at the back of the shop.
‘Mrs Coop!’ he yelled. ‘Mrs Coop!’
There was no sign of the shopkeeper but in the silence after his yelling he could hear her out the back. The bright light from the open back door reached all the way up the hall and came to rest on the stool sitting in the doorway. She was almost always sitting there whenever Tom came in, fanning herself with a piece of old cardboard. Above her stool, high on the wall, was a dusty bank of brown Bakelite light switches and next to that the electricity meter and the fuse box, and next to that, hanging from a nail, calendar over expired calendar counting back from 1969. Over the counter a sticky mess of old flypaper, bejewelled with blowflies and wasps and beetles, swung gently in the breeze – a grisly record of long-gone summer days. At Tom’s feet, alongside the shelves, were the tracks of countless customers worn into the wood. He followed them while he waited for Mrs Coop to come in, tapping the coin in his hand against the shelves as he went. There was no one else in the shop and the lollies arranged on the counter in coloured boxes seemed to wink at him as he circled. He thought about taking some, gulping them down before Mrs Coop appeared, but his ears immediately began to burn and he had to think about other things to cool them. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smells of the shop. He imagined a calf walking down between the desks at school, collecting books in its dripping mouth, and he imagined his teacher, Mr May, pointing to the blackboard with a fishing rod instead of chalk, and then he saw the smooth neck of the girl who sat in front of him in class and he wondered, for the first time in his life, what a kiss might be like.
When he opened his eyes again the ice block in his hand was already beginning to melt. He was about to shout down the hall again when he heard the shopkeeper coming, saw her swaying from side to side because of her bad hip, heard her wheeze. A blue dress with pale yellow flowers covered her bulk and on her hip, like a freshly picked crop, was the basket full of laundry she’d just collected. The deep black line of her cleavage caught Tom’s eye and held it for a long second.
‘Hello, Mrs Coop,’ he said, lifting his chin.
‘Hello!’ she replied, blinking. ‘Who’s that then?’
‘Tom Ferry.’
‘Ah. Afternoon, Thomas. School’s out then?’
‘Yep.’
‘Plans for the weekend?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good boy! What can I do for you then?’
‘This,’ he said, holding up the ice block by its tip. ‘How much?’
‘Thirty-five cents.’
‘They’ve gone up!’
‘They have?’
Tom looked at the ice block despairingly, then at Mrs Coop. ‘But I haven’t got that much, and I can’t put it back because it’s melting already.’
Mrs Coop laughed at him and then made a waving movement with her hand that set the flesh on her arms wobbling.
‘Well, you’ll just have to owe it to me then,’ she said. ‘Or, better yet, when you’ve finished, you could pull up that grass that’s coming up at the front there and that’ll settle it, I reckon.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. Now go on, get stuck into it before it’s just so much coloured water!’
‘All right. Thanks, Mrs Coop. Thanks very much.’
Tom turned to go but then he remembered something. ‘Oh, a pack of Marlboro too, please. For Henry. On his account.’
‘All right then.’
While Mrs Coop reached for the packet Tom stuck his head out of the doorway. There was grass a foot long coming up between the cracks in the concrete out the front of the shop, all the way from where the awning posts met the ground to where the shop and the footpath met.
‘Can I come back and do it tomorrow, Mrs Coop?’ Tom yelled into the shop.
‘Course you can,’ she answered from the gloom. ‘Go on now.’
‘All right. See you tomorrow.’
‘All right. Bye now.’
Tom ran down to where the street ended and the ferry ramp began. He sat down on one of the ramp posts and took a big bite out of the ice block but the cold made his forehead ache almost straight away. When the pain had passed he took smaller bites and caught the melting runoff in the cup of his hand. The ferry was on the far bank and he could see the old ferrymaster sitting in his cabin waiting for cars, the twisting streamers from his pipe vanishing into the breeze. Overhead, fat white clouds clippered across the sky and the wind began to pick up, rippling his shirt, cooling him and the day down. School was over for another week and another Apollo was on its way to the moon and that made even Angel Rock seem a more exciting place. Tomorrow, if it was still hot, he’d take Flynn swimming, or maybe fishing, then later, after dinner, they could lie outside on the grass and try to spot Apollo, or just imagine it soaring out there among the stars.
He sat looking out across the river and soon forgot where he was, his mind enchanted by images of moon landings and rockets, astronauts and parachuting capsules. He wondered if the Apollo II patch he’d ordered from the Post would ever arrive. He sat, the ice block dripping onto the ground, until the sound of a commotion filtered through to him. He turned and looked back towards town. The bus from the high school in Laurence had just finished setting down a dozen hot and cranky kids in the main street and now, walking towards him through the rippling heat-waves rising up from the road, was Sonny Steele and his little mate Leonard. He groaned. From about the same spot – just past the bowsers of the Golden Fleece – he’d once seen Jack Webber swing an axe at his brother Joe as if Joe were a tree that needed felling. A summer afternoon just like this one. In the time it had taken him to run to where they faced each other the axe was in Joe – right in his side – though he was still walking, but wrong, like the man up the valley who had polio, and going for his brother with his fists up, the blood draining out of his face. Then Pop Mather, the local copper, had come running up the road and tackled Jack and smacked him one. Then he’d saved Joe’s life by jamming his shirt into his wound to keep in the blood. Henry said it was drink and women that had made them fight and he said neither was any good reason to put an axe in someone, especially family.
Tom remembered it as he watched the two older boys increase their pace and he wished wholeheartedly there was an axe handy now. He stood and started walking towards home, jamming the packet of Marlboros down inside the elastic of his shorts. He wouldn’t run – he knew there wasn’t much point.
When they caught up with him he stopped and turned to face them. Sonny and Leonard stopped too, both dripping with sweat, their mouths open like panting dogs. Sonny stared at him. Sonny had gone to the Catholic primary before high school. Tom thought he must have been like some of the boys in his own class who were always in trouble, who would never do as they were told, whose fathers had short-back-and-sides and wore their trousers up high, whose mothers were heavy and brown-armed and stiff in their floral frocks when they shopped on a Saturday morning. Sonny was one of those. He was nearly three years older than Tom; a foot taller and twice as broad. He had dark curly hair and a curiously flat and featureless face. One eye was dark brown and the other so pale it was almost no colour at all. Tom thought it might once have been blue but had since faded. Wall-eyed, Henry called him. He said his family
