Things are mostly brown here, where we live. My mother, my brother, father man and me. The gravel, the paint on the house, the rust along the bottom of the car door. I am brown-haired. There’s only so much yellow hair to go around and people miss out. If you are yellow you have a yellow name like Jodie or Denise and you have to wear shorts. If everyone was yellow it wouldn’t be so special and men would take another colour and make it the best for themselves. My mother started out brown. She was brown in the time before. There is a photograph of my mother holding a baby in a laundry basket on her hip. My brother is a plump grub in with the sheets and towels. My mother has messy brown hair and a floaty blouse and beads on a leather cord at her throat. A grown-up woman can make herself new for the man that wants to settle on her. For father man my mother has yellow hair that’s combed straight, each strand its own thin, separate rope.
At home now, the car must be gotten out of. The brown house must be approached and entered. The view can’t be shattered. It always brings us back to here. You can’t go straight to your room. You have to bring in the shopping bags and touch them and open the fridge as if you are putting something in or taking something out. You have to take the cat food out to the laundry. Everybody in a family, even when it has made itself ugly, has to help.
I have something special in my room. Something I want to get back to. Hidden under the bed is the manual for father man’s blue car. Scientific Publications Holden Workshop Manual Series No. 51, in its protective plastic cover, with its rub of grease across the front.
If you had never touched an engine, if it were only a matter of looking in the manual, you would think it was a miracle, that it couldn’t have been made by a man. The front wheel hub and drum assembly – hub bolt, grease-retaining seal, inner bearing, drum attaching bolt, outer bearing, castellated nut – all gilded, all snug up, side by side. Perfect, glossy, tight. When the creamy paper rears up at me I can see how the parts fit together. I can see the exploded view.
In the manual you can choose to look at the parts, or the air in between them. The air in between isn’t nothing; it isn’t blank. If you make yourself look for what’s not there the empty spaces become parts themselves. The empty spaces become air parts, bordered by the metal and rubber. In Exploded View of Water Pump Assembly the air part around the fan looks like a design for a jigsaw puzzle of a windmill. Steerarma, hubner, suspenister. Why not? Why shouldn’t the air parts have a name? If you cast only the air parts in steel and assembled them the engine would be peaceful, then. It would be beautiful. The engine would be made from air.
The place where a part connects is specially prepared with a housing, a rim, a thread or a flange. One true surface against another. It’s not possible for the parts of the body to fit together like this. There’s skin and there’s the flesh under it. The flesh, the meat of the body, isn’t stable. There are three lines cut into the leather of father man’s belt. The deepest cut is in the middle to fit his regular girth, then there’s a shallower cut next to the hole on either side for thinner days and fatter days.
Probably every manual or every book exists within another book, and every picture probably exists within another picture if you could just use your eye to cut it up and reassemble it to make the pieces anew. Each new thing is just a version of something else. It’s the order that changes – perhaps you can save yourself by putting things in a different order? My mother, myself. It means you are part of something but it also means that you can’t get free.
It is safe in my room after dinner and I lie on the bed. A juvenile skink comes in through the hole in the flyscreen and slides down the wall beneath the window. The skink’s toe suckers work for rocks and bark, but not so much on paint. If you are a skink you only have two speeds: still and rushing. A skink never moseys along.
Once, when I skipped the bus, I challenged myself to walk as slowly as I could to the tip to get time over with. That’s what school is useful for – getting through time. I didn’t stick at the slowness. Perhaps I am a person that doesn’t stick at anything? The colonel on Hogan’s Heroes says you can let life happen to you, or you can go out and take it by the horns. The colonel doesn’t have trouble taking the girls in their white frilly blouses and taking stolen goods out of trucks and taking the mickey out of Colonel Klink. Life is always easier for Americans.
The skink that came through the window into my room wants to get out again. It can make it over the skirting board and up the wall, one foot, two foot, towards the window, then its toes lose stickiness and it falls. After six attempts it stops being good to watch. The skink can’t turn in the air like a cat does to make sure it lands on its feet. It falls flat and stupid like a piece of toast with its margarine side down. Soon it will break apart, then Babette will eat it. I wait until the skink has clambered up a foot or so, then I put the Holden manual underneath it, perpendicular to the wall, and use it gently, like the rising floor of a lift, to boost the skink up to the window and then safely out. I’m not saying this because it seems kind, only because it was useful.
It’s nice to imagine the skink opening its gummy mouth and telling its family about its adventures in its squeaky skink voice. The human voice is made in a box in the throat. When there’s damage or a fault you get an electrical voice that sounds like a robot to hold under your chin. There’s a lot you can do with your head and your neck and your shoulders to take the place of speech. If your mother asks you to get her a glass of water while she’s watching television you fetch it. Did you feed the cat? Nod, half-nod, partial shrug, slow blink, faster blinks, shoulder jerk. Perhaps I have invented another language? Nearly thirty days now. A seal forming in the throat. A hard layer settling across the box of the voice.
Last thing at night, before he goes to bed, father man unclips the key chain from the belt loop of his shorts and does the locking up. Father man has the key to the outside lock that keeps us out, and the inside lock that keeps us in. He doesn’t have his outside boots on; he has brown rubber thongs on for inside the house. The soles of the rubber thongs stick to the lino and release a squelch with each footstep. Twice the key must go around to slide the bolt across, and in the morning twice again to bring it home. That’s what a deadlock is – a tool that can’t be roused or argued with. The deadlock protects us from danger. The deadlock doesn’t know if the danger is on the outside or the inside. For a brief time, while he is walking the keys from the kitchen to the door and back again, father man holds us in his hand.
Once a Mormon came on a bicycle sliding through the gravel. He rode up the driveway, dismounted and leant his bicycle against the front of the house. It was lunchtime and all of this we could hear while holding our sandwiches up to our mouths. The Mormon knocked and knocked on the front door. It was hot. He might have liked a glass of water. The front door of the house has never been opened or unlocked. Father man said the sandwiches had been made and the sandwiches had to be eaten. Fresh food always has to be eaten when it is fresh. The Mormon kept on knocking. His knock grew weaker as we chewed, then sharp again with its last rap to tell us that he knew we were inside.
If the house caught fire at night we would be found with our faces pressed to the locked door as the flames licked at us, as the fire melted our hair. We would die before we went to father man’s coat to touch the keys to the deadlock. Or perhaps we already have?
The window is my night-escape. I peel the flyscreen back from its frame and climb through. I like to walk on our road in the dark. Chips of iron in the bitumen. If father man pushes you down on the road in the summer the tar will stick. Grease on your wrists, stains on your clothes. No need to tell, he says. But tonight the road is clean and cool. The blackness gets right up against you, rests on your shoulders and your hips, gets in between the strands of your hair, curls into the space between the legs of your jeans. All your expressions are safe in the dark. It doesn’t matter that you are having cruel thoughts and that your face is ugly while you are having them.
Later, back in
my bed and waiting for sleep, I listen to the trucks braking on the highway. It means all the parts are working – the foot of the driver against the pedal, the hydraulic cylinder pushing the brake shoe, the lining of the brake shoe pressing the inner surface of the drum. Friction turning motion into heat. If a part is broken the heavy truck on the steep hill becomes a runaway. Any animal or person on the road can become its victim.
The arrester bed is a reassurance. A bed of gravel to control what is out of control. The driver of the runaway truck steers into the cage of the arrester bed. The gravel within the cage pushes between the wheels, seeps into the suspension, into the cavities around the engine, smothers the speed and its danger and brings the truck to a stop.
I imagine the soft body of the driver against the hard gravel as it floods into the cabin of the truck, a pillow of gravel collecting around his face. It must feel like being held; it must feel like an embrace.
A hot day, still. It’s a Saturday and father man makes me lie down in the dirt to mark out the distance between the uprights for the new back fence. I am five feet tall. Father man says, ‘no need to measure.’ Five feet between each upright. The post-hole digger is like a shovel but it twists out a neat, round mouthful of dirt. The post-hole digger grips at my hair and drags it down into the mix. Father man doesn’t tell me that I’m allowed to get up again, but I can hear when the post-hole digger is deeper than my skull. A firm impression has been made; it’s all right to stand up now.
We don’t live on soil. We live on stones. The post-hole digger loosens the stones and makes them separate. On the top layer the smallest stones are round and perfect like orange pottery peas. Somehow weak pale grass grows on top of this and flattens it out and makes where we live look like everywhere else. I shake the stones out of my hair. I walk over to the trailer, select a new post and roll it over so it will be ready for its hole. Building the fence only takes half a day and it looks nice when the wires have been fed through the holes in the uprights and the fence is finished. It looks like the land matters so much to someone it has been given a necklace to wear.
My mother watches the fence going up as she pegs the underpants on the washing line. Babette mews at my mother’s ankles because she doesn’t understand what’s happening above her and it must seem like my mother is dancing. The adult male underpants and the adult female ones hang next to the boys’ fourteen-plus and the girls’ twelve-and-up. They are all mixed in together as they go from wet to dry and nobody says one word about that.
It was a shock to see the crop of black hair down there. When I was a child I thought the black hair was to hide a join between the legs and the body, a join that was needed when the new parts came in. I thought there was a clasp, or perhaps a ridged line like on a jam jar where the top screws down. I didn’t think the black hair would happen on me. After it started to happen I couldn’t look at a man with a tight black beard that covered his lips and made his mouth look like a hole. If I stood close to a man with a beard like that I thought people would know what was happening to me.
After lunch, when the fence is finished, Darren comes over to help father man remove the Holden’s engine with a block and tackle attached to a beam under the workshop roof. Both Darren and father man think they alone are doing the heavy lifting, that the other man is not pulling his weight.
‘Hold the cunt,’ father man says as the engine sways above him. ‘Hold the cunt still.’
The wooden rafter moans as the rope bites into it. Darren strains and rearranges his weight at the end of the rope.
‘I am holding the cunt still,’ he says, but his voice is soft like plastic.
With two men there is always the man that makes the words and the man that repeats them. It’s not decided by age or size, but which of them is crueller, to others and to himself.
When they are finished with the hoist father man gives Darren a beer and they lean against the bonnet of Darren’s white Valiant. Darren lights their cigarettes with a tiny match he rips from a cardboard matchbook. His forearms are covered in a sleeve of hair. Blue singlet. Black football shorts. Workboots. When sitting, one withered apricot ball pressed against his thigh.
Darren lives between the shire reserve and the tip and the new housing estate. He tells father man how he found a shire raincoat at the tip and that when he hears people cutting timber for firewood in the reserve he puts the shire raincoat on and hooks his trailer up and drives in to tell them that they need a permit. Then he tells them that he likes them, so he won’t report them, but they should unload the wood from their trailer into his trailer. Darren sells the trailer-loads of firewood to the people who live on the new housing estate.
Father man and Darren crack another can and Darren says the thing is, lately, when he goes out to his car in the morning there’s a human shit on it. First morning the shit is on the bonnet, right in the middle, next morning it’s on the windscreen, and then on the roof and that can’t have been easy because the roof is slippery and there’s a roof rack. Yet the shit, Darren reckons, is large. Adult-sized, he says.
Father man whistles through his teeth and shakes his head as if he’s trying to tip the shit, or the thought of the shit, out of his ear. They talk about the Valiant and what needs to be done to her, and then they talk about my mother.
Babette is tiptoeing around father man with her back arched, rubbing her sides against his legs. An animal doesn’t know what shame is. An animal never feels tainted.
Darren goes home and in the afternoon the lady with the pink plastic glasses who lives on Struttle Road comes to pick up her Mazda. Father man tells her the best thing to do is to drive the Mazda into the ground. Every car is a collection of failures waiting for their time and place. When the failures are so great the car is no longer worth repairing.
Then Mrs Thomas drives up in her white Morris and she and the car are all tilted to the side. She sits side-saddle, with her knees together, a crocheted cushion under one buttock. Her pantyhosed feet reach out to operate the pedals as if she’s playing the piano. A car will go where the driver looks. Mrs Thomas’s head is sideways on her neck like a bird’s. She scrapes fences, is a danger in the car park. On television, when the driver is speaking to the passenger – a man to his wife – he will look at her face but keep driving straight ahead so you know he’s not really driving. There’s something rigged up with the camera that you can’t see. Mrs Thomas doesn’t have a television set, or maybe it was in for repairs when I climbed through her toilet window and into her little white house.
The corner swells ahead. Father man is doing a test drive in Mrs Thomas’s car. I am in the back seat, for later. There is a broken headlamp on the seat beside me. Father man returns the broken parts, sometimes on a rag if they are greasy, to prove that clean new parts have been installed in their place. It isn’t always true. He doesn’t buy new parts from the automotive supplier; he has no account. If a replacement part is essential he has his own carcasses stacked behind the workshop to harvest from, and in the town down the hill there are fields and fields of wounded cars in the pick-and-pay.
‘Your receipt is in the back,’ father man says, as a joke, when a customer hands over the cash. Especially with a female, any broken part will do. At her last service Mrs Thomas took home the burnt-out motor of our vacuum cleaner. She clucked her tongue and shook her head at it through the window of her Morris.
‘So it was you,’ she said to the tiny plastic motor, ‘that caused all that trouble.’
The next day an Alfa comes in for brake pads. I don’t like its crimson panels, its bumper bar like a crooked lip. The Alfa-man wears a cap with Alfa written on it and the Alfa badge with the snake and the cross. He says the car is a ground-up resto and that he only paid a finger for it. He says when it’s finished it will be worth a hand.
It’s a dark night. The spring-loaded bonnet of the Alfa comes up like the tongue of an envelope, bounces a little and then hits me in the head. The next night when I drive the Alfa down the hill a clu
tch of golf balls roll forwards under the pedals. When I drive it back up the hill they roll under the seat and wait in the rear again.
Stopped at the stop sign on the highway, I hear a telephone ringing sadly behind the door of a house. It is surprising how tight the steering wheel is, the resistance of it in your hands and arms. When I was a child I thought the wheel went all the way around, that there was no end to its turning. But really it is more like a shoulder – it is attached, in a complicated way, to the other working parts, none of which are any use at all if they are on their own.
I like that you have to look forwards, when driving, to see what’s coming up behind. The windscreen frames the view nicely. It favours the road, of course. You could look elsewhere, off to the dark hills, up to the stars in the sky, but the windscreen makes you keep the road in mind. Everything is set up for that.
Remember to return seats, side mirrors and the rear-vision mirror to their original positions after you have stolen the keys to a repair and driven it through the night.
I go to the tip the next day and come home when I’m hungry. After dinner my brother falls asleep on a slice of bread and father man uses the pincers. If the pincers were big enough it wouldn’t have hurt. It could have looked pretty even – my brother’s neck decorated with the shining pincer jaws.
My brother had been sentenced to the table with his plate of peas. He didn’t know how to hide vegetables in the pockets of his cheeks. Next to the plate of peas was a bread-and-butter plate with a white slice. I’m not sure if my brother slumped suddenly onto the white slice or rested his cheek on it gently. His face was shut and the slackness in his feet under the table told me he wasn’t foxing, he was really asleep on the slice of bread.
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