Act of Grace Page 6

  When he sat next to her, their arms touching, he didn’t look at her; instead he followed her gaze across the yard. ‘When will this end?’ he said, as they took in the groups dotted around the stunted trees, a Year Eight inflating his empty juice box and laying it on the ground, creating a loud pop as he stamped his foot on it, briefly stunning the mingling bored. It was a holding pen, high school. There’d been a short-lived spurt of enthusiasm in Year Seven, repeating itself briefly each year after – they showed up in January with their books covered in contact, margins ruled for at least sixty pages. They all had the same thought – New year, clean slate – though each sought a different outcome: I’m going to be popular, I’m going to be taken seriously, I’m going to get straight As. But before Term One had even wound up, they were all back in their old skins: class idiots, loners, sluts and so on. And for the most part, they stayed stuck, dutiful in their banal personas. Except the Messiah, of course.

  Robbie looked at her wrist, as if checking a watch. ‘Two years and nine months,’ she replied.

  A week later, he kissed her in the vacant block behind the school. They skipped sixth period and squeezed through a gap in the fence, sneaking down a laneway, to where he’d stashed a bong in a clump of grass. It was a regular hangout for the Year Elevens and Twelves, and a bunch of flattened cardboard VB boxes had been laid out as makeshift seats, around a midden of lighters, bottlecaps, empty chip packets and cigarette butts. Robbie watched as Nik took a wooden bowl and a pair of scissors from his schoolbag and transferred a mix of tobacco and dope into the bowl, pumping the scissors into the grain. His sleeves were rolled up and Robbie saw an ace of diamonds inked on the inside of his wrist, a home job, the blue blotched where someone had blown the ink too hard. He packed a cone and flicked his eyes – blue like the ring of a gas flame – up at Robbie, and her heart kicked so hard she had to look away.

  He passed the bong, producing a lighter and handing it over like it was a knife, safe end first, and Robbie dipped her head over the glass vase, angling the lighter. The cone crackled as smoke unfurled upwards into her mouth like fog off a small black pond. She closed her eyes, feeling it stack inside her chest and move out, flooding her body. After Nik did a cone, he leaned across and kissed her on the neck. No one had ever started there before.

  *

  In the nursing home, Robbie’s father turned off the lights. The nurses let him do it before bed. They said it relaxed him, made him more manageable. ‘Off he goes,’ a nurse said to Robbie and her mother and brother one night, all of them watching as he flicked the switches, a kind of collapsing darkness following him. The nurses turned the lights back on after he passed by, and once he was in bed, they pulled up the sides of the cot, latching them, so he couldn’t get out and do it all over again.

  Danny was forty-eight when he got dementia; Robbie was ten and Otis, seven. The doctor said he was too young for dementia, but he got it anyway. Danny had been a small-time boxer back when he and their mum met, but he would not let her say anything about it to the doctor. He said the doc would judge him, and she agreed. ‘Of course he will. It’s a stupid thing to do.’

  They’d still teased each other back then, had a laugh. But nothing would make their father trust the ‘system’ – that was how he described it. The system was basically everything: hospitals, cops, schools, the government. He said if Claire, their mum, hadn’t been there at his first medical appointment, he would have been made to do a breathalyser test. He’d always been like that, a bit paranoid. When Otis broke his arm coming off the neighbour’s trampoline, Danny wouldn’t let Claire take him to the hospital. He claimed they’d work out who he was – ‘or what’, he said contemptuously – and next thing, Human Services would be at the door. But the swelling didn’t go down, and when Otis got a temperature, Claire drove him to Emergency. Robbie stayed home with Danny, watching her father pace, the townhouse heavy with a sick, scared feeling.

  Before the illness, Danny had been a caretaker at a private boys’ school in Hawthorn. They liked his being Aboriginal. Fancied they were doing their bit, hiring him. ‘Half-Aborigine,’ he pointed out to a teacher there who prided herself on including the Dreamtime in her religion classes. ‘Maybe less. And only in blood,’ he added. She gave him a lecture on the ‘all-encompassing spirit of Aboriginality’, that he ought to be ‘100 per cent proud’ of who he was. Her name was Mrs Eckersley.

  Mrs Fucking Eckersley. There were still times when those three words popped into Robbie’s head, the focus of a rage she couldn’t let go of, as if in her mind she’d decided Mrs Fucking Eckersley had made her father sick.

  At home the family had gotten to know her – at least they imagined they did. Danny would fill them in on what Mrs Eckersley had said during the day and their mother would act it out, popping a grape or a cherry tomato in each cheek, making up how the religion teacher spoke (an odd mix of posh and squirrel-like) and how she walked. Robbie’s dad would snort, laughing at her mum, but also in relief. It became a ritual.

  ‘And she said, “Aborigines are very good at football, aren’t they?”’ Danny reported one night to the three of them. Otis frowned, too young to understand, worried this might affect his basketball ambitions.

  ‘You’re joking?’ Claire said, her face incredulous.

  ‘Nope,’ Danny replied, shaking his head. He explained that she’d sung it out to him when she was on yard duty and a group of students were walking past, bouncing a footy.

  Claire laughed, telling Robbie and Otis their father couldn’t kick a goal to save himself. ‘You,’ she said, pointing to Otis, ‘take after my side of the family.’

  ‘What about Dad’s boxing?’ Robbie said defensively, keenly aware that she did not take after her mother’s side of the family in this respect.

  Claire smiled at Danny, a teasing look on her face. ‘I never said your father was a good boxer.’ Danny narrowed his eyes in mock anger. ‘Your father’s only talent in the ring,’ Claire continued, ‘was getting out of the way.’ To demonstrate, she wriggled her arms and legs like the tentacles of an octopus, wobbling around the kitchen until Danny grabbed her, pulling her close.

  ‘You, on the other hand . . .’ he said gruffly, as she snuggled into him. Then, looking at Otis, he nodded. ‘Your mother’s right, you take after her side. You’ve got talent.’ Otis beamed.

  It was clear to Robbie that her father loved Otis best. No, that wasn’t quite right: it was more that when he looked at Robbie, he saw something of himself, and didn’t like it. Otis resembled Claire – his skin fair, his eyes blue and his hair a rusty brown – while Robbie was darker, her eyes owlish like his. When Danny looked at his son, he had hope, a buoying sense that his kin would get through the system unimpeded. Robbie couldn’t articulate this, but she intuited it, the same way she understood that she gave her father a sinking feeling, an unshakeable sadness, a miserly sense of history repeating. Claire could see it too, and tried to counter it, gathering Robbie into a hug when Danny reached for Otis. But Robbie never held it against her father. She held it against the world. Against Mrs Fucking Eckersley.

  *

  The Messiah’s townhouse was red brick with a split-level roof. A panel of yellow dimpled glass beside the front door shone at night when the hallway light was on. The street was one-sided, the houses lined up in a row, facing a large concrete wall buffering a highway on the other side. The first time Robbie visited, Nik let himself in with a key he kept around his neck and led her up the stairs. His bedroom was dark and smoky, with the curtains drawn. It took a while for her eyes to adjust, making out the posters of fluorescent fractals on the wall and the various decks and amplifiers from which tiny blue lights glowed. The screensaver on his computer was a vortex of shapes and lines, constantly transforming.

  Then, as night drew in, people appeared in his room, like apparitions. Nik, his skin transparent and otherworldly like an axolotl’s, greeted them, measuring out grams on kitchen scales, wrapping buds in al-foil, hair in his eyes. Th
e bong was passed around and the doorbell rang again, and it was only later that Robbie wondered how they all got in. But for a time, as in a dream, she did not question it.

  In a lull of people making their communion, Nik took out two plastic ziplock bags, one filled with white pills, the other with perforated paper. ‘Mitsubishis,’ he said, taking out a pill and breaking it in two, putting one half in Robbie’s mouth, another in his. ‘One of the best batches I’ve had.’ He slid open the other bag and carefully ripped a tiny square off along the dots. ‘Purple ohms,’ he said, cutting it in half with nail scissors, licking the thin blades afterward. ‘Try and keep it on your tongue for as long as possible.’

  The candyflip was good, coming on in waves. As people visited, Nik looked after them and even gave out gear on tick, while Robbie talked, her voice rushing out. She trailed her finger along the inside of people’s arms and felt the approving glances of Nik’s friends. ‘So you’re Robbie O’Farrell,’ one of them said, and she understood he’d been aware of her for a long time, perhaps longer than she of him. Robbie had a reputation; she knew this. She and Tash were known for their wildness and their aloof, tenuous connections to the machinations of school life. For a stint the two of them regularly chromed, a couple of times wandering around the schoolyard with silver paint splattered around their mouths, and the year before Robbie had been suspended for a week when she revealed her art project, two mirrors titled ‘Go Fuck Yourself’, one with a padded hole at crotch level, the other with an erect rubber dildo sticking out. Had she done it for attention? Her teachers said she had, but Robbie didn’t think so. For the most part, she’d wanted just that, for everyone to go fuck themselves.

  But with the pill and acid, the anger slipped a bit. It didn’t disappear, more drifted, gave her some space. In Nik’s bedroom, someone put on some trance and she danced next to the speakers. She shared cigarettes, cradling and cupping them like lit candles, and when everyone was gone, she put her head in Nik’s lap and slipped her hands inside his T-shirt sleeves, pulling him lower. His upside-down lips on hers; the two of them tasting each other for the longest time, fingers electric. And then a pulse between their pelvises, as though they were magnetised. Robbie had had sex before – if that’s what you call a fifteen-year-old lying on top of you in a playground at night, his body jerking towards a sticky ending. But this was different: the two of them moving so slowly that Robbie kept forgetting where she was, so she became less a body and more a meandering feeling, until, without warning, she and Nik seemed to align. Oh my god, Robbie heard herself saying over and over, oh my god, like the pleasure was splintering, coming out of her in a multitude of ways, an explosion of pink.

  Later, when they were lying naked in Nik’s single bed, Robbie sat up and opened his curtains. The night was almost done. She propped Nik’s window open with a cricket bat. In the yard next door, a black-and-white cat was knotted in sleep. Nik stayed in the shadow, rolling a joint, while Robbie watched light slowly pour into people’s gardens, the outlines of chairs, plants and a swimming pool filling with colour.

  *

  Before Danny got sick, Robbie and Otis used to walk to his work after school. It was about six blocks, and Otis would dribble his basketball the whole way. He was so constant, so persistent, that Robbie would worry when he skipped a bounce and turn to check. They passed the 7-Eleven, slowing down to stare wistfully at the kids buying Slurpees. Sometimes, on really hot days, they’d get money to buy their own, and Robbie would discreetly wander the aisle with her cup, filling it with chocolate bars or sherbert sticks – once a pair of sunglasses, good ones – before returning to the Slurpee machine to cover the stolen merch with the icy drink. It scared the shit out of Otis, the poor kid trembling at the counter when she paid for their drinks. Don’t tell Dad, Robbie would warn afterwards, and Otis never did. It had been a triumph, nicking those sunnies. A victory over the system.

  They had to wait a long time at the fancy iron school gates for him. A couple of the buildings were old and solemn-looking, with arches, towers and turrets like out of a Dungeons & Dragons book, while on the other side of the oval was a dome-shaped building made from multicoloured bricks and gold-tinted glass. It shimmered in the light like spilt petrol. Her dad said it was the gym. ‘When I turn the lights out in that building,’ he told her, pointing to another modern building, ‘I’m almost done.’ And so, every afternoon after school, Robbie would watch the building while Otis practised his dribbling up and down the footpath. The windows were not like normal windows, in neat rows; they were clustered together in groups, each group making the shape of a fish, and when Danny turned the lights off, it was like the fish were diving down, following one another into the deep.

  Some afternoons a school bus would park at the kerb and the students would pile onto the footpath, lacrosse sticks poking from their enormous bags, socks crimping down their calves. They were loud and smelled kind of pungent, and Otis would stop bouncing his basketball, moving in close to Robbie, the two of them watching as cars – mostly silver or black 4WDs, the odd bullet-shaped sportscar – slid in, the mums winding down the passenger windows and leaning over, glossy-lipped. ‘Hi Nathan, hi Cory, hi Thomas,’ the women would chime, the boys chorusing back, ‘Hi Mrs Button,’ or ‘Hi Mrs Carrier,’ or ‘Hi Mrs Horton,’ while one of them would get in the car, his ears burning as he slipped down in his seat. Robbie caught sight of Otis once, his mouth open in the same way it was when they watched TV, like the screws on his jaw had been loosened, and she realised she probably looked like that too. From then on she made a point of not staring, jabbing Otis in the ribs with her elbow to stop him too.

  Occasionally, if Danny was in a good mood when he finished his shift, he’d bring them biscuits from the janitors’ room and then shadowbox on the way home, pretending to try to pummel Robbie’s and Otis’s shadows with his fists. They’d run and squeal, Robbie slowing down hopefully, taking her father’s embrace when she could get it.

  A few times, though, Danny was in an inscrutable rage when he met them at the gate. Once, he appeared carrying two plastic supermarket bags filled with books. He barely looked at the two of them. ‘Let’s go,’ he said curtly.

  When halfway down the street the handles on one bag tore, the bottom thumping on the footpath, he swung his boot back, about to kick it, but stopped himself. He gathered the bag up, holding it from underneath, while Robbie and Otis stole nervous glances at each other. In a moment of absentmindedness Otis bounced the basketball and they both froze, expecting their father to turn on them, but he didn’t. Just kept walking.

  At home, Danny waited till Claire arrived before spilling the contents of the bags onto the table. Curious, Robbie looked at them. There were about a dozen books, with titles like Finding Your Path in the Dreamtime, The Rainbow Spirit in Creation, The Aboriginal Gift, Totem Animal Spirit Journey. Mrs Eckersley (‘Call me Susan, Danny’) had left them in his cleaning closet. Claire gaped at them and started to laugh.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ Danny snapped. He rubbed his eyes, kneading his fingers into his sockets. ‘It’s like, it’s like – I don’t know. It’s like sexual harassment or something.’

  Claire put her hand over her mouth, trying to stop. ‘I’m sorry, hon, seriously I am,’ she managed to splutter. Danny sighed. He began to pack the books back into the bags, snatching Aboriginal Awakening out of Robbie’s hands, while in the courtyard the backboard vibrated repeatedly as Otis practised his shots.

  Later that evening, over dinner, Danny told them that Mrs Eckersley had asked him to speak to her Year Nines about ‘his culture’ and the Dreamtime. ‘They are very interested,’ she’d said.

  ‘I told her I didn’t know anything about the Dreamtime,’ he said. ‘Next thing I know there’s those bloody books in my cupboard.’

  ‘Maybe you should complain?’ Claire said.

  ‘What do I say?’ he asked. ‘I can’t say, “Hey, this woman is discriminating against me,” can I?’

  She shook her he
ad. ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I can’t say she’s a racist, can I?’ he continued.

  She shook her head again.

  Danny banged the table with his fist. ‘Jesus Christ, Claire, I’m fucking damned if I do and damned if I don’t.’ Robbie lit up inside at that word, fucking; she played with it silently, turning it over in her mouth. She didn’t often hear her dad swear.

  Claire gave her a sharp look, before turning back to Danny. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? It doesn’t matter what other people think?’

  Once or twice at Robbie’s school there had been a special assembly where the principal would talk about bullying, how words can hurt, that sticks and stones isn’t accurate, that kind of thing. But Robbie had never needed that lesson. She had her father, and she could practically see the welts and dints that words left in his skin. It was possible she saw it better than anyone, even her mother. For Danny reared up when Claire said that, his eyes flaring. ‘Doesn’t it?’ He pointed to the plastic bags on the floor. ‘Did you have to carry these books home? Do you have your own little spirit guide at work?’

  Claire reached across the table for his hands but he withdrew them. ‘I’m not saying it’s easy, but —’

  ‘No, it’s not fucking easy!’ Danny stood up. He was big suddenly, towering over the table, the three of them. ‘It’s not fucking easy! Everywhere I go, it turns into something. I don’t see anyone else being told to get in touch with their inner fucking leprechaun. Do you?’ The three of them shook their heads as one, and Danny dropped back, recognising the obedience he was demanding, the fear he was instilling. He put his hand over his face.

  ‘It’s okay, my love,’ said Claire, reaching out again, but he warded her off with his other hand, shaking his head.