Nicholas sometimes had Tristram over to his house, but there was less to do. The Closes’ house was small, its underneath exposed and useless for private things like making army IDs and shanghais and plans of conquest. The only place that was dark and away from his mother’s scowl and Suzette’s curiosity was the garage. But Nicholas didn’t like taking anyone else in there. It was Dad’s space. His tools were there. His old ports were there. Being in the garage made him feel weird — angry and sad and a bit lonely. He could hardly remember his father, but stepping into the dark garage with its smell of grease and sawdust brought a flash of the only enduring image of him: a scarecrow-thin man leaning over the white-washed garage bench as he sharpened a saw with one hand while drinking from a squat bottle of amber liquid with the other; then, hearing Nicholas, he looked down and smiled — half of his face bright with yellow light through the dusty window, half as dark as the cobwebbed shadows in the garage’s far corners — and slid the bottle away into the bench drawer. No, the garage was not a place for games.
This Sunday morning, Nicholas had come over straight from church (the Boyes didn’t go to church — further evidence of their grand good fortune). Suzette had changed into shorts and T-shirt to tend her little garden patch. She’d found an old book somewhere that had belonged to their dad, and had become excited about planting tiny seeds and urging them up into curling green things. After a spat over TV channels, Nicholas had once threatened to dig up Suze’s garden and she’d gone totally spack, hitting him and screaming that he’d better not dare! The one male in a house with two females, he was wise enough not to. As Suzette screwed on her sunhat, Nicholas had pulled on his gym boots, kissed his mother’s cheek, and jumped the back fence.
He and Tristram had eased into the day’s play with a hunt through the Boyes’ games cupboard. While Nicholas and Suzette had an incomplete chess set and a deck of cards, the Boyes had an Aladdin’s cave of entertainment: Bermuda Triangle, Payday, Microdot (complete with cool plastic Lugers, stiletto knives and wirecutters), Mastermind, Grand Mastermind, Squatter, The Game of Life, Mouse Trap, Cluedo, Chinese Checkers, Monopoly (British and American versions), several decks of cards, and a roulette wheel that Tristram said came from a P amp;O steamer. But this was too bright a day for the lethargy of board games. The sunlight had a tart sting, the jacarandas were dropping sweet blizzards of lavender flowers, nasturtiums blazed between roses. . no, today called for violence. So they set up the killer jumps for their Matchbox cars.
‘We’re going to Fraser at Christmas,’ said Tristram, slotting an orange plastic tongue into the end of a section of track. The boys had appropriated the whole front veranda and had nearly finished the two ramps, each facing the other. At the farthest ends were kitchen chairs for height. The tracks swooped down to the floorboards, ran two metres, then swept up ramp stays of phone books and atlases. If they timed their releases right, two cars should collide spectacularly in midair.
‘Oh?’
‘You don’t know where Fraser Island is, do you?’
Nicholas shrugged. ‘Up your fat arse?’
Tristram chuckled. The boys had just discovered the joy of insults, and Nicholas was the acknowledged master. Not knowing what or where Fraser was didn’t upset him, but news of the Boyes’ trip did: if Tristram went away, the Christmas break would be really boring.
Tristram pulled out his ace. ‘Dad’s going to hire a Land Rover.’
‘A Land Rover? Really?’ Nicholas couldn’t disguise his excitement. Land Rovers were what the SAS sped to battle in. They had aluminium bodies and wouldn’t rust. ‘Wow. Will your dad let you drive it?’
Tristram shook his head and grinned. That was one thing Nicholas liked about him: he might be rich, but he was honest. ‘I reckon he’ll let Gavin drive it, though. He’s thirteen now. Dad learned to drive on Pop’s tractor when he was thirteen, so. .’ His ramp finished, Tristram squatted back on his heels and looked at Nicholas. ‘What were you going to tell me?’
‘About what?’
Tristram came to Nicholas’s ramp to help him finish.
‘You said you found something on the way home from school on Wednesday, then you went all funny and shut up.’
Nicholas felt some warmth go out of the morning. The dead bird outside the woods. The bird with no head. . or with a strange head of woven sticks and its own scrawny legs. He had wanted to tell Tristram about it on the way home from school Thursday and Friday, but Suzette had been with them and he didn’t want to freak her out with gory talk about birds with legs cut off and the weirdos who did such things. She was really easy to upset right now; for instance, she hated walking home past the shops, but wouldn’t explain why. And, to be honest, he didn’t know how to phrase the story about the bird. He wanted to sound cool about it, matter-of-fact. But he also wanted his best friend to know how creepy it was, how the sight of it — not just limp and dead, but so helpless and mutilated — had made his stomach grip tight with unexplainable fear.
‘I found a dead bird down near the woods.’
Tristram tore the sticky tape off with his teeth and secured track to the telephone books. ‘So?’
‘It had its head and legs cut off.’
He watched for Tristram’s reaction. This would be the decider: if Tris’s expression was serious, Nicholas could finish the tale with its bizarre ending. But if he wore his ‘what bullshit’ look, he would shrug the story off and change the subject to a cool book about Tiger tanks he’d found in the library. Tristram looked up, and Nicholas felt a wave of warmth for his friend: his expression was both serious and inquisitive.
‘Yeah? Cut off like by a mower cut off? They mow that grass out front.’
Nicholas shook his head. ‘Cut off, cut off. On purpose.’
He described how the bird’s head was gone and replaced with a handmade sphere of woven twigs, the poor creature’s legs as horns and the strange symbol painted there in what had to be blood. By the time he’d finished, Nicholas’s voice had dropped to a whisper and his heart was thudding in his chest.
‘And?’ asked Tristram. They knew each other well enough to know when things were still unsaid.
‘And I think. .’ Nicholas bit his lip and frowned. ‘I think something came up behind me.’ From the woods. He shook his head. ‘But I don’t remember. I remember smelling something bad, and then I ran home.’
‘Was it. . was it a grown-up?’
Nicholas thought about that. ‘I don’t know. I think so. Whatever it was, it felt. . it felt big. And old.’
Tristram nodded, chewed his lip. ‘Did I tell you I found a cat down there? When we first moved in, before we were friends. A dead cat on the gravel path.’
Nicholas shook his head.
‘It was just bones really,’ said Tristram. His voice dropped steadily to a whisper. ‘Dead for ages. Orange fur, all dried up like a mummy. But it was a mess. Its paws were cut off.’
Nicholas stared. He didn’t mind being trumped — cat beat bird hands down. Besides, Tristram wasn’t showing off, not this time. In fact, this was the first time he could ever remember Tristram looking. . well, so worried.