Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  The pointed tip of father man’s workshop key brushes against my thigh as it dangles from the ignition. I don’t like to hold or touch a key, or a set of keys, that belongs to another person. I wouldn’t ever put a set of keys in my pocket. When I’m turning the ignition on a repair I use a tissue or a rag to hold the key. Females with a perm have their keys in a Glomesh padded purse with gold or silver scales. A boy gives the purse to you. It’s what they give you before a ring. I won’t ever have the ring. I don’t understand why it is twenty-one for getting a card with a key on the front when you get the real key at seventeen. A boy gets the key to his V8; a girl gets the key to her hatchback. If you can make it to seventeen everything opens up then. Once you have the car and the key you don’t stay with the family after that.

  A corner up ahead. The headlights are painting the road and the bushes on either side. Decelerate. Slow in, a clean change down, the curve of the wheel held to the shape of the road. Trim the line. A good feeling, the matching of machine and corner. If the approach is well handled, somewhere around the clipping point power can be reapplied. The driver must place the car correctly for the turn. The driver must maintain smoothness and stability. Don’t stamp the accelerator. Squeeze it open. All that power and movement just there, beneath you.

  Check mirrors and road position. Correct use of lanes draws less attention. When the gears are fully played, when the needle hits sixty, that’s when I can speak.

  ‘Love is in the air. Love is in the air. Touch me and I will kill you. Love is in the air…’ I say to the air above the steering wheel, to the instrument panel with its pretty green glow.

  The words bounce against the windscreen and fall to the dash. Cruising now at sixty. A safe speed on this highway at night, with dry conditions, with little traffic. There’s enough petrol to go all the way out, and back.

  Wednesdays aren’t good for school because of softball. I watch my brother get on the bus and then I walk to the tip. I don’t take the road. I take the track that’s too overgrown for cars in case Darren is out doing firewood. The f lies are bad today and the holly banksia is scratchy. The thing about coming across kangaroos in the bush is that they stand up tall with their arms at their sides and their heads very still on their necks like people. They leave it until the last minute to hop away, so there’s time for both of you to be scared of the other and to get a good look. The joey breaks first. It’s a large joey and all of a sudden it leaps for its mother’s pouch. It must be a teenager but it somersaults in, headfirst, so I can see a lot of its tail and its t-square legs and the black underpads of its toes hanging out of the pouch when its mother swivels and bounces off. It’s something funny. It’s something lovely, really. It’s the kind of thing you would like to tell to someone.

  The main things at the tip are plastic bags of rotting rubbish and garden hoses and mattresses and broken toys. There are magazines to read. I like most of the smells. When you’re in a place that doesn’t smell good you can always find somewhere else. Some of the bags of rubbish have secrets inside, but they don’t belong to me.

  A ponytail isn’t a secret. Hair doesn’t weigh much and all of its weight is dead. Last night, after everyone had gone to bed, I looked at my ponytail in the kitchen bin. It was splayed over an empty can of corn – damp and sticky. So quickly, it had become rubbish. It took hardly any time at all.

  At dinner my mother has her Mills & Boon on the table and there’s the television for us. The telephone rings. Father man says not to answer it. My brother washes up; I dry. Then I read a bridal magazine from the tip in my room. I think I’d like to sleep. I try to sleep. There’s no firm plan in my mind for sabotage, but after a few hours I climb out of the window and go to the cars. There are always cars to go to. You might just touch them or sit in them, try to sleep a little even, across a bench seat. There’s no plan to hurt them, until you do.

  It is not a crime if your mouth does it. Soft parts or hard parts, it’s just the same, your two lips making a seal around the hose, your teeth pushing through tired rubber. There are fibres crisscrossed in there, a weak kind of string. The last bit is more grinding than biting. Where it was one firm thing now it hangs doubled, ragged, and you feel sorry about that. Afterwards the oil and the bits of rubber stick to the insides of your cheeks and are foul in your mouth so you need to spit them into the dirt. It’s not a crime if your hand does it when your eyes are shut. Blind reaching, blind stroking. Skin on metal. Fingertips tickling bolts, the slackening of the part as its fastenings loosen and then the cool fall of it into the hand. Draped then, quickly, in a rag, or pocketed. The sky will be black after, but a dog won’t always be barking. If a dog is barking, even a long way away, you can reach out for each beat so you don’t have to listen to the air going in and out of your ribs and the heart over-hot in there too. It’s not a crime if your hand does it while you look the other way. You can do it outside. You can do it in the workshop. There are pinholes in the roofing iron for starlight to get through. There are tools with yellow plastic grips that are happy like toys. And you get better at it so your eyes don’t even ask to look anymore and your skin isn’t nervous. You can use the trowel or a broken piece of star picket to dig a hole and bury the part. Don’t bury them too close together – avoid a cluster, give them their own plot. The ground is never too hard for digging. Even with a large part there isn’t much excess. The dirt and the stones make room for the part and fit back together again much like before. If you don’t look at what you are doing, if you do everything by feel, there are no witnesses. There’s the stain on you but that can be cleaned away, and then the only thing that’s left is what you felt.

  A TRIP

  Father man announces a trip. We will sit in the blue Holden. He will drive us in a big arc to a place on the coast on the other side of the country where we can stay in a man’s house for free, for three days. Then we will drive home.

  Eight days in the car. Three days at the house of father man’s friend. Eight days home again.

  For the trip we each have a plastic shopping bag. Father man says suitcases are useless for the effective packing of a car; too much empty volume. In my plastic shopping bag: four pairs of underpants, four t-shirts, two pairs of shorts, one pair of jeans, a yellow bathing suit I can’t wear as it becomes see-through when wet, a purple spray jacket, pyjamas and the Scientific Publications Holden Workshop Manual. I don’t have a ponytail anymore so I don’t need elastics, not since father man cut it off.

  Preparations for the Holden are extensive. Father man has been put to trouble. I do not, during the time of the preparations, get up at night and go to the cars. I do not pierce a hose or strip the thread of a bolt or loosen any housing or pour beer into the battery. I do not remove a part from the Holden and bury it. I stay in my bed. I read Seven Little Australians (the baby is called the General as if he’s a horse, the children are stupid but one of them is beautiful) and scratch my mosquito bites.

  My mother is frightened for her plants. She has made the plants by cutting the tops off potatoes and burying them in dirt. The frilly potato plants hang from the guttering along the edge of the verandah in their baskets of dirt. The night before we go my mother fills plastic drink bottles with water and up-ends them in the dirt in the corner of each basket.

  At dawn we troop out of the house with our slept-on hair, with our plastic bags. An early start. We troop past the mounds of wet soil that has leaked out of the baskets onto the verandah.

  ‘Something to come home to,’ father man says.

  It’s barely light. Headlights will always brighten with engine speed, as long as the alternator voltage is well adjusted.

  Father man. My mother. My brother. Myself. Each member of the family has their own window, but you cannot touch the handle. If you wind the window down a gust of air will enter the car and people will object. You cannot object when the other people in the car wind down the window in front of you, or across from you, and you can’t object when the driver, who sits in f
ront of you, lights a cigarette and the slipstream from his open window funnels the smoke into your face. Nineteen days ahead.

  Food. Petrol. A logbook to record mileage. Road trains. Other cars. Roadkill. My mother’s map of Australia is so large she cannot open it when we are moving without obstructing the windscreen.

  The car makes the wind and then the windscreen defends us from it.

  Father man’s rules: avoid major roads and highways, don’t stop in town, no eating in the vehicle, sound horn repeatedly to push caravaners to the shoulder, don’t give way to road trains – hold your speed, hold the road. It doesn’t take long before there’s nothing to look at. No shops or houses. My mother starts a game of I-spy. My brother chooses f for fart so there’s no need to speak. The game is already over.

  I don’t know the name of where we are, but it’s time to eat. We sit around the concrete picnic table pecking at a parcel of newspaper. The vinegary chips are best. I let my brother choose then I come in after. Everyone gets their own piece of fish although it’s only a fingernail of white under the batter. If you don’t eat as fast as they can, or if you can’t put hot things straight in your mouth because it will burn, that’s tough luck. Father man stands as soon as he’s finished and jiggles the car keys. It is annoying for him to be here with us, without his workshop to get away to. My mother wraps up the paper parcel. She wraps it nicely, I think, snug and neat like you might wrap a baby, then she shoos the crows away and pushes the parcel into the rubbish bin.

  My brother drinks his lemonade, I drink my Fanta as we walk back to the car. We have driven for a long time but the sky is still full of light. Maybe if we drive fast enough the night will always be ahead of us.

  ‘No glass,’ father man says as we open our car doors, so we run back across the gravel to the bin and throw the sweet bottles away.

  The bush is where we are now. Every Australian road leads into the bush. The stems of plants drill their holes into the soil; the stubble pushes out of the holes on father man’s chin. There are holes everywhere shot through with sticks of wheat or needles of hair. What does the sky feel when the wheat stubble rakes against its skin?

  ‘Wouldn’t you want to drown that?’ father man says.

  A mother is pushing a large child in a wheelchair along the side of the road. The mother has tied a dishcloth around the child’s chin with a ribbon to catch the drool.

  What you know about a mother is that she loves you. If you have crutches, or a birth stain on your face, or a melted arm from the kerosene, she’ll still love you. A mother doesn’t have a choice. Even if you’re spastic, if you wet yourself, if you have fits, if you can’t shut your mouth and your teeth go yellow, she won’t complain or gag or not want to walk with you at the shops.

  Father man has slowed down so we can all get a good look at the large child in its wheelchair, but our mother doesn’t look. Our mother has her head down; she’s searching for something in her red handbag. She’s been searching for it all of my life.

  Follow the white line. Follow the centre line. Out on the highway a dash of white paint marks the edge of each lane. As we come into town there’s a dash of white paint and then an orange cat’s eye stuck down in between. A dot, then a dash. A dash, then a dot. A dot, then a dash.

  This town has white concrete wheat silos. You might think they were castles if you didn’t know better. A metal ladder is bolted to the outside of the silos for climbing up and jumping off.

  A black rectangle on top of a faraway yellow hill. Could be a car. Could be a cow.

  Is the fat lady from next door missing us? Babette will eat the skinks if the fat lady forgets to feed her. The fat lady’s sister comes to visit on a Friday – that’s the day she’s likely to forget. The sister catches the bus. She brings a polystyrene esky on a string. The two women meet on the driveway. They lift their fat legs towards each other and open their fat arms and come together on the gravel. You can see from the side that there is no air between them, that each round part meets its opposite in roundness. They walk back up the driveway together on their high, fat feet. Always the esky swinging from the sister’s wrist. What must be kept cool – a dish of jelly, a pair of lamb chops, a part from their girl days that can’t be left behind?

  Father man needs the municipal toilet. I need it too, but I’m not getting in trouble for holding things up. My mother is asleep. My brother is reading a comic. Father man leaves the keys in the ignition. They stop swaying after a minute or so. I lean forwards, my arm snaking between the seat and the door, and force myself to touch the keys. The door key, the workshop key, three other keys, all hanging with their points towards the floor. A leather cuff hangs too. The edge of it is dark and greasy from where it has swayed backwards and forwards over father man’s thigh.

  Rain on the windscreen nailing us in. The wiper arm stiff, battering the glass. The dark grey road ahead, above it the dark grey sky with its soft white trim. The road tilts up towards the sky. I wait, breathless, for the bridge, for the giving point where the wheels will leave the road and roll into the sky, but it doesn’t come. The road flattens out again; the sky darkens and pulls back. A trick of the dusk.

  A car is the ideal container for a family. You can be always going to a better place and it keeps everyone stamped down neatly in their seats.

  Broken brown glass for beer, broken white glass for pop, moss and rocks and ants, flattened bottle tops, prickly bushes with toilet paper streamers, a sports sock, boy shit, dog shit, rabbit pellets, a plastic plate, a pair of green jocks, a vinyl suitcase unzipped – its jaw out of whack – and in among it all, tiny yellow thumb birds, cheeping, apologising to us, at the roadside stop.

  Sleeping arrangements. Father man and my mother recline their seats using a lever near the floor. They jerk in unison, lurch, settle. My brother stretches out across the back seat. I have the floor. My plastic bag of clothes is soft. I take the clothes out and create two even piles. I use the piles of clothes to raise the floor on both sides of the tunnel created by the transmission hump. Father man has parked us sideways at the roadside stop but the headlights of the cars and trucks on the road still find us. The rear-vision mirror fills with light and then drains away – a long, strong illumination for a road train, a shorter, weaker flash for a car. Why are they going where we have come from? Perhaps I should warn them? Eighteen days ahead.

  Packing the right tools for the road requires common sense and forward thinking. Don’t take too much or too little. Sandpaper is useful for buffing back the battery terminals, then you can apply some vaseline. Individual parts of bearings must not be renewed separately. If any part of a bearing is faulty, the complete bearing must be replaced.

  Father man starts each day by cleaning the grille of the Holden so insects don’t get sucked into the engine. He has a brush that he keeps in a plastic bag in the boot. He taps the brush against the tyre rim to clean it afterwards. I think he’s happy then. Father man is happiest when he’s holding a tool.

  The manual in my lap. The road beneath us. A fence rushing past. My brother is asleep with his chin resting on his chest.

  There are times when I’m looking at the manual that I can see how everything fits together – the cogs all separate in their airy spaces on the page. All of the parts have the same distance around them. All of the parts are clean. They are made of the same smooth, sheeny substance. A chain is shown dry, without its grease. If the hands are there, the picture is not quite so pure. In Installing Oil Seal to Crankshaft Flange the hand spiders over the circular flange, each finger making light contact with its rim. There is some symmetry in how the fingers are arranged, but then there’s the stubby thumb, the nail pressed into the bulging flesh below it. A crease of thickened skin heads down to the wrist, a loose web of white skin in the private place between thumb and forefinger. As a covering for the apparatus of the hand, the skin is grimy, irregular. You can see the holes in it, the spaces for things to get in.

  In Exploded View of Front Disc Brake Com
ponents: the piston seal, the piston, the rubber dust seal, the circlip, the shim, the brake pads (there are two; they look like slices of toast), and then, in the same order on the other side, the shim again, the circlip again, the rubber dust seal again, the piston again and finally the piston seal – such a pleasing sandwich of layers and shapes.

  There is much to see and learn here, in the manual. It’s clear that without brakes, on a hill, a vehicle is a missile – a moving coffin for its driver and anything in its way.

  Two cars zoom past in quick succession. The blur of coloured metal, the wind of them bouncing off us, a moan, a pause, another moan.

  I wonder if the fat lady could be driven. Imagine an axle put between her teeth. Could she be forced onto the road?

  Cars stop in the same places to go to the toilet along the highway. The toilet paper caught on the bushes is yellow from the sun. Men can stop anywhere to piss. Men that wear caps do it on the side of the road. You see them with their shoulders up and their jeans loosened as they hold their dicks. Sometimes they look over their shoulder at you as you drive past. When they are pissing their eyes under their caps are sleepy like a puppy’s when its vision is still soft.

  Ants enjoy a toilet stop. Here there are black ants with red heads, walking in line, each nest mate carrying its crumb of shit.

  There was the time my brother did a big shit in the toilet and he didn’t flush, or maybe he did flush but it didn’t go away. Father man found it. He said he didn’t think it was possible for a child to produce something like that. We were watching Mash on television. Men in green pyjamas were doing operations in tents to make us laugh. Our mother was outside with her plants. The back door slammed. We heard father man tell her that her children were animals, that they stank worse than dogs. Our mother came in and stood in front of the television. She was in her weekend clothes, her pink smock top, her blue flares, her Dr Scholl sandals – long slabs of pine belted to her thin feet. I don’t know if she had already been to the toilet and flushed, but I knew she shouldn’t be talking about the toilet in front of a boy. It was forty degrees. My legs were stuck to the vinyl couch with sweat but I got up and went to the toilet and pushed the button just in case. Dogs don’t really stink, but it would have been hard for father man to think quickly of an animal that does.