Underdogs: Three Novels Read online

  “Dead souls from the city.” Rube smiles with a kind of sarcastic joy. “What’ll we do if we get one on the end of our line?”

  “Jump ship, mate.”

  “Too bloody right.”

  The water moves again, and slowly, waves start rolling in from somewhere we can’t see. They rise up and jump into the boat, and they get higher.

  There’s a smell.

  “A smell?”

  “Yeah, can’t you smell it?” I ask Rube. I say it like an accusation.

  “I can, yeah, now that you mention it.”

  The water is excessively high now, lifting the boat and us and throwing us back down. A wave hits my face and I get a mouthful. The taste, it’s grotesque, burning, and I can tell by the look on Rube’s face that he’s swallowed some too.

  “It’s petrol,” he tells me.

  “Oh God.”

  The waves die a little now, and I turn to a boat that sits closer to the city, right near the shore. There’s a guy in it, and a girl. The guy steps out onto the shore with something in his hand.

  It — glows.

  “No!” I stand and throw my arms out. He does it. Cigarette.

  He does it as I see another person doing laps across the bay, intense. Who is it? I wonder, and in another boat still, a man and a woman are also rowing, middle-aged.

  The guy throws his cigarette into the lake.

  Red and yellow rolls into my eyes.

  Oblivion.

  CHAPTER 7

  On the Thursday of that week, Rube also conned me into making a new exodus — a journey a

  way from our normal robbery expeditions.

  signs.

  That was the new plan.

  It was still afternoon when he thought about it and told me which sign he wanted to get.

  “The give-way,” he said. “Down Marshall Street.” He smiled. “We sneak out, right, say elevenish, with one of Dad’s spanners — the one you can adjust by rubbing that thing on the top …”

  “The wrench?”

  “Yeah, that’s it…. We put our hoods on, walk down there casual as M. E. Waugh in bat, I climb up on your shoulders, and we take the sign.”

  “What for?”

  “What, exactly, do you mean, what for?” “I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Point?” He was, what’s the word? Exasperated. Frustrated. “We don’t need a point, son. We’re juvenile, we’re dirty, we don’t have girls, we have noses full of snot, throats sore as hell, we’ve got scabs on us, we suffer bouts of acne, we’ve got no girls — did I already say that? — little money, we eat mushrooms mashed next to meat almost every night for dinner and drown ‘em in tomato sauce so we can’t taste ‘em. What more reasons do we need?” My brother threw his head back on his bed and stared desperately at the ceiling. “We don’t ask for much, dear God! You know that!”

  So that was it.

  The next mission.

  I swear it, that night, we were like savages, just as Rube had described in his outburst. It shocked me at first that he knew us like that. Like I did. Only, Rube was proud of it.

  Maybe we didn’t know who we were, but we knew what we were, and to Rube it made acts of vandalism such as stealing street signs seem like a logical thing to do. He sure didn’t feel like considering that we could end up in a police cell without the proper safety-standard bars.

  Of course, we knew we couldn’t succeed.

  The only problem was, we did.

  We snuck out the back door of home at about quarter to twelve with our hoods hunching over our heads and footsteps raking us forward. We walked calmly, even toughly, down our street with smoky breath, hands in pockets, and whispers of greatness stuffed down our socks. Our sniffs and breathing scratched us through the air, pulling it apart, and I felt like that Julius Caesar guy going to conquer another empire — and all we were doing was stealing a lousy gray-and-pink triangle that should have been white and red.

  Give way.

  “More like give away,” Rube snickered as we arrived at the scene of the sign. He got up, slipped, then got up again on my shoulders.

  “Right.” He spoke again once he found balance.

  “Spanner.”

  “Huh?”

  “Spanner, you stupid sap.” His whisper was harsh and heavily smoked in the cold. “Oh, right, yeah, I forgot.”

  I handed him the spanner or wrench or whatever you want to call it and my brother proceeded to unscrew the give-way sign on the junction of Marshall and Carlisle streets.

  “Geez, she’s a bit bloody stubborn,” Rube pointed out. “The bolt’s so rusty that all the garbage is gettin’ stuck on the nut. Just keep holdin’ me up, okay?”

  “I’m gettin’ tired,” I mentioned.

  “Well, get through it. The pain barrier. The pain barrier, son. All the greats could always break through the pain barrier.”

  “The great whats? Sign stealers?”

  “No.” It was sharp. “Athletes, you yobbo.”

  Then came the triumph.

  “Right,” Rube announced, “I’ve got it.” He jumped off my shoulders with the sign just as a light came on in one of the dilapidated flats on the corner.

  A woman stepped out onto her balcony and sighed, “Ah, grow up, will y’s.”

  “C’mon.” Rube tugged at my sweatshirt. “Go go go!”

  We took off, laughing as Rube held the sign up above his head, cheering, “Oh, yes!”

  Even when we snuck back into our house, the adrenaline was still crouching in my blood, then springing forward, taking off. It disappeared slowly when we were back in our bedroom. With the light off in our room almost instantly, Rube slid the sign under his bed and said, just for fun, “Tell Mum or Dad about this and I’ll see if I can fit this sign down your throat.” I laughed a little and soon fell asleep, still hearing the gentle sounds of women sighing at undesirables in the middle of the night. I wondered about Rebecca Conlon before sleep came as well, and I remembered moments when we walked down the street and when we were abducting the sign in which I pretended she was watching me. I wasn’t sure if she would like me or think I was a complete idiot. Complete idiot, most likely.

  “Ah, well,” I whispered to myself under my blanket. “Ah, well,” and I started praying for her and everyone else I had prayed for lately. In the night, not long after sleep captured me, my dream came — a bad one. A nightmare. A proper one.

  You will see it soon enough….

  Next day, in the morning, Rube took the sign out to admire it again in the comfort of our room. I was coming back in from the shower.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?

  “Yeah.” I didn’t sound too keen, though.

  “What’s with you?”

  “Nothin’.” It was the nightmare.

  “Okay.” He put the sign away again and poked his head into the hall. “Aah.” He looked back at me. “Y’ left the bathroom door open again — do you do that on purpose just to let the cold in before I go in the shower?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Well lift your game.”

  He left, but I followed him, with my hair wet and sticking up in all directions.

  “Where the hell do y’ think you’re going?”

  “I’ve gotta tell you something.”

  “Right.” He shut me out of the bathroom. I heard the shower go on, the door unlock, the curtain shut, and then a shout came. “Come in!”

  I went in and sat on the shut-up toilet.

  “Well,” he called out to me, “what is it?”

  I began talking about the nightmare I’d had, and through the heat in the bathroom, an extra heat seemed to come from out of me, overpowering it. I took a minute or two to explain the dream properly.

  When I finished, all Rube said was, “So what?” The steam was getting intense.

  “So what should we do?”

  The shower stopped.

  Rube stuck his head around the curtain.

  “Pass me that towel.”

&n
bsp; I did it.

  He dried himself and stepped out, breaking through the steam with, “Well, it’s certainly a disturbing dream you speak of, son.”

  He had no idea how disturbing. It was me who dreamed it. It was me who had believed it when it was in me. It was me who.

  End.

  End this.

  No …

  It was me who had woken up in the darkness of our triumph with sweat eating my eyes out, and a silent scream pressed down on my lips.

  In the bathroom now, I suggested, “We’ve gotta take the sign back.”

  Rube had other ideas, at first.

  He came closer and said, “We can ring the RTA and tell ‘em the sign needs ing.”

  “It’ll take absolute weeks for them to replace it.”

  Rube paused, then said, “Yeah, good thinkin’.” Unhappiness. “The state of our roads down this way is a disgrace to the nation.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked again. I was genuinely concerned now, for the safety of the public at large, and I also remembered a story I’d seen on the news a year or so back where these guys in America got something like twenty years for stealing a stop sign because it caused a fatal accident. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It happened.

  “What do we do?” I asked again.

  Rube answered by not answering quickly.

  He walked out of the bathroom, got dressed, and then held his head in his hands as he sat on my bed.

  “What else can we do?” he asked, almost pleaded. “We take it back. I s’pose.”

  “Really?”

  Savages, all right. Savages, frightened.

  “Yeah.” He was miserable. “Yes. We take it back.” It was as if Rube himself had been robbed of something — but what? Why this need to take things? Was it just to feel how it felt to cut up the rules and feel good about being bad? Maybe it was that Rube felt like a failure and he was proving it to himself by trying to steal. Maybe he wanted to be like the hero in the American movies we see on TV. Frankly, I had no idea what was going on in his head and that was that.

  Before we went to school, he pulled the sign out and gave it one last sad, adoring stare.

  That night, Friday night, we took it back at around eleven and nobody caught us, thank God. It would have been pretty ironic — busted for stealing a sign when we were actually returning it.

  “Well,” he said when we got home, “we’re back, empty-handed. As usual.”

  “Mm.” I couldn’t get a word out just then.

  One thing I will always remember about that night now is that when we made it back home, Steve was sitting out on the front porch in the cold. His crutches were still next to him, because his ankle was still very screwed up. He sat there, on our old couch, with a mug perched up on the railing.

  When we slipped down the side of the house, sort of ignoring him, I heard his voice.

  I returned.

  I asked.

  “What did you just say?” I said it just very normally, like I was interested in what he’d said. He repeated.

  This: “I can’t believe we’re brothers.”

  He shook his head.

  He spoke again.

  “You guys are such losers.”

  To tell you the truth, it was the vacancy he’d said it with that chewed into me. He said it like we were so far below him that he could barely be bothered. Then, considering what we had just done, I could almost see his point of view. How could Steven Wolfe be of the same blood as Rube and me, and even Sarah for that matter?

  All the same, I only stopped slightly before walking off, hearing a high-pitched noise cut open my head, from inside. It whined, as if injured.

  Back in our room, I asked Rube where he would have put the sign on the wall in our room. Maybe I asked it to forget what Steve had said to me.

  “Here?”

  “Nah.”

  “Here?”

  “Nah.” “Here?”

  I didn’t get an answer for a long time, and that night the light was left on for a while as Rube thought thoughts about things I would never know. All he did was lie on his bed, softly rubbing his beard, as though it was all he had left.

  Once settled on top of my own bed, I thought intensely about the next day, working at the Conlons’. Rebecca Conlon. I’d thought the day would never come, but the next day, I was going back. Once I forgot about Rube and Steve, it was beautiful to be alive, conscience free and awaiting a girl who was worth praying for.

  After a long while, Rube made a statement.

  He said, “Cameron. I wouldn’t have put that sign anywhere on our wall.”

  I turned to look at him. “Why not?”

  “You know why not.” He continued staring toward the ceiling. Only his mouth moved. “Because the moment Mum saw it, she would have killed me.”

  There’s a car, prowling around the city. It’s orange and big, and it makes the heavy, brooding sound cars like that make. It roars around the streets, though it always stops at red lights, stop signs, and all that kind of thing. Cut to somewhere else —

  Rube and I are walking, out of our front gate, supposedly to watch Steve play football, even though it’s about two o’clock in the morning. It’s cold. You know, that kind of sickly cold. Cold that somehow breathes. It plows into our mouths, blunt and hurtful. A question.

  Rube: “You ever think about beatin’ up the old man?”

  “Our old man?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t know — don’t you reckon it’d be fun?” “No, I don’t.”

  At that, we return to silence, walking. Our feet drag over the path as a few stray cars stroll by. Taxis come past and swerve all over the road, a garbage truck struggles past us, overweight. The orange car rolls past, growling.

  “Tossers,” I say to Rube.

  “Definitely.”

  As he says it, the car takes off and we hear it draw away, then come back on a side street behind us. Cut to somewhere else —

  Rube and I are standing at the corner of Marshall and Carlisle streets. Rube crouches down as the closing statements of a car call closer. He crouches down, holding the give-way sign we stole between his legs. The pole there is empty when I look at it. It’s just an empty pole embedded in cement.

  Arrival.

  The orange car comes up Marshall Street, almost devouring its own speed, gathering it greedily. When it gets to us it’s flying. No sign.

  No sign.

  It speeds past us, and as my eyes smash shut, there is an almighty clenching sound of metal wrapping into metal, a shriek, and a delayed downpour of broken glass.

  Rube crouches.

  I stand, eyes still shut.

  Murmuring silence.

  It’s everywhere.

  My eyes open and we walk.

  Rube drops the sign, stands, and we walk in a slow, shuddering panic down to the cars that look to have bitten into each other in attack.

  Inside, the people look swallowed.

  They are dead and bleeding and mangled.

  They’re dead.

  “They’re dead!” I call across to Rube, but nothing comes out of my mouth. No sound. No voice.

  Then a dead body comes to life.

  The eyes in it punch out at me and when the person cries out, the sound in my ears is unbearable. It sends me to the ground, squashing my hands to the side of my head.

  CHAPTER 8

  When I went to the Conlons’ place the next morning with Dad, it’s true, my heart beat so hard, or big, as I originally put it, that it kin

  d of hurt. It pumped something into my throat, causing me to salivatquestions.

  What would I say?

  How would I act when I saw her?

  Nice?

  Calm?

  Indifferent?

  That shy and sensitive style that had never worked for me in the past? I had no idea.

  In the van on the way over, I thought I was going to choke or suffocate or something. Such was the feeling this girl had plant
ed inside me. It grew as we drove closer to her house. It even got to the point where I was hoping the next light would be red so I had more time to think things through. It’s funny. I had all week to go over this, to be prepared, and now Saturday had come and I was at a loss. Maybe I’d had too much time to think about it. Maybe I should have spent less time worrying about Sarah and Bruce, and Steve, and stealing and returning road signs with Rube. Maybe then my own game wouldn’t have suffered. Maybe then I would have been all right.

  If.

  Only.

  It was no use. All was lost.

  When we arrive there, I thought, I’d be better off just sticking my head into the ditch and digging a hole for myself. Girls didn’t go for someone like me. What self-respecting girl could even stomach me? Permanently messy hair. Grubby hands and feet. Uneven smile. Uneasy, limping walk. No, this was definitely no good. Not at all.

  Let’s face it, I even lectured myself inside, you don’t even deserve a girl. I was right. I didn’t. I showed clear signs of dubious morality, at best. I was easily led by my brother. I committed pathetic acts that were petty and done just for some kind of wild pride that was so ridiculous it was hard to comprehend. All I was was a panting desperate mess of a person, scrambling around for something to make me okay….

  Then. Suddenly.

  In an instant, I thought how strange it was that I never prayed for myself. Was I unable to be saved? Was I so dirty that I didn’t deserve a prayer? Perhaps. Maybe.

  Yet, I did get Rube to return the sign, I managed to rationalize. So maybe I’m not so bad after all. That was better — a bit of positive thought, as Dad’s panel van rumbled on in the direction of my fate.

  When we pulled up at the house, I even started to have some tiny moments of belief that maybe I wasn’t the ugly, sick degenerate I’d judged myself to be. I started telling myself that I was probably quite normal. I remembered what I thought that day back in the dental surgery — that all young boys are pretty disgusting, like beasts. Maybe the challenge was to somehow rise above it. Maybe that’s what I was looking for with Rebecca Conlon. Just one chance to prove that I could be nice and respectable instead of purely lustful and terrible. I just wanted one shot to treat her right and I knew I wouldn’t blow it.