Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  Graham asks how it is that Rien knows this is the real world. ‘I mean,’ he says with his freckled meaty hands on his hips, ‘all this time I thought it was some kind of fantasy.’ Rien, vigorously sweeping a pile of faded purple hair, flushes crimson and pushes the hair into the staff room where she can collect it without the customers’ eyes on her. But she knows Mai, who has her own ambitions to become an air hostess, means well. Mai tells Rien she is fed up with listening to people’s ‘coiffure-crises’ and dreams of disembarking in a new country each week. She wants to deliver food in neat silver serving trays and stand in the airplane kitchen sipping Bloody Marys from a plastic cup. ‘They’ve got everything on planes these days,’ she says, ‘even the celery garnish stays crisp.’ Sometimes she lists the names of exotic places she plans to go – the favoured is Paris, which she pronounces Paree – and describes with clasped hands how she will sit sipping coffee from one of those big-bowled mugs and tear the heart from a soft white baguette while the Eiffel Tower looms above.

  Graham loves to hear her describe such places and goads her with additional details – ‘Pigeon shit,’ he warns her, ‘that’s the side order in those outdoor cafes’, and ‘the canals of Venice smell like the world’s toilet’, but he brings her small gifts, a black felt beret, a glass dome full of tipsy gondolas and falling snow and, once, a toy Citroen.

  On her first day at work when Delilah told Rien her duties, she emphasised the importance of ‘pampering’ and how she specialised in ‘extras’, little touches that ensured the customers’ time was pleasantly spent. The staff were a kind and easygoing bunch, mocking the pretensions of the newer, groovier salons that dotted the busy street. Mai took Rien under her wing immediately, filling her in on the quirks and peculiarities of various clients – ‘Don’t fasten the gown too tightly around Mrs Esk’s neck, she has some throat phobia, thinks you’re gonna throttle her with the Velcro’, and ‘See that bloke, don’t stand too close, he’s been known to “accidentally” get his hand stuck underneath your skirt.’

  Rien soon realises that some customers like the way Mai clicks her tongue and shakes her head and says madre in an exotic Latino accent when they describe disastrous flutters at the Melbourne Cup, or their doomed love lives. In Mai’s view the storytellers are always to blame for their misfortunes. She works on the principle that anyone alive and able to tell the tale has been the least harmed by it. Such discursive powers, she believes, are both evidence and reason to doubt the intensity of their suffering.

  Mai tells the clients that Rien writes stories about salt, since this is the only description Rien has shyly proffered while fending off interrogations about her literary ambitions. Some of the regulars begin to bring in snippets they have found for her, bits of random information they think might help her on the way to a bestseller.

  One morning Jean arrives with a quote scrawled on the back of an envelope and reads it aloud as Rien prepares her for a shampoo.

  ‘Human beings, it has been said, are miniature oceans encased in skin, and salt solution is essential to blood, nerve impulses and heart action.’

  ‘Miniature oceans, I like that,’ Mai says then winks meaningfully at Rien, who now has her hands full of emptied coffee cups from the previous customers. She takes them to the kitchen where she scrubs off the lipstick rings around the rims. She holds them gingerly by their handles so she won’t have to touch where the customers’ mouths have been and swipes them inexpertly with a scouring brush. Rien thinks of Jean’s quote as she rinses the cups. Unlike Mai, it’s the words ‘heart action’ that interest her, not the bit about the sea. She thinks of her father, his heart failing on the front lawn, and the thin, salty tang of blood in her mouth that day. She must have bitten her tongue.

  Graham struts proudly in after successfully selling one of his second-hand cars. He asks Mai to trim what little wisps of hair remain plastered to his scalp, then tells Rien his story.

  ‘It’s ’istorical. You sail along the Arabian coast and you get your fine self to a city called Gerrha where the exiles from Babylon have settled.’

  ‘Boney M,’ Delilah interjects, her hands entwined in a ringlet perm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Graham’s irritation is thinly disguised.

  ‘Boney M – aren’t they the exiles from Babylon? Y’know how their song goes.’ Then she sings a line in a voice that startles them with its sweetness. Something about the rivers of Babylon, weeping and remembering.

  ‘Have you finished, Del? Okay, in this here Gerrha, there’s plenty of building material but it happens to be soil. So these people build their houses with the soil but the soil’s reeeal salty.’ He stretches out the last two words and pauses for maximum effect, cracking his knuckles loudly.

  ‘So then the bloody Arab sun is beatin’ down, beatin’ down on their houses and the flakes of salt start to peel off. And these poor buggers have to keep sprinkling their houses with water to keep the walls from collapsing. Imagine? Houses of salt …’

  ‘House of salt – sounds like the local fish and chipper.’ Mai’s comment is specially designed for Graham who frequents the nearby takeaway almost daily. He gives her a withering glance. It reminds Rien of the way the boys at the Home looked at the girls when they talked during Doctor Who.

  ‘Well, thanks, Graham,’ Rien says shyly, holding the broom in one hand, her head cocked to one side. She feels sheepish around all of the customers, but has grown fond of Graham. He reminds her of her grandfather who was shamelessly teased by the white-coated women who filled his scripts each week at the local chemist. He used to take Rien with him when she was young and they’d arrive home armed with chemist presents – bottles of lotion, and plastic-flower hairclips that she fingered lovingly then arranged in the fine, white wisps of her grandmother’s hair.

  Mrs Stephens, who had listened to Graham’s tale with a faintly amused expression, pops in the following day with a story from an old medical book. She tells Rien she has been reading about Ayurvedic medicine. Her thirty-year-old daughter is dying of cancer. ‘No, that’s not right, she’s living with cancer.’ Together they’re learning alternative methods. Meditation and diet. Chinese herbs and acupuncture. Massage and faith. She had one day quizzed Mai about her knowledge of herbs in Chinese culture. Rien had watched Mai’s carefully sculpted eyebrows move heavenward and down again, then saw a kind of bored and pained expression settle on her face. ‘Herbs?’ she had asked. ‘You mean like MSG?’

  Mrs Stephens sits, back upright, half-glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, and holds a sheet of paper at arm’s length. She announces to Rien that she has selected this passage with Graham in mind.

  ‘It’s from the Charaka Samhita, from the tenth century BC: “These men who are habituated to excessive measures of salt, suffer from absence of hair, baldness (partial or entire) of head, whiteness of hair and relaxation of the flesh. All these occur long before the maturity of years comes in”.’

  Rien and Mai laugh. Mrs Stephens, pleased with her research, smiles faintly at Rien, as if laughter’s an art she’s forgotten but likes to watch other people practise.

  Rien walks with Mai to the bus stop where they part each afternoon. Mai asks her about the book – is it nearly finished, when can she read it? Rien replies with a pleading note in her voice, she’s not really writing a book, it’s just lots of different stories. Mai says it doesn’t matter, lots of people write books of short stories. No, Rien says, she doesn’t really think it’s that kind of thing.

  ‘What about this boy you’re shacked up with then? Gonna tell me anything about him?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, is he a looker like Graham or just some ugly bastard you dragged home from the pub one night?’

  Rien laughs, covering her mouth as she pictures Graham waiting for her at home, aproned Graham in the kitchen, Graham reclining in her bed, naked. ‘Nah, he’s alright-looking you know …’

  ‘Madre! Your powers of description are truly spectacular, Rien. Come on.
You can do better than alright.’

  Rien is dumbstruck. She tries to picture Mark and cannot conjure him up. She finds it impossible to separate what she sees from what she knows of his being, recognising him only through his gestures, his voice, the warm smell released from his skin with the rub and heat of her hands. She thinks he is perfect, and that she is clumsily pieced together from a form once cracked apart. But how can she say this to Mai?

  She tries to picture him as a stranger would, passing him in the street, and sees dark hair he combs with his fingers. Hair he used to cut himself, without a mirror, using a pair of nail scissors. Now he lets her do it – she sets a chair in the yard, in a sliver of sun or shade depending on the heat. And he sits calmly while she slides a pair of borrowed salon scissors through the thick strands, imagining the sound she is making as she passes them above his ears. A clean metal swish, the whiskery grinding of his hair between the blades.

  Her thoughts have gone astray. Mai, impatient, is flicking madly at her lighter, a cigarette dangling gangster-style from her lower lip.

  ‘Grey-blue eyes, heavy eyelids. Longer lashes than mine.’ Then she drifts off again: slight but broad shoulders that betray a surprising and pleasing strength. From behind, his spine’s a delicate print; a pattern of bones that remind her of the shape and texture of a seahorse. A little dark hair across his chest. His soft stomach seems a form designed for kissing – his bellybutton an eye that grazes hers, its visceral pull when she touches it reminding her of how he was once connected like he’ll never be again: the cord uncoiled and beating with blood.

  ‘His skin,’ Rien says finally, ‘I think, is olive.’

  Mai shakes her head in disappointment and blows smoke from a corner of her mouth. ‘You think! Is this one of your stories?’

  Rien shifts uncomfortably and begins to say goodbye, glancing down at her bare wrist and gesturing toward the bus stop as if she knows the timetable, that the bus will soon be there.

  ‘Yeah, you’d better get yourself home and take a good look. I’m expecting a full report on my desk tomorrow, ten o’clock sharp.’

  When she arrives home she finds a newspaper on the kitchen table, red crayon arrows drawn across it, leading her eye to a small article on page five. Mark has found something new for her archive, she thinks, another bleak tragedy she can transform into her own words, then notices his name, Harry Barnett. The police were still tracking him down and now believed him responsible for the Home fire. She sits slowly on a milk-crate chair, wondering where he could be. She says a small prayer to speed him on his way. Harbouring a known felon isn’t her idea of a fresh start to their life, but they owe him at least that much.

  It was Dog Boy, after all, who had introduced her to Mark. After she was released from the Home clinic she had watched Mark from afar, his mantle of stillness. Whatever he touched was lit upon with care. When he spoke the sounds around him seemed to cease. His body emitted a blue and tranquil light, but she saw the white violence at its edges, noticed his calm and mistook it for peace when it was the stillness of a body in a vice of its own design. She wrote him notes then tore them into confetti and poured them into the wind beneath the dormitory windows. She didn’t have the faith required to speed the messages’ meaning: that small degree of belief in the possibility of another’s understanding. Two months in the Home and she was still a girl without community.

  When Mark came to the Home, Dog Boy told her, he carried wires, plugs and switches – all the components that converted him from boy to machine. He’d plug himself into the wall several times a day. Wire himself up to eat, sleep and breathe. He’d built himself a world that was all about control, but he forgot the bright fact of pain. How it knows no edges, slips inside the most intricate structures. After two years of silent connecting he gave up some of his attachments and began to use his voice. His mother’s story was he’d just turned mute one day. As if he’d awoken one morning and decided. But he had the vocabulary of someone twice his years, he just lost the will to use it.

  When Mark was nine he hooked up with a kid he called Power Pete who Mark believed was a source of constant electrical power he could connect himself to. When his own internal motor was failing, he would seek Pete out, make worshipping gestures of deference in front of him, then attempt to link one of his wires up with some part of Pete’s body.

  Pete soon grew tired of being treated like a walking battery pack and shrugged off Mark’s attempts to plug himself into his left arm one winter afternoon. Dog Boy had watched the screaming tantrum that followed this refusal and heard Mark exclaim, ‘He broke my feelings.’

  A few months later Mark fractured his hand while pounding it against the brick wall of the dormitory saying, ‘It won’t work, I must smash it to pieces.’ This happened just days after he was caught puncturing his stomach with a butter knife in order to drain the blood from his body. Because, he had said impatiently when questioned, he was overheating. His brief explosions of physical harm occurred more often as he gave up his repertoire of wires and circuitry, of plugging and switching. In order to relinquish the senseless gleam of his machines, he had to discover the messy unpredictability of his own body. And since his destructive energies threatened no other child but himself, the Home doctors chose to simply minimise and contain them, set limits on the toys and objects he had access to.

  Three months after Rien arrived, Mark and Dog Boy approached her together for the first time, thinking they could draw her out of a fast-descending blackness. They’d spied her climbing the stairs of the bell tower the night before, seen a shaky leaning into the dark that no one else noticed. Dog Boy found her in the corner of the library, reading a book on anatomy, her head bowed, intent over the heart’s four chambers. She was whispering a word full of secret power: ventricular. Mark stood gazing at her. She looked into the dark architecture of his face; it was like viewing an x-ray, so clearly did she see right through to the grey medulla of bone.

  Mark held out one of five pieces of glass he carried with him. He put the blood-red, stippled surface to her eye: a gift of solace. They stood in the company of silence and a world turned crimson.

  It’s official – Dog Boy is out in the raw, wild world. Rien thinks his name in newsprint makes him seem more real than in the flesh. She jumps at the creaking sound of the rusted front door hinges and expects to see him standing there, a sandy-haired, freckled Harry in a corona of red, as if sped across the city on a cape of fire. But it’s Mark who saunters in and thumps a pile of fresh newspapers onto the table. He has bought every edition, including the ones with lurid invented news.

  ‘Might be some clues in there,’ he says gesturing to the paper pile. ‘Where he’s at, where’s he’s been – if not, all the more for your scrapbook stories.’ He scratches an old wound on his forearm.

  A whirr of worry starts up in Rien’s chest as she surveys the headlines: DINGOES RAISE INFANT TWINS AFTER DESERT DESERTION, VAMPIRE-GRANNY SAYS TEENAGE BLOOD TASTES BEST. The world out there, Rien thinks, the people in it, Dog Boy somewhere in the mire and muck, fire his only companion.

  Dark Therapy

  Slowness is important. I like to say good morning to the world on my own. So I get up early. Half an hour of peace. Climb up the rooftop to watch the sun crank itself up the sky. Sit and watch the confusion – the just-woken faces as they walk by.

  Shiftworkers in overalls.

  Garbage men.

  Runners, panting.

  The half-tanked stumbling home.

  Dog-walkers with their shit scoopers.

  The bedraggled night ladies with their bright and broken shoes.

  I send them a daily prophecy, ‘You’re doomed, you’re all doomed!’, watch their faces turn skyward. They think it’s GOD or something. Bothering to talk to them.

  It’s then I think of it, how he could just be walking by – any stranger, any old Joe with his hands in pockets, hunched down in his coat. I start to look carefully, to really peer. Think about getting hold of some bin
oculars. A telescope. Something to help me widen the view. I try to stay alert. Make a mental list of certain features. Like a poem of me.

  One mole brown, left forearm.

  Thick dark hair, no curls.

  Eyes grey or poss. blue.

  Nose broad but not hooked.

  Long hands, nails squarish.

  Not tall, top of ears pointed.

  Long legs, narrow hips.

  Not too hairy.

  An amateur’s identikit photo. Put all those bits together and you’ll likely end up with a mess. Face like one of those newspaper crims. A mug like no one that’s ever roamed the earth. Chances are my father looks nothing like me. Probably the case I’m a throwback to the previous generation. Nothing like my mother, nor her father tall and gruff, broad as I am narrow.

  Rien wrecks the whole sham. Yells up the chimney back at me:

  ‘Jesus, Mark, it’s 5.30, what the fuck are you doing?’

  She’s freaked. Probably thinks it’s some weirdo Santa Claus. Been hanging round since Christmas, trying to get his arse out of the chimney. I choose not to tell her about my search. Talk of fathers makes her jittery. Gets her delicate heart thumping at a record rate. Rien and I were only children. My first father up and left when I was two, hers called her precious then died on her.

  My real father’s the mystery I have to solve. Maybe his hands were gentle on me. Maybe he wasn’t like the others that replaced him. I tell Rien my father got renewed, over and over. And she goes, ‘Like a library book?’ Yeah, I say, only I couldn’t return them and choose another. Nor could I, she says, reminds me I’m the luckier one – my dad’s still out there somewhere, not lying stiff in the cold soil. So I try to keep the topics neutral with my girl. She’s had enough pushing to remember her tragic early life. Head-shrinking every week at the Home.

  What I figured out. Two kinds of people make up the world. Those who provide the circuits. Those who need the tiny connections to live. I knew from the start she had something to work out, by her overthinking, overbreathing.