Tigerland (2 page)

“You two!” Fran cried. “You should never be allowed out of your homes!” She stormed off, leaving us still standing on the veranda.

“Do you think we can go in now?” Roger asked me.

I rolled my eyes at him, pulled open the security door, and followed Fran further into the house. She had thrown herself onto the couch in the lounge room.

“Do you have any superglue?” I asked.

“Don’t,” she warned me.

“We could try to fix it.”

Roger shuffled into the room, a hangdog expression on his face. “Franny,” he said.

This simple evocation of her name made Fran burst into tears.

Roger crossed the lounge in one giant step and fell to his knees beside her. “I’m sorry. Please don’t cry.”

“I killed it first!” Fran wailed.

Both Roger and I made some form of guttural response not unlike that Scooby Doo would make when questioning one of Fred’s bizarre plans.

“I didn’t mean to!” Fran said, taking the headless torso from Roger and staring down at it with sadness. “I had to go to the shops to get milk, and I placed her on the roof of the car for a minute as I was trying to get out the keys. When I started pulling the car out of the parking space, she fell off the roof. And her head kind of popped off.”

“Kind of, or did?” Roger asked.

“It actually bounced!” Fran cried.

I snorted back a laugh, and both of them glared at me.

“It isn’t funny!” Fran admonished me.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, as straight-faced as I could at that moment.

“Roger, face it, we’re fucked. We
both
killed our child. We can’t do this!”

Okay, things were going too far, and my amusement was starting to wear off. “People! We need some perspective here!”

I now had their attention.

“Do I
have
to remind the both of you that this wasn’t a child? It was a doll! A piece of plastic with a computer chip!”

“But it’s meant to be the real thing!” Roger argued.

I snatched the doll from Fran and dangled it upside down. “It’s a
toy
. And you two are starting to act like those sad couples that adopt Cabbage Patch Kids and think they’re real.”

Fran grabbed the baby back. “It’s funny how you get attached.”

“A doll is never going to give you an idea of what it is like to be a parent. When you have a kid, a living, breathing kid, all these hormones are going to kick in and you’ll have all these natural instincts to rely upon. You know, like how a cat that’s been indoors all her life still gets that little wiggle in her butt when she sees a bird through the window?”

“That’s your example of how we’ll become good parents?” Roger asked.

I thought it was a pretty good one, myself. You just can’t help some people sometimes.

“People have been having babies for centuries. You’re no different. Besides, this is a glorified toy. You’ll be better with a real kid. You can do it.”

“Well, not today,” Fran said, getting up from the couch and pushing the doll away with a final sniff. “Let’s have a beer.”

An even better idea.

I
WAS
a little bit too tipsy to want to negotiate the public transport system, so I caught a taxi back home.

All the other guys had left, and Dec was snoozing on the couch. The apartment was remarkably clean—he was a bit of a freak when it came to that. I would have probably been passed out between a stack of pizza boxes and beer bottles. I threw myself down next to him and burrowed my head in his chest. He jerked awake, then hugged me sleepily.

“It’s you.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“I thought maybe it was Abe.”

“So you automatically went to cuddle him? And you think Roger and I are close.”

Dec laughed. “I knew it was you, although the smell of beer stumped me for a minute.”

“I had to play counsellor.”

“And that involved getting pissed?”

“Beer therapy is forty-six percent more effective than any other.” I slid my hand under his shirt, resting it against his warm skin. He had recently started developing tiny little love handles that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he tried to exercise them off. He hated them; I loved them. Having been retired for just over a year and a half now, his body had already started to change. He was still fit and toned, but he was no longer the dedicated professional athlete putting in over three hours plus of exercise a day.

“Roger or Fran?”

“Both. Pre-parental anxiety.”

“They have nothing to worry about.”

“We all know that. The only people who don’t are Fran and Roger.”

I remembered the talk we had ages ago about possibly having kids one day. We were nowhere near ready for it. Undoubtedly Roger and Fran thought that about themselves as well, but they were starting to consider it more seriously—hence the “real doll”. Deep down, I was scared at how having a child could affect our little group dynamic, but I knew that unfortunately such things were part of growing up. I also believed that if I wasn’t maturing by the ripe old age of thirty, there might be no hope for me at all.

“Besides, Fran already has a kid to look after.”

I propped myself up on his chest. “You do know people probably say that about you, right?”

“And they’d be correct.”

With mock outrage I started getting up, but Declan held me firm. We kissed, long and slow, my beer breath obviously not that bad in his opinion.

Life was pretty damn good at the moment.

But things have a habit of sneaking up on you when you least suspect it.

I
T
HAD
been just over three years since Dec came out of the closet. After he left the Devils and played in Melbourne, it was only another two seasons of footy before his knee injury flared up again, and he had to retire early. It was a rough year that followed. Dec had been a footy player for so long, and it was all he knew, having been recruited straight out of high school. If it hadn’t been for his knee, he could have easily had another five or so years in him. He was headhunted to take up assistant coaching, but it was too bittersweet to watch others take to the field instead of himself. He knew it would only make him feel more miserable, so he got into commentating instead, as it seemed enough of a distance from the physicality of the game for him to not have to resent it. After a while things seemed to click back into place for him, and he seemed content again.

All of that happened around the same time I left the festival Gigi Jones had headhunted me for. Some internal politicking had led to Gigi leaving to take on a management role with a community television station. She decided that she would take Nyssa and me with her, as Nyssa and I still came as a package deal.

At least until a handsome New Zealander from an affiliate station came over for a conference, and the two fell immediately and nauseatingly in love. Knowing Nyssa the way we did, it surprised none of us that she was capable of running away to another country with a man she barely knew. It also surprised nobody that, with her brand of charmed life and unsurprising luck, it would all work out beautifully for her. You couldn’t begrudge her that, even though she left a huge hole in my life. I still had Dec, Roger, Fran, Abe, and Lisa—but there was a Nyssa-shaped hole that would never be filled, though my new assistant, Coby, tried his best to be both work colleague and friend.

And Abe and Lisa, well, there was another story. They were currently “on hiatus,” which was just their fancy way of saying that they had split up, were still being tight-lipped about why and if they would ever get back together. Dec couldn’t get anything out of Abe, and they usually shared everything. Lisa avoided us both, knowing we might succeed at breaking her down.

So, although things were great and wonderfully normal between Dec and I, our friends were on more unsure footing.

I should have known better than to take mine and Dec’s security for granted.

Maybe everybody else’s troubles were a portent that other storms were brewing. Dec and I had had it easy for a while—our last hiccup had been the changes in our careers happening at the same time, and even then we had never been in serious trouble with each other. I had pledged after all the brouhaha associated with Dec’s coming out that I would become a newer, stronger, less dramatic Simon Murray. Dec said he liked the old one just fine, and truth be told I slipped up enough to keep him happy.

It was Abe who had changed the most. He had played for another season after Dec retired, and he took it far worse when an injury forced him out of professional play as well. For a while he raged between irritability and depression, and although Lisa tried to help him he resisted it. When she left him out of frustration, I think she hoped it would cause him to confront what was happening to him. It hadn’t really worked, although we all still hoped it would. But Abe continued to suffer, and Lisa stayed out of sight.

It was funny how much things could change in almost three years. It would only be sensible to assume that Dec and Abe would be starting to think of retiring, if not retired already as not many footballers had careers past their early thirties, but for the three of us to be in new careers, Abe and Lisa in Splitsville, Nyssa abandoning me for New Zealand, and Fran and Roger to be considering having a brood of their own, seemed to have swiftly thrown us all into life as semi grown-ups. I still didn’t know what to think of it all. I think before I met Dec I was settling into a comfortable rut, and who knows what I would have been doing if I hadn’t been dragged along to that housewarming party by Fran and Roger? Maybe I would still be at the Triple F Film Festival, and still thinking I was revelling in singledom. Maybe I was in a comfortable rut now, but it was a hell of a nicer one.

I guess “rut” isn’t the right word. A rut is something you subconsciously want to get out of. The thing is, when I admitted it to myself, I was
happy
. Happy happy happy. And that’s a good thing. But the problem with being happy is that life can knock it out of you in its own natural submission to the tall poppy syndrome.

When it all started, it was summer in Melbourne. We were suffering through a long, humid heatwave with storms that promised relief but only made it worse. Everybody started to get that sluggish look of the walking dead. At night I cranked the air conditioning up, making Dec complain and pull a jumper on. I said it was better to be cold and put on a jumper instead of suffering in the heat and doing our best Wicked Witch of the West impersonations after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her.

I was never at my best in summer. Roger Hargreaves could have written a book about me—
Mr. Homicidal
. I chose to become a hermit camped out in our air conditioned apartment, only venturing out when Declan forced me to, whinging vociferously. I was a winter boy through and through, and Melbourne never failed to deliver on that, but winter was still too far away.

So it was only natural that everything would happen when my mood was at its lowest point, serving to aggravate me only further. And the cause of our problem was one man: Greg Heyward.

T
HE
power must have gone out at some point in the night, because I could feel myself struggling in my dream, which involved searching my parents’ house for a golden key (don’t ask me). I felt overheated and finally woke feeling suffocated, sweaty, and dehydrated. Part of the suffocation was due to the fact that Declan was sprawled across me and I was crushed beneath his weight. He had no sense of personal boundaries in sleep. Normally, I didn’t mind so much, particularly in winter when he proved to be better than an electric blanket and a cat for warmth, but that was helped by the fact that we normally had working air, cooling the impossible summer night heat. Right at this point of time I wanted him off me and as far away as possible.

“Dec.”

He remained as heavy as stone, and as impenetrable.

“Oh, come on.” I pushed at him, my hands sliding on the warm and moist skin of his shoulder, which elicited a grunt from him but still no movement.