“Easy as draining a jug of beer,” she said to
him through small yellow teeth. “All I had to do was drive to the hospital
after 10pm, ask where the emergency room is, put on one of those gowns I nicked
when I was getting by boobs fried, head to maternity and grab the little
bugger.”
“What are you going to
do with it?” he asked his mother over the baby’s screams.
“Get some money for it ya
wally.” She was lighting a cigarette, unmoved by the noise in the room. Beer
stains were visible on the front of her night gown and her hooded eyes were red
with tiredness.
They sat in the room that passed as the lounge of
her prefab house, the air made blue by smoke and sunlight and rang with the sounds
from the TV and the child.
He winced at the noise. “Have you fed it?”
“Sure, but it’s not hungry, an’ I don’t plan to have
it for long.”
“So how long have
you had it then?” he said reaching across the small table between them to take a
cigarette.
“Only a week,” she said.
“A week!” he spat out the smoke he had just inhaled
and jolted forward. “What the bloody hell are ya doing? You barely dragged me
up, what makes you think you won’t kill it?”
“Aw keep ya nuts in their sack. That’s why you’re
here.” She pulled the tab on a can of beer which hissed and a small mound of
foam dropped on to her stomach before the can could reach her mouth.
“Oh, fuck… We’re fucked… Fuck me… What the fuck?” he
chanted to himself. With his head bowed he waited for her to continue.
“You’re going to go in to the bank,” she began. But
before she could finish he looked up at her, his eyes wide with incredulity.
“The bank? Why the bloody bank? We goin’ to rob it I
s’pose, armed with a baby and dressed in a hospital gown.” But neither of them
was laughing.
“We got to go somewhere where we’re not recognised,”
she said. Her gaze had shifted to the baby and he realised she was serious.
“What about all the bloody cameras?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess -”
“Got it! The council office,” she said pointing her
cigarette at him and depositing ash on the floor in the process. “And you’ll
give ‘em a letter saying we’ve got the baby an’ if they want it back they got to
pay for it.”
“I won’t do it,” he said. “Pay how? How we going to
pick up the money without getting caught?”
He drew his legs up in front of him and wrapped both
of his arms around his knees as if somehow shrinking in size would remove him
from the situation.
“Then you can take your tail out of here and crash
somewhere else,” she snarled. “And you can take that stolen piece of crap
you’ve got hidden on my back lawn with ya!”
With that she threw her half-full beer can at him,
narrowly missing his head but having the desired impact none-the-less.
They stayed in that room. He occasionally shot
glances between her and the child while she dozed until there was a knock at
the door. She instantly lurched upwards and hissed, “Quick, hide the baby.”
But before he could
move she had grabbed the laundry basket with the small creature in it and
darted to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
He waited for a moment
to see if the caller would give up and go away. But soon there was another
knock and it sounded louder and more insistent this time.
He stood up and instinctively
grabbed his keys, wallet and cigarettes from the coffee table. He then set off on
a slow circuit around the room, switching off the TV and standing on a beer tab
“Crap!” before finally reaching the door.
“Who is it?” His heart
pounded. He looked back at his mother’s closed bedroom door and tried to think.
“It’s me, Bill from
next door.” The voice was familiar so he stepped forward and slowly opened the
door.
“Yeah?” He cringed at
the uncertainty in his own voice.
The neighbour shunted
his large frame up to the top step until he was so close he was able see the oily
glow of the visitor’s skin.
“That bloody dog of
yours is tearing up the bins on the street again,” Bill said loudly.
He looked over the neighbour’s
shoulder but could see nothing other than the last glimmer of the day’s sun thinly
coating the tops of a couple of cars.
“Ok, I’ll
go get him,” he said. But before he could close the door there was a low gurgle
and then a loud baby’s cry from his mother’s bedroom.
Visibly interested, the neighbour stretched
to look past the doorway and into the fog of the front room.
“I thought I heard a baby crying,” Bill
said. ”Been here about a week hasn’t it?” his short neck craning to scan the
inside of the house. “Didn’t know you had a kid.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my ex-girlfriend’s. I’ll sort the dog out,” he said and
shut the door without any further hesitation.
He
went to the kitchen at the back of the house, reached over the large bag filled
with used disposable nappies and grabbed the lead off a nail on the wall. He
waved a fly away from his face and when he turned he saw his mother standing in
front of him.
“Who was it?” she asked
in a lowered voice.
“Neighbour, complaining
about the dog.”
“Do you think he heard
the baby?” she asked.
“I think the whole
neighbourhood heard the baby,” he said.
“What did you say to
him?”
“Said it was my ex-girlfriend’s.”
“You’ve never had a
girlfriend,” she raised her hand. “Bloody dog. Mutts, both of ya!”
But he was ready for
her this time and quickly leaned back so he only felt the breeze from her hand
is it passed his cheek.
She turned and stormed
to her room and slammed the door.
About a hundred and
fifty metres up the street he could see the dog’s big tan shoulders, its head deep
within the bin it was enjoying.
“Mac,” he called to the
dog - named after his preferred take away and where he found the animal. But
the dog remained undisturbed.
The lead dangled at his
side as he made his way up the street towards the dog, feeling good to be out
of the house. The pavement under his bare feet still held the day’s warmth and
the mechanical grinding of cicadas was beginning to give way to the singing of
crickets.
When he reached the dog
he stood for a moment, reluctant to interrupt its obvious enjoyment. In the
distance he could hear a stereo, some children’s voices and the squealing of
car tyres. He bent down and put the lead around the dog’s thick neck and paid
little attention to the noise of squealing tyres as it grew louder and closer.
“C’mon boy,” he said
and turned to begin to walk back towards the house. Suddenly, three cars rounded
the corner at the end of the street, sped down the road and screeched to a halt
near the gate of his mother’s small, faded yellow house.
He stood motionless and
watched as men scrambled from darkly coloured sedans, some towards the front
and others towards the rear of the house. There were no voices at first, just
the bang of the front door being kicked and moments later his mother’s voice.
At least he thought it was her, as she had never made that sound before. It was
a high pitched howl and then a more familiar guttural noise and then clearly the
words, “It’s his…lying bastard…”
He
stared as they bundled her and the laundry basket in to separate cars and
before he knew it they were gone, almost as quickly as they came, tyres still screeching
and with lights flashing now.
He did not know how
long he stood there, but eventually he could feel the dog pulling on the lead. As
he approached his mother’s house he saw the door was open and a light still
glowed inside. He paused briefly to be reassured by the silence and then walked
down the gravel drive and around the back of the house, not noticing the
neighbour’s curtain move as he passed.
He pulled the grey tarpaulin
off the ute he parked there a few days earlier and after some quick work had
replaced its number plates with those from his mother’s grey sedan parked
nearby.
He
opened the ute’s passenger door and motioned to the dog who needed little
encouragement. He climbed into the driver’s seat and after placing a small
torch in his mouth he reached under the dash. Moments later the vehicle lit up
and began to hum. Mac’s big open mouth and flapping tongue smiled at him. He
could see that the recent rummaging had left a new stripe on the bridge of the
dog’s nose and suddenly felt hungry.
“C’mmon
boy, let’s get a take away,” he said, before reversing out of the drive.
