Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  ‘Was that the arm you hurt when you fell?’ Caroline asked.

  Rien nodded, gripping it harder.

  ‘Is it still sore after all this time?’ Caroline looked down at the arm.

  ‘They said Dad would get well, like my broken bones did. All knitted together. But he didn’t and when I asked Mum why not she said, “He shouldn’t have been carrying you around like that in his condition and you should have known better than to ask him.” ’

  Then the world got shaky. She watched her mother’s hands at night, her gold ring gone, the white mark on the skin beneath it fading, her long fingers trembling as if a wind was forever whipping through their home.

  Caroline unrolled a green mat and asked her to lie down and close her eyes.

  ‘Listen to the sound of your breathing. Try not to think of anything else.’

  Rien heard the dry rasps of breath going in and out and it made her nervous. She opened her eyes, saying, ‘I don’t know if the breaths are too fast or too slow.’

  ‘Concentrate,’ Caroline said.

  He has the same brown coat on. She is wearing shoes this time. He spins her round and stops, his breath coming faster and louder. ‘Daddy’s a bit puffed today,’ he says, but she is looking up at the sky and down onto his head while one hand comes up fast and holds her too tight. ‘Dad,’ she wants to say, ‘you’re hurting me, let go.’ But she is falling, his other hand at his chest and his voice shouting ‘Hold on’, anger in his words for the first time. She fills her hand with his hair and sees the sky again and suddenly there is the raw scent of grass and a buzzing noise as if the ground is thick with bees.

  ‘You tell that story as if you’re not in it.’

  Rien doesn’t reply because she’s not sure if it’s a question or Caroline’s out-loud thinking which she does all the time, and because she is somewhere else where the colours are harsher and the breath in her chest has flown out like a bird.

  It’s the story she remembers transforming, over and over – slapped for it, she had even laughed telling it, because at five, she had no idea about the permanence of death. Death was like a sting, which hurt and then healed up. She began to think that she was the bee, a giant, queen daughter bee whose weight had been too much for her father and so made him fall, his heart stopping.

  For years she thought he had taken a holiday without them. She waited for the postcards and answered all the phone calls that went beep beep beep at the beginning with an ear for his voice. And listened to the muffled clinking as her mother drained all the bottles in the house.

  The room was very quiet until Caroline said, ‘It must have been very frightening for a five-year-old to see her father like that and to wait so long with him with a broken arm, not knowing what was wrong.’

  It takes Rien a minute, or maybe an hour to say, ‘There were bees in the grass,’ and she remembers the painted-over beegirl with sting fingers on the card she had made. And the awful buzz for hours as the sun disappeared and the grass wilted and grew damp and she couldn’t move because her father seemed to have fallen asleep on her.

  ‘Perhaps you thought that you had died,’ Caroline said.

  Rien was quiet, she held her breath and sucked in the fast thinking till black furred bugs whizzed across her eyes. The question didn’t make sense, she thought, if she had died then who was she?

  After a minute or so Caroline asked, ‘Who is breathing?’

  Rien clambered from the floor and walked to the cabinet with the toys in them. She was too old for the dolls and blocks and pretend tools and miniature plates and cups, she didn’t even glance at them usually, but that day she took the four figures from their cosy poses in the doll house – tweedy Dad from his carpeted den, the two doll children from each of their wallpapered rooms, the smiling doll Mum from where one of the kids had upended her in the bathroom, her bushy head down the toilet. She sat them on the roof where they promptly slid across the tiles on their plastic bottoms and tumbled over the miniature guttering. The falling bodies tasted like salt.

  The dolls are already dead, she thought, so they can’t die again.

  ‘Can you tell me more about falling?’

  It was Thursday. She liked Thursdays because they reminded her of her favourite number – four. Multiples of two were good and three was evil. Rien tried to work out what Caroline wanted to know. She looked out the windows at the rain. The brown fields in the distance looked blurry like a painting or a memory. She felt a long way from the room.

  Whenever it rained she remembered his funeral and how she worried he’d drown in the hole they had dug, deep in the mud with the worms. Her mother threw fists of soil onto the shiny black coffin and the dirt knocked loudly then softened into pools of mud. Rien grew angry because the clods of earth were making him disappear. Her grandma whispered, ‘Don’t you worry, sweet pea, he’s not really in there,’ and she wanted to ask where then?, but remembered the story she was told earlier. She wondered if the rain was God’s tears since her grandma said her father was one of his children.

  Still, she didn’t believe he was up there, looking down. James had never believed in God, she heard her mother tell a woman after the funeral.

  Rien kept one of the cards they handed out. The gold letters spelt out a verse from her father’s favourite poet. Her mother read it aloud by the open grave as the dirt was shovelled in, but all Rien heard was the bit about the drowning heart as she watched the rain tearing down.

  ONLY DEATH

  There are lonely cemeteries

  tombs full of bones with no sound

  the heart passing through a tunnel

  blackness blackness blackness

  as in a shipwreck we die inward

  as if drowning in our hearts

  as if falling from our skin to our soul.

  ‘Can you fall and catch yourself at the same time? Who will catch you when you’re falling?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘Sometimes it rains and drops fall, drip drip and some people can catch them, in a bucket or on their cheeks and then they’re like tears and maybe you don’t know if it’s rain or if you’re crying but you can feel the cold drops of wetness.

  ‘That’s all you can know with your eyes closed and your head back with your face looking up. And when it rains, well that’s like part of the sky falling, but you know there’ll still be something up there.’

  ‘Tell me, how do you know that?’

  Rien began to feel annoyed with the way Caroline made the world seem all in-between, not one thing or the other – that’s what falling felt like, she thought, with your feet halfway between the air and the ground, when you’re not up or down but somewhere caught in the middle.

  ‘You ask too many questions,’ Rien said. ‘Isn’t there anything that you believe in?’

  Rien rolls the salon chair closer to the mirror’s mercurial light. She grapples for the arrogance, the confidence she had on that day with the doctor but cannot recall the source of such conviction. She had once believed in something. She searches the dark planes of her face in the mirror. Was there nothing to be relied upon?

  In the centre of the park, beneath a voluptuous sky she sees three figures a little distance from each other. One is running, the other stands by the drunk man as he begins to collapse, holding his torso as if to catch himself, a white dog puts its paws on the man’s falling body.

  Red

  One phrase in your head like a lightning flash as you pass the man in the park, turn back to see Dog Boy near the man and his dog.

  Keep running toward the flickering light of the salon. Then jiggle the handle of the wood-panelled door. Fucking OK Corral this place. Think about kicking it down with a cowboy foot. But you’re torn, between the scene and the rescue. You stand instead at the window. Push your face close. As you watch her, the only certain thing – terror turns you against your self.

  At least you can equal her, pain for pain. A word for every silent movement. A thousand. The quiet shimmies into your ears and haunts
there. Head’s like the scraped-out cavern of an old contraption. Bits of wire flipping uselessly inside. Tongue’s a dull flap clamped to the roof of your mouth. Your lips are fibrous, unyielding. Something rises from the burred metal tube of your throat.

  She turns fast. Squints at you. More startled at the sound of your voice than the work of her hand. You put the words to the picture because it’s all you know to do. Stuck like a cardboard advertisement for a man. Pressed against the window.

  ‘Everything will be alright. I give you my word.’

  You say this as you watch her fall. The same words she once wrote and passed to you in an orange-peel envelope. Back in those pain days at the Home. You press your hands against the glass as if they’ve something to offer. Superpowers to change the colour of her throat. Suddenly you’re looking at a photograph. Everything is still. Except her blood. You hear pads of footsteps on the path. Dog Boy walks head down toward the window. Stops, then peers into the salon with a look that makes your heart drop. You turn to watch a scene through the red lens of your childhood. The moment when you saw the world turn pink. The first time in your life you really wanted to speak.

  III

  Heaven is not the earth

  made anew:

  it is the ruins of the earth

  gazed on compassionately.

  Montri Umavijani

  The Flowers of Evening

  When she wakes she finds a fleshpink envelope on the bedside table. Inside is a postcard of coloured flowers shaped like a clock, beside this a list:

  LINNEAUS’S FLOWER CLOCK

  6 am – Spotted Cat’s Ear opens

  7 am – African Marigold opens

  8 am – Mouse Ear Hawkweed opens

  9 am – Prickly Sowthistle closes

  10 am – Common Nipple Wort closes

  11 am – Star of Bethlehem opens

  12 noon – Passion Flower opens

  1 pm – Childing Pink closes

  2 pm – Scarlet Pimpernel closes

  3 pm – Hawkbit closes

  4 pm – Small Bindweed closes

  5 pm – White Water Lily closes

  6 pm – Evening Primrose opens

  In the 1700s Carolus Linnaeus made a clock of flowers. It silently chimed as the petals opened. The changing light caused the flowers to respond and strike the hours by opening or closing their petals. This way light kept the time, and time would strike with light.

  On the back of the card, in the blue rounded curls of a hand she has almost forgotten, her mother has written:

  Dear Rien,

  There are lots of things for us to talk about. Perhaps when you are well we can begin. Pops gave this card to me after your father died. I thought you might like it.

  Love

  Louise

  Rien touches the cut stem of her throat with a finger and feels along the bright pulsing edges of the wound.

  A nurse arrives to check her drip and tells her that both Mark and Cassie have been and gone, and would like to come again when Rien feels well enough for visits. It is Cassie, the nurse says, who has brought the card from her mother. She hesitates, pulling the sheets tighter across Rien’s legs. ‘It seems your mum wasn’t up to a visit.’ Rien gestures toward the whiteboard she has been instructed to use until her throat has healed. The nurse wheels it towards where Rien’s hand is ready, gripping the thick blue marker, then watches the message take shape.

  ‘Come now, visitors are often just what you need, are you sure …? And Cassie was very keen to come back once you’d woken … Perhaps she’ll bring your mum this time?’

  Rien attempts to shake her head but points instead to where she has cast Cassie out with her message. She wishes only for the blackness that has covered her so thickly during the past hours, that blissful state between sleep and waking.

  For now, disturbing thoughts are forming quickly, as if backed up from that numb, suspended time. Why had her mother signed the note Louise and why hadn’t she come herself? Perhaps she no longer believed in the right to claim a maternal connection, after all this time apart. How could Cassie dare to visit after her deceit with Caroline? Rien tries to imagine a bedside reunion, Cassie begging forgiveness for what she has done. But fears it is her own self who will be held responsible for all that has happened; that Cassie, busy with some new project, will not see the part she has played in her old one.

  Rien closes her eyes but the light still passes through the papery flesh where she can see tiny veins illuminated. Her lidded eyes, she realises, still stare into the world. She always imagined they swung down into the dark cushiony place beneath the lower rim of each socket, but here they were, peering straight through this capillaried curtain. It’s only sleep then, she thinks, that allows them true rest. But she recalls the dreaming girls in the dormitory and the mothy flickering of their eyelids as she paced the cold floor at night. She used to try and guess at their dreams as she watched them. And sometimes pretended that she was their mother, wondering about the particular love she would have for each of them. It didn’t seem hard, as they slept, to love those slack-jawed mouths, the empty curls of their hands, their tucked-up souls. Some girls slept with limbs splayed, as if readying themselves for an airdrop of love or kindness. But others, like herself, were private and coiled: tight knots of legs and arms, their fingers fisted against the dark.

  She looks down again at the bright wheel of colour on the postcard, a clock of flowers marking 4 pm, the petals of bindweed closed against the sun. The clock, she sees, would not show the time at night, though she has heard of flowers that open in the dark. She pictures the dormitory where twelve girls marked the black hours with their sleeping bodies. They formed a clock of mortal time, and were not silent in their chiming, calling out the names of sisters, brothers, muttering stories lost to the waking world. Such a clock marked only the heat of loss, or the hook of memory; their bodies turning beneath the sheets.

  A different nurse arrives with a bag of blood for the pale man opposite and it strikes Rien that her own body is just a bigger bag with a hole in it, where the redness oozes out. She wants to laugh. If only it were that simple. I have turned myself into the liquid-throated mother I once had. Puncturing the passage of breath and sound. No more talking, words don’t explain the world.

  She is glad for the relative quiet of evening in which she can make out the stirrings of other patients, the whispering gossip of the nurses. Silence is part of the protocol in the emergency room. It signals the patients that need the most attention. In the intensive care ward, she learns that talking can be a kind of flashy excess, a luxury. The nurses joke about the ‘rude health’ of the articulate patients – the ones that describe their pain are considered least in danger.

  Rien would like to share this snippet with Mai, who comes to visit with gaudy flowers and a card signed by some of the regular clients and Delilah. She knows her friend will enjoy the story. It reminds Rien of Mai’s tough philosophy about failed love; how those who have survived to tell the tale are by far the better off.

  It wasn’t a total scandal, Mai tells her. But it was a pretty spectacular end to an evening. Rien has heard the nurses’ whispers, their antiseptic gossip. They have asked her to tell them what happened, there is nothing to fear from the truth, they say, wanting to believe it was an accident. But this is one story she’s not sure how to tell.

  Perhaps she had cut herself to reveal a different truth. The bright fact of blood bursting from her skin. The pearly tendon. Whiteness of bone. These were all and only hers. Though possibly it was a prevention. The throat, blood, blade, hands to distract from feelings that no word or concept would dissipate. She had watched herself fall under a spray of blood and a final garbled sound slubbered from her liquid throat.

  As she fell she saw the crazed pane of the salon window and heard its shattering, the world, herself exposed to each other. It was like her dream of the glass coffin where she lay, stilled and cold, unable to reach beyond the box, but looking keenly out as the
world moved past.

  Mai does not ask questions, she seems to know there are no simple reasons for what has happened. She nestles against Rien’s thigh and pulls disgusted faces when groans and sighs waft from the curtained beds.

  She whispers, ‘Time for your enema, Rien,’ then slaps a five-ringed hand to her mouth. ‘Oh sorry, you’re not supposed to laugh.’

  Rien sees the flash of jewellery; it’s her day off. Mai doesn’t wear her rings at work, they get caught and scratched on the handles of her scissors. Mai tells Rien the clients think she must have slipped on the wet floor or tripped over the swivelling chair. Mrs Stephens has offered to come and visit with her books and impart her knowledge of healing. At the bottom of the rose-covered card she has written:

  ‘The Syrian Book of Medicines … recommends the salt of Cappadocia as good for the stomach and excellent for those who faint from a great loss of blood.’

  ‘Mrs Stephens thinks salt is part of your cure,’ Mai says. ‘I should have brought the shaker!’

  Rien remembers the last time she saw the woman, emerging from beneath the drier, her white hair frizzed like a burst cotton flower. She had given up the purple rinses, convinced that dyes could seep through her scalp to collect in a poisonous indigo sludge in her liver. I am thankful for the gift of the present, Mrs Stephens had said. Her daughter had been given a month to live, two at the most, though she’d already survived much longer than predicted.

  Rien writes on the whiteboard, Delilah angry at me?

  ‘Oh no, don’t be silly, it’s just the excuse she needs to start renovations. Replaced the window in a jiffy then started calling round for quotes and slabs of marble for the rest of the place! In a weird sort of way you did her a favour.’ She paused, ‘But the blood was a bit drastic, not to mention gross … We’re all wondering if this had something to do with Mark … well, since you never told about the guy …’ She stops, seeing Rien’s tears as she vehemently mouths, No.