kicked sand at Bo and Bo shielded his face. ‘Fuckoff.’
But Frank kicked some more and Bo roared, but it wasn’t anger, he was just scared and then he was even more repulsive, and Frank kicked him in the fat gut to see what would happen, and Bo rolled on to his side and lowed like a cow, his face wet, and he kicked him again and then went running into the thick black, and the sounds of the bush got louder and something far away crowed a victory.
The thing that really scared him was the pit toilet. He could smell it, he could imagine the thick-backed beetles that lived down there, the little ticking crabs and the bandy-legged rats. How far down was it? It was far, it was far enough that there’d be no getting out, and the sides were slime shit and you’d be up to your waist in it, if you were lucky. And all there’d be would be that crescent moon of the toilet hole all the way up there, where the lid peeped open. It felt like his next step would be into that hole and for a time he stood still on the spot, sweating, too scared to put his foot out into the dark. Then he got a hold on himself. It was the gasoline he could smell, still all up in his nose, and he could aim himself towards the bush through the cane and that way he wouldn’t even come close to the dunny. He listened to the cicadas and went towards them, then when the cane started flicking past his ears and across his eyes he ran full tilt at the sound, the rib-rib-rib, and he felt the air, wet around him. He heard the strange crow again and headed for it, deep into the deep black.
He’d slept a night, or perhaps a night and a day, on the dry leaf ground. Ants had tickled at his neck, mosquitoes had made his eyes pinholes. Watched by a million different things that didn’t expect him to stay so long. The sound of something hopping through the dry leaves like a thing on a spring, of a nightbird mooing like a calf. The swish of a snake in the dark. And past all that he’d been listening for something else.
He woke in an apple-pie bed at a hospital and his old man was there, pale and red but sober. He’d touched Frank’s foot through the blankets. Frank wanted to speak, wanted to know what had happened, but he couldn’t, a kind of lockjaw. Before he fell back to sleep his father said, ‘We’ll have to chain youse to the bloody radiator, mate,’ and inside Frank had felt a sarcastic laugh at his dad who kept a photo album of dead men under his bed, a grubby little cache of death porn to look at on nights he wasn’t screwing some drunk woman who made the whole house smell.
It could only have been his imagination, but in the dark he felt things moving. Things too lumpy and heavy to be held up by their thin legs, things with brown spines and slits for eyes, cat-sized rodents with teeth that grew as long as their bodies, things that reached out for his face with their blind hands with claws like knitting needles. He felt air move close to his face and shut his eyes, waiting between the howls of Jesus in the bush, waited for the claws to close in on his cheek, to poke up a nostril and push into his mouth. At points he thought he heard it get closer and once he heard a scraping at the door, a snuffling, a scritch-scratch, and all that he could do was close himself up, his eyes, his palms and his ears, and hide in bed like a child. If it thinks I’m asleep it’ll leave me alone, as long as I don’t move it will drag itself past my bed.
14
Leon’s feet felt wet in his boots even though he’d just towelled them, even though he’d wiped out the insides and let them dry overnight. When he’d banged them against the ground in the morning, a red centipede as thick as his thumb rizzled out, its stalk antennae up and pointing like two warning fingers. Rod cleaned his feet with his towel, which he’d managed to keep fairly free of dirt, considering. Delicately, he threaded the stubby end of it between each of his