He turned his eyes away as he washed his sodden, uneaten Weetbix down the sink, rinsed the breakfast dishes and left the kitchen.
Then he went back upstairs to get his knife. Despite the humidity, Joss kept the hood up on his jacket when he changed buses at Wynyard. The bruising on his face was at its most livid this morning, and he noticed that people averted their eyes when he glanced in their direction; today that suited him fine.
As always, he felt guilty on the way to his mother's place.
His maternal grandparents had moved Joss and his mother out of Cabramatta after the car accident. The fight had left her after that. The much-loved only child of Richard and Joan Preston-Jones, lost to schizophrenia, and later heroin, was finally home.
The house in Mosman evoked a confusing mix of nostalgia and pleasure for Joss. After six months of half-arsed rebellion, he'd settled with relief into the quiet habits of his grandparents, happy to swap the chaos of his childhood for their structure and normalcy. The house was the first real home he'd ever had – he and his mother had bounced between rental units, her friends' loungerooms, squats and refuges for his first thirteen years. The sedate mansion that had smothered his mother when she was growing up was, for him, the first place he could breathe.
It hadn't been that way in the very beginning, though.
Now, staring through the rain into his childhood, his breath fogging the window on the bus, Joss thought about the only time he had tried to unite his Cabramatta past with his Mosman present. He'd been living with his grandparents for three months or so, and although he'd made a few friends at his new school, Sandhurst College, the other boys had had a great time at his expense, filling every moment outside of class with stories of his ignorance of the social etiquette they took for granted. After fighting three of the loudest on the oval after school, they began to make comments only when they were in groups so that he couldn't distinguish the speaker, and they developed codes that sent them into fits when he walked by, like raucous packs of birds.
He had missed his brothers from Cabra. Their escapades became heroic adventures in his mind, adventures that he knew the pissants at his new school would never have survived. He remembered his face pushed into the gravel one night, squashed with Fuzzy against a railway wall while a train passed above them, deafened, aware that he would be decapitated if he raised his head just a fraction. Just when he'd thought that the screaming monster above them would suck him up, the last carriage had passed, and he and Fuzzy had risen, their legs trembling in the dark, to finish their graffiti piece on the side of the wall. They'd been legends for a year for that piece, sprayed onto a virgin wall that everyone else had assumed was untouchable.
He remembered running from the transit cops with Cutter, Hendo and Tatts, jumping fences, dropping level to level in carparks, turning back to laugh at the fat fucks running behind them. He remembered, after trashing a school, the searchlights of a police chopper turning night into day. His friends had scattered in all directions, but he'd chosen the worst route – across the school quadrangle. Two cops behind him, guns drawn, shouted at him to stop or they'd shoot. He'd imagined the bullets entering his back, but he didn't stop. He still wondered at his indifference to death that night.
And so he'd invited them over. And, unbelievably, Tatts, Esterhase and Cutter had come to Mosman. Hardly anyone knew Tatts's real name: Guo Qi Xu. Even the teachers couldn't say it properly, so they also called him Tatts. Tatts's uncle, this mad motherfucker who sold smack from his tattoo parlour, had been practising on his nephew since Tatts was six. Tatts loved the body art, and hated his real name, so everyone was happy. Mouse and Cutter wanted Tatts's uncle to do all of their crew with spiders crawling around their necks. Joss and Esterhase had copped some shit from the others when they'd refused.
Joss remembered his grandmother's face when she'd first seen Tatts, but to her credit, she'd welcomed his friends, preparing them sandwiches and juice to eat in the garden by the pool. She'd provided them with tennis racquets and left them alone to spend the day together. Joss had known that inviting them was a mistake from the moment they arrived. Tatts had pulled out a joint as soon as she left. But it was when he'd caught Esterhase with his grandfather's camera in his jacket that Joss told them to leave. He'd never felt so alone. He was no longer one of them, but he didn't want to be a Sandhurst boy.
He got off the bus on Military Road and walked the last couple of blocks to the house. Aged, overhanging trees kept most of the rain off his shoulders, and he breathed in the smell of the wet road, remembering cold, damp afternoons and the welcoming warmth of home. Smiling, he put his hands into his pockets.
His fingers brushed against the knife.
The light left his eyes as he walked up the path of his grandparents' house.
The nurse stepped back and let him in without a smile. He'd seen her here before, but couldn't remember her name. She didn't offer it. She was one of a rotating shift of healthcare workers from an agency paid for through his grandparents' estate.
His mum looked just as she had for the past twenty years. She was sitting by the wide bay window in the main loungeroom, rocking slightly. She looked up when he came in. Her mouth stopped working for just a moment before her tongue continued its rhythmic exploration of her teeth and lips, endlessly pushing in and out of her mouth. Tardive dyskinesia, caused by three decades of antipsychotic medication – no wonder she hadn't wanted to take the shit, he thought for the thousandth time, bending to catch her head with a kiss as she rocked.
He pulled a heavy armchair over next to hers, and sat down. One of the kinder nurses, Kathy Lin, had told him that his mother liked to be touched, to have her arm stroked, her hair brushed. He watched the rocking slow as he communicated with his mother in the only way they had left. He talked to her, the usual one-way conversation, and wondered what she heard, what she took in, just as he always had.
When it was time for her medication, Joss left her with the nurse and the production line of pills and went upstairs to his old bedroom. When he'd left home, his grandmother had not changed his room. There had been no need: there were far more rooms than she could use in the house, and she knew how important stability, the absence of change, were to Joss.
He knew the house now technically belonged to him, but he thought of it as his mother's. He knew he'd never live here again.
He dropped onto his old bed with a pain in his throat; it felt like he'd swallowed an apple, whole. The skin on his mother's arms was almost see-through now, soft like tissue. Her eyes were lifeless; he almost missed the madness that used to shine behind them. At least there'd been energy there.
The rain plashed quietly on the windowsill outside.
At last he rose from the bed and walked over to the cupboard in his room. He'd lived here for more than a year before he'd found the door on the inside wall of the cupboard that opened to a smaller, hidden cavity. Over the years, the space had held liquor, poor report cards, and once or twice a bag of pot. Now his old school backpack filled the space completely. He took the bag back to the bed and opened it. From inside his old pencil case, he unfolded a faded newspaper page. Smiling up at him from the top half of the page was Fuzzy, dressed in school uniform, curly hair completely out of control.
Teenager's Throat Cut! screamed the text below the picture.