14

Walking to the primary school down the long bluestone lanes that run behind their houses, they stretch their steps to land on the highest blocks. Mostly they stick to the lanes.

People’s back fences always tell better stories than their neat front fences and it feels safer in the lane and even the weather feels better, cooler in summer and warmer in winter. The lanes are their highways. Full of old bike tyres and knots of rubbish that can yield anything, including the occasional rat.

But the Browns don’t often walk together and sometimes they even seem to hate each other. Maybe they remind each other of their old man. Their life at Wolf Street is the weight behind everything. When they are out, by accord, they pretend home doesn’t exist. They know other kids’ fathers are rough and some are alcos too but they think the world believes that their own is normal and they want to keep the illusion going.

Still, down the lanes they walk, laced with the sense of each other being close by, if not too close. They spread out with Frank the dog in the lead, then comes Rob and Louisa, and the twins, together even when they’re stepping around dog turds and under passionfruit vines, straggle along behind.

One day Louisa is coming last in the little procession down the lane. There’s been yet another fight with Rob over his treatment of the twins. Strange, she thinks, how they make up with him more easily, even though she’s been the one protecting them, and while she’s mulling over this strangeness, Louisa is confronted by a man looming before her.

His mouth is open, his pants are down around his ankles and he’s pulling at his white stalk of a thing, his red footy socks glowing. In that moment, it seems he wants something from her and she is stunned and she realises the lapse has come again, the moment between action and inaction, and she stands there shocked, waiting to be released from her own fear.

When the moment comes, she gets past him as fast as all speed but the laughing man with the big open mouth and the loose eyes haunts her. And as she runs all the way to school, she sees that whatever this is, it’s not personal, it has nothing to do with who she is, it’s just what she is that matters.

Though he’s wildly fascinated, Rob pretends not to believe a word she says. ‘Tell me again about the socks and about his dick, about his eyes,’ he says, sitting on the back step that hot afternoon and when she does, and he laughs so much, she thinks he might choke. He loves such stories about anything seamy and enjoys seeing her embarrassed. It’s not that funny but who else is there to tell?

When it rains, the troughs in the middle of the lanes run with grey water. The kids straddle them casually. Sometimes other kids push out into the lane from flimsy gates and join them on their way. Rarely a car might want to pass.

Frank sometimes deliberately stops to rouse up dogs behind fences and their fits of barking get him a nudge in the guts and a warning to get moving. ‘Get on Frankie, get on,’ they’ll say as they move forward like shepherds towards a paddock.

When Peter, with a stick in his hand and a bag on his back, remarks to Louisa that he wishes he could just go somewhere else. ‘I want to live where no one can get you,’ he says. ‘Where is that Lou? Where can no one get you? Is it London?’

She looks at his lightly freckled face. Like Daniel’s but not identical, she always thinks he’s smarter than Dan. She’s holding Daniel’s hand which is red with chilblains and she says, ‘There’s nowhere Pete that I can think of that’s safe except maybe being a grown-up, reckon that might be where you get safe, but that’s not really a place is it, little mate?’

Homewards the journey is much the same. Frank waits outside Mr Hessian’s shop. This is where, if there’s any money, they call in to buy a Redskin or some other durable lolly. When they see each other in the street or at Hessian’s they act casual, as if they are strangers, and they never share lollies though they might swap, sometimes even generously, if the mood takes them, and if it doesn’t, it’s no skin off anyone’s nose. Walking home, they stretch out, watch the cobalt sky with clouds like trailing smoke, chew their Redskins and take as long getting there as they can. No one ever wants to be first home.

Frank walks on ahead, carelessly leaps low fences and craps on scraps of lawn. When he does, the kids don’t know him. Up the sideway into the fernery is the worst part and their scalps tighten as the alertness locks in. When they get there, they suss the joint out. Is he home? Second one home always whispers the same question, what’s the mood? The answer varies.

He might be there and then, how will he be that day? Quietly, they take their bags and hope to pass through into the passageway that leads to the bedroom. Even after all these years, smoke from the fire still clothes the passage walls. Leftover smoke that can never bear to leave this home of theirs.

They pray the mood is good because when Emmett needs to be alone not much will save them. Wander past and they risk a swipe that will leave them bruised.

The Browns are hidden children. Mostly good at school though Rob teeters on the edge of delinquency. How far can you go? he wonders. The differences between home and school taunt him. It’s amazing how daring a boy can be at school compared to home. How far can he go? Pretty damned far, it seems.

He touches his teacher Miss Summer’s bum as she bends over in front of him one day and is strapped for it, both at school and by Emmett, which is far worse. But while they regularly refer to him as insolent in the staffroom, not many of the staff think about pushing things further. The boy often has a subdued quality that seems against his nature. There’s something strange there, something broken.

Louisa, Daniel and Peter are quiet, attentive and grateful to be at school; like children of a cult, they are sworn to secrecy. They are no trouble, eyes guarding privacy and always keeping the distance between other people and themselves.

They walk the world with secrets nailed to their hearts. Images of their mother being slammed into a wall and of seeing her head held above a boiling pot of food are seared into them. Crying is a matter of course in their house. Things they do not want others to know determine the way they are.

And they hide the truth of Emmett carefully. Sometimes other kids at school notice, perhaps they see the bruise on Rob’s neck where he’d picked him up ... there are always clues and other kids understand without words.

Ronnie Whitehead, a pale boy with honey eyes, sits beside Louisa during lunch for a week after her face and eye are bruised. Ronnie’s kindness feels like a life raft, or pieces of bread left out in a fairy story. He gives her a way to not feel alone. He shares his geography book when she leaves hers at home, doesn’t say anything, just pushes it between them.

The ones whose fathers terrorise them are a club. And though they hug the secret of themselves tight, they don’t need to feel ashamed because all this cruelty, well it’s just tradition. Just fathers handing on the past.