ALL THIS POST-COITAL OVER-THINKING was the prelude to Billy. And as they slowly began to recover from the paradigm shift of the first child, of course they began to wonder. Pushing Billy on the swing, dressing him in the new astronaut-style jumpsuit with hood and visor that Iris designed, or watching him toil away at the job of growing (how to aim a twisty stream of milk into a cup; how to react when a bigger kid, of whom you are in awe, bursts into tears) they thought: there. That fleeting minute, can we pause it, replay it? Can we have another toddler puddling about like a penguin, leaving surrealist art installations all over the house — a tiny cow in a teapot in a hat on the doorstep, of course! A stuffed crocodile in a silk camisole perched beside a woollen chick in a beanie on the bread-bin, why not!
Billy shadowed them everywhere — following so closely that sometimes, if they turned around mid-thought, they’d step right on him. They started to say: ‘I think Billy’s lonely. I think he needs an ally.’
So they tried for another child, feeling the chill cast by the friend who said, ‘Most animals have more than one offspring, of course. It’s Nature’s insurance policy.’
Did the effort begin in greed for love? In fear, or even in over-confidence? (Look what we can do!)
Was the mistake not to be happy with Billy for his own sake?
Why think in terms of mistakes?
Well, why think at all? Life sideswipes you anyway. For there they were, wondering if they were unable to conceive again (was it the stress of Liam’s work at TVNZ, was it Iris’s irregular cycle), when wham, they had to take in Liam’s nephew, Jason.
‘Another bairn,’ Iris’s mother said. ‘Any bairn’s a blessing. This could be an answer to your prayers.’
‘Who’s been praying?’ asked Liam.
‘Lee-am,’ warned Iris.
Billy was two; Jason was six. Liam’s sister-in-law, Steffie, had died of breast cancer. Almost a year on, his brother, Pete, couldn’t cope. Liam and Pete’s parents had died several years ago; Jase had no maternal grandparents alive either. There was one aunt on Steffie’s side, but she lived overseas. Besides, Pete had once said, ‘Wouldn’t trust her with a dog, let alone a kid. She’s high half the time, pissed the rest. Changes boyfriends fast as pants. You’d never know whether the bloke she was with would be any good for a child.’
Looking after Jase was meant to be until Pete could get back on his feet down in Wellington; get himself well again. But the thing was, he couldn’t. The poor guy couldn’t, and his body was found in the Akatawara Forest one weekend by a couple of polytech students with trail-bike permits. Pete didn’t have a permit. That was a detail the police officer emphasised when he knocked on their door. Iris felt something in her throat fold over and over, which was just as well, because it meant she couldn’t spit out
This man’s brother, this child’s father, and you —
This man’s brother, this child’s father, and you —
Liam managed better. Expressionless, he said, ‘Not many people in that frame of mind would be thinking legal particulars.’
‘I am sorry for your loss, sir.’ Something tutored and robotic in the officer’s manner, Iris thought. Not that he didn’t feel it. She saw how he watched Jason valiantly trying to play swing-ball with his little cousin out there, in raincoats, on the lawn, though Billy couldn’t follow the rules. The man didn’t know how to convey it, yet still stay within the guidelines of his brief.
Unfair of Iris, unfair. Because when they both sat down to tell Jason that they loved him, they would always look after him, but they had very tough, very sad news, the small, cruel words peeled off, dry and unrelated to the facts.
The facts were more than facts. They were a great tumbling mist: confusion that warped and cracked open into flash-fissure caverns of Oh, no. Oh, no.
But you had to hold on. You had to take deep breaths and play ‘We can manage this’, and face it, for the children.
When they told Jason, he bit the ulcerated patch on his lip that had been there since he’d come to them, and asked, ‘So — am I a norphan?’
A gnaw-fin. A small fish eating at itself. Iris quickly tipped her head back as if tears could roll clean away.
Liam’s hands worked to pull words from the air. ‘Technically, I guess. But you don’t have to think of it that way. You’ve got us, eh, Jase?’
Iris and Liam sat there with Jase sandwiched between them. Even terrible-two Billy, nose raw with winter sniffles, fell quiet and clambered up on Iris’s knee. Liam took his nephew’s hand. As they sat there, Iris with not-knowing-what-to-say battering like a giant moth in her throat, Jason, drawn and pale, began not to cry, but to yawn. Great aching, stretching yawns. The sheer fact of taking in the massive change in his circumstances meant they had to say, Jase, you need a rest. Have a lie-down, as long as you need. You’re safe here. We’ll keep you warm and safe.
He was a lovely kid. A lovely, poor, sad, unfortunate, ordinary, annoying, delightful nuisance of a ratbag of a hoot of a kid. Taking him in was the best of things, the worst of things. It meant Liam had no time to wallow in regret for what he should have done for his brother. On the other hand, there were days he felt he’d had no time to really let it all sink in — but — on the fourth hand, was it? — what Jase had lost mattered more.
After a while, Jase and Billy acted like siblings, almost. That was a comfort. By the time Billy, too, had started school, the pair of them wanted another word for what they were. ‘Cousin’ wasn’t close enough, they said. They’d heard of cuzzy-bros, but everybody said it like a joke, so that was no good. They tried bruzzins, bruth-cuzzes, cuzz-bruths, but everything sucked, apart from pretty-much-brothers, or basically-brothers.
Iris and Liam were glad the boys so easily found their equilibrium. Of course there were fights, whinges, jealous jabs and selfish pouts. There were, yes, even flashpoint rages of don’t-you-dare-pull-that-one-on-us, when Jase tried, ‘I hate you. You’re not my mother!’ Or ‘I don’t have to listen to you, you’re not my father!’ And even, ‘Get out of my room, Billy, y’ yabber-mouth. You talk diarrhoea.’ There were raised voices, ultimatums, punishments. There were also long, sometimes sullen, sometimes tearful talks on the couch; misspelled sorry notes pinned to the fridge; and hugs, lots: even the embarrassing at-the-schoolgate kind.
Over the next few years, they had the normal ups and downs of any other family.
‘For when we’re up, we’re up; and when we’re down, we’re down; and when we’re only halfway up, we’re neither up nor down,’ sang Iris, regularly, to her grand little dukes of orcs.
‘Orcs they are,’ sighed Liam, whenever the boys dropped undies, socks, fruit peel, cotton buds, milk-soaked oats, athlete’s foot cream or tissue clumps, or left piddle dots on the loo seat — name a yuck, they’d trail it behind them.
In other ways, Billy and Jase were opposites: Billy already diligent, sprinting away with literacy and numeracy at only five; Jason an average student, more interested in people than paperwork. They were chalk and cheese who met in the cheerful in-between. Rousting around in the altogether: the Nuddy Butt Club, the boys called it; or, when they were supposed to be heading off to bed, the Naked Wakers. They hid out in huts made of picnic rugs and chairs, driftwood and sand, or lavalava and the hole in the backyard hedge. They sketched side by side, everywhere from the living-room to summer campsite tables; they pottered over Lego, co-building a universe called Doctor Topper’s Scrinching Vortex; shared an intense and often sweaty obsession with Star Wars. They both begged regularly for some fresh costume accessory from Iris, as if the point of her sewing/design workroom were to cater for their games; they frequently commandeered her dressmaker’s dummy, Coco, as a character (usually a corpse) in make-believe; they developed private amusements like Twitch. Twitch was a birdwatching game that grew out of a family debate on a car trip to the Bay of Islands: whose first word was bird?
‘It was Billy’s: he pronounced it “bid”.’
‘No, but my mum, she said it was mine.’
‘Really? How strange. Sure you’re not mixing up your memories with stories we’ve told you?’
‘No, it was definitely bird. Or actually, bir-duh. I know because whenever we saw a magpie, she’d blow a kiss and say that rhyme. One for sorrow, two for joy, and she’d remind me. Bir-duh. Bir-duh.’
‘You might have even been saying two words,’ said Liam, glancing at Jase in the rear-view mirror, checking for wistfulness, traces of the losses the boy had borne. ‘A bird, a bird, a bird.’
The boys now imitated themselves as babies, whenever they saw a magpie on farmland, or the fingered wingtips of a harrier (‘No, say kāhu, Mum’) scissoring across the sky, or, once, a gangly white-faced heron (matuku moana), landing on a concrete water-tank. Whoever said the babble-word first won points.
‘Can words run in families?’ asked Billy.
‘You learn words, Dillbrain,’ said Jase. ‘It’s not like a nose or something.’
‘Don’t say Dillbrain, Dorkmoron.’ Billy landed a soft punch to Jase’s arm.
‘Hey. Stow it,’ warned Liam.
‘Peace, love and happiness, please,’ Iris sighed, scanning the scenery sliding past for a flash of kingfisher, or any other bright relief from car-cabin fever.
‘I do love him,’ said Jase. ‘He’s my most favourite dillbrain in the world.’
‘That’s nice. You’re the best dorkmoron I know.’
‘Boys.’
‘Point to Aunty Iris! We’re boys!’
‘Better give you two points, Mum, because you never see the birds first.’
Twitch was mainly for holidays or the dull torpor of car travel, when they’d also swap bird facts to fill the gaps between sightings. Did you know that herons stab frogs? Kāhu are bigger than falcons, eh? What’s Māori for falcon? Kārearea. But even during term time, now and then, at the end of a yelling match over who got the blue and who the red light sabre, or who’d messed up Iris’s thread spools (for the love of all the gods of little brats!), a truce could be signalled by:
‘Bid.’
‘Bir-duh.’
Or possibly:
‘Bir-duh.’
‘Bid.’
How Iris wanted to suspend them in this phase; where Jase seemed happy to play at Billy’s level, as if he needed to regress, just a little, into a safer era of his own boyhood, after the floodwrack of his orphaning. Sure, there were already days Jase said to Billy — ‘Fifty cents if you just zip it for five minutes.’ But what would it be like in a few years? When Jase had moved on to desire, to late-night dances, to drink, and—
‘Don’t speed things up, Iris,’ Liam said. ‘We’ll worry about that when we get there.’
True, some days, the teenage years did seem distant. She’d feel the serpent of worry start, and then — just as she was sure some issue would destabilise the entire family dynamic — there’d be a reprieve. Like when Jase started guitar lessons, in his final year of primary school. He wanted a leather jacket for his birthday, refused Iris’s offer to sew him a denim version, then put up a large poster of Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter movies on his wall. Iris thought, Holy Hendrix, not puberty so soon? How do we talk about this? How do we talk about telling the difference between love and a crush? How do we talk about safety? How do we talk about respect? How do we — no, he can’t have the jacket. It costs far too much. She and Liam bought him a digital tuner for his birthday instead.
Not long afterwards, Iris thought both boys had fallen unnaturally quiet in Jase’s bedroom — increasingly, a place out of bounds for Billy, when Jase wanted to escape the constant broadcasts of what he was not allowed to call The Billy Bulletin. (It was the tone he used.) The unlikely silence drew her up to the door. Her suspicions of monkey business were reinforced by a thin, scaling sound, like a strong zip being undone, perhaps, and then a duet of disbelieving, delighted sniggers. She tapped on the door and walked straight in — to discover the boys getting the new guitar tuner to register their farts. The tuner’s screen raced wildly through wavering chromatic arpeggios — up for Billy, down for Jason. The more they laughed at Iris’s facial expression, the more they accidentally farted, and the wilder the screen went.
Liam smirked at that story. ‘Madhouse!’ he said. ‘I don’t think we need to worry about Jason dating soon. He’s still way too infantile.’
‘Silver lining,’ said Iris, setting down the half-empty baked-bean can and two sauce-caked spoons she’d rescued from Jase’s bed. Cold beans, Billy explained, worked best. ‘We tried bananas but it wasn’t as fast. We’re experimen-talling.’
‘Peas and beans: the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot,’ Iris quoted, despite herself, from a Margaret Atwood novel she’d read a million years ago, when she knew nothing of raising small dukes of orcs. She immediately regretted her burst of rhyme: the boys took it up in a frenzied chant, punctuated by kazoo imitations.
‘Calm down, you lot, calm down! Your mother needs a break!’
And it was all right to say your mother to them both, because that was the way it felt now: all four of them together, experiencing the normal human zoo moods of trying to civilise Appetites into Persons.
Really, when was an up an up, and when was a down a down? Even when Jason had to be grounded, more than once, some good seemed to come of it. Including for his worst offence. Oh, God, the dread that sowed … He’d taken a lighter to school and tried to set fire to another boy’s lunch and science-fair project. Liam and Iris were terrified he was heading off the rails: that despite all the love they poured into the absence of his mum and dad, he was avenging himself on the world.
The other boy, Lou, had copied, Jason said. There was evidence. Originally they were meant to work as a pair. Jase was the only one who’d handed in the first stages of the project: there were dates and the teacher’s signature in red as proof. When Lou ditched Jase and said he didn’t want to collaborate any more, things compounded. Jase’s team beat Lou’s at lunchtime miniball, because Jase scored a late slam-dunk. Jason (unadvisedly, yes) roostered, ‘Lou! Lou! Lou-zzerrrr!’ Lou retaliated with, ‘You’re the loser. No wonder your dad topped himself. Probably couldn’t cope with you. You’d be a shit-mare to look after. Who’d wantcha?’ Then he gave Jase a fat lip.
A school-and-family/whānau meeting was called. In Jason’s favour were:
1. He hadn’t thrown a corresponding punch.
2. He’d taken the lunchbox and the poster out to the miniball courts, because ‘I didn’t want to arsonate the entire place’.
3. The plagiarism accusation held. (The poster was only scorched by the time the duty teacher apprehended Jason: he’d spent more time trying to melt Lou’s ClickClack lunchbox.)
4. The comment about Pete and Jase was well below the belt.
5. Jason’s behaviour at school until now had been impeccable, despite what he’d been through. His marks were pretty, ahh, average, but he was known as a friendly and likeable kid. These antics were out of character.
6. Jase initiated the idea of after-school reparation: helping the caretaker empty out bins, or vacuum schoolrooms. Commendable, really.
And, as Jase’s teacher told Liam and Iris — out of Jason’s hearing — there were several factors against Lou:
1. He had already been suspended once. (For trying to search for ‘Big Tits’ on the class computer at lunchtime, within earshot of some Year 7 girls.)
2. When asked about the plagiarism, Lou said science fair sucked cock anyway and he hated that lunchbox.
3. Lou refused to put money in the headmaster’s swear jar.
4. All four of Lou’s parents and stepparents had agreed, in their school-and-family meeting, that Lou had a bit of an attitude problem.
The up that grew out of that down was that it gave Liam and Iris a chance to say to Jase, as he sobbed through an apology at home, ‘No, we are not going to send you away. You are not too hard to look after. That was never behind what your dad did: Pete didn’t die because of anything you’d said or done.’ Which, of course, was the question scalding him, until pushing the fire outside his head had seemed the only way free.
After the family debriefing, Jason asked if he could be alone in his room. Would they mind keeping Billy busy? He just —
‘Yes, of course,’ they said. ‘You take some time out.’
Which Billy thought was totally unfair. He still thought time out meant punishment. So when Liam and Iris assumed he was contentedly working on a crayoned picture of Doctor Topper’s MultiDimensional Suitcase, he was writing a note to Jase, using all the phonetics an extremely verbal and high-performing five-year-old who still struggled with bs, ds and ps could muster.
bear Jason sum qeoqle are to mean
love from
yore baSikly bruthr Billy
xOxxx
A soft darkness grew in the house, while Jase stayed shut away; thinking through how many wounds? Then, around six, he came out again, hungry, stretching. He read the note, and rumpled Billy’s hair. Said nothing, but led his little cousin back into his room and pinned the letter to his wall. Iris made popcorn, hot milk, let the kids choose a DVD from the family shelves to watch while she cooked. Billy said Jase could decide. The ten-year-old settled on a David Attenborough, of all things. She would have thought a smash-’em-up cosmic warlord space-race crossed with dysfunctional family psychodrama would have been more cathartic. But Jase said he wanted to try something new. The boys sat there, gazing at the hillstar hummer from the Andes, the purple-coloured wood star from Ecuador, barely bigger than a moth. Each time the scene shot changed from cave or plant back to bird, the boys muttered to each other, ‘Bid.’ Or ‘Bir-duh.’
Peace. Even keel. A respite from He’s a worry, what should we do, have we handled this properly? He was going to be okay. They’d stick to their decision to ground him for another week — but he knew he’d overstepped a line, and he knew they loved him.