by Cath Moore
‘Good girl,’ he says when I finish and put my cutlery together on the plate, tilted to the right like they do in fancy restaurants. No reason not to be polite even if I am being held against my will.
The phone rings suddenly and William clears his throat to get up. After a minute I know who it is and all my anger for Pat comes back clear as day.
‘He’s back home,’ says William holding out the phone. I’m still feeling raw like I’ve fallen off my bike and have gravel rash inside my heart. But William just looks at me with his eyebrows up. So I take the phone and turn towards the wall because what I have to say is private.
‘Dylan?’
‘That’s my name, don’t wear it out.’
‘Hey kiddo, how are you?’
‘I’m not a kid.’
Pat pauses and even though I’m a million miles away I know he’s staring at his shoes ’cause he doesn’t want to look me in the eye.
‘No you’re not. I know that. I just…’
I’m waiting for him to say he’s made a mistake and is coming back to get me as soon as he can fill up the tank and have a cheeky Chiko roll before he hits the road.
‘It might take a while but I think you’re really gonna love living with your grandad. He’s a good man, Dylan.’ ‘And what are you?’
Pat doesn’t say anything so I pick up a pair of scissors from the side table and cut the cord in half. Maybe it wasn’t the best reaction but if there’s an investigation I’ll say it was a crime of passion. I try to tie the ends of the phone cord into a sailor’s knot but it doesn’t work.
William comes back in with those uppity eyebrows again. ‘Finished?’
He looks down and then his eyebrows follow. They turn into a frown. ‘What in God’s name happened here?’ Now he’s looking at my un-sailored knot. ‘You can’t just tie it back together!’
‘Nothing here fits! Everything is the wrong size for my identity!’
‘I don’t know what that means, but you just can’t… This is not acceptable!’
Well sure, none of it is. I especially did not accept Pat dumping me here or William shouting at me, so I shouted back.
‘Aaaaaaahhhh!’
He doesn’t say anything, just stares at me with goggle eyes. Then I remember he’s a little bit deaf so I shout even louder.
‘AAAAAAAHHHHHH!’
‘THAT’S ENOUGH!’
‘It’s your fault the badness damaged my DNA. You gave it to my dad and he gave it to me!’
Apparently that was enough because I left William standing there like a stunned mullet, ran into the bedroom and slammed the door behind me. I watch as a dust ball whooshes into the air and falls gently back down into the corner. Inside the wardrobe I listen to William walking back and forth outside the door, creaking on the floorboards. I reckon that soon enough I’ll know the sound of every board in the entire house. I could be blind and still make my way around.
When it goes quiet I push the door open. There’s no one but that lazy wind outside, batting a tree branch against the window. Slap, slap. I creep out and sit in the middle of the floor. My head is spinning in a déjà vu. That’s not a French chicken dish; it’s life repeating. A word, a place, a feeling. My mama, my dad, William, Pat, Aunty Cecilia all running through my blood like drops of dye in water. Mixing into one another to make a new colour. Is it a pretty shade or still too dark for anyone to see what I am underneath?
24 Reckoning
William’s got his days mixed up. Church is only open on a Sunday so he’s three days early. But after breakfast he says, ‘Will you come with me?’ Which was not really a question since he was already holding the flyscreen door open that leads directly to the carport. So I sit in the front seat, which at least doesn’t have spongy parts sticking out like the seats in Pat’s bomb. I look at his long, bony fingers wrapped around the steering wheel like a skeleton. He’s got the classical station on (yawn) and he’s humming away, fingers dancing through the air like he’s swatting flies. Men without rhythm shouldn’t sing. Or drive and conduct at the same time.
I sigh loudly but it does no good. ‘Ba bum bada bum bum bum!’ God help me! (That is a saying, not a call out to someone who probably does not exist.)
Even though I’m a heathen, being inside the church is a relief ’cause William finally puts a lid on it. You’re only supposed to speak after the priest finishes his talk and then you say ‘Amen’, which is like a full stop. I didn’t say Amen at Mum’s funeral. I thought that would be lying, like a vegetarian who eats pork chops on the weekend. This church is empty apart from a woman cleaning the windows up the back. Margie used to say that men turned to God or the bottle to dissolve their sins. She said the Bible was only written for and by men who had screwed up and wanted another chance. She also used to say that Jesus was actually a ‘swarthy lookin’ fella’, so I don’t know how he ended up looking bleached like old curtains hanging in the sunroom.
Maybe William had brought me here to ask forgiveness. But then I realised the wardrobe in the corner wasn’t open for business.
‘I’m not getting baptised, and you can’t make me,’ I say. If that’s his game he needs to know straight out who he’s dealing with. The back door suddenly creaks open and all these people come in. Apparently it’s church choir rehearsal. William says he can’t sing to save himself but that listening is a joy. They have a proper conductor. Not like Mr Bony Fingers here. The songs are in a dead language, which means that people don’t speak it anymore except in front of God ’cause he still remembers it.
If I ever had a baby I would name him or her Latin. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
Ave verum corpus, natum
de Maria Virgine,
vere passum, immolatum
in cruce pro homine.
This music is another kind of magic altogether. That’s why people keep coming back every Sunday: to let the wounds that brought them there be healed.
I look at all the faces in the choir. What a bunch. There’s a redhead teenage boy with braces and bad skin, a moustache man covered in tattoos, twin old ladies in wheelchairs and a bald woman with a dent in the side of her head. I guess you don’t need sight to sing, because there is even a blind lady whose dog sits at her feet and looks bored the whole way through.
I wanted to hate William, I really did. Spent a lot of time on it over the years. If one single person could be the whole reason why you got hurt and lost people and felt wrong about yourself, then maybe the world would make a little more sense. But it isn’t simple like that. And in the end it doesn’t take the pain away. I don’t want to be here, but I am also scared that one day I might wake up and find William gone. How can you explain that?
I looked at the faces in the choir. A few of them might have done bad things, been in jail even. But they could also make something beautiful together. William said very few of us are born with a halo or a red tail. We are all dancing up and down that ladder between heaven and hell. And then I know that William has come here to confess. Not to the man upstairs, but to me.
‘I lost connection. With myself, my God and most of all my family. I left when my kids needed me the most, and I’m ashamed about that,’ says William.
I tell William that Mama is connected to the land because everything of her, the bones, hair, teeth, even the last meal she ate, went into the ground.
He reaches out to touch my face, and I let him. We watch as the sun streams through the coloured windows and onto the pews. It’s times like this I want to believe in God, that he could talk to me through the light. That divine intervention was a real thing and I could be born again with a few drops of holy water.
‘I couldn’t do it, look after them on my own. Lot of guilt with that kind of…failing,’ William says with gravel in his voice.
How can the past be real if memories shift and change? I don’t know what made my dad the way he was. Maybe he had darkness in his mind, weighing him down heavy like stones. Maybe William broke his
heart by leaving. Or maybe it was something else altogether.
‘Your dad, he didn’t belong to anywhere or anyone. He said it was my fault, and maybe he’s right about that.’
William’s words bounce around the room and make a pattern. Lines travelling through him and along my arms. Reaching up and over the ceiling.
‘But I want you to have a place. I want us to belong to each other.’ His hands reach out and take mine. They don’t feel as bony as they look. His skin is soft but those lines and patterns follow us out of the church and I’m worried it’s all going to turn into a terrible mess of regrets and wishes pulling us down to a place we do not want to go. Words are cheap. That’s what Margie used to say.
As soon as we get to the car William lights a cigarette. He leans against the bonnet and takes a long drag, trying to get as much smoke into his lungs as he can.
‘That stuff will kill you,’ I say.
He turns his head to the side and blows the smoke out, away from my face. ‘Damn straight.’
Back home I think it might be okay to put some of my dresses in the wardrobe. Delicate things can’t stay in a suitcase forever.
William sticks his head in through the open window. He’s been in the bungalow the whole day, but I don’t want to go back in there. I ruined it last time.
He’s got something for me. It’s a photo of Mum before I was born. She looks like a big little girl, smile so wide it could run off her face and skip down the street. And my dad is hugging her tight, their cheeks squished together. Next to them is William when his hair was twenty-three per cent less white than it is now. He’s standing just a bit to the side with his mouth wide open like someone told a joke just before the camera clicked and he’s thinking, ‘Geez, that was a good one!’ Now I’m smiling cause every inch of that photo is happy.
A billow of smoke whooshes into my room. It smells good. Someone’s cooking snags.
When everything is new the days are long. Time yawns and every hour slides gently into the next. After bangers and corn chargrilled on the barbeque, sleep crawls into William’s eyes. I tell him about the potato-rolling competitions back in Beyen and how kipflers are my least favourite for mash because it takes ages to peel the skins. He doesn’t want to talk anymore which is fine by me ’cause I’ve got other things to explain. Like water. How it makes life but can take it away too. All the animals that live in it, feed from it, all the people who are taken by the floods, storms and tsunamis when the water rises up, crashes down, rushes in and rages out. Or does not come at all for a very long time so there are cracks in the thirsty ground. Circles and cycles keep life going and we are cocooned inside whether we like it or not.
William’s got his eyes closed and says nothing. My heart sinks thinking all that knowledge has fallen on deaf ears. But then he nods his head.
‘You’re a good storyteller, my little channa.’
I don’t know what that is, but I’ve never been anyone’s channa before so I’ll take it as a compliment. With too much whisky.
I share a lot of stories with William over the next few days. Sometimes we are quiet together and that is all right too. When we are shelling peas for Friday night fritters, all you can hear is pop pop pop! Little peas tumbling into the bowl just like Mum and me used to do, and that was nice, finding a memory in something small and green. One night as I’m going to bed I tell William that I’ve got his eagle, and I hold out the drawing he did all those years ago for my dad. Feels wrong to keep it hidden at the bottom of my backpack.
William’s eyes are scanning it, and for a moment I think I’ve upset him again.
‘It’s not dirt,’ I say quietly, pointing at the smudges of Vegemite that still hold Dad’s fingerprints.
William squints closely, shaking the paper a little as recollection hits. ‘It was Marmite,’ he says. ‘Almost the same but a little sweeter. That’s what they had in Guyana when the Brits took over. Marmite, jaffa cakes and marching bands that played “God Save the Queen”, except on May 26th when they celebrated not having to sing that song at all.
‘That’s not an eagle. It’s a hoatzin. It’s got an unusual gut that makes food in its belly smell like sauerkraut, so it’s also called a stink-bird.’
It feels good to have made him happy.
‘How we goin’? he asks.
‘We goin’ all right.’
He nods and turns off the bedroom light, takes the drawing with him.
I listen as the wooden floorboards creak with his steps down the hallway, until he falls into his own bed and dreams deep. Faraway from being and knowing, until the morning light taps him on the shoulder and brings him into the world again.
25 Joni
Every good story needs a disaster and a reckoning somewhere along the way, and you can be sure that’s where we’re heading. The whole journey is starting to make sense, to me at least. I’ve been brought to William to learn about the hoatzin bird. It will lead me to the sea where a shell will lead me to Joni, and Joni will lead me to the boat.
It’s been two weeks since Pat left. I’m trying not to look back in anger because that can really damage your neck. Besides I’ve gritted my teeth long enough trying to really believe that ‘gratitude is the only attitude’. The lady down the street in Beyen with big boobs and a liking for tight skivvies had that sticker on the back of her Datsun 180B. As well as ‘Magic Happens’. I gave her the thumbs up whenever she drove by.
Maybe you have someone in your world so special you can’t imagine life without them. Well, that wasn’t the case with me and my cousin Joni. When he came to visit he always brought that raggedy soft toy called Augie Belle. It had been Jules’s when she was little. Maybe he hadn’t been washed since then ’cause it looked like a grubby grey rat. But that Joni boy held onto Augie Belle, rubbed its droopy ear over his own making that little lobe boing back and forth like a cat flap. He would ogle at me without blinking, not even once.
What did Aunty Cecilia think I was going to do with him? He was way too short and quiet to play with. Cecilia said that Joni didn’t talk at all. He understood everything but just chose not to use his words yet. William said that people grew into themselves at different speeds. In a way I grew used to having Joni around, like a wart on your thumb. It’s annoying and shouldn’t be there but isn’t really doing you any harm. Especially since most of the time Joni just sat under the kitchen table like a pet dog that never barked.
My new food here is schnitzel. William got the idea from Father Ewald who taught him at school and said v instead of w. ‘Vat is life vizout love?’ Ewald was a priest, a man of the cloth. God’s son knew about water. Turned it into wine and he could walk on top of it. Most of the other Fathers at William’s school were flatliners: talked in a straight line with a voice that went nowhere. Others were harsh and cruel in their own ways, but William didn’t tell me about that. He said there were some things I didn’t need to hear.
But Father Ewald was different. Even though he was devoted to doing God’s work on Earth he was a restless soul. A wanderer searching for solace. Father Ewald was returned to his maker a long time ago but William still remembers the silly things he used to say. Like how his wallet was lined with onionskin because every time he looked inside it made him cry. William chuckled like it was hands-down the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Apart from eating schnitzels we spent those first two weeks getting through the paperwork backlog in the shed. ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ is another bumper sticker that I kept telling myself to believe ’cause my guts still hurt, worrying that William would always feel like a relative stranger.
Even though Pat is in my bad books on every single page he feels more like home than ever. I’m not ready to say this out loud so I keep hanging up when he calls. Geez, he is persistent though, like one of those slow blowies on the windowsill that refuses to die no matter how hard you whack it with a tea towel. William had to buy a new phone after the scissor incident and I am sorry about that. But the new one ha
s an in-built answering machine that blinks with a red light every time someone leaves a message:
‘Yeah, hi Dylan, it’s just—’ Beep. Delete.
‘So I’m just hoping to speak to—’ Beep. Delete.
‘G’day Dylan, look I know that—’ Beep. Delete.
‘William if you could please ask Dylan to—’ Beep. Delete.
I pretty much just keep my finger down on that delete button for two whole weeks. The only other person to call is some Indian lady called Justine who wants to know if we can make a donation to save the children. I say I can donate all of my Timmy’s fish logs but that isn’t what they are looking for.
Deep down I know something bad is lurking around the corner. You can’t hide from the darkness, no matter how nice and smiley you pretend to be. I hold a workshop with myself to figure out if I can still escape this family exchange program. How could Pat just dump and run when he knew all about the troubles with my dad? He should have found another way. Mum said that sometimes you can’t see the smoke signals until it’s too late. Like her and Dad. If he hadn’t disappeared we would’ve run away for sure. Sometimes when it all got too much I rocked back and forth, telling myself to stay solid on the inside not soft like a machine.
William always watches from a distance, not knowing how I feel and maybe thinking I’m a robot, not human at all.
But one night everything changes. I’d left the window open to catch a cool breeze and that’s when I hear that hoatzin bird calling me. I climb out the window and run. Pieces of gravel get stuck between my toes but I keep hobbling down that road with the hoatzin soaring above. Cut through the bush and take the trail between the trees where the night owls keep watch. ‘Stay close, follow fast,’ they tell me.