Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  I practise my new name under my breath. My wolf eyes will spy all the shades of darkness. I’ll sense the things to avoid with the prickle of fine hairs down the length of my spine and the sniff and tang of a breeze. I knew that when the time came to leave the Home, it would travel along the air and I would smell it.

  I carved the marks on the chipboard back of my dormitory bed. Still got the blond splinters beneath my nails. Scratchwork: each line was a day passing, a countdown to my departure.

  This wasn’t how it was gonna be. Not how Mark swore on Jonas’s grave. We’d light a raging fire in the teachers’ wing, sneak out while the Home was in chaos. A conflagration, Mark called it. Lit in memory of Jonas. Jonas whose laugh used to sound like his sputtering fires. He taught me all there was to know about making unwanted things into a flickering sight. The way you make the past a present, he’d say. And light me up another. ‘Once you start playing with fire all those tears’ll dry right up.’ Showed me how nearly everything could burn, in the right conditions. The fires in the Home were bright moments in the blur of months passing. When I watched his firebug work I wanted to make a noise to wake the devil.

  Fire in the green metal garbage bins that lined the school hallways. Creaking and singing when they got hot. In the toilet bowls stuffed full of paper rolls. ‘Oh miss I seem to have rather explosive bowels,’ Jonas’d yell. Made farting noises with his cheeks sucking in and out. In the emptied lockers at the end of the day. ‘Now, kids, today’s lesson is about nothing, that’s right, nothing. So you can all just set your books on fire and piss off back to your mummies. Oh sorry, kiddies, I forgot you don’t have any mummies. Boo hoo.’ In the lost-property bin full of blue school tracksuit tops and bottoms. Skid-marked underwear. Unravelling jumpers.

  I was sworn to secrecy. He’d set my bed on fire if I ever let the truth out. A burning bed with a roast Dog Boy in it. That was the promise he made me. I hid the lighters and boxes of matches smuggled into the school and Jonas gave me things in return. Bubble gum and cigarettes, sometimes money. Bits for Mark’s machines – wires and the clunked-out bellies of clocks. Water meters no more ticking. One day the stomach of the fire alarm gouged out with a blade. ‘This one’s for the future,’ he said, for our grand plan to burn the whole place down. I think about him now. Dead and burnt and in the ground. Jonas buried like old Rover. Mum’s favourite dog.

  A conflagration – that was how it was gonna be till Jonas died and Mark found a reason not to start the burning. Someone. Rien wanted to wait till they were legal and could go freely into the new world. They got permission from the Home. Old enough to leave on their own. Walked out, no one chasing after.

  ‘Mate,’ Mark had said, ‘if this bag was big enough I’d carry you out of here in it.’ A backpack packed full, so the zipper wouldn’t even close. Yeah, that’s right. I watched and couldn’t speak. Maybe if I chopped you into pieces, he said and waited for me to laugh but I went to the toilet block and sat in the shit-stained stall. Flicked lit matches till the light of morning. And then they left.

  Rain became my friend. I’d poke a long tongue out the window. Drip drip. A tongue dry from panting and waiting. My breath got heavy trying to catch my thoughts. I’d let the drops from the dirty sky drip right into my mouth, standing on tiptoes to reach. Tasted like lead pencils which I used to suck till my lips went black. Looked out the dorm window onto the world. I could see the thousand rooftops that would lead me to them. Behind me was a jar of marbles Mark had left when he said goodbye. I didn’t play with them though, nup, there was no one left to play. The marbles stared like bottled eyes from their place on the shelf. The green made me think of Dad’s best pet, Hermann, the Alsatian. The shining black was like Mark’s deepest goodbye look.

  Three stations to go till the old suburb looms up. I take myself to the shaky train toilet. Graffiti climbs the walls.

  Susan luvs Giovanni 4 eva and he is a top root.

  Gina Lewis is a four-eyed slut.

  Henry P eats shit on toast for breckfast.

  Search in my bag for a pen, then remember an easier way to leave my mark. Stuff the toilet full of paper, check outside till the second-last station flies past then strike a match and light the fire. Bolt down to the back part of the train imagining the flames scribbling burn-messages on the toilet walls: Dog Boy sets the world on fire.

  Three days ago I told myself it’s time. Mark and Rien gone for weeks. I’m out of here. Breakneck speed.

  I walked up and down in my room through the afternoon then huddled in a pretend sleep when the go-to-bed bell rang. At midnight I took a bite of the stale bread in my pocket. Snuck down the corridor with the lighters and matches, Rien’s old newspapers full of holes, the petrol tin from the days of Jonas. Inside the Home hall I took another look at the artwork hanging there, cabinets filled with plasticine sculptures and papier-mâché lumps pretending to be animals and humans. I tore one of the pictures down, evidence of something that Rien ought to see. Yeah, that’s right. I stuffed three garbage bins with paper, lit a match, put it back in the box, and dropped the lot inside. Stood and waited for a little blaze. Broke the lighters with a brick and spread the oily liquid down the hall, splashed petrol round the base of the doors, lit the trail of fluid, took one final look to see a curtain of fire, then jammed a book behind me as I pulled the door shut. Stepped out into the half-light, my smoke-seared nostrils pointing in the direction of the rest of my life.

  Now I say to all the alone boys and girls that live at the Home: Dog Boy’s gone away. Good people are out there, waiting for me.

  I leap through the sliding doors and out onto the platform.

  Cassie

  Cassie watched her neighbour from the upstairs bathroom window – the child was wandering around the garden, stopping to pluck something from the branch of a tree then pocketing it, a pensive kid with long black hair and large dark eyes. As the afternoon turned to dusk she continued to glance into the yard before realising that the girl couldn’t get into the house. She climbed a tree, then slid down the bark of it. She stood in the middle of the yard composing herself for a moment then flung her body upside down and teetered in a handstand for a few seconds before bringing her feet to the ground and flinging her hands in the air as if at the end of a gymnastics performance. When the sun disappeared behind the gums along the back fence Cassie walked next door past a tree full of shiny black crows that seemed to mock her with their ark ark ark. She crab-walked down the narrow weedy passage at the side of the house. The girl was standing by a bush of daisies, chanting something as she plucked petals from a flower. When Cassie caught her eye she dropped the stem in alarm and shut her eyes quickly saying, You can’t see me.

  Cassie waited, shifting from one foot to the other in the damp evening air. As insects ticked and trees shuffled in the slow breeze, she found herself momentarily doubting the reasons for her presence there and almost obliged the girl her fervent wish. She turned to leave but something pricked, her conscience perhaps, or simple curiosity.

  She had heard the stories from the Barnes and the Boronskis about the events that had split apart what seemed a quiet close family, years ago. They were muffled piecemeal tales that respected no chronology and hardly fulfilled the usual criteria Cassie required for truth. Was it these bits of gossip that fuelled her decision to confront the girl? She persuaded herself she was there for the child’s well-being but, given the chance, might make her own inquiries about the truth or otherwise of what she had heard. This was only fair, and would achieve the journalistic balance she had been trained to maintain. But though she often dressed her intentions in the morally spotless tenets of a fair go for all, she was stirred by usual human curiosity and a certainty that things askew could be put right. It was all a matter of seizing opportunities and accessing particular resources. She might have been a lawyer or a social worker, but her daily work allowed the combination of both and, for now, she believed thoroughly in its purpose.

  When the girl finally raise
d the lid of her left eye she took two steps back. Cassie asked her name. Two syllables came in firm reply: Ree an. She spoke vacantly, a little wearily as if in rote response to a repeated question in class. She said, when asked, that her mother was probably out with ‘the new man’ and Cassie felt a small piece in the neighbourhood puzzle slide neatly into place. Sometimes they went to the club together, Rien didn’t know where it was or when they would return. She seemed defensive, fisting her hands, her head on a leftward tilt toward her shoulder, summing Cassie up with a cool curiosity. She balanced on one foot, holding the other against her bony knee. Her arms were bare and goosebumped, her toes poked through the holes in each of her blue sneakers. Soon Cassie led the girl down the side alley and peered into the uncurtained windows as she passed. Through the gloom she could discern the lumpen form of a lounge chair, a pair of pigeon-toed shoes and the mercury gleam of a mirror on the wall. The spartan arrangement of the room confirmed the impression she had – it might have described a monastic spaciousness but did not. She wondered about what was not visible – toys, bright colours, such things that might be provided for a child. She left a note on the front doorstep, scrawled on the back of a Dial A Pizza flyer.

  Inside Cassie’s kitchen Rien sipped at a second mug of steaming soup and Cassie buttered more toast, cutting each piece into quarters so the girl could dip the bread.

  ‘Soldiers,’ Rien contemplated the toast. ‘Pops made these for me when I was little. They’re not really soldiers but you could pretend and march them into the middle of your egg.’

  ‘Do you see your pop very often?’

  ‘I’m not allowed. I don’t like soft eggs because they dribble so I squidge the hard egg onto the soldier with my spoon.’

  She asked to use the toilet then followed Cassie’s pointing arm to the stairs which she bounded up two by two. She returned smelling of soap, her hands and face wet and gleaming.

  ‘You have quite a big bathtub!’

  ‘Yes. Do you have one at your house?’

  ‘I’m dirty, Mrs Peters said.’ She looked down at her stained clothes and stretched out one leg to examine a scraped and dusty knee.

  ‘Is that your teacher?’

  Rien nodded, then spoke gravely. ‘Do you think I am dirty?’

  ‘Maybe you’d like to try out the bath?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, her face suddenly illuminated, ‘I really am quite a grub.’

  ‘We’ll put some bubbles in.’

  ‘Will you blow them first?’

  ‘No, they come in a bottle, it’s what you call a bubble bath.’

  Rien stepped timidly into the tub and bent to feel the water with her hands. A hank of hair slid over her shoulder like black oil. She was thin-skinned, the purple runnels of her veins showed where her flesh stretched over bone; a bright pink plaster was stuck to one side of her chest. She put her hand to it briefly and felt around the curling edges, pushing them against her skin. Cassie wondered what the plaster concealed; it was a strange place for an injury. Once seated Rien gathered up the bubbles and arranged them in a glistening shawl about her narrow shoulders.

  She stayed in the tub for more than an hour, soaping herself and gently blowing bubbles across the water. Cassie helped her wash her hair, rinsing it with bowls of water from the sink. Rien cleaned herself with great care and concentration, like no seven-year-old Cassie had ever seen, stopping to soap a finger and poke it behind each ear and between her toes. Finally she stood, red-skinned from her scrubbing, to wrap her body in a towel.

  Cassie stood by the window as Rien dressed, watching the fluttery shape of the girl reflected in the glass. She was picking up each item of clothing gingerly, as if she expected to find a cockroach or spider in a fold of cloth. Cassie peered into the yard next door, then looked to the back windows for lights, some sign of the mother’s return. Nothing. The streetlight cast a butter-coloured beam across the front lawn of the house. In the corner of the yard the dark bones of the macrocarpa were hung with clusters of pods. They swung like furred bats in the stiff night breeze.

  By nine o’clock Cassie had decided the girl would stay the night. She would leave another note for the mother, inviting her to come over or phone at any time. Rien spelt her name aloud, wandering around the kitchen, then stood transfixed before a jar of preserved apricots above the stove.

  ‘I saw a baby once, pickled in a jar like that. A feed, something, a feedus. It looked so sad all drowned in the water. I waved and tapped on the glass but its eyes were closed like its little hands.’

  ‘So where is your lovely name from?’ Cassie would not ask about the pickled child. It was better not to encourage.

  ‘French.’

  ‘Well, it’s lovely. Is your mother from France?’

  ‘No. Mum wanted to call me queen but guess what – they spelt it wrong when I was born. It was meant to be e-i and n-e. Reine. Then she liked the new name even more. She used to sing a song with my name in it.’ She tilted her head and fixed Cassie with a burning look. ‘She was a singer. What do you do?’

  ‘I write stories,’ Cassie signed the note with a small flourish, Cassandra Cord, joining the tale of the d in her surname to the tip of the C so the word became enclosed.

  ‘Oh books!’ Rien sighed and clasped her hands against her chest.

  ‘No, I write for a newspaper about people and things that happen in the city.’

  ‘You could write about me!’ Her voice remained animated, her eyes alight with anticipation.

  ‘Well, I suppose … but you would have to do something special first … let me see – do you plan to become a TV star, Rien, or a singer?’

  ‘My dad was in the newspaper once for dying.’

  Cassie straightened in her chair and leant forward toward Rien who now sat nonchalantly peering about the room, though her hands were clenched more tightly it seemed, the flesh stretched whitely across each knucklebone.

  ‘Oh, honey, that must have been sad,’ she was ready to comfort, and expected to.

  ‘No, I don’t remember if it was sad. Sad mad bad. Being sad can make you mad!’ The girl said this in a singsong voice. Cassie tried to disguise her alarm, composing her malleable features, then suggested the girl had read this line in a book. It sounded like Dr Seuss.

  ‘My dad had lots of books, he used to read to me. ‘

  ‘And your mum reads to you now?’

  ‘Well, sometimes. She gets the words mixed up and I say no that’s not right and sometimes she says “You read to me”. I like Harriet the Spy. I have a special spying book like she does. I used to like Chicken Little, and sometimes I still read it. The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’ She turned suddenly as Andrew strode into the room with Kate.

  Cassie had left the new note on the crumbling sandstone doorstep of the house next door, weighing it down with a glass bottle. In the morning it was still there. She knocked loudly on the door and peered again into the windows. The light was bright now, the floorboards bare. The few pieces of furniture did look stranded beneath the stream of yellowy dust motes.

  ‘No sign of the mother,’ she said to Andrew as he looked at the untouched note, sipped his coffee and sighed. Rien was a shifting mound under the covers on a mattress in the lounge.

  She walked in hushed steps to where the girl lay, hearing the small rattle of breath in the throat as she picked up her folded clothes. She dug inside each pocket of the grubby red shorts and found a flat dove-coloured stone, a crumpled note and a half-destroyed daisy, which she recognised from the bush in the child’s backyard. The paper of the note was soft like chamois, it had been folded and unfolded so many times. It contained three letters in a rounded child’s hand: FFG. She washed the clothes and spun them in the drier. When Rien began to stir, she picked up the paper and rock to return them to the pocket. Right or left? She tried to remember which and noticed an R scratched on the underside of the stone. She guessed left and slid them in.

  Delilah’s Hairdressing Emporium

&nb
sp; Rien’s workmate, Mai, tells her that in Chinese the character for salt, yen, is a pictograph made up of three images: a servant, a pool of brine and a pottery cooking pot. This was how salt was made before the discovery of natural evaporation. Rien falls in love with the image and carries it around in her head all day. There’s work inside the word; there’s labour in yen and a human figure toiling with it.

  Delilah’s Hairdressing Emporium is decked out like a stable with wooden panelling, studded leather seats and an old saddle and stirrups mounted on the wall. The decor wasn’t strictly Delilah’s thing – she had taken the salon over from its previous owners who had run the business as Mane Man, and for now she was stuck with the stable effect. Rien had at first assumed the salon appealed to a particular type of male customer, but it was mostly older women who visited. Delilah knew the local suburb well and had many friends and acquaintances with a huge array of coiffure needs. The men came in after work, or during their lunch breaks, and between times there’d be sets and curls and blue rinses for the ladies and occasionally someone would bring their kids in for a tidy-up, their fresh young faces incongruous amidst all the wine-coloured leather and horsy paraphernalia, their soft hair falling in startling shiny loops among the wiry beard clippings and drifts of greying hair.

  Rien was employed as an apprentice, but unofficially she was the floor sweeper, coffee maker, port pourer and glass washer. Delilah was the first to offer her a position after she had phoned most of the salons listed in the local directory:

  A Cut Above

  Curl Up and Dye

  Cut and Dried

  Hair We Are

  House of Hair

  Scissors Palace

  Snip and Pluck

  Top Crop

  Mai, the youngest of three hairdressers in the salon, tells the clients Rien is a writer, that she sweeps floors only in order to research the ‘real world’ beyond her head. ‘Why else,’ she asks Graham, who, despite near baldness, has come in for his regular trim, ‘would she hang around with the likes of you?’