Growing Up in Flames, page 15
‘Come here.’ It takes my fingers a moment to find the latch. I open the door and slip my arm in, feeling around until I find her feathers. My fingers are taut as I pin her wings to her sides and take her out.
Finally, pinned hard in my hand, she’s quiet.
Her feathers are soft as I stroke them.
‘Good girl,’ I whisper.
It takes almost no force to break her neck.
Ava has the posture of an old woman when she comes through the door, the weight of Alex’s gratitude on her shoulders. She looks at me, surprised that I’m still awake. It’s late.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out by yourself,’ I explain. ‘You’ve already been through so much.’ I can still taste the petrol I siphoned out of the bike to get the generator going. Just in time. The fan spins steadily above us, ticking occasionally.
She rubs her temples. ‘What are you talking about?’
I point to Deli on the floor in the middle of the room. Her feathers are ruffled and one leg points upwards, toes curled.
‘Oh my God!’ Ava drops her bag and lifts Deli in both hands, light as a paper bag. ‘What happened?’ Tears grow and drip from her eyelashes.
‘I don’t know. I got home and she was there on the floor.’ I point upwards. ‘I think she flew into the fan. You mustn’t have closed her cage properly—you’ve been so tired.’ I squeeze her shoulder.
She gently strokes the feathers on the top of Deli’s head with her thumb. ‘I always check.’
‘I guess she flew out here to find you.’ I kiss her shoulder. She huddles into me, the dead bird still in her hands, crying silently as I stroke her back. I play with the hem of her shirt and the skin underneath it, then I slide my fingertips under the waistband of her jeans, the elastic of her underwear.
‘Why did you leave her out here?’ She sniffs into my chest.
‘Hmm?’
‘Why did you leave her on the floor?’
My jaw tenses and I take my hand out of her pants. ‘I thought you’d want to see her. I didn’t want to just… throw her out before you had a chance to say goodbye.’
She pushes back from me; looks searchingly into my eyes.
I throw up my hands. Why can’t she ever let anything be?
‘You could have picked her up off the floor at least.’ Her eyes flick back and forth between mine. ‘Did you want me to see her there?’
Jesus, what did I do to deserve this? ‘I thought you should see what happened. I thought you’d want to!’ It’s a thin lie, and I can’t look at her as I say it. I can still taste petrol.
Something changes in her face. She puts Deli gently down on the floor and stands up, her arms wrapped around her belly like she’s hugging herself.
‘Oh my God.’ Her chest rises and falls rapidly as she sucks in short breaths. She’s shaking.
I stand and step towards her, but she backs away.
She looks so scared.
‘What?’ I reach out to her. ‘What?’
‘You did it.’ She looks at the floor. ‘You killed her.’
I grit my teeth so hard I think they might crack. I spit words like bullets. ‘That’s ridiculous. Do you have any idea how long it took me to catch her for you? How hard I worked?’
She’s edging towards the door. Moves faster when I step towards her.
‘You killed her,’ she repeats under her breath. ‘You killed her.’ She’s still hugging herself.
‘Ava. Stop it!’ I bring my fist down on the kitchen counter. Glasses clink in the cabinet behind me.
‘You can’t have her.’
Tears cut a line down her cheek. She hugs her belly tighter and shakes her head like I’ve said something. ‘You can’t.’
She takes the keys from the bowl with a clatter, her hand shaking. I sigh and hang my head. Why does she have to make such a drama out of this?
I’m staring at the kitchen bench, tracing patterns in the wood grain as I hear the front door close. It doesn’t slam.
It’s not until I hear the engine starting that I look up.
The car keys are still in the bowl.
This diary belongs to Ava Olsen
I’m sorry. I’m sorry I had to make you wait. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a life yet.
When they let me out of here, I’ll leave. I don’t know where I’ll go yet, but without you there’s nothing for me here anymore, so I’ll go somewhere a baby can grow up and not have to live with my mistakes.
Next time, I’ll be ready.
Noah
Present Day
Do I knock?
Don’t be an idiot, Noah. I aim my foot next to the handle and kick hard. The door smashes open, and the force sends me stumbling into the room.
They’re on the lounge.
There’s a blanket over Kenna’s legs and Faulkner is pulling his arm back from underneath it. She’s crying, scrambling backwards as she pushes herself upright.
‘Look,’ Faulkner gets up and walks towards me. ‘She came over. She was an absolute mess. I got her cleaned up. She just needed a bit of looking after.’ His hands are raised next to his head as he shakes it, standing right in front of me. ‘I think that—’
I’m still holding my helmet and I smash it into his face, knocking him backwards. Blood runs from his nose into his mouth, staining his teeth in red streaks. He touches his upper lip and looks at me in shock.
‘Kenna. It’s time to go.’ I try to keep my eyes on them both at the same time. Kenna doesn’t seem to hear me. She’s picking up her bag, knees pulled close to her chest on the lounge.
Faulkner snarls and lunges towards me. I turn too slowly, and he catches me by the shoulders, driving me back into the wall. My head snaps backwards and my teeth clack together.
I smell petrol. The stink of it is everywhere. It’s in my eyes and on my clothes.
Mum is flapping around in a billowing shawl that catches the air like a cape. Stretched between her arms and over her back, the patterns look like feathers.
She is talking to herself, or me, it’s hard to tell.
‘Matches. Why can’t I ever find the matches? I swear—’
I’m sitting in the middle of her bedroom floor like she told me to. The floorboards are slick and the fumes rise around me. Drops fall from my hair onto the ground.
I hear the front door downstairs. Then footsteps.
Dad freezes in the doorway, looking at me on the floor, Mum flying around the room.
‘Jeannie?’
She looks at him, smiling. ‘Fire fixes everything, honey. Makes it all go away. Nothing left.’
He says nothing, but he picks me up with one strong hand and closes the door behind us.
Mum’s yelling.
He puts me in the shower, tells me to close my eyes as he rinses my hair. I do as I’m told. When it’s done, I feel clean and he dries me with my towel. The petrol leaves a rainbow smear on the shower floor.
‘You’re a good boy, Noah. You were very brave.’
I nod, not understanding.
‘Sometimes Mummy thinks things that are wrong. You need to help her.’
I nod again.
By Monday, he’s gone.
I drop my helmet. Faulkner tries twice to punch me in the ribs, but my bike jacket turns both hits into dull thuds. I shrug to the side and drive my fist into his jaw, grateful for the knuckle-guards in my gloves.
He thrashes at me. I push him off and turn my padded shoulder into the next blow. I grab him by the hair with my gloved hand and smack my other elbow into his face. His body collapses underneath him. He spits red and doesn’t try to get up.
I see movement out of the corner of my eye and turn, hands raised. Kenna’s mouth is a single line as she jumps forward, her hand clutched tight around a small knife—I can see glimpses of a red handle between her fingers. For half a second I think she’s trying to kill me before I see that she’s looking beyond me to the man on the floor.
I catch her, mid-step, grabbing her wrist. She thrashes in my arms, the tip of the blade scratching uselessly over my jacket. I hold her wrist tight and away from both of our faces.
Her scream fades into a sob as she collapses into my shoulder. I make her drop the knife, and I kick it away from Faulkner. Then I pick her up like a kid and carry her outside.
I take her to her car. The motorbike is around the corner, behind some trees. I’ll come back for it later. The storm has ended, leaving downed branches and streams still flushing the gutters, carrying mud and rubbish. The air smells cleaner.
I put Kenna in the passenger seat and clip a seatbelt over her. She doesn’t speak or look at me, and I don’t need her to. I take her bag from her lap and find the car keys. Because I’m used to checking, I also make sure that she has her phone and wallet before we leave. It’s not until we’ve been driving for several minutes that she speaks.
‘How did you know where I was?’ She’s looking out the window, knees still pulled up to her chest.
‘I got your voicemail. Figured you’d end up here sooner or later, looking for answers.’
She turns to me, leaning her head back against the window. ‘It was Mum’s fault. All of it.’ Her voice is cold. ‘She’s the reason Kahn’s in a wheelchair.’
‘She ran him over?’
‘No.’ Kenna closes her eyes, her head vibrating against the glass as I drive. ‘She played a trick on him and he…somehow he ended up getting hit by a car. That’s why she never came back to Kimba. She couldn’t live with herself after what she’d done.’ She pauses. ‘He’s going to hate me, because of her.’
‘Who is?’
‘Doctor Kahn.’ She closes her eyes and knocks the back of her head against the window with a thump. ‘I deserve it. I deserve all of it.’
‘Deserve what? Deserve him?’ I shake my head. ‘Anyway, that’s not why she left.’
She bangs her head again and I’m worried either it or the glass might crack. She looks like she’s about to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. I pull Ava’s medical file from inside my jacket and drop it in her lap.
Kenna’s mouth closes. She stares at the file for a moment, then picks it up. We drive in silence as she scans the pages in the flicker and fade of the streetlights. It’s not a thick folder, and it doesn’t take her long to read through it.
‘She was pregnant?’ Kenna looks up, her eyes shimmering.
I nod. ‘Yeah. Until the crash.’
Kenna feels around at her feet for something, then produces an old leather-bound book with long straps dangling behind it like the tentacles of a jellyfish. She places it on top of the medical file and flicks from the back, skipping past blank pages until she finds one with writing on it.
‘There was something in here.’ Kenna scans with her finger. ‘I’m sorry I had to make you wait…I couldn’t give you a life yet. When they let me out of here I’ll leave. I’ll go somewhere a baby can grow up and not have to live with my mistakes.’ Kenna’s voice sounds strangled. ‘She meant to crash the bike. She meant to…’
I say nothing. We’re both thinking it. Ava chose not to have her baby with Faulkner. She chose to leave and start again. The weight of a life never lived settles on us like an iron cloud. There are too many questions to ever start asking. Instead, we sit in silence and let it sink in.
‘She wasn’t running away. She was running towards something.’ Kenna has her eyes closed again when she finally speaks, and I’m not sure whether she’s talking to me or not.
But I want to tell her: I think I understand what Ava felt. The kind of pain that drove her; the stupid things she did to feel happy. I know about the need to escape your family. I’ve had my plan for years—ever since Kahn and I came up with it. A way to get away and start my own life without just abandoning Mum like Dad did. A way to make sure she’s okay.
I want to tell Kenna everything. But the plan isn’t to be shared. It’s the only thing that’s really mine.
I tell her this instead.
‘My mum tried to burn me alive when I was four years old.’ I keep my eyes on the road, but I hear her sniff and go quiet. ‘Dad was out, and she sat me on the floor and poured petrol over me and told me to wait quietly while she found the matches. She almost killed me, and it’s not her fault. She can’t help it—it’s just the way she is.’ I swallow. ‘Dad found me and cleaned me up. Then, a few days later, he left. I guess it just got too much for him.’
‘He just left you with her?’ she asks between sniffs. ‘After that?’
I nod. ‘And I get it. Every day I have to think about looking after her—making sure there’s food in the house and the washing gets done and that she doesn’t kill herself or attack the postman. I’ve never…Well, so many things. I mean I’ve never had a sleepover. Ever. I can’t have anyone over, and she needs me every single day.’
‘Do you hate your dad?’
There’s an energy between Kenna and me, a focus that tells me this moment is important. I pull over to the side of the road.
‘Doctor K. says hate’s just lazy thinking.’ I close my eyes to look for the words. ‘I’m angry with him, but I don’t hate him. I get wanting to leave. I really, really get it. I just…I need to make sure she’s okay.’
‘Even after what she did.’ She doesn’t say it as a question.
‘She’s done a lot of things, but she’s getting there. She’s a lot better than she used to be. Maybe one day soon I can go away for a bit. Have a holiday.’ I smile at the thought.
‘I like your mum. I could watch her.’
I look her up and down, this tiny wisp of a girl, clutching her sunburnt legs together and offering to look after my maniac.
‘Thanks.’ I almost put ‘no’ before it. ‘She likes you too.’ I look at my hands, still wearing gloves, and I rip the Velcro and pull them off by the fingertips. ‘He’s not going to hate you, Kenna. It’s Kahn. He’ll understand.’
‘No, he won’t.’ She doesn’t cry this time. Her voice is soft and faraway. ‘It’s my fault.’
I shake my head. ‘It doesn’t matter what your Mum did—’
‘I killed her.’
That shuts me up. I close my mouth and look at Kenna. Her chest is shaking and her eyes are closed.
‘I killed her,’ she says it again. Like a balloon deflating, her shoulders fall from her ears and her feet slide from the seat to the ground. She’s boneless, like liquid, her eyes watching a bug crawl on the outside of the window.
‘How?’
‘I’m pretty sure I started the fire.’ She speaks without emotion like she’s in a trance. ‘I didn’t mean to. I was just out for a smoke. I don’t even know if we had a fight. I’ve tried to remember, but it’s just blank.’
Kenna closes her eyes, as if this time the memory might come flooding back, then opens them again and sighs.
‘I went down to the bush at the end of our street, and I walked until I got to this big rock that I always stopped at. It’s actually not that far in, but it’s far enough that you can’t see or hear people or cars and you can kind of forget that they’re there. It’s like you’re the only person in the world for a little while.
‘I only had a couple of smokes left, I do remember that. I wanted to make them last because I didn’t know when I’d be able to get more.’ She runs her thumbs over her fingertips like she can still feel the pack in her hands. ‘I sat there on the rock—I was angry about something, I think—and smoked them both.’
She turns and looks at me, her eyes wide. ‘I don’t remember if I put them out, or if I just let them fall down into the bush below. I’ve gone back over that day so many times, and I remember smoking—I just don’t remember putting them out.’
I keep looking at her, holding her eyes until everything else fades away.
‘It was that afternoon the fires started, somewhere down in that bush at the end of our street. Mum sent me to my friend Hannah’s house because the fires were getting too close. We’d done that before a couple of times, and it’d always been okay. I didn’t think about it much. I was glad to get out of there. I was happy about it. It was exciting.’
She pushes herself up in her seat and chews a fingernail. ‘That’s the last time I ever saw Mum. I drove away, happy to get out of the house and leave her behind, and she died sometime that night.’ She looks away. ‘I killed my mum, so whatever happens to me is fine. Some people don’t deserve to be happy.’
She goes quiet.
‘That’s why you went back there? To Faulkner’s?’
She shrugs. I pull the car away from the kerb and we spend the rest of the trip in silence. I drive to my place. She can get herself the couple of minutes home from there.
I park in the driveway, hoping the sound of the engine doesn’t wake Mum, and I turn to face Kenna. She’s fiddling with a loose thread on the side of her seat.
‘You don’t know you started that fire.’
She locks eyes with me. ‘You don’t know I didn’t.’
‘So, what’s your plan, make sure you’re miserable, just in case? Let other people hurt you? Will that make everything better?’
Kenna’s eyes flick over my face. She unclips her seatbelt and leans over the handbrake. Then she kisses me.
I’m too surprised to react at first. Then I run my fingers through her hair and kiss her back. She tastes like rainwater and beer. Her nose brushes mine and her tongue slides over my lip. She grabs my hand and pulls it towards her breast.
I pull away first, and she looks up at me, wide-eyed and confused.
‘No one hates you,’ I pant. ‘Figure out how to not hate yourself.’
I open the door, grab my helmet from the back seat and go inside, leaving her in the driveway.
Kenna
Present Day
Rob and Abbey are waiting for me in the lounge room when I open the front door. I stop when I see them, sitting at the dining table holding each other’s hands. They look so relieved. Abbey runs across the room to hug me. I can tell she’s been crying.
