Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  Paddocks and paddocks of broccoli trees with black bark. They are native trees – they don’t make fruit and nobody planted them. They grew up injured all together.

  The road is always in me now. We are always going past the same dreary scenes. In westerns they ride in front of the same cardboard rocks glued to the same painted canyon. A cowboy horse can become an Indian horse just with a change of saddle blanket, although sometimes they scruff up the mane.

  We had a different television set in the time before. I remember my brother walking up to the screen to pat a dog with a long snout. There is an adult-sized face reflected in the screen as my brother holds out his hand towards the dog. I was still a baby then. Was my mother in the room? Perhaps it was someone else?

  My mother is opening and closing her red handbag. She unzips her purse and counts her loose change. She likes to pay for things in coins rather than notes if she can. My mother looks over at my brother and me in the back seat and starts to sing. She sings, ‘row, row, row your boat…’ Father man lights a cigarette. Life is but a dream…

  Coming into a town. A greyhound track next to a wrecking yard. All quiet. Not a dog or a person in sight. The track where the dogs race is edged in bent sheets of corrugated iron. I think it happens at night. There are big floodlights hanging overhead and an advertisement for beer and charcoal chicken near the entrance. Enjoy Your Night at the Dishlickers, it says and there’s a picture of a happy greyhound with a long pink tongue cheekily licking its chops.

  I often see the man who lives two streets from us on Bonnington Road walk his greyhounds in the mornings. Five dogs trot beside him, lean against his legs, lift their caged snouts into the air of the day. The man walks them on the gravel path. Darren tells father man that when the greyhounds don’t win at their races, when the man from Bonnington Road doesn’t want them anymore, he has a hammer in his shed to kill them with.

  My first choice is the lilac, next the fawn with the drooping ear tips, then the brindles. The black is last. One morning I saw the black dog quiver when the dog man ashed his cigarette over its back. I saw the black dog’s skin shrink and pull tight, then prickle and bead up along the knuckles of its spine.

  The dog man’s hands cannot end the dogs. His hammer can. Perhaps it is a clean feeling to break a skull and feel the glue behind it? The flies are always quieter after you’ve done the thing you had to do.

  I went in on a moonless night from the back, across the creek, through the bush, to avoid the gravelled driveway and the windows of the house. The dog man’s house is brick with a belt of hedge around it. The dog shed is at the rear. A chicken wire fence bulging between stakes, a bolt on the shed door to be coaxed from its keep. Streetlight beamed through the holes in the tin roof, silvering the cages of the sleeping dogs. Fear that the dogs would wake and bark. It was a comfort to hold the torch. When there’s a stick-up on Hogan’s Heroes and the German soldier drops his gun, the television lingers on the hand so you can see the sadness in the fingers as the gun drops and falls away. That was how my hand felt about the torch. I put the torch down on the bench, next to the hammer. The lilac dog stood up then and tottered to the corner of its pen to squat but nothing came. It yawned and circled then lowered itself back down to sleep. The two brindle dogs were penned together, were asleep on their sacks together, so it wasn’t possible to see where each of them began and ended.

  The dog man had wiped the hammer’s crime from its face. The silver disc was spotless. It could have been a stud or a button, a token in a board game, a wristwatch whose hands had fallen free. The blood was on the rag. When the rag dried it had lost its softness, but that’s where the blood had ended up, that’s where it had to stay.

  The rag remembered it was cloth, remembered how to rip. No dog woke. There were enough strips of rag to wrap the hammer three times. The dog man’s hammer came out looking like a baby. He’d find it in the morning. There it would be, on the bench, ready for its cradling.

  I miss the smell of my bed. I miss the sound of father man’s beer fridge clearing its throat on the back verandah. Do I miss the sabotage? Do I miss getting up in the night, putting my hands in an engine, deciding which part to take or hurt?

  A flat tyre. Father man has to unload the contents of the boot to reach the spare and the wheel brace and the jack. He’s angry about all the useless shit we have brought with us. He’s angry about having to move the plastic bags. My mother lifts the picnic basket up off the dirt and holds it against her hip as if it’s precious, as if she’s worried it might get left behind. My brother holds his ball. A few cars pass us on the road. The people in the cars are looking at us, my mother with her headscarf, with her round knees and pink shorts, my brother bouncing his ball in the dirt.

  The correct wheel rotation to prolong the life of the tyres starts with the spare in the boot. Move the spare to back left. Drive. Move spare to front left. Drive. Move spare across to front right – this is a big move as the tyre is now on the other side of the car. Drive. Move spare to back right, then return spare to boot. When the spare is in the boot it is flat like a lozenge. It has done what it was meant to do. It is all sealed away. It can rest now.

  Father man concentrates on the task at hand, but the fury in his back and arms and shoulders signals to any helpful passing car that it’s better not to stop.

  My mother asks everyone what their favourite meal is. Only my brother answers: fish fingers, orange jelly and ice cream.

  What if you were to choose a tool to love? Not a different one every day or every week, but the same tool for your whole life? Father man would be a hammer. My mother would be a rag. I would be a knife. The knife handle, the knife blade, the knife tip is nothing without a hand to hold it. A knife is deaf, of course – it is all tongue but no talk. It is momentum, forward motion; a knife has no brake, it is treachery and misery. A knife is the most sordid of tools. Cut and run, slash and spill. My brother would be string.

  Last month my brother said his tooth hurt. We were watching television together. He is frightened of the dentist and I knew that he had cried. He opened his mouth and I saw his tonsils – two red bells hanging down. He said he’d give me fifty cents to pull the tooth out with the doorknob and a length of cotton. He showed me the coin. It had the same tissue lint on it as in our mother’s purse. My brother sat on his bed. He couldn’t open his mouth very wide. Strings of white saliva stretched between his jaws. The first time I tensioned the cotton with the door closed, so it wasn’t taut enough to pull. The cotton was green when it should have been white. The second time, I opened the door, wrapped the thread tight around the handle, and then, without warning, kicked the door shut. The difference between a grown-up and a child is knowing when the blood will come. An adult would have tied a bib around the boy’s neck, or made him put on old clothes. When it comes mixed with warm saliva, blood is a bubbly, hopeful pink.

  That same night, while I listened to my brother snivelling through the wall, a truck ditched into the arrester bed. We didn’t hear it happen. I don’t know what sort of noise it made, or if the sound would have been loud enough to carry up the hill to the house. The ditching was reported on the news. A wet road. An empty road train returning from the eastern states lost its brakes on the descent. It was picking up speed – a missile waiting to slam its hardness into an oncoming car, or a highway-side cottage, or a lady with a pramload of babies, or a man out walking a sweet old dog – but the experienced truck driver took the centre of the road and steered and coaxed the runaway wheels around each curve and bend, waiting for the arrester bed he knew was up ahead. It was a good-news story. The next day there was footage of a crane mounted on the back of another truck pulling the road train out of the gravel, and the gravel dripping out of the engine and the cabin like orange hail. There was footage of the sign: Truck Arrester Bed Ahead. The reporter said the truck driver didn’t even have time to wind up the window. The driver wasn’t shown. Perhaps he was in hospital? Perhaps the gravel flooded the cab and pushe
d all around him and into his ears and his nostrils and the sockets of his eyes? I would like to know from him how the rush of the descent felt – did the heavy cab and engine drag the trailers hitched behind, or did the trailers bunch up and push the cabin on?

  A dead magpie on the road salutes me with its wing, an armpit of blood and broken feathers. Sometimes, when it’s fresh, the magpie family will be gathered in the other lane, paying their last attendance.

  I don’t know where the birds go at night. Are they safe in the dark? Father man locks the doors. I watch the first star of the night out of the window for a long time. Eventually the world turns and the star is gone. I haven’t cleaned my teeth. For some reason I lied about that, not that there’s ever been kissing. Thirteen days ahead.

  I dream of a car that flies. The sky car hovers free of the road. All of its parts are flying in unison. There are no highways up here; the sky car pierces a cloud. The cloud’s stuffing explodes into the atmosphere. Infinite speed is possible. My sky car has television and a hair dryer and a biscuit tin. There is a first-aid kit mounted on the door strut next to the seatbelt but when you open it, it makes milkshakes. There is no need to sit and watch the road.

  I don’t know where the power comes from. There is no petrol tank – perhaps the power comes from me?

  In this town pink and grey galahs peck at the watered grass around the municipal pool and squat old ladies in white bowls dresses walk up the street together. There’s a pub and a cafe and a bank and a Chinese restaurant with a red and gold sign. Some of the bowls ladies have blue hair, some have lilac hair, but most have white hair. It must be nice to stand on the green carpet grass but I wouldn’t want to wear the pantyhose or put my hands around the cold black ball. Some of these ladies might be sisters. Even when they are old, sisters can be next to each other. It doesn’t seem like a sad life.

  There are times that we have to stop so my brother can play with his ball. Except the further in we get the less he wants to play with it. On the other side of Hay my brother kicks his ball over a fence and into a paddock. We drive away and leave it there.

  Just the road and the car slowing down even though there isn’t a corner or an intersection ahead. We have driven through the screen of the day into the place that a crash has made. Why here? The road is straight, no hazards, but there’s a bridge nearby – perhaps it is implicated?

  Mother says, ‘don’t look.’ She says, ‘look away,’ but father man slows so we are crawling, ambling past, and what to do but feast on it? We never see inside the body; we never see the foundations from which we are made. But here is a red car that has torn into a green car. They are resting now, but all around them is the force of the tear. The red car is puckered through its middle, seats slumped forwards, the steering wheel jutting rudely on its black stem. The road displays its takings: an ashtray shaken free, still rocking on its hinges, a yellow plastic bag, a red biro, strips of black vinyl, sunglasses, a rubber floor mat, some wrapping paper, tissues, an empty packet of Twisties, a can of ginger beer, unidentifiable small pieces of plastic that might be part of the same item.

  The car’s body is misshapen, hard to look at, but the broken glass on the road glitters and entertains. Why are some colours more violent than others? The fleck, the shatter, the spray of jagged glass. Then back to the red car again, its gills, guts, tendons, the tufts of cushion fat ripped free. Petrol dripping from the red car’s flanks, petrol gleaming in wavy pinks and greens, slipping across the road. Moving past it now, a stretch of empty road, a little glass underneath our tyres sounding like biscuits being crumbled, several onlookers standing, onlooking, then we are approaching the green car, which is tilted, playfully, on its roof. The glass cabin of the green car is intact against the road like a multi-sided aquarium. All of this is aftermath. There’s no hint of where the cars were – in which direction they were travelling. Was the first touch the only impact? Did they skid together and then apart? Did they travel the road in chaos together, torn panel to torn panel? The green car has a list of pleated wounds cut into its bonnet. Does the road cut, at speed?

  My mother moans at the back of her throat because the door of the green car is hanging loose from its shoulder, and the inner side of it, across the window and down to where the handle of the window winder is, is sprayed with smeary orange blood. Because the door of the car is upside down the blood seems to be dripping upwards, as if it is seeking release in the sky. How stupid for the wheels to be free from the road. Four small black circles, like licorice allsorts, decorating the air.

  I forgot to say about the people. A grey blanket covers a body on the hard shoulder. It would have been nicer to move it off the road. A woman with messy hair and her head in her hands sits in the front seat of a van that has stopped. It isn’t her van because she sits as if she’s on a seat in someone’s kitchen, or at a barbecue, not in a vehicle. I think I see blood, in between where her hands are caged to her head, but it could be lipstick. There’s movement in the deep ditch along the far side of the road, behind the red car. I can see the tops of two heads: a bald head, a sandy-haired head. The faces of the heads are tilted downwards so they must be looking at somebody who is dead or resting, down in the ditch there.

  ‘T-boned,’ father man says.

  We could stop. Other people have stopped. A woman with very white legs is holding a first-aid kit in a plastic lunch box in her hand. People stop to be helpful. An ambulance could be on its way and a tow truck to clear the road. The police keep a broom in the back of their car for sweeping accident debris. We don’t stop.

  Father man takes his position again in the left-hand lane. He checks his mirrors, accelerates, moves up through the gears. Back on the road.

  When you are a pedestrian you should always walk along the side of the road closest to the oncoming cars so they can see your eyes before they hit you. When your back is turned they will see your soft hair covering the soft part at the back of your soft head. Later they will see where the soft part of your soft head hits the bonnet. The bonnet will be dented like a warm pillow in the morning and your head will be resting on the road then. There won’t be a stain or a mark. Blood and tar are much the same.

  Here is a dog trotting down the highway with a green plastic bag of shopping in its mouth. There is something inside the bag, but I can’t see what it is.

  When I walked up Struttle Road hill to tell the lady with the pink glasses that her Mazda was ready a white dog slunk around a gate with its lips pulled back. I didn’t see it until we were nearly touching. It slouched out of the way with its big head low and heavy. My heart bunched up and clutched itself. The suddenness. A big white dog, right there in front of me. It might have been chance that the dog came through the gate just then. Maybe it hadn’t even seen me. The dog turned and walked along the side of Struttle Road where I had just been walking. It was a dirty white dog. It wasn’t a dog that people touch or that has a bowl and a collar. It was a dog with a chain hanging off it, a dog that will get a lump on its belly, that eats in the dirt and keeps its head down and shits behind a tree and tries not to be noticed, because while it knows it is a dog with its dog’s body and dog’s ways, it knows it is the wrong kind of dog. The dog didn’t see me because it was seeing itself.

  When a mother needs to go to the toilet a place has to be found with trees and bushes and everyone has to stay in the car and pretend it isn’t happening. The mother walks in a long way through the bushes, placing her feet carefully between the clumps of grass in case of snakes. It takes a long time. Once, when my mother barely had her legs back in the car, father man drove off because he could see a caravan coming up behind.

  There are birds that only fly the road. Plain, working birds that have their own stretch. Up and down the road they fly, through the trail of bitumen haze. Sometimes they do time with us, coasting in our slipstream. You have to be thankful for how they give the road a purpose, make the road a place. A circling hawk is never pitiful and the flock birds that cruise across th
e horizon are always going somewhere new.

  A torn lizard, then some pieces of a rabbit. At a death and near a death there will be tyre stains, bloodstains and little lumps of ripped flesh furred on the top side only.

  A sunburnt man on a bicycle wearing a singlet and white gardening gloves. If you put a glove on your hand it can be a comfort. It can be like having your hand held by another hand. Or at least I imagine so. Sometimes, when father man is out, I put my hand in the workshop vice. Just testing. I wind both plates so they are snug, then wind again until they crush and leave it for a count of fifty. One elephant, two elephants, fifty elephants. Fifty hippopotamuses would take longer but that word is chock-a-block with fun.

  A yellow school bus sign smattered with black bullet holes. They must be doing a new topic at school by now. I’ve missed the old topic too. Every day I wake up and my heart pumps and my lungs breathe and my blood goes around. Knowing about the first settlers and the wool industry doesn’t change anything, or the Jabberwocky, which they say is good, but it would be bad if we did it.

  At speed, the road has a strong, hard wind. To be out of it, at the roadside stop, where the wind is soft and round, is unsettling. Because I am wearing shorts the wind feels like a hand reaching between my legs. Father man’s hands are only for the road here, and I’m fine with that.

  The mirror is too high on the wall at the roadhouse toilets. Open mouth. Shut mouth. A face. A cave. Check that the tongue is still padlocked inside the mouth. Good to take a minute off the road, though. If you keep on driving in other countries you get somewhere. You get to a new country. Perhaps you get to the sea? If you keep on driving in this country you can lay your whole life down on the road.