So, maybe he should have stayed home after it all blew up, or maybe he should have gone home eventually, but there were better things to do and besides who ever wanted to be at home anyway?
It was the morning after the party. A Sunday and Francis was at Burger King again. Outside there was the thump, thump of a car with its bass turned up. The pop and scuttle of tires accelerating too fast over concrete. The screeching of the train on the railway line and Britney Spears screaming I’m a slave for you over the loudspeakers. They came here for the quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comes with no sound. The kind of quiet you find in a place where you don’t need to impress anyone.
Not too long ago Francis had seen Clare walk past the front windows on her way to the station. She’d be back home by now, probably, reading fat books or writing poetry or reciting Shakespeare or whatever. He couldn’t imagine it at all, really, what she did when she was alone.
Inside Burger King was full of tweens with bags of crap they bought at Westfield and goths from the nightclub next door. Tall thin white men with dirty hair entered through the front doors and ran up the back stairs and didn’t come down again. It was a rundown version of a 1950s milk bar. The walls had been decorated with posters that advertised Pepsi and Lifebuoy Soap. Someone had drawn thick black texta tags over the faces of the smiling kids.
Jesús and Charbel and Francis all had cans of VB between their legs under the table and burgers and chips up above. Charbel insisted that beer cured hangovers and Francis and Jesús just liked to drink.
‘What?’ Charbel said.
‘I don’t know. What?’
‘What?’
Francis didn’t say any more; that was about all he had for now. They were back to silence. Jesús picked at his chips and yawned. Francis poured a bit of VB into his waxy Burger King cup and sipped it. He picked up his whopper and shoved it in his mouth.
Jesús had fallen asleep at the table. His arms were folded across his chest. The only way Francis could tell he wasn’t dead was because of his snoring, just loud enough so that he could hear it when the kids at the table next to them stopped screaming. Charbel always looked so awake, as if his big round eyes might pop out of his shaved head and move across the room if he had to keep sitting there. He never seemed to get tired. He was slurping down his VB like he didn’t care who was looking. He didn’t look at Francis. He looked around the restaurant. He was busy surveying the scene. Francis looked beyond his head to the woman at the table behind him who was reaching into her handbag over and over again and pulling out handfuls of the odd crap women keep in their bags, lipsticks and tissues and breath mints. She dropped it all onto the surface of the table.
Charbel looked up at Francis and gave him an oversized smile. He held a couple of chips covered in tomato sauce in his fat hands in front of his face. ‘So what’s up with your fuckin’ dad?’
Francis wasn’t sure where to start answering that question, and, to be fair, the two of them had been having the ‘what’s up with your fuckin’ dad?’ talk for years. Each one of their dads was the most fucked up, depending on the time, the year, whatever they were doing to piss them off. Jesús never talked about his dad. They all knew he was probably dead. They all knew it had something to do with politics and Chile and why he had grown up here with his mum and no one else, but none of them knew how to talk about it.
And anyways, Francis was tired of this conversation. He’d had it too many times with his sister who was always calling up demanding answers, as if there was some sheet of facts he was hiding from her.
‘Don’t know. Same old shit I suppose. Or different shit but same shit anyways.’
‘My dad says he saw your dad on CCTV throwing rocks at Lot 185.’
‘Yeah, that’s probably him.’
‘Serious. Only didn’t report it on account of you and your family and plus he feels real bad for your dad about everything that’s happened but you gotta get ya dad to stop doing it, he’s got enough problems, right? Doesn’t need any more.’
Charbel looked at Francis, looked at him hard. Not in an aggressive way but in a way that said he meant business. It was a warning from Charbel’s family to his. Sometimes Francis thought everyone’s just the same, like in high school, where Charbel got to call all the shots because he was so loud and so confident and Francis only got to be that guy who followed him around all the time waiting for some of that slickness, that easy way of being in charge, to rub off on him a little.
‘No worries. I’ll just do something about that. Don’t know what but somethin’. Embarrassing shit, that is.’
‘What?’ Jesús was suddenly awake. He licked his lips, pushed his thick black hair behind his ears, wanted to know what they were going on about.
‘Francis’ dad.’
‘Yeah, I know. Rock-thrower. Remember how pissed he was when he had to pick us up from the police station that one time, back ages ago, when we was in school?’
Francis was hoping that Jesús would stop there and he did. He got distracted by a blonde in hot pants slinking by their table. Jesús stared at her for a while. He nodded slightly at her and smiled his boy-band smile whenever she turned slightly his way. Charbel looked at Francis and they smiled a half-smile at each other that said they both knew the other was still pissed.
Francis was glad that Jesús didn’t go any further. He didn’t want him to say anything to Charbel about watching his dad last night. Francis had decided not to talk about it with anybody. He and Jesús had watched it silently, and then walked on to Collectors without talking about it afterwards. And besides, they were drunk and maybe it wasn’t what it looked like. After his dad had walked out of the house, his mum had turned up the music and Clare had grabbed their retarded uncle and started to dance. That’s just what those two were like, but Francis couldn’t stand it, all that fakeness, so he’d left too, out that same back door his father had left through, and then Jesús had followed. They’d all followed each other because none of them ever really knew what to do next.
Charbel picked his cigarettes up off the table and they followed him outside. They sat on a bench near the arcade and smoked. There were two small Chinese girls with pigtails and dresses that were too pink and had too much lace. They looked something like four and six. It made Francis dizzy, watching them passing a ball that lit up and sparkled back and forth, back and forth. He looked at Charbel, lying against the bench, surveying the scene, like he owned all the concrete he was looking at. He probably did. His family had been steadily buying up the neighbourhood for years now. It was starting to get on Francis’ nerves, just like it got on his father’s. He couldn’t say exactly why it bothered him so much.
Jesús inhaled deeply on his cigarette, leaned his arms against his thighs and let out a heap of smoke. Five feet away from them, an old woman sat on a milk crate outside a two-dollar shop like someone had washed her and set her out there to dry.
Charbel rolled up the sleeves of his thin black cotton blazer and looked at his big-arse metal watch. Francis wondered where he had been all night. Everyone he hung around, including his father, was living a kind of half-life and you never knew which half you were seeing. They kept smoking and Francis waited for both of them to say they had to piss off somewhere. Francis was always the last to leave. He had a thing about it, about staying till the end. It made him feel like he was better than everyone else in some way, like he had this kind of commitment to things, even things that meant nothing and no one else could match it.
‘Gotta head,’ Jesús said and Charbel nodded and looked at his watch again.
‘Same.’
Charbel was probably off to have Sunday lunch with his family but he’d never admit to doing ordinary things that everyone else does. Both Jesús and Francis nodded at him, slowly, like everyone in the room knew he wasn’t any more important than shit, then Jesús was off too, following not so far behind him, and Francis was left on the bench still smoking the same cigarette.
He just sat there, looking, trying to shake the fog out of his head. Francis hoped his mum wouldn’t be home when he got home. He didn’t want to have any kind of real conversation with anyone today. Clare would call him later. He would make a point of not answering until she’d called him for a few days in a row, and then he’d make up some kind of excuse neither of them would find believable, and everyone’d just get on with it.
For a few minutes, while he was looking, he thought he saw his dad in front of the chemist. There was a man with the same kind of navy-blue slacks and long-sleeved collared top his dad always wore outside of work. He had the same thinning grey hair on the back of his head and he was leaning against a cane, looking at the specials in the window. He knew though, knew absolutely that it wasn’t his father. After watching his dad last night he knew better this new shape of his. He knew which way he leaned into his cane, how he paused for a long time before he made any moves. He’d realised, for the first time since the accident, just how different his father’s body had become. Even as he got older, his father had always been such a strong man, his body shaped by many years of hard labour, he still had muscles in his arms that made the sleeves on his shirts look slightly too tight. Francis didn’t know where all those muscles had gone now, they seemed to have melted back into his skin.
He didn’t even know if his father knew they’d been following him the night before. They hadn’t even tried to make it look like they weren’t behind him. Francis and Jesús had stopped every block or so, sat on someone’s fence, had a smoke, while his dad stopped and looked at a house. It had gone on like this over and over again: his dad walked slowly, looked at every house like he’d never seen it before, stopped for a little while at some, for a longer time at others, just stared and stared. Some of the places had seemed to piss him off if he looked at them too long. That’s when he’d start having a conversation with no one they could see, not loud, just low and quiet like he was conspiring or maybe he was just talking to himself, who knows? And sometimes, something had pissed him off so much he’d get to destroying things. Not much, a rock thrown at a window, a paling on a wooden fence kicked until it cracked. The thing was, watching his dad, you could tell he was trying to fuck something up in a serious way but he couldn’t move so fast anymore and even though the cast had been taken off his arm he couldn’t really throw anything with much force, it had all just made him look kind of pathetic and that was really what made Francis feel empty – not that his dad wanted to fuck things up, but that he couldn’t do it properly. That was kind of tragic in itself.