Blushing, she takes out her purse, gives him the right coins and leaves. Nathan turns in the street, half expecting to be chased.
Wind kicks the leaves in the gutters. Walking through the houses is less windy, Nathan’s mother says. She’s overspent. They must walk halfway home, then take the bus the rest of the way. Carrier bags dig trenches in Nathan’s palms. Now and then, his mother pauses and says, ‘That’s a nice front door, isn’t it?’ or ‘I love those windows.’ He doesn’t understand how anyone can love something like windows. She stops, pulls the hood over the buggy to protect Helen from the drizzle and looks at shiny white windows. Some have the front page of a newspaper taped to the glass. The newspaper is a flag with a photo of a grinning soldier in the centre. There are only three words on it: ‘Support Our Troops’. Nathan wonders if the people who put the paper in the window have dads in the service, brothers or sons. The wind blows in his ears; they ache. He sees Spiderman curtains in one window and wishes he could knock on the door and go in; his mother looks as if she is thinking the same and would love to make friends with someone for a while. Maybe there’s a kid in the Spiderman house just like him he could talk to, but he can’t. Joe wouldn’t like him talking to people for a start, his lips are a sealed plastic line.
‘Tell no one nothing,’ he says. ‘You admit your fears and stuff can start to bug you, seem real.’
And nothing is all Nathan tells everyone all day long.
Under raindrops on her clear plastic bubble, Helen is asleep as they arrive home. Nathan stares at the newspaper taped to their window as his mother rummages for keys. The soldier’s grin is almost white, bleached by the sun.
‘I could have sworn we still had some packets of pasta left,’ Nathan’s mother says. ‘Where does it all go?’
She unpacks the groceries, but he can’t help. Stiffly, Nathan walks upstairs, rips into the cardboard packaging under his coat and undresses Joe quickly, not looking at his smooth groin or touching the abs etched into his torso like scars. The jumpsuit is spattered in brown and green splodges that don’t camouflage with the carpet or the white flowers on the wallpaper. The helmet fits. Nathan stands the soldier on tiptoes like a ballerina to get his feet in the boots.
‘Bit of a squeeze, Sarge,’ Joe says.
His toes strain at soft plastic. Nathan squeezes the boot the way his mother decides if he needs new shoes. Tearing the cardboard packaging to bits, he hides it under his bed.
‘Made in Taiwan,’ Joe reads the scrap of card at his feet. ‘It figures.’
Nathan knew it would bug him. He doesn’t think there’s ever been a war with Taiwan, but it doesn’t matter to Joe. It’s another country.
‘Anywhere could be the enemy,’ says Joe, ‘anyone.’
Nathan looks at the doll handed down by his cousins. Sometimes Nathan wants to argue, but who knows where Joe’s been? How many wars he’s seen?
It’s Saturday again. Nathan’s mother runs through the hall in rabbit slippers, tripping over foam ears. She barges through Nathan’s door with an envelope in her hand. This time it’s not a letter from school. She isn’t asking him why he wouldn’t take off his scarf in class.
‘He’s coming home!’ she says. ‘Really, this time.’
‘Great,’ Nathan says.
He wants to believe her, smile with her, but he can’t feel his face. His mouth feels like a foot he’s been sitting on too long. The door gapes when she leaves.
‘We need shelter, Sarge,’ Joe says. ‘Somewhere to figure out manoeuvres.’
Nathan builds a fort with a blanket and chairs by the bed. Inside glows orange, the lamp lights up the old blanket, revealing thick and thin patches. It feels quieter in the tent than anywhere in the house, though the walls are just wool. Sometimes, in the tent, Nathan tries to talk.
‘What’s it like, Joe,’ he says, ‘where you’ve been?’
‘Sshh,’ Joe says. ‘Look out.’
Nathan positions Joe’s eagle eyes sideways. From his voice, he knows that’s what Joe wants. He places a plastic gun in his hand pointing at the door. The end of the gun is slightly chewed from when Nathan was bored. There are lots of chewed things in the room; Nathan chews everything he can get. He likes biting something firm, seeing the size of the dents his teeth can make in things. He looks at Joe’s left thumb now, chewed to the knuckle, the tip spread out like a spatula. He was sorry he chewed it once Joe started to talk.
‘I’m sorry about your thumb,’ he says again.
Joe’s on the look-out, not looking at his thumb.
‘Can’t feel it,’ he says.
Joe wakes Nathan up with a hiss: ‘Patrol,’ he says. Nathan can hear birds. He gets up, listening, and stands in the hallway guarding the letterbox, ready. The newspaper pushes through into his hand. On his knees, Nathan flicks through the paper. There’s a picture inside of a flag over a box and people with brass stars on their hats standing still. He scrunches it into a ball in his pocket.
‘Is that the paper?’ his mother says.
She walks towards him with a mug of tea in her hand. There isn’t time to replace the page with a story about fish with bellies that look like smiling faces. He watches her read over cornflakes. When she comes to the missing sheet she frowns.
‘There’s a page missing,’ she says. ‘Again. I think that paperboy’s stealing them for the comic strips or something.’ She looks out of the window, picturing a boy on a bike collecting crosswords or page threes, stashing them under his bed. Nathan’s heart pounds.
‘Maybe he just dropped them,’ he says.
She shrugs, flipping the page. Everything is ok, what’s missing is skimmed. The sort of page that makes her look at the letter again isn’t there. ‘I hope they actually let him come home this time.’
It’s almost bonfire night. Outside, fireworks whoop and whine. Nathan’s mother cleans out closets, tossing old shoes into a pile.
‘Lie low!’ Joe says.
Nathan slides on his belly in the tent. The streetlights are on outside, though it should still be day. Joe’s stomach grumbles on time.
‘Mess time,’ Joe says.
Nathan opens a packet of rice and holds grains to Joe’s lips. They won’t open. His plastic stomach is hollow, but every day it rumbles, regular as the chiming clock in Nathan’s grandmother’s lounge. Nathan holds the food close to Joe’s nose, hoping he can smell it and will go back on duty full, not realising he didn’t really eat.
‘How we doing for rations, Sarge?’ Joe asks.
Rations are low. There are packets of rice under the bed, but Joe won’t ‘eat’ from one that’s already open: ‘How do we know it’s not contaminated, Sarge?’
Nathan waits till his mother stops moving around. It takes time. Even when she does stop, she doesn’t really. In the middle of game shows, she says, ‘The skirting in the hall needs painting. I’ll do it tomorrow.’ Everything in the house stands on parade. Helen needs new sparkly tights. Nathan must have new laces in his shoes. Finally, she is still. Nathan listens to her in the lounge, a pretty woman is falling in love through the walls. He looks both ways and creeps into the kitchen with bare feet. He knows how far to open a door before it squeals. Stuffing packets of pasta in his jeans, he moves along. In the cupboard by the mugs is the stuff his mother stashes like a squirrel for special occasions. He takes a bottle of whisky, pours some into his Superman flask, tops up the bottle with water and puts it back.
Upstairs, boy and doll lie with their eyes open. Joe doesn’t sleep in the bed, he’s not that sort of doll. His close-cropped hair is like Velcro. Everything sticks, stray feathers and lint. Nathan hears him under the bed, sock pulled over his chest like a sleeping bag, murmuring in the dark.