by Cath Moore
When I look up more of the old ladies have gathered round me in the ninth row. Like these vultures in a cartoon Mum thought was very sad because it showed how indifferent the west had become to despair that was not its own. In the cartoon the vultures were standing over this starving African baby. It looked very sick and one of the vultures says, ‘Look, it’s still moving.’ Sometimes there are messages in cartoons that people can read through the pictures, but I am not one of those people.
The ladies on the bus kind of look like vultures because of their craggly skin and wide-open eyes, gaping. But they smile like a hungry grandmother. One of them asks if I could tell a story from the Dreamtime and I don’t know which one she means. So I tell her about the last dream that got stuck in my head. I could fly and ran really fast off a cliff, flew over to the shops, got some milk and a can of peas and even though it was not on the list a Violet Crumble which I ate in the shopping line. Then all these ants came and ate the crumbs so I had to run out because they were suddenly huge but then I couldn’t fly and my feet felt like lead so I had to leave the peas behind. I went up in the sky again but then crashed down into a paddock and woke up with a really big shock.
The women stare in wonder nodding their heads and Doris says that their First Nations people also had an affinity with nature and animals. Ants aren’t animals; they’re in a different category, genus buggus. I’m scared they might turn into real vultures if I tell them I’m not Aboriginal. But I am browner than some Koori kids ’cause I saw a girl once with blue eyes and blonde hair even though her brothers were all dark. Sometimes when we went to Boyd’s Creek, which has two IGA supermarkets one at each end and a drive-through Maccas, I’d be waiting for one of them to look at me and say, ‘I know you feel shame, ’cause I feel it too.’ Even though sometimes I got called ‘sis’ or ‘tidda’ there was nothing underneath my skin that made me one and the same. I still wished and wished for it because maybe then I’d have a sister or brother for real. And thirty-seven relatives called Aunty. Is skin enough to be family? No one’s ever set me straight there.
‘Tell us more about your…knowing,’ Doris said, real low and quiet.
‘If I cannot be a singer like Tina Arena I will work with the animals, mostly orangutans which are technically primates so I would be a primatologist.’
Now I feel like I’m the monkey. Stuck in a zoo with all these faces staring at me wondering if I’m gonna do a trick. But I keep going because no one ever listens to me. Not like this.
‘An ologist is someone whose brain is very specific. Mine is. Doctors have said so. I will go to Borneo and look after the baby orangutans that have lost their mothers because we use too much palm oil. They have big eyes and always seem to hunch over like they do not know how to start the day or where they are supposed to be and if they could speak the only thing they would say is “oh well” and then climb very slowly up into a tree and go to sleep.’
Still not a word from the granny brigade. I take the silence as permission to continue, like I’m giving my maiden speech in parliament and everyone has to be quiet even if I’m way boring.
‘If I cannot be a primatologist I will be a taxidermist, which is not a dentist who drives around. It is a person that gives dead animals an eternal smile. It is legal to hang them on the wall. If you have a library you can put them on the mantelpiece.’
Then the bus pulls away and I see Pat bolting back to the car, slipping on the gravel. One leg falls from under him and he has to crouch on the ground for a moment to get his balance. That’s when he sees me looking through the window of the bus. And three shades of red rise up his neck covering his entire face. ‘Right!’ he thinks, ‘You bloody little ratbag!’
He gets into the car and tyres spin round like he’s at a drag race. Then Evelyn asks if I could say something in my native tongue so in French I say: ‘Your boobs are falling down.’ I shouldn’t have said that even though it is true. When you are old everything starts to head south like a runny egg cut with the wrong knife and there is very little you can do about it. Margie says everyone’s tits and bits end up dropping, dragging or drooping. ‘Surrender now!’ she used to say when she drank sherry with Mum. But it doesn’t seem to matter in this case because the ladies just look at each other like I’ve told them a little secret and aren’t they lucky to have heard it.
Then we all hear loud beeping and look out the back window. There is Pat holding his hand on the horn with wide eyes goggling at me. He pulls up alongside the driver and points. Everyone is on one side of the bus and I wonder if we might topple over. Bob up the front says to Walter, ‘Hey, maybe it’s one of them Mad Max fellas!’
The bus pulls over, Pat storms on and pulls me out. All the ladies get really worked up and say, ‘Where are you taking her?’ Pat says, ‘She doesn’t belong here.’ Doris gets all huffy: ‘Well, where does she belong? This is all her land, we are the visitors!’ I tell Doris it is okay, that my land used to be 44 Carroll Street, Beyen. Not this highway in the middle of nowhere.
And then I see the woman I came to find, two rows down and over. Much smaller than me, drawn back into herself, she was. I feel her bruised heart so I whisper in her ear: ‘She can still run in her sleep.’ Other people’s stories thunder through me like a bolting horse but before I can pull the reins in and get a good look, the pictures in my head have galloped off for good. So when Walter asks how I know her granddaughter was hit and run over by that drugged-up Latino fella so high he might’ve been on Mount Everest, I can’t answer. But I do know that in that girl’s dreams her back is not broken and at the farmhouse she runs all the way down to the lake, along the jetty and takes flight. Long limbs dangling, lungs screaming with delight, and nothing can ever be as perfect as that moment before she hits the cold, crisp water below. Carrying her shadow across as far as it will go.
Half a smile creeps onto the lady’s face as she watches Pat drag me out of the bus. I feel heavy in my chest like that poor lady does. That’s what grief is, knowledge and pain all squashed up together. As me and Pat walk back to the car the grannies open their windows and shout at Pat: ‘We know all about your Mabo!’ and I asked Pat what his Mabo is but he doesn’t say anything. It wasn’t my fault getting swept away with everyone. That is a real life defence in court. ‘She just got caught up with the wrong crowd, your honour.’ Pat didn’t have just cause to get angry. But he’s not one for following the rules.
‘Geezus. For the love of…you can’t just…take off!’ ‘Yeah, I can. I’m a bird.’
‘You’re not a bird, you’re a bloody idiot.’
I look outside and see a peregrine falcon hovering in the sky, like she’s posing for a still-life painting. I know it’s a she because they are bigger then the males. They mate for life and both look after their eggs, which take thirty-three days to hatch. They are the fastest animals in the world except for when they’re floating in the sky above you. She’s not like the purple-faced eagle that William Freeman drew for my dad. But I wonder if birds can talk to each other, even if one is real and the other is only a picture, drawn a long time ago on a page that’s crinkled and torn. Is that falcon up above telling the purple-faced eagle where we are really going?
Pat said he’d lost time, that we were on a schedule and I can’t just do what I like. Then the phone rang and his boss Warren got angry with him because he’d sent an order through for some beer, but Pat didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he realises I’ve been pressing buttons on all his technologies.
‘You can’t keep your bloody hands to yourself, can ya!’
‘If God calls, then you should pick up the phone!’
‘Stop with all the bullshit! If you’d just be normal none of this would have happened! None of it!’
Subtext is like a truth submarine lying underneath the surface of what people say. Pat knows I understand. It’s my fault we’ve lost Mum. Trouble ends up sticking to me like superglue any which way the wind blows, but am I smart enough to run when the tidal wave
reaches shore? Or would I close my eyes and listen to the ocean as it sang me all the way into its dark belly?
9 Why you always park in the middle
What am I afraid of? There’s no x + y equation to figure that question out so I get a different answer every time. Pat hasn’t said a word for ages. My eyelids close up shop for a while. When I wake up the sun is looking for the other side of the world, taking its bright glare with it. A herd of cattle crosses ahead and Pat slows to a stop. The last cow, she’s almost to the other side but then she stops and looks straight at me. Cows never look afraid. They don’t care who you are or what you look like. They’ll always just stare at you the same and that’s why I like them. Vegetarian egalitarians.
And now we’ve made it to Newridge, a town of 147 people that you can actually find on an outback map (of nowhere places no one really cares about). The road in is the road out, a couple of handspans down the track. We pull into car space number three out the front of Midge’s Creek Hotel. Halfway between one and five, this third business always leads to trouble, especially when there are ten spaces, but Pat doesn’t understand. Pat only sees what numbers look like, not what they mean. Mum used to say I could make something feel better if I changed its value. I tried to change the value of huntsman spiders from terrifying to just God-awful until one crawled onto my arm once and I flung it across the room, screaming my head off. Then Mum had to throw magazines at it because that spider kept rearing its front legs up like a shocked horse. The New Idea finally got him but he was squashed all over Olivia Newton-John’s face and she did not look ‘sublime’ like the magazine cover said. Just sick.
Spiders are always scary and parking in the third car space is always wrong. You know what Pat says? That someone did a survey in Paris recently and found out that people’s favourite number was three. He was trying to trick me into changing its value, but I knew only bad things would happen. Pat looks at a scribbled note on the palm of his hand: ‘12/3/96, 10.07 am–11.46 am No. 2.’ His eyes are five steps ahead. Inside the hotel Pat sees me jiggling and tells me not to cause any trouble, but it’s uncomfortable having two needs at opposite ends of your body. I decide to relieve my overextended bladder before I get a lemonade. When I come back from the loo the lemonade’s waiting for me with a pink umbrella and a plastic monkey hanging from the side. I hop onto the bar stool and listen to the horserace on TV. There’s a few men watching in the corner, one with a brown cap pulled so far down I can’t tell if he’s asleep or not.
‘Yeah, that O-ring was a bit loose, mate. Anything else?’
Pat’s fixing a tap at the bar. Bob the publican shakes his head and looks back at the horses. His mouth’s a very thin slit like God had run out of pencil and had to scratch a skinny line with his fingernail so Bob could at least breathe.
Pat glances at the writing on his hand again then acts all casual. ‘Got some time up my sleeve then.’ He heads towards pokie machine two because he thinks there’s still magic inside like there was last time. You can’t tell Pat he’s put more coins in than he ever gets out ’cause he’ll get all huffy and say you don’t understand the logic involved in playing.
‘How about a washing machine? You got a fridge up your sleeve too?’ I’m all sarcastic and Pat glares at me but he knows what I’m talking about. Money owing? Then you got a knockin’ coming your way. Every now and then the repo men took a whitegood from Pat’s house. Repo men wear singlets stained dark with sweat right through the middle of their chest, who always told Pat they didn’t make the rules, they just enforced them.
Days when Pat was real quiet and went out the back of our place to fix something we knew another whitegood had been taken. Funny thing is, Pat never really got around to mending anything. Holding the kitchen curtains back I’d watch him just flicking pieces of paint off the verandah staring into space. Once I thought if I made a pretty picture collage out of all that dried paint it would make him forget about the pokies. But the wind always blew those flecks away before I could catch them. So I can’t help Pat now like I could never help him back in Beyen. Oprah says we all gotta be agents of change for ourselves so I just sigh like a sad orangutan and watch the horserace on TV.
‘Handsome Prince has a clear lead, with Daddy’s Little Girl closing in...’
And that is when it happens. The race caller’s voice suddenly becomes like static, all fuzzy and out of focus, then I can’t hear him anymore. As they come round the last bend the horses move in slow motion and I hear Mum call the race in French, just like she used to with the potatoes we rolled down the front driveway. She was messaging herself to me through the TV: ‘And 3 Times Lucky comes round the bend, will he make it?’ But horse number three came in almost last. This made Mum really upset.
‘Oh no, this is a tragedy! As a Frenchwoman I renounce the number three as lucky!’
I was right about the number three and Mum’s spirit was trying to protect me. No one else knew what was happening. The punters are either cursing the TV or rubbing their good luck between the palms of their hands. And Pat? Well no surprise there. Flashing colours dance around his face with every coin he slots into his machine. I turn back to the TV but the real race caller’s voice is back.
‘Chinese Lantern coming in there third, with Lazy Weekender fourth...’
Why didn’t Pat ever believe me? I KNOW about number three and all the corresponding dangers. It goes back to the ancient Greeks and their mythological multiples of three like Cerberus the three-headed dog or Scylla, a sea monster with six heads. Now I have proof from Mum’s spirit so I march on over to Pat and clear my throat.
‘I don’t think the car is all right. I don’t think we’re okay. I better just check it.’
‘Sit and drink your juice.’
‘It’s not juice, it’s lemonade.’
Pat can’t take his eyes away from the machine, and because there’s always a gap between justice and the law I take the car keys without asking.
Head back towards the toilets then duck out the front. I unlock the car and slide in like liquid. Turn the key, but nothing happens. Then I remember to push down on the pedal at the same time. I slot the car into reverse and shoot across to the other side of the road, put my foot on the brake just before the car rams into the St Vinnie’s display window and a rack of half-price winter cardigans. I push the other pedal very gently a few times, slowly forward when another car drives right into the spot I want without asking! So I rear-end it accidentally on purpose.
That is called shit hitting the fan. Pat runs out screaming at me but I can’t hear ’cause this big white pillow has exploded in my face and the horn won’t stop beeping. Pat told me to always lock the doors if you felt like you were in danger and so that’s what I do, but now he was telling me to open up. I push some buttons that just make lights flash and the windscreen-wipers go back and forth and then the sunroof starts to open and Pat jumps up on top of the car like he is a lion in a safari park and falls inside head first. Quick sticks he presses more buttons and the balloon falls away from my face. The noise stops. Then all the people standing on the footpath stare at me and Pat like we’re in Back to the Future when Marty crashes into that barn and the farm boy thinks he’s the spaceman from his comic book. That was funny, but this is not.
This, I thought, is exactly what happens when you do not park in the right spot in the first place. Pat said he was about to win some money because the time and day were all in alignment like the moon in front of the sun. But those machines are never soft on the inside like Turkish Delight; they only make things harder for everyone.
The exploding man says, ‘What the bloody hell was she doing?’ like I’m not even there. Pat gets out of the car and talks to him in a mumbling voice that adults do when they are trying to put a lid on things. I reach into the back seat and pull out one of the merchandise caps as a sign of goodwill.
‘What the fuck is this? I don’t want a fucking cap! I don’t even drink Coopers!’
Pat grinds his teeth
so loud it feels like an earthquake in my ears. He shoves a hand deep down into his pocket and pulls out a lot of money which he gives to the exploding man. Maybe so he could buy a hat of his own choice. All the while Bob is standing in the doorway to the pub and you can’t even tell if he’s happy or sad because that thin scratchy mouth never moves, not ever. He just shakes his head and goes inside again. And then all the other stodgy sad sacks, as Pat would call them, shuffle after Bob like he’s mother duck heading back to the pond. That is the end of the story about why you always park in the middle. Pat was in a Richter-scale-27 mood so I couldn’t even tell him about how Mum had talked to me through the TV. Mon Dieu!
10 A darkly shadow
The speed dial keeps going up and up. If there was a copper waiting behind a bush he would’ve clocked us at 143 km per hour. A siren-worthy number. The copper would say, ‘A tad too fast for these parts don’t you think?’ Pat would scrunch the ticket up, drive off and say, ‘I play by my own rules.’ There was no copper so that didn’t happen. This was the real conversation:
