Chapter 22
EVAN
Chrissy’s door was ajar. The kid was sitting back in his desk chair watching a chat conversation roll up the screen, Metallica blasting.
The room smelt of sweat and Lynx body spray.
I was so used to coming in and turning the music down I didn’t even have to look for the knob, did it by feel as I sat on the bed.
I steadfastly avoided looking at the cum stains on the sheets beside me and said, ‘Hey, birthday boy.’
‘Hey.’ The kid didn’t look up. Spaced out.
He was resting one of our nice crystal tumblers on his belly and sipping from it now and then, something that, from the smell, was probably vodka and Red Bull.
The blatant underage drinking was typical Chris.
He was in trouble for the paintball shooting.
Might as well double down and defiantly drink my stolen vodka in our special glasses right in front of me. ‘Mum’s pissed at you.’
‘Mmm. Well, she’ll get over me abandoning her to go to work faster than she’ll get over you shooting one of your friends in the face, Chris,’ I said. ‘She just showed me the photo. That kid’s not going to school on Monday.’
‘Yeah, so what?’
‘So we need to talk about today. And last night.’
Chris shook his head, blew air out through his thin lips. ‘Man, this is rich.’
‘I know you were in Redbelly last night,’ I said.
‘No, you don’t.’ His words were firm and slow. ‘Because I wasn’t there.’
‘There is only one reason I can think of that you’d lie to me about being there,’ I said. ‘Because you’re afraid of being in trouble. For underage drinking, or for being with someone you’re not supposed to be with, or for anything else that might have gone down.’
‘Dad.’
‘Someone who looks exactly like you caught an Uber into Redbelly last night, just before eight, and bought a drink at the bar. They had a good hard look at the murder victim. That person—’
‘Jesus, fuck!’ Chris suddenly roared, throwing down his drink.
The crystal glass thunked loudly on the desktop, sloshing liquid over some papers.
There he was: the angry, cornered Chris.
The shyest abandoned dog at the shelter, which, if pushed hard enough, could become the most savage creature in the building.
He’d always been like that. Bottled up fury.
‘Would you listen to yourself? I give you an answer to your question and you just keep going at me like I didn’t answer at all. Why am I even talking to you?’
‘Where did you go, if you didn’t go to Redbelly last night?’
‘To Liam’s.’
‘Call Liam on your phone right now,’ I said. ‘Put it on speaker.’
‘No.’
‘Open your Uber app and show it to me.’
‘Make me, bitch!’
Fury sizzled in me. Because I bottled my rage, too, but over the years the lid that kept it down had become old and degraded. I told myself to loosen my grip on the edge of the bed. ‘Do you have any idea what would have happened to me if I’d called my father a “bitch” at your age?’
‘Don’t start down that road.’ He waved a hand at me, eyes back on the screen. ‘You think he’s a terrible person. I get it. I’ve been hearing it for years, how terrible Pop was to you and Uncle Rus. I’ve got news for you: everyone thinks their parents are terrible people. It’s part of life.’
‘Chris.’
‘He never burnt you with cigarettes. He never left you to starve.’
I was starting to shake with rage.
‘He’s never told you that he loves you,’ my son went on. ‘Too bad. Get over it.’
I blew out a measured breath.
‘You’ve got no empathy for the guy at all,’ Chris said. ‘His parents died and they put him in a boys’ home at six years old. Do you know what used to happen to little kids in those homes back in the day?’
I didn’t answer.
‘What about if you, like, thought about Pop as a guy. As just some guy. You’d see his story is actually really sad, Dad. His wife killed herself and left him with two young sons to raise all alone,’ Chris went on. ‘Can’t you have any forgiveness?’
‘I can’t believe I’m listening to this,’ I murmured.
‘You ought to go on TikTok and look up “intergenerational trauma”, and, like, see what you think about him after ten fucking minutes of self-education.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Check out “covert narcissism” while you’re at it.’
Empathy. Intergenerational trauma. Covert narcissism.
I was biting the inside of my cheek without knowing it, only realised when I tasted the blood.
I spotted the ancestry DNA kit box on the edge of the desk, by a pile of tissues and an empty bowl lined with furry mould and old lumps of puffed rice.
My pulse quickened as I reached over and plucked it up.
‘I’m sitting here wondering if this isn’t all connected, Chris.
If maybe you went to Redbelly because you were meeting my father there.
The Redbelly pub is a weird place for a kid to hang out.
It’s usually locals and older people there.
But it’s halfway between Mangrove Mountain and Maroota, and here you are, suddenly a little spokesperson for Arthur Powder. ’
‘I’m disengaging from this conversation.’ Chris sighed.
‘You know you’re not supposed to be alone with your grandfather.’
‘Why?’ He looked at me, his eyes big and wild and defiant. ‘What happened at the farm was my fault.’
I put the ancestry kit box in my lap so I could hold my head. I had known, deep down inside, that Chris felt that way about an incident that had occurred between him and my father a couple of years earlier. But I’d never actually heard him say it.
It had been the anniversary of Russell’s coming out.
November. Heading into Christmas. A touchy time for any toxic family.
Arthur had been calling me drunk every few nights, ranting about Russell, wanting to know if I’d known, if I’d ever had any hint.
Wanting to explain to me that it was our mother’s suicide when Russell was eight and I was four that had caused all of this.
Because she’d known that shooting herself in one of the back sheds on that particular day, at that particular time, would mean that Russell would be the one to get home from school early and find her, and not Dad.
The suicide had warped Russell’s mind, caused him to be unable to tolerate having a beautiful, loving, nuclear family.
‘He had to find a way to fuck it up,’ Dad had rambled.
‘This whole gay thing is just the biggest way he could think of to drop the bomb and blow up his family.’
‘Dad, I’m pretty sure that’s not how homosexuality works,’ I’d said dryly. ‘At all.’
I couldn’t tell, during these calls, whether Arthur was crying or not.
His voice sounded husky and thin and worryingly old.
When he’d begun asking about Chris, I’d relented and suggested Chris go out there for a day to help him with some mowing.
My thinking had been that Arthur was learning something.
That he was seeing the error of his ways.
That maybe he was feeling some actual human emotions, like remorse, and regret, and sadness, and aching through the great empty silence that Rus had left in his life, the same way I was.
It was far too late for Arthur to be a decent father to Russell and me.
But maybe there was some way he could heal—and through that, I could heal—by his forming a healthy relationship with Chris.
I’d sent Chris, defying Delle, who had misgivings about the whole thing.
A mother’s instinct. Chris had lasted at my father’s farm for about an hour before calling me, near hysterical, to come pick him up.
In a series of breathless confessions, Chris told us that Arthur had taken him straight to the back sheds almost as soon as I departed after dropping him off.
The old man told the boy the lawns could wait, because he wanted help to cull his entire coop full of chickens so he could pluck and gut and freeze them.
The old man had just bought a new deep freezer second hand, and he was sick of caring for the birds.
As my thirteen-year-old son stood and watched, my father started grabbing and beheading chickens with an axe on an old sawn-down slab of tree stump, tossing the dead birds aside, working through them swiftly.
All the while he encouraged Chris to participate, getting steadily angrier and angrier when he wouldn’t.
Chris’s reaction to the scene had sent Arthur into a flaming, spitting rage, and he’d brandished the axe at my kid, bloody and manic.
Delle and I sat numbly and listened to the tale in the car on the side of the road not far from my father’s house.
My biggest concern in sending Chris to his grandfather’s to mow the lawn had been the possibility of snakes.
I spent that whole night shifting between Chris’s bedroom and mine and Delle’s.
Delle was in a fury, and I was trying to convince her that hunting and killing animals on farms was a perfectly natural activity, something we’d done an awful lot as kids, and that my father had been well-meaning but deeply mistaken about Chris’s ability to witness something like that.
In Chris’s room, I just held the boy, who shook and cried from sundown to sun-up.
‘What happened was not your fault,’ I said now. ‘But it was a lesson, Chris. That there’s nothing for you to gain from looking backwards into our family. Okay? I’d really like it if you didn’t do this ancestry kit thing.’
‘Nope.’
‘I am very happy to replace this gift with something else, Chris.’ I told myself not to plead. To hint at the importance of it all. Like showing fear to a dog. ‘I’ll get you a PS5.’
‘Get me a PS5 anyway.’ Chris snorted.