Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  ‘Stop that!’

  Elizabeth grabbed the puppet and began to whip the small boy, flailing him with the monkey’s skinny arms, stinging him with fabric, until she saw the boy cower down, hands protecting his head. An eerie silence stilled the room. It was the quietest it had ever been. Elizabeth looked around and, to her astonishment, saw only a couple of children sitting in the chairs. Hidden away in her black box she hadn’t realised there was hardly any audience today; most of the children, like the pretty Ong girls, were long gone.

  Elizabeth excused herself, left the few remaining children with some colouring-in sheets and the monkey puppet in a scrappy heap on the floor. She walked out to the church storeroom where the old stuff was still being hoarded—the broken crèche toys, the embroidered Fruits of the Spirit wall-hanging, the artificial flowers in urns. All the items that no-one could bear to throw away. Long wooden church pews were double banked against the walls, having been replaced in the hall years ago by rows of durable plastic. She remembered the days as a child when the elderly gentlemen would totter bow-limbed down the aisles, take off their hats, then bend and slide their trousered legs across the polished pews. Now, it hurt to slide her own legs across the splintered, neglected wood, but she preferred it that way. After all, forgiveness was like going against the rough grain. Allowing your sister to push you forward, towards the sailor man with one hand up a puppet, the other up a skirt—your eyes wobbling and rattling like a dummy’s, as your insides scream out red.

  ARROW

  Each morning Fran holds her breath to see whether her son has made it through another night. The empty packet of Arnott’s Savoury Shapes is a good sign. Also, the slops of curry at the base of the fridge. Now she is able to start getting ready for her day at work.

  Before she leaves the house, she places a packet of Tim Tams inside the fridge to keep them cool. She thinks about writing a note, but decides against it. The last one, she found ground to a pulp in the dishwasher. She wonders if Damien is still wearing the same tartan blanket poncho, with a hole hacked in the centre to make room for his fat neck. Or whether his skin is still as pale as the cabbage moths that flutter like paper over the tomato bushes.

  Fran likes to think of her son as a harmless resident ghost, sexless and sweet like Casper, not the angry, unwashed twenty year old who has stewed for years in his own filth.

  * * *

  ‘You’re the classic enabler,’ says Coral Knightley, Head of the English Department, who always holds court on the softest sofa in the staffroom. Coral is wrong. Fran can’t think of a single thing that Damien is able to do, apart from retracing the small arc of his life: a few steps to his room, the fridge, the toilet. Oh, there was that one time she had found the front door unchained and left ajar—does that count?—the thought of him stepping out in the early hours of the morning onto the dark front porch, blinking at the neighbouring yards of nothingness.

  Coral leans forward to rub Fran on the arm, and slows her voice to a child’s pace. ‘He needs to leave home. Stand on his own two feet.’

  Fran is beginning to tire of Coral and her regular psychobabble. The other staff members aren’t much help either. Fran suspects they only listen in so they can feel better about themselves, like people who watch those hoarding horror shows. She excuses herself from Coral’s condescending hand, and takes her lunch box to her office at the end of the hallway.

  She eats hunched over her desk and bits of dry rice fall between the computer keys. There is dust on the computer screen and small sprinkles of dander on the black base. When Fran is at work, the arc of her day becomes smaller, too, like Damien’s: the car park, the staffroom, her desk. It’s been months since she organised a careers seminar for the students or a vocational pathways talk for the parents. The last district Careers Expo she attended was two years ago in June, when she’d sat at a booth stacked with copies of the Job Guide and watched the students bypass her stall and flock to another decked out in colourful balloons and a psychedelic hand-painted sign: Free Personality Testing.

  Fran looks out of her window at the neatly edged chapel garden and the row of cars with P-plates in the car park. She can just make out her small yellow Datsun, a lonely canary amongst the dazzling sea of silver and white. Spotto, she says in her head, just like Damien would have said at the age of ten. A gardener moves a wheelbarrow slowly over the lawn, and Fran wonders if the girls—or boys—have a crush on him. Find him hot. She remembers what it is like to go to an all-girl school and develop crushes on the unlikeliest of people. The effeminate Japanese teacher, the pock-cheeked bus driver. But these girls seem different, more confident and more certain of all their options. They wouldn’t settle for a gardener. It reminds her of the series of career bullseye charts from the Department of Education, tacked all over her office walls to add a semblance of colour. Career options for every subject imaginable: maths, science, history, English—even a chart for entertainment. All the colourful rings of possibility, inner and outer, and you shoot for the best possible life.

  Bullseye!

  * * *

  Fran listens to Amy Hepple talk on and on, and wonders if she is an alien. Her eyes are too widely spaced, like a bug, and she has an impossibly high forehead. And there is a blue-green vein in her forehead that could be the conduit for all that alien blood, the mother source of this über-ambition. For Amy wants to be a CEO by the time she’s thirty, Amy wants to be as famous as Mark Zuckerberg. There’s no point in even showing Amy Hepple the bullseye because her career trajectory is clearly off the charts.

  Fran can hear the next Year Ten student shuffling electricity on the carpet outside her door. She needs to cut Amy short but Amy doesn’t pause for a breath, she just goes on and on and on. Fran dislikes the girl but watching her is addictive, so she lets her speak about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and her volunteer job at the Nulsen Haven Foundation and wonders what it would be like to live inside Amy’s forehead. Or anyone’s head for that matter. Who can really know someone unless you prise open their skull cage and step inside? A baby would know though, wouldn’t they? Absorbing more than just nutrients through the womb wall: the mother’s thought patterns, silent conversations, the nervous beats of the hand and the heart.

  With Damien’s father it was different, inside Fran for less than thirty seconds.

  Fran looks beyond Amy’s head at the rows and rows of cars. Two of the Year Twelve students are fooling around against a silver car, then they lean playfully across the bonnet, the girl on top of the boy, and her long shimmering ponytail spills like a waterfall over his face. From this distance it’s hard to see if they are kissing, or mouths brushed together and laughing, but Fran can imagine it: the surprising softness of the touching lips, the mint and tang of saliva and lip balm and then an unnameable earthen taste that comes from beyond the throat, from deep within a beating chest. The students pull away from each other, and there is a moment where they seem frozen in time, blinded by the ripples of light that shoot across the metallic hoods and bonnets, little flying arrowheads, and Fran feels weirdly cold, as if one has flown through her heart. The students suddenly come alive again, warm up in the sun’s steady rays and then they race up the stairs, their hips softly bouncing together along the pathway to the chapel. Fran recognises them by the way they move: Kyra has plans to be a dancer, Ryan a sports physio.

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ The words seem to leap out from nowhere.

  Fran sees Amy hesitate. This is obviously not the kind of question she has prepared for in her short sprint to the top.

  ‘My son... If you’re interested...’ Fran’s voice falls away as she notices Amy’s widening black pupils. A shocked, sickened expression, as if the moon has settled permanently over the sun.

  Fran knows now that the students have heard and believed all the stories about Damien. Or is it just her, Fran, who they know and despise?

  ‘That’s all,’ says Fran sharply. ‘No need to see me again. According to Myers-Briggs, your type is
destined to rule the world.’

  * * *

  Coral has cornered Fran in the staff bathroom again. She bangs on about a story that Fran is certain she’s heard before. Either watching a TED podcast or reading it in a Steve Biddulph book about raising boys. It’s a modern-day retelling of the ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ fairy tale, where instead of the mother throwing the beans in the garden, she gently takes them and locks them in the dark cupboard, saying to her son, We’ll discuss this in the morning.

  ‘See,’ says Coral, twisting her lips in a smug fashion. ‘If the mother had been angry and thrown the beans in the garden, then Jack would’ve had his adventure, slayed the giant and become the man he was destined to be.’

  Fran wonders if Coral talks like this at home to her husband. Probably not. With her grown-up children dotted around the country, there are only the Year Twelve English students and she who are Coral’s remaining captives.

  ‘Sorry, I’m in a hurry. Gotta fly.’

  Fran flees the building, and escapes in her car. On the way home she pulls into the Bunnings car park, something she does whenever she feels the anxiety take hold. The warehouse looks empty, only a few tradies and retirees looking for the right screw or nail for the job. Fran makes her way to the paint section and stands in front of the Dulux colour selections. There they are, little slips of the rainbow fanning out from one colour spectrum into the next. All those endless possibilities. She runs her fingers along a row of blue and takes every fifth sample out, then folds them away in her purse. A big lad with baggy jeans and a store name badge, ‘Dean’, watches her, but pretends not to notice. He’s seen her too many times to think she’s shopping for paint. She is stealing colour. Dean’s face is flushed, like a permanent sunburn, a perfect match for his prickled reddish hair.

  Fran wonders about his educational background, how he seems a little slow and slack-jawed, and whether Damien, too, could work in a place like this. She remembers the first summer when they bought their house after years of renting, and how they spent countless weeks taking home the sample pots, testing stripe upon stripe of blue all over his bedroom wall. And how they laughed at the names, laughed so much it hurt their breastbones—Snorkel Sea, Mineral Mist, Cousteau— and then coming up with their own versions of colour: Mystic Bruise, Sneezy Breezy and Varicose Vein. That’s a cool job, to name the Dulux paints, he’d said, and Fran pictured Damien, so happy thinking up the new names as if he was Adam christening all the animals at the beginning of Creation. And the snatches of joy continued for them in unexpected bursts—at the hairdresser or in cream-walled waiting rooms, when Damien would lean over to whisper in her ear, Mr Whippy .

  But then he had chosen black. The blackest of black. Painted over each and every hesitant blue stripe until the bleak oily walls absorbed all colour and life.

  She sees a man in paint-speckled navy overalls sidle up to the shelves of rollers and brushes. He is a grizzled grey— Barbed Wire Grey—and everything about him seems so tired: his folded-in eyelids, his not-so-erect lumbar spine, the creased, sad-sack clothes—and Fran wonders if being with a man like this would have made a scrap of difference for Damien, and whether her decision to not date men or pursue a relationship had been the right one after all. Pouring every ounce of her fibre and soul into her only son, as if growing a prize pumpkin for the Royal Show.

  * * *

  The house smells horrible. Fran opens up all the windows and doors, and switches the air conditioner onto the fan setting. She examines the kitchen for signs of life then stands at Damien’s door, pressing her ear lightly against the wood. Fran desperately wants to hear the sound of his breathing but all she can detect is her own irregular heartbeat. There is no light coming from under the doorway, only that constant flashing electric blue from the computer screen that Coral says is as addictive as the pokies. Oh yes, Coral has terrified Fran with stories about the Dark Web and the beastly, horror-show images that are traded and paraded for boys by the hour. What terrifies Fran the most is that she has no knowledge of the world which Damien now inhabits.

  The doorbell rings and Fran is momentarily confused. She looks through the security screen and realises that she has forgotten the four o’clock appointment, the first client for her hastily set-up résumé-writing business. The contract with the private school will finish at the end of the year and she knows it won’t be renewed. There have been far too many parent and student complaints for that.

  ‘Have I got the right place?’

  ‘Yes. Come in. I’ve got the office set up down here.’

  The man follows Fran down the corridor. She feels uncomfortable letting a complete stranger into her home, but he looks innocuous enough. Ordinary features, office-style clothes and a polite, neutral voice. He has already sent through his details and qualifications, which Fran skimmed through last week. She vaguely remembers that he worked in a warehouse in Belmont and moved from Queensland six years ago. She apologises for not being organised and hurriedly prints out his documents while he waits patiently, taking in her office décor. Fran is quick, able to leap over the years and assess the situation. She likes this peephole into someone else’s world, the ability to rearrange and embellish the small set of attributes and skills in order to compose a better, neater life. Align all those margins. Something bothers her though. Five missing years, and the man’s dirty fingernails, which pick at a worn groove on his belt.

  ‘Can you tell me what you were doing in 2009?’

  ‘I just want a job.’

  ‘I need a bit more information.’

  ‘Can you do this or not?’

  Fran wants to tell him that she cannot restore those lost years; the chinks in his timeline cannot be poly-fillered with ink or bubbles of paint. She suddenly feels pity for him, apologises for not being able to help him after all. She gives a weak motherly smile.

  ‘Are you fuckin’ kidding me?’ The man has the same look of incredulity on his face as Amy Hepple did when Fran dismissed her from her office, when she stared at the older woman and said, Why are you even doing this job?

  Fran could not answer her. There was nothing to say. No-one ever grows up wanting to be a career guidance counsellor, or the mother of a son who cannot step one foot outside the front door.

  * * *

  Fran doesn’t go to sleep. She forces herself to stay awake just so she can get a glimpse of Damien and make sure he’s okay. She takes a cup of coffee and waits in the lounge room at the front of the house with the light switched off. In the dull glow of the moon, she scrolls through the LinkedIn notifications on her phone. She’s updated her profile but knows it won’t make a difference. No-one will be headhunting her any time soon.

  Sometimes she scrolls through the list of men called Simon Hobson. Or was it Hodson? It’s been over twenty years since she woke up next to the stranger from the party, did the drive of shame down Kwinana Freeway, going against the peak-hour flow. She has forgotten everything about his face: it’s hard to tell if it’s Simon Hodson, a manager for Exxon, or Simon Hobson from Tech Solutions. She strains to find any trace of Damien in the suited necks and grainy faces.

  In the stillness, Fran’s heart is changing rhythm. On every fourth beat it feels as if it’s a leg, kicking out all crooked, like a child learning how to swim. She can hear the puckered calls of the frogs coming from her garden fernery, how one low moan sets off the next, until the world is filled with the same stammering vibration of love me, find me, love me, find me. She wants to paper over the cries, just like she did when Damien screamed as a baby, smothering his wailing mouth with her nipple, force-feeding a gushing flow of milk down his gullet until he flopped like a drunk on her lap. The frog calls get stronger and more plaintive, and then she hears heavy footsteps down the hall. She stifles her breathing and switches off her phone. There is the sound of the fridge door unsticking its rubbery hold, and then dishes and jars being clanked around. The open door sets off a series of warning beeps and Fran knows that Damien is still standing t
here, shovelling the tray of lasagne into his mouth.

  A classic enabler.

  Fran hears him walk to the other end of the house; the toilet flushing and cistern gurgling. She is about to leave and go back to bed when suddenly she hears steps again and the click and slide of the glass doors opening. Where is Damien going? Curious, Fran creeps forward and sees a hulking creature standing like a statue in the garden. She watches in horror as Damien lifts up his blanket poncho and exposes his nakedness to the cool night air, his monstrous marbled belly hanging like an animal pouch over the tops of his white dimpled thighs, his penis a peeping worm. Then he turns his head to face her, and she’s shocked to see he is now like an old man. The gloss of youth shrivelled away— wispy, thinning hair and dead eyes. Click! Fran steps forward to turn the lock, and Damien lets out a surprised bellow, screams and charges at his mother through the closed door. She watches all the rage and loathing, the hatred building to a climax on his face. And then she realises it’s not Damien’s reflection she can see, but her own: an angry, embittered middle-aged woman blinking unhappiness through the glass. For Damien is already running through the maze of unlit streets, his flesh wobbling in crazed momentum, his strange garment flapping like a dress and letting in the breeze.

  IN MEMORIAM

  It was the night of the superstorm in Adelaide and I was sitting in the middle of Cousin Deidre’s lounge room, surrounded by the remains of Walter’s life. There were boxes of CDs and stationery, mementoes from the university and teaching years, science fiction paraphernalia, and of course the newspapers, decades of The Advertiser and The Australian bundled and stored to the height of the ceiling. I had made two circles in the midst of the mayhem, one for me and one for Cousin Deidre, and we had two small deckchairs set up as if we were on holiday at the seaside and not in this nightmare of a house.