The Parable of the Mustard Seed Page 8

  “Who’d you expect?” John asked her. “Santa?”

  No, not Santa. Jessie was wearing low-cut jeans that did nothing to flatter her broad hips, a sparkly top that showed off way too much cleavage—since when did Jess have cleavage anyway?—and a face full of cosmetics.

  She huffed at him and turned away.

  “Not so fast,” John said, and she turned back, rolling her eyes. “Why have you been giving Ma hell?”

  “What do you care? And I have not!”

  “Jess,” John said, spreading his hands, “what are you doing?”

  She scowled at him. “Nothing!”

  “You need to pull yourself together, you know,” he said. “I mean that. Or one night they’re gonna find you under some bridge with a needle in your arm.”

  “Oh my God!” Jessie screwed up her face. “So suddenly I’m a druggie? You are such a prick to me, John!” She raised her voice. “Ma! I’m going out!”

  She elbowed past John and stalked toward the front gate.

  John sighed and stepped inside. Sepela stood in the hallway, her arms folded.

  “Okay, so I could have handled that better,” John said as guilt stabbed him. He wondered why their mother hadn’t commented on Jessie’s language when she was still liable to take after John or David or Mary with the wooden spoon for the same offence.

  “You think so?” She shook her head and smiled wryly. Wearily.

  Shit. Why did Jessie drive him to distraction like this, when he dealt with far worse kids every day at work? Why couldn’t John find the same patience with her, when she was family?

  “Come in, baby. You look tired.”

  “Thanks, Ma.”

  They sat around the kitchen table while the kettle boiled.

  “Is it work?” Sepela asked him, and then raised her eyebrows. “Is it Caleb?”

  She was too fucking intuitive, his mother.

  “It’s Caleb.” John fiddled with the tablecloth. “He kissed me.”

  “Ah.”

  John smiled despite himself. “That’s it? ‘Ah’? Ma, I drove straight here from his place, and that’s all you’ve got?”

  Sepela smiled as well. “What else do you want, baby? That boy loves you and you love him.”

  “Can’t go there,” John said. That same voice in his head was still echoing Caleb’s: Why can’t we? Because Caleb was strong, the strongest person John had ever met, but it wasn’t enough. Because you never gambled more than you could afford to lose. “It’s wrong for him.”

  “Love is never wrong,” Sepela said. She reached out and laid her hand over his.

  “It’s not that simple, Ma,” John said. He swallowed with difficulty. “I want to believe it, but it’s not that simple.”

  “You can believe anything you want to, John,” she said. “That’s what believing means.”

  “It doesn’t make it true.”

  She shrugged, and patted his hand. “Who says?"

  And she left it at that.

  Chapter Seven

  "Get me a body and you can charge them with murder," the suit from the DPP said.

  "This is bullshit," John said.

  The suit looked at Brian to get his mouthy constable under control.

  "It's bullshit," Brian agreed.

  The suit raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, well it's not your decision. What do you want here?"

  John wanted the lot of them to rot in hell.

  "We won't get a conviction on murder," the suit said. "Juries like bodies. So we charge them with what we know will stick. We only get to play the murder card once. Find me the body, or we won't get a conviction."

  It was bullshit.

  John stared at the map on the board. Lot of bushland there. Where was Simon?

  Court ran late. It was past three by the time John was called. He sat in the witness box, thoughts of Caleb whirling through his brain, and gave his name, and affirmed that the statement he’d submitted as evidence was true and correct. That should have been it, but the defence barrister wanted to nit-pick every little detail. He kept asking for the video interview to be paused.

  John hated watching him and Liz in the video. Hated the way they both nodded sympathetically when the creep complained about how unfair this was. Hated pretending that he understood. Hated suggesting that a kid wearing swimmers could be provocative. Hated agreeing they’d asked for it. Because you had to do that sometimes. Had to get the sick fucks onside so they’d talk.

  Sure, it was satisfying once the tape had been turned off and he could look the bastard in the eye and tell him he was scum and he deserved to rot in hell—not like that exchange had made his statement, or the courtroom—but the process always made John’s skin crawl. It made him feel ill for hours afterward. And it made him worry that smiling and nodding while someone like that spilled out his most vile confessions was the kind of stain he could never completely scrub away.

  Eventually, he’d burn out in Child Protection. Most people did. Maybe it was time for a stint in uniform again. Hauling vomit-stained drunks out of the gutter and hosing shit out of the back of the vans had to be cleaner work than this.

  John resisted the urge to check his watch while he was cross-examined, but proceedings were dragging. Even the magistrate was looking annoyed by the time John was finally dismissed.

  John made it to Caleb’s psychiatrist by four-thirty. He was running half an hour late, which meant Caleb was already inside. So was Darren, John guessed, since he wasn’t in the waiting room.

  John nodded to the receptionist and took a seat in the waiting room.

  “Would you like a coffee, John?” the receptionist asked him. She was an older lady, bottle blonde with a warm smile, and John could never remember her name even though he was often the one who brought Caleb to his appointments if Darren couldn’t.

  “No, thanks,” John said. “They’re already inside?”

  She nodded. “They shouldn’t be too long.”

  John flipped through a magazine while he waited, listening for any sounds of a disturbance from Dr. Harper’s office. Shit. He was supposed to have been here at four so that Darren didn’t have to break it to Caleb on his own.

  The door to Dr. Harper’s office opened twenty minutes later. John stood, not knowing what to expect.

  Caleb shuffled out, pale-faced and hunched over, his hands stuck in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie.

  “Hey,” John said, his mouth dry.

  “Hey.” Caleb’s slate-grey gaze met his, and his mouth quirked slightly. “Guess you were supposed to be here for this clusterfuck too, huh?”

  “Court ran late,” John said. “Sorry.”

  Caleb shrugged, and pushed his way through the heavy glass door outside into the car park.

  John followed him.

  Caleb straightened up in the sunlight and drew a deep breath as he turned to face John. “How come they’re getting out, John?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “Fucking parole board.”

  Caleb’s mouth tightened briefly into a thin line. “I’m not a kid. I’m not. I mean, I knew it’d happen one day, right?”

  “Right,” John agreed cautiously.

  “I’m not a kid,” Caleb repeated. “I can handle it.”

  Except John didn’t know if that was really true. He didn’t know if Caleb knew it either. Because nothing about dealing with Caleb was easy. Sometimes you got calm and rational Caleb. Sometimes you got the Caleb who withdrew into himself and refused to engage. Sometimes you got Caleb’s panic attacks and tantrums. And sometimes you got them all in the space of minutes.

  And this was big.

  Caleb was strong. Most people didn’t get that. The ones who saw the bottles of pills, the scars on his wrists, the public tantrums, they didn’t get that. Thought he was some kind of fragile, hysterical thing when he was like that. But that was because he’d been pushed further than most people ever were. If some tiny thing sent him over the edge—a new job, a party where he was expected to ta
lk to people, once, spilling sauce on his shirt—it was only because he was so consumed with dealing with the big stuff, so worn out with it already.

  Even John had been guilty of it in the past. “What are you worried about, mate? It’s just a stain. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it’s everything, John, it’s fucking everything!”

  And then there were the people who thought the meds should fix him, as though mental wellness was just a pill away. As though dark thoughts and self-hatred and patterns of behaviour could be killed with a shot of antibiotics like a virus. A magic pill to make him better.

  Well, it wasn’t like that at all. The meds were a constant balancing act. Caleb’s prescriptions and dosages changed, sometimes month by month, depending on how he responded to them. Depending on how quickly his depression and anxiety and PTSD regrouped and fought back.

  Caleb was strong, and he was always fighting, but people didn’t get that. Didn’t get that just because he was fighting something intangible, something invisible, that the fight was as deadly as if it had been a physical disease. People understood cancer. Didn’t attach a stigma to it. But mental health, well, why didn’t they just pull themselves together?

  Caleb was strong, but this was so big.

  “I can handle it,” Caleb repeated.

  “They can’t come near you,” John said. “They can’t have any contact with you. If they even try, they’ll be back in prison in a fucking heartbeat, mate. I promise.”

  Caleb’s mouth quirked again. “I know.”

  But it wasn’t that simple. They both knew that too.

  Darren approached them across the car park, his face drawn. He nodded at John.

  “Sorry I was late,” John said.

  Darren shook his head. “It’s fine. Thanks for coming. You want to join us for dinner? We figured we’d have an early one. Maybe go to that new Indian place in Beenleigh before we head home.”

  Beenleigh wasn’t exactly on John’s way home, but it was on Caleb and Darren’s way home, and not too much of a detour for John. Funny how all those middle-of-the-night runs between Logan and the Coast when Caleb was in crisis put everything into perspective. A drive to Beenleigh for dinner was nothing.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Can I go with John in his car?” Caleb asked.

  “Yeah,” Darren said. He smiled, but there was something wary in his gaze when he glanced at John, something new, or maybe it was all John’s guilty conscience. “I’ll see you guys there.”

  Three hours later John was letting himself into his apartment, shrugging off his suit jacket and unfastening his tie. He didn’t usually wear the tie and the suit jacket, but, well, court days. He was expected to look professional for those. Caleb had teased him a little about it over dinner, and the memory of it sat warmly in John’s chest. The Indian place hadn’t been busy, but the tables were small so John had spent the meal with Caleb’s knee pressing against his under the table. How pathetic was that? Taking those little moments of contact between them and spinning whole fantasies out of them. Fantasies where he and Caleb were in a relationship, and every casual touch was imbued with deeper meaning. With love, or some bullshit.

  And it was bullshit, because John already loved Caleb, and Caleb loved John, so it was already there but at the same time it wasn’t enough. Or it wasn’t the right sort of love, or something. Or, worse, it was exactly the right sort of love, but they still couldn’t go there because the risks to Caleb’s happiness, to his health, to his life, were too great.

  John had seen Caleb lying in too many hospital beds with his forearms bandaged up to dare imagine it would never happen again or, if they fell into a relationship, that he would never be the cause of it in some way.

  He couldn’t do that to Caleb.

  John hung his jacket up on his bedroom doorknob and then looped his tie over it.

  He remembered something, vaguely, about different types of love. The ancient Greeks had a bunch of words for them, but John could only ever remember eros, and he didn’t give enough of a fuck to Google the others. The point was, he supposed, that love wasn’t always romance, and that was fine. Okay, so he felt like that cartoon of the dog sitting at the table while everything around him burned, but it was fine.

  His phone rang, and John dug it out of his pocket. David’s name lit up the screen.

  “Hey,” John said.

  “Hey, John. I know it’s getting late, bro, but is there any chance you can pick Jessie up from her youth group?”

  John sighed. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “My bloody car won’t start,” David said. “And Tee’s at her sister’s place having a girls’ night, you know? I’m pretty sure they’re already three sheets to the wind. I’m really sorry to spring this on you.”

  “It’s okay.” John was already heading for the front door. “Shit happens, huh? You need a new car, David. I’ve been telling you for months.”

  “Hey! My car runs like a dream,” David said. “Usually.”

  “It’s a shit heap.”

  “Yeah.” There was no rancour in David’s tone. “But she’s my shit heap, and I love her.”

  “Does Tee know she’s got competition?”

  “Please. Tee knows I’d happily set fire to everything I owned if she asked me.” The obvious smile faded from David’s voice. “Thanks for doing this, John.”

  “It’s no problem,” John said. “I only just got back from dinner anyway.”

  “Oooh! Hot date?”

  John snorted. “I was with Caleb and Darren.”

  David was silent for a moment. “They doing okay?”

  “About the same as always,” John said.

  “What about you, bro? Are you doing okay?”

  John paused before he answered. “About the same as always too.”

  The church that Ma went to was the Uniting Church in Woodridge. John had been coming here since he was a little kid. Every Sunday back then, plus the kids’ group and then the youth group during the week. He didn’t consider himself a regular now, and hadn’t in a while. First there had been his shift work as a police officer, and his roster didn’t give a fuck if John was supposed to rest on Sundays. And then there was Caleb too.

  There was always Caleb.

  As John pulled into the car park, he wondered if his stepping away from the church should have come at a much earlier time, the way it did for so many other gay kids. If it should have happened when he was sixteen and had come out to his parents.

  Ma had bristled when he’d said he didn’t know if he’d go back to church.

  “You listen to me, John Faimu,” she’d said. “Jesus is not a thing you put in a box and forget about! He sees you, smart boy, whether you look at him or not! Loves you, too, though you don’t deserve it most of the time!”

  So he’d gone to church and had that talk with the minister, and it was good. The minister at the time had been good, and most of the people were good, and going back every Sunday he could manage even when he’d been working shift work had been good.

  Not for Caleb though. He couldn’t share this part of his life with Caleb. Couldn’t even talk to Caleb about God and Jesus and the church, because they meant such different things to Caleb, such horrible, dark things. When John’s mother told him that Jesus was watching he rolled his eyes and behaved himself. If someone told Caleb the same thing, he’d be a mess.

  John believed in God. He always had, and always would. Maybe not the same God his mother believed in exactly — hers had all the answers, hers was full of comfort and peace — but he believed, all the same. He’d seen some awful things in his work. He no longer asked how God allowed such things, only comforted himself with the certainty that the perpetrators of evil deeds would burn in hell. And maybe that was flawed thinking, but it didn’t matter. He needed to know that men like Ethan Gray would burn in hellfire forever, and that it was still too fucking good for them. He could never turn from God, because he needed
to believe that if there wasn’t justice in this world there had to be justice in the next.

  But Caleb had to be an atheist. John understood that.

  And John had chosen Caleb over church and would make the same choice every time.

  John headed around the side of the church to the hall. The doors were open, spilling light into the night, and John nodded at a few of the waiting parents. The kids were all still inside, scattered around on the floor while the pastor talked to them.

  Pastor Ian was a young guy, and John didn’t know him well. He seemed like a decent bloke though, and he managed to walk that fine line of preaching while also being cool enough for the kids not to roll their eyes at him.

  “Okay,” he said. “One last thing before you all go back to the Fortnites and the Skyrims and the yeeting and the Tide pods.”

  The kids groaned and laughed.

  Maybe that was why they liked him. He knew how to take the piss out of himself.

  “I want you all to think about parables,” he said, and held up his hands. “I know, I know, you don’t come here for homework. But I want you to think about what Jesus meant when he said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.’” He smiled at the kids. “So have a think about that this week, and how it applies not to the church, but to all of us. It’s easy to lose hope when we see all the big obstacles in our way, particularly when we’re planting such a tiny, tiny seed, but, to mix my metaphors with my parables for a second, great big oaks grow from tiny acorns.”

  The kids murmured in agreement.

  Pastor Ian climbed up off the floor. “So with that in mind, I’ll see you guys next week, and yes, Leo, we’re having pizza.”

  An obvious in-joke that made the kids laugh.

  Jessie was chatting with another girl when she turned and saw John waiting for her. Her animated smile vanished immediately and was replaced by a stone-faced sullen stare. John fought down what was becoming a typical rush of resentment when he saw his little sister and reminded himself that Jessie was hurting right now.