Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 14, Issue 6

by Leigh Swinbourne

  I left most of my belongings at my cousin’s house, in his garage, which had been an alarmingly small amount. I’d considered going and buying a doona to bulk it out a bit more. I had all my clothes with me in a suitcase, a few books, my phone and wallet. I’d told my housemates I was moving back with my mother to save money to travel. ‘Peru, or something,’ I told them.

  My father’s studio had been cleared out even before he died, after an art critic, a famous one, had come to one of his exhibitions and declared him a complete fraud. There were articles about it in the newspaper. I’d managed to nab a painting before he destroyed the body of his work. I’d left it in my cousin’s garage though, inside a pillow case, because it felt somehow indecent to bring it home.

  What Richard does with the oranges each day is squeeze them into glass bottles. They used to have pasta sauce in them and they still smell faintly of tomatoes. He’s more athletic than I am, and in his mid-sixties, like my mother. He keeps his grey hair is swept back and he’s shockingly tanned, like he’s been hit by a solar flare.

  ‘What’s on the agenda for today?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m meeting a friend for lunch,’ I say.

  ‘A special friend?’

  ‘A friend,’ I say, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

  My old bedroom has been left almost entirely intact. I’ve slid my suitcase under the bed, being careful not to disturb anything. I worry that my mother has left it like this because she knew I’d be coming back. I think about it while lying awake, listening to the deprivation tank at the end of the hallway. It hums.

  To appear more healthy I’m eating a grapefruit, which I can’t stand. I spend a lot of time spooning the sections apart and looking at them. My mother comes into the kitchen wearing her togs and goggles pushed up to the top of her head.

  ‘Each day I come out of there and I feel like I’m new born.’

  ‘That’s the effect,’ Richard says, nodding.

  ‘I feel younger,’ my mother says. ‘Like I’ve been floating.’

  ‘Lightness is something we should all be trying to attain,’ Richard says. ‘You cannot underestimate how lucky as shit birds are.’

  I look at the two of them looking at each other, and how happy they are. Sometimes I enjoy how their intimacy erases me from the room; other times, like now, it’s less appealing.

  I didn’t want to tell my mother that the other reason I’d come home was because of this terrifying dream I’d had where she’d died. I’d woken up in fear from it. To explain this better though: I’m not the kind of person that takes this kind of thing seriously, so I have never mentioned it to anyone and probably never will. I have never believed in a horoscope, or ghosts. I can’t remember the dream very well, but sometimes I’ll be watching TV and my mother will be sleeping on the couch in front of the TV and I’ll suddenly remember the feeling. It gets me like a jolt.

  Two days later the neighbours have trimmed the branches of their orange tree. Richard comes back inside the house, closing doors forcefully so we’ll notice. He sits at the table and stares into the middle distance, looking frustrated, like he’s trying to close the kitchen door but only using his mind.

  ‘Maybe they needed to prune,’ my mother says.

  ‘No,’ Richard says, shaking his head. ‘Everything always means something.’

  I go outside to have a look. They’ve done a pretty good job, and I can’t see any branches or twigs or even leaves in my mother’s yard. Of course there’s no more oranges sitting on the lawn either.

  Whether or not Richard’s hatching some kind of plan, I can’t tell. I don’t know the man, and can hardly even guess at what he’s thinking. He doesn’t mention the oranges again, or drink the orange juice that’s still in the fridge. No one else drinks it either.

  I like to think that I have a rich inner life, and this makes up for being uninteresting, but I’m starting to suspect this isn’t true. I’m not looking for a new job, or trying to meet people, and even the books I’ve been reading are just the books I’ve already read, when I was a child.

  I sit on the couch a lot, with a blanket on and my glasses, and read and sometimes fall asleep. Sometimes my mother is there, on the living room floor, doing exercises along with a DVD.

  The neighbours with the orange tree come over. I answer the front door. They’re a young couple, younger than I’d been picturing, but still older than me. They ask me if I’ve seen their cat.

  ‘I haven’t seen a cat around, sorry,’ I say. Then add; ‘I’m new here.’

  ‘We’ve printed a flyer,’ one of them, the man, says.

  On the flyer is a picture of a cat. Its name is Stamina. In the photo the cat is sitting down and looking straight up at the camera. I’m not good with cat breeds. The photo is black and white, and then I think maybe they had a colour photo printed in black and white to save money. I tell the couple that I’ll keep a look-out.

  I put the flyer on the fridge and then mention it at dinner. My mother is worried about the cat. She says she looked after it for two weeks when the couple went to Tokyo last year. I look to Richard and he says, right away, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with this.’

  ‘No one’s saying you did,’ I say.

  ‘You gave a look.’

  ‘No one gave any kind of look,’ my mother says. ‘What’s happened here is a tragedy, we all think that.’

  ‘Do we?’ Richard says.

  ‘We need to watch over the little creatures,’ my mother says.

  ‘Cats usually come back,’ I say. ‘They just need a week or two, maybe even longer.’

  I’d read stories about animals returning after going missing for years, and of children too, returning as adults. I used to live with a guy who would sometimes drive us out into the hinterland, near the military base, to watch out for aircraft. We never saw anything, but I liked the time we spent together, in his car all night, drinking from a thermos. He used to say it was only a matter of time until everything would be revealed for what it truly was. He never got more specific than that.

  Richard goes over to the neighbours to talk to them about Stamina. I don’t go with him, but I watch him leave and then move from the couch to the front window to watch. They have an argument, eventually, I can’t hear what they’re saying but I can hear their voices. Then there’s a pause and then Richard walks out onto the road and get hits by a car.

  By the time I make it out onto the street he’s lying on the ground on his back. The neighbours are there too, holding each other like they’re braving a storm. The driver is bent over, seeing if Richard is alive. Richard is whispering, over and over, like some kind of mantra.

  ‘Don’t move,’ I say to him. ‘You’re not supposed to move in case you’ve broken your spine.’

  ‘I think you mean twisted,’ he says. ‘My spine can’t break.’

  ‘The guy came out of nowhere,’ the driver says. ‘Scared the fuck out of me.’

  I look but there’s no blood. Richard reaches out and I take his hand in mine. I nod at him, and try and say something encouraging, but I can’t think of anything. I make a humming noise instead.

  ‘I have lived a horrible life,’ Richard says.

  What I think my housemate meant, when we were waiting in his station wagon for drones to appear, was that things don’t actually happen how you want them to, or don’t ever come in big events. What you get instead is a slow unravelling, and then everything becomes clear in the end.

  Richard’s out of hospital in a few days with his leg in a cast. He takes my spot on the couch to get his bearings and then doesn’t leave.

  ‘I still need to lift some kind of weight,’ he says. ‘This broken leg is no excuse for me to drop out on my routine.’

  ‘You want me to bring your weights down?’ my mother asks.

  ‘Anything. Rocks. Bags of sand. I’d lift up the moon if I could.’

  My mother takes this like she does everything; with a simple good humour, knowing it really doesn’t have too
much to do with her. I’ve come to thinking that it’s something I admire about her. At night I’ll leave my bedroom door open, I’ll be sitting up in bed, and I’ll watch her climb into her tank. We’ll nod at each other, and then she’ll lie down and wait for the deprivation tank’s door to slowly descend, encasing her in darkness.

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