Brothers and Sisters (28 page)

‘Okay,’ I said to Klara and we started to walk quickly away.

‘Hey,’ Dieter shouted.

We bolted like startled deer, running till our breath was ragged and our chests sore. We ran past cages of monkeys and stands of poplar trees and enclosures of emus standing in the sun until finally Dieter gave up following us and we found ourselves in a small forest somewhere in the back of the Caribbean Gardens and we sat on the ground, cool earth covered in a dry carpet of leaves, and I felt as if I had travelled through some barrier to reach a place in another time or another dimension.

I had seen the trees as we ran towards them, a copse of trees next to a big shed made of corrugated iron. But now we were in the copse the trees seemed huge. I lay back on the fragrant eucalyptus leaves and looked up through the branches at the distant pale sky.

‘Have we lost him?’ Klara gasped, almost sobbing, trying to get breath into her skinny body. ‘Is he behind us?’

I sat up. ‘I can’t see him,’ I said.

She was doubled over, still sucking in air.

‘He doesn’t seem to be here,’ I said. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

He was there one day at their house when I rounded the corner, looking for Klara. He and another friend of his. His friends were always small boys, while he was big, solid, fleshy. His small friend was holding a dartboard and Dieter had a dart in his hand. They were in shorts, both of them bare-chested. I wore a pink spotted dress and my best sandals because Klara and I were going to practise walking with books on our heads.

I never saw the dart leave Dieter’s hand, never saw it fly through the air. When the tip of the dart flew straight into the boy’s chest, above the left nipple, and hung there, I was as silent and astonished as they were. We all stared at the dart standing straight out from the boy’s chest as if it had hit a tree trunk or a pole. Four feathers, vanes quivering. A brass collar holding the dart tip to the shaft.

A drop of blood welled from the point where the dart had penetrated the boy’s chest and dribbled down towards the dartboard he was still holding flat against his belly. When Dieter let out a sharp bark, a laugh of sorts, his friend’s eyes widened as though he had only just realised that this dart was embedded in his own chest, and he shrieked. Long and high like a rabbit.

Dieter won’t like that, I thought, my stomach starting to spin. The shriek went on and on. Dieter’s mother came pelting out of the house. Klara’s narrow frightened face appeared at her bedroom window.

‘He moved,’ Dieter called to his mother as she flew past. ‘He shouldn’t have moved.’

When she reached the boy, Dieter’s mother took hold of the dartboard he was still pressing against himself like a target and flung it to the ground. The boy kept staring at the missile standing out from his breastbone. He pushed Klara’s mother backwards when she reached for the dart. His mouth was wide open but no more sound came out. She stepped forward, grasped the dart, pulled, then covered the place it had come from with her hand.

A few weeks later I came to Klara’s house and the boy was there with Dieter again. They were tying red crackers together and lighting the fuse before they threw the bundle into an empty oil drum in the vacant lot beside the house. The crackers hammered around the drum like a machine-gun. Dieter laughed and laughed, and the boy with a hole in his breastbone stood behind him and giggled, glancing around nervously as though the danger might come from somewhere else, not right in front of him.

‘Go and get the catherine-wheels,’ Dieter said.

‘Okay,’ the boy answered breathlessly, and as he raced past me to the house I wondered how Dieter could keep these people coming back.

When Klara and I were eleven, her family moved to a small farm in the country. The next summer holiday I went to spend a week at their new place. They lived in a fibro house. The property ended on the boundary of a flat scrubby national park. In the heat of the day Klara and I walked through the straggly bush and sat with our legs dangling in the creek. Or we lounged on her bed in her bedroom, batting away mosquitoes in the dense air and slurping fast-melting blocks of flavoured ice.

Klara sat with her arms wrapped around her legs, her chin resting on her knees. Sometimes she held her pillow like a shield pulled tight against her shins. She was so thin and could make herself so small that the pillow almost hid her from my view when I lay on the other end of the bed. When she was hidden away like that, she told me some of the dark thoughts that occupied her mind.

‘I picture myself dead. Like I’m dreaming, it’s so clear. My body lying bleeding on the floor, my head smashed in. My stomach split open like a supermarket bag. Do you ever have those dreams?’

‘No,’ I answered.

‘Dieter will kill me one day. I’m sure of it.’

She turned the jam biscuit she had been holding for fifteen minutes around and around in the palm of her hand and finally took a tiny bite of the jam that had oozed out of the side of the biscuit. A red spot stuck to the corner of her mouth.

‘I think he’s insane,’ she said.

Since she’d moved away Klara had sent me notes and cards. We’d talked on the phone but she had never mentioned Dieter.

‘I haven’t thought about your horrible brother all year,’ I replied. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s been staying at a friend’s place. He’s back tonight. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want him to live here,’ she whispered.

‘Neither would I.’

We were silent for a moment. I picked at a mosquito bite on my shin and from the crater a trickle of thin red blood emerged. I blotted it with my hankie.

That evening Dieter arrived. The car dropping him off pulled up so fast at the front of the house that pebbles from the driveway flew up and pinged against the lounge room window. The car door slammed and the car backed away, tyres spinning and crunching on the gravel.

‘Let’s go to my room,’ Klara said hurriedly. She took my hand and pulled me out of the lounge room and along the hall to her room. Behind us, the front door opened and a gust of fiery dusk wind burned down the hallway.

On my last day at their house I woke late. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Klara’s room. The night before, we had set the alarm to twelve for a secret midnight feast of chips and chocolate we’d been hoarding all week. Everything tasted extra salty and extra sweet by torchlight. We stifled our laughter by pressing the sheets against our mouths and fell asleep again at two.

‘I think she’s in the shed, darling,’ her mother said when I came into the kitchen after my shower, so I skipped to the shed and pushed open the big door. Dieter and Klara were both inside in the gloom.

‘Hi,’ I said, still unable to see properly in the dim light. ‘What’s happening?’

Dieter giggled his high, unnatural giggle. My stomach leapt inside my ribcage and my skin prickled. As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I saw Klara standing against the wall, her arms held out horizontally, her face turned away from Dieter, who was standing a few metres back from the wall. Below her hemline Klara’s legs were glistening and there was a puddle in the dust at her feet.

‘Ready?’ Dieter cried, and he giggled again.

Klara pressed her face harder against the wall as Dieter drew back his arm then flung a knife in her direction. The knife thudded into the wall above her left arm before clattering to the floor. Another was embedded in the wall near her face.

I tried to scream but no sound came out. Dieter was staring at me and giggling with such hysteria that he sounded like a neighing horse. I ran towards him and shoved as hard as I could, and he lurched backwards, dropping his handful of mismatched kitchen knives on the dirt floor. His laughter stopped. Instead, I could hear the furious rasping of his breath. He grabbed my arms and forced me back until I slammed into the shed door and it swung shut. The only light came in through the green translucent sheeting on the roof. Dieter’s face above mine shone green like his eyes. Even his teeth, bared in a crazy grin, looked pale green. He forced me to the floor and started to pull at my jeans.

‘Klara.’ My voice came out like a long, high sigh.

Dieter pressed his forearm on my throat and leaned down hard while he wrestled with my jeans with his other hand. I was choking. I punched him with my fists until he slapped my face so hard I thought my head would fly off my body. As I lay stunned with my cheek against the dirt floor, he rocked back onto his heels. He took hold of my jeans and wrenched them off, dragging my sandals along with them. Then he pulled open his own jeans. Now I screamed. His hand came down so fast to cover my mouth that only a peep escaped.

He was too strong for me. I tried to throw myself to the side, but with one hand still over my mouth he caught my wrists and pinned them to the ground above my head. He used his knees to prise apart my thighs and he pushed and pushed until something broke and he was inside me. The pain split me in two. His green face was inches away from mine, sweaty and grimacing. His teeth, still bared, were tipped with foamy saliva like a dog’s fangs.

As everything slowed down in my mind I rolled my eyes from side to side, trying to escape the face leering above me. When my eyes reached their lowest point of vision I saw Klara’s corduroy sneakers. I looked up. She stood, with her arms hanging at her side, watching. She was watching me, my face, and she stared and stared and I stared back, our eyes locked, expressionless, as Dieter pounded into me, grunting and panting. Finally he shrieked and let go of my mouth and my hands. He pushed himself off me, stood up and walked out of the shed, doing up his jeans. The shed door stayed open a crack and suddenly nothing was green anymore, just dull grey, back to dull grey.

Klara stood above me and held out her hand to help me up, but I turned my face away from her.

‘Go away,’ I whispered, the tears starting. Pain in my face, my throat, between my legs, my wrists. Moisture dribbling from inside me onto the dirt floor. I felt the cold on my bare thighs, the goosebumps rising, the hairs standing on end.

Klara moved slowly to the door of the shed. She hesitated there, her hand curled around the edge of the door.

‘Get out,’ I whispered. My throat seemed to have closed. Words could barely escape.

She waited a few seconds more. Then she pulled open the shed door and the light savaged my naked skin.

‘If you tell,’ Klara said in a scratchy voice like an old vinyl record, ‘he’ll kill me. You know he will.’ She pulled the door shut behind her.

Twenty years later that scratchy voice spoke behind me.

‘There are seats at that table.’

A slim hand beside me pointed to a bench seat at my table which was littered with chip packets and a dozen glasses—half-empty, ringed with dried foam, lipsticked and smeared with greasy fingerprints— from the crowd that had headed out to the beer garden. The funeral was over. Everyone had moved on to the informal wake at the pub where the drinking and shouting was getting harder and louder.

‘Natalie?’ the voice said into my ear. Her fingers touched my wrist, light as fairy dust, and twenty years vanished. I was flung back to the days of Klara, the hot sunshine and tickly grass, our special jokes and the purse full of lucky white stones we collected from each corner of the playground, chanting as we went.