by Paige Clark
‘You should just keep quiet,’ my mother said on the ride home. ‘You are always in everybody’s business. It’s ageing me beyond my years.’
I noticed how her centre part was widening. Like the canyon, I feared it would take me. How strange, I thought, how strange that even when you have so little hair, you can still not possibly count all the strands. Later, I found my hairbrush snapped in two and discarded in the kitchen trash.
My new boyfriend gets a haircut. ‘Do you like it?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say, ‘but you are very handsome.’
In the early morning, when he is still asleep, I notice tiny bits of hair sprinkled around the back of his neck—the haircut. The sight makes me queasy, so I pretend we are in Hawaii. The waves lap at our ankles as we walk beside the water. The thin chords of a ukulele drone as we kiss while the sun goes down. He picks me up over his shoulder and throws me into the frothy surf. For a moment, I am happy—weightless as a child being tossed above her father’s head.
When he wakes, he asks what is wrong. I don’t know how to tell him the answer to his question.
Instead I say, ‘You are my island of happiness.’
I bought a new hairbrush and hid it at the bottom of my sock drawer. I brushed my hair secretly in my bedroom and wore my hair in a tight bun. One night, my mother barged in on me examining myself in the mirror. She said, ‘Your vanity is endless.’ I did not mention that I had seen her staring at photos of herself—before and after shots given to her by the salon, close-ups of the back of her head.
She stopped taking me with her to Beverly Hills. The bottles at the bottom of the shower multiplied. Their labels advertised them as stimulating scalp shampoos, protein daily rinses, density boost conditioners—as everything except what they were. I overheard her mention Ringo casually on the phone to her friend, as if she’d known him for years. She did not say how she met him.
From the internet, she purchased a laser wand to encourage hair growth. She held it over each inch of her head for five-minute intervals twice a day. When I asked what the wand was for, she said, ‘Vitamin D. I don’t get enough sun.’
‘Why don’t you take a walk,’ I said.
My new boyfriend goes on vacations with his family. After he graduated from university, he took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Moscow with his parents and his younger brother. On the train, the Russians were hospitable and made sure his family always had a bottle of vodka. His mother, knowing that once a bottle is opened it must be finished, drank with them shot for shot.
When they went to Disneyworld, she went on every ride. I picture her there—platinum hair ratty from the wind and clothes soaked in chlorinated water from Splash Mountain.
We never went on family vacations. One time, my mother drove me to Santa Monica beach. We shared a corn dog and a lemonade. We walked along the pier and I had my caricature drawn while she watched from the shade, applying high-SPF sunscreen and combing her fingers through her hair, then long. Later, when her hair was short, she would still run her fingers down her chest, remembering.
‘If we go to Hawaii,’ my new boyfriend says.
‘When,’ I say.
When we go, I will wear my hair down and drink rum cocktails decorated with tiny umbrellas in the sun until I am lightheaded. We will dance all night at the cheesy hotel luau, the colourful leis scratching our sunburnt skin.
My mother said I needed a haircut. She had just started seeing a doctor who activated her scalp with thin needles and prescribed a mix of hormone pills. I found the bottle of medicine first, then the invoice from the doctor for her weekly procedures.
‘Look how long your hair is getting,’ she said. ‘You look like a fundamentalist.’
‘I’m afraid of hairdressers,’ I said. ‘They love telling you what you’re doing wrong. Split ends, dry scalp, I don’t care.’
‘I can cut your hair.’
When she came back with a shiny pair of scissors and no chair, first I begged and then I said nothing.
She told me to hold still and put her hand to the back of my neck. Her fingers dug in but did not leave a mark. Three snips was all it took. My new hair was short and jagged, as if I were a doll that a child had given a haircut.
I can’t forgive you, I thought.
‘Tell everyone you got gum stuck in your hair,’ my mother said.
My boyfriend and I book flights to Hawaii. I buy us matching Hawaiian shirts and eat macadamia nuts to prepare for the trip. When I am by myself, I practise wearing my hair down, flipping it behind me as I walk. On our way to the airport, we drop his dog off at his parents’ house. His mother waits at the door as we drive away, waving as our car rounds the corner.
When we are in the air, high above the Pacific, I try to tell him why I don’t speak to my mother. But what I can’t explain is this—how she is always there like a phantom limb, the body’s memory of what is lost.
THE CRANES
Tommy was born in the year of the station wagon. He was from the suburbs, but it was more like the country then. Pakenham Upper—the teens from there loved to say the name aloud. Though his mum always called it Upper Pakenham. She was holy like that. His family lived in a house his father built. It faced the house next door instead of the street.
Fernie was the kid that lived next door.
Everyone said Fernie was born with music in his head, and Tommy agreed. For as long as he could remember, there was singing. It wafted through his childhood like a breeze. It kept him company. ‘He’s a backup singer to boredom,’ he overheard Fernie’s mum telling his mum once. This confused Tommy, who didn’t see himself as the lead singer.
Fernie didn’t even try to become a musician. He became an engineer and worked on the city construction sites erecting apartments. He wore a hard hat in the colour white to remind the crew he’d earned a university degree. Tommy looked out for Fernie when he walked through the city to his café job, trying to make out the faces of the tradies he passed. He listened out for him too. Instead he heard birds. You could hear them at that time of morning.
As boys they had played with their fair share of blocks and diggers and mechanical cranes. Fernie was meticulous. He made Tommy wash his hands before he touched any of the toys. Tommy always felt much younger than Fernie, though their mothers drove the same make and model of station wagon, purchased in the year of their birth. He was still trying to remember not to wet his pants, and there was Fernie, polishing his blocks as if they were made of silver.
They built many things together over the years, Fernie more and more ambitious with age. Each time they finished a project, Tommy was awestruck. It was not unlike the feeling of his morning walk through the city, the pastel metal of the buildings mimicking the rising sun.
It was the same question that bloomed: not what they were building but why.
Tommy’s mother always called him before he went to work, but these days she called him Thomas. She was trying to make him fit into his grown-up name. Though it was her fault in the first place he was doomed to this one.
‘Thomas, darling, is now an okay time to talk?’ she asked.
‘I’m almost at work.’
‘It’s Fernie. His mum just rang. He’s gone back to hospital.’
‘Why’d she ring you so early?’
‘He’s at the Royal Melbourne. That’s close to you, right?’
‘Mum. You know where I live.’
‘He’d love to see you, darling.’
Fernie was sick, but who wasn’t? Just the other week, Tommy’d had a pre-cancer removed from his face. And he was fine.
He walked into the café at the bottom of a midsize apartment building and smiled at his boss and at his co-workers. He spent all morning texturing milk, litres and litres of it. He estimated in his head that he’d made five hundred and thirty-one lattes that morning alone, most served in a paper cup with a plastic lid. One woman asked for a straw for her black coffee, mentioning by way of explanation that she’d whitened he
r teeth.
Well, who was he to judge? Tommy threw empty milk bottles straight into the bin. When he’d asked the building manager about recycling, the manager claimed he didn’t have the space to store it. Now, taking the rubbish out before his lunch break, Tommy watched as skim milk leaked onto his shoes. He accepted this fate. To smell sour. To be sour. He would not go to the hospital. He’d visited earlier in the year anyway.
The truth was, after high school, they’d grown apart. Fernie went to university and then went travelling, where he’d met a woman abroad. When he told Tommy about her, he described her as oriental.
‘She’s from Singapore or maybe Canada,’ Fernie said.
‘You can’t call women oriental anymore,’ Tommy replied.
‘Fuck it. We’re all people.’
Turns out, she was from Los Angeles. Tommy met her when he’d visited Fernie in hospital a couple of months earlier. She smelt. She kept dabbing the sweat off her upper lip, all the while emanating an anxious, metallic stink. She was clean enough. In fact, by Tommy’s observation she did not have a single strand of stray body hair. Still, he wasn’t game enough to shake her hand. He didn’t want to get close to her in case what she had was catching. Fernie sensed this and asked her to leave, giving her arm a squeeze.
‘Take five, babe,’ he said. She scurried off then, her eyes welling up with relief.
Tommy examined the room, which also smelt. Fernie had three roommates, who all seemed to be sleeping.
‘The worse the room, the better the diagnosis,’ Fernie said.
‘Anybody snore?’
‘Everybody here snores.’ Fernie looked proud as he said this.
A phone rang, and an old man with duck fluff for hair sprang out of the bed by the window. He talked excitedly into the phone, peering out the glass and exposing his rear to the entire room.
‘Careful, mate,’ Tommy said. ‘There’s gonna be a full moon tonight.’
‘Better watch out for my missus,’ Fernie said.
‘Werewolves too.’
‘Forecast predicts tsunamis in Japan.’
‘That’s not the moon. That’s global warming.’
There was still that easiness between them, Tommy thought. By the window, the man in the open gown continued to jump up and down. His fluff hair was stuck to his head like cotton wool clouds glued to construction paper.
‘Farmer Bob,’ Fernie said.
‘Your mate.’
‘His wife’s afraid to visit, so they talk on the phone.’
‘A lot of people are afraid of hospitals.’
‘It’s not the hospital she’s afraid of. It’s the city.’
‘Is his name really Bob?’
‘No.’
They laughed then. Even Fernie’s laugh sounded like singing.
‘What’s he in here for?’
‘Dunno. Same shit,’ Fernie said.
Across the street from the café, two new apartment buildings were going up. Tommy liked to think of it as a competition: which of the two could be made faster, cheaper, uglier. Some of the tradies came in for coffee and some didn’t. He preferred the ones who didn’t, like the road-traffic controller with a face more tomato than human. He spent his shift puffing on ciggies and leaning against a sign with a drawing of two ferocious hounds and a warning. Every day Tommy looked for a dog, but never saw one.
It wasn’t just the tradies. Tommy was intimate with the office workers too. He knew who didn’t eat the crusts off their toast. He knew who didn’t remember to push their chair in. He knew who was sleeping with the boss. He saw their knees touch under the table.
When he was a boy, Fernie’s parents often forgot to close the drapes in their bedroom. One lucky time, Tommy saw Fernie’s mother getting dressed. Tufts of hair sprouted from the sides of her greying underpants. He stared at her tits and her fleshy stomach. Eventually, she noticed him. Then, in nothing but those ageing undies, she walked to the window.
‘Hello, Tommy,’ she mouthed and drew the curtain closed.
Through the open bathroom window, Tommy heard Fernie singing in the shower—a slow, mournful show tune.
Walking home, Tommy wondered if Fernie’s mother was at the hospital. He’d tried dating women with her brand of beauty but had been left disappointed. They covered their bodies hastily after sex. They shaved. Waxed. Or, worse, lasered. He was put off by their mutilated skin. Still, even if he’d wanted to, they wouldn’t have let him have a long look.
He’d go to the hospital and see.
He got home, changed out of his stale coffee clothes and headed to his car. It was one of the last of its kind. A Ford Falcon BF Mark II 2007. Now cars were made in Asia, in Germany, in exotic places. He reprimanded himself. He wasn’t supposed to but he let himself think that word sometimes. Well, he shouldn’t be driving either, when he could easily take a train. At least he’d converted his car to run on gas instead of petrol. He couldn’t afford the switch to electric.
Tommy started the car and without thinking drove past Grattan Street and the hospital. Even after he’d realised his mistake, he kept driving. Where he should have made a right turn, he made a left. He went on this way, until he knew that he wasn’t going to visit Fernie at the hospital. He knew that he was going back—back to where those two houses sat, one peeking in on the other. That’s where his Fernie lived.
Stopped at the last lights before the start of the toll road, Tommy noticed the road-traffic controller in his rear-view mirror. He looked the same as he did at the construction site, leaning on his headrest instead of on the picture of those angry, mythical dogs. He slurped on a cigarette. Without thinking, Tommy turned around and waved. He’d watched this man working for the better part of a year.
In reply, the man with the produce face beeped his horn.
‘Go, you fucker!’ he said. ‘It’s green.’
Tommy accelerated, waiting for the road-traffic controller to pass him. They drove the exact same car—the last to be made in this country.
‘Top bloke,’ the tomato said as he passed Tommy, who just waved, knowing full well the man had not seen him, not now, not ever before.
Tommy thought of the Royal Melbourne behind him, shrinking in size until it was small enough to fit in his hand. Funsize. But he did not turn off. Around him, the cars were all driving badly, following the road rules to the letter. In the fast lane, a Hilux braked and accelerated, keeping its speed to exactly one hundred kilometres an hour at the expense of Tommy’s patience. His phone rang.
‘Mum, I’m driving,’ he said.
‘Thomas.’
‘You’re on speakerphone.’
‘Thomas.’
‘What, Mum?’
‘Fernie’s on level eight, in the new section of the hospital. I hope you’re on your way.’
‘I told you. I’m driving.’ He hung up.
He merged onto the Princes Highway and kept going. He passed the turnoff for Ernst Wanke Road. Tommy put his hand over his heart. No matter how many times he drove by this exit, he paid his respect. To his sexless boyhood. To Fernie and his TV room. To Ernst Wanke. Bless his cotton socks. Long may he live.
When they were in year seven, Fernie figured out he could get audio from the porn channels on his TV. While their school friends watched hours of SBS hoping to catch sight of a breast in a foreign film, Tommy and Fernie sat in a haze of static and listened to the sounds of real sex. Both boys sat in pure, ecstatic silence, not wanting to miss a single thick breath.
‘What do you think she looked like?’ Fernie would ask afterwards.
‘Hot,’ Tommy said.
‘Yeah, but, like, tits?’ Fernie asked.
‘Of course tits.’
‘Big ones?’
‘Yeah, big.’
‘Nah, mate. Like medium-big. And perky.’
‘Fuck, I don’t know. You’re the one who asked.’
‘She was hot, but.’
‘Yeah,’ Tommy said.
Later Tommy was disappointe
d when the women he met weren’t loud like that. They sounded instead like Tommy and Fernie did as twelve-year-olds in that TV room. Like keeping quiet.
Tommy knew he should turn back. He could still make it to the hospital before visiting hours were over. But then he noticed the cars ahead of him weaving to avoid something on the road. An old Tarago was parked in the emergency lane. There, in the middle of the Princes Highway, stood a woman in a tracksuit and thongs, protecting an echidna from the traffic. Tommy slowed his car, put on his hazards and parked in front of where the woman stood with the monotreme.
‘You can’t be out on the road like this!’
‘It was crossing,’ she said. ‘It got scared and tried to dig in.’
‘Throw it,’ he said.
‘I can’t pick it up.’
‘Use your sandals. C’mon. Quick.’
The woman removed her thongs and used them to pick up the echidna and fling it to safety.
‘It’ll walk back out,’ she said.
‘Get back to your car before you get hurt,’ Tommy said. He watched as she weaved back across traffic, not bothering to put her thongs back on. A semitrailer beeped Tommy as it drove past. He moved the car into drive again, forgetting his resolve to turn back.
When he and Fernie were kids, they’d gone hunting for a platypus. Fernie insisted—kill not capture. They found an echidna instead, and when Fernie tried to pick it up, it dug in.
‘Its feet are on backwards,’ Fernie said.
‘It’s like a living cactus,’ Tommy said.
‘Cactuses are alive, you mong.’
Now Tommy thought about that echidna, clutching the dirt for dear life. Lucky its feet were on exactly right.
Tommy made it all the way to Pakenham. Since he’d moved to the city, the suburb had grown like a suburb—divided and divided again until it was a network of poorly fabricated homes and shopping centres teeming with chicken shops and fusion noodle houses. Fernie had built some of these shopping centres. Tommy had to hold him accountable for that.