Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

  *

  Then Easter Saturday, years later, half waking to her weight at the end of the bed. Your sister has become so light, at first you think: Cat. That one of them must have snuck in, sprung up.

  You are twenty-two years old, and she has driven all night, through bad weather, to reach the bayside address she sometimes scrawls in childish loops. The house she finds you in holds seven people, ghost odours, faulty wiring, suspected asbestos. Cupboards full of stolen glassware and instant ramen. When trains rattle past, this house shakes its window casings like rickety fists, coughs plaster dust from a network of fissures. Families of stray cats take refuge in the overgrown backyard, and while the more tenacious ones occasionally move inside, mice continue to run their skittery cartels behind the walls. It’s the first place you’re able to call home without your stomach clenching, and it will be knocked down for apartments within the same year. Your room in it is large and bright, with most of the floorspace given over to rolls of canvas and silk mesh, milk crates of paint and ink, a narrow daybed pushed into the bay window. At certain times of the year the light spills in underwater-green through the new soft leaves of vines, but when your sister shows up the vines are bare, the light untinted.

  The impression of her there, through your eyelashes. Backlit by too-early morning. She’s propped the window sash with a tin of linseed oil, is breathing smoke out into the thin winter light. Bottle-black hair banked over her face. Still wearing her uniform. Or no, you’ll see later; just a shirt dress all wrong for the season, but half-asleep you mistake it for cabin garb.

  Even with the window open, the room has filled with her smoke, and it carries into your fitful half-sleep, becoming that of the fires: that first year, boiled-wool blanket spread by the dam. Your twelve-year-old self clutching fistfuls of summer grass to stay anchored in that summer, to the scrape and thump of rabbits shuffling in their box, Mum cracking up over nothing. These sounds as loud as if in the next room.

  For a flicker of time Lani exists in both places, like those double-sided trick cards whose images merge when the card is twirled around fast enough. The horse and the rider becoming horse-and-rider; the cage slamming over the bird. Your sister is there by the window and she is there by Hornett’s dam, her long legs stretched forever, stretched towards the water. But looking as she does now; nursing the hot drink that somebody from downstairs has given her, fiddling with the knot of the silk scarf that is meant to go with her hostess dress. The still-sleeping part of you wants to grab and hold her, keep her there, whatever fight she might kick up. If you could just get the two of them into the same place, Lani and your mother, then perhaps—

  But it’s ten years since you’ve seen her. And there’s the grit of a hangover waiting behind your eyelids, stymieing generosity. Why should she be let off easy, allowed to waltz right back like nothing’s happened? The part of you that is awake demands to know, Who let you in? Who gave you that? then shifts the pillow to block out whatever the response might be. Remembering her bathers growing mould in the laundry sink.

  But it’s no use; she’s still audible, still there in spite of the buffer of musty feathers and yellowed pillowslip.

  Kiddo, she’s saying gently, shaking your foot through the covers. Come on. I didn’t drive all this way for a cup of Orange Pekoe.

  Outside it’s very cold, very clear now, with the fierce metallic light that comes after a night of storms. Crossing the park you can still taste last night’s party. Lychee vodka. Never again. Ancient eucalypts have dropped their gnarled limbs throughout the playground, and the area is taped off like a crime scene, deserted.

  Apocalyptic, Lani says, wind snarling her hair as though it means to haul her up by it.

  True. Which horseman does that make you?

  Her car is un-beautiful; a grey, froggish thing nearly as old as she is, its interior a mess of takeaway containers, rumpled clothes, paperback thrillers. Airline miniatures of toothpaste and gin. A battalion of near-empty coffee cups, the gut-rot stuff from pitstops along the Hume, milky dregs curdling in spite of the chill.

  Pestilence, obviously, she says. Peering into a coffee cup and wrinkling her sharp nose.

  Thought you’d drive something else. Sleeker, you tell her, standing there kerbside, shrugged into a silver puff jacket. Couldn’t you have just flown? Don’t they let you fly for free?

  Tired of flying, she says, sweeping rubbish from the passenger seat. Climb in. Don’t worry, it goes. How many weather balloons died to make that jacket, Ru?

  Haha. You slam the door.

  The radio comes on with the engine. Talkback, a comedy quiz show with a guest politician. She switches it off. There’s an odd smell, familiar and foreign at once, thick behind the smoke-filled clothes and the phantoms of woodsy air-fresheners. Something grassy and cloying.

  Lani meanders the car around the edge of Port Phillip Bay. Yacht club, surf club, bowling green. Are you hungry, she asks? We can stop somewhere if you like.

  No, let’s just get to wherever we’re going. Where’s that?

  I didn’t really have any place in mind. Just the drive.

  We’re not actually going anywhere? You swivel in the passenger seat to search out the smell.

  What’re you after?

  Nothing.

  If you’re hungry there are some snacks in the glovebox. She reaches from the wheel, springs the catch on a muesli-bar cemetery, empty wrappers glinting amongst roadmaps, broken sunglasses, pamphlets for winery tours. A duty-free cache of American chocolate and European cigarettes.

  Oh, right. That’s for—Happy Easter.

  The chocolate or the smokes?

  Anything you like.

  You’re bribing me? I’m not five. And though you don’t quite mean it as a joke, she laughs, flashes her crowded-out incisors, the faint scar on her lip.

  Anyway, you got it backwards, you tell her, tearing the cellophane off a random soft pack. It’s supposed to be European chocolate, American cigarettes—everyone knows that.

  She brings the heat up and you wind the window down, letting in the scent of the rained-upon inner suburbs, now waking; damp air laced with exhaust fumes and turning kelp, drying bitumen, Vietnamese bakery. You want, for the first time in years, to feel that sugary bread sticking soft to your teeth. Remembering impromptu picnics, waiting for traffic to thin, your father fresh out from the repat clinic. Mum at the helm of his old Ford. Hot pies and dense pastel meringues eaten in city gardens, watching aggressive swans hiss at wayward toddlers. Watching your father, white paper bag trembling in his big hands, pastry flaking his new whiskers. He’d be drowsy in the passenger seat for the drive back; a flicker of how he might become as an older man, gentler, grown too tired for rage. Was she waiting for that, your mother? And could that be called patience, or plain idiocy, or did love allow room enough for both?

  Lani murmurs a song you don’t recognise as bayside apartment blocks flick past. White stucco, pink stucco, all their blinds open for the view, display-case living. A cream linen suit hung up in a third-floor window, waiting for someone to fill it. Race day. Lani asks about art and you tell her. She asks about men and you correct her.

  I did know that, she says, accelerating to make an amber light. It’s so much easier to talk when we’re driving, don’t you think?

  In the backseat, her silenced phone growls and growls and growls, but she doesn’t reach for it. You want to ask who’s calling, who her life is made up of now; what kinds of friends, what kinds of parties. What she’s done with all those years. How she answers when people ask where she’s from. Whether she’s happy: rarely/sometimes/often? But your mouth refuses to open for those questions. Out of pride and something else. Loyalty.

  I got a dog a couple of months ago, she’s saying, prattling now, filling space. I don’t know, maybe that’s selfish since I’m away more than I’m home. But a friend traded up for a baby, and it was
bye-bye Bruno, poor old fella. The neighbours all love him though. I thought of bringing him down for the ride but you might just as well bring a buffalo. Actually I did see that once, a buffalo, only it was on the back of a motorbike. All trussed up, crazy. That was Laos, I think.

  Lani?

  Mm?

  Does Mum know you’re down here?

  Lani lifts a hand from the wheel and rolls her wrist. Yawns. A stalling technique you remember from when you were young. It does for an answer, and in the long silence that follows you take inventory of the glovebox, keep your hands busy coaxing holiday brochures into three dimensions—swan, lotus, peacock. A modest repertoire of serviette origami you learnt setting tables in a suburban Thai restaurant. Your sister ignores the dashboard menagerie. After a few more ks she sighs and flicks the indicator, swings the car across the oncoming lane and into a green place, oceanside. Cypress trees dripping wet crepe streamers from Good Friday celebrations, and tables haunted by ugly, thuggish seagulls, hunkered down into their feathers. No-one’s around yet, and the gulls stand mobster-like along the railway sleeper benches, eyeing the car ruefully. One lands on the bonnet before the car has even stopped, peering in through the windscreen. You hold out a piece of chocolate for it to see, and it cracks its yellow beak against the glass, streaking birdspit.

  Lani kills the ignition. From where she’s parked you can see down the beach to the breakwall, the few coloured plastic buckets stationed along it. People flinging lines out into the wind-riffled bay, casting for who knows what. Jelly blubber and toadfish.

  You smooth a failed lotus back into a Margaret River winery map, determined not to be the first to speak.

  Lani watches you level the creases. It was different for you, Ru, she says. You were too young to really … Look, she was just different with you.

  The smell you noticed earlier is stronger now, without the air rushing through the car. A peculiar, animal must to it. Not a doggy smell; greener than that. You swivel around in the passenger seat again to scan the back. Two plastic shopping bags are stuffed behind the driver’s seat.

  What’re those?

  What? She twists to look. Oh, they’re wool. The lanolin reeks a bit, doesn’t it? Sorry, I’ve stopped noticing.

  You reach back into one of the bags, tug a greasy strand from the bundle and roll it between your fingers. What’s it for?

  I don’t know yet. A woman was selling it outside her hobby farm on the way down here. From her own lambs, she said.

  They’ll be chilly though. It’s the wrong time of year.

  I wouldn’t know. But she looked cold out there herself. Frail. I felt bad for her.

  You tease the wool strand to fibres. But not Mum.

  How do you mean?

  You don’t feel bad for Mum.

  Lani straightens up. Oh Jesus, sometimes I do. And sometimes I still feel angry as hell. Other times I don’t feel much of anything—I go to picture her face and something in me just blinks off. Is that awful?

  You shrug. Yeah, maybe that’s worse than angry. Is it the same way with Dad?

  I don’t feel all that much about him either. I don’t think I do.

  You don’t think …

  Well, you know every now and then I’ll see someone. From the back or the side, sitting in a parked car. Waiting outside a terminal. And from the way their shoulders are set or whatever. How they’re holding their ciggie. It nearly knocks my breath out. I don’t know what that says. Of course I’m always wrong, anyway, I see that as soon as they turn around. And a few months back—but he’d never fly, right? Said it always made him sick, even when he was in the army. So I knew all along that this wasn’t him either.

  *

  In the story that your sister tells, the man who could not be your father boards a red-eye in Perth with a grey duffel, a heavy cable-knit cardigan stretched across his broad back. She says she cannot recall exactly what it is that first draws her attention to him over the hundred other passengers. She has been awake for fifty-something hours, and life has taken on a dreamlike, underwater feel. As in dreams, every encounter seems luminous, important. These are the times she’s dumb enough to buy lotto tickets, when she hears a thread of wisdom in the things the Darlinghurst crazies rant at her from their putrid doorways, from their nests of rags and paper. She knows, you both know, that this is only a hereditary delusion.

  The man with the duffel is tall, folded uncomfortably in spite of his exit-row seat, in the manner of one who has come to accept a certain amount of discomfort. He’s taken off his cardigan and rolled it into a bolster for his back, and when Lani comes by with the drinks trolley and asks what will he have, he smiles at her in a pained way and says, Just tonic, dear. Little bitta lemon if you’ve got it.

  Dear. Not love. A woman’s word. Or a more tender word anyway, she’s thinking, pouring his fizz into a plastic cup and spearing a slice of lemon. When he reaches out to take it she sees the tattoo, just the hindquarters sticking out of his rolled shirtsleeve; the splayed claws, the flick of tail. She might have seen a thousand men with blotchy big cats climbing their arms, but this is different.

  She’s staring hard enough to leave a bruise, but the man with the tattoo doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a few deep swallows from the tonic and leans his head back into the seat, closing his eyes. Someone two rows along is already badgering her—do they have iced tea? Do they have lemon squash?—and she trundles the cart to a woman with a couple of brats whining for cola.

  When she goes back through the cabin with the snack trolley, the tattooed man is already asleep, bulky cardigan pulled across himself for a blanket, his arm covered up again. Then the lights are dimmed, and the other passengers angle themselves into similar impressions of sleep. She decides that she will say something, about the tattoo. Upon descent. Or maybe before, if she catches him awake. She’ll find the right moment and keep her questions innocent, impersonal. Just curious. What it means, and so on. She won’t go and embarrass herself, or him, by asking outright: Did you know my father? Or maybe she will. Maybe she will be that brave.

  She makes excuses to walk past him for the rest of the flight, springing up whenever somebody hits the call button, but he sleeps on. They’re somewhere over the desert when one of the engines gives out.

  Oh, all the time, Lani says when she sees your eyes widen. Happens all the time; they’re pretty much made to fly with just the one, and the engines are built so that no-one but the pilots know when something buggers up. Still means an emergency landing, though.

  The real chaos doesn’t start until they disembark, swarming a tiny shelter-shed of an airport on the brink of civilisation. All the re-routing to get sorted, everyone inconsolably held back from east-coast business meetings and honeymoon cruises and dying great-aunts and farewell stadium shows for retiring entertainers. The man from the exit row never enters the clamour, never raises his voice. He sits patiently with a tabloid newspaper by the window of the crummy lounge, taking occasional bites from a vending-machine chocolate bar. But somehow the right moment never arrives, and before she can say anything they’re ushered onto different planes.

  Lani’s quiet a moment, rolling her wrist again as if to crack it. Down on the beach a couple of kids stamp through a tangle of sea grapes, rabbit ears fitted over their woollen hats.

  That’s it?

  That’s it, she says. Finito.

  You let him go. Without even …? It’s not a fair question, but she answers as though it might be.

  I can’t help feeling like maybe I wasn’t meant to say anything, anyway. That maybe speaking to him wasn’t actually … wasn’t the point.

  The point? You’re being superstitious again, Lah. The nickname like a foreign object, there in your mouth after so long.

  I know I am, she says. I’m only saying what it felt like. And probably it was just something off a tattoo parlour wall somewhere. Straight
off a wall, where any old goose could ask for it.

  The wind carries up laughter, and the crackle of burst sea grapes; like someone snapping their fingers, lost for a word.

  What was it, the last straw? Was there a last straw?

  I don’t know, she says. Jeez. Maybe the dog—that was rough on him.

  I meant for you.

  Oh. Because you want me to say I’m sorry.

  Not now. I don’t really give a damn anymore. But yes.

  Okay, she says, but still doesn’t say it.

  One day you will tell her. How her absence eclipsed his absence. How he vanished completely when she took off. But this afternoon you are either not big enough or not small enough to say so, and she drives the eight hours back to Sydney without hearing it. Five months after, she steps off a plane in Port Hedland, and refuses to step back on. She lets her hair go the colour of a baby animal. She gets pregnant to a ranger from Esperance, and they name their children for places they hope to one day see. You post small gifts to the west coast. She sends back photographs of the gifts being worn or held or chewed on.

  It remains mysterious to you, how you were mild and she was savage. Way back there. But somewhere in the years between, she must’ve used her anger up, run herself to exhaustion. Burnt it all away like quick, hot fuel, flaring high and blinding then gone, smokeless.

  You wonder when your real life will start. You wonder what good all your being good has amounted to.

  One morning you flick on the radio, and there’s a report about recent studies in genetic memory, the inheritance of lived experience. The studies consist largely of torturing mice into fearing the smell of cherry blossoms, so that their offspring might also fear the smell of cherry blossoms. The baby mice are satisfactorily terrified. Beyond reasonable doubt. They get a whiff of the synthetic blossoms that were piped into their fathers’ electrified cages, and they huddle together in a trembling grey mass, in one corner of their safe little unwired room.