Golden Boys Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  Sonya Hartnett writes for adults, young adults, and children. Her work has won numerous prizes, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2008), and is published around the world. Hartnett lives in Melbourne.

  sonyahartnett.com.au

  ALSO BY SONYA HARTNETT

  Wilful Blue

  Sleeping Dogs

  The Devil Latch

  Black Foxes

  Princes

  All My Dangerous Friends

  Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

  Thursday’s Child

  Of a Boy

  Forest

  The Silver Donkey

  Surrender

  The Ghost’s Child

  Sadie and Ratz

  Butterfly

  The Midnight Zoo

  Life in Ten Houses

  The Children of the King

  PICTURE BOOKS

  The Boy and the Toy

  Come Down, Cat

  The Wild One

  AS CAMERON S. REDFERN

  Landscape with Animals

  For my own sisters and brothers

  With their father, there’s always a catch: the truth is enough to make Colt take a step back. There’s always some small cruelty, an unpleasant little hoop to be crawled through before what’s good may begin: here is a gift, but first you must guess its colour. Colt’s instinct is to warn his brother – Bastian, don’t – as if away from a cliff’s edge or some quaggy sinkhole, but doing so risks leaving him stranded, alone like someone fallen overboard in the night, watching a boat full of revellers sail on. Bastian will want to play. Their mother will say, in her voice of reined-in dismay, ‘It’s just a bit of fun.’

  As the eldest he gets to guess first, so he guesses, ‘Blue.’

  Their father shakes his head happily. ‘Nope! Bas?’

  Bastian is prone to birdiness, his whole world one of those plastic kitchens in which girls make tea from petals and water. He guesses, ‘Yellow?’ as though it’s perfectly possible their father would bring home for his two boys a bicycle coloured yellow.

  ‘Nope again!’ Their father is cheered, rather than nonplussed, by the attempt. ‘Colt?’

  Already Colt feels they’ve run out of colours. ‘Green?’

  ‘Not green. Your guess, Bas.’

  Colt lets his shoulders fall. He looks at his mother, who is lingering by the leather recliner where their father would be sitting if he wasn’t standing by the mantelpiece conducting this game. She wears an apron, like a mother on a television show, and doesn’t look at him, although she surely feels it, his stare that is leaden even to him. And it happens again, like the clear tinging of a bell, the eerie moment when a truth breaks from the green depths into sunlight: she’ll ignore Colt for the rest of his life, if the choice is between her husband and her son. His mother will cling tight to the rail of the boat. Bastian’s saying, ‘Spotty?’ and Colt, dazed, stares down at his own feet. He wonders if this is what growing up is – this unbuckling of faith, the isolation. He is only twelve, but he’s not afraid. He is old enough. He looks at his brother, laughs rustily. ‘Spotty? Bas.’

  Bastian lifts his face. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a spotty bike?’

  ‘I mean, all different colours —’

  Colt shakes his head; his brother can be unbelievable. ‘It’s not spotty.’

  ‘Who knows?’ cries their father, reeling them back. ‘Who knows what’s possible? But it isn’t spotty. Your guess, Colt.’

  Colt rummages for colours – he can’t remember any they’ve already nominated, feels only an indignation which, if it had a colour, would be a swampy scarlet. ‘I don’t know. I give up.’

  ‘If you give up, you mightn’t get the bike . . .’

  ‘Don’t give up, Colly!’ Bastian bounces on his toes.

  Colt draws a breath. He wants to shout at his father that he doesn’t care, that no bicycle is worth this humiliation, that he’s not some prideless puppet. His mother has turned to him, her gaze reaching across the water, willing him to guess again: he swallows, as if it were icy air and salt water, her refusal to share or even acknowledge his affront. It doesn’t matter, he wants to yell. I can be alone. He’s not yet that courageous, but he will be. ‘Black?’

  ‘Not black. Bastian?’

  ‘Oh, I know, Dad! Purple?’

  ‘Purple it is not. Colt?’

  ‘Red,’ Colt snaps.

  ‘Not red. It’s difficult! Your turn, Bas.’

  ‘Is it brown?’ asks the boy.

  ‘Sorry, Bas, not brown. Colt?’

  This can’t go on all night, but it threatens to. The time has come to draw a knife through it. Colt digs his toes into the carpet and thinks about all the bicycles he’s seen. At his old school – already it seems a place from a lifetime ago, although if he returned now his friends would hardly have missed him, familiar books would be open, the same papers would be pinned to noticeboards in the corridors, it would be as if he’d never left – the boys had hooked their bikes to the chain-mesh fence, posing them like skeletal carousel horses with their front wheels bucked off the ground. Expensive bikes, all of them, and when they were not the most costly they were still the most fashionable, racers with curved handlebars and tyres as thin as plate. Colt and Bastian have, in fact, such a bicycle each already, neat speedsters which at this moment are safe in the shed and in perfect working order, as their father maintains them. Two boys, two bikes, no need for this mysterious third; but their father heaps gifts upon them, there is nothing the brothers don’t receive. Everything they own must be the biggest, the better, the one which glitters most. Suddenly convinced of it, Colt says, ‘Silver.’

  And although he’s sure his father must shout yes! silver! what he actually says, with no sign of wearying, is, ‘Not silver. Bassy?’

  Frustration rears crazily, before Colt can crush it. ‘Dad! Just tell us! Bastian can’t guess anymore!’

  ‘Of course he can —’

  ‘I can!’

  ‘No!’ Colt storms. ‘Just say it!’

  ‘Is it green? It’s green —’

  ‘You already guessed green!’

  ‘That was a different green! Dad, is it green? No, orange? Is it orange?’

  Colt claps his hands to his face. He hears his mother laugh sympathetically, but her sympathy is useless, insulting, a leaf thrown into ocean. It is stuffy behind his hands, airless in the lounge room where the sun has shone through the big window all afternoon. The walls of the house are freshly painted in a shade of sand-dune beige, and smell like something plastic lifted out of a long-closed cardboard box. From the newly-laid carpet rises an odour of chemicals and glue. There had been a different smell when he’d seen the house for the first time, the day on which he’d been told it was to be his new home – a papery smell, like a wasps’ nest, and the walls had been the palest blue. On the mantel had been arranged a picket-
fence of keys, each attached by a short string to a cardboard label. Front door spare, screen door original, side door, garage door, laundry overhead cupboard: he’d never known a house in need of so many keys, as if each corner concealed a secret. His father had swept the keys and their cards into his jacket pocket. Colt has no need for keys: his mother doesn’t work, so when her sons come home from school she is there; whatever she’s done that day, she has finished doing. She has a car key, and a duplicate of the front-door key. All the other keys Colt has never seen again. At the mantel, their father is laughing. ‘Isn’t that what postmen ride, orange bicycles? Do you want to be a postman, Bas?’

  Bastian screws his face up merrily. ‘Dad! No!’

  ‘If I gave you an orange bike, you might turn into a postman! Maybe that’s how postmen become postmen?’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’

  That’s red bikes, Colt thinks into his hands: it’s red bikes postmen ride, you . . . moron. Because on this night when truths are rising to the light, he’s seeing this too: his father can be absurd. He’s been a god and then a man of miracles and of late he has sometimes seemed a stranger to Colt, or someone he wishes were a stranger, but through all this downhill metamorphosing his father has remained a man of dignity: absurd comes to Colt like the scratch that makes the record player’s needle skim. He lowers his hands to consider his father in this new, diffuse light. He’s amazed that it’s taken him so long to see it, and wonders how much else he is missing. The evening is warm, but Colt feels cool. As if to halt what he’s thinking dead in its tracks, their mother finally speaks. ‘Dinner’s almost ready, Rex.’

  And perhaps even their father is bored, as it must be boring being ringmaster to such witless clowns: ‘All right,’ he says, pushing away from the mantelpiece, ‘you can give up. It’s an impossible task for two intelligent boys. Dinner’s almost ready. Quick then, let’s look at this bike.’

  It is parked outside, on the porch, below the lounge-room window. The four of them crowd around it like sheep at the manger, Bastian’s hands fluttering to his mouth. The bike is a BMX, with wide chrome handlebars like a stag’s horns, and vinyl-covered rolls of padding press-studded to the handlebars and frame. Its crow-dark tyres are densely, deeply knotted. The narrow seat is hardly present, not intended for sitting on; the handgrips are knobbly, the pedals serrated for grip. It has no gears, but its brake cables curve boldly, silver-threaded antennae. Not everyone has such a machine, they’re a marvel seemingly just recently delivered into the world, and standing beside it Colt feels the warmth of its desirability. It smells of its newness, and in the entire world there is no better smell. But what he sees is the hook that was buried in his father’s game, the treacherous seaweed beneath the waves; and in the moment when he should thank his father, what he says is, ‘It’s black. I guessed black.’

  ‘It’s charcoal,’ their father corrects. ‘What do you reckon, Bas?’

  Bastian has the wide eyes of a fawn, the colour of caramel syrup. There’s a kind of trepidation in them now, an awe of how good life can get. ‘Oh Dad!’ he breathes.

  ‘Rex,’ says their mother, ‘you spoil them.’

  ‘Ah well!’ Their father shrugs helplessly. ‘Why not? There’s been a lot happening lately, new house, new school, but you’ve been good about it, haven’t you, boys? You haven’t complained. And what goes better with a new neighbourhood than a new bike to ride around on? All the kids will want a piece of this when they see it, won’t they? The fellow in the shop said it’s the kind all the boys want.’

  And Colt, who hadn’t known complaining had been an option, runs his fingers over the BMX’s shiny frame and perceives that this is why he – for it will be he, not Bastian, who commands this savage thing – now owns it, and owns so many good things, and only has to ask in order to receive more. Their father piles his sons with objects worth envying, so he will be the father of envied sons. Two boys, one bike: it’s not for them, it’s for him.

  It is murky, this perception – he has a sense of something charmless shifting its position, something which sees him but which he is failing to see. He lets his hand drop. ‘Do you like it?’ his father’s asking.

  ‘I love it,’ says Bastian heartily.

  ‘It’s great.’ Colt looks at his father, who is framed against the white sky and the last fanning rays of the light. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Can we go for a ride, Dad?’

  ‘We’ll take it for a test-run after dinner,’ says Rex. ‘And there’s the weekend ahead of you, remember. Plenty of time. Dinner first, fun later.’

  He spins his younger son around and smacks him on the tail, and Bastian, released from the spell of the marvellous thing, shoots into the house, flailing with excitement. There’s the merest moment, as their father follows the boy inside, for Colt to catch his mother’s eye. ‘I guessed black,’ he says. ‘Charcoal is black.’

  He sees her concede with the faintest of nods. ‘You’ve got it now,’ she says. ‘Don’t make a fuss.’

  Freya Kiley has started to see things she hasn’t seen before. Until recently she has lived as every child must: as someone dropped on a strangers’ planet, forced to accept that these are the ways of this world. Being a child, she thinks waftily, is like being in rough but shallow water, buffeted, dunked, pushed this way and that. If it is sometimes alarming, there is always the sight of the beach. There’s always the sand under your feet.

  The problem, however, is that sand is sand. From where she sits she can almost feel it, the way the water sluices the grains away from heels and toes. It’s stupid to put your trust in sand. And when you’re a child, that is what you are: stupid.

  When she was younger – nine, ten – Freya had tried to be holy. Piety was one of the rare things which the nuns at school approved of in a child; more than that, it seemed to be something she had no choice about. Certain traits characterised this world: the sun rose, dogs chased cats, and God lay underfoot everywhere like a clammy carpet. So Freya had tried to love the lamblike Jesus with his flowing hair, she’d strained to feel the presence of her guardian angel. She’d dwelt upon the cloudy Heaven awaiting her at the end of her hardly-begun life. If it had always been an effort, if her thoughts had repeatedly roamed, she’d assumed it was because religion was nerve-wracking. Talking snakes, toady plagues, corpses walking, people drinking blood. A mutilated man nailed to planks, his brow pierced by infectious-looking thorns. And, overseeing everything, a vile-tempered ghost, an emaciated and rebukeful old man in a hospital gown, watching and waiting to notch up a girl’s smallest mistake. A God who was always harsh and rarely fair, who would hurl even an infant to Hell.

  Now she’s older and smarter, and she’s starting to see that the world is a castle, and that a child lives in just one room of it. It’s only as you grow up that you realise the castle is vast and has countless false floors and hidden doors and underground tunnels; and that the castle is haunted, and that the castle scares even itself. And as you get older, you’re forced out of the room, whether you want to go or not. Freya wants, with urgency, to go.

  Already, through the first doorway, she’s discovered this: the reason the angels and Heaven and the old ghost have never stuck with her is not that they’re nerve-wracking, but that they are not true.

  There was no particular moment of realisation: it is more like something she was born knowing, and the knowledge has been slowly making its way like a splinter to the surface, and now it has finally arrived. It’s come accompanied by a sense of shame and hurt, as if she has heard at last a snigger that’s been skulking behind her back. Freya glances around, and sees plain faces. No one is laughing, yet she hears it.

  She sits down, because the time has come to sit. When the priest has finished talking, she’ll stand. Her fingernails carve crescents in the polished pine of the pew. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,’ the priest says, reading from the Bible which is a great gilt-edged slab, a monster book full of monstering: when Freya l
ooks at the congregation, it doesn’t seem wicked to her. Wicked would be interesting, but everyone looks dull, half-asleep, slightly angry. Her brothers and sisters are kids, and they’re not wicked, only irritating, and if God were here she would tell him that nobody has her permission to say nasty things about them. The church is recently built from cream brick and too much glass, so the air is thick and overheated. It has hard-wearing brown carpet and teal-blue trim. It is meant to be modern – the crucifix above the altar is made from beams of industrial steel, so intimidating that Jesus has absented himself – yet the priest is reading the same old lines from the same old book. Freya’s nails dig into the pew as if she’d screw the place up and throw it away. This is the last time, she swears. She will never come here again. She is not going to tell herself lies, nor accept the lies of others. From now on, she will do things properly.

  And when it is finally over, the priest bowing before the altar and trudging off with his duckling row of boys into the private room where girls are not welcome, the morning is done as if packed into an elderly person’s wardrobe, but at least she is free to leave. Freya would like to sprint away kicking her heels like a pony, but that’s not what can happen. The aisle clogs with parishioners and she gets hemmed in, has to worm through gaps while her siblings and mother disappear out the doors. Distance stretches like toffee, for a moment she thinks she will never reach fresh air: at the door she’s caught in a blockage that has congealed in the hope of seeing the priest as if everyone hasn’t seen him just minutes earlier and can’t also see him in the milkbar buying cigarettes and see his underwear, too, if they so desire, hanging on the line in the yard of the presbytery, and it amazes her that with these signs they don’t see he’s just a human, a man of baggy elastic and bad habits, and by the time she’s dodged and wriggled her way into the sunlight she feels scorched with contempt for every last living thing.

  Only to find that her mother, too, has been snagged, and is stopped on the path beside the carpark with Marigold and Dorrie sagging beside her and Peter in his stroller arching his chest against the straps, and she’s talking with an awkward smile to a man and a lady and two boys Freya has never seen before. The sun is warmer than when she’d last been under it, the heat drawing fumes from the bitumen; cars are reversing, people are standing about, children are beginning to cry. She tries to slip past unseen but her mother catches her – actually lunges sideways to grab her – and tells the strangers loudly and eagerly, as if only enthusiasm keeps her heart pumping, ‘This is another of my daughters, this is Freya.’