‘What a wuss,’ Wally said. He wiped the tap with his shirt and leaned in to take a sip. ‘Did you see that thing growing on his ear?’
‘What was he talking about?’ I asked. ‘What was in the paper?’ I watched Brendan on the oval. He was talking to Mrs Raymond, pointing at us. He was almost as tall as she was. They could have been two grown-ups having a conversation.
‘Who cares?’ Wally said, wiping his mouth on his collar. ‘He’s just a peabrain.’
‘But why was Les in the papers?’
Wally gave me a look that said he knew something I didn’t. ‘It’s a secret.’
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘You’re not allowed to keep secrets from me.’
‘Not telling.’
‘I’ll give you a dollar.’
He smiled, zipped his fingers along his lips, and then fiddled at the corner of his mouth, turning the invisible key and throwing it over his shoulder.
‘I bet you don’t know anything,’ I said. ‘You’re too doughy to have a secret.’
I knew Wally was just trying to make me feel like he was more clever than me, knew he had no idea what Brendan was talking about, but I slapped him on the shoulder anyway and then ran away before he could hit me back. I hid in the girls’ toilets so he couldn’t get me, and when we got back to class Wally had to stand in the corner facing the wall until big lunch, even though it was the first day of school and Wally hadn’t even done anything except flick someone on the ear, which isn’t even that bad. I didn’t talk to Wally for the rest of the afternoon, though.
When we got home from school Cassie was asleep on the couch, still in his uniform. Even though Cassie was in year twelve he never did his homework, never talked about what he was going to do when he finished at the end of the year. I always got nervous when Dad nagged him about it. I wanted Cassie to stay at home forever. When we were little Cassie said he wanted to be a spaceman. He had this dinky helmet that he’d made from papier-mâché and pasted with alfoil, and he wore it all the time. Sometimes he made Wally and me come to his room. He’d close the door and put towels over the windows so that the room was dark, and then he’d make us spin him around and around on the rickety desk chair, helmet on, as though he was hurtling through space. But then Dad told Cassie he needed a degree for that kind of job. A degree and a brain the size of a watermelon. Cassie stopped wearing the helmet after that.
I pressed my fingers against Cassie’s nostrils until he woke up. He swatted me away, smoothed down his hair and dug at the corners of his eyes. Straight away I asked him what Brendan had meant about Les, what had been in the papers. Even though I knew Wally was lying and that he knew nothing about anything, I still couldn’t stop thinking about what Brendan had said about not being allowed to be our friend. Not that I’d want to be his friend anyway.
‘I dunno,’ he said, turning on the TV.
‘Tell me,’ I said. I yanked Cassie’s arm. ‘Please.’
I knew Cassie would know. Cassie was the only person who told me anything about Les. Before Les died, Cassie went to the yellow house all the time. He said they played snap and knucklebones, and always watched the midday movie while they ate pickled onion sandwiches. Sometimes they went into town afterwards, where Les’s best mate Mal would give Cassie a cold cheerio for free at the butcher. It was only because of Cassie that I knew anything about the day Les died. He was finishing off the McCleary house two storeys up a ladder when something burst in his brain and his limbs turned to custard. Cassie told me that when people die their souls get put into an animal or a plant seed, so maybe Les’s soul was floating somewhere above the paddock, waiting for somewhere to go, for something warm to slip into. Maybe it was only when me and Wally were born that he stopped floating and split in two and we each got half.
‘Get off me,’ Cassie said. ‘Stop being such a pain.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask Dad. Or Mum.’
‘Don’t, Cub,’ Cassie said. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I’m going to ask them right now.’
‘I’m serious, Cub. Don’t ask them.’
‘Why?’
‘Just don’t.’
‘I won’t if you tell me why.’
Cassie paused. He looked at the screen, and then back at me. ‘Do you remember when you were in year three, and Mum was sick for a real long time? How Dad had to make our dinners and would sometimes have to take her to the big hospital in the city?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I looked at the carpet. There was a pea on the ground and I squished it with my toe. I didn’t like talking about that.
‘Well, if you ask her, it will make her sick again,’ Cassie said. ‘And it will be all your fault. Do you want Mum to be sick again? Is that what you want?’
‘No.’
‘That’s what will happen if you ask her about it,’ Cassie said. He held out his pinkie towards me. ‘Do you promise you won’t?’
‘Okay,’ I said. We hooked pinkies, shook on it.
‘Don’t listen to Brendan Vaughn,’ Cassie said. ‘Everyone knows he was dropped on his head as a baby.’
I sat down and watched TV with Cassie until dinnertime. When Dad came home I thought I might ask him about Les and the papers. I hadn’t made a pinkie promise not to ask Dad, only Mum. But the show we were watching was a funny one and after a while I forgot all about it and when I remembered again it didn’t seem as important as before.
The next afternoon I asked Mum to go over to the yellow house and invite Tilly over. I thought Mum would say no, tell me to do it myself, but she went outside right away and called out to Tilly from over the fence. I felt another glow towards Mum, and in moments like that I felt like she was on my side, even though she’d always liked Cassie a bit more than Wally and me.
I gave Tilly the grand tour of our house, asked her how she liked her new school.
She shrugged. ‘It’s alright.’
‘Have you made any friends?’
‘Yeah,’ Tilly said. ‘Heaps.’
‘What are their names?’
We were in the kitchen. There was a dead cockie on the lino and I put my foot over it so she couldn’t see it.
‘There’s too many to list,’ Tilly said.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Alright then.’
We went into the lounge room, sat on the carpet with Wally. I was worried about Tilly, about her making too many new friends. If she had a lot of friends at school she might not want to keep playing with us. I didn’t know what the kids at the private school were like, but I knew for sure they’d be a lot better than the ferals at our school. They probably wanted Tilly all to themselves. They probably saw her how I saw her, as a present sent from the universe. But they didn’t deserve her as much as I did.
‘Let’s play knuckles,’ Wally said, standing up. We followed Wally to Cassie’s room. The door was closed, but Wally barged right in. Cassie was lying on the covers, headphones on. He didn’t have a bed, just a mattress in the corner. One day he took apart the frame and dumped the planks outside. The whole thing rotted in the rain and Dad was fuming for days. There were no clothes on the floor, no clutter on the side table. It was as if he’d just moved in, as if he hadn’t already spent seventeen years living there.
‘Give us your knuckles,’ Wally said.
‘What?’ Cassie took his headphones off, leaned up on his elbows.
‘We want to play knuckles,’ Wally told him.
Cassie lay back down. ‘Get your own.’
Les had given Cassie the knuckles before he died, in a pouch made of dark green velveteen, with a gold rope tie that frayed like dental floss. Sometimes, when Cassie wasn’t home, I took the pouch from his socks-and-undies drawer and stroked it, held it up to my ear and listened to the bones rattling around. They looked like big teeth with yellow stains, black specks like holes that needed fillings, but I knew there was something magic about them. Sometimes I’d press the smallest knuckle against my lips. I thought that if I put them in my mouth then the magic thing would get transferred over to me. But they only ever felt like metal against the inside of my cheek, not magic at all.