January in Wagga. A belt on a hook, a jam sponge no one lights, Elvis on the telly, the river pulling like a promise. A boy learns to keep quiet, then meets a friend who does not.
The rest of 1973 will unfold here over the coming months. If you want the whole story now, you can buy the book today.
For extra context, you will find below two brief companions to this chapter, a guide to the Australian details and a history note on the headlines of January 1973.
⚠️ This work contains domestic and family violence, coercive control, and a child’s fear; please read with care and step away if needed. ❤️Reader Care
The morning light sliced in under the door, hitting the edge of Christian’s mattress like a blade. Summer made the house meaner. The heat settled on things and held them there. Sweat behind his knees, the itch of a dry sheet, the sour tang of breath and vinyl. Outside, a magpie gurgled through the stillness. Inside, the house waited.
He stared at the ceiling for a while. Counted the cracks. Thought about getting up, but didn’t. It was his birthday. Thirteen. The word tasted like a question. He didn’t expect anything, not cake, not presents. Not even a card. Still, a small, stupid hope fluttered low in his chest like a trapped moth.
The floorboards creaked in the hallway. Maggie’s footsteps, soft, deliberate. She paused outside his door, then moved on. The kettle clicked on. A cupboard opened, closed. The clink of a spoon. The fridge hissed. Familiar choreography. She wouldn’t knock. She never did anymore.
His room was barely a room. A plastic milk crate served as a bookshelf. His school shirts, faded blue, hung on a single wire hanger hooked to a nail. The window faced a paling fence and a neighbour’s lemon tree, whose branches never quite reached far enough to matter. The walls were the colour of old milk.
He got up when the cicadas started. Peeled off his shirt, pulled on shorts. In the bathroom, the door wouldn’t shut properly. He pissed with one foot bracing it closed, just in case. Wayne hated that. “Don’t act like you’ve got secrets, boy,” he’d said once. Christian had been ten.
At the kitchen table, Maggie was smoothing margarine onto toast with the back of a spoon. No “Happy Birthday.” Just a glance, and the quiet offer of a slice on the edge of a cracked plate.
He sat. Ate. Said nothing.
Wayne’s chair sat empty, but the air already held him. That stale trace of tobacco, sweat, and masculine disapproval. Christian could feel it even when he wasn’t in the room, like gravity.
There was a belt kept on the hallway hook. Wayne had cleaned it recently, the buckle shone in the morning light.
Maggie lit a cigarette with hands that didn’t tremble but wanted to. She looked at the wall clock like it might speak. Outside, the lawn browned under the heat.
“You can go out if you want,” she said finally, voice thin as steam.
He nodded. He would. Library maybe. The river, if it wasn’t choked with kids. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Before he left, he stood at the hallway mirror and looked at himself. Wiry hair. Freckles. That stupid open face that never seemed to harden, no matter how hard he tried. His mouth didn’t look like it belonged to someone worth listening to.
He wasn’t born quiet. He learned it.
Christian stepped out into the heat, shirt already sticking to his back. The screen door snapped behind him with a hollow clang, too loud, and his body tensed. The sound echoed in his chest like a warning. He didn’t look back.
The yard was more dust than anything else. A few stubborn weeds clung to the base of the fence. The sun poured down in sheets. Nothing moved but the flies.
He kept to the footpath, head low. Walked past the neighbours’ houses with their heat-warped fences and pink hydrangeas half-dead in terracotta pots. Somewhere, a radio played Johnny Farnham’s “Rock Me Baby.” Farther off, someone cursed at a mower.
He didn’t know where he was going, not really. The library was closed until ten. The river would be crowded. He wasn’t ready for either. So, he walked. Past the corner milk bar, past the old woman who sat on her porch with a hand fan and a dish of milk for the cats. She didn’t wave. He didn’t either.
The heat settled in his shoes. He felt it rise through his soles, softening the rubber. His shirt clung like another skin. A stone skittered underfoot and disappeared into a drain.
He stopped at a bus bench outside the post office. Sat. Let the sun beat on the top of his knees. Watched a truck pass. The tray held a rusted fridge and a dog that didn’t bark.
From his pocket, he pulled a scrap of newsprint, yesterday’s headline, torn from the paper bin behind the house. “America to Exit Vietnam by Month’s End.” He read it again, the words as dry and flat as the air. He liked headlines. They were clean. Decisive. No room for pretending.
A breeze came and went. Not enough to matter.
He sat there a while longer. Let the stillness take him. The sun peeled him quiet. Time moved without shape.
When he finally stood, his legs were stiff. He folded the headline, slipped it back into his pocket like it might mean something someday.
And walked home. Slowly. Because there was nothing else.
The lounge room smelled like smoke and floor polish. Wayne sat in his usual spot, shorts riding up, a beer balanced on his belly. Maggie stood at the kitchen pass, half-watching the telly through the flyscreen door. The ceiling fan squeaked with each rotation. It was too hot to breathe properly.
On the counter sat a small sponge cake. Lopsided. One candle, unlit. No writing. Just icing sugar dusted over the top like it was trying not to be seen.
Christian had found it that afternoon, covered loosely with a chipped bowl. Maggie hadn’t said anything, just nodded at it once, barely. There was no song, no card. Just the quiet fact of it, like a message passed under the door.
He hadn’t touched it.
Now, Aloha from Hawaii filled the room. Elvis in white, sequins catching the light like rain. The sound cut in and out on the TV, old aerial, but Wayne didn’t seem to mind. He tapped a beer can on his thigh and muttered something about showmanship.
Christian sat on the floor, cross-legged near the doorway. Not close enough to count as watching. Not far enough to be accused of sulking.
“Look at that git,” Wayne snorted. “Prancing around like he’s still twenty.” He raised the can to his lips, eyes not leaving the screen. “Still, can’t knock the voice.”
Maggie lit a cigarette and stood beside the sink, her shoulders curved in. She wore her navy skirt and a blouse with a tea stain near the hem. Her hair had come loose. She looked like she wanted to apologise, but didn’t know what for.
Christian watched Elvis sing about a hunk of burning love. He wondered how anyone could shout something like that in front of the whole world and not get swallowed by it.
Wayne belched. “What a bloody joke.”
The cake sat untouched in the dark corner of the kitchen. The single candle leaned slightly left.
“Did you want—?” Maggie started, voice soft, uncertain.
Wayne waved her off without looking. “I’m not eating sugar this late. Christ.”
She flinched. Christian didn’t move.
Maggie turned, opened a drawer, and closed it again. “Christian,” she said, quieter now, “if you want some before bed…”
He shook his head. Not unkindly. Just no.
Wayne laughed at something on the screen. “Thirteen, eh? Time you toughened up, boy.”
Christian didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. That was part of the rule.
The concert ended with a swell of applause that filled the room like static. Then silence.
Wayne stood, joints cracking. “Turn that off,” he muttered to no one in particular. “Bloody circus.” He walked down the hall, and the air changed.
Maggie stood still for a long moment. Then she flicked off the telly, stubbed her smoke into the tin tray, and opened the fridge.
Christian waited. Then rose.
In the kitchen, he paused beside the cake. Looked at it.
“It’s got jam in the middle,” Maggie said, eyes on the fridge. “Your Nan used to make it that way.”
He nodded. Still didn’t touch it.
Then he walked to bed, the candle’s slanting shadow stretching across the linoleum behind him.
He dreamed of a man with green eyes and eucalyptus on his skin.
They sat beneath a ghost gum that bowed toward the Murrumbidgee. The bark peeled in long ribbons. The man, his father, not Wayne, had a paperback in one hand, spine split and soft from use. He was reading, voice low and calm, like the river had slowed to listen. Christian didn’t understand the words, but it didn’t matter. The sound of them filled something.
He asked the man a question, maybe Do I make you proud? or Do you see me? But the words wouldn’t come. His mouth moved. The man only smiled and turned the page.
Then the wind shifted. And Christian woke.
The ceiling fan ticked overhead, slow and uneven. Light spilled around the edges of the blind, too bright already. He lay still, heart heavy with the ache of something half-remembered and too beautiful to be true. It was always like that. These dreams left him hollowed and greedy, the echo of love, not the thing itself.
In the hallway, the belt was gone. Wayne must’ve already left for work.
He padded into the kitchen barefoot. The linoleum was sticky near the fridge. Maggie had gone too, a scrap of notepaper tucked under the sugar bowl read Back before lunch. Don’t stay out too long. — Mum.
The cake sat where it had been the night before. Still uncovered. The candle hadn’t burned. Still didn’t. The sugar on top had drawn flies overnight, two slow ones that circled and landed, unbothered.
Christian waved them off and cut a slice. Ate it over the sink with the tap dripping beside him. The sponge was dry. The jam too sweet. But he chewed slowly, methodically, like eating might fill some other kind of hunger. One Maggie didn’t know how to feed.
He thought about his real dad. Daniel Tambor. A name, a photo once glimpsed, a story stitched together from silences. “He had your eyes,” Maggie had said once, then never again. Christian remembered that, the way her voice had caught. The way she’d busied her hands with tea towels and never answered his follow-up.
He imagined the man reading poetry. Holding books with callused hands. Fixing things. Saying nothing when Christian cried, but staying. Just staying.
When the cake was gone, he washed the plate, dried it, and returned it to the cupboard. He didn’t touch the rest. The candle he left standing.
Outside, the heat hit like a slap. The streets shimmered. A whine of cicadas threaded through the air like static. Christian walked with his head down, fingers twitching in his pockets. Past the petrol station, the bakery, the Big Wheel Coffee Shop with its air con fogging up the windows. A man leaned against the arcade wall, smoking. Christian didn’t look at him.
At the Civic Centre, he paused. The library was open now, just, and the doors slid back with a hydraulic sigh. Inside, the air changed.
He loved that moment: the sudden hush. The paper-smell. The difference.
He didn’t go to the front desk. Mrs. O’Connell was sorting returns with her lips pursed. She nodded at him without speaking. He liked her for that. She didn’t ask why he came every other day. She didn’t call him “love” or “dear” or “quiet little thing,” like Mrs. Fletcher at school. She just let him be.
He made his way past Fiction, past the shelves with torn paperbacks and spines held together with tape, to the Non-Fiction row he’d claimed for himself. Politics. Protest. Old wars and ones still happening. He traced his finger down the call numbers. Stopped at a book about Vietnam. A new arrival. He checked the date, 1972. Fresh enough. He tucked it under his arm.
Next, he moved to Poetry. He never borrowed those. Just read them in place, like prayers. Some of the titles he knew by heart now, Ariel, The Pillars and the Sky, Four Quartets. He didn’t always understand them, but that wasn’t the point.
He took The Fire and the Eye and walked it to his corner, the far back, past the Local History display. There was a beanbag that had long since flattened, but it still cradled his spine the way nothing else did.
He opened the poetry book and let his eyes blur. Words moved across the page like smoke. Something about fire as hunger. About silence that sings. He copied one line into his notebook. Just one.
From the staffroom, a kettle clicked off. A mug clinked on tile. Someone laughed, faint and short.
The light above him buzzed, and he didn’t mind.
He was where he needed to be.
By late morning, the library grew louder, not with noise, but with heat. The cool air thinned. A toddler squealed near the picture books. Someone slammed a reference drawer too hard. Christian slipped the poetry volume back in place, touched the spine once for good measure, and left without borrowing.
The walk to the river was long and hot. He didn’t rush it. Took the back streets, crossed uneven footpaths, passed the old fence behind the RSL where lizards basked in strips of sun. The cicadas were louder here, like the sound lived in the air itself.
By the time he reached the levee, the sky was white-hot. The bush curled at the edges, thirsty. He took the slope slowly, dust clinging to his calves, and emerged onto the scrubby stretch of Wagga Beach, no sand, not really, just river grit and old footprints.
The Murrumbidgee was high from the rains. It moved slow, wide, dark with silt. Kids shrieked farther down where the bank shallowed. Christian veered the other way, to the bend near the fig tree, where the water ran quieter.
He sat. Pulled off his shoes. Let his toes dig into the warm dirt. The breeze off the water smelled of algae and something older, bark, sweat, rust.
That’s when he saw her.
A girl, maybe his age, waded out from the reeds, bare feet and rolled-up shorts. Hair dark with water, face turned to the sky like she owned it. She moved without hesitation, the way boys did when they thought no one was watching.
Christian stiffened, unsure whether to stay or go. She spotted him but didn’t startle. Just tilted her head, curious. Then kept walking.
Behind her, a man stood with his arms crossed, Army haircut, pressed shirt, boots even in the heat. He wasn’t watching Christian. Just scanning the bank like a sentry. His shadow fell long beside a towel and a pair of women’s sandals that didn’t belong to either of them.
The girl reached the shallows and kicked at the water. “You just gonna sit there like a tree stump?”
Christian blinked. Realised she was talking to him. She grinned, not mocking. Just direct.
He shrugged. “It’s not that deep.”
“Only if you’ve got chicken feet,” she said, and splashed a step closer. Her skin was freckled, her elbows sharp. She didn’t look like she belonged in Wagga.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
He hesitated.
She waited. Not impatient.
“Christian.”
“I’m Mary.” She pushed wet hair out of her face. “We just moved. Army transfer.”
He nodded, like that explained everything.
“You swim?” she asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Well, I swim always.” She looked back at the man, then returned her gaze to Christian. “That’s my dad. He’s strict, but he lets me roam. Just don’t tell him if I say rude words.”
Christian almost smiled.
She flopped onto the bank beside him like they’d always sat this way. No edge, no permission asked. The air sagged with warmth, and for the first time that day, Christian didn’t feel like he had to brace against it.
The heat had broken overnight, not gone, just less cruel. Christian woke early, pulled on the same shorts from yesterday, and slipped out while the house was still stretching into silence. Maggie’s snores hummed from behind her half-shut door. Wayne was already gone, or hadn’t come home. The hallway felt briefly neutral. No warning in the walls.
At the library, he took the newspaper first. The Daily Advertiser was curled on the rack, crisp with heat. He smoothed it flat on the reading desk by the window, elbows tucked in, like always.
"U.S. Supreme Court Legalises Abortion: Historic Roe v. Wade Ruling" the headline read. Underneath, black-and-white photos of protesters. Some cheering. Some shaking fists. A quote from Justice Blackmun about privacy. Christian read the words twice. The idea of choice caught in his throat like a splinter.
He didn’t fully understand the law. But the notion, that a person might decide something about their own body, and not be punished, felt dangerous. Holy, almost.
He copied a sentence into his notebook.
“The right to be left alone is the beginning of all freedom.”
Below it, he scrawled one word: someday.
Afterward, he drifted back to poetry. Touched the spine of a familiar volume. Picked one at random and read a line about rain being a memory, not weather. He closed the book softly and didn’t take it with him. He liked leaving the words there, like a promise to come back.
By early afternoon, the heat returned in earnest. The kind that pressed on your ribs. He walked to the river again, half-hoping, half-dreading.
She was there.
Mary.
She was already in the water, splashing toward the deeper bend. Her laughter cut through the cicada buzz, wild, unashamed. Christian hesitated at the edge of the tree line, watching.
Then she spotted him.
“Well?” she shouted, arms out. “You just gonna stand there like the world’s ending?”
He stepped forward, awkward, but grinning now. “Maybe it is.”
“Then you better run before it does!”
And he did. Kicked off his shoes. Took the bank at a run and splashed in, too cold and too fast. She shrieked, not in fear, but joy, and they collided, half-swimming, half-splashing, river water stinging their eyes. He forgot to be careful. He forgot to watch himself. He just was.
They played until the sun dipped lower and Mary’s father called out once, just her name, calm but commanding.
They waded back to shore, dripping, breathless.
“Can we walk home, Dad?” Mary asked, wringing her braid.
Sergeant Daley glanced at Christian, then back to her. “So long as you don’t dawdle.”
“We won’t,” she answered. “Promise.”
He nodded once. Gave Christian a long look, not unkind. Then turned toward the car.
They walked the edge of the footpath, shoes in hand. Damp footprints fading behind them.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Mary said eventually.
“I didn’t either.”
They didn’t talk much after that. Just walked. A breeze rose. A bird shrieked from somewhere deep in the gums. When they reached Christian’s street, Mary paused.
“We’re only two blocks over,” she said. “That’s lucky.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him. Not through him. Not around him. At him.
Then she grinned, big and sudden. “School’s gonna be boring as batshit.”
Christian laughed before he meant to. It escaped him, raw and bright.
She waved once and turned. He watched her go.
When he reached his front gate, he realised something had shifted, not in the street, or the weather, or even in Mary.
In him.
The last week of January pressed down like a held breath.
School would start in seven days. Christian knew the date, February first, not because anyone had said it aloud, but because the dread curled closer with each morning. Stationery lists. Haircuts. Wayne’s muttered threat about “no more bludging.” The long exhale of summer was ending.
He felt it in his limbs, the slack of them shrinking back into shape. His body had been loose these past weeks, almost boyish again. But now it started bracing. Shoulders pulled in. Breath shortened. Like he was waiting to be scolded for something he hadn’t done yet.
That night, he lay on top of the sheets, shirtless, limbs sticky against the mattress. The fan ticked overhead, a weak metronome. Outside, the world hummed: cicadas, the thrum of a car two streets over, the bark of a dog unsettled by nothing.
The open window let in heat, not air. Moonlight spilled across the milk crate beside his bed, catching the corner of his notebook. He reached for it, thumbed through earlier pages, copied poems, clippings, words he wasn’t ready to say aloud.
He stopped at today’s entry. The quote about choice. About freedom.
“The right to be left alone.”
He thought of Roe v. Wade again, of the women in the photos, some smiling, some yelling, some crying. How none of them looked afraid to be seen. He tried to picture himself among them, holding a sign. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
A breeze finally stirred. It moved the curtain just slightly, enough to shift the moonlight. Christian pressed the notebook flat and wrote one line beneath the quote.
“I don’t want to be brave. I want to be left alone. But not always.”
He stared at it.
Then he turned the page, not to forget it, just to rest.
The image of Mary flashed again, her wet braid, her loud laugh, the way she’d walked beside him like it was the most natural thing in the world. Not precious. Not dramatic. Just true.
He wondered if she’d say hi at school. If she’d sit near him. If she’d defend him, like she might.
He didn’t expect it.
But the idea lived somewhere in him now. Not hope, exactly. Just the shape of it.
The fan groaned into its next rotation. A car backfired. The smell of river mud still lingered on his skin.
He didn’t sleep for hours.
But he did close his eyes.
He was back at the river. But it wasn’t the river.
The water shimmered dark and gold, like oil slick under moonlight. The sky above it pulsed, green, violet, then black again. He stood barefoot on the bank, and the dirt moved. Shifted like breath. Something hummed underneath.
Mary was there.
She stood in the water up to her knees, dress soaked and clinging like second skin. Her arms were outstretched, but she wasn’t calling him. Just waiting.
He stepped toward her.
The river whispered. Not words. Just sound that wanted to be words.
Mary tilted her head. “You coming, Christian?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came.
“Don’t be scared,” she said, smiling. “It’s only water.”
He stepped in.
The current wasn’t cold. It was warm, thick, like blood. It pulled at his calves. Mary laughed, not at him, just because she could. Her eyes were gold.
She reached out, and he took her hand.
Then the water rose.
Up to his ribs. Then his chest. Then his neck. Mary was still smiling. Then…
She changed.
Her face shifted, not all at once, but in pieces. Her eyes darkened, mouth grew sharper. Her braid unravelled into short curls. Her shoulders squared. Her voice dropped half an octave.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she, he, said.
Christian blinked.
The boy standing in the river held his hand the same way Mary had. But he was not Mary. His grip was firmer. His smile, softer.
Christian tried to let go. He couldn’t.
The boy leaned in close. “You knew.”
Christian tried to speak. “No,” he said, but it sounded like yes.
The river turned red.
Not blood, not quite. But the colour of shame. The colour of too much truth, too fast.
The boy leaned closer still. “You want this.”
“I don’t—”
“You do.”
And then Christian was alone.
The river was dry. Cracked. The trees were on fire. The boy was gone. Mary was gone. The world pulsed like a wound.
He was naked.
Not in body, in knowing.
The notebook lay open on the ground beside him, soaked through. The pages blurred. His words unreadable.
Then a sound.
A door opening. A belt unbuckling. The rush of air before…
He woke with a gasp.
The ceiling fan spun slow and blind above him. His skin was damp. The pillow stuck to his cheek.
Outside, the first bird of morning cried out. Too early.
He lay still, breath shallow, heart hammering. The dream folded in on itself like paper in water, gone, but still staining.
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