PERHAPS WHAT CAME NEXT was her fault. Perhaps if she’d made it to the school at the usual time, just before the bell … but she must have gone into a trance. The honey of the shifting patch on the floor soaked into her; she imagined wearing sunlight; a sheath dress made of molten amber. Now and then leaf shapes shadow-played over the light’s border. She fell into an exhausted fugue, and—
It can’t be a short spell. She’s fifteen minutes late, and doesn’t meet Billy coming the other way. Odd. She heads to his empty class, explores his still-new-really school. He’s nowhere. Tamping down panic, she hurries to the school secretary at reception. The woman manages to both stay calm and go through every worst-case scenario. She tells Iris to think where he might have gone. Tells her to phone Liam. Tells her that tonight someone will be at the school until five o’clock, and not to hesitate to call, but perhaps it would be best if she goes home, waits for Billy there? If he doesn’t show up within half an hour, get Liam to ditch work early and search the streets. ‘If there’s still no luck, phone the police. You don’t have to wait to notify them, especially not for a child.’ The woman’s garish rocking-horse earrings swing as she says, ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that. You’ll probably find he’s gone to a new friend’s house without thinking.’
Iris wheels around and rushes back downhill, her heart catapulting. ‘Billy, Billy, Billy,’ begs the blood-beat in her head. ‘Bad luck comes in threes, oh, no, bad luck comes in threes, shut up. This family is cursed, shut up, this family is marked, shut up. Billy, Billy, I’ll tear a strip off you, Billy, Billy, I’d never ever hurt you …’
She’d left her mobile at home, of course, when she hurried off in a flap of I’m late! So it’s not until she gets back inside — and finds no Billy — that she calls Liam. She explains. Thank goodness, he understands. He says he’ll get on his bike straight away. ‘Are you coming home?’ she asks, painful tingles in odd, disparate places — thigh, ribs, arm and one side of her scalp; the fears are trying to gather and swarm.
She assumes Liam’s silence is fury but actually he’s taking time to think.
‘No. What I’ll do is I’ll head to some of the places he already knows. The kids’ section in the library, the Botanic Gardens, then that park by the inlet. I’ll have my mobile. I’ll call you when I’m on the way home.’
She imagines him in profile, chin lowered. She swallows. ‘Shall I call the police?’
‘If he’s not at the gardens, yes. But I’ll let you know.’ He hangs up.
Something in her heart jams, as if the hands on a clock have snagged. The needle plays over and over. Billy, where’s Billy … For more than an hour she waits, the tingling in her body now like a strange cooling, as if cells are separately turning to stone. She cannot move. Then a phone call electrifies the stalled air. It is Liam, and the unforgiving, frozen moment splits back into past and present. His voice frees the tight cords in her limbs. Oh, so yes, she does so love this man, so she does.
Liam’s instinct was right. When Iris was late, Billy had taken it into his clever-nuisance feather-head to use next Friday’s sausage-sizzle money (which he’d forgotten to give his teacher) to pay for the bus fare across town. He went right past their new house, all the way along George Street, hopped out, and every now and then asked, is this the way to the gardens? He even lied to one young woman. She asked, ‘Where’re your mum and dad?’ And Billy replied, ‘My big cousin and I are meeting them there. But he’s gone on without me!’ (It didn’t feel like a lie, he said later. It felt like the way it should be.) The woman must have caught the urgency in his voice. ‘Head thataway!’ she pointed. Yep, that looked right to him: he recognised the overbridge now, the underpass mural, the pet store in the distance.
The familiarity meant that afterwards he said, ‘But it’s fine at the gardens, Mum, we’ve been there heaps.’ As if she were worried about the birds. Or even the plants.
Liam and Iris thought he was more sensible than that.
His father found him at the cockatoo cage, fingers hooked through the wire, though there were warning signs up saying that was precisely what not to do. Billy was doggedly asking a parrot to talk; trying to teach it a new phrase by repeating, ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re our only hope.’ It wasn’t for several days that Iris found that funny. The cockatoo was white, a Princess Leia in her flowing robes; and although its yellow head-crest was nothing like Leia’s famous coiled side-buns, there would still have been something unsettling, satirical, about its bobbing and ducking plea for freedom, if it had learnt the catch-cry.
Liam jumped off his bike, slung it against a park bench, and went to Billy, speechless with anger, relief and the crosstown sprint. He grabbed him by the shoulders and, Christ forgive him, gave him two hard shakes. ‘What the hell’s gotten in to you?’ There was only a handful of other people around: every adult turned and stared, but to Liam, even the old guy with a walking stick had that kind of … creepy, vacant-streets feeling. Paternal overdrive, maybe. To Billy, on the spot, he said, very low and false-calm, ‘Never, ever do that again. You don’t go off like that without telling somebody. Anything could happen.’
Billy still wouldn’t come until he’d fed his last coin into the donations box for the birds. Even then his hand crept into Liam’s trouser pocket, ferreting for change.
Liam yanked his son’s wrist out of his pocket. ‘Do you understand why I’m angry?’
Billy went down into himself. You can tell, said Liam; his face doesn’t move, but it’s like his eyes draw up a screen. No — oh, I don’t know how to put it exactly but it Drives. Me. Spare.
But you — Iris wanted to say — can’t you see there’s a sort of, hmmm — but she couldn’t say it then; it wasn’t the right time; she was trying to hear the and then and then and then of facts; as if, when you knew them, you would know how to break the chain.
Liam had taken Billy by the neck-scruff, turned him around and started to march him home, all the time wheeling his bike along, one-handed.
They walked the entire route. Yes, through town, along the one-way roaring with stock trucks, over the railway footbridge, into the southerly, along the howling waterfront with the sea’s grey surge beside the footpath. Billy said it made him seasick to even look at; well, bloody don’t then, said Liam, and how am I ever going to get you into a kayak, eh? which Billy conveniently ignored.
‘There’s a bus, Dad!’ he said.
‘I’m not putting a bus driver to the trouble of stowing my bike, and I’m not paying for the fare. This has been your mistake and you’re to feel the consequences.’