Metal Fish, Falling Snow

by Cath Moore

  I look over and Pat’s floating on the water by himself. He’s waiting to walk through the back door of a memory as well.

  The first time I met Pat, Mum kept staring at me like I was a lab rat and no one’s sure if the experiment’s gonna work out. She sipped her shandy all quiet and polite and Pat kept looking round the bar like he had someone else to meet. I counted Pat’s fillings up the back of his mouth, which I could see when he threw peanuts down his throat. Two on one side, three on the other. Dirty gold colour. After a while they forgot I was there. Mum smiled when Pat whispered something in her ear even though she pretended to be shocked. Some people say they don’t like games and just want to get real, but adults play all the time. Mum said Pat was a bit rough around the edges and that is what she liked about him most. Back home in France, people wouldn’t know what to do if a snake crawled into their living room and curled up asleep under the TV. But Pat did. Got a long stick with pincers on the end, grabbed it by the neck and shoved it in a brown sack. Twisted it round so the snake got dizzy then drove it halfway out of town. Back home in France the men would wail like a baby if they were fixing a fence and some barbed wire pierced their hand so deep it looked like it would come out the other side. But Pat just snipped the wire off on the other end, drove himself to hospital and said, ‘Think I might need some snitches.’ Of course he meant stitches but by then he’d lost a litre of blood and was about to collapse. And even though Pat could not dance like a Parisian, he had his own little moves that made Mum giggle and that is better than knowing the right steps. Like when he wiggles the first finger on each hand pretending to be an AFL umpire. Or sticks his hip out to the side like he’s shutting a car door. Mum would laugh and laugh. And I liked it when Pat danced with me too. He’d spin me round until everything turned into a blurry rainbow and I was proper dizzy. He’d always catch me before I fell. But sometimes Pat came over to the house, thoughts swirling round his head. He’d just sit on the couch with his mouth closed tight. One night we brushed the flies off a lamb roast for an hour and a half because he was so late. When he did finally come Mum only talked to me.

  ‘Dylan, why do you call when you’re going to be late?’ she said.

  ‘Because you might make someone worry.’

  I was happy ’cause I’d got the answer right, but Pat just took out a beer from the fridge, cracked it open and finished it in one gulp. Then he said, ‘Now listen…’ and that’s when you’re supposed to leave the room. However I was starving so I shoved a forkful of peas in my mouth. I knew it was stupid but Mum was still trying to talk to Pat through me and it all became a bit of a mess. If only I’d forked up a piece of roast potato first. White food before green. Always. I stuck a finger down my throat to start again but Mum yanked it out. She said if I ate in reverse everything would be the same, only backwards. Pat said I had to stop all these stupid food rules, and Mum said we were a package deal. Like when you buy sausages and the butcher says there’s a promotion so you have to get the sweet Thai chili sauce even if you don’t like it.

  Mum shouted at him in French: ‘Vous êtes tous les mêmes!!’ Then Pat said, ‘Why do you do that when you know I can’t understand?’ So Mum said it in Australian: that sometimes the way he talks is blunt like a dull knife. She started to cry and told him the heat in Australia sucked everything dry and made her feel like she couldn’t breathe anymore. And that if he couldn’t love me for who I was then maybe we’d just go back to Paris. Pat said Mum was an enabler and what I needed was discipline. So while they were shouting I sat on my bed and listened to my Best of Johnny Farnham tape on the cassette player. ‘Take the Pressure Down’. ‘You’re the Voice’. The heavy hitters.

  Once some real dancers in sky-blue tights gave us a workshop at school. Me and Dean Flanagan did a duet to ‘Two Strong Hearts’. We nailed it. But that night I skipped some of the words. Maybe Pat was gonna be just like Dad and everything would be ruined again. When Mum came into my room I lay down and pretended I was asleep. Then it was quiet and I watched the shadows go across my wall when Pat’s car reversed out of the driveway. Could hear him all the way down Hooper’s Crossing, going over the one-lane bridge, the back way home. Hands gripping the wheel so tight his knuckles were ready to pop through his skin. All ’cause his heart was scared that Mum would leave.

  Here in the dam I look across at Pat floating on the water and I know he’s been watching the colour fade from the exact same memory. Before either of us can say anything, the sky above fills with hundreds of butterflies. Like a moving painting changing shape and size in a dance only they know. Me and Pat are puppets with hundreds of tiny strings and the butterflies lift us up towards them, leaving specks of dust on our face as their wings flap in slow motion.

  ‘Dylan, about the boat…’

  Pat’s words cut the strings and we are back on top of the water. I breathe out and blow those butterflies up higher and higher until they’re nothing more than tiny dots fading into the blue sky.

  ‘I need you to listen…’

  But I don’t want to hear about the boat right now. I don’t want to hear or see anything except what’s right here. I’m listening to the bush, alive with a sharp endless rhythm. In this dry heat cicadas blare. Crows caw.

  ‘Go on, you know what he has to say,’ whispers that dark wolf deep inside my chest. But if Pat tells me about the boat and where we are really going, he might spark a fire. The whole bush might go up, so I duck under the water. Hold my breath until my lungs are about to burst.

  17 Bleed ’im dry

  Walking out of the dam the breeze makes my nipples stick out like the rubber end of a pencil. I don’t have mountains yet, just molehills, but they are there. When Pat sees them he slips in the mud and splutters about. I offer him my hand again but he doesn’t want to take it. Gets his pants on real quick then heads off without me.

  You know how some people say change is the only constant? Well they’ve never driven through the middle of nowhere like we are now. My crop top is still damp and it feels nice underneath my T-shirt, flapping in the wind. I look out at miles of nothing but red dirt and it’s like we’ve been travelling just to stay in the same spot. That’s the Red Queen theory of evolution. A polar bear changes from brown to white so he can sneak up on prey more easily but at the same time, that snow fox he’s after just got faster legs. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland everyone’s running just to stay in the same place and I’m scared we’ll never make it. Scared that Pat will finally tell me what he’s been meaning to since we began the trip. About where we’re really going.

  Last pub on Pat’s run is called The Last Shout and that’s no joke. It’s the actual last place someone will hear you shout for the next 500 kilometres because after Karalee there is not a single living soul north, east, west or south. Pat says there’d been talk the Last Shout was getting a makeover and goodness knows everyone likes a transformation story. Like Sue-Ellen from Arkansas whose house burnt down in a fire because her pa smoked a handmade pipe in his bedroom, which also had a collection of newspaper cuttings dating back to 1964. To exacerbate matters Sue-Ellen had lost the piggery in her divorce and weighed close to 200 kilograms because she ate her feelings. But then the host with big hair and chipmunk teeth from Turning around Tragedy came and built her a new house with a mini-piggery out the back. The show brought a mobile makeover van because there was only a slaughterhouse and fishing store in the town. Couldn’t do much about the fatness so they just rolled her into an orange taffeta dress and slapped on some electric pink lipstick. Red carpet was laid down over the muddy driveway and she had to walk past all these people clapping. At the end they gave Sue-Ellen a baby pig with a big red bow tied around its neck.

  To cut a long story short the Last Shout had been made over too, with a new pokie room at the back that Pat calls the Shrine. More machines than the Watering Hole in Wanteegi. Rows and rows all blinking and beeping like a puppy dog waiting to be thrown a ball, all saying, ‘Look at me, I’m the prettiest,
I pay out the most, I can make it all happen, jackpot, jackpot!’ Mum said the machines had already taken away her and Pat’s future. I don’t know how that works if the future is always ahead of you, but she’d said it enough to make me think it was true. The future for her was living with Pat and having the great Australian dream—a house and a dog and a barbeque on Sunday with the men holding tongs and drinking beer while the ladies put out potato salad and tell the kids off when they try to grab a lamington before lunch. Somehow, all that was in the coins he gave to the pokies. And still Pat thought he could break one of those machines in, like a wild brumby only with magic numbers instead of a whip.

  ‘So tell me, do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?’

  I didn’t make that up; it’s from a movie about a man who doesn’t wash very often. Pat didn’t answer, just walked through to the main bar in a trance leaving me to carry the last cardboard-cutout man inside. This one’s head accidentally got jammed in the back door and had a crease through his face like a big operation scar. Lawrence the Chinese publican was on the phone. ‘Nah, sorry, Joyce. Haven’t seen him,’ he says, looking at a dopey old man propping up the bar with his elbows. The man slaps a few dollars on the counter and walks out.

  I set up the cardboard-cutout man; cap on head, beer in hand. Maybe Pat thought I was the one feeling lucky because he handed me a cup full of ten-cent pieces.

  ‘You think you can hear water? Maybe you can hear money too.’ He told me to sit at the back of the room so Lawrence wouldn’t see. It’s not the legal thing for kids to do and it’s against my moral code but I went anyways. Sat at the back of the room all incognito.

  That’s when I noticed her. She had cold metal running through her veins. Hair pulled back so tight the comb marks left deep lines all the way to her scalp. Her spinal cord stuck out like an old skinny lizard. There was a massive two-litre bottle of Coke on the floor ’cause I guess her insides were so dried up she was always thirsty. I could see the cracks in her lips and dry flakes of skin she kept trying to peel off with her teeth. Cannibalising herself. Eating from the outside in.

  She pulls the lever, sucks in her breath and pats the machine five times on the side. Three crowns fall into place and a waterfall of silver coins spills into the tray below. But this was dirty magic and nothing good would come from it.

  ‘Slit-eye Larry reckons he’s gonna reel in them rich chinks from China,’ she says.

  Margie would’ve said she was cheap and nasty like a two-day-old pastie, jingling coins with her long bony fingers, turquoise nails chipped at the end.

  ‘But maybe I’ll just bleed ’im dry instead.’

  I think she cast a spell on me, that woman. Her stale breath fills the room with a dirty haze and I can’t see much past my hands in front of me. I am going to swell up and suffocate with those words stinging me all over: ‘bleed ’im dry’. I also didn’t want the chinks from China to come here and lose all their coins because maybe they were a nice family.

  Pat is still talking to Lawrence, oblivious to the disaster unfolding behind him, so I go around the back of the machines looking for their power source. The cables and wires are all hooked together with plastic ties that were stored in a broom closet. I put my finger on the switch and wait for someone to yell ‘freeze!’ But no one does so I flick it. And that’s when the witch screams her turkey gobble: I’ve taken her dirty magic away. Pat knows straight off the bat it is something to do with me. Quick as lightning he pulls me out of the broom closet and glares with those wild, furious eyes. Funny thing is, when Lawrence sees how angry the witch is he smiles at me. She starts jumping up and down shrieking at Lawrence that she’d just hit the $500 jackpot and the money was still coming out. But that is a down-and-out lie. I saw the numbers flashing on her machine and it only said $50. Lawrence is nodding his head while the witch keeps up her fake little hissy fit. Then she lunges at me with her cup of coins like some kind of wild attacking bird.

  ‘This is a crock-a-shit and youse know it! If you can’t keep your little Abo in line then I will!’ Just like with the white vultures on the bus, I don’t think it is the time or place to set things straight. And besides, witches like her don’t care. One black is the same as another to them.

  Pat steps in front of me so she clobbers him instead, right in the eyeball.

  For a quiet man Lawrence sure can shout when he wants. He points at the door and tells the witch to get out.

  She cackles and says we’ve mucked about with the wrong family.

  I call after her: ‘It’s the year of the duck and that’s what Pat is, so you can’t touch us!’

  But she’s already gone.

  ‘You’re gonna need a lot more than a duck,’ says Larry. And Larry was right.

  18 I can get you out

  I hate it when people ruin a perfectly good name. For example, Amanda Pearson let me fall into the creek during a trust exercise at school camp. Joke was on her because I love getting wet, but I don’t trust Amandas now. And even though Tina Arena is a gift to humanity her name has now been soiled for life. Turns out this pokie witch is another Tina and her brother is the one and only cop in town. Darren. Two minutes after she storms out of the pokie room a police car skids into the hotel car park. Darren walks inside like a bow-legged cowboy, pulling his belt up under that big playdough beer gut of his. The wrong Tina’s following behind, all smarmy-like. Lawrence steps forward and says he doesn’t want to press charges.

  ‘Well, that may be, Larry, but it’s not that simple.’ Darren smiles like Lawrence has 1.5 brain cells and wears a tea-cosy for a hat.

  Pat then sidles up and says HE wants to press charges for assault on account of the swollen eye he is sporting, but it all gets out of hand and soon he’s screaming at Darren. Then Tina hits Pat over the head with her pink fluffy handbag, but it’s Pat who Darren handcuffs and throws into the back of the paddy wagon! He’s a bent copper; bent in all the wrong directions no doubt about it.

  So I have to sit in the front seat with him all the way to the station which was so close to the pub I could have walked and got there faster, but I’m guessing big Darren drives everywhere just to show off. He smells like cheap soap. The small little white bars you find in motels that are not even wrapped in paper. And his breath is a brewery, which is illegal because he’s supposed to be a teetotaller under the uniform.

  ‘What are you doin’ with this fella, luv?’

  ‘Who I keep company with is none of your concern.’

  ‘Everything in this town is my concern.’

  This part of the story should be made into a conspiracy movie because it is a pavlova piled high with trouble and nonsense. Darren chucks Pat into the cell down the back of the station and says he’ll stay there until the wrong Tina is reimbursed and that in regards to the black eye, well that was a matter of self-defence. Although Pat can’t see us, I can see him and he’s prowling that cage like an angry bear. I try to burn a hole through the bars with my eyes, turn my anger into a laser beam but I was totally un-super. No special powers at all. Pat gave all his money to the wrong Tina back at the pub to try to smooth things over, and she just pocketed it like nothing ever happened.

  ‘Now the thing I’m trying to figure out is what’s goin’ on here,’ Darren calls out to Pat. He looks me over then turns back to the cell.

  ‘You a kiddy fiddler or what?’

  What Pat says is dead rude. Like a swear jar had broken, spilling *&%$##$@% all over the floor. The whole time Darren just watches Pat with a blank face. I get scared when I don’t know how to read people.

  ‘You know, I can’t abide cursing. It really fuckin’ shits me.’ And then copper Darren smiles because he is being ironical. His brewery breath floats out of his mouth again and I feel sick.

  This is Ghandi’s might-over-right for sure. If we want to get to the boat I’ll have to take charge of the situation. Like a fox that chews its own paw off to get out of a trap, I’ll have to let part of me go too.

  When Darren go
es to take a piss I scramble over to the cell. Pat’s knuckle-popping hands are wrapped around the bars. I look him square in the eyes, through all the fury to the centre. ‘I can get you out.’

  Pat is yelling after me but I don’t look back, not even one time.

  •

  I saw it as we drove into town. They all look the same, and maybe in a way I’m drawn to the treasures that are waiting inside: all the dreams people thought they could buy back but lost for good. The bell over the door tinkles. It’s a friendly yellow sound, makes you feel like you’ve been there before. I know I have to focus because if I look at anything for too long I’ll be in danger of losing my way.

  ‘G’day, luv.’

  The man behind the counter’s reading the Trading Post, drawing perfect circles round things that take his fancy. I rummage around in my bag and hold it in my hand. Close my fingers tight around it and press it into my skin. I feel them coming back, running through my body, like an electric current, those memories. Let them come out of the necklace and into my heart where I can keep them safe.

  I can let go because now it is empty of her and what she’d been to me. The man carefully holds it up, looks at all those rainbow moonstones so perfect and round, just like the circles on his paper. And I bet he’s wondering why is it called a rainbow moonstone when it’s as pale as snow.

  ‘Where’d you go gettin’ something like this?’

  ‘It was an air loom. But now it’s empty.’