Free Gotham by Nick Earls

this?’
    â€˜She’s…’
    He steps around to see her before I can prepare him at all. She’s thinner than the wallpaper shot on my phone. He’s got his happy meeting-a-kid face stuck on and he’s fighting to hold it, to pretend for all our sakes that he’s not shocked.
    â€˜Hey, honey,’ he says eventually, softly, cautiously, as he crouches down. ‘So good to meet you. I’m a friend of your daddy’s.’
    He edges his hand forward to shake or high-five hers, but then settles for resting his forearm on his knee. Ariel sticks a hand out, in high-five pose. She is used to New Yorkers crouching, forcing a smile and a bright tone of voice, then talking through whatever grim thing they are planning to do to her to make her well.
    Smokey looks up at me. ‘Is it cool?’ he says, pointing to her hand and his.
    â€˜It is now. Unless you’ve got some disease I should know about.’
    â€˜High-five,’ he says, and his big hand meets her much smaller one with a satisfying slap. The sun sparks on his grin. ‘No diseases other than sleep deprivation and a distinct lack of popularity with my lady, but we’ll get past that. Now, honey, what we gonna do? What is therein the Billy Johnson Playground that takes your fancy?’ He’s talking animatedly, keeping the grin on, keeping his spiel moving at a clip so that we can all pretend all’s well with our caped crusader. ‘I believe you have already noticed our excellent stone slide, soon to be written about in newspapers across Australia by a man well-known to you.’
    I can’t stop myself picturing her bones, all her unprotected points, bumping on granite all the way down. She’s had weeks when only sheepskin was close to comfortable, though we’re past that now.
    â€˜I don’t know that she’s…’
    Ariel cuts in and says, ‘Dad…I want to.’
    â€˜Sure, honey, sure,’ Smokey says. ‘It’s your dad’s call but if he okays it, we can make it work. Because I have a plan.’ He moves directly in front of her and crouches again. ‘Some people call me Smokey, honey, but you can call me Eugene. Myboy’s over there.’ He indicates the master slider, shooting down again, like a torpedo in a tube. ‘He’s Eugene, too, so we made that nice and easy. But we call him Junior, mostly. He’ll answer to either.’ Ariel is staring at his grills as the light dances from the gold. ‘You readin’ my teeth?’ He draws his lips back to give her a good look.
    She laughs. ‘I can do letters.’
    â€˜Maybe I best keep my mouth shut then.’
    He folds his lips over his teeth in a comical, bulky way. He covers his mouth with his hand and pretends to go on with the conversation about the slide, making all kinds of nonsensical sounds, as though he’s giving a meticulous muffled outline of what he’s got in mind. His free hand is measuring, pointing, making all kinds of shapes, fingers running up steps, sliders on cardboard swooping around the curve, braking screechily or stacking, Wile E. Coyote-style. Ariellaughs so much the stroller shakes and takes a hop backwards.
    â€˜Yes!’ she shouts, and her hands give an involuntary clap. ‘I want to.’
    Smokey cranks his lips apart with his thumb and finger, making can-opener sounds, and says, ‘We got a plan. She’ll go down with Junior. Tandem. He’ll take all the knocks.’ He reaches into his other pants’ pocket. There’s a jangle of keys. ‘I’ll get him ready for it, too. D’vonne don’t let me out the door without my pockets full of this shit.’
    He pulls out a bottle of green sanitiser, squirts it on his own hands and then calls Junior over and goes to lube his legs.
    â€˜What?’ Junior takes half a step back and almost stumbles over his father’s hand.
    â€˜Be cool, buddy.’ Smokey