New Australian Stories 2 (37 page)

A siren wailed to life nearby, and Penny made a quick decision to cut through the unlit park. You weren't supposed to walk here at night, but nobody could fuck with her now. Dead grass crackled underfoot, cicadas shrilled from all directions and a plane rasped overhead, blinking upwards and out of sight. She walked faster than usual, taking long strides, a new confidence welling up inside her. Her bag swung heavy on her hip, and she felt strong.

Next morning she phoned work to ask about the roster. The manager picked up. A sour man with a neurotically thin moustache, Greg liked to play favourites, and Penny wasn't one of them. His answers were curt, and he kept saying her name like it tasted bad. No shifts available next week,
Penny
; I'm in the middle of a stocktake,
Penny
, we'll be in touch if we need you. She hung up and swore at her bedroom wall. She'd like to punch that asshole right in his stupid moustache.

Five weeks into the job she'd balanced the till wrong twice, and yesterday had lost her temper with two pimply jerks in the fruit aisle who'd made repeated enquiries about ‘them melons' while gawking at her chest. Penny was sick of it, all the ogling and moronic comments, and her reply had been quick-witted and lacerating. It had also been loud. The two creeps slunk away, but Greg appeared at her elbow. Next thing she was in the storeroom listening to him cite a long and viciously exaggerated list of her shortcomings as a grocery worker. He didn't need to remind her she was just a casual. He refused to let her explain, so she'd been reduced to glowering.

Out in the lounge room her housemate Derek was hunched over a breakfast of Cheezels, watching TV with the curtains shut. The ceiling fan spun sluggishly, stirring the bong-scented air around like soup. Onscreen the bushfires devoured whole swathes of the map; the camera panned across the blackened shells of homes, and emergency workers led weeping people through the smoke.

‘Hey,' said Penny.

Derek grunted a hello.

She took her daily fortune cookie to her room:
Today
is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday
, it informed her. What the hell was that supposed to mean? It was no help at all. Today she should re-jig her CV, look for another job and sign up for the dole. Glumly she fired up her laptop, angled her desk fan for maximum sweat evaporation, and began her weekly email to her mum.

Everything was great, she reported: her housemate was really laid-back and into current affairs, and uni was going well. She hit send without getting too elaborate. The lies had begun two months ago, with the discovery that she'd missed the application date for her design course. Sorry, the admin person had said, try again next year. Three weeks later she was packing groceries under Greg's militant gaze: not a great result for moving halfway across the country. Most nights she had a recurring dream: she was stuck on a train that ran a circular loop of track, over and over. It wasn't that hard to interpret.

Her sketchpad lay on the desk. Penny regarded the gap beneath the wardrobe for a while. Then she kneeled down and slid the gun out, positioned it in the sunlight, and began drawing. This was the first gun she'd seen up close, and it was a beautifully designed thing. She sketched its outline, blocked in shading, copied the curlicued logo and the tiny writing stamped into the metal:
38 S & W SPECIAL CTG. / REG. US. PAT. OFF. / MADE IN USA / MARCAS REGISTRADAS / SMITH & WESSON, SPRINGFIELD MASS
. She held up the final result: not bad. At least she could still draw.

The firing mechanism was hidden somewhere inside. Fiddling with guns was a bad idea, but if she was careful … A childhood spent dissecting household appliances and copping whacks around the head from her stepfather had taught her how to put things back together properly, to treat machinery with respect. She tested the cylinder, but it wouldn't budge; must be a lever. The one at the back stirred vague memories of crime shows, the bad guy cocking it just before squeezing the trigger. She tried a smaller catch below, and the cylinder gaped open. A light tremor went through her. There were six bullets inside.

That night she opened all the windows wide, but the house would not cool down. Derek was sucking at his bong like an asthma patient taking bottled oxygen. On TV a suspected arsonist was being taken into police custody, a towel draped over his head as the cops held back an angry crowd who bayed at the man like starving animals. All that pain, so ugly to see.

‘Don't you get sick of watching that stuff?' Penny asked. Derek, busy packing a cone, didn't reply. The furniture was placed at awkward angles; she had to step around the couch to reach the front door. ‘I'm going for a walk. Have a good night,' she said, not bothering to hide her sarcasm.

Penny set out for the field by the airport, where you could lie back and watch the planes, pale bird-bellies exposed as they rose or sank towards their destinations. Two months after moving here she was virtually friendless. Derek, obviously, didn't fit the bill. Miranda, the chatty girl she'd shared shifts with at work, had not returned her last two text messages, but maybe she was busy or had lost her phone. Penny crossed the bridge over the aqueduct, a dry concrete avenue with a channel running down its middle, a strip of black water at the bottom, and slipped through the wires of an old farm fence. She followed the faint track, her way lit by the eerie glow coming off the airport, and settled into the grass beneath the southern flight path.

A big jumbo lumbered over the tarmac to the runway entrance, then squatted under the lights as if gathering up courage. It rolled towards her, gathering speed, but liftoff always looked impossible from here — the runway inadequate, the machine too slow and heavy. The engine screamed as the spindly front wheels left the ground, then the heavy back end rose up too, and the huge beast heaved itself clear and tore right over the top of her. Its stomach slid past, white and vulnerable, and the landing gear folded in like little claws. She watched the plane climb steeply into the night sky and wink away until it was no longer visible.

When she reached into her bag to roll a smoke, there it was, wrapped in a scrap of velvet. Carefully she held the gun aloft, keeping her fingers well clear of the trigger. Its blue-black metal gleamed in the airport lights as she weighed the heft and menace of the thing. She'd searched the online news for recent crimes in the area: a knifing weeks ago, a local bottle shop knocked over, and a string of 7-Eleven burglaries by a druggie with a bloody syringe — all unsolved and no mention of a gun, abandoned or otherwise. She'd read up on the model: the bullet calibre and firing pin, its double-action mechanism, the spring buried deep within the handle. The cylinder contained six chambers where you loaded the bullets; when the gun fired, one bullet shot out, the cylinder spun, and the next one was right there, ready to go.

How would it feel to point a loaded gun right at someone, someone who had it coming? Once she held it in her hands the thought came unbidden: you couldn't help wondering. Couldn't help imagining the look on their face, the fear dawning as the situation switched and they lost their hold: Greg's smirk fading, those assholes who'd taunted her falling silent, backing away. Her stepdad losing the upper hand for once, his gaze wavering, palms held out all helpless, saying,
No, don't
… Yes, she thought, a cold kind of pleasure blooming inside her: she had some idea how it would feel.

At home Derek was watching a documentary on terrorism. He nodded hi, so Penny flopped down on an armchair. The credits rolled over shots of bombed-out buildings and military checkpoints.

‘Full on,' observed Derek.

Penny looked around the lounge room, at the slow- spinning fan, the mismatched furniture set at odd angles, the boxes piled in one corner. On the way home she'd texted the girl from work again, Miranda, but no reply.

‘Let's rearrange the furniture,' she said suddenly. ‘Sort out the feng shui in here.'

Derek peered at her. ‘I dunno. I was planning on taking it easy tonight.'

But now she could see it, the difference it would make. She was on her feet, making brisk suggestions; bossier than usual, halfway between insistent and cajoling.

The TV was showing a documentary about voles. ‘All right.' Derek sighed. ‘Just don't smash the bong, that's all I need.'

Two days passed in a blur of heat. Penny left her CV at a couple of cafés and registered for the dole. There'd been a long wait before her number was called. The woman behind the desk asked questions and noisily banged Penny's replies into her computer.

‘What was the reason for leaving your last job?'

‘It wasn't really a proper job,' Penny said, ‘just shifts here and there. They've got none at the moment.'

The woman looked up. ‘They just stopped calling?'

Penny nodded, and the keyboard clattered for what seemed like a long time.

Her mum had emailed: the cat had had a lump removed from his ear, someone had set a car on fire down the street, and she hoped Penny was making friends at university. No mention of her stepdad. Miranda still hadn't replied to any of her texts. Fuck her, thought Penny. Stupid cow had probably dobbed her in about that face cream — one measly jar. You couldn't trust anyone.

In the hot afternoons she stayed in her room, parked by the fan in her underwear, reading up about ballistics.
Go
confidently in the direction of your dreams
, one fortune cookie had instructed. But her dreams all starred that aimless train, stuck on its circular route to nowhere. And sometimes that other dream came: the one where she lay wide awake, motionless, feigning sleep as she watched the silent shape of a man standing at the foot of her bed. Her dreams had nothing good to say.

Now after dark she'd go out walking. ‘Later,' she called to Derek as she left that evening. She kept a quick pace on these night walks, as if it wasn't just wandering around, as if she knew exactly where she was going. The air was still sweet with woodsmoke, and the day's heat radiated up off the footpaths, sending hot swirls around her bare legs. The streets were empty and TVs flickered through windows as she crossed the road to cut through the park. It was a decent-sized park, about five minutes' walk from one side to the other. She was less than halfway across when she heard the footsteps.

The man was behind her and gaining steadily. He made no effort to lighten his step; it sounded as if he was wearing heavy boots, like the ones tradies wear. She could just make out the path ahead, hemmed in with tall shrubs and stretching into blackness. Walking faster would do no good; she was still a long way from the far side. She had two choices: run, or turn around to face him. She slid her hand into her bag and felt her fingers slot neatly into the gun's handgrip. As she turned she heard him speak: ‘Hey. You got a light?'

He stopped a couple of metres away. Penny could not see much, but the man's outline looked tall and heavyset; she could hear him breathing. She kept her voice level. ‘No,' she said, ‘and you better just keep walking.'

It wasn't until he laughed, a dry noise with no humour in it, that she took the gun from her bag and held it low against her leg.

‘You were the one
just walking
,' said the man in a pleasant voice. ‘Now you've stopped, so I'm asking if you got a light.'

She thought fast: should she pull back the hammer, or was the first shot primed to go if you squeezed the trigger hard? She couldn't remember. ‘No, I've quit,' was all she could think to say.

‘What you doing out here by yourself?' he asked, and this time he made no effort to sound friendly.

She had no idea where the words came from: ‘I'm looking for assholes. Are you an asshole?' The gun was raised now, pointed at his middle.

The man didn't answer at first, just hovered there. ‘What's that you got?' His outline shifted, craning a little closer. ‘What is that?'

Then he backed off and she could just make out his hands, lifted up in front of him. ‘I just wanted a light,' he said. ‘You need to fucking relax.'

Penny tried to keep her voice strong. ‘Go away. Just go, right now.'

He stood there a moment, then his footsteps began retreating. ‘Crazy fucken bitch,' she heard him call back.

Penny listened until there was nothing but the high screech of cicadas and her own shallow breathing. Then she turned and ran, her heart slamming in her chest and the tears already coming, blurring the lights from the highway on the far side of the trees.

Out under the flight path she lay in the grass and tried to slow her breath. She had been lucky, she reasoned; if she hadn't had the gun, if she hadn't thought so quickly on the spot, it could have happened to her all over again. But she knew it was not quite that simple, because without the gun she'd never have cut through the park at night in the first place. The thing that had saved her … it was the same thing that had led her to take the risk. And what if she'd pulled the trigger and shot him, right there in the dark? How would that really feel, afterwards?

One split-second decision, one chance encounter, and your whole life could switch course, events tumbling on uncontrollably like those rows of falling dominoes. You can't reverse things: once the bullet drops into the chamber it's too late.

In the sky a plane was circling, coming in to land on her runway. She cradled the gun against her stomach and tuned in to the approaching roar.