CHAPTER TWENTY

Saturday 28 December 1974

Charlie

I sit on a park bench in the treeless playground near Indooroopilly Shoppingtown while Abby pushes the twins on swings, first one then the other. She’s like a hydraulic machine. One arm in, one arm out. Yelling at them to hold on to the thick chains. Grim.

There’s a long gulley in the ground where kids have dragged their feet to slow down. Petey draws a line through it with the front of his thongs, lifting the dust. I can call up the feeling of my own shoes stuttering against the ground, the vibrations going up through my ankles. But the dust – the dust brings other things to mind that I don’t want to think about.

To my left, two boys are kicking a football across the dry grass. They’re both wearing short shorts and jerseys. One of them, with flame-red hair, leaves his arms hanging in the air after he kicks, and watches the curve of the ball against the sky until it thuds into his friend’s arms.

I’m the sole man in the play area. Four or five bored women watch their children, sometimes chatting to one another. A kelpie zips around the climbing frame, which is shaped like the skeleton of a rocket, and has a steep slide coming down from the top. The dog barks anxiously, ears pricked forward, shifting his weight from one front paw to another like a tennis player not sure which way he might need to run after the serve. His small human must be inside the rocket.

A girl in green shorts comes zooming down the slide, her legs held up so her skin doesn’t burn on the metal.

A toddler with a mask of freckles lets go of the large spinning disc that serves as a self-propelled merry-go-round. He falls down, face-first.

I watch and smoke and think. We’re a hundred feet away from the beast of a shopping centre Abby dragged us through before directing us to the park. Thick white plastic letters shout the name Westfield above the glass doors near us.

‘This is child abuse, Abby,’ I’d said as we walked through the fluoro-lit, noisy passageways past pinball machines, record shops, shoe shops and a giant ball of a fountain with coins littering the tiled bottom. What were people wishing for here? To find a way out of the labyrinthine building without buying some hideous dress or sickly guinea pig?

Abby’s desensitised to the horror of the place. Mind you, it was a whole lot cooler in the air-conditioning than out here.

‘Can we go now?’ I call out, but she shakes her head, still pushing the swings as though it was a full-time job.

Abby had some kind of mental flip-out before we left the house. I thought I’d calmed her down, but evidently not.

‘I don’t see how I can be a lawyer now.’ She’d looked from the sink to me. ‘I shouldn’t even bother going to uni. I’m compromised.’