Elaine sounded harried – but not drunk, at least. Her words, already thickened by a French accent, were damp with unshed tears. Not for the first time I felt I might have been starring unwittingly in some mournful European film. She’d had a bad day of it: a tradesman had tracked mud into the house and then been unable to fix a pipe we had been waiting on for two weeks; Therese had to be changed three times.
‘But she did a funny thing, Dan. You won’t believe this but I went in this afternoon, she was in the sunroom – you know how she loves to stare at the birds at the feeder – and I swear she reached out to stroke my hair as I leaned over her.’
I paused to take this in. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘She stroked your hair?’
‘Yes.’
This could be a breakthrough. I leaned forward, elbows on the desk. ‘For how long?’
‘Well. A few seconds.’
‘It could be something, though, couldn’t it?’
‘Sure. Yeah.’
‘It wasn’t a –’
‘Dan. I’m sure.’
Pinned to the wall above the desk where I sat was a child’s drawing of a dog. Bulbous shapes conjoined by stick-like limbs, a scribble of blue cloud. I imagined Therese in her low bed staring at the ceiling where I had stuck luminous stars: her implacable face, her shining eyes. She might have contained entire oceans, shipwrecked galleons, dragons, concertos. I loved my daughter more when I was away from her; her actual presence only highlighted my inability to help her. My beery breath bounced back at me from the plastic receiver, and for the thousandth time since her accident I was flooded with sudden, acute disappointment at how I had so quickly reached the limits of my love.
I told Elaine I would be back the day after tomorrow at the latest, depending how long it took to get the car repaired.
‘Dan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you promise?’
She often asked me that. ‘Yes,’ I said.
Returning to the lounge room, I passed a carpeted hallway I hadn’t noticed earlier. Pop music drifted through a part-open door at the other end and a long matchstick of light fell on the swirling carpet. This must be the daughter’s bedroom. I paused to listen, as if the music might offer a clue. Kylie Minogue. ‘I should be so lucky’. Hysterical laughter from the lounge room, Angola asking his sons something. I shuffled down the hall towards the daughter’s room. She was singing along to the music in a low voice. Despite myself, I sensed the thrill of discovering something truly incredible. What if her father had been telling the truth? I crept closer, almost holding my breath.
‘You right, mate?’
I swivelled around to see Angola standing at the other end of the corridor. Although he was in silhouette, I could tell he was glaring at me. ‘Yes, I was just –’
‘That’s Chloe’s room.’
‘Oh. I was, ah, looking for the bathroom.’
It was clear he didn’t believe me. He wiped the back of his hand under his nose, then pointed the way I had come. ‘That way. And dinner’s ready.’
In any case, I didn’t have long to wait before seeing the daughter. When I returned from the bathroom, the family was gathered at the dinner table and looked up expectantly at my entrance. The daughter, Chloe, was seated opposite me. She looked ordinary enough, but I couldn’t help inspecting her whenever the opportunity arose.
Dinner was roast lamb with mint sauce and vegetables. Everyone talked at once. The boys bickered and thumped each other. Emma lit up a cigarette at the table as soon as she had eaten. Angola talked on his mobile phone for several minutes. The television raved away in the background. It was disconcerting to be at such a rowdy family dinner, but gradually, with the help of a few beers, I began to enjoy myself. So, I thought, this is family life.
Angola had cooled towards me, but I regaled the gathering with tales from my years as a verifier for Ripley’s. Soon they were all laughing and wide-eyed, gasping in astonishment at South Pacific cargo cults, at the man who dived into buckets of water from great heights, the parachutist who shaved and smoked a cigarette in the time it took to float back to earth.
Angola picked something from his teeth. ‘And do people make, you know, money out of these things?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sometimes.’
At this, Angola’s wife uttered an odd sound. I could restrain myself no longer and turned to the girl Chloe, who had been quiet the entire meal. ‘So. Your father tells me that you have quite an unusual talent yourself? Would you like to show me what you can do?’
The family fell silent. Then Emma put her head in her hands. ‘Jesus, Dave. I knew it. I bloody knew it . . .’
Angola started to protest, but his justifications were trumped by the only words I heard Chloe speak. ‘No,’ she piped, ‘that’s my sister Emily. She’s in the shed.’
The shed was really a stable about one hundred metres from the house. A wind buffeted us as we made our way across the yard with a torch. I was anxious. Many years ago I met a woman who claimed to have a portion of Hitler’s jawbone – complete with some piece of paperwork or other that verified it – but from the moment I stepped into her stinking, ramshackle entrance hall I knew she was just a lonely madwoman with a house full of junk. That I fell for it has long been a source of embarrassment for me, but in my business one needed to check all reasonable leads. Would this, perhaps, be the same? Or even worse?
Angola unbolted the massive door and swung it open. The stable was ill lit. Pausing on the threshold, I could smell wet hay and the sweat of animals. I knew the rest of the family were standing at the kitchen window, watching to see what I, a stranger, would make of their daughter. After Chloe had spoken up at the dinner table, there had been a heated discussion of money, of fame and reality TV that I did my best to dampen while still allowing them enough enthusiasm to show me their bizarre prize.
I stepped inside. Angola followed and closed the door behind me. Something stirred in a far corner; I heard a clank of chain. Angola brushed past me and went to another door on the other side of the stable. He paused with his hand on the wooden knob. ‘You ready?’
I nodded. By this time my heart was hammering. The miraculous has a smell, and this godforsaken place was ripe with it. Angola opened the door and went in. Another rustle of chain, the swish of straw. Murmured words, kindly words. He beckoned me over. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, then to his daughter, ‘This is Mr Shaw, love.’
I said hello and drifted into the room, which was spacious, decorated like any fourteen-year-old girl’s room: posters of pop stars, family photographs, drawings of horses. The girl, Emily, was sitting on a low bed placed along one wall. She was slight, pretty, with long brown hair and large eyes. She looked momentarily startled, but quickly recovered, said good evening and smiled. It was clear we had interrupted her reading a book; it was placed facedown on the bed next to her. Then I saw the iron hoop around her ankle and the short chain attached at the other end to the bed frame. Emily noticed me staring at it and shrugged. Angola seemed anxious and asked her if she might show me her trick.
‘It’s not a trick, Pa,’ she admonished.
Angola unlocked the iron hoop. ‘Well. You know what I mean, love.’
Emily rolled her eyes.
Angola dropped the key to her bolt into his coat pocket and stepped back. He offered me an apologetic smile. ‘Teenagers, eh?’
Emily swung around until both legs hung over the edge of her bed. Angola and I waited by the door. Horses moved around nervously in their stalls nearby.
‘Are you sure, Pa?’
Angola nodded.
‘But you said that –’
‘Emily. This man might be able to help us.’
‘Okay.’
And after a few minutes, it happened, as Angola had said it would. Almost imperceptibly, Emily began
to levitate from the bed with no apparent exertion. The space between the hem of her dress and the rumpled bed expanded. Her face wore the expression of one absorbed in an interior activity like, say, listening to a favourite piece of music or contemplating a scene of sublime beauty. The entire thing happened in silence. When at last I could speak, I asked Angola how long she had been doing this.
‘Oh, only two months or so. Not long.’ It was clear that, behind his concern over what was happening to his daughter, he was very proud.
Meanwhile, Emily rose higher and higher. After several minutes, she put out a hand to prevent her head bumping against the high ceiling. Gently she shoved herself off, whereupon she drifted down and across the room before again floating to the ceiling. Finally, Angola took a length of rope, flung up it to his daughter and hauled her down to the floor, as one might a boat to a pier.
He secured Emily to her bed with the iron bolt. They exchanged tender words. He thanked her, kissed her on the forehead. We left the barn. Then he turned to me with an avaricious gleam in his eye, and I knew instantly what I had to do.
In the middle of the night, when I was certain the family was asleep, I eased the ring of keys from the hook by the kitchen door and crept from the house.
Emily didn’t seem surprised to see me standing in her room. I sensed her looking at me as soon as I unlocked her door, but she said nothing, uttered not a sound. It was so quiet out there in the country I could hear her breathing in the gloom. I crouched by her bed and told her not to be afraid and she nodded as if she had known all along – known even before I did – what I intended to do. Some girls were like that. I unlocked the iron clasp from her bony ankle, gave her a moment to put a robe over her pyjamas, then lifted her from the bed and carried her outside.
My shoes crunched on the gravel driveway. I registered the familiar, pleasing sensation of a girl’s warm and trusting breath on my neck, a cheek bumping against my shoulder. I had intended to carry her far beyond the edge of the property, but she was heavier than I anticipated – or I older and wearier – and I was compelled to put her down in the driveway seventy or so metres from the house. The girl gave a startled laugh, wobbled, then grabbed my sleeve as if momentarily unbalanced on a beam.
I held her by her wrist and we stood there for several seconds, staring at each other in silence.
‘I’m scared,’ she whispered.
‘I know. But there is no need to be.’
The moon was high and full. By its light I saw the silvery outline of her jaw, tendrils of her hair waving in the breeze. Experimentally, I loosened my grip on her wrist and for a few seconds longer we stood there in the driveway, the girl and I, until she, too, let go of my sleeve.
I heard animals moving around us in the darkness, the soft and furry blink of their eyes. Emily smoothed her knotty hair and looked around. For a second I feared she would run or cry out for help but, instead, she looked at me and smiled. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
Gradually, she rose into the air as she had done several hours earlier and the sight of it thrilled me anew. Her knobbly knees floated past my face and I realised I was weeping. She stifled a giggle with a hand across her mouth, then relaxed and held out her arms, and it seemed to me that she was not rising so much as the earth on which I stood was falling away beneath her feet. She waved. By the time lights came on in the house and I heard angry voices, the girl was already out of reach, floating above a nearby stand of gum trees.
Angola and his family ran up behind me with mouths full of oaths, but instead of escaping, as I should have done, I closed my eyes to better imagine the world from the girl’s new height. I wondered if she saw trees in the distance, the yellow gravel of a driveway. Did she hear her father crying out and feel the stars close at hand, the vast and ancient universe into which she was being drawn? Far below, did she make out a man beating another man over and over with his fists, and hear a dog yapping at the commotion? People clawing at each other, throwing up their hands, shrieking?
Finally, when her family below fell silent and looked skyward, each of their faces glowed strangely and were so small they might have been coins at the bottom of a well as, free at last, she disappeared from sight.
Blood Brother
It’s always summer in childhood. I remember when we went to see the Peanuts movie Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown for your birthday. Your dad dropped us off outside the cinema and we accidentally went into the wrong theatre and saw The Deep instead. It was 1977. We were nine years old. Lost treasure, Jacqueline Bisset in a wet t-shirt, harpoon guns.
We lived next door to each other until we were fifteen. We climbed to the tops of trees and all over the roofs of our houses – seeking a better view, I guess. Danger and escape from it. We could see a long way, perhaps not far enough. One hot afternoon we scored a gash in our palms with knives, smeared blood in each other’s wounds and swore undying loyalty. An exchange. It was corny and it was true.
We collected dozens of cicadas in an old ice-cream container. We boiled and cut open a golf ball. In Manila we drank shakes made with condensed milk. More than once we stole your mother’s cigarettes and smoked them in the back shed. We swam one summer weekend at Aireys Inlet and got into a rock-throwing fight with some older kids. We made slingshots from coathangers and rubber bands and shot at birds in trees. We ate plums straight from the tree, bitter, juicy. We made plans. Those countless Sunday mornings playing football when we were boys and, when we were older, shooting pool or playing pinball on weeknights at Johnny’s Green Room. Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee. ‘Money for Nothing’ always seemed to be on the jukebox – which makes it 1985 or so. The hours kicking a ball around in your backyard or watching videos of The Deer Hunter, Star Wars, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now and The Graduate. Endlessly, until we knew most of the dialogue. Are you trying to seduce me? You talkin’ to me? Charlie don’t surf.
I don’t feel I have a right to miss you, not really, because we hadn’t seen each other in years. I remember that day. The last time, that is. You, driving a taxi, sad and overweight; me, leaving my flat in Acland Street, St Kilda. This was probably in 1999. We were thirty-one. We made plans to catch up, but never did. You were at my wedding, but not really there at all; it was as if you had already left. But still. I do. Miss you, that is. And perhaps you of all people understand that you can’t help feeling what you feel.
I’d heard of your troubles, of course, because our mothers are still friends and see each other regularly. Besides, it was our entire childhood, where everything really happens – the place where, as we age, we spend more time.
One afternoon I came home from school and you were waiting for me on the burning footpath, terrified. There was someone in your house, you said. A burglar or a murderer. We were probably twelve years old. Our older siblings were elsewhere, had most likely moved out of home by then. The parents were not around. It was different in those days; we had our lives and they had theirs.
From my place we grabbed a cricket bat and, having decided that entering through the back door was wisest, crept up the side of your house where the plum tree grew. The house was dark and cool, as always. The creak of old floors beneath the grey carpet. Did we call out or did we creep through room by room, opening cupboards and flinging things aside in our search for the intruder? We were excited, fearful of what we’d find.
The precise layout of the house is difficult for me to recall. I think your sister’s bedroom was on the right, your own room on the same side but a little further along. There was a TV room, the dining room which was hardly ever used, the kitchen that overlooked our back garden. From that kitchen window we might have seen our dog, Winston, snuffling about in our back garden, maybe my odd sister sitting on the couch watching Family Feud, rocking back and forth.
I remember hearing of your death. A bad phone line, my mother weeping as she relayed the news, the cold air on the porch at my brother’s place in the coun
try where I took the call. Stars, the fog of my breath, the vast universe. The shiver in realising that a menace long eluded had at last slipped inside.
Often, in the middle of the day, I stop and think of what you chose to leave behind. The smell of dawn breaking over the ocean, the flavour of nectarine, a great joke, a catchy new song. I guess it wasn’t enough.
Your note reached me several months later, after it was released by the police. They said you wrote it as the drugs took hold, but I don’t know how they determined that. Thanks, but you never needed to apologise. I think that what you did was heroic in its way.
We found nothing, of course, that afternoon as we riffled through your house in search of the axe murderer, pulling our best kung fu moves and shouting Ha! as we kicked open doors and flung aside clothes. Afterwards we laughed and poured ourselves orange juice before going outside to kick the footy.
I was flattered you trusted me that day, that you thought me strong enough to help you. Because there was something hiding there, wasn’t there? Somewhere we failed to look. I’m sorry we weren’t able to flush it out and kill it. I was too young and you were too young. But, my friend, your blood runs in me still.
Crying Wolf
No one knew where the girl came from or even what her name was. My best guess was that Fat Ken the taxi driver had picked her and her boyfriend up in the middle of the night and somehow convinced them to come to Cecil Street to drop acid. This was a terrible idea; they were first-year university types who had only recently moved from the country. They had a fight almost immediately and the boyfriend vanished into the Fitzroy night in a huff. Meanwhile, the girl became convinced her scalp was bleeding, which of course it wasn’t. At least I didn’t think it was.
I had always been scared of acid (a little too nervy, too predisposed to apocalyptic fantasies of death and suicide and chaos) so I only took half a tab instead of the whole one the others took and, on account of this, the role of looking after everyone fell to me. I was to ensure no one did anything particularly idiotic or dangerous. I was in charge of playing records, making tea, stopping anyone from trying to cook or fly from the roof – that sort of thing. Which is how the girl became my responsibility.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 14