Deborah Forster

My mother once hid a boy in our shed to save him from a beating. Fred Jones, his old man, arrived at our place after his son, breathless, red and beery. He loomed at our side gate like a beast quivering with the scent of prey. We had no trees in the street or grass and sounds were held by the houses surrounded by a sea of dirt, wire and weeds. Dad liked rusty old petrol containers, and they were grouped here and there, I thought in families. The shed was a loose collection of old timber. We washed with a copper in there. We used to get buckets to fill it.

The side gate was open, and Mr Jones pushed into the yard. It was around about teatime and the afternoon was still searing, though the shadows along the fence were growing. Six o’clock is hot in summer. Must have been half-past because the pubs had closed, or Mr Jones would have been busy.

‘Evan. You hear me boy! I know you do. You little bastard! I’ll skin you!’

Mum moved out of the shed and stood hands on hips, looking at Mr Jones as if she had darts in her eyes. I thought she was a goddess. Mr. Jones was hunched with his hands on his knees sucking in air from the chase of Evan.

‘I want Evan. I know he came in here you miserable bitch. You get him now! I’m warning you.’ Mr Jones in his baggy cuffed pants and grey singlet was filthy, sweaty, and beyond pissed. A couple of strands of his black hair peeled free from his scalp. He was spitting and shaking with his belt tail swinging loose.

Our dog Tinsie backed away and got under the step with her eyes sliding from white to brown due to all the action.

I moved backward a step too. Mum explained later you only have to be scared of your own man.  ‘Julie, love, you might not believe this but there’s a law against other men hurting you.’ And though this doesn’t make much sense, I hang onto that idea, knowing it cannot be true else there wouldn’t be any murders. I look at my brothers playing with their trucks in the dirt and think, when they grow up do they get to hurt people? When does that come about? I decide to go live in a safe country where this doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t mention such details in the atlas or the children’s encyclopaedia.

 

‘No,’ Mum lies calmly to Mr Jones, ‘I can honestly say I haven’t seen Evan all day.’ She’s hanging the washing out, rows of nappies winking white in the late afternoon sunlight.  ‘Oh, and Mr Jones would you mind shutting the gate on the way out? Our dog wanders off.’

 

Evan was about fourteen with pimples and a chin too big for his face. He stayed out in the shed shaking and crying for a good while and mum made me take a glass of lemon cordial and three rounds of Vegemite toast out to him.

‘Thanks,’ he said stuffing down clods of toast, still shaking, still scared. ‘Your mum is nice.’

‘Yeah, for sure. I agree.’

And then he looked sad, and I gave him the tartan mohair blanket to keep him warm out there.

‘Reckon Dad will kill me one day.’

‘Why do you think that? Mum said he’s not allowed to kill you.’

‘Well today I forgot to clean out the chook pen.’

‘Not much of a reason for getting that mad.’

‘He’s just a bastard. He never really liked me. Why should he anyway.’

I didn’t know what to say. ‘You seem all right to me. For a boy, that is.’

That night he slept among the earwigs on the pile of lost clothes, the ones that would never get washed or ironed, and next morning, he took off. He left a note written in yellow soap on the window. ‘Gone To NSW. E. Jones. ’

 

When I was young, I got used to things kids shouldn’t know about. It was the way then and still is for plenty. It seemed that each family had a tyrant.  Mostly fathers, but sometimes mothers. Ours was Dad. He threw her into the walls, and she slid down like a leaf on a wet window. She was quiet though, didn’t scream, just turned to the wall for protection. I know this because I hid in the linen press wrapped in her blue dressing gown for protection and when he left I found her there, bleeding, bruised and once with a broken cheekbone and her wrist was broken too. I called a taxi (from when I was very young, I had always saved stolen money for taxis, and I knew the number, I still know it) and we went together through the plain grey Saturday evening to the hospital. She said she’d fallen down the little steps to the yard. No one believed her. I saw them looking. The horse races, (ruled by the Gods), had not gone well for my father that day but then, they almost never did.

He swore, called her names, smashed things. I thought there must be a key to turn off his anger, after all it wasn’t always there.  Sometimes the fury swerved away like a truck missing you on the road. And you’d think what can I do to stop this? If I’m silent, or funny or even mean to the others, will it stop the force of him? Will it?

Men roll over women and children like tanks and they still do today, but given the inevitability of his anger, us kids were never surprised by it. Cyclone season was all year round in our house. He tamed us, but with her it was personal,  he held her responsible for every day of his hated life. His unhappiness powered him, and it was all her fault.

 

It was widely held that kids needed hitting otherwise they would turn out to be useless or worse, spoilt. When he took his belt off though, pulling it through the loops like a whip, then I knew I would be delivered into dust, and it would take me days to get back. I had younger brothers. These beltings were all for our own good and sometimes he even said it hurt him more than it hurt us which seemed a cruel to say. I tried to be a better child it but there was no changing some people and as the eldest, no good would come of me. I knew that.

 

Mum always called shopgirls ‘darlin’ and chatted to them about whatever – dances or dreams or meaning of the stars in all the zodiac. She laughed and they got to know her, called her Dottie.

She brushed my brown hair, plaited it carefully and tied it with ribbons. On good days she liked a flutter at the races and a shandy and a sometimes even a little tipple on Saturday afternoons. She loved to laugh and to watch soaps on tv but more than anything she loved us. I was ten when after another night of him bringing about havoc, she packed some of our things in the old brown suitcase and carried it out to the street. By the time we left he was inside sleeping, blowing drunken fumes. That summer night it was before midnight and there was no moon. I remember such things. The clock ticked out our last hours there. She woke us from our beds and kept us quiet, dressed us, made me help the younger ones, all floppy with sleep. She could not lift the smallest because she was still hurt from the last attack. We were broke, I’d given her my taxi money for food, so we had no option. I remember walking through a patch of cobwebs on the nature strip under the streetlight and kicking them to death just for the hell of it. I’d always wanted to run from him and now that we were, I  felt a strange sadness and thought of him alone eating  chops in the lonely blue kitchen. He would never make himself vegetables. Oh well, now he might win at the races without us, seeing as how we were such bad luck. My brothers were there, they were shorter and younger and as usual I wondered if they had violence in their bones.

I think I held her hand and we went to the corner of the big road, waited for the green bus. There were so many stars in the dark sky and the Milky Way ran above us like a river. My dad told me about the Milky Way once when we went camping.  His favourite was the Southern Cross. ‘Best place in the world you can see it from Jules.’

We got on the last bus, and I was still holding Mum’s hand, but I might have been holding my brothers’ hands. She must have had the baby on her. It’s hard to remember everything. We went all the way to the city and then to the police station and they took us to the hospital first because Mum had something wrong. She’d been pregnant and Dad punched her, and the baby died so the doctor needed to see her.  We waited with a policeman for ages, and he gave us all Butter Menthols from a little roll in his pocket. Then they took us to the women’s refuge across the town in Pilgrim Street  to a house a long way from ours. It had stripey blinds over the windows and it seemed big, looking over the city. The canal ran through the bottom of our street and then it went to the sea. I smelled salt air, and it was a beautiful smell in the warm still night.

Melbourne in summer can be cataclysmically hot and this Sunday, when we woke, was the hot crescendo day of the cycle, a day gorged on the north wind when out in the bush, fires would ignite in an instant in the flammable air and gum leaves and dry wood lay waiting like kindling. The sun peered down like a laser. My legs chaffed in my shorts and here we were in a strange house, in a strange part of the city, with a mother who had to rest and no father.

In the backyard, kids were playing under the sprinkler, but I was wary.  We were the Lewis’s from Preston, and I wanted to be that. The other kids said we could join in though, and the water looked silvery and cool, but we would definitely not be part of it. I looked at my brothers and they knew not to. The others were another whole family, four boys and a mother. These new kids, the Ashburns, were like vanilla ice cream, white and small and melting. Suncream had not been applied. I thought of them as the ‘Kreem-b-tweens’. Audrey their mother was a little too small to be normal  and she had crinkly brown hair she hid behind. She wore a pinny in a brown colour, she always wore it so she must have had two. She was very kind. I was as tall as her at ten and I loomed beside her, and she gave me a hug and said, ‘you’re a good big sister aren’t you young Julie?’  And I nearly cried. She put her arm around me and ran her hand down my unravelling plait and squeezed my shoulder. Being happy was rare enough, but this was really something.

I started to love her then, and I could barely make myself ever leave her. I was always seized with love for people who are kind to me, and this has never left. ‘Welcome home sweetie,’ she said when the policeman went and left me in the hollow of this new place called a Women’s Refuge and I was shocked at that kind word.

Audrey had no daughters, only sons. She said I could be her special adopted daughter and that would be a great favour to her. I was dumb struck that she should offer such a thing, that anyone would want me, because since I’d never considered myself any kind of a benefit to anyone, this was a novelty.

One side of Audrey’s face was thick and scarred with some kind of burning that made her face seem plastic and ridged. Mum said it looked like an acid burn.

‘Don’t stare at it Jules and don’t let the boys,’ Mum said. She was resting in the bedroom we all shared. One of the blue bedspreads was pulled up over her and though it was summer, she shivered. I put a mug of tea down beside her.

‘Jules.’

I helped her to sit up and fixed the pillow behind her. She took her tea.

‘Remember when you were a baby, well you would have been two, I suppose, so you probably can’t remember, but we went to Cobb’s Ford? The waterhole was clear and deep with big warm stones all round and your dad and I took turns at dropping into the water from a big rope tied to a tree. We took turns so we could mind you. We had a picnic with egg and lettuce sandwiches, and he had one beer, those were the days when he could have one. He met a friend there, Joey Ellis and they got chatting and then, Joey had a transistor and brought it out and Little Richard came on playing ‘Lucille’ loud as you like. It was real good fun. People started dancing right there in their bathers. And Joey danced with a girl who was there with someone else  and the next thing there was a fight, and your father was into it as well. Well, you know what he was like.  Always something wrong with him. I kept away and carried you around.

‘And then I couldn’t find the car. He’d gone off with Joey and we were stuck like a pair of shags on a rock, still in our bathers.’ The blind is half drawn, and amber warmth seeps through.

I didn’t know what to say. Mum never talked much and now here she was talking and talking.

‘I put extra sugar in the tea mum. Audrey said to.’ Mum pulls the bedspread up. ‘That day at Cobb’s someone lent me a cardigan and one of the men gave me his trousers to wear. In those days clothes were expensive. It was nice of them, and I got the things back to them. We got home but it took hours.  We walked with the others to a bus stop, waiting and changed buses. You know Jules, I was expecting your brother then and I was quite big. It shocked me that he could just leave us us like that and I don’t think I got over it. You see, love, I was never enough for him. He wanted much more than me. You watch out for men darling, Jules. They can be hard to read.’

 

I didn’t know what to say. I heard the other kids laughing in the yard. I wanted that. I didn’t want to be part of the clag of this.

‘You rest mum.’ I put a towel over her feet to keep them warm. ‘We’re all right. Don’t you worry about us. I won’t let anything happen.’

 

No one did talk about Audrey’s face though the kids’ father was said to be mean, so the thinking was that he would’ve done it for sure. You pick things up and I heard he was still after her for leaving him and his crusade vibrated through them like electric shocks. He came to the front door and pulled his pants down and did strange things, spitting at the windows, weeing on the steps, saying he had a knife. The mothers shut us in the darkened bedrooms till he went away and waiting in there, we held hands. It was like Sunday school. ‘Please God don’t let him hurt us. Don’t let him hurt our mums.’ I thought our father was so much nicer than their father. Least he wasn’t cruel. He was just a drunk who took it out on us.

Audrey’s kids didn’t go out much but then, neither did I.  Her two youngest were Mark and Paul, twins, bizarrely, one fat and one skinny. They could be irritating, they liked to sing little ditties and repeat a line like ‘I am the walrus’ over and over and they played a lot of war games and car races games with my brothers, who were also hard to take.

They were all obsessed with footy cards. Bobby Ashburn, the eldest kid had something wrong with him (people called him retarded then) but he was gentle. He had a trannie that he loved, and he kept it next to his ear whenever he could. He wouldn’t eat at all if his food touched other food on the plate.  He was strange, that’s for sure.

The other brother, Jack, wanted to play cricket all the time but he wasn’t able to because he wasn’t registered around here for the clubs. In better times his father had taught him to bowl but even at ten you could see he knew he’d never get there. Bowling for Australia was not for weedy little blokes whose fathers are nut jobs and whose mother’s faces have been ironed. This is the simple reality.

Audrey was so clean, and it seemed that each part of her was shining. Once I caught her in the laundry soaking her hands in bleach, just leaning forward over the sink, and keeping her hands in the bleach. Said she wanted to be clean again. The fumes from the bleach made tears leak out of her. I gave her a towel and we sat on the laundry floor watching the ants outside tracking past. You work out early that adults don’t know everything even if you do love them.

Anyway, she liked to wash a lot and she washed our clothes too without even being asked! I couldn’t believe that. My mum was sad then in those early days at the refuge and even her eyes seemed closed off to me. She drank tea and smoked and hardly ate, said the sugar in her tea was food enough for nutrition. The police came to see her about Dad, and she decided it would be better not to go through with what they wanted.

 

I liked the police especially the nice one who gave me another Butter Menthol, which I believe are superior lollies because they are certainly good for you. I think I may have loved this policeman and probably still do even though I see now love and such things is just another form of gambling.

Audrey cooked us pasta bakes or sausages with salads with circles of orange on top. The boys fought for the circle of orange and the winner ate it stretched out until what was left was  a thin line of bitter pith. Once my dad came round and kicked the security door in, but he didn’t break through the big door.  Audrey called the police. Mum held her head in her hands and cried and shook. I cried and Jack, Audrey’s son, held my hand.  Bobby covered his ears and banged his head and screamed loud as you can scream. He tried to drown Dad out with ‘Rock around the clock’ on his radio but that couldn’t work, it just didn’t have enough power. Bobby was definitely more normal than my father and he understood love. Dad just faded out and went away and never bothered us again. It really took so little to get away from us.

 

When Jack held my hand that day, I could not let go of it and it seemed like I forgot he was someone else and not me.

Audrey was offered a Housing Commission house before us, and they went away, and we were left without them with a new family of Italians to get used to.  The mother had her side teeth knocked out and strange dark puddles under her eyes. She was fat, though looking back, not as fat as I thought at the time, and she was always very tired. She had something wrong with her kidneys. She dozed on the couch and if you woke her she rose up, so mad and yelling. Her kids were scared of everything, even her. The phone ringing made them hide. The wind scared them, and they whispered all the time. They wanted me to run away with them to Shepparton. They thought there was fruit there for anyone to take. It was just hanging there, rich and ripe, on the trees.  They made a tent under the table. They collected pinecones and pebbles and coveted each other’s finds.  I went into the tent, but it was not the same anymore, missing Audrey, Bobby and Jack was like missing my life.

After a while, it turned out that we’d got a place in the same new settlement as theirs, in the same street and Jack would be in my grade at school. We were three doors up in houses each painted a different pastel colour, ours was pale lemon. The Ashburns’ house was pale blue. My mother planted a lemon tree in front of our lemon house, and she guarded it from the rough neck kids, springing out at them if one of them so much as touched it. Sometimes I saw her standing on the little porch, usually with a broom in her hand, and sometimes she would smile and then, I felt like I’d won the lottery.

On my first day at the new school at lunchtime, Jack and I sat on the seat beside the shelter shed and the grass was all tufty and dry and shared our lunch even though I preferred his because I loved anything Audrey had made. He had jam and I had Kraft cheese. He asked me to marry him during that first week at school.

‘What do you mean marry?’ Jack had brown hair and freckles, a wide smile, and green eyes light as summer leaves. His chin had a small cleft.

‘What go to a church and get married?’

I was astonished, but still eating his sandwich. ‘What about the way men get after you marry them? You know they try to kill everyone.’

We both started to giggle and then laugh, and I don’t know why, probably because we both knew about the way I tended to lean towards exaggeration. It was often remarked on.

‘I won’t be like that. I’ll be a good bloke. I promise, cross my heart.’

It just seemed logical. Who else would ever understand us?  So, I said okay but wondered why you had to get married to be friends.

 

One evening I waited for my mum after school outside her work at the car parts factory.  We’d been in the new house for a year or so. It was dusk, still my favourite time. We walked home and as usual we called in at the milk bar. I was meant to wait outside because I would beg for stuff all the time, even at eleven I was addicted to lollies. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ Mum said and smiled, and I rejoiced that she was wearing lipstick again and being her old self.

I sneaked in anyway and hung around the chocolate bars checking them out carefully. Mum took the milk to the girl at the till. This girl was from somewhere else, maybe another country or state, maybe Tasmania? or maybe just another suburb. Anyway, she was new to us. She’d plucked her eyebrows into strange arches so that she looked permanently surprised, then she’d drawn them again in black. She’d dyed the tips of her hair blond. She did look weird, and I could only look at her sideways because of it, as if that turned her down a bit. Mum said to her, ‘Lovely day today’ and the girl ignored her, so Mum said, ‘I say, it’s been a beautiful day today’ and the girl glared at us and snapped ‘yeah and I’d rather be anywhere else but here.’ Mum didn’t seem to notice I was behind her with a stolen ‘Milky Way’ in my sweaty hand. She studied the girl’s unusual face and said: ‘I can understand that.’ And then, the shop girl started to cry, and Mum reached across to rest her hand on the girl’s hand.

‘It’s just so hard when you have family troubles to worry about. I will help you in any way I can.’ The girl was wracked by crying and embarrassed.

Mum asked her, ‘do you have family troubles my love?’ The girl said she did, and she asked if mum had them too.

Mum paused, surprised. ‘Well, I’ve had my share.’

She picked up her milk and put her purse away. ‘Oh, darlin, one of these days it will be behind you. But I am so sorry you are troubled like this.’ Them her eyes fall on me, a plump little beetle and I put the Milky Way down and we walk quietly home through streets where it seems to me there are so many tears behind all these curtains in all these houses.  For a while I thought of the girl at the milk bar and then she passed out of my mind.

 

We learned her name was Valerie Anne Demarkis and she was from Burnie in Tasmania.  We learned all this in the newspaper.  Her story was headed ‘Shop Killing’ and at first it seemed she was the victim of a robbery, but the shop had one of the first CCTV cameras and it caught the death of Valerie with a hammer. There was no sound, but the man chased her behind the counter of the shop and killed her there.

And it wasn’t long before the police made a connection between the victim and the killer. The murderer was Kane Silva, her former boyfriend. His tattoos and Silva’s ute complete with license plate numbers were the giveaways.

In court the defence argued provocation, alleging that Valerie had made disparaging remarks about his manhood and also that she had a temper. Well, that’s what Silva remembered.  He got eleven years and might be out in eight.

It was all in the paper with a big picture of her pale surprised face. I never talked to mum about Valerie Demarkis. I didn’t know how. I suspect though mum knew but she didn’t speak to me about Valerie or about the sea we ride through paddling in our fragile skin boats.

 

Over the years Jack and I are solid in our intent, pure for each other. We will be each other’s family. He grows taller and stronger. He’s still nice and I believe his kindness is real. I watch him play cricket on Saturdays. He’s not too bad either. Though mostly I read library books in those long cricket hours under some tree that offers shade, often sharing shade with others. It feels good to know that Jack will always be there for me, feels like a sweet breath. In the winter I see him kicking footballs, doing male things and I’m proud that we are going to be married. I like it that he picked me out, but I forget that I also picked him out.

From the age of twenty we lived together, and Bobby lived with us. Jack had got him a job working with him for the council in the parks and gardens department. He didn’t tell them about Bobby’s issues and when Jack was looking after him, they didn’t notice. Jack was training to be a gardener and I wanted to be a nurse. We had almost no money, enough for rent and food. Enough to be happy in the garden flat in Howard Street.

At the hospital as a junior, I did a lot of introducing and taking patients to other places in the hospital. Family troubles were everywhere. Sick children, dying mothers so many troubles that mine shrank away.  I paced myself. I found I loved helping children, but I didn’t want to be a mother, not for a long time if ever.

 

My mother died of cancer that first year of nursing training. She will always be with me, and I can’t speak of her without the pain of losing her looming before me. And Dad just disappeared like the ghost he was. He probably changed his name. Or went to some war where all that anger would be useful or some ore mine where he could drive a huge truck and gamble all weekend, he would have been suited to that. I hope he never married anyone else and didn’t have kids.

On Saturday mornings, Jack would get up early and make me a cup of tea. He’d bring it in and leave it on the bedside table, even if I’d been on night shift, so the tea would mostly go cold. After, he’d play cricket or footy and when he came home, I’d perch on the bath to chat to him while he was in the shower. I’d rave on about my studies, child psychology or even anatomy.

‘Did you know the human hand is the most complex thing we have in our body.

‘Bullshit Jules.’

‘How dare you say that! I just read it.

‘Pass me a towel darlin’.’

‘What d’you want for tea?’

‘There’s that frozen lasagne I made.’

‘Don’t fancy it. What about fish and chips. I’ll buy you a pickled onion.’

The steam gathers around his face.

‘Reckon I need to shave?’

‘Nup, you look right enough.

We ranged through our lives like birds pecking at fallen seeds, and we were friends.

 

 

And then by degrees I knew that I would break Jack’s heart. He was too good for me, but still I felt crushed by his ownership even as I knew I wasn’t good enough for him. And I was bored with him, bored by our history. I wanted no one to know about me. I wanted to be alone with the story of my life and running away seemed reasonable. I knew what it would do to Jack to be so betrayed, but I couldn’t stop myself and so I just put myself first. It was the first time I’d done it. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel right.

I ran away with a doctor who seemed to love me in a crazy wild way. I swapped stability for being wanted. That he didn’t know about me was, I thought, a good thing.  Dr Edward Pinter was a man in control, where Jack and I were just little people. I wanted to have more power in my life, and I made the mistake of thinking a man could ever give me that. I called it love, now I think I was just mad with boredom and there’s a lot of madness about.

Edward and I went to live in a country town near the Blue Mountains and he got a job at the local hospital (and so did I) and then somehow in a few weeks, I lost him. He disappeared into himself and turned away.  He did cryptic crosswords and on different days; the newspapers were folded and left in spots, by the toilet, in the middle of the kitchen table, by the bed. If I touched or moved them, he knew. If I lost a pen beside one of them, he knew. They were works in progress he said.  He drank whiskey in squashed looking glasses. He read ‘War and Peace’ then ‘Anna Karenina’. He was the doctor to his core, boyish floppy fair hair, and handsome enough face but he seemed less and less invested in me. Something in the way he held his cheek out to be kissed when he left. Still, I had garden full of birds and fat blue hydrangeas. I wore a hat when I gardened. I thought I’d made it. We went to dinners for the local hospital and Edward was the big man around town.

 

The feeling of things turning bad was a settling of a kind of lowness on me like when you’re getting sick.  I brought this on myself, and I believed it was something in me that caused it, rudeness probably or just not being nice enough. The burden of being ‘nice’ is like living in a net, you are so tightly restrained. Maybe it was just that I’d watched the see-saw of my parents’ marriage and the extremities of my father’s violence are in my pathways too. I understood it then, now I’m not sure but whatever it was, the weight of it was inescapable. It’s in my blood. How can you relate to a man when you think he might, in a burst of temper just kill you? You strive for the right tone and then you slip. And when the striving gets too much and you let yourself answer without restraint, you feel the weight of his hand but maybe that’s worth it to hear yourself just finally be yourself. Maybe it is. Being with Edward showed me my mother’s life all over again. And I saw that too when I lived with Jack, I lived in a haven but he was really my brother. So, understanding took me a lot of time.

When he had an off day, Edward started to pick at things, that the dishes weren’t done the way he liked it, that I was a slovenly cow who ate too much and then he slapped me, pushed me. Did things to make me weep and plead. There’s no consolation in anything.

To mistake interest for love has ruined me twice. I would have run to Jack but Audrey, his mum had written that he’d gone to the Northern Territory to work on a cattle station.

She wrote ’He wants lots of sky and no thought of anything ‘cept bringing the cattle in.’ And I thought that hurting Audrey was probably worse than hurting Jack. And always I thought, ‘you had a best friend and couldn’t even hold onto him.’

I came back here to Pilgrim Street where the enemy is sleeping or at least is understood. The hospital is not far, and I want to work there. See if I can help some kids.

In the street I pass the men, chancers who catcall, and I know they are part of the old problem; we are thought to be owned by them. Here, the everyday streets remind me of the truth of my life. The old refuge looks much the same. I walk past the milk bar where poor Valerie Demarkis was murdered, and I feel her sad spirit and her surprised eyebrows and remember that Mum was kind to her for a small moment. Memory makes us whole sometimes.

One afternoon I was waiting for an interview at the hospital, and I sat in a quiet café. I read the paper, scanning without commitment and plenty of condescension, through the range of tawdry stories. I looked up, away from a story about a footballer who got busted for drugs or for pushing his girlfriend. It wasn’t clear what he’d done, and there in front of me, to my astonishment, was Bobby. He shuffled in like an old man. I couldn’t believe it. He looked neither left nor right. He was grey and his gait was worse. More hunched somehow, more sideways. The shock of seeing him, the boy with the transistor from the women’s refuge had bowled me over. I thought of Jack immediately, but I knew there was no way. That was over. People move past you. You hurt them enough, they never look back, and anyway he married a woman named Tracey Olds.

By the way Bobby ordered coffee you could see he was different, but you could also see the staff liked him. He spoke to them for a while asking about their families. Smiling, remembering, respecting. ‘Jenny, how is your new dog? Ate some grapes. Bad for dogs. Oh no! Joanna, is your daughter happier now?’ Looking at one person at a time courteous and intent and I recalled that kindness is one of the knightly virtues and it seems that Bobby was always the truest knight. When he said, ‘Please. Please sorry to trouble. I’ll have my coffee outside today. I want to listen to my radio’, Joanna the waitress, nodded. ‘Of course, Bobby’.

Outside, I see he’s got an old trannie held together with electrical tape but still going, maybe it’s even the same one. He places it on the table and turns it on and out pours Hits and Memories. The day is warm but not hot. Cars pass without effort.

In a display of easy contempt, a swarm of schoolboys with their socks down and their white shirts hanging out, pass by. ‘Loony! Nut job. Wanker!’ they yell. Bobby smiles at no one in particular.  I stand up and shout ‘Leave him alone! He’s worth a hundred of you, filthy little shits.’

If he has noticed them, he doesn’t let on. He drinks his coffee and drums his fingers to the tinny music.  A scarlet crepe myrtle bends under the wind, the long branches leaning to him. I leave for the interview without speaking to Bobby. I didn’t think he would have recognised me. I walk the slow way to the hospital with cars passing like boats, and our childhoods came with me.

Copyright Deborah Forster