Rien swings her legs to the floor and walks slowly into the lounge. She can’t remember dreaming, the contents of her head feel like fibrous towel, her mouth is parched. She blinks gritty eyes at the light streaming through the front windows then starts a fire in the grate and waits for it to grow. She feeds it what it wants, page after page, tearing them from her book of stories.
Words don’t change the world, Cassie had said, long ago on a wintry afternoon. She was tiring of her work, she didn’t think writing meant anything anymore. ‘People don’t read the paper,’ she’d said. ‘They’d rather the lurid drama of the TV news.’
Rien protested, she’d always read Cassie’s stories, even when she didn’t understand all of the words. ‘Aren’t I people?’ she asked. She knew the meaning of lurid though, which made her think of Slime, the glow-in-the-dark variety that Theo loved to throw against the ceiling of the garage.
Rien would write the hard words from Cassie’s stories into her spy diary and quiz her about them. Or sit at home with her father’s heavy dictionary and riffle through its soft, delicate pages. Sometimes she would pretend to be the librarian, or a teacher at school and speak aloud as her fingertips travelled down the page. ‘May Brown, perhaps you might make a sentence with the word gullet.’ Some words were good to say aloud, like currant and midget, others deserved a whisper – plush, for example.
But Cassie could not be rallied from her doubts that day. Writing doesn’t make a difference. To what? Rien wondered. ‘There are many things I’d change if I could,’ Cassie said. She wanted the world to be a good place for kids, a place that was safe and clean and ordered and Rien thought, But this is what your home is like.
The pages of her book burn quickly, she tosses the remaining sheaf onto the flames. The black type of the newspaper and the scrawls of Rien’s handwritten versions shrivel like spiders in the heat.
Words could metamorphose – she had heard that in the Arctic words could freeze in the act of speaking, whiten and drift into the snow. Or once flung, become lost on the wind. Either way they disappeared. Other words seemed to turn hot and hard when uttered.
She knew the true story about words: when it came to dark moments they brought no rescue and offered no respite, they were so much decoration prettying up the mouths of believers. Since the day she lay calling, the raw scent of grass in her nostrils, she had known it. But hoped it was not true. She had lain beneath the weight of two straining hearts, her own a tiny bulb in the cool earth of her body, her father’s hot and urgent, already wrecked against the bones of his chest.
From her lap she plucks the photograph she has carefully removed from the back of her book. It shows a mother and daughter outside in the yellow glaze of afternoon sun, no traces of the woman’s nightclub smile, a clear and open look in her eyes, upturned toward the photographer. The toddler lies plump and rosy in her mother’s arms. She seems a gentle mother caught in the lens of her husband’s camera, sitting with her legs curled on a green green lawn of grass.
The yard in the picture was freshly mown and tidy at the edges. It was the same lawn Rien had hopped across, years later, stung and whimpering at her father. The same grass she was crushed upon, again crying out, but more urgently. Words don’t change the world. She had shivered and ached while the cold things of the earth shifted beneath her, and small winged creatures dropped upon her and struggled, dying slow as the light. Her throat ached where the moist sap in it clung, then turned sticky.
She brings her knees to her pounding chest, bows her head to the floor. Her arms press back along her sides: pose of a child. Caroline had taught her this. Mark found her curled up one day and had laughed when she told him the name of the position.
‘More like pre-roasted chicken. Except for your head you look ready to stuff and baste. I’ll have a juicy thigh.’ He slunk up beside her, sinking his fingers into her flesh, ‘and zen a lovely tender breast, s’il vous plait.’
He said plait like plate with a hard ‘t’.
The child’s pose was like the opposite of falling, the body clenched, as if at the end-point of collapse.
In the room, still, the acrid smoke of the burnt book. She thinks about the spy diary of her childhood, tucked safely in a box beneath the bed. Thinks about the secret page of lemon writing. How all that’s needed is heat to bring the truth to light. When the wind comes down the chimney the ashes are released and a thousand charred letters fall about the lounge.
She sees an old blue bag in the corner of the lounge and recognises it. Dog Boy. Inside there’s a motley collection of junk: an old smelly jumper, a bunch of coloured marbles, a pair of socks, loose change, a pamphlet she recognises: Salvatore’s son Antonio smiling out from the front page. She thinks of Dog Boy’s pub tale unfolding, the story that had last night so disturbed her, and digs deeper, more urgently into the bag. Finally she finds the newspaper article he had shown her. The paper is damp and smells of old beer and socks. She takes a quick look and decides something, stuffs it into her pocket. Leaves a half-jokey note for Mark about ‘hair of the dog’, and walks out in search of her own hangover cure.
Doctor Who?
‘Something else happened,’ Dog Boy stammers as I close the door behind him. We’re both stuffed with Love pizza and Home memories. Give him a hearty pat on the back and look around the room for signs of Rien.
‘You’ve got a stinky whiff coming off you, Dog Boy. A bloody lot’s happened, I know. We’ve been following your criminal career. You’re a wanted man. An arsonist. A firebug. You’re famous now, you know that, don’t you, won’t be able to just walk down the street in daylight much longer. You gotta be a bit careful …’
He stutters something about a new name. Follows me through to the empty bedroom. Rien gone, ashes floating round the lounge room. He wants me to call him Running Wolf. Try not to laugh ’cause I know he’s serious. His humour’s from another planet, I learnt that long ago. Some place where animals roam and humans aren’t welcome. Even has a picture of it – showed me this doggy world he dreamt about. A coloured place of geometric hills, a happy mutt in the foreground.
He starts stammering her name again. Adds something about the pub and last night’s reunion.
Rien’s not home and Dog Boy’s in a tizz. I slow him down. Place him on the couch. Give him panic attack instructions – breathe two three, breathe two three.
‘So I know the deal, you two are drinking buddies now? And, let me guess, she wanted to keep on – you know she can drink the both of us under the table … Hey,’ I grab his clammy hand and yank him off the couch, ‘wanna be the first to see my invention? But promise not to tell Rien?’
‘Rien Rien Rien Rien,’ he says.
‘Slow down, old chap,’ I say, wearing my inventor voice. Half Doctor Who, half MacGyver. Yesterday I spent the afternoon on The Prayer Machine. A wheel of coloured verse to light the darkness. Been pacing, thinking of a poem for Rien. I’ll slide that one behind the blue triangle of glass found by the side of the road. Eggshell-coloured words for a pale bird girl.
I scrounged a shining wheel. Unscrewed it from a bike propped outside the supermarket. Wheeled the thing in a wobbling run back down the road. Peeled off the tyre in the backyard. Stripped the inner tube and flung it in the air. Hardest part was connecting each piece of glass to the spokes. Then I saw the pegs in Rien’s basket. Never used. Started thinking about the Hills Hoist, how it’s a kind of wheel too, lying flat not upright like a bike’s. Then I worked out how to set it up. Like a miniature washing pole, twelve pieces of glass jutting up around the crown.
At the end of the day the tally was: three pieces of glass to five cuts and tears in the skin of my hands and arms. Purely accidental. Tomorrow I’ll search for a base to the structure. Then thread up the light source. A small covered globe, balanced in the centre of the wheel. Grease it up and get it spinning. Watch fortune change at the end of a whirl.
He starts to say something but my palm in the air means ‘stop’. Ignore his whines as
I pull him into the dim light outside.
‘You’ll never guess.’ My arm flings toward the glassy structure.
‘Um, yeah right, some kind of weapon, that you roll and it cuts people’s shins as it goes past?’
The end of his sentence goes up like a question. I remember Miss Marshall correcting us in English class. We all spoke badly. She blamed it on a high rising terminal contour. Asked me what that was. Guessed and said a place since it sounded like geography. Maybe all the kids who spoke like that were raised on a hill.
Dog Boy’s wearing a desperate face. Sweat’s dribbling from his forehead. Suddenly I realise I don’t want to tell him what it is. Not so sure he’ll understand. Probably think it’s something to do with God if I explain. Or say the words light and prayers and poems. Realise I have to work out who the prayers are aimed at. ’Cause I don’t believe in any kind of bearded bloke up there. Some giant inventor, pacing the sky. They won’t be like questions that need answering. The power will rest in the words’ escape, their bright parts flung through beams of coloured light.
Dog Boy puts his hand in his greasy hair. Says my name slow, loud and scary. Then something about last night’s boozing. Takes the scenic route with the story. There’s a blind guy and a missing kid. A disappointing volcano. Blacked-out windows and beers drunk. A doctor who disagrees. A distraught girl and a newspaper story about the Home.
‘Antonio,’ I say remembering Rien’s flier. ‘But why would she get upset, and doctor who?’ I ask. Laugh a bit at the final question. Doctor Who! But his fervour’s infectious. Liquids in my body start to vibrate at a speedy rate. A garble comes from his squeaking throat.
‘The journalist, that’s right, Rien’s friend. Cassie.’ He begins to grovel around in his blue bag and produces a folded piece of paper, an artwork he says he took from the Home hall before he set the place on fire. I take the paper and unfold it slowly, then take a long look at the familiar handwriting there.
‘Stay here.’ I manage this much. Walk into the house and check the bedroom once more. No bird girl. No surprises in the note she’s left on the bed. Then over to the fireplace where charred words are drifting. Recognise a couple of the half-burnt sentences there: something about falling, another about salt.
I take the bloody bone of his fear. A shivery-kneed entrant in a relay race. Turn myself into a machine for moving. Left, right, left, right. Try not to interpret Dog Boy’s story. His sweaty concern. Tell myself she’s just taken her sore head, those fisted hands out for a drink. No drama, nothing new in that. Left right. Break into a sprint, wooden and mechanical. Hardly faster than your stiff walking pace. Fuck. Let that cog turn till I can’t stop it wheeling in the truth.
Think as I run about where she’d go. Somewhere high in the darkness? Take a left past the blaring pub. People spilling out the doors into the cooler night. Push my way through the crowd there. Out through the pub courtyard. High-jump the drunk sprawled on the footpath. Check out the park, eyes to the trees. A thousand possible perches. Sun’s a fizzing globe that lights the way. It sends out a silvery metal stream. Ground rises to meet my feet.
After streets of steady running, I jerk to a stop like a brain-button’s been pressed. On the corner is Junkie Park. Place no one goes to play. The earth’s prickled with needles and broken glass. An old bloke with a white dog is shuffling toward the tramp-proof bench. One of those backless, narrow-seated ones the council started putting around the suburb. I stand puffing like a waiting train on the corner. Do a circuit round the trees with my head back. No movement, not even the usual bats snuffling up there.
In the distance I can see him. Dog Boy moving at a snail’s pace. His head hung low. Ignore him and run to the only place that’s left to go.
The Drunken Angel
Past the park with the sign that says No running, no dogs, no frisbees, no bikes or skateboards. A park only for the man who is staggering there, sucking beer bottles with his mouth upturned to the sky. Rien reaches the salon and unlocks it, her breath comes in juddering gasps. She spins herself in a chair then gropes beneath the counter for the bottle and takes a slug of the sickly port. It grips her throat as if it has already returned from the roily pit of her stomach, oversweet and thick.
She looks at the mirror and sees the picture in it: a slight form in too many clothes with one hand flat against a denim thigh and the other a little way from her side and shaking. Uncontrollably, as if all of the body’s force has travelled from every limb to that one hand, each tendon and sinew electrically fizzing.
She places the newspaper clipping onto the bench next to the gloss, the fixing spray, the gel, the mousse, spreads it flat with the palm of her hand and peers at the writing. The ink is slushed and wavery. She kneels on the floor and holds the bench to keep herself as still as possible.
The word art, Dr Baker says, really means to be or being. It originates from the earlier word ars. The art the children make in their therapy sessions is a vital way of being, she says and it is important that such works should not be displayed as aesthetically pleasing images for the general public.
In the corner of the mirror Rien sees the tiny figure of the drunk, weaving in circles, followed by a white dog. He stumbles across the park, a drunken angel making the shape of a halo over her mirrored face.
Dr Baker showed this reporter a meticulously planned calendar. In each of the graphed squares the child has printed her name in an immaculate long hand. The pages are lacquered with Sellotape.
‘This is a work of impressive precision and strict order,’ Dr Baker said. She pointed to the bottom right-hand corner where one of the child’s entries was scored with black pen.
‘But you would not realise how devastating it was to this child to make that one small slip, after weeks of planning and painting. I have seen the children create something with such intensity and care, spending weeks on one picture or building an intricate model. On a bad day a misplaced paint stroke, a wrongly glued piece of card or accidental drip of glue could wreck the whole thing and the child would see the work only as ruined, as waste. Such a slip could set them back for days or weeks – therapeutically and socially I mean.’
The syrupy port rises in her throat, she feels herself sicken and walks to the bathroom to vomit into the toilet, perspiration sprouting at her temples. Back in the chair she looks down at the torn edge of the story and reads the remaining half of the byline.
andra Cord, it says, as she knew with an ancient, cellular knowledge that it would. Cassie. Some nameless shapeless thing begins to pitch inside her, her head aches with the realisation that surfaces slowly. Cassie and the Doctor. The quote about the meaning of art gave them both away – had they been in secret collusion?
‘My therapeutic role is to observe the smallest sign of what’s happening inside the mind and body,’ Dr Baker said. ‘I understand every movement as something significant. The artwork is the endpoint of a physical gesture. It is an expression translated into a visible form. The slightest thing reveals so much. A blush even, that’s a physiological response to feeling evident on the surface of the body. The tiniest shudder, the clench of a jaw – you see this at the temple.’ Dr Baker held her finger to one side of her head like a gun.
‘It speaks of tension.’
Rien searches the page for further clues and sees beneath the headline three italicised lines describing Cassie’s first visit to the Home years ago and how she had come to admire the Doctor’s dedication. Was it this that Cassie believed to be worth more than the love of Rien’s own mother? Rien remembered her friend’s strange demeanour, the game they had played on that last day together. ‘Take my heart,’ Cassie had said, handing Rien the picture. It wasn’t a fair exchange, Rien thinks, all those motherless years in the Home swapped for Cassie’s careful painting.
One day Caroline had said Rien’s neighbour’s name, articulating in a familiar, knowing tone, Cass. Rien had corrected her, without thinking, it’s Cassie. Oh yes, Caroline had said absently, but the
two women must have then been acquainted. She looked back at the article.
A bruise made by a parent provokes a strong reaction, Dr Baker said, but she would always try to imagine the gesture that produced it, how it spoke of the parent’s own pain and inability to cope, and she tried not to judge it, but to do her best for each person suffering.
I cannot help but think during this interview, everything I do in this room, gives myself away.
Cassie, using the first person, I.
It was Cassie then, who gave her up, Cassie with someone else’s theories about art, her special interest in Rien’s pictures, her questions, Why are the girl’s arms stuck like that? Searching Rien’s body for signs of neglect, weaving stories from her bruises and cuts, from the stumbling gait of her mother. Rien remembered an overheard conversation. Conspiracy, that was the word Andrew had used. Everything’s a conspiracy to you.
She stole my childhood, Rien thinks, but her anger feels tightly reined, because she knows it was stolen years before: her father’s leaving, his buried lonely bones, her mother’s taut singing throat turned slack.
Cassie and the Doctor. They had been two solid shapes in the whirling blur of her life. She believed in no god but these terrible mortals and the blaze of their attention. Now they were subsiding before her like the drunken man. Where possible, Caroline told the reporter, children should remain with their parents – it was more valuable to work with families than to split them apart.
Rien shuts her eyes and clasps her arm where years ago it had snapped like a twig. The clumps of her fingers push hard into the flesh so she can’t tell if the pain existed before, or is there because of her pressing.
She had sat this same way with Caroline, three years after their first meeting. She was sixteen, though it was hardly evident: her body remained defiantly more girl than woman. Sometimes she spent the entire session painting. Every now and then she’d complete a face but was unable to identify it when questioned. It wasn’t her own or even that of someone who had once passed through her life. Once she left two red prints on the floor from where her paint-sticky hands held her upside down. Every now and then she used the wall to catch her handstands. But only when Caroline wasn’t looking.
Machines for Feeling Page 14
