Anyway, poor Holden. His life sucked. I knew he was sad about what happened to his brother, so deeply sad that he didn’t think anyone could understand. And yet he wanted to be the one rescuing people. Holden wanted to watch over the children playing in the field of rye; he wanted to be the one to catch them before they ran over the edge of a cliff. That to me was the saddest thing in the world – and the best. Holden wanted to save them. It made me want to save him. I wanted to climb into those pages, slip onto a seat at that bar and listen to him, protect him. To be the catcher of the catcher.
I heard the screen door bang and climbed off the bed. By the time I got to the kitchen, Kevin had already slumped into a chair and was pulling off his boots.
‘How are you feeling?’ Kevin asked when he saw me standing in the doorway.
‘A bit better.’
I was feeling better. Resting on my bed for the afternoon had allowed the nausea to pass and my headache to finally go away. And, of course, I had been with Matt and Holden, which definitely made things better.
‘What’s to eat?’ Kevin said. ‘Any lasagne left?’
I shrugged. ‘No. I ate the last bit.’
‘You’ve been home all day.’ He looked up from his boot. ‘Couldn’t you make something?’
I guessed this was part of the stuff we had to work out in our new lives. ‘You never said it was my turn to cook,’ I said. ‘Besides, there’s nothing in the fridge, unless you count a dead lettuce and beer.’
Kevin looked over at the refrigerator and nodded as if acknowledging his failure to provide for me. ‘Come on then. We’ll get fish and chips.’
When we arrived at Leanne’s shop I stopped short of the entrance.
‘You coming in?’ Kevin said, holding the door ajar.
There were people in there who would stare at my bruised eye and the bandage on my head. ‘I’ll get the order when it’s done,’ I said.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Kevin.
I pulled up one of the plastic chairs on the pavement outside and sat down, watching through the window as Leanne, all smiles, took Kevin’s order.
He came back out and slumped heavily into the flimsy chair. ‘It’ll be ready soon,’ he said, lighting up and staring at the wisps that coiled like serpents in the dead air. I wondered what he was about to say. Would he try to discuss our argument at the waterhole? Have a debrief? We hadn’t spoken about the fight, or about the fall. My dagger-shaped words had been flung and if Kevin had chosen to take offense he certainly wasn’t showing it. His heart remained, as ever, an impenetrable fortress, repelling my blades as mere trifles.
‘So, what did you get up to today anyway?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. Nothing that you need to know about.
‘There’s plenty to do around home. I’ve got some odd jobs for you.’
‘Like what?’ I wrapped my hands around the bottle of lemonade he’d given me.
‘Clearing out the spare room … weeding the vegetable patch.’
‘Isn’t that what Dylan was doing for you?’ I said softly. ‘Odd jobs?’
Kevin inhaled deeply and smoke residue leaked from his nostrils. I thought of dragons.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Dylan was working in the shed, clearing it out. Your grandmother was a bit of a hoarder. She left piles of stuff everywhere. Dylan was trying to … he was …’ He paused and looked across the street at the pub.
‘Dylan was what?’
‘Listen, you have to give me a hand, alright?’ He glared at me. ‘You can’t expect to laze around in bed for two months while you’re on school holidays.’
‘I thought we were talking about Dylan.’
‘We’re talking about us. You’ll have to pull your weight, now.’
Now, I thought, now as opposed to before when Mum was alive, or now as in I never pulled my weight before. Didn’t he remember? When we lived in Dawson I worked at the animal shelter with Mum every weekend, cleaning enclosures, feeding dogs, washing bloody cats – all for free.
‘You’ve been living there for nearly two years,’ I shot back. ‘It’s not my fault the place is still such a dump. What have you even done to fix it?’
‘Well, you know your mother. She had other things on her mind.’ Kevin stood up and glanced across to the pub. ‘Grab the fish and chips. I’m going over to get some beer.’
‘You can’t exactly blame her anymore.’ I hurled the comment after him, but he was already halfway across the street and my words melted into the warm, black night. I noticed a news van parked outside the pub. The crew were probably staying there, hoping for some big story to break about Dylan.
The bell on the door jingled as I went into the shop to collect the order. Leanne buzzed around behind the counter constantly pushing back strands of lank hair.
‘Hello, Sunny,’ she said, her back to me as she lifted chips from the fryer.
A clicking fan turned up to the maximum hurled a hurricane of hot air around the small room. A young couple seated at one of the plastic-covered tables dragged their eyes from a blaring TV that hung from the ceiling, their mouths enclosed around milkshake straws. For a moment I was more interesting than the news.
‘Hi,’ I said.
Dylan’s face appeared on the screen. The voiceover was distorted above the noise of the bubbling, snapping fryer, ‘… and police have not ruled out suspicious circumstances.’
There was a shot of the car park and the surrounding rainforest. I wondered what narrative they
