"I can't breathe!"
"You told them, didn't you?"
"Everyone knows."
"What? What'd you say?" He shoved Michael's head against the sink washboard, forced it along the metal ribbing, then dropped him to the floor. Michael's body shivering. The storm muted in here. Slowly, he felt the remorse bleeding into him. Always it came, immediately afterward. He said, "Everyone knows what?"
Michael curled into a cupboard corner. He lifted his hand to feel the side of his head. He was breathing hard when he looked up, and he didn't look at Jamie's face but at some indistinct point beneath it.
"That you're gonna fight Dory," he said in his deep voice. "And that he's gonna slaughter you."
***
ALL NIGHT HE COULDN'T SLEEP.
He threw on some clothes and wandered outside. The rain had stopped. Branches shuddered the water off themselves. The moon was still bright, caught in their wet leaves.
His mother had fallen asleep on the reclining couch. She was snoring softly. The moonlight poured in from the window and buoyed around her as though to bear her up. It seemed unreal. He pulled the blanket snug beneath her chin. Her mouth dropped open as though its hinges had snapped, and she snorted.
"Darling?"
"Sorry, Mum," he said. "I didn't mean to wake you."
It was as though she were swimming up from some distant pit of herself. The drugs awash in her — he saw it now. With sudden clarity he understood how lost she must feel in her body.
"God, I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was drawn thin. "I was wrong. Who gets to choose where they die?" Her eyes were barely open, one of them darting about quick as silverfish.
"Mum, wake up."
"But the boys love it here. You too." Her face loosened. She said, "You wouldn't believe."
"Mum." He shook her shoulder.
"The things I see now. But my hands."
"Mum." A pulse in her eyes and then her mouth moved. It jerked, then spread slowly into a smile of recognition.
"Sweetie." She fell quiet. They listened together to her breathing. All through her the odor of bleach, bleach sopped and smeared with a used rag.
"What is it?" she said.
A nauseous rush of answers rose up in him but he said nothing.
"The girl?" She didn't wait for his response. "And that horrible boy. Are you scared?"
He nodded.
"You're my son," she whispered. A strange shifting in her eyes, as though grass moved behind them. For a moment she looked lost. Then she said, "My son does anything he wants."
Gradually her head drooped forward. The muscles around her mouth went slack and he realized she was lapsing back into sleep. This was where she lived most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour. He wanted it to stop. When? Monday, after training? What would be enough — what commensurate with his lack? And what if he couldn't? She had come back from the hospital and the first thing she said to him and Michael was, This won't happen to you. I promise. He was rubbish. Whatever he did or didn't do now, he'd hate himself later — he knew that.
A truck raced by on the coastal road, ripping skins of water off the bitumen.
Her head still bowed, she said in a slurred voice, "James?" He slid his fingers into the pouch of her right hand. He'd never before noticed how loose the skin around her knuckles was.
She said, "My wine." After a long silence she said, "Will you pass it to me, please?"
"Mum."
"Your father and I love you very much. No matter what."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
It wasn't until a minute later he realized she might be squeezing his hand. "Okay."
He dreamed he was alone. The glass was cold against his fingers and forehead. He shrank away, went to the next black, steamed window, and the next, calling out as he searched. His voice sounded as though trapped inside some metal bladder. What if the paddocks were empty? And the long white corridors, too, with their waxy floors, and the dark slopes of the dunes he clambered up and down as though drunk? What if he couldn't find him?
The ocean seethed and sighed in the dark. So this was where you ended up, sick in sleep. Your night a beach and all sorts of junk washing up on shore.
***
AT SCHOOL NEWS OF THE FIGHT HAD SPREAD. Monday at last. Everyone watched him and no one looked him in the eye. Even the teachers seemed to leave him to himself, steering their voices around. The semis, the assembly — all of it seemed long gone, preserved elsewhere. He was being quarantined. He'd seen it before. You were dead space, you were off — limits-until afterward. Nothing malicious in it. What made it strange for him was the incongruous buzz around school-everyone getting fired up for the holidays and, in particular, the grand final that weekend. First time in five years, and against archrivals Maroomba too. The tension brinking on hysteria.
Recess he spent in the C-block toilets. What was the grand final to him? He tried to throw up but couldn't.
Lunchtime he saw her. Her friends clustered in the concrete corner of the downball court where, as one, they turned to look at him, opening apart, unfurling like some tartan-patterned flower, and there she was, leaning against the wall with large concentric targets painted in white behind her. She held his eye for a second and then the circle sealed shut. He realized he was holding his breath.
Vague impressions of classes rolled on. Each period ending with teachers saluting the team, rallying everyone for the big game. Jamie felt exhausted. Time pushed him forward. His mind wound out, one point to the next.
"C'arn, Halfies!"
He spotted Dory just before final period. Taller than everyone else. Like a dockworker in his school uniform — shirtsleeves high on his biceps, shorts tight across his quads. His eyes too close together, his hair flaxen, floppy. Like some sick cartoon of a dockworker. The corridor packed and noisy. A few people saw them, made space, straggled, but Dory disappeared into a classroom. Lester was behind him, of course, and from a distance Jamie could see his face, pinched up in anger, yelling something out.
"Fucking retard!" he seemed to be yelling.
Jamie opened his mouth.
"Fucking retard mum!" he was yelling.
Of course he couldn't be saying that. Jamie shook it off — the bog-like feeling that accompanied the thought of his mum. There was his mind again, groping at anything but what was right in front of him. In front of him — wherever he went — Dory. Huge and hard, a thing of horror. He'd been dumped on the beach by his folks. He'd bashed up this guy, hospitalized that guy. He'd killed a Chink with his uncle.
The teacher talked on as Jamie watched the clock.
You had to shut it out. You could see it on players' faces, how they approached him, ready to take damage. You could hear it in your parents' voices. You had to shut it all out, otherwise it would sprout in you like weeds.
The bell rang.
He was headed for the lockers when his geography teacher flanked him, escorted him wordlessly to the principal's office and dropped him off there.
"Go on," said the secretary. She looked up. "Go on. Mr. Ley-land's waiting."
Jamie knocked, cracked open the door.
"There he is," a voice boomed. Coach Rutherford. He was wearing trackies and a Halflead T-shirt, a whistle around his neck. He stood behind the principal's desk. Where was Leyland?
"I was just coming to training," Jamie said.
"Good," said Coach. He waved him inside. Then Jamie saw Leyland — on the couch obscured by the door. With him was Jamie's dad. His mum in her wheelchair. His mum — what was she doing here? Jamie stood in the doorway and didn't move. All these people. All day he'd been waiting-all those days since Thursday night's party — and now it felt as though time had pushed him forward too far, too hard. Everything collapsing into one place.