When I originally wrote this chapter, we'd FINALLY discovered Kane's Dad's "real" name so I thought I'd do an explanation for him being called Richie.
chapter 12
Richard Augustus Phillips.
Richie Phillips never got over the embarrassment of his middle name. It was a long standing family tradition for the eldest son to inherit the name Augustus. Richie's Dad Gus told six-year-old Richie he should just be ------- grateful he got Richard as a first name, smashed his fist into his face, and went down the pub to get blotto. It was also a long standing family tradition to drink hard and answer annoying questions with your fists.
What made it even worse was, soon as he realised how much Richie loathed his middle name, his younger brother took great delight in yelling O, Augustuuus! in a high-pitched voice, preferably when Richie's mates were around to snigger. Didn't matter how many times Richie bashed him for it, they hated each other and Joe wasn't going to miss an opportunity like this!
Things changed though when Joe married Rose. She had a steadying effect on him and, to his father's and Richie's disgust, he got honest work and wasn't interested anymore in the "family business". And it was a long time ago since he'd screeched O Augustuuus for the fun of seeing Richie do his block but the damage was already done. Some of Richie's mates had begun nicknaming him Augustus, swiftly changed to Gus when they discovered his fists packed one helluva punch. Gus it was when he met beautiful, volatile Diane, who could pack one helluva punch herself. Their relationship was far removed from Joe and Rose's calm. From the very first moment, it was explosive, exciting, drink-fuelled.
"Gus sounds like a ------- cat!" Di said. "I prefer Richie."
So he was Gus to folk who'd known him all his life and Richie to anyone who knew him after he married Diane. It was one of the few things Di got her own way about before he tamed her.
Scott Augustus Phillips.
Richie got a sadistic thrill when he inflicted the hated name on his first born son. Scotty kept quiet about his middle name. Kane would have been astounded to learn he even had one. Like his father and his grandfather before him, there were heaps of things Scotty preferred to keep quiet about.
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"I could nick one from the shop," Kane suggested.
"Nick what?" Scotty asked impatiently, squishing Kane's school clothes into his school bag.
It was a complete mystery why everything was stained in sand. Lucky he'd thought of buying him a cheap new top and shorts from the beach shop so no one got suspicious though he resented having to spend his own cash. He hoped they didn't ask about his kid bro's old trainers, these guys were meant to be seriously rich.
"A pear. Or if I didn't get that I could nick an orange or an apple, no worries." Kane was anxious to help after all Scotty' kindness. He'd just got some new clobber and been told he was going to a kids' party. It was the last thing he'd expected when he'd fronted up to meet him like Scotty had told him to do or he'd dob him in to Dad for wagging school.
Dry bread and cake, chocolate, four small green apples that had fallen round the tree planted behind the Yabbie Creek war memorial, on which he'd sat kicking his heels till Scott showed, nothing had satisfied his hunger. And he was hot and tired as well as hungry. Scotty's news about the party had startled him. His head was full of what there might be to eat and he'd hadn't been paying too much attention.
Scotty's eyes flashed. "Have you listened to a ------- word I said, drongo?"
"Yeh! I say I'm Wills Bennett and the pear had to shoot through."
"The au pair, ya ------- dill, and ya've come for the ------- party!"
"I say I've come for a party or the pear's gotta go."
"Are you being deliberately thick?"
Kane blinked back sooky tears as his brother's voice rose to danger level. He'd been trying his best to remember but he always got mixed up when Scotty or Dad did their block because that inevitably meant another bashing.
Scott fought back the strong urge to shake his kid bro till his teeth rattled. There were heaps of people around and they might interfere. Jeez, though, he deserved their sympathy if only they knew! He'd spent ages thinking this one out. His first big job. His first lucky break.
He'd heard the Bennett family were away on holiday and he'd been looking out for open windows when the shiny silver envelope carelessly dropped on the path caught his eye. Scott had hoped it was a birthday card containing cash and at first he was disappointed to find it was nothing more than a kids party invitation. Then the plan hit him so suddenly that he was almost dizzy with excitement! He read the name again. Alex King. Scotty made it his business to keep his ears close to the ground so he knew exactly who that was. The little American kid. His Mum was dead and his Dad, a wealthy jeweller, spoilt him rotten to make up for it.
They were renting a huge house, once used as a small hotel, in Yabbie Creek for a month to do with his Dad's work but the month was up and Danny King had invited all the local kids of Alex's age to a leaving party for six-year-old Alex. Including Wills. His family had very recently moved to Yabbie Creek and nobody had even seen him yet but they'd certainly heard about him. Mr and Mrs Bennett had been dirt poor till they won the lotto and now they'd decided little Billy Bennett should have an au pair, a private education and be called Wills just like Princess Di's little boy in England. Small for his age, Kane could easily pass for being a year younger and he could do the working class accent, no worries. And imagine all the stuff he'd have the opportunity to nick!
If only, though, he had the brains Scotty had...
Scott put his arm round Kane's neck, smiling sweetly, the picture of brotherly love. He spoke softly.
"I'm runnin' through it just one more time. Ya rock up with the invite and say ya Wills Bennett and the au pair dropped ya off. Ya get inside and nick whatever ya can. There won't be no second chances. You stuff up...and I'll kill ya."
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"Ya goin' somewhere?" Scott asked smugly, blocking their way out the front door.
His earlier visits to Summer Bay had paid off. He'd been careful to circle the outside of the little seaside town and talk only to newcomers, but people were as helpful as Summer Bay folk had always been. He'd learned so much. Like where Kane worked, what his wife and kid were called, how isolated was the long, winding country lane where the Phillips house stood. How isolated. He looked down at them, grinning.
"Don't think for one second I'm afraid of you. Hurt us and you'll have Kane to answer to," Kirsty replied levelly.
Startling him because she was unafraid. Though she held her small son's hand, frozen to the spot, the rain and wind blowing in through the open door, knowing he was so very much stronger than herself.
It wasn't what he expected. It wasn't how it should be. So his grin grew wider. "Is that right? You want me to make ya scared then? Like what if I was to tell ya ya've got Buckleys of Kane rockin' up? Oh, he ain't dead. He ain't gonna cark it. Maybe. But only if ya very, very good and do what I tell ya."
He waited, gloating, for the power to shift back in his favour. Waited for her to beg. But she didn't.
Her eyes flickered as if she blinked back tears. Her voice trembled but only a fraction. "We had a photo," she said.
"What?"
She had him totally confused. By now he should have slapped her some, maybe thrown the brat around, let her know he meant business. Why hadn't he?
Kirsty remembered Kane's older brother vaguely. She'd seen him only twice, years ago, once when he'd come into the school playground to talk to Kane, the second time from a distance when he was being bundled into a police car. But a picture flashed into her mind. The grinning kid eating the ice popsicle. Before his and Kane's world fell apart.
"A photo of you and Kane, your Mum and Dad. Standing by the window and there were rose bushes in the garden. And I don't know why...I don't know why I'm telling you this."
A single tear, silver in the moonlight, trickled down her cheek. Yet not of fear. Tears of love and concern for her husband and kid. Tears of anger and helplessness. But not fear. Like she knew. But that was impossible because nobody knew. Nobody knew Scott had kept the pictures.
Not that there were many. One of himself and Kane when they were very, very young, posed sitting on a table, Scott with his arms wrapped protectively round his baby bro so that he didn't fall back. A school photo, probably the only one his parents ever paid for or kept, taken shortly after he'd started school, his class sitting outside on some hot sunny day and pink petals on the grass near the chick with the long blonde hair that he'd always liked. Mum and Dad's wedding day in the neat, polished registry office, Mum looking stunning, smiling broadly, holding a posy of flowers and her hair piled up high, Dad wearing a suit, and looking proud and smart and handsome.
Because they were adorning the walls of the living room in their cracked, dusty frames, they were the only pictures to escape the shed fire when Mum had thrown photos and her wedding dress into a box, struggling to stay steady with the matches, pausing momentarily to raise the bottle of whiskey to her lips. And even the wedding picture was burnt at one corner, from the day Dad had pulled out the photo and put a lighted cigarette to it. Scotty remembered Mum furiously snatching it from him and putting out the flame before she threw a shoe that caught Dad square on the mouth, in the days before she gave up fighting back. He remembered Kane, maybe three years old, trapped in their crossfire, his eyes wide and terrified, looking to Scott for protection, in the days before Scott gave up protecting. And he remembered well the photo she was talking about.
He had grabbed Kane by the scruff of the neck, almost lifting him, and they had knocked against the television set as they ran, making the picture frame fall face downwards to the floor, and when they'd crept back home, hours later, when Dad was sleeping off the drink, and Mum sat sobbing and wailing, oblivious to all around her, the photo still lay face down, somehow intact despite the chaos surrounding it.
"Look, I told ya, ya won't get hurt if ya good," he said gruffly. "All you haveta do is tell me where he's put the stash."
"The stash...?" Kirsty asked blankly.
"You heard. Come on, come on, I ain't got all night!"
"I don't know what you're talking about." Beside her, Jamie had begun to sob and she squeezed his hand.
Scott's face darkened. He'd been patient long enough.
"Don't play games with me, sweetheart," he warned in the low, menacing voice he always used before he doled out a bashing.
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Kane was just two years older than the American kid, but it might as well have been twenty years. He watched in amazement as Alex threw another hissy fit, hurling the remote control car against the wall and sending the remote flying after it. Jeez, Dad would've really laid into him for that!
But Alex's Dad was pleading with him, promising him a bigger, better car when they got back to the States, which made Alex scream all the more. The chick who'd been hired to care for Alex was busy trying to look after all the other kids, which was a pity, thought Kane, observing like a miniature adult, she never once needed to yell or bribe yet Alex was heaps better behaved when he was with her.
Alex's nanny had thick black hair and olive skin and Scott had said she was Spanish or Italian or Portuguese or something (though she could have been from Mars for all Scotty cared). She hadn't understood Kane's garbled account of apples, pears and oranges, which was hardly surprising, a professor of literature would have had trouble working it out. Unaware of their plan and of Scott watching, figuring she couldn't leave a little kid on his own on the doorstep and that he had an invite anyway she brought him inside.
There was a bouncy castle out in the garden and later a guy was going to come to show them magic tricks and how to tie balloons in the shape of animals, Maria, the chick who might have seen the job advert for a nanny in her local Martian newspaper, had told him in broken English as, picking up on one or two words from Kane's rambling conversation, she concluded he was asking for lemonade, and poured him a long drink of fizzy orange, popping in a fancy cocktail straw.
Of course, Maria didn't know he couldn't be a kid. She really thought he could just play and jump on bouncy castles and watch magicians, and when she'd caught him lifting the covers from the plates and stuffing himself with as much food as he could cram into his mouth, she only scalded in a nice way, jabbering away in her native tongue, but smiling as she waved a finger in front of his face.
Kane ditched the fancy cocktail straw and guzzled back the orange drink, drained the beaker noisily, burped, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He stopped briefly in the doorway to watch with heavy heart, wishing he could stay. Maria and another chick who was helping, had organised two teams and had filled a sack with small, intriguingly wrapped prizes. Everyone, even Alex, was shouting and laughing as they made their way into the grounds.
Kane sighed and closed the door softly behind him. They were kids, not a care in the world. He couldn't hang around playing like kids could.
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The dreams had been long and vivid, every moment of that terrible day etched into his mind forever.
"Kirst?" He whispered into the darkness, for a crazy moment imagining he was at home waking from another nightmare, and anxious that Jamie shouldn't overhear.
And then, slowly, as the thunder echoed, through the storm playing out against the curtainless window, his eyes made out the unfamiliar shapes of the room and he began to remember. His wife and son were in danger, he had to get back to them!
He tried to jump up...but blackness overshadowed him and he put his hand to the excruciating pain and into the blood that matted and tangled and soaked his hair. He had to get back to Kirsty and Jamie, to protect them from Scotty, he had to...
Fighting for breath, tasting blood trickling down his face, Kane could manage only two or three faltering steps, before the world crashed again. He was sure he heard Kirsty and Jamie shouting to him for help before he plunged back into the darkness.