Burning Eddy

by Scot Gardner

  I had started to warm up again and think about what Amy had said. It made me feel like I’d eaten too many plums. It was quiet inside the cottage and I looked up, wondering what they were doing. Four pairs of eyes stared at me smiling from the front window. I waved, felt my face get hot and smiled back. One turned inside and said something in Dutch. Eddy came to the window, pulled off a pair of narrow glasses and beamed.

  ‘Oh my Got,’ she said through the window. ‘It’s Dan-ee-el. Hello, my sweet.’

  She waved and the cat looked up. I waved back and the cat darted off my lap and behind the apricot tree. Eddy was gagging and spitting in Dutch to her friends. She opened the door.

  ‘Come in, darling. Why are you here in the rain?’

  I shrugged. ‘Came down to pull out that apple tree for you.’

  ‘Ja, but it is raining. You can’t work in the rain.’

  I shrugged again and stepped inside. ‘I don’t mind the rain.’

  Eddy grunted. She turned to the linen closet and grabbed a clean old towel for me.

  ‘What happened to your face, schat?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  She nodded, led me into the lounge room and introduced me with a wave of her hand. ‘Luke, Annika, Claar and Tedi. This is my friend Dan-ee-el.’

  Luke shook my hand, his long fingers almost touching his thumb around the back of my hand. The ladies nodded.

  ‘The nature boy,’ Claar said, smiling.

  They laughed.

  ‘Nature boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Ja,’ Luke began. He was a tall man with a scruff of thick grey hair. ‘Eddy has never been able to pat the cat. Her Timmy. He always runs away.’

  ‘True!’ cooed Eddy. ‘He is stray. For two years he has been living under the house. Sometimes sleeps in the chair. I feed him but I have never been able to touch him. Always so frightened.’

  Eddy spoke to her friends in Dutch. I listened hard. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying but I knew she was talking about me.

  Luke raised his eyebrows. ‘Ja, real nature boy.’

  Annika’s hair was dyed flame orange and her nails were painted the same colour. She looked me up and down. ‘Now we must be going. Nice to meet you, Daniel.’

  They nodded their goodbyes and hugged Eddy before scuttling into the rain. The three ladies hurried into the white Toyota with Claar behind the wheel. Luke went to the Holden. I thought he’d probably had it since new. He let it idle on the nature strip for a full minute before taking off.

  Eddy ushered me into the lounge room and closed the door. ‘Your face, darling. Who did this to you?’

  She sat in her lamb’s wool and looked at me with her eyes pinched.

  ‘Bit of an accident really.’

  ‘Bah,’ she said, and flicked her hand at me. ‘Your face is scratched but your heart is bleeding, Dan-ee-el. What happened?’

  The way she just looked right through me, through my thoughts, made me feel as though it would have been pointless to try to keep anything from her. That, and the feeling that I wanted to tell her everything. I stumbled with my words. God, I always stumble with my words. I couldn’t work out where to start.

  ‘From the beginning, Dan-ee-el. Start at the beginning.’

  ‘There’s this kid I go to school with . . .’

  ‘Ja, what is his name?’

  And I told her the story of my game of ‘terrorise the tourist’ that went bad. Of getting my face mashed into the gravel.

  She held her hand to her mouth. ‘Have you phoned the police?’

  ‘No, it was nothing really. Something that I asked for, in a way.’

  She was quiet for a full minute. Her eyes were locked on mine, sea blue and unforgiving. ‘No one asks to be hurt like that, Dan-ee-el.’

  ‘I really have to sort it out myself.’

  ‘What? To be more hurt?’

  I shrugged. I felt like smacking Michael in the head with a shovel. He’d have to be quick to hurt me again. I wouldn’t run the next time.

  ‘In Dutch we say, je kunt geen vuur met vuur bestrijden. It means you can’t fight fire with fire. Always there will be someone ready to hurt you or steal from you or rip you off. That doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Sometimes you have to close the door on all the muck.’

  I nodded and fantasised about meeting Michael in the bush. In the dark. A car shhhed past outside on the wet street. Timmy the stray meowed his pathetic meow.

  Eddy smiled. ‘You know, to see you with Timmy just now was a miracle. You can not believe how timid he is. When I open the door he is already under the house. How did you do it?’

  I shrugged. Maybe I’m part cat. ‘Just called him.’

  ‘Ja. You really are the nature boy. Do you love animals? Of course you do. Animals know that. They can sense it. Feel it. Like the bird. When you were here the first time I saw a bird . . . little yellow bird . . . land on the broom in your hand. Just like you were a tree, but they know. They know you are friendly. They can feel the love.’

  I looked at her and she looked out the front window. Her eyes lost focus.

  ‘Like my dog, Ziggy,’ she began. ‘Ziggy was a sausage dog. With little legs and big ears. We lived on a farm at Bellan. You know Bellan?’

  I nodded. ‘Ja. I mean yes. We live in Bellan.’

  ‘Jaaa? Of course . . . near Tonio. Anyway, Kasper worked at Hepworth and he left early. One morning it got to maybe ten o’clock and I couldn’t find Ziggy. He was always with me. Always. And if I was inside he would wait on the mat until I came out. So, when I couldn’t find him I got worried and I started to call, “Ziggy, Ziggy. Here boy.” Nothing. Not . . . a . . . thing. There were foxes everywhere out there and Kasper decided to set some traps after a fox killed one of his beautiful peacocks. Killed her in the nest.

  ‘I don’t like traps. They are horrible mean things and I thought maybe Ziggy got, you know, caught in the trap. So I looked around the fence where there were traps and ja, there was Ziggy. My poor beautiful dog with his leg caught in a trap. His front leg. He was biting at the trap and crying.’

  Eddy’s eyes glistened and she swallowed. I wriggled in my seat.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do, hoor. I had not the strength in me to open the trap — it is hard for a man, impossible for an old woman. All the blood. Kasper would never be back until maybe five o’clock and by then poor Ziggy would be dead.

  ‘And then there was a miracle. I prayed to Got, “Got, what can I do?” and the trap . . . I pushed the trap with my hands and it opened like a book. Like a book, and Ziggy, he scrambled away into the bushes. When I found him he was laying on his side and panting huh-a-huh with his eyes wide open, and I could see white bones poking out of his leg and I think that he is sure to die. I have not a licence to drive a car and it is so far to town. I could hardly lift him. I couldn’t carry him. Ziggy looked up at me and I prayed to Got again, “Got, help my Ziggy,” and I put my hand on his leg and closed my eyes because I think I’m going to be sick, and there was a miracle. Another miracle. Ziggy licked at my hand and in one minute . . . one . . . minute . . . he rolled onto his feet. I thought he will make it worse, the break, so I try to look at his leg under my hand and he licks at me again. I took my hand off and I thought, You stupid old woman, you have put your hand on the wrong leg. This one is fine. No blood, no bones poking out. Nothing. But I turn him around and his tail is wagging because he thinks I am playing with him. The other foot was fine too. Not . . . a . . . mark. And Ziggy walked home. Miracle. Praise Got.’

  I thought she was crazy. Part of me thought she must have skipped her medication or something but another part of me wanted to believe. And God? God was something that lonely people believed in so they could sleep better at night. I’d never been inside a church. Not once. Never been in a hospital and never been in a church. The few times church people have come to our place trying to sell us stuff, Dad
has gone right off at them. He swears at them and tells them to bother someone else. Graham and Tina have a sign on their front gate that says ‘No Jehovahs’. Dad has never made a sign. I think he likes going off at them.

  ‘Hard to believe, huh, schat? I know, I know. That is my experiment. You have your own experiment and I have mine.’

  ‘Experience,’ I said.

  ‘Ja, experiment. We are different but we are the same. Sometime you will know something or see something and you won’t be able to explain it. There are many, many things from my life that I can not explain.’

  I wriggled forward on my chair, then stood up. I thought that if I didn’t get going on the apple tree soon I’d miss my ride with Tina. The leather beneath my legs had turned dark with the water from my clothes. I wondered if it would stain.

  ‘Nay. It is fine. Here, sit on the towel. The rain is too heavy for you to work today. Today we talk. Sit. You want coffee?’

  I arranged the towel and sat down. She knew my thoughts long before they’d come out of my mouth. She moved into the kitchen. ‘I’ll pay you to keep an old lady company,’ she said, and chuckled.

  She made me a coffee — white with two sugars — and sat it on the coaster in front of me. Two windmill-shaped biscuits on a small plate. I had never had coffee before. Mum and Dad drink tea. To Eddy I wasn’t a kid. To Eddy I was just another friend. I sat back on the towel and sighed to myself. She was paying me for this?

  ‘So, Dan-ee-el, how old are you? You live in Bellan, ja?’

  I told her my life story in two minutes. Told her about my grumpy dad and my mum in her vegie garden and my little brother who shares my room. Oh, and Kat. My big sister who lives in another world. Almost forgot her.

  ‘It is good that you have a family. Families break up all the time now. They have forgotten how important it is to bring up kids. The mum or the dad, they go when they get an itch. I feel for the children growing up.’

  I thought about my dad and how I wouldn’t miss him if he took off. It would be like a huge weight off my shoulders. And Mum’s.

  ‘Oh, but you would miss your father if he wasn’t there,’ she said, as if my thoughts had been words. ‘Just because you don’t think all the time the same, doesn’t mean that you aren’t good for each other. Sometimes those people that are hardest to be around teach us the biggest things in life.’

  I shrugged and the thought flashed through my mind before I could stop it: how would you know?

  She reached for her coffee cup and slurped noisily from the edge. A hint of a smile hung on her lips. She patted her cobweb hair.

  ‘We lived on the Bellan road. Near to where that poor man died under the tractor. Do you remember that? Last year?’

  ‘Mr Lane? That was three years ago at least.’

  She snickered. ‘Ja, it probably was.’

  ‘Who bought your house? Was it Graham and Tina?’

  ‘No. Our house was burnt to the ground twenty years ago. There is nothing left. It’s all pine trees now.’

  I looked at the mental pictures I had of that pine forest — I’d walked through there a hundred times — and I thought I remembered a concrete slab. Yes, a slab and a few broken bricks. I knew where she had lived.

  ‘Skippy saved us. I used to look after animals. All the baby animals off the mothers who were dead by a car. One little baby joey we called Skippy — we called all the baby kangaroos Skippy, after the TV program. You remember? Nay, it was before you were born. Skippy was to be put down the next day because his back legs wouldn’t work. When his mum was killed his back was hurt but Kasper and I fed him and looked after him. He slept in an old jumper in the lounge room, hanging on the arm of the chair. He couldn’t hop and we decided before we went to bed that night that we would take him to the vet in the morning to be put down.

  ‘Kasper and I were asleep in the house and during the night I heard hop, hop, hop down the wooden hallway. I’m thinking to myself, “Ja, I’m dreaming, hoor.” And it came again, the sound hop, hop, hop, so I am getting up to find Skippy bouncing in the hallway. It is a miracle and on the ceiling is all smoke. The stove flue had caught alight in the roof while we were sleeping. I wake Kasper and there is a crash from the kitchen and I can see the flames from the bedroom, so I am grabbing Skippy and we’re climbing out of the bedroom window and watching the house burn like a big bonfire. True, hoor.’

  I believed her. I had no reason to, but I believed her. No reason except the tears in her eyes and how her breath caught in her throat. She believed.

  ‘These are my experiments. One day you will have an experiment the same and you will know. You will know that there is more to life than skin and bones and trees. That is how we understand spirit, from experiments. Church teaches people about spirit but they can’t really know until they have an experiment of their own.’

  I had to go. The gold clock on the cabinet was screaming at me. If I didn’t leave right at that moment, I’d be walking the forty kilometres home.

  ‘Ja, take a biscuit. Come back again when it is not so raining and work some more,’ she said, and stood up. She pulled an envelope from her pocket and handed it to me.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Jaaa. You turned up. Take it. Do you think if you work for McDonald’s and nobody comes through the door that they will not pay you? Come again, huh, schat? Come and work some more in my garden.’

  I took the money and felt guilty about it until I reached the shining street. The sun had poked its watery head between a few heavy clouds and lit up the neighbourhood with a triumphant shine. It had stopped raining and the air smelled wet and alive. The white car with the ‘For sale’ sign in the window was still sitting on the nature strip. I read the phone number. I ripped the envelope from Eddy open, counted fifty dollars and thought that I might buy that car. Eight hundred and fifty dollars. Would blow a steaming great hole in my savings, but would the water bead like crystals on the bonnet of a car that hadn’t been looked after?

  It started raining again. Hard. I said the phone number over and over as I jogged to Tina’s work. By the time I made it to the ute I was soaked again, but I was singing the phone number over the din of the rain like a madman. Tina was rattling her keys and hurrying from the office with her head bent and eyes squinting. She stopped short of the car when she saw me.

  ‘G’day, Dan. You been for a swim?’ she shouted, and laughed.

  We dived into the ute.

  ‘Pooh. You smell like a dog,’ she said.

  I thanked her.

  She grunted and looked at me as though I was wearing a possum on my head.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I do believe I heard you make a joke, Daniel.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Then shut up and drive.’

  She roared with laughter and saluted me. ‘You in love, Dan? You’ve got a smile on your face. Your eyes are sparkling.’

  ‘Not likely,’ I grumbled. ‘I like the rain.’

  Tina looked at me sideways.

  I struggled not to smile and looked out the window. I forgot the phone number.

  nine

  P O S S U M

  Michael Fisher had glandular fever. That’s what Amy what’s-her-name said on the bus. She was talking to Chantelle but everyone could hear. ‘The kissing disease’, she called it. She said that she might have it. I hoped she did.

  She didn’t turn up for the bus the next day or for the rest of the week, and by Friday the scabs had started falling off my cheek. It looked like I’d taken an electric sander to my face.

  The bus trip seemed quiet without Amy and Michael. Chantelle had the back seat to herself. We were heading home on Friday afternoon, hurtling past Carmine Cemetery, and she caught me staring back at her. I turned, but I thought I saw her pat the seat beside her. She must’ve been desperate. My gut tingled. She was looking out the window. It gets on Wayne’s nerves
when kids walk around while the bus is moving.

  Chantelle patted the seat. Was she looking at me? I glanced around but there were only a couple of year sevens and Kat on my side of the bus. Kat was elbow-deep in a copy of Dolly with the radio blaring in her headphones. Chantelle must have been looking at me. I pointed to my chest and whispered, ‘Me?’

  She nodded and waved me over. I glanced at Wayne and skidded through to sit beside her. Well, on the same seat as her. Could have squeezed another three bodies between us.

  ‘Hey, Dan, what happened to your face?’

  ‘I . . .’ I couldn’t decide which story to tell her. I cut myself shaving? I got assaulted in the bush? Maybe a new one. A car accident! ‘I fell down went boom,’ I said.

  She chuckled. Her earrings jingled; little horseshoes on chains. ‘How? Did you stack your bike? You got a motorbike?’