The Trojan Dog (9 page)

‘It's a journey,' he said. ‘Not all of it needs to make the kind of sense you're after.'

‘Until you get there?'

‘Maybe. Maybe not.'

Peter called from the other room for someone to help him off with the helmet, and Ivan said, ‘Be back in a minute,' as though I was about to run away.

‘What's it about?' yelled Peter, running in. ‘I want to know!'

‘Here.' I handed him half a sandwich, and he began to eat.

Ivan told him the story of the horse. ‘They were just so sick of the siege, of hanging in there, I guess,' he said slowly, watching Peter munch his sandwich, avoiding my eyes. He took nothing for himself, but sat with his hands flat on the table.

‘I mean being walled up in a town with enemies all round. The Greeks weren't having a picnic either. Between a rock and a hard place. The Trojans—food's short, but at least they're at home. You know, sometimes the best ideas come when you've reached the end of your tether—'

Peter chewed, considering this, as Ivan began warming to his story.

‘You're just about to give up and some joker says, “Hey, man, why don't we—” And at first you think—nah—the sun's got to this dude. Fried his brains.' Peter giggled. ‘But then you think about it, and you can't
stop
thinking about it, because, jeez man, there's nothing to do
but
think!'

Peter glanced at me. I knew he sensed that Ivan was going to tell him something wrong, a wrong thing to do, and he wanted to hear it, especially when he could see I disapproved. At the same time, he was keen not to give himself away.

‘And then you say to yourself after a while—why not? Hell, man,
why not
? Fried brains.' Ivan grinned and touched Peter lightly on the arm, as though he felt that this small contact was all he could allow himself.

Peter wriggled. ‘But who
won
?'

‘The Greeks, of course.'

Peter considered this for a long moment, then he said, ‘I'd rather have a dog.' He went back to the workroom.

‘Why did you do it?' I asked Ivan.

He gave me a long look as if to gauge whether my question was an open one, or whether I planned to squash his answer as soon as he'd offered it.

‘Just grabs me, that's all. I've loved that story ever since I was a kid.'

I wanted to leave, but I knew that if I walked out then, took Peter home, I'd never go back to Ivan's house again.

Ivan said softly that learning anything requires an act of faith. And with the technology we were talking about, maybe more faith was required, not less. I called him a magician, thinking it would make him angry, but he said there might be something in that.

‘You have to get the incantation of the spell exactly right, and it's all illusion anyway.'

‘How do you mean?' I asked.

‘If you make even a titchy mistake in the program, the illusion's spoiled, it's obvious that the whole thing's a make-up.'

‘So you're like that wizard.'

‘Who?'

‘I've forgotten his name. In
The Wizard of Oz
.'

‘I see what you mean. Kind of, yes.'

Ivan was right. An act of faith
was
required—this was what frightened me—an imaginative leap that neither he nor Peter seemed to have any trouble making. A leap taken in trust and joy, without seat belts or life insurance.

I felt dirty and dull and sorry for myself. Yet I would have found it easier to believe that there were spirits nattering in the blond grass outside the windows than to toss myself in faith, just then, through Ivan's window of the mind.

. . .

When I handed Peter his dinner that night, he looked at me indulgently. Don't grow up too quickly, I thought with a sudden stab of panic.

‘Ivan's nice,' he said.

‘I think so,' I answered carefully.

‘Kinda weird too, but.' Peter grinned the fey, childish grin that I was afraid he might soon abandon. ‘Y'know,' he giggled, ‘y'get Ivan talking, and he forgets we're s'posed to be practising my reading.'

We washed up our dishes together, companionable and calm.

Peter had a bath, put on clean pyjamas, and sat up in bed to read to me.

For the first time, I saw the words as he'd been seeing them; only with this difference, that he was beginning to come out of it, the way a baby comes out of crawling, only much more deliberately, with conscious courage, because he had already faced the black cliff-edge of failure.

Peter's eyes were clear, though the familiar frown was there down the middle of his forehead.

I saw each letter of the words he was required—condemned—to read, not as clear curves and straight black lines, but as nervous flutters, raw fragile moth-ends, a soft filigree stretching into greyness, and a stab at meaning, the way he had grabbed hold of a stick when he was younger and speared a live moth, a Bogong, blown off course into the house.

The small boy's anger when I took it from him. Still there.

‘You're going well,' I whispered. ‘Great.'

Peter looked at me with clear eyes, and continued reading aloud in a sing-song voice quite unlike his own, running a finger under the lines, not jabbing at the words the way he used to, but with a smooth continuous movement.

‘Who suggested that you read like that?' I asked, after he'd finished the page and I'd said, ‘Well done!'

‘Ivan.'

Peter got to the end of the story without making a mistake, though the meaning his gamelan voice gave to some of the sentences was very odd.

I felt cold, afraid for him, grateful. ‘Do you read like that at school?' I asked.

‘No,' Peter said carefully, flicking the last page with his finger. He wasn't mocking me, but I stood corrected.

Then he looked at me as though I'd asked for a sweet from his hoarded bagful, and grinned and said, ‘G'night Mum.'

I wanted to unburden myself to Peter then, to recall and explain, to lay out between us my version of our years of fighting over his reading, now that this long miserable time might be coming to an end.

Instead, I picked up the book and switched off Peter's bed-light. I bent to kiss him goodnight, and he let me. The last thing I saw was the courage in my son's eyes, and faith in this new method that he and Ivan had concocted between them, a peculiar knowing and adult gallantry.

Peter and the Wolf

Dianne Trapani pulled out another cigarette. Her brother Tony gave her a sideways glance, his full lips set in an expression of extreme ­discomfort.

I'd been going to spend my lunch hour doing messages when Di waved me over.

‘What's up?' I'd asked. It was obvious that something was bugging her more than usual.

Now fifteen minutes had passed, and I'd given up my plans to shop and go to Medicare. I munched a leaky salad roll, while Dianne told me the story of her brother's troubles at the university.

The head of ANU's computing department was convinced that Tony and his friends had been pinching time on his Internet account.

‘Have you?' I asked, looking straight at Tony, annoyed at being stuck there, between him and his sister.

Tony shook his head and moved the froth around on the top of his cappuccino. He had his sister's blue-black eyebrows, and the hair to go with them.

Di blew a smoke ring, exchanged another glance with her brother, and said, ‘If Mum and Dad find out, they'll stop paying his fees. Poor old Tone'll be out on his ear.' She coughed and picked at a spot on her black dress with long purple fingernails. The light of the travel centre seemed to squash objects rather than illuminate them. Her dress looked worn and dusty, her dyed and carefully mussed-up hair more like a wig than ever.

‘What happened?' I asked Tony.

‘One of our assignments.' Tony's voice was soft and shy. ‘A question's got a mistake in it. Like, two, actually. I point them out to Prof. Bailey, and he argues with me. He leaves the question as it is, so no-one gets it right. Some of the guys complain, and he takes it out on me.'

‘But someone's been using the Professor's account? Is that correct?'

‘Yeah, but that's not to say we did it. It could be anyone.'

Tony glanced at Dianne from under thick black eyelashes. The connection between them was momentarily so strong it was like a fourth person sitting at the table. I finished my roll. I still felt hungry, but I didn't want to waste time in a queue of bus travellers.

It may have been the lighting and her purple nails and lipstick, but the whole of Dianne's face looked flat. I tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to have her for a sister.

‘Bailey?' I said, feeling a cog slip in my memory. ‘What's his first name?'

‘Lionel,' Dianne replied, managing to fill the word with a weight of sarcasm fit to sink a Sydney harbour tug.

‘I think I know him. One of his kids goes to the same school as Peter. Peter's my son,' I added for Tony's benefit. ‘There's some sort of school fund-raising thing coming up. Would you like me to try and talk to Bailey? If he's there? I might be able to find out a bit more about what's going on.'

. . .

That evening, as I drove across Commonwealth Avenue bridge to pick Peter up from his new friend Kester's, I decided that if I was going to speak to Bailey on Tony's behalf, I needed to speak to Tony again first.

I recalled Dianne's face, her look of astonishment when I'd offered to try and intercede for her brother. I was beginning to wish I'd kept my mouth shut. It wasn't as though Bailey was a pal. I'd only met him at a couple of school concerts, a bush dance where he mashed my feet in Split the Willow.

I'd plunged back into full-time work, into a project I cared about that a new government might axe, and that, with Rae Evans gone, had no-one in charge of it, no-one to steer it through. I was a single parent for a year. Surely that was enough. But I realised that I was determined to defend Rae somehow. And I'd just offered to plead for Di Trapani's brother. What was happening to me?

I looked up and saw the Parliament House flag hanging motionless on its giant mast, steam from the boilers rising underneath it. I thought about how it's wrong to say evergreen trees have no seasons. From June onwards, the wattle is getting ready to flower, from a distance a dull yellow haze against the leaves. Blossoms slowly swell under the green skin of acacias.

. . .

Coming back from a lightning trip to Civic next day—I'd had to do two days' messages in one and all I'd had to eat were three mini spring rolls while I jogged across to Medicare—I saw Tony Trapani at a corner table of the bistro sharing a coffee with a boy about his own age. The boy was smoking and scowling into what looked like an empty cup. I noticed that his black leather jacket had two perfectly round holes on the left side, as though someone had shot at him, or perhaps a former owner of the jacket.

‘Hi,' I said.

Both of them looked up, Tony surprised. The other boy's scowl barely shifted.

Tony smiled and said, ‘Have you seen my sister? She was supposed to meet us down here.'

‘I've been doing some shopping,' I told him, ‘but she was upstairs when I left.'

I held my hand out to the boy in black and introduced myself, then pulled a chair out and sat down, deciding that I'd risk being a few minutes late.

‘I was going to phone you,' I said to Tony, ‘before I talk to Professor Bailey.'

Tony blushed, glancing mutely at his friend.

‘Bailey sucks,' the boy in black said.

‘Tell me about it.' I found it hard to keep my eyes from the lethal holes in his leather jacket.

‘Mad bomber. Opens fire for no reason.'

‘You mean in lectures?'

‘All to do with quotas. He told us at the start he was gunna fail a third of us. The whole system sucks.'

‘Nobody likes him.' Tony's voice was gentler, but his condemnation in a way was more severe.

‘Know what some of the guys did once?' the boy in black went on. ‘Had all calls to his office switched to Rosie's. That's like a brothel out in Fyshwick.'

‘That was you two, was it?'

‘No way.'

‘It was just a joke,' Tony explained. His friend rubbed the rim of the cup as though more coffee might magically appear and said, ‘Bailey's dishonest, he's sloppy and he hates students. He's the best argument for getting rid of tenure that I know.'

When it came to understanding male adolescents, I had it all ahead of me, but I saw Peter in Tony Trapani, in his look of slyness when he was trying not to smile, when his lips just wouldn't hang a straight line, in the swing of his fine black hair, darker than Peter's and much longer, his skin soft as the first morning without frost.

‘Do you have any other brothers or sisters?' I asked him when his friend got up to buy more coffee.

‘No, just Di and me.'

‘How did your sister get the job at DIR?'

Tony looked surprised, then said, ‘Di knows heaps about statistical modelling, all that stuff.' After a moment he added, ‘Evans wanted my sister, so she had to take that whatsername as well.'

‘Bambi, you mean? You know Bambi? You've met her?'

‘Nah.' He blushed. ‘Well, I've like seen her in the park.'

‘Ateeq's incredible,' Tony went on. ‘His folks are from Pakistan. You know he never had a Christmas present till I gave him one?'

Ateeq came back with a single cup of coffee. Following a routine that was clearly well established, he sugared the coffee, swallowed a large mouthful and handed it across to Tony.

Tony thanked him and said, ‘You know Ateeq runs Black Snake.'

‘That'd be the way you hook up to ALTOS?'

Tony took his turn to drink, while Ateeq stared at me without answering.

I'd done a bit of homework. I'd phoned Dianne and asked her why she thought Bailey suspected her brother. She'd explained that Tony and a few of his friends had been spending their nights dialling up ALTOS, a German bulletin board. According to Di, who seemed to know about these things, it was famous as the hangout of the Chaos Computer Club. Ivan had told me that in theory anyone with a computer and a modem could access any bulletin board anywhere in the world, but in practice you had to be accepted first, become a member. Some boards were public, others very private. The main point seemed to be that the nightly entertainment Tony and his friends were into was expensive.

‘Why don't you go to one of your other teachers?' I asked Tony. ‘Or the student counsellor?'

‘No-one'll go against Bailey. They're all like really scared of him.'

‘Who pays your phone bills?'

‘Teeq's parents own Akewa Hi-Fi,' Tony said, watching his friend finish off the coffee.

‘So your parents pay your phone bills?' I asked Ateeq, determined to get an answer from him somehow.

Ateeq nodded with a bored expression.

‘Did you keep them, the bills?'

‘Of course.'

‘Then why don't you present Professor Bailey with them? Explain that money's no problem. You don't need to use his account.'

‘He ripped the bills up. Said they were a fake.' Tony spoke so softly he was almost whispering, then ran his tongue around his teeth.

‘Well—' I was beginning to wish I'd never set eyes on either of them, ‘if money's no problem, why not hire a lawyer and take the good professor to the cleaners?'

. . .

I was irritated that I'd been roped into the fancy-dress party. Peter had insisted. He'd come home from school yabbering about it; and now I had an extra motive. The more I thought about it, the more embarrassed I felt. I could hardly even remember what Professor Bailey looked like.

It was Ivan, of course it was Ivan, who gave us the idea for our costumes. When I told him about the party and said I didn't think I could get out of it, Ivan smiled as though just such an opportunity was bound to have come up. He had it all worked out.

‘We shall be three wise guys from Peter and the Wolf. Peter as himself, naturally, myself as Ivan the Cat, and you, my dear Sandy as—the hunter!'

I hadn't said anything about Ivan coming to the party with us. I blushed and laughed, while he yanked an arm around my shoulders.

Half-protesting, I said, ‘It's just an idea the social committee's dreamed up. Are you sure you can be bothered?'

‘Only problem's finding a cat skin,' Ivan growled. ‘Have to go bush and skin me a feral cat!'

‘Yuk!' Peter cried. ‘Can I come?'

Peter's costume was easy. He could wear his own gumboots with tracksuit pants and a red cloth cap that Ivan produced from his collection, and carry a coil of rope and a popgun.

Ivan seemed to have sources from which he could produce practically anything at short notice. I hadn't seen a popgun like it since I was a kid. It was the traditional tin rifle with a cork on a string. The cork and the string were both new, but the gun itself looked old.

Peter had his own plans. He intended going to the party as Croc Dundee, and got as far as borrowing a neighbour's scout hat and ­stockwhip.

He writhed around the living room making huge snapping movements with his jaws, then, switching roles in the flash of an eye, cracked his stockwhip and chased an imaginary crocodile across the tropical river of our carpet, yelling like a demon.

I was all for letting Peter do what he wanted. What did it matter? It was just a dumb old school fund-raiser. But Ivan was determined that we should do this his way. Peter and the Wolf it was going to be, and with characteristic obstinacy he turned Peter around, and got him to agree.

I spent an hour riffling through costumes in a theatre supply and hire place, looking for something to wear, while Peter spent a fortune in the video arcade next door.

Through the thin dividing wall, I could hear the guns and the high nasal whirr of fighter planes. When Peter appeared in the doorway asking for more money, I still hadn't made up my mind. In the end he helped me choose, and I paid the sales assistant, who sat on a high stool in a corner with her knitting and her radio, and glared at me like the public lavatory attendants used to when Peter was a toddler. She bunged my costume into a plastic bag and warned me against tearing or staining it.

‘Do you want the gun?'

‘Pardon?'

‘There's a gun that goes with the costume, madam. Do you wish to take it as well?'

‘Go on, Mum!' cried Peter.

‘Well—OK,' I said. ‘I guess. If it's no extra.'

Walking into the street after the tense stuffiness of the shop was like entering a giant refrigerator, a knife blade slicing underneath my sinuses, filling spaces I did not know I had with freezing air.

‘Mum?' said Peter. ‘Can we have pizza for dinner?'

‘No.'

‘Hey Mum, what should a telecom van have on its roof? A giant Jacko's Pizza!'

. . .

Ivan had a clarinet, and surprisingly, or not surprisingly, he could play a few notes on it. On the night of the party, Ivan entered our hosts' living room to a reedy rendition of Prokofiev's triumph, Peter marching in step beside him, alternately speechless with self-importance and overcome with giggles.

We paused for effect in the doorway, or rather Ivan did. I got stuck behind him. Peter ducked under our elbows with a cry of ‘Yo, Ian!'

Within fifteen minutes, Peter had shed the lot, gun and rope, hat and boots, borrowed a samurai sword and was alternately stuffing his mouth with chips and chopping great slices out of his classmates.

‘Bambi should be here,' I murmured. ‘With her flair for dressing up.'

Ivan was cross because no-one took much notice of us. I watched from a corner of the living room as new arrivals entered the spotlight, expecting the audience in front of them to applaud in some way; to laugh at the humour of their costumes, or to clap. Disappointment was cold on their faces when they saw more imaginative or funnier characters than they had dreamed up; or, their moment of entry having come and gone, they stood looking deflated as laughter and clapping greeted the next arrival, rival in their eyes.

I felt embarrassed for Ivan and annoyed with him, for competing with these people and for showing it.

I recognised a couple of Lyneham parents under their masks and make-up, but my lack of participation in school functions was obvious to me and, I was afraid, to everybody else. I was one of those mothers who never did tuckshop or any other kind of school duty, and here I was attempting to make up for it. I'd forked out thirty bucks at the door, because I suddenly couldn't bear the thought of Ivan paying for himself.