The Family Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

less seemly implications of the insight (the isolation, the loneliness, the feelings of those left behind) in a mother-like sigh as she glanced at her smudged reflection in the carriage window, scratched and penned as it was with the hastily scrawled graffiti of other teens’ snatched attempts at garbled self-expression. Bazza woz here. Mica hearts Steve. Boyz rule! And diagonally across the top of them all in poorly executed 3D lettering, MEGAN IS A SLUT in thick red ink.
    The train hurtled on, the skyline closing from station to station, transporting her into the waiting unknown.
    *
    As Sundays go, it is pretty quiet. Harry jogs along, skirting rubbish bins and kicking at the gravel, doing his best to lose himself in the activity, one foot in front of the other, like at training, the street a coastal idyll of gently swishing gums and chatty parrots, most of the young children still corralled inside for lunch as he fights the impulse to throw rocks through the windows of the quiet houses, the domestic lull setting off a torrent inside of him.
    Again he asks himself how one day can look so different from the next. He doesn’t understand. His brain feeling like a shaken Etch A Sketch. Rattly. Incomplete. He can hear his dad. Bloody women . Back in the day, his explanation for everything. That and needing a drink. Not that it is the girl’s fault. Harry can’t hold her responsible for his state of mind, however much he might like to blame her for it, the world feeling like it is closing in around him, getting smaller and smaller as he tries to shut himself off from everything she’s touched, automatically ruling out possibilities as he attempts to control the spread, tying off the affected area as one might tourniquet a leg after a snakebite. No, he won’t shake hands with boosters at the Members’ Social. No, he won’t go on the footy trip. No, he definitely isn’t checking his email. Doesn’t want to know what is being said about him online. All he wants is for everything to go back to the way it was before. Set. Straightforward. Family was family. The team was the team. Each day had its own rhythm and routine. If he played well he was happy, if he didn’t, he wasn’t. He didn’t have to think about what it all meant or where he fitted in or what it was that he thought that he wanted. He didn’t have to think about changing anything. He hates uncertainty. His whole life has been about following in other people’s footsteps, sticking to a well-trodden path. He’s spent so much time trying to march in lockstep, the last thing he covets now is being forced to determine his own direction.
    At the oval, galahs congregate on the cricket pitch, picking over the newly sown grass seeds, their coarse screeching carrying across the field, competing with the low hum of the cars from the main road. He circles the pitch slowly, watching the way the birds stick closely to one another, never straying far from their flock.
    A beat-up old kombi van burns past the ground, its speakers blaring. He looks to the galahs, expecting the flock to alight, a great spray of pink and grey feathers shot against the pastel sky, but the birds scarcely look up.
    Complacent bastards, he thinks. He finishes tying his laces then gets up and makes directly for them, running hard right down the centre of the pitch.
    He keeps running, past the primary school, past the units where the paddock used to be, and then instinctively turns left in the direction of Dean’s. That’s what he needs, the easy company of an old friend. Someone he’s known his entire life. And he’s known Dean for as long as he can remember. They went to pre-school together. His mother has pictures of them as kids sharing a bath, he in plastic sunglasses, Dean wearing his “frog” shower cap. Dean looked like a cockhead even then. The same lopsided grin. But that is a person you don’t have to explain