Benjamin curls his long fingers through the wire of the school fence as Charlie crosses the road towards him, his sagging backpack slung over his shoulder, his hair damp and matted to his forehead.
‘You’re late,’ Benjamin says when Charlie reaches him, but Charlie just rolls his eyes, jerking his head down the fence, towards the entrance of the school grounds. That’s all it takes for Benjamin to scamper, to grab his schoolbag and Spectacular Man figurine and stumble down the playground alongside his brother, the net-thin fence the only thing left between them.
‘I figured you’d still be mucking around with Jodes,’ Charlie says when Benjamin catches up, and the name quickly sours in Benjamin’s head. He shrugs petulantly, his schoolbag riding up his shoulders. It’s answer enough for Charlie, who does a slow whistle, the sort Olive likes to do, and the thought of that only makes Benjamin scowl even harder.
The day is bright, the sun’s glare saturating the afternoon, and Benjamin tugs his wide-brimmed school hat further down.
Shepherd Primary School’s playground opens onto the street, and, with the fence between them gone, Charlie and Benjamin start down the winding footpaths leading home. The day is bright, the sun’s glare saturating the afternoon, and Benjamin tugs his wide-brimmed school hat further down to shield his eyes from it.
‘Did you know lightning doesn’t need rain or clouds to strike?’
Benjamin blinks, looking up at his brother. In the last few months, Charlie has grown almost ten whole centimetres. Benjamin knows this because they measured him, just like Charlie measures Benjamin – scribbling the numbers down on post-it notes that he sticks in the scrappy notebook he keeps for these sorts of things. He may have grown, but it’s only to stretch – to make his body something elastic like Mr Fantastic – all the way into adulthood, long, angry red marks appearing on his back as if to prove it. It makes Benjamin feel short and compact beside Charlie’s shadow, his brother’s age only really showing in his thin and sunken chest, and the softness around his jaw.
‘That’s where that expression comes from, a bolt from the blue. Lightning breaking through blue skies. It’s more dangerous that way too because thunderstorms make negative lightning, but blue skies make it positive, and positive lightning carries a higher current, so it hurts more when it hits.’
Benjamin looks sceptically up at the brilliant blue sky above them, his lips pursing.
‘So we could have lightning right now?’
‘Maybe.’
Benjamin scrunches his nose.
‘What’s the point of lightning if it doesn’t mean rain though?’
Charlie doesn’t answer that, which isn’t exactly unusual for Charlie, and Benjamin shifts his focus to the long walk home and what he’ll watch when they get there – Voltron or Avatar or Young Justice or—
There’s a mumble beside him, a mutter, and Benjamin looks back to see that Charlie’s started talking to himself – those weird, rambling sentences that usually mean he’s worrying his way through a theory or a problem or something all in his head. His fingers tap the case in his hands, and Benjamin eyes it carefully.
‘Is there a space thing happening?’ he asks, and Charlie hums a little, picking up his step until Benjamin has to jog to catch up.
‘Kind of. A planetary huddle.’
‘A what?’
‘Planetary huddle.’ Charlie holds up three fingers, spreading them wide. ‘It’s when a bunch of planets’ orbits line up closely enough with each other, and then with Earth, that we can see them all at once.’
As he talks, he moves his fingers closer together, until they settle in a neat line. Benjamin digests this information, turns over the importance of such an image, such a spectacle to Charlie’s logical mind, but all he can think of are the interplanetary politics and battles and team-ups that must be involved when aliens are readying themselves for a huddle. He tells Charlie this, and Charlie laughs, the loud one that Benjamin likes the best.
‘What’s the point of lightning if it doesn’t mean rain though?’
With his warm summer skin and dark features, and his tangle of chocolate curls, Charlie looks more like their mother than Benjamin and Olive do. His uniform is a little off-colour today, and there’s an old, unfamiliar bruise at his arm, peeking out from the sleeve of his shirt – brown, grey, purple. Charlie quickly covers it, folding his arms across his chest and gripping his biceps, still laughing.
‘You’re a weird kid, you know that, Banjo?’
Benjamin hums, refocusing, and thinks of the games he can play at school tomorrow with this new information about the weird antics of space. Wonders if Jodi Baxter would be willing to don a mask again if it meant saving not just one planet but three.
They stop outside their front gate, and Charlie heaves it open, the rusted hinges whining as he pushes it back against the high and wild grass of their yard. Mum refuses to do a thing about it until Olive mows, but Benjamin knows she never will. Knows that she likes the way the grass takes over, even in this dry, barren summer, and if he’s honest, Benjamin likes it too. Their backyard looks like the jungles in his comic books – thick and mangled and heavy with insects. Sickly weeds coil around the frame of their old, rusted trampoline, and bees try to build a hive in the joints of Charlie’s telescope stand. The narrow path leading up to their house – a Queenslander lurching on its stilts – is nearly engulfed by wilted grass, and by the time the sun sets none of them will be able to walk out here without kicking a broad-faced cane toad or tangling themselves in the silky strings of a spider’s web. Benjamin mostly just hopes for owls, the frog-mouthed ones with beaks like secret keepers, but the wildness of the yard isn’t quite wild enough for them yet.
Heading towards the sagging wooden steps of their house, Benjamin slows to a stop. Charlie isn’t beside him anymore, or even behind him. Rather, he’s stopped in the middle of the yard, his school hat in his hand, the rim darkened with sweat, and his bag dropped to the grass, almost swallowed by the foliage. Charlie looks up, a hand to his forehead, his gaze fixed on something Benjamin cannot see.
‘Charlie?’
‘I’ve got a lot of notes to make, Banjo, if I’m gonna see it.’
Benjamin nods, ignoring the twist of disappointment in his belly at spending the afternoon alone. He’s reaching into the pocket of his pants for his keys when Charlie calls again.
‘You want to grab my post-its and my star wheel and help?’
Benjamin blinks in surprise, and turns to meet Charlie’s toothy smile. He couldn’t say no even if he wanted to.
This is an extract from The Rabbits by Sophie Overett (Penguin Random House Australia). The Rabbits is available now at your local independent bookseller.
