Mike by Brian Caswell Page A

reason, suddenly, he was gone, and I was here.
    And every day at school I had to face Shane Thomas.

2
THE VIEW FROM THE
WINDOW
    Riny sat behind the glass of the wide bay window and watched the street. In particular, she watched the young boy in front of the house opposite.
    He was poking a stick into the gap between the columns of the veranda. Concrete columns the previous owner had painted — badly — in an almost-beige colour which didn’t suit the house at all.
    The boy seemed quite intent on what he was doing. He was always so serious. In the months since he had moved into the house with his mother, she could barely remember a smile on his face. It wasn’t good for a youngster to be so unhappy.
    Maybe he was lonely too.
    Riny looked around the small room. Tony’s special room. It was unchanged. She had left it exactly the way he had left it on the day he …
    She closed her eyes and pushed the thought away. It didn’t pay to think about it. She had trained herself to remember the good times, the years they had shared, the love. Not the terrible loneliness of the last months. Not the empty future stretching out before her.
    The boy had stopped his poking. He tossed the stick into the vacant block next door, turned and went back into the house. He moved slowly, and his shoulders drooped. Sadly, she shook her head.
    No, it wasn’t good.
    She sensed the movement beside her and looked down. Into a pair of huge, liquid-brown eyes.
    â€œAnd what do you want?” She smiled and stroked the young dog gently behind the ears. “You always seem to know, don’t you, Gretch?”
    The dog took a small step forward, laid its head in the old woman’s lap, licked her hand once and began to wag its tail, thumping it gently into the side of the chair.

3
VICTIM MATERIAL
    The phone rang just as I finished scraping the wasps’ nest from between the columns on the veranda. When we first moved into the house, there was a big nest up near the eaves, where the downpipe joins the gutter. Mum had a man get rid of that one, but the wasps kept coming back and finding new places to build. They were mud-wasps, the guy said. They built their nests out of mud and saliva. Hundreds of tiny round cells, where they laid their eggs and hatched their babies. You had to watch them he said, or you could get overrun. I reckoned he was just looking for more business. There’s a lot of competition in pest-controlling.
    Anyway, the phone call.
    It was Shane Thomas. He’s a jerk and a bully, and he was just phoning to remind me that he’d be waiting for me tomorrow.
    As if I could forget.
    I don’t know why he chose me to pick on; he had the whole school. There wasn’t a single kid in sixth grade who could come close to him in a fight.
    Or in the pool.
    He had one of those mothers. You know, huge and loud and pushy. The type that stands on the sideline at kids’ football matches yelling, “Kill him! Rip his arms off!” Stuff like that.
    Except that Shane Thomas never played football. He swam. She took him to the pool at six o’clock every morning and he trained for a couple of hours before school. It’s probably the reason why his shoulders looked like a scene from “Terminator 3”. Still, I could imagine her standing next to the pool at one of his swimming comps. What do you yell at swimming comps to scare the opposition? Surely not “Rip his arms off!” Whatever it is, I could imagine her yelling it. I suppose she was the reason he turned out to be the way he was. Someone had to take the blame.
    Lisdalia Petrantonio, the smartest kid in the whole school, maybe even the universe, said it was “genetic”. I asked her what that meant and she looked at me as if I’d just slithered out from under a large rock. I seem to have that effect on the girls up here. Funny, I never seemed to have any problem back home.
    So, what was I going to do?
    I