Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [78]
‘What are we playing?’ I said.
Klara looked over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Nothing.’ She dropped the stick. She whispered again, ‘Let’s go and play over there,’ and she pointed even further away, out into the field where even her parents couldn’t see us.
‘Are we allowed to go that far?’ I asked. My parents would never let me wander that far. I glanced behind and saw Dieter coming towards us with his friend, red-faced and crying, staggering behind him.
‘Okay,’ I said to Klara and we started to walk quickly away.
‘Hey,’ Dieter shouted.
We bolted like startled deer, running till our breath was ragged and our chests sore. We ran past cages of monkeys and stands of poplar trees and enclosures of emus standing in the sun until finally Dieter gave up following us and we found ourselves in a small forest somewhere in the back of the Caribbean Gardens and we sat on the ground, cool earth covered in a dry carpet of leaves, and I felt as if I had travelled through some barrier to reach a place in another time or another dimension.
I had seen the trees as we ran towards them, a copse of trees next to a big shed made of corrugated iron. But now we were in the copse the trees seemed huge. I lay back on the fragrant eucalyptus leaves and looked up through the branches at the distant pale sky.
‘Have we lost him?’ Klara gasped, almost sobbing, trying to get breath into her skinny body. ‘Is he behind us?’
I sat up. ‘I can’t see him,’ I said.
She was doubled over, still sucking in air.
‘He doesn’t seem to be here,’ I said. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.
He was there one day at their house when I rounded the corner, looking for Klara. He and another friend of his. His friends were always small boys, while he was big, solid, fleshy. His small friend was holding a dartboard and Dieter had a dart in his hand. They were in shorts, both of them bare-chested. I wore a pink spotted dress and my best sandals because Klara and I were going to practise walking with books on our heads.
I never saw the dart leave Dieter’s hand, never saw it fly through the air. When the tip of the dart flew straight into the boy’s chest, above the left nipple, and hung there, I was as silent and astonished as they were. We all stared at the dart standing straight out from the boy’s chest as if it had hit a tree trunk or a pole. Four feathers, vanes quivering. A brass collar holding the dart tip to the shaft.
A drop of blood welled from the point where the dart had penetrated the boy’s chest and dribbled down towards the dartboard he was still holding flat against his belly. When Dieter let out a sharp bark, a laugh of sorts, his friend’s eyes widened as though he had only just realised that this dart was embedded in his own chest, and he shrieked. Long and high like a rabbit.
Dieter won’t like that, I thought, my stomach starting to spin. The shriek went on and on. Dieter’s mother came pelting out of the house. Klara’s narrow frightened face appeared at her bedroom window.
‘He moved,’ Dieter called to his mother as she flew past. ‘He shouldn’t have moved.’
When she reached the boy, Dieter’s mother took hold of the dartboard he was still pressing against himself like a target and flung it to the ground. The boy kept staring at the missile standing out from his breastbone. He pushed Klara’s mother backwards when she reached for the dart. His mouth was wide open but no more sound came out. She stepped forward, grasped the dart, pulled, then covered the place it had come from with her hand.
A few weeks later I came to Klara’s house and the boy was there with Dieter again. They were tying red crackers together and lighting the fuse before they threw the bundle into an empty oil drum in the vacant lot beside the house. The crackers hammered around the drum like a machine-gun. Dieter laughed and laughed, and the boy with a hole in his breastbone stood behind him and giggled, glancing around nervously as