Swallow the Air

by Tara June Winch

  The women started laughing. They knew what the punch line was going to be, nothing that they could afford, ever. Their laughter cascaded over the balcony rails as they followed each other back into the shade of their rooms.

  ‘Steady on there, Alice, you got a little one to feed there too!’ they said, seeing Mum entranced, watching his mouth move and the sun bouncing off the pans.

  He told her the price, something ridiculous, and Mum didn’t even flinch. She lit up another fag, puffed away. I think he was surprised, maybe relieved she didn’t throw him out. He rounded up his speech and Mum just sat there as he packed up the saucepans.

  ‘You not gunna let me buy em then?’ Mum said, blowing smoke over our heads.

  ‘Would you like to, Miss?’

  ‘Of course I bloody do, wouldna sat here waiting for you to finish if I didn’t!’

  Mum told him then that she couldn’t afford it, but she wanted them. So they made a deal. Samuel, the travelling salesman, would come by once a month, when money would come from the family, and take a payment each time.

  Mum worked extra hours from then on, sometimes taking home the ironing, hoping to get a little more from the lady of the house. And she did, just enough. And Samuel would come round and chat with Mum and the other ladies and bring sweets for me. He and Mum would be chatting and drinking tea in the lounge until it got dark outside. They were friends after all that time.

  Three years and seven months it took her. When Samuel came round on his last visit, with a box under his arm, just like the first time, Mum smiled big. He came into the flat and placed the box on the kitchen bench.

  ‘Open it,’ he said to Mum, and smiled down at me and winked.

  Mum pressed her hands down the sides of her uniform then folded open the flaps and lifted out each saucepan, weighing it in her hands, squinting over at Samuel, puzzled. With each lid she pulled off, her tears gathered and fell.

  ‘What is it, what is it?’ I was saying as I pulled a chair up against the bench and could see then in one pan was a big leg of meat, under another lid potatoes and carrots, a shiny chopping knife, then a bunch of eggs, then bread. And in the Dutch oven, a wonky looking steamed pudding. Mum was crying too much to laugh at the cake.

  ‘I haven’t got a hand for baking yet. Hope you don’t mind I tested it out.’

  Mum just shook her head; she couldn’t say a word and Samuel understood. He put on his smart hat, tilting the brim at Mum, and as he left the doorway, he said, ‘Good day to you, Alice. Good day, young lady.’

  And when Mum passed, she gave the pots to me.

  When our mother finished her story she’d be crying too, tiny streams down her cheekbones. I knew she would hock everything we’d ever own, except the only thing that mattered, five sizeranged saucepans, with Dutch oven. Still in their hard case, only a few handles chipped.

  I run my fingertips over fingerprints now, over years, generations. They haven’t changed much; they still smell of friendship. I suppose that to my nanna, Samuel was much like a cloud buster. Letting in the sun, some hope, the rainbow had been their friendship. And I suppose that to Mum, Samuel was someone who she wanted to be around, like a blue sky. For Samuel, my mum and Nanna, I don’t know, maybe the exchange was even, and maybe when those clouds burst open, he got to feel the rain. A cleansing rain, and maybe that was enough.

  My Bleeding Palm

  Billy got a job on the milk run and Aunty got pissed to celebrate. It felt like everything was a celebration then: when I got the year-eight art prize at school, when Aunty had a good day on the pokies, when we had Chinese food. It seemed just about anything called for celebration. With Aunty there, every night was toasted. We were happy when Aunty was happy, laughing and yarning and dancing around the yard. She’d be flat on the grass and still dancing in her head, eyes glazed with an absence, a bliss. I imagined her as an angel, laying out her wings beneath the satellites of the sky. There she soared.

  I could gaze out on that backyard for hours, patterning circles in the grass, like a cat ready to pounce. Sunsets were for staring at across the long sweep of disorder, over rooftops where the day would snigger and slowly hide its semi-circle of tangerine.

  ‘I’m goin out, ya kids be good for ya aunnie, right?’

  ‘Yeah, Aunty,’ Billy called from the fridge door, ‘we be good.’

  From the back steps I watched the loose heel of her stiletto drag along the hall carpet and disappear through the door frame, like an arm that’s been slept on all night, all paralysed at the bend. Aunty was off again to see her boyfriend or whatever she confessed him to be. I followed an invisible line back from where she’d stumbled from the mirrored basin. Where she’d drawn cocksucker red lipstick over her black lips in worship of her prince.

  Aunty got a boyfriend. Skin just like mine. I’d hear Aunty cry all the time. Fists of black hair. Cheek to the stove. Don’t know when my real Aunty is gunna come home.

  ‘I’m goin for a walk, Billy, back soon.’

  ‘Yeah, watcha back for the boogie man!’

  Billy grunted in his thin belly before filling it with a bong. I slipped through the broken palings that the council were supposed to fix years ago, a splinter hiding its shard between my forefinger and thumb. Behind me I could hear Billy pop the cone and cough on his heartache, lunging back unlove.

  Paradise Parade, built over the old Paradise Abattoir, bore two long rows of housing commission flats, unregistered cars, busted prams and echoes of broken dreams, all crammed into our own special section of Woonona Beach. Paradise, ha! Way down, past the flags and half a million dollar beachfronts, there hid a little slice of scum. From the wrong side of the creek, we’d had the privilege of savouring the last crumbs of beachfront property. Soon they’d demolish all the fibro and move us mob out to the western suburbs. For now we were to be satisfied with the elitist postcode and our anonymity.

  The cycleway was the only thing that bound us to the estate properties that bred rapidly from the dozed clay beds. Big terracotta storage boxes. Here is my wife and these are my children and this is Bingo the dog, oh, and let me show you the patio.

  The liquorice ocean blew its chilly Pacific spray against my presence, each quivered lip caught in the undercurrent of a quarter moon. She drew back her sea’s crown and swallowed my fear. We were like the morning ladies, doing tai chi: out with the black clouds, in with the white. Clean.

  I squinted through the darkened clouds, eyeing the serpentine cement path. Out of sight the sounds syncopated with the tide, like a basketball bounced against a car bonnet – the compressing of air and the jolt of metal. I drew behind a bottlebrush bush and pulled back a fresh branch, bending on bracket knees, trying to get a glance. The hard glow of suburbia cast patterns of destitute light on the openness. Nothing. The sounds twisted louder over my ears and through it I heard someone scream. The lads were out. I strained to see what was happening.

  I once knew the cycleway well. Billy and me would ride this way to Bellambi Beach when we were kids, when the nor-easterly currents would get rounded into the southern bend of the beach. There, at the mouth of the creek we’d find blue swimmer crabs for cooking up. Only certain times of the year you could find the crabs though, all the months with the letter r in them Mum used to say. It wasn’t often too that the channel would be opened up to the beach and as we got older we began to feel like we didn’t belong on that side of the creek either. Trailing behind the graffiti tags strewn among the grey. ‘Mull up lads ... fuck off coons.’

  I began to hide my skin from the other beach, from this stretch of cycleway. There were bends all through this part, I remembered. They wouldn’t see me, I thought. I’d run along the side of the path and hide in the dune entrance further up near the creek. Ready set ... Keep your knees bent, don’t look, hear the voices, keep low, not far, not far, quiet, here it is... down.

  ‘See that man, some little friggin spyin broad ... SEE THAT!’

  I watched him tilt with his shadow. He was alone, sti
ll against the light crashing on hurling bodies. His mates were too busy taking apart one of the kids – probably one of the dope runners ripped them off. Payback, slamming his rag doll body between the Datsun panel and Nike.

  I hid deep in the scrub and tried to see through the condensation of screams. The line of white press-studs that ran down the side of his tracksuit caught the moonlight as each leg strode toward the walkway. I slid under the dune fencing and doubled myself into the pandanus branches. I am invisible, I am earth, I am sand.

  ‘Oy, ya little coon bitch, what tha fuck do ya think ya doin?’

  The bottle dropped to his side, dribbling onto the sand. My eyes flickered at his slippery face, his fat bottom lip tucked under his front teeth, sliding off, sucking the dregs of beer, drawing a ball of spit, glaring sliver-eyed at my slightness.

  I scrambled up and ran toward the water; my feet cupped the dunes and spat the damp sand sideways, my arms flailing the whipping southerly. The panting of terror drew behind me as my shirt gave way and dumped me over, heavy kneecaps, hands and sand tormenting. We’re down, we’re stopped, and a blade caresses my cheek like a sympathetic breeze.

  ‘This gunna show ya where ya don’t belong dumb black bitch.’

  The popping buttons over my back take me elsewhere. Bubble wrap. Lemonade burps as Billy and me push each plastic blister between finger and thumb, choking on each other’s laughter. Popping giggles silence violent grunts.

  He ends it mutely and clips back his buttons: pop ... pop ... pop. I forget to feel the blade swim through my palm, shallow, seeping blood.

  I do not nourish, I do not even turn over, not even when he leaves, this be my death, where I quietly finger the softness of my tongue.

  Bushfire

  From the head of the escarpment, I used to think that I could see the world. When I was younger, when Mum was still here, I’d ride up to the quarry or the old miners’ trails, always with secrets. I’d push through the thick scrub faces, where in the ferns I’d hide. And the ferns would hide too, or try to. Their feather prongs always peeking through burnt-out car remains and the o-rings of washing machines.

  It was always wet up there, always a cloudy place in the mountains. The middling trees would gather last night’s sea breeze in their canopy, away from the sun, letting cold dewdrops fall on passers-by and soft winds. Slicking sweaty skin and sleeking hair strands against my face.

  That summer, just after Mum left, the fires started. Every year they got worse. It stopped being so wet, the dampness fell away from the soil, and up until Christmas the whole coast would shift into a furnace of dry salt and smoke.

  The year I was fourteen the bushfires would not be packed away in manholes and hall cupboards with the Christmas tinsel; they stayed on right through January and into school’s first term. The nor-easterlies drove the red ginger skies to the wall of the coast road, and soon the entire national park that kept outer Sydney from our coastal town was left a charred break-wall, a warring deaf-black distance.

  On the news it showed birds falling from the skies; they’d hit the pillows of smoke and drop to the earth like little soft bombs. Ash dropped from the sky too. All over Wollongong fragile cinder flakes stained hung out linen and car bonnets and drifted into the southerly swell. The ocean kept the sooty snow afloat and at night the smoke kept the fires lit up, so that day and night blended into each other, so that everything appeared both carbon black and hazy yellow or a constant humming orange.

  At the end of January a postcard arrived, redirected from our old house down the road, to Aunty’s. It lay in the shade of the flip top metal letterbox, the handwriting side showing, addressed to us Gibsons, our family name. Sorry it’s been a long time.

  Sorry.

  The postcard was late, too late for Mum. The ink had been wet before, its dotted i’ s and stroked t’ s seeped across the boundary. From Dad, from Dad.

  Sorry.

  From Dad.

  I walked my bike out from the side gate, slid my hand into the letterbox and tucked the postcard into the side of my shorts, so that the glossy cardboard stuck to my fleshy hip. And then pedalled as fast as the heat would let me to the quarry, at the base of the escarpment.

  At the entrance to the miners’ track, beside the strangling figs and purple lantana, I left my bike and headed up by foot. The ground was dry, as it had been for so long. The track was swept with a thick cover of brittle, banana-shaped leaves from the gums, and sun-burnt palm spines, that crisscrossed their way up the sloping dirt. The smell of fire still rose, even from so far away; it belonged here with the other odours of dust and mining and sweet banksia blossoms.

  In the small clearing, where I’d hide shaded by umbrellas of grass trees and tree ferns I took the softest ground as a seat. It was dry there too. When it was damp and you’d sit up there for a while, you’d be sure to find a leech on one of your ankles or sucking the blood from between your toes. Mum used to say that these parts are famous for their leeches, or used to be anyway. She said that the old people used to trade them, big juicy fat ones, they’d use for medicine. She said that the people from this part are called the Dtharawahl people, and dtharawahl means valley, a perfect wet breeding ground for leeches. It is their land, Mum would say, so we have to help look after it for them in exchange for our staying here. Be respectful, she’d say.

  But there were no leeches anymore; they left when Mum left – traded for the bushfire’s arrival. Maybe they were hiding deep in the soil where it was still a bit wet, waiting for the rain to come and moisten the hard crust, waiting for the rain to make mud so they could slither out for food. I imagined all the other animals that survived the fires would’ve been hiding too, waiting for the right time to come out and start again.

  Maybe Dad had done the same. Maybe he needed to hide away until now, until he could come back. I wondered if he’d come back.

  Sorry it’s been a long time that you haven’t heard from your old man. I’m up here near Darwin picking mangoes on the harvest. The season is over soon and one of the blokes here’s going pearlin out west so might send you some treasure. From Dad.

  The shiny photograph on the postcard was of a pretty display, a pile of orange mangoes, strawberry hibiscus framing them. There was another photo next to the first, of palms between rows of huge thick-crested trees, which leaked their branches into the slender grasses below. Against one of the trees was a ladder; a canvas picking bag was slung off a rung where a man was standing. It wasn’t Dad; the man had a big wad of blonde hair and was clutching a mango, as if to pick it.

  I didn’t know it then, but the man would no longer be there and the mangoes would’ve all been packed and sent away in dusty oversized trucks. They would all be bought and eaten, the skin and seed rotted, the yellow dew leather chewed through by worms. Fruit flies would have flown to new flesh. And the dark finger leaves would’ve grown over in pink wax scale, the hibiscus turned black and the sweating fragrance of caustic sap and sugar long been buried with the season.

  But to me, then, under the thick mangle of brown branches that pleaded for rain in the desperate dry air, he might as well have been right there. He could just as well be perched on the other side of the escarpment, or down at our old house. I’m five years old and we’re eating powdery watermelon, spitting black pips with a mouthful of giggles. Or I’m about six, following his forearms, his fingers as he shows us how to cast the hand line off the beach, swinging the hook and sinker, his aim perfect. How to pull up the slack of the nylon line, gently. His arms are strong and pale, I remember, as I follow them out to the breakers. Watching the bream and whiting surf the waves in huge schools like dolphins. Before the line would take and he’d reel in a catch. I’m six still and I’m watching his bare limbs heaving a shovel in the backyard, the sound of the blade hitting the damp clay, the smell of the exposed soil, weekend cut grass and his sweaty back moving like the tide. I can still see his fingers moving unconsciously as they roll a smoke, flicking the lighter and drawing back
on the cigarette. The muddled smells of White Ox tobacco and yellow Palmolive Gold soap on his hands.

  He might as well have never left. I wondered how I could ever have thought he did, how I could’ve allowed the memory of my father to pass me by, to cease existing.

  And the memories all came back then, bit by bit, shiny little bubbles, quick, sharp. Just before they spit open and disappear again, clear.

  Leaving Paradise

  No one taught Billy how to fight. Mum had once said to me that he just had to; he already knew before he was born that he had no other choice. His heart was bleeding before the world had even got to him, before he could even swallow air, Mum had said.

  She was just a young girl when her stomach started to swell like the full moon had gone and grown itself inside her. She was just a young girl when the doctors said that her little baby might die. That they would have to cut open his chest and patch the holes in his heart, that afterwards he might not live very long either. That little brown baby had two setbacks then, she thought.

  Billy’s dad ran away, he was the right skin for Mum too, but he wanted to play rock’n’roll instead, wanted to live in a swag or the back of a Kingswood, no place for a sick baby and a young mum.

  A year later she found out that he had driven up to the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney, that he’d rented a cabin at one of the villages along the ridge. That he’d woken one morning, the type of morning where clouds hustled into the side of the mountains, embedding themselves thick in the pines. Letting each indent of the valley be filled with mist, those mornings where everything seems silent, a faint echo of a car or birdsong somewhere far off and empty. That he’d walked out to a lookout and jumped straight through the fog and into the sandstone base of a waterfall. That something must’ve been itching him bad.