Kimmy McAllister, née Varagos, was my favorite of Duncan’s ex-wives.
The newest and the youngest, most people believed she had married him for his money, calling Duncan an old fool and worse. But while Duncan’s wealth was undoubtedly part of the attraction—when a reporter had facetiously asked her what she liked to read, she’d answered, “The BRW Rich List”—Kimmy was far smarter than people assumed, and there had been a crackling spark between her and Duncan from the moment they met.
Kimmy had been working for a cosmetics brand in a department store, spraying passers-by with perfume and saying: “Have you tried our new fragrance, Detour? You never know where it may lead you.”
Duncan, as he later recounted at their wedding reception, had been one of those passers-by, when he stopped to watch her spritz shopper after shopper before walking over and saying, “Detour? How ridiculous, come on, we’re taking one.”
Then they had gone back to his flat, to resurface two days later, engaged.
“We just thought what the hell,” Kimmy told me one day at the studio. “And my mother said he’d make an excellent starter husband for me.”
But behind Kimmy’s flippancy lay a deep fondness for Duncan, who, she told me, was a kind, funny, and generous husband, who had been unfaithful to her since the day they met.
“Who cares?” She’d shrugged. “I’m hardly Mother Teresa myself. But I love him.” She added, “I bet they’d all be surprised to know that.”
Duncan’s death had left her, at twenty-five years old, a very wealthy woman who, like all of Duncan’s ex-wives, remained loyal to the man who’d picked her up in the perfume department, refusing all interviews or the offer to pen a tell-all of their life together.
“I just told them I couldn’t write,” she laughed.
Kimmy was good to Duncan’s kids as well, with Kiki, Kerry-Anne, and Karen all trusting them to her care from time to time, which was why she called me one afternoon on Willow, just as I was heading out the door for a walk with Barney.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lulu, it’s Kimmy.”
“Kimmy! Nice to hear your voice, how are you?”
“Good, really good—fabulously wealthy, actually.”
“I heard.”
“How’s Barney boy? Still eating for Australia?”
“He’s good—you know, Kimmy, if you ever wanted to visit him, you’d be more than welcome.”
“No, thanks, Lulu, can’t think of anything worse than being stuck on some crappy island—no offense. How’s the house?”
“It’s lovely, Kimmy, it’s really wonderful—I hope you don’t mind me having it . . .” I began to say, still feeling unsettled by the size of the gift Duncan had given me, but Kimmy interrupted.
“Couldn’t care less . . . Listen, are there any gorgeous men over there?”
“No.”
“Definitely not coming over then—but can I send Duncan Junior?”
“Yes, he ran away from Kiki’s and has been living at my place for the last two weeks.”
“Why?”
“Dunno, probably fancies me, but the point is, Lulu, he’s here, he’s dropped out of school, and he doesn’t do anything but mope around the house and look at my boobs.”
Duncan Junior was the oldest of the McAllister children and as Kimmy talked, I saw his pinched face at his father’s funeral, his arms stretched all the way around Rhees’s, Jasmine’s, and Jarrod’s smaller shoulders.
He would be sixteen now, I realized, Rhees about fourteen, the twins eight, I thought, maybe even nine, and all of them, according to Kimmy, dealing with the death of their father in different ways, Duncan Junior not very well.
“He says he’s an emo now,” she was saying.
“A what?”
“An emo, Lulu, you probably don’t have them there on Chestnut Island.”
“Willow.”
“Whatever—anyway an emo is like a kid who wears a lot of black and won’t go out in the sun and is always fucking miserable and plays the worst fricking music I’ve ever heard in my life. He’s driving me crazy; I really think he needs to get some fresh air and maybe see Barney. So, what about it, Lulu? Can he come and look at your boobs instead of mine for a little while?”
“They’ll be a little bit of a letdown after yours.”
“I know,” Kimmy agreed. “Most people’s are.”
“Up, Barney boy,” I said a fortnight after Kimmy’s call. “We’ve got a visitor coming.”
I walked down Avalon Road, past Julia’s house and down the sandy track toward Luggage Point, Barney sticking his nose down in the sand the moment I opened the gate, trembling with excitement as he picked up a scent and took off after it, hind legs frantically trying to catch up with the rest of him.
So Duncan Junior was coming—very reluctantly, Kimmy had told me—to Willow.
“He doesn’t want to go,” she said, “Says there’s no point, he hates the sun and won’t go swimming.”
“Great,” I said. “So why’s he coming?”
“He says he wouldn’t mind seeing you.”
“Right,” I said, and wondered why.
We were not, I thought, particularly close, but I had always been fond of Duncan’s eldest son—and felt more than a little sorry for him for having to bear his father’s name.
I’d once asked Duncan about it. “Not my idea,” he’d huffed in reply. “It was Kiki’s. The woman had just gone through thirty-six hours of the most unmitigated gut-wrenching pain it has ever been my displeasure to witness, and quite frankly if she had wanted to name him Vlad the Impaler, I wouldn’t have denied her.”
I reached the pier that stretched out from Luggage Point to the ocean, sat down, dangled my legs over the edge of it, and waited, trying to reconcile this new version of Duncan Junior, the one who hated the sun and wouldn’t go swimming, with the boy I knew.
I could see him at Lingalonga, a tall, skinny kid with the angular body of a surfer, wearing the same pair of board shorts, it seemed, all summer long, running in and out of the house, slamming the screen door behind him, making his way each time to the sea.
From the mainland, a gray speck of a boat came into view, but the wind and spray crossed its lines and blurred my vision until it came closer and I could see the shape of Will at the back, and at the front, hunched over, something flapping at its face in the wind, a jagged, little black crow.
Will raised his hand when he saw me. The black figure at the front did nothing, remaining at its perch until the boat came all the way in and Will threw me the rope.
“Duncan,” I called out to the strange, black creature, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
The face looked up at me with no smile of recognition, and for a moment I was unsure what to say to this new version of the boy I had once known.
“He can’t hear you,” Will called. “He’s listening to one of those Walkman things. . . .”
“Right,” I said as Duncan shuffled off the boat, the frayed hem of his long black coat trailing in the water. “Thanks for picking him up, Will, I’ll take it from here.”
“You sure?”
“Mmm, Duncan’s an old friend of mine, aren’t you, mate?”
But he was gone, his hot woolen coat flapping in the wind.
“Better you than me.” Will grinned.
“So this is your room,” I said as Duncan nodded, mute on the bed. “There’re fresh towels there, for swimming.”
“I won’t need them.”
His words surprised me, not because it was the first time he had actually spoken since he arrived, but because of the deep baritone that he uttered them in. Even through his ridiculous coat I could see he was thin, too thin, huddled up on the bed and looking, I thought, despite the manly voice, about six years old.
A six-year-old wearing his father’s overcoat.
“Duncan,” I said, “would you like Barney to sleep in your room tonight?” He nodded wordlessly, but nothing else was forthcoming, so I took that as a sign to retreat.
He didn’t eat dinner that evening, said he wasn’t hungry, and, the moment he possibly could, escaped up to his room, shutting the door behind him and leaving me standing uncertainly outside it, cursing the father who had begat this particular son.
“What now, Duncan?” I asked the air. “What on earth do you expect me to do now?”
Later that night there was a mad scrabbling down the stairs as Barney rushed for the door, followed by the hunched figure of displaced youth behind him.
“He’ll want to be let out,” I explained, “to go to the toilet.”
Duncan Junior nodded as I opened the door.
“Do you want anything?” I tried. “I’m just about to make some hot chocolate.” I wasn’t—I didn’t even know if I had any hot chocolate, but for some reason with the wind blowing and the sea howling, and the sad, ghost-white boy looking out the window, it seemed like the right beverage for this particular occasion.
He nodded again.
“Right,” I said.
I put the saucepan on the stove, watched the milk bubbling to the surface, took it off the boil, and poured it into two mugs, stirring in the chocolate, and carried them to the lounge room, waiting to see if Duncan Junior would follow.
It was a wild night, a night Duncan Senior would have called not for the fainthearted, as the wind whipped through the dunes and the horsetail casuarinas’ branches belted against the eaves.
His son came in and sat beside me.
I handed him his mug and heard the vaguely tinny sounds coming from his earpiece. If I was going to talk to this boy tonight, he would not hear me. I sipped my chocolate and decided that this was fine by me. I was not sixteen; I did not know what it was like to have a famous father whose name you carried on your shoulders; I did not know how it felt to lose that father, or to love and hate your mother, and deeply fancy one of your stepmothers. I did not know how it felt to be warmed by the sun one day and turn your face away from it the next.
I was not a sixteen-year-old boy.
I did not know.
I drank my hot chocolate.
A few days later we were both up early, sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, separated by its wide expanse and the tinny sounds still emanating from DJ’s ears. (I had taken to calling him DJ; it was less confusing for when I was cursing his father.)
Enough.
I motioned to him to remove the plugs, took a deep breath, and dived in.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here, I want you to be here, and you can stay as long as you like, but sometimes, you’re going to have to speak to me, because right now it feels like there’s a ghost living here with me and that’s all right some of the time, but not all of the time.”
He nodded.
“Also,” I said, “I’m going to ask you to help me around here a bit . . . not too much”—I smiled, seeing the grimace—“really just with Barney. It would be great if you could walk him in the mornings.”
Another nod.
“Good.” I smiled, pointing to the earbuds. “You can put them back in now, if you want to.”
I kept in touch with Kiki during Duncan Junior’s stay—and with Kimmy, Kerry-Anne, and Karen, who all rang wanting to know how he was.
“He seems okay,” I told them, “although to tell the truth I just don’t really know what to do with him.”
But I knew who might.
“Hello,” Will called out, “you in, Lulu?”
“I’m here, Will, out the back.”
Will let himself in through the front door and walked through the house, no doubt noticing the many signs of Duncan Junior’s presence littered along the way.
“Teen debris.” He smiled, joining me at the gate. “So,” he said, “how’s it going?”
“Fine,” I said, “though I spend half my life here hanging around the gate waiting for him to come home, and then when I see him coming I run inside so he won’t know I’ve been doing it.”
“Still wearing the cloak of death?”
“Yep.”
“Any progress at all?”
“A little. He’s started to talk to me a bit more.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“But it’s not enough, Will. I’m not equipped to deal with all this stuff. I don’t mind him being here—in fact I’m glad he’s here—but I don’t know how much good it’s doing him. I’m not enough for him. I’m not his father—I’m not even a bloke.” I looked straight into his eyes. “But you are,” I said.
“So, you have noticed,” he said, one eyebrow arching higher than the other.
It was a both a challenge and an invitation, one that had been coming since our awkward encounter in the kitchen, when I had sidestepped his touch.
I knew exactly what he was asking me, and I knew the answer too.
Of course I’d noticed Will Barton was a bloke, he was far and away the most masculine man I had ever encountered. In fact, I was fairly sure he had some sort of strange, musky scent wild animals could pick up in the woods. But he was also a good man, and a simple one who didn’t need the sort of baggage I now permanently traveled with.
So I kept sidestepping.
“Is that a trick question?” I asked flippantly, reducing the conversation to lighthearted banter.
When Will was concentrating on something, I’d noticed, he had a habit of clenching and unclenching his jaw.
He was doing it now, as he considered my response.
“I guess it’s tricky for you,” he answered heading back toward the house, then softening his words somewhat by promising to take DJ out crabbing the next day.
After he left I stood at the gate and watched the sea.
“Dammit,” I said to the sky.
The next morning, Will and I were both standing by the crab pots waiting for DJ, when his familiar, dark figure came shuffling toward us.
“Oh God,” Will said, “is he wearing mascara?”
“Just wave,” I replied, raising my hand and calling out, “Ahoy there, me hearty.”
“ ‘Ahoy there, me hearty’?” Will echoed. “Are you serious?”
“I told you I needed help,” I said, smiling at DJ, who was now hovering uncertainly around the pots.
“Hey, mate,” Will said, “ready to do some crabbing?”
DJ nodded, lifting his coat to step into the boat.
Will put up his hand. “I’m sorry, mate, but that coat’s not coming.”
DJ stared at him.
“Too much weight,” Will said. “It will upset the equilibrium of the boat.”
I had no idea if Will was telling the truth or not; all I knew was that shedding the coat’s heavy weight, DJ looked like he had never felt so relieved in his sixteen years of life.
They were heading down the river in search of sandies, leaving the open sea behind them and rigging up the mackerel frames, looking for the deep drop-off to set the pots, DJ surprising Will, he later told me, with his quick hands and knowledge of what Will called the fine art of crabbing.
“Who taught you, mate?” he’d asked him.
“My dad.”
“Well, he knew what he was doing.”
“Yeah, some of the time.”
“I knew him,” Will had offered. “We fixed up the house together.”
Another nod.
“Anyway, he was a good bloke.”
“Yeah.”
Will had passed him a spare T-shirt, saying, “Lulu will kill me if I return you as red as a lobster.”
DJ had smiled—“It was like the sun coming out,” Will had said—and opined that I wouldn’t hurt a fly.
That’s what you think, I’d thought instantly.
Will and I were sitting on the side porch after DJ had headed up to his room, and he was recounting the day’s events to me, including the moment he’d persuaded DJ to jump into the river’s green embrace.
It was stinking hot, and Will had gone in first, curling his legs up under his arms to perform a classic bomb dive, knowing, he said, there was no sixteen-year-old boy on earth who would be able to resist joining in.
“Come on, mate.” Will had laughed up at him. “Jump in; just jump in, mate.”
DJ had paused for a fraction of a second before standing up and surprising Will by executing a perfect swallow dive into the water.
He’d stayed down for a long time, long enough for Will to start getting a bit antsy, before he’d shot back up again, breaking the surface.
“Thought you were swimming to China, mate,” Will said, but DJ had dived deep down again, listening only to the water.
After that, the two of them were pretty much inseparable, DJ heading out the door first thing to join Will on his boat runs, or to help him out in his shed doing, as Ben would say, “manly things” together.
Sometimes I’d join them, the three of us racing one another down Bramble Bay’s giant sand dune on bits of cardboard, Barney barking like mad at the bottom, or, on some lazy afternoons when it was too hot to do anything, not doing anything much at all.
DJ stayed for three more weeks, until his mother could bear it no longer and came to collect him.
I had always been fond of Kiki; I liked the way she watched the endless procession of Mrs. McAllisters who came after her with good humor, even acting as witness to Duncan and Kimmy’s registry-office wedding, wearing a new pantsuit and a resigned smile.
I liked the way she let her son spend as much time with his father as he liked, and the way she had let that same son come to me.
“I don’t mind at all, Lulu,” she had said on the phone when we’d talked just prior to DJ’s arrival. “Just see if you can get that coat off him long enough for me to at least wash the damn thing.”
Now, a month after he had arrived, it hung on a hook behind the laundry door, looking, I thought, even more depressing than it had when it had had an owner to cling to.
I folded it up and put it in a bag for DJ to take home. I walked up the stairs to his room and found him lying on the bed, Barney splayed out on his feet.
“So, your mum will be here tomorrow. You okay about going back?”
“I’d rather stay here.”
“Well, you’re welcome anytime, sweetheart, you can ask your mum if you can come for the September holidays.”
“Cool.”
“Cool,” I echoed, and sat down on the bed. “Here’s your coat.”
“I don’t want it.”
“All right, I’ll keep it here for you, for next time.”
“Throw it away, Lulu.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I wasn’t ever really an emo, I don’t reckon.”
“No, perhaps not.”
“I still like the music though.”
“Well, that’s something, JD,” I replied, trying out his new name, trying to make it sound effortless and everyday on my lips.
It had happened the night before.
We had fallen into a pattern of having dinner together after he had come home from a long day spent with Will. We would eat, take Barney out into the night for a final run, then return home to sprawl out on the couches reading in companionable silence, save for Barney’s dreaming snuffles and grunts.
Occasionally I would steal a glance at Duncan’s son, noting with pleasure the pallid, hollow cheeks filling out more each day, the limbs bare and brown again, the shoulders relaxed, one hand idly scratching Barney’s head, and I would hope that whatever it was that had troubled and brought him here had, at the very least, been softened by his stay.
We had not spoken at all about why he had come, and I had no intention of introducing the subject, but on that last night, he had brought it up himself.
“Lulu?”
“Mmm-mmm?”
“Thanks for having me.”
“My pleasure.”
“My dad told me to come.”
I sat up, looked at him.
“He told me that if I was having any sort of trouble after he died that I should come to you.”
“I see. Well, I’m glad you did.”
“He said you were very restful.”
“Oh, well, that’s—am I?”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Good.”
“Because you don’t keep prodding at me, you know?”
I smiled at him.
“That’s because I am not your mother. It’s a mother’s job to prod.”
“My mum never stops.”
“Because she loves you.”
“I know.”
We went back to our books, but after a minute I felt his eyes on me and he spoke again.
“I miss my dad.”
“I know.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“Me too.”
Then out it came, in a rush of words mixed with snot and tears and the tale of a girl at school, Marlena, another emo, who had, apparently not seeing the irony, dumped him for being “too depressing.”
Blowing his nose continually on his T-shirt while I tried to look like I didn’t mind, but later soaked it in laundry detergent for hours, he told me how Duncan had broken the news he was dying by jovially announcing that his son could finally drop the junior part of his name, because the senior part of the equation wasn’t going to be around much longer.
Then came the confession of how desperate he was to do just that: change the name he had always hated.
“I’ve wanted to for ages,” he said, “and even though Dad said I could, now that he’s gone I think it would be really wrong to do that, you know?”
“I’m sure it would be fine,” I told him. “Did you have any idea what name you might like to change it to?”
“I thought Raoul, maybe.”
“Raoul?”
“When I was an emo.”
“Right,” I said, trying not to laugh, and failing.
DJ, I was pleased to see, was laughing too.
“Stupid, really.” He grinned.
“Well, what about what I call you—DJ?” I tried. “That sounds pretty cool, and it kind of fits you, don’t you think?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“Too try-hard, everyone will think that I reckon I’m some sort of deck spinner.”
“Right,” I said, though I had no idea what a deck spinner was.
“But I don’t mind JD.”
“JD?”
“Yeah, for Just Duncan.”
Just Duncan left with his mother the next day, Kiki explaining that his school had given him compassionate leave and had said he could return to finish the year out if he wanted to.
He was certainly smart enough to catch up, but his mother thought he might want to finish it by correspondence, then start university as planned the following year.
She added: “He said he wants me to call him JD.”
“Well, it’s better than Raoul,” I said, patting her shoulder.
Will came to see me the week after JD left.
“I miss him,” he said, “which is not something I would have predicted the day I picked him up in his vampire outfit.”
“I miss him too,” I replied, “but he’ll be back.”
“I know,” Will said. “I told him he could come and work with me anytime.”
“Thanks, Will,” I said. “It was really good of you to take him under your wing. I don’t actually know what I would have done with him.”
“No problem. He was a big help, in the end.” He leaned on the door, one arm on its frame, his torso, I noticed, running half the length of it. I had told Kimmy there were no gorgeous men on the island, but I had been lying through my teeth. Will Barton was gorgeous, every salty inch of him, and I wanted, I realized, looking at him leaning in my doorway, his hands on me.
Will caught my gaze and made a half move toward me, before I turned awkwardly out of his way.
I was the last person on earth who deserved a man, let alone a decent one.
“Oh God, Lulu,” Will said softly, but I pretended not to hear him.