Short story: Breath test, by Emma Neale

Newsroom

26-07-2025

I'm just saying goodbye to Janine, one of my clients, when I hear the monkey-whoop of a siren in the distance. Janine hardly reacts — but all my flight muscles tighten, and my ears zero in, tracking which way the cop car is travelling. Janine is on the front stoop, chatting away about her daughter and one of the sweetly funny, piquant things she's said about the new baby on the way. I wait with my face in neutral, hoping, uncharitably, that the full heft of Janine's pregnancy will start to drag at her pelvic floor, and she won't be able to stand there for long.
A disproportionate wave of relief takes me when she's gone, though I agree with the gist of what she was saying: there are times when even very young children make observations that turn you in your tracks. 'How did you know?' you might ask. 'Where did you find that out?' The entire family appears to be in a vehicle with a learner driver. The child makes small, bunny-hop lurches in maturity, and the parents fling forwards too, before their skulls thump back on the head rest, jarred, disoriented, reactions lagging.
Like the day we were taking our 10-year-old twins, Eddie and Mike, and their friend, Tal, across town at the start of the summer holidays. We were shepherding Tal home after a sleepover at our place. All three children, who'd only really started playing together in the last few weeks of term, were suddenly desperate to see each other outside school. It's often the way of things, I guess. Affection and ties intensify when kids realise primary school is about to end, and time sharpens for them: for some, their first experience of its edge. My husband and I had just met Tal; he had only transferred into the twin's class from another room at the school that year, and he was going to be leaving town soon. He and his family had arrived here from Syria on the emergency refugee quota scheme, five years earlier. Now Tal's father, who had trained in pharmacy, had found a job up north.
The trio of children had been immersed in one another's company for almost two full days now. They'd played football in a local park, ridden their bikes around the empty fields and footpaths of a nearby intermediate school; stayed up to watch old Ice Age and Star Wars movies and have a 'midnight snack' (which they rustled open before ten p.m.). That morning, bright and early, we'd taken them to the pool, for hours of hydro slide, diving-board hijinks, and running and slipping around an inflatable obstacle course installed in the main pool for the holidays.
None of the boys seemed the least bit worn out. I'd loved watching their loose and easy activity: the way they seemed to move like long grass, toi-toi, dipping and dancing in the wind. I teach movement classes for seniors here and there, around the city, and I have a home studio where I can also run yoga sessions for pregnant and post-partum women. Most of my clients would look at the freedom of these boys with wistfulness, or even envy, I suspect. Maybe knowing that deepened my own urge to hug and hug the children, every hour, on the hour.
They were still chatting away in the back seat, the conversation moving in a swift linking then switching way I could barely follow. Their interest gripped onto, then swooped from, teachers, other kids at school, fidget spinners, Lego, football stars, Minecraft, Ramadan, another baby on the way for Tal's mother, Tal's father's transfer, our boys asking, but why,
saying nawww,
saying, why aren't there good jobs here
asking, what about your team next year? The Western Hill Harts will die without you, Tal, they'll sink to the bottom of the abyssal butthole of the league.
What's abyssal anyway, is that a bad cuss?
You can't cuss in front of Tal, Mike.
Duh, Eddie, abyssal is an abyss.
Nerd.
'Shit,' my husband, Jack, said. Proving he had been tuning out the boys successfully: a survival mechanism for the driver.
'Shit a brick,' he elaborated. The road had sprung a spine of orange road cones. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon. A team of cops in luminous yellow jackets armed a drink-driving checkpoint; traffic slowed. I felt a small, dry clench of irritation that Jack had sworn again in front of the kids, but I wasn't worried about the breath testing. Jack hadn't had a drink in months — not since his father fell ill. He wanted, he said, to stay clear for all that was coming to us. I figured we were sure to be delayed only by a couple of minutes, and anyway, neither Tal's family nor we had anywhere urgent to be after we'd delivered him home.
We came to a complete stop. 'Why all this?' Jack said, mildly now, both hands off the steering wheel and resting in his lap. The only clue to his mood was that his thumbs pressed to his fingertips for a moment and squeezed thin air as if to crush something both miniscule and irritating.
'It'll be because of the concert last night.' Town had filled up for a big international act performing in the covered stadium. When the boys and I had gone to the store for groceries and their 'midnight' snack food, we drove past a flock of women posing for photos at the cenotaph. They wore pink cowgirl Stetsons and glittery pink, tiger-print leggings, or fringed black leather miniskirts. One of them straddled a pink-maned unicorn dobbin. 'Why has she got a kid's toy?' Eddie had sighed, with weary disapproval. I saw a flicker of what he'd be like as an old man.
'Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross!' I'd sung, involuntarily. These things just come back to me: as if they should accompany childhood the way birthday cakes and skinned knees do.
Mike had leaned forward to pat my shoulder and with the gently warning, protective air of someone pointing out that the terrain was steep and slippery: 'Tal doesn't know that rhyme. You're embarrassing yourself again, Mum.'
We were signalled along closer to the police checkpoint. Jack gripped the steering wheel again. 'Country music,' he said, as if now he was really cussing. I clocked his profile and saw that he wore his disbelieving-yet-entertained expression, the one I'd seen in other scenarios, like when our old, should-have-known-better cat got its head stuck between the bars of baby Mike's crib, because Mike tried to offer it milk dregs from a sippy-cup. Or when at the age of forty, I didn't understand exactly what a merchant marine was. Jack had to rescue me from a series of faux pas in a conversation with a ferry skipper at a party. With his trim beard and diamond stud in one ear, the skipper was like a pirate all cleaned up for his mother's second wedding. Which two glasses of wine meant I actually said aloud as Jack steered me away.
Exasperated, amused, yet resigned to his role in this ridiculous world, Jack put on the indicator lights and pulled over. I glanced up into the rear-view mirror: we were the last car in line for now.
A very tall, solid young blond male cop sauntered up. He looked as if his family had raised him on a lifestyle block with fresh milk from their own cow, growing him strong bones for outdoors adventures and an abundance of sunny days sailing Optimist yachts on silky inland lakes. I know: a snap judgement, unfair. Perhaps anyone in a position of power is going to seem protected, with just that extra creamy layer of privilege we don't have. Even those of us—yes, Jack and I—who seem to have caught the freak wave of sweet fortune that's carried us just ahead, just above, the wrench of deep calamity. Only just: but ahead and above, all the same.
For how long, though? Does that question spiral and gyre in your head, too? Given the glaciers. Given the floods. Given the tornadoes, the droughts, the desertification of agricultural land, the stock deaths, the particular men in power, who seem to fear any physical body not the mirror of their own, the way certain children fear jellyfish, spiders, snakes, dogs. And these men, they overcompensate, or is it decompensate, they frantically spin and wrap that fear in cold righteousness. Thou shalt not be seen as my likeness. Thou shalt not be believed. Thou doth not possess a viable self.
'Catastrophic thinking,' Jack might have said, when we were young. 'Can you see someone about that?' That was before we had children. Now, he would exhale, then wait. Then gaze at the floor, say, 'It's fucked, all right.'
Jack tapped at some controls and rested his elbow on the opened window's thin ledge. 'Gidday,' he said to the officer. He is a 'Hi', a 'Helloh', a 'Kia ora'kind of guy. But 'Gidday,' he said, as strategically mild as a white bread roll from a pack of twelve own-brand identicals.
A second cop shuffled up, his walk slightly hitched, as if he was hobbled by sciatica. 'Morning-afternoon,' he said, looking at his watch. He raised his eyebrows, crumpling the scalp a fair way along the bald dome of his head. 'See the show last night?' he asked,
'Nope,' said Jack.
The second cop seemed to push his heels firmer into a patch of gravel. The blond cop frowned at his breathalysing tool.
'Work,' Jack added. His tone implied night shift at the mine, night shift on security, or night shift on the docks. What he meant was reorganising his study at home. He teaches geography at a local high school. Now that the teaching term was over, he had time to sort out all manner of clobber flung into his den: from chafing ointment to hiking gear, dud cables, sheet music, magazines, squashed box of tea bags, chess pieces and physio resistance bands.
'Orright,' said one cop, through a chuckle that sounded satirical, as if Jack had revealed some frailty, some deviance.
The other cop lifted his chin. 'True,' he said.
We'll never know why he did this, but next, instead of holding out his digital gadget towards Jack and saying, 'Can you speak into the screen here, giving your name and date of birth?' the blond cop said, 'Outside the vehicle, please.' He straightened his spine, pulled his shoulders back: underlining what he said. 'If you could step outside.'
Jack and I exchanged a quick look. In my hand, a random, infinitesimal spasm sparked up: a silent tremolo in a nerve, jittering my thumb. I masked it with my other hand, feeling a tilting, nauseous gratitude that it hadn't been the kind of tic that swims across your facial expression: mouth, eyelid, cheek.
The children's movements were rapid, fluid, and then suddenly angular: not dissimilar to the way they had ridden along ecstatically together on the hydro slide at the pool. Cling, rush and fall: all three of them tumbled out onto the footpath. Except here, they were unnervingly silent. All three of them, arms bent in the air, hands by their heads, then Tal, shaking like a moth on the edge of lift-off, leaned with both palms against the back window of the car.
Once they were there, nobody was laughing. My husband stepped out onto the road, his own hands still at his sides. I scrambled out too, and gathered all the boys to me, all of them at once knobbly and yet soft and warm, like lambs, with their knuckly, bony joints, their tousled, chlorine-scented mops of hair. 'It's okay,' I said. 'You're okay. They're just checking drivers to make sure they haven't been drinking. Just drivers.' The car and house keys from the ignition were already in my pocket. Faster than I could account for, I'd realised that I'd left home without my own set. I would need them if Jack was taken from us.
Yet Jack was breath-tested and promptly given the all-clear. The police, after the children's reaction, couldn't get us all on our way quickly enough. They could barely look at the boys, in fact. The one reference either of the cops made to the strange, chilling speed of the boys' submission and obedience was a comment from the bald guy, who said, voice mitred and flat-packed, 'Got some live cargo, there.'
Jack very carefully didn't smile—but he was also very carefully not unsmiling. I could almost see how headlines strobed in his mind in scraps of torn, blunt, merciless light. I saw them, too, bringing with them images from TV, news sites, of life jackets, boat hulls, white tents, washing strung from rope, makeshift fences of wooden stakes and packing materials, electrical cables hanging haywire over rust-stained tubs.
The policeman's tone was professionally scraped of feeling, as if speaking in rote the phrasing of a statute, a clause, that sought to cover all possibilities without ambiguity. Yet even there, on the leafy hilltop suburban street, as other cops staffing the checkpoint tested and let another wave of drivers through the blockade, it felt pointed, taunting, sinister.
Still, like I said: they let us go. I know how much luck and advantage plumps even that one short phrase. We drove Tal home, where his mother, Rida, greeted us, her English careful and brimming with an intense gladness that told us that having a child returned to her would never be what she could heedlessly, naturally expect any more.
'We loved having Tal,' I said. 'He is a lovely boy.'
'A good boy,' Rida said, and her eyes shone, as two smaller children darted out onto the stoop. A girl clung to her knee; a boy lifted Rida's apron and hid under it, yet moulded it tight to his face, as if trying to see us through the weave of the fabric.
From then, Rida's perplexed, suspended expression as we tried to explain even mild things — 'The boys have been going hard out, non-stop … I mean, they've had a lot of exercise … they were up past ten o' clock last night ….' And her reply each time, 'Thank you, thank you,' meant we didn't mention the traffic cordon. What had really happened, after all? Discussing it, even saying police, might bring unnecessary confusion, distress.
The little girl reached for her mother, twinkling her fingers, wanting to be picked up. Rida twinkled her fingers back, then knitted her hands with her daughter's.
'You must be so busy here,' I said, thinking also of the baby furled inside her. 'If Tal has time to come and stay again …'
Tal turned his face to his mother, and a silent, sombre look flowed from him. I hoped it said, please, please let me visit them again. Rida gave a shooshing cluck, as if he had genuinely spoken aloud. 'Thank you,' she said again, smiling, but with her eyes cast down to the tiny boy who had now turned to bury his face against her. 'I thank you; we thank you.'
For a couple of weeks, our boys stayed in touch through their old school email accounts, and when those shut down, they found each other through online chats on Minecraft. Then, mid-January, we asked Tal over again, but he got caught up in the tangle of the family move: he was needed at home, to help pack, clean and to help mind the little ones. I woke a night or two after the boys learnt that he couldn't visit, and a thought, a line of questions, came to me with the abrupt and jagged clarity of unearthing fragments of glass from garden soil. Had Tal told his mother about the checkpoint? Did she and her husband decide we had neglected a responsibility in not trying to explain? Had we done enough to care for Tal, in that moment? I stared into the dark nowhere. Sleep came with the stealth of something slinking into camouflage. Then — Tal was gone. The family flew north to settle in their new town.
Our boys had begged for cell phones for Christmas, saying they'd be able to keep in touch better with Tal and with other friends who were off to different intermediate schools, and one whose mum had an overseas sabbatical, and everyone else had a smart phone, why were we like this, there were Boxing Day and New Year's Day sales, they would have Christmas money from grandparents, could they do chores, lots of chores, any chores around the house, to help pay for the phones? 'Please, Mum? Pleeeeease, Dad?'
We'd fended them off, fended them off. All I could think of was the three of them—Tal, Eddie, Mike—young boys already too informed, their knowledge of harm coursing through them, to move them from the back passenger seat and hold them, pinned and outlined in sunlight, arms up in the summer air. Whether it came from what Tal himself had survived and seen as a very young child (missile strikes, men in army uniform, watch towers, exodus by traffic jam, step out of the vehicle), from what all the boys gleaned from the feverish churn of schoolyard talk, or the already ubiquitous contagion of their friends' smart phones, those blue hot spots smouldering everywhere like fire spores ready to ignite more prejudice, fear, turmoil … we resisted. For just a little longer, Jack and I agreed: till they are in high school, at least, let us try to stem the flow of what they have learned. Let us breathe so carefully that no monitor could detect it. Let us hide. Even if a flashlight, a searchlight, passed over us, we would seem to be outcrops of rock. Like rock, like caves, let us shelter the boys from the blister of division. For just a little bit longer, let us believe that we can.
Asked what was on her mind when she wrote her story, Emma Neale replied, 'The central image of the story came to me with a jolt about a year ago. I was carrying out an ordinary daily chore when the image of the three young boys piling out of a car, with their hands in the air on an ordinary suburban road near me, hit with unnerving clarity. It felt like a memory uncovered, though the incident did not happen to me or my family. I wrote down the whole story in pencil in a notebook, in a concentrated rush, at a speed that hardly ever happens to me. I suppose really it comes from several years of mulling over a swirl of issues to do with children and state violence, children and social media, the intertwined global refugee and climate crisis, living in a multicultural society, how to be a compassionate world citizen, and a tough truth about parenting: no matter how hard you might try to insulate your own children from harm, they are of necessity out in the world, and part of it.'