Attachments

of sticks and stones

He is almost there. The trick is to hook the sheaf of papers before raising the length of wire across it like a paperclip. This way the wire should press the pages flat while shielding them from the underside of Lee’s door. Unfortunately the pages have started to curl inwards and fray. To withdraw them in once piece he would need to pull diagonally, which is impossible because of the narrow balustrade belonging to the caravan’s aeroplane-like miniature staircase unit. Every caravan has one of these. He installed them before he fully understood the finances.

There was not always a caravan on this spot. It used to be a picnic area. It used to be an area, at any rate, with an unfinished timber bench and a communal barbecue. The barbecue never had any gas, and Kenneth could not recall anyone ever eating at the table, save for the odd family of tourists who had not yet cancelled their booking for one of the motels. Mainly it was the area he had gone to when his mother told him to go outside. He would sit on the bench and watch them through the window, a drive-in movie with hammy gestural acting and R-rated dialogue that the walls of their demountable did not fully absorb. There was never violence. This fact had always separated their family from the animals, though now and again Kenneth would wonder at the obscure circumstances of his father’s leaving.

There is a new picnic area now, with more benches and barbecues to reflect Golden Crest Caravan Park’s expanded residential capacity. He has never seen anyone eat there either.

He hears squeaking steel and the smooth displacement of gravel, too late, and withdraws the coathanger as subtly as he can. Leighton’s BMX blocks the staircase exit.

The boy dodged Lee’s most prominent features: his hair is dark, not coppery, and his skin uniformly olive rather than dot-shaded with Scottish freckles. On the other hand, he inherited his father’s menace—the ratlike tapering of his features, a gangly swagger that says I could do anything, and might. He is eleven or twelve, and makes Kenneth feel nine or ten.

Kenneth tells the boy he is investigating a problem with the doors on some of the newer caravans. Then he says that he delivered something to Lee by mistake, which should have gone confidentially to different tenants, and he wonders if Leighton could unlock the door for him.

Leighton says he does not have keys, which is a lie, and that it is illegal for a landlord to be sniffing around like this without giving adequate notice, which is approximately true. A thin smile exposes the boy’s sharp little front teeth.

---

There is a folder in Kenneth’s emails, above the trash folder, marked IMPORTANT. When he drags a message into one, he likes to imagine he is dragging it into the other.

The important emails are mostly from his sister. Not very long ago he had looked forward to reading her name in the sender column. She would vent her laundry regarding her now-husband’s unhurried approach to their wedding arrangements, and Kenneth would worry as euphemistically as he could about his then-girlfriend Jacqui, whose sex drive had become so polarised against his own that he feared for their long-term survivability. By using their old childhood email addresses they evaded the dragnet of conventional snooping. Always being cleverer than their partners was something that bonded them.

In the last email he had been delighted to receive, their mother was recovering well from her first stroke. He was thrilled, he told his sister, that she would emerge from her ordeal with minimal debility. What privately thrilled him was that the question of Golden Crest’s fate could continue to be avoided. He did not have to tell his sister, yet, that he would rather sell than carry a gram of the responsibility. That night, after stroking and massaging every non-erogenous part of Jacqui until she pretended to fall asleep, he was so light of heart that he went straight to sleep himself, without first having to visit the bathroom.

His sister no longer writes in her own voice. She believes she has been more than lenient regarding the status of their payout, which Kenneth had promised to release as soon as the takings restabilised, on the subject of which she would like to remind him that their creditors still CC her in every due notice.

Not all of them, he thinks.

---

The unit nearest to the entrance is leased through a short-stay app by a Swiss couple who had grimaced when Kenneth tried to resuscitate his Year 11 German. Leighton is circling the unit on his bike, throwing rocks at the windows.

Once there had been a boy called Marvin. On Lee’s sleepovers they all used to ride their bikes to Marvin’s house and pelt it with eggs. One night, with no eggs handy, Lee rolled Marvin’s garage door open and waved them all inside. The flashes of rictus he saw when each boy passed a light source proved that Kenneth was not the only one flush with adrenaline, but he was the only one driven to giggling, and when Marvin’s mother appeared at the top of the stairs in her nightgown he stood behind a bigger kid to hide his laughter.

He giggled all the way home until Lee slapped him quiet. The bigger kid slapped him harder, and they continued in turns until someone in the group came sheepishly to his senses. The more Kenneth remembers of that night the less sure he is that it really happened.

The Swiss couple runs from window to window, peeking left and right, failing to glimpse their spry assailant. Kenneth wonders if he could love a child for turning out like Leighton. He wonders if the answer to that question would change if he wore Lee’s shoes, or if the question would even have occurred to him. He looks at the clock over the door, then at the half-bottle of red wine under his desk, then at the full bottle on top of the fridge.

---

On the night Kenneth conceived his child he had worked late because there were many things he did not wish to think about. Jacqui had not been one of them until she surprised him, recumbent in her as-new lingerie, her mood uncharacteristically warm. Of course she is, he thought.

He ran the shower. It would be more likely to start a fight than not, he reasoned, if he turned her down, and when they eventually had that fight he did not want to have surrendered any ammunition. He was getting what he wanted. If he really felt so deprived he could hardly afford to be choosy about time and place.

In these circumstances it was exceptionally easy for Kenneth to enhance his stamina by putting his mind elsewhere. He thought about the lies he would have to tell to avoid disclosing when precisely he learned that his mother had suffered another stroke and died. He thought about property arrangements, and whether will readings were something that only happened on television. He remembered the time he had found his mother at the dining table in the demountable, writing something long and cursive on one of his school exercise pads, which she said was an explanation to his father of why it made no sense for him to stay gone. His father was a reasonable person, she said, and she trusted him to be reasonable, once he had time to appreciate the ramifications of his emotional flare-up. Kenneth had not considered until then that what his mother wrote on the exercise pad might have been legal in character. He thought that someone should inform his father of her death, if his father was still alive.

---

The very old sea green station wagon can be heard long before its nose swings into the driveway. A rope crosses twice through each window and meets on the passenger side in a fisherman’s bend, securing a stack of reclaimed wood to the roof.

As a Navy cadet Lee had found such an aptitude for knots that he was once able to snatch Kenneth’s backpack and hoist it where the Tasmanian flag had flown, at full mast, in the time it took for Kenneth’s shorter legs to carry him to the flagpole. Kenneth pawed at the rope until long after the lunch bell rang, continuing until the taste for suffering that signifies membership in the Elect attracted a teacher’s aide called Hannah.

All he remembers of Hannah is that her husband had worked with his father, that her sons were identical despite the two years between them, and that they all sat in their own black-tie corner of the Uniting Church service. He remembers this and what she told him that afternoon. Those are the people who will become addicted to drugs and the pokies, she said. They are cruel to you because they know you are thoughtful and, unlike them, will do good things in your life.

When Jacqui said in a tight voice that she had produced a positive pregnancy test, Kenneth knew at last the meaning of Hannah’s creed. It was not enough to avoid addiction, forswear cruelty, and be thoughtful, he realised. He also needed to do good things.

Instrumentally at first, and then with fullness of heart, he started to believe in male primogeniture. It did not matter if he proselytised this convincingly, or through attrition, or by wounding his sister’s idea of what their mother would have wanted. It was a matter of good faith. He ignored his sister's efforts to drain him of what she assumed was Jacqui’s poison, and ignored Jacqui when she asked what she had done to make his sister’s texts suddenly so brusque. He ignored them because he knew that their boats would rise with his, and if they did not, it was only lamentable that they had not been called to his mission.

His sister accepted a high price for Golden Crest. She accepted it on promise, and on the strength of her new wish to see Kenneth humbled, and to see the fanged creature destroyed who had stolen what was noble about her brother and gestated it into something that could no longer be safely invited to barbecues.

---

The lights in Lee’s caravan have been on for half an hour, which is long enough for the show to have started. An argument expressed in staccato gestures, arcing wider as the temperature increases, until the wiry monster representing Lee grows to full height and throws something. Their door swings open, slamming on the metal balustrade. Kenneth snaps his curtain closed.

The rest of the wine makes him cough. He breathes through his mouth to expel the fumes. He could love Leighton, he thinks. Whether he would love him in Lee’s shoes, or could have loved him for the length of a childhood, are pointless considerations. Sympathy and compassion live in their own compartments, distant from ideas of right and wrong. Lee cannot help destroying his son, nor is he entitled to grace. The two facts are recorded in different ledgers. There is a power, thinks Kenneth, that returns lost things in improved condition, and in this act their losers and thieves are christened alike with true and final names.

A flurry of knocking rattles the demountable. The bottle and glass are hidden under Kenneth’s desk, his hair smoothed, collar straightened. When the door opens not onto Leighton but onto Lee, he braces his knees to stay unmoved.

Lee brandishes the sheaf of papers, pointing, especially incensed by the pages written in legal language. The gist of his interpretation is that he will not pay, and that Kenneth did not have to bury his query in an avalanche of creepy, sadsack shit to learn that.

Last night, in the mood he was in when he wrote it, Kenneth would have replied that all of the language was legal. He would have said, quoting his own precis, that Lee was one reasonable person hearing an argument from another that life should be lived differently, and it was disappointing that he should take such a small part of that argument for the whole. It would have made him tall to say this. He would have risen from the ground and watched life unfold from his seat in the clouds.

Instead he sees Lee’s reddening skin and remembers the night Jacqui sat him down after work and told him she was relieved, really, that it had happened after few enough weeks that nothing had time to change. He remembers growing so hot that he could not speak except to ask to see it, and when she said this was impossible he walked until the heat became unbearable and sat in the gloom of an empty dog park looking at pictures on his phone of babies lost after the same number of weeks, babies with forms and features but no skin, little diaphanous parcels of blood the same colour as Lee’s face, and something is so shapelessly exciting about this correspondence that it is impossible for Kenneth not to laugh, and impossible for him to stop.

---

Something is wrong with the time. It cannot be early because of colour of the light, but nor can it be late, because that would mean he has missed the check-out window. A phone notification, hours old, confirms the departure of the Swiss couple. We remained for one night and an evil boy all the time was throwing his rocks. We have tried to leave but the proprietor sleeps on his desk. I would subtract stars. Translated from German.

Kenneth’s face hurts. He searches his desk for an ibuprofen and something to swallow it with, bumping his mouse, causing a recently viewed video to autoplay from the beginning. In the video, a duckling who has been raised as a swan goes on an adventure. He meets frivolous fish, depressing dogs, sarcastic snakes, and incredulous impalas, all of whom doubt his claim to swanhood. Soon he finds himself in the kitchens at Duckingham Palace, where he secretes himself under a silver cloche, but when he is unveiled to the royal family they are disgusted and refuse to eat him. He misses the company of his swan family and his hideous best friend Cygnet, so he returns home, only to find that camouflaged hunters with duck whistles have massacred his village. Cygnet is the only survivor.

---

The teachers who knew what he was planning tried to stop him, but the person whose job it was to convene assemblies thought it was a lovely idea. Her own shoulder had been chipped by bullies, in a different time, in the same-but-different context of a suburban girls’ grammar. She offered to help him with the words, but respected that they had to be his own. That was what he told her—in reality he agreed with his mother that this person was a silly cow full of misplaced airs and graces, and he did not trust her judgement.

A different teacher, Mrs. Hunter, sat behind the crowd, looking dewy and compassionate. It crushed him when, instead of gilding his speech with praise, she asked him if it was really what he wanted to do. Being crushed in this way made him defiant. In a different time he will picture Mrs. Hunter after he composes a pressure-sealed argument that, while the near-mother of his lost child may not owe him a future, she has nevertheless stolen from him by paving one out before demolishing it. Picturing Mrs. Hunter will make him decide not to press send. Later, when he is more drunk, he will picture her again and become defiant.

He looked away from Mrs. Hunter. Other faces, indistinct ones, hummed with polite expectation. A few, including Lee, including Marvin and the big kid who had once slapped him, including also a couple of the more laddish teachers, were beaming in the wrong humour. He told himself in his mother’s voice that these were the people who most needed to hear him. His mother’s was the voice that sounded when he straightened his sheaf of papers and started to speak.