Trick of the Light

by Laura Elvery

  A policeman, hunched in his reflector vest, holds a radar gun beside the road just out of town, and I ease off the accelerator. Even though I know it’s eighty, maybe they’ve changed it since yesterday. Perhaps there are roadworks. A station wagon passes and two kids in the back beg me for a wave. A milk truck sways with a hundred thousand udders, and I almost bring up my lunchtime sandwich at the thought of all that liquid sloshing and lapping about in the stainless-steel vats. Already, each night, I check my nipples for signs of early milk. Jane said it could happen anytime from now, that it’s just the body’s way of getting ready. In the back of my throat, I taste the Vegemite and the butter and the bread, and breathe deeply till the nausea releases its hold.

  Today’s sacrifice fell from heaven whereupon a Pajero sent it skywards again. Above is the powerline where it must have scuttled and lost its grip – alarm wheeling through its brain. Up ahead I see the school with the mural; I indicate for five seconds and pull onto the side of the road. Four-wheel drives whip past, but nobody stops to hear the lies on my lips, ready to be born. Breaks my heart to see them on the road. Or, Why do they call it morning sickness, haha, if it lasts all night?

  On his side, his claws curled up, Possum sermonises in the grass: But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee. I lean in: he’s been strafed across the head. His cheeks are bloodied and sticky with grass, but his body is mercifully untouched. Possum is in one piece, and likely only two or three hours dead. Hunger squeezes my throat. I circle a hand across my belly: a promise, an appeasement. Not long now.

  Back in the Barina, the Tupperware coffin on my passenger seat could contain anything. If that police officer is still there and he stops me, peers in with his torch, he’d have no reason to ask what was inside. Waiting for Pete at home are two chicken drumsticks glassy with cold fat, tinned eyeball potatoes and congealed waves of gravy. Wedding plate. Wedding cutlery. Pete will eat standing up, then move to the lounge room to watch TV on mute.

  As I drive, I send silent thanks to Alison. The baby will be Grace, even though I think the name is too common – eight girls at our church alone have the name. But it was the only one Pete and I could agree on, and Grace is what he whispers into my skin at night. I’ve chosen her middle name, Bernadette, after my great-great-grandmother who had fourteen babies, alternating girl-boy-girl-boy, all delivered in the paddock on the way into town, and all given names beginning with S. That’s the story, anyway.

  Last night, I dreamt I craved green vegetables: kale, spinach, broccoli. A blooming, a flowering, a nourishing forest. A Babylonian garden within. At church, Grace H’s mother drank a green power smoothie every day for nine months. And already now, Grace H, not even nineteen weeks old, is crawling. In my dream, I craved those smoothies, but they were gone when I woke up.

  I’ve looked it up, of course, at work where my computer faces the window. It’s not that unusual – some women are even willing to be photographed and interviewed. In Scotland, one woman searched for pheasants hit mid-flight by trucks an hour’s drive away. She marinated the meat and served it to dinner party guests. Her friends trusted her as a great cook. Together they all had a laugh, she said.

  Even a wafer. I dreamt I craved a communion wafer, pressed onto my tongue while my eyes were closed and I knelt not at the grassy side of State Route 18 but at the altar. I dreamt I could confess to Father Frank.

  Blessed are they which do hunger.

  Blessed are they which grip the steering wheel on the highway and scan the fiery bitumen.

  Our house blisters with light, and I hide the Tupperware in my bag. But it’s quiet inside. Pete is asleep in the recliner, tucked up like a foetus. His fingers touch the chicken bones. I resist kissing his greasy mouth. If he wakes, I’ll tell him that I ate earlier – a bit of this, a bit of that. Always pear juice. Always carrot sticks during the day, yes. Almonds for the good fats. Cottage cheese for the iodine. Pete sighs in his sleep. He dreams of his baby in a white dress.

  I sit on the back steps, where I pray and the knife blesses me till I hold in my fingers the tiny pockets of flesh that look like the oysters Pete and I fed each other on our honeymoon.

  In the kitchen, in the dark, images float around me of Bernadette feeding fourteen babies in her farmhouse kitchen. I stand back from the stove and add a pool of olive oil. It’s just me and Grace, who wriggles like a fish inside – perhaps she senses the building heat and is curious about what’s to come, or she knows that my mouth is watering. It’s just the two of us, and our sweet offering anointed in oil that sizzles in the pan.

  What You Really Collect Is Always Yourself

  In the summer after primary school, my friend Sadie came to stay with us for eight nights, while her mother went on an all-inclusive cruise to Vanuatu. When Sadie arrived, Mum raised her eyebrows at the palm-sized box of chocolates Mrs Collett gave her. She zipped up the side of Sadie’s suitcase where a scrap of nightie had fallen out, and tossed the chocolates onto the kitchen table as Sadie’s mum drove away.

  Later, after we’d eaten Hawaiian pizza with my little sister Juniper, Sadie and I offered to take slices out to Dad, who was working in the shed. We arranged them the way we thought someone in a restaurant might. We pointed the tips of the triangles together and badgered Mum for what we knew was called a garnish. She wouldn’t have indulged me, but Sadie was our guest and it was only the first night, so she dug through the crisper and emerged with a sprig of parsley that we laid on top of the pizza. We stepped out into the night air.

  In Dad’s shed, the concrete floor was veined with paint and bristling with dust and wood shavings. Plastic zip-ties and nails and screws and a million other bits of metal hung collected in old jam jars, their lids glued to the undersides of rows of shelves so they were easy to unscrew. After Pop died at the start of the year, Dad commandeered his tools. He wanted to restore Pop’s yellow Morris Minor. There it sat in the middle of the shed under a bedsheet and a lightbulb on a cord.

  ‘Dad? There’s pizza for you.’

  I saw his head bump up from a bench opposite the car. He stood, holding a tin and a paintbrush.

  ‘Natalie. Sadie.’

  ‘What are you doing, Mr Simmons?’

  He swept a hand towards Pop’s car.

  ‘Is that your granddad’s?’ Sadie asked.

  ‘Pop drove it every day, didn’t he, Dad?’

  Dad started sniffing, making odd little crying sounds. I fingered the garnish on the pizza as he let out a sob and rubbed his face where a slick of silver paint stuck to his nose. Sadie gaped at me.

  ‘Pop was pretty sick,’ I said. ‘By the end.’

  Dad whispered, ‘He was very old.’ In the dim light his face looked melted. A patchwork of dark and light. His eyes drooped like commas.

  Sadie spoke loudly. ‘Mum says she wants one of us kids to kill her before she gets old and loses her mind.’

  Dad nodded at Sadie. ‘I’m petrified of that.’

  ‘I think Mum just means my brothers and I are really annoying.’

  Dad fixed his gaze at a level just below our eyes. He told us that ageing was a disease. ‘There are people,’ he said, ‘actual scientists, who are close to a cure for ageing. We humans are nothing more than machines. We are just like cars and aeroplanes that fall apart after a lifelong accumulation of damage. But we can choose to fight it. Scientists already know how to keep bodies alive after death.’

  ‘Like in movies?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s called cryonics.’ Dad was skittish. He seemed to redden and swell.

  ‘Like in freezers?’ I asked. ‘With your head in ice?’

  Sadie let out an almost soundless laugh.

  I couldn’t disguise my alarm. It felt like I’d never had a conversation with him before in my life. ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’

  He was watching Sadie pick up a Hungr
y Jack’s plastic novelty cup from a bench streaked with paint. She turned it over and over in her hands. She tried to stop her giggles. I thought of Sadie’s mother eating dinner on the cruise, piling her plate with intestine-pink prawns and lettuce shells and globs of mayonnaise, an umbrellaed cocktail resting on the buffet. I wondered how Sadie would describe Dad to her mum, and then I wondered who Mrs Collett might tell. The truth might escape before anyone could catch it.

  Mum and Juniper came round the edge of the shed and saw us all standing inside the roller door, beside the front half of Pop’s Morris Minor.

  ‘Dad, look. I fixed my gymnastics routine.’ Juniper bent backwards, placing her hands on the ground and almost forming an O. Her tight little belly pulsed towards the ceiling. Upside-down her voice came thickly. ‘I made it better.’

  Dad made a noise like he’d forgotten Juniper existed. ‘That’s good, love.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Mum stared at Sadie and me.

  Sadie stared back. ‘Um. Cryogenics?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Dad is telling us,’ I replied, ‘that he wants to be cryogenically frozen when he dies.’

  Mum looked at Dad, smiling. ‘Gary. What?’

  He swallowed. ‘The idea is to keep on living. To just take a pause, while your body is kept alive. From the moment we are born—’

  Not joking. Mum got it now. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gary. Sadie’s here.’

  Mum took up a jar of nails in her hand. The insides rattled. Juniper levered herself back to standing.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave you all behind.’

  ‘If you love the girls so much then why don’t you come in the bloody house and make the gymnastics coaches some Christmas shortbread.’

  Dad’s blonde eyebrows and blue eyes made him look like a Viking. At last year’s disco, Sadie told me that everyone thought he was the cutest out of all the dads. He asked for anti-shine daily moisturiser for Father’s Day. He’d recently bought dumbbells and started on about protein.

  ‘Dad?’ I said. ‘This is a joke, right?’

  He shook his head. The silver paint gleamed across the bridge of his nose. ‘And if you think I’m going to be buried in some box, you don’t know me at all.’

  Mum shut her eyes and drummed her fingers against her forehead. I felt Sadie’s hand on my wrist, greasy from the pizza. Looking at the Morris Minor, I wondered if Dad had even touched it.

  Mum narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Do you mean that you want to live forever?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  She looked at Juniper and me. She scoffed.

  He said, ‘This is why I can’t tell you things.’

  Mum folded her arms. ‘And the late night excursions?’

  A secret thread revealed itself.

  Dad’s eyes widened. ‘I’ve only been going to meetings,’ he said. ‘Life extension meetings.’

  I believed him. Sadie couldn’t control her giggles any longer.

  Mum clapped her hands together. ‘All right, Gary. That’s enough. Girls, leave his dinner somewhere.’

  ‘It will happen to you,’ Dad muttered to her.

  At the door to the shed, Mum, trembling, picked up a rag and balled it in her fist. Her face was fixed like she was trying to hear a sound from far away.

  ‘It will happen to us all,’ Dad said, much louder than a whisper.

  I washed up. Sadie and Juniper wound tea towels around their hands. Sadie dropped dishes she said were dirty back into the water for me to do again. She asked Mum if she could use the phone.

  ‘Do you miss your mother?’

  Sadie shrugged.

  ‘Well,’ Mum said, ‘don’t stay on too long.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Who knows how much they charge out at sea.’

  Sadie rolled her eyes at me. I guessed it was a boy she was phoning and I guessed he was not on a ship, not out at sea.

  Juniper dipped her tea towel into the sink. She took aim at my legs. Dad had taught us the whipping trick.

  ‘Juniper? Don’t,’ Mum said, passing the cordless phone to Sadie before she left the room. My sister spun the towel and reached back and flicked the wet corner onto my thigh.

  ‘Mum!’

  Sadie started dialling. ‘Don’t dob,’ she told me.

  A couple of nights later, Sadie shuffled in bed beside me. She sat up and cracked her knuckles against her face. She knew I hated it. She knew it would wake me up.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing out there?’

  ‘Who?’ I said, knowing.

  ‘Your dad. He’s been in the shed all night.’

  I pulled the doona closer to my face, but left a gap so I could still hear. ‘You’re obsessed,’ I said.

  Sadie’s hairy legs rubbed against mine. I’d recently thrown a packet of razors in the shopping trolley, no eye contact, and Mum had paid for them with the rest of the stuff, and left them in the shopping bag for me on the kitchen bench. I used a different razor each time, which I didn’t think Mum had figured out yet. She kept buying them, wordlessly.

  The pop and crick of the joints in Sadie’s knuckles again. ‘Aren’t you curious?’ Sadie whispered.

  I readied my feet at the bottom of the bed and kicked where I knew Sadie’s feet would be. I had no idea Vanuatu would feel so far away. I missed being alone in my bedroom. I missed standing naked in front of the mirror after a shower. Rubbing moisturiser on my legs and chest. Inspecting myself. Studying signs that I was changing. Logging a voice that assured me I was bony and ugly. Dad had it – aloneness – out there in the shed.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  I stood outside Mum and Dad’s bathroom, desperate to be by myself. That day, in the hours between lunch and dinner, Sadie and Juniper began conspiring against me. Lots of things were on the table to be mocked. My excessive handwashing. My cold feet in bed. My unrequited crushes at school. Michael Moroney, who told Sadie after the sports carnival that, sorry, he only liked me as a friend. My smallness, everywhere. Juniper, only three years younger, calling me Dwarf Hat Rack, and Sadie laughing, saying, That’s good!

  I left them picking at a board game in the suffocating heat of the lounge room. I planned to take a cool, lengthy, very adult bath in Mum and Dad’s ensuite, during which I would form a rock-hard tumour of wrongs that would feel good to mull over. Sadie still had three nights left of her stay. Maybe they would notice I was missing. I was about to enter the bathroom when I heard voices behind the door.

  ‘You must have done something,’ Mum said. ‘People don’t get sacked for no reason.’

  ‘He didn’t give me a reason. What difference does it make?’

  I slunk into the doorway of their walk-in wardrobe, where I was still able to hear.

  Dad said, ‘Justin thinks he can get me a job.’

  ‘Who’s Justin?’

  ‘We have the life extension meetings at his house.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Gary,’ Mum said. ‘We don’t have the money for you to be this weird.’

  She stalked from the bathroom and out into the hallway. Dad started to follow, but stopped in front of a low window that led to the front yard. I watched Dad for a moment with the late afternoon sun behind him. He tapped a finger at his belt, then ducked his head around the door frame to give me a wave.

  ‘I love you, Natalie,’ he said. ‘I love both you girls.’

  ‘Did you lose your job?’

  ‘I need to go out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To see a friend.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘Justin. You don’t know him. He’s a doctor.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Just me and Dad and the open road. Maybe we’d stop at a servo somewhere for milkshakes.

  He rubbed a hand across his f
ace and through his hair. ‘Yeah, okay.’

  Through the house together and I shut the front door behind us. But as soon as I did, it opened again. Sadie.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Dad stood on the front path.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Sadie asked.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Dad put his hands on his waist and leant around me, pointing at Sadie. ‘Quick. You’d better bring your mate too.’

  Dr Justin Berryhill lived in a plain house. There was a skinny letterbox numbered with black stickers and a short, steep concrete driveway leading to a garage. Two storeys, flat-faced except for a small awning above the door. Not curtains but towels in the windows.

  Outside, Dad said, ‘You can ring the bell, Natalie,’ like I was three years old. ‘This is where we have our meetings.’

  Footsteps coming down inside and then the door opened. Dr Justin Berryhill was tall and thin with glasses. He had a painful-looking Adam’s apple above the neck of his yellow polo shirt. He was younger than Dad.

  ‘Hi, Justin.’

  ‘Gary, welcome. Just got off work.’ They shook hands and pulled each other into a hug that left a gap where their hands were linked.

  ‘This is my daughter, Natalie. Her friend, Sadie. They wanted to come for the ride.’

  Justin took us up the carpeted stairs to the lounge room, where I saw the printed side of the towel I’d noticed from the car. It said: Players Hold All The Cards. Another one draped over the side of a stereo, fixed with a lava lamp, showed a tiger prowling. On an armchair, Justin plucked a remote control from under a departing cat and silenced a game show.

  ‘Take a seat.’

  On the couch, Sadie sat cross-legged, taking up room, happy to be on an excursion, hungry for it. This was all a cruise-ship buffet for her. I was prickled with irritation. Dad chose another armchair. I watched him trying to smile, nodding like he was finding a beat.

  ‘How was work?’ he asked.

  ‘Good, good.’ Justin kneaded his armrest. He regarded Sadie and me, then pointed to the logo on his shirt. ‘At the moment I’m down at the Plaza. Doing security. Head of.’