‘There are lots of ways to tire a man, Rien. My bet is you’re afraid of just how unlousy your bloke is. You want him to be brutish and rude and to treat you badly. That way you can whinge and moan like Delilah’s clientele. There’s no evidence that he’s lousy, from what I can gather. But if he’s good, he shows you up, how miserly, how scrawny and erratic you are with your loving.’ Mai plaits her fingers then cracks them in a backward stretch.
‘You don’t know anything about him!’ Rien stands, pushing the cold food toward the thin-lipped chef.
‘So tell me why you’re here?’ Mai asks gently. She had not intended to offend.
‘Why is anyone here?’ Rien drops her voice. A small tender spot inside is smarting from her friend’s neat assessment. The bright bead of truth in it. When had she become so transparent?
‘I’m not asking for the meaning of life,’ Mai sighs. ‘But tell me why you’re here, Rien, in this house when you have a home – of course you’re welcome, stay as long as you like. But I’d like to know and maybe he deserves an answer too.’
Rien pushes the wobbling chair into the table and adjusts it to align exactly with the laminated edge. She places her hands on the back of the chair and leans in as if to speak, but no words will come. Inside her chest, small snakes coiling and uncoiling. I thought you were my friend, no questions, the words lash about but will not emerge from her blocked throat, sore from where the unchewed celery had stuck and finally scratched its way to her stomach. So she lashes her limbs instead, propelling them toward the back door. She turns, sees the bemused look on Mai’s face (what would it take to rile her?). The congealed meal gleams, accusing in the middle of the table.
‘So you speak French, Mai?’ (She had slid that ragout word so expertly from her lips.)
‘Why, are you going to swear at me in a foreign tongue?’
Rien maintains her gaze across the now darkened room.
‘Well, Rien, I did learn at school and was quite good at it, but I’ve forgotten a lot. I remember strange bunches of words from time to time. Like frottage and brisement de coeur – that’s heartbreak. Don’t you think French always sounds sleazy? Or maybe it’s just the films they make. I’ve seen a couple, I like to guess the places – the Seine, Notre Dame, Left Bank, Right Bank. Lots of young – no actually more older – men falling into bed with perfect-skinned women who sort of coo while they’re having sex.’
Rien listens, a little confused, the conversation has shifted so, her anger suddenly disappearing. Perhaps it slid out the door, through the too-small cat flap that Mr Whiskers was once prised from – it was creaking and swinging.
Mai continues, ‘They’re always troubled, those French blokes, scoffing red wine, but they play really awful rock – the soundtracks, eugh! You’d think their music’d be a bit more deep … I always meant to ask if you knew your name meant anything?’
‘Yes, it means something,’ Rien retorts, despite the distraction of Mai’s chatter she now remembers her original annoyance and adjusts her tone to revive it.
‘No – anything is what your name means. I looked it up when you were in hospital. Just to be sure.’ Mai has unpicked her fingers and flattened her palms against the table.
‘It means nothing, actually,’ Rien says and wonders, Sure of what? Then turns back toward the door, hoping to find that wisp of anger, so deflated does she feel now repeating this fact to her friend.
‘It’s both – nothing and anything. It’s great to have two options. Mine’s truly tedious. I think I would have preferred October, but I should be grateful it wasn’t some horrible twin-set-and-pearls name like June or April.’ She laughs and turns as her cat comes sauntering out from her bedroom.
‘Mr Whiskers!’ Mai calls and catches the tom between her hands. She strokes his arching back and bends to look into the green-flecked eyes. Then croons a string of invented words, a version of baby-talk interspersed with animal noises. Rien thinks of the cooing Frenchwomen as she watches, incredulous at how unselfconsciously Mai delivers these garbled sounds of love. When she had first witnessed this ritual of affection she turned away, as if intruding on an act of human intimacy. But now finds herself compelled and looks on, longing for some intangible thing.
She leaves the loving couple to step outside. The moon above is a perfect O, it might be a hole in the flat stretch of darkened sky – she wonders what lies beyond it. A whirring chorus of cicadas fills her ears and stops short the train of thought that might stall her there in the yard, as it did so many years ago. She begins to walk and will not stop till she feels the graceful state that comes of movement and exhalation, her breath taking part in the air around her.
By morning a thick cottony fog will coat the city whose desperate citizens will fumble blindly toward something solid.
Recipe for Breath
When the world shrinks and it’s hard to make breath,
Open it up.
Take a knife, some kind of blade. Make it a sharp one.
Open up the house of your body and go visiting in there.
A bright firework of pain.
Blue skeins of vein. Tendons.
World expanding in one small flick.
Mark scrawls it out on the notepad then looks over at the kitchen bench where the one cookbook lies, stain-soaked and floury. He can’t bear to use it any longer, every grubby fingerprint in its pages, all the glued remnants of dinners past remind him of how things used to be. He calls his poem Recipe for Breathing No. 1. Reads it through and hangs his head. The razor she used to shave him with sits below the window, he can see the black light gleaming on the steel.
He writes the words because he can. He looks at the blade and pulls his hair to feel the small hurt at the base of each stem. Bites off the nail left hanging above the pads of his fingers, ripping into the skin and sucking back the warm salt of blood.
The house smells of yesterday’s burning, the air is pungent and thick. Though the floors are cleared now, and the rooms emptier, he does not feel relief. He contemplates the walls, the ceiling, wonders at how much kindling might be required to set the whole place off, an abstract thought, devoid of feeling.
Don’t you ever play dead? Those were the words Jonas had spat at Dog Boy on his first day at the Home. And Mark had silently watched, his young fingers stroking the smooth blue glass in his pocket. The pain that crossed Dog Boy’s face that day caused Mark to recognise a familiar kind of torment. Such misery transformed the freckled new boy from a sort of neutral specimen into a mortal Mark recognised as akin to himself. It’s pain that connects us, he thinks as he looks now at the blade. Everybody knows how it feels to suffer. Soon all three boys were close friends, Jonas enlisted the faithful Harry as an accomplice to his firestarting and Mark had tagged along when he wasn’t busy with his own forms of destruction.
He had seen the same suffering on Dog Boy’s face during science when they dissected a bunch of frozen rats. The rodents were packaged in newspaper like fish and chips. They were large and white-furred with pink eyes that stared glacially from their sockets. The class was shown how to pin the four tiny rat feet in a splayed manner onto a board. Tony Wong looked down at the rat and named it Blondie, Deborah Stein had pulled the rat’s legs in vain, tugging and pressing them to the sides of the rat’s body. Dog Boy would not touch the animal. Mark stood like a nurse at the edge of the table, handing over the pins for the rat’s legs, the scalpel for the procedure. He looked over at Dog Boy as they heard the snapping of the rat’s legs being wrenched into position.
By the end of the class the students were in various stages of despair or a kind of gleeful bloodlust. Three had vomited, adding a sharp cheesy whiff to the acrid odour of the frozen rats, Andrew Ferrare was crouched, rocking and emitting a low-pitched echolalic mutter from beneath a science table, Alexis Deakin was concocting a ‘ratshake’ in a test tube out of various rodent organs and Jonas had begun to barbecue the snapped-off legs of a rat above a Bunsen burner, asking Dog Boy medium, rare or w
ell done? then waving the leg underneath his nose. Mark had watched the light filter out of Dog Boy’s eyes, then saw him turn to blink at the bleached sky through the window.
Dog Boy told him later that when he had checked the rat’s eye at the end of the class he saw that it had closed. The rat, Dog Boy said, had wished to disappear, turning its gaze upon itself. Mark tried to reassure him then, the rat’s eyes had simply defrosted, dead things don’t feel pain.
Dog Boy turned, angrier than Mark had ever seen him and said firmly, ‘It’s not a thing,’ then more quietly, ‘it’s not a thing, Mark.’
Jonas died the following year, and again Mark reassured his friend. It wasn’t your fault. He would have lit the cigarette anyway, Harry, whether you’d been there or not.
Rien’s notebook sits on the table, saved from last night’s grand cremation, the pages limp from being pored over. He had gleaned nothing from his reading, her notes were old and disappointingly free of evidence, hints of the life to come. The book contained the innocuous details of a curious and precocious childhood, but told him less about her than all those rewritten accounts in her archive. And since it was filled long before she came to the Home, he hadn’t even gained a mention. He drags it toward him, opens it at the back. There’s a scramble of words down the page he hadn’t noticed as he’d fanned his fire and flicked through it. He runs his finger across the paper then sniffs it, the words look scorched, they’re blurred and clumsily rendered. But cover the page in a brown effort of writing. A simple message, an urgent cry from the lonely heart of her childhood.
His mind grinds fast now, he looks over at the razor in panic. His breathing quickens. The opposite of cutting is sewing, he thinks and wonders at the brilliant stitches that could hold his girl together.
He begins with the tiny act. Snips a square of fabric from the corner of her pillow and sews it onto the underside of his sweater shoulder. The colour in the centre of the pillow where her head used to lie is the same yellowy brown as the words in the back of her notebook. He tilts his head to test it out, pulls the collar up and pushes his nose inside.
After Words
Rien races from the shadowy yard to pluck up the phone with sap-stained fingers. It’s a mild Wednesday afternoon, the skin of her cheeks is flushed from the sun and exertion. She has been moving wilted and yellowing plants around the garden to better suit their temperaments. The green smell on her fingers tingles her nostrils as she half listens to her friend’s voice. She is still mesmerised from the buzz and heat of the yard.
‘Now Mark’s not sure …’ Mai begins.
‘You spoke to him?’ Rien is jolted from the reverie of plantlife at the sound of his name, not forgotten.
‘He rang about your friend – whatsit – God Boy? I couldn’t exactly hang up. And they found, the police found a body – but they don’t know whose it is and he’s, Mark’s, worried it might be him and said something about not asking the police because of a fire?’ A curious tone tips Mai’s voice upward.
Rien looks at the phone as if there might be a sign there, a clue to Dog Boy’s whereabouts. She notices that the receiver is bone-coloured and looks away, utters empty words back into the hard form and replaces it. There is nothing more to be said or done, it seems, but wait.
They wrote to Dog Boy after leaving the Home, but believed he was too guileless to enter the world. She admired and envied his enthusiasm – the naivety that cast a rosy emanation around his scruffy presence. He stood so solidly in what seemed to her a precarious life, trusting all that he encountered where she was continually suspicious.
Death is distant and unreal. She is still waiting for her father’s call, to tell her a mistake has been made in the grand order of things – he is coming back promptly and all will sit right. Dog Boy was so determinedly part of the growing breathing world, it seems inconceivable to her that he could pass beyond it.
The room is cluttered with objects Mai has collected – shells and smoothed stones from the beach, stubs of half-melted candles, decorated boxes and plants spilling from cracked plastic pots. For the first time Rien feels a pang for the decay and emptiness of the squat; the bare floorboards, pricked with rusty nail heads, clogged with dirt and human detritus, the flaking plaster, even the mould that flowered on the bedroom ceiling and made her cough and itch.
Mai’s grizzled toothy cat rubs against Rien’s legs with a pathetic mewling sound. Its grey hairs stick to the fabric of her trousers. She moves her leg away, and watches the cat’s fur stand on end, caught in an invisible static of love or need. Rien holds her neck as tears catch at her fingers. The grip reassures – something might spill out suddenly – so large and firm is the ache inside her throat. She stays that way, the back door ajar where she has left it, her fingertips coated with clear dried caps of sap, till Mai comes home and stirs up the air, swatting at moths and mosquitoes. Then sits beside Rien with insect-bloodied hands and leans a little toward her friend, careful to keep the insect gore in her own lap, offering her sturdy body in support. Rien feels this unfamiliar human scaffold and succumbs. She tilts her throbbing head and rests it, like an oblivious nodding sleeper against a stranger.
The week dawdles, stuffed with messages. Mai brings them from work: still no sign or word from Dog Boy, though someone has found a set of bloody tools in a shack not far from the squat. Now Mark’s the one scouring the daily papers for information and updates, ringing them through to the salon because Rien still will not speak with him. She holds her twitching fingers firm and walks outside to taste the briny air then bends in the grass and tears at the weeds with a furious sorrow.
She cannot look at the sea now without thinking of Dog Boy. How excited he was when she and Mark had returned from a school excursion to the ocean. She had pleaded his case with the teacher, Sir, the sea air is meant to heal, having read this somewhere or seen the salty transformation on television. But Dog Boy remained behind, a freckled creature sweating his shape onto the stiff sheets of the sickroom bed. In the evening they came to the hot, pale boy who seemed more ill on their return, as if deflated by his deprivation. They made the sounds of waves and seagulls yarking. Then remembering the healing claims, Rien let him lick the white powder of salt from her arm where it had dried in a fine rime and Mark passed him a sandy souvenir. Dog Boy had cupped the shell-skeleton in his clammy hands as if it were a living thing.
She decides to keep her eyes to the ground instead and plunges the garden fork into the earth. But is reminded of bones and of Dog Boy again when she does this, recalling the queer science project she had carried out while Dog Boy and Mark were building their volcano for class. She had dug into the soil at the back of the Home yard to exhume Madonna’s body from where it was buried months before. Inside the sock she had found a few bits of grizzled cartilage and feathers that came off the ribs and skull in her hands. The wings were a fan of sharp twigs loosely connected by a crumbling membrane. There was nothing about the delicate carcass to identify it. This, she realised, was what her father had become – a crumbling set of bones beneath the earth. Confronted with this material evidence, she had formed a new question: where had the dead disappeared to?
And she had thought then, looking at the remnants of the bird, that the ribs were really a cage for the heart. The pressure in her chest when breathing became too hard was the heart’s begging to be released. She thinks of this now as she walks from Mai’s house to the sea and back and feels her breath trapped, her throat tight and closed, the words Dog Boy a mantra that she chants in her head to the rhythm of her faltering steps.
When Rien had told Caroline her theory about the heart’s prison, she had replied, Perhaps the ribs are the heart’s protection, and Rien wondered what the heart needed protection from.
On the Friday she decides to go there – she might find some small trace of him, a clue to reveal what occurred, whether he was involved. She cannot begin to believe in his death until she holds it in her hands: bone, flesh, the heart stilled. She catches two bus
es back to the old suburb and walks the long way toward the park, avoiding the familiar streets. She keeps her head low, just in case, but must pass the Dead Woman’s shop, and briefly spies Larry in the distance, cradling the head of his doll in his hands. Soon she reaches the grassy hill and climbs toward a swaying patch of pines. At the base of the slope a river twists in muddy swirls, clumps of rubbish are gathered in each bend. The wind has a cruel bite in its heart, she pulls her jacket closer.
The ground outside is a soupy mess of mud, the shed door hangs precariously from its hinges. She steps inside, cautious. What will she find in the twitching cords of air that move through the shed? She begins to imagine the possibilities – a pattern of blood, a single loop of sandy hair. Then realises, the place will have been thoroughly searched. The police had discovered the bloodied tools, and the three bright marbles that proved Dog Boy had once been there. But no link had yet been made, she reminded herself, between those instruments and the owner of the marbles. Perhaps he had simply taken shelter here and was now strolling happily about in a newly discovered Eden.
Her eyes are slow to adjust to the darkness, she notices a flickering at the back of the shed – a hole, she guesses, where the daylight streams. There’s a leafy scrunching in black corners, a dank dirt smell and feathers in small drifts across the floor as if chickens have been slaughtered here. The fronds of light are golden. She moves slowly closer and sees a shadow cast on the far wall – a sort of yellowy film. Light streams from a small globe above a circular construction; closer, she makes out the shape of a wheel, then grazes her leg on something sharp. A twiggy snap reverberates through the shed. She feels along the edges of this scratchy impediment – it seems to be a fence, woven into a ring. Small beads glint inside it, garnet-coloured and glossy. In a moment she sees it entirely – a nest, human-sized, knitted from coloured streamers and straws, electrical wires and thin lengths of twig and branch. The base is lined with downy feathers, it looks soft and inviting. She stretches one hand to touch an ochre gleam, then recognises the texture, the gritty crumbling beneath her fingers: amber.
Machines for Feeling Page 20
