Everything in its right place

by Tobias McCorkell

  Only later could I even begin to imagine what this must have done to her. But at the time, I had to take it out on someone.

  Dad and I walked up the long driveway to his station wagon parked by the nature strip out front. As we walked, I pictured the driveway as the main street in an old western movie, the one that the gunslinger hero must stride down at noon for a duel. It helped fuel this fantasy that Noonie and Pop were spying at us from Unit One; in westerns, the townspeople board up their shopfronts and peek out at the noon duel from behind drawn curtains, curious yet afraid of catching a stray bullet. My father surely noticed the twitching curtains in Unit One.

  Dad had taken a restraining order out on them, because at some point Pop had tried to confront him about the child support payments. His appearance on their property not only put them in legal jeopardy but was also the reopening of a wound, shelling their bunker with distasteful memories. Their surveillance as we left compounded my guilt and left me with the odd sense that they knew something, just as the panic-stricken townsfolk know that one of the shooters out there, on that tumbleweed-strewn drag, is sure to die.

  When we were on the nature strip, Dad gave me a hug. The embrace made me feel awkward. I never knew what to do with my arms. I didn’t like being touched by men.

  After he’d thrown my bag in the boot and we’d gotten into the car, I set up some music. He’d bought me a CD-to-tape converter for my last birthday, this wire cord with a cassette at one end and a jack at the other that plugged into my discman; he’d bought it so I could play music on these long drives north to the Goulburn Valley, because his Commodore didn’t have a CD slot. He liked music, and I’d play things that I figured he wouldn’t have heard. It was one of the few ways we bonded. That and drinking.

  Only since I’d started drinking and smoking had the three-and-a-half-hour drive become bearable. As a kid I was deathly allergic to cigarettes, and these drives would almost kill me because my father chain-smoked the entire ride. By the time we arrived in the bush my face would be twice its usual size and red and itchy, my eyes almost closed over. Back then when he would stop for petrol, I would snap the filters off the ends of his cigarettes, and he would scream at me when we were back on the highway and he had reached for his next smoke.

  Unbeknownst to him, my father transported me back into the past. Though I no longer rubbed my eyes for so long they looked as if they were bleeding, when smoke spewed from his mouth, I was haunted by memories from the earliest days of his ongoing crisis.

  Demons

  Dad’s station wagon kept north along the National Highway – dry grass and flat, underpopulated stretches of land – all the way to Nagambie, where we made our customary stop.

  After a loo break, my father and I walked across the street to the bakery for the usual: a milkshake and a jelly slice. We sat at a quaint table in back, and I liked the way the layers of red jelly and creamy cheesecake and sweet biscuit would hold together as I cut evenly through the slice with a dainty little cake fork.

  ‘So, what’s been happening for you?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Oh, ya know. Not much.’

  I never told Dad anything. When before I used to try, I never got the sense he was listening, and I would feel embarrassed, like maybe it was because I wasn’t interesting enough, so I’d stopped.

  However, emboldened by the memories I’d been grappling with during the car ride up, along with the depressing knowledge that everyone I knew – Dougie and Moose and maybe even Will and Ellie – were sitting down right now on Boxing Day to eat Christmas leftovers and watch the cricket, I had a compulsion to make him squirm.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I know I never asked you this, but, like, how come you and Mum got divorced when I was little?’

  Dad’s eyes widened before darting about the bakery. ‘Your mother never told you?’

  ‘No. Well, I mean, a little, yeah. But we, like, never …’ I had nothing to say and began to regret bringing it up. What was I doing? We’d never done this before and perhaps for good reason.

  ‘Well, ah …’

  It was hot enough in Nagambie, but I felt sure the film of sweat covering Dad’s upper lip hadn’t been there a moment before. I decided not to speak and looked down into my drink, stirring the milky bubbles inside the metal cylinder with my straw.

  ‘… ya know … ah … well … really … um … sometimes two people just aren’t … ah … compatible … and that when you make … ah … for instance … a … um … roster for household chores … for instance … sometimes people can’t … ah … agree …’

  In the span of what felt like hours, but was likely only ten minutes, I listened, mute and stunned, as my father reduced my parents’ separation to a simple misunderstanding between adults over … ah … ya know … whose turn it was to do the washing-up and on which days they should sweep the kitchen floor. I was enraged by his inability to bring himself to tell any kind of truth, and this anger drove me to spite him.

  ‘Cool,’ I said. ‘That all sounds like it must’ve been really … ah … hard.’

  ‘Ah, yeah. It was. It was really hard.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said, sucking up the last of my milkshake so it made that irritating noise inside the cylinder, ‘ya ever hear anything of Ken Mears?’

  ‘No, son. No,’ he said, droopy-eyed at last.

  *

  My parents had been married fourteen years when my father left. I was five years old. The only thing I remember of the time is the rocking horse they’d bought for my birthday. When Dad had gone, I was allowed to open the oddly shaped parcel – which I’d been studying in the back room of our former house – two days early. It was a black horse, but the insides of its nostrils were painted a glaring red, which wasn’t very realistic but looked right all the same.

  At five, I didn’t understand the clichéd significance of my father’s decision to leave my mother and me and the city, and to move back into the bush on a desolate property in Seymour, where he would create a new life for himself with a former naval officer named Ken Mears. At that age I didn’t understand much of anything. What I did have, though, were my senses and my feelings. And in the first two years after my parents divorced, my senses and feelings taught me there was nothing much good about my father’s – and by proxy my own – new life on that Seymour property.

  I soon learned that the relationship between Ken and Dad was something other than mateship. At least it was unlike the mateship between me and Dougie and our other footy mates, because none of us bashed each other about in our kitchens, nor did we embrace on the floor and cry about it after. Plus, I never saw Dad and Ken kicking the footy to each other.

  All I knew, then, was that it was dire between them, and that the stress and tension on that Seymour property outweighed even that inside The Compound. The stress didn’t just come from their constant fighting, which so often erupted into violence – and which, perversely, I drew small measures of satisfaction from witnessing, because watching Dad cower around Ken felt like a small victory that alleviated, if only fleetingly, my own inordinate fear of this troubled man whom my father had let into my life – but it also came from the fact they had gone bankrupt before barely recovering.

  By the time I was eight, Ken and my father had managed to hold on together, but for the second time in three years they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

  On the upside, this meant they had little time or concern for me. I was mostly left to my own devices while they poured time and energy into attempting to save themselves from ruin. Not that it was any great wonder, the situation they found themselves in. Their ingenious plans to turn a profit included making money at the track (they owned a pair of lousy trotters and a handful of greyhounds) and from breeding what they termed ‘thoroughbred dachshunds’ and what I called ‘sausage dogs’.

  Whenever I was feeling brave enough to explore the property, I would run to a shed far along the westernmost fence where the trotter buggies were kept, my fingers crossed that one of them
would be down with its wheels planted on the soft sawdust that coated the floor. The buggies were normally hung upright along the wall like giant pushbikes, but if one was down I would jump in and imagine myself with cap and goggles on, the swishing tail of a horse before me as it sprinted out into an eternally spiralling racetrack.

  One day when I was out walking, skirting the perimeter of the property away from Ken and my father, and after I’d found that none of the buggies were down, I got caught by the dogs.

  If I was afraid of Ken, then my fear of Gus came in a close second. Gus was Dad and Ken’s most prized dachshund and money-maker, an all-round alpha pup and King Cheese of the breeding program, an ace stud. For whatever reason, the little cunt had it in for me. Whenever I ventured from my room, Gus would bark at me and bite me, and he would even round up the other dachshunds in a posse to harass me. Generally I could evade him, so long as I didn’t go near the giant green metal shed near to the house, a kennel-on-steroids that smelled of damp hair and meat and dry dog food.

  On this day, however, as I was crossing back to the house after inspecting the buggies, Gus and his group of dogs materialised. They had found a way out of the kennel and were roaming amongst the many gums in the dense goldfields brush between me and the house. When Gus spotted me, it was on. He barked to signal the chase, and I hightailed it into the bush with what seemed like a hundred bobbing heads behind me, all yapping as they bounded across the earth.

  I ran as fast as my legs would take me from that angry horde of sausage dogs, through the brush and out clear across a field. I ran and ran, then vaulted a white wooden beam. I travelled several more paces before tripping over myself. When I got up and looked back, the dogs had stopped and were standing together, barking at me like mad. They wouldn’t pass beneath the wooden beam I’d vaulted. I realised it was part of a fence.

  A coldness was rapidly setting into my feet. I looked down at them. I was standing, fixed, in heavy muck that squelched and formed a suction around my feet, and it had gotten all over my clothes when I’d tripped over.

  For a moment I thought the dogs hadn’t followed me under the fence because their little legs couldn’t navigate the mud. But really it was only a wide puddle. Why weren’t they yapping at me from the verge of the dry ground?

  It was when the whinnying came sharply into focus, like the crack of gunfire on a silent winter morning, that I understood. I’d run into the one place I had been warned and warned against entering alone. I had startled the horses, and they were moving about their paddock restlessly like they might charge or buck or bolt.

  Each of my legs felt as though it weighed a ton. In freeing one foot, I lost a shoe.

  After what seemed an eternity, my father walked into the paddock, harried and paranoid and angry. ‘What on earth were you doing? What were ya thinking?’ he yelled, before picking me up and carrying me back to the house, the dachshunds circling his feet and yapping at me still.

  I can only imagine he was as afraid of legal consequences as for my safety. He was also scared, no doubt, of having to explain the incident to my mother – or, worse, to his. After all, he often left me alone in the house with Ken, which had convinced me that my father didn’t love me.

  For all the questions he had as to why I’d found myself in with the horses, I had many of my own. Like: Why were the dogs out in the first place? And why do they hate me so much? But most important of all: Why do I have to keep coming to this godawful place?

  That night, Dad, Ken and I ate dinner in the silence typical of our rare meals together. Ken had cooked rissoles on the electric frypan. They were rubbery and I could taste the breadcrumbs, and I felt hot and still shaken up about the horses. Dad wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

  It was a chore to get the rissoles down, and I wanted a glass of water. But this made me agonise over drawing their attention, so I sat there a long time pushing the food around my plate, working up the courage to ask for something to drink. I couldn’t be trusted to pour one for myself without smashing a cup or causing a spill; in Seymour, my nervousness resulted in a spectacular clumsiness that generally kept me confined to my room. It frustrated me to no end that back home in the city I was a competent pourer of glasses of water – and of cordial and of milk – but in the country I was all thumbs.

  Eventually I spoke up. ‘Can I get a glass of water?’

  Neither of them responded for a moment, then Ken said, ‘How do we say that?’

  I thought about it. ‘May I have a glass of water?’ I tried.

  ‘You may. You know where it is.’ Ken had a great facility for making me feel like a complete idiot.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, getting off my chair to go into the kitchen.

  I was aware that eyes and ears were on me as I set about this simple task. By the time I was in the kitchen and had selected a glass and brought it down from the shelf, I was shaking rather violently with the pressure of getting it right. I wanted to ask for help, but I also wanted to prove to Ken and my father that I was not always such a stain on their existence as the boy who’d found himself covered in mud in their horse paddock, the boy who was afraid of their ridiculous, tiny dogs.

  When I poured the water, a little of it spilled over the glass into the sink. I emptied some more from the top, so that even if I shook I could carry it back safely. I proceeded to walk to the table, concentrating on placing one foot in front of the next.

  But I didn’t hold on to that glass as I carried it back from the kitchen. It shattered on the dining-room floor.

  The consequence of my mistake, as it so often was in those days, was Ken’s ire. ‘Why the fuck does he always have to be here?’ he screamed at my father, while I started picking up the jagged pieces sprayed across the floor. ‘That fucking kid can’t even drink a glass of water without fucking it up.’

  My father was on his knees beside me then, brushing my hands away in case I cut myself. Knowing that he no longer wanted my help and that I was now unwelcome at the table, and embarrassed that I was on the verge of tears with nobody to console me, I retreated to my room. I curled into a ball in the corner, sobbing silently into my windcheater until the tortoiseshell cat came down off my bed and found a more comfortable position in my warm lap.

  I listened to their row, muffled through the walls, until the front door slammed and Dad’s station wagon started up in the drive. Its tyres rolled out across the gravel, crunching the stones and scattering them loose like all those pieces of glass I’d created in the dining room. I could feel my heart and lungs in my throat, knowing I was alone with Ken, could hear his footfalls in the kitchen and then the living room and then the corridor and then the living room again, going back and forth inside his life, whatever it was to him, and so I closed my eyes and prayed to be home, to make it through the night, to Sunday, to four o’clock, when I’d be reunited with my mother.

  Minutes move slowly when you count them, especially when you’re not very good at maths. I patted the cat until my sweaty palm gave her the shits and she moved away. Not too far, thankfully, but out of reach.

  A while after I’d stopped crying, there was a knock on my door. Then it opened a crack.

  ‘You still in here, Ford?’ Ken asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said from the dark.

  He turned on the light to inspect my puffy red face. ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you have. Now, tell the truth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  The cat came back toward me then, as Ken took a seat at the foot of my bed. She sat back in my lap, between us.

  ‘I don’t know what we’ve done,’ he said, taking in the room, ‘but they don’t seem to be going away. Have you been saying your prayers, like I told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be lying again now, would you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Ford.’ He let out
a long breath. ‘See here?’ He pointed to the floor between the bed and the outer wall, where the window was set into the brick.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking hard at the carpet and trying to decipher what Ken perceived.

  ‘You can see that, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘Well, then, we’ll have to make preparations again. You seem to bring such bad luck to yourself. I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be sorry to me. Be sorry. Inside. You have to mean it if you want them gone.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, petrified.

  ‘Set your traps then. And quickly. It’s getting dark and I’m concerned you’re already behind.’

  I dropped to my knees and set about building the traps. Under the bed, I fastened a length of thin cord from one bedpost to the next, until it wrapped around the base of the bed just below the mattress and centimetres above the floor. To the cord I attached clothes pegs and tiny bells alongside glittering objects I’d taken from a dress-up box at school – dangly beads and earrings and anything that might rattle if it was disturbed. I’m not sure what I expected the pegs to do, but they looked intimidating to me, like teeth, and I thought this illusion might help scare the demons away.

  I’d heard adults speak of having demons, and I’d soon discovered it was just an expression meaning ‘troubles’. But the demons on the Seymour property, in that house, were real, and according to Ken they resided underneath my bed. He’d helped me build the first of my traps – it was the only generous thing he’d done for me, I supposed. They were one way of stopping the demons from reaching me, but although they kept me safe at night I stayed awake all the same, listening out for their warning sounds.

  There were other rituals Ken taught me, in order to help with this matter of having demons under my bed, but I’ve forgotten exactly what they were. The details, at least, are hazy, and I don’t feel like getting into all that.

  When I’d finished fastening my various objects to the cord, Ken looked at me for a long time, and I just stood there feeling dumb and tired and hungry.