Chapter 6

Phinn tried to keep a bead on the rotating hexagons spinning rapidly out of sight as the shapes quickly merged into a shrinking white ball still on an upward trajectory as it passed over the grey metal crossbar.

‘Dribbly dammit,’ he murmured, hands on hips, head tilted. The mistimed kick would mean a walk into the unruly scrub behind the goal net.

He was already tired of walking before he got to the fields, which served as the final border between the town and the bush surrounding it.

Without the car it was a good forty-five minutes on hoof to the browning glorified paddocks, and that wasn’t even taking in the 400-metre driveway that the European arrivals to the area were forced to lay down to get to the last decent-sized expanse of land unthreatened by the bushfires during the worryingly more frequent dry seasons.

Still, it gave Phinn time to think on things without the irritating volleys of perceived offences constantly arcing between his sisters, his mum and his aunt back at the house. At one point he had tried to tune out the chatter and petulant stomping up and down the hallway by reading one of the abandoned history books, before he realised that the background white noise had trapped him in one paragraph on the post-World War II origins of the CIA for forty-five minutes.

He looked back at the looping blue gravel track towards the highway. Phinn had a theory about driveways and the blokes he grew up with.

He noticed that with his invariably wilder mates in town, they would be out of the school gates in a flash and back to their local streets. He watched and waited as they sprinted up the slightly uneven concrete drives to their houses. Once inside they would quickly shed their navy school clothes for different uniforms of Kmart surf-branded T-shirts and hoodies and almost run back into town to yell their expletive-laden greetings to the same wayward schoolmates they had just spent the last eight hours with, in and out of detention. The only difference was that this time the disapproving scowls came from civilian adults outside of shops, not just the exhausted ones in the playground on the Department of Education’s meagre payouts.

But when it came to his mates whose houses lay on the other side of the highway, it was a completely different equation. The battered silver bus would stop and drop them next to either a mounted keg or a white-painted stump with a number serving as a postbox. Beyond that, there would be another off-orange trail, sometimes winding a kilometre back to a homestead, usually bordered with barbed wire.

These guys didn’t seem to be in any rush at all. They slung their bags over their shoulders and shuffled on, sometimes pausing to launch one of their scuffed sneakers at a fence post.

Phinn marvelled at it. With his pal Zeke, a ruddy-faced son of a dairy farmer, it had been a lazy twenty-four minutes before the pair saw the rusted rotary hoe, the first sign that they were approaching his fourteen-year-old mate’s red-brick home. After banging open the screen door leading to the kitchen, Zeke had dumped his grey bag and rummaged in the fridge for the lime cordial as Phinn had watched on, curious. Zeke’s movements betrayed no urgency.

‘Aren’t you going to change out of your uniform?’ he’d finally asked.

‘What for?’ Zeke replied. ‘To do what? Make more washing?’ He’d lazily pointed at the two-metre-high squat rainwater tank outside. ‘That’s a flogging, Phineas.’

Embarrassed, Phinn had looked around at the lemon-yellow cabinets. ‘Ah, so are we going back to town? To do stuff?’

Zeke turned back to his mate with a withering look. ‘What for? We just got here.’ He’d suddenly arched an eyebrow and delivered the first of what would eventually be many references to the family’s undeclared cash crop. ‘I’ve got to go check on the old man’s … ah, green patch, out near the pump, just down the road. You can come. If you’re not scared of tearing your uniform.’

‘Walking?’

‘Walking.’

More driveways, Phinn thought now as he rubbed the mud off the Barça-branded sphere and walked back to the bag of other soccer balls in the net. Zeke and all those other blokes outside town. Always shuffling on a driveway to another driveway just to get back in time to another driveway.

He hummed his own remix of Tom Cochrane, making life a driveway instead of a highway.

He lined up another ball on the right-hand corner of the goal box and thought of his other childhood mates in town, like Jase and Brayden, now reduced to faraway Facebook images of sunburnt stubble, Arnette sunnies, tribal tatts on biceps and AR-15s, all set against monochrome backdrops of clay huts and sand horizons.

This time the three steps to the ball lined up perfectly and he felt his left foot take his full weight before his right – one second coiled behind him – came swinging down. The satisfying sound of the strike gave him a full-body sensation. He watched the ball’s tiny blur of a logo spin back at him then it disappeared into a strained section of the net at the goal’s left edge before suddenly dropping like a shot bird.

‘Wonder how many army careers could have been stopped just by longer driveways,’ Phinn murmured to himself.