by Joshua Lobb
‘They’re fascists,’ he’d sneer. ‘She’s so bourgeois.’
I didn’t ask what these words meant. I never asked, either, how he’d got the scar on his face, but he did tell me that his birthday was coming up and his mum had said he could have a sleepover if he wanted, if I wanted. He said this out of the corner of his mouth, so that the scar twitched in a strange way. I don’t remember saying yes, but I do remember walking to his house after school, pyjamas and toothbrush in my backpack. We left by the incorrect gate, the gate I never allowed myself to go out by, but I squeezed my elbows into my rib cage and kept my palms close to the sides of my legs. I gave my thighs four quick taps. I don’t think my almost-friend noticed.
It was a long walk to his house. He pointed out objects of interest in an off-hand way: the big gnarled tree, the lawnmower repair shop, the stormwater drain. I said something about The Goodies being on tonight, and he agreed that we’d watch it if we had time. The afternoon light was greying. We walked to the edge of town, out onto the floodplain. The streets here had big gaps between houses, as though there’d once been a house there but someone had erased it. In the spaces were rusted husks of cars growing in the long grass. We arrived at my almost-friend’s house. It was made up of horizontal strips of white wood; some strips were a grottier shade of white than others. Against the boards was a stack of bicycles. As we made our way up the cracked cement path, the screen door shrieked open and a midget child galloped out and tackled my almost-friend.
‘This is my fascist brother,’ my almost-friend sneered.
The rest of his family was in the kitchen. The room was cosy: a pot-belly stove was going and the mum was stirring something on the stove. It was the same smell that clung to my almost-friend, but in this room it smelled hearty, delicious. The mum was curly haired and eiderdowny, like the wife on All Creatures Great and Small. The dad had just come in from the backyard still wearing muddy gumboots over his corduroy trousers. In the corner was a crib with a baby in it, and the dad was cooing over it. I said a tentative hello and the family replied with some friendly welcoming words, the younger brother talking over the top of everyone else and then the mother telling him consolingly that he could tell me all about his toys later.
‘Come and see the chooks,’ my almost-friend said.
The chooks were kept at the far end of the muddy, knotty-grass backyard. The coop was tacked onto the side of a nearly-fallen-down shed: a wire caged-in area with a metal gate. Within the cage at least ten brown dishevelled birds strutted, pricking the soggy straw. My almost-friend strode over the puddles and the tufts of grass. I held back as he untangled the latch of the gate: a coathanger wound around the metal frame.
‘Are you scared?’ a voice behind me said. The younger brother was standing at the back door, clutching a knitted toy in the shape of a cow.
‘They’re only chooks,’ my almost-friend said as he stood amongst the terrifying creatures.
When I stepped into the coop—my hand getting stabbed by the end of the coathanger latch, the mud squelching under my school shoes—the birds flicked their heads and stared at me with their goggly eyes. I hoped they might scatter, but they started, instead, to advance on me. They clucked, loudly. One bird lifted her head and stretched her neck, Godzilla-like. Another lifted a talon. They twisted their heads, peering at me with one eye and then the other.
‘They’re only chooks,’ the younger brother said, clambering in after me.
‘Go back inside,’ my almost-friend sneered at his brother. ‘This coop is for intelligentsia only.’
The brother stayed where he was. ‘This is my cow,’ he said to me, sticking out the knitted black-and-white toy.
‘No one cares,’ said my almost-friend as he checked the plastic water bottles that were hanging from the top of the cage. Tubes protruded from the bottom of these, like you saw in the hospital wards on Trapper John, M.D. A little red plastic bowl sat underneath and some of the creatures were poking at the water. My almost-friend leaped over to the corner of the cage and ripped the lid off a large ice-cream container. He grabbed some pellets that looked like All-Bran and flung them across the straw. The birds’ clucking changed pitch, and they strutted towards the pellets, their heads pulsating forwards and back.
‘They’re tidbitting,’ my almost-friend said. ‘The weird thing they do with their neck, the weird noise they make, it’s called tidbitting.’
One of the birds tidbitted in my direction. Under the watchful eyes of my almost-friend and his younger brother, I kept as still as I possibly could, my hands by my sides. The bird plucked nearly-but-not-quite at my toes. Another bird high-stepped over and took a swipe, not at me, but at the other chicken. The first chicken scurried away.
‘We call that the pecking order,’ my friend sneered. ‘The one at your feet now, she’s the boss of the coop.’ The creature tilted her head at me, as if she was considering pecking me, too. ‘It can get pretty bloody, stabbing at the face and neck with their beaks. Sometimes they all gang up on one chook. They can peck it to death. They don’t peck at people, not very often. We had a rooster, it wanted to be the boss of Dad even and my dad had to wear these special gloves and then pin it to the ground whenever it got too cocky. It still wouldn’t submit so Dad said there was only one option …’
The chicken at my feet strutted away. ‘Which was …?’ I didn’t want to say.
‘The stew pot,’ my almost-friend sneered.
‘The stew pot,’ said his younger brother. ‘Do you want to play with my cow?’
There’s the word ‘chicken’: pecking at my feet, tilting her head to gaze at me; and there’s the word ‘chicken’: the stringy brown meat bubbling in the pot on the stove.
‘Are you sure you’re not hungry?’ the mum asked me, doling out a second helping to her son.
I smiled wanly but didn’t say anything.
‘That just means there’s plenty for the rest of us, eh boys?’ said the dad, then gave a big bear-laugh to show me he was being funny.
The brothers didn’t appear to be listening: my almost-friend had snatched the knitted cow away from his brother and was holding it aloft, just out of reach.
‘I’ll leave some in the pot in case,’ said the mum. ‘And there’s heaps of bread if you want it.’
The younger brother was struggling with my almost-friend, grabbing upwards. ‘Give me it!’
‘No!’
I nibbled at a corner of the crumbly, kibbly bread.
‘Give me the cow!’
The mum had turned away to look at the baby in the crib. The dad was watching his sons squabble, amused.
‘Why do you want it? Why do you want it?’ my almost-friend was saying.
‘Because it’s mine!’
The older brother flicked it across the room and the boy scrambled after it. ‘You’re such a materialist,’ my almost-friend said.
The dad let out a massive hearty chuckle. ‘Now where’d you pick up words like that?’
‘Chip off the old block,’ the mum said, good-naturedly. ‘Who wants to wash up?’
The dad washed up and I helped my almost-friend dry. The younger brother wiped down the kitchen table, and the mum picked up the baby and held it in her arms. She undid a few buttons of her shirt and I looked into the sink at the suds draining down the plughole. The younger brother was jumping up at a high shelf in the corner of the room and the dad strode over and took down a pack of cards.
‘Do you know how to play Verbot?’ the younger brother asked.
I said to my almost-friend, ‘I thought we were going to watch The Goodies.’
‘Oh, luvvie,’ the mother said, ‘we don’t have a television.’
My almost-friend wasn’t looking at me. His face was humming.
We all sat down at the table and played cards. During the card game the dad told me about ethical farming and the principles of social equality before the mum told him to quieten down before he bored us all to death. My almost-friend, scowling next to m
e, didn’t say anything, and missed some crucial plays in the game. He didn’t even notice when his brother’s score surpassed his or when the mum deliberately let him win. And then we all went to bed.
It was strange looking up at a different ceiling in a different room. His brother was snoring in the corner.
‘I know my house is a bit weird,’ my almost-friend said.
‘It’s all right,’ I wanted to say.
‘My dad says that he made a choice, and it was the best choice, for all of us. He says we’re all caught up in the capitalist alienation machine, no, not machine, the industrial power complex. He didn’t want to be a corporate automaton. I don’t either, I s’pose, but I also don’t want to have to keep moving towns and I want to buy proper clothes and …’
His brother snuffled and rolled over.
‘I just want to watch telly,’ my friend whispered.
A car drove down the street. I watched the lights curve across the ceiling.
‘My family’s weird, too,’ I said.
And I told him everything. I told him about the silences in my house and the stilted conversations between me and my father. I told him about the daily visits from the nurse, and the buckets of vomit my father brings out from behind the closed door. And the times the doctor comes and spends forever in the closed-off room and then when he comes out he won’t look at me. And then my father is even more silent. I told him about going into the stifling room and not-talking to my fading-away mother.
And I told him the other stuff, too, the places where I can and can’t cross the street and the way I play my Hitwave ’81 record and the humming words forming in my brain and the way I have to tap tap tap tap. The words unfurled from my mouth and ascended to the ceiling. They curved through the air like light.
My friend didn’t say anything.
‘It’s all right,’ I said to myself.
‘It’s all right,’ my friend echoed.
In the morning, I ravenously ate four pieces of buttered toast.
‘I knew you’d get your appetite back,’ the mum said.
I avoided an invitation from the younger brother to visit the chooks again, thanked the parents for having me, and took the path past the empty spaces and the lawnmower shop and the gnarled tree back to school.
My friend didn’t say anything on the walk.
And then, at playlunch, when I looked for him in the quadrangle, I noticed that the atmosphere in the playground had changed, just a little. The figures were more clumped together than usual and they were buzzing with some new excitement. As I made my way over to the usual corner, a clump of students shadowed over to me. I drifted casually in another direction as if that had always been my intention. I didn’t normally like to go this way: the quadrangle here was a tangle of hopscotch lines, scrawled in red paint. The horde moved over with me. I tried to slip past, but one of the boys stuck out his leg and I tripped, slapping my palms hard on the cement, my hands and knees cutting into the red paint.
‘Made you step on the crack,’ the boy guffawed.
‘Tap tap tap tap,’ my almost-friend sneered behind him.
My father-in-law said, ‘What’s got her goat?’
My brothers-in-law snorted and one swigged at his beer. The patio roof thrummed in the summer heat.
‘Dad,’ my wife was still trying to finish her sentence. ‘It’s just—she’s just—it’s just something that—’
‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said.
She was still crouched in the far corner of the backyard, staring into the Colorbond fence. I sat down on the lawn next to her. She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence.
‘It’s all right,’ I wanted to say.
Her eyes were dry from staring.
‘Darling,’ I said.
‘I won’t, Daddy. I won’t.’
I tried to think of the right thing to say.
‘Darling, please,’ I said. I looked back at the patio and my relatives-in-law leaning over the platter, my still-wet-from-the-pool nephews licking their sticky fingers. ‘Darling, please. It’s what they do in this family.’
I thought of families—not just this family—gathering at Christmas time, celebrating together over roast chook, falling asleep together in front of the telly. I thought of the whole power complex.
‘There are two words,’ I wanted to say. ‘There’s “part”: the word you use when you’re included, when you’re in on the conversation. “I’m part of the whole,” you might want to say. And there’s “part”: when you leave the room, when you’re cut away from the rest of the group, when a quadrangle of children sneer at you, when you don’t know what happened on The Goodies last night, when someone catches you picking the bacon bits out of the potato salad.’
I thought of being on the outside looking in.
‘It’s what we do in our family,’ I said to my daughter.
Eventually, I was able to prise her away from the Colorbond and drag her back to the table. I had to use sterner words than ‘please’, harsher actions than a hand-hold. ‘But sometimes,’ I told myself, ‘it needs to be done, it’s for her own good, it’s what we have to do.’
She sat at the table; there were four pink marks on her upper arm where my fingers had been. ‘I’m sorry, Granddad,’ she said, the words falling out of her dry mouth.
Then I watched her from across the table, licking off the gluey marinade to reveal the chlorine-white meat underneath, forcing the stringy flesh into her mouth. Her eyes glinting blackly, looking at me murderously.
My father watched me from across the table, his nails tapping against the marble.
For the rest of primary school, I tried to make myself as normal as possible. I’d see my no-longer-friend in the quadrangle, playing handball with his mates, sneering together. Then one year—halfway through term—he wasn’t there any more. I’d walk home, taking a different route each time. I locked away the humming and the tapping for the times when no one was paying attention. When my father served up dinner, the plate clanking down on the marble table, I ate what was put in front of me.
Nocturne
I do haunt you still.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
He’s never seen a tawny frogmouth, not in real life. He’s seen pictures on the internet. Grumpy, crumpled faces, staring at the camera, enduring the human gaze. Tufty, downturned old-man eyebrows. Their beaks are wide and flat, like a schoolboy’s cap. Glumping-round torsos, like Banksia Men or fluffy boom mikes. He’s seen videos of them on YouTube: they yawn and their mottled heads hinge open like a hand puppet. There’s smooth pink leather inside. There are recordings of their midnight call: barely audible, low and relentless, woom woom woom woom. A sad thrum in the distance. He’s heard accounts of their wondrous camouflage. The sleeping bird, beak raised; still and silent, hunched into the rough skin of an ironbark. You may be rumbling down a bush track in your car and you’ll see a dead branch on the road. If you stop and watch, you might see it ruffle. It might wink at you: an orange-sapphire eye, watching sullenly, too doleful to fly away.
The young man is sitting at a narrow desk. Four alabaster walls frame him. There is a blank sheet of paper in front of him. It’s that time of night when the air is nebulous and the darkness seems eternal. The palpable silence that overwhelms, when thoughts can be insistent, urgent, insurmountable. A frightening but beautiful silence: as if he’s the only one awake in the whole world. He wants to write. Sometimes the words come easily. Tonight they do not.
The man stares at a glimmering screen. He’s withdrawn from the warmth of the bed, extricated himself from the entanglement of his wife’s limbs. He’s shuffled his pins-and-needles feet into the study and slid into the swivelly chair. He’s trying to decipher a spreadsheet. The digits are like scratches on a prison-cell wall. They blur together, fluttering over each other. Silent wings polishing the night sky.
The boy is lying on his back in his bed, embalmed under a heavy blanket. His legs feel leaden, his feet are warm and hea
vy. His arms are tight against his torso. His spindly fingers peck against his leg. He concentrates on the accompanying words. Please don’t let it. Please don’t let it. There’s a fifth word in the mantra, one more tap, but he switches hands before his thoughts leap there. He doesn’t want to get to the end of the sentence. His open eyes watch the grey streaks of light on the ceiling, the murmuring not-thoughts. He hears a sigh of pain coming from behind a closed door.
The man is reading online articles. He’s recently chucked out the shoeboxes under the bed, but he’s still bookmarking webpages, collecting and connecting ideas in his mind. The sluggish air blankets around him. He’s skimming over political catastrophes, ecological crises. A bushfire smoulders; a presidential rival says, smearingly, that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. A desert encroaches on fertile land, swathes across the shoulder of Africa. There’s a chasm deepening in forests in Brazil, in Myanmar, in New Zealand. Closer to home. The man reads about forest dieback on the east coast. The trees wither from the top downward. The cancer spreads through the branches, discolouring the leaves. There are multiple catalysts: logging and insects and even birds. He learns about the bellbird’s involvement in deforestation: a memory is tainted. He decides not to tell his wife about his discovery. He delves deeper. The birds scare away the other species, those who’d normally eat the grubs. The grubs multiply and suck away the sap. He scans the pictures. A gash of grey emptiness. The shards of tree trunks lacerate the sky. Economies crumble, cultures are annihilated. Humans and bellbirds shriek into the void.
It’s another night, not that long ago. The baby is screeching, unrelentingly obstinate. The man hesitates in the doorway, emerging from a jagged sleep. The baby’s head is splayed open. The tongue curls in her purple mouth. The man is sullen and sore. He’s not aware of the strumming fingers on his thigh. The baby keeps crying.
