Burning Eddy

by Scot Gardner

  I looked at his smooth skin and smiled. It was official. I’d looked after Toby since he was a baby. I’d changed his nappy for Mum and fed him and got him in the bath. When he hurt himself and Mum wasn’t around, he’d cry for me. I played with him and showed him things. I did the things that Dad should have done. Now Dad was gone for God knows how long, and it was all official. I’d look after my brother like he was my boy. We’d be okay.

  I pulled the keys out of my pocket.

  Toby gasped. ‘Where did you get those? They’re Dad’s.’

  ‘Yeah. He doesn’t need them at the moment. They don’t work on the locks where he is.’

  Toby nodded. ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  I stood up. ‘Well, first I think we should let all the birds go free.’

  Toby whooped. ‘Yeah!’

  We unlocked the four big cages and chocked the doors open. The family of rosellas in the last cage seemed to know what was going on. As soon as we’d propped the door with a stick Toby had found, they flashed past. Streaks of red and blue, flying, then gliding in short bursts across the paddock and eventually into the blackwoods along the creek. We left the doors open. We filled up their seed and water. They could come back if they wanted to. The doves in the second aviary fluttered near the door, then flew onto the perches at the back of the cage. Toby wanted to chase them out. I held his hand and said that we should let them decide.

  My hands shook and it made the keys rattle as I stood by the door to Dad’s shed.

  ‘Come on, Dan, open it up,’ Toby said, and pulled at my shorts.

  I flicked through the keys and tried a couple before the lock clinked open. The pad bolt was heavy and stiff. It eventually opened with a crack that echoed off the trees like a gunshot. I shoved the door. We went inside.

  Toby screwed up his nose. ‘Smells funny in here. Like mice or something. Petrol. Something.’

  Dad’s shed was as neat as a flower. The tools hung on the walls like they’d grown there. Every one had its place. The spanners for working on the Leyland, the saws and hammers for building things.

  Toby picked up a little spirit level.

  ‘Don’t touch, Toby,’ I barked.

  He jumped and put it back.

  I apologised. I’d sounded like Dad. ‘Better leave things as they are.’

  He nodded. ‘This is spooky, Dan. Can we go now?’

  ‘In a minute, Tobe. You can go if you want. I’ll come out in a minute.’

  I stood in front of the locked drawer. I could hear my heart beating in my temple like I’d run ten ks. I found the key.

  ‘What are you doing, Dan?’ Toby asked.

  I slid the key home and the lock jumped open.

  ‘Dan?’

  I breathed through my mouth. Short breaths. I pulled the drawer. It slid open freely.

  Toby stood next to me and pulled on my shorts. He couldn’t see. ‘What’s in there, Dan?’

  Photographs. Kat as a baby. Me as a baby. My first day at kinder. Mum and Dad on a boat. A headstone with flowers. Toby as a newborn, in hospital. Dad with some smiling men. He looked about my age and was smoking a pipe. Dad as a boy. Dad on the beach with some old people who could have been his mum and dad. A Christmas tree. An old car. A ghostly house with windows that looked like the empty eye sockets of a skull.

  ‘Dan?’

  Dad as a young man with a girl who didn’t look like Mum, fishing from a jetty. Dad with pimples and the same girl. The same girl in a flowing white dress with Dad in a suit and bow tie.

  ‘Dan, what’s in there?’

  ‘Nothing much, mate,’ I said. Not what I expected. No drugs. No bullets. No rude magazines. I realised that I didn’t know my dad at all. Not at all. ‘Just some old photos.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and handed him a few from the top of the pile. He flicked through without really looking at them. ‘Huh,’ he said, and handed them back.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, it stinks, doesn’t it, Dan?’

  ‘Uh-huh. It does.’

  I left the door unlocked, the drawer unlocked and I unlocked the car and left the keys in the ignition. A dove flew from the aviary, flapping loudly, and landed on the gutter of the house. It was getting dark. It should have been settling down for the night. I thought that it might not survive, that a fox or a cat might eat it. It might not know how to find food.

  I sighed. Freedom. It would know freedom.

  twelve

  E C H I D N A

  Kat had been suspended. She didn’t tell Mum until the following morning when Mum came in to wake her. Kat gave her a note from Mr Grimshaw and Mum closed the door. They talked while I had breakfast. Mum told me that Kat was spending the day with her. I shrugged. I thought about asking if it would be okay to drive my car to Graham and Tina’s place. I knew the road like my thumbnail and there was never any traffic at that time of the morning. Mum rubbed her temples. I sighed, kissed her goodbye and jogged to Graham and Tina’s place.

  Tina asked me about Dad on the way to the bus stop. I told her the truth; that I didn’t have a clue why the police had taken him.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘he’s lived with me for nearly sixteen years and I don’t know him. Is that possible?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘That’s possible. You can only know someone as much as they want to reveal. Lots of people have secrets.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I have mine. My magazines under lock and key. What I think about at night. How I feel when I wake up in the morning. I looked across at Tina and couldn’t imagine her having many secrets. Not big ones like Dad has, anyway. She’s just too honest and friendly. She doesn’t laugh much but she’s always happy. Maybe that is her disguise. Maybe she has one smiling face that she gives to me and to the rest of the world, and at home she bites the heads off live chickens.

  ‘I’m really sorry about the mess with your dad, Dan,’ she said. ‘I hope it all works out okay. If there’s anything I can do to help, just yell.’

  I thought that the chickens at her place were safe.

  Chantelle smiled at me as she bumped down the aisle to the back seat. She waved with the three fingers that weren’t holding the strap of her bag. Michael and Amy were in the corner of the back seat, locked in a kiss. When Chantelle sat down they came apart at the lips and started talking. I heard something about lover boy, then Amy shouted, ‘Hey, Fairy, how do you spell Chantelle?’ and laughed.

  The skin on my neck got hot and I looked at the inside of my arm. The scratching had faded a bit but something in me was still red-raw. Amy took great pleasure in salting the wound for me.

  ‘Pooh, something on the bus stinks like wet possum,’ Michael yelled. ‘Is that you, Fairy? Have you been humping possums again?’

  I looked over my shoulder. Amy was laughing. She stopped to stick her middle finger up at me. Michael flashed the gap in his teeth. Chantelle had moved to the corner of the seat and was staring out the window with her arms crossed. Her cheek was red. I thought that she must have got tired of their grade-three games too. She waited until they’d got off the bus before she stood up. She smiled again as she walked past.

  ‘Sorry, Dan,’ she mumbled.

  I smiled. ‘I keep waiting for them to grow up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  I went to Eddy’s that night. I strode to the bus to tell Kat, then remembered she’d had the day off. Jake Teychenne stopped me.

  ‘Daniel, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘Did Kat come to school today?’

  ‘No. She stayed with Mum.’

  He looked different and it took me a minute to work out that he wasn’t in uniform. He pulled an envelope from his pocket.

  ‘Can you give her this? Will you see her tonight?’

  ‘Yep. Yes, I’ll see her and I can give that to her.’

  ‘Cool. Thanks, mate,’ he said, as he stuffed the letter into my hand a
nd slapped my shoulder.

  Eddy was watering the vegies. She was in her dress and blue and white checked apron, talking to herself. Maybe she was talking to the plants as she sprayed them with the hose. She had her back to me and I didn’t want to frighten her so I sang out, ‘Hello Eddy.’

  ‘Ja, hello Dan-ee-el,’ she said without looking. ‘Here so soon? Marvellous! Come to work in my garden, good good.’

  ‘Come to pull out that apple tree,’ I said, and stopped beside her.

  She put her arm over my shoulder and kissed my cheek. ‘It’s lovely to see you, darling. What is new in your world?’

  She had kissed me. She’d kissed me and it felt so natural that my arm slipped around her back and rested there until I realised what I was doing. I pulled my arm away and scratched my head. She smiled.

  I looked up the driveway. ‘What’s new? Nothing much.’

  Eddy chuckled. ‘You say that but I know that there are many things new, heh, schat?’

  I shrugged, walked to the shed and grabbed the mattock and shovel.

  ‘Drink, my sweets. Drink,’ Eddy whispered to her lettuce as the spray drummed on their leaves. ‘Already so dry this year.’

  I shook my head and carried the tools to the skeleton of the apple tree.

  ‘What about the bus? The one that broke down near Luke’s place? Your new car? Tell me about these things. “Nothing much,” he says. Godverdomme!’

  I pushed on the trunk of the tree. It wasn’t going to budge without some serious root pruning. I dug and talked as Eddy watered. Told her about hitting the wallaby in my car. Told her about Zwarte Piet the pig.

  Eddy laughed and coughed. ‘Luke is a beautiful man. He always brings me vegetables, even though I grow my own. So kind and sweet-hearted.’

  ‘He thinks the same about you.’

  ‘Ja, ja. I know. Don’t I know!’

  I stopped digging.

  Eddy smiled at me. ‘Come on, work!’ she cried, and squirted me with the hose. I jumped and she giggled. A cheeky giggle that made me want to grab the hose and squirt her back. I kept digging.

  Eddy sighed. ‘Last year he asked me to marry him.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Ja, marry him.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him I was an old woman. I’m eighty-six for goodness’ sake! I have lived on my own for nearly fifteen years. I like to be by my sel-uf. I love him dearly but I have been married. And I don’t think that Kasper liked the idea.’

  ‘But Kasper is . . .’

  ‘Ja, dead. Dead a long time. His ashes are there,’ she said, and squirted an arc over the vegies. I felt a bit sick at the thought of her eating the remains of her husband. Gross.

  ‘Kasper is dead but he still watches over me. That I know.’

  I glanced at her.

  ‘When Luke came to ask me to marry him, we had a coffee in the lounge. Drrright in there,’ she said, and pointed at the window of the cottage. The sill was lined with blue and white porcelain trinkets.

  ‘Luke would not take no for an answer. I tried to explain to him that I loved him but that I didn’t want to be with him all day and all night. He cried and cried.’

  She took a breath and bit her lip.

  ‘In my lounge room I have a stand with plants and a collection of shells and little animals made of porcelain and a peacock carved in wood. Luke cried until I had to ask him to leave. He told me that he wasn’t going to leave. Not now. Not ever. Me, I got frightened for the first time since my Kasper died. I could do nothing. Nu-thing. And then it happened . . .’

  I stopped digging and straightened. She stared at the carrots.

  ‘The stand with the pots began to shake and rattle so,’ she said, and held her hand out, palm down and shivering. ‘Then mine little porcelain cat leapt off the shelf and landed on the floor. Luke stopped crying and looked at me. All by itself! The plant was shaking, then a shell flew drrright across the room and hit Luke in the chest.’

  Sometime during the story, I’d stopped breathing.

  ‘True, hoor. Then Luke stood up and like bullets mine little animals shot at him so he had to cover his face. He run for the door and mine wooden peacock spun through the air and crrracked into his head.’ She slapped the back of her head and giggled. ‘He yelped like a dog and ran outside. Drove home.’

  Too much. I shook my head and thumped into an exposed root with the axe end of the mattock. Woodchips spat into the air. One hit me in the chest.

  ‘Ja, it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. This is mine experiment. Hoe ouder, hoe gekker. The older I get the crazier I become. You will one day have something that you cannot explain and you will know that there is more to life than the things we see and touch. I knew that my Kasper was a spirit trying to help me.’

  She wet her fingers and wiped her face. ‘At nights I have many times felt him standing by my bed.’

  ‘Ghost?’

  ‘Ja, maybe.’

  Eddy watered and I dug. It seemed like the normal thing to be talking about the ghost of her dead husband. Kasper the not-so-friendly ghost. As normal as talking about football. For Eddy it was as real as laced leather and the smell of fresh-cut grass. For me, the truth in her eyes sucked me in. Eddy was like all the grandparents I’d never had. Mum’s parents had died when I was little. Dad never spoke about his family. When Eddy spoke, I listened with my whole body, my skin prickling and I didn’t miss a word. It didn’t matter if it was true or just a story.

  ‘Kasper knew he was going to die. He fixed up all his finances. He made our home all like new with new plumbing and a new roof. He booked his trip to Holland and he died on the other side of the world in his home town. He came to me to tell me that he had gone. In my sleep. It was a dream but not really a dream. He woke me like he was going to work, kissed me and said goodbye. I woke and I knew he had gone. I knew with mine whole heart that he had gone. Mine whole heart.’

  She sighed and shifted feet. She looked at the sky. ‘Ready when you are, Got,’ she said.

  I stopped digging. I leaned on the mattock and looked at her. ‘Careful what you wish for, Eddy.’

  ‘Ja, careful. I know what is coming. I am not afraid.’

  I opened my mouth to say something, to tell her not to say stuff like that but I couldn’t find the words. She packed up the hose and went inside. I thumped into the roots with a new strength. The dirt and woodchips flew.

  She came back with a cassette tape. ‘Dan-ee-el, I have something to ask of you. A very important thing.’

  I rested the mattock against my thigh and dusted my hands.

  ‘When I die . . . maybe it will be years away . . . would you play this music at my funeral? When they burn my body? Please. And take my ashes into the bush. Give them back to the earth.’

  She handed me the tape. I opened my mouth to speak and she raised her hand. ‘Just say ja.’

  I didn’t really know her. I didn’t know about death the way she did. Just a few weeks of working at her home and she wanted me to be at her funeral.

  ‘Eddy . . . I . . .’ I said. My brain stalled. The words wouldn’t come out. I wanted someone to take me by the ankles, lift me up in the air and shake me like a moneybox so the words would come out. It was all too much. I don’t know. Death scares me. Eddy put her hand over mine. Over the cassette.

  ‘It is good to be unsure of death,’ she whispered. ‘It is what stops you from walking in front of a train or a bus. And I pray that one day you will have an experiment that will show you that death is orright. It’s orright.’

  She let go of my hand and I put the tape in the pocket of my shorts.

  ‘When I was a child . . . nay, not a child, a teenager . . . I had a bad bad disease of the . . . what do you call them?’

  She thumped her chest and breathed as though she were choking.

  ‘Lungs?’

  ‘Ja! Lerngs. What was it called? Nay, doesn’t matter. I am on my back in bed and breathing so,’ she said, and labo
ured another breath. ‘Then suddenly I am a spirit and floating on the ceiling, looking down at mine body choking. No pain, hoor. I can breathe normal but I am floating near the roof, zooming and diving like from the biggest diving board. Looping around the room.’ She held her arms out and pranced around the garden. She stopped.

  ‘Then I am feeling myself being sucked through a big sort of tunnel. So fast through and at the end of the tunnel there is a light so bright, like you have never seen. Never. But it did not hurt mine eyes. Beautiful. I saw mine groot-moeder and she hugged me and kissed me so . . .’

  Eddy grabbed me and planted a wet kiss on each cheek. I went like a board.

  ‘. . . like she always did when she was alive, but she died when I was seven. I thought to my sel-uf, “But she is dead,” and I heard her say, “Do I look dead to you?” Nay. She looked better dead than alive, hoor.’

  Eddy chuckled. I shifted feet and smiled. Fake smile. Polite smile. Inside I didn’t know what to think.

  ‘Then I heard a voice saying, “Nay, it is not your time. You must go back.” Kind voice. Gentle. I didn’t want to go. If I could have stayed, I would. So beautiful. I would.’

  She looked at the top of the dead apple tree. ‘When I am staying, that is dying. When I am dying I will be happy. Happy and sad.’

  She stared at me. I nodded. I knew what feeling happy-sad was about, though when I thought about Dad I felt more sad than happy. It was like he’d died. The feeling sat heavy in my gut. I leaned on the mattock.

  ‘What is it, schat? Are you okay?’ she asked.

  I almost blurted it out. The words were right there behind my lips. The cops took my dad away. I didn’t say it. I opened my mouth but only air came out. A long stop-start sigh. I shook my head. I grabbed the mattock and positioned myself over the root I’d been hacking at.

  ‘You don’t have to die just yet, do you?’

  She chuckled. ‘Nay, I don’t know when. Whenever.’

  She stepped closer. ‘Will you do it for me? Play the music?’

  ‘Ja,’ I said. Chop, chop. Bits of dirt and root went flying.

  She smiled and clapped her hands together. ‘Good! I’ll make a cup of coffee,’ she said, and turned to go inside. She paused and broke wind like the air escaping from a balloon stretched at the neck. It rattled on for a few seconds. Breeeeet.