by Nick Earls
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘And, Wayne, could you not use the tissues with the aloe vera in them? They’re kind of expensive and we got them because some of Mum’s skin’s pretty fragile, remember?’
‘Um, yeah, sure. She must have brought them out here earlier, or something. I’m just watching TV.’
The sound of heavy on-screen breathing is back before we get to the front door, just for a second or two, and then he mutes it till we’re down the stairs.
‘I’ve got to tell you a bit more about all of that,’ I say to Tanika. ‘Everything that’s been going on. It’s been a funny sort of day.’
‘Yeah. I thought it might have been. Are you hungry? I know it’s the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t mind some pizza. How about that?’
‘I think I used my voucher already. But we could reheat the leftovers in the house . . .’
‘Fresh pizza’d be better. And it’s my shout. It’s a special occasion. And I hear it didn’t go so well earlier. Wayne told me a few things. I think it’s still a bit confusing for him, though.’
‘Do you think he’ll be okay?’
‘Back there with his video? Yeah. He’ll be fine. You’ll probably need to explain some things to him some time, though.’
‘Yeah. I will. But there’s still some things I’m only just finding out about myself.’
She drives us to Domino’s and when we get out of the bus she says, ‘Meatosaurus, isn’t it?’
It’s bright in Domino’s, fluoro bright, and there’s a crew of them in there still at work, rattling trays and folding boxes and scooping up pizzas when they come out of the oven. Tanika orders and pays and they tell us it’ll be ten minutes maximum.
In the car park we talk a bit about what’s been going on. Two delivery cars turn up and then go again, but there’s only us waiting and the car park’s mostly empty. Tanika leans against the bus door, and I walk along the white line that’s marking out two parking spaces, then off that line and onto the next. And I tell her. I tell her I thought the problems had started for my parents when I’d been around a while, but that’s not how it is. And I knew I’d come along a bit early, but I didn’t know I hadn’t been meant to come along at all. And that’s a different situation, and it’s kind of hard to take. He used her, that’s what I reckon now. He was older by a couple of years and she was our age or, in fact, younger and not at all ready for a man like that. A user and a scumbag and known all the way along to be reckless, even though he came across as suave and interesting. That’s how I put it – as tough as I can make it, because I think she has a right to know and to hear it in the most direct of ways.
‘And I could be like him in some respects,’ I tell her, also because I have to. ‘I look like him. I’ve seen the photos of when he was young. Mum doesn’t know that. They’re under the house and she never goes under the house.’
And the speaker on the wall outside Domino’s says, ‘Bell, Bell. Pizza for Bell.’
And Tanika says, ‘That’s okay, you know. He’s your dad. It’s no surprise you look a bit like him.’
‘And that doesn’t worry you?’
‘No.’
‘Pizza for Bell,’ the voice from Domino’s says again. ‘That’d be you two, wouldn’t it?’ And the guy who took our order is at the microphone, and he’s waving to us, shouting about us all across the car park in a crackly electronic voice. ‘Yep, you two. Don’t want to interrupt, or anything . . .’
‘We should get the pizza,’ Tanika says. ‘This is all fine. So your dad was a good-looking man. So what? Let’s get the pizza.’
We go inside and the guy says, ‘What were you doing out there? Solving the world’s problems?’
‘Well, it’s got a few,’ Tanika says. ‘So we thought we’d make a start.’
And we take the pizza and drive to the beach, Tanika at the wheel of the bus again, me just behind her with the box on my lap and the steaming meaty aroma of Meatosaurus rising up through the holes.
We park and the door opens and I can hear waves breaking, just over the dune. The sand is cool under my feet and the breeze is cool too, finally, and still coming off the sea. The dune’s off-limits for revegetation, and we walk around the fenced area and the tide is in, waves breaking and breaking, silvery grey in the moonlight. Breaking and piling up and thinning out and running to nothing, up the sand and shells, ending in a rush, disappearing in that last noise, like a long breath out.
The moon’s up high and behind us, and the sky’s completely crowded with stars. And I told Tanika most of what I needed to, I think, and it seems to be okay.
We sit in the sand and eat pizza and this feels much closer to the night I wanted, though it took a while to get here.
‘Would that be Venus?’ she says when we’ve talked some more. ‘That one over there?’
And she’s pointing to a star or a planet that’s just coming over the horizon in the east. And it’s not white, the way Venus would be, the way Venus was when we first paid attention to it, back two months ago. It’s red, kind of red but not red really, more a glinting kind of rusty orange.
So I tell her, ‘I reckon it might be Mars,’ and I tell her about the ‘Today’ show, what I heard on the ‘Today’ show back on a day that was long ago now, as far ago as yesterday.
And she says, ‘Mars. I don’t know that I’ve seen Mars. But I must have, I guess, without knowing. It’s not like they just invented it. God, what a sky it is tonight. But maybe I just don’t look up often enough. There’s a lot out there. Who knows what? Hey, remember the music of the spheres? Did you do that at school? It’s from Shakespeare. It’s about how there was once this idea that planets and stars made noise. You know, put out a kind of music. And you look at them tonight, and you think maybe they could. I don’t even know what play that’s from. That’s the only bit of it that stuck in my head. We saw the movie at school, and I remember that bit, but the teacher said it wasn’t particularly important.’
She moves in closer to me, and I put my arm around her. We slide the pizza box under our bent knees with the lid three-quarters down to stop the last two slices getting any colder.
‘Everyone finds things out, you know,’ she says. ‘People are always hiding something from you, waiting for a better time to tell it. So you end up finding out in a way you’re not supposed to, and it makes you feel like bringing up your tea. I know how it goes. It’s always a pretty foul kind of surprise when you hear that way.’
‘Yeah. I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
Her hair’s blowing around again, and she pushes it out of her face. ‘I’ve got to get this cut,’ she says. ‘It’s driving me nuts. My family . . . they’re an example of the things you find out, you know. And you can’t tell anyone this, okay? Not anyone. But my Uncle Barry, a guy you don’t know – and a guy I don’t know, so how would you? – he’s actually . . . well, he actually started out as my father. Technically So that’s kind of one of those things as well. They were about the same age as us too. When Mum got pregnant to him, I mean. You’ve got to wonder what was going on back then, all those kids coming along. Didn’t anyone ever tell them how it happens and how to make sure it doesn’t? Anyway, Barry did a runner, as soon as he found out. And Dad, who was about five or six years older, thought that was a really bad thing, bad for the whole family. And he kind of liked Mum – not that he’d met her too often – and he was training to be a priest at the time. But he said he figured it must have been happening for a reason. He said it was a sign that he was being called to do something else. Not that they got around to telling me. I found out a few years ago, when Nanna was going off her nut, and not the best with secrets any more. She thought I was Mum, and she started having a go at me for fooling round with Barry, and I didn’t even know who Barry was. I spun out, like you’d expect. They should have told me. Dad put it in a better way once he’d had time to think about it. That’s when he said I’d become his calling. Even before I was born, the most important thing h
e had to do was see me right. It’s special in a way, but not the way you’re expecting.’
‘Which sort of explains how he was over Christmas. I thought that was a bit intense.’
‘Sure it was intense. And maybe I should have told you then.’
‘Well, you have now. And there was that month when you weren’t allowed to talk to me . . .’
She nods. ‘Yeah. Good on you, Dad.’ She takes another bite of pizza and she chews it, looking out to sea. ‘So they didn’t choose the relationship either. It’s all a question of circumstance too. Or, at least, Dad made a choice, but a choice about me, not so much a choice about Mum. They’ve never . . . loved each other in the regular way. As far as I’m aware. But we make it work, most of the time. You know how it is. And he was going to be a priest anyway, so . . .’
‘Yeah.’
And she tells me that, despite all that, and despite my father and how he handled things, she still holds out some kind of hope that it doesn’t have to be that way. That there’s better luck going around, and sometimes it goes to people who deserve it. And she says she believes not everyone’s like my dad or her Uncle Barry. She really believes it. That I’m different and her dad’s different, and he annoys the crap out of her sometimes, but he’d never let her down.
‘You’re like that, I think,’ she says. ‘Not the annoyance part, that’s not what I meant.’ She laughs. ‘People can depend on you. Even if they freak out sometimes. You’re probably not like your father, even if you’ve seen the photos. Some people think about other people. Some people don’t. Some people make the most of what they’ve got, others’ll toss it away in the hope that something better’11 blow along. Or they drift along themselves, in and out of things, and they don’t play by the rules.’
Like clouds. That’s what I’m thinking, as she keeps talking and I keep looking up at the sky. Like Wayne’s misunderstanding about the ‘Today’ show, and the prospects of making laws for clouds. Though I’ve been more like one of the sky divers today, falling and falling until I hit this sand. Hitting clouds and pockets of clear air, one after another, all the way down. It’s like that cartoon, that old cartoon with the coyote, falling off the edge of some canyon and punching holes in the clouds all the way to the ground. Holes like they’re punched by a cookie cutter, like gingerbread men. Mum used to make those once, when we were younger. They’d have Smarties for buttons. We have to do something about Mum.
It doesn’t make sense to jump into clouds, if you look at it from a practical point of view. How would it feel to fall through a cloud, without a clear idea if it had a bottom or not? What if the last part of the cloud was fog all the way to the ground? You’d never even know.
The last I heard from my father was a couple of letters from north Queensland, where he was crewing fishing boats, mainly.
I tell Tanika a bit about that – Dad going up north and the shark story that came on on the ‘Today’ show before the Mars story.
‘I wrote him a long letter once, care of the Post Office at Babinda, but I never heard back. That’s when the letters from him stopped. Or postcards, really. He’d send postcards, and I’d send postcards too. That happened a few times. Then, that one time, I sent him a long letter. I wracked my brain about that afterwards, obviously, about my letter and anything I might have put in it. But you don’t know, in the end. That’s what you’re left with. A lot of not knowing. When we had that boat, the Stormy, a lot of things got a lot clearer. Particularly when she sank when Dad shouldn’t have been out in her at all. Mum goes on about Dad taking risks. She’s always afraid of risks but, the thing is, he’d take them all at once. There was the money issue with the Stormy too, not just the problem with him taking her out that night. That’s how he lived. How he still lives, probably. So I notice those kinds of stories like the one on the ‘Today show. Shark stories. And I always thought one day we might get the call – the call to say he’d been off doing something mad or stupid and they only knew because they’d found him years later in some gully somewhere and the dental records matched up. That sort of thing. And that’s why there’d never been another letter. Or postcard. Except I don’t know if he ever went to the dentist. It’s not really his thing. So he’d probably just be some mystery guy.’
But who knows? Who ever knows? I’ve wasted a lot of energy on that one over the years. You brace yourself for that kind of call, and now’s the time to stop.
Some people take other people into account, others don’t. And you probably can’t make them. And you probably didn’t have anything to do with them being the way they are. Whenever you came along, however you came into the world, whatever you did to whatever plans they might have had. As Father Steele’s always said, you’re pretty much guaranteed of being innocent at birth.
And you might have done your best since then, as often as possible, and that won’t make them come back or change the way they are. It’ll do other things though, some of them good. That’s what you have to hope for.
Some people stick by rules, some people duck and weave and live outside them. And make millions or hurt people or go to jail (always feeling as if they’ve been treated unfairly) or leave their bones on hillsides or in the bellies of big fish, showing where they ended up and the last thing they did. But even the people who stick by the rules can get tipped from their boat by a freak wave. The guy missing up north – the guy whose thigh bone they think it is – he never took a risk. Not that kind of risk. He was a regular guy, with two kids or three, and not a bad word said about him all the time he’s been gone.
But you can only do what you can do. And some people will do far less. And expecting my father to live by any rules is like making laws for clouds, the way Wayne thought they meant it.
Mars gets higher in the sky, the night ends. There are lights out to sea – container ships, trawlers – and they become less distinct as the land takes shape around us and starts to take on colour, and the sky goes kind of purple on its way to blue.
It’s TB that Harbo’s got, not cancer, and he’s getting better now. We made him go back to the hospital, and now he’s getting better. But he keeps telling us he won’t be round for ever, and there’s a boat in it for us when he goes. As long as it’s not the gas stove that takes him out, of course. Harbo can’t stop himself making jokes about his own death, now that he probably won’t be up for it for a while.
‘I’ll be careful with the cooking now kids,’ he said a few days ago. ‘Don’t want to leave you nothing but splinters and an oil slick in the water.’
The sun comes up, and Tanika goes down to the edge of the sea and goes in up to her ankles. I walk along the beach a little way and I pick up a stick and start scratching in the untouched sand left by the going-out tide. First the tightest perfect spiral that I can, growing out and out. Then something that becomes a letter T, dressed up like iron lace-work on a balcony. You don’t get that here, but you get it in Sydney. I’ve seen it on TV.
Then I scuff it up and hide it, press it flat with my feet, and I move on. I draw a planet, a bone and a cloud. Then another letter T, chunky and strong this time, not so ornamental.
And Tanika shouts out, ‘What are you doing?’
The water’s up to her calves now.
And I tell her, ‘Nothing much. Just thinking. But I’ve probably thought enough for now. I should stop while I’m thinking that things are pretty good, shouldn’t I? And that a lot of stuff that mightn’t be as good doesn’t matter in the way I thought it did.’
‘That’s getting complicated,’ she says. ‘But it’s probably right. Come over here. Stop thinking. Come and we’ll get wet. I want to swim, and the morning’s the best time.’
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