Gravity (8 page)

I looked at my jeans and work boots in the mirror as Harry flicked intently through the hangers of pants and
micro-fibre shirts in all the colours of the rainbow. He guessed my size as the same as his own and handed me some black pants. They slipped through my fingers like plastic shopping bags. He gave me shirts with collars like little aircraft wings. I tried them all on – like a good lad – and Harry nodded approvingly.

I had my own fashion consultant.

Even the shoes were a good fit, softened by a hundred wears on the inside, with a new-looking shine on their exterior.

I felt like a knob. All I wanted to do was crawl back into my crusty jeans and poke my toes into my work boots.

I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to be a city boy.

Splitters Creek had nothing like the lids at the pub that night. It was a hat-fest. White ones and fawn ones and black and ivory with feathers and badges. Indoor hats. A sea of indoor hats, check shirts and leather boots.

So, this was country.

Harry's hair was a gelled mohawk and he drank vodka and lemon. They had Bundy and cola on tap and at half past eleven, when Lee Kernaghan finally made it onto the stage, the joint was whooping and whistling and I was hammered. I had to take a leak and the bloke next to me at the urinal sang to himself and nodded his felt-hatted head.

‘Good night, hey mate?'

He nodded harder.

‘Did you have to come far to get here?'

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Yeah, I live out in the sticks,' he said.

‘Me too,' I said, and burped. ‘Whereabouts?'

‘Out Boronia way.'

I nodded. He tucked himself away and I shook my head.
I'd seen it on the map. Boronia was probably thirty minutes' drive from that pub. I realised that I wasn't ‘country'. Country was a style like goth or punk or homeboy and when I pushed back into the crowd, I felt lost in a way that I never had in the bush. The sort of lost where a map won't help. An inside lost that made me feel like I should have stayed at the flat and patted Mum's back. Retreated to the edge of my known and rocky universe.

I spotted Harry and pushed in beside him at the bar. So many unfamiliar faces. On a big night at the Splitters Creek Hotel or even at the Catalpa Arms, when it was shoulder to shoulder and stinking of armpits and ciggy smoke, if I looked along the bar I might spot one or two faces that I
didn't
recognise. For one confused moment, I felt like I needed to escape that pub and all the fake country, but then Harry had his arm on my back, shouting in my ear.

‘See!' he lisped. ‘I knew you'd fit right in.'

He slapped my shoulder and his arm fell away. I drained my glass and ordered another round. The woman who served me was wearing a tight black T-shirt and I had to haul my eyes from her chest to her face. Her forehead shone under the bar lights and she smiled as she cupped ice into fresh glasses. She was a city girl. She wore make-up and her dead-straight bottle-blonde hair framed her gorgeous face. She took my money and slapped the change on the counter beside my outstretched hand, still smiling.

I liked city girls.

I slid Harry's drink along the bar and scanned the crowd. So many beautiful women. In ten minutes I'd gone from
feeling like a fish out of water to feeling like I'd arrived in the proverbial sea with the plenty more fish.

Between sips, Harry's head pumped in time to the music and when he'd drained his glass, he motioned with a single finger and I followed him into the grooving part of the crowd. He moved with all the grace of a black dude on a video clip and I felt like a dick standing beside him with my hand in my pockets, dancing from the neck up. In the tiny mumbling gap between the whistling applause for one song and the beginning of the next, I heard Harry squeal. He squealed like a little kid and wrapped his arms around a woman I didn't recognise. They jumped and hugged and then jumped again. I saw Bonnie behind them. She smiled and held out her hand. I took it and she dragged our heads together.

‘Like bloody little kids,' she shouted, and kissed my cheek. ‘You look nice.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Harry's got a shirt the same as that . . .'

I leaned in close. ‘This is Harry's shirt.'

I smelled her hair. Flowery shampoo silk.

She laughed and held my hand at arm's length. ‘Pants? And shoes!'

I nodded.

‘You did all right.'

My skin tingled and I wondered where Jeremy was. Bonnie danced and before long I was dancing with her. From the neck down. She moved tantalisingly close and ran her hands over my chest then span away. The flirting went on and it added a welcome heat to the confusion in me. What
did Bonnie want? Wasn't she with Jeremy? It was all happening so fast and I couldn't take my eyes off her. The mini and the lace-up calf-high boots definitely weren't country, but they were steamingly hot on her.

We drank and danced until Harry let his woman go long enough to introduce me to her: Nadia. Nadia and Bonnie headed to the toilet together and Harry slapped my back.

‘We're heading off,' he said. ‘You going to be okay?'

I nodded and raised my glass. ‘Thanks. I really needed tonight, hey.'

He smiled and danced at the bar until the girls returned. He hugged Bonnie and kissed her goodbye. Then, with his arm on my shoulder, he kissed my cheek. He was still smiling as he left and I rubbed where his stubble had scratched my face. Then Bonnie was under my arm, hot and soft. She slipped her hand inside the waistband of my jeans, inside my boxers and dug her nails into the flesh of my bum.

I jumped and stared at her, open-mouthed, half shocked, half delighted.

She drew me into a proper hug, her free hand locked around my neck, bodies exchanging heat.

‘I think I'm just about ready to go, too,' she said.

‘I've got . . . my car's outside.'

‘Okay,' she said.

She hung on tight as we stepped into the car park. It had been raining and we giggle-jogged together to Bully's Subaru.

‘This is it?' she said.

‘Um . . . yeah.'

‘There aren't any spiders in there, are there?'

‘I don't think so.'

I opened the passenger door for her and she had a good long look before lowering herself into the seat. I let myself in the driver's door, started the engine – first try – and cranked the heater to the max.

‘What are you doing? You can't drive,' she said. ‘There are cops everywhere.'

‘No. No, I was just starting the car to run the heater.'

She crossed her arms.

I swallowed. My head was swimming. ‘We could jump in the back.'

She took a tiny phone from her skirt pocket. ‘I had fun, Adam. Great night.'

‘The swag's comfortable.'

She laughed. ‘I'll call a taxi.'

My brain felt bruised when I woke on Saturday morning. The disorientation forced me to focus and I was fully awake by the time I worked out that I'd slept in Harry's clothes, in the Subaru, alone, at the back of the nightclub. It was early but there were cars parking around me. I needed to piss.

Emergency.

I patted my hair and slipped on Harry's dress shoes. I could see that the cars parked around me weren't all recent arrivals. Some were still there on nightclub business – utes with damp swags in the back and station wagons with fogged windows. I followed a family over the road to a grassy park that had been transformed into a market while I'd slept. I dashed past the trestle tables and food vans to the red brick toilets. I bent at the urinal and tried hard not to moan with pleasure as the waves of relief washed through me.

Something bumped my leg. A kid, scarcely taller than my kneecap, stood beside me. He had his pants pushed around his ankles and he sighed as his stream hit the stainless steel. He looked up and smiled.

I shuffled to give him some more room and smiled back. ‘Bet that's better.'

He nodded.

The kid shook himself before he'd quite finished and I felt drips hit the leg of my pants. Harry's pants.

And I didn't care.

Wasn't the first time I'd been caught in the splash zone of a little kid.

I washed my hands in cold water and was still shaking them dry when I walked into the squint-bright sunshine and spotted the boy who had peed beside me. He stood there with his arms by his sides as the crowd moved around him. He scanned the faces that were passing him, his movements becoming sharper as the panic took hold.

I squatted beside him. ‘G'day mate,' I said, and he jumped. ‘Everything okay?'

‘I can't find my mum and my dad. They've gone and I can't find them.'

‘Do you want me to help you find them?'

He nodded and his mouth trembled.

‘Do you want to hop up on my shoulders so you can see further? You know, shoulder ride. Does your dad give you shoulder rides?'

He nodded and I wiped my fingers on my pants before hoisting him aloft. He was so light and his piss-damp fingers clamped intuitively across my brow.

And I didn't care.

I held his thighs and scanned the crowd. ‘What do they look like?'

The boy didn't answer.

I strolled.

‘What are their names?'

‘Mum and Dad and Christie,' he said, and I smiled.

We'll find them, I thought.

The market seemed to go on forever and while the panic seemed to fade from the child, every solemn face that passed us by sharpened the edge of my own concern. The boy had been on my shoulders for fifteen minutes when we passed a stall loaded with brightly coloured toys and a man with a money pouch at his waist was making huge soap bubbles with a plastic ring on a handle. I kept moving and the boy craned to watch the bubbles wobbling into shape behind us.

‘Leigh!' called a voice. I felt the boy's thighs tighten against my neck.

‘Leigh,' the voice called again.

‘Mum?' the boy shouted.

I made a bee-line in the direction of the voice and eventually traced it to a full-bodied woman in a Day-Glo yellow parka, urgently wrestling a stroller over the grass.

The boy on my shoulders began to jiggle and I swung him to the ground. He sprinted as fast as his little legs would carry him and clung to his mother's knee. She scowled and patted his back.

‘Where have you been? You can't just walk off like that. I thought you'd gone for good! Silly billy.'

The woman sussed me out, and then smiled. ‘Thank you,' she mouthed.

A man with a severe crew cut swept in and hooked the boy into his arms. He looked him over then held the back of his head as the boy buried his face into the crook of his neck.

‘Came riding in on the shoulders of this nice man,' the woman said.

The man was incredulous. He took a second to check me out, then strode towards me.

His face split with a smile and he stuck out his hand. ‘Thank you.'

‘No trouble at all,' I said.

The family walked past and after two steps I turned to watch them go. The beautiful things about the city, I thought, are all the people. And the scariest things about the city, I thought, are all the people. How could you keep a kid safe and not squash them with your fears? How would you ever know when it was time for them to fend for themselves?

Leigh's head poked above his father's shoulder, and he waved.

I picked among the market benches and the people, marvelling at the shit that had been packaged up for sale. Biscuits that looked burnt, five-year-old
National Geographics
, rusty garden tools and snack food that had only just passed its sell-by date.

‘There he is,' I heard.

I turned to see Leigh struggling with a bunch of flowers. The freshest flowers I'd ever seen – a melee of colour that had somehow managed to capture the smile of winter sunshine.

With his father's hand at his back, the boy came up to me. I crouched and he handed me the flowers.

‘For me?'

He nodded and I took them.

‘What for?'

‘For nothing,' the boy said, and his dad chuckled.

‘For being such a nice man,' Leigh's dad added.

‘Gosh, they're beautiful,' I said. ‘I'm not sure that I deserve . . .'

‘Nonsense,' Leigh's dad growled.

I stood and he shook my hand again.

‘Thanks,' I said.

‘Thank
you
.'

I made it back to the car before the flowers felt completely awkward in my hand. I rested them on the passenger seat. I started the car and wondered what I'd do with the posy. A couple of hours on the seat and they'd be wilted and ugly. I tried to remember how much I'd drunk the night before and I smelled my breath. I changed into my jeans and boots and T-shirt in the back of the Subaru.

I grabbed the flowers and locked the car.

I took a train to Mum's.

Just to be on the safe side.

The closest thing Mum had to a vase was a white plastic mixing bowl. The flowers slumped and the bunch looked a bit threadbare, but Mum loved them. I couldn't remember the last time I'd given Mum anything. I'm sure I'd given her things on her birthday and we honoured Christmas with gifts, but I couldn't remember a single one. Admittedly, I hadn't paid for the flowers, but that didn't soften their intent.

‘Sorry, Mum.'

‘Don't be silly,' she growled.

‘But I am. You're right. I have been selfish and ignorant and all that. I should have done more. I should have . . .'

‘Stop it!' she snapped. There was real anger in her tone.

‘What? I'm not even allowed to apologise?'

She shook her head. ‘It's too late for all that.'

‘Too late? How can it be too late?'

Her breath came faster, as if she was bracing against a storm surge of emotion. Inside, she was tearing the washing off the line and stuffing it in a basket.

‘How can it be too late?'

She spoke through her teeth. ‘I've made my decision.'

‘What? What decision did you make?'

‘I left.'

‘But you needed a rest. A break. I understand that. Dad understands that. We didn't do enough. If you came home tomorrow, it'd be different. We'd be different.'

She shook her head. ‘I can't go back.'

‘Why not? Of course you can go back.'

She considered her words for a long time. ‘A mum just doesn't leave.'

I understood, with those few words, that Mum and I had broached the same part of the Splitters Creek wall to be there. That, unsurprisingly, our struggles had a common thread.

‘But you didn't run away, Mum. You escaped. There's a big difference.'

‘There is?'

‘Of course. You run away if you're weak. You escape if you're brave.'

Mum snorted. ‘Sounds like semantics. Sounds like you're trying to justify your own bad decisions.'

How do mums do that? I had been standing on the edge of my self-doubts and Mum had shoved. I teetered, arms flailing.

There was nothing brave about shirking responsibility. There was no real freedom in pretending that it didn't happen.

How do they see straight through you?

‘If you're weak, you run away. If you're weak, you escape,' she said. ‘It's not a prison. It's family. It's a town. It's our history. Being there isn't a punishment. It's a test.'

She looked at me, her eyes soft with resignation.

‘We failed.'

The words were as honest as an open hand to the cheek.

‘Every time I see you, every time you open your mouth, every time you say sorry, it rubs my nose in it.'

There was a long, ear-splitting silence. The sort of silence the city had never known. I could think of nothing more to say or do.

Nothing.

I left.

I waited for a train to take me back to the Subaru. There were more pigeons than people on the platform. They scurried about like big wobble-headed rats, pecking through the morning's detritus.

‘Go home,' I told the fat one that came right up to my boot.

It leapt into the air, reedy wings pumping and clapping.

It probably was home.

I called my dad.

‘Hello?'

‘Just me, Dad.'

‘Adam?'

‘I just wanted to check that everything was okay. That you were okay. How's Simon?'

‘Si's okay. I'm fine. How are you?'

‘I'm good.'

And then silence swallowed us. I heard traffic and pigeon wings cutting the air. I missed him, but the words were a splinter I couldn't get out by myself.

‘I have to go,' I eventually said.

‘Righto. Look after yourself. Come home soon.'

‘See ya.'

I phoned Bullant.

Chuck said he was still in bed, that he'd had a big night. He was certain that Bully'd want to talk to me and that he'd get more joy than a dad should from waking him.

Bully
did
want to talk to me. He didn't sound tired at all. There was a squeaky sort of excitement in his voice that I hadn't heard since we were in primary school. He told me that the guys had given up hassling him for information about me; that the storm had passed. He said that Simon was coming up to his place for breakfast most mornings and hanging around at the pub while Dad was on the road. He said that Dad had been absent from the pub for a couple of nights but that he was back drinking at the bar again now and things seemed to have settled with him and Simon. I walked in circles on the platform as I listened. It had been too long since we'd spoken. It had only been a few days, but it was too long. My eyes misted with tears a couple of times. Little tears that crept out of the
darkness in my belly. I swept them away. My train arrived and I realised that I didn't have to hang up so I kept talking, mostly about work. I told him about Harry and Bonnie and when he asked about Mum I told him she was well. That story was too big for the phone. I got him to write down my number and he asked me what I was doing that night.

‘Wouldn't have a clue, mate. Why?'

‘I miss my car,' he said. ‘Don't get me wrong; the ute's a lovely vehicle, but it's like a bloody tank and shit, she's thirsty.'

‘I don't think I'll have time to get up there this weekend. I don't . . .'

‘Nah, I'll bring the ute down there.'

‘You shouldn't have to do that. I was the one who . . .'

‘Bah. I need to get out of here. Need a bloody holiday. I didn't make it to training on Thursday. I rang Childers and told him that I'd pulled a hammie and wouldn't be available for this morning. Maybe I'll call in sick at work on Monday, too.'

My phone started beeping and vibrating in my ear.

I swore.

‘What?'

‘My phone's going weird. I have to go. Give us a call if you're serious about coming down.'

‘I'm serious. I'll see you later.'

The beeping and vibration was a text message from Debbie.

Coffee?

Sure
, I replied, but I wasn't.

She sent me directions and, after I collected the car, I found her sitting in her MX5 near the eastern entrance of
the shopping centre. Exactly where she'd said she'd be. I guess the car wasn't easily concealable, but I did feel a sense of achievement in finding her.

With a smile as her only greeting, she walked into the centre and I followed.

Like a good puppy.

With all the self-doubts stirred and murky in my body, I asked myself what I was doing following the woman in the dark sunglasses. I watched her firm bum through her designer tracksuit and realised I was looking for distractions. Searching for another form of oblivion. Mum hid behind her work and her new life. I tried to occupy myself with Bundy and women.

Debbie sat at a table in the food court and I plonked myself opposite. She lifted her sunglasses into headband mode and smiled again.

‘We don't have to have a coffee. I understand if it's awkward and that,' I said.

She glared. ‘It's only a coffee.'

I wondered who she was trying to convince.

She bought cappuccinos.

Silence.

It buzzed around us until it had woven an impenetrable shell of awkwardness.

This is fun, I thought, and a boy sitting at the table behind Debbie let rip with a forced Coke burp that almost tore a hole in the space–time continuum. It cracked the egg of silence that had settled over us.

Debbie laughed quietly and shook her head. ‘Who'd actually want to have kids?'

I laughed and shook my head. Kids aren't the problem, I thought. They're just honest and some of them don't care what you think of them. Some of them will kill you with their farts and then try to kiss you back to life. Debbie couldn't see the boy who'd burped. At a squint, he looked like a ten-year-old version of Francis. And if Francis had brought forth a burp like that, it would have been cause for much celebration. Tori would have called him Thunder Guts and the boy would have tried to force another one until some of the Coke found its way back into his mouth.