The Last Thread Read online

  Michaelis can hear the hum of the pool filter. He has to lean on his toes to hook his arm through the hole in Nikki’s fence. He scrapes his arm against metal until he finds the catch, and swings in on his toes with the gate.

  The pool in the backyard is deep and clear as a tropical lagoon. Michaelis and Nikki fight together on inflatable pool ponies. They swim until they are shivering, then lie on the warm stone path side by side, talking, daydreaming, the water evaporating from their backs.

  When they tire of the pool and the sunlight, they wander into the house. They play on a machine called an Atari. It connects to the television with a cord and you play games using a joystick. Nikki lets him choose the games. Moonsweeper. Tank Battle. Space Invaders. A spaceship made of white pixels glides from side to side on the gleaming, bulbous curve of the screen. Michaelis controls it and pretends the fate of the world rests on his shoulders. Nikki watches his tense, earnest expression and can’t stop laughing. Some laughter makes Michaelis blush. Not Nikki’s.

  After the Atari, Nikki’s father comes in and puts on a movie for them. One wall of the living room is a bookshelf. It’s not full of books but videotapes, the titles typed onto small white labels. Nikki’s father watches movies and says if they are any good. That’s his job. With Nikki, Michaelis has seen The Wizard of Oz more times than he can count. And he has seen The Elephant Man, which made him cry, and all of the Star Wars movies over and over again. The video machine is a mystery to him. Like the Atari, he didn’t even know such a thing existed until he met Nikki.

  The mess in every room of Nikki’s house is at odds with the way in which Mum keeps things at home. It’s hard to walk around without stepping on something from the Star Wars galaxy. Nikki owns a large cardboard model of the Death Star, the ice station of Hoth, a handful of intricately designed spaceships. They play with them together for hours, inventing all sorts of scenarios. Nikki has too many toys to keep track of. He gave Michaelis a stormtrooper once, all white and fresh out of the packet. Mum made Michaelis give it right back.

  ‘One day you’ll understand,’ she said.

  This is what happened when he got a present from Dad’s relatives. They have relatives somewhere near Newcastle, from the Greek–Cypriot side. Mum couldn’t believe it when she found out, but when you are Greek you find relatives everywhere, or they find you. Dad sent money all the way from Holland, and a short, fat woman—Dad’s sister—turned up and gave Constantine and Michaelis presents. Constantine got the official soccer ball from the last World Cup and Michaelis got a plastic aeroplane.

  Constantine is the firstborn and he should get more according to the Greeks. Not according to Mum. And even though Michaelis was happy with his aeroplane, Mum took both presents and gave them back.

  ‘Either you spend the same money on both of them,’ she told the woman, ‘or you don’t give them anything at all.’

  When Mum says these things, there is never any doubt in her voice. The woman looked at Mum like she was crazy and they never heard from her again. Later, Mum said that Michaelis was mistaken, that it wasn’t about the presents at all, but that when she’d talked to them about Dad, they hadn’t liked what they heard.

  One of the movies that Nikki’s father puts on for them is black and white. A man invents a machine that makes things smaller and accidentally shrinks himself. The man grows backwards. He becomes as small as a boy, then smaller. He tries to figure out how to stop shrinking. A cat chases him into a doll’s house. He fights a spider with a toothpick. In the last part of the movie, he keeps shrinking, smaller than a speck of dust, smaller, smaller. Smaller. The man wonders what will happen when he shrinks into nothingness. That’s how the movie ends.

  Afterwards, Michaelis can’t stop thinking about it. He often has this dream about running along a wide, empty road. At the end of the road there’s a square pit and it’s full of spiders with legs longer than his body. He’s running so fast that he can’t stop. He’s terrified of the spiders but for some reason, with a strange, horrible enthusiasm, he jumps right in. That’s always the moment he wakes up.

  ‘After you die, you go to this place where you live forever,’ Nikki says quietly as he angles the Millennium Falcon along his bedroom walls, Han Solo rattling inside the cockpit. ‘It’s called the afterlife.’

  Michaelis can’t imagine anything more frightening than living forever. When he gets home, he asks Mum about the afterlife.

  ‘Of course there’s an afterlife,’ she says. ‘I made a deal with your grandfather once. Whoever died first would come back to let the other know. One night, my father was sitting in his favourite chair. He was in the middle of one of his stories. He lifted one finger, opened his mouth to say something, and died. Something happened in his brain. Just like that. It was very peaceful. A few months later, when I was staying at your grandmother’s, I woke up to find my father standing over me. He was dressed in his favourite suit. He smiled. I blinked and he was gone.’

  As Michaelis listens, he pictures Moessie’s apartment, a place full of old, heavy furniture that you could never imagine moving, the place where he was born, where his grandfather once lived and slipped from the edge of the world. There is a massive painting of two fish in a fishbowl. The ornate gold picture frame looks like it would kill you if it fell on you. Oil colours are layered on the surface. The painting seems covered in dust, but isn’t.

  One fish is black, the other orange. They’re floating side by side in the bowl. The black fish has eyes the size of apples. Next to the painting is a figure carved into wood, a halo over his head. It’s Jesus. He’s smiling and he’s making the okay sign. When it’s quiet, you hear the grandfather clock. It has a window in the cabinet and a brass disc swings inside the glass. Time goes forwards, memories fall backwards. Every now and again, in the house of his grandparents, the clock booms and the sound swells through the house, and you feel it in the air long after it’s finished, like the beat of a brass heart.

  ~

  The midday sun hurts his eyes. A teacher runs towards the sick bay, and Michaelis only glimpses what she carries: a boy slumped in her arms. A boy covered in blood.

  The boy is howling, and Michaelis didn’t see his face. Someone grabs his shoulder. Carl. ‘He’s hurt really bad. Let’s go.’

  Michaelis lets Carl guide him along. They hear wailing from the sick bay. A teacher tells them to go away. The voice sounds all raw echoing in the corridor, more like an animal than a boy.

  Michaelis still isn’t sure if the boy is Con. He follows Carl to the toilets. The toilets are wet and dark and smell of urine. The tiles are slick with it. Sometimes boys hide and shoot piss at the younger kids as they walk inside.

  Carl hunches over the taps and scrubs his face with water. He has a big, round face like the moon, his hair like windblown grass piled on the top of it. He paces from one side of the toilets to the other. Michaelis realises that he’s crying.

  ‘He’s my best mate. His head is split right open. I was chasing him, so it was my fault. We were playing tips. I’ll never forgive myself if he dies. My dad died, you know. Brain cancer. I don’t want to lose my best mate, too.’

  Michaelis doesn’t know what to say. People always seem so devoted to his brother.

  Carl stops sobbing and ruffles Michaelis’s hair. ‘He’ll be all right, Mike. I’ll look out for you if he’s not.’

  These words make him worry. Sometimes he hates his brother and wishes him dead, but he also has dreams in which his brother actually gets killed and he wakes up crying. And he’ll glance at the bottom bunk and see his brother asleep and feel a tender sense of relief. It never lasts long.

  ‘Serves you right,’ Dirk says at the dinner table that night, ‘for being an idiot.’

  He glares at Constantine, daring him to say any different. Con fingers the wound and the three stitches that pull it together.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ Mum says with a shake of her head. ‘You’re always getting hurt. I’ll bet you were showing off. Reminds me
of when you were little, back home. That time when you were hanging upside down on the monkey bars by your legs. Well, that girl showed you.’

  ‘What happened, Mum?’

  Michaelis knows. He just wants to hear the story again.

  ‘The little girl took both his feet and flipped them off the bar. He cried all the way home. Even after I bought him an ice-cream, he kept on with it, so I knew he was serious. Turns out he’d broken his arm.’

  ‘And what about the time he pretended to go to school?’

  Mum laughs and even Dirk is smiling now, his heavy jaw squared off inside his beard.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Mum says. ‘When I used to drop him at kindergarten and he’d always refuse to walk through the door until I was gone. He’d just stand there staring back at me until I went away. One afternoon, after school, we went shopping together, and this little girl walked over and asked him why he hadn’t been at school. Turns out that he used to go to the park across from the school after I left. He’d spend the day playing by himself and arrive at the school gates when it was time to be picked up. He’d tell me all of these stories about what he’d been doing at school, but it was all made up.’ Mum leans across and strokes Constantine’s hair, a relaxed, faraway look on her face. ‘He was always good at keeping secrets.’

  ~

  ‘The leadlight windows are beautiful, don’t you think, boys?’ Mum hugs Michaelis and Constantine close and gives a determined nod. ‘Everyone will want to live in Carrington soon. You’ll see. All of these houses will get done up and it will be such a pretty street. We’re getting in early.’

  They are standing in front of their latest house, an old miner’s cottage wedged between other cottages. Dirk takes his pipe from his mouth and taps the ash out against his pants. ‘It doesn’t need too much work. Paint. Rip up the carpet. Sand and polish the boards.’

  He’s not really talking to anyone, only himself. He begins stuffing the pipe with more tobacco. There are lines of grease and dirt along his fingers and under his nails. He sometimes sits on the couch and uses a nail file to scrape the undersides of his nails clean. When he does this, with his feet flung out before him, his forehead mounts over his eyes and he looks like a child left waiting too long for his parents.

  Their street is wide enough for teams of oxen to turn around with their loads of coal, except there aren’t any oxen here anymore. The miners have long since moved on, too. The coal is still nearby, though, heaped up in mountains at the next suburb along, waiting to be loaded onto ships. The dust from the coal is on the fence when you run your finger across it.

  At one end of the broad road, there is saltbush. Beyond the bushes, the ground loses itself in mounds of dirt and rubble. Past that is the restless expanse of the harbour, seeping and receding through a mess of mangroves near the shore, roots littered with plastic bags, bottles, syringes, fragments of pornographic magazines, a mattress, the murky water lapping from this to the decaying old warehouses on the other side.

  ‘And you can walk to school,’ Mum says.

  Through waves of heat, Michaelis can make out the latest school and he has seen it up close already: a stretch of asphalt hemmed in by a wire fence, brick buildings with drab paint peeling from the window frames and the doors, all of it full of menace even when it’s empty. Weathered steel monkey bars, graffiti over the bike shed and toilets, the stall of bubblers, half with twigs stuffed into the holes. The grass on the fields looks dead, all burnt at the tips and faded, straggling in clumps from the dusty earth.

  ‘Yes,’ Dirk says. ‘It’s a good place to buy in.’

  Mum gives another quick, tight nod. ‘And there’s a backyard for Harmony.’

  Dirk brought Harmony back to Alexander Street one day. He got her from someone at work. He pulled up in the station wagon, opened the door, and Harmony came out, slapping her tail like she was coming home, as if she’d been doing it all her life.

  ‘She’s a hunting breed,’ he told the boys, ‘but she doesn’t have the killing instinct.’

  Plenty of people here do, though. Mr Smith, the principal of the new school, has a compact body inside a brown suit, penetrating black eyes, a pencil moustache and salt- and-pepper hair combed sparsely across his shiny skull. On the wall behind him, the school motto is emblazoned in gold on a wooden plaque. Honour above all. Mr Smith rises from behind his desk and shakes Mum’s hand. He looks at the boys.

  When he speaks, he clips off each word. ‘Welcome to Carrington Public, boys. I’ll show you something interesting.’ He opens a glass cabinet and pulls out a cane. It slices through the air. ‘This is for when you transgress.’

  Michaelis feels his hand tighten into Mum’s.

  When you get caned, you hold out your hand. Count your age—that’s how many blows you’ll get across the palm. Call every teacher Mr or Mrs or Sir, and the men will call you son, as if they are all your fathers.

  At home, it is no different.

  ‘Put it in your mouth,’ Dirk says.

  The liver sits on his fork, a slippery piece of illness. He slides it onto his tongue, brings his teeth together. Something rises at the back of his throat.

  Dirk lifts one hand. ‘Don’t you dare.’

  Mum’s plaintive voice breaks in. ‘He doesn’t have to eat it.’

  ‘You cooked it. He eats it.’ He turns back to Michaelis. ‘If you vomit, I’ll still make you eat it.’

  Michaelis tries to swallow. Bile swells his cheeks, making him want to vomit even more, and then he does, a little, into his mouth. Dirk leans towards him, the hand still raised, the wedding ring glinting over a dirt-grained knuckle.

  ‘Wil je een klap? Swallow.’

  Klap. The sound the hand makes when it lands flat, close to your ear. Michaelis swallows. Dirk’s mouth pulls down at the corners. He studies Michaelis.

  ‘Do it again,’ he says in a low voice. ‘This time chew properly.’

  When Dirk drops them off at the cinema to watch E.T., Constantine sneaks Michaelis into Conan the Barbarian instead. It’s rated R. It’s meant to be for adults. Michaelis has never seen anything so full of blood and violence.

  At the start of the movie, when Conan is a boy, his tribe is massacred and he is enslaved. He grows into a man by pushing around an enormous wooden wheel. That’s how he spends the rest of his childhood: alone, chained to a wheel, walking around and around in circles, until he grows lean and strong. And then he escapes and goes on a quest to find the man who killed his parents. Michaelis loves the bare-breasted women and cannot look away from the blood and beheadings.

  ‘Who is your father, if it is not me?’ the villain asks Conan at the end. ‘Who gave you the will to live?’

  Michaelis doesn’t know. Constantine’s eyes shine in the darkness beside him. Con is nine, three years older than him. They are sitting right at the front, below the screen, their heads craning. Above them, with all his gleaming muscles knotted pensively, Conan the Barbarian looks like he wants to say something thoughtful, like he might even want to agree with the villain, but instead he cuts off the man’s head and throws it down a set of stone stairs. Now that’s a way to answer a question. The head thuds down each step and rolls away. Then Conan sets the villain’s temple on fire. Each time light blazes from the screen, it washes across Con’s face and reveals it, like something carved from stone.

  Michaelis should be used to getting hit, should be getting toughened up himself. But the only time a teacher tries to take him off to be caned, he collapses and has to be dragged along. His shirt tears at the sleeve. He shrieks and sobs. Others are watching; Michaelis doesn’t care.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ the teacher says. ‘Be a man about it!’

  Michaelis makes himself a dead weight on the ground. The teacher gives up in disgust and walks off. Michaelis picks himself up. He has lost the opportunity to be a man about it, to be like Conan the Barbarian. He wipes his hands on his shorts, feeling the eyes of other kids on the hot surface of his face.

  If he ha
d to do it all over again, he would do the same.

  All he wants to do is get home. But as he leaves the classroom, with his head hunched into his collar, he hears the news from kids running past. Some boy called Tom, huge and drunk and twelve years old, wants to beat up Con. Michaelis runs after the other children, but by the time he gets there, people are walking away.

  Tom is sitting on the ground holding his nose, stunned by the blood running down his wrists. Constantine, bag slung over his back, kicks at an old can as he walks down the street. He’s whistling out of the corner of his mouth, like a gunslinger. Michaelis follows at a distance.

  They go home and take Harmony to the park. There’s no one else around. A hot, dry wind blows from the direction of the factories on the other side of the harbour. The horizon is tinged yellow. A thick, sulphurous tang saturates the air. You can see cracks in the ground and green ants scuttling across it through the brown-edged grass. Blue silos to one side, the bridge on the other. Vapour ripples up from the road that runs towards the bridge.

  At night, the walls of their house dissolve into the summer humidity and clanging noise of the harbour. You can hear the clamour, as if the container ships are gliding past the house, sending out their booming greetings and farewells straight into the bedroom.

  Squinting against the sun now, Constantine throws a stick with a smooth, effortless motion, and it looks like it might disappear into the sky. Harmony brings it back and gazes up at him, down on her haunches, ready to spring into motion. She likes playing fetch. She’ll do it endlessly—just don’t ask her to kill the stick.

  Mum said they should get Harmony desexed, but they don’t have the money. Later she says it was a big mistake. She says it on a really hot evening while she’s peeling potatoes over the sink. The cloudy sky through the window is on fire. The sun has disappeared, but heat rises through the floorboards and sweat sits on your skin. Tiny dust shapes spin in the sunlight. Outside, there’s another dog scrabbling at the fence, and Harmony’s howling at the end of her chain.