Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  These are the different types of sabotage:

  An act of sabotage through the loosening of essential connections.

  An act of sabotage in which false connections are made.

  An act of sabotage by cutting.

  An act of sabotage through removal.

  Removal followed with burial.

  An act of electrical sabotage.

  Electrical damage is quick and clinical. Perhaps it is female? Tracks can easily be covered with a fire in the circuitry. Scorched electrics have the pleasant smell of burnt toast. It’s a family-friendly smell with overtones of the kitchen and winter mornings and everyone snug indoors.

  An act of sabotage through drainage.

  This is best when the oil is clean. When the oil is fresh and new it will run fast like golden syrup and be soaked up by the gravel overnight, leaving very little trace.

  An act of sabotage involving swallowing.

  Some of the screws for Japanese appliances – a transistor radio, for example – are so small they are easier than peanuts to pass down the throat. The Japanese screws can’t be replaced so the lid of the transistor radio’s battery compartment will always be loose then, causing poor connection and interruption at important times, like during the cricket.

  An act of sabotage where you go for the heart of the car.

  An act of sabotage where you pick at the edges.

  There are many ways for a machine to come undone. Also, avoid using the hacksaw; its teeth are hell to clean.

  The manual for the Holden is under my bed again. In Exploded View of Front Wheel Hub and Drum Assembly there is the large dark circle of the hub. Transiting behind it are the grease-retaining inner seal, the inner bearing and the tiny hub bolt. Transiting in front of it are the bearing cover, the castellated nut, the sub axle washer, the outer bearing, the wheel hub nut and the very, very tiny drum attaching bolt. The creamy paper around each part is the galaxy of the hub and drum assembly. This could be the whole world – yes? All of the circular parts orbiting around one another and never touching or getting hurt and always being happy?

  The next night it’s just me in my bed, but after a while I get up anyway. I rip one of the index pages from the manual and fold it over and over like we learnt at school, making a simple fan. I climb out of my window and skip across the grass. I feed the paper fan through the radiator cap of father man’s Holden. The manual for the engine and the actual engine can be together now, with nobody getting in between.

  A car is always better than the bus. Where am I going today? Nowhere that matters. The bus finally comes in its coat of white exhaust fumes and shrieks its painful shriek as it gears down to stop for me. The driver moves his neck but no parts of his face as he takes my coins. He has a red am/fm transistor radio between his thighs. The old people put their eyes on me as I walk down the aisle, then put them back on the windows. Nobody beautiful has ever caught a bus. The seat has a stain but it is never in the exact place it would be if the stain had come out of you. The road churns past beneath us.

  Sharon gets on the bus further down the hill. She comes and sits next to me. I have a shell for her that I found on the beach. It’s in the bottom of my bag and I think about giving it to her. Sharon tells me about her tyre boy again. I don’t say about my time with the tyre boy at the Best Western motel because it was only made up. It only happened in my mind.

  Looking out of the window of the bus I can see pieces of a car accident left behind on the side of the road, but without the cars. It’s like a paddock where the animals are gone but strings of wool and shit remain, marking the places where they stood in the grass. Pieces of a car accident on the road can look like the stuff that’s been emptied out of a handbag or a purse. It isn’t money; it isn’t anything useful at all. It’s yours though, so you carry it around with you anyway.

  The bus slows down as we go past the arrester bed. The bus slows again, then stops, groaning on the hill, because a tow truck is dragging a semitrailer out of the arrester bed in front of us. Even Sharon stands up to look. The semitrailer has white tarpaulins roped down over its load. It doesn’t look happy at being dragged out of the cage of gravel. The orange gravel is pouring, sleeting off it, as it comes unstuck. The tow truck tugs and finally the semi breaks free, a shower of gravel pinging off the cab like hailstones. A soft orange cloud balloons into the air above the truck as if it has done a colourful burp. The bus gets going then, picks up speed and continues down the hill. I go back to my seat. Sharon has gotten out some Minties but she doesn’t offer them.

  Sharon is bad at stealing, but my hands were made for taking. My mouth was made for lies. The thing is only stolen when you bring it across that first time. As soon as it’s in your pocket, or even in your bag, it’s yours.

  I steal a penknife for me, and one for Sharon, from the camping store. Sharon is going to give it to the tyre boy at the automotive because they’ve been going for a month now. It’s an anniversary present. She won’t say where she got the penknife from and I don’t think he’ll ask. He’ll just take it as his due.

  A Holden panel van comes in. We don’t get many panel vans in up here. The panel van is black but without the painted flames licking the sides that I’ve seen in magazines. They mainly belong to boys that surf. I don’t know why the panel van has been brought to father man’s workshop here, where it’s hot and dry and far away from the sea.

  It’s a full moon the first night the panel van is in. I brush my hair and smear vaseline on my lips. The metal door of the panel van squeals as it comes free. What happens in the factory the first time a new door is opened? Is there a ceremony? Do the factory men stand around and watch? First there was a sheet of metal, then there was a cut, now there is a door. The door is pulled free, leaving the metal around it behind – an offcut, a discard – or perhaps, like pastry, the metal can be mashed up and reshaped to make another door?

  I climb into the panel van and lie down on the chipboard floor. There are no windows, just gilled vents along the sides. It’s the same model as they have on Matlock Police for the paddy wagons. Why are the police so careful to protect the heads of the criminals as they put them in the back of the paddy wagon when everyone knows they kick them and punch them down at the station? I wish there was a mattress in here. You could fit more than two people lying side by side. Human volume: the sack of you, the sack of me. I put my candle stub in the ashtray and light it with the lighter from the pocket of my jeans. The flame dips and sputters then glows golden against the metal. I trace the outline of the Holden lion stamped on the ashtray with my fingers. The lion is sitting proudly on its haunches, the boulder resting beneath its paw. This is where it all began – men watching a lion rolling a stone.

  Here I am, here I am, ready for you, in the panel van. I say a page I have remembered from Seven Little Australians and a little of the Jabberwocky. I have on my Amco jeans and the underpants I stole from the changing room at the pool. There might be traces of the other girl on them, but it’s probably a good thing and I can’t ever put them in the wash. I have on my western shirt with the pearly press-studs so it won’t be hard to get at me when you come. I blow out the candle and lie down on the floor of the panel van. I close my eyes. I say some songs slowly so they sound like prayers. I try to sleep a while.

  I think I was waiting for the tyre boy from the automotive. Only I didn’t tell him that I was waiting for him, and he didn’t know that I was there.

  Let me explain about smiling. You don’t just open your mouth: you pull it back and show your yellow teeth. The lips are pink or red. A smile will be the thing he’ll like best about you.

  Some days there can be touching that doesn’t make a mark: a haircut, an injection, the dentist. You make it happen when you put your skin in the way of someone else. I stab a drawing-pin into my palm so I can ask my mother to dig it out.

  Here is a chance to talk – my mother dabbing at the bottle of Mercurochrome with a tissue from her red handbag. A child learns spee
ch because a mother speaks to it. A mother starts talking to you in the womb. She might even play old-fashioned music that doesn’t have singing. A father won’t speak to something he can’t see. After you are born it will annoy a father to lean down so he can catch the high soft spit language that comes from your small girl’s mouth. For a man, a boy’s voice is in a better register; it’s always easier to hear.

  My mother sticks a bandaid across my palm. The skin is still wet so it won’t stay on for long. ‘Stupid girl,’ she says. ‘Don’t do it again.’

  Perhaps I should go back to sounds? S is for snake. R is for rip. It’s one thing to make the sounds that form a word – not much effort at all, it barely takes thought. But the weight of the word on the person receiving it, the struggle with it, forever pulling a braked truck uphill…

  The next morning a flock of parrots shriek in the pine trees outside the workshop. Twentee-eight, twentee-eight. A circus. They are unnatural colours. Their beaks are open, their pink cockled tongues shamelessly on display.

  The fat lady comes over to the fence and calls out. A pigeon is trapped in her toilet. Fifty cents to catch it. I use the green towelling mat with two arms that hugs the toilet bowl. I lay the mat on the air above the bird and let it take them both down to the lino. The fat lady waits outside. I hold the bird and the mat under my arm and count for a few minutes to make it seem longer, like it is worth the money. Dead flies in the plastic light fitting, a matchbox on the cistern, dust on the skirting boards. The bird twitches in my armpit. Outside, when I throw the bundle into the air, the pigeon’s claw is hooked in the towelling of the toilet mat, so this time the bird takes the mat down to the dirt on the fat lady’s driveway before it struggles back into the air.

  My brother’s old Lee jeans have a coin pocket on the hip because men don’t carry handbags or purses. I can feel the fifty cents pressing into me as I bend over and climb back through the fence, even though it isn’t there. The fat lady said the mat was damaged. She said I didn’t earn the fee.

  Some nights I know I have been asleep – time has passed – but I come back without a dream. The bed is still and flat and I like how the pillow presses into my neck and how the inside of one leg fits snugly against the other. I don’t understand where I’ve been – somewhere like death? It would be good to go there now.

  I think I could live in the fat lady’s laundry. I wouldn’t need to throw anything out, just move a few things around to make space for a bed. I don’t need a cupboard. Pyjamas under the pillow, clothes in a cardboard box. I can be out walking or up at the tip in the daytime – I’d only need to come in at night. The louvres are no barrier; it’s easy to slide the glass from their metal trays. But what if the fat lady found me still asleep in the morning? Would she touch my hair or would she scream?

  Father man has been oiling the rocker cover nuts and studs on the fat lady’s Mini. The nuts are laid out like silver jubes on the workshop bench. I put three of them in my pocket and take them for a night-walk to the tip. The white wires of the fences are tight where they are threaded through the posts then slack between them. Where do the birds go; where does the sun go? How can it be so warm still if the sun is no longer in the sky? Is the night a black felt blanket and every piece of the day still intact, just hidden behind it? The bitumen feels springy beneath my sandals, as if I’m walking on the top of a crusty loaf, or maybe I’m walking along the draped edge of the blanket. Is it just dark for us – for our family – and light for everyone else in the world?

  Up Davidsons Road. The tip smells of sick that’s cooled after being out in the sun. There are houses on one side of the road and bush on the other. No lights inside the houses. The windscreens of the cars parked in the driveways are the grey of television when it has been switched off. The cars wait outside the houses like chained dogs. When someone gets behind the wheel, the glass of the windscreen will clear again and the cars will give themselves over to being driven. Sometimes there is a rustle in the holly banksia. A goanna maybe? Nothing with fur could live here.

  Hexagonal. The nuts are warm in my hand. I’m going home now. One at a time I flick the nuts into the bush.

  Why am I myself? Should I be sorry about it?

  My brother has a swollen ear because a boy at the bus stop hit him. Our mother says, ‘there’s never a dull moment,’ but she knows it isn’t true.

  Later, here is my brother in the kitchen with his hand inside our mother’s handbag. It doesn’t look comfortable. He’s trying to get her purse out without fully undoing the top zip. He has to stand close to the edge of the table and paddle his hand in from above. It’s safe because our mother is having a headache. Nobody ever has to tell us to be quiet.

  Darren’s been again. The Valiant has thick tyres that leave ugly marks in the gravel. A tyre can’t make choices. Rolling isn’t freedom when there’s a chassis attached. The rear tyres punch and deepen the pattern made by the tyres in front. A blind person could read the tracks with their fingertips. If the blind person could speak they would say the tracks meant danger.

  When you take a car out at night all of the owner’s belongings go along with you – money, lipstick, food, tissues, pills, letters, cutlery, tools, maps, condoms, reading glasses on a chain, stickers for beer and teams and God. Sometimes a sweat stain on the back of the headrest. I don’t like to night-drive a car that has a baby seat. I don’t like to drive a car with toys.

  It feels good to sit inside the fat lady’s Mini in the dark. A protected feeling. When you’re a child they say, look how you’ve grown, but only while you are going upwards. As soon as you start going outwards nobody says anything. Their eyes get caught on the new flesh of you and then they look away. Any engine can be stripped down and reassembled if you know how. When a human body is taken apart there’s no way it can ever be put back together again.

  No parcel on the parcel shelf for me tonight, nothing in the glove box. I’ve never had gloves. Wickedness on television is a German with black leather hands.

  As I drive away from the fat lady’s house I apologise to the road beneath. It is insulting to drive so fast, so casually, over a road that knows the heat and weight of your feet on its back. It’s not the same on distant, unfamiliar roads. Someone else walks those roads. They are not mine to care about.

  Take off the handbrake at the highway, release the shuddery clutch. How pleasant to be out on a night like this. No headlights flattening out the road. Just the warm green light of the ignition switch and the glow from the rear-vision mirror as a truck comes up, as a truck gains on the Mini from behind. I write a letter to my brother in my mind – an explanation, just in case. But the little car is determined. We make it home again, despite the missing parts.

  My mother is having a tidy-up. This is what mothers do. They clean up the past so there’s neatness and cleanness, so there’s space for the future. My mother is throwing away a box of our childhood things, things from the time before. My brother drew cars when he was small. He drew rectangles balancing on puffy doughnut wheels. No hint of an engine. Always a spoked yellow sun in the sky. Off the paper, the hardness of the armature is so unexpected. How metal clenches. How the panels want to grip each other so a bonnet must be wrenched open, a door yanked from its hinges.

  In my childhood drawing four horses are frolicking in a field. There’s a black stallion with a curved neck and red nostrils and a golden palomino with a ribbon in her mane. A lean grey colt jumps a fallen tree, and a small brown pony has her head down in a tumble of hay. I have given up on colouring in the pony, or perhaps I ran out of brown before she was finished.

  The fat lady’s cat, our old cat, has kittens. My mother says it isn’t possible because Babette was fixed but the fat lady says it can still happen. The fat lady gives my mother the kittens in a tea towel. The ones that are still alive don’t look like kittens; they look like sausage rolls that have been sat on. Father man puts the kittens in a plastic shopping bag and drowns them in a bucket. He should have put a rock or a
brick in with them, because the bag still has air in it and the kittens thrash around and scratch him with their tiny claws as he pushes the different bits of the bag under the water with his hands.

  Funny to think of the bag of kittens buried close to the car parts. I don’t have to worry about what father man might dig up, because he gives me the wet plastic bag heavy with the sodden bodies of the kittens, and the shovel, and tells me to do the deed.

  When I come back to the house to wash my hands afterwards father man is cracking the tab on his green can. Is there a latch in his throat that he unfastens to pour the yellow beer down? Not easy to imagine that his mouth was ever full of milk.

  In Photograph Showing Removal of Front Disc Brake Pads both of my man’s hands are held together, nearly touching at the fingertips, as they gently grip the shim. The manual shows that sometimes a delicate touch is needed to manipulate small parts. There’s no physical reason why hands that work an engine can’t do soft tasks – plaiting a girl’s hair, icing a sponge cake, patting a baby’s back to make it burp. Engine hands must be strong, but they don’t have to be cruel. Cruelty happens outside of the manual. A large person never hurts a larger person. A large person will hurt a smaller person, or an animal, because it is permitted for them to do so.

  The best thing, now, would be for the pop truck to come up the driveway. They know your order because you phone it in ahead each month. It doesn’t stop you putting in a special order, if it’s someone’s birthday, for instance. The pop truck is a rigid-body flatbed. The crates sit next to each other on the tray with a rope around them as if the glass bottles aren’t delicate at all. The pop colours are right, but not the taste. It doesn’t stay in your mouth like the real thing and it doesn’t get cold enough. If, say, you had a friend over after school and you poured it into a glass with some ice while they weren’t looking, you could get away with the orange pop but not the cola. Coke is too special.