Frederic could have said my father is a thief, mother is a fence. But he said nothing and she began to cry.
He lifted her wet hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles.
What did I do wrong? she asked. Just tell me what I did.
His dark eyes were unnaturally still, more like a nurse’s than a teenage boy’s.
I’ll get you your own key, he said and, with his index finger drew a line through the wet kohl on her cheek. That frightened her, the key. It was Saturday morning, not yet ten o’clock.
11
ON A RED OLIVETTI VALENTINE, the man known as Moore-or-less-correct reported that Gaby Sando and Frederic were on a Melbourne tram, travelling north along Lygon Street to Brunswick, past clothing factories, cyclone fences, faded signs for English lessons. They entered familiar Holmes Street. They felt the tram shake itself and do a dogleg dance and Gaby tumbled into Frederic who smelled of leatherwood honey.
Everything was fine and sunny: clouds the size of little farts. The tram rattled north, passed all the cast-iron verandahs that, at that date, had survived the council’s planned destruction of all memory. They got off at what was meant to be a posh street but the footpath was in Coburg and therefore narrow. Sando was bristly and bloodshot as if he had been playing pool all night.
The street had a snotty name but the trees were weedy, starved of love, survivors with hessian bandages. Gaby was shocked by the cracks in the concrete, the lonely quiet, the little houses shrunk inside their borders, alone, disconnected. They saw a malevolent cluster of boys like rats with mullets, operating on a Datsun 240Z, roaring, revving, sending oily smoke across the intersection. One lay on the mudguard, deep into the engine, his plumber’s crack shining at the sky.
Frederic smiled excessively and annoyed the boys with mullets who thought he was a poofter cunt. He was blatantly some unknown quantity who would get her father bashed. They escaped into the dead end of a suburban street, unscathed, and she understood that the liver-brick shitheap right in front of them would be, forever, That Coburg Place.
Broken pickets. Weird old flowers. Red-hot pokers. Cactus with shark’s teeth growing along the edges of its flesh. The house was one hundred years old, at least, dying in deep shadow, with a wide low slate roof and verandah tiles like a mansion you pay to visit on a boring Sunday, blues and terracotta which turned out, in this case, to be smeared with illegal skid marks. The garden smelled of gas and cat’s piss and there was a tall palm tree with a dead frond. Complete and utter lossitude. She could have cried.
Wow, said Frederic. Oh wow. Mr. Quinn, do you have a key?
Sando kicked the front door and it swung into the gloom. The previous inhabitants had lit a fire in the middle of the living room and burned a hole to the centre of the earth. The injured floorboards were wide and waxy and marked with motorcycle skid marks.
This was their clubhouse, right? Frederic asked. The White Knights? This can be so good.
Sando took Gaby’s hand in both of his and led her, in this ungainly way, from one room to the next, through violent debris of a type you might not expect to see unless you were, for some unexpected reason, on the run, frightened for your life.
There’s a lot of room, she said.
So cool, said Frederic and she did not know what to think of him.
Plaster hung in shards held by ancient horsehair, moving gently in the breeze.
Sando held his hands out: Will it be OK? he asked his daughter.
She saw it in his eyes: someone had been murdered here but he had bought it because it was so cheap. Celine would have a shit fit. It would be Gaby’s job to make it all OK. And it would be Frederic’s talent to know all this without being told. He understood the role. He was Matty Matovic’s son and therefore knew the cost of lead and copper. He had attended auctions all over Melbourne. He knew the value of these internal stone walls. He knew the squiddy underbelly inner-city pubs and midnight runs, and he would, for his reward, have her beside him in the tunnels of the world of Zork.
He perched fearlessly on the corner post of the front fence and saw what no-one else could see, that the leak in the bedroom corresponded with one broken slate, that “this must be Gaby’s room.”
“Gaby’s room” had a narrow window with a view of an empty laneway. It’s quiet, he said and his voice made her tailbone hum and he was being the power, the generator.
We can get kids from school to help, he said.
No, she said sharply.
Why not?
It’s not your house.
But I’m helping you.
Gaby, honey, said her father.
He’s not helping me, she said. He’s creeping me out. I don’t even know him.
And she saw Frederic’s hurt face through the hot blur of tears. Her father was restraining her, holding her, squeezing all her breath out. She wished to be back in her own home which was being taken from her, mother gone, father crumpling like paper in a bin.
12
FREDERIC REFUSED to be offended, no matter what she said to him. He already knew what she was like. He said that. He may have even been correct. But then he told her he would teach her to code, and assumed that was just so attractive. How totally up himself. She was a girl so she must want him.
On Monday, after everything she had said to him in Coburg, he tried to catch her eye. Even while she ignored him she wrote “Frederic” in her notebook and scribbled over it, obliterating him forever. She went into the loo and ripped him out and tore him up so small no-one would ever know what she had done.
She got back home and a telegram arrived—the first telegram she had seen that was not in a movie. She signed for it and left it on the table for her father who threw it in the trash when he was finished with it. Soon it was covered with spaghetti bolognaise, so obviously it was from Celine.
Is it Frederic? her father asked. Is that why you’re so sad?
That was him? Saying she was sad? What had been in the telegram?
I’m studying Cicero if you want to know.
Gaby, I’m not sure Frederic likes girls.
Oh aren’t you? she shouted, without warning, even to herself. Really? she yelled at him. She threw her book on the floor. Who was he to talk? What a mope. Letting Celine get away with all that shit.
He patted his big hands before his chest. He said, it was just my feeling.
And what are you, a homophobe?
It was as if she had slapped his face. Oh God, she thought, please Daddy, don’t be drunk.
Why don’t you just go and get her back? she said. Just get her and bring her home.
Then he was offended and shook his head at her, like some awful TV actor trying to convey disappointment. Then he stormed out of the house. Up to the Albion, of course.
And this was just one of many incidents that occurred in the two weeks when Celine was sending telegrams from Moggs Creek. On another night: Gaby had been looking through the cardboard box of Dylan Neil Young Jefferson Airplane Beatles. There was Rickie Lee Jones doing “Chuck E’s in Love.” She had danced to this track with her mother when she was a little girl, Celine crooning. He learn all of the lines, and every time he/don’t stutter when he talk.
On this night, Gaby thought, Frederic! (And it’s true! It’s true!) And then, the needle scraped across the vinyl and her father was home and the vinyl was flying through the open doorway out onto the dirty street, and all her insides were cold spaghetti. Her father was insane. Why would anyone do a thing like that?