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  Damon stepped inside. ‘Hello,’ he called, and hello echoed to the top of the dome, circled and then echoed right back at us as loud as when he first said it.

  ‘Ssshhh, Damon,’ I shushed. ‘You’re not supposed…’

  We sat on a pew. There were candles in the candle stand and flowers in vases beside the altar, which was like a dolls’ palace made of marble.

  ‘You see that bowl thing?’ I whispered. ‘That’s holy water. You dip your finger in there and put it on your forehead.’

  ‘And if you’re a devil worshipper it burns you, right?’ Damon said.

  ‘Yep,’ I replied. ‘Or if you’re possessed.’

  ‘How come you know all this?’

  ‘Our class does religion every Thursday.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’ he asked.

  ‘Mum says church is a man-made institution. But some old people believe it.’

  ‘What’s through there?’ Damon pointed to a door behind the altar.

  ‘That’s where the priest comes in.’

  ‘I’m havin’ a look,’ he said. And with that he got up and walked down the centre aisle, then he turned and said, ‘Coming?’ as loud as day.

  I scampered to join him. ‘You have to whisper. Someone’ll hear us.’

  ‘No one’s here. It’s the holidays. Who goes to church on a holiday?’

  The door was small and wooden with flaking paint. Damon turned the handle a few times but it didn’t open.

  ‘Must be locked,’ I said, trying to sound disappointed.

  ‘I think it’s just stuck,’ said Damon, and he rammed his shoulder into the door.

  Whack!

  It was so loud, I thought there’s no way he’ll do that again.

  He did it again. Whack!

  And the door sprang open in a cloud of rust.

  ‘Huh. Maybe it was locked,’ said Damon. He stepped inside, and reluctantly I followed.

  Inside was a plain room with one little window, a desk and a wardrobe.

  ‘I wonder what’s in here,’ said Damon, with the same look in his eyes that he’d had when he pulled the louvre out. He yanked at the wardrobe door.

  I stood in the middle of the room willing him to stop, but knowing he wouldn’t. I prayed no one would come.

  When the wardrobe wouldn’t open he moved to the desk. On top of it was a Children’s Edition Bible, a notepad and a pen, and a mug with dregs of old coffee.

  ‘What’s the priest like?’ he asked.

  ‘I dunno. S’pose he’s all right.’

  Damon wrote ‘dickhead’ across the first page of the notepad. ‘He’ll probably vomit when he sees this,’ he said. He looked in the desk drawers. ‘This priest’s got lots of magazines.’ He held up an old Women’s Weekly.

  I heard a noise from outside, a scuffling: it was so quiet I might have imagined it. I wished I hadn’t made up the story about the security guard because now I wasn’t sure I trusted my ears.

  ‘Woah, look at all this stuff!’ Damon held up some cards with gold-painted edges. On one side was a picture of a guardian angel watching over a boy and girl playing near a cliff above a raging river. On the other side was a prayer. He put half of the cards in his pocket. Next he held up a handful of silvery religious medallions with saints on them. He said, ‘A shopkeeper might think they’re ten centses if we mix ’em in with other money.’

  The noise outside seemed to have stopped. Damon scooped the medallions into his shorts pockets with the cricket ball and the cards.

  For God’s sake stop stealing stuff, is what I was going to say, but before I could he said, ‘Hey look,’ and from under the desk he produced a bottle. ‘Wine.’ He twisted the top but it wouldn’t open.

  ‘Let’s take it! We can drink it later,’ I said, all the while thinking, What the hell are you saying? and also Now he can’t say you’re a chicken, and Maybe now he’ll stop and we can get the hell out of here.

  ‘Way ahead of you,’ he said and he put it under his shirt. Already I’d changed my mind. No, let’s leave it, was what I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. I edged the door open to check that the church was still empty.

  It wasn’t. Far back among the pews was an old woman in a blue cardigan, her head bowed. She wasn’t moving. Was she sleeping? Praying?

  ‘Is there another way out?’ whispered Damon.

  I shook my head.

  We waited. Eventually Damon said in a low voice, ‘Gunna have to go for it,’ and he began tiptoeing past the altar. I followed, my eyes staying on the old lady all the way to the door.

  Outside, we ran, leaving the church behind us like a gigantic iceberg. I almost cried with relief to be in daylight with the birds and the wind rustling the branches of the trees.

  ‘Did she see us?’

  ‘Nup,’ said Damon with no echo now. ‘Bet that’s the first time you’ve flogged something.’

  ‘Yep. I couldn’t do that again.’

  ‘Why not? You did okay.’

  It felt like the highest compliment I’d ever got. And I thought to myself, There’s no way anyone’s going to walk down this lane right now. Fifty steps and we’re free. And then I thought, Who’s the worst person that could turn up? A policeman? Mum? The priest?

  And then Father Lockhart appeared round the corner. He walked up to us, smiling a friendly smile, his face all cheeks, bald but for a few strands of comb-over. ‘Afternoon, boys,’ he said. Then he stood hands in pockets, rocking on his heels, waiting for a reply.

  I said, ‘Afternoon, Father.’

  Oh God, please don’t let him recognise me.

  I glanced at Damon, who had his hands behind his back.

  ‘What are you boys up to this fine day?’ said Father Lockhart with a laugh in his voice—he always seemed to find anything a kid said or did funny.

  ‘Just playing,’ said Damon and, fishing in his pocket, he produced the cricket ball and held it up as proof.

  ‘Six stitcher, ay? Can I see it?’ asked Father Lockhart.

  Damon chucked it to him and Father caught it. He put it to the light and examined its stitches.

  ‘Can you spin it?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ said Damon.

  ‘Can you bowl spin? You know, cricket.’

  ‘Oh. Nup.’

  Father Lockhart threw the ball up, flicking his wrist as he did, and the ball spun crazily. Then when it hit the ground it bounced almost sideways and he stopped it awkwardly with his foot. He bent to pick it up.

  ‘You have to put your fingers like this. See? I couldn’t do it either, but I practised every day then after a while it was easy. Perseverance is the thing, as in everything in life,’ he said, and he chucked the ball back to Damon. ‘You practise and soon you’ll be taking more wickets than you can poke a stick at. Anyway, on you go, boys.’

  ‘See you, Father’ I replied.

  He started whistling as he kept on towards the church, and we kept on up the lane.

  ‘Is he gone?’ asked Damon without looking back.

  I looked round. He was gone.

  ‘What did you do with the wine?’ I asked.

  Instead of answering, he ran back, his pockets jangling with the medallions. He stuck his head into the hedge, then returned with the bottle.

  ‘Let’s take it back,’ I whispered.

  Damon looked over his shoulder. ‘I think he went into the church. We can’t.’ He put the bottle under his shirt and we ran back through the school grounds, back across the oval, back along Shoe Street, with me thinking, That was robbery. Did we really just do that? Did I do that?

  But there was Damon beside me with the bottle: we’d done it all right. I was a robber. If Father had been a minute earlier we’d have been caught.

  ‘That was close,’ said Damon. ‘Fun though.’

  ‘You think it’s fun to be nearly caught stealing?’ It was an actual question, but he laughed. I was laughing too, but also thinking, Why am I laughing? What’s wrong with me?

  ‘Where
should we hide it?’ asked Damon.

  ‘The swamp?’ It was the first place that popped into my head.

  ‘Good one,’ said Damon, ‘Lucky Connor wasn’t here. He would’ve had pee all down his leg.’

  I laughed again. I wished Connor had heard that.

  We made our way along the track. By then it was about two and the sun was at its hottest and everything was slow and beaten down except one little bird that buzzed above and below the grass like a stone skipping on smooth water.

  At the clearing Damon hid the bottle in the reeds and stood back, checking the spot from different angles. No, he didn’t like it there. He retrieved it, wiped the mud off, and slid it up the drainpipe that protruded from the bank.

  ‘I can’t see that. Can you see it?’ he said.

  The drainpipe was big enough to crawl into—the thought made me shudder. I looked up it and couldn’t see anything except blackness.

  Damon dug a handful of medallions out of his pocket and put them with the wine, and then he put some prayer cards up there as well. ‘I got something else too,’ he said and he held out a closed fist. He opened it slowly, watching my reaction.

  It was a string of rosary beads. Each bead was gold. Each chain link was gold. The crucifix was glinting gold, and there was a red stone above Jesus’ head that didn’t look like plastic. Old, obviously, and valuable. Like something in a museum.

  ‘It was in the drawer. Be worth about five hundred dollars, I reckon. Think I’ll sell it on the black market.’

  I pictured pirates in a smoky bar with piles of gold coins on the table.

  ‘You can have half,’ he said. He was still watching my face, daring me to say he shouldn’t have taken them, expecting me to say it, getting ready to pounce on me when I did.

  I shrugged casually, carelessly.

  He said, ‘I do stuff like this all the time.’ Then he reached into the drainpipe and dropped the beads there with the other things.

  ‘The priest probably won’t even notice they’re gone. You know you can’t say anything about this to anyone, right?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Not even Connor. You’ve gotta swear.’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘Put your hand like this,’ he said, and he shaped my hand into a salute like the cub salute. ‘Say: “I swear on my mother’s grave I will never tell anyone about what we did today.”’

  I said it.

  He gave me one of the prayer cards. ‘This can be your share for now. Go home. I’ll see you round. And remember—no one.’

  I walked back along Shoe Street with the prayer card in my pocket. We’d done a terrible thing, I knew, an unforgiveable thing, a life-changingly earth-shatteringly awful thing. And a stupid thing—we’d be caught for sure. It seemed to me a bottle of wine might not be missed, but a gold rosary—Father would definitely notice that was gone. And he’d seen us.

  I stopped in my tracks as that sank in.

  I felt like throwing myself on the ground. Instead, I ran. Thankfully no one was on the street. Anyone who saw my face would’ve gone straight and called the police: ‘Don’t know what this kid’s done but it’s something bad. Murder, probably.’

  At home I hurried to my room and put the card in my undies drawer. Then I went into the lounge room and turned on the TV and watched Star Blazers and then Six of the Best and then Neighbours and then the news without taking my eyes off the TV as outside the sun went down and night set in.

  3

  THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

  ‘YOU STUPID IDIOT!’ said Darth Vader. ‘I can’t believe you just did that. You fool.’ He was yelling at a stormtrooper who’d dropped the Crystal of Doom.

  ‘Get him! Kill him!’ said Luke to Han Solo. They were trying to rescue the Crystal of Doom before it went into meltdown. ‘Han, you idiot. What are you doing?’ Luke was on edge because Han kept shooting his laser near the crystal despite knowing it contained enough nuclear power to explode the whole universe.

  I was on my bedroom floor producing/directing an epic Star Wars game, which also involved some dinosaurs and a few GI Joes. I was too old to play Star Wars; Connor called me a nutjob. But it took my mind off things when I was stressed.

  The stormtrooper dropped the Crystal of Doom again. Darth Vader choked him to death. Then Han Solo fired his laser one last time.

  ‘Noooo,’ yelled Luke.

  ‘Noooo,’ bellowed Darth Vader.

  Kbooooom!

  It was the biggest explosion ever. Lego was flying everywhere. A tyrannosaurus was blasted so high it hit the roof. Darth Vader and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker sailed across the room and into the wall.

  I sat back, stunned. ‘You know what this means?’ I said in Luke’s voice, though of course it wasn’t Luke talking: he was dead. Everyone was dead. The universe—the entire universe—had exploded. Just like that.

  Nothing was left but silence. And then into that silence came a purring, sinister voice: ‘Aren’t you the kid that stole the rosary beads from the church?’

  It was my conscience. Mostly my conscience sounded high-pitched and annoying, kind of like my own voice, but not always. The time I killed the goldfish it had sounded deep and ominous like Darth Vader. This time it sounded even deeper than that. Like a black panther, twice as big as me, or maybe four times as big. I imagined it sitting on my bedroom floor licking its paw with a what’s-it-to-you? attitude.

  My conscience-panther stood up, stalked around the room, then stopped in front of my cupboard, which was half hang-up section and half drawers, and nuzzled my undies drawer. ‘What’s in here, I wonder. Something stolen, perhaps?’ it said, like it thought I’d forgotten.

  Mum hadn’t hassled me about breakfast, it being both a Saturday and the school holidays. I got back into bed with the intention of staying there all day. I took Darth Vader and a dinosaur with me but couldn’t get another game going. It didn’t help that Boba Fett, my favourite, was missing. If Oliver West hadn’t been in Ingham I could have told him about the universe exploding, which struck me as a weird occurrence because I was supposed to be in charge of the game but I totally hadn’t seen it coming. Probably it meant something, like dreams mean things: the universe ended in your Star Wars game? That means great change is coming, or, You’re going to travel, or, You’re totally screwed.

  I could fake that I was sick. I’d done that before, to get out of school.

  I was the kind of kid who felt guilty a lot; for instance, I could work up a fair guilt just eating the last chip. But this was different. This guilty was big and black and purring and was starting to look hungry.

  I was getting hungry too, so I crept out to the kitchen, with my conscience-panther padding along behind me.

  Connor had left his breakfast bowl on the kitchen table and the milk sweating on the sideboard. The clock radio said quarter past ten. The phone was off the hook, which meant Mum was sleeping in; I put it back on its hook and then had some Weetbix. I wondered whether Damon was feeling guilty, and decided that he probably wasn’t.

  I went downstairs and listened at Connor’s bedroom door with my ear pressed against the ‘Connor’s Room—Keep Out’ sign. Connor and I used to sleep in the same room in bunks, but after Christmas Mum had cleared out the storage room and she and Connor painted it, and now it was his room and I had the bunks to myself. So it was even easier for him to avoid me. I knew he was in there: it was too quiet.

  I knocked, gently.

  No answer.

  ‘Connor?’

  Nothing.

  I went back to bed and stared at the empty bunk above me, with the foam bulging through the springs in diamond shapes. My bed creaked: the panther had followed me; had curled up at my feet; was watching me. It glanced at my undies draw. Yes, I know, I thought. What do you want me to do about it? It looked away as if no longer interested. Thanks. You’re a big help.

  I blinked a few hard blinks. Okay, Aaron, you’ve stolen some rosary beads from a priest. What now? I’d dug a hole fo
r myself so deep it had bats and stalagmites and stalactites and ponds with fish that didn’t have eyes, but I was bloody well going to find myself a way out of it.

  After half an hour of thinking, the only ‘way out’ I’d come up with was to hope no one would notice anything was missing and that it would all blow over.

  Mum was up. I could hear her banging around in the kitchen.

  After a while she called out, ‘Lunch is ready.’

  I took a deep breath and got out of bed.

  Mum was at the sink and Connor was at the kitchen table with a book in front of his face when I strolled in.

  ‘Good morning’ I said, trying to sound breezy, but it came out like I was an alien in disguise and good morning were the first words I’d ever spoken.

  ‘Morning,’ said Mum. She was in her pub uniform. She smelled of cigarettes, even though she was supposed to have given up.

  She’d made ham sandwiches for us and cheese and lettuce sandwiches for herself—she was trialling vegetarianism. She said, ‘Don’t think I’m doing this every day. You’re old enough to make yourselves a sandwich. I’m gunna be working a lot this week, and when I’m not here I don’t want you to just watch TV. Why don’t you play with your Monopoly game, Aaron?’

  I shrugged. She’d got it from Vinnies. The lid was sticky-taped together and some of the cards were missing. And, anyway, it required at least one other person to play against.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked Connor.

  He finished chewing. ‘None of your biz.’

  ‘Yeah, where’ve you been?’ said Mum from behind her little make-up mirror.

  Connor sighed. ‘I was in my room, of course. Reading.’

  Mum pulled her hair into a ponytail. ‘Well, I want you two to play together this arvo,’ she said as she picked up her bag and rushed down the front stairs.

  As soon as she was gone Connor skulked off to his room and I was by myself again. So far so good.

  Later, I was watching TV when I heard a motorbike revving up the driveway, which meant Mum had finished work early and hitched a lift back with Bernie.