‘Peace isn’t a place, sweetheart, it’s feeling calm, not being upset. Your mum’s just heartbroken right now.’
‘So when is he coming back? Will he call us soon?’
Grandma looked at me with sideways eyes and said tomorrow we’d talk about where he was. I tried to work out if Mum’s heart would be fixed. I wondered if an attacked heart was different to a broken one.
Grandma ate mints which she kept in the side of her armchair. Sometimes I found money down there when I went looking and she let me keep it. Sometimes it was just fluff and Pops would say, ‘I’ll swap you, two balls of fluff for twenty cents.’ The chair had a lever which made her legs rest on a special cushion. She let me pull the lever and her legs went up and down up and down and Pops held his side because laughing hurt his tummy.
‘They’ll bloody snap off,’ he said, pointing at her legs. So I stopped moving the lever and Grandma put a mint into my mouth. Pops said, ‘If you open your mouth and suck in the air it feels like the icy Arctic breeze.’ I balanced the mint on my tongue and breathed in the coldness.
‘Tomorrow we’ll plant some flowers,’ he said and he made his hands like Grandma’s knitting and his fingers went crack.
‘They’ll bloody snap off,’ Grandma said to him and Pops beckoned me over to where he was sitting and showed me how the top of his thumb had come off and was moving up and down.
He showed me how to throw a punch with your thumb stuck between two fingers so it can make a nasty pain. He told me about the war and how he saw rats as big as dogs. When he met people called Enemy he’d put his hands down their throat and pull them inside out. Grandma frowned and bunched her lips up and said, ‘Jack’, making his name sound all stretched out.
He took me out to the garden and showed me how to pull the weeds and not the flowers and we made a special garden for Dad with plants that would grow up high. We went out every day and Pops let me water the little green shoots. He turned on the hose and each time he’d say, ‘Oh Rien, I think it’s starting to rain,’ and he’d flick the water over me saying, ‘That’s funny, I’m not getting wet at all’.
One morning I found a dead bee in the patch of daisies near the back door. I took the bee and put it inside one of Pops’ matchboxes then I dug a hole beside a pansy and buried the little box. Pops asked me when he found matches and no box ‘Where is it?’ and I told him about the bee grave and said, ‘Don’t touch’. I wanted to dig up the bee when I came back to visit and see what had happened to it. ‘Well, let’s put a little marker by the bee so I know where it is then,’ he said and we went outside and stuck a Paddle Pop stick in the ground above the bee.
When Pops stood from bending down his knees went click and the noise made me laugh.
‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Crikey, my knees are creaky.’
Grandma said blimey and Miss Jones said shivers which I didn’t like. When she said it I thought a ghost was passing through the room because Maria Bates said that was how you knew. The hairs on your arms stood up and you shook for a moment. I asked what was a ghost and she said whoever’s dead’s a ghost. You can’t see them but they come back to hunt you.
When Miss Jones said shivers, I thought of Dad, in an invisible crouch at the back of the school room, like a leopard about to pounce. That was how you hunted, I had seen a hungry spotted cat on TV.
After twenty-nine days Mum came to get me. She hugged me too hard and wouldn’t wait to see the garden Pops and I had made.
‘It has peas which you can eat,’ I said and pulled her hand but she didn’t want to look. The sweet peas were going to reach to where Grandma told me Dad was and he could smell their lovely smell and pick some peas if he wanted.
Mum smelt funny and Grandma looked at Pops and shook her head when she saw her. Mum said she needed me more than ever now he was gone. I knew they were talking about Dad but they still didn’t say where he was or when he’d come back. I remembered the story Grandma told about how he wasn’t ever coming back. I pretended to believe her because it made her sad when I kept asking about him. She told me things about hearts and how hers kept beating because it had a special machine in it that made it run. It was called a pacemaker and it kept her heart going boo boom boo boom and she let me listen to it each night before I went to sleep. Pops didn’t have one and nor did Dad or Mum.
Grandma’s heart stopped beating two years later even though it had a machine.
Pops visited us a few times after Grandma died. He’d drive up with the mower sticking out the back of his car and stay for the afternoon, teaching me how to cut back the plants that grew ragged in the garden. I’d meet him on the front step and we’d stay outside, planning a lawn at the front of the house that wouldn’t scare me. A lawn I could walk across, wriggling my toes into the softness. A lawn gentle and sweet-smelling to lie on. I still have the piece of paper we made our plans on. I tried to write them while he listed the plants, telling me how to spell them.
Every now and then we’d look back at the house and catch the curtain flicking back into place. Mum watched from the window but never came outside. Even when it rained one afternoon, he didn’t go in, just hopped in his car till the clouds passed over. I climbed into the passenger seat and we listened to the radio while Mum looked out the bathroom window so Pops wouldn’t be able to see. I spied her through the rain and the frosted glass. Her blue dress made a smudgy sort of picture at the window.
One day Mum said, ‘We’re alright on our own, we don’t need his green fingers in our garden.’ She brought home a machine for answering the phone and listened to the ghost voices of all the callers before deciding which ones she would speak to. I would run to the machine and sometimes I’d hear his creaky voice, asking us to call. I didn’t like pretending that we weren’t home when we were sitting there listening. I’d ask Mum why we couldn’t speak to him and she’d shake her head and waggle a finger at me. Each time the answer was just because.
Birdland
Birdland, Mark thinks. Completely and totally. It’s the top level on his mental register of how she is each day. He made it up in his head one morning, a jokey thing to distract himself from a poem he was trying to write, looking up the bird words in the thesaurus. He pictured his register like one of those hospital charts used to graph the body’s temperature or the rate of the heart – a sort of avian measure. Bird in the hand was a good stage, it meant he had possession of her, her thoughts weren’t wandering off to some other distant planet. Bird in the bush was when she began to get away, coming home later at night after wandering God knows where, getting jittery in her sleep, peckish with her food. Birds and the bees was good, very good, they were having lots of sex. Sometimes she went off it altogether, for weeks, a month once, jumping away from his touch. Bird of prey – that was a nasty turn, where she started picking at him, where her sarcasm soared and overtook most conversations.
Tonight she’s dressed in too many layers for the weather. She’s trying to disappear beneath all those jumpers and shirts, aiming for nothing at all he thinks, knows how skilled she is at turning her body to bone, becoming as disembodied as when she had first arrived at the Home.
Rien stumbles into the room, passes a paper bag to Mark and sits, teetering on the arm of the tilted couch, like a child on the high side of a seesaw with no one weightier to bring her down. The wind makes a hollow sound in the chimney. A fist of ashes flies up from the grate. She picks at the black dots floating in the air before her. Hiccups and runs her fingers through her hair. Her lifted hand makes a delicate fan of tendons in the air.
‘Made your favourite,’ Mark says, turning to the oven where the heat is seeping from the broken seal.
‘Mark, you’re a dollface. Godblezz,’ she slurs then eyes the clinking bag he has placed on the table. ‘Pour uzza drink will ya, love.’
‘You went to the pub. Was that nice? But on the way home you were possessed by the soul of … um, Sadie the Cleaning Lady?’ He opens the bottle of beer.
‘Yezz,’
she says defiantly, ‘I am the fucking cleaner lady, sweeping sweeping a hairy floor, doon the dishes.’
A new phase in her decline, he thinks, bird of prey. He remembers she swore she’d never drink, because of her mother’s struggle – no that wasn’t what she’d called it. It was a wholehearted embrace, she said, that was how her mother embarked on her drinking career. She had not once attempted to give it up. He passes her a frothing glass, choosing the smallest he can find, an empty Vegemite jar with half the label still stuck to it. It says mite.
‘Mmm nice, fucking nice, everything’s juzz …’
Her voice becomes a gulp as she raises her glass. She seems to be shrinking as she speaks, sitting on the body of the couch now and subsiding back into the cushions.
‘Well, Sadie, time for your dinner.’
She gets up slowly and walks to the table, peering down at the plates with a stupefied look; her legs wobble slightly. She sits then points a crooked finger at the food, the other hand slopping the beer from her glass. He has made a lasagne, thick and oozing with extra cheese, adapting the recipe for the vegetarian anorexic. She sticks her fork in one side of the slice and leaves it poking there.
‘Viscuzz,’ she says then repeats the word. She stares at the food like it’s the most fascinating sight she’s seen in days.
‘Mark, the childrenalllgone. Gone.’
‘What children?’
‘Fuckinall of them. Their fazes everywhere and,’ she lowers her voice and leans toward him, ‘there’s a club. Lil fazes looking at me.’
‘Are you talking about the Boy Scouts? Because what you’ve described sounds like that kind of scary shit …’
‘No allchildren, babies’n’toddlers. S’like the dead birds Miss Holmes took. All gone away.’ She flicks a hand in the air as if to signify a wing and flings it toward the window. She squints suddenly, as if all the missing children she has seen in those passing photographs, stitched to coat lapels and cardigans, might be gathered in the dark of the yard, their pinched faces clamouring at the window and begging to be let inside. Mark looks over to where the gloom is making its way in or out of the room. She picks up her fork and takes it on an aerial wander above the table. Then it flies across the room and lands in the middle of the lounge. She stares, fascinated.
‘Dog Boy’s here. He’z got a coupla friends. Brings news from Home.’ She stands, moves back from the table like it’s on fire, and her chair scoots across the vinyl floor on its back. She bends forward, peering again at the window.
Mark, unsure of what is real and what delusion in her stories, worries first about how to distract. Her eyes are on the unopened bottle of beer.
‘You serious about Harry? You saw him?’
‘Mmm, at the pub, he’z got some innnersting information ’bout how exactly fucked up we all are.’
He stands then and walks to her, taking this news in slowly, his right arm leading.
‘Hey, let’s dance, we never do.’ Yes, he thinks, we’ll do the funky chicken, and he laughs, though he feels the worry pushing back at his forced humour, a misty rising in his head.
He holds her and she shudders at his touch. She lifts one arm slowly, then brings it down twice as fast, hits him, a pathetic right-hander. Another, from the left. He stands quite still, deciding they are hailstones, or huge fat drops of rain. He’ll wait it out, patiently. The pelting grows harder and faster, now her fists churn at his face as if it’s pastry on a board, she grabs and kneads the flesh. He turns himself into a machine-man. No feelings, nothing hurts. ‘Don’t touch me with your gentle hands,’ he remembers her saying one slow afternoon. ‘They feel like nothing.’
He grabs her wrists and pushes her back on the low side of the couch. He sees she is weary now, her red-rimmed eyelids closing like a baby’s in a nodding trance. He sits, tucks a blanket around her till she looks like a swaddled infant. He strokes the creases from her brow, putting pressure there at the same time, to prevent her from getting up.
‘Hey, bird girl. Go to sleep. Everything will be okay. You, me, the children. Dog Boy. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
He sees something has fallen from her bag where she has tossed it, a pamphlet about grieving and a lost child called Antonio. The small cherub face looks out from the front page of the flier. He looks closer, reading the caption beneath it, Have you seen my son? He recognises it from somewhere, a small child smiling in some kind of uniform. He glances back to where Rien is sleeping now, or passed out, then takes the picture with him to the bedroom to ponder.
He lies down and stares at the peeling ceiling. There are bows in the patterned plaster, and flowers marred by mould and damp. He gazes at the spreading stains as if they are Rorschach tests to determine his particular condition.
His chest and shoulders hurt, his skin smarts from her grabbing fingers. He says a silent thank you that her nails are short and smooth. He feels bruises already rising beneath the puffy surface of his skin. My heart is failing, he thinks, I need to rewire myself, become all powerful, hold out a shield-like hand to deflect the whizzing hurt. He thinks of the picture he found beneath his bed at the Home, the one of the man with his palms turned upward, his red heart exposed through the flesh of his chest. Dog Boy had called it heart surgery Jesus. Even Jesus’ healing hands couldn’t make a difference. He held them out like he was asking a question and we were supposed to know the answer, he thinks. Jesus couldn’t save himself, ended up slumped in a dark place with his hands in a mess. Then he remembers the phrase, invent something, and looks again at the picture of Antonio. Both seem connected in some way but he cannot find the link.
In the dim morning he wakes and stands to stretch. His face is reflected in the pane of the bedroom window. He looks as if he has been badly made-up, one running mascaraed eye stares black at him, purple shadows above the lid. Then suddenly the face shifts, a new one appears, a freckled nose, bright blue eyes and a stiff wedge of honey-coloured hair. Mark jumps back from the window and squints. Bloody Harry Barnett, he shakes his head, remembers Rien’s drunken ramblings. Bloody Dog Boy’s really here. He puts his hands on his hips, then taps on the window, puts a finger to his lips then points toward the back door. He tiptoes into the lounge like a cartoon figure, his legs lifted high, a hopeful feeling in his chest at last. Rien lies murmuring something in a fitful sleep on the lounge. He tucks the blankets tighter round her body, then heads for the back door.
The Pose of a Child
When she opens a sleep-cemented eye she is looking directly at the keyhole in the warped and peeling door of the lounge. One eye stares, the other is crusted shut, as if spying, though she’s a metre away, a wiry coil at the edge of the couch. She moves then groans, something slides inside her head, tectonic plates are shifting, the world tilts on its axis. This waking view’s a sign, she thinks, telling her something about what can and can’t be seen, what should be locked up tight, the key thrown and lost.
Hungover. The pale face of her mother comes to her now, the conditions of each midday when she had crawled slowly from her bed to make up some white fizzing concoction that she called a headache mixture. How she suffered from such awful migraines, bringing up pub dinners in the toilet, once in the kitchen sink, Rien tucking a bucket beneath her bed.
She has one memory of her in the night trying to soothe her dreams. Her mother had sung a song in a pure voice that hadn’t been visited by drink. It seemed to Rien then, in the confusion of sleepiness, the blue ghouls of a nightmare interrupted, that her mother was an angel, white-gowned and standing at the end of her bed. She didn’t want to wake to the grey-rimmed morning eye, those shaking hands.
Sometimes she experiments, pretends Louise is not her mother but rather a faint white figure, singing into the darkness, someone glowing with the effort to live. If she were a stranger she would owe Rien nothing. If Rien heard that stranger sing she might simply admire the swoon in the voice. If she saw that stranger’s shins bruise and stumble, she might feel only alarm and not pity w
ith its drag and undertow of obligation.
She had always associated her mother’s singing voice with lightness. And those days had ceased as suddenly as her father’s heart. It was as if this loss reminded her mother of the terrible load her body carried, her own heart’s iron weight. Rien thought the singing voice animated her mother, as if to sing was also somehow to live – every soaring phrase required its equal drawn breath. When the tunes ceased, her mother’s chest seemed to sink a little, her throat following this downward slide. She became bent, hunched over some deep internal pain.
Rien hears a scratching on the rooftop, Mark, she thinks, no doubt devising plans and tactics for leaving her. How to disappear from her life like a magician in a puff of stale smoke, leaving her wide-mouthed in dismay. Gone, the magic in his trick’s the fact he never comes back. The inevitability of it eats at her.
She lifts her torso slowly, taking care to keep her head on an even plane then prises herself off the couch. She takes dragging steps toward the bedroom which she sees is mercifully dark. The sun has not yet passed to the back of the house where it sends its searching beams into the room. She lies on the bed, puts an arm out in search of his recent warmth. She imagines herself repeating this gesture over and over until the sheets are worn and colder each time, until her arm has grown stiff and bony, the skin in liver-spotted pleats down its length. A phrase from her childhood: I will grow old with wanting you.
She falls into a lolling-mouthed sleep, her tongue thick and dry, like a blockage in her mouth.
The house is quiet when she wakes – it has the sad afternoon glow of fading summer. The tawny gold of first decay. As she sits, a curl of paper wafts to the floor.
Hope you’re feeling okay. You dreamt of trees and falling from them. I held your hand when you yelled STOP! Dog Boy’s here! We’ve gone for some Love pizza. We’ll bring you back a hangover cure made specially by Death. (Joke ha ha.)
Machines for Feeling Page 13
