Metal Fish, Falling Snow

by Cath Moore

  ‘You’re a first-class shit, you know that! Do you want me to lose my job?’

  ‘No, that’s okay. You can keep it.’

  ‘That was a lot of money, my money and I can’t get it back! Do you understand that?’

  I understood he’d made his own mess, like a dog that pees in his kennel.

  ‘What are the odds? Go on, you tell me what the odds are of you keeping your mouth shut for the rest of the trip.’

  I thought this over seriously.

  ‘They are two and six.’

  Pat screeches over to the side of the road and stops. He is panting real hard so I think I’ll tell him a story. That’s what Mum used to do when the buzzing round my head got too loud. I was gonna tell him about my Great Uncle Frederick, who used to eat soap and cigarette butts when he went sleepwalking in the middle of the night, but Pat is having none of it. He bosses me about, says I should get out of the car and find my own way.

  ‘No wonder your mum had a nervous breakdown. You’re a bloody handful!’

  She didn’t get nervous. She got real tired, that one time when I thought my body was turning into metal and I couldn’t sleep in case I woke up as a robot with eyes that wouldn’t blink.

  Nevertheless, I do get out of the car and stand by the side of the road while Pat drives off over the hill. The car’s all wobbly in the heat waves before it disappears completely. He was blowing off steam. I could wait. But when I’d counted all 183 of the ants making a migraine of a pattern on the ground, Pat was still gone. Some kangaroos lazing about on the open dry grass were looking at me.

  Halfway through a bushwalk with Mum I’d once found the foot bone of a roo. It looked wrong all by itself, so long and narrow. When I stare back at those kangaroos, thoughts come into my head. That I am wrong too, standing here like this. Maybe the roos are feeling territorial. Maybe they will come over and kick me out. No trees to hide behind, creek beds to jump down, back doors to run through and home safe. None of that in the here of the now. Land and sky stretching so wide I think the world will never end.

  ‘I am a real girl, not invisible, not a machine, alien or robot. I am a real girl.’ I step back and forth so I can see my shadow moving.

  ‘I am a real girl, not invisible, not a machine, alien or robot. I am a real girl.’

  In the distance a tiny figure appears. Trouble. Men don’t need backpacks unless they are up to no good. In the news police are always taking backpacks from houses they have searched for incriminating evidence.

  When I squint real hard that’s when I can see. He’s black. Blacker than my dad and I can feel his darkness suck the air out of my lungs. Of all the places and times to be alone with no one around except territorial kangaroos. There used to be a safe house in Beyen where you could go if a weirdo was following you home from school. Not here. My own darkness lets him know I am alone and now he will make the earth swallow me whole. He’s coming to tear me apart with his angry hands. Turn me deaf with his cyclonic wailing. Make me blind with his piercing eyes. So I run. I run like a rabbit running from a fox with nothing but fear in my eyes and the boom of my thumping heart. Tina Arena says you can’t rely on anyone else for happiness. But also, you cannot rely on anyone else to save you when a black man with a deadly backpack appears in the middle of nowhere.

  Unhelpful thoughts and questions tumble out of my head so I can travel faster. Things like a dream I’d once had where this guy got a potplant stuck to the back of his skull and the roots were strangling his brain. And why banana Paddle-Pops taste better than real bananas. But then something extraordinary happens. The kangaroos are running with me. Bouncing high and fast, bodies leaning forward every time their long feet kick off the ground, faster, further, faster, further. They can smell my fear and are trying to show they understand. Feels like I’m competing in an iron-man competition without the swimming and riding. I’m going for gold, going to get away, I’m unstoppable. Until I trip over an old tree root and land with a face full of dirt. Have I lost a tooth? There’s something crumbly in my mouth. I spit into the dirt and a large pebble comes out. Get to my feet and quickly assess the damage by triaging myself. There are grazes on my knees and my chin is sore but I can’t see if it’s bruised. But praise be to God, no blood. No tsunami wave of red coming out of my skin gushing through the dry earth. Mum used to say my fear reached biblical proportions, which made me angry because she only believed in God when she wanted to. Still, I could do with some divine intervention ’cause the man is running towards me and I’ve lost all my energy. Peed my pants again too. The wet makes a little well in the ground as the man stands over the top of me. He is trying to see into my soul but I won’t let him even when he says, ‘for the dirt’ and I see he’s holding out a water bottle for me to wash my eyes. How can I know if his water is pure or has the kind of magic I need? So I don’t take it, just get up and keep running. And the look on his face is tattooed on my mind: confused and wounded somehow. For a moment it even looks like the blackness has left him or he’s forgotten it was there to begin with and is just a normal man.

  He doesn’t open his mouth but I know he’s saying: ‘Where are you going?’

  I just want to get out with all five senses and essential organs intact. I think of Phar Lap and seeing that big old dead heart of his at the museum. I imagine it pumping in the glass box, big and full of life. I sprint away, with Mum calling the horserace of my life: ‘Oh, yes, and She’s a Goer is on the home stretch now, with Darkly Shadow trailing far behind. This filly is a stayer, all the way…’

  Then I remember my metal fish. If it rescued me from Dad then surely it would do the same with this fella. I rip it out from the bottom of my bag and hold it in the palm of my hand. Up towards the sky like it’s gonna lift me right up and outta here. But my feet don’t leave the ground. I do feel vibrations buzzing through my shoes though, travelling up the length of my body all the way to my fingertips. Pat is coming back. Up the road I could see the car wobbling through the heat waves again. He does a U-turn and pulls up beside me, wants to reconcile the situation.

  ‘Righto, now we’ve had some time to cool down, so let’s just zip it for a while whaddyareckon?’

  I’m panting so hard I can’t answer. He’s just staring boggle eyed at the dust and little rivers of wee on my legs.

  ‘What happened to you? Jesus!’

  ‘No, he never showed up. Not even once.’

  I yank the handle so hard I think the whole door will fall off. Jump inside and slam it shut. Bam.

  ‘Black travels faster than light, so GO!’ I look behind and clock the stranger. I’m not sure if he’s looking at me or something further up the road. Standing still makes him look small. And the further we travel, the smaller he becomes until I can’t tell him apart from the ground he’s standing on. Had I seen a nightmare that wasn’t real? I slink down in my seat. Now there is no body of evidence to prove my life had been in danger, Pat would just think I was playing games.

  ‘Look away.’ I slide off my peed undies and rummage around in the back for my denim shorts.

  ‘Dylan…’

  I know he’s trying to find a way back into us.

  ‘Listen, we’ve just had a blue. No need to—’

  ‘Have a green too?’

  Pat goes to say something but then just nods his head.

  ‘Yeah. Spot on.’

  I still have my realness because I got the answer right! And I know the truth submarine under Pat’s answer was ‘You’re a weird kid, but you’re safe.’

  You know they say the Aussie sun is harsh on your skin but the land out here is hard on your mind. It is strange and intangible even though it burrows deep inside of you. The land lives without needing anything but itself. And maybe in this moment I don’t need anything except Pat. I push the seat lever and it goes flying back so quick I’m suddenly looking through the sunroof at the bright blue sky.

  11 Drawings on the back

  Happiness is an energy source. So if you burn i
t up, hunger is just around the corner. When we pull into the Highett Grove petrol station I’m starving. No chicken tandoori so I have beef and mushroom. I open the pie lid and pour tomato sauce in like engine oil. Pat even got us a mid-sized bottle of Coke each, like we were contemporaries or something. I burp all the way to Pintoori. Did the alphabet twice. Pintoori’s a large-scale small town so there’s a hotel above the pub even though the only regulars are the bedbugs. One time Pat showed me the bites on his back like he had chicken pox. I choose the left bed and slowly sink into the middle. Pat will have to winch me out in the morning. The air is sticky, makes you feel lazy like golden syrup dripping off a spoon.

  Pat puts a big map up on the wall and stands back to take it all in. It’s a map of roads, towns, pubs and state lines we’d travel through and across before we got to the ocean, but it’s more than that. There is another line through some of those pubs drawn with pink highlighter, some circled in red. This is a treasure map. I raise a leg into the air and let the breeze from the ceiling fan cool my toes. Pat’s nodding his head slowly and crossing something off in his notebook. And just when I think he’s forgotten I’m there he says, ‘Those teeth aren’t gunna brush themselves.’

  Fifty brushes upstairs, fifty brushes downstairs, and my teeth are as clean as a century. The tap’s leaking and no matter how hard you turn it a slow trickle of water runs down the side of the sink. What a waste of magic. Water has a strength you only see through time. Runs so smooth after hundreds of years its worn great big rocks down to tiny little stones. It doesn’t start like a car engine or switch off like a light bulb. Back home it would come through the bathroom taps: water travelling down on the back of a melody. Sometimes it sounded like a whale calling across the sea to its baby, sometimes like a harp with strings made out of early morning spiderwebs covered in sparkly dew. If I hold out my hand, sometimes the song drops will come sit in my palm or balance on a fingertip just like a butterfly.

  Water used to protect me from Dad too. If I couldn’t get to the hole in the trunk of Barry in time or find the metal fish, I’d imagine myself diving down into the sea where I couldn’t hear them fight. The water can be dark and ruthless, don’t ever forget that. It can slam you about, steal the life from your lungs before you’ve got time to come up for air. Wrap you up in a wave and you’re gone for good. But in the bathroom it sings. If you play violin or maybe the tuba, you’ll be saying, ‘Well, are the notes G sharp or E flat?’ But I cannot tell you that because the notes I see are colours. The Mongolian monks know. They throat sing about their water which is magic too. For me the low notes are darker in colour. The highest note is clearer than light. But there are no black ones.

  I fill two water glasses up, one just shy of the top. If you get the levels right and run a finger round the rim you can sing in harmony. I carry the glasses into the bedroom. Water sloshes up the side but folds back into itself so I don’t spill a drop. I place each glass in diagonally opposite corners of the room where the walls meet.

  ‘You don’t waste water round here,’ says Pat.

  It’s a scientific fact that genders see things differently and men lack foresight. ‘The water is our insurance policy until morning. Night is the loudest time of day and there are many things we cannot know about because they hide in the dark and we ignore them at our peril.’

  Pat frowns with confusion. Probably because men also have a limited vocabulary.

  ‘Peril is risk and harm combined and water is the antidote.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, righto. Just go to bed.’

  I try, I really do.

  Pat turns out the light then sits on the balcony and smokes a cigarette ’cause he thinks that I can’t see him. He’s breaking a promise to Mum and that makes him feel even worse about it all so he needs another cigarette to calm down. ‘It just takes the edge off’ is what they say, those people who huddle in a circle out the front of city buildings like a secret tribe trying to make smoke signals. I watch Pat with his feet up on the railing like he’s been there for years. Now he’s a silhouette of an old man looking down on a sleeping town below, the town he’s grown up and old in. Thinking about where the time has gone, the drought of ’64 and the flood of ’78. The Christmas dance in Mick’s shearing shed where he met his wife Meg, buttoned up in the starchy white shirt his mum had ironed special. All the secrets he kept but wishes them long forgotten because he’s just too tired to keep holding them anymore.

  That’s what the quiet time is for, the time between sleeping and dreaming when memories float through the air, twist and turn like vines crawling up to the sun and reach out to rest in someone else’s head. The dreams of strangers pass through all the time. They might bring a sadness that’s not your own but is bruising all the same. And your heart can’t grow when it’s hurting like that. I keep thinking of Mum, where the boat is, who I can be without her. And then I am taken in a dream of my own.

  We’re right in the middle of a big intersection with cars zooming past and busy businesspeople banging into us. They are cold and unfriendly. Then a man says if I tell him the answer to a riddle I can keep her. But he never tells me what the riddle is. I hold onto Mum’s hand until the ground slides away. Then people on buses and in taxis call out to me, talking over one another just to confuse me. And I need all my concentration to hold onto Mum so I scream at them to tell me the riddle and a woman with no eyes turns to me and smiles: ‘How long is a piece of string?’

  Then she takes Mum’s hand and before I can think what the answer might be she slips from my fingers, disappears into the crowd as they shuffle into buildings far away.

  I wake up with a start, panting like a dehydrated dog. Even though I hadn’t cried in my dream I lick salty tears from the corners of my mouth. Pat is standing over me; says to go back to sleep but I don’t want to close my eyes in case I go into the same dream without knowing the answer. I lie on my stomach and ask Pat to draw on my back.

  Mum would draw mythical animals like a Centaur, Griffin or a Sphinx. Sometimes even a Teumessian fox, which is so huge that no one can ever catch it. But Pat doesn’t know these animals. Mum says Australians have no sense of themselves let alone the history of the world and even though Pat said that was a bit harsh he still doesn’t know that man-eating birds with beaks of bronze and sharp metallic feathers are called Stymphalians.

  Pat says we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow and that we both need to get some sleep. He wipes my face with one of his hankies and it smells a little bit like the eucalyptus lollies he keeps in his pocket so Mum doesn’t know he’s been smoking. He says I should just try to think of something nice, but I say that everything nice has a picture of Mum in it somewhere. I ask Pat why, apart from when Mum died, had I never seen him cry, not even once. Pat sits on my bed and for the longest time he says nothing. Then he says that once the floodgates are open it’s hard to close them again. The shadow of Pat’s hand reaches towards me. I think he’s going to draw like I want him to and I don’t even care if it was something unmythical like a stapler or a pineapple. But he got startled by his own silhouette. Got up and lay down on the other bed. He still had that old man’s sadness as well as his own.

  I watched Pat that night, watched as his breathing got slower and slower and heavy with stories travelling through the night air. We would have to take turns looking out for one another. Even though Pat was older than me, he still needed someone to stay near when he was scared and thought that dam would burst. Suddenly I had the answer to that riddle—I knew how long a piece of string was. Twice as long as half of it.

  12 Lending time

  Some things you just can’t return to, least not straight away. And when you wake from a dream, it’s like missing the bus. Another will come around the corner but it might take you somewhere else. Even though I stepped back into sleep, I couldn’t find the building where those people had taken Mum. Couldn’t find that cold grey place at all. So in the morning I wrote down the riddle and the answer just in case that bus came bac
k another night. Pat was shaving in the bathroom and I had to pee real bad so I lay back on the bed and stretched my legs up and over my head so it wouldn’t trickle out.

  ‘How will Mum know where the boat is if she doesn’t have the same map as us?’

  Pat’s razor stops halfway down his cheek. ‘Mothers know everything.’

  Pause button off, the razor slides down to his chin.

  It was true but not the answer I’d asked for. I stretch my toes out but get a cramp in the little one. Pain shoots up my foot and I remember that I’ve still got a balloon for a bladder. Upright myself and dash past Pat, pull my undies down and…there it goes.

  ‘Hey, I ain’t—whaddya—’

  ‘It’s a human right.’

  ‘Takin’ a piss?’

  ‘Knowing where your mother is.’

  ‘You know where she’s buried. And you’re here with me until we get to—’

  ‘But where is omnipresent? If her spirit is everywhere then why isn’t she here now when I want to talk to her?’ Pat wipes his face clean with a face cloth. Missed a few spots but that’s not what he’s looking at. He’s staring at me in the mirror with puppy-dog eyes like he’s gonna ’fess up to stealing a Mars bar from the corner shop twenty years ago.

  ‘Dylan, I need to show you something…’

  Fingers tap his back pocket but then he just rubs the rough patches of stubble on his face. Figures it’s not the time or place for secrets, and the only thing he finds is that furrowed brow again.

  ‘The eggs are shithouse downstairs so we’re going across the road.’ Cleans out his razor, flicks it twice on the sink and walks out. That tap is still running. I turn it an inch to the right but it makes no difference at all. The girl staring back in the mirror looks younger than me. She’ll need to catch up if she wants to stay with me. Brushing my hair, I tell her I know some things are best left forgotten until you’re ready to stop running. I brush until all the curls are gone and it’s just one big ball of fuzz, like when cartoon characters get an electric shock and everyone laughs. But it’s not funny. People used to call me Velcro at school; laugh and wink like I was in on the joke too.