Hapi by Cari Waites

The rainjust didn’t let up. On the drive back to the caravan park, the windscreen wipers on Barry’s old car squealed and shuddered as they worked but barely made a difference. Barry huffed, leaned forward, and turned off the radio while he peered through the windscreen at each scant glimpse of the road in front of them.

They made the drive back at a crawl, but it was still a hell of a lot better than walking.

Barry was no conversationalist. “Bloody rain,” was all he said, and Jayden hummed in agreement before they made the rest of the drive in silence.

When they got back to the caravan park, Jayden thanked Barry for the lift and splashed back to his cabin. It was dark despite the fact it was noon; the clouds were heavy and low. So much for the bright blue skies and sunny beaches Jayden had been imagining as he’d planned to head north, but at least it wasn’t cold. Jayden stripped off his wet clothes and hung them out with yesterday’s, which were still damp.

He unpacked the groceries and then made himself a peanut butter sandwich. He sat on the couch in his underwear to eat and stared out the window at the rain-smeared day. A few palm fronds close to the cabin window waved, but everything farther away was lost in a haze.

Jayden wrinkled his nose at the view. Picking bananas in weather like this would be miserable fucking work, although, it was still better than no work.

His thoughts drifted to Cairns and to the same uncertain crash of his hopes against the most likely reality: his dad hadn’t wanted him when he was younger, so he probably wouldn’t want him now. Maybe there was a part of Jayden that was still that wishful, lonely kid, desperate for anything resembling affection and approval, but he couldn’t allow that kid’s voice to be the loudest one in his mind. The best he could hope for was that his dad would acknowledge him, and maybe they’d end up with a decent relationship they could both live with, but Jayden refused to allow himself to build castles in the sky. Life didn’t work that way, and the safest hopes were modest. He’d been disappointed so much in the past that he knew better than to expect much from his dad.

If he could even find him.

And if he couldn’t find him, it didn’t change anything. He’d look for a place to live, look for work, and he’d manage, the same as he always had. He didn’t need his dad, he just needed to close the door on the uncertainty of not knowing. One way or the other, getting to Cairns would be a relief. He just had to keep those childish hopes on a tight leash in the meantime, and stop them from getting loose and going wild. So while his thoughts always drifted to Cairns, Jayden pulled them back again. He tried to concentrate on the journey, not the destination. Practicalities, not fantasies.

He peeled the crust off his sandwich and set it aside for last, just for something to do.

The rain eased finally, though the day remained gloomy. Jayden pulled his damp clothes on. He winced as he shoved on his wet sneakers. His feet squelched as he went outside to take advantage of the slight improvement in the weather. He didn’t have anything else to do, so he figured he might as well check out more of the caravan park.

He headed to the amenities block again, just for somewhere to start, and then did a circuit of the place.

There wasn’t much to see. There were cabins like his at the back and spots for caravans at the front of the park. There weren’t many of the van spots filled, and those that were looked to be taken up by long-term residents because grass and weeds grew up over the tyres of their vans. More than one van had a sagging canvas or built-on shade cloth annexe. Jayden glanced inside one annexe as he passed and saw a large woman sitting in an armchair. She stared out at the day, a cigarette in her mouth and a stack of beer bottles beside her. A small hairy dog, some kind of terrier, sat at her feet. A television blared from somewhere inside her caravan.

Jayden hurried on.

At length, he found himself at a rundown playground on the banks of the river. Two swings, the seats made from old tyres, hung from chains on a metal frame. A plastic slide sat nearby, the colour leached from it. There was a wooden picnic table with benches a little farther along from the play equipment, and Jayden waded through the ankle-high wet grass to reach it. He sat on the damp table, then put his feet on one of the seats.

There was a sign between the playground and the water, the red lettering stark against the yellow background.

WARNING. ÁCHTUNG. And the same, presumably, in two other alphabets that Jayden couldn’t understand. Chinese? Japanese? Crocodiles inhabit this area – attacks may cause injury or death. There were further warnings underneath to stay away from the water’s edge.

Jayden peered out at the flat, muddy expanse of the Johnstone River and shuddered. It didn’t look like the sort of water anyone would want to swim in anyway. As he watched, a ripple spread over the surface of the water, and he wondered if it was a croc, or maybe just a big fish. He resisted the urge to draw his feet all the way up onto the table.

The drone of an engine came closer, and a moment later a flat-bottomed tinny puttered into view through the frame of the trees that lined the river. In the back of the tinny sat a man, one hand on the tiller of the outboard motor.

Jayden’s heart hammered.

It was the man from Coles; the one with the tight black T-shirt and the piercing stare. The man’s gaze was fixed on the river, not on Jayden, but he still felt that same uneasy thrill he’d felt back in Coles, the one that reverberated all the way into his bones and stole his breath from his lungs.

The tinny moved out of view, lost behind the screen of trees.

Jayden stood and climbed onto the top of the picnic table.

He peered through the trees, going up onto his tiptoes. He couldn’t see the tinny anymore, but he caught a glimpse of what looked like a tin roof on the far side of the river, and a moment later he heard the outboard motor on the tinny cut out.

What was it that Barry had said? The Horace boys lived across the river. An odd bunch, he’d said. Black T-shirt guy must have been the driver of the black ute from earlier, too.

Jayden shivered despite the humidity and then climbed down from the table and headed back to his cabin.

He made it just before the rain hit again.

* * *

In the officeBarry had a sagging bookshelf stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks, magazines with the covers ripped off, and boardgames with missing pieces. Jayden wasn’t really much of a reader, but he found a couple of thrillers that would see him through the week until his next Centrelink Youth Allowance payment came through and gave him a little more freedom to get out and do stuff.

He fell into a routine, while around him the world slowly drowned under the relentless monsoonal rain.

Every morning he slept in as late as he could and then dashed up to the amenities block to shower. The men’s shower block had four toilet stalls, four shower stalls, and three sinks set against the far wall. It stank of bleach, but it was clean enough.

He dashed back again minutes later, as soaked to the skin as though he’d never stepped out from under the showerhead, and then he ate a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. After that, he poured a cup of cold Coke and sat on the front steps of his cabin reading while the rain pounded down.

Lunch was another sandwich, or noodles if he felt like them, and in the afternoon he watched talk shows on the TV, squinting at the screen whenever the weather caused the signal to drop out and the picture to freeze and then fracture.

It was boring and lazy, but Jayden knew to savour it. He had food, he had shelter, and sooner or later he’d get a call about banana picking. Jayden had been in places before where every tomorrow was fraught with uncertainty, so boredom was a strange kind of relief. He didn’t love it, but it wasn’t the worst thing.

He kept away from the other residents of the caravan park. He said “hello” in passing, and he was friendly enough, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that most of the other people here weren’t the sort he wanted in his life. The caravan park called itself a tourist resort, but it clearly hadn’t welcomed tourists in years. The people in residence had ended up here because they had nowhere else to go. Unemployed or unemployable, alcoholics and drug addicts, and the mentally ill: everyone here was a heartbeat away from actual homelessness. And Jayden was too. It didn’t mean they weren’t good people, but Jayden knew from experience how easy it was to get entangled in other people’s lives and dramas. Suddenly they were borrowing twenty dollars, and then another twenty, and then they’d sold your stuff to get the next hit of whatever they needed to make their life temporarily more tolerable. His mum had been an addict, so he knew how they worked. He maintained his distance and kept the cabin door locked at night.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he thought he heard the faint drone of an outboard motor on the river, but maybe it was his imagination. It was impossible to be sure over the rain anyway. He found himself thinking of the man in the black T-shirt and found himself dreaming of his piercing stare, of being frozen underneath it, helpless while the man reached out for him. He always jolted awake before the man touched him, usually to find himself grinding his achingly hard dick against the damp sweat-slick sheets.

It was the boredom getting to him, probably. He was in danger of going stir-crazy in the cabin, so his brain was fixating on the weirdest stuff. Also it had been ages since he’d gotten off, mostly because he didn’t want to use the communal shower block for that in case someone walked in and heard him—growing up in a group home had made him paranoid about being overheard—and the cabin was so humid that he barely had the energy to move, let alone wank. When he was lying in bed at night, the last thing he wanted to do was get up again to wash his hands. But obviously there was some disconnect between his body and his brain because he woke up without fail every night trying to rub one out against the mattress, only to have all that pent-up need drain away again as lethargy overtook him the moment he was awake.

It was hot as fucking balls.

On Wednesday afternoon Jayden finished the spy thriller, and afterward, he headed up to Barry’s office to put the novel back and find something else to read. He carried the dog-eared book under his shirt to protect it from the rain, but he could still feel rivulets of water sliding down his back, warm as sweat, so he wasn’t sure what state the book would be in by the time he returned it.

The front office was open. Jayden darted inside. There was no sign of Barry. The interior door leading to what was presumably the back office area was closed. Jayden withdrew the damp book from underneath his shirt and crouched down in front of the sagging bookshelf to put it back. He ran his finger along the cracked, faded spines of the other titles on the shelf, waiting for something to catch his eye. He pulled one out and turned it over to read the blurb on the back. Something about espionage and terrorists. He flipped through the book quickly to check all the pages were there and then ran his fingers over the embossed title on the front cover.

The outside door squeaked open.

Jayden glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see Barry or one of the residents.

It was the man from the river and the supermarket. Black T-shirt and jeans again today. Dark, piercing stare, olive skin, slicked-back black hair, and a face as expressionless as though it had been carved from stone.

The book slipped through Jayden’s numb fingers and fell with a dull thump to the floor. His breath shuddered out of him as the man stared. He felt pinned down by the intensity of the man’s gaze, a mouse in front of a snake, hypnotised. A strange thrill ran down his spine and his skin prickled as though it was suddenly too tight for his body.

“Get up,” said the man.

Jayden’s body obeyed, jerking like a marionette as he rose awkwardly from his crouch.

The man’s gaze slid over him and then landed on the closed door to the back office. “Where’s Barry?”

His accent was strange, like a song with every third or fourth note sung in a different key. There wasn’t enough difference for Jayden to pin it down, only to be certain that the man wasn’t from around here.

“I-I don’t know,” Jayden said, his voice catching. He blinked and imagined a dark cloud behind the man, a vortex that he wanted to fall into. It was the crazy dreams, maybe; the nighttime visions where the man had stared at him like he was nothing, until he suddenly was—an insect, a thing—reduced to something small and helpless while the man smirked down at him knowingly. Those unsettling dreams teetered on the edge of being nightmares, except that Jayden woke up from them every time with his dick hard and aching.

The man took a step closer, and a tremor ran through Jayden.

And then the door to the back office opened, and Barry appeared, wiping a hand across his damp combover.

“Happy,” he said, sounding startled.

The man turned away from Jayden dismissively.

It took Jayden a moment to catch up. Happy. The man’s name was Happy? Jesus, it had to be one of those ironic nicknames, like calling the quiet bloke Rowdy or the one with red hair Blue, because Jayden couldn’t imagine a less fitting name for the man whose dark gaze held nothing but heavy menace. It was so ludicrous he might have even laughed, except he had the feeling Happy wouldn’t react very well to that.

“What can I do for you?” Barry asked warily.

Happy reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a leather wallet, which he opened and withdrew a pink five-dollar note. He set the money down on the counter. “I need ice.”

“Ah,” Barry said. “Righto, then. Yeah, I’ve got a few bags in the freezer. You boys, ah, you havin’ a party?”

Happy didn’t answer.

“I’ll go grab a couple, then,” Barry said. He darted into the back office.

Happy turned toward Jayden and took a step to close the distance between them. His dark gaze held Jayden’s. “You’re new here.”

Jayden jerked his chin in a nod.

“What’s your name?”

Jayden swallowed dryly. “Jayden.”

He caught a glimpse of a tattoo peeking out from underneath the sleeve of Happy’s T-shirt. It was the bottom curve of a circle. He couldn’t see the rest of the design. The ink was brown, a shade or two darker than Happy’s olive skin. Jayden was mesmerised by the way Happy’s muscles moved, causing the tattoo’s edge to roll like a bow wave in the dirty river.

Happy hummed, the sound low and dark and amused, and Jayden jolted and pulled his gaze back to the man’s eyes. He could feel his face burning. Happy leaned in closer, and Jayden’s heart skipped over a beat.

“You’re new, Jayden,” Happy said, his breath hot against Jayden’s ear. “But you won’t be here for much longer.”

A thread of panic twisted through Jayden’s gut. He pressed back against the bookshelf, hands grasping on air.

Happy hummed again and then reached out and pressed his big palm against the front of Jayden’s boardshorts.

Jayden’s brain shorted out. He whined, half turned on and half terrified, as his dick hardened against Happy’s palm. “What the hell—”

Happy stepped back as Barry bustled out into the main office and set two bags of ice down on the counter. Happy collected the bags without another word on his way out of the office and into the rain.

Jayden struggled to breathe.

“You right?” Barry asked, his ugly face creased with a frown.

Jayden managed a nod.

“Stay away from the Horace boys,” Barry muttered. “If you know what’s good for you.”

Jayden nodded again, and then, shaking, he reached down and scooped up the book he’d dropped on the floor. He held it carefully in his trembling hands.

Barry didn’t meet his gaze.

Jayden hurried back to his cabin, splashing through the rain, and locked the door behind him.