Kevin's Ghost

The Hospital Shorts By Michael Gray Griffith

Apologies for posting so much, but i don’t get the time to sort these.

Kevin was a friend of sorts, and all the characters are based on real people, now dead. Even the Hotel is long gone.

This is set in Midland Western Australia and it’s goal was to try show readers how beautiful these people were.

Kevin

With the distance of a mannequin, Kevin is staring at the sunset staining the sleepout louvres to chartreuse. In his slender fingers, an undrawn Winfield waits with the hopelessness of an understudy, its smoke rising in churns and seductions as it performs alone for the stirring mosquitoes and his cramped bedroom, where a standalone wardrobe continues to regret its broken door in the dust diffusing a dressing table’s cracked and bubbling mirror. Sunk into the only pillow, a small radio is asking “Why?” but Kevin can't hear Bob Geldof's reply because the boy is gone, and despite the hungry dark swallowing all of this, his body remains on his single bed, obedient, silent, and half-mooned against the pale blue and darkening weatherboard wall.

Barry

Barry knows Kevin has switched off. Knows too how completely the boy can separate himself. Barry also knows that his own mother isn't asleep in her room at the front of the house. Before him, the laminate table is strewn with packets of chocolate-dipped marshmallow biscuits, some emptied, their inner plastic smeared in chocolate melt, others as yet unopened, scattered between the long drop forest. Barry's lips are thick with chocolate. His fingers sticky with brown marshmallow glue. The warm beer combining with all this sugar is pushing his diabetes to a sugar rush climax that will race him after the hallucinations. He has danced before around the kitchen slash dining room with a woman constructed from marshmallows and chocolate. Has jived into the fridge. Crashed into the table. Slid backwards down the face of Kevin's bedroom door.

Tonight, he's mumbling about Asian hookers. He's informing Kevin in his drooling voice how their pussies are slanted and can smoke cigarettes. Then he curses the fridge as it cranks into life, re-denting the door with the base of a bottle that breaks and shards. Grabbing another biscuit, he grumbles at then ignores his mother's distant chastisement.

A woman is here. She is dancing between the clutter on the table. Rotating her hips as he starts clapping and whistling. Her breasts are floating as though suspended on water, and Barry is screaming because her vagina just smiled, and her teeth are nothing but rows of broken glass.

Kevin

“Yeah, that’s right, a wog. ... Uhhuh ... Uh huh ... Well, probably tomorrow. He's pretty sick, though. ... Yeah, okay ... Okay then, I'll tell him when he wakes up.” ... “Yeah, ... Yeah, bye.”

“Tell him what?” Gran asks without looking up from the sink.

“He said he really should have a doctor's certificate this time,” said Kevin.

“Well, he's never needed one before, and heaven knows he's taken enough sickies.”

Kevin does not reply. After lighting a cigarette with his feminine grasp, he curls himself into his trademark stance, leaning against the kitchen’s door frame, one elbow cupped into a slender hand.

On the table, Barry is flaked out on the pillow of his forearms. What biscuits survived are in the fridge, leftover beer poured down the sink. Piss remains in the air despite the floor below his chair still wet from being thoroughly mopped.

Between them, all the flies are buzzing as they search for something lost. Landing momentarily, lifting again, landing once more, only to re-lift, and the summer has followed them in through the back door's flyscreen.

Behind the house’s thirsty back garden, over the burnt remnants of their fence, an enormous plot of land lays undeveloped. Grey, waist-high grass bursts with quills of seeds, and a few car bodies, all upside down, rust.

Kevin's older brother, Terry, dropped a bolt bomb he made down one of these wrecks' petrol tanks once. The fire from the "suburb-rocking" explosion devoured the wooden back fence and went after the house before succumbing to the combined hoses of Gran and her neighbors. Terry, eyebrows singed, scarpered with remarkable speed and endurance to the abandoned train yards, where he hid for two days.

“It's rubbish day today.”

No answer.

“Kevin?” A pause.

Gran turns to find Kevin's eyes somewhere out there in the block.

“Kevin!!”

“What?”

“It's rubbish day today.”

“Oh yeah, is there any rubbish left in here?”

“No,” and she stops with the dishes, “Kevin.”

“Yeah?”

“You got to stop doing that. What if one day you can’t come back?”

Water

The iron soil refuses to drink. Water trickles to the lowest points—footprints and insect valleys where it collects and stains. To Kevin, the chore is as routine as breathing.

Barry is snoozing on a plastic banana lounge beneath the shade of the shed's overhang. Sleeping hands, independent from his sleep, ineffectually swat flies from his face. The diesel of the train yards has darkened his overalls. He is a welder.

Gran is on her knees, ripping out the resilient weeds. Behind her, the back of the weatherboard house, almost eighty years old, hangs together by miracles. Twists of wire hold the downpipes askew. Nails, whittled by the elements to resemble petrified wood more than the metal, clutch the paint-flaking boards to the house’s jarrah frame, and a bougainvillea is on fire, its tropical incandescent petals pinking half the roof's tin.

The house has not had any maintenance done since the shopping center rumors first began circulating. Midland already had two shopping complexes, but a third had been talked about. Built on the spanning block behind this house, it was meant to encompass the street’s entire string of homes.

The rumors spoke of businessmen wandering down the street, buying your house for cash. And not just for what your home was worth, but amounts that would have you rushing to pack up your life. The duration of time elapsed since these first whispers spilt from the wings of the swooping magpies was six years. Kevin had not lived here then, but even the remnants of the rumors were a bulb waiting for a switch; like the single red flower on the sick rose he was watering.

“I heard you should only water in the morning or just after dark,” said Kevin.

“What?”

“I did. It was on the radio.”

“You listen to me. I’ve been watering in the day ever since I was a little girl. You can’t tell me it's bad for them. I would have found out by now. If it's not those people always trying to change things, it's you trying to get out of watering?”

Kevin falls back to quietness.

The water tears a limp spider web. The liquid’s rip leaves it dangling in curtains, droplets stuck precious to its soaked and severed strands. Kevin fails to notice. He moves on to a small bricked-off flower bed against the neighbor’s fence. Its weeded soil supports a few sparse geraniums. The water slurps across the soil before running down to the depression behind the half-buried bricks. He gives each plant a few seconds of water.

“Make sure you give them a good drink now!”

“Uh huh.”

“They're looking stringy. They're not getting enough water, not in this heat.”

“Uh huh.”

“I don’t like losing a geranium. Hardy plants, geraniums. If they suffer, it’ll mean we’ll definitely lose the roses.”

“Uh huh.”

“Roses need lots of water. Too much water, I think. Those scientists might be able to make roses in all sorts of sizes and colors, but they can’t grow one that can go a day without a drink.”

“Maybe they have, and you just haven’t heard of it.”

She rises to her knees as though praying. “Well, of course I would have heard of it. Mrs. Wistal works in a nursery; she would have told me if there was one. She’s always telling us about new plants, and I know she hasn’t mentioned a rose that can go thirsty. I would have remembered that. I’m sure I would have. You know how partial I am to my roses.”

“Uh huh.”

The boy does not turn from the watering. Her failing eyesight blurs his edges. Blond strands melt to one flaxen color. Feminine features sink into its shade. A hand rises a moment before the precious glow of his cigarette’s heart, lights.

He’s tall, like his father, thin like he was too. He used to water the plants as Kevin’s mum waited, smoking on that deck chair, that broke years ago. Kevin can’t remember living with them. Born the last of three, they separated before he had reached the age of four when Noelene’s family took and split the children amongst themselves.

Kevin was given to Aunty Joan. Unfortunately, despite most people thinking of her as a headstrong woman, Aunty Joan was a manic depressive besieged with the delusion that the family was out to destroy her. Therefore, in the accordion-strained corridors of her troubled mind, she routinely reasoned that Kevin had been planted in her house like a virus. She housed him reluctantly for six rollercoaster years until his tenth birthday, but only on the premise that the rest of the family were never allowed to visit him. For a lack of another place to put him, and a

grudging common belief that although she was a bit odd, she always went to church, her wishes were respected. His parents, now both with new partners and desperate to sever themselves from their sharp-edged history, agreed. But despite having all her demands met, she still fell. On Kevin’s tenth birthday, convinced now that the devil was growing inside Kevin like a lizard in a chook’s egg, she placed him in a home. She told no one of her actions, and no one inquired. For the next four years, with no one aware of his whereabouts, Kevin received no visitors. He grew up unaware that he had gained five new stepbrothers and sisters, two on his dad’s side, three on his mum’s.

In his fourteenth year, Gran, who had had no connection with her son’s children since the separation, heard of Kevin’s incarceration from a chance meeting with a social worker she’d once known who also knew Kevin. That afternoon, raging enough to tear apart the house with her own arthritic hands, she pulled on her best meeting clothes, sobered up Barry, and had him drive her down there in their Morris 1100. Head pounding and feeling the shakes, he waited in the car as his mother stormed back across the grass, dragging her stunned grandson out from under the limp protests of the supervisors on shift. Kevin never spoke during the entire trip back, nor did he thank her when she got Barry to construct him a room. Although she was fired up enough to withstand any attempt at retrieval, locking both doors and all the windows in the house, no one ever arrived to take him back.

He’s sixteen now, and he has not seen Aunty Joan since. Inside Gran, there is a tear that is Kevin. Every time she catches him disconnecting, it opens, every time she envisions those years, it bleeds.

A colony of ants attacking her heel brings her back to the weeds. She looks down at the insects, smaller than short-grained rice, attempting to bite the dried skin of her lower leg. With a dirt-stained hand, she wipes them free. Their bodies twitch erratically before dying unseen in the dirt.

“Cup of tea, Kevin?”

“Nuh.”

She nods, brushing the loose dirt from her hands with the brush of the other hand’s fingers, before wheezing to her feet and disappearing into the cool dark of indoors.

“I’ll ‘ave one!” says Barry.

Tea and Cigarettes

Barry has risen to a sitting position to drink his tea. Sipping from the mug, he's observing Kevin as he sits on an upturned concrete laundry sink, next to Gran. The sink was carried out here by himself and Kevin the morning after it fell away from the wall while Barry was climbing it in an attempt to keep up with a floating hallucinogenic lady who was disappearing into the laundry’s ceiling. The fall had cracked it along its base. He told his mother he’d take it up to the tip. Now time had wrapped a collar of weeds around its base.

As Kevin inspects with mild curiosity the end of his cigarette, legs crossed and eyes closed, Gran lifts her face to the sun, which is unable to tan her further. A mug of tea is steaming in her hand.

“What’s wrong with yer fag?” Barry asks.

Kevin doesn't look around, nor does he reply. Gran opens her eyes briefly, then re-closes them.

Barry’s eyes are now here and present, altering constantly to the moments that are battering him. He has worn out his early forties face. Tanned its skin to a rough, dried leather until creases have become sharp and permanent. His lips, through a man’s neglect, have dried beyond retrieval. Neither the alcohol, chocolate, nor his tongue dragged across their cracks will soften them. Yet they are full lips, out of place on the rest of his narrow face. It's as though he’d been born a Siamese twin, and the only proof of another, more sensitive brother, were these lips.

“Those things’ll kill ya.”

Bringing the cigarette to his lips, Kevin allows the end to become bright and precious.

“Didn’t yer hear me? I said those things’ll kill ya.”

As though nothing had been said, Kevin exhales, and as the smoke drifts from the twin chimneys of his nostrils, his cool blue eyes follow vaguely their whorling disintegration.

Barry takes another strategic sip of tea, then runs his tongue over his lips as soon as the cup is removed. “How the hell can yer afford ‘em on the dole, anyway?”

Kevin tilts the cigarette up. Briefly he studies its duller red heart before bringing it back, slow and fluid, to his lips.

“Yer know it’s my bloody taxes that give yer the money for the cigarettes, don’t ya!”

Kevin turns his head away.

“Don’t turn yer head on me when I’m talkin’ to yer boy!”

“Why don’t you take yer overalls off, Barry?” Gran says. “Yer must be boiling.”

Her question startles Barry. Running his spare hand over the front of his overalls, he appears to realize that she’s right. Then he feels pathetic for not noticing. Though only his mother sees this, for Kevin has not turned back.

“I’ve put some clean pants in yer top drawer. Leave those in the laundry. I’ll wash them later.”

As Gran re-closes her eyes, Barry glares at them both.

“I’ll finish me tea first.” He grumbles.

Kevin rises and throws a monitoring glance at his uncle. Then drops the spent fag below his thong. “I’m goin’ to the shops. Yer want anything?”

The old woman shakes her head, and he leaves, heading towards the broken fence.

“Kevin,” she calls out, and he stops and turns back. “Stay out of trouble.”

The Old Hotel

Astride the undeveloped land, an empty three-story hotel decays. Pigeons are using its attic for breeding and its top-story broken glass windows for lookouts. Its ground-floor windows are boarded up with nailed-on planks of plywood. One side is wrapped in chicken wire. On its roof, six crumpled chimneys hold onto their bricks with slipping fingers of mortar. Below the red remnants of “The Castle Hotel,” a painting of a cowboy on a rearing horse is a ghost being washed away from its side. At its front doorstep, the Great Eastern Highway charges its traffic into and out of the center of Midland; an artery of life, a worn sidewalk beyond the old hotel’s heart.

Small lizards are scurrying into the long grass, whose dagger-like seeds pierce and fix to Kevin's jeans or catch between his toes and the rubber of his thongs. There is glass to be avoided along the path, stubbies broken into land mines of razors. A few forgotten bricks. Dumped piles of junk mail. Empty plastic bags snagged to dumped trolleys and crackling in the breeze.

A child is playing in one of the car wrecks. A small boy. He is turning the rusted steering wheel first one way and then the other. Kevin knows him by face. He’s the boy Barry reckons used to play with those black spiders that live in the cracks of the walls until one bit him and he went temporarily blind. The boy pauses his playing upon noticing Kevin, becoming still as though stillness will hide him from the world. It does. Eyes back to the path, Kevin continues.

On the verge of the Great Eastern Highway, Kevin halts to let his remote control brain maneuver him across the heavy traffic. Before him, another empty plot of land leads onto the car park of Midland Gates shopping center. At the fringes of the car park, the cars are parked sporadically. Closer to the building, they thicken as those as yet un-parked patrol the lanes, hungry and frustrated.

Across the road, Kevin turns towards one of the shopping center's three openings, within flocks of others. The building from the air looks like a brick and glass sponge, absorbing people and collecting cars.

Kevin

In Coles, shoppers push trolleys down the brightly lit aisles while a woman on a microphone offers two roasted chickens for the price of one. Signs are splashing today’s specials: soap powder, biscuits, baked beans in ham sauce, and tomato sauce.

On either side of him, a film developing shop, a shoe store, men’s and women’s boutiques, and a record store display goods and services. The mall is cool and busy. The shops are positive and smart. Along the center of the mall, benches are arranged in islands of convenience, each sporting their own trash receptacle, a false but attractive plant, an ashtray, and two benches, one on either side.

This is what Kevin has come for: an empty seat in the organized chaos to escape the heat. The plastic is cool. After rotating his head to stretch his neck, he slumps forward, resting his face over his knees. There is a thin film of sweat covering him like a damp doctor’s glove, and before him is the mall’s newsagency.

Children are laughing and demanding. Some are hanging off the edges of squeaking trolleys, others running down the people-jammed malls like scouts followed by tired-looking mothers. There is the sickly sweetness of combined sweat in the air as the air conditioner chills everyone’s wet. Mothers snap commands: “Get off that—Put that back—No, you can’t have it—Leave yer bloody sister alone.” Old

people maneuver between the crowds on varying diminishing motor skills. Some are too old to maneuver, forging slowly ahead as icebreakers cut through pack ice.

Kevin unfurls his fingers, revealing his cigarette packet and yellow plastic lighter. He lights and savors the smoke with the same expression as those in the café down the corridor take the first sip of their cappuccinos.

Unaware that he is doing so, the boy closes down. People he knows to different degrees of relationships pass without his knowledge. His hand, independent of his absence, rises the cigarette to his lips, which close, automatically drawing the heated air down.

He sits content for an hour, separated from the world, separated from himself, until his own stomach calls. He blinks himself back to where he is and plans. There is no money in his pockets. In his back pocket, though, a bank passbook has two dollars left in it. Not enough for a packet of fags but enough for a pie. Rising, he slips into the throng.

The Man

Behind the newsagent’s counter, the proprietor watches him go as his girls serve customers around him. Kevin irritates him. For every minute the boy sits there disconnected, he believes a customer bypasses his shop. The high rent, the out-goings would be easier if only the finicky consumers weren’t so easily put off. Kids like this are the reason his tax is so high. Why the mall’s losing its customer base. Kids like this are dragging the place down. They should be banned unless they intend to purchase something. This is a bloody shopping center, not a halfway house for bludgers. Do you have any idea how hard I work to keep this shop? Any idea how my marriage suffers? How much my kids miss me because I’m always here or up to my arse in book work? Do you have any concept of how much money these bastards want from me before I can even sniff a dollar of profit? It’s hard, heartbreaking work. I work harder in one day than that kid works in a year. Look, go on, look at my books. Do yer see how much we’re down this week compared to the same week last year? Can you see fewer people in the place? Course ya can. That’s ‘cause there are fewer people. They don’t like coming here anymore because of all these kids hanging around. It’s true I’m telling ya! Him and all his good-for-nothing mates are scaring ‘em off! Do you think in Singapore they let no-hopers sit around their malls all day? ‘Course they bloody don’t! That’s cause everyone bloody works over there. Not like here. Not like that bloody kid. Look at him go, the bloody useless bastard. I’m going under because of the likes of him. Do yer realize that? I’m going under.

Kevin

Compared to the mall, the bank is silent. A place where the first unwritten rule of a library is enforced. Deposits are also preferred.

“You’ll have to sign there, sir.” She slides the slip back.

“I wonder if you could just sign your name again, sir.” He stares at her confused. “You have to make it look like the signature in the back, see.”

Grasping the pen, he bends over the counter and signs again.

“How would you like that, sir?”

Kevin looks at the mouth asking this question. There are people all around him; the woman behind the counter is waiting.

“What ever.”

“Two one-dollar notes?”

Kevin nods. His eyes raise to her eyes. The window that stretches the entire front of the bank is reflected upon them, and more, so much more that he's forced to look away.

“Next,” she calls as he tries to pick up the money with his chewed-off nails.

Kevin

The pie dribbles broiling meat onto his fingers. He licks the gravy mince off while blowing cool air into the pastry’s rupture. He started eating it outside, but the sun is too aggressive. Habit wanders him back down the corridors across the clattering front of Kmart, eating as he walks. By the time he gets to his original seat, he is wiping pie from his lips with the back of his hand.

The seat is empty again. He rests on it like an old man on a verandah.

The newsagency man sits next to him. Sits heavy and too close. Kevin turns to him briefly, bewildered.

“You gonna buy anything?” The man’s whisper is hoarse and direct.

“What?”

“You planning to buy anything, or you just gonna sit here all afternoon?”

“I bought a pie.”

“Don't get smart with me, yah little bastard.” The man has closed in. To passerby’s, the pair are simply close. “You're gonna sit here all afternoon, aren’t ya?”

“So?”

“No so! Out!” The man grabs Kevin’s upper arm in a vice. Yanking him up, he drags him out of the mall’s corridor through his own shop towards the access door at the back. Behind him, Kevin is floundering. He can see people silent, watching him being dragged past. Their eyes are burning. A rack of cards, knocked, falls. Magazines look up, smile. In the front glass, he can see this man’s striding reflection. In its mirror, the man is a bull and Kevin a small cart being dragged along. Kevin has been dragged before.

Something breaking snaps.

As the man shoves the door open and tries to throw Kevin out, Kevin grasps the man’s arm. With a strength surprising even to himself, he swings the man off balance. The man crashes to the inlaid bricks, where enraged he roars. The man puts a hand down to rise himself, but Kevin is out of control. Screaming the words of the animal within, of the dark. The first kick thuds into the rising man’s face, spinning the store owner over onto his back. The second smacks into his ribs. The third into his rolling back. A crowd has gathered, and a trolley is snatched from a stunned onlooker and spun with such force at the newsagency’s window that the implosion is a bomb. Glass flies over those inside. Over women. Over children. Some shards fly as far as the mall. There is blood. There is screaming. Behind the man groans. Kevin turns. Eyes burning, he smacks another kick into the downed man’s side. Exhaling, the store owner curls into fetal. Outstretching his palms submissively above his head.

“Enough!” someone yells from the crowd.

“Let him go!” comes another.

“Kevin?” a third.

He turns to the female. It’s one of Gran’s chapel friends. Her presence moves inside like water extinguishing. The crowd turns to her, then to him. No one moves forward to hold him back; no one retreats inside the store. All hell is breaking loose, screaming and bleeding.

Roaring towards the crowd that parts, Kevin breaks into a run.

He can see the back of Gran’s house. The decision not to run there is instinctive. Not an option. The pigs will go there first. Before him, the hotel is quiet and waiting.

He tears across the road, working his way through the rubbish in the grass, pulling a piece of plywood aside to gain entrance through a glassless window. As he enters the darkness, the plywood sheet snaps back, dulling in its rejoin the drone of the traffic and reducing the heat to a cool dark hall. Everywhere shadows and silence breed ghosts and spiders. None of them bother him. He has been here before.

The old floorboards are deliciously cold. Swords of sun paint the floor in custard bars as alone he follows the path he knows so well. There is a small room, slightly larger than his bedroom, its floor covered in crushed coke cans and empty packets of cigarettes, and a single mattress sits against the far wall. The room smells of dust and cats.

Curling up on the mattress, he lays on his side and faces the dark doorway. He tries to bring his knees up to his chest, but one won’t comply. A bone in his foot, bruised perhaps broken. Nothing to do but escape. Into the distance, the pain follows him until he falls asleep.

Kevin

The newsagency proprietor pushes him back then throws him around like a rag doll made of cloth and filled with foam. A dream crowd, fired up, throws him back and around. He cannot raise a rag limb to protect himself. He cannot open his painted lips and scream. He cannot push a single tear past his plastic button eyes. The crowd crams closer. Aunty Joan is here. “He’s the devil!” she's screaming. “He's the devil!” as Barry reaches up and grasps his legs. The newsagency man grabs his arms and the pull. His stitching gives. Foam falls and spills. He rips open above the crowd. Limbs, severed, are thrown about and lost. Desiccated foam covers their faces, is dandruff in their hair. For a moment, his dust hangs only to disappear in the very next breath.

Kevin

Three things fail to wake him. A cat entering the room, hissing at his presence. A fire engine droning down the highway towards the low rolling hills. The awful throb from his foot. Nothing penetrates his disconnection until...

A distant whimper is weaving through a chink, rare and open and separate.

Sleep-weary, he stretches on the bare mattress, evaluating his damage as he stretches. His mouth

is thirsty from the heat and the salt in the pie. His eyes feel red and weary, and beyond them, his foot cries. Dragging his lighter from his tight denim pocket, he ignites the naked flame near his foot. The crown glows bruised. Throbs when it is still, daggers when it moves.

Around him, the black has swallowed the walls, and the mattress is damp with sweat. He brings his foot around to a sitting position and grimaces at the pain. Extending his leg, he searches for his cigarettes. They’re squashed into his back pocket. The lid of the packet falls off as he pulls them out. The smokes have stayed whole despite the crush. He lights up in the darkness. The smoldering heart lights no more than the fingertips that hold it.

The whimper comes once more. It is soft and distant and troubled.

He disregarded it first. An anomaly. A wind. Now it’s real. Definable. Raising his lighter, he spins the flame into life. The room lights to dimness. It is as empty as when he entered it. Grey paint peeling off the walls. The solid door frame leading to further darkness that this solitary flame cannot light. The lighter’s metal heats beyond endurance. His thumb’s pressure on the gas eases, and the flame dies in an instant, and the small room loses its light.

With the suddenness of its return, the whimper is gone. He listens. Above his breath, the only sound is the traffic. Moments pass. Solitary moments that have no sound. He goes back to the pain of his foot. The wall accepts his leaning back as inevitability hits him. The cops would’ve been round already. Gran will have kicked Barry out to go look for him, and he’ll have gone down the pub. Her face will be strained. That exhausted expression, a mile past the one that cries. She’ll be cleaning the lounge room or the kitchen shelves, dragging pots, tins, and plates out of the dark recesses and killing any cockroaches she finds with her hand.

There’s comfort in knowing she’s held together with whatever holds together her house. The whimper returns.

Bolts Up

He listens. Thin and desperate, the voice floats into the room. Goose flesh bubbles. The whimper drags on for another moment, then stops.

The silence returns, but it’s incomplete. Its pureness marred by his heart’s stronger and faster beat.

The Voice

As the imperfect quiet lengthens, his mind gives in trying to give the voice identity. Perhaps it was the wind wailing through a crack, or pigeons fucking, or perhaps...

The empty shadows have begun to breathe. He can feel them taking form. Arms, legs, mouths. He shakes his head, but the others linger and start watching him from the dark.

Lifting onto his damaged foot, he hobbles back to the doorless doorway. At the precipice of the long hall, he listens again. Silence. Nothing but the outside traffic. Looking all around first, he shuffles on towards the plywood-covered exit. The streetlights do not penetrate the wall’s cracks like the sun can, so he cannot see a hand in front of his face. He limps through the darkness with a memory as a guide.

The whimper begins. A faint voice falling from the floors above. Rigid, he peers up, but there is nothing but darkness to see. A darkness where the rain is a voice, a soft, frail drizzle.

He considers calling out, but doesn’t. The wail stops.

Faster, he moves to the window. The plywood pushes out easily. Holding it with one hand, he slips the bad foot through the gap. The outside rushes in, all sultry and stained with the smell of dry grass.

The whimper breaks. Hollow and starving. It sounds lonelier than the hotel itself. As he waits there, its volume rises and falls, reverberates like a crying ball bouncing off the dark walls he can’t see.

Kevin is motionless. The heat of the night outside warms his leg while the silent house cools his shoulders. He remains in the awkward position, staring up at the ceilings he also can’t see. Gran has mentioned the ghosts of this place. But for all the times he has hidden here, he has never heard or seen a thing. Yet here the whimper continues.

His foot’s pain sharpens, but still he doesn’t move. Halfway in, halfway out, he knows this sound. He has heard it before. It is a wasted noise for no one comes.

Yet still the whimper calls to the dark as though it was the small voice of the dark.

Hesitantly, Kevin brings his foot back in. Then taking an extra, unnecessary breath, he limps around to where he knows the staircase is.

A streetlight from across the road penetrates a second-story window, allowing the banister to throw a broken backbone across the adjoining wall, yet the whimper doesn’t care. It’s clearer here, winding down the stairwells.

“Hello!” Kevin calls. “Hello!”

The whimper stops. There is no reply, but the gentle hum of the vehicles shooting by outside.

“Hello! Is there someone up there? Hello!”

The silence unnerves him. The stairs frown down with too many secrets tucked into their steps. Neither they nor the darkness are inviting. He waits here, small and stupid at the bottom, and starts to remember he has nowhere left to go.

“Hello.” It’s a child’s voice. A boy’s.

“Hello!” And his bad foot is on the first step.

“Hello?” comes back.

“Who is it, huh? What’s yer name?”

“Christopher?” The quiet reply drops from the upper floors in a flight of wings, tear exhausted.

“Christopher,” Kevin repeats to himself. “Not little Chris from number seven?”

“Yeah.”

Kevin has never spoken to him before. He has only heard Gran saying hello as he passed the front gate on his way home from school.

“What’s wrong? You stuck?”

“I can’t see. It's too dark.”

“Where are you?”

“Up here.”

Kevin grins. Looking down, he evaluates his busted foot. In the dim light, he can’t find it, but the crown is throbbing. Fuck, he whispers.

“What?”

“Nuthin, I said I’m coming up to get ya!”

Kevin climbs. Each second step sends needles into his legs. He feels a dribble of blood in his mouth as his teeth penetrate the soft flesh of his lips. The dust rises, too, filling his nostrils.

At the first turn, the light penetrates less, and the creaking steps melt back into darkness. “You still up there?”

“I’m thirsty.”

A brief smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there soon.”

Another step. The wood creaks. The creak’s echo retorts throughout the hotel, and the little voice screams.

“Don’t worry, mate. It’s only the stairs.”

“Someone’s here!”

“Who?”

“Don’t touch me!”

“Chris?”

“Please don’t touch me!”

Kevin breaks into a run. His foot cries to the pain, but he ignores it. At the first floor, he stops and listens. The scream replays from higher up. The boy is going insane.

“Leave him alone!” Kevin roars, charging up the next row of steps, following the boy’s screaming trail.

A spider web collapses, covering his face. He scrapes it free with one hand, shivering at the thought of the spider crawling through his hair.

He reaches the second floor. The boy is hysterical. His fucken foot. The rotting ceiling is crazed with streetlight. He shuffles down the broken light, down the empty hall. Doorless doorways lead off to darkness. The voice is louder. He dismisses room after room until...

“Help me!”

He’s in the room at the end of the hallway. Kevin lurches forward, lifting his pained foot to a hop.

“Leave me alone!” The boy screams, and Kevin trips in shock, landing with his full weight on his bad foot. Fuck!

“Don’t hurt me!”

Around him, there is only darkness. “Are you in here?”

“Yeah.”

“Who else is here?” He fumbles for his lighter. “You were screaming at someone?”

The boy does not reply.

“Well, is there someone here or not?”

“They left.”

“They left?”

“I could hear you on the stairs. You sounded like a monster.”

“But you knew it was me.”

“I know, but maybe I was wrong about knowing things.”

Kevin’s face smirks momentarily before pain and annoyance steal it back to grimacing. He spins the small built-in flint. The naked flame dimly illuminates the room. The room is larger than the one he slept in. An old table at the rear before the dark windows. Under the table, the boy has his little legs curled to his chest. He is watching him. His eyes shimmering in the meager light. There is dust on his face, channeled with tears.

“What are you doing under there?” The lighter burns. He lets it go quickly. The room shoots black, and the boy screams.

“No, no, it’s okay. The light just went out, that’s all.”

“I can’t see.”

“I know, but it’s okay. I’m here. I won’t let anyone hurt yer. Now come on, stop crying.”

The boy’s sobbing eases.

“I want to go home.”

“Well, come on then. How about I take you home now, huh. Come on, just crawl to where you saw me in the light.”

“I can’t. It’s too dark.”

“Okay, stay where you are, and I’ll come and get you.” Kevin’s foot is a bitch. He suppresses his own groans, sliding across the floor to the child.

“What are you doing? What’s that noise?”

“It’s only me. I hurt my foot, so I have to drag myself to you.”

“How did you hurt your foot?”

“I fell.”

Reaching in, he stretches a hand underneath the table and touches the boy. The boy springs out like a jack-in-the-box, clutching his arms around Kevin’s neck. Kevin’s arms open. He is unsure what to do. He can’t remember the last time he was held. Slowly, in the dark, like a Venus flytrap, he lets his arms enclose the clinging boy. One arm wraps around his tiny back, the other softly pats his trembling head.

“Come on now, huh. Yer going to show me how brave yer are.”

“I want ta go home.”

“We’re goin’ home.”

The boy will not let go. Kevin rises to his feet, using the table as support, before hobbling on his bad foot out of the room.

His foot is ferocious.

“How’d you get up here anyway?” He grimaces as he places it down.

“I was explorin’.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to be a bit braver if yer want to go exploring again, won’t ya?”

“I wasn’t scared!”

“Oh, so what, were you just acting scared?”

They reach the top of the steps. His leg jolts with each step, but slowly they descend.

Pushing open the wood, the boy slips from his grasp as the night air greets them with blankets of humidity. The boy goes first, and Kevin follows, releasing the wood gently behind him. Before him, the suburb glows, and the boy looks up. Kevin has raised his foot against the side of the house to try to quell the agony.

A cooler breeze runs through the dry grass and explores their skin. The boy turns and glances over his shoulder at his own house, then back to Kevin. A woman’s voice can be heard calling his name over the spare block. She sounds distressed.

“That’s me Mum.”

Kevin nods and smiles. “Don’t let me catch you in here again, yer understand.”

The small boy does not reply except with a look, a turn, and a quick “Seeya.” Kevin watches him run down the rubbished path towards his house. Within moments, behind the grass and car wrecks, he has vanished. He relocates him only by the sound of the woman scolding and the boy’s new cry echoing back off the hotel’s wall. He strains to see their positions until their agitated voices too disappear.

A police car cruising down the highway drags a torchlight over the long, large block. The beam rises and falls over the shifting grass until the corner house’s bulk consumes the light, and the patrol car turns lazily into his street.

The cooler breeze slips fingers through his hair, getting stuck on the broken web. With a rising detachment, he spends time watching the shadow that creates the back of Gran’s house distort to the incoming headlights. Watching still, he retrieves and lights one of his squashed cigarettes, cupping his hands to protect the flame from the breeze. The smoke of the first drag is soothing and familiar. Lifting his head back, he slowly exhales, then brings a hand to the back of his neck where the ghosts of the boy’s hands linger.