Swallow the Air

by Tara June Winch

  But Mum still thought that boys needed their dads, needed to have men around to grow into. So she went and found herself another dad for Billy, a white fella. And a few years later I arrived. But Billy was still sick, he’d turn yellow soon as you looked away, dropping off, fainting, his heart too slow, or too fast. Those doctors never really did get it right. The stitching came away like loose shoelaces and his heart would be bleeding again, leaking inside his skinny little body.

  When Billy could finally stand though, he refused to sit down. Mum knew then that he’d be ok no matter what happened, that he was a fighter in his heart, even if it was his heart that was barely fighting.

  One day at the beach when we were kids, I remember running my finger down the melted ridge of skin between his ribs. I asked him if it hurt but he said he couldn’t remember. The scar felt slippery, I remember that. And then we never talked about it again. I never thought about it again either.

  Not until the day Billy turned eighteen.

  We were still there living with Aunty, though mostly she was either out or out of it. The booze had got a strong hold of her, her and her boyfriend Craig, and the bottle was what the house turned into, not a home any more than she had meant for it to be. Just a place of grog and fists. Craig had a rage, I hated him for hitting her. I asked Aunty why we didn’t just go, but Aunty said he’d never remember the fights, that he’d have blackouts – and that he couldn’t help it. Poor Aunty.

  Every night it happened, I began to wake before they’d even come home, my body waiting for the back door to fling open and bang against the wall, for them to be already at each other’s throat, or laughing and chatting before a blue would start. I’d lie awake through the whole thing, my breathing so loud that I was sure that if they’d stop bashing into each other for a second, that through the walls they’d be able to hear the air passing fast and heavy in my throat.

  But they didn’t stop, they’d keep going until they were exhausted and one would plead with the other to have a drink, would say sorry and drag em to bed.

  Night in and night out, on the other side of the walls that held our Aunty and some stranger captive: two puppets of booze trialled their messy, confused violence. But this night, it was Billy’s eighteenth birthday and it’d be the last fight either of us would hear.

  That afternoon Aunty had given Billy a silver flask. We sat around the kitchen table with a sponge cake and candles that I’d bought from the Vietnamese bakery. Singing happy birthday, the three of us, Craig in the lounge room. Aunty, sitting there smoking and sipping a cuppa, told Billy to jump up and grab the blue plastic bag near the washing powder in the laundry. We giggled while Billy made this dumb look on his face with a bit of a smile as he went out to the laundry.

  He came back to the kitchen with the bag and untied the crumpled, bow-eared handles at the top. He didn’t drink grog but Aunty said it’s a keepsake anyway. Billy liked it. She jumped up and grabbed it off him. ‘Here ya,’ she said spinning the lid off the bourbon bottle and holding the flask over the sink. ‘Fill it up for when ya wanna have a drink one day, on your wedding night, boy!’

  Billy’s face went all red and he pulled a cheeky smile at his feet. She tightened the flask and grabbing the tea towel off the bench, smudged the case clean.

  ‘There!’ she boasted. ‘Your mum’d be so proud of you, the both of you.’

  Billy and I dropped our heads down. Aunty was gettin all tipsy and emotional. I didn’t mind her like this so much.

  ‘Garn, get out. Go meet ya mates.’ Aunty scoffed him off with the back of her hand and threw herself in front of the TV.

  ‘Ya wanna come?’

  ‘Me?’ I said.

  ‘Course, you dickhead – what are bros for?’

  ‘Where we going?’ Big smile crept across my face.

  ‘Movies – my treat, but we’re watchin Terminator, ya reckon ya can handle that?’

  ‘Yeah yeah!’ I said, stirring.

  At the cinemas Billy’s mate Vardy and him went halves in my ticket. I was so stoked. I remember walking into the movie thinking, yeah this is my brother, the best brother in the world.

  After the movie we decided to walk home. Vardy started drinking the bourbon from Billy’s flask. Then Billy drank some too. They took big gulpfuls and winced. Billy and Vardy started getting drunk and raving about the movie.

  They would take turns at saying ‘I’ll be back’ in the Terminator’s voice, jumping over front fences, tripping into people’s yards, falling over wheelie bins and pot plants before running back to the footpath for us all to piss ourselves laughing. They’d take a swig, pass the flask to me then run into the distance.

  I was laughing so much that I thought I’d have a swig too, a little tight-lipped sip so that only a tiny bit passed my lips. I’d smelt it before, but the taste was bitter and antiseptic. My head whooshed dizzy and I belly laughed at the boys more and more with each sip.

  It was so much fun. We said seeya to Vardy at the bottom of Paradise Parade and as we walked the street, he and Billy flung I’ll be back’ s over front yards and fence lines until we got to Aunty’s, laughing our heads off still.

  We cleared the back steps and into the kitchen. It was quiet except for the low murmur of Craig’s voice and Aunty’s faint whimpers. He had her black hair all tangled in his thick fingers fist, the red metal coil of the stove plate a few inches from her face.

  It happened so fast. We’d never stepped between them. Billy pulled back Craig’s arm, grabbing at its thickness. ‘Let her go, ya mongrel!’

  Craig’s fist freed itself from Aunty’s head, flinging her downwards. His arm rose and hammered into Billy’s chest. The thud was bottomless, booming against the stale kitchen.

  That’s when I remembered.

  As Billy’s mouth opened wide and sucked in air from the pit of his stomach, his eyes dilated. He brought his open palm to his chest – the place where his heart lay beneath the skin. He tumbled backwards onto the linoleum, a dead weight.

  The kitchen light swung slowly back and forth across his body. Billy’s eyes were wide and searching the ceiling. My head whooshed more, I dizzied above him, too shocked to touch his weakness. Billy’s hand was still against his chest as he grabbed Aunty’s eyes with his own. His scream was from somewhere deep within. He bellowed, baring his teeth, yelling miles and miles of hatred upon her. It seemed like forever that the sound pelted out of him and up to her face.

  He pushed himself off the floor and charged to the fibro wall, kicking his foot through the chalky plasterboard as we all looked on disbelieving.

  ‘Fuck this place, fuck you all! Fuck this shithole of a house, fuck this town, and fuck this life. Let’s go May, ya comin? Fuck this for a home. I’m not comin back, May. Not ever. Let’s go.’

  He stood at the back doorway, his chest heaving adrenalin. My head fogged over, the alcohol no longer giggly, it shivered inside me, suffocating any normal judgement.

  ‘Let’s go, May!’

  Again and again he threw the words at my hands, hands incapable of taking hold of them and running. I could only stand and sway as he punched his fist into the back door and disappeared into the night. His screaming flung through the streets like I’ll be back’ s, but I knew he wouldn’t.

  When I walked up and down Paradise Parade, to Vardy’s house, to the beach, away from the chaos of Aunty and Craig, away from everything we hated, as I walked the empty black streets, I realised Billy was really gone.

  Billy and me were like shadows; we could merge into the walls without being noticed. We’d move on the same tides; when we were laughing we couldn’t stop each other, when we were talking neither of us could get a word in, when we were fishing, being sad, or being silent, we were both empty cups. We were rarely angry, we rarely fought, and if we did it was only if I was annoying him, and even then he’d just chase me and kick me up the bum and it’d turn into us laughing together again.

  We didn’t talk about Mum or our dads or all the booze and s
hit around us, we knew the world in the same way that we knew each other, in the quietness that we shared. It wasn’t in our eyes, or our voices or what we said, it was just there, that understanding, that sameness – it slicked our pores, our skin. It was a feeling that you couldn’t see, or smell or hear or touch; you only knew.

  I thought I’d know where he’d be, up the bush, at Bulli Beach, thought I could track him down, thought he’d be where I’d go, the same. But I looked for days, weeks, months. He never came back to Aunty’s, never for clothes or for a feed or to find me. He’d really gone.

  And the more he wasn’t there, the more I realised too, we were all gone.

  To Run

  Sometimes people stand in the way of other people’s eyes. I wasn’t waiting for change; I wasn’t waiting anymore for things to get better. I took the mango into my mouth, my teeth traced in yellow stringy sweetness. I took all of him, away from Aunty, away from her fermented eyes.

  She didn’t see the postcard from my dad like I did, she couldn’t see the piece of me, even if it was only paper. She held her booze like a butcher’s knife, cleaving off each part of herself – and her own. I would sit on the back steps, blocking out her drunkenness, only imagining Darwin. If you could be any fruit what would you be? I would be the mango that breaks off the stem into my dad’s fingers, the apple of his eye before I slide into the picking bag.

  I pulled the zipper of my backpack tight over the nylon. When it reached the end of two rows of teeth it busted open and a slight gap of black shine hung out like a sock end. I stepped off the porch and padded across the grass to the cycleway, feeling like a seagull, taking the air into my wings, tucking under the busted red leg that wouldn’t matter in flight.

  I knew a squat where a friend had been staying; I’d been there with her once to pick up her sleeping bag. I remembered they said I could come round. The words stuck to me. ‘Come back and stay anytime, sister.’ The invitation shone beyond the damp memory of the house, through its empty lines, the wet walls.

  The house wheezed, jammed between the new motorway and the train line, alongside the lapping sidewalk that rose and fell like undulating limbs. The garden path ran through the small yard where a woman and a man were arguing, her hand gripped his pawpaw bicep as she grunted into his face, muttering something about money. I traced around them, to the steps and peeped through the open door.

  ‘Hey, girl! I know you don’t I? Who are you? He sits cross-legged in the sunroom beside the frayed vinyl lounge. ‘You’ve been here before, I know you!’

  His hands closed in his lap fly out and grab memory from the space between us.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been here; I’m looking for my friend Crystal. She was stayin here, hey?’

  I thought back to the time I’d visited, there were people hanging around everywhere, a drug house of anxious nobodies. And now, here I was, hiding that same, quiet desperation.

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah, Crystal, she’s a nice girl, haven’t seen her for ages.’

  I watch his eyes move from the thought of Crystal to my rucksack. ‘Need somewhere to stay, girl?’

  ‘Yeah ... Last time I was here, you guys said I...’

  Before I could finish, he’d jumped up and was leading me down the hallway to a big room with a drum kit and a mattress in it. He grabbed a piece of foam off the mattress and laid it down in the opposite corner.

  ‘Welcome. This is my room but I don’t mind sharing. Don’t worry, it’s safe.’

  He went on about how he got his name and where he was from and the rules of the house; community he kept saying, shooting thoughts like tearing open birthday cards. I could hardly track his jagged mind. He was friendly and kind of jittery and silly with a mange of tight curly hair, like a jack in the box or, as some must have thought, a sheep.

  Sheepa gnashed his sentences a few times and broke into a grin, his jaw quivering under his top row of teeth like scared magnets. ‘Anyway,’ he began to exit back down the hallway, then turned and leapt at me gently, ‘you like poppies?’

  I followed him to the rotting kitchen, I held onto the door frame, to half hide fear. I trusted him. Should I? I didn’t care anymore. It didn’t matter.

  In the kitchen Sheepa rinsed an old cola bottle clear. From under the sink he took a plastic shopping bag and emptied half the little black dots into the cola bottle and filled it again from the tap. The water pipes shuddered under institutional cream walls. He shook the bottle for a while, tilting back his head and looking into my face, calmer and more real than before.

  ‘What’s it do?’ I asked.

  ‘It’ll take the hurt out of your eyes.’

  I brushed my fingers across my face as if turning diary pages, smearing secrets along my skin, owning them. Before I closed the book and looked away.

  Sheepa tightened a sock over the top of the bottle and strained the muddy water into a glass. The grey water didn’t dazzle or twinkle in any midday light; it sat as dull as my heart. Launched by his blunt chewed fingers it slid towards me across the flecked bench. I took the glass carefully to my chest and walked back into the room. As I sat against the edge of the foam and let each mouthful bleed down my insides, every nerve ending and muscle lay down its guard. And soon I felt less confused than before.

  I am lying on a bed of foam, though my skin knows it as water; it rises to my pores and laps at my ear cavities, muffling the choke of intersecting roads, of voices, of wind. Belly up to the sky where whitewashed clouds let out the blue like venetian blinds. The warmth swims up around my neck and outlines the painlessness of my face, of me. And from here I am perfectly happy. From here I stay, unwiring this bliss behind eyelids that make pictures and movies. I dream I dream I dream.

  In the movies I am there, I know it is me but my face is blurry, and the other people in the movies I know too, but they are also blurry. My cousins are there and my dad too, we’re inside the house looking out into the yard where he’s chasing a blue tongue around with a shovel. He’s jumping and heaving the metal rusted blade into the sandstone and dead garden beds. He’s angry, but we’re laughing at him. Then he turns towards us, his eyes come into focus and he’s crying, but he can’t help it. There’s blood spitting down one of his legs. He comes up to the window, and now instead of the shovel he’s resting on the lawnmower handles, the motor’s running still and the noise drives me back to the room, I’m halfway between and he’s still crying. I can’t stop him from crying. He leans down and pulls a beer bottle top from the flesh of his shin. He’s laughing hysterically, as if the possibility of the event is so small, as small as a beer bottle top.

  The movie changes and I’m swimming, I’m always swimming, and Mum is swimming too. We’re diving through salted waves, catching our breath, before we realise we needn’t breathe. I look toward her but she’s not there anymore. And when I open my eyes again I’m in the middle of three lakes, a gutter runs through the centre where I wade. Where I stand feeds the lakes, the shore, the mango tree in the distance, the black cockatoo circling my head. A lone grey kangaroo drinks at the water’s edge. When I imagine he is there, when I believe he is there, he looks up at me and stretches back, resting on his tail, displaying all that grey muscle, flesh and fur.

  I wake. Again and again.

  When I feel trapped walking in my head, solving unsolvable mysteries, I drown, and the releasing surges out of me, pungent flowing vomit, freeing. The drug doesn’t recognise me anymore, doesn’t recognise that I even exist under its hold.

  I witness more spooling movies. Dad has come and gone, as he did. Or would have. I think about when he left, I can’t remember why, it torments me; it keeps me awake for days trying to remember. I feel this kind of frenzied serving dish in my belly; it fires and burns with an aching for my father. There has been fighting, for how long I don’t know, it’s always just there, in my mind. I ask my brother if he remembers, or if it even matters, but his face is blurred and his mouth has not yet formed. I wonder if I am beginning to understand things, or if
I am losing grip, like Mum.

  Sheepa entered the room. He gave me two pink notes, his shout for lunch, but I must go to get it. I don’t enjoy crossing the busy road to the corner store. Inside, my skin begins to grease, the frying vents seem clogged up and a thick yellow blanket rests at the ceiling. The stench of oily potato and stale fish fills the small shopfront nook. The red-haired woman square-dances around the fryers, dipping a metal basket in and out of the swampy liquid. While her back is turned, I pocket a packet of noodles and a Mars bar. I think she knows, but she needs us and we need her. I promise myself I’ll stop stealing, when I’m old enough for Centrelink.

  She glares over her glasses at me.

  ‘Two hamburgers with the lot, thanks.’

  I walk outside and dump my body in the chair on the footpath, my back melting into the hot plastic. Even with the bushfires finished, the Gong is still a fighting city. Smoke from the steelworks competes with the hot air that clings brown orange to the coastline, the haze that has filled my lungs since my first breath at the hospital, the haze that has hung over the backyard of Paradise Parade and singed the dim, glittery nights. To the west, the escarpment traps the grubby air, keeping it from escaping still; the shop’s clogged vents work in the same way. I let the warm plastic cradle me, imagining some huge clean openings in the sky that would suck all the shit out. With the heat, you choke on it – you taste the dirt.

  I stare at the fragile clouds and loosen my thoughts before my eyes drop focus on the house. And just then my heart fell into the pit of my body, bruising its hard shell. All feeling jolted back into me as two men and a woman enter the house. One is Billy.

  How long had it been? I counted a few months as I balanced on the median strip, waiting for the traffic to speed past. I skipped past the tail of a car and into the sunroom as fast as my smile had leapt onto my face. And left. Just as fast.

  ‘Billy! Where have you been?’