Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  In a strange way Bryant preferred the busier part of the evening. The world would whirr past him in a flash of humanity, where the woollen coats and wrapped scarves of Europe would seamlessly morph into the bare midriffs and beaded braids of Bali. Forty seconds to eye a person and make a secret judgement about whether they should be coded on their declaration form for a baggage exam. Over twenty years of doing the job, Bryant had developed a sixth sense for what kind of traveller stood in front of him. He knew the type who would stash an extra bottle of Jim Beam in their hand luggage or the ones who would try to bring back a heritage tomato cutting from Italy. Of course, anyone transiting Colombia got put in for a full search. His eyes would flick from passport to face, to screen, back to face, all the while assessing the risk and keeping that neutral, easygoing smile fixed on his face. Lately, though, he’d found himself assessing people in a different kind of way. Those families, the families of four who were returning from a holiday at the theme parks in Florida or Euro Disney, the Dads whose stated occupation was ‘electrician’ and the mums who were nurses; staring at these families who could afford such a holiday, and there he was, a shift worker with a wife who also worked, barely meeting the mortgage repayments for his median-priced home in a suburb south of Perth. He didn’t think he was jealous, just perplexed in the same way he was when he watched the younger colleagues at work being streamed ahead of himself into cushy promotions in Fremantle.

  After the midnight and early morning flights had been processed, he found himself as usual walking back up to the recreation room with Eddie, another older officer who had trained in his year intake. The class of ACO 20: the last group to enter Customs through the regular public service exams, without needing a degree to get ahead.

  ‘You look tired, mate.’

  ‘I didn’t get much sleep. The kids woke me all excited. They found a giant egg in the dunes.’

  ‘An egg?’

  ‘They think it’s prehistoric.’

  ‘Sounds like an elephant bird.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elephant bird. Remember the one found by a kid in Cervantes years ago? His family tried to auction it privately but the government stopped the sale because it was found on Crown land. The boy hid the egg, reburied it—only coughed it up once the State Government agreed to pay.’

  Bryant vaguely remembered the story. An image of a boy and his dad on the news looking like they had just hit the jackpot.

  ‘Be careful. It might be worth a fortune. Tell them you found it in your backyard.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ grinned Bryant, but something like hope fluttered in his heart and stayed with him all shift.

  * * *

  That afternoon, once he had slept and showered, Bryant set to work researching the egg. He found out that the kid in Cervantes got an ex gratia payment of $25,000 from the State Government but on the open market it could have fetched five times that amount. He also discovered that the watermelon-sized egg had drifted from Madagascan shores and somehow found its way across the Indian Ocean to Western Australia to lie dormant in the sand for thousands of years. The trouble was, their egg was bigger than that of the extinct elephant bird. He found another site that talked about giant prehistoric emus, but there were no pictures to verify what they had in their garage. Every now and then he questioned if it really was an egg at all, and he’d lift the roller door to go peer under the sheet, and trace his fingers over the rough, dark coating.

  Bryant took a photo of the egg from different angles, a few close-ups, and one with a chicken egg placed beside it to provide a sense of scale and then attached these to an email addressed to the Head of Palaeontology at the city museum. He kept the story short and to the point, being careful not to give away any personal details. His reasoning was simple: in order to sell the egg privately he needed to know exactly what it was. He was surprised when a reply bounced back at him within minutes.

  Dear Sir/Madam,

  I am very interested in examining your specimen. Please contact me to arrange a viewing.

  Yours sincerely,

  Professor Mike O’Shaughnessy

  P.S. Where exactly was it found?

  The email sent a thrill through his body. He knew the guy was just as excited as he was. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, not knowing what to write back or how much to reveal. When the kids got home from school, he was so distracted with after-school snacks and homework that it was only when he went online to do some further research that he noticed another email waiting in the inbox.

  Hello,

  Not sure if you received my previous email. I would like to discuss your interesting find immediately. Please come to my office asap. Or ring me on my office number or mobile.

  Bryant’s mouth went dry. Somehow he’d thought he could discreetly find out what he needed to know without having to meet up with anyone. As he sat at his laptop trying to work out the best way to proceed, there was an almighty bang on his front door. Bryant could just make out a bulky form through the frosted panels of glass, and when he opened the door there was a large man dressed in a fluoro-orange safety vest.

  ‘Where’s Kai’s egg?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Bryant blinked. Then it came to him—his neighbour from across the road.

  ‘I want Kai’s egg.’

  ‘What do you mean Kai’s egg? My boys found it.’

  ‘Bullshit. It’s his.’

  ‘It belongs to us.’

  ‘I’ll take youse to court.’

  ‘Fine. Speak to my lawyer.’

  Bryant pushed the door shut before the neighbour could wedge his leg inside. He could see the blurry shape of the man standing motionless and then he heard the buckling of metal as the figure gave the screen door two swift kicks.

  ‘Dad?’ Casey was standing beside him, with that look he gave when he didn’t comprehend something.

  ‘Kai’s banned from coming over, right?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His dad claims the egg is his.’

  ‘It’s all of ours. Kai can have it one week, then us the next.’

  ‘We’re selling the egg.’

  ‘Dad, no,’ Casey pleaded. ‘I don’t want to sell it.’

  Bryant snapped back, ‘Do you want to go to Disneyland?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  ‘Then we’re selling it.’

  Casey started to protest, but stopped when he saw his dad’s expression. Bryant knew what he had to do. He would get his wife to ring in sick for him, and then he’d keep a close watch over the egg until he could offload it to the highest bidder, and then maybe after that he’d better think about moving house.

  * * *

  For the next three nights Bryant slept with the egg. He brought it in from the garage, and lay on the couch with the egg standing like a quiet sentinel beside him. The second evening he transferred it to the guest bedroom so he could get a better night’s sleep but found himself waking with a start every hour or so just to check if the egg was still there. By the third night he had brought the egg into the bed with him, arm draped across it as he slept. Bryant’s sleep was deep but troubled, infused with crazy dreams and an intense heat that spread from his body into the egg—or was it the other way around?—so that when he woke he was drenched in so much sweat he thought he had wet himself.

  The situation was absurd, but he understood why he was so obsessed. Skylab. It was the year 1979 and there he was, a white-haired boy with scabs healing to pink on his knees, scrabbling through the scrub at the back of his house in search of pieces of the space station that had fallen through the milky night skies. He remembered the knobbly feel of honky nuts pushing into his cheap sneakers, and the fear of spiders as he pulled back fallen sheaths of papery bark, desperate to find anything foreign and metallic. And each night as he watched the Channel Seven news reports heralding the grinning kids and dads holding up their new-found bits of Skylab, he would glance across at his own dad, who sat with a beer on his belly and shoulders always o
n that downward slump.

  Bryant eased himself out of bed, and hoisted the egg with him to the kitchen. It was Sunday morning, the quietest time in the household, and his wife was drinking her coffee with the laptop perched in front of her on the breakfast bar, browsing her favourite site: RealEstate.com.

  ‘We can get a four bedroom, two bathroom with a pool and theatre room for only 750.’

  Bryant frowned. ‘We need to sell the egg first.’

  ‘Have you contacted the museum guy yet? He’s sent about another ten emails.’

  ‘I’m still researching stuff.’

  ‘What’s that on your face?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those red marks.’

  Bryant touched his cheek, and could feel a sea of lumps.

  ‘Must have been bitten by something.’

  ‘Dad, quick, you gotta see this.’ Casey was wheezing as he came tearing into the kitchen. Bryant and his wife followed him outside to where their wheelie bin was positioned at the side of their house. The words ‘Fuck You’ were scrawled in white paint over the green bin.

  ‘Who would do that?’ whispered his wife.

  ‘I know exactly who,’ answered Bryant grimly.

  ‘Is it that guy? He’s been there all morning.’ Casey pointed to a silver Mazda that was parked at the end of their cul-de-sac.

  Bryant stared at the car, trying to make out the person sitting in the driver’s seat. Suddenly they heard the pure, clear sound of a child’s scream.

  ‘Ben!’ shouted his wife.

  ‘The egg!’ cried Bryant.

  They all ran into the kitchen, to see the little boy wailing and rubbing his foot.

  ‘It fell on my toe,’ he whimpered.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you not to go anywhere near it,’ yelled Bryant, making the boy cry even harder, his tiny shoulders quaking with each sob.

  Bryant heaved the egg back into the guestroom, then went to peer through the front blinds. The silver Mazda had disappeared.

  ‘It’s just a coincidence,’ he tried to tell himself, but he knew it was more likely that someone had tracked him down through his email account. The professor... Maybe, but there was also that bizarre exchange with Leonard58 on an antiquities forum, which had left him feeling unsettled.

  ‘Ring the professor,’ his wife urged him, and he knew that he could no longer hide in that no man’s land of hope and longing.

  * * *

  His wife dropped him off in Northbridge at the Cultural Centre and Bryant hurried across the square with the egg wrapped loosely in the sheet. People stared. For all they knew he could have been an art student carrying his end of semester project, but he wasn’t dressed in cool retro clothing or like someone with the promise of idle summers stretched before them. Instead, he looked like a bag of shit. Over-laundered, short-sleeved shirt his wife had bought him one Father’s Day and a greasy stubble where he had smeared some cortisone over the itchy red lumps. At the front counter the museum staff eyed him with suspicion, until he told them he had an appointment with the professor.

  He was expecting a man as dry and colourless as the specimens he curated; instead, this man before him was young and robust, with a rosy hue to his skin.

  ‘Bryant. Good to meet you. Is this the...?’ Professor O’Shaughnessy seemed to tremble as he touched the egg.

  ‘Not here,’ muttered Bryant.

  ‘Of course. My office.’

  Bryant followed the professor to the other side of the building, gripping the egg protectively.

  ‘Let’s look at it, shall we?’ and the professor knelt down and unwrapped the giant specimen. He smoothed his hand over it, and examined it closely, turning it around slowly to study it from every angle. Bryant watched him for clues, trying to second-guess what he was thinking.

  ‘I can’t say for sure, but it looks like it’s man-made.’

  ‘What?’ Bryant’s heart began to race.

  ‘Man-made. It’s either ceramic or a type of metal casing.’

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘I can do some further tests if you like. Ask my colleagues. Maybe a CT scan. You can leave it with me and I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Do you take me for an idiot?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘An idiot. I’m not leaving the egg here so you can sell it yourself.’

  ‘Have you not heard me?’ The blotches of colour deepened across the professor’s cheeks. ‘It’s not an egg. Someone’s having a joke on you.’

  Bryant stood up. He thought of a nine-year-old boy making a stance, a boy sticking it to the authorities by reburying the 2000-year-old egg in a secret location. He could do one better than that. One giant Fuck You. He grabbed the egg and brought it down with such force that it broke on impact with the ground, shattering like a meteorite in every direction. One piece flew into his leg and surprised him with the pain, another lodged in the professor’s eye, which wept red like an anemone. Bryant ignored the cry, the blood beginning to trickle in lazy rivulets down his leg. He limped away, past the gallery and towards the station, knowing his forty seconds to work it all out would soon pass, leaving him with no better understanding; only the feel of the city sun on his skin bringing a healing warmth, the pulse and throb letting him know he was alive.

  THE RETURNING

  The first time I saw my father cry was at the airport. My mother was distracted by a woman she vaguely knew, so there was a moment when it was just my father and me standing at the departures gate, and his long face, normally a fixture of calm rationality, crumpled a little then broke. I was so taken aback that later, on the way to Singapore and then Frankfurt Airport, whenever I thought of that moment where his face lost its familiar, rigid composure, I would also silently weep.

  The year was 1983 and I was on my way to Germany for a twelve-month student exchange program. A year when children still dressed in pyjamas to greet family members in the Perth Airport arrivals hall and there was still a kangaroo enclosure near the car park, a family of bored roos with fly-bitten ears. A year when a graffiti-covered wall in Berlin still separated East from West.

  This time, I leave on my own. My mother has been dead almost twenty-five years and my father is too infirm to make it to the airport to see me off. I look around, half expecting to see someone like my mother dressed in white elasticised pants, yelling, Yoo-hoo, Ellie!

  This time, I don’t need to race through Changi Airport to obtain a new boarding pass for the next leg of the journey to Frankfurt. Instead, I stay in the Qantas Business Lounge, grazing on the crackers and salads and reading the Australian Financial Review.

  No-one will meet me in Frankfurt. I will make my own way by taxi then train to the town of Würzburg, and stay overnight in a hotel room. In the morning I will hire a car and then drive the 41.9 kilometres to the small village of Markt Bibart. I am counting on the fact that nobody there will recognise me. A lot has changed in thirty-four years. I am no longer plump and downy-cheeked, and my once flowing long, dark hair has been cropped and dyed to a shimmering grey. My dress sense has changed too. When I look at old photographs I can’t remember what it was like to wear those floating pastel colours and patterned Indian scarves. Now I favour all black—structured jackets and tailored, dry-clean-only trousers—and silver bespoke jewellery: oversized rings with expensive stonework—my favourite being an amethyst worn on my ring finger, even though I’m no longer married. No-one here will be able to navigate this version of myself because they never saw this transformation happen. To them, I will be a complete stranger. Well, that’s what I hope for, though to make sure of this I also wear dark Armani sunglasses as I drive the car through the tiny village’s main street.

  What strikes me at first is how much I don’t remember. The place looks familiar in that way all German villages do: centuries-old houses built at odd angles and abutting the road so that it seems as if all the cars will veer into their cornerstones, the fachwerk whitewashed buildings with carved wooden flower boxes, and narrow cobb
lestone pathways. But I spend more time thinking about whether that Gasthaus was there before, or that public garden or that shop front. I wonder if it is because I am now driving, and not on foot, or leaning against a bus window, my eyes semi-shuttered, and my hand against my cheek, softening the bumps from the road. Or is that what trauma does to you, allows you to block out huge chunks of time so that those bumps are softened too? I drive on, following the GPS and looking for the fields of corn and the copse of woodland signalling where this village ends and the next one begins. I think there is a cemetery here somewhere—I have the sudden recollection of a story about an elderly couple whose only daughter was murdered in Nuremberg, her head hacked off while she was closing up the butcher shop one night in the Turkish district. This happened years before I first arrived, and the parents still made the daily pilgrimage to the graveside, lighting candles when the winter days shortened into night. Now I can’t see a cemetery and I have no desire to type that destination into the GPS. I am here for the living, not the dead.

  I recognise a stretch of road, the newer housing development built in the 1960s, and then a row of houses—and one in particular that makes me pull over and cut the engine. At this end of the street the double-storey homes are covered in cheap, prefabricated white cladding. Even time hasn’t closed up the telltale seams.

  The house is exactly as I remember it. There is still no garden to speak of. Just a strip of lawn in front of the lattice-topped fence, and a fir tree planted too close to the house, so that it looks as if it is trying to smother it with needled hands. There are frosted panels of brown glass on the front door, and windows of varying sizes on both storeys. The largest one upstairs is the kitchen, the smallest one downstairs a bathroom. But staring at the house I am now feeling confused. There isn’t a level where a basement should be; I can see that the house abruptly stops at the ground. All these years I had remembered living in a basement, and as I push my brain into understanding this anomaly, I realise that by descending down the stairs after each meal to hide in my room it must have felt as if I was retreating to an even lower level of life.