Rocks in the Belly
Page 1
Jon Bauer was born in Wimbledon. His short fiction has been broadcast on national radio, performed for the stage, and published in the Sleepers Almanac and The Bridport Prize. Rocks in the Belly is his first novel.
Praise for Rocks in the Belly
‘This is such a beautifully choreographed, sensitive and accessible novel, it’s hard to believe it’s Bauer’s first … his orchestration of grief and comedy, innocence and pessimism … has emotional honesty that matches the best Helen Garner.’ Australian Literary Review
‘Anybody who reads this book and isn’t instantly a fan probably wasn’t paying close enough attention. Rocks in the Belly is both a masterpiece and a very challenging piece of writing … With this beautiful novel, Bauer teaches us the meaning of “too little too late”, with an ending that is sure to bring a tear to even the most stoic reader’s eye.’ Australian Bookseller & Publisher *****
‘Jon Bauer tells his dark, psychological story obliquely and with dramatic precision … what dazzles most is Bauer’s eye for physical and emotional detail.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘One of the most unsettling novels I have read in a while, with an emotional sharpness that hurts. Oh, and it’s quite funny too.’ The Australian
‘Rocks in the Belly, a debut novel of considerable power, covers rare territory and culminates in scenes of tenderness and compassion that are never sentimental.’ Australian Book Review
‘A powerful book … It is marked by candour, humour and sadness, and seethes with so much frustration that in parts it becomes difficult to read. However, its ultimate sentiment moves towards compassion.’ The Weekend Australian
‘This is compelling reading, and provides great scope for discussions about the nature of good, evil and love. The narrative voices are superb, as is the characterisation … Rocks in the Belly is a beautiful and profoundly disturbing novel.’ Good Reading
‘Bauer perfectly catches the uncertainty of a deeply insecure child who does not want to share his mother’s love, and neatly displays the ambiguity of the situation … This is a largely tragic book, but it speaks in a mesmerising voice a brutal truth about the intensity of family relationships.’ The Sunday Telegraph
‘This is either going to be one of those amazing breakthrough novels or it’s going to be something that gets handed around at book clubs for a long time and becomes a quiet cult hit … This is a remarkable coming-of-age story.’ The Courier-Mail
‘An ambitious, darkly disturbing, challenging and well-written debut novel.’ Marie Claire
‘This is a stark, painful, yet beautifully observed novel and not one that you’ll forget in a hurry; a hint of redemptive catharsis before the end saves it from being oppressive and frees the reader to appreciate the considerable skill with which it has all been done.’ The Advertiser
‘A disturbing yet deeply moving debut novel … Brilliantly inhabited and told.’ The Big Issue
ROCKS IN THE BELLY
JON BAUER
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Jon Bauer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2010 John Bauer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2010 by Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
First published in the UK in 2012 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 845 4
eISBN 978 1 84765 811 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Carried, but never held.
I used to tell people I was a foster child. As a boy I’d tell every new stranger until it started burrowing into me as a sort of truth. A truth that’s still here, keeping me from belonging.
I used to tell people I was a foster child even though I was the only one in our home who wasn’t fostered. And now I’m supposedly a man, everything about me is still fostered — my country, the history I tell people.
I can’t even bring myself to belong to my own childhood.
But I can still feel it, despite moving overseas, disavowing myself entirely of my past. It doesn’t matter where you go, or what you do with your feelings, your truth lies in wait. My childhood haunting me in much the same way my fists haunt my hands.
Moving away hasn’t allowed me to leave my parents behind either. I carry them in those remembered moments they inflict on you. Mum especially. Funny that of all those steeped-in memories, the one where she’s most vivid is from a day of supreme greyness. The day we buried Robert. Everyone gathered round the television to watch that video of him.
Not the Robert who’d come up our path years before, hiding behind the social worker. Not that thoughtful, clever little Robert. Special little Robert. But the Robert we turned him into.
I remember the TV was turned up too loud, Robert full of gangly smiles towards the camera while they strapped him up. His played-back face looking right at me. Someone making a comment about how great he looks in his orange outfit, and Mum managed a smile too.
Then Robert’s hair was fluttering on the screen, both him and the man behind him wearing goggles. Robert all tongue and teeth and movement, his trembling brain fidgeting him with excitement.
There is a rough edit.
His hair is really blowing and he’s strapped to the man and screeching with a mix of fear and happiness. They shuffle him along on his bum, and from the movement of the camera you see Robert, the walls, Robert. Then, through the open door, the clouds. Great, billowing clouds in a vast sky. Robert of the Clouds, Dad always used to call him, or Robert McCloud. Our lounge bursting with people. All of them dressed in black, and carrying the colour as if it were heavy. Everyone crying over Robert’s happiness coming at us from inside the TV. From back in time. Crying because that’s all that was left of what he might have been.
The camera pans to Robert perched on the edge.
‘1’
His tremors are still there, his eyes smiling. The man tells him to put his head back and Robert’s exhilaration erupts as a giggling squeal.
‘2’
He is totally still. I remember the whole room stopped too. Everyone who’d come to bury him held their breath.
1
I walk out of the train station and down the hill, dragging my suitcase along this familiar parade of shops. The whole time I’ve been overseas they’ve just stood here, in all weathers. People sitting inside them, waiting for a livelihood to trickle in. Everything here having remained painfully familiar and yet undergone the subtlest, almost imperceptible changes, as if the shops are oozing slowly, glacially down this hill.
A million years and they’ll be collected into a melted pile at the bottom.
I look behind the sheltered bus stop and my graffiti is still here, the faded marker pen signalling change like lovers’ initials engraved on a tree. The lovers having long since split up, just like I’ve lost touch with the me who used to wedge himself in among the litter and undergrowth back here, sniffing thinners from my blazer sleeve instead of going to school.
The bus comes and I stick out an arm.
I pay the driver, wondering if he was at the helm seven years ago when I rode this bus in the other direction, and whether coming back will unravel al
l the work I’ve done while overseas — striving for some kind of invincible.
I lift my baggage onto the rack and lurch down the bus as it takes off, an old woman staring at me from the front seat and two school kids stewing at the very back, out of school, feet up on seats — their own small version of invincible.
My home town passes outside the dirty windows, the glass vibrating the image as the bus accelerates, then refocusing it all as the clutch dips for the next gear. I fall into staring, feeling what being here does to the vibrations in me.
When we reach the top of Hawke Street Hill, I slowly stand, push the button for my stop.
There’s that house of my childhood. I get off but the driver nods back behind him and I climb up again, blushing, retrieve my luggage.
The bus leaves me in a fumy quiet, my suitcase trundling along behind then throwing itself off its wheels, yanking my wrist over. I stop to right it and walk on, the houses quiet, just the sound of little plastic suitcase wheels.
I reach our gate but pause at the threshold. I recognise this moment I’m standing in. This is the moment before. This is the breath you take.
I look from the front door in its rotting frame, up to the clouds. I had my childhood under this bit of sky with its fairy-floss athletes, white rabbits and all the other bulbous shapes that floated by on invisible air streams. The Loch Ness monster came by once.
But most of our precipitation came with the foster children. Lost souls carried between these hedges to the aprons and hugs of my mother. Children with pasts I was supposed to pity them for.
I used to park my little bum on that front step there, trying to hit makeshift targets with stones while Dad stepped back, sipping from his mug of tea, a few privet leaves gracing his wayward hair. He never let me use the hedge-trimmer but he kept me in money for sweets and catapults if I lugged black bags full of trimmed hedge.
I automatically lift the gate to open it, like always. The hedges obscure the path now so I have to weave my way by, carrying my suitcase to silence my approach. I set it down at the door, iron out the red marks it has pressed into my palm.
After I’ve knocked there’s a silence.
I go and look through the front window at the posh dining table we never used, the dust on it like the coating that settled over our lives after Robert. We had no use for the special occasion table then, only the beaten family one in the kitchen.
Now there’s the sound of someone shuffling down the corridor. I adjust my posture, flatten my hair. The footsteps reach the other side of the door and I make myself still in front of the little security eyelet — my insides held. The eyelet darkens. I try for a smile but it comes out sad.
The door opens slowly like something out of a horror film. As if it should be Igor standing there and lightning going off, but it’s a shiny day and not Igor although it does look like Frankenstein in a dress. Dad used to say that about ugly women. He said that about my Auntie Debbie especially. Auntie Deadly he called her.
‘Hello, Mum.’
She looks like somebody impersonating my mother. Or Mum in disguise. Looking at me with the same blue eyes but her face bloated and unsure. She thinks she knows me but isn’t certain — something drying at the corner of her mouth.
We stand here and I’m trying not to gasp at how inclement time has been to her — that or the illness, the reason I’m back here.
I close the gap between us, shutting out the trembling of the moment by moving in and hugging her, my hips held away from hers.
She smells of clothes that have been wet too long then dried, her body swollen but bird-like, frail. I stare out from the hug, looking at the hallway, every detail of it cut like a hill trail into my brain — the vase full of my grandfather’s homemade walking sticks; that ominous lump of mica rock; someone like me staring out from old photos on the wall — that uncomfortable face.
She breaks the hug and leans away, her hands on my upper arms to keep me at a close distance, her eyes scanning from one to the other of mine, drinking me in.
‘Hello,’ I say again, shrivelling. ‘It’s me.’
Her mouth opens, trying to form words but there are only sounds in the back of her throat and then a closing of the offending article and a shaking of her head. I’ve been warned about this.
She leads me down to the kitchen and the old familiar smells, her face turning back to me occasionally with the urge to say those perfunctory, greeting things — the cupboard in her head empty but still she goes back to it.
Then we’re both in the kitchen, the overgrown back garden looking in at me through the windows, my suitcase at the door like a dog that wants to be let out.
‘How’s work?’ she says, surprised at having got some words airborne. Then her back’s to me as she second guesses herself about something as simple as making the tea.
Seven short years have turned her into one of the uncertain, the old. Now she has that way old people have of crossing the road or telling a story, all the time waiting to get it wrong. Saying Hong Kong instead of King Kong, or the other way round.
‘Good. It’s good, Mum — as work goes.’
She gives me a smile that’s a frown again before she’s turned fully away, and I’m gazing at the back of her head but remembering the way her brain looked on the light box a few weeks ago during that flying visit I made. When she was all propped up and unconscious, hospital tubes running through her. A clinician pointing his biro at her CT scans as if gesturing to a weather forecast. The single tone with which he spoke about my mother’s life, up there in lights. The way he had of dealing out reality, like prison food. Her mind lit up except for that dark walnut growing in her brain. Right inside of who she is.
I wonder what part of her it’s elbowing its way through now, while she waits for the kettle.
But I remember looking at that dark walnut on the CT scan and thinking it’s me. That’s me in there eating its way through her. If that growing darkness is a specific part of Mum, it’s the me part. The son part. The disappointment. The one who did that thing all those years ago.
I’m the black walnut.
2
The government says that children under 13 can’t sit in the front seat and anybody who sits in the front has to wear a seatbelt. Clunk-click. I don’t have to wear one in the back which is sort of a consolation prize for not being in the front, but really I always want to be up in the business end.
Dad calls it that when he lets me ride shotgun. Usually only once we get round the corner from Mum and up the road a bit. I have to sit on the first aid kit cos the seat’s too low.
Every time I’m climbing over he’s always getting me to say when my birthday is and my answer is supposed to be today’s date but thirteen years ago, as if it’s my thirteenth birthday. And I’m supposed to look smug when I say it to the police officer if they catch us, then tell them we’re off to celebrate at McDonald’s.
Dad says it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you have some facts in there with your lies. So if we get pulled over all I need to do under pressure is know today’s date and I always know that because I have a calendar on my wall and a thermometer stuck on the outside of the window and I mark off the overnight lowest temperature every morning and check the water measurer on my window ledge for rain.
I like the weather and when I grow up I want to be a weatherman cos they’re famous and get to tell the future and people will tune in and wear different things based on what I tell them. Plus by the time I’m a weatherman technology will be so amazing that weathermen will be able to ask the weather computer, which is called Nimbus, to predict when there’s going to be a bomb or a war or a car crash.
We’ve got a new foster boy staying with us. Dad calls him Robert McCloud because he loves clouds. He’s been here 4 days so far and is all sulky and soft and quiet, boring. He just sits outside in the garden a lot and looks at the clouds or reads in his room and doesn’t do anything mysterious or suspicious so that I get really bored of spying on h
im, really fast.
‘Come on, folks,’ Mum says, leaning out the back door to the garden while I’m in the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to pick some stuff up but I’ll take you for a nice dinner after.’ She has her foster kid voice on rather than her mum or wife voice.
Robert is 12 and so it might not be many days of the year until he’s 13. Plus he could lie about his birthday and have had his real one recently with his bad parents and then get another birthday out of us good people who are helping him out of the kindness of our hearts. Mum says good people should have children but she has only had one, me.
We’re running to the car like Hunchbacks of Notre Dame cos it’s raining again. This is the first time Robert has ridden in our car, except the time we went to the video shop and Mum and Dad sat up front and tried to act normal.
‘You have to go in the back too, Robert,’ I say as we’re running. Mum is covering her hair with a hand and running round the car. ‘No, he doesn’t,’ she says. ‘Jump in the front, Robert.’
I stop on the lawn and watch them. I’m keeping very still and instead of thinking about what Mum just said I’m wondering why everybody makes such a fuss about rain. It’s only water. Robert looks back at me and frowns as he opens the door to the front. He gets in without needing the first aid kit and slams the door.
Mum starts the car but then she’s standing half out of it again with smoke coming from the back and Robert’s pink face is in the warm, water running down the car window so that he looks sadder.
Mum is getting very angry and is in a rush cos of the rainwater. I wonder how many millimetres have fallen in my collector.
Every raindrop has a small grain of dirt in it. Which might be what the fuss is about. God put dirt in rainwater because the clouds need to turn into rain but they need something to turn into rain on. Like the steam in the bathroom has to turn into raindrops on the mirror or the walls or the windows. Clouds use dirt in the air to make rain, which is why mums don’t like it when their washing gets rained on.