We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  I hadn’t been outside long when Bobbie came out and said, ‘She’s going to a different school. It’s not like she’s going to war or something.’ As I spun towards her the hose turned with me but I made sure that it didn’t squirt Bobbie. Water bounced on the ground between us. I went to speak but Bobbie got in first. ‘Her mum called me,’ she said as if that was all I needed to know. She had the good scissors in her hand, the gold ones with metal all through the handle. She leaned and snipped at the flowers at the top of the basil.

  ‘Carmelina’s mum called?’ I choked. I had a sudden urge to take the hose and wrap my mouth around its nozzle. I had a sudden urge to take on water as if to simulate drowning.

  ‘Sheep stations again,’ she said as if I was always playing for them.

  There was a sound then. At first I didn’t realise that it was Eden. It was a call for help and it was made at high volume. It had come from the front of the house. I felt heat shoot through my body as if I’d swallowed a haystack of questions about Carmelina. There was a panic to this sound though. I’d never before heard Eden yell out. Bobbie turned and rushed. I splashed water into my mouth and turned the hose off and then I ran too.

  I didn’t run along the side of the house. I ran through the back sliding door, across the cork-lined back room, into the house proper and then straight down the corridor. It was light and then dark and then light again as I ran past doorways. When I reached the kitchen, I could see the front door though I had to look across dark towards the light. Eden and Bobbie were just shadows in the doorway but they were only two and not three. Hemi was not there. I ran towards them and as I did I saw that I was wrong about Hemi. I’d missed her because she was in the shadow of Eden’s arms. She was quiet and limp.

  Eden spoke before I’d had a chance to ask. He looked at me and said, ‘She can’t walk.’

  Hemi’s eyes were open and had not rolled back but when I leaned down and patted her I could not see any sparkle. In fact her eyes looked swampy and grey. I had a horrible feeling that she’d been run over. I thought then of a red car with Carmelina’s mum in it. ‘That spotty dog on Maddox Road bit her,’ Eden said.

  ‘The brown one?’ I said.

  ‘She tried to run away but it bit straight into her spine at the back,’ Eden said.

  ‘I’ll get some water,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘Ring the vet,’ Eden said.

  ‘It might just be shock,’ she said.

  ‘It bit into her spine,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t go bananas,’ she said.

  ‘Good answer,’ Eden said but sarcastically.

  ‘Any idiot can give a good answer,’ Bobbie said. She went to the kitchen and ran water into a purple ice cream container. She motioned for Eden to bring Hemi to the couch. Eden stayed by the front door and I did too. ‘We’re going to the car,’ he said as if stepping properly into the house was not ground he was prepared to concede.

  I looked at Hemi lying near-dead in Eden’s arms. I thought how that brown dog had sunk its teeth into her at roughly the same time that Carmelina had jumped from the scoreboard. I thought I should reach out to stroke or to take hold of Hemi but I worried that I’d not get it right.

  I said, ‘She’s lost.’ I said this because Hemi wasn’t jumping and licking as she normally would be. I knew though that I was also thinking of Carmelina. I turned to Bobbie then and said, ‘Hurry up!’ as if tensions between us were high.

  ‘She’s not dead and she’s not dying,’ Eden said as he stood up.

  Bobbie stood with the ice cream container in her hand but she put it down and walked towards the kitchen. Eden said to me, not soft, ‘She better not be getting wine.’

  ‘I’m getting my keys,’ Bobbie said, changing direction. We all had hurry in our voice but Eden was the one propelling us.

  It wasn’t the time but with Bobbie out of the room I said, ‘She’s not going to Bayside.’ I said this in a panic and as though I hoped he might solve it. He looked at me with Hemi in his arms. He said, ‘She’s a drug to you and you’re addicted.’ As he said these words I heard the voice of our dad as if his voice had just that second become older.

  ‘So now what do I do?’ I asked, though my first thought had been to apologise.

  ‘You stand up to yourself,’ Bobbie said as she returned. I could whisper something under a hundred mattresses and Bobbie would still hear it.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ Eden said. ‘But I’m saving Hemi.’

  I felt for a moment that I hadn’t been given enough credit for the races that I’d won. I felt like I’d earned the chance to stop, slow down and gather myself and yet everything was still hurtling on. I thought this and then suddenly felt sick at myself. I should have been thinking of Hemi.

  Instead of stepping towards Hemi I stepped away and spun a circle as if I was confused.

  ‘The vet might be closed,’ Bobbie said looking at her watch and racing.

  ‘It bit into her back and dragged her,’ Eden said. He lifted Hemi towards me then. He handed her to me as if I’d been pleading with him to let me hold her but I’d actually been doing the opposite.

  ‘Hurry,’ he said, pushing me on.

  I had to take a step forward then. Bobbie headed for the car as Eden reached past me to pull the front door of the house shut. Both the warmth of Hemi’s body and the look in her big tadpole eyes dug deep into me. Eden rushed towards the car and I followed and it would have been strange that I was the one carrying Hemi except that Eden was the one who had orchestrated it. As I held Hemi her warmth spread through me like hot soup on a cold day. ‘Hurry,’ Eden said again as he opened the car door for me.

  I climbed carefully into the car and Hemi still hadn’t moved and when Eden climbed into the other side of the car I looked at him.

  Eden held my eyes. ‘You’re not a puppy dog,’ he said.

  I held Hemi tight and Bobbie sped up our street and Eden looked out his side window. An orange glow of light streamed into the car and it was probably because it was now early evening but I wondered if it was from the refinery.

  I did not say anything in return and in fact I looked away. Hemi sat in my lap like a pool. I looked up at the rear-view mirror and Bobbie glanced at me in it. As she did I saw her lick at her lips.

  ‘I keep forgetting who’s dead and who’s still alive,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘She’s not going to die,’ Eden said.

  *

  The vet took one look at Hemi and said that Werribee was the only place for her and so we raced straight down the highway. A sign by the road said Hoppers Crossing and then the University of Melbourne and we turned in there as if Hemi was up for study. They took Hemi immediately from us and we sat in aqua blue plastic chairs and waited. Eden still had his running clothes on and it was late for the vets and the chairs were mostly empty. I looked at the chairs and noticed that they were in rows like the vines in Bobbie’s vineyard. We sat still and Hemi was not there to warm me but I felt my forehead and my hair turn wet and clammy as if just waiting to hear about your dog could make you feel sweaty. A vet came in and introduced herself to us as Dr Chua and we stood to follow her. As soon as I stood up I felt my head spin.

  We entered a small surgery room made mostly of stainless steel and Laminex. There was light from a window but mostly it was fluorescent. Hemi lay on the table and she did not move a muscle or a paw but as we came in an eyelid quivered as though she had tried to blink it. I zeroed in to her chest to check that she was still breathing. I did not look at either Bobbie or Eden but I was sure that Hemi lying there motionless had cut straight into us. If Hemi had leaped from the table and slathered our faces with her tongue we would have cried a flood. Instead I felt my stomach jolt as if already on the inside I had started sobbing. Eden and I didn’t have a sister but if we had she was a sun-coloured Labrador named Hemi.

  The vet looked sombre. It was as if the news she had to tell us was locked inside a can with a seal that was not easily broken. She almost seemed t
o look around for an opener. She lifted Hemi then and tried to make her stand and the fluorescent globe blinked and fluttered light onto Hemi’s face as if she’d tried to rouse. We rushed to her, all three of us, to touch her body and her fur. We stroked her head and her nose and the upper part of her back, and as we did we helped to prop her. Hemi felt soft and warm and the feel of her gave comfort even when she couldn’t. The vet gathered a plastic sheet and put it under her and then said, ‘I’m going to check her belly now so just be careful.’

  We didn’t move other than to keep patting and nuzzling Hemi. The vet then moved gloved hands over her body. ‘Her bladder is full,’ she said. ‘I’m going to squeeze it and that will tell us.’

  As soon as the vet applied pressure, a dark liquid drained from Hemi’s body and fell onto the plastic sheet. The sound of this as it hit the stainless-steel bench had a drum effect. We could both hear it and feel it. We looked at this honey-red liquid as if we could tell our fortune in it.

  ‘Okay,’ the vet said, cleaning up, ‘I was afraid that would happen. She’s lost all control there.’

  The vet continued to speak, but as she did I felt sweat drip down the line on my forehead and onto my nose.

  ‘Microsurgery might be an option,’ the vet said. ‘We can definitely do scans.’ She took a breath, a long one, and then she said, ‘If her front half looked bright then I might advise differently. But she looks as though she knows that her time is up.’

  I took my hands from Hemi and placed them on the cold steel table. Only hours earlier Hemi had bounced alongside Eden as though an after-school run counted as the best day of her life. I tried to hold myself up but failed.

  ‘I don’t feel good,’ I said. Suddenly I felt younger than I was, like I was still young enough to sink my face into someone’s leg.

  ‘She’s lost her will to live,’ the vet continued.

  I didn’t collapse, I sank. An elbow dinged the table, my legs turned to custard and my head began to drop. There was nothing I could do except fall down. As I slipped though I felt Eden dive beneath me so that when I went down I didn’t fall completely and instead folded straight into him. It was if we had practised the manoeuvre and in a way we had by diving all those times at the couch to get the best view of Mum. We slept in different beds and no longer really wrestled and so it had slowly become unusual for us to touch, though I always liked it when we did. I lay there against Eden and the blood slowly returned to my head. ‘Don’t get up,’ the vet said, hurrying. ‘Keep your head down.’

  The vet found a bottle of Lucozade in a cupboard. I drank half and then passed the rest to Eden.

  ‘Would this have happened,’ I started, pressing myself gently back into Eden so that he knew that I was talking to him, ‘if I’d been running with you instead of stuffing around with Carmelina?’

  Eden did not try to answer. ‘We’ll get the scans,’ he said.

  ‘Broke the mould,’ Bobbie said as if Hemi was already dead.

  I looked at Bobbie then because her words sounded hard and flippant and because I knew that she’d say more. I saw that her hands gripped the stainless-steel bench so tight that her knuckles were like white stripes. I saw too that her lips were moving, almost trembling, even though no words had yet come out. Eventually she moved closer, just a fraction closer, to Hemi. ‘I regret a lot of things,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure but it sounded as though she was apologising, ‘but I never regretted Jack. And despite how it might have looked I never for a second regretted you.’

  I thought of swimming then. I thought of washing the wet clammy sweat from my body. I thought of Hemi’s warmth, of how she might soon cool, of how they put us in helicopters and flew us away from our mum and dad and let them go cold without us.

  All of a sudden then I felt myself crush down with tiredness. I felt as though every bone in my body had suddenly been extracted, my muscles dissolved, my energy vacuumed clean out. I felt nothing, like nothing. For a second it occurred to me that I could give everything up, that I could toss swimming away like a stone, not to mention Carmelina. No one forced me to swim, no one forced anything. But almost immediately this thought, even for an instant, felt disgusting and insane. It felt wrong. I looked at Hemi then, her fate so recently declared, and instead of succumbing I pressed my teeth together. Suddenly I wanted to swarm like Fuzzy’s bees had done. I wanted to grab Eden and swim fast with him, side by side I thought of that black unwavering line on the bottom of the pool as if it was something I had to tie myself to. I pictured the two centre lanes, the open water out front, Eden and me, winning.

  I thought in my heart right then that it mattered, that we had to swim fast, that we had to swim to the other side of all this.

  It was night. Hemi lay near-dead on the table. We didn’t have any swimming gear with us, though there might have been some wet stuff in the car’s boot.

  I said, ‘Is there a pool near here?’

  Eden had his arms on me. His fingers felt for the line on my forehead. He gripped me tighter. I turned and saw that he was looking at the vet. He looked like he was about to say something important. When he did speak he talked as though he’d just scaled the scoreboard and was calling out from the top. ‘That’s my brother,’ he announced.

  *

  Every night I sink my head into the pillow and repeat the same silly sentence to myself. I say it only once, I don’t know why, but I’ve done it ever since I got back from the hospital, before Eden came home. I never think of this sentence at any time other than when I turn the light out, or not usually, but when Hemi’s scan results came back and the vet said she’d have to be put down I thought of it. I remained still, my arms trembling, my feet like concrete, this stupid sentence in my head.

  It says something about Eden that instead he thought immediately to assert control, without consulting Bobbie, without consulting me. He stood and stepped into the path of the vet as if blocking her. ‘She’s not yours,’ he said.

  The dying process, the vet said, would be cruel and slow if we took her home. ‘Is she in pain?’ Eden asked as if he’d already thought it through.

  ‘No,’ the vet said. ‘But she won’t stay comfortable.’

  ‘She’s family,’ he said, ‘and she’s coming home.’

  It says something about me that I watched this scene with my mouth slightly ajar. Eden could do things that I would never think to do.

  We took Hemi home to Newport. We put her on our bedroom floor. Instead of getting into bed we took our doonas and lay them beside her and that’s where we slept.

  In the morning Hemi had neither moved nor changed and so we gathered her and carried her to the car. Hemi had been Grandpa Jack’s dog. She was from Flowerdale. We wrapped Hemi in a bedsheet and perched her on a cut of foam rubber. Of all our journeys up to the bush this was our least talkative. It was summer but the morning was cold and there was a mist. As we drove the mist lowered so that it blocked out the rising sun. Bobbie said that it had become a peasouper but otherwise she put a plug in her usual stream of quips. Her silence had such a loudness to it that she pushed on the stereo. ‘Summer, Highland Falls’ played. We stroked Hemi’s head, we looked out the window, we buried our face in her coat. Hemi was mostly paralysed but she could move her head and with effort she did to rest it on Eden’s leg. The sight of her head on his leg was something. Our mum and dad died on the road to Flowerdale, though from the other direction. I looked at the cars on this trip, the ones coming towards us, travelling the same way we had that time. They seemed to burst out of nowhere as they slipped out from beneath the fog. We travelled this road so many times but that day I noticed more than ever how many other cars travelled along with us. It felt as though we cut a groove, all of us, as if we were a river, rolling.

  ‘Home,’ Bobbie sighed as we cruised up the driveway, mostly I think to Hemi.

  We stepped from the car. It was Saturday already, morning. The sun must have come out and then disappeared because the bees were back, not swarming but not i
n their boxes; there was a large thick cluster of them hanging again from the eaves, up near the house’s back corner. They were a strange sight in the grey fog but the cluster was tight, as if they were hugging. Eden carried Hemi and stepped away from the car. He looked me directly in the eye. He said nothing, he simply turned, he didn’t have to.

  ‘I couldn’t cope, I just couldn’t,’ Bobbie said out of nowhere then. I wasn’t sure but I thought she might have been talking of that time when she’d banished Hemi to Werner’s. What I was sure of though was that I’d never heard Bobbie’s voice sound so sad.

  A strange mood came over us then. A quiet mood. The kind that only happens when things are about to go unspoken. We caged around each other and got things ready. Bobbie picked up the keys to the tractor, the one she used for ploughing and spraying, and we carried Hemi and sat on the back loader as if it was a couch.

  And like that, still in silence, Eden and I rode the tractor down to the creek. On the way we fixed our minds on doing the thing that could not be said. Bobbie then stood near and watched as we climbed off the tractor and strode straight into the cold creek water and then held Hemi under and drowned her.

  What struck me was not that we did this but that we did such an excellent job. We did not care about getting it wrong but we were desperate to get it right. We held Hemi under and bubbles rose, for longer than I might have imagined, but even once she had been under for some considerable time we waited and held her under for longer. Hemi did not move or struggle but there was a charge in her body and we could sense it. We didn’t say anything or check or even look at each other. We just kept staring into the water at Hemi. Then after what seemed a long time more bubbles floated to the surface, big bubbles these ones as if they’d been trapped deep inside, as if the end is never exactly where you think it is. Hemi gave a kick then and it surprised us and although we both reared we kept our hands firm, strong and down. And that was it. We had felt the exact moment when she was done and we knew it and it was chilling but it was what we had wanted. We stood then with our feet in the creek and our pants soaking wet. I knew that primary school was over and Carmelina was going to a different school and Hemi had lost the will to live. I stared at Hemi in the water and felt parts of me flowing away just like the blood had from my face at the vet’s.