I just sat there on the examination bed. The ones with the white sheet. You can tell it’s plastic underneath because the sheet slips all the time. I sat there and wondered why they didn’t use a bigger sheet so they could tuck it in, but then I thought they probably changed it every time someone new sits up there because of germs and it must cost them a lot in laundry detergent. Laundry detergent is expensive.
That’s what I closed with. Stories sound truer if they have lots of details in them.
Becca wanted to know where my dad was now and I told her I didn’t know. Maybe he was a spy? He could have been captured and tortured. She wanted to know if he was in Guantanamo Bay.
Becca Holdenstodd told everyone that my dad was a missing person, and the next lunchtime I had to tell the stormy-night spy story to a larger crowd. I told it so well I even cried.
Lorelei Darton told the teacher who was on playground duty that I was telling lies and he made us play soccer instead. Mr Lewis didn’t like my stories, or tackle footy either.
The next day Becca wouldn’t talk to me. Neither would Lorelei, or any of the other kids. I tried to play soccer with them, but nobody passed me the ball.
After that I stood on the wooden seat near the stinkbug tree and sang songs to myself. I tried to lilt like Billie Holiday. If it rained I went to the library and read Mad magazines.
At the next school I stuck to the away-on-business story and I never invited anyone home.
2
WARD
I hate waking up and not knowing where I am. This place smells like a vet clinic. There’s a sound – a persistent beep, like a barcode scanner in a supermarket. I open my eyes and the ceiling is made of squares, bordered by narrow metal strips. The squares look thin, as though you could lift them out with one hand.
The bed I’m lying on is narrow and there is a plastic sheet under me that crinkles when I move. Then I remember. I had been curled up in a chair in the ward’s waiting room until there was a spare bed available. A woman was discharged and so a nurse put me in this bed.
Opposite me is an old woman. She is glaring at me. Her cheeks are hollow. The beeping sound is the machine attached to her. She has plastic tubes up her arms and in her face. Her eyes are sunken and there are nasty purple marks blossoming under her skin – skin that is draped over her bones like unironed linen.
Her shock of hair is the same colour as the pillows. She is so thin that if you couldn’t see her withered face and stringy, mulberry-stained arms you’d think she was a pile of rumpled sheets.
To avoid her gaze I watch the mini TV hanging in the corner near the ceiling. There’s a game show on and somebody is winning a tropical holiday plus a home gymnasium package.
I slide out of the bed and tiptoe into the hallway. I find Itsy. She’s sitting with her friend – the one she pretends to me that she doesn’t see because I don’t like him. He’s all limbs and he scuttles like a spider.
We studied spiders in science class. They poison their prey. They wait until their quarry is helpless, and then they spit on them. Their spit melts the body and then they suck up the juice. That’s what Mum’s friend is like. He has all those long limbs and he’s waiting.
Itsy is telling the nurses a story. She says it was an accident – a splinter that got infected. She’s told the real-estate agent a hundred times that verandah’s dangerous, but they never do anything, do they? It was a splinter and she took it out – most of it, she thought, but it couldn’t have been, because it went septic. She’d thought it would get better.
The nurses don’t say anything at all, but I can tell they know she’s lying because we’ve been through this before. They know what she does. They say they are using the maximum dose of painkillers.
Itsy uses swear words in front of the other patients and I’m embarrassed. She says she’s going outside with her friend. The nurses exchange a glance. Itsy and her friend walk down the hallway. I was hoping that she would come to check on me first.
As soon as she is around the corner they start to talk about her. Even the patients say what they think, and I don’t want to hear because Itsy is my mum and I love her.
I slip down the hall and climb back into my narrow bed. The old lady and I stare at each other. A nurse comes to tell me Itsy will be five minutes, but she takes much longer than that. The nurse sits on the edge of my bed and strokes my hair. I close my eyes, but I’m not really asleep. When she gets up I see that she is crying for me.
3
TIGER
My dad’s a semi-professional golfer. He doesn’t play in the major competitions – just the minor ones. Mostly he goes around to different clubs giving lessons to really rich people. Sometimes he’s gone for weeks at a time on tours. When he’s away he eats at restaurants every single night. At home I have a whole bunch of soaps and hand lotions from all the hotels he stays at.
One time there was a guy who owned this big company – they make tints for paint, or something like that. He asked my dad to go on an overseas holiday just to give him lessons, every day, at a tropical resort. I think it was in Vanuatu. It could have been Fiji. It was for three whole weeks, and Dad only had to give a lesson for two hours a day.
We were going to go as well, but at the last minute I got the mumps.
4
CANCER
Once I told people that Dad was in hospital with cancer. All the people I told felt sorry for me, but it wasn’t like any kind of pity I’d met before. I liked it.
I couldn’t bring myself to think it in the front part of my mind, but I was wishing that he did have cancer. If he’d had cancer, I wouldn’t hate him for leaving.
There was another advantage to the cancer story, which was that I could genuinely say that I didn’t want to talk about it, and they would back off. It was a different sort of back-off too, as though they were backing away from a basket of sleeping kittens, rather than a huntsman that suddenly appears from behind a picture frame.
I wanted to stick with the cancer story, but I had to consider the possibility that he would come back. I suppose he will, eventually. He will want us to pretend that nothing has happened. Or worse still, he’ll want to talk. He’ll tell me it wasn’t my fault really, and if he needs to say it, then it means he has considered that it might be.
My fault.
I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to know that he has thought about it.
He’ll want us to move to the country so he can grow wine grapes and be a yoga instructor. He might even have found God.
At least we aren’t in the same house. In the old place he would have strutted around picking up things and moving them, like an old dog pissing on posts.
He will have to familiarise himself with a new place – like a guest.
Will he look like a cancer patient? I imagine him pale, drained, sapped, shell-like. He will be smaller. Reduced. Diminished.
5
THE CHEMIST’S SHOP
The chemist’s shop is bright with fluorescent lights hanging on chains over the tables, as if it was a pool hall. My dad is wearing his white smock with buttons at the shoulder. It’s dirty with dark grey handprints on the chest and at the hips, like newsprint.
There are tablets in ziplock bags and in vials on the counter – yellow ones and blue ones. It looks as if they have funny marks like faces on them. Maybe they’re lollies. I lean over to get a better look and Dad says, ‘Careful, Possum’.
I’m in my primary-school uniform – a pale blue tunic with a white Peter Pan collar. There’s a dried stain on the front from the melting chocolate iceblock I had at lunch, and normally that would be a problem because Itsy might not wash my tunic overnight, but today it doesn’t matter because tomorrow is sports day and I will wear my green pleated netball skirt and polo shirt, which I have already ironed and laid out ready.
I bounce over imaginary hopscotch squares down the middle of the shop to pass the time while Dad finishes.
There are customers on plastic seats wai
ting for their orders. An old man with sad eyes rubs at a terrible rash that scales up his chin and over his nose. There’s a young woman with a T-shirt that has ‘Kiss me before my boyfriend comes back’ written in silver sequins on the front. She’s jiggling a baby on her knee, and it makes a staccato gurgling sound, as though it’s riding in a car on a dirt road.
I’m hoping tonight we can have takeaway from the shop around the corner. We’ll have hot chips and fresh bread for sandwiches. Dad will order a hamburger with the works for himself and two dim sims for Mum.
The runner comes in. He takes a few packets off the counter. His job is to deliver the packets to the people at home who might be too weak or sick to come and get them themselves.
He throws an imaginary stone and then hops along my hopscotch squares. I accuse him of stepping on a line and he lunges forward to tickle me. I squeal, turn, and run straight into the old man, who grunts.
Dad reprimands me, but I am already embarrassed. I sit on one of the plastic chairs and swing my feet. I have new teeth coming through. I can feel the sharp edge with the tip of my tongue. I’m watching the runner boy. He winks at me, not because I got in trouble but because we both did. I grin and it’s the first time I have ever looked at him and felt that he is family to me.
Itsy will be mad at Dad for stopping at the chip shop on the way home because she’s been waiting for him to bring her medicine. She’ll shout at him and he’ll roll his eyes at me, at least that’s how it was supposed to happen, but we didn’t get to the fish-and-chip shop after all, because . . .
PART THREE
Travelling into
flames
I had a dream about us
In the bottles and the bones of the night
‘CAN’T RUN BUT’
PAUL SIMON
1
BUGS
I don’t feel alone out here. I’m surrounded. I’m an alien in a new country, unfamiliar with the customs. An easy target.
During the day there are black flies that I’ve never seen before – sniper flies. They bite, and I don’t know until they’ve gone. An ant crawled up the leg of my pants and bit me in three places. I could feel the poison burning under my skin and I had to undress to get to it. I crushed it between my fingers, smelling the alkaline odour, and it waved its antennae smugly. The damage was done. I dabbed some toothpaste on my reddening welts.
At night there are mosquitoes that hover over me like news helicopters over a train crash. Graceless beetles attracted by the firelight hurl themselves at trees and each other. Possums hiss and snarl like alley cats, shaking the limbs of the trees. Crickets clamour like a chorus of spectators.
At dusk three green frogs hopped into my tent. I picked each of them up and their cold, clammy legs hammered against my fingers. Then when I turned off my torch I could see their silhouettes in the firelight as they clambered around on the fly-sheet catching the insects crashing into the sides of my tent with a sound like heavy rain.
There are tiny money spiders hanging from silk trapezes, and an orb spider that in the evening wove her web in the archway between the top of my tent and the guy ropes. When I went to collect wood I found a spider apartment block – a network of flossy web spreading metres in each direction and at least half a dozen arachnids scattered over the surface, limbs akimbo.
A finch bounced around the campsite. He found his reflection in the dented billycan and spent the next ten minutes challenging his little, dull, misshapen chum. Later a currawong settled on a branch and sang a melancholy cadence, but when I moved it flew away.
I was not prepared for the death. It’s everywhere. Fish jump out of the river to catch flies. A bird stole a dragonfly from a spiderweb and then took the protesting spider. I watched a lizard catch a grasshopper half its size. I could see the grasshopper’s legs thrash and then it was still. While the lizard stood in the open, struggling to swallow its enormous prey, a kookaburra swept down from a tree and snatched it.
Predator becomes prey. There is no justice, only stealth, speed and opportunity.
2
SIBLINGS
Scott arrived when I was about six. He was fifteen. He seemed a grown-up to me, tall and pale with a shock of red hair. He’d been in and out of foster care and juvenile detention homes for at least three years. No hippo-therapy for him.
Itsy didn’t like him, although she pretended she did in front of Dad. It was only little things. If she made a booking at a restaurant, she’d book for three so they had to re-lay the table on the spot. If he was watching television, she’d flick through the channels to see what else was on. She turned on the dishwasher when he was having a shower.
She didn’t have to do any of it. Scott and Dad were already awkward with each other – needing tools or sporting equipment to have something in common. Their pauses were a wretched search for something to say, whereas lulls in conversations between Dad and me were all about contentment.
I could crawl into Dad’s lap.
Dad tried too hard with Scott. He had a basketball ring installed above the garage and shot hoops. In the afternoons they went fishing together on the beach. Itsy would stand on the verandah and drink Blue Lagoons.
Through a jigsaw of partial conversations I had overheard I got the impression that Itsy was the reason that Dad wasn’t with Scott’s mother any more, but I was six, and while I knew on some level that my parents had existed before I was born, I also assumed that nothing important had happened until me.
Scott only stayed a few months and then Dad gave him a job at the chemist’s shop and bought him a flat nearby. It was on the second floor. Scott had guitars on stands in the corner and there was always a pile of dirty dishes on the floor next to the lounge.
Our ages were too different for us to play together. Besides, he was a boy.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, he just wasn’t anything to me. He was like a fellow commuter on a train. You both look out the window. You make sure that no part of you touches any part of them. You make polite conversation if you have to, and then you get on with your life.
I always dreamed of having an older sister. She would have a sensible name like Sandra or Cathy, and she’d walk quickly, as though she had lots of things to do and not much time. She would always have mints in her handbag. She’d boss me around about how I was going at school, and the clothes I was wearing, but in a nice way – as if she cared about my future. She’d insist that I cleanse, tone, moisturise, and wear sunscreen.
My older sister would buy me something for Christmas that I’d forgotten I wanted, and when I opened it she would give me a secret half-smile of satisfaction that would be as good as the present itself.
I’d go around to her place for dinner a few nights a week and on weekends, and we’d sew hems on curtains, try out new low-fat recipes, or plant basil and rosemary in squat terracotta pots on her large back patio.
She would have a pool, and in summer I would go around to her place after school and swim laps or practise somersaults until she got home from her sensible middle-income job. My older sister would be a pathologist, a town planner, or a bank teller.
When my sister came home from work she and I would lie around on inflatable floats listening to the drone of the pool vacuum as it twitched along the blue floor below us, and we’d bitch about Itsy.
We could talk about Dad, or not, and she would know when to do which.
She would tell me it’s not my fault, even though she knows the truth. The whole truth – not the re-remembered version.
I don’t think I’d like a younger sister – besides, I asked Itsy about it and she told me that she’d had her tubes tied after me. Apparently I made her sick all the time and she put on fifteen kilos. She got acne and her legs swelled for the whole nine months.
Itsy said she actually started smoking when she was pregnant because she heard it reduced the size of the baby’s head. ‘The baby’s head’ – that’s the way she said it. She was talking about my head.
This is why a big sister would be better.
If I had an imaginary friend it would be a big sister called Sandra or Cathy, but I’m worried about starting an imaginary friend, especially at my age, because I might develop multiple personality disorder.
Besides, knowing my luck I’ll start an imaginary enemy instead.
3
TRUST FUND
The downsizing happened quickly. I didn’t notice at first because our standard of living didn’t change so much. I still had new toys, new clothes and plenty of food in my belly. Then one day it was all gone and I didn’t have any of those things.
Not long after Dad left, Itsy sold his car and put the beach house on the market. I went back there much later hoping that our beach house would still be somebody’s weekender, so that I might squat for a few nights, but it’s a belt of villas now.
Itsy traded her Saab for a second-hand Barina. She put most of our furniture in storage. We moved into a cottage in a neighbourhood with a much greater ethnic mix than I had ever seen before.
Itsy sold our house next. She didn’t discuss it with me, because back then I was a child and she was an adult and she made the decisions.
I’ve only recently thought about how much all of these assets would be worth.
On one of those cold winter days when the light slants across the afternoon sideways and the air is crisp and sharp like citrus, Itsy was chopping wood on the driveway at the side of the cottage. I watched my breath, cramming my hands in the pockets of a pale yellow parka with fake fur around the cuffs. I loved it but it was getting too small. There was a box of kumara on the front step – a gift from our Samoan neighbours, who had a substantial vegetable garden.
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