Rocks in the Belly

by Jon Bauer

  I go to my room but there’s a lot of shouting so I race back to the front to see the bad dad stumble into the front garden and Dad is out there after him with his sleeves rolled up and Mandy shouting something and keeping them apart. The bad mum takes a cheque out the dad’s hand and chucks it towards my parents but it only seesaws slowly down to the grass, the bad dad looking silly running around trying to catch it but he can’t till it lands and I’m bouncing up and down and joining in with my fists and helping Mum and Dad fight back!

  I dash down to help and I can see Robert through the window, still lying on the grass in the back, smiling up at the sky. Mum shutting the front door and Dad marching in straight past me shouting about ‘the gall and the nerve’ and he has a really red face and these marks on his neck and Mum is all crumpled.

  They start laughing and I don’t think they’re going to stop until Mum changes to crying and Dad finally gets to comfort her.

  I wrap myself round their legs and hold on tight in case all the water washes us away. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to cry.

  24

  I’m walking Hawke Street Hill with my head down, out of breath from trying to run myself sober. That orange burning on the horizon is just a glow now.

  I stop and sniff the air, standing right about where I paused on my bicycle and watched Robert on the ladder.

  I long for that day the way you’re supposed to long for a lost lover. Wishing I could live it again. I’ve rewritten it so many times in my head and I can’t help but wonder where I’d be standing now if I could.

  I take off my shoes and damp socks, my feet feeling good on the cool concrete, the quiet suburban night wrapped in close around me — people sleeping in beds behind all those identical windows. Curtains blinked shut.

  I light a cigarette and try to reconnect with the exact brain state that was once in this spot, that little eight-year-old mind. I kneel down so my head is where his would have been. As if the space–time continuum could be disrupted and I could affect the thoughts that were there. Here.

  I can see the hedges. Malfour Park sleepy behind me, the cirrus cloud a little reddened from the chemical plant burning. People probably out in their dressing-gowns standing looking at it, faces creased with sleep.

  I go in through our gate and the poorly cut hedges snag on me as I slide by. I ignore our front door and head down the side of the house, rummage in the darkness of the shed, finding what’s left of a seat to sit on.

  I ran home to her but now I’m here I’ve stopped at the perimeter of her.

  I light a candle to build a joint by, rolling myself some oblivion — smoke it rocking back and forward out on the lawn.

  Then with the joint still glowing in my mouth, I’m clattering over everything in the shed, the bike overhead. I dig out the extension lead and hedge-trimmer, the ladder — staggering back and forth and setting it all up in the front garden.

  I put out the joint and exhale the smoke, watch it disperse and rise in the night air. The clouds have changed again, gliding silently over the house. Dawn can’t be a million miles away.

  I used to sit and watch Robert looking up at that sky, trying to see what he saw, trying to savour it the way he did.

  I unroll the full length of lead and find a chunky repair in it — black gaffer tape wrapped round and round the thin orange cord.

  All his talk of idiot-proof orange. I’m looking at the gaffer-tape repair like it’s a piece of Dad. His fingerprints might be fixed somehow under all that sticky tape. I look up at the sky again, my thumb stroking the repair.

  You never lose anyone completely. They embed themselves in you, motifs of them everywhere.

  I can’t help but think about the way he must have felt sad or lonely. That maybe his life looked tragic to him. My dad who lived out his life in the ice age after the comet struck. Me, I’m the comet.

  I hold on to his repair and want to cry for all the times I must have planted a sadness in the centre of him. Every moment I snubbed him in some way. Every time I had a tantrum. Every time I ran to Mum instead of him. For every moment in which he didn’t feel like he was enough. For every moment I didn’t think he was enough.

  And for that moment when I wasn’t enough — that eight-year-old.

  But what eight-year-old is enough? I’m twenty-eight and I’m not enough.

  Now Dad’s in the ground and I’d give anything to have him stretch out those arms. I’d never reject him again. Part of me wanting to unravel this gaffer tape, put it under UV light and show up the grease of his fingerprints stuck in among the adhesive. Get just a little bit of him back.

  Maybe some UV light could shine there where Robert fell too and you’d see something, some black mark from where his head hit the ground.

  I get my key out, open the front door, pull the lead in by its plug, the house making my body stand on end. It’s dark inside and I’m stoned, nervous. I search for somewhere to plug in the hedge-trimmer but a noise stops me — a sound like a creaking door, but sharper, hoarser. It’s coming from the kitchen. That gagging and retching. It brings my hand up to my mouth, still holding the electrical plug.

  She’s throwing up in there, the tumour pressure in her brain too much for her body and all it can do is empty her. I put my fingers in my ears, shut my eyes, locking myself into the darkness, the sound of my own life pumping harder inside me now.

  Robert used to make that retching sound. After the accident his stomach was like this weakling. We had to feed him simple foods like pureed carrot and sweet potato — the blender going all the time and Robert still making that noise. The blender jug always sat there in the sink, full of water and claggy bits of vegetable, fruit. The house revolving around the chaos inside his split head.

  Then, maybe an hour or so after food, if we couldn’t keep him quiet, that sound would come and I’d turn up my TV. Shut my door. A deep, back-of-the-throat noise Mum always used to be so terrified of. Her and her vomit phobia.

  Now she’s making the same Robert noise and I’m crouching down, my breath held, the cord still snaked around my hand. My fingers in my ears. Each gag almost overlapping with the next so that she’s gasping for air in the seconds between them — struggling to stay afloat in high seas. Engulfed as another wave comes over her, tumbling her under. She comes up behind it for air but another comes, another. The oxygen deficit filling her.

  She surfaces again, spitting bits of the seabed out. Her own body buckling under, forcing her into being as much a gasping witness as I am. Those flywheels spinning inside me, harsh and electric — my panic turbines firing up. Because there’s no ‘It’s just something I ate’ for her. There’s no ‘You’ll be fine tomorrow.’

  Cancer is not something you flow around.

  That black walnut has its back against her skull wall, hobnail boots pushing on her brain, shoving her off her stem, down and out of her own head.

  I plug in the lead just so I don’t have to hold it anymore, glancing at the gaffer-tape repair to see if it’ll light up electric and show me Dad’s fingerprints in the dark — an impression of his hand to hold.

  She cries out and I’m running, the smell hitting me when I reach the kitchen. The lights off, darkness, I slip on the wet, babbling at this Mum-sized shape in the dark near the sink. I can’t see her face, not properly, just a sparkling where her eyes would be. The outline of her abject helplessness.

  I can’t believe I’ve punished this unravelled woman.

  I get down on my knees with her, my own stomach threatening. ‘Where’s your steroids, Mum? You probably just forgot your steroids.’

  She takes my hand and all her rings are on again even though she’s too swollen for them. All the memories the nurse made her take off, wedged halfway back onto her fingers, just beyond the first knuckle. Probably the ring Dad bought her when I was born. And that one from the night he proposed to her at the race track.

  The plain gold band he put on her on that day I’ve seen in the pictures. Carefree pictures, but th
at enormous truck in there somewhere, in the background, invisible. The truck that’s hidden in every happy photograph, thundering closer with its shipment of reality. Here it is now. Here’s the truck, in the kitchen with Mum and me. There goes that hiss of air as it puts the handbrake on.

  ‘No Mum, not yet!’

  I grab at her hands, one of the rings falling away and even with her body’s convulsing, she’s groping the floor for it. I help her, my fingers finding the ring, wiping it off, putting it back on the end of her finger. The wedding finger. The ring she wore even after their entire marriage had emptied out through the crack in Robert’s head.

  I stand from her, go over and switch the TV on, something for sound and comfort — just a little light. The screen tingles to life and somewhere there’s a cricket match happening, commentators babbling into microphones. Somewhere it’s a sunny day.

  She screams then, reaching out to me from her hands and knees on the floor, her head staying down, focusing on keeping some control over what’s happening inside. Trying to keep an even keel on the deck of a struggling boat.

  ‘D’you want me to call an ambulance, Mum!’ Partly because I need a phone-call-sized moment away from this. ‘Do you, Mum? Shall I call an ambulance!’ But I kneel down with her. ‘Please don’t. I’m just SO sorry.’ Those words are an axe thunked into my breastbone.

  She grips my hand but she’s flailing about like a caught fish on this boat deck we’re on. Me holding on to her as her mouth gasps for life. My body trying to breathe for her. Both of us far out in the dark centre of a capricious ocean. There’s nobody out here with us. Nobody coming to the rescue. We’re alone with that basic, lonely fact of life. Alone with that truck. With how alone we all are. Alonely. The way I can’t help Mum with this even though I’m right beside her. Cricket on the TV. The players dressed in the cleanest white. The commentators with their polished, calm voices commentating on my mum’s dying.

  She crawls spluttering into my lap and I’m rocking her back and forth in an awkward semi-embrace. She’s stopped flapping, just her great blue fish eyes looking up at me, the TV sunshine caught in them. The crowd applauding and the cricketers run, one of them jumping into the air midway across the wicket, his bat aloft. This bloated and tired fish in my arms, gazing at the screen. The boat windows hinting at the red of dawn.

  The commentators laugh. The batsman adjusts his groin with a big glove — spits.

  She’s looking at me now, something clearing or clicking back over. She makes a noise, struggling with a movement or change inside her. Some final reconfiguration perhaps. She’s making noises about it but her face is calm, her throat shaping the sounds, her mouth shut. The sea becalmed around our fragile little boat and Mum this beautiful shining thing. A pulse bumping out at her temple, rings all over her fingers, the kitchen walls green suddenly from a close-up of the cricket ball running across the pitch to the boundary. Applause. Her face nothing but this regret. Her expression speaking so clearly, How is it that I’m leaving you?

  I burrow right into the same neck I cried on so many times as a child. In where I used to be when she carried me over-tired and emotional up to bed. In the nape of where so many things have been healed. And so many scooped out and scarred.

  Her shoulder flexes and her arm comes swinging slowly round like a crane or a boom, lands straight and simple on my back. Both of us wrapped in a clumsy embrace and this hammering of our hearts. The cricket crowd cheering something somewhere far away, on dry land.

  Her arm falls away and I rush to the phone, dialling the number so fast I dial too many and have to end the call. I punch in the numbers again but there’s just silence. I tap frantically at the button to end the call, listen again. Silence.

  I rush out the room, thunder upstairs, the phone still off the hook on her bed. I start to dial emergency from here but hang up and race back, the distant sound of applause on the TV.

  ‘Hang on, Mum.’

  A clinical voice answers and I say ‘Ambulance,’ the word like jelly and the crowd erupting again as the batsman hits a shot, the ball airborne, the cricketer waving while he wanders out to meet his team mate halfway, the ball landing in the stands.

  Immediately the replay is going at a tenth of the speed, the batsman leaning back, his lips gone, pulling the ball into the air, his eyes shutting at the moment of impact, the ball followed, the camera operator a genius for tracking it against the sky — all that air and just a little red ball, the kitchen walls and windows turning sky blue for a second.

  And in this moment, everything is in the air.

  I look back to Mum and her chest has sunk, her eyes gone and the ball lost into a load of outstretched hands.

  ‘Ambulance service. Go ahead, caller.’ All those hollowed-out emergency callers’ voices he hears on the line. This just another night at work for him, a cup of tea steaming on his worktop, a picture of his wife. How does he hear these things night after night without running home and never letting her go.

  ‘My mum’s dying. She’s got cancer.’ This image of a little tape recorder going round, pulling this phone call onto it.

  ‘Is she breathing?’

  I watch her chest in the TV half-light, the camera focused on low black cloud slung over the city, just beyond the cricket match, the commentators’ voices dropping a little, talking about my mum’s motionless chest.

  How many of us see a chest doing that, just sitting there. Still. She’s sunk under the water.

  ‘Mum?’

  The clinical voice says ‘Sir?’ from above the surface, the TV showing an image of a man in the crowd holding up the ball he caught. He looks like Dad. There he is smiling at me.

  The kitchen changes colour again because we see the sudden glare and vibrancy of the adverts.

  ‘Mum!’ I hang up the phone and go over to her, hesitant, then leaning in. I touch her face, stab the mute button on the remote control and the ads are silenced and we’re in a sudden quiet, the walls of the room changing colour with the high-speed editing of the selling. Her body motionless but that expression of soft and loving regret still on her face.

  I sit on the floor and lift her head into my lap, the phone starting up hammering its sound into the silence — ringing and ringing.

  Then stopping.

  After a while the tears come. Slow, vacant tears I’m not quite connected to. I just sit here stroking her forehead even though she’s already asleep.

  25

  Auntie Deadly says there’s a special place for bad children in hell and the devil visits every day after work to burn them. Plus parents can’t visit.

  When we get to Deadly’s house Dad helps unload my things and gives me a bad hug. Auntie D is standing in her doorway, filling it up. I don’t like the hug Dad gave me even though he’s getting very cuddlier. It was like the ones he used to give me when he’d had a bad day at work. You could tell his bad days cos his hair was spikier.

  These days his hair is normally always spiky even though he hasn’t got a job at all.

  Plus he’s going to leave me alone with Auntie Deadly which is like being dropped off at a giant lobster’s house. She looks like a lobster does Auntie Deadly. One with hairy armpits and a moustache. All big and pink and googoo eyes and claws for hands and a tough shell and she’d probably make you sick if you ate her. Like Dad and the lobster he had when we were on holiday and he was pigging out.

  Tahir from school has a Muslim God instead of our God. Tahir isn’t allowed to pig out. He muttons out.

  I don’t get that and nor does Tahir. He’s just using his dad’s jokes like they’re his. It’s stupid.

  On the way to Auntie Debbie’s Dad said we’re going to try to adopt Robert if we win the investigation. ‘Just letting you know,’ he said, ‘so it can start cooking in that big, hairy magic box of yours.’ Then he messed up my hair.

  I did my hair again.

  I thought I’d feel something when he said that about adopting but when I stuck my feelings dipstick into
my tummy it came up empty.

  ‘The hearing’s the day after tomorrow so it’s only a few days with Auntie. Don’t look like that, your mum and me just need a little bit of time. You know what fostering means to her. She needs some smooth sailing for a bit, no rocked boats. Social Services have got their beady eye on us, and if the worst happens at the hearing …’

  Auntie Deadly shows me my room which smells of pot puree and has a pink towel on the bed with flower patterns all over it and a window up high in the wall like in a prison. Only without bars. I swallow a lot when I first get to her house and she whispers with Dad before he leaves.

  I watch his car go and have this tummy feeling that I’m never going to see him again.

  ‘I do NOT want your grubby little paws touching my net curtains, thankyouverymuch!’

  I want to cry. The longer I stay here the more Mum and Dad will fall out of love with me.

  ‘Can I go home please, Auntie Debbie?’

  ‘Not a chance. Just be patient and behave yourself.’ She lights a cigarette and sits in her chair, filling it up. ‘You’ll do well to pull your horns in while you’re here, my boy. You got that? Sensitive my behind.’

  Dad packed me my Transformer even though I don’t play with it anymore. It just stays half changed between a burnt robot and a burnt monster.

  It’s dinnertime and I have to sit at the table until I’ve finished my LEEK and potato soup. It’s taking me ages and the soup’s already cold and I’m only halfway through. Meanwhile Auntie D is finished and watching TV in between spying on me, and all I’ve got to look at is soup plus some pictures on the wall of Auntie Deadly in smaller dresses before she had a moustache.

  Sometimes Dad does the ‘What’s the difference between a walrus and Auntie Deadly?’ joke. I always get the giggles and Mum looks skywards. ‘One of them has a moustache and stinks of fish, and the other one’s a walrus!’