on the wall, a potted ficus by the slider, a midden of washed laundry on the coffee table. The layout was identical to his, but her flat felt homelier, more lived-in.

She looked pretty in her denim skirt and sleeveless top, but she was subdued. On the tiny kitchen table Kai had a book on raptors open at a picture and description of the brahminy kite.

He haunts that library, said Gemma, setting some chops into a pan.

I was the same, said Keely, taking in the third chair pulled up to the table.

Don’t worry, I remember. Always had your face in a book.

No wonder I never noticed anything, eh?

You want a beer? she said as if she hadn’t heard him.

Nah. But you go ahead.

Can’t, she said. I’m workin tonight.

The boy seemed content to leaf through his book undisturbed. Keely watched Gemma cook the meal briskly, without flourish or fuss. He didn’t quite know where to sit or stand, what the evening was about, how he was placed, but he was glad of the invitation, appreciated the brief sense of propulsion it afforded him, and there was something lovely in the domestic fug of this flat: a woman, a child, food being prepared. This was the life functional people lived and he had to guard against it setting things off in him he couldn’t manage. He was nervous. About her more than anything.

He leant against the bench savouring the curve of her butt in its denim skirt. Impersonating a man at his ease.

When the food was ready Gemma set the plates down unceremoniously and they sat, the three of them, around the scuffed little table. Keely made too much of the lamb chops, the mash and the peas. Gemma suffered his praise and directed him to shut up and eat and so they ate shyly, silent but for the low mumbling TV, the burp of the sauce bottle and the scrape of cutlery. The meal was like something from Blackboy Crescent: the three colours on the plate, the dull sheen of laminex, the mist of sheep fat in the hot evening air.

Keely couldn’t help but observe Kai. The boy segmented his food with precision, aligned it on the plate by size and category, and chewed gravely, consuming his meal with the unhurried method of a lonely spinster, and it was only when he addressed the wicked finger of fat on his chop that he became, in Keely’s eyes, a child in whom he could see himself, a kid — avid, exultant. He tried not to smile, lest it disrupt the boy’s hermitic concentration. The adenoidal snuffle, the hunched wings of his shoulders. Here, surely, was a kid without friends, a boy who was an island of self-possession. He was peculiar. Compelling in a way.

Keely felt Gemma watching, and wondered if he was paying the boy too much attention. He smiled at her. She gave him a thin grin of uncertainty, maybe regret. Was she having second thoughts about this, him, last night? For here they were. A woman alone. A friendless child. A man adrift.

You had a sister, said Kai.

Keely saw the boy peering his way, as if emboldened to examine him. Perhaps it was the abruptness of the inquiry or the boy’s use of the past tense that left him stranded.

Tom? Gemma said, prompting. Your sister?

Oh, said Keely. Yeah. I do. I still have a sister. Her name’s Faith. Your nan used to sleep in her room sometimes.

I don’t have a sister, said Kai.

No?

No brother, too.

Still, said Keely. You’ve got your nan, though, eh?

The boy nodded but appeared to find this fact unimpressive. Now it was one discomfiting moment after the other.

The kid scratched himself. Gemma’s irritation flared.

Look at you. Wrigglin around.

Itchy, said Kai. In the underpits.

Cause you’re a dirty sweaty little so-and-so.

So-and-so, said the boy. He seemed to be testing the phrase but Gemma took it as mockery.

Into the shower, she said with force.

What about icecream?

We’re out.

The boy blinked. Once, twice. It wasn’t incomprehension; it was protest. What a thing they had going, these two. Gemma burred up, the kid needling her blankly.

There’s no damn icecream, orright? So git.

Kai gazed at Keely a moment as if considering an appeal.

You heard, said Gemma.

The boy retreated to the bathroom. Keely squirmed a little, said nothing.

When the water ran Gemma lit a fag and sat back, cradling an elbow in her spare hand. Smoke coiled towards the open slider, grey, sinuous, reeking, and she squinted a little, following its passage in a manner that seemed studied, the way a smoker can make something out of nothing or, indeed nothing at all from something, with a struck pose and a bit of business. Not that you could blame her. Here he was, surveying her, cataloguing her really, from across the table. And sensing this, why wouldn’t a woman arm herself with a little performance? What could she be thinking in the wake of last night, having gone to bed with the ghost of a boy, a wreck like him, out of raw need or the false safety of nostalgia? She had to be wondering what she’d done and how to extricate herself, having him right here in the building. Dinner was probably a gesture of kindness, a gentle kiss-off, the neighbourly thanks-but-no-thanks.

And then as he watched, Gemma’s face was overtaken by a crooked grin.

Underpits, she said indulgently. Bugger me.

He’s a good kid, Gem.

When he was little he had eyebrowsers, too.

Eyebrowsers. I like that.

Keely relaxed a moment. He set his knife and fork together on the plate and sat back. She tilted her head, amused.

Doris taught us to do that.

Do what?

All that table manners stuff. Elbows off, elbows in. Wait for the cook to start, close ya mouth, knife and fork together at the end. May I please leave the table?

Geez, he said. Sounds a bit uptight.

She had standards, mate. Nothin wrong with that. She knew shit. She taught me how to read, you know. And about girl things. Showed me how to plait me own hair, used to brush it for me morning and night. I used to sit in her lap and get dreamy. She smelt like apples.

So did you, he said. It was the shampoo.

Thought you didn’t remember anythink. About me.

Well. There you are.

It was beautiful, my hair. Inside I was rubbish. But on the outside, them golden plaits, I was a friggin princess. And look at me now.

It was beautiful hair, he said.

Nah, it was just trouble. Honey on a plate.

Oh? he said, as if he didn’t know what she meant.

A bloke pulled a hank of it out once. Whole bloody handful. Spose it’s one way to express your undyin love. Couple of times I nearly cut it off meself anyway. Wished I was a nun. Not that God’s any different. All hard feelins from Him in the end.

Keely had nothing to say to any of this. He was not remotely competent.

Gemma stubbed out her cigarette, raked a hand through her faded hair and gathered up the dishes.

I’ll do these, he said. You see to Kai.

Suit yourself.

Keely filled the sink and peered through the curtain. The window could have been his own. Same sink. Same terylene curtains. Same view of the war monument and the date palms on the hill. The human things were unfamiliar: the cheesy knick-knacks, the Blu-Tacked posters, the potted cactus on the bench, the happy snaps in Kmart frames. But the bare brick walls, the mean, low ceiling, the shifty parquet floor in the kitchen — they were no different. For some reason it made him smile. A totally separate life being lived in exactly the same space. That was the Mirador for you. Ten floors of architectural uniformity. And within it, all these folks resisting replication. The thought gave him a stab of fondness, for people, for shambling, ordinary folks. Yes, for just a moment he loved his crooked neighbours with his crooked heart.

Then it occurred to him as he rolled suds like lottery balls through his fingers that she was right. After all, what were the odds? Of his being him instead of Gemma. And the pair of them, decades later, finding themselves here in identical containers like the tools of some finicky technician.

As he dried and set everything on the bench behind him, he listened to Gemma and the boy in the bathroom. Then closer, in the bedroom. She had a gruff way with the kid familiar from Keely’s own boyhood but no longer approved of in middle-class circles. Kai’s voice was toneless. And Keely wondered what that was about. He could barely imagine the life the boy had endured. Endless uncertainty. Disorder. Probably worse. It’d be cruel for her, seeing her own childhood repeated like this.

On the bench, stood up in a ghastly quilted frame the colour of smoked salmon, was a photo of Kai as an infant in the arms of a girl Keely could only assume was his mother, a pretty-enough blonde partly hidden by the outsized lenses of her sunglasses. The infant Kai stared at the camera as if trying to decide what was necessary. To smile? To stay still? To keep the peace. Looking at him there, with his silky hair adrift, he could have been Gemma in the sixties.

She was sixteen when she had him, said Gemma.

Keely swung about and almost dropped the frypan. He didn’t like to think how long she’d been there. Reading his thoughts, all his social judgements, his anthropological musings.

Gem, she looks lovely.

She was. Once.

Like you, he said.

Gemma grunted, displeased.

His Nibs wants you to say goodnight.

Oh? Oh. Sure.

Keely didn’t need to be shown the way to the bedroom. But he managed to feel a little lost along the way, for it was suddenly strange territory. Harriet had nieces and nephews but Keely hadn’t been in a kid’s bedroom in a very long time. He felt a snag of panic. And sensed Gemma watching from the doorway, doubtless smiling, finding his awkwardness comical.

Given its mélange of boy-things and woman-things — Motocross posters and high-heeled boots, face creams, action figures, bras, boxer shorts — the small bedroom was orderly if not strictly tidy, and it smelt a whole lot better than his own, cigarette smoke or no. There was a queen-size bed. A couple of boxy side tables. The standard miserly built-in robe.

Kai sat bare-chested beneath a sheet. His Bart Simpson pillowlay alongside Gemma’s flouncy shams. As Keely stood wiping his hands anxiously on the back of his shorts, Gemma came in, snatched a few things from the end of the bed and went through to the bathroom.

No nonsense, she said before closing the door. You hear me?

Keely raised his eyebrows mischievously but the boy did not respond. With the door shut and the shower running, he stood a sheepish moment before sitting at the bed’s edge. Perching. The boy smelt of toothpaste. He had a vee-shaped scar just beneath his collarbone. His skin was creamy as if he’d never been outside without a shirt. Perhaps it was the way these days. Safer. But it looked foreign, this ghostly pallor.

The boy shifted beneath his sheet, impatient. Keely didn’t like to get too close in case they touched inadvertently. Kai looked over as if assessing him.

Can you tell a story?

A story.

About eagles.

The boy’s face was plump and round and serious. Yesterday’s sun lingered on his cheeks and along the soft bridge of his nose. To that small degree he was comprehensible to Keely. Just this bit of colour made him an Australian child in a way he recognized.

Um, well. Okay. A story about eagles.

I don’t care if it’s make-up.

Well, I used to know a song.

About eagles?

Keely wasn’t sure about this. He was way out on a drooping stalk here. Hadn’t seen it coming. The sudden memory of the devotional chorus; it had to be about this morning, the memories of Nev and Doris and all those fireside church-camp singalongs.

But I don’t know if I can sing it, he said a little desperately. It’s been a long time.

Orright, said Kai flatly, as if accustomed to build-ups that went nowhere.

And it stung Keely, spurred him into croaky song. He just lumbered into it. Like a man pitching himself off a ledge.

We will fly with wings of eagles, he warbled in a key too high to sustain. We will rise and fly away. We will run and not be weary. We will walk and not be faint.

Okay, said Kai.

That was a song I knew when I was a boy, he said, flushing. It just came to me, that’s all.

But have you got a story? asked Kai as if he were prepared to put this embarrassing interlude behind them.

Right, said Keely. Yes. Not a story so much. But I know one interesting thing about raptors.

Nn?

You know from your book an eagle is a raptor, right?

A kind of bird. What hunts.

Pretty much. Well, did you know that when they do hunt, when a raptor grabs something, its talons lock up? Its claws — they kind of go on automatic. Like the osprey. It dives for fish, mostly. Imagine what it’s like when it gets hold of something too heavy to lift out of the water. I saw that once, on a documentary, a film on TV. This great big bird underwater, trying to drag itself up with a huge fish way too big to carry. It couldn’t heave itself out of the water, couldn’t even get to the surface, but couldn’t let go. It was locked on. Fighting up through the water with its wings. Like something you’ve never seen in your life. This great white bird hauling itself up, trying to fly against the ocean.

Kai blinked. Keely sensed, too late, that this was hardly bedtime fare for a child. He’d gotten carried away, florid as a souvenir teatowel.

One day, said the boy. The birds in the world will die.

What? he asked. What did you say?

In the end, said the kid. All of them, the birds. They die.

Well. Yeah. I suppose everything dies eventually.

I saw pictures. All the birds dead. On the beach, in town.

Ah, he said. Right. That. Jesus, he thought, I’m in the weeds here; this is way too close to home.

And then I knew, said the boy. One day all the birds in the world will die.

Kai, he said, trying to keep himself in order. That was lead poisoning. It was an accident. Well, actually a bad mistake. It’s just a terrible thing that happened because people were lazy and stupid.

Keely knew it was so much worse than that. But he shouldn’t be thinking about it right now. Had to let it alone for his own sake. And yet his mind had already run ahead, flashing on it, dragging him in. Esperance. Ten thousand birds killed. An entire town contaminated. Vegetable gardens, watertanks, clothing, food. Kids poisoned. Because of how easy it had become to do business in this state. There was nothing in the way of the diggers and dealers but hot air.

Look, he said too brightly. It’s over, Kai. It’s fixed.

The boy didn’t seem convinced.

This is where it begins, Keely thought, the lying to children. He had to stop thinking about this shit. Right now.

Dinosaur birds went extinct, said Kai.

What’s that? he said, tamping the tremor in his hands.

Bird dinosaurs, they went extinct.

Yes. Yes. That’s right. A long time ago.

The boy yawned.

Now it’s just bones.

Yes.

And birds will just be bones.

Well.

Extinct, he said through another yawn. Like us.

But our birds are okay, Kai. And we’re okay, too.

Keely could not believe what he was saying. He’d never lied like this in his life. And he’d broken into a sweat.

The boy slid down the pillow, pulled the sheet to his neck. Keely felt a little knee brush his hip as the kid rolled on his side and looked up with drooping lids.

Extinct, he whispered, as if tasting the word, trying it on for size.

Everything’s fine, Kai. It’s all going to be okay.

Orright, you two, said Gemma in a billow of steam. Lights out.

Keely felt the urge to ruffle the kid’s hair, to pat him reassuringly, but he didn’t dare. He felt Gemma waiting for him to leave.

Night, mate, he said on his way out.

The light clicked behind him as he went through to the livingroom; he thought he might slip away while he had the chance. But it felt wrong not to stay and thank Gemma for the meal. The mute TV flickered on — another bit of evening trash masquerading as current affairs. He saw his hands trembling, shoved them in the pockets of his shorts.

Gemma came out in her powder-blue tunic. She dropped a cheap pair of gym shoes on the seagrass matting and while he stood there, trying not to look at the chipped paint on her toenails, she spread a towel across the corner of the kitchen bench and set to ironing a fresh pair of school shorts.

How long’ve you been doing this? he asked, still standing.

Sometimes she dumped him. Other times I took him off her. And now I’ve had him a coupla years.

The iron swished breathily. The old fridge kicked into life.

Tough, he murmured.

Well. What can you do, eh?

You work at the place on the corner? That’s handy.

Did, she said. Now I’m up Canning Highway. They shoved me across a month ago. Bloody buses hardly ever come when I need em. Spend half me pay on taxis. It’s shit, really.

Keely was stuck for a moment. For want of something to fill the gap, he gestured at the travel posters gummed to the raw bricks of the wall. Coconut palms and sunset at Kuta. A smiling child feeding the dolphins at Monkey Mia.

Which did you prefer? he asked.

Prefer?

Which place did you like the most?

I do speak English, Tom.

Sorry.

Never been to either of them, she said dismissively. Kai found the posters at the Vinnies.

Wrongfooted, he made the neutral sound any nitwit makes stalling for time. He stared hopelessly at the clunky old Telstra phone and the notepad beside it.

Gemma turned the shorts over, sighed at a paint stain, and finished ironing them.

Listen, he said at last, surrendering to failure. Thanks for dinner.

Just chops.

It was nice.

Gemma set the iron aside and looked him up and down as if considering something. Keely thought he saw an idea retreat from her face. He took up the pencil beside the pad. It seemed that every page had a different bird on it, sketches and doodles Kai had worked on. Many of them bore no resemblance to any bird he knew, but the kid had given all his creatures wings.

I’m just writing down my number, he murmured.

We know where you are.

Right, he said, steadying himself to remember the digits. But you’re off to work, he’s here on his own. I mean, in case you’re worried.

I’m not worried.

I know it’s none of my business.

But.

I don’t mind looking in on him.

He’s fine, she said. He’s used to it now.

For a fleeting moment Keely thought he could detect a hint of regret, as if she wanted to take him up but daren’t. He wondered if it was last night, the lingering implication of a transaction. Or just pity, having seen how hopeless and awkward he was.

Well, the offer’s there.

Sad. That you didn’t have em.

Kids?

They fuck you up, anyway.

Every good thing does, doesn’t it?

She shrugged and he felt himself gently dismissed.

At the door she patted his arm. He hesitated. Then pecked her on the cheek. And pulling away, saw that it irritated her — the hesitation, or perhaps the kiss itself. She closed the door on him before he’d even turned to go.

~ ~ ~

With the laundry all done and no dinner dishes to deal with, Keely found himself at a loose end. A stroll perhaps. But he was still tenderfooted from this morning’s fugue-walk around the marina. And he hardly had the funds to entertain himself in town. Not at a pub and certainly not the bottleshop. He couldn’t afford them, not in any sense. So there was no other choice but to stay in. Which left what? Google? While he still had access. Either that or the rich tapestry of network TV. He’d given up on the Norwegian novel — couldn’t concentrate.

He should clean the flat. That’d burn an hour or so. And God knows it needed doing. But just thinking about it made him wilt.

He was tired. His brain felt scorched. Too much sun. Too much happening and too quickly. And he didn’t want to think anymore, not tonight. Being with Gemma. Her strange kid. The Esperance fiasco bringing him back to the boil. He needed to break off, cut the frigging circuit before he shorted out. Needed to calm the fuck down. His bloody heart was pelting. So shower again. Clean towel. Brush your teeth. Jesus, that face. Eyes like crushed strawberries.

Just paracetamol. Two. And nothing else.

And lie down. Fucking head. Like there’s sand in it. Just lie there. And go to sleep like a normal person. Sparking.

He tried a few of the relaxation exercises Harriet had gone in for. Lying back on the righteously clean pillowslip, endeavouring to ignore the slightly shrunken feel of his sunburnt face. He was tired enough — wasn’t he always tired? But getting over the edge was the objective. Once you tilted out you were alright. And there was no feeling so sweet as falling. So over half an hour he huffed and cooed himself into a swoon. And for five, maybe ten minutes he was close, giddily close, projecting, wafting out towards the purple New Age precipice, beyond which only sleep awaited. No thinking, no puzzling or raging. Just sleep. Goneness. Paddocks of sleep, forests of sleep, valleys and rivers and churning gorges of sleep.

And he was almost there, right at the cusp, when he heard it. The whimpering wall. Those cries of fear. The noise that made his arse pucker in horror. His neighbour. So clear, so close. She sounded as if someone were in the flat with her, standing over her, slavering, ready to do something unspeakable. But there was nothing he could do. She was alone in there, duking it out with herself, tormented by something that descended on her like the weather. You could feel her cringing, hiding, balling up, quietening a moment until she gathered herself, became defiant, cried out, cursing whatever it was at her shoulder, commanding it to get behind, and then retreating, finding a rhythm, falling into the grunts and chants that saved or ensnared her, poor beggar. It was horrible to hear: and there she went again, off and riffing, on a roll now, louder, more insistent, uglier, more desperate and distressing every second. Oh, Christ!

Keely sat up.

How could someone so troubled be allowed to live ten storeys in the air? How was it she hadn’t hurled herself from her balcony already? And how was it, for that matter, that he hadn’t done so himself in order to be free of her? The poor creature — why couldn’t they help her, why couldn’t they just cart her the hell away and let him sleep?

Get out! she growled. Out! Out-out-out-out-out-out-out-out!

He belted on the wall with a shoe. She fell silent a moment, as if startled by the intrusion, then she muttered darkly, cried out once, plain and shrill, and resumed the chant.

Keely got up, flailed about for the dinky iPod, and shoved the buds in his ears. He tried a bit of Delius to calm himself, but quickly discovered that the first cuckoo in spring was no match for the nutjob next door. Yelping and barking through the wall, she was more cuckoo than anything the London Philharmonic could come up with. What he needed was a fortress of noise, his own sonic Monte Cristo, but Black Sabbath seemed in poor taste in the circumstances. So he chose a bit of Captain Beefheart, despite how perversely it brought Harriet to mind. He shouldn’t be thinking about her like this. She hated Beefheart, the opaque melodies, absurd lyrics, the man’s savage, grating voice. Keely cranked it up, hoping to match madness with madness, and he blasted the poor woman out of range, cast her into a lake of fiery tumult which gave him wild relief, before the guilt set in and his head began to fizz and his thoughts returned unhelpfully to Harriet.

She needn’t have gone. They might have gotten past it eventually, outlived the catastrophe she’d brought down upon them. He could have lived with it, with what had happened; he was convinced of that. Hadn’t he forgiven her? She thought he had to be cracking up, just by saying it, but could simple forgiveness be such a threat? Apparently so. She said it frightened her when he was like this. So weird and jerkadelic, like his stupid Beefheart albums. So florid and manic. As if he thought he were a character in a Russian novel. It was creepy. It wasn’t normal.

It was no good.

He ripped the buds from his ears, lurched up off the bed with a sickening suddenness and weaved out into the livingroom, tormented afresh by thoughts of Harriet and her baby. The other bloke’s baby. He had to get off this jag, stop thinking about it.

So many half-clear weeks on that front and he was back to flaying himself with something he could never fix. It was unsound, unhelpful; it unhinged him and rendered him pathetic, laughable, immobile. Et cetera.

He stood at the open sliding door to watch the orange lights of container cranes strobing across the north quay. Beyond them, like a fence against the darkness, the channel markers flashed red and green without ceasing.

Gemma was right. They fuck you up. Even the ones you don’t have. Especially them.

But enough of that. He needed to be asleep, to be gone from this.

As he wrenched the knife drawer open all the matt-plastic bottles rolled away as one. He snatched up the first serious-looking container within reach and got it open and pitched a bunch into his palm. The tap water tasted metallic. And he wondered if that was how a horse tasted the bit, whether it tasted anything at all.

~ ~ ~

The phone.

Phone.

Phone.

That really was the phone ringing. So far away. So close to his head.

Waking was like clawing his way free of something dark and heavy. But he was, in the end, awake. He lay panting. The phone brayed away on the side table. He craned to see the luminous digits of the clock — 2:15. Not good. If he really was awake, then this wasn’t good. Unless it was Faith in London, forgetting the time difference; that was just an accident, that’d be harmless.

He snatched the thing up. There was only breathing.

You’re kidding me, right? You’re fucking kidding me. Who is this?

Tom?

What is this?

Tom?

Tiny, feeble, fearful voice.

This is Kai.

Kai?

Yes.

What — mate, what are you doing up? It’s the middle of the night.

Yes.

Are you okay? Keely asked, gathering himself a little. The building was quiet. Down on the docks a container hit the deck of a ship with a muffled boom.

There’s a dream, said the boy.

You had a nightmare?

It’s a dream.

Did you call your nan?

She’s busy. It’s work.

You want me to give her a call? I don’t have her mobile number.

It has to be important.

She’d want to know you’re alright, Kai. Wouldn’t she?

A dream, said the boy, is not an emergency.

Well. Okay.

It’s the only job she’s got.

I know, mate.

She has to have the job. Or the people take me.

Keely hauled himself up. He pressed his head against the bricks.

Kai, no one’s gonna take you. You want me to call your nan? I think I should.

No. You can’t.

Okay, Kai. Alright. You want to talk for a bit, until you can get back to sleep?

Yes.

That’s fine. We can talk.

Here?

We can’t just do it on the phone?

The boy was silent. Stayed silent. Keely tried to steel himself against it. He couldn’t be doing this. This would not look good. But the kid held out. Diamond drill-bit silence. Boring into him.

Okay, he said at last. Alright, Kai. I’ll be there in a moment.

Keely switched the light on, began casting about for his shorts, maybe a shirt. The wall furred and buckled slightly. He wasn’t right. Not even close.

Up at 1010 the kitchen light was on. Through the terylene curtain he saw the wiped bench, a mug, a tin of International Roast. The curtain twitched and Kai’s face appeared. Keely gave him a goofy thumbs up and hitched his shorts woozily as the lock clunked and the door sat back. For a moment, the boy was just pale mist in the narrow gap. Keely felt himself being scrutinized, as if the kid needed to make certain it was him. Keely smiled as reassuringly as he could, given the hour. He steadied himself against the gritty wall.

You want me to help you get to sleep?

The boy shook his head.

You want to talk?

Kai scratched his scalp, expressionless. Then he pulled back the door.

Keely hesitated a moment. He was reluctant to cross this threshold but he didn’t fancy standing out here in the walkway in full view at this time of the morning.

He stepped in. The flat still smelled richly of lamb fat. The boy closed the door.

What about a glass of milk?

Kai shook his head.

On the table was the battered library book on raptors. Beside it lay the pad with Keely’s number on it.

Keely sat at the table. Kai stood opposite, hands pressed against the laminated edge at the height of his bare chest. There were tiny purple anchors in the cotton of his shorty pyjamas. Dockers jarmies. And the kid had brand-new football boots. One day, he thought, one day I must take him for a kick. This season I’ll take him to a game.

You had a dream, then?

The boy nodded.

What sort of dream?

Flying, the boy murmured.

I have flying dreams, too, he said scratching his beard. I like them.

The kid looked sceptical.

What happened in your dream?

I crash, said the boy. There’s people there. With only eyes showin. And I can’t talk.

Hang on a sec. What did you crash?

Just me, said the boy.

You crash to the ground?

But there’s people there, with only eyes. All black. And just eyes. Behind them it’s… fire.

Fire. Like a crashed plane?

No.

So… what kind of fire?

Fast. Shooting.

You mean firing? Was this like a movie, Kai?

The boy rocked a moment, considering. He nodded, but without conviction.

You’re flying. You crash to the ground. And there’s people on the ground. And they only have eyes?

They talk, said Kai, eyes clouded with awe. But, not proper words.

Like aliens, like space people or something?

Kai shook his head.

Then what happens?

They go away.

Where do they go?

They’re kind, I think.

Wait, Kai — how do they go? How do they leave?

The kid twisted his pyjama bottoms intently.

Everything goes away, he said. Soft.

Soft?

Like, no battery.

Ah. Like a game?

The boy champed his lip. Like I die, he said.

Wow, said Keely, leaving no time for this thought to hang there. Then what?

Kai shrugged. I’m laying there and I die.

Then you woke up, right?

He nodded.

And you were here at home, right as rain.

Kai nodded again.

Well, it’s just a dream. You don’t have to worry about something like that.

Sometimes it’s not me.

You mean you’ve had this dream before?

The boy nodded, yawned.

How many times?

Kai looked at the backs of his hands as if calculating. Seven? he said uncertainly.

The boy appeared to have wilted a little. Keely wondered if it was prudent to keep asking him questions. He was way out of his depth already.

But you’re okay now, he said. You’re safe. Everything’s good, eh?

The boy blinked. He was clearly exhausted.

Maybe you should hop back into bed. You want me to sit with you for a bit?

Kai nodded. Then took himself to the bedroom and climbed onto the mattress. A fan oscillated on the side table, pushing the hot, clothy air about. Keely sat at the foot of the bed. Kai fixed on him.

I’m right here, Keely whispered.

The fan droned. Somewhere in the thin-skinned building, a pipe flushed. A can rolled down the side street in the freshening easterly.

We’re okay, Keely whispered, willing it to be the truth.

*

He woke in sunlight with Gemma standing over him. Before he could properly focus on her face and what she was saying, he saw the Bali poster over her shoulder, the waves of coconut palms, the wrongness of where he was. He hauled himself upright on the couch. Dawn light spilled onto the kitchen bench.

Shit. What time is it?

What’re you doin here? she hissed.

I don’t know, he said thickly before catching himself. Kai. I didn’t —

He’s got school, said Gemma. Jesus, he knows not to let anyone in.

As she leaned over him, whispering fiercely, he smelt sweat and coffee and cigarettes. He struggled to his feet. His back hurt.

Sorry, he croaked. He had a nightmare.

He went to your place?

Yeah. Well, no. He called.

Christ, he shoulda called me. What sort of nightmare?

Calm down, Gemma, it’s alright.

You don’t stand in someone else’s place when you’re not sposed to be there and then tell em to calm the fuck down.

Okay, yeah, I’m sorry.

Jesus. Just go, will you.

I think it’s something he’s seen on the telly. The war maybe, or some science fiction thing. He’s alright. He was careful.

Careful be buggered. He knows the rules.

I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now. I just sat here a minute to make sure he was really asleep. I was worried about leaving him here alone.

He registered her flash of anger but before she could speak Kai was in the doorway, looking circumspect, wary of both of them.

Tom’s just headin off, said Gemma.

Keely gave a little wave, but from the kid there was not a flicker.

~ ~ ~

Still woozy, and with a beach towel around his neck, Keely limped to the shed behind the laundromat. As a pair of welfare mums watched from the second-floor gallery, sharing a fag and a few laughs at his expense, he extricated his bike from the snarl of greasy wrecks and wheeled the old Malvern Star across the carpark at the rear of the building. He wobbled out onto the side street, rounded the corner and noted, as he rolled by the front of the building, his neighbours wan and silent heading for the bus, the train, the boss. The forecourt was baking already, and he was glad to leave the whole place behind a while.

On soft tyres he pedalled through the morning streets as they stirred, past discount stores, supermarkets, cafés, keeping where he could to the footpaths to save being mown down, and within a few minutes he was in the residential arc between the marina and the beaches, where he felt safe enough to tool along taking in the weatherboard cottages, limestone semis, peppermint street trees and vine-strangled verandahs. The old neighbourhood was a comfy mix of prosperity and bohemia, where the Kombi lay down beside the Beemer, and the little garden patches in front were either wistful references to Provence or a homely riot of hippified vegies and bougainvillea. The further south you rode, the more prayer flags there were strung from porches, the more bikes and dreads you saw, and the thicker the reek of patchouli became.

He pulled up a moment outside the old house. Its lovely window sashes were freshly painted. The jarrah boards of the verandah had been oiled. And there was a silver Prius gleaming in the drive. Alerted by the familiar creak of the front door opening, he stood on the pedals and teetered away.

Along Marine Terrace, tradies in idling utes sucked choc-milks and wolfed meat pie breakfasts as brokers pulled into the boatyards and dealerships in Mercs and Range Rovers. A few seedy liveaboards weaved in from the marina on their rusty jetty bikes, all deckshoes and earrings, abroad in search of coffee, sex and cheap labour.

Keely pushed on past the stockaded perimeter of the yacht club and on to the grassy apron behind the dunes. At the open-air showers a woman hefted a woolly mutt beneath the spray; holding the dripping pooch to her breast she looked blissful in a way that didn’t bear examining. He leant the old crate against a casuarina and picked his way through the eternal dog shit to the water.

Stripped down to his Speedos, he plunged in by the rock groyne. The sand bottom was a creamy blur and the water delicious. But his limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated and it took a little time to find a rhythm. Eventually he settled into a long, reaching stroke and for several minutes thought of nothing at all except the feel of the sea. But by the time he reached the southern breakwater he was back to wondering what it meant for a child to dream of falling — not just flying, but crashing to his own death surrounded by faceless aliens. And what did having such a dream repeatedly say about Kai’s mental health?

Keely couldn’t get it out of his head, the plausibility of the kid’s description — or was it more an intimation? — of the actual sensation of dying. Like a failing current: no battery. You couldn’t ignore that; it was alarming. Though what could he do? He’d already overstepped as it was. And now the shutters had gone down. He’d pissed Gemma off. There was no mistaking her fury. He’d be back to keeping his sorry self to himself. And he should be glad.

He swam until the acid built up in his shoulders and his lower back began to tighten. Inshore, locals gathered in gossiping knots — long-shanked men, women with high, late-life bellies. They all hurled sticks for galumphing mutts, their sun-fucked faces shining with adoration. It was a village of cults, Fremantle, but of all the twisted sects it harboured, surely the dog folks were the hardest to take.

He waded ashore, breathless, mindful of where he trod, and as he retrieved his gear and towelled off, he felt restored, even modestly cheerful.

But of course when he got to the grass beside the casuarina, his bike was gone. No sign of it in the saltbush thickets nor the maze of trails behind the ti-trees. He scouted south towards the kiosk and the carpark where weed-dazed backpackers were only now beginning to spill from vans in the heat, but it wasn’t there.

He trudged homeward alongside the rail line. The low fence was festooned with purulent yellow bags of dog shit. These daily offerings were part of the liturgical practice of dog folks. Who bagged their pooches’ turds, tied them into gilt baubles and either left them on the sand or hung them here on the fence. As evidence of their good intentions. To be collected later. Which of course they never were. And after an hour or so the contents began to fester in the heat until they became objects of penitential contemplation for wayfaring pedestrians. Haste-making incense. The collect of the day. And Keely was, in the spirit of things, both hastened and incensed. He was impressed to the very limits of derangement. How could they be matched for devotion, these dog folks? What a spiritual service they did! Doubtless, good people and true. And yet smug and dozy fuckwits all the same. What else could these golden offerings, these buzzing prayer flags be except emblems of right-thinking, evidence that actions were but paltry moments of attachment? This wall of ordure said it all. It was so Freo.

Of course, he might be a little bitter. A tad jaundiced. And his day wasn’t shaping up as he’d hoped.

He held his nose. Pressed on. Mocked by the wet slap of his thongs.

Fucked-fucked.

Fucked-fucked.

Fucked-fucked.

Yeah, very funny.

~ ~ ~

Googling aimlessly, sniffing the panic abroad, Keely wondered how Faith’s rescue mission was faring. He hoped that whatever she was saving was worth the sweat. It was two degrees in London. Maybe not so much sweat.

Knew he shouldn’t be looking. Letting himself be persecuted by the news cycle like this. Given what it did to him.

A noise outside. Someone scraping against the security grille on the way past. The door was closed. He was in full lockdown. Back to business as usual. Whatever happened out there did not interest him. He had to learn from the dog people. Rise above mere shit.

But there it was again. That sound. Like somebody sawing against the insect screen with a fingernail. Irritating. Hard to detach from. Given it made the hairs rise on the back of his sunburnt neck.

The screen door opening. Bloody cheek of it. The Mormons were in the building. Or worse, someone from the body corporate.

Then knocking. One-two-three. Tiny knocks, too timid to be official. Perhaps the lonely demoniac next door. Seeking garlic.

Keely yanked the door open. And there was Kai. In clammy school kit. Clutching a book to his chest. So small. So fair. Making his heart jump. It must be after three — God, where had the day gone? He struggled to reassemble his expression for the kid’s sake. He had the face of a monster; he could feel it.

Kai, he said.

The kid blinked. The wind ran through his hair. His uptilted eyes were dark, his gaze was cautious, even apprehensive. Then averted entirely.

Where’s your nan?

Kai tilted his head towards home.

She know you’re here?

The boy pursed his lips eloquently.

Kai, I don’t think she’s very happy about last night.

Kai did not disagree.

She won’t like you coming over without her knowing.

The boy held the raptor book face out, presenting it at arm’s length.

What’s up?

The kid peered past him to the roasting interior of his flat where the westering sun was having its way.

I don’t think you better come in, mate.

I was here before, said Kai.

Yeah, you said.

The boy took the book in one hand and raised his arms from his sides. Keely’s first thought was of a bird, that he was stretching his imaginary wings, but then he thought, Underpits. The kid was letting the breeze cool his sweaty underarms.

Maybe you should run along. Your nan won’t be happy. This morning was my fault. I fell asleep.

It wasn’t a osprey.

Sorry?

Kai opened the weathered book and pointed to a photograph.

It wasn’t a osprey, said the boy, what we saw at the river.

Kai pulled the book to himself a moment and rifled through pages. He presented a double-page spread of two similar birds side by side. Pressed it against Keely’s chest until he accepted the book, surrendered his attention to it. Over the page were diagrams and silhouettes. Tipped into the gutter fold was an old envelope with Kai’s markings in felt pen. They were dihedral representations of a soaring bird, the first with upswept wings and the other with wingtips tilted earthward.

White-bellied sea eagle, Keely read from the text. Hunts on the water. Doesn’t dive under. Did our bird dive?

The boy shook his head solemnly. Keely thought back. The thing had swept down off the bluff, smacked the surface of the river and hauled itself away.

Well, he said with a grin. Inconclusive. But you might be right.

Am right.

Okay, I stand corrected. Even so, this bird’ll still take a rat, so I consider myself in the clear. But let’s just say it, for the record. I was wrong and you, my friend, are right.

The kid didn’t smile. Either he’d forgotten the rodent that set all this off or he didn’t understand. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.

You’ve been looking closely at this.

Kai said nothing.

Hmm. Preys on reptiles, other birds, mammals, fish.

And carry-on.

Carry-on? he said with a grin. What’s that, like, luggage?

The boy looked at him blankly.

What is it?

Carrion? Well, anything really. Creatures that’re already dead. You know, lying there.

Carrion.

He’ll sweep down, cart it off. There we go: immature individuals often confused with the osprey. Well, Kai, he said, handing the book back. You’re a smart kid.

The boy chewed his lips.

What? asked Keely.

Kai averted his gaze.

Kai, what is it?

The boy drew the book to him carefully.

Is there something you want to say? You look worried.

You mad?

Mad? Keely asked with a dropping sensation.

At me.

Oh, he said with a sick grin. Of course not. Why would I be angry? How could I be angry with you?

Kai hugged the book, his shoulders tipped inwards, his gaze lowered. A screen door clanged up the way. The boy took a glance to his right and though he couldn’t see her Keely knew it was Gemma. Man and boy stood silent, even apprehensive, in the seconds it took her to arrive, clacking down the gallery in hard shoes. She pulled up in something black and short and sleeveless. Her hair was raked back in a barrette and she wore truly high heels, shoes of a sort that could not be ignored, not even by a man like Keely who knew nothing about clothes and for whom women’s shoes were an abiding mystery.

What’re you lookin at? Gemma asked.

Nothing.

They’re just shoes.

They were ridiculous shoes, porn shoes. They showed off her legs. Everything, now he let himself look. Felt a little nutbuzz despite himself.

Just shoes, he said, grinning.

Ignoring him, Gemma addressed the boy.

Told you to ask first.

That’s a good idea, said Keely as much to her as Kai.

She was staring at him now, weighing something up.

What? What is it?

I gotta be somewhere.

Keely said nothing.

I can’t take him, she said.

So lock him in. I’ll keep an ear on him.

Well, he’s here now.

And?

Can you look after him for me?

You really can’t take him?

Forget it, she said, reaching for the kid who sidestepped her effortlessly.

Don’t be daft, he said. Of course he can wait here.

I’ll be twenty minutes.

Take your time.

Just keep him inside, orright? Keep him safe.

We’ll be fine, he said. Won’t we, Kai?

The kid didn’t even shrug.

And then she was gone, clopping down towards the lifts, bum bouncing sweetly, dressed to impress someone else entirely. For twenty minutes. They stood in his doorway a while, Keely and the boy. He could still smell Gemma’s cloying perfume. The boy gave off no sense of having triumphed. He just moved past Keely and went inside. Keely followed, pleased and slightly nervous.

When he looked around for something to feed Kai he saw that all he had in the place was a bowl of oranges. The kid didn’t seem keen until he offered to peel one for him. Perhaps it was a juice thing, or not knowing how to get the skin off. But once the fruit was on a plate, bare and slightly furred with pith, Kai was all action. He was fastidious, almost obsessive, about breaking the orb into segments. He fanned them around the plate, anxious to avoid any juice-letting, and when everything was laid out to his satisfaction he took a piece and began to suck at its point with great care.

Keely did little more than sit back and watch. That round face, the silky hair, the paleness and self-possession. He seemed slightly damaged, and yet he was so bright. Keely knew nothing about kids but this boy was too sharp for his age.

I know all this, said the boy, pausing a moment to look around. I’ve been here.

Keely opened his mouth to speak just as a pair of doves fluttered onto the balcony. Kai flinched. After a moment, as if embarrassed, he recovered his affectless poise.

Doves, said Keely, getting up to wave them away.

Doves aren’t smart.

They’re supposed to be peaceful, said Keely. But they’re always crapping everything up.

Birds are first, said the boy, the orange segment flaccid in his hand.

First at what?

First to die.

Keely was flummoxed. This fixation. How did he get straight to death from a pair of doves? What was happening in his head? A six-year-old. He was scary-smart, but he couldn’t have read Rachel Carson. Perhaps he’d seen something on telly, a show about canaries and coalmines. Keely hoped to God he hadn’t set this off himself with all his faffing on about seabirds.

Kai got up, looked at his bare feet a moment, as if arrested by a thought or a sensation, then stepped up to the sliding door to gaze out. He suckled at the crescent of orange and with his free hand he touched the tips of his sticky fingers to his thumb in steady alternations, like somebody recalling music or the lines of a poem.

I’d never lived up so high before moving here, Keely said. Strange, isn’t it, being able to see so far — out and down.

Kai made no sign of having heard.

Isn’t it weird, the way you look out there and you feel yourself going out at the same moment?

Kai turned and surveyed him and immediately he regretted saying it; this was not the sort of thing you said to a kid ten storeys up, especially not a kid with falling dreams — and, fucksake, not a kid who leapt off the balcony in your nightmares. What was he thinking?

You go out, said Kai, agreeing. But it’s okay. It’s just your eyes.

Exactly, he said, sounding in his relief like a dolt.

Keely had never had a thing about heights but some days up here it was too much to simply stand your full measure without being giddy. Talk like this was not helping. But he was fascinated by the kid, wanted to catch what he was seeing and thinking.

Kai pressed his brow to the screen, wheezing slightly.

So, what’re we looking at down there?

Just me.

You’re down there?

Sometimes.

Like a grownup? Walking around? You imagine yourself like all those people down there one day? You know, being in the big world?

The boy thought about this a moment. No, he said.

Where are you, then, what are you doing when you see yourself?

There, he said, pointing down to the paved forecourt.

What are you doing?

Laying down.

Resting? Asleep? Just lying there?

Kai sniffed, gave the slightest of nods.

Can you see it now? Kai, are you down there now?

The boy sucked his bit of orange with some fierceness, as if impatient.

Kai?

No, not now.

This is your dream, then?

Sometimes.

Wow, he said for something to say. That’s pretty interesting.

Can I go out? asked the boy, pointing to the balcony.

No, mate. I think we’ll stay here.

Do you have Scrabble?

Keely shook his head.

I know a tree with an owl in it, he said lamely.

The boy said nothing. Worked his way through the orange.

I gotta wash my hands.

Keely ushered him to the sink and when he’d dried his hands on the teatowel Kai picked up the book and headed for the door.

Kai? Maybe you should wait for your nan?

But the boy went ahead regardless. Keely trailed him along the gallery to 1010 where Kai was fishing a key from inside his shirt.

Kai? Shouldn’t we wait for Gemma?

The boy went in and closed the door behind him. Only a few moments later Gemma came clomping down the walkway from the lifts. She’d been gone a lot longer than twenty minutes.

What’s he up to?

I think he wanted to play Scrabble.

We don’t have Scrabble.

Me either.

Keely didn’t know how to broach the subject of the boy’s strange fantasies. Gemma seemed preoccupied, anxious to get inside.

Listen, he said. Kai asked me if I was angry with him.

Are you?

Of course not. Why would he ask that?

Maybe the bird, she said.

What about the bird?

You had the wrong bird. He knows a bloke doesn’t like getting showed up.

You’re kidding me.

Never wrong, any of yez. But look out if someone calls you on it.

Oh, man.

You said it.

He sees things.

Tom, you dunno what he’s seen. You got no bloody idea.

All he could do was nod, acknowledge it.

Okay, he said. I’m going back to what it was I was doing.

And what was that?

Not nearly enough.

I need a favour, she said. Can I come by in a minute?

Not a problem.

Jesus, she muttered, going inside. You gotta stop sayin that.

*

When she returned to rattle his screen door he was halfway through a grocery list. He’d already made his daily resolution to finally scrub the shower recess and then put it off until first thing tomorrow. He waved her in. She was barefoot. The dress was all but backless and he saw that she had a tattoo he’d not noticed before. The standard murky butterfly, in the middle of her back. And down her arm, inside her left elbow, was a burn scar the size of a coin.

What d’you need? he asked, hoping to hell it wasn’t money.

I don’t like to ask, she said, sitting opposite, tugging the barrette from her hair. But there’s no one else.

Kai’s no trouble, he said hopefully.

Gemma turned a bracelet on her arm.

It’s not that. He’ll be at school then.

When’s this?

Thursday, she said. I’ve gotta collect something from his father.

He waited.

And I was sorta hopin you’d come along.

Right, said Keely with a nervous flutter.

Won’t be any aggro, she said. Shouldn’t be. But some company’d help. Figured while you weren’t workin.

Well. Fair enough. I spose.

You don’t mind?

Not a problem, he croaked.

She leant over and kissed him on the side of the head. A flash of lust ripped through him. He laid a hand on her hip and it slipped free as she straightened.

It won’t take long.

What’re you picking up?

Just some stuff that’s ours. I’ve put it off too long. It’s not easy doin all this shit on me own.

No, it doesn’t look like it is.

When we first come here, when the Housing people put us here, it gimme the creeps, this place.

A school for Kai. Right next door.

Yeah. And work, too. In the beginning at least. It’s somewhere, I spose.

That’s what I tell myself.

There’s others with nothin after all, she said. And Kai likes it.

He’s a nice kid.

He likes you.

Keely’s heart gave a treacherous ping.

And his dad — there’s not much contact?

Restrainin order.

I see.

Anyway.

Gemma reached into the front of her dress and his balls buzzed again. From inside her bra she drew out a key tied to a dark loop of wool.

Here, she said, getting up. This morning I got a fright, that’s all.

I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. And then I fell asleep.

Just look in on him, willya? When I’m at work?

He nodded.

Other night.

Yeah?

You’n me. We were just lonely.

Yeah.

And I’d had a couple. You see?

Yeah, of course.

I don’t want a bloke anymore, Tom. I haven’t got it in me. But I could do with a mate.

Not a problem, he said too brightly.

Christ, will you stop sayin that? she said with an exasperated laugh.

Absolutely.

Thursday. Means you got time for a shave and a haircut.

You serious?

Wouldja mind?

She gave him a winsome, girlish grin of supplication that excited and annoyed him. But Keely thought about it, the itching nest his beard had become. What was it anyway, all this hair, but a kind of wallowing in defeat?

Honest, you’re no use to me lookin like that.

Okay, he said, from longing more than friendship.

She kissed him chastely again and when she was gone he gathered the key and held the woollen loop to his face to catch her musky scent.

~ ~ ~

Conan the barbarian was harmless enough. Between spells in the locked ward the scrofulous, bellowing vagrant was a fixture on the streets in all seasons, and at his least offensive the locals were fond of him. He did a lot of unfocused seething and roaring, his great leonine head thrown back in rage or pleasure, and although he was an infamous and copious public defecator there was some charm in knowing he did this more for effect than from need. Conan was nuttier than Queensland batshit but he wasn’t mad enough to underestimate the grander pleasures of performance; he laid it on with a trowel — and that wasn’t always just a figure of speech. Wags in cafés said it was only a matter of time before he got an arts grant. In summer he liked to colonize bits of public space — a bus shelter, park bench, beach awning — where he could hunker down in his midden, snooze, scream and drink epic quantities of beer. He was entirely harmless. Unless you offered him money, advice or help of any sort. Keely, who had over the years done all three, knew that the best way to get along with Conan was to avoid him completely. For once you fell into his noxious orbit he liked to reward you with his attention, for hours, sometimes days, and this would entail blistering harangues, buttock display, and the trumpeting of your name in public as he pinched a loaf. All in the service of extortion, for the purpose of securing free lager, in bulk. And the wily bastard never forgot a face or a name. Which was why, next morning at the beach, rinsing at the spigot and feeling semi-decent, Keely was so studious about ignoring him.

He’d come straight up between the dunes in a sweet pain-shadow, mildly revived by his swim, and he was standing beneath the shower when he caught the glint of crushed beer cans around the awning. There was a denser mass of junk in the shade where it looked as if someone had backed a truck in and dumped a load of garbage. But the sight of two horny feet protruding from beneath a candlewick bedspread was all it took to know that overnight the beach shelter had become Conan’s latest bivouac. Keely cut his ablutions short. Morning regulars jogged by, wincing as they caught whiffs of the old stager’s ruinous miasma. Some raised a conspiratorial eyebrow and grinned circumspectly, with the sort of boho-bourgeois forbearance locals prided themselves on. As Keely towelled off he observed from only the very corner of his eye the mattresses, shopping bags, rags and cartons, the profusion of empties shining in the sun like footlights around the perimeter. He was seasoned enough not to gaze frankly but found himself caught up in documentary wonder all the same. You had to marvel at the havoc one man could wreak on a place in the space of half a day.

Conan was asleep. Or lying doggo. Maybe biding his time between eruptions. The dozing inferno. Keely was keen to be on his way. Feeling as tentatively fair as he did this morning, there was no point pushing his luck by staring recklessly into the maw of this Vesuvial force of nature. So he looked away, finished towelling off briskly and was gathering himself to go when his eyes wandered back treasonously. Which was when he saw it. Buried deep. But patently there. Camouflaged by sodden underpants, beneath hanging kelp and broken fronds of saltbush. His bike. Keely’s spirits rose. Then sank again. Because just seeing this had complicated his day irrevocably. Conan was mad, not stupid. He loved to negotiate. Especially when he couldn’t lose. Like a desert warlord in a hostage bargain, he’d choose the longest and most indirect path to the least pleasant outcome.

The Malvern Star wasn’t worth suffering for. Its ransom would include an hour’s foulmouthed argy-bargy and a carton of Emu Export at a bare-arsed minimum, not to mention having his woebegone name shouted up dune and down dale for a week. Keely hadn’t even had breakfast yet. He had five bucks seventy in his pocket. He was supposed to be home cleaning the flat. Then to the barber to satisfy Gemma. These days the price of twenty-four cans of industrial-grade beer was no small thing. And it seemed so much steeper when you weren’t drinking them yourself.

No, he thought. Bugger it.

And yet.

He needed the bike. It was, after all, his bike. And it browned him off, being robbed and stood over by a lunatic.

He was fresh from a swim. Fresh-ish. Damp flab. Headache in partial remission. Weak. But no kitten. He could dash in now, right now. While Conan slept the sleep of the unloved. Wrest the treadly from the grimy heap and bolt before the malodorous thief even stirred. Yes, dammit. He’d have it back.

Dry and dressed, Keely stalked towards Conan’s camp, thongs clapping him on. I’ll outrun you, mate, outride you, and you can take your pants-down, butt-slapping warrior dance elsewhere. It’s my fucking bike.

Keely went all the way. He did not deviate. He strode right through the eye-watering frontier of Conan’s encampment, head up like a man with a sturdy will, and actually had his fingers around the handlebars when a single basso fart sent him scurrying in search of an ATM, an early opener and a slab of Western Australia’s nastiest.

*

The bloom was well and truly off the morning when Keely finally wheeled the redeemed Malvern Star into the cycle shop. He wanted a titanium lock. Immediately and forever. Yes, it was worth more than the bike and twice the cost of a carton of piss, but after what he’d just endured he needed to know there’d never be a repeat performance.

He was comparing two rival brands and muttering to himself when he heard her voice.

Tom?

Before he even looked up, he knew it was Harriet. She wore a black suit and blunt-toed shoes. Pushed back on her head, her sunglasses held up the dark tide of her hair. She looked flushed, even blotchy; he supposed it was the heat.

I didn’t recognize you for a moment, she said. The beard.

Right. Of course.

So.

Right. Yeah.

So, um.

How’s things?

Harriet did that slant thing with her mouth. It was hard. Lovely. Terrifying. To see her again after so long. A year? Fourteen months. There before him. Smelling of herself.

Thought you’d gone to Brussels.

She shrugged. Changed my mind.

Ah.

You okay?

What? Why?

You know you were talking to yourself?

Bullshit.

Whatever.

I have to buy a lock, he said, holding up the gizmos in their sealed packets. Bloody Conan.

The homeless bloke?

Homeless? He loves the outdoor life. Makes himself at home wherever he goes. Helps himself to whatever you have. Shits in front of old ladies.

So, okay. Right. The street bloke.

Keely recognized the tone of aggrieved patience. He waved abstractly and put the locks down in surrender.

Anyway, he said. Not a good start to the day.

They stood miserably a few moments, during which time Keely registered the fact that she’d put on weight. For a second he had the dimwitted and painful thought she was pregnant again. The things he did to himself. She was ten years his junior. But that glorious youthful gloss was gone. Which just made her more sad and lovely.

I was in town for a meeting. Always loved this shop. You know, she said, tilting her head towards the boys putting sleek machines together, bustling about in their dreads, talking nerdy bike lingo.

Yeah, he said, just to make a sound.

Thought I might even buy a new bike, she said. I’m chubbing up, as you can see.

Bollocks.

Thought maybe I could ride along the river before work. There’s a nice path on the foreshore.

Keely nodded, a little lost. It was a lot of talk. Out of nowhere. Out of nothing. After such resolute silence.

Listen, she said. You want to get some lunch?

Us?

It’s only food.

But. I mean. You think that’s a good idea?

We’re not savages, are we?

No. But.

A quick meal, Tom. Don’t get —

Okay.

Right, then.

He looked down at his thongs, his damp shorts and T-shirt.

It’s Freo, she said. No one gives a shit.

It was too hot to go in search of somewhere anonymous, so they ended up in their old regular, the Thai joint a couple of blocks away. Their entrance caused some confusion amongst the family staff who’d witnessed the dissolution of their marriage, enduring it week by week with sad discretion.

After a minute’s skin-peeling banter with various members of the clan, Harriet ordered a bottle of semillon. Waiters came and went gingerly around their table. He was glad when the food came and they were free to do more than stare at one another indulgently.

You’re living in Perth, then, said Keely despite himself. In the CBD?

It’s odd. Like living in an industrial park. Bit of a shock, actually. They weren’t kidding; it really is Dullsville.

I guess there’s the river.

Yeah, there’s that. The flat, shallow, brown bit.

And the food’s better there.

If you fancy a fifty-dollar steak.

Are they good? The fifty-buck steaks?

She glared at him.

And work’s okay? he asked with a grin of small satisfaction.

Corner office.

So you’re a partner at last.

I live a block from the building. No wonder my arse is bigger than my tax bill. All I do is work.

Keely gulped wine, caught himself. He set the glass back and made handprints on the bare wood of the table.

So.

So, she said.

Is it still good work?

Righteous work, you mean? she said with a wry grin. Sometimes.

I meant is it stimulating, interesting.

I know exactly what you mean; you’re a Keely.

He held his hands up in concession.

Harriet cracked a wan smile. Anyway, you know how it is.

Afraid so.

So, yes, they own my bones.

But it’s interesting?

Of course. I’m in China once a month. Paying homage.

He nodded — what could you say?

You look shocking, Tom.

Thanks for noticing.

Sorry. That wasn’t… But the beard — Christ.

The beard is not long for this world.

But are you okay?

He shrugged.

Are you seeing someone?

Harriet.

I meant, like, counselling.

He stonewalled with a mirthless grin.

I wish it hadn’t happened, she murmured. Any of it.

Keely took a breath but she clarified immediately.

I don’t mean the marriage. I don’t regret that. Just —

Let’s not, eh?

No, you’re right. I’m sorry. Hey, is it true you’re living in the Mirador? That’s different.

You’ve been talking to Doris?

I’m always talking to Doris.

And she’s talking to you.

Well, sometimes it’s professional.

She never said.

She’s a bloody legend, you know. Anyway, everyone still wonders what you’re up to.

Sure they do.

Hey, I saw Freda from the EDO. She sees the WildForce crew all the time. Half the movement knows where you are.

And so few visits, eh.

Come on, Tom. You’ve left them in no doubt about where things stand.

So why ask? he said, pouring himself another glass.

I dunno. Worried, I guess.

Right.

People respect you. I know you don’t feel it.

Stop.

And they’re curious about what you’ll do next. Both sides.

What is this, a bloody reconnaissance mission?

Sit down, she said. And don’t be a wanker.

I mean, shit mate.

Let me rephrase —

Don’t bother.

Sit down. Please. You’re embarrassing me. Everyone.

Keely flopped back to the chair. Chugged his wine. Refilled. Went again. And Harriet sighed. The sound was so familiar he could have wept.

Sorry.

Me too.

But I mean it. A lot of people wish you well.

It was wasted. All that time.

The reef? The karri forests? Are you serious?

Fuck it, anyway.

Like I said, they wish you well. Wish you were well.

I’m fine, he lied.

So. The Mirador.

It’s just a little flat, he murmured, noticing they’d almost finished the bottle already.

But it’s okay?

Come and see, he said. If you’re that curious.

Doris says you won’t even let her up there.

No.

What’s that about?

I don’t even know anymore.

So why ask me?

I’m not planning to jump, if that’s what you mean.

What?

Lure you up and jump. It wasn’t on the agenda. I’m all out of romance.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Nothing. Sorry.

Jesus, Tom.

Well, don’t just sit there looking guilty and buying me lunch. Say something interesting. Spice up my sad little life.

Try not to be a shit, will you?

Keely shrugged hopelessly and downed the last of the wine. He badly wanted to leave. To take her with him.

We should have had children, she said. I concede that.

Stop it.

I know that’s what this is about. I know it’s why you went like that. We were stupid, both of us.

No, just me.

Well, you were stupid and I was cruel.

I was shooting for cruelly stupid. Fell short, as usual.

I’m a ruined person, she said dully. I know it sounds melodramatic, but it’s how I feel, even on a good day.

You’re still young. You’ll recover.

Not that sense of who I was. No. I don’t think so.

What do you mean? How can you say that?

You know damn well how I can say it, she said, staring him down like he was a vexatious litigant. There’s just part of me I don’t believe in anymore.

Keely blinked. In recognition. It smarted.

You know, she said, I was proud, in a way. Proud to be me. I don’t think I was conceited. I think I had good reason to be proud and so did you. We always did what we said, acted from principle. Couldn’t be bought, felt like we were authentic.

Oh, that old crap.

Yes, that old crap.

Harriet, you’re still the same person.

No. It’s as if one betrayal unlocks others.

People screw up, mate. It’s normal.

So banal, though. The office romance.

Yes, banal. That’s what I thought. How banal.

Bad faith. It bends you out of shape.

Faith of any sort, I’d have thought.

Jesus, we shouldn’t be talking like this.

Don’t mean to harp on a costly theme here but —

Tom, I don’t want to hear about your forgiveness.

But what about forgiving yourself? You’re a good person. Good people do stupid things. Your entire life isn’t defined by one mistake.

And you’re trying to tell me that?

What I did was not a mistake, he said. It wasn’t wrong.

Just weird wrong. Crazy wrong. As if you didn’t understand defamation.

I understood perfectly.

Well, it wasn’t much of a martrydom, was it?

I’ve loved every minute. Look at me. Rejuvenated.

Still, she said bitterly. You did get to retain your status as the moral cleanskin.

Yeah. Feels great.

And you’ve heard about the CCC, I gather.

Fuck the CCC, he said, feeling the penny drop.

What? she said in false protest. It’s Tiny Town. Everyone knows already. Something’s finally happening.

Keely looked at her. Wished he could tell her what was really happening. But he knew he wouldn’t. He was a coward.

Sorry, she said. Didn’t mean to bring it up. I’m just —

You don’t have to be sorry. None of it matters. I forgive you.

Tom, we’ve covered this, she said briskly. In several fora.

Fora.

Stop it.

Keely saw what this was doing to her. She’d put herself in the same room as him and he was doing this to her.

Okay, he said, assembling himself with some effort. Let’s just eat.

Don’t you dare jump out the fucking window.

Listen —

You don’t have the right to punish me. You have no right.

Harriet. I promise you, I promise.

She looked at him directly and her eyes shone with tears.

Really, he said. I don’t want to punish you. And I promise. A Keely never breaks a promise.

Isn’t that the whole trouble? she said with a smile rendered ugly by pain.

Love you, he murmured.

Please!

Sorry.

God, you’re a strange man.

So I gather.

And loving doesn’t help. Believe me.

But he couldn’t. The evidence supported what she said. But that was one shred of faith he wouldn’t let go of. Love had to help something, somewhere, otherwise he would just go ahead and launch himself off a balcony.

They ate for a while in wounded silence. Keely noted the air of covert surveillance from the counter and the kitchen door and it heartened him to think anyone harboured hopes for them, however fanciful.

Keely was as thirsty as a motherfucker but he didn’t dare order any more wine.

You ever think of going back to teaching?

I couldn’t do it, he said. Even I’m not that worthy.

So what will you do? You must be skint. You look it.

He shrugged.

Do you need money?

No, he lied.

Will you tell me if you do?

He smiled and she snorted a friendly surrender.

Your arse isn’t big, he said.

Don’t lie — you’re no good at it.

Get the bike, he said. Buy it now, while you’re thinking of it. You’ll have fun. I’ll ride it up the river to your place, save you the delivery.

No, she said. No visits. Besides, I drove. Maybe I’ll put it in the boot.

You can’t drive after this much wine.

Well, Jesus really wanted you for a sunbeam, didn’t he?

I’m only saying.

And you’re right, you scruffy prick. I’ll get a cab.

They finished lunch. Harriet did not buy a bike. As her taxi pulled away he walked up to the barber on the next block and ordered a haircut and full shave. He fell asleep in the chair and woke to the news that he owed seventy dollars, which meant taking the bike lock back across the street for a refund.