The Children's Bach by Helen Garner Page A

right arm still extended in its melodramatic curve. No-one spoke. Poppy turned a page.
    â€˜Mind if I sing another stanza?’ he said.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Vicki. ‘I do. Hymns are boring.’
    Had anyone ever crossed Dexter before? Had anyone? He jerked back as if he had been struck. His chair splintered under him and he saved himself only by flexing his legs and grabbing the corner of the table with one hand.
    The gin bottle was empty.
    â€˜Why was that teenager so rude to that man when he was singing?’ said Poppy on the way home.
    â€˜Who knows,’ said Philip.
    â€˜But I like the mother,’ said Poppy. ‘Athena’s perfect, isn’t she.’
    â€˜Perfect – you reckon?’ said Philip.
    Elizabeth looked at him. ‘She’d have to be, to live up to the name.’
    â€˜The goddess of war,’ said Philip.
    â€˜I didn’t mean that perfect,’ said Poppy.
    â€˜Of war and needlecraft,’ said Elizabeth.
    *
    It was a grey rabbit. It had no name and its life was not a happy one. When Athena’s parents came to visit and saw it crouched in the old chook pen half buried in Virginia creeper, her father said, ‘What the hell are you keeping that for?’
    â€˜Dexter thought it would be nice for the boys,’ said Athena.
    â€˜What would he know about rabbits. Knock it on the head. Wring its neck. Flaming pests.’
    â€˜At least in the cage by itself it can’t breed,’ said Athena’s mother.
    One morning Athena and Vicki lowered it into a deep cardboard carton with grass in the bottom and a teatowel over the top, and put the box on the back seat of the car and drove it out through Footscray and down the highway.
    â€˜We’ll have to get far enough away from civilisation so there won’t be any feral cats,’ said Vicki.
    â€˜I have to be back for the boys,’ said Athena. ‘I didn’t mean to come this far out.’
    â€˜There’s heaps of time,’ said Vicki. ‘We can get fish and chips. Did you bring any money? Aren’t we near the sea? Go down the side road.’
    There was thick grass at the verge, and a brown dam fifty feet inside the fence. Vicki knelt up on the seat and lifted the teatowel off the box. ‘We should have got someone to kill it. Can Dexter kill things?’
    â€˜He killed a chook once. A dog bit the back of it right off and it was full of maggots. He held it down on a log and chopped its head off. He went white.’
    They dragged the box out of the car and laid it on its side in the grass, but the rabbit would not come out. They stood waiting. The wind combed the surface of the dam into fine ridges and raised the hair on their arms.
    â€˜Is he still in there?’ said Vicki. She gave the box a tap with her toe. ‘Come out, come out.’
    They began to giggle.
    â€˜I feel sick,’ said Athena.
    â€˜Tip the box up.’
    â€˜I can’t. You.’
    They were convulsed with laughter. Vicki stamped her foot. Together they seized the carton and tilted its mouth to the ground. The rabbit, its ears laid back and its head withdrawn into its torso, slid towards the air. It dropped out, they whisked the box away, and it crouched shuddering between tussocks, under the huge blank sky.
    *
    He should have rung up first, but he didn’t have the number or the last name, and anyway that wasn’t the way he did things. The back of the house was shabby, and the jasmine, whose smell he remembered from the night visit, seemed the only thing holding it together, but someone had already been working in the garden and had left neat piles of weeds all along the path to the lavatory. A row of children’s tracksuit pants, frayed and dripping, hung on the line, and the bins stood with bricks on their lids at the foot of the concrete steps. All the doors and windows were open.
    He made a lot of noise going in, to warn her, but the music – an orchestra,