Sometimes, though, there was a mild disdain, a sense of why-the-hell-would-you-want-to-leave? It was the men who did it best, especially the older ones, with their ripe faces, and an eye clenched tight at the sun. The words came out lopsided:
“So you’re goin’ the city, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir? You’re not fuckin’ there yet!”
“Shit—sorry.”
“Well, just don’t let ’em turn you into an arsehole, all right?”
“Say again?”
“You ’eard me….Don’t let ’em change y’ like they change every other bastard who leaves. Never forget where y’ from, right?”
“Right.”
“Or what y’ are.”
“Okay.”
Clearly, Michael Dunbar was from Featherton, and he was a bastard, but potentially an arsehole. The thing is, no one ever said, “And don’t do anything that’ll earn you a nickname like Murderer.”
It was a big world out there, and the possibilities were endless.
* * *
—
The day the results came in, Christmas holidays, Abbey told him she’d stood by the letterbox. He almost could have painted it:
The mass of empty sky.
A hand on her hip.
She’d baked in the sun for twenty minutes before she went back for a lawn chair and a beach umbrella, a thousand miles from the sea. Then for a cooler, and some Icy Poles; God, she had to get out of here.
In town, Michael was hurling bricks up to a guy on a scaffold who was hurling bricks up to another guy. Somewhere, much higher, someone was laying those bricks, and a new pub was going up: for miners, farmers and minors.
At lunch, he walked home and saw his future, folded up, poking out, in the cylinder reserved for the junk mail.
Ignoring the omen, he opened it. He smiled.
When he phoned Abbey, she was panting from running up the path. “I’m still waiting! Bloody town wants to keep me here an extra hour or two, I reckon, just to punish me.”
Later, though, at the job, she’d appeared and stood behind him, and he’d glanced back and dropped his bricks, one each side. He faced her fully. “Well?”
She nodded.
She laughed and so did Michael, until the voice flew down, between them.
“Oi, Dunbar, y’ useless prick! Where are me Goddamn bricks?!”
Abbey, ever-present, called back.
“Poetry!”
She grinned, and left.