Free Charades by Janette Turner Hospital

cheeks of Michael Donovan’s father. Maybe Davey or little Elizabeth would start to cry too. And my mum would take another beer out of the fridge and pour it for Mr Donovan and pat him on the arm. “You’re a soft-hearted bloke, Mick Donovan,” she’d say, and she’d smile to herself and he’d smile back and next thing she’d be ordering us off to bed.
    But there was another side of Michael Donovan’s dad.
    Across a thicket of too many beers one evening, he heard a coo-ee from out by our mango tree. “Christ!” he said, thumping the table.
    My mum, reading well-known signs, said to me: “Charade, go out and see what young Michael wants.” My mum was a stepper-in-between. My mum did not like to see child or man — or animal either, for that matter — get hurt.
    Well. It was an odd thing, going out there to meet my scourge of the schoolyard under our mango tree. Boys at school have a hard shell around them. They are full of spikes and sharp points. You can’t come near them. But under the mango tree at night, Michael Donovan looked small and different, almost naked. Like one of my little brothers in his hand-me-down pyjamas, say, when I had to hold his hand and walk him down the dark path to the dunny last thing at night.
    Michael Donovan and I stared at each other nervously, like strangers. Like dingoes waiting for the fight to start. Around us, the air was shrill with crickets. I never thought of Michael Donovan before as someone who might stand out under the stars and pleat eucalypt leaves between his fingers; as a mirror image, in a sense, of myself. Minutes passed. Stars dipped and swayed in the sky, the Southern Cross wheeled above us. And from the kitchen a voice called: “Charade!”
    Michael Donovan and I both jumped, and I blurted: “My mum says what do you want?”
    â€œGotta see my dad,” he said.
    â€œWhat for?”
    He rubbed one leg against the other and looked away as though the words he needed might be nailed to the broken-down fence. “ ’Coz of Brian,” he said. Brian was an older brother who worked in Brisbane, where he was, more often than not, in trouble with the police, people said. “Come home this evening and went off in Dad’s truck,” Michael said. “Smashed it up.” He turned to face me and his eyes were big and pale as Cape gooseberries. “I can’t get him out from under, he’s all
bloodied up.”
    Fear leapt between us, and awe, and some kind of sordid thrill. And suddenly we were both belting across the space to the kitchen steps.
    â€œMum! Mum! Come quick! It’s Brian Donovan killed.”
    Disaster cuts through beer-fog as a single note, maddening and high, the kind of sound that breaks glass. It careened inside Mr Donovan’s skull, I suppose, and he reached for the fastest relief. He struck and struck and struck. Michael Donovan took the blows on the face and chest and shoulders, yelling “Dad, Dad, I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t help it.” A shambling progress was made, a violent blubbering whirlwind of arms and legs, down the steps and into the night where Brian bled.
    I stood under the mango tree and listened till the thumping and yelling faded. I knew it would be years and years before Michael Donovan and I would look each other in the eyes again — if ever. Something else I knew too: it was not the blows Michael minded, but the fact that I saw. I thought he might never forgive me for that.
    I went down to the old track, past the banyan trees and silky oaks, swinging down the dangling roots, all the way down to the curtain fig and the bone man. The bone man was getting smaller and smaller, and some of his parts were missing, his white geometry in disarray. Pilfering possums, dogs perhaps, other children? He seemed to be disappearing line by bleached line — though he hid quietly under dead leaves and