We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  Alone. A twin. The noise. It wasn’t the obvious, the hurt, the blood, the dead. It was the isolation. Nine years old. No one there for us. Eden. Just Eden. I’m nine. We’re nine. I said that. Out loud. We are nine years old.

  I pushed. I had to. Get out. Just get out. I pushed and kicked at the front passenger seat, pushed hard, both feet, my whole legs, driving at it, desperate. The seat had Mum in it or most of her but its hinge snapped and her whole chair moved. Because it had buckled. Down the middle. Mum flopped forward, lifeless. Lick the cream off the beater, Mum. Wrap my arms around your waist as you stand and talk, Mum. The void then of both Mum and Dad quiet. No jokes. No puns. No throwing footballs or wrestling on the couch.

  I regretted it. Instantly. I regretted moving Mum, it wasn’t right, I might have hurt her. I knew she was dead and I was fully aware but still I worried that I had hurt her.

  I twisted then and unbuckled myself. I tried to lift Eden and get out of there. My chest like a burn, like a scorch. Door open, flung clear in the car’s somersault of shatter. Lifting. Pain from all the wrong places. But able to move. Eden dropped onto the wet earth outside. Tried to lay him down softly. So incredibly thirsty of a sudden. The cleanse of rain. Leaves and twigs and grass. Eucalypts. A wet forest. The smell of petrol or exhaust or a milkshake. I felt it. My clothes. Wet with blood. It felt like the blood was alive. That thought got into me. It was Mum. The blood was Mum.

  *

  Rain. Stop. Please, I thought, please stop raining. You don’t know.

  *

  And then there were hands on me. And I was asked where I hurt. And I was pulled away by someone who did not smell like our mum or dad or even like Bobbie. And I saw again that lights flashed, a bright orange sunset haze swept the road as if the world was a globe that could shatter. Someone in a yellow raincoat bending over Eden. A packet of Monte Carlos on the side of the road. Opened. Tiny little crumbs of sweet biscuit. ‘Who moved him?’ the person said.

  And I said, ‘Me.’ And then I coughed. As my throat clogged. My chest. I was a mess. There were people there.

  ‘Best we don’t move him again,’ she said.

  So I said, ‘He was fitting.’

  And she said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here to help, I need you to stay calm.’

  As that horrible sag of my chest clawed at each breath. The blood. It rolled. Like a slick. Like seabirds could drown in it. Like that’s it. I’d survived. Only to drown.

  ‘Don’t look, don’t look,’ she said, because I’d turned, I had to.

  And so then, right then, I emphasised or at least I tried to, ‘He’s my twin!’ And I tightened an arm around Eden and reached my other arm towards the car, towards the shiny screwed-up car. The metal. Cold and wet.

  ‘Just be calm,’ she said. And she was looking at me but she was glancing at Mum and I know that’s where she didn’t want me to look.

  And then she called out, ‘More here.’ And then almost instantly she yelled, ‘Over here!’ And then again, like she too was caught up in it, ‘Blankets! Covers! Quick!’

  And then she cut Eden’s clothes up the middle like she was parting sausages. And I saw the bare broken body of my twin. And I heard her say ‘Sharps out’. And there were people around but they were blurry and few. And I saw her strap his arm and dig a needle in and inject something, then yell to someone else to call out for a MICA. ‘Tonic,’ she said. Then, as she grabbed a gadget she had attached to her shirt, ‘Brain,’ she added.

  And I was looking at Eden when a man cut my own shirt open and said, ‘Crikey’ and then said, ‘We’re going to need more choppers.’

  And then suddenly it was crowded and bright like the beach in summer. As if we’d been washed up, as if we were something to see, despite it being dark, despite it being night. There were waves of people and lights and beds and boxes all swarming like bees. And in this bustle I lost sight of Eden though I kept trying to see.

  And then I heard the word or the letter K and I was injected and it had no effect so it must have been working. The feel of rain or blood in my eyes. ‘Eden!’ I called out, hoping he would return my call but if he did I did not hear it.

  *

  And then they flew us fast in helicopters.

  *

  Different helicopters. As if they didn’t know that we are twins. So I fretted. And wondered. And kept trying to see. And then on a trolley at the hospital I looked and he was there. I thought of smiling but he wasn’t running or standing or wrestling but instead was lying down. And so I didn’t, I didn’t smile, I stared, shocked. And thought that I should also look out for Mum and Dad. That it might be my last chance to see.

  Eden and me strapped side by side. He woke. Tried to sit up. Asked a nurse to move him. ‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’ he asked. Straight away. Like firing up a drill.

  ‘Not here,’ I answered, a breathing mask, I could lift it.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He slumped. They attended. He pushed back up. ‘Are they still in the car?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t leave them,’ he said.

  ‘There are people there,’ I said. And I turned my head and there was moisture on his arm, from the rain maybe, and I was still thirsty and desperate for water and as I thought of licking the water from his arm a doctor held my hand and I didn’t care about medicine or surgery, I just wanted that doctor to keep holding my hand.

  ‘They were hurt?’ Eden asked.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘They need us.’

  ‘There are people,’ I said.

  I tried to cough but when I put my hand to my mouth there was blood and it could have been mine but I wondered again if it was Mum’s.

  ‘You left them?’ he pleaded.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t.’ He didn’t say these words, he held them to me.

  And when I said nothing he said, ‘They are our mum and dad.’

  And there was fog or breath or a mist of water on the window frame of the hospital wall and I looked at it and wondered if it was a mirage.

  And I whistled across tubes of plastic, ‘Yes.’

  And he said, ‘Mum wasn’t wearing a jumper,’ as if he was worried that she’d be cold.

  And I said nothing again because I felt embarrassed because I had time and because I could have put a jumper on Mum.

  And Eden said, ‘We were talking about the Olympics.’

  *

  Wheeled deep into the hospital and swung away for scans. They slid me into a hole and pumped Coldplay through headphones though the beep of the machine drowned it out. All I could think of was Mum and Dad on that wet road and the swirl of orange light and the smashed-up packet of Monte Carlos. On the road I’d seen a baby-sized lump beneath a white blanket with a tiny hand hanging out. This hand still had a hard-chewed rusk for teething in it.

  *

  I didn’t see my twin again for more than five days.

  *

  Tubes in my chest, drips in my arms. Can’t get warm without Eden. A conversation.

  ‘I’ll be looking after you,’ Bobbie said, standing by my bed.

  ‘Looking after us?’

  And I felt a rush like a helicopter, like this fact had hurtled towards me at speed. I knew what had happened and what it meant. But we would and could look after ourselves. We were only nine but we weren’t one, we were two.

  ‘In Flowerdale,’ she said, swallowing. ‘You’ll be living with me at Flowerdale.’

  And although we loved her farm at Flowerdale it was a playground and not our home.

  ‘That’s not our house,’ I said.

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not our house,’ I said again.

  And I looked down and Bobbie had gripped the white cover to my bedsheet, gripped it like she was holding on, and I took this in and then looked back up to her face. She wanted to look away, I could tell, but she didn’t. Sh
e did not wear glasses but she squinted as if reading me. Her nose was red like the tail-light of a car.

  ‘I don’t want to ask this,’ she said, ‘but there’s a lot of things I’d rather not do. Do you want to be at the funeral?’

  Before I answered I looked for the bowl or the pan in case I was sick. It was not on my side table so I tried to reach around but it hurt and so instead I said something stupid. ‘My toothbrush’s in my bag in the boot of our car.’

  Which made Bobbie flinch or perhaps flinch is not the right word. She said, ‘We’ll get you a new one.’

  ‘Mum’s vegies need watering,’ I said rapidly.

  Bobbie seemed stuck then and so I added, ‘We help her.’

  ‘You can help me,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a funeral?’ I asked. And I had only been to one funeral and Bobbie had spoken at it. It was for our Grandpa Jack and it was only last year though that now felt like ages.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ she said.

  ‘Is Eden going?’

  ‘He can’t,’ she said.

  ‘Eden’s not going,’ I said.

  ‘He can’t be moved.’

  And it took time and there was a silence and then eventually I asked, ‘Is it one funeral or two?’

  Which seemed to alarm her. But then she said, ‘Together.’

  And I coughed and the pain drilled into my spine.

  And I don’t know why I thought this but I said, ‘Are they both in the same coffin?’

  And I did not notice Bobbie move or react but once my words were out I felt a tremble to the bed, like a shudder. I looked and she still gripped my bedsheet cover as if she was worried it might run away.

  ‘No,’ Bobbie said. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘our grip on things is as thin as the paper in public toilets.’

  And then when I said nothing she glanced down and said, ‘You’ve seen enough,’ then turned to see if there was a nurse.

  Before Bobbie could stand or move I said, ‘Eden and me aren’t from Flowerdale.’

  *

  Two weeks later I walked free from the hospital and left Mum and Dad behind as if it was easy. There was no tantrum, no refusal to leave but I wish I had, I wish I’d thrashed and screamed.

  *

  I remember the moment, a car, expected to step into it. I wobbled. I walked to Bobbie’s car as if everything was normal but when she opened the door my spine turned like jelly and I grabbed at her arm. A car. A tearing, twisted, flying image of a car.

  ‘Wondered,’ Bobbie said. ‘Come on, we’ll grab a sandwich.’

  ‘Can we go by train?’

  ‘There’s no train.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘We’ll get hot chocolate,’ she said.

  We sat and drank hot chocolate as if she’d forgotten its place on that night, the smell of it so ugly, and I forced it down in the hospital café. In the midst of silence Bobbie piped up and said, ‘We humans only get one hard drive. You can reboot it but you can’t replace it.’ As if sensitivity was foreign to her.

  After we’d finished we headed again for her car but before I agreed to step in I turned to Bobbie and said, ‘Will we see the nurses again?’

  And Bobbie replied, ‘Likely not.’

  ‘Ever?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe when Eden’s ready,’ she said.

  And then as if it might help me get into the car she added, ‘Every day we say goodbye to something.’

  ‘I forgot to say,’ I said. That there’d been a doctor and some nurses who’d held onto my hand and I’d wanted to thank them and had been hoping to.

  *

  Threads of my t-shirt had become tangled in the cracked bones of my ribcage and I’d had surgery to my head and as Bobbie talked in the car on the trip out to Flowerdale I ran my fingers across my temple and skin flaked as I did. Eden had a fracture in his spine and in his neck and though they kept the seriousness of it from me I still felt like I knew.

  *

  The strangeness of Bobbie. In the car on the drive back to her house. ‘Ever since Jack died I’ve slept on the couch with the phone off the hook,’ she confessed. As if I was an adult. A new daylight world where our parents couldn’t hover.

  ‘Grandpa Up The Bush,’ I said.

  ‘Jack,’ she said.

  ‘Grandpa Jack,’ I said because Mum and Dad would never call him Jack, they’d say Grandpa Jack or Grandpa Up The Bush.

  I thought as we drove then that her farm was a long way from school and that we’d have to get up very early to get there on time. I looked out my side window or at my hands or at the brown dirt dust on her car radio. I thought of Mum’s plants and how dry they’d now be.

  Eventually I said, ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not waiting for him to call. I know,’ she stalled but then she said with a deeper boom applied, ‘I know that he’s dead.’

  We passed an Aldi store, a building called The Strand, a picture framer with stands of fresh married people in the window. I’d never noticed these places before. I hadn’t because Dad hadn’t pointed them out.

  *

  One afternoon immediately after vintage our Grandpa Jack had taken a big pink towel and gone sunbaking on the grass out near the apple trees. He was there for hours and was three-quarters in shade when Bobbie went to check. An apple had fallen and bounced right onto his back and it sat there as she ran. She turned him over and the apple rolled away and she breathed into his mouth and forgot to pinch his nose and she had to pump his chest to the rhythm of a song from the seventies but she didn’t know if it was a disco song or ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ and there was a massive difference. She had been Australia’s first female stockbroker or so she believed and she’d built a life on pips, numbers and timing but she felt completely out. She’d placed all her chips on Jack. ‘We hated all the same things,’ she’d said at his funeral, I remembered; I was eight then. I remember Mum’s leg trembling against mine as she’d listened.

  *

  ‘Funny,’ Bobbie said. ‘Bizarre for someone who spent their career on the phone. But now that I’m alone I’m scared of the phone. Especially at night. So I leave it off the hook.

  ‘On my first night, the day Jack died, I pulled out a bottle of the first wine we made and drank the whole bottle myself. I’d never done that before. And as I cut the foil on the second bottle I thought to myself that I might as well go ahead and drink our whole stash. Everything we’d grown together. It was a quick thought. Then I passed out on the couch.

  ‘But then,’ she said, ‘maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

  As I listened to Bobbie I wanted to turn to her and say, Stop telling me things that you wouldn’t if Mum and Dad were here. Stop at least until Eden gets here.

  ‘Sorry,’ Bobbie then said. ‘I’m not practised at mum-ing.’

  *

  Bobbie’s place. There was a For Sale sign out front and we pulled in the drive and its stones crackled beneath the car’s wheels. We walked to her front door and Hemi her dog was all leaps and lick-crazed bounds. Bobbie fumbled the keys as if she was nervous. As she fumbled I zeroed in on the lemon tree near her front door. A flower, open, which would one day bear fruit. A bee climbed into it. I stared at it transfixed, that bee in the flower. I wondered if life could just carry on like that. I kneeled then and let Hemi bustle into my arms.

  And then the sun came out as the front door of Bobbie’s house opened. I looked up and Mum was there on the wall. Her ribbon was yellow and her goggles were banded and for a while she was all I could look at.

  *

  What I thought as I stepped into Bobbie’s house was that she hadn’t made any real effort. I’d heard Mum and Dad talk about her house but they’d only seen the tidy version. There were scraps of paper, clothes, bottles and empty coffee cups littered about the living room. It might have felt homely but it didn’t; it felt cold and lonely and old.

  ‘You probably want lemonade,’ Bobbie
said. She opened the fridge but then shut it before I could answer. ‘I never wanted to live in a place that felt like one big shiny clean bathroom,’ she said in response to the expression on my face.

  ‘I’ve spent so much of my life in the corporate world,’ she said, ‘that the last thing I want is a home that feels like an office.’

  She helped me to the couch and then stepped into the kitchen. On the couch was a blanket and a scrunched-up pillow. I reached out to touch them as if they were soft toys. Bobbie was by the coffee grinder then, her finger poised on the button. The microwave beeped behind her. It felt as though I was in her house for the first time. I realised then that her house smelled of dog and rat and of something festering. I said, ‘Bobbie?’

  And she said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you have a washing machine?’

  Our mum had been a swimmer but she didn’t smell of chlorine, she smelled of detergent and vanilla and custard.

  ‘You know where the toilet is,’ she replied.

  ‘Can I let Hemi in?’ I asked.

  ‘I forgot to get something for tea,’ she said.

  I thought of our washing machine and how I wished I could put my head in it so that I could close my eyes and smell. I flinched and Bobbie saw.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Life’s different on the other side of youth.’

  *

  My night-light was at home at Newport and I was nine years old but I was still scared of the dark. I got up and told Bobbie and she tried various door-ajar tricks but none of them worked. I asked for a glass of water. She put her wine down and rose from the couch and fetched me a glass and led me back. This time she sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. ‘I’ll tell you from the start,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell Eden too. I’m not going to be dovish with you. Maybe there’s a time to be timid if you feel you need it but timid buries all kinds of fears. It’s no way to live a life. We’re going to be hawks, we’re going to take life by the neck, and it’s going to make you feel better.’

  She didn’t smooth the covers or stroke my head. ‘I used to be a stockbroker,’ she said. It was late at night but her fingernails were dirty. ‘If I was charting you and Eden, I’d pull out my red texta and circle you at the start. You were born twins. You were the CBA float, hot at the start, a story already.’