‘Can I sleep in this?’
‘In the frog towel?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you think you’d be comfortable sleeping in a towel?’
‘Yes.’
Sometimes his dad smiled at him and it made Orion think that he was glad he had his dad with him and not his mum. He missed having them both with him at the same time and he missed having his mum all to himself but sometimes, if he had to choose only one, he was happy his dad was the one with him because his dad said, ‘OK, mate,’ and his mum would never have let him sleep in a towel. But sometimes Orion knew it was wrong – wearing a towel to bed and being glad it was his dad and not his mum who was still alive – and then he thought that maybe he was bad and she’d know he was thinking bad thoughts because she was always with him, right? So when he crawled into bed he began to cry.
‘What’s wrong, Orion?’
‘I miss Mom.’
‘I know you do. I miss her too.’ His dad looked sad but still he smiled. How did he do that? All Orion could do was cry and cry and cry and cry because this was their family now: him and his dad and Digger the dog at Orion’s side of the bed.
His dad kept rubbing his back and it felt good, even good enough that he could stop crying, but he still couldn’t stop sniffling.
‘Dad?’
‘Yeah, mate.’
‘When are you coming to bed?’
‘Not too long. I’ll be in soon.’ He kissed Orion on the forehead and Orion reached his arms around his dad’s strong neck, and it felt good, even good enough that he could now stop sniffling. ‘I love you, Ry.’
‘I love you.’
And his dad turned out the light, leaving the door cracked because Orion hated the dark.
In the dim room he could see the dresser his parents shared. His mum’s jewellery still sat in little bowls. The books she’d been reading before she got run over were still by the bedside lamp. He looked around the room, taking note of everything he knew to be hers, then gave up and looked at the ceiling.
Some nights Orion would lie awake for a very long time staring at the ceiling and imagining his mum’s face. She’d be looking down on him and smiling and her lips would be moving but he couldn’t hear what she was saying, like when he was in that underwater world in the ocean or the bath, only he was lying in the bed that used to be hers and now was his. Some nights he would tell her, ‘Goodnight,’ and wonder if she heard him. If she was always with him, then wouldn’t she hear him? Or was death like an underwater world too? But she was ash, like the sand on his skin. But she was looking at him from the ceiling too; sometimes it seemed so real. But she was also in heaven, like Coco had said to him and like Grandma Pearl had told him on the phone. But she never woke up, she never woke up, so was she still sleeping?
‘Goodnight, Dad!’ he yelled to the dim room, and through the crack at the door that let in the light he heard, ‘Goodnight, Orion!’ and then he could close his eyes, and then he could fall asleep.
The List
If ritual makes the horrible seem normal, then here was Stan, pulling nails out of pallets of wood with a horrendous hangover. Morning breath still coated his tongue at 2 pm and a dry tongue it was. A six-pack-of-beer-and-half-a-bottle-of-wine kind of dry. The beer was Sierra Nevada because it was an American beer, and Stan found himself drinking only American beer these days in memory of Jean. She used to say it was worth paying the extra money every now and again for good craft-brewed hops, and no place crafted them better than her home country. She loved them, and now he did too. The wine was a Langhorne Creek cab sav because Jean never drank anything but South Australian wines. Though he’d never been a big wine drinker before Jean died, he drank plenty of South Australian wines now. Luckily for Stan, Jean hadn’t had a strong affinity with spirits.
Firewood tended to be Stan’s go-to hangover job, no matter what time of year it was. It was now March, as good a time as any to be sorting out the winter wood. And the wood pile was, indeed, plentiful, as hangovers had been a regularity the last two months. The pain of Jean’s death seemed to be worsening, not lessening, over time.
‘Got another pile for you, Ry.’
Orion looked up from the sandpit under the passionfruit vine and said, ‘More nails, Dad?’
‘More nails.’
The boy ran to where his dad stood, hammer in hand, sweat that smelled of alcohol sticking fast to his forehead, and Stan smiled at him, despite the thudding in his skull, because he realised that, for a five-year-old, placing a dozen nails at a time into a plastic bowl must be an exciting job. ‘We make a good team, hey?’
Orion beamed at his dad, said, ‘Yep,’ then moved his loose tooth back and forth with his tongue. ‘Still wobbly!’ he announced, then ran back to the sandpit. The nails, the tooth, the sandpit – it was all very exciting.
Having dug it up and filled it herself, Jean had loved the sandpit. She’d specifically placed it under the passionfruit vine, where she’d buried Orion’s placenta to give the soil richness and the word ‘passion’ new meaning. She called the corner ‘Orion’s Spot’ and painted a sign to welcome him in.
A cloud layer moved west, opening the warmth of the sun. Stan bathed in it then remembered he didn’t have a hat. The ozone layer, he thought, remembering Jean’s list of things she’d lost. Then, with each nail pried from the wood, Stan added his own entry to the list. Things that hold other things together. And just how was he holding things together? Grief was tearing at him like the hammer the nail and the nail the wood but somehow he was managing, wasn’t he? Somehow they were getting by.
Jean had been a true list-maker if ever there was one, leaving Post-it notes all over the fridge. Lists of what to get done over their breaks, even though she knew they’d only tackle a third of them. Lists of people she wanted to catch up with, even though she always chose the same two friends when the opportunity to go out arose. Lists of things she wanted done to the house once they’d saved a little money and lists of places she wanted to go once they’d saved a lot of money. When Orion was inside her belly there were lists of boys’ names and lists of girls’ names, separate lists for first names and for middle names. Stan could not help but puff up in pride when he had seen those lists, and he’d always made an effort to look at them for the six months they were there. When Stan’s mum was going through chemo there were lists of soups Jean would make for her, then recipes for those soups posted on the fridge, even though Jean never followed recipes. Those lists had made Stan’s gut feel empty, and it wasn’t that ‘mung bean and turkey’ reminded him that there was an absence of food in his belly; it was the possible absence of his mother from his life.
Jean had kept an ongoing list of things that had gone missing: a single green earring, the thick woollen sock, the cap to the toothpaste, Digger’s tugging rope, the spare key to her bike lock, her bookmark, her emergency safety pin. Initially Stan thought Jean might have a touch of the obsessive-compulsive in her, but Jean rationalised that it was only a silly game she played with herself because losing small things drove her mad and crossing them off once found made her happy.
‘What if you made a list of the things you’ve lost that you’ll never get back?’
Jean had taken up that challenge and made a new list for the fridge. A flowery list. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad. A little work of art. Snow, mountains, my youth, my faith, my virginity, the northern night sky, sleep-ins, my father, the ozone layer.
Stan bent over to pick up the dismantled pallet pieces and begin the task of carrying them over to the woodpile. How big was the blood vessel in his brain? How hot was the sun? Maybe he needed a hair of the dog.
‘Dad! Look at the aeroplane.’ A jet stream split the sky.
‘Where do you think it’s going, mate?’
‘America!’
Stan watched the silver point disappear, the white line lose its precision, thou
ght about the last time he’d been in a plane, wondered when it might be again, envied the passengers their flight and their freedom. He looked back to his son in the sandpit. He picked up an armload of wood. Freedom to fly.
Just then the backyard gate scraped loudly on the concrete path. Stan’s mum tried to close it so Digger wouldn’t run off, but the gate was stuck, and Marion looked very frail.
‘Let me get that, Mum.’ Stan put the wood aside while Digger ran past him to be first to greet Marion properly. She smiled and bent down to pat the happy dog, who shuffled in tight circles at her feet until finally he sat, staring up at her and thumping his tail. Digger wasn’t running through the opened gate. He seemed to have everything he needed.
Stan shut the gate and kissed his mum. ‘Perfect time to knock off. Got a white in the fridge.’ Stan raised his eyebrows, hoping his mum would join him.
Marion’s eyes took on octagonal shapes, fraught with worry and urgency. ‘It’s back, Stan.’
Stan had taken his year six class to the Adelaide Gaol and, as they sat outside eating their lunches, he heard it first, coming from the west. It was a rough bowling rumble, and when he looked up to the low layer of cloud, he thought that the sound of the train might be affected by it. Might echo more, bouncing from track to cloud and down again. Or would the clouds absorb the sound and muffle it? He wondered whether the River Torrens felt its momentum. Whether it trembled. Whether it danced. The high wall prevented him from searching for ripples.
‘Hey, it’s The Ghan!’ Christos was one of the excitable lads who had many friends.
‘Duh.’ Julian wasn’t.
‘No, it’s the Indian Pacific,’ said a third. ‘It says so on it.’
Stan recognised the significance of a train speeding by a jail where whipcords soaked in water once broke skin and spirit, their echo so loud that birds must’ve flown away, forgetting how to sing. This could be the lesson the kids would take away. What was freedom and in what ways might perception change its definition?
He could see the passengers who’d probably crossed the Nullarbor and wouldn’t have minded a walk along the river. All those eyes trapped inside, marvelling at the symmetry of a barbed wire loop, gawking at the immobility of brick on bloody brick. And what of him? Hungover again, stuck in time, unable – no, unwilling – to get past his longing for Jean so that days were suddenly too long when once they’d seemed so short and nights were a fucking nuisance. And what of his poor mum, confined in her dying body, mind sharper than ever and honed to a point of penning truly great works of art but the body sinking so far into itself that soon there’d be nothing left but the cancer licking its wounded lips? We are all prisoners in our own points of view.
It seemed, for a moment, that every one of his students contemplated the train, and that when the train had disappeared, so had their interest in it. Back to apples, sandwiches, juice boxes, muesli bars.
‘Did anyone take notice of those passengers? Did anyone think them lucky to be travelling on a train, free to leave their homes for someplace new?’
Heads rose in mere ambivalence, though some surprise because it was lunchtime, their time, no real place for their teacher to comfortably fit in. These kids were young. All they knew about freedom was that they had it.
‘Anyone?’
‘Yeah, we’re in jail and they’re on a train.’
‘We’re not in jail. We’re visiting.’
‘Yeah, we’re really at school.’
‘Hey, that’s like jail!’
Stan smiled and shook his head. They were allowed their own points of view. ‘So are you free in a jail?’
‘No.’ Varying degrees of interest mingled murmurs with answers that suggested an echo of Julian’s ‘duh’.
‘What about in a train?’
‘Yes.’ Slightly more interest in their tones. The discussion might build. Then Danni said, ‘No, because you can’t get off.’
‘What about school? Are you free when you’re at school?’
‘No!’ They almost yelled this time. Then Danni said, ‘Well, we are, sort of, because we’re learning, and you don’t get to learn in jail.’
‘Yes you do!’ another girl countered. ‘Remember the library in there? Some people probably read more here than they did when they weren’t in jail.’
‘Maybe you need to go to jail so you read more,’ said Jack, always sarcastic. What sort of prison did he live in?
Stan thought about Charley Cromwell, the ex-con who’d run over his wife while she was riding her bike to work. He’d found out about him through Neddy, who’d learned about him from an old friend she’d run into at the funeral. In the beginning Stan had thought about him incessantly, but eventually the obsession faded so that he’d almost forgotten his name. But when Stan and his students arrived at the Adelaide Gaol, the name appeared in neon from the deep fog of his tired depression. Charley Cromwell was a murderer. Apparently a model prisoner, learning to read on the inside. He’d gotten out early for good behaviour. The cops saw no reason to punish him for Jean’s death because it had been an accident. Was he free? Was Charley Cromwell a free man?
He felt like asking, ‘And what of the old woman who finds out she’s dying of cancer and chooses to forgo treatment? Is she a prisoner because she’s dying or is she free because she’s decided to die on her own terms?’ But that would be morose. Inappropriate. Might give him away.
As the students returned to their social circles, Stan considered how he fit in. He was a single parent now with a mother who was in need of serious attention and he was unable to get away from it all. His week-long mountain biking trips with his mates were a thing of the past. Leaving his son for a week with Jean and just getting on his bike. Just going. What he wouldn’t give to go a few hours north, get on a trail and camp when the day was done. Or put his bike on a plane and travel somewhere, his jet dividing the sky as it left Australia behind. He punched himself inwardly because this was not about being dragged down by his five-year-old son and his 77-year-old mother. He was free to leave if he wanted. There were friends on hand, eager to help. Neddy called at least once a week asking if there was anything, big or small, that she could do. And just last week Viv had asked if she could have Orion over for the weekend. ‘It’s too soon,’ he’d told her. Too soon for whom? Orion couldn’t be the problem because Orion was most often the solution: why he got out of bed in the morning, why he laughed in the evening. And it wasn’t his mum, either. She’d been such a help, so indispensable, both physically and emotionally, when Jean had been in the coma and during the planning of the funeral that Stan felt ready to give back. It wasn’t something he had to do, but something he wanted to do.
It was Jean. Memories imprisoned a person in the past, but what would he do without them? Stan went back to first hearing the Indian Pacific rolling nearer, imagined Jean had been with him and heard it too. He imagined they’d talked about Perth, where they’d spent their last holiday together before the accident. He imagined taking hold of her hand, seeing, once again, the crinkle of her freckled nose when she smiled. He thanked god he had the memory of her crinkling and freckled nose. He looked to where the train had just been, now replaced by an overcast horizon. Freedom. He knew he’d added ‘freedom’ to Jean’s old list of things she’d never get back, the big things, things she missed, as he watched the aeroplane in the sky the day before, and it made him feel guilty then, but he couldn’t erase it now. That was the problem with a mental list.
At first he’d left the list of little things Jean had lost on the fridge. He was hoping for the day when he’d find something on it and could cross it off: the reading light that was supposed to be with their camping gear, the acupuncture voucher she’d bought for his mother – Marion could certainly use it now; the cancer was in her lymph nodes. But as weeks turned into months the realisation that he wouldn’t find the little things, and the fact that the little thi
ngs had become really big to him, was painful. He took the list off the fridge and filed it away in a folder in the office, where he’d put the list of big things Jean had lost. There, they would always be safe; there, they would always be out of sight. Obviously they weren’t out of mind because, though he’d filed away the list of big things the morning after Jean had died, he was mentally adding to it now. Clearly it was an obsession.
There had been three additions already today. Hungover again, Stan had placed morning clarity on the list. The recycling bin mocked him every morning when he chucked in new bottles. It smelled sticky, sweet and foul and made him gag just a little bit, made his head swim momentarily. Then, when picking up bread after school and before going to his mum’s, he added books. He’d seen a woman reading at the crossing and, when the light changed and the pedestrians began to move, the woman moved too, still reading. Jean had loved to read. Had been in a book club. Had two floor-to-ceiling shelves in the spare room packed with novels. Stan wasn’t much of a reader so, now that Jean was gone, books weren’t really an obvious presence in his life. And at his mum’s, when he picked up Orion because it was Tuesday – Tuesday was always Marion’s afternoon with her grandson and she insisted it remain that way, cancer or no cancer – he’d seen a hairbrush on the kitchen table and thought, Mum’s hair. She wasn’t losing her hair now and, with chemo and radiation out of the question, she hadn’t planned on losing it ever again, but her hairbrush had made Stan remember her first bout of cancer. He’d had a memory of being at Marion’s just after her hair had started to grow back, when the cancer and her breasts had been forced from her body, the malignant cells secretly lying dormant in her lymph nodes. Orion had fallen asleep on the couch, next to Stan, who’d been watching the footy. He remembered his team had won that day. There’d been a fire. He’d been eating something. Jean had been brushing his mum’s hair. ‘I used to love brushing my friends’ hair when I was a little girl. Guess I still do,’ she’d said, and Marion had said, ‘I love you,’ just like that. Stan knew that if Jean had been with him earlier this evening and had seen the hairbrush on the kitchen table, she would’ve remembered it too.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 14
