Metal Fish, Falling Snow

by Cath Moore

  At the YMCA hostel that night there was unlimited soft drink top-ups. Normally I would’ve been up for an alphabet burping competition because I can usually get to J. But on that particular night if you’d opened me up, you would’ve seen that big old wolf howling at the moon. Alone and lonely (at the same time). Brown is a loud colour to wear on your face. I get onto a crowded bus and everyone looks up at me like they’ve heard my skin arrive. ‘What are you doing here?’ their blank stares say. ‘Turn that pigment down!’

  If you didn’t already know, skin has a lifetime colour guarantee. Once I got a whole box of scouring pads from under the kitchen sink and tried to scrape the brown off my arms. I wanted my skin to grow back white so I could be beautiful like Mum. So when we sailed back to France no one would look at us funny and I could blend in like white people do. But when the gauze pads came off it was just the same brown again, full of scabs. So as much as possible I pretend that I’m like water—no colour at all. ‘Can’t hurt me if he can’t see me.’ That’s what I used to think about Dad. Same went for that William Freeman fella. My grandfather. True enough there are things I want to tell you about him. Things not even Mum knew. But I can’t tell you right now. Secrets like those have to be unwrapped at just the right time.

  I look inside the Red River Hotel. Pokie lights are still blinking their happy times bright rainbow. They don’t sleep. Pat catches me looking at him and flicks his eyes back to the road ahead. I roll down the window and listen to the gravel crunching under the tyres. Let the sound massage my ears. When Mum was here I never thought about what this town was made of. But after the fall, the world shattered into a thousand pieces. Then I realised those little particles of dust floating through the air were a part of every word we said, every breath and step we took. When they float away there’ll be nothing left and now this place is all but gone.

  2 God-knocking box

  I’d only ever passed by Hutchins Road on the school bus. Every other day it’s just where the police hide at the bend hoping to nab someone for speeding. But on the day of the funeral, Hutchins Road was a punch in the guts and a ten-car procession.

  Pat puts the clicker on and we turn down the road. Can’t leave town without paying respects. The sun falls over Pat’s eyes and for a moment it looks like they’ve turned from blue to green. It’s only a quarter after eight but the heat is already on. Crickets drone like a one-note symphony. The air feels stretched, and you think about which way you’d run if a fire ripped through. Pat’s been here before, buried his mum and dad two weeks apart. Some people are so connected their hearts beat in synchronicity. When one goes, the other can’t survive.

  ‘I’ll get onto it. Next pay packet, promise.’

  There’s not even a wooden cross like some of the other new graves have. I wanted Mum’s to read Tell me when it’s time to wake up because she always slept through the alarm. I’d get the porridge on and tell her when breakfast was ready. But Pat said you couldn’t write a joke on a headstone.

  I can still see the holes in the ground where the fold-up chairs were. They didn’t want any of the oldies keeling over with heatstroke. One funeral at a time, Margie said.

  At the funeral it was mostly Pat’s friends who I didn’t know. Men in mismatching suits with chunky black sneakers. Narelle, the Red River barmaid, wore a tight red skirt and strappy heels. She came long after Mum had stopped working at the pub, but maybe it was a solidarity thing. Like she was representing the union for pretty girls behind the bar. I thought the church was supposed to love everyone no matter what you wore but Margie whispered in my ear that it was blasphemous to dress like a hooker in the company of a priest. ‘Cheap and nasty spoils the party.’

  Margie said I could still come over whenever I wanted and have Monte Carlo biscuits with Cottee’s orange cordial. Margie stroked my face and said she could give me jobs for pocket money now. That I could clip her nails and pick up the dog poo her neighbour’s terrier Anzac kept leaving under her roses. The veins in her hand ran across the surface of her skin like a kid had drawn on her with blue texta. A map with mountains and tracks that grew deeper every year. They felt nice to touch.

  Mrs Hall from school came to the funeral. When she saw me her mouth opened to speak but then she just smiled with one side of her mouth. I also saw Allen and his mum. He gave me a handmade card. There was a lobster on it because that’s what he likes to draw at the moment. Its claws were holding a heart. Even Tammy who always calls me a retard was there. She sat at the very back and didn’t look at me once, just kept chewing the inside of her cheek like she was trying to whistle.

  If you wanted to, you could go and have a look at Mum in her coffin. Her face was so beautiful. The lady in a funny hat who worked there said she would be in an endless sleep and wasn’t that a nice place to be. I wanted to say not if your mouth was covered in dirt and worms were turning you into compost. But I just touched her face softly and sang ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ by Serge. It wasn’t the same because there are two parts to the song. Pat said it was time to start so I kissed her on top of the head and blew over her eyes. The priest said some nice things about Mum. That no greater gift was she given than me.

  He said it was sad that none of her family could come from France, but I know Mum left when she realised there was no one to stay for. Her own mother thought only of herself, and her brother René had stolen the inheritance, but Mum didn’t talk about money because that was vulgar. When the organ music played ‘Ave Maria’, Pat started to cry in that man kind of way: shoulders all shaking with silent sobs. Margie gave him one of her hankies with the roses sewed onto it. And before I knew it, I was swaying back and forth.

  Sometimes things are so sad you just have to sway it out, like you’re giving yourself a lullaby. Margie’s niece said she knew how I felt, but she didn’t. The pounding behind my ears was a tidal wave of furious white noise, pushing me out of the pew and straight into that box. The one in the far-left corner of the church that looks like a wardrobe. Even though I was in the church I was not of the church because I was never baptised. Still, I just needed a dark space of my own. And if the man upstairs had a problem with that he could knock on the door and tell me himself.

  The priest’s voice became muffled, which was just fine because I didn’t want to hear his words anymore. There were other things I could hear if I closed my eyes real tight and let my ears off the leash. Margie’s stomach gurgling. Tammy’s eyes trying to blink away tears she did not see coming. Allen moving his neck from side to side—the crunching sound it made because he sleeps on a pillow that is too high for his head. After the organ started playing again and people sang another song about lambs and blessed be thy name, Pat came over and told me to come out because they were going to put Mum in the ground. God never knocked on that box, not even once.

  In the ground there’s not just less time, there’s no time. No meetings that run late or birthday parties you were early for, no twiddling of thumbs or chasing the last bus home. You will never think about the past or the future and right now is always. Pat gave me some roses to throw into the grave but I dropped some potatoes down instead. We used to dig up Dutch creams and kipflers, boil them, spread a knife full of butter down the middle and pile on the salt. I smiled at that memory even though it didn’t seem right, standing over the top of my dead mother. I wanted to jump in and lie down with her—just one more time.

  That was eleven days ago and here we are again like it was yesterday. I wanted to get fake orchids because we wouldn’t be back for a while and they would last a lifetime, but Pat said that was crass. So we got yellow petunias from the petrol station. They were a few days old and already starting to droop. I put them down where I thought her arms might be, one bunch in each hand. Pat’s silhouette moved so close to mine we merged into one big shadow, large and wide. When death has come and gone some people say ‘How can I keep going?’ Even when friends bring a beef casserole, do the ironing and gossip about poor Shirley and Geoff who got food poisoni
ng in Bali, that person just can’t start again. One day they lie down for a nap while the 5 pm news is on the radio, and they die too.

  ‘Pat, who am I now?’ When life mucks you about, sometimes it’s hard to know.

  ‘You’re the same always…same as…before,’ he says with eyes to the ground. But that was a lie. Dirt talkin’ is always a lie.

  ‘Am I still real? Do you see me?’ Here in this moment I’m losing it all: my words, this place, the past.

  Pat’s hand reaches out but stops before he can touch my cheek. Maybe I’ve just gone and disappeared. How could I be real without Mum? When the world was too noisy, she would put a finger to her lips and slow it all down. Taught the wind how to hold its breath. Now everything is sliding backwards and I want to throw up. I leg it through the cemetery, run halfway across the normal Christians, through the Jews and Greek Orthodox. Keep going past the heathens who shouldn’t have been there at all, and only stop when I see the tiny crosses. There are headstones too, some with pictures of those babies before they became angels. Why does God gift them to Earth only to snatch them back so quick? I am angry for all of us left behind. God is a selfish man and grief makes you unwhole. My dad once said he would punch Jesus in the face if he had the nerve to come back another time.

  I look up into the cloudless sky. ‘Make me real!’ I scream.

  Pat’s arms wrap tight around me. I try to get out but he won’t let go and after a while I don’t want him to. I wonder if those angel babies can still hear their parents whispering—wishing, hoping, praying they’ll come back. I wonder if those babies blow birthday kisses to their brothers and sisters; watching as they get older even though angels never can. I wonder if they are watching me right now, telling me it is okay to go and find Mum’s spirit.

  And do you know what? I stare into that picture of two-year-old Therese Boylan with the rosy cheeks and the curly mop of blonde hair and I hear her say: ‘Be it metal or wood, go find the boat.’ I think Pat hears it too because he turns to me and nods.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  3 Hand in hand

  We’re driving back through town and a semi hurtles past taking up more than its fair share of the road. It’s so long it might as well have been a train. The line through Beyen stopped years ago when people forgot what there was to see so far out. The town is slowly waking up now. I see the corner shop with Tran sweeping dust back and forth on the footpath. Alan taking his pug Jojo for a poo, back legs quivering so much she might fall over with the strain. There’s Mr Reeler the-hands-on-feeler sitting on a bench in Cullen Park, three-piece St Vinnies grey suit and no socks. People keep throwing bricks into his window ’cause he’s a nasty piece of work and isn’t allowed into the public swimming pool.

  We pass by Miriam’s spicy chicken and chips takeaway where we had dinner the night before. Jesus had a last supper. People in jail in America also get a special meal before they die. This one lady who buried all her ex-husbands in the backyard, she ate some cornbread, beans and rice, McDonalds Big Mac meal deal, a chocolate milkshake, and cherry vanilla ice-cream with hot apple pie. It’s not good to sleep on such a full stomach. Even if you’re gonna wake up in hell.

  My last meal was eight chicken nuggets, chips and gravy. I drank a sip of Pat’s beer and he said my face looked like a ferret’s fart. When we laughed some beer came out of my nose and we laughed some more. Good times like that are rare with me and Pat. Almost endangered. I’d been sleeping at his place for the past few nights on account of my house being totally empty. Salvos van had come and gone and I was living out of a suitcase. I saw Mrs Lupido riding down the street in Mum’s favourite summer dress. I just can’t scratch that memory out of my eyes.

  It’s never easy to sleep at the beginning of the end. My last night in Beyen was an oven-hot scorcher. Every time I heard a bump outside I reckoned it was a possum keeling over ’cause they can’t take their fur coats off. And even though it couldn’t be true I swear I heard a train in the distance. Thumpety thumpety thump. In my dream I crawled out of bed and flew into the tree outside. There were no clouds to scare me or make me fall. Just a purple-blue night where bats flew across the full moon. I watched myself as I got onto that train, turned around and waved goodbye. If I am going, then who is left behind? The train was so small in the distance now it looked like a toy. That girl—me, myself—she’d gone. Running as far away from her dirty blackness as she could. Only trouble is, wherever you go, there you are.

  Making our way down the main drag I see no one’s bothered to organise a ticker-tape parade. Doesn’t seem proper to leave with no fanfare at all. When we turn onto Harmony Street I see the town statue, that big old metal hand with its palm facing towards me, and it’s saying STOP! WAIT! STAY! I grab hold of the steering wheel and we screech to a halt in the middle of the road.

  ‘What-the-hellsmatta-with-ya??!!’ Pat clutches his chest like his heart’s trying to escape.

  ‘It’s a sign!’

  ‘It’s not a sign, it’s just a big bloody hand!’

  Well that wasn’t true. It was the BIGGEST hand in the southern hemisphere, made in honour of the town’s founder. Lambert Beyen was from Antwerp, which is a town in Belgium. And Belgium is a little country that was swallowed up by other countries fighting around it until someone said, ‘Okay let’s find a king and draw lines in the dirt and put up stop signs and make this our own place.’ So they did and then Belgium became a real country on the map. There used to be a giant called Antigoon who lived by the river in Antwerp. If you wanted to cross you had to give him all your pocket money otherwise he would cut your hand clean off! Then a Roman warrior came and cut off the giant’s own hand and threw it in the river. There’s a statue of him right in front of the town hall. You can buy little chocolate hands in Antwerp to eat. I thought that sounded nice, but Mum said it was awful because it was from another story about the Belgian king who used to cut real people’s hands off in the Congo. She said the Belgians hadn’t fully ‘reconciled their pasts’. Like going to Pizza Hut, chucking everyone out, eating all the food and then leaving without paying for your meal.

  The first hand statue they made in Beyen was moulded from plastic, and in the heat wave of 1986 the fingers melted and it looked like a really old person with arthritis. People started touching the sticky surface and covering it in heaps of fingerprints. So then they had to cart it away because they said someone could actually get hurt for real and that would be a liability and the town could not afford to get sued again after that truck accident where Mrs Harrison got run over by a breakaway pack of squealing pigs. If she’d been quick enough she would have nabbed one for her husband Gerald. He’s Gary’s twin brother, the other butcher in town. So we got a new hand made out of metal. It still gets really hot in summer but no one gets stuck to it. Het is echt een mooie hand. If you lived in Antwerp that’s how you’d say ‘It’s a real beauty’.

  ‘Me and Mum used to sit in that hand,’ I tell Pat. ‘We used to pretend it was taking us for a ride.’ Sometimes it still feels like I’m holding on. Pat clears his throat and taps the steering wheel. Then he says real quiet, ‘That was a long time ago.’

  I stretch my hand out on the window glass. If I close one eye it fits right inside the statue. The engine kicks over again and vibrations run up my fingers. Pat was right. The hand wasn’t telling me to stop. It was pushing me away. I look in the rear-view mirror as it gets smaller and smaller. My backpack sits on my lap. I unzip it slowly. I let my fingers run over the few precious things I was allowed to take with me. My proper good fork, the only one in the southern hemisphere that does not leave too much metal in your mouth. Mum’s fancy necklace, a perfect circle of rainbow moonstones that used to be her mum’s. I had to take it because it’s an air loom, which is something precious that passes down from one generation to the next. Mum used to wear it even if it wasn’t a special occasion. When she wanted to make a boring job fancy she’d whip it on and peel those potatoes like a princess. I don’t like having thin
gs around my neck so I’ve brought it but I won’t wear it. There are other things that would be easier to leave behind, but I have to keep, like a fish and a snow globe.

  Mum and Dad were never meant to be. Light and shadow, soft and sharp, lost and found. Me in the middle like a chook with its head cut off, going round and round in circles. I don’t really feel whole or a pretty sum of my parts. Not the right sum at least. Imagine this: a shiny fishing lure lying in the middle of a dirt puddle all the way out here in whoop de whoop. The hooks had come off, rusted and bent out of shape. Can’t get further from the sea than here. This tiny metal fish of mine is the story of Dad. I was running away from him when I found it. Put my headphones on and tried to cancel out his shouting, but I could still see tiny specks of spit and angry vowels flying out of his mouth. Beautiful silver scales so small and perfect, each half-moon laid over the next. I picked that fish up and ran my fingers across every one. Every stroke, every scale shimmering in the sun. Reminded me to breathe all the way to the bottom of my lungs. I kept that fish in my pocket and when things got too loud, nothin’ left but to run, I’d hold it between my fingers. Count the scales until all was said and done.

  The snow globe is the story of Mum. Inside that perfectly round glass dome is Paris. Actually it’s just the Eiffel Tower but if you shake it up snowflakes float all around, then fall slowly to the bottom. Mum gave it to me. She found it in the cat-rescue op shop in Wyndful Gully that one summer we went on a holiday. Well camping, ’cause we couldn’t afford to go anywhere but the next town across. We walked there. All the kids at the camp site had a go shaking the globe as hard as they could, timing how long the snow took to settle. Twenty-seven seconds was the longest. It’s the only time I had something everyone else wanted. Until someone’s dad took kids for a ride in the back of his ute, doing donuts and crazy stuff. Mum wouldn’t let me go and I was glad because one boy called Conor fell out and broke his arm. The night before Mum went for good we set a new record. Sat nose to nose on each side of that globe until the last snowflake dropped. Thirty-three seconds. When we looked up I saw myself in her eyes, reflected a thousand times over like a picture in a picture. That’s called an optical illusion because there’s only one of me, and now there’s none of her.