The Children's Bach by Helen Garner Read Free Book Online Page A

avenues of trees, a light flicked on outside the public lavatory, and still she pushed and sang. He could not get enough. She ran round in front of the swing to look at his face: it was a pink blur, he was in ecstasy. She was bored. She tried to change the song, but he let out such a scream that she bit it off in mid-phrase. They probably didn’t even have a radio, or if they did it was permanently stuck on the ABC. She slackened the force of her pushing and he writhed on the seat and clanked the chains. His rhythm left him and he hung close to the ground, dangling and roaring. He would not look at her, he would not get off. She made him, and dragged him away across the grass. They turned a corner, rounded a thick hedge, and the wind hit them. He stopped struggling. Air rushed over the ground like a flood of water at blood temperature, and he pulled himself free of her and went into it pacing slowly like a dancer, his arms spread out and his face tipped back, his eyes closed and his mouth melting.
    He made her sick. He was empty, open, nothing but a conduit for meaningless rage or bliss. She wrenched at him, pulled him towards home, but he trailed, he tugged, he smiled weakly into the warm air. She let go his hand again and he drifted towards the edge of the footpath. In the half-dark a heavy truck blundered round the corner. The ground shuddered under her foot-soles, it tickled her, and in a rapture of disgust she saw Billy step off the pavement into the gutter. Quick, better for everyone. She took two long steps, she gave him a light shove between the shoulder blades, and he walked out under it. The huge wheels swallowed him up like a bunch of beans in a blender and he was gone, not even a stain on the bitumen.
    Athena was in the kitchen and the light was on.
    â€˜There was a big truck,’ said Vicki. ‘And I thought, I could push him under it. Do you ever, have you ever –’
    â€˜Of course,’ said Athena. ‘Hundreds of times.’
    She took hold of the boy by the shoulders and turned him towards the bathroom. He submitted with glazed eyes and a drunken smile. As he passed Vicki he leaned on her and rubbed his back against her hip. His buttocks rested against her thigh and she felt the warmth and depth of his flesh.
    So Vicki came to live with the Fox family at Bunker Street. They moved the junk out of the small room behind the kitchen; it overlooked the vegetable garden and the shed and the rabbit’s cage and the Hills Hoist and the European trees, thick with new leaves, that grew along the banks of the Merri Creek. Athena and Vicki painted the room yellow. ‘I’ll be like a chicken in an egg,’ said Vicki. Elizabeth thought the yellow was rather ochreous, but in her relief she kept this opinion to herself. She went home on the tram and was surprised to find a small lack in herself, a blankness where the unwelcome responsibility had been. She flung the pink quilt out to air over the windowsill and went into the city to buy herself a pair of shoes.
    Early in the morning Vicki lay with the striped sheet over her nose. Billy was on the loose in the house, a forlorn seeker. He stamped and shuffled down the hallway, in and out of rooms. He puffed and hummed as he went, he tested his voice in a series of light screams, he lapsed again into his grieving, wailing cries. He stopped outside her door. She lay still. He laughed under his breath and shoved at the door with his shoulder, grunted, gave a breathy screech, and wandered away again on dragging feet towards the room where his parents would be sitting up in their big bed reading, like two figures on a tomb. Vicki sprang up and ran across the kitchen to the bathroom. She pushed open the door. The room was not empty. She saw a rosy haze of steam pierced by bars of sunlight, a haze in which Athena – lanky legs, rounded belly, drooping breasts with pearl-grey radiating stretchmarks – was stepping out of the shower and