Tim Winton - Eyrie

Neither he nor Gemma spoke until they reached the swamp, now a recreation precinct of bicycle paths, pine-log gazebos and mown lawns under floodlights.

Fuck, she said.

Yeah.

Go back, she said. Chuck a u-ey.

A little dazed, Keely swung about and headed uphill at a crawl. Number 14 was gone. He idled out the front of a shrunken Tuscan villa behind whose wrought-iron gates stood a Chinese 4x4.

I don’t care about ours, she said. But I wanted yours to still be there.

Well. It isn’t.

A sensor light came on. He pulled away, heard her counting houses. But in the end they didn’t need to count. For there it was, unmistakeable.

Wouldn’t it rip ya? she said quietly.

The old Buck place had every light on, curtains askew, music pounding from open windows. On the parched front lawn a slew of vehicles, some on blocks. A dog flew out, flashing its teeth. From the porch a woman called it back with a foul stream of imprecations.

That’ll be why they changed the name, said Gemma. So more boongs could move in.

Stop it, he said, pulling away.

I wish we hadn’t come.

Well, we did.

It’s all different.

No, he said with pleasure. Your place is still the same.

Fuck you, she said lighting up a fag. Go fuck yourself.

He drove homeward in the stormy silence and as the lights of the container terminal rose before them he heard her weeping in the back.

Instead of settling for budget-brand muesli, Keely sat in Bub’s and ordered his morning usual. While he was waiting he fired up the newly charged laptop for a casual look at what needed doing. And a single glance was sufficient. He slapped the thing shut with so much force a woman cried out at the next table and all he could offer was a grimace of apology.

Keely thought he’d seen porn but he’d never encountered anything quite like this before. When breakfast came he ate it blinking dumbly at the battered Acer which had suddenly taken on a radioactive aura. Between that and the nervous glances from the poor woman alongside him, he wasn’t inclined to linger and the outing was an expensive washout.

Once he got the machine home he found the software was registered to Carly M. Fairlight, but he doubted she was the gonzo-porn enthusiast. He spent the rest of the day dumping files and running clean-up programs. He wondered about Gemma’s mood last night, whether she’d stumbled on this cache — or worse, found Kai with it. That was an ugly thought. But no. If she’d seen that shit she’d have pitched the thing off the tenth floor already, wouldn’t she? Maybe he was a resentful puritan — wasn’t that how the shock-jocks portrayed him? But that stuff was foul. He wished he hadn’t seen it.

Eventually he got the computer running smoothly, and for good measure found he could pirate other folks’ wireless networks right here in the building, and by way of exorcism or whatever sacrament applied to soiled machines, he wiped it down, inside and out, with antibacterial handwash.

In the afternoon he left the front door open but nobody knocked. He made a fiery and extremely cheap vegetarian curry and ate it at dusk in a virtuous sweat.

At eight the phone rang. He was expecting his sister or his mother, but it was Gemma. She was subdued; she sounded hoarse. Kai was being difficult. She had a shift to do. Would he mind coming over for an hour?

He met her on the gallery. She was dressed for work, made up a little too vividly. She looked wretched and spent.

You could have come by, he said.

I didn’t think I should, she murmured shakily.

It’s fine, Gem.

I’m just a stupid bitch.

What did he do, that bloke? What’d he say to you?

Somethin nasty. Somethin a bloke’ll say.

You won’t tell me?

She shook her head.

Last night.

It doesn’t matter.

I just needed somethin nice, she said. Somewhere I could remember bein happy.

It took some absorbing. After everything she’d told him, everything he’d seen for himself, Blackboy Crescent was where she’d been happiest? He didn’t say anything. She looked too tired.

Just sit with him, will you, Tom? Don’t make him do anythin. Just be there.

He nodded. She gathered herself, pecked him on the cheek and went.

Inside 1010 the TV was off but the flat was a mess. Kai was in bed flipping through the raptor book. As if his being difficult were directed at Gemma alone. Keely greeted him but the boy did not respond. There were blue pools like bruises beneath his eyes. Keely resisted the urge to natter brightly at the kid. He did only what Gemma had asked, pushed her pillows against the wall and sat with him.

The boy closed the book and sank deeper. He tilted the thing up on his chest and surveyed the cover. It was a close-up image of an eagle’s eye — black-rimmed, stark, the iris a web of yellow-bronze — and Kai wasn’t merely glancing at it but peering deeply, chewing his lips, wheezing in fervent concentration. Keely tried not to stare but it was difficult. The kid seemed to mesmerize himself, sink into the interlacing layers of the bird’s iris.

Eventually the boy’s eyelids began to droop and flutter. He seemed to struggle against sleep as if stalked by it, and this skirmish went on for a minute or so, until the book began to waver. At the last moment, as if to save himself from falling, the boy reached aside and took Keely’s arm. And was gone. Keely caught the book with his spare hand. Saw him down. Tried not to hold his breath. Watched him sleep.

He woke on the floor in his own place with the slider open to the baking wind and his legs stippled with mosquito bites. His face hurt, his mouth was woolly, but he didn’t remember drinking anything. In the bathroom mirror he saw what amounted to a shiner. He had no memory of hurting himself. But there was still an eerie sparkle behind his eyes. A sequin fizz. It took a full minute to unscramble the label on the toothpaste.

In the café Bub raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Keely drank one coffee only and paid with shrapnel. He was turning to leave when Bub sent down a double-shot on the house. He waved in sheepish gratitude and tried to savour it. But he thought of the boy, his dry little hand on his arm. And the bird’s yellow eye. And the troubling fact of the wide-open door.

After a few moments Bub emerged from the kitchen and slid a tall glass of apple juice onto the table.

Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel’s cookie.

I am that. And thanks.

Tom, said Bub, smiling at the black eye, you’re not the fighting type.

You think?

The kitchen bell chimed. Bub clapped him on the shoulder and headed back.

They gave him thirty bucks for the iPod and ninety for his laptop. He suspected that without the shiner he’d have gotten more, but he was content enough afterwards, trolling op-shops with cash in his pocket, looking for something to please the boy. He started at Save the Children, moved on to Oxfam, then the Vinnies. But they had nothing he was after. Then at the last stop, closest to home, he scored. He walked out of the Good Sammies with a perfectly serviceable game of Scrabble and change from a fiver.

At home, tucked into the grille of his security door, was a fair pencil rendering of a mudlark. He pulled it out and went on to Gemma’s. At his knock he saw the tiny moon of the peephole flash a second. She pulled the door back on its chain and peered out warily.

Just me, he said.

Christ, what happened?

I walked into a cliché, he muttered.

I’m serious.

It’s nothing. Really. And look, he said, holding up the battered box.