Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  A blue Volvo shimmers, then firms as it overtakes us. In the frozen second before it rushes past, the mouths of its people can be seen moving inside it. A child in the back seat has slid across to the middle where its feet must be banked on the carpeted transmission hump so it can hear the words made in the front and make some of its own.

  ‘The cow is brown,’ says their father man from behind the wheel.

  ‘I see a bird,’ says the child, its mouth stretched wide like its tonsils are being inspected.

  The mother waggles her cap of yellow hair and rubs her legs together. The scritch of her pantyhose leaks out the window and settles on the gravel on the side of the road.

  ‘Soon,’ she says, ‘we will stop for tea.’

  A row of foxes tied to a fence, tails up, heads down. A row of shoes tied to a fence by their laces.

  A long evening on the road. The radio has run out. Father man does not want us to open the doors or windows as we get ready for bed because of mosquitos.

  There are no in-between times on the road. We are driving we are sleeping we are eating we are driving we are driving again. Seventeen days ahead.

  It costs too much money to always eat at a roadhouse. We stop at a small supermarket in the next town so my mother can buy sandwich materials for the picnic basket.

  A tiny baby is walking in the supermarket, an Indian baby in a white padded suit with a hood and white knitted shoes that has just learnt to walk. The baby’s whole family is in the small supermarket: mother, father, big sister, big brother. They have walked on ahead and are hiding, watching their baby from behind a stack of kitchen towel at the end of the aisle. The baby walks slowly down the middle of the aisle, smaller even than the bottles of drink on the shelf next to it. It doesn’t cry or suck its thumb. It looks straight ahead out of its cross brown face. The family laugh softly together and shush each other in case the baby hears as they huddle in their hiding place. The baby’s pusher is attached to the hand and the arm of the mother; its wheels run backwards and forwards over the smooth floor of the supermarket. The mother’s black hair falls forwards nicely over her face as she is rocked. All of this, while the baby walks its lonely walk.

  It could have been stolen, that tiny baby. It could have been crushed and killed. A family will only laugh at cruelty if it knows it is kind.

  When you’re learning to walk an adult from your family will walk alongside you. The whole of an adult hand is too big for you to hold so the female adult will offer you one part, one finger. You can grip that part with your fat baby’s fist to attach your frame to the larger frame of the adult, who knows how to balance, although she will be angry at having to go so slow. All of this will matter later: the fact that you weren’t left behind, that you were brought up. In an African tribe twins are considered evil so they put them in pots and leave them in the forest to die. It isn’t too deep in the forest where they put the pots of twins so when the other children are out playing and collecting water they can hear the twins crying as they die.

  The newspaper on the counter at the small supermarket has a picture of a koala that was rescued from a bushfire. Every summer a new koala is rescued from a bushfire. We’ll see photographs of it in the newspapers and on TV for a week or so, until we forget. First the koala will be in a bucket to bathe its singed skin and fur, then sitting in a cage with bandages on its burnt hands. There are blue bandages on its hands if it is male and pink bandages if it is female. The skin of the koala is getting better, its hands are getting better, but it will be dying in its eyes. Only human beings have fancy hands that can grip the hand of another human as they are being brought up. Did it happen so we could link together in a chain with the smallest ones, or did it happen so we could make tools?

  In our family father man must look after his hands. The black grease gets into his skin and never gets out but this doesn’t matter. It matters when he cuts them. If it’s a deep cut he’ll get black thread and a sewing needle from the sewing box and stitch it closed himself. It happens at the kitchen table but not while we are eating. Father man’s hands put the parts together and take them apart. His hands are where the money comes from.

  In the car park behind the supermarket father man returns to the wrong car. I see him veer towards another Holden – the same make and model, the same colour blue. I see him insert his key, or try to, in the wrong lock. He hasn’t noticed the snapped aerial, the towelling seat cover coming loose in the rear, the balled tissues on the front passenger’s floor mat, the copy of Philately Today on the dash. I could have called out and saved him.

  Forty-one days then, without speech. A flock of birds fall noisily on the bushes that border the car park. A flock of tiny birds trilling to each other. I am walking alongside father man now. I try to motion with my head, to look in the true direction of our car, but father man doesn’t see me away from the workshop. Out in the world I am invisible, of less interest than a dog.

  I understand father man’s confusion. I don’t like to see the Holden in a car park. I don’t like to see it shoulder to shoulder with another make of car, its tyres potted inside the painted lines. I don’t like large car parks where there are too many cars, rows and rows and rows of cars – it is sad to see them docile, waiting for a family to remember them, to return and fit themselves inside.

  When a car is born it has all the promise of movement – a spin of the wheel and the tyres will dance it in any direction. It is only when it is taken home that a car understands it is sentenced to life on the road.

  Yesterday, on average, if I counted to ten there would be a house or a gate, or a letterbox. Today I have counted to 817 with no sign of human life.

  The road ahead is not for my eyes to open onto. From the rear seat the front screen is obstructed like at the movies, where the back of the heads of tall people block out the horse’s legs if it’s John Wayne, or the deep sea if it’s Jaws. My eyes are for the side. Sitting behind father man I can look down all the driveways we could turn into. A set of gates, a cattle grate beneath them, a white drum for mail, sometimes a sign if the place is a stud and there is something to tell about the sheep and the cows.

  Some of the big farms – they might be called stations – have paddock cars left near the front gate for children to drive up to the house and down to the road for school. When there is a whole family of children the biggest one does the driving. The biggest brother or sister could kill the smaller brothers and sisters by driving into a tree or a dam, but they don’t, and they don’t wait until the smaller children have gotten out of the car so they can drive away somewhere. They could do that; it wouldn’t be hard. But they don’t.

  Father man is driving with his right arm out of the window. His left arm steers. All morning now we’ve tracked the river. How friendly to keep time with this happy road of water flowing by our side.

  My mother’s eye drops have leaked in her handbag and Chateau in the Palms is wet through. While we are stopped at the roadside stop my mother puts the book on the roof of the Holden to dry. Every time a car zooms past the pages flicker in the wind as if the speeding vehicle is reading the book very, very fast. My mother is lucky; she has good timing, because we’re not far down the highway when it starts to rain.

  I remember playing in the storm drain with my brother after a week of rain. We started by running up the road and throwing sticks and leaves into the water and chasing them down until they became snagged. I think the game was to see whose sticks went furthest. A few times when my brother’s stick was slower or became snagged he switched to following my stick. I clapped for him when his stick – the stick that had been mine – went over the imaginary finishing line. When cars came and we had to get off the road my brother waited to see which side of the road I would go to and then he went to the other side.

  For the next game we dragged boulders into the drain and diverted the water across the road. In the deepest part of the drain above our dam the water was a clean, cold muscle, but after the water had coursed
around the boulders that we had rocked out of the soil, and through the dirt that clung to them, it was weak and brown. The weak brown water spilled across the road in a puddle.

  All that day I copied what my brother did. Not exactly – I watched what he did and then calculated what was a half of it. If he chose a big boulder and started rocking it to loosen it from the soil I found a boulder half its size. Once my brother’s boulder was free he kicked it so it rolled down into the drain, running away just before the splash. My boulders weren’t heavy enough to roll on their own; they lacked weight and impetus. I had to squat down beside them and pat them along. Our hands were coated with mud, and our jeans too, around the knees and higher up where we had wiped ourselves.

  ‘It’s like the trenches,’ I said to my brother.

  He nodded but then he turned away. It wasn’t right of me to try and hook him like that. I had forgotten myself – I had become too excited and I wished I could take it back.

  We climbed the orange trees at the front of the block and watched the brown puddle leak over the road. We didn’t say so, but we thought the water would make the next car that drove along skid and crash. My brother ate five of the miniature oranges. Runt fruit, we called them. I ate two. Then we sat, full of sweet juice, listening for the sound of a car approaching – maybe even a bus.

  I don’t know why I remember this. I don’t know if I’ll always remember it. Perhaps, later on, I won’t need to remember it anymore and something else will be there instead.

  At Caiguna father man stops for petrol and cigarettes. A Ford stands cooling at the bowser opposite. It can’t have come far on these roads, its bright work still shining. Father man goes in to pay and emerges with a fresh pack of cigarettes. He checks that our eyes are seeing him, then he pretends to reach for the doorhandle of the Ford as if he has mistaken one car for another.

  ‘Just ragging,’ his mouth says.

  Is this play? Should we have smiled? He opens the correct door, the door to the blue Holden. He settles himself in the seat, lights his cigarette and speaks at the back seat.

  ‘Ah, there’s Stupid, and there’s Stupider,’ he says.

  Children are only half a person so it’s right that we must share the word.

  The manual on my lap. My brother asleep with his mouth open and his fringe puffing out in front every time he breathes.

  My man’s hands are in thirteen of the twenty-seven photographs in the workshop manual for the Holden, but never in an exploded view. An exploded view is to show the spaces between the parts and how they fit together. My man’s hands model the parts in situ – show how they are to be manipulated. My man’s hands are pale and clean. They point, touch, grasp, turn, hold. They show scale and direction. Here is the diaphragm; here is the valve, the economy jet… My man’s hands suggest, by the tension or softness of his flesh, the force required for the task. They demonstrate to every man who reads the manual that the procedures for installation, for dismantling, for tensioning, for alignment are all achievable with a little patience and, of course, with his own pair of hands.

  It is good to stare at the place in the photograph where the flesh of the fingers meets the part. This way the part loses its edge. The softness of the hand un-engineers the part. My man wears no ring on any of his fingers. My man’s hands are not old, but they are not the hands of a boy. My man’s hands don’t force a part to separate from another – they coax. It is the hand that corrupts, not the part.

  In the manual each cog is separated on the page. Here is the hand fingering the accelerator pump. The pieces of the pump float on the papered air. The numbers, the instructions, the photographs are in front and behind the hands and the parts. The hands have no body – no arms or legs, no thigh in overalls to rest slackly against. The parts have no chassis, no cabin dragging its stuttery shadow down the road. The parts are designed to come together. A flange, a rim – flat metal against flat metal – a valve, a spindle, a pin, a bolt, the housing and the housed. In the manual everything is straight. Everything is clean. A pure view.

  Tap, tap, tap. The week after father man arrived he tapped the timber handle of his hammer against my head. ‘Like to like,’ he said. ‘Wood meets wood.’

  In Removing Circlip from Lower Ball Joint my man holds a pair of pliers like he is gripping the wings of a bird. The pliers stab the circlip with their beak. A few black hairs at the wrist of my man’s hands. I can see his palm, the pillow of flesh beneath his thumb. I can see his fingernails, neat and shiny like postage stamps.

  In the night my man’s hands will graze my cheeks, will reach behind my head, will grasp my neck, the hairs at the nape of my neck, and tug, not sharply so it will rip, but enough to wake the skin underneath the hair. My man will do it the way that I do it to myself, but it will not be my weak girl’s hands – it will be his grown man’s hands. The hands he has given to me in the manual.

  The road is chalked here. A section of it is scribbled with measurements and arrows – instructions for a road crew to come back later for repairs.

  I like it on the cop shows when they draw a line on the pavement around a dead body in chalk. Most people in America get shot. You don’t see the body. You see the white chalk on the black pavement. The fat lady next door says it’s a good day when you wake up in the morning and there’s no chalk line drawn around you. I know what she means. I watch the cop shows too. The chalk line is a stencil for a body without its flesh, without its parts. It wouldn’t work in the outback. If you were shot or stabbed in the outback there is no hard pavement, there’s just the dirty paddocks full of stubble and animal shit. There’s no firm surface to press against.

  A girl that is young has just the one edge, just the one long outside line between herself and the world. When she starts to wear a bra and the breasts and the black hair must be hidden, the life of parts begins. Skirts and dresses are a factor of it. You can’t draw a chalk line around a body when it’s wearing a skirt. Some of the lines won’t be true. It is always possible to draw a line around a man. There’s the edge of him; there’s him on one side of the chalk, the world on the other, but not for a woman, or a girl like me.

  Father man has the road in his hands and the Holden that adheres to it and the stream of air it pushes against, and us strapped inside. He passes us from palm to palm between two socks, because, after being parked in the sun, the steering wheel is as hot as an oven tray.

  Mother says, ‘don’t park here, find some shade,’ but there isn’t any shade close to the shop. When mother has the wheel she parks head-on to a tree with the bonnet pushed right against it like the car is a horse hitched outside a bank. Our rear end jutting out onto the road.

  We get out of the car and file down the road to the shop for a pie with sauce and an orange juice. Then we file back up again. Road trains pass us and spit gravel against our legs. Nobody wants the pulp that sinks to the bottom of the orange juice. It is a relief to get back into the car.

  Dusk. A different type of cicadas here, or it could be frogs. Father man has a last piss on the bushes at the roadside stop. He locks the car doors. I can see my brother’s elbow working away above me. He is picking the tops off his pimples. The road sounds get quieter through the night. Sixteen days ahead.

  There’s always a fly trapped inside, hitting itself against the glass. Its buzzing gets louder as we drive. You can squash the fly with your hand or you can wind the window down a fraction and shoo it towards the gap. If it has been in the car for long enough perhaps it will be released to a new fly-country with a different fly-language? Maybe it will be happy there, but more likely it will be killed.

  At home I like to make sure that I’m not on the verandah much, but it was good to watch the skinks eat the flies, their tongues snapping out blind and sticky. It wasn’t hard to collect a handful of flies from the windowsills, the black tangle of them – eyelash legs, church-window wings. Sometimes a fly was on its back, but mainly they were tilted over. So light, a fly, a whole life too light to register
in my hand. What I didn’t know was that my mother had been spraying with the extra-strength Mortein. I fed the Mortein flies to the skink family for lunch for a week before a little poison became a lot, became too much. All the skinks died except for the big one. Maybe it was the father? It knew my smell or shadow and came out from under its rock ready to feed. I didn’t have any flies. I picked it up by the tail, the way you shouldn’t. It was sleek and plump. Its ear slit glared open like the eye of a needle. It didn’t cry out but there was blood on my hand when I flicked its tail away.

  I remember this because earlier that day I had been cleaning the parts in kerosene under the trees. I was putting the clean parts back on the bench in the workshop when father man called out to me from the pit. Father man was in the pit underneath the Holden. I had crept past on my way to the bench, but he must have seen my ankles.

  He told me to bring a spanner down the ladder into the pit. Then he told me to go up again and bring a rag.