DISCOMBOBULATION WAS A NEW word for Billy. His mum was using it a lot while they tried to find a house; then decided to rent one; then enrolled him in a new school; then while Mum did the ‘screeds of things your father and I still have to sort out’; then when they all went round to Dad’s new business partner Steve’s place for dinner. They met Steve’s children there, and his wife, whom Billy wasn’t afterwards allowed to call Posh Hannah. Billy was told off for talking a lot; he was told off for asking too many questions. He was even told off for telling Mum and Dad the things he’d learned about spoonbills after he’d seen six of them at an inlet they drove past. He was told off for trying to show Steve and Not Posh Hannah how a pukeko walked and how a kārearea, the falcon, can turn on its back in flight if attacking a bigger bird. He was told off while Mum and Dad unpacked boxes, shoved in plugs, made phone calls; they said his burble in the background was utterly discomBOBulating. Could he please go and try the old trampoline or tree house left behind by previous tenants; could he befriend the landlord’s cat that came so-called ‘free’ with the house?
DiscomBOBulating, discomBOBulating, discomBOBulating, he whispered to himself. He liked it. Saying it was like invisible bubbles. It felt exactly right for the way things in the new town bobbled at him and floated past in a slightly unreal way.
Time muddles and slides. The way it does at school, for example, the day he is asked to run a message. He likes his new teacher. He likes the very green and grassy playground. Yet he misses the sounds of Auckland. He misses the slow heat. His tummy feels wrong. He tries not to think about that on his errand, though it turns out he has to go past the bike racks. There is a bike that looks a bit like Jason’s, except it has handlebar streamers. In his head he says, ‘You look like a bike I used to know.’ There is something friendly, horsey, about it. As if it will whinny and toss its handlebars to get the flame-coloured streamers out of its eyes. Billy pats the bike seat, and says, ‘Easy, easy. Good girl.’ The bike asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Oh, there was Jason’s accident,’ Billy answers. The bike understands.
Billy imagines parts of the crash, sees it on the screen that sits up to the left inside his head. A small figure does an aerial jump like a BMX hero. Black against the sky, it floats down fast, like the wriggly threads you see when you’re tired. Billy tries to make it stay still, but again and again the tiny Tom Thumb leaps and drops. Some people think you can decide what to dream about before you go to sleep. Billy doubts it. He can’t even stop his own thoughts when he’s awake.
The bike asks Billy, ‘Did you go to the funeral?’ Billy retorts, ‘That’s a weird thing for a bike to ask.’ Then he feels bad about it because the bike starts to look more like chrome and tinsel with yellow sponge showing through the PVC seat cover and less like something alive.
Billy runs his hand down the bike’s metal stem and along the frame as if he could wake it up again. He waits for it to huff, some horse-bike kind of purr. It stays still, metallic. A weird thought arrives: a bike-shaped coffin of a bike. Cold pain tingles at the side of Billy’s jaw as he remembers events after the funeral.
When the service ended, even when he slowly realised that of course Jason wouldn’t really be at the chapel, Billy still half-thought he would silently slip away with them afterwards. Billy thought that once they had the real Jason home again, now that he had died, it would probably be like one of the times Jason was grounded. Like when he was in major trouble for using Liam’s credit card on the internet for a game he didn’t have permission to buy, and for not coming home from a movie when he’d agreed: a super-bad week, followed by a fortnight of no-friends, no-screen-time, no-pocket-money, no-iPod. Billy remembered some of the shouting.
‘You’ve had sod’s luck, Jase, you’re right. It’s not fair that you don’t have your own folks, true. But we’re trying to do our best for you, and you know what? We actually love you. When you act up, it’s like you’ve thrown that back at us. We have these rules to keep you safe. What if — what if Iris and I started stealing groceries because I was upset about your dad? It’s not bloody logical, is it? What if we ignored our responsibilities? Stopped paying for sports and holidays because we decided life’s not fair?’
‘Don’t you like holidays with us, Dad?’ Billy said.
Liam had said, ‘Butt out, Billy.’ So Billy stuck his butt out and waggled it, which Dad didn’t think was very funny. Billy got sent outside.
Jason had been like a turned-down version of himself then: quiet, in his room or doodling; and in the weekends, spending hours building elaborate Lego space stations again with Billy, as they lay on the floor next to the stereo, listening to all Mum and Dad’s old eighties and nineties CDs. Sometimes Jase would sing under his breath, ‘I’m banned, I’m banned, I know it,’ then do a Michael Jackson move that made Billy’s parents laugh but try to hide it. Billy wished Jase wouldn’t do the move, to be honest. Actually, he wished Michael Jackson on YouTube wouldn’t do it either. But Billy had liked Jason grounded.
Billy had thought after the funeral would be like that: his cousin more exclusively his own. Yet the house was eerily quiet, tidy. There was no Jase to leave his things lying haphazardly around like graffiti tagging his space. He wasn’t there to gurn with, when Mum and Dad nagged, or when Mum did her nut because someone had sneaked off with her embroidery scissors. No Jase to talk about the coolest things to stock in joke shops or the weirdest way to get into the book of Guinness World Records.
When they moved down south, Jase wasn’t there to say it would all be okay and so help make it okay, even if in every other way it wasn’t.
Billy’s head felt as if it would never get out of exactly that kind of loop. Sometimes, he just had to talk and talk to drain off the noise in his head. Sometimes he just had to run and jump and flick and shake.
Knowledge seemed to have that shadow-twin of not-knowing with it all the time now. Like, Billy knew Jason wouldn’t be there each day after school. He knew there was no point bounding into Jason’s room when he was up too early to wake Mum and Dad. His cousin wouldn’t be there to sardine with under the covers, and play fart-ball, or stew up some fart-soup. (They never got away with blowing off in Mum and Dad’s bed. Dad said what they did was not only disgusting but highly toxic and very likely flammable. If there was static electricity because of friction between Mum’s nearly-a-negligée and the sheets, they’d be fried alive.)
But every now and then, the not-knowing Billy would think, I’ll ask Jase. Or he would save him a place. Or look for him in assembly when Jase didn’t even know Billy had started a new school.
Billy swims up a bit from remembering and realises he’s picked at the exposed underlayer on the bike seat. Ashamed, he quickly stuffs the foam crumbs he’s pinched back into the gap. He doesn’t know whose bike it is: hopes they don’t notice. He pats the hole and whispers sorry. He stares at the jagged edge of the rip. It looks like skin and that makes him sick.
A lot of stuff makes him feel sick these days. The world has gone pretty strange. His dad seems to have turned sort of deaf. His mum does this thing where, in the middle of some normal job, she freezes, her eyes wide as a spooked rabbit’s. He wishes she would stop suddenly calling for him, insisting on being in the same room, even following him right up to the toilet, sometimes. He is eight. Nearly nine! When she trails him and calls after him in that high voice, his arms and back stipple all over with bumps of new goose-down.
Billy blinks. His eyes feel a bit sticky, sleepy. He is supposed to be telling a teacher in another class that his own teacher would be ready for singing group to start after playtime. It is his day to be Class Helper. He doesn’t want to go back inside the classrooms, though.
At the edge of the playground is a monkey-puzzle tree. His mum always says, whenever they see one, ‘Hmmm, no monkey in it; that’s a puzzle.’ He can’t help looking for a monkey every time. He ambles over there and startles a small bird. It chitters with alarm, seems to skid on the sky before it soars away. As it climbs higher, there is a pulling sensation in Billy’s chest. A wish so strong should have the power of rocket fuel: why can’t he fly, too?
He turns, trying to keep track of the bird dot — and then he hears another bird, from somewhere in the garden over the fence. A riroriro. Its song reels and wheels: whenever he thinks it will rest, it bells and pipes again, spiralling, winding, climbing. It sings with rolling, wild joy.
The bird comes into view. It sees Billy. It looks right at him, so deeply into Billy’s eyes that for a moment he feels held by its mind. Had the other Auckland bird somehow talked to this one? For it knows things about Billy. There is a calm acceptance: You are Billy, I know you. Then it fans away. Billy feels its song in his body the way you feel good dreams still in your blood as you wake up slowly.
That dream feeling. The birdsong brings it back, with pictures, too, that come like the fall of honey from a spoon. There’s a dream he started having soon after Jason died. Each time it’s slightly different, but on the first night, Billy looked down and thought what a handsome feather vest he wore, then saw his feet. They were talons delicately curled around a branch. A tiny white tuft drifted to his few thin toes. I am raining, Billy thought. Then, in the rapid way of dreams, his legs and wings coursed with new knowledge. He didn’t leap — he merely stretched out on the air and floated. Hearing a triumphant cry from down below, Billy’s flying!, he circled in the sky, song spilling from his beak as if the spool of music helped to keep him in the air. Whenever he woke, he tried to hold the sweet blurred feeling in his head so he would dream it all again …
He tries to get it back right now, but the school bell shatters the mood. At the same time, he sees his teacher charge out across the courtyard. Miss Hooper calls him, very annoyed. ‘Billy, you were supposed to deliver my message to Ms Johnston. What on earth are you doing?’
His tummy jolts. He tries to make a standing leap for a lower branch so he can swing himself up into the tree. He dangles from it, but—
‘Billy! Down here on the count of three. One, two—’
He drops, though his mind hares to and fro. He comes up with a question-lie. ‘Wasn’t that the playtime bell?’ He knows it was, and he also knows that isn’t the point.
‘Did you give Ms Johnston the message?’
‘I was going to, but I thought I saw …’ His mouth bumbles. ‘I thought I saw some rosellas out here.’ No he didn’t. He feels even more ashamed when the lie works.
Miss Hooper looks from tree to tree, then scans the sky. ‘Really?’ She sounds so happy. ‘I love rosellas.’
‘Miss Hooper, we could have a bird-feeder in the field. We could put out sugar water and nuts and things.’
‘That’s not a bad idea. It’d be lovely to be surrounded by birdsong.’
‘That would mean tuis and bellbirds maybe. But Miss Hooper, have you ever heard rosellas? It’s like cleaning windows.’
Miss Hooper gives him a funny look.
‘Fast squeaky circles,’ he explains.
Then something distracts her: the principal waves from the lower playground. Some Year 4s mill around him, wanting him to shoot baskets with their ball. He misses, then toils up the steps, hands in pockets. ‘You’re a mine of information, Billy,’ says Miss Hooper. ‘Now, what exactly did you want me for?’
Ha! Billy sees his chance. He goes from frozen on the spot to on his mark, get set, go: legging it, as he calls over his shoulder, ‘Nothing! Just gonna give Ms Johnston that message!’