‘She’d miss brushing your hair,’ he said out loud to his mum that evening.
‘What?’ Marion turned to her son as she pulled on oven mitts.
‘Jean. I remember a time when she brushed your hair.’
His mother touched his shoulder and looked up towards the ceiling. Was it memory or angels she was searching for up there?
And now there was Orion’s first tooth.
~
‘How’s the Tooth Fairy going to get in our house?’
‘She’s magic.’
‘How do you know it’s a “she”?’
‘I’ve seen her before.’
‘When?’
Stan kept it rolling, knowing if he stopped for only one second to think about his answers, he mightn’t know how to continue. ‘When you were born. She came into the hospital and told me when you turned five you would start losing your teeth, and that she would come and take them.’
‘Were you scared?’
‘No. I could tell she was nice.’
‘Was Mom there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she scared?’
‘No. She was holding you.’
‘Where’s the Tooth Fairy going to put my tooth?’
‘She said she turns the teeth into stars.’
‘But I already have stars in the sky.’
‘I told her that. She said she was going to add them to your constellation and make his sword even brighter.’
Orion looked off to the side as a smile took over his face, and Stan could see his little imagination lifting to the skies. He ruffled his son’s hair, pulled the doona to his chin, kissed him goodnight. ‘See you when I come to bed,’ he said, because Orion still slept on Jean’s old side of the bed. As he ruffled his son’s hair a second time for good luck, he told himself not to forget about the tooth. He told himself to go looking for some gold coins as soon as he turned off the light. Tonight he was more than a single parent; he was the Tooth Fairy, and he couldn’t mess it up. He would have to slide his hand under the pillow, Jean’s old pillow, now Orion’s. He would have to find the tooth and take it out and put it on the bedside table, where a couple of gold coins would be. He would have to pick those up, slide his hand back under the pillow again and leave them for Orion. He would have to carry the tooth to the pillbox Jean’s mother had given to her, the one Jean had said she was going to put Orion’s first tooth in. Then he would have to fight the urge to cry, lamenting the minute she’d lost the beating of her heart, the minute she’d lost the use of her lungs, the minute she’d lost the chance to share in this moment with the people she loved most. He would then tell himself that there would be no more mental additions to Jean’s list because he was pissed off with its abstraction, with its absurdity, with its relentlessness and its implications of ‘what’s been lost’. How vulgar. He would take out a piece of paper and write down the words ‘first tooth’ – nothing more, not even a title, though he knew the title was understood: Things I Want to Share with You – and he would stick it on the fridge so that he could add to it at the end of every day. His own list. Not hers. And he would be freer because of it. Stan didn’t want to be free from Jean, just freer, and it would turn out to be a far better alternative to his daily hangover.
Licking the Wound
There was a flash of two crazed dogs in an urgent moment over the fence, barks and snarls, the two dogs jumping high enough for Digger’s paw to find its way into Pyro’s teeth, and when they started falling back to the ground the drag of poor Digger’s leg against the fence skinned him raw. Other dogs in other houses and backyards were barking frantically in response, as if they all wanted a piece of the action, but no beast would choose to be on the receiving end of this madness. No beast would choose to be Digger.
The dog licked the black oil of his paw. It had been a hard day and he found comfort at the feet of his man. Digger looked up at his man’s clean and friendly face and wondered if his man knew how badly it throbbed. How could he know the violence of the thing – he hadn’t been there. His boy hadn’t been there either and his woman was still gone. Digger missed his woman’s clean and caring face. He missed her neat hands and how she fed him scraps while she worked over the kitchen bench. He missed nights when she let him onto the couch where his man would not. He missed her pale skin around his animal coat and the way she burrowed her nose right into him. No, his woman hadn’t come back so she hadn’t been there for the trouble.
They’d been pups when they’d first met, sniffing each other through the tin fence, one smelling like the bottom of a brown river and the other like the film that might rest on top. They’d had their routines: Pyro did a series of high jumps first thing in the morning to find Digger over the fence; Digger told Pyro what he was getting for dinner and Pyro let Digger know with one gruff bark when he’d had enough of his bragging. Hadn’t they been friends? What had turned them against each other so suddenly and violently?
Digger rested on his forepaws and fell asleep, so tired from the day, and the warmth of the fireplace felt so good. He woke only to lick his paw, this sleep-then-lick, this sleep-then-lick seemed to be an obsession. His man touched him on the head.
‘What have you got there, Dig?’ His man got down close to him on the floor. There were small drops of darker red on the lighter red carpet. ‘This still hurting you?’ His man had seen the paw when he’d first come back from work because Digger had been limping. His man had come back. His boy had come back. His woman had not.
The neat hand touched the furred paw and his man held it as if it were a flower. His woman used to hold flowers this way. His boy would give his woman flowers from the garden and she would hold them as if they might break, as if they might go away and never come back. Then she would put them in her hair, where they always fell out and died.
‘What did you get into today, mate?’ His man held the paw and Digger moved to lick the neat hand, grateful for his man’s touch and his words and his clean and caring face. Digger felt the love. It was a full feeling, shining inside him, round and big, like what he knew the moon to be, and he would always love his man like he would always love the moon.
Since his woman had gone, his man had been reaching for him more often and staying with him longer, and Digger knew that his man, too, was full with the love. But it was love and something more. It was a deep sadness that they shared, which came from the same place as the love, only the sadness didn’t shine inside; the sadness carried stones to give itself more weight, then laid down its burden and rested.
‘We’ll take you to the vet in the morning.’ Digger liked the vet with the treats, but his woman and his boy used to take him to the vet, so he looked at his man curiously, then looked at the skinned part of his leg and licked it.
‘What’s this?’ His man got off the couch again and moved to the floor to be with him. Digger felt like howling just a little when his man saw the leg.
‘Jesus, Dig. What happened?’
It was the trouble that had happened.
‘We’re definitely taking you to the vet tomorrow.’
He liked the vet with the treats so he laid his head back down again and swiftly fell asleep. He did not know that this time tomorrow he’d be wearing the Cone of Shame, so he dreamed of the waiting room, where other dogs were and other animals like cats in boxes, then he woke up again to lick his paw. Sleeping wasn’t working. It was all too hard. He stared at his man, telling his man everything important with his eyes, and his man stared back, having heard it all. ‘You’ll be right, mate. You’re a good dog.’
Digger beat his tail twice against the carpet, the thickness of the tail a thud of effort. His man was here, with him.
When his man turned off the light and went to his room, Digger raised himself, shaking a little, and stretched his body long. Slowly he walked to his boy’s room where he could sleep on the bed. His man h
ad told his boy that Digger would sleep with him if only he’d return to his own bed. His boy had said he missed his mum, then started sleeping in his bed again. Digger loved the bed and he loved his boy. His boy often got down on the floor with him to show him the love. His boy often laid his head and his chest on top of him so that they were almost the same. His boy fed him at night, now that his woman had gone. On the safety of their shared bed, warming each other in the winter’s night, he thought his boy was the only person who would never go away.
What We Don’t Know About Animals
Dawn stretched itself out for what seemed like an hour. Was that how long he’d been writing? Only now the sun was rising above his roof and holding the promise of heat. Charley laid down his pen and walked over to the window. A koala was breakfasting on the leaves of a tree in his backyard. Not a usual sight. Charley watched as if it were giving birth or ripping apart another animal for a feed – as if it were nature at its peak rather than an animal barely moving. Truth: two things that shocked Charley when he first left prison were colours and living things, and after all these years on the outside, both still blew him away. He wondered how long the little fella would take refuge in his backyard. In his experience, animals didn’t live long around him, no matter how much he willed them to. He thought it just bad luck, but knew it could be something more.
Charley picked up his letter, lit himself a cigarette and sat back down at the table to read what he’d written. It was enough to make a grown man cry, but not him. No, he’d got all his crying out when his mum died. He’d been so riddled with guilt for the man he’d become that he refused to see her in lock-up. How could he have asked to go to her funeral to say goodbye when it’d been far too late to say anything at all? So he hadn’t gone to her funeral but held a vigil in his cell. The photo, the prayers, all the letters she’d written to him laid out to read. The tears had come on heavy, then stopped. Heavy, then stopped. The problem with tears was that once you let them out, they wanted to come out and out again and again, but what good were they? Charley was a big man. He’d plenty of room to hold them in.
He was trying to write a letter to Orion and it wasn’t any good. He didn’t know how to talk to a kid. He didn’t know what to say, especially to this one. Did he tell him what kind of man he was? What kind of son he’d been? Did he tell Orion he killed Jean Harley one rainy morning just as he was about to mail a letter and, hey, here’s a letter for you! For some reason Charley had answered yes to all of these questions and the letter read like a bad confession. He crumpled it up, then thought that writing to Lisa wasn’t such a bad idea because this was where his comfort lay: cigarettes, coffee, morning sun, writing a letter to Lisa.
He stared at the paper long and hard, then closed his eyes and breathed three times through his nose. He was ready to compose.
Dear Lisa – I’m trying to write to Orion. I wonder what his favourite thing to do is. I started out telling him I liked to read and build things like houses, pergolas and decks. Did you know I once sculpted a naked man? It’s true. I’ve built cages for animals too.
The first cage was out of scrap metal he’d found in the bush from burnt-out cars and the springs of old chairs. He was twelve when the people round town started complaining about the mangy dingo. They said it was probably half dog/half dingo and dangerous. They wanted it dead. Charley thought he might catch it and keep it as a pet but some old cocky got to it first. I cried when me mate Runt told me. He was my best friend and I never cried in front of him before. I never did again. But I couldn’t help it because they killed that dingo and they didn’t need to. I would’ve looked after it. I would’ve loved it.
Charley began transcribing onto paper. By the time he’d finished, the sun was well and truly up, light pushing through his dirty window. He got up to look for the koala, afraid it’d be lying dead on the ground or wounded to the point of needing to be put out of its misery. But there it was, still as lazy and round and plush as you’d imagine, feeding off the biggest tree on Charley’s small, wild property. ‘What’re you doing, you silly bugger?’
He finished his coffee watching that koala. He’d have liked to stay at that window all day long but there was work to go to, bricks to be laid and he’d had it in his mind to get a good chunk of the letter to Orion written first. One to Lisa would have to do. He rambled on in his head:
Not long after, Drillbit gave me a turtle. He visited his cousin in Adelaide who took him to a pet store. Drillbit’s cousin was saving for a pet turtle for months and finally he saved enough. They named it Lobster. Funny name for a turtle but it seems like names are sometimes the opposite of who or what we are.
Example: his old friend Trev was Bat even though he was part deaf and the old saying goes, ‘blind as a bat’. He was one of the Warriors. There’d been four of them: Bat, Runt, Drillbit and Charley, who they called Rascal. Together they were a group of boys who got into fights with the blackfellas at their school. They weren’t racist, just needed to fight. None of them liked their homes and they didn’t much like themselves, but when they were together, things were different. They were different.
Kids made fun of Bat because he talked funny on account of his disability, but Bat knew how to get back at them. He worked out their weaknesses. Back then Charley thought it was crazy that Bat used words instead of fists to hurt those who’d hurt him but years later, during his time behind bars, Charley thought it was crazy that he’d turned it around. Wondered why Bat ever had to change.
Bat’s mum’s old boyfriend used to make fun of him and that guy was the one person Bat didn’t know how to get back at. The fucker had too much power. Bat told the gang that the one thing he hated more than anything else was knowing that his mum cared more about the old man than she did about her own son. He said one night she walked right past Bat in the kitchen while the guy was pretending to be a spastic and making fun of the way Bat talked. His mum saw it all and didn’t do anything about it. Eight years later the guy was arrested and went to prison for identity fraud and the Warriors celebrated by pouring beer over Bat’s head and staying up all night.
Stevo was Drillbit because he liked to joy-ride in other people’s cars. Not that stealing a car has anything to do with engine mechanics or building a car body but nicknames come in roundabout ways. Drillbit’s dad wasn’t around – none of their dads were – but his mum was and she was a drunk, throwing things at him and calling him ‘weak’ and a ‘girl’. Drillbit used to say he never understood why his mum called him a girl like it was a bad thing because it seemed to him that his mum loved his sister and hugged her for no reason at all. She stopped hugging him when he was six. That was the year his dad left and his mum was pregnant and started drinking so much she lost the baby on the kitchen floor. He said he had to clean up the mess with half a roll of paper towel.
Charley’s best friend Jack was the short one so they called him Runt. He hit puberty late and didn’t really grow until he was seventeen so there wasn’t much mystery to his nickname. Runt made up for his shortcomings by being the toughest in the gang. In upper primary, kids made fun of his mum because her tits were big. Runt beat them up. Later, in high school, the jokes got less funny because they called her ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ even though they didn’t know that she had different men over all the time. No one but the Warriors knew, so the stupid kids didn’t know they were hitting just the right spot. ‘In their sleep,’ he used to say, slamming a fist into his open palm like some wise guy in a gangster movie, ‘when they’re dreaming about fucking Mum.’ Instead he took care of them in the schoolyard. It’s like he couldn’t ever punch enough kids to make the jokes stop, so he punched more kids than deserved it.
Charley was the quiet one who didn’t want to do anything bad so he got the nickname Rascal since rascals always got into stuff, couldn’t help themselves. Charley was the boy with his head down and textbook open and unread. Thought he was stupid because he couldn’t read. He was the bigg
est kid in the class so Drillbit, Runt and Bat wanted him in their gang. And he was angry, just like them, so he felt like he fit in because they all had shit lives. None of them were winners, but they knew if they stuck together, no one would ever call them losers.
Charley was angry because of his old man, a thief and a drug addict found dead outside the Star Hotel. He used to hate walking past that pub, let alone teasing the bloke who delivered the beer because he had no teeth. Why would he tease a man he didn’t even know in front of a building that made him sad? The Warriors were doing it and it was ‘all for one and one for all’, but if it hadn’t been for the teasing would the bloke ever have come up to Charley in the park when he was minding his own business, kicking the footy around by himself?
When Drillbit and his cousin brought Lobster back to the house, his aunty said, ‘No way,’ so Drillbit brought it home with him, hiding it from his mum the whole way back. When he finally took it out of the car like it wasn’t even a secret or surprise, you can imagine what she said: ‘No way.’ So I got it.
Much transcribing to be done and already nearly 8 am. There wasn’t any time to write about how Charley didn’t want to risk his own mum saying no to Lobster, so he stuck a small plastic bin inside the cage he’d made for the dingo because he loved that cage and didn’t want it to go to waste, but in the morning Lobster was gone. It would’ve taken an hour to write how he found its shell a couple days later about a hundred metres into the bush, how he’d wanted to see the death trail, where the hunter went with the soul of the turtle heavy inside its stomach. Where had that animal gone? What type of animal had it been? He’d guessed a dingo.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 15
