Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  “Asa’, wait! Come back from it! What if there IS something in it?”

  If he heard me at all, he very capably ignored me. He continued staring into it, moving his head this way and that as though trying to make sense of something through distorted glass. Then he sidestepped around it, studying its surface, top to bottom and all around.

  My nervousness began to transform itself into annoyance. Annoyance at being ignored; annoyance at his total and totally uncharacteristic disregard for good sense! For him to expose himself like that, so blatantly, to the unknown (and I include in that, not knowing how I might react to being ignored) was completely provocative!

  “No joins,” he said. “No seams. She’s just herself.” He was positively purring with assurance! And then, “It’s okay,” he said softly. “No one’s going to get hurt!”

  A line of ‘What-would-you-knows?’ queued up at the tip of my tongue, until I suddenly realised that he wasn’t speaking to me.

  * * *

  I don’t say that I was putting any level of credence at all in anything my brother said, because only a simpleton would do that! But I also wasn’t about to cower in the background while he took control of things. I marched up to it myself, intent on going him one better, and splayed the tips of my fingers to touch it. The morning was still very young and cool and the shade was still on The Thing, so I expected the cold reply of metal, which was exactly what I didn’t get! I pulled my fingertips away and put them against my arm, my neck, my face, then back to The Thing. Despite being clearly metallic in composition, it was the same temperature as me – the temperature of my blood!

  That was obviously impossible! But what followed was even more impossible! Probably as an attempt to out-do my out-doing of him, Asael bent and gripped The Thing around its middle – and stood up! It lurched into the air so suddenly and easily that I stumbled back, thinking it had jumped up of its own accord!

  “Look!” Asael laughed. “She’s light as a feather!”

  I found myself stuttering, my mouth chewing my thoughts into unintelligible mush before spewing them out into the air. What I was trying to say was, ‘No! No-No-No! She can’t be!’ I was waving at the piled mound of earth and the crushed cane. Look at the damage it did! It can’t be that light!

  “Look!” Asael was crowing. “I could hold her with one hand!”

  There are times, I’d say, when mistrust and suspicion must be two of the most valuable qualities a person can have, and they kicked in big-time with me at that moment. My every instinct said it should not be so, but if it was so, then something very unknowable was going on – unknowable and scary!

  “Asa’ look around us! Look at the damage! Something that light didn’t do all this! If it’s that light now, then something really WAS inside it! Asael, we have to go! Now! Put it down! Now! Please!”

  On virtually every other day that Asael had lived, he would have done as I said, without question. Even on that day, with The Thing in his hands, he almost obeyed me, bending and holding it toward the ground. But then he stopped. His mouth fell open and he straightened up again, curious and alert, holding The Thing in front of him like a giant, mis-shapen balloon.

  “What’s that?” he whispered.

  “What? What’s what?”

  I’d almost have welcomed a look of horror on his face, but the mask of surprised delight grew even wider, which I took as an equally worrisome sign. I stepped closer, intent on somehow loosening his grip. A hard jab in the ribs would likely have done it. Instead, I tried the gentle approach, catching his arm, leaning in to catch his eyes and putting a hand against The Thing to press it earthwards. And it bit me! That’s not the right word but none other comes quite close enough! I jumped away. It hadn’t hurt me and it clearly wasn’t hurting Asael. But something was there that hadn’t been there a moment ago! A little sort of electrical nip!

  “That!” he said. “What’s that!”

  I forced myself to touch it again and to hold steady against it. This time, it was like an apologetic little tap at my fingertips, barely nudging the epidermis.

  “Batteries?” I suggested.

  “It’s like a pulse! A racing pulse.” Asael had taken his own pulse and mine and Bridie’s so often that he was virtually an expert. His eyes rolled up and I could see that he was counting.

  “It would have to have a heart to have a pulse, Asael. And machines don’t have hearts. They have batteries!” My own heart could have overwhelmed any battery in the land at that moment. “Put it down, Asael! I’m warning you! We’re going!”

  His eyes fell to his hands and roamed slowly up his arms, as though they were clear bottles and he was watching them fill. Within a moment, he was jiggling and giggling exactly as he did when I tickled him under the arms.

  “Come on!” he said. “We gotta show Amalthea!”

  Nothing I said could touch him. Joyful as a leprechaun, he headed through the wall of cane which, though it seemed to part to let him pass, closed behind him, leaving me scrambling to catch up. By the time I battled through, he was virtually hippety-hopping down the open headland, losing and regaining his footing without a care, holding The Thing easily, though her top was more than a metre above his head.

  For the first part of the journey, he held her away and to one side, like a dance partner, so he could peer around her. Once, though, when he stumbled, she struck the ground, catching part of his weight and, from then on, he held her like you’d hold a baby – close to his body, pressing his cheek against her. I scrambled behind, in helpless semi-despair, wheeling my bicycle. Asael’s bike, we left lying in the headland.

  * * *

  I suppose, from the moment he found he could lift Queenie, it was inevitable that she’d be taken to Amalthea’s house and I was relieved to see, as we entered the yard, that the curtains had been drawn back. So at least she was up. Though no one could have been prepared for such a manic start to their day.

  Rosemary was first out, nudging the screen door open before we reached the steps, sniffing the air and squinting at the flood of garbled shouts emerging from Asael. Amalthea followed a moment later, bare-legged, still in her nightshirt. She shook her head in surprise and her auburn hair, still wet from the shower, flicked into little ropes. Then she laughed, though whether in negation or resignation or pleasure, I couldn’t tell.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I was only humouring him! I didn’t expect to be bothering you! He was afraid those boys’d come back and find her and smash her!”

  “Well,” Amalthea said softly; “we don’t want that happening, do we? Not to our Queenie!”

  * * *

  Still on the plastic sheet in the middle of the living room floor, surrounded by nibbled flowers and burnt candles, in the dreamless sleep that should never end, the lolly-bombed and murdered Garlic shudders invisibly and points his mind at the curious bleating of his old friend and partner, Rosemary.

  Chapter 12 – Sunday Morning Visitations

  “You think it’s dangerous, Amalthea?”

  We were in the kitchen, she and I, making coffee and buttering toast. Asael was in the living room with Rosemary and the corpse of Garlic. And Queenie, which I’d insisted Amalthea should touch, to feel the electrical pulsing. Strangely, there was none.

  “I don’t know, Ruthie! I mean, it’s not sharp or pointy or heavy or, apparently, explosive! Not hot, not mobile – not unpredictable in any obvious way!”

  “Hm. I’m not taking any bets on the mobility thing yet! But it has to be electrical, doesn’t it? The lights we saw the other night? And the pulse?” Asael at least had backed me up on that detail.

  “I guess, but . . . even with that . . . it has an aura of peace about it, doesn’t it? And Asael, obviously, hasn’t got any reservations about it!”

  I was about to object to using Asa’ as a gauge of anything but she held up a hand. “I know! I know! You have no faith in his perceptions! But you’ve said yourself, he has an instinct for self-preservat
ion! As does Rosemary, by the way! And she’s not bothered either! So no. I think I’m going to vote for NOT dangerous.”

  We were standing in the doorway, watching it – or rather watching Rosemary watch it. She was staring into it, so close that her breath made little clouds on its surface while it, though its bottom was as round as a beach ball (a very large beach ball), stood motionless where Asael had placed it, balanced on a pinpoint and seemingly inert.

  A stranger thing altogether was happening to Asael. He’d begun prowling about the room – walking away from Queenie, turning his ears this way and that, then going back to her and walking away again. He was like a yo-yo on a string that was being held by that still, metallic thing. Like she was sending him out and drawing him back – testing her control. It did nothing to ease my worry, that’s for sure!

  “I wish I knew how it stays standing like that,” I said.

  “Mmm,” Amalthea said. Then I felt her stiffen, just a little. She flicked the hand towel over her shoulder and went into the room, straight across to Queenie and bent to look at the floor beneath it.

  “Well!” she said. “How did that get there?”

  I joined her and, when she looked up at me, I felt my cheeks flush crimson. A black ribbon was there, the stencilled words glinting up at us: ‘Nothing matters: everything counts’. Amalthea knew exactly where that ribbon should be and, to my everlasting and obvious embarrassment, so did I.

  * * *

  Asael can hear Ruth and Amalthea clearly – hear their continuing chatter, their concern and their bumping about in the kitchen. He listens contentedly for several minutes, even though their words are not directed at him. When he stops listening to them, other less insistent layers of sound begin to intrude. At the top, there’s the noisy chatter of birds, underlain by the dreamy chink of a wind chime and the purposeful chug of the distant mill. And further down, something much less intrusive; something flagging; something with a voice no bigger than the squeak of a leaf against a twig. And yet, somehow, it’s that layer that summons his attention. It’s somewhere in the periphery of the room, but he hears it best when he’s near Queenie. He keeps returning to her, finding new bearings.

  Finally, he finds himself at the window, beyond which the landscape is already fiercely bright. The sound – a dry little flutter, like a corner of paper that’s now and again ruffled by a breeze – is not coming from out there.

  He searches the window ledge and finds there, jammed in a corner, a dragonfly. Its body is a long, blue straw, interrupted by hulking shoulders and pea-sized red eyes. Hours spent beating itself against the glass have drained it so that its four, crystalline wings lie dully at its sides. As he watches, they rise, ruffle the air half-heartedly and fall again, making the sound that he’s been tracking.

  Asael sweeps the dragonfly gently into his palm and it tumbles like a broken plastic thing – no longer a dragon. No longer even a fly. He holds it near his face, marvelling at the huge, lidless eyes, wondering that such eyes should have failed to search out some other exit – to find some solution other than this hopeless battering. Through them, he must seem a monstrous apparition.

  He walks with it to the door, half expecting to see it move or object or try to escape, but there’s nothing. He opens the screen and holds his hand out. Still, it doesn’t move. He jiggles it, feeling it feather-light on his palm. He brings it close to his mouth and puffs a dollop of air onto it. Immediately, it rises to its feet, clicks its wings and turns itself in a full circle on his palm. Then it lifts into the air and hovers briefly, its great eyes turned to him, before diving off into the shadows of the Poinciana.

  Asael knows what has happened. The creature was close to death and is now fully alive. It’s alive because of him and his act of carrying it to the door and breathing onto it the force that has gathered in him from his contact with Queenie. He felt it filling him up when he carried her. And now, in Amalthea’s doorway, with a green and brown landscape of possibility stretching away before him, he raises his arms to the sky.

  “Baa-ah-ah,” says Rosemary, punching lightly into Asael’s leg.

  He shakes his head at her and then, with a sudden sense of insight, goes back into Amalthea’s living room, straight to the makeshift bier and the dead body of Garlic the goat. Rosemary comes to stand beside him, positioning herself to watch Asael’s face as though expecting a mask to be lifted. Thoughtfully, Asael puts out a hand to stroke Rosemary’s living chest and puts his other on the cold shoulder of the recumbent Garlic. They are like that when the shadow fills the doorway.

  * * *

  Amalthea studied the black ribbon briefly, probably assuring herself that she hadn’t had that album out in months. Then she gave me a blandly inquiring look, as if to say, ‘Is that who you are?’ She held it out for me to take – Nothing matters; everything counts. Then she snapped the towel off her shoulder and went back to sit at the kitchen table. I followed her, though I felt much more like crawling under a rock.

  “Amalthea, I’m sorry! We were waiting for you. Asa’ got bored and . . . I should have made him put it back straight away. It’s not his fault, it’s mine.”

  “It’s all right!” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Sit down, coffee’s getting cold.”

  I threw myself into a chair, even as I heard myself saying, “We’ll go. We shouldn’t have come, imposing ourselves on you like this.”

  “Right, right. Imposing yourselves.” She put her elbows on the table and held the coffee cup under her nose. “Going through my stuff.”

  I slumped in the chair. “Shit-shit-shit-shit!” And, prompted by a large dose of humiliation which had to squeeze itself in beside the confusion I was already feeling over Asael and Queenie, I started to cry. When I cried at home, I could always count on Bridie to try to comfort me, which gave me the option of shrugging her off. I half-expected Amalthea to do the same, but she didn’t. She sipped her coffee and left me blubbing away on my own. Finally I managed to push myself upright onto my feet. I put the chair in, like that would erase any evidence of my having been there, and put the ribbon on the table.

  As I started for the door, she said, “It’s not a mantra to live by, of course. Even she understood that in the end.”

  I stopped, slapping away tears. She was gazing through the steam from the coffee, eyes focussed somewhere beyond the room, into the past.

  “Still,” she sighed, “whatever gives you comfort, right? The universe spins along on its merry way. We keep up as best we can.”

  Then she patted the table where I’d been sitting and pushed my cup a little closer to the edge. I sat back down, sniffling, and she pushed tissues my way.

  “Who is she?” I managed.

  “Was. She’s dead now. Who she was, was Philippa . . . my little sister. Half-sister. We have . . . had . . . the same mum.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  “Mm. Me too. I miss her. We all miss her, Rosemary and . . . well, maybe not Garlic anymore, I guess.”

  She started to tell me about the farm she’d grown up on with Philippa and their mother and Philippa’s father and Garlic and Rosemary and, finally, Philippa’s disease. She was dead at thirteen, my age, from an illness that had slowly and cruelly reduced her.

  She told the story quickly and scantily and, when she finished, I asked the only question I could think of that made sense.

  “How did she . . . ? I mean before she . . . ! Was she brave?”

  “Brave? I guess she was, yes! Something certainly managed to keep her spirit upright; even after her body lost the ability to walk. And she had a wicked sense of humour, that’s for sure!”

  “Humour? While she was dying?”

  “Oh yeah! A way of seeing things. Our father – her father, my step-dad – made a goat cart and Rosemary and Garlic used to take turns taking her around the farm. Once, near the end, she was lying back in that cart. And she said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be awful, Am’, if life took its clothes off and you were expecting somet
hing beautiful and you found it had a pale, freckled, pointless little arse like mine!’ She laughed herself senseless over that!”

  I didn’t get it, and I guess my puzzled look showed as much.

  “She wanted life to be beautiful, Ruth – even her small, failing life! Meaning? Sure, it would be nice if it had meaning. But if irony was all we could expect, she was prepared to appreciate that. She’s one I expect to find again somewhere, sometime, somehow. Her and Garlic both!”

  * * *

  Philippa had told her parents she wanted the commemorative bookmark ribbons to be green, to symbolise growth, but when it came to it, Pip was their child – the child of both of them – and, though they were willing to let her say that nothing mattered, to them it mattered desperately! It counted and it mattered. The ribbons were ordered in black.

  “It’s crazy, you know? How you lose so much! And then when it’s gone, Life just nudges you ahead, as if . . . so what? It’s like, ‘Did you think you were here for that? No, no, no! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ And then, if you really are persistent – you stumble across laughter all over again! It’s always out there you know, Ruthie! In pockets – maybe in your own pockets! Just waiting for you to dig down to it! I for one can hardly turn a corner without thinking, maybe this is the one! The one Pip’s going to jump out of and shout ‘Ha! Tricked you!’”

  * * *

  Amalthea seemed to have fallen into a dream that she needed to speak out loud. Philippa was clearly still alive for her. I, on the other hand, stayed very quiet, hoping she’d get to the pictures of Kevin. She didn’t, because the first of her unexpected visitors arrived.

  “Hello? Ye outta bed yet, girl?”

  It was the voice of Alf Caletti, her landlord, calling from the front door; a shy man’s way of respecting her privacy. He called and then retreated to his Ute, cap in hand, rubbing the sun away from the top of his head and carrying on a muttered conversation with Vivian, his wife, who remained in the vehicle. Thea went out to them and I stood inside, behind the screen.

  “Alf! Vivian! This is a surprise! Early morning visits aren’t usually your style!”

  Cane farmers are an aging breed and the Caletti’s were no exception to the rule; both fifty-ish; old enough to be marked by heavy work and the tropical sun and the endless anxieties of unreliable crops, markets and weather.