Growing Up in Flames, page 14
‘Well, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.’ He takes his hand away, stands up and clears the plates from the table, leaving the glasses. ‘If there’s anyone who understands needing a place to go, it’s me.’
‘I can’t go back there.’ I can’t believe I’m telling him this. Maybe it’s because he’s alone too. ‘To my uncle and aunt’s house. They want us to be this little family, just me and them and their kid.’ My throat closes in, and I fight to not let it show. ‘Like Mum never existed…’ I grit my teeth and swallow. ‘I can’t do it.’
He just nods. He doesn’t ask me anything more, and I’m glad. I’m fighting back tears I thought I’d already run out of. My body is shaking at the thought of going back there. To Rob’s disappointment and Abbey’s anger. To Iggy being afraid of me.
I don’t want them to hate me. I just don’t want them.
‘My dad had a pretty bad temper.’ Faulkner lights a cigarette and the smell of smoke wafts through the room. He shakes the pack in my direction, and I say no with a wave. He shrugs like it’s my loss and smokes in the kitchen with the window open next to him. ‘He used to be in the army. One of those ones that never really got away from it, I guess. I left, eventually. After that, Mum got the worst of it.’ He blows a puff of smoke in the direction of the window. ‘When he was bad, I used to go down into the bush. There was a creek there, and birds.’ He waves a hand towards the cage in the corner of the room. ‘I like birds. They make me feel better. That’s why I keep them around, I guess.’
I can imagine it, a young Faulkner running out the back door like I did, jumping the fence and heading off to watch the birds.
‘Did you ever take Mum there? To your house?’
He shakes his head, sucking his teeth before finishing his smoke. ‘When I was fourteen, I caught my first bird down at the creek. It was a wagtail, like these ones.’ He indicates the cage again. ‘They’re cute, but they’re not the brightest.’ He tosses his butt out the kitchen window and closes it. ‘I tied one end of a piece of string here,’ he points to the base of his forefinger, ‘and the other around its foot, so that it couldn’t fly away.’ He grabs a couple of beers from the fridge and comes back to the lounge next to me. ‘It didn’t anyway. Birds are funny like that. Some of them just know they’ve been caught. After that, they don’t try to go anywhere. You’ve got them forever.’
He pops the caps off the beer bottles and passes one to me. We clink the necks together like old drinking buddies.
‘I took it home. It didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want to let it go. I snuck it into my room and kept it in my desk drawer.’ He looks at me seriously. ‘My dad found it the next day, and crushed it in front of me with my maths textbook. I never took Ava to that house.’
I go to say something but end up taking a swig of beer instead.
‘I got him back, though.’ Faulkner smiles bitterly. ‘I waited until he left for the day and I went back to the creek and I caught as many birds as I could find, maybe twenty of them, and I brought every one of them home and put them in his study.’ He grins at me. ‘When he got home, everything in his room was covered in bird shit. He almost killed me for that, but it was worth it.’
He chuckles and the birds in the corner whistle back. I can’t help but smile and clink bottles with him again.
‘He made Mum clean it all up, even though he knew it was me.’ He says it softly, his eyes far away for a moment, as if he’s still watching it in front of him.
The motorbike must have been like a dream for him—a way to get out of that house. Mum must have been an escape too—the dancer from town who wrote in her diary about how she hoped he’d kiss her.
‘Ava liked that story too.’ He looks at me fondly. ‘You’re definitely her kid. You look like her, you know?’
I shrug. I do know.
‘How do you catch the birds?’ I change the subject. ‘Do you use traps?’
He grins. ‘Do you want to see?’
Without waiting for my answer, he jumps up from the lounge and goes into the kitchen. I put my beer down on the table and stand up. My head feels a little light and I take a moment to steady myself. My schoolbag is still on the floor next to where I’ve been sitting.
Faulkner produces a little roll of string from a drawer in the kitchen. He cuts a length off and expertly ties a loop, pulling the line through it until he has a type of lasso. He fiddles with the knots a little, his fingers quick on the string, and then lays it out on the kitchen bench, making the loop about as wide as a dinner plate. I watch in silence as he picks up the little ceramic dish with the bird food in it and sprinkles a few pellets in and around the loop.
‘That’s it?’ I try not to sound surprised.
He shrugs. ‘This is one way. I have other traps. Different things work for different birds.’
He goes to the birdcage and lifts the hook that keeps the cage locked. Opening the door a crack, he slides his arm in, waving from one side of the cage to scare the birds to the opposite end. With a fluid movement, he pins a bird against the side of the bars—not so hard that he could hurt it—and closes his hand around its body. James strokes the little bird’s head with his thumb as he pulls it from the cage, carefully latching the door behind him. Then, with a glance in my direction, he lets it go.
The little thing zips out of his hand in a flash, flitting across the room to the mantelpiece. From there, it flutters down to the coffee table, pecking at some of the crumbs from dinner.
‘Come on.’ Faulkner takes my hand and leads me behind the counter. We crouch until we are eye-level with the loop of string. Instinctively, I’m silent. My heart is pounding.
‘Here.’ He hands me the line with a whisper.
‘What?’
‘You can do it. Just wait for the right moment, then pull hard.’
I take the string and feel him place his hands on my back to steady me. My attention is on the loop of string. I try to tune out everything else. His hands on my back. The sound of the birds in the cage. The memory of Iggy screaming as I snatched Mum’s diary from his hands. The thought of Mum sitting by Alex’s hospital bed knowing everything was her fault. Rob’s scars. Dr Kahn’s spine. The smell of smoke.
The bird lands on the counter with a sound like a phone ringing. In sharp, jerky movements it steps right next to the string, pecking at the pellets. Its head moves in quick bursts. Down. Up. Side. Side. A step.
Faulkner’s hands tense on my back and I pull. The line tightens and the bird tries to fly away, but crashes back down onto the counter, anchored to my grip. It’s like holding a helium balloon with an attitude.
Faulkner is up and helping me pull it in after a moment. My heart is pounding and I’m breathing heavily, a stupid grin slapped across my face. I can’t believe I did it!
‘Now what?’ I look up at him.
‘Watch.’
He reels the little bird in and closes his hand over it again. With a turn, he flips it over and lays it on its back on the countertop. Its eyes are wide and it struggles in his hand, but it can’t move.
‘Shh,’ he croons to the little thing, stroking its chest and tail feathers. The bird flicks its head from side to side a couple of times, then stops. Faulkner pulls one wing out to the side, then lets it go. He does the same on the other side and the bird doesn’t resist.
I’m captivated. I watch as the little bird goes still. It coos softly as he strokes it, then falls silent. Its eyes are still open as he lets it go completely. He ties the end of the string to the knob on one of the drawers, and the bird just keeps lying on its back, head to the side, blinking.
‘You hypnotised it?’ I ask, dumbfounded. I can’t stop watching the little thing.
‘Yep.’ He takes a sip of his beer. ‘It’ll stay like that for half an hour or so if I leave it.’
‘How does it work?’
‘Well, for a lot of animals, it’s a panic response.’ I follow him back to the lounge as he explains. ‘Once they realise they can’t do anything, their brain tells them to shut down. In nature, some predators track animals using movement. There are also predators who won’t eat something that’s already dead.’
‘So, it’s a survival mechanism?’ I find my beer on the table and take a drink.
‘Exactly.’
I look back over to the bird, still frozen in place with its legs in the air, and I shiver.
Faulkner looks concerned. ‘You’re cold. One sec.’
Before I can argue, he’s up and down the hall again. He comes back with a blanket and spreads it over me like you might tuck in a child. I wonder if this is what dads do. Mum’s the only person who’s ever tucked me in. It feels strange for a man to do it.
‘It’s wrong what they’re doing, you know.’ He sits back down next to me.
‘Who?’
‘Your aunt and uncle. Trying to make you forget your family so that they can have you. It’s not right.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not exactly like that.’
He nods. ‘I know they’re probably nice people.’ He takes a drink, finishing his beer. ‘Maybe they’re just the wrong people.’
That’s it. They’re just the wrong people for me. They’re not Mum. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Dr Kahn.
Faulkner leans back in his seat, looking sideways at me. ‘Not my place to tell you what to do. You’re a big girl, you can figure that out for yourself.’ He smiles suddenly. ‘Ava would have gotten away from them though, taken some time to figure out what she needed without all those voices in her ears telling her what to think.’
‘Yeah?’ Would she? Is that how she moved on?
The words from her diary run through my mind. It’s all my fault.
‘I know that’s what it was like for me—people telling me where I had to be, what I could eat, what I was allowed to do. Then I got that motorbike.’ He jerks his head towards the picture on the mantelpiece. ‘I could go anywhere.’
My mind is a little fuzzy from the beer and the warm blanket. My fingers feel like the bubbles in soft drink, tingling up my arm. He lost his freedom when Mum crashed his bike, and she let people think that he’d hurt her. Why would she do that?
Faulkner shivers and slides the edge of my blanket over his legs, shifting a little closer to me on the lounge. ‘That’s what she loved about me. I could take her away from everything—from her dad, from what she’d done to her brother. With me she was free.’ His hand slides onto my leg under the blanket. ‘We could do anything we wanted.’
I feel his hand above my knee with the weight of an anvil, like it will leave a bruise. My leg is hot, and not just from the sunburn.
‘She was a wild thing, your mum.’
My chest is tight like a bubble has expanded in it, stretching the bones outwards, shifting my lungs to the side. I can smell the smoke on him. I can feel his calluses on my skin. I feel dizzy. Is that the beer?
‘She was always up for anything. I bet you’re like that, aren’t you?’
No.
It’s like he’s hit an off switch I didn’t know I had. But I’m frozen in place. I can almost see the string around my ankle, tied to a knob in the kitchen somewhere out of view. I’m looking at him, blinking, breathing, silent.
‘You know, birds are very trainable. I used to catch pigeons and take them to school in my hoodie. In that front pocket, right there.’
He slides his hand across my stomach to show me where he means. I just nod.
‘They’d sleep in that pocket all day if I let them,’ he continues. ‘Or I could take them out and get them to walk in circles on the desk.’ His finger traces a lazy circle on my ribs, his other hand still firmly on my leg. ‘Drove teachers crazy,’ he whispers in a confidential tone.
I’m paralysed. My breath is tight and shallow. This isn’t some teenage boy trying to cop a feel at the movies. This is a grown man in his own house, and a small voice inside me says you deserve this. Some people don’t deserve to be happy, and I know that it’s true. Part of me wants to close my eyes and cry while the world punishes me.
The birds chirp and rustle in the corner. I wonder if the little hypnotised wagtail has woken up, but I don’t dare look.
He brushes my hair behind my ear. His hand slides up my thigh, fingers feeling their way under the hem of my skirt. He shifts his body up against mine, stroking my arm with his other hand until I feel goosebumps form on my skin. He pulls my legs towards him as he pushes my shoulders down, laying me on my back, my knees towards him. His hand is under my skirt.
Some people don’t deserve to be happy.
The words flicker in my mind like neon.
He leans over me.
My legs clamp down as I recoil. It’s more reflex than anything else. I don’t want this. I don’t want him. I shake my head and my hands grip his wrist under the blanket to push it away.
His face darkens. His hand is pinned between my thighs as I hold his wrist. He doesn’t pull it away.
Faulkner sucks his teeth, producing a whistling sound. His birds respond with their own chirps and a clatter of movement. His hand is still between my legs. He leans over me and his words are like my own thoughts. ‘Come on. This is why you came here. You want this.’ He pushes his hand forward, and I can only think one thing: This is what I deserve.
James
Twenty Years Earlier
A week later I hear the words I’ve been fearing.
‘He’s awake,’ Ava says as she comes through the door. No hello.
She drops Dad’s car keys in the bowl she bought for us to empty our pockets into. I guess I probably won’t take the car back to him. I picked up the bike weeks ago so I leave her the car when I go to work. I tried teaching her how to ride, but she kept forgetting to brake. Ava on that thing is a recipe for death.
My gut is heavy with stones now. I can’t breathe for all the rock that’s in me. Alex will’ve told everyone what we did to him. The cops will come soon.
Does Ava know I took his glasses? I still have them at the bottom of a drawer. I take them out to look at when she’s asleep. They remind me I won. I beat him. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.
‘Did you see him?’
She nods, looking at me to gauge my reaction. I close my eyes. God, I’m tired. I wait for her to tell me and for it all to be over. I’ve been waiting for weeks.
‘He doesn’t remember anything.’
I open my eyes again. She’s staring at the ceiling.
‘He doesn’t remember the tree, or us picking him up. He doesn’t remember what happened in the field.’
I actually laugh. I can’t help it. It bubbles up through my lips, and I blurt out the sound. Ava frowns at me.
‘Nothing? He doesn’t remember anything at all?’ I hold my arms out for her to walk into.
She keeps her distance. ‘He thanked me for coming. His parents keep telling me what a good friend I am.’ She looks like she’s in pain as she throws herself into a chair.
There’s a light inside of me, and the stones are crumbling to dust. ‘That’s great!’
Why is she so upset?
‘We should be punished.’ She mutters it so low that I almost don’t hear it.
The joyous light dims. I feel my smile slip, and I hate her for it. For a moment, I thought we were done with it. Just for an instant, I felt that freedom again—that this place could be just ours, away from all the shit.
‘Stop it.’ I stand over her. ‘You’re never going to say that again.’ She shrinks into the chair, pulling her knees up towards her. ‘It’s done now. All of this is done. We never talk about this again. Do you understand?’
She’s crying, but I need to hear her say it. I grab her by the hair. ‘Do you understand?’
She nods, small and quick, and I let her go. She presses her face into her knees. I kneel down next to her.
‘Shhhh…it’s okay. Deep breaths.’ She slides onto the floor, into my arms, and I hold her like a little child. ‘Everything’s okay now. No one ever has to know, because we’re never going to tell anyone, are we?’
She shakes her head. I’m sure she’s just wiped snot all over my shirt.
‘You don’t want people finding out it was you that got him in the car and took him out into the fields, do you? You’ll never be able to live in this town. No one in your family will. Good girl—nice deep breaths.’
When she’s calmed herself down, I get Deli from her cage. She steals a pellet of food from my fingers before I open the door and let her step onto my hand. The second I reach the lounge room she flies to Ava’s shoulder and starts to nibble at her hair.
I switch the ceiling fan off in case she decides to fly back to me but she stays with Ava, rubbing against her cheek and cooing softly.
I light a cigarette.
The next afternoon I rattle around the house like a pinball. Ava’s at the hospital, I assume. Again. Sooner or later she’ll get tired of holding his hand. The guilt of it is making her sick. She actually vomits from it. He thanks her for being there and it’s a knife in her ribs. Every time she comes through the door, she’s more hunched over.
I trip in the dark and swear when I stub my toe on a corner. The generator died—ran out of petrol—and I haven’t filled the jerrycan. I stumble around, holding my toe. Fuckin’ house. It hates me today. I can feel the walls laughing at my pain.
‘Yeah?’ I headbutt the wall and feel my brain rattle. A headache sets in immediately. Stupid house. You won’t be laughing when I burn you to the ground. I can’t even feel my toe anymore as my head hammers a pulse that threatens to push my eyes out of their sockets. I press my forehead into the wall—the pressure helps.
Deli’s squawking from down the hall, rattling about in her cage. I grit my teeth and rub my temples.
‘Shut up,’ I mutter, but it doesn’t stop.
She’s quiet for Ava. She stands on her finger and pecks grains from her palm, bobbing silently. For me, she screams like a siren. I play Marco Polo and follow the sounds through the dark house and into the bedroom where the sound is deafening.
‘Shut it!’ I kick the cage and Deli panics, bouncing off the bars. There’s nowhere to fly to. I listen to her cries and the pain in my head eases a little because it’s funny, the sound of her rattling around. It only makes me feel better for a moment, though.
