Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  Dog Boy reaches up to pat the golden dog, saying, ‘Hello there, Mr, you’re a lovely fellow aren’t you yes.’

  ‘It is Miss, actually, she’s Lola, the lovely Lola,’ the man says. ‘And I am Salvatore. Are you coming to the meeting?’ While he grapples to zip himself and stand, Dog Boy sees that the chapel doors have opened and several people are milling around inside. On a board at the top of the stairs there is a notice: Griefwork. Thursday 9 am. Welcome all Parents and Friends, Brothers and Sisters. Father Gosper on Loss and Anger.

  The man reaches out for Dog Boy’s arm and grips it so Dog Boy walks with him and his dog into the coolish gloom of the church. He sniffs a dusty bookish smell and the waxy scent of candles. About twenty people have gathered and are perched on the long wooden pews. Most of them wear some kind of badge on their coats but each is of a different shape, size and colour. He sees now that the man beside him has a picture of a young boy’s face stitched to his coat lapel. A smiling chubby child. Slowly he realises they all wear faces on their jackets. A hush descends, the mutters cease, a craggy-faced man in robes stands at the head of the chapel and begins to speak.

  After the meeting Dog Boy and Salvatore descend the slope beyond the chapel. A swatch of water wavers in the distance. Dog Boy had yawned and scratched and thrown bits of paper into the air to amuse Lola inside the chapel. He remembered few words, but felt the changing weight of the air in the room as the meeting progressed. Those bodies hunkered further into their coats at times, the air suddenly burdensome, and some dabbed at eyes with handkerchiefs and tissues.

  ‘Let’s sit,’ the man suggests and Dog Boy leads him to a wooden bench in the sun. He unwraps the pile of scones he has stashed inside his t-shirt and puts one into the man’s palm.

  ‘So,’ Dog Boy recalls the meeting, and peers closely at the man’s jacket. ‘This is your son and he’s … gone?’

  ‘Mmm,’ the man feeds small pieces of the scone to Lola. ‘Antonio. Missing is how I like to say.’ He settles further back into the bench as if preparing himself, then continues.

  ‘He loves to wear the dress-ups of our neighbour Gina. He steals this harlequin outfit and with it he sleeps under his pillow. He wears this costume all the day, he will not take it off. His mother say, “Antonio, we must for bathing”. But Antonio takes the bath in this outfit! His mother looks at this – her child in the bathtub with the puffy pants and she is shaking her head, you know. The mother say it is not right, a boy in clown dress in the bath. But he’s a happy boy, Margaret, look at him. There he is smiling, smiling, these pants are drowned in the bath. Antonio. I say to Margaret, “Rubber ducky, clown pants, what difference?”.’

  Dog Boy listens, confused. He grins down at the dog, then looks toward the water and sees a tiny boat teetering there.

  ‘Antonio loves the dance of ballet too. He stands at the front gate of the house in his clown dress and here he does his dance. Dance of the first spring flower, dance of the fallen branch, dance of the butterfly landing on the leaf. Dance, yes, even once it was dance of the three-legged dog! The dog of our neighbour who has the accident with a car. You like that one? All the day he dance dressed like a clown. The orange wig upon his head. His mother in the garden planting the vegetables. Watching him. He doesn’t want to plant vegetables, he says, he only want fruit trees and flowers, strawberries he like – magnolia, plum tree …

  ‘Then this day, in the morning,’ Salvatore clears his throat, ‘this bright morning, Antonio put the clown clothes on. He sleep, a miracle! this night in his pyjama, but on with the clown in the morning. That is the day he is stolen. In this wig and clothes of our neighbour. And I think always – somewhere is this dress-ups now. It will tell us something about what happened, where Antonio went to.’

  ‘But who stole him?’ Dog Boy pets Lola gently. She is placid, her eyes close.

  ‘He is in the garden. Margaret pulls the peas. She takes the peas inside our house. One minute. Then she is outside again. Maybe two minutes. The sunny yard. Antonio is gone. Maybe two minutes, she says. Then gone. She searches searches all the morning. Then comes to me where I am working. Her hands smell like fresh peas. Her fingers are bleeding …’

  Salvatore pauses, wringing his own hands and Dog Boy waits because he knows the story isn’t finished, though he senses it may never be.

  ‘Then we give this picture to the police,’ he taps the image of Antonio sewn so securely to his coat.

  ‘We have none of him in the costume. Only this, his school uniform, looking like the big man. Our boy. For the posters, the newspaper.’

  ‘But how can you see it?’ Dog Boy watches Lola roll onto her back, her pink belly expectant, waiting for his touch.

  ‘I am not all the days blind like the bats! Only the last few years I see very little. I hoped, you know, I could find my son before this with the glasses. But no matter, I will see him in my way. The hands, the nose will know my son even after the years pass.’

  ‘Maybe he’s dead though.’ Dog Boy wonders how many years Salvatore has been telling his story. The pictured boy looks no older than six or seven.

  Salvatore sits quiet for a long moment while Dog Boy continues to pat the dog. Salvatore brushes imaginary crumbs from his lap then says his wife left him, many years ago. He falters for a moment, smoothing the old worn fabric of his trousers more vigorously now. Margaret believes the boy is dead, he says. She wanted to adopt another child. But he would not give up hope, he said, nor replace his son with some substitute child.

  Dog Boy thinks of the word missing and of some of the stories he had heard from the children at the Home. Most of them hoped to be reunited with their families, even when it was clear their parents had caused them great suffering. Dog Boy now feels ashamed to realise he doesn’t share their feelings. He had been happy, true enough, with the company of his family’s dogs, and missed them, achingly at first. But those words cried out in the dormitory night – Mum! or Dad! – are truly absent of feeling for him. They seem more like labels you stick to objects to remember what they are. Instead he developed a deep sympathy for the children who called out.

  ‘So tell me. Who is missing in your life?’ Salvatore turns to Dog Boy, as if to search his face for clues and Dog Boy feels suddenly adrift. He tells Salvatore he has made a mistake, no one in his life has gone missing. Who do you love then? Salvatore asks. A lucky girl perhaps?

  Love? Dog Boy considers this and can only think of things, the volcano he and Mark built in science class after they had learnt about Krakatoa, an eruption heard at the other side of the world nineteen hours after, the cannon-shot sound travelling the fastest recorded in history. But how can he explain such a thing to Salvatore? That what he loves is the life on the island beginning again. All the creatures and plants were swallowed in ash and magma but in years new forms were struggling away. Seeds and small animals were carried across the sea, windborne or on the feathered transit of birds. He loves to think of small creatures rafting across to the burnt island on leaves and bits of bark, of things landing purely by accident.

  He thinks of the secret growing sounds of plants and how he loves to lean into the rush of the breeze, recognising the texture of wind by the lift of hair on his forearm; of seeing the colour of a plant, a flower petal as another frequency in the vibrating plane of his life – not just geranium red or cornflower blue but an energetic transfer of light and sound. He moves through a private universe filled with shimmering lights, glowing auras. He can look into a stretch of bush and see rainbow explosions amid the banksias and gums. Certain plants or rocks glow, radiating their specific hues and emitting a kind of hum. Colour is not a thing – it lives and moves beyond sight – dark blue emits a low, chest-rumbling note, wattle-yellow has an airy dissipating soprano. Bruise-green gives off an open undulating sound. Hot pink is shrill. A sound can be tasted and sniffed, a sight felt with the skin and understood by the noises conducted, by the timbre of scent coming off it.

  All these things are part of a pri
vate world beyond words and Dog Boy does not know how, or even if, he wishes to share them. He repeats, he is missing no one but adds, he is searching for some friends. Perhaps they are missing you, Salvatore says, then yawns. ‘I think it’s time for a morning drink. Come join me. And then we’ll make a plan, help you find your friends, eh?’

  Salvatore heads off toward a nearby pub and Dog Boy walks by his side, looking down at the working dog, so trusting, so clever the way she shows her master where to go, guiding him slowly down each step, barking at the edge of the pavement. He observes Lola’s attentive face, and feels a yellow gladness spreading despite the empty niggle in his chest. His early morning sadness may soon be torn apart like the grey sky, the blue light now tumbling out.

  Everything and Nothing

  There are days when looking at him directly is too much. His lingering gaze feels like a question. She turns her head away. To return his look with the same force would be to surrender something she doesn’t believe she has.

  Sometimes he holds her pinned against the bed so she can almost feel the slats of wood in the pallets beneath the mattress. The princess who wants the pea, she thinks, the harder the better. He clenches her two wrists together with one hand which makes her think of the animals at the back of Butcher Joe’s, the ones she had peered at, fascinated, as a child, their hooves tied and hung from the ceiling. He puts his free hand at the base of her jaw and turns her face toward him. All that she has left, with her limbs flattened and held to the bed, his weight on her lower half, is her eyelids’ slow decline. He ties her this way so his hands are free to roam, he avoids the bite of her teeth then, the pinch of her waggling fingers – but she has no interest in harming him, it’s his squeezing grip, the points of his teeth she wants and her threshing hands against their restraints are the only way she knows to ask him for it.

  When he touches her gently she says, ‘I don’t know anything about it. It feels like nothing.’ She wants his hands on her hard, or not at all.

  One day she shaves him, a private affair. She puts a blindfold across his eyes and takes off her clothes. Circles him slowly in the kitchen, the vinyl squishing against her bare feet, keeping a careful distance from his hands. She is halfway through his four-day stubble when a finger brushes the skin of her stomach and he says, ‘Here are the rules – for every stroke of the blade I get one touch.’

  This is the way he turns her game into his. But then, with his smooth cheek against her back, there are no rules except what is translated from the skin of his body and the heat of hers. His blindfold still in place, the blade a little blunter – streaked with dark stubble and left by the kitchen sink.

  Sometimes she remembers the boy before all of this and feels the rush of an ancient guilt. How has she changed him? He once knew nothing of her body’s secrets, of the tension between what is kept fast inside and what is revealed. Now she has forced it upon him, the ten pressing pads of her fingers, the gnashing weight of her bones at his hips. Everything kept tight and then revealed, her fast coming breath, the world gone white, her gasp released and funnelling up to the rafters.

  This is what she loves: he is artless where she feels all art, a series of gestures copied and performed, over and over. He is like the sea creatures that make their shells from the substances of their bodies. He is entirely at home in his skin.

  The House-Machine

  The day was gusty, great puffs of pollution filled the air, Mark’s throat stung from diesel blasts and the plumes of gritty smoke that poured from the shoddy exhausts of Toranas, Datsuns and Holdens cruising and skidding down the streets. A cluster of men sat huddled in a vacant block, in conference, passing a paper-wrapped bottle between them. Mark sat on a nearby bench, watching the day pass, thinking of how any one of them could be his dad. He wasn’t certain he would even recognise his mother’s face anymore, could only remember it framed in the ochre glow of his night light, hovering above him as she tucked him into bed or dug him out of some small cubby hole he had wedged himself into.

  One of the men stood from the group and lurched toward the road; the others watched the man’s stumbling with cool interest. He seemed to be drunk, unsteady on his feet, one arm circled beside him like the blade of a tilted helicopter. Mark stood as the man teetered at the edge of the gutter and bent to pick an invisible item up from the road. Cars whizzed past, missing his head by a fraction, their horns blaring.

  Mark ran to the man to pull him back, remembering the time he had seen someone crushed after ambling onto the zebra lines of a pedestrian crossing. That body had made a sound like something deflating, the cracked head on the ground like a split watermelon – the same red watery oozing, the black flecks of seed. Mark grabbed the man’s arm as he turned toward him, his eyes wild and pale as if the colour had been drained out, his breath a sour whiff.

  ‘Mate, you’re going to get yourself killed,’ Mark said, pointing to the road. But the man seemed to be looking into some intangible place, a smile growing slowly.

  Mark knew plenty about oblivion, discovering the limits of the gristle and bone, the dark quarters beneath his own flesh. But his childhood experiments in watching the blood burst from beneath his skin had never been about wanting to die. He had only craved to know what stuff he was made of, to feel the harsh pain of a cut, so that he might better understand the limits of his self. He had taught himself there was more to life than the body alone, than the pain of a wound. He would quite calmly watch the blood leak from his body, and soon learnt that some other force remained, enabling him to stay alert throughout, as if watching it all from above.

  Though he looked directly at him, the man did not appear to register Mark’s presence. His smile became a grimace, he seemed to be practising various expressions as if looking into a warping funhouse mirror, mesmerised by the repertoire of contortions his features could adopt. Mark dragged him back from the road and heard a small cheer rise from the group of men. The man jerked his arm away and looked at Mark; this time he seemed to see him. Anguish crossed his face. He opened his mouth and began to yell.

  ‘Someone,’ the man roared, ‘should invent something!’

  Another cheer, louder this time, erupted from the group behind them. Mark wondered if they knew what the man was referring to, had they been discussing some communal yearning before his lurch to the side of the road? He held the man’s gaze – he was quiet now and waiting, perhaps, for a reply. He wondered what to say as the man tipped his head closer.

  ‘Some fucking thing.’ The man muttered his final phrase, spun wildly on his heels, then returned to the clutch of onlookers.

  In the days that followed, these words became an obsessive phrase in Mark’s head and he wondered if this was one of those portents that Rien was so oppressed by, one of those random events that could alter the course of your thinking, staining your thoughts a deep, ominous colour. But he had always dismissed such things as meaningless, had talked Rien down once from an encounter with an old varicosed woman who had sidled up to them in the supermarket and muttered, ‘They can’t fuck us, we’re not sexual.’ Rien had been convinced it was a sign, that the woman had singled her out for a specific reason.

  He knew that such moments gained their power from the energy infused by endless rumination. What captivated him about the incident was the man’s words. The command touched a dormant yearning to create something solid and purposeful. To invent something.

  Mark sits now in his rooftop nook. He has watched the birds making a nest on a neighbouring roof, against a wild red sky. A new set of fires has broken out south of the city, staining the air with a deep blush.

  He sniffs the mossy scent of damp rising from the bricks. He likes the chimney because it’s a conduit for smoke, a simple invention for controlling flames, funnelling them up to the sky. It makes sense to him, that the birds are building their nest here in the middle of a teeming city, instead of the bushy suburbs where homes have been engulfed by flames. Adapt or die, he thinks, this is his new and daily ta
sk.

  The birds have collected garbage from around the streets, bits of string and wire, coloured streamers and plastic bags, striped straws and a shoelace. They construct their home from these fragments, barely a twig or branch to be seen. The birds use their beaks to insert the materials, their feathered breasts to push each item into place, leaning into the sides of the nest. Inside, the female bird makes the circular shape by turning, hollowing it out. The body of the bird is a house-machine, he sees, a kind of feathered drill. He loves this independence from the implements of the world. This is the dreamy vision he has for Rien and himself – a made-to-fit, cosy shape that they can keep returning to, lights burning in the windows to guide her back after long days at work. He wants to give her the security of a home she has never inhabited, the same safe haven he wishes for himself.

  He feels the sun on his skin, pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it, then makes a small smoke loop. He watches the junkies shooting up in the lane, leaning back against the fence with their legs askew, taking their brief lolling-eyed holiday from the day. The local tramp makes his daily passage down the length of the street and back again. He’s wearing his usual coat, a ventriloquist’s dummy stitched to the fabric on one side like a miniature conjoined twin. The dummy bounces as he walks by. The man keeps a steady mutter, addressing the smiling plastic figure perhaps. Even in the thickest heat of summer he wears the heavy wool coat, the hair of his coarse black beard nearly indistinguishable from the grubby skin of his face. Mark sees the well-dressed men in their slow-crawling cars approach the corner girls. The men are all mouths and hands. The girls look bored and chew their nails while they wait. They are like bright birds, he thinks, in their sequins and leather, making daily collections for their own nests, their bodies malleable tools in the hands of the men. He feels sorry for the men, they look lonely, even though some of them drive up in big family cars and sometimes have baby seats at the back.