Exploded View

by Carrie Tiffany

  The driver of the truck doesn’t wear a uniform but the door of the truck is painted red and the word Pop is written on it at an angle with bubbles coming off like you’ve just twisted the cap. Driving the pop truck would be a good job for a father to do.

  At school I learnt that humans are descended from fish. There’s nothing to say that evolution has stopped. Because of cars our legs might shrink and we could go back to being fish again. At school I learnt about sets. A set is a collection. First you identify a common property among things and then you gather up all the things that share this common property. In a collection of men not all of them are fathers. A set of fathers has the one thing in common, but it might not be obvious. (In a set of bachelors some of them could be secret fathers.) Once you’ve identified a set of fathers there are still many different types. The awkward father is best. There’s the pitiful father, the angry father, the father that has been cut loose. There’s the forgetful father, or the father that was so fine and so handsome and so happy that when the time before is over he can’t go on, and he disappears.

  Fathers can be made to do things. Most of the time it’s driving from one place to another, but you can also make him lift things and go and get things. He will not be happy about it – he’d rather be with men – but he will do it anyway. When you are old enough a father will hire a suit and hold his arm out so you can grip on to it and you don’t trip over in your big dress. Even if he never had you, a father will get to give you away.

  There is less risk underneath the bed than on top of it. Dead flies under here, and tissues that have gone hard. I find the consolation prize certificate for grade five penmanship under my bed. The cardboard is creased now. A consolation prize is for comfort after a loss. The certificate says, Have Pen – Can Write. But where would I begin? What would I start to say?

  My birthday. Here we are still breathing. Air particles are tiny. It must be some of the same air going into us all. We sit in a line at the table to eat. We sit in a line in front of the television to watch. The toilet is private but you know when someone has been there before you. A car leaves; a car comes back. Breakages are common under the blue sky. Only some of the broken things are ever fixed. The cicadas stitch their song into the day.

  This day, during which we continue to breathe, is not a still life. A day is not a cloud study. It is not music (even good music you can nutbush to). It is not a limerick. A day is not three kisses scratched inside a birthday card. There is no card; there is no cake. There was once a vase on the table. It was from the time before. A fluted glass vase with bubbles caught inside. It never held flowers and then it broke. A day is just time. Sometimes, but rarely so, a bird will sing. There is nothing that this day can give you. It has nothing. The day doesn’t know you were born on it years ago and it couldn’t say happy birthday even if it did.

  I am not that much in my bedroom on my birthday. I am in the kitchen, then I’m in the hallway. Later I’m in the workshop. Here is the engine cradle – you don’t have to touch it – just to be near. Here is the test battery on its trolley. I am full of acid today. I am the snake in the woodpile that curls back on itself, poison dripping from its fangs.

  Father man is out on the highway fixing a repair that has broken down again. I wonder if he will have to return the money and what excuses he’ll make. I sit on the stool in front of the workbench and put Sharon’s shell from the beach to my ear. There’s no noise, but perhaps I need to give it time? The sea might be inside the shell, just trapped and having trouble getting its sound out.

  At the end of our trip in the blue car we spent three days in the stranger’s beds, on the stranger’s toilet, on the stranger’s chairs, before we drove home again. The shop near the stranger’s house made sandwiches for our lunch at the beach. We had roast meat sandwiches with tomato sauce on white bread with margarine and salt and pepper. The girl put on plastic gloves to make the sandwiches. She had an electric carving knife that roared and worried at the roast meat until it fell into slices. Big animals eat smaller animals without any of the wrapping, or the extras. When a fox catches a rabbit does it eat the tastiest bits first or leave them for the last bite?

  We took the meat sandwiches to the beach. It was hard with the flies, and with the tide out so far we were sitting at the edge of a giant puddle. My mother brought her handbag and the specials catalogue from Woolworths. It turns out the specials are the same all over Australia. Father man stayed at the stranger’s house because the cricket had to be listened to. There were other people on the beach with eskies and large coloured towels and music and balls and umbrellas. My mother put the Woolworths catalogue over her head to block out the sun and we lay on the hot sand. My brother said we were too old to make a sandcastle and he didn’t want to bury me.

  We didn’t know what to do at the beach. We weren’t qualified. There was no surf to jump in. There were no large shells to pick up and take home so you could hear it forever, just the small shell I put in my pocket for Sharon. The actual sea was silent. I’d heard it before on television, though. Hot Lips on Mash has a dream that she’s walking along a beach with Major Frank Burns. Hot Lips is wearing a bikini and the wind from the sea is frothing her white hair all around her head. The dry sound of romantic music was mixed up with the wet sound of the waves, so it wasn’t easy even then to unpick the sound of the sea and hear it just on its own.

  I put Sharon’s shell on the workbench and tap it, gently. Not much force is needed when using father man’s hammer.

  The next day there’s a moth trapped in my room. The moth flies against the window. Sometimes it lands on the curtains for a rest. Wings open, wings closed, wings a-tremble. My mother is at work. My brother is at cricket. There isn’t much time in between the beat of a moth’s wings, but this afternoon it is enough.

  Afterwards there’s the rag that has fallen from father man’s pocket. I hide it in my schoolbag. Perhaps I could wrap it up later and give it as a gift – a filthy scarf for my mother?

  The Valiant is out. Darren’s spare door key hangs from a string in his meter box. His house has green carpet covered with plastic mats in the hallways and on all the major routes. Every house has its own bad smell. Darren’s collection of matches is on the bookcase next to the television. Matchbooks and matchboxes. There are old ones from history and ones from other countries. On top of the television is a glass jar full of thin matchbooks from pubs. Barmaids put the matchbooks in the ashtrays and anyone can take them, so Darren wasn’t stealing. Darren has a giant matchstick with a blue tip mounted on hooks above the television. The giant match says Disneyland USA in gold lettering on the pale wood of the stick; its red head is rough and spackled. Not easy to strike such a heavy match. I scrape it over the concrete trough in the laundry. I scrape it again and again.

  ‘God bless Mickey Mouse,’ I say, as the match hisses into flame. I march backwards and forwards on Darren’s green carpet, holding big Disney in front of me as she burns.

  There’s a letter in the letterbox from school that says I’ve missed more than the acceptable number of days. My attendance is irregular and the school must be informed of any illness. I put the letter in the fat lady’s letterbox. First I scratch out my name. Then I write in hers.

  Nobody is concerned about the television that we missed when we were away. Some of the shows seem to have a story but it turns out you can take a break from them and there’s nothing you don’t know. I like how females look on television. They decorate their hair with a scarf or a ribbon and their ears with a jewel or a bead pushed through a hole in the earlobe. There are charm bracelets with dangling love hearts and puppy dogs and telephones for the girls with good skin that don’t have any trouble with time. One minute the girls are cute six; next they are sweet sixteen. The girls and the women know to let the laughing go up and down and then fade out before they speak, and they know always to wait for the men and the boys to get their speaking done first.

  She should be cautious, but a girl should no
t be silent. She should have a voice that tinkles like a bell. Words are made in the head and sent down to the throat for speaking. It happens instantly. Except when a part is broken and the words go around and around inside instead. If they ever found their way out who knows what mess they would make?

  The lady on the back seat of the bus pulls the cord for the next stop. The bus corners. An inner wheel rotates on a smaller radius than the outer wheel when the vehicle describes a curve. The lady’s bra strap slides over the meat of her shoulder and tap, tap, taps against her elbow. Low gear for the slow descent. Warning signs for the truck arrester bed. A telephone in a blue box to call for the crane. The lady with the fallen bra strap has dropped her bus ticket. She’s making her way to the front door. Maybe she won’t need it, but I lean down and pick the ticket up off the floor near the wheel arch.

  ‘Here,’ I call out to her. ‘You dropped this.’

  Sixty days, then, without words. To speak you have to learn not to listen to yourself. You have to trust what might come out of you into the plain day air.

  Shaft. Sphere. Yoke. Spring. Rod. Engine speech is clean.

  The workshop holds the brown night in the way a pool holds water. The darkness weakens at the walls where the jam jars and tobacco tins and rags wait on the metal shelves.

  The shadow board glows above the workbench, each tool held snug inside its painted outline. A tool doesn’t like to be the only tool taken. Don’t stint. Take all the tools you’ll need for the job at hand. A mirror hangs from a nail above the bench. A small mirror is useful in the workshop for checking oil leaks, for seeing the underside of a part. Substance and reflection. Surprising how much light the mirror soaks up from the darkness. A shock to see what has become of my face as it goes about its crime.

  When you go out at night to hurt the fat lady’s Mini you have to take a lot for granted. You have to believe that the black night air can be breathed like the clear day air. You have to trust the ground will take your weight even though you can’t see your feet as they press down upon it. You don’t have to worry about the darkness. The stars always make enough light to identify the parts to be hurt. It’s never too much. Once a bonnet is open the stars draw closer. The shiny engine beams up at the stars; the shiny stars beam down at the engine. Perhaps it is beautiful that my hands can bring them together?

  Time to take the Mini out on the highway now. The fat lady has cut two patterned Axminster carpet squares from the rug in her dining room as car mats so it’s like driving a room of her house, which is a comfort for me. I park the Mini near the arrester bed and sit and watch for a while just in case it’s the night for a brake failure, and for one of the big trucks to ditch.

  I would like to see the face of the man in the cab as he ditches. I’d like to see his attitude as he steers and stamps and steers and stamps on the slack brake. I would like to see the weight of the trailers catching up behind him, coming down around his shoulders like an avalanche that he’s so busy running from he can’t see it coming.

  On the way back the Mini stalls on the incline of the driveway. I have to do a hill start close to the side of the house where my mother and father man are sleeping in their bed. No matter about the noise. I am invisible tonight.

  An engine can tolerate a small amount of disturbance – sand, for instance – but gradually, over time, the effect of the disturbance increases. A handful of sand – a female-sized handful – might be within working limits, but after that just one more grain is enough to tip the operation into seizure.

  My mother puts the radio on every evening when she’s getting ready for bed. If you listen to the top ten you could think that someone’s coming to get you. If you stay still, if you stay in one place, and play the same song over and over, sooner or later a boy will come with a guitar and pointed fingernails and the plastic lozenge he uses to pluck the strings. The music will be all around you and he’ll look at your hair as he sings.

  Nobody is coming to get me, which is good because I wouldn’t have the right jeans if they did.

  I heard father man sing a song once. We were on our trip. We were having lunch at a roadhouse on the plains. The sausage rolls were hard to swallow, too much dry material banking up in the mouth. There was an old white cocky in a cage on top of the gas bottles outside. ‘Dance-cocky-dance,’ father man sang at it. Then he took my mother’s hand and said, ‘put your finger in there.’

  More rain today. The rain touches gently. It isn’t vicious. It wets everyone just the same. I like to walk in the rain. Down Struttle Road hill, just past the bus stop, just under the street lamp, the smell of burning rubber is sweet on the wet air. The fat lady’s green Mini is crumpled in the roadside ditch. The driver’s door is open. I don’t go to it, because not far ahead a swollen tree has fallen across the road. Not all of it is across the road; its legs and the hem of its dress are on the gravel in between the road and the bush. The road is taut but the fat lady is slack upon it, the pieces of her heaped up like rubbish. I lean over and look at the wet strings of her yellow hair where they are fixed to her pink head. I look at the water in the bowl of her ear and down the front of her dress where one white tit is pleated up against the other. Her fat eyes are closed and airy bubbles are foaming from her mouth.

  The fat lady likes to ride the clutch. I always knew when she’d gone out driving from the papery smell of the clutch face burning, like someone trying to light a whole wet newspaper at once. Her Mini has a two brush, two pole, shunt wound generator unit controlled by a generator regulator. It was easy enough for two small hands to slacken the pivot bolts and brace nut and push the generator towards the engine. I prised the fuse cover off the fuse board too. All the tiny circuits like a field of flowers, like the weeds on the fat lady’s dress.

  I like the sound my raincoat makes as I walk around the fat lady on the road. Nobody else can hear the plastic as it rustles, but it sounds loud and good to me. I think the fat lady has been here since before it started raining because the road underneath her is pale and dry. I think she staggered from the crashed car and then she fell. There are old tissues in my pocket that I use for the blood. The lady that sells duck eggs further up the hill makes the phone calls and I don’t have to wait because I am a girl and I need to be getting home. People seem to think it isn’t safe for a girl to be out in the rain.

  The next evening my mother went to her dancing class and my brother was watching television. The window above the television and the window in my bedroom are on the same side of the house. They look out to the same place.

  It didn’t take long. Not much longer than an ad break.

  My brother wouldn’t have seen this because he can’t look away from the television screen, but when I turned my head to the side and looked out of the window the hopping bird was back again. Its withered claw a tangle of roots sprouting from its scruffy body. The hopping bird jerked across the verandah, throwing itself forwards, leading with its beak. There are steps but the hopping bird didn’t take the smooth surface; instead it tilted into the garden bed and hopped and fell and hopped and fell across the dirt and stones.

  Father man shuddered and then he winced. On the other side of the wall the ads for toys were over and it was back to the show.

  Once a crime is made on you there’s a stickiness, as if the crime is bait to draw other crimes near. When you think about what happened to you it can be confusing because other crimes are there, or around about, in the same place. Some of the crimes are part of your story; others are part of the stories of other people that you might be taking as your own.

  The only way to tell what really belongs to a person would be if a film was made of your life – if a camera hung over you every minute of every day and every night. If you had this film you could press the button to make it play backwards and there you would be: un-putting your clothes on, un-brushing your hair, getting down from bed, waiting to be un-touched.

  If everyone had their personal film, who would own the parts of the film where
a family comes together? When families are assembled for talking, eating, watching television; when families are driving in cars and sitting on buses and passing each other on the street; and then, later, coming together in fear and in despair?

  That night, I pack a bag and run away to the tip. I’m not really living anywhere. There’s nowhere to sleep, mainly I’m walking but because I come back in the morning to feed the baby skinks nobody knows that I was gone.

  The next evening, as soon as it gets dark, I walk back up Davidsons Road towards the tip again. I don’t know if I’ll stay over. It’s been a hot day, again. Cicadas are drumming in their family band. The warm road bakes the bottom of my sandals. It might be time for a kangaroo. The chugging is Darren’s white Valiant coming up behind me. It’s a V8. Valiant means manful; it means brave. Smooth through the synchromesh into second, a squeeze of brake. The engine rumbles; the muffler grunts. It’s hard for a car to keep time with a girl walking when the car is hot and petrol-rich. Perhaps Darren is wearing his shire raincoat? He wouldn’t have known I’d be out walking now, but here I am. He has his high beams on. The headlights paint my hair, my shoulders, my bum, the backs of my legs. I swerve a little towards the bush. One sandal slaps the gravel in front of the other. The looseness of the sandals around my feet will slow me down when I need to run.

  The Valiant keeps an even distance, then Darren cuts the headlights and the road rears up blackly in front of me. Can he see me? When is the right time to run? The air is going in and then going out of me hot and jerky. The air is catching on something where my throat is narrow – perhaps it is a word?

  But listen, another engine is approaching, another car is coming up behind the Valiant. Darren is blocking the road now; there could be an accident. He has no choice but to flip his lights back on and accelerate ahead. The weight and the wind of the long white car as it passes, the feel of it across my cheek. He drives away; he cuts me free.