Free Settlers' Creek by Carl Nixon Page B

as easily as if they’d known each other since they were kids. She started telling him about herself, about her son, Mark, about the people she picked berries with. Eventually they’d got around to giving each other their names.
    ‘Box?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘What’s your real name?’
    ‘It’s been so long that I’ve forgotten.’ She grinned.
    When the sun went down over Tasman Bay the inside lights were switched on. The light spilled out over the lawn and reflected off the shiny leaves of the citrus trees. Box and Liz sat together, bums up on the wide wooden rail of the deck, and she told him about Mark’s father. But that relationship had been over for almost a year. According to Liz it had barely survived the unexpected pregnancy and then staggered through the first few months of reflux and sleepless nights before Stephen Sullivan had announced that he was off.
    It was almost midnight when Box carried the sleeping boy back to the house next door. He watched from the doorway of the bedroom as she put him into his bed. Then they talked some more.
    At times Box had wondered if he’d had any choice in the two of them getting married, only nine months after Thumb’s barbecue. Right from that first night it had felt like a done deal. And as for saying the two of them, that wasn’t true either. It had been the three of them really. Liz and Mark were a package. And that had always been fine by him.

Five
    Box lay stiff as a board next to Liz and listened to the bass thump coming from the house next door. It was just after midnight. The party had kicked into top gear about an hour ago. He could feel the music thrusting through the walls of the bedroom, vibrating the musty air, jolting the wooden bed frame, rattling his chest like a cage.
    Box tried to relax, to sink down into sleep. But his thoughts pinballed backwards and forwards between Mark — my son is dead! Mark is dead! — and the tangled arrangements for the funeral, a rope in the garden shed, and a tree up on the hills overlooking the city. Hanged himself. Dead.
    Why the hell were they having a party on a Sunday night? Inconsiderate pricks. There must be people all up and down the street who had jobs to go to the next morning. There were kids who needed to sleep so that they could get up on time and go to school.
    In the ten years that they’d lived in the Taylor’s Hill house, before the credit crunch, before house prices tumbled likea home handyman’s birdhouse in a storm, before all the bad luck that had seemed to fall on him like a biblical curse — he tried to push those endlessly looping thoughts from his mind — anyway, before all of that, there had never been a time when he could remember the neighbours having a loud party.
    Actually, now that he thought about it, that wasn’t true. Once, when Jo and Richard Stanton’s daughter had turned nine, things had been a little bit boisterous there for a while. Box remembered looking out from his upstairs bedroom and seeing a colourful flock of shrieking girls on the green square of lawn next door. They were playing some type of variation on stiff candles with their bright party dresses swirling as they ran. But that had all been over with by dinnertime.
    Box opened his eyes and stared up at the water-stained ceiling. A series of images came to him from another birthday party. Mark must have been turning six, maybe seven. He’d become too excited by all the attention — that was normal, the way kids got. Maybe it was the excitement of all the presents, the colouring in the jellybeans — who knew — but the boy was acting up. Mark had started yelling and crying when some game or other didn’t go his way. Box had ended up frogmarching him down to his room. He’d locked him in there with instructions to settle down. Mark had almost been beside himself with rage and indignation and had started shouting and throwing his stuff around. Box had fired up and — he should have just walked away —