Sometimes you’ll look down and there are your fists, clenched. You just find them that way. An involuntary action, though you suspect that some part of your brain does this voluntarily. Purposefully. And although you don’t entirely grasp its reasoning, you do hold theories.
Here is the hippocampus. Here is the amygdala. Here is involuntary motor control …
Something it doesn’t want you to look at, something that is within its best interests not to see. The tail of something fearsome disappearing around a corner. What’s hiding in there? What are you so afraid to look at? But your fingernails spike your palms before you get a chance to follow. At the first whisker of something you might remember, you scarper back into the corner of your cage.
It doesn’t make any difference, turning away like that, doesn’t put a stop to the howling that surges up in you sometimes. From somewhere unknowable, a dull echo there in your blood. The sound of great wings, of iron wheels grinding along a clay road. Old Terrible. And because you do not open your mouth for it, do not howl, it moves through you in other ways, comes out in sweats and tremors, the way it did your father. A violent shaking that takes you to the bathroom floor, cheek pressed to the cool dirty tiles while you wait for it to be done with you, to roll over and away like the black cumulonimbus chargers of coastal storms. The dreadful grandeur of it almost ridiculous against the backdrop of crumbling grout, spilled aspirin, the stray flattened slipper lost beneath the soap-scummed clawfoot tub.
Twenty minutes burn up. A full hour. All the while this feeling that you might be throwing off light and heat, emptying out brilliantly, like a star collapsing. Thinking, This time. If no-one comes. This time, I will die.
But then, simply, no. No-one comes, and you do not die. You run a bath and fall in and stay there, until the water is cold and your lips are colourless, until there are doors slamming downstairs, voices rising from the kitchen, strangers and friends. Then you get out.
*
You keep waking from those dreams. Where the dead come back to get a look at you, just to see what the years have done to your face. Always, the feeling of leaning back against sun-warmed brick, lulling and simple and familiar. The sweet, heady mingling of magnolia and lawnmower fuel. And it’s fine for a while, all the catch-up talk. Tell me, love, just what’re you looking forward to? How cheeky her kids are getting, and how soon the water restrictions might lift.
Everything looks a bit parched, tell the truth. Tell the truth, I’m a bit parched myself. But can’t complain, really, can’t grumble too much, hey?
And aside from that thirst, no word or hint of death. The cheeks not sallowed by it, and the eyes still alight. But after a while you feel it must be your place to quietly inform them—that it’s only polite, the way you would for someone who’d left a zipper undone—that they’re not alive anymore.
You’re sure everyone has this dream, or some version of it, sooner or later. That it must be about as common as the one with the falling-out teeth. Only more difficult to make sense of, because the dream with the teeth means pretty much the same thing for everyone; Looka yonder, change a-coming. Whereas the dead always come back to tell you something specific, particular to you—isn’t that how it goes?—only they’ll never tell it to you straight. You want to grab them by the shoulders and shake it out of them, What do you want? What do you know? You try pressing them. But the dead just smile like they’re humouring you. The dead go all aloof, and change the subject. Ask whether Arnott’s still make those biscuits they liked with the coconut. And when, dumbfounded, you tell them no, not for years (have you really been away that long?), they seem to have more trouble making sense of this than the news of their own mortality.
That long? I s’pose I have, love. I suppose so.
*
If he was dead, someone would come and tell us. Never you mind. And if he wanted to be found, we’d know that too.
But did you look?
Did I look. Ru, you tell me: how much looking did I do? How much running-after? Were you asleep all those years—were you dreaming, girl? Your mother, turning her back in the kitchen of the blank suburban unit. Easy-clean venetians, nothing on the table but a bowl of lemons and the big ginger tomcat stretched out across the racing form.
Anyway, she says, ministering gentle half-twists to the cat’s lionish ears. What’s got you to thinking about him all of a sudden? Bet you my last dollar he’s not thinking about us. Wherever he is. Off in woop woop.
Oh, I don’t know, you tell her. Scraping at waxy lemon skin and yawning in the way Lani might. I guess they were talking about Father’s Day on drive time coming over here. That was probably it. I don’t think about him all that much. (This is one kind of loyalty. Another is: She didn’t say to say hi, exactly, but she did ask after you.)
Here, you say, sliding a photograph onto the kitchen table.
Your mother looks into the photograph, nods at some private question. Asks, without looking up, Which one is which?
The one patting the quokka is Alyeska. The other one is Skye.
She nods again. Later she slips the photograph between the pages of a cookbook she rarely opens, children’s cakes.
At some point during the course of her fifties she’d come back into the stern Scandinavian beauty she’d started with, albeit a little taut now, a little lived-in. She takes a long, unhurried time putting herself together in the mornings. Her lips lined and filled, silver-blonde hair twisted up tight into a marcasite barrette. For her own sake, she says. No more I used to be. Now she is again. Like being written back into an inheritance. Only now there is nothing much to do with it, no worthwhile place to spend it. She waves a hand when you ask if she isn’t lonely.
I was lonelier when your father was around. And not as if either of you girls needs a father now, anyway. (Still saying girls. Still that stubborn.)
Though men look at her now more than they ever did, or more than you ever remember them doing. You catch them at it, standing apart from her in public. Even in simple clothes—the blue cotton sundress from the day of the fire, decades old and taken in and taken in—there is something. There in the guarded grace about her movements. Something compelling. Selecting stone fruit at Trang’s Grocery, cupping her slender hands over the downy cauls of peaches and apricots so lightly she might be testing their warmth. Carrying herself with the same grave care, as if walking with a very full dish of water she is determined not to spill, never to spill.
Perhaps preoccupied with that task, with not spilling, she seems further away than when you were young. Further away than she was in her rages, her fierce disappointments and hair-tearing.
In her bathroom you scrounge the cabinets for evidence, medications that might hint at her cooling, her pulling away, but there’s nothing at all to incriminate or explain her. Even the walls of her small house are left blank, painted a glossy china-white, like the inside of an eggshell. No pictures, not even a tack mark. As if to say, Look; nothing happened here! Nothing ever happened here!
But at times when she’s concentrating, lost in thought, you’ll see her tongue seek out the gap he left in her teeth. And now and then his name appears in the search history of the old PC Aunt Stell set her up with. You don’t need to follow the links to know that not one of them will arrive at him, that Jack Burroughs is only a dragnet of far-flung solicitors and dentists and wedding photographers and motocross heroes.
When the two of you drive north to visit Tetch, you listen: does she also hold her breath while going past the old house, they way she always said to do with cemeteries? (It’s impolite to breathe in front of those who can’t, she’d say, but you felt the real reason was something else, if no more rational.)
As for yourself, yes, you hold your breath. Old hurts and petty thefts long buried in the yard. Dirty words you etched into hardwood stumps, lying on your belly in the sour, under-house dust. The roof tiles that stained your feet red,
then broke beneath them. These are still there, and it might be they will hear you, and be woken.
Viburnum has been grown up to screen it now. Green and orange striped sunshades on the front windows, like gaudy eyelids. Evidence of a different family strewn about the lawn, a family’s worth of gumboots ranked beside the front door.
Even so, you still half-expect to see one of your own there, captured in the flicker of kitchen fluorescents, or hauling up the roller door.
Your mother, staring from the passenger seat, she never says, Look … She never says, Remember when …? Though her eyes might scan the lawn, the lined-up boots, the trike, the red heeler pivoting, barking out at the road, at your black sedan.
We’re late, as always.
He won’t mind, my heart. He never minds.
Always, there are offerings stationed by your uncle’s letterbox, spill-over from his garden now there’s no-one to help him eat it. Recycled ice-cream containers heaped with plums, apricots, oranges. A note saying to Please Take. Though half the time they end up being lobbed right back at his truck, sticky rinds candied to the windshield. He’ll put the next crop out there anyway. Help Yourself.
Why?
Stubborn, I s’pose, he shrugs. Don’t let the bastards drag you down and whatnot.
Your mother talks to him the way she used to talk to the rabbits, but only once you’ve left them to it, sipping at their glasses of cloudy shed-brewed ale. Strange itch to it, like swallowing grass seeds. Their faint murmur following you out to where you wander between the crowded garden beds. Cucumbers and capsicums, tomatoes with their stalks noosed to stakes by ruined pantyhose—Blue Midnight; Silken Mist—that your mother has worn out and saved for him. If there’s more to it you don’t want to know about it. You break a pea pod away from a lattice, crunch into it, taste drought. Spit it back into the mulch, where the yellow bones of some animal or other are poking up through the loose earth.
Tetch will try, once again, to send your mother home with cuttings he salvaged from the magnolia, before the new people cut it down to extend the old house. He equips her with perlite and peatmoss, margarine containers of hormone grit, handwritten instructions for coaxing the roots, but nothing ever takes. She tucks each new endeavour behind the laundry door, to shrivel up black inside its makeshift milk-jug greenhouse.
*
Still, somehow, the spilled salt thrown over your shoulder, even in restaurants. Still counting the magpies in the cypress branches, as though a higher Something has taken the trouble to arrange them out there, for you to tally and make sense of. Still your heart slipping whenever a sparrow finds its way into the house, whenever a forlorn ornament stows into January.
*
By the time you meet your nieces, they are already upright, flanking your sister in her doorway. Leaning into her shyly, just to feel the reassurance of her freckled hands in their soft hair.
Say hellow, she tells them. Be polite.
All through the gauzy, jacaranda bore-water Christmas, whisking up purple blooms instead of pine needles, there’s your sister’s sweet voice singing between rooms, Who’s my Tiny? Who’s my Bewdy …? and the girls careering down the hallway by way of reply.
You sit out on the deck with a drink in your hand, turning the glass, letting the glass grow warm. A tourist, even here, watching her children running under sheets of sprinkler mist.
I was so afraid at first, she says. Low-voiced, as though someone else might hear and misinterpret. I was so afraid there wasn’t enough good in me to make anything good. That I couldn’t … not biologically, but whatever else a person needs. You know?
You tell her yes, you know. Telling yourself that yes, this is where you’re meant to be. That you might yet shake your distrust of any thing, any love that comes to you easy, palms up. Telling yourself to be still, to let the day billow like sailcloth, and the days that follow on from that. (Did we make it? you want to ask. Are we here? That mythology you once read, about children who start as splinters in the heel of some mother-god or other, how long it takes them to work through the skin.)
New Year’s Eve, she’s pulling the blinds open on the pewter light of late afternoon, the power blown by a summer storm.
Tell me that’s not an omen?
Love, it’s not an omen. Her gentle man, shaking his head: another hour till a taxi will nose down the wet gravel drive, that white downy corona through tinted cab glass.
He stands at the open back door to see by, thumbing emergency D-cells into an old radio. Scanning past the hit parade and sports commentary to reach the World Service, the shipping bulletin prattling out low and steady. You listen, the five of you, making a game of it for the girls while the television is temporarily deposed. Everyone lying almost still and almost quiet on the lounge room floor, reverent during the litany of meteorological predictions for these faraway, storybook-sounding places: Viking north at zero south at zero south-westerly veering north-westerly five or six occasionally seven later perhaps gale eight later wintery showers good occasionally poor Forties Cromarty west veering north-west five or six showers good … Thirty miles one thousand and one falling slowly north-west three seven miles nine nine nine falling slowly Ronald’s Way west north-west three sixteen miles nine nine nine falling slowly Melonhead north-west five showers five miles nine nine nine … Now rising, and the girls clambering giddy onto furniture, so as to rise higher. Taking turns at swooping towards their father’s chest, then into his arms from various launchpads, from armrests and chairs.
Now falling—help me down!
Now rising—help me up!
They can make a game out of anything, these three, Lani whispers, reaching for you across the hardwood floor. And I was so bloody afraid …
Falling slowly—help me fall slow!
Now rising!
Feel her hand close lightly around yours. Rising. Okay, yes. By some latent grace. The heart unclenching at the memory, at the echoed sensation of stepping into the stirrup made by someone’s (his?) interlaced fingers and having them hup-hup-hup! you weightless into the stinging, silvering air. Hanging there for a moment, suspended, caught like a star between the grainy sky and sea. When was that? And if you could press that moment flush to this, what might slip between? What might fall away, be lost?
You think, Here. Please. Let her find us just like this.
But the remembering is spooled away, the thread snapped. The girls fall once more into their father’s arms as the broadcast turns to headlines—West Africa is falling, crude oil and the ruble are falling. Greece is still falling. Only sea levels and the US dollar are rising—and the man whose shoulders you flew above vanishes, now as always. Here again is the hardwood floor, like smacking back breathless to the glassy surface of the ocean. Dried blue husks of jacaranda blooms swept in under tables, behind chairs, caught amidst the household’s dust. Your sister letting go your hand and getting up in time to see her, out there, making her way across the soaked lawn. Stepping ginger-footed through the confetti of blossoms crushed into the grass and stone, as if a parade has only just passed by.
Acknowledgements
Several organisations have contributed invaluably to the development of this book, and to my practice as a writer. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Yaddo Artists Colony, Arts Victoria, The Australia Council, Omi International Arts Centre, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University.
*
Wholehearted thanks to my editor, Ian See, for his patience, intuition and acuity; I could not have hoped for a sounder compass. Thank you Madonna Duffy, and all at UQP.
Thank you Tobias Wolff for your guidance and generosity, and for encouraging a longer endeavour. Thanks to Elizabeth Tallent, Adam Johnson and Daniel Mason for their care and counsel, and to my fellow Stegners over 2014 and 2015.
Thanks to Ocean Vuong, whose su
perb lines form the epigraph to this book. Thanks David Astle, for the cryptic wordsmithery that appears in ‘Breakwall’.
Thanks to Lang, Ash, Krien and McKay, for early insights. Thank you Jason Montano, for all the highway, silver halide, kindness. Thank you Chris Flynn and Angela Meyer, for being so sturdy and transpacific in your friendship. Thank you Judith Hamann.
Thank you, always, Patrick Pittman.
References
‘Breakwall’ includes excerpts from the following texts:
Harold Holt, Vietnam Ministerial Statement, 17 October 1967.
Robert Menzies, Vietnam Ministerial Statement, 29 April 1965.
National Service Registration Office, conscription letter, Department of Labour and National Service, Sydney, 1967.
Royal Commission on the Use and Effects of Chemical Agents on Australian Personnel in Vietnam, Final Report, July 1985, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1985.
United States Department of the Army, Soldier’s Handbook for Defense against Chemical and Biological Operations and Nuclear Warfare, US Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, 1967.
First published 2016 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
[email protected]
© Josephine Rowe 2016
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
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