Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett

here.’
    Freya nods. How drear it must be, she thinks, to be a lady, if conversation must always revolve around whether or not everyone is happy. ‘What are you reading?’
    Tabby glances at the book clamped on her hand, then holds it up for Freya to see. It’s a history of a queen who is wearing, on the cover, a white dress positively dirty with jewels. ‘Are you interested in history?’
    â€˜Oh. Not really.’ Freya is barely conscious of it. From where she stands, with only a dozen years behind her, even the previous month is infinitely past. Her grandparents, uncles, aunts, parents and teachers are about as old as the moon. ‘I like dinosaurs,’ she says, and hears herself, and winces. ‘That’s a bit dumb.’
    â€˜Not at all.’ Tabby smiles; she looks even prettier, on the corduroy couch, than she had in the church carpark. Her skin is smooth and her dark hair is groomed into waves, and she’s wearing lipstick in the house. She doesn’t seem much like a mother – it’s impossible to imagine her wiping clean a baby’s clagged-up bottom. Any sandwiches she would make for her sons’ lunches would be healthy, compact and, above all, placed tidily into their lunchboxes. Freya wishes her own mother were more this kind of person, someone in control of her life. ‘If dinosaurs aren’t history,’ Tabby says, ‘what is?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ says Freya, and dredges, ‘My brother Syd is always looking for bones and dead things. He loves stuff like that.’
    â€˜Boys seem to, don’t they?’
    â€˜He found a dead rat once, and boiled it in a saucepan to get the fur off. It stank up the whole house.’
    â€˜How awful.’ Tabby laughs.
    â€˜Mum was mad.’ Freya bites her lip. There’s a large painting above the mantelpiece, it looks like tins of blue paint have been upended on the canvas and swept by a broom. The picture above the mantel in her own house is a landscape of a country lane, which to Freya’s mind is preferable, but she can accept that this blue painting is what she should admire more. She wonders what it’s like to live in such a house, where everything is new and nothing speaks of what’s gone before. She flaps a hand at the hallway down which her brother has disappeared. ‘I’d better go and find the others.’
    Tabby Jenson nods; when she smiles, her hazel eyes smile also, which strikes Freya as pleasing. ‘Don’t stay out late. Your mother will wonder where you are. Tell Avery to go home, too. He shouldn’t worry his grandmother.’
    Freya scoffs. ‘Avery’s grandma doesn’t worry about him.’
    â€˜That’s what he says. I’m sure it isn’t true.’
    â€˜It is.’ And because she knows more about Avery Price than anyone in this family could, and because she’s eternally indignant over the way he is being raised, she says, ‘Avery and his sister only live with their grandparents because their mother wasn’t feeding them or taking them to the doctor or sending them to school. So Mr and Mrs Price have them, but they’re old and cranky. It’s all right for his sister because she’s sixteen, she looks after herself – but she doesn’t look after Avery. Nobody looks after him. His clothes never fit him properly, he’s always wearing t-shirts when it’s freezing cold. They never make his lunches, just give him money for chips. His hair isn’t cut, he’s never clean, if it rains he gets wet because he doesn’t have a raincoat. Nobody ever knows where he is or what he’s doing. It’s like nobody owns him.’
    Tabby looks down at the queen on the book’s cover. ‘Poor boy,’ she says. ‘It’s not easy, raising children. I’m sure his grandparents do the best they can.’
    â€˜Nope,’ says Freya adamantly, ‘no one cares about