Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  He used to envy the prostitutes with their chattery loitering – they’d found something to do with their days. They were part of a community. He would watch the neighbours stop for a chat as they walked their dogs. Some of the girls would bend and stroke the dogs or help the old ladies with their shopping bags, their high heels flashing beside the pensioners in their drab-coloured dresses. He has been waiting for a plan to come upon him, the right way to spend his time. But today he realises he has known it all along – the one thing he can do to transform the sluggish days.

  His girl lies below him, still knotted in the wrenched sheets of the bed, his girl gone lately birdie, gone completely flapping. Thinks about what to do and what not to, realising that doing nothing can be a kind of mad interference, nasty and cowardly and small.

  Invent something. But what could he make to deflect her fascination with the dark moments of her life? She used to say he was slowed up, but she’s the one eternally turned to face the past. He has tried again and again to fill her emptiness. At first he thought sex was working, it seemed to lift her out of worrying dazes into a place where now and here and like this were the order required. But she would veer off into her head after the event, his body failing in all its attempts to replace the missing thing.

  He has been collecting certain components and parts during his wanderings around the suburb, bits and pieces of plastic and metal that catch his eye. He photographs the loaded beak of a pigeon, the wino brushing an imaginary spider from his grimed neck. He thinks about his absent father as he watches men passing, and stares in the hope of a line, a blemish, a confluence of features that will reveal a familiar pattern of blood and cells.

  Rien knows nothing of his new collection, nor of his father-search. He is sure she will see it as a backward step. He stores his magpie madness in the small basement beneath the house, stacked in neat piles according to their future purpose.

  Mark watches the pink embers of his cigarette tossed beyond the guttering and adjusts his limbs, a tile has made a thick indentation in one of his buttocks, it feels numb and sore. He clambers down to where she’s sleeping and stirs her, whispering, ‘Wake up, I want to show you something.’ She groans and manoeuvres her head under the pillows. He digs his arm into the bed and circles her waist, puts another beneath her knees and lifts her. Featherweight, he thinks, she’d disappear in a breeze. He sits her in a chair beside the bed, her head rolling forward.

  Finally they are balanced up there, side by side, a blanket round her shoulders, she leans against him for warmth. He points to the roof opposite where the mother bird is crouched, watching the onlookers headily; a breeze lifts the feathers on her wing. Rien sits, quiet, scratches her leg, yawns. Soon the other bird comes flying in low and lands beside the nest, a bright blue straw in his beak. Their home is nearly complete, a coloured basket of city waste, woven tight.

  She puts her head on his shoulder and he feels her shallow breathing on his neck. He says to her, sudden then, and sure: I am happy.

  Beegirl

  Two social workers drove Rien up to the white fence of St Mary’s where she looked across at the children in the playground. The trip had been very quiet. Her mother stayed behind: a shrinking figure in the middle of the overgrown front lawn, her arms hanging limply beside her, not a wave nor a kiss blown.

  The women had visited two weeks earlier, perching on the edge of the lounge as if they were just about to leave, though they stayed for an hour, maybe more. Her mother fidgeted while waiting for the tea to draw. She brought out a plate of biscuits laid in the pattern of a fan. This careful display betrayed her mother’s nervousness. They never had guests, except for the boyfriends and when they had biscuits, their hands went straight into the packet. It was early in the day but her mother’s eyes were already rheumy and her hands trembled. Her bra strap hung loosely on her upper arm where it had escaped from her dress, her hair was coming unpinned at the back and clung to her neck in sweat-soaked loops. Rien carefully pinned a stray curl back into place.

  On first sight the Home was a yard of bones – every child seemed thin and wretched, skin almost opaque. Rien thought there were ghosts there for certain, hovering a little way from their bodies. She was just as much skin and bone because she didn’t like eating, but some ways of making yourself invisible are twice as revealing. The difference between me and them, she thought, is that I have a mother and a home to go to. Eventually, though, she realised none of them belonged anywhere. They were all so far gone from the world of calm routines and safe houses – the ‘normal’ life they couldn’t imagine themselves into in the keenest daydream.

  She bit the inside of her lip till it bled and swirled the blood around her mouth. She looked out the car window at the playground where children were huddled in secret conversations, or running about, and thought my new family. Then she looked down at the picture that Cassie had made for her a few weeks before. She had found it at the last moment before leaving the house and hadn’t had time to pack it in her bag. The picture was the wonky shape of a heart with four chambers drawn in. Inside each compartment there was a portrait – of Cassie, her children and Rien. Cassie’s drawing made Rien’s face look pinched and wary, where she and her children smiled out from the other sections of the heart with plump cheeks and bright eyes. Cassie had painted Rien’s eyes so they were dark and downturned. Almond, her mother called them, just like her father’s. The picture made her think of the start of The Brady Bunch and how each person’s face was in a separate box where they gazed happily across and up and down at each other. She tried to remember all their names as a panicky feeling rose up – Marcia, Cindy, Peter …

  In the afternoon she was led to a clinic to be examined by two doctors. She wondered why all the adults at the Home had come in twos, like something from Noah’s ark. Perhaps it was some strange experiment – they chose different kinds of kids and stuck them together in the building to see what would happen. Maybe they were pumping altered air through the vents in the walls, trying out different substances and noting down the effect: hormones or pesticides. Things like that had happened, she had seen programs on TV, rows of screaming babies left untended, adults with scabrous skin and vacant eyes, rocking silently or murmuring words you couldn’t understand. Had she crossed the border into some other country?

  She asked the woman without a stethoscope, ‘Are you the head-shrinker?’

  The woman laughed, a smooth liquid sound. ‘Well, I prefer to be called Caroline actually – it’s nice to meet you, Rien.’

  And the cold-hands man taking her pulse said, ‘I don’t think we’ll be in the business of shrinking a-ny part of your body, you’ve done a fine job of that on your own.’

  Caroline rolled her eyes while he filled out some forms on a clipboard. She caught Rien watching and smiled. Then she took her to a room that looked like a hospital ward. There were two children there, tucked in white-sheeted beds. One was reading a comic, his right arm bandaged from the wrist to the elbow. She felt his gaze burning into her back as she walked past. The other, a girl a little older than Rien, was sleeping. There was a long ominous-looking tube winding from a bag of yellowy liquid down into her bedclothes. The air smelt keen and toxic. Caroline spoke to a nurse, handing her the page of notes the doctor had written. She told Rien she would stay there until she felt like eating more. The nurses would help her grow stronger by giving her food through a tube like the other girl had. Rien looked over to where the tube snaked under the sheets and began to cry, a steady, soundless dripping. Caroline put an arm around her and bent down so their eyes met.

  ‘If I start eating can I go home?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the best place for you right now. But when you and your mother are stronger, maybe then you can.’

  What did she mean, best place? Had her mother failed to impress the social workers who reminded her of the school inspectors that used to come and sit in the classroom and write notes in a small book. Her mother had picked furiously at the hem
of her dress, trying to keep her shaking hands occupied. Then she had wiped one hand across her mouth and Rien waited to see what new expression her face would hold when she finished removing the old one. But it was the same look of utter desperation. Perhaps it all came down to this – her mother seeming somehow lost in her own home. Rien had tried to distract, asking her about the tea. Her mother had jumped up then, reached for the drawing pot, and gratefully begun to pour. Some liquid spilled onto the table and the stockinged social worker stood and walked swish swish to the kitchen to find a cloth, then returned with the grey-coloured rag that was burnt at one edge. She wiped the table gingerly then took her time walking back to the kitchen, turning her head as she passed the bedroom doors.

  The social workers sipped slowly, they didn’t put milk in their cups and didn’t want any biscuits. When the stockinged one stood finally, she brushed the back of her skirt down, as if she’d been sitting on a messy patch of grass in a playground.

  Perhaps it had something to do with the times she hadn’t come home and Rien had waited in the darkness of the yard, or later, after Cassie had suggested hiding a key, when she would eat a potato crisp sandwich in the fading light of the lounge and watch movies where men killed each other and large-breasted women took off their clothes slowly.

  Then an unsummoned memory floated up – of her in the dark of the yard, waiting. Chanting while she wrenched the petals from a decapitated daisy: ‘She will come home / She won’t / She will / She won’t.’

  *

  The Home was a bit like a school you had to sleep at, only some of the kids were allowed to write things on the walls and paint bright pictures on a long concrete fence.

  There were lots of baths with hot water, lined up in rows in a big white room. Next door was the dormitory where she was sent after a month of tubed-food and half a stone heavier.

  She visited Caroline in a large airy room with a row of high windows down one wall, boxes of paint and toys and a sandpit in different corners. Caroline told her she’d been very sick in the clinic and that when you stop eating, parts of your body don’t want to go anymore.

  ‘Like a machine,’ Rien said.

  ‘No, your body is more than a machine, it needs food to make it go but it also needs care and love.’

  ‘My grandma had a machine that made her heart go but it stopped. Well I don’t know if the machine stopped or the heart. She’s dead. And not buried but burnt, then sprinkled somewhere … I forget where – to feed a tree I think.’ Caroline looked at her for a long moment. Rien thought she was trying to prove that she could really see her. Caroline’s eyes were wide-set and didn’t seem to blink. Rien shut hers to break the stare and squinched the lids together, an old habit, summoning a neat oblivion. At the same time, without knowing it, she stopped her breath, her cheeks puckering and her small chest rising.

  ‘I think perhaps you would like to disappear altogether.’

  That was the way Caroline put things, like a suggestion so it couldn’t be right or wrong.

  She unpacked her bag on the first day in the dormitory and stored her small cluster of possessions in a white cabinet beside the bed. She took out the Get Well card she’d made for her father years ago. Her kindergarten teacher Miss Jones had helped her with it. On the front in thick gobs of shiny red she had painted a crude love-heart. Inside Miss Jones wrote in immaculate cursive Get Well Soon and read the words aloud so Rien would know the message enfolded within her lumpy artwork.

  She wished she could have taken some of her father’s things to the Home, but her mother had thrown them out long ago. She wanted no reminders, she’d said on the day after his funeral when she lurched about the house emptying drawers and shelves and piled all his clothes into four green bags. Bags meant for garbage, lined up on the street for St Vinnies.

  Rien looked at the card and noticed that some of the red paint on the love-heart had flaked off to reveal a blur of colour underneath and suddenly she recalled the first picture she had painted there. A bee in stripes of yellow and black. A Sunday morning song came to her, the sound of hands clapping in the cold air and the cocoon warmth of her parents’ bed. Her mother cooking eggs in the kitchen – a sputtering noise while her father held each of her hands in his and sang ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands …’

  She thought her father hadn’t seen the card, but that day in the dormitory she noticed three fingerprints in the thick red paint. She laid the tips of her own fingers against them and saw that the indentations were much larger. Perhaps he had touched it when it was still wet, his hands coming away stained and sticky.

  The second time she visited Caroline, Rien stood near the wall. She didn’t want to talk, had spent the week rigid and silent with grief, breaking the quiet only to sob into the muting heart of her pillow while twelve girls slept around her, their breaths a mix of quiet sighs and strangled cries through the night. She woke with sooty ovals under her eyes and stumbled through the day in a bluish stupor of anxiety and loneliness, a whispered song in her head: If you’re sad and you know it cry, boo hoo. The knuckled balls of her father’s hands at his eyes, wiping feigned tears. What had she known of sadness then? She took refuge in the library during breaks from classes, thrusting her nose into the cloth-bound books and drawing in the fusty scent, woody and comforting, pages cream as lichen.

  She spent most of the next meeting with Caroline still but alert, her head making small twitches at every sound or movement. Caroline made suggestions, offering her plasticine, paper, paint or a sleep, pointing to a mat in a sunny patch of the room.

  After the hour was nearly up Rien walked to the far wall, opposite the windows. She wore a thin cotton dress that caught the air as she strode, the skirt ballooning up faintly. She stopped short of the wall by two metres, stood straight then did three handstands in a row, kicking and holding herself up, her dress falling slowly to cover her face. She liked the swooping feeling of her body going up and the bit where it was in between up and down, not knowing if it’d fall backward into nowhere, or if her feet would guide her to the floor.

  ‘I wonder why you don’t do them up against the wall?’

  Rien stood, her cheeks flushed with blood from the inversions and shook the hair back from her face. She put one foot carefully at the knee of the opposite leg, stork-like, narrowing her eyes in concentration. ‘I wonder why you never stop asking questions?’

  ‘I wonder why you never answer them?’ Caroline replied evenly.

  ‘I don’t need a stupid wall.’

  ‘Maybe you like that falling feeling. Lots of the children who see me like to play falling games.’

  ‘I’m not a child,’ she spat the last word with distaste.

  ‘What are you then, Rien?’

  She didn’t want to say young lady like her mum used to when she was in trouble, or like Cassie had once when Rien’s girlish body had started to put out its small shoots toward adulthood. So she said nothing.

  Rien sniffed the rich scent of her science book and laid her head in the crook of her arm, propping the book so she could see it from this reclining angle. She had found some pictures of how the heart works, dizzying maps of the venous system, arrows to show the direction of pumped blood. She loved the colour, the bright reds and clear blues and the way the skin hid all the body’s busy traffic from the world.

  The heart was a muscle, fist-sized. There were journeys of blood. Twisting streets of veins, valvular byways. She liked the word tricuspid.

  She closed the book and carefully lowered her forehead to the cool tabletop, rolling it back and forth to feel the pressure of wood beneath her head. She shut her eyes. This was part of a posture Caroline had taught her, kneeling to place the head onto the floor, arms resting at her sides. It might help to stop your mind from whizzing, she’d said, as if she was familiar with such a feeling, the body disappeared, the head clamouring with the sheer might of thinking.

  She felt sleepy and vague from a night spent crying and wondering whe
n she would go home. From midnight wanderings to the highest perches in the Home where she could lean out into the air and make herself feel the allure of height and distance, the swooning nothingness of falling.

  She put the book down and saw in a half-doze the brilliant green lawn at the front of her house and a circle of pain in her foot. She had stepped on a bee and gasped and hopped her way to the front step while the foot swelled. Her father held her foot in his lap and she watched as he pushed his car key and a forefinger into her flesh as if trying to unlock it and find the sting. The skin went from crimson to white when pressed and then turned a deeper red as the blood rose from the sting hole. He told her the bee would die because it had released its sting. And she had forgotten the pain then, the sky, the grass and the blood, asking over and over about the bee – not understanding, at five, why an animal would choose to sting someone if this would bring about its own death.

  ‘It isn’t a choice, my sweet,’ her father said. ‘It’s just the work of being a bee.’

  She felt the throb in her foot and the brown scratchy feeling of her father’s favourite jacket as he lifted her onto his shoulders. ‘My queen, I’ll just have to carry you wherever you travel to make sure your feet are safe.’

  And she had urged him to lift her higher, a daughter queen crowned by the golden sun.

  Two weeks later he lay in hospital and she was waiting in the hospital corridor, her left arm swathed with bandages and suspended in a sling. She had a small plastic bag of lollies with her from a party she’d been to the previous afternoon, saving them so she could spread them throughout the week – each day a mouthful of sweetness. She met a boy in the corridor, dangling his socked and sandalled feet from an orange plastic chair. He was crying, a hiccoughing sound, mucus ran from his nose.