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“Enlighten me.”
“I don’t know what happened to you before you washed up in Tara, before you had no choice but to live here, but it can’t have been good. And it’s obvious why you wouldn’t want to come back. But you choose to mark yourself with a scene that scarred you in so many ways. Most people get tattoos to rebel, be a nonconformist, or because their mates did. You choose to commemorate pain and fear.”
“You’re wrong.” He turned so he could see her face, the look in her big wide pale eyes. “This was where I was reborn. This is where a kid with no prospects took control of his life and swore to make something of himself. This wasn’t about punishment; this was about honouring the beginning.”
She smiled. “I’m happy to be wrong, Will.”
/> He kissed her forehead. She was wrong about the tattoo, but right about so much else. He abandoned the idea of food. He took her hand and led her out to the verandah. He held the edge of the big hammock suspended across the deck. “With great power there must also come great responsibility.”
She sat on the edge and swung her legs up. “Confucius circa a long time ago?”
“Spiderman early sixties.”
She laughed. “What are you trying to tell me?”
He made a scoot motion and she shifted over so he could climb on, making the hammock swing wildly as he settled and pulled her into his arms. He wanted to be close to Darcy while he did this. He hoped the awkwardness of the hammock, the threat of pitching her out, might stop him from simply walking away when it got too much.
He started, “Norman was drunk, more than usual,” and she went coma-still on his chest. “When I pulled him off Pete he came after me with a branch from the fire.”
“The burn scar on your ribs.”
He nodded and the hammock swayed. “He burnt his hand so he went to the creek. I followed him to the bank. I wasn’t going to let him get near Pete or me again, though I don’t know what I was going to do to prevent him, I was hurt pretty bad. He tripped and fell in, just in the shallows. He could’ve stood up if he wasn’t so tanked, but he started laughing, stumbling about in wet clothes and went in deeper.
“He thought it was funny, till, I don’t know, his boots, his pants, something snagged. He couldn’t pull free and went under. He kept calling me to help him and swallowing water. I wanted him to shut up. I didn’t want him to wake Pete. I didn’t want Pete to see him, because I’d have hit Pete myself if he tried to stop things. I waited till Norman stopped thrashing, till he sank. I waited hours till he washed up on the bank. It was morning. I hauled him out. Then I woke Pete and told him what I’d done and we buried him.”
Will closed his eyes. All that had come out of him so easily. Like it’d had been stacked up on his tongue forever waiting to scuttle out; when he’d thought he’d never have the words to admit it aloud.
That night, both of them sore, bruised, his own ribs blistered and weeping, he and Pete made a pact to never speak about what happened and until that conversation in Quingpu, they never had. Firstly from the sheer fear of what new horror might rain down on them, but later because it was irrelevant. Norman had meant so little to them, so little to the world, he was easy to be finished with. But Will had just told the woman he loved in stark detail how he deliberately, consciously, let Pete’s dad drown, and all she’d done was hug him tighter.
He felt like he was floating, not because of the hammock, but in his life. He was that sixteen year old again, burning with hatred and frustration, weighed down with his self-imposed responsibility for Pete, the younger, weaker, nerdy kid who alone accepted him for the dumb lug he was then.
He could walk the event through like it was a comic book, complete with thought bubbles. Here he was standing on the tarmac outside the block hearing Pete yelling. The thought bubble above his head said, “Danger. Save Pete.” In the next frame he was jumping on Norman’s back, drawing him away from Pete as he cowered in a corner of the container. “Take that, you evil bastard.”
Then, Norman crashing him into the side of the container, winding him, cracking him with his belt, pulling a branch from the barbeque fire and coming after him shouting, “I’ll get you, you brainless fuck.” Pete crying in the dark from fear, from pain. “Sob, sob.”
Luring Norman further away with the flaming branch in his hand and being outsmarted, the branch catching him on his side, burning his shirt, his skin, making him howl like Pete had.
After, the relief of seeing Norman burn his own hand and stagger to the creek. Plotting, not too strong a word, how to make sure the man never hurt him or Pete again.
Darcy was holding him tight across the chest. “It was a decent reason to get a new name,” she said.
“A new name. New lives. That came later.”
Will knew it was twisted and evil and intentionally wrong then, and he knew it now. More than being accused of Feng Kee’s murder, more than being beaten half to brain dead in Quingpu, what he’d done to Norman was the reason he wasn’t fit for the world.
What he didn’t understand was why Darcy wasn’t repulsed by him, how she could stand to touch him.
She came up on her elbow to look him in the eye. “It wasn’t your fault he drowned, Will. He might’ve drowned you to save himself.”
“Pete would agree with you. He never regretted it. Has never once blamed me. But he didn’t see Norman’s face.” He passed a hand over his own eyes, trying to clear the vision of Norman’s panicked eyes. “When he knew he was drowning he sobered up some, enough to know I could save him if I gave him a hand. Enough to know I wouldn’t.”
Darcy put her finger to the scar under his chin. Smoothed it. “How did the two of you survive?”
“Norman wasn’t missed. We let people believe he was drunk. Later we said he’d shot through. After a while people stopped asking. We lived off his dole payments, a part pension he got from veteran’s affairs. The money went a lot further outside the pub. Then a year later, a grandfather Pete didn’t know he had left Norman money. We got creative and claimed it, just like the dole payments. Everyone knew we were fending for ourselves; they cut us some slack, let Pete sign as Norman. Would only happen in a small town like this.
“The inheritance money was enough to get us out of Tara. Get Pete into a boarding school, get me to Brisbane. That’s when we became Parkers, brothers. We were going to change our lives.”
“And you did. You triumphed from such a bad place.”
