TO GO BACK, WALK ~
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1996.
Billy Thunder dreams. If you stand low over him at these minutes with a torchlight playing in Billy's face, his head on its side resting on his hands as he sleeps, you will see his eyeballs bat and flicker about behind his eyelids in remarkable REM. Beat a saucepan and he'd wake, but the torch won't do it.
Letting the torch light linger on his face affords the opportunity to look closer. Being idle over it, like at the waxworks. Be fascinated. If you have seen him once at his swivel seat in an open-plan office, you have seen him a hundred times, but never as he is here. If you have met him scores of times for coffee in this and that down-town cafe when you were younger or half a dozen times for sex you have never seen him look so placid as he is now, in his dream-sleep. He lies on his side with his hands drawn together in balls beneath his moon-shaped face and double chin (which disappears when he holds his head up), and his cheeks glow softly, burnt from the day's sun. His nose is classical, a straight roofed triangle, but thin, with f clefts for nostrils, and in the shallows either side of that nose the pours are open. They seem to have faint, grey hearts. High on his left cheek grows a freak, black hair, curled round and round like a rolled whip, which you have an urge to reach down and pluck. Towards morning the sheet covers less of him each hour showing a buttock to mosquitoes or a batwing of curly hair on his chest. He is not far overweight, but if he is lazy, the thickness that is already gathering across his waist and kidneys could easily turn to a middle-aged unsightliness. Otherwise, except for high-arched, small feet, he is built very ordinarily, but he would have been a chubby baby - a baby of promise. When Billy smiles in his sleep, so tranquilly, you would believe he could keep that promise.
At 3 o'clock in the morning, he shifts. His arms fall apart and away from beneath his head, and he smacks his lips together. Then sits bolt upright.
"Damnit, I've dreamt." Billy scrubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. The day's sins have came back in his sleep to make mischief in his head - he doesn't usually dream, he thinks. He reasons: ordinarily, people remember their dreams: he remembers no dreams: I do not dream. (The syllogism pleases him). And the dream chilled him. There had been people runnng. It was vivid. But even as he wakes he's no longer sure about how many or their identity, though the further back into his memoery he traces them the more he pictures someone very like you. But he knows he must be mistaken. He draws the sheet to his chin.
"What were they running from?"
You almost answer. But bite your lip, hard enough to taste the bruise purpling. You are in the deeper shadow around the door or behind the wardrobe or have slipped beneath the bed, which creaked when he sat. The wind's coming up again, blustering and sucking at the bedroom window outside, rattling it, sucking the humid moisture from the brick walls. A finger of sparks creeps up Billy Thunder's spine into the back of his neck making his hair stand on gooseflesh. "Is there anybody there? Who's there?" So here it is: all along you hadn't known what you would do if he woke.
You either step forward and clout him with the torch, bursting its globe, or slip backwards out of his room scampering for the back steps: in either case Billy stays put, concussed or petrified. Or if you are under the bed you stay perfectly still yourself. In a moment Billy will go find the back door open and then bang about the house holding his fists clenched and chest high, searching each room, until he wakes his sister.
**********
Though then again if it had happened that you clubbed him once with the torch, you might have kept at it three or four times until the glass lens burst and he was unconscious. It must have felt good, it surprised you: was something you could have done anytime in the years you were best mates, he could be so infuriating. Cudgel him once more, just for the weight of it, the glutenous thud and jolt along your arm, the visceral shudder. Once again. You could have turned a light on then and searched the room more thoroughly. Not sacking it of course, but shifting objects from one place to another, or lifting an item and putting it back very nearly in the same place, displaced a centimetre.The first area to search is the dresser. You feel in behind his underwear and socks, between his shirts and sweaters, layer by layer. Alone in a toiletries bag under hand towels in the bottom drawer, shockingly (because it was unexpected), is a hardly squeezed tube of KY jelly still in its box like toothpaste used once and discarded for flavour. You want to spit the saliva out of your mouth but have to swallow.
You look behind the books in the bookcase, pulling them forward three and four at a time to peer behind, touching for longest the spines of those books you know. Some of them are yours, titles you'd lent him and that he kept, and in one is an inscription to you on your sixteenth birthday. Then you pat down the pockets of everything in Billy's wardrobe and feel in the toes of his joggers and shoes. What you are searching for is only a small item, it will stand in your palm when you find it. But Billy has not kept it safely wrapped in tissue and tucked snug in some solemn nook. Instead, you find it in a mildewed cardboard box on top of the wardrobe.
He has had some of this rubbish since you were boys together. A cache of gimcrack treasure. Collecting and hiding it behind a false panel in your closet had constituted a juvenile game - mostly his game, but the secret-keeping excited you, too. Live and spent .303 shells; bits of transistor radio and battery-electric motors; pen-lights; strips of magnesium (that you burnt at night blinding yourselves for minutes); miniature boxes and bottles and phials (mostly heavily scented oils and eau de toilette samplers). In some benign corner of adulthood you might have felt sentimental over this trash. There was the half a torn foreign banknote (its markings in a Cyrillic alphabet) that Billy had found rolled into a link at the base of a cyclone mesh fence, too. Billy had imagined it to be a coded message between Russian spies; you and he had clung to one another's arms in fright for weeks watching dark blue-suited strangers in parked cars near your homes. Childish wreckage. You began to expect to find a long rosary of yellowed and shiny, ivory beads, too, the beads separated by tiny straws of raw blackwood. Billy found it and gave it to you, but then tried to take it back with the rest of the trash one Friday afternoon. You are disappointed that the rosary isn't in the box.
The day he had tried to take it away, Billy had come to your place after school like he often did. (When was this - sixth grade?) After an hour or so he had looked at the collection at the back of the closet and said brightly: I think I'll take all this home, hey, don't you think? You glowered at him - he didn't even look at you. In fact, what you couldn't know, he had looked at it himself suddenly embarrassed for the both of you, because all he had seen that day was a box of trashy bric-a-brack. He had gathered it up hastily (all but the rosary: you'd reached under his shoulder to pick it up and had wrapped its decades around your knuckles, clenching it) and was gone before you could gather your hurt up into a nugget jagged enough to hurl. Well! you thought to yourself. So let the suck take his garbage, you didn't need the dag, the bastard, the bitch.
How many days was it before you spoke to him again? A school week? Two? In the school yard, who would speak to Bill-the-pill, Billy Der, if not you? Your first memory of Billy Thunder was the day in grade two that he brought a small cardboard suitcase to school and announced to the littlies play yard he would do a magic show. At little lunch, he squatted against the cold blue-stone wall of the old courtyard, lay the case down and draped a hankie over it. A small, expectant audience squatted on the asphalt in front of him. Billy took from the case more hankies, a fistful of one-inch steel ball bearings (which years later had become prized items in your shared treasure, and now lay up there in that cardboard box on top of a wardrobe), a handful of dried peas, four egg cups, and a pack of playing cards. He began shuffling the playing cards. He hid the marbles under the up-turned egg cups, the hanky rucking as he slid the cups past one another around the suitcase lid. He kept draping the hankies over the cups or over palm-fulls of peas and lifting them off again (peeking under his end first), waiting for magic to happen. Soon, just like everyone in the disgruntled, purse-lipped audience, you thought him a dickhead and moved off. The boy beside you stalked off saying loudly he was going to get his big brother to come bash this moron. But you didn't move far: you watched him. Billy stayed squatting behind his case, smiling to himself sometimes, his movements very even and unhurried, packing his unmagic objects away. You hoped the kid with the big brother wouldn't come back. Billy's optimism, his positivism and utterly unfounded faith, his trust that magic would happen, had taken you up. Of course, these were not your thoughts in grade two, standing thirty feet away watching the dick pack away his trash....
When you did speak to him again after he'd taken the cache of junk from the back of your closet, it was only because he bumped into you down at the shops and invited himself back to your place saying hows about we go see a movie. So, no skin off your dick if he treated you like the whole thing hadn't happened. You could too.
And in that trashy cardboard box with the rest of it is the small item you have come to take back from Billy. A table decoration. You had last seen it at Billy's house one Summer holiday thirteen years ago (you have counted). His family had moved to Coldstream by that summer, up into the dingley dells and wooded hills of the nouveau commuting class, and you saw each other much less frequently. The occasion of this visit - the last time you did visit him at his own home - was your sixteenth birthday. The following Friday, Billy would be seventeen. This was the one week of the year in which he and you were the same age - an important week. You had taken this treasure with you.
It stood in your hand now after thirteen years, a device for forgetful Bridge players. A machine that displayed trumps. It had belonged to your grandmother and then to your father and he had passed it on to you, a small, elegantly cast silver frame under which hung five card-sized leaves of alabaster inlaid with ebony, rose-wood, ivory and silver, each finely and simply decorated to represent a different suit. You described it once as a sort of teledex, a description you immediately regretted: but a small crank would turn the rigid cards over the top flipped one at a time to reveal another face. Spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, no trumps. Your gran had been a champion player and so had your father, and he had been proud of it. There are other trophies and mementoes of him, but the one that as a child you had cherished was this. And you were taking it back.