by Cath Moore
I knew as soon as I saw the playlist. Johnny Farnham’s ‘Burn for You’. There’s only a few couples on the dance floor and a swaying drunk with his eyes closed, talking to someone who isn’t there. I take the snow globe out of my backpack. Shake it up and watch all the tiny snowflakes fall softly around the Eiffel Tower. 178 little specks of white floating through watery air. There’s me and Mum climbing up that tower staring at a city where the streetlamps turn into a thousand fallen stars and someone somewhere plays music on a wind-up box, a tinny song everyone half remembers from long ago. I hold the snow globe up to my eyes and look through it. This time I see Mum for real. She’s on the dance floor beckoning me over. But I don’t go. It’s her turn to listen:
‘You have to call, otherwise people won’t know where you are,’ I tell Mum.
I know she’ll be gone, but I take the snow globe away from my face anyway.
‘You might make them feel bad, don’t you know that?’ I say to her even though she’s not there.
The corners of the room are etched in darkness and suddenly that drunk with his twelve-beer breath is dancing with me. Too much, too close. All the little pock-marks in his face where the whiskers come out and glassy bloodshot eyes drowning in missed opportunities. He stumbles round squeezing me closer and closer. When he laughs I can see gold in his mouth and a wicked tongue that wants to tell me things I should not know. I try to get away but he’s too strong and I’m too sad for my mama. All the colours of his boozy song run into each other like a dirty puddle. I can feel him get hard in places that men are supposed to keep to themselves. Not for me, not for me, not in this place, not ever.
‘I’m a real girl, I’m a real girl,’ I say so I’m not stolen away by the fear of it all. And then the only thing I can hear is the sound of my teeth grinding together.
Boom, boom, boom. My giant is back again. Pat rips that man off me like he’s snapping a pistachio shell in two. Crack! He spins round trying to stay on his feet but crashes into other people who knew what was going on but turned away. Someone shouts at Pat like he’s done the wrong thing!
I don’t want to be there with strangers’ eyes pecking at my face like hungry birds. Pat takes my hand and we stumble back up to the bedroom. He asks if the man had touched my private parts and I say everywhere is private when I don’t want to be touched.
He puts me into bed and now I can’t even remember why I was downstairs in the first place. I want to start again, go back and be a tiny baby who doesn’t know anything yet. I want nothing in my mind except white space.
‘I didn’t get to her in time,’ is all I can say.
Pat sits down and draws on my back, keeps me in the room away from the loud, the hurt, the echoes of all that we’ve lost.
‘Ssshhh. You’re gonna be safe there. For real, for real,’ Pat slurs. ‘Where?’ I want to ask. When we get to the boat? Or Paris, back in the belonging? My mouth is drowsy and I have to close my eyes. He’s drawing the outline of a heart over and over, making a tattoo on my skin. I’m back on the Eiffel Tower again watching 178 little specks of snow float slowly past.
15 Rabbit pie
Dreams chase me down again as soon as my head hits the pillow and I’m far away from that tower in the snow globe, trying to climb a mountain with Pat. We hear a low rumble. He says it’s only thunder but I know it’s coming from the sea, building up and taking everything in its path. All the starfish, seaweed, crabs and sharks. Pat keeps saying all we need is tissues but I don’t know what that means. The rumbling gets louder until I wake up. There’s light streaming out from underneath the toilet door. I’m afraid but creep over all the same.
‘Pat?’
‘Why did ya do that? Take her away from me?’
I peek through the narrow slit between the door and the wall and inside Pat sits on the toilet, head in his hands.
‘We had something goin’, ya know?’
He opens the door and shoves a little box into my face. Inside is a ring. Maybe he was gonna go on one knee in the middle of a pricey seafood restaurant where everyone would put their lobsters down to clap.
‘We were gonna be something! And now it’s all gone. Why did ya take her away from me?’
I had stones in my belly weighing me down because it was true. I should have stayed inside Margie’s house and eaten my Monte Carlo biscuits. Then everything would have been okay. Pat wasn’t playing The Price is Right. This was Tonight Is All Wrong. You can’t just plug holes with another person’s glue. I heard that on The Phil Donahue Show, about a man called Ferone who had five wives in three different states ’cause each one of them was a little bit like his high-school sweetheart who’d run off with a Texan rodeo clown called Cordell. And now I see all of that plugging we’d done for each other hadn’t worked because Pat’s dam had burst and the only thing I had for him was a home-brand tissue, crumpled up but still new. I straighten it out and slide it underneath the door. It doesn’t feel as soft as it should.
After a moment he comes out, puts his jacket on and heads back downstairs, pretending like he never cried in the first place. But if you don’t cry you can drown from the inside out.
I go back to bed but this time there are no dreams following me.
Early morning light flickers. Out the window in the tall ghost gum newborn maggies are gabbling with hunger. It doesn’t look like a nice way to eat, having a worm rammed down your throat. But nature’s not always pretty. I heard some guy on TV say that when he’d just seen a monkey eat another monkey’s baby.
Who knows what time Pat came back last night. I poke him but he just rolls over like a walrus sleeping on the beach. They are best left undisturbed. But then the phone rings. He falls out of bed and stumbles across to the dresser.
‘Yeah, nah, I’m on my way. Be there round lunch. Yeah well…been a few hiccups along the way.’
He looks straight at me.
‘I understand that, Brian.’ Which is code for I’d like to bung you over the head, Brian.
‘Na. We’re good.’
And he looks at me again.
This time, I nod.
It isn’t long before a small rattle underneath the car bonnet turns into a chug chug chink and then a non-stop grind. I have a pair of stockings in my bag for special occasions—or a fanbelt—but Pat says this is a problem that needs a bank loan to fix. So my brain’s thinking ahead to a worst-case scenario: we break down and Pat’s got no phone coverage. A goods truck finds the car weeks later, but we’re long gone. A search and rescue party is sent out. Finally helicopters spy us crawling through the desert. We’re out of Coke and I’m not drinking my own pee so they’ve come just in time. We’re winched up to safety and it’s high fives all round. The papers print a photo of me wrapped in a foil rescue blanket.
But for now that’s all just a hypothetical scenario. After 457 thumps and bangs we make it to Boorilliak and pull up out front of the Shearer’s Arms. (Why don’t pubs talk about people’s legs?) This pub smells like the boys’ toilet at school where the preps accidentally piss on the floor because they can’t aim straight. Pat’s on the phone again. ‘Yeah, I know it’s overdue, I put a cheque in the post yesterday.’
That’s not true ’cause we haven’t seen a postbox for ages. I guessed Pat had lost another whitegood. Maybe his washing machine. Mum said one day he wouldn’t own anything except his fillings. Can you imagine, the fridge, washer, TV and even the three-piece settee. There isn’t a slot big enough but somehow the pokies have swallowed the lot and made a liar out of Pat.
He puts on a business smile as the publican nods him over to the bar. This is Brett who must have tapeworms in his gut because really, all I can see is skin and bone. There are tiny ones sticking out the side his nose and ears and he looks like a cartoon stick figure. Meanwhile his wife who makes the counter meals—today there’s pork chops and peans (peas and beans)—has a stringy mop of grey hair and I kept thinking Mum could have done a really nice perm, made her face a bit softer.
&nbs
p; ‘Had a lady come in the other day, sat right where you are,’ she says like we’re picking up from where we left off last week. Her boobs jiggle up and down as she shoves the tea towel round the inside of a glass. ‘Was talking to who I imagine was her daughter—something similar in the eyes, you know?’
I nod because sometimes people just want a sounding-board.
‘She was telling the daughter that her own folks used to run this pub back in the 40s, way before me and Brett ever thought we’d end up this way. Said she remembered how the bathroom was right above the front bar and one time her three sisters had been muckin’ about with the taps and flooded the bathroom. Water dripped through the ceiling and onto some poor punter’s head sitting right here having a port, would you believe, at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon.’
I look up at the ceiling and there are still wriggly brown water stains on the roof. That was one long bath.
‘You wouldn’t believe it but the bloke sitting next to this lady turns to her and says, “Yeah, and you still owe me a refill.” If it wasn’t our Tommy who’s sitting on the same bar stool a good fifty-something years later! With his port! I mean what are the chances?’
I thought about it for a while. I mean I really thought about it because this was a complicated one. ‘They are 22 and 30.’
She’s not bothered by my answer. She laughs with one big hoot. ‘If they didn’t go and buy him a two-litre bottle of port from behind the bar here! Can you imagine, all for our Tommy! Ah, dear, that was a day.’
An oven timer rings and she brings out a shepherd’s pie for Barney who’s a Vietnam Vet and thinks ASIO is microwaving his house. Just to be sure, he keeps his chickens in an underground coop. He pays for pub meals in eggs and lemons from the tree in his backyard. Now, I know all this but I don’t know Barney. Nevertheless he turns to me before leaving and says: ‘The tides don’t wait.’
Barney’s mouth was moving, but it was Mum who spoke.
‘Pay no mind and mind me language, but Barney’s still pissing out Agent Orange,’ says Brett’s wife, flicking pastry flakes off the counter.
Pat’s still busy with Brett so I’m hoping that Barney might let Mum talk to me a little more. But he’s already doing a U-turn in his battered old Kingswood by the time I make it outside. On the bottom step of the entrance hall a little girl’s playing with a slinky, scratching her head like a monkey with lice. She takes three jellybeans out of her pocket—two green and one black—and places them in the middle of her palm. Squints at me for a second then nods, so I sit on the step beside her. She slowly holds her hand out and I take a green one.
‘I don’t like the black ones either,’ she says.
We sit and suck on our jellybeans until they turn into clear blobs all slippery and flat. I am eyeing off her slinky because it is all the colours of the rainbow. She puts it on the top step and we watch it slink down over itself again and again. Every step a different colour.
‘Do you want to swap it for my rabbit?’ I think that is a reasonable transaction and her eyes open wide with excitement. So I take out the poor little bunny I’d been keeping in my backpack. Hold him by the scruff of the neck like mama animals do and he sways gently in the wind.
The girl pokes him with her finger and screams.
‘Ssshhh, he’s sleeping,’ I whisper.
Some people are scared of dead things and I understand the girl wants something in-between, either alive or a toy, but I didn’t have either. She runs back inside and gets Brett’s wife who is apparently also her granny.
I think she’s gonna blow her top but she just cocks her head to the side: ‘Well…it’s been a while between rabbit pies.’
16 Flutter by
My rabbit didn’t make it into a pie and I did not get the slinky.
Pat comes out to see what all the hoo-ha is about. He reels back when I open my backpack and I don’t blame him. Death smells if you don’t burn it or bury it. Pat says I can’t carry the rabbit round with me even if it had been an injustice. ‘Only thing you can do is write a letter to the department of…animal cruelty,’ he says. While we drive out of town Pat tells me to look out for a good place to bury it. I see a few along the way but I’m not ready to let go yet so don’t say anything. Doesn’t matter ’cause in the end that rabbit chooses his final resting place.
I tell Pat to pull over, and I get out and climb under a barbed-wire fence. Pat looks a little bit worried about it all but I just keep on walking ’cause this rabbit knows where it wants to go. Snap and crack stepping over old, bendy twigs. Bark peeling off ghost gums like wallpaper pulled halfway down. And then we stop. This is the place right in the middle of a circle of trees, happy to watch over him for all time. Pat gets on digging a hole. There is always a ‘sleeping shovel’ in the back of his ute in case he hits a roo and has to put it out of its misery. I stroke the rabbit a few more times. Leave lines in his fur with my fingers so he’ll know someone was with him. The wind changes direction and flickers along the dry grass up the hill, tells everyone to settle down and stay still. I lie the rabbit down and watch as Pat covers his body with dirt. Hovering above I’m like a clumsy ogre with long limbs.
Some people say that nothing is the opposite of everything, but I don’t think so. Nothing can be silence and light and that is worth a lot in a world full of angry noise. Space is nothing and everything at the same time. It’s where we came from and where we return. Soon big clumps of dirt cover the rabbit’s head and he’s gone, wrapped up in the earth.
‘Can he keep Mum company?’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Maybe they’ll be looking for potatoes.’
‘Do rabbits eat potatoes?’
‘They eat whatever the good Lord provides.’
I don’t know if that is true. My rabbit could’ve been a fussy eater like Atticus Barnes who only ate devon and tomato-sauce sandwiches on white bread. Pat rummaged in his pocket and took out a clothes peg. It was yellow and faded, the plastic cracked in the middle. Sometimes Pat would do his washing at our house—when the repo man took his last washer away he did it all the time. When he hung out a load he’d always have pegs sticking out of his mouth. Sometimes when I was in his good books Pat would take the last peg and chase me round the garden, snapping it like a crazy duck. I always told him to stop even though I didn’t mean it. He looks at me now and snaps the peg. We run and run like that paddock is the back garden stretching on forever and teatime is a long way off.
Pat pretends he has a lame leg so I can beat him but then he speeds up and runs past me.
‘Oldest trick in the book, ya daft chook!’
I think I’ll show him so I run off in the other direction. Back through the gum trees and the tall grass swooshing this way and that. I can feel her warm hand on my back and I know that when I get to the other side of the trees I’ll find water. So sure that Mum will look after me. I close my eyes. Just walk through the bush until the dam is right in front of me. Having water is a human right so no one can stop me from swimming in it.
‘Dylan, Dylan!’
I strip down to my crop top and undies. Wading in I feel mud slide between my toes. It’s slippery and cold. After being cooped up in a car for the past few days this feels like heaven.
‘DYLAN!!!!’ Pat’s still a long way off. He’s screaming now.
I paddle out and duck under. The water’s happy to see me too, humming deep like a purple and burnt-orange note together—what a beautiful harmony those two make. I swim under all the way to the other side. When I come up a crow’s wings flap overhead heavy in flight. She’s gliding away from the sun, scared the heat will melt her beak clean off.
Wing shadows pass over Pat who’s standing on the edge of the dam. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing? You just pissed off! Again!!!!’
‘I could hear the water.’
‘You can’t hear a dam.’
‘Yes you can. If you listen loudly.’
‘Get out!’
‘Get in!’
‘GET OUT!’
‘GET IN!!!’
Pat is none too pleased with me.
‘I’m not having this, Dylan. Stop piss-farting around and get out.’
‘We need the water. It’s a life force. Plus, you stink.’
•
This was true on all accounts. The shower hadn’t worked at the last pub and when it jolted into action all that came out was brown stuff with sandy bits in it.
Pat takes his boots off at the edge of the dam and all the hot botheredness comes out like steam from an oven. He paces up and down in the shallow bit like he is still thinking of something to say. Water molecules vibrate faster than the speed of sound and slow everything down. I reckon that’s why Mum had led me here in the first place, so I could help Pat slow his flustered heart. He takes his shirt off, splashes some water on his face and under his armpits.
‘All right, you’ve had ya fun, now move.’
But I just hold out my hand. You have to be patient with people who are scared.
Slowly, he comes in deeper until the water’s up to his nipples. Pat can’t swim but I just keep holding out my hand. I look at him like Crocodile Dundee staring down that big old water buffalo. Hard to believe a man like Pat could be scared of something so beautiful. That he can’t see how it will help his body heal itself.
But then he lets go. Enough for me to guide him into the middle of the dam where the mud disappears below and you have to float. He takes a sharp breath in.
‘I can’t…’
He struggles at first, tries to turn back and get out, but I’m under him before he knows what’s happening. I push his legs to the surface until he is floating and can’t do anything but stare straight up…and then he lets the water take his weight. I do the same and I’m back home. Mum’s defrosting the fridge, eating pieces of ice as she goes. Pat’s got his legs up on the table, pushing the chair back like a cocky schoolboy showing off. There’ll be chicken and chips for dinner and I’ve got a Golden Gaytime as a special arvo treat.