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  Ben tried not to think about these possibilities or about the world’s problems. Maybe then they’d go away. Well, it seemed to work for Dad.

  Monday morning. The local tennis courts were alive with women in white. Several thousand dollars worth of imported racquets flashed in the sun. Dozens of small, round objects moved in a blur.

  Not balls. Tongues.

  Di and her friend Jean had it down to an art. They swiped the ball back at their doubles opponents without a falter in the flow of the conversation.

  Jean could actually time her forehand to stress a key word in a statement.

  ‘You mean (whack) starkers?’

  Di was worried.

  ‘There she was on the front cover in all her glory and Ben didn’t seem the slightest bit interested.’

  She threw up a backhand lob and looked across at Jean.

  ‘He should be at twelve, shouldn’t he?’

  Jean didn’t take her eyes off the approaching ball.

  ‘Jason is,’ she said. ‘Obsessed. Caught him peeking at me in the shower the other day. I was (whack) furious.’

  She sent her forehand return hurtling past the two women chatting at the other end of the court.

  ‘Well, I had this crummy old shower cap on, no makeup …’

  Jean always played tennis with one hand holding her hair in place. She had evolved her own unique serving style. Racquet between the knees, toss the ball in the air with the racquet hand, grab the racquet and whack, over the net.

  ‘The only thing Ben’s obsessed with at the moment is the starving millions,’ said Di gloomily.

  ‘Never mind. Could be worse,’ called Jean, getting into position for an approaching backspin lob.

  ‘Jason had a craze on earthworms. Dozens of the things wriggling round the backyard. Barry was (whack) furious. They can weaken the root structure of the lawn and bring down the value of the whole house. We had to have the entire garden sprayed.’

  Ben pushed through the yelling throngs of school-uniformed Space Killers, video movie blackmarketeers and Aussie test teams.

  In front of him Rev. Harvey’s suede jacket receded across the playground. (With Rev. Harvey in it, of course. Miracles were thin on the ground in state schools, much to Rev. Harvey’s disappointment. A scripture teacher’s suede jacket strolling unoccupied across the playground would at least take the little horrors’ minds off the rude bits in the Bible.)

  Ben put on a spurt and came up alongside Rev. Harvey.

  ‘Sir … did you think of an answer to my question, sir?’

  Rev. Harvey, a young man with straight hair, glanced around. No escape. No Hand of God to pluck him up and drop him into his car.

  Without breaking his stride he put an arm round Ben’s shoulder. Ben had to slip into a trot to keep up.

  ‘I like to think of it this way, Ben,’ said Rev. Harvey. ‘If there were no starving people, how would we know to give thanks for our own full bellies? If there was no torture, how could we truly appreciate the heavenly gift of a quiet evening in front of the television?’

  Ben wished they were in any part of the world where the chances of Rev. Harvey stepping on a mine would be greater than they were now.

  ‘If there was no arsenal of nuclear weapons,’ continued Rev. Harvey, ‘poised to wipe out all life on Earth, how could we be truly grateful for God’s promise of eternal life in heaven? Eternal Life, Ben, Time Without End (beep beep beep) …’

  Rev. Harvey took his arm from around Ben and switched his digital watch alarm off.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me Ben, I’m running late.’

  He strode off into the carpark.

  Ben realised the bell had gone.

  The Space Killers, video movie blackmarketeers and Aussie test teams were all back behind their desks waiting to hear about River Capture on Sandstone Belts.

  Ben watched Rev. Harvey’s car pull out of the carpark. So much for religion, he thought. Three years in a row I’ve made a dill of myself in his nativity play, plus I’m allergic to straw, and when you need them they piss off to get a McDonald’s.

  Ben decided this Christmas he was going to offer his services to Mr Bright’s production of ‘The Rocky Horror Show’.

  He walked slowly back across the playground, alone.

  That night at dinner Ben ate his beef curry and felt something burning inside him that had nothing at all to do with the effect of curry powder.

  Ben looked at his father.

  Across the table Ron chewed slowly, his mind elsewhere.

  Ben looked at his mother.

  Di was glaring at Claire, trying to get her attention without Ron seeing. Claire was staring defiantly at the wall, her heaped plate of curry untouched in front of her.

  Finally Claire glanced at her mother and Di signalled angrily with her eyes for her to eat. With an exaggerated gesture Claire picked up a single grain of rice, put it in her mouth and chewed vigorously.

  Di glared at her.

  Ron looked up and wearily watched the silent battle of wills in progress.

  Suddenly he reached over and picked up the National Geographic from the sideboard. He held it open in front of Claire.

  ‘Do you want to end up looking like this?’ he said.

  Claire looked at the photo of the stick-thin Ethiopian and tried to stop herself giggling but couldn’t.

  To their surprise, Ron and Di found themselves giggling too. They saw Ben looking at them stony-faced, but even with that they couldn’t stop.

  Ron nudged Ben across the table.

  ‘It’s only a joke,’ he said.

  Ben didn’t smile.

  So that was why they wouldn’t talk about it. Only a joke. People starving to death and the world about to be burnt to a crisp and it’s only a joke.

  How could they?

  Ben swallowed a mouthful of curry and it felt like ice as it slid through his pounding chest.

  He knew now exactly what the Feeling was, and what he was going to have to do about it.

  5

  No Chicken

  Ron smiled contentedly.

  The sky was blue, the sun was warm, his pool was sparkling clean and all around him people were doing something that gladdened his heart.

  Eating meat.

  He threw a couple more steaks onto the sandstone-block gas barbeque and brandished his flashing steel in the hazy blue smoke like a Samurai warrior. One that didn’t mind being seen in public in a paper chef’s hat and a plastic Boss Of The Barbie apron.

  Di moved among the guests with garlic bread. Everyone took some and juggled it along with their drinks and steaks against their New Season Leisurewear Pastels.

  The only person to have viewed this idyllic backyard gathering with more contentment than Ron would have been a manufacturer of Instant Pre-Wash Stain-Remover.

  The guests, women trim and tanned; men pale, overweight and tired; chatted, laughed and tore into steaks and people not present with equal gusto.

  Di wandered over to Ron and slipped her arm under his apron and round to where she could give his paunch a loving squeeze.

  ‘Taking your mind off things?’ she said.

  ‘Haven’t used the word wholesale all afternoon,’ lied Ron grinning.

  She gave him a big, wet kiss.

  Jean, dressed more for a wedding than for a backyard barbie, came over with her husband Barry.

  ‘Only thing about this wholesale meat caper,’ said Barry loudly, ‘the abattoir out the back here’s going to ruin our property values.’

  Everyone within earshot laughed. Ron pretended to prod Barry with the barbeque fork.

  ‘I suggest we all sell up now and move to a better area,’ continued Barry, ‘like Calcutta.’

  Everyone fell about. Barry was known as a bit of a wag up both sides of the street as far as his place.

  Jean took Di to one side.

  ‘How’s Ben?’ she asked. ‘Through his phase yet?’

  Di wrinkled her forehead.

 
; ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘He seems a lot better lately.’

  In the bathroom Ben stood in his underpants listening to the laughter and chatter filtering up from the garden below.

  He heard Barry yelling, ‘Phase … what phase?’

  In front of him in their rack were Ron and Di’s His’n’Hers Electric Shavers.

  He pulled one of the plugs out of the double socket and looked at the three shiny brass pins.

  He ran his fingertip over the three tiny slits in the plastic facing of the socket.

  Now the time had come he was scared.

  Down in the garden Barry had just been reminded about Ben’s ‘phase’.

  ‘Starving millions?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Where do they get them from?’

  He tucked his drink under his arm, balanced his paper plate on one hand and put his other arm round Di.

  ‘Di, take it from an old hand, phases pass. Or as in the case of our earthworms, pass on. Mind you, you might have to get Rentokil to spray Africa, India and China …’

  In the bathroom Ben listened to Barry’s monologue, distant but crystal clear.

  He heard a faint ripple of laughter and knew then he was going to do it.

  But if he could hear them, then they might be able to hear him. He didn’t want them to hear him. Not till it was finished. He had to use a silent method.

  He pulled open the drawer below the sink and rummaged through old mascara bottles and half-empty packets of Aspro.

  Ah, there it was, Dad’s old razor and yes, a packet of razor blades.

  Barry’s audience had gradually drifted away as usually happens at barbeques when someone drones on about the same subject for nearly fifteen minutes.

  But Barry didn’t seem to have noticed and kept on churning out the words between mouthfuls of steak to whoever was listening.

  Which was Jean because she was loyal to her husband even though sometimes she wished someone would cement his mouth over, and Di because she was loyal to Jean.

  ‘… the thing you’ve got to ask yourself about the Starving Millions is, has charity made them soft?’

  Barry stuffed a chunk of steak into his mouth and chewed it into submission.

  ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘if I knew there were vast organisations running doorknocks and telethons all over the world with the sole aim of putting a bowl of curried prawns in my hands I’d think twice about going to work too. I don’t say I’d necessarily lie around in the backyard and let flies crawl up my nose …’

  He didn’t notice that Jean was looking past him and gasping with horror.

  Di followed her gaze and looked for a moment as though she would faint.

  Oblivious, Barry put another piece of steak into his mouth. Then he noticed the sudden silence and saw that everyone else was staring aghast at something behind him.

  Slowly he turned.

  What he saw drained the blood from his face and froze every muscle in his body.

  Standing close to him was Ben, naked except for his glasses and a white loincloth, his skin stained brown from his bare feet to his gleaming, shaven scalp.

  The boy looked steadily at the ashen-faced man.

  Barry tried to swallow his half-chewed lump of steak.

  ‘In the time it takes for that mouthful of steak to reach your stomach,’ said Ben softly, ‘ninety people will die of hunger.’

  Barry stopped swallowing and started to choke.

  The guests gaped.

  The lettuce slid unheeded off Claire and Amanda’s plates.

  The only person to move was Jason, a cheery-faced boy of Ben’s age. He hurried towards Ben to get a closer look.

  ‘Fancy dress. Ripper.’

  Jean, his mother, grabbed him and pulled him back as if from the brink of a cliff.

  Ron and Di stared at their son, dumbstruck.

  They stared at his brown skin. They stared at the white cotton tablecloth knotted round his waist and between his legs.

  They stared at the shiny, bald dome of his head.

  They realised they had a problem.

  6

  Lashings of Tongue

  ‘Why?’

  Ben sat on the edge of the settee in the lounge-room. A towel had been placed between his dark brown skin and the light brown leather. His loincloth was beginning to cut off the circulation in his upper legs.

  ‘Just tell me why?’

  Ron spoke with the exaggerated softness and slowness of a man about to go through the roof.

  He and Di stood looking down at their small brown son. Outside the evening breeze blew paper cups across the empty yard.

  Ben looked up at their grim faces.

  He wished he could say a magic word and in a flash of laser light get really big muscles and a bullet-proof cape and fly with a parent under each arm to the African villages he’d seen on TV, and the South American government torture chambers he’d read about, and the big concrete basements in Russia and America where men older than the ones who’d dribbled at Grandpa’s funeral brunch sat ready to fire bombs that would make whole countries as shrivelled and mottled as the skin on their shaking hands.

  ‘Because,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t understand why nobody gives a stuff about what’s happening.’

  ‘Don’t you use that language …’ said Ron, his voice rising dangerously, his face going red.

  Di grabbed his arm and spoke with exaggerated calmness.

  ‘We’re going to be civilised about this,’ she said to Ben. ‘Despite the fact that you broke up our barbeque, upset our friends, used nearly a whole tube of my instant tan lotion, none of us are going to lose our temper.’

  Ron lost his temper.

  He advanced on the cowering Mr Alsop, his face the colour of rump steak.

  ‘Your job is to teach geography,’ he screamed, ‘not inflame impressionable young minds with propaganda!’

  Mr Alsop, a pale young man who at that moment wished he’d taken the geology elective at college so he could now be drilling for uranium in the middle of the Simpson Desert, retreated.

  He backed across the classroom, banging into desks and knocking chairs over until he came up against the blackboard with a jolt.

  ‘Mr Guthrie, please,’ he pleaded, ‘I’ve done nothing of the sort. All we’ve done this year are Tropical Zones and Tundra. Haven’t we, Ben?’ He looked pleadingly at Ben, who stood pink-skinned and smooth-domed by the door in his school uniform.

  ‘Don’t forget, sir,’ said Ben sweetly, ‘our excursion to study the weather systems over the Sydney Cricket Ground during the Second Test.’

  Mr Alsop smiled nervously at Ron.

  ‘Famine and Starvation isn’t until Year Eleven,’ he said, and hastily added, ‘even then it’s an elective unit, interchangeable with Temperate Ski Zones II.’

  He flung a piece of chalk at the window, where a dozen faces ducked down out of sight.

  Word had already swept the playground that Guthrie’s dad was laying into Alswap for letting Guthrie catch leukaemia on the cricket excursion.

  The air in the Guthrie bathroom was thick with pre-work and school urgency and the smell of burnt toast.

  Claire sat on the toilet brushing her teeth with an electric toothbrush, the toothpaste in her ensuite having run out.

  Ron stood in front of the mirror with a towel round his waist, running his electric shaver over his tired face.

  Next to him Di had one foot up on the sink, shaving her leg with a safety razor.

  Ben wandered in in his pyjamas, rubbing his eyes. He took Di’s electric razor from its rack, flicked it on and guided it across his bald scalp.

  Ron and Di looked at each other.

  Di said it first.

  ‘I think we need some help.’

  The psychiatrist sat in her chair and looked at Ben sitting in his.

  She was a large, middle-aged woman who smelt like she’d fallen into a tanker of Chanel No 5 a couple of years earlier.

  She looked thoughtful.

&nbs
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  Behind her a workman was drilling holes into the office wall with a power drill.

  A large oil painting of a green and purple cat with six heads, lying on what appeared to be a rice salad, leant against the wall waiting to be hung.

  ‘Ben,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘If you had to sum up all your feelings about the world’s problems in one sentence, what would it be?’

  Ben thought for a moment. The workman drilled on. Ben wondered if the psychiatrist was deaf. He was going to be history if he had to do this in sign language.

  ‘How can we just carry on as if nothing’s wrong?’ he said.

  The psychiatrist thought about this for several minutes filled with the noise of drilling. White dust settled on her hair.

  Ben tried desperately to think of the sign for ‘How’.

  At last she spoke.

  ‘What exactly do you mean by wrong … ?’ She spat out a small piece of wall plaster. ‘Do you mean wrong in the Jungian sense of an absence of rightness or do you subscribe to the Reichian theory of the inversion of moral criteria?’

  She wrinkled her brow and muttered to herself.

  ‘Or have I got that wrong?’

  Di sat anxiously in the waiting room flicking through a magazine and trying not to look at the young man in the corner taking pencils one by one out of a box and smelling them.

  Next to her Ron hammered away on his calculator, papers from his open briefcase spread over the coffee table.

  The door opened and the psychiatrist came out of her office with her arm round Ben.

  Ron and Di stood up.

  ‘Well, Mum and Dad,’ said the psychiatrist heartily, ‘we’ve given the fat a good old chew and I don’t think you need worry any more. I think we’ve managed to screw a few lightbulbs into a few sockets.’

  Di glanced at Ron with relief.

  The psychiatrist looked down at Ben.

  ‘What do you say Ben, ready to rejoin the land of the living?’

  Ben shrugged apologetically to his parents.

  The young man in the corner never knew if the bald kid was apologising for his misbehaviour or for the psychiatrist’s performance.