Cassie didn’t seem to try that hard to find a job. He spent the next days sitting around at home watching TV. Sometimes he’d go and meet Ian after school, or they’d set out to the knackery for a few hours, but most of the time he just slobbed around inside in his trackies. I hated seeing him like that. There was a girl at school, Jocelyn, whose Dad had died the year before. I’d overheard Jocelyn telling her friend that he stopped going to work and lay around all day in bed doing nothing, and then one day her mum came home and he was dead, just like that.
I didn’t want that to happen to Cassie; I needed to figure out some way to make him feel better. One afternoon when Wally and me got home from school he was lying on the couch. I sat down next to him. He moved his legs so I could fit beside him, but stayed staring at the screen.
‘Stop watching me,’ he said after a while. His face was puffy, a crusty cold sore on his top lip.
‘Have you been crying?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘You have,’ I said. ‘Give me your hand.’
‘What? No, Cub. Just piss off, would you.’
I grabbed his hand anyway. His arm went rubbery and he didn’t fight me.
At lunchtime that day I’d watched two girls from grade seven as they ate their lunch in the shelter shed near Wally and me. One of the girls had taken the other girl’s arm and told this story about a snake and a tiger and an ant and an elephant going on a picnic. Every time the girl said the name of an animal in the story, she did something different to the girl’s arm, from the wrist to the elbow crease. She slithered her fingernails along the skin for the snake, pinched for the ant. For the tiger she jabbed her nails along the arm, and when she talked about the elephant she thumped her fist hard along the girl’s skin.
‘And then when they got to the picnic, they realised they’d dropped the strawberry jam,’ I said to Cassie, running my finger along the soft part of his arm that had turned red as sunburn, red as jam. Cassie looked at his arm and pressed down on the hot skin. He looked at me and smiled but he didn’t offer to do it back to me, which was the whole point.
‘You do it back to me now,’ I said.
‘Nah,’ Cassie said.
‘It’s easy,’ I said, holding out my arm. ‘Go on.’
‘Don’t you have homework or something?’
I took my arm back, turned towards the TV. I tried to think of some other way to put him in a good mood, but I didn’t have any lollies, couldn’t think of any funny jokes. When the news came on Cassie patted me on the shoulder, got up from the couch. He seemed a little bit happier, a little less sick-looking, but when I went to the bathroom later there were bits of spew in the toilet water again.
At dinner Dad asked Cassie when he was going to start paying rent. ‘I’m not paying for your food if you’re sitting around on your arse all day,’ Dad said.
‘Your dad saw a sign in the bakery window today,’ Mum said to Cassie. ‘Looking for someone on Saturday mornings. Maybe you could pop in tomorrow?’
‘I was hoping for something full time,’ Cassie said. ‘So I can save up.’
‘Save up for what?’ I asked.
‘Go overseas,’ he said. ‘Go to Europe, maybe.’
‘Why would you do that? Why would you want to go there?’ What I really meant was: why would you want to leave us?
No one noticed I’d spoken. ‘They’ll give you plenty of hours when you show them how hard you can work,’ Mum said.
‘I thought I’d try the meatworks maybe,’ Cassie said, picking at a bit of dirt under his nail.
Dad snorted and then pulled at a bit of gristle between his teeth, set it down at the side of his plate. It looked like a tiny organ from a mouse or a baby bird.
Mum put down her fork and smiled at Cassie like she was talking to an idiot. ‘You’re not working there, Cass,’ she said.
‘They hire anyone so it’s easy to get a job,’ Cassie said. ‘And it won’t be for forever. Just until I save up.’
‘I don’t want you surrounded by criminals,’ Mum said. ‘They’ll turn you filthy.’
But the next day Dad took Cassie to the big abattoir up north.
‘I know a bloke who works there,’ Dad said. ‘Gary Druid. Played footy with his brother. He’s been in and out of prison for half his life. He’ll be able to give you a tour of the place.’
They were hardly gone an hour. When they got home Cassie stormed into the house, the flyscreen bouncing behind him. He’d dressed in one of Dad’s old painting jumpsuits, like he was playing dress-ups, and pulled at the buttons until the top was down and flapped around his waist. At first I thought that he and Dad’d had a fight, but when Dad came inside a minute later he was chuckling.
‘I’m not working there,’ Cassie said to Dad. ‘You can’t make me work there.’
‘He passed out, can you believe it,’ Dad said to Mum. ‘One sight of a carcass and he was horizontal on the floor.’
After a week Cassie still hadn’t found work, hadn’t bothered looking. Mum kept nagging him about the job at the bakery, but by the weekend there was a new girl with a berry-coloured birthmark covering her whole right arm serving at the counter and the sign in the window was gone.
Ian came around the next Friday afternoon, waited on the verandah while Cassie fixed his bike chain in the yard. Dad was already home from work, but Ian and Cassie didn’t seem to care. He was watching the races, and I could hear the commentator through the kitchen window as I sifted through Mum’s vegetable patch. Mum didn’t garden anymore and mostly everything was dead. There was a slug slimed onto a leaf, a green cherry tomato as small as a pea. I walked up the stairs, passed Ian and climbed up on the verandah railing.
I watched Ian from the corner of my eyes. I knew Ian was the reason Cassie was so upset. If it wasn’t for Ian, whatever had happened with that girl in the toilets wouldn’t have happened and Cassie would be fine. I needed to figure out how to make Cassie hate him as much as I hated him.
After a few minutes, Ian looked over at me. ‘What?’ he said, mouth full of chips.
I didn’t say anything, turned to watch Cassie, who was crouched next to his bike.
‘I can feel you staring at me,’ Ian said. ‘It’s creepy.’
‘I wasn’t staring,’ I said.
‘Yeah, right.’
I jumped down from the railing and sat on the chair beside him. I sat cross-legged and the soles of my feet were black with dirt.
‘What’s wrong with your face?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I said. I hovered my hand in front of my face, trying to hide it. I didn’t want him looking at me too closely.
‘Your eyebrow,’ he said. ‘It’s all scabby.’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ I said, felt my cheeks go red.
Now that I was right up close to him I didn’t know what to do; it was like my brain was wrapped in sticky tape and I couldn’t think properly. ‘Can I have a chip?’ I asked, just to say something. He held the chips towards me. When I put my hand into the bag he held my wrist through the foil, trapped my hand in the packet. He pulled on my wrist, yanked me closer to him.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘A chip,’ I said. ‘I just want a chip.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re staring at me. I don’t like it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound soft and nice.
‘Stop staring at me, alright?’
I let my hand go limp and didn’t say anything. He was breathing loudly through his mouth and I could smell his bready chip breath, could feel it on my face like a layer of grease. He gripped my wrist tighter, until it began to hurt. He put his hand on my knee, which made my wrist hurt less because all I could think about was his hand touching my skin and what it was doing there. I didn’t move. I looked down at his hand as it squeezed my knee tight. My body froze, my throat closed up. His hand felt greasy like his breath.