Machines for Feeling

by Mireille Juchau

  ‘I didn’t know you lived so close to the sky.’ I stretched my head back carefully then to where the clouds throbbed whitely.

  ‘Proximity to heaven,’ she said, ‘that’s why I’m sort of holier.’

  I have begun building a garden in her overgrown yard. After my first week with her she presented me with a box of seedlings and cuttings, bought from the local nursery and plucked from some of her clients’ gardens. In the mornings I dig and turn the sandy soil. When Mai returns from work we draw up plans on butcher paper, choosing flowers from books I have borrowed at the library. I try to recall the blooms that Pops used to grow in his garden, but all I recall is chamomile, a spreading wispy plant.

  I like to wander in the new neighbourhood, at dusk, when the spring light’s fading, but it’s not yet dark and there are people sitting out on their front steps with cool glasses of beer or wine talking to their neighbours in slow heat-sodden voices and the crickets are chirping and it’s still warm and the pavement gives off a heat I can feel through my shoes. I look into the warm lights pouring from windows as I pass and see people, at work, singing, listening to the radio, helping their children do homework, cooking a meal, staring absently out into the night and catching my face as I peer in briefly. I’m a passing moon, sometimes sad, sometimes I imagine there’s peace on my face, but I’m not sure what that looks like. The best part is the smell, of jasmine on unruly vines, of night flowers blooming, of grass freshly mown, of cooking and sometimes, the waft of a scent which can only come from families: the accretion of the familiar, sweat, the vanilla smell of babies’ heads, the steamy dank of teenagers’ rooms, the perfume of evenings entertaining – a blend of random and common notes to make a distinctive scent. Sometimes I wonder if I could live in a family like that, or invent one – noise and smell and routines that speak of something approximating love.

  One wall of Mai’s lounge is papered with photographs – scenes from all the countries she plans to visit. Rolling green hills and the ruined walls of castles, the steel towers of cities and houses with brightly painted doors. On the first night in her house she described all the places to me, but I quickly forgot where they were. A picture wasn’t much without anyone in it. I thought then of the photographs I had found among the boxes of family snaps at home, how I had scrabbled through them on a mad search for the repeated poses of my father’s face. There were landscapes, rolling hills and skies with a range of colours I had never seen. But those places seemed desolate to me, empty as they were of faces. Bleak, no matter how much sunlight streamed through the lens when they were snapped. After Mai went to bed that first night, I took out the picture my mother had sent to the hospital and pinned it to the wall. Linnaeus’s Flower Clock. Whenever I pass by I check to see which petals are opening on the other side of the world where the clock flowers bloom. There are two other pictures I would like to pin up there, to remind me of my past: the card I had made for my father and the heart-card Cassie had made for me on the last day I had visited. Though they’re linked to anger, loss and sadness, these three gifts, and the people that connect them, are the key to something I am trying to figure out. They are as much a part of me as the blood of my body and the scar at my neck.

  ‘There are no more heroes and no more big ideas,’ Cassie had said on the last day I saw her. It had been two weeks since I fled her house after the news of the baby. The first week passed and I couldn’t work out who was supposed to be angry, me or her. She had stopped popping up at the backyard fence to say hello, or dropping around on the weekends. Instead she’d wave from the upstairs windows of her house when she caught me staring up. I watched her and her family going about their lives in glimpses and sneaked looks as I wandered by.

  She was standing on a ladder hanging balloons and streamers across the garage ceiling. I was helping her decorate the garage for Kate’s birthday party.

  ‘What do you mean? You’re being, what’s that crossword thing?’

  ‘Crossword, what do you mean?’

  I used to ‘help’ Dad with crosswords when I was small, drawing squiggles across the blank squares and into the blacked-out ones. He would patiently wait his turn, writing over the crayon marks with a fine black pen.

  Cassie gave me a bunch of papers every week to take home. She showed me how to do papier-mâché and bought me a pot of glue. She wanted me to make all those stories into a new shape. A horse, a cow, a wobbly vase. I would read the papers instead, searching for her name, and try to understand the articles she wrote, cutting out certain stories and gluing them into my diary. And then I would find the crossword page and linger over the clues, Dad’s heavy dictionary beside me. The dictionary had little indentations on the edge of the pages with letters printed on them. You were supposed to put your finger in the dips and find the right page. Some of the letters were worn from where Dad and I had touched them over and over. I liked the unpopular letters and felt sorry for them. Z and U were still shiny and hardly touched.

  ‘Cryptic,’ I remembered, ‘that’s what you’re being.’

  I was wrapping plastic baby animals in layer upon layer of newspaper for pass-the-parcel. My own baby-secret, I thought, as I covered a lamb with paper, until one of Kate’s friends unwrapped the tiny thing mid-game.

  I was glad the animals were made of plastic and hadn’t been given pretend fur or feathers. I didn’t like to touch the knotted and stained fluffy toys that seemed to multiply in Theo’s toybox because their skins felt dead. Plastic was safe and clean and wasn’t pretending to be alive. Cassie kept looking at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice. She asked me if Mum was well, was she going out much? But she really wanted to ask whether she was home in the evenings; sometimes I wished that adults would just say what they meant. I sighed.

  ‘Fine,’ I told her, ‘everything’s fine.’

  A lie was bad, but remembering the truth was like sticking my head under the bed in the middle of the night to check for monsters. I’d hang over the edge with my head upside down, dizzy and scared that something would leap out and grab me. When bad dreams put their talons in me I tried to stay still, I would pull my limbs away from the dangerous edges of the bed and wish that I was just a speck beneath the covers, never to be found. Because I couldn’t shrink I would suck in my breath. Sometimes the air from your mouth makes a long snaky arm, wavering in front of your face and giving you away. When I lay like this years later at the Home, I would dream of being inside a coffin. It was the same dream every time, except sometimes I felt safe, and other times I felt lonely and trapped behind all that glass, like some ruined display at the museum.

  Cassie started making a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, drawing four versions of the donkey shape using a thick black texta. She picked up the third donkey and held it up on the garage door, pointing and raising her eyebrows to make a silent question.

  ‘Um, it looks a bit cowish,’ I said.

  I caught her glancing at me again, with a pruney look, a face that meant she had a question she wanted to ask but wouldn’t. The look reminded me of Theo when he bent his small legs just slightly and stood quite still in the middle of a game or a run. It was the strained face of someone pushing poo from their body.

  I felt the disturbing feeling I sometimes had at home when one of Mum’s boyfriends came to visit. Those men would crouch down and try to find out what I was about, asking stupid questions about my favourite food and what I wanted to be when I was grown. I didn’t speak but shook my head or stared at something across the room till they stood up straight and put their hands on their hips. Sometimes I would practise being a statue. This was harder than just being silent, because whenever I froze my body I would take in a deep long breath and hold it. If they stayed talking for too long I would run from the room to some empty part of the house and splutter into a corner. Left with the boyfriends for more than a moment I would feel a kind of homesickness in my own home.

  Cassie asked me if I had lost weight, looking me over and pointing the black texta toward
me like a teacher. I turned to the pile of balloons and busied my mouth so I didn’t have to reply, puffing madly at the flaccid red rubber and going cross-eyed as it expanded. She waited, then said, ‘Let’s play our own game’, and I let go of the balloon in an exaggerated sigh at the change of topic and watched it fart its way across the room, finally deflating on a pile of newspapers in the far corner.

  ‘I’ll trace you first and then you do me, but you’ll have to take that skirt off, I need your legs.’

  I hesitated, trying to recall what kind of underwear I had put on that morning while Cassie laid the paper across the floor, oblivious. I pulled off my long skirt to reveal the washed-out grey of my rattiest knickers. They were drooping and overlarge and had long ago lost their elastic snappiness.

  Cassie traced my shape as I lay on the paper, crawling around my body with the black crayon pressed hard into the floor. I felt my pants bunch up as her hand passed my hips on their way round my flesh. I was a knobbly island, corners where there were supposed to be curves. When she reached my leg she stopped and put her fingers on the scratches there, and she furrowed her brow like she was trying to understand something. I jerked my leg away.

  ‘What’s this from?’ she asked.

  In the two weeks of neighbourly silence I had avoided crossing the front yard. Bees seemed to buzz again in the thick itchy grass there. I had to sidle down the narrow alley instead, where asparagus vines lassoed my legs as I passed. My shins were scratched and bleeding after such a detour. But they stung reassuringly, a bright simple feeling.

  ‘Keep still,’ she said gently as she rounded the slope of my shoulder and came to a halt, stepping quickly up and back from the paper, which made me think of a video rewinding. I stood up slowly: I was eager to see but I didn’t want her to know how much. I expected to be surprised when I saw the shape as if it wasn’t my body she had traced but that of someone twice my width or with a third arm or extra leg to startle me.

  When I traced her she kept her eyes closed and let out brief hoots of startled night-bird laughter.

  ‘I’m incredibly ticklish, remember,’ she said. ‘Be careful!’ I took my time as I moved the crayon up the sides of her body, looking carefully at her stomach to see the evidence of the peanut growing inside there. But nothing moved beneath the stretched skin. The child was quiet and still. She didn’t talk about the baby that day, though I had all kinds of questions, about whether the peanut was still coming, about the absent father.

  She hung the two pictures on the wall of the garage. I looked at the stick-figure of my body next to her rounded form. And then at the wilting donkey shape further along the crumbly wall.

  She passed me a sheet of red paper and instructed, ‘Now you make me a heart and I’ll make yours. Make it good, I want to keep it forever.’

  Why? I started to get nervous about the game which now seemed somehow sinister. Forever was the word Grandma used when she had explained about Dad and where he had gone. I watched Cassie dip a paintbrush into a pot of red. She passed me the palette and a couple of brushes.

  ‘There was once this kids’ doctor who used to teach his medical students about the heart. He’d ask a child to help and while all the students watched, he’d x-ray the poor kid and because it was afraid, the students would see how fast its heart was beating and how it slowed down when he spoke gently and reassured it.’

  ‘It? You said it for the child … anyway didn’t they use dead people so they could show how the heart looked from the inside?’

  ‘That’s my point. What use to the students was a dead heart? The heart still beating in a child’s body would help them understand how the organ was connected to the person who felt things and had fear and could be calmed. The heart’s not just a thing that pumps blood, it’s a mirror of your feelings too.’

  When we had finished, we held up our pictures. Hers was a strange and abstract thing, with four sections. In each she had painted a tiny coloured face which she said represented Kate, Theo, her and myself. I wanted to ask why she hadn’t put Andrew in there, or the curled-up shape of the new child. I gave her my painting – it was a clumsy replica of what I’d seen in textbooks, the meaty shape rounded out, the veins delicately drawn in.

  ‘Oooh very anatomically correct! You’re quite an autodidact.’ She said the last word slowly. Just like Dad, I thought – Pops had used the same word when he told me about Dad’s brilliant childhood. I felt my throat thicken.

  ‘You be careful with my heart now,’ Cassie said, gently handing it to me. ‘Don’t go breaking it!’ Then she blindfolded me and spun me in front of my outline up on the wall. ‘Off you go. But make sure your heart’s in the right place.’

  I stood, dizzy, confused, and unbearably sad, thinking of the child behind the x-ray screen, its little heart thudding away while the students watched. I thought the heart was just a kind of machine that pumped the blood around for you.

  ‘What’s up with you, come on now, you’re being heartless!’ she hooted.

  When I pinned it I felt quite certain I had guessed correctly but somehow it landed at the centre of my throat where an Adam’s apple might be.

  ‘Aha,’ she had said, unpeeling the blindfold, ‘a girl with her heart in her mouth.’

  ‘Throat, it’s in my throat.’

  ‘Better to wear it on your sleeve I think,’ she said as I tied the blindfold and gave her a mighty spin. She stuck it somewhere round her navel after I quickly moved her picture up the wall, not wanting her to get it right.

  ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw it.

  ‘Her heart sank,’ I said and we looked at each other for a moment, until she turned, distracted and I felt the cool spreading again inside my chest and thought I should leave, though I didn’t want to go home and had nowhere else to be. ‘Take my heart,’ she had said then, straight-faced, ‘it’s yours for keeps.’

  Mai says she has had a pre-life crisis, and now takes driving lessons in the misty evenings. She has given up on the air hostess dream after three application forms were sent and never seen again. On a dark afternoon of the soul she conceived of a way to experience by proxy the joys of overseas travel. As a taxi driver, she explains, she will park at the airport while the metal birds swoop down from the sky full of the next hour’s business. Then she’ll meet people returning from all the cities she wants to visit. In her vision they’ll gladly share their travel stories on the sleepy drive through the city and she’ll draw them out, asking for small details, the things that give their journeys weight and colour. What sort of trees line the cobbled streets, describe the blue of the sky over Spain, the texture of water off the shores of Greek islands? It’ll be less expensive, she says, than really being there. And she might well become an expert, gathering information about the towns to avoid, the ideal season for certain destinations and how to find a reliable guide.

  I watch her drive off with her road luck scarf, a silky red thing that flies out the car window as she jolts into first gear and throws her head back, laughing with the instructor. Their two heads jiggle conspiratorially as they make their slow way down the road.

  There’s a clifftop park near her house and sometimes I walk down there when it’s clear. I sit on the benches and watch the waves far out at sea where pearly fish have been sighted, leaping into the air. I teeter at the edge, a high breezy place and feel the sky lurch beneath me. Sometimes the neighbour’s children appear through the dense bushes with rubber balls and frisbees and towels on their way down to the ocean. They recognise me now and wave or nudge my arm as they pass by. Once they dragged me from a hazy fug and led me to the rock pools for a morning of wandering and peering and screeching with delight at finding a rare creature, a delicate shell or weed. They are experts on all kinds of sea life and describe their favourite kinds. There are sea creatures in the ocean where no light falls, they tell me, and these are just as beautifully coloured as the ones in shallower waters.

  Come!

  On the dusty floor of the shed Dog
Boy found tiny seconds to wonder. He was tied, and gagged in certain positions that increased the pressure at his throat. Right and left HATE were busy clanking in a far corner, Little John moaned and whispered secrets about coloured jellies and other bright sweetnesses. Some dogs save humans, Dog Boy thought, rescuing them from the snow drifts or wildernesses. A dog knows what a human is. Some dogs care about humans.

  From the corner of his eye he could see Big John rubbing his bitten arm from time to time, exaggeratedly it seemed, since Dog Boy’s small teeth had barely pierced the skin. He had never planned in his short life to hurt another, and if he had done so it was unknowingly, or in the hot confusion of instinct. But fury had rucked up inside him on the last days at the Home and his plans for burning eased the sensation. He was sure of this: fire reduces matter to the coruscating truth of what is, peeling back to the cleaned bones at the heart of things. This knowledge was Jonas’s legacy. And he had seen it for himself, passing the lit match to Jonas, slumped against the stall in the boys’ toilets, a cigarette in his mouth. A fire would take his small anger and multiply it, the flames managing what he could not.

  On the Wednesday morning of the last week at the Home Dog Boy had snuck out early and let himself into the hall to take a long and sobering look at the exhibit there. The Embellishment of an Intolerable Life, the words were displayed on a board at the entrance. He wondered whether intolerable life referred to that of the children before they arrived at the Home, or after. And he soon saw how each piece chosen testified to those intolerable things, the moulded shapes were painfully wrought, the paintings rendered fiercely. What would have been revealed about him and Mark if their lumpen mountain had been included?

  It was envy that led him to enter the hall. He wanted his sculpture to be seen by more than the clamouring few in the science class, who, it must be said, were so impressed they asked for an encore once the thing had exploded. It seemed to represent a true connection for Dog Boy, not just between himself and the coloured world of seeds and flowers, the hot fire within each rock, but also between the two sculptors at work. A solid friendship was built, like that mountain, in slow daily layers. When he thought of the volcano, he thought of Mark. They both seemed sturdy, reliable structures – Mark had none of the sudden flare and dying flame of Jonas. He had his moods but they were less erratic, he hummed at an altogether lower pitch and was not prone to the fury and obsessions that took Jonas’s attention elsewhere. In his grief at losing his friend, Dog Boy clung to the relative calm of Mark. He had even revealed the secret about Jonas’s death, making him promise to tell no soul.