Escape

by Anna Fienberg

'Yes,' said my mother. 'Such an exotic way of life!'

  Guido shrugged. 'Is exhausting. Every day, the same thing. Is not so different from going to the office.'

  My father laughed in disbelief.

  Guido's eyebrow rose, then he smiled suddenly, lifting his fork to nail a bite-sized piece of thigh in a fold of bacon and mushroom. 'For me is this the real magic,' he said, popping the morsel into his mouth, and he winked at Deborah.

  In the silence that followed, I could hear the squeak of my father's back teeth. Guido ploughed on through his meal, barely lifting his head to breathe.

  'So,' my mother said brightly, 'what are your plans? Do you have engagements back in Italy after this tour? Or can you extend your work here?'

  Guido finished his mouthful and took a gulp of wine. 'We will see what happens,' he said. And he pressed his lips together.

  While we ate, we talked about politics in Australia. I told Guido about our prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and his introduction of free health care and tertiary education, and how lucky it was that my going to university had followed the election of the Labor Party. 'We never could have afforded uni fees otherwise,' I said.

  In 1975 we'd watched Whitlam accept defeat on television. 'Maintain the rage!' he'd thundered. His sonorous voice had always had a vibrato, an inbuilt flexibility to it like an opera singer, but this time I'd heard a definite wobble. Every time that oily silver-spooned Malcolm Fraser came on the news, growing sleek as a seal in his pool of victory, Mum would howl. Once she threw her leather boots at the screen and almost smashed it. But I just went back to school. Actually, I took two days off before that and lay on the sofa like a tumour. I only got up to pee. But it wasn't about Gough. Michael Jeffries had dumped me. I should have gone on the protest marches, but I was too sad to move.

  As we finished the meal and moved on to dessert, I was grateful for my mother's conversation, even though I wondered if Guido considered political upheaval in Australia tame in comparison with terrorist bombs and fascist conspiracies. After a while I noticed Guido's gaze flicking over my head quite often and his eyes became fixed on the yellow wall opposite, as if he'd left them open politely while he was thinking about something else. So I rushed in with chatter about the history of magic, recounting Guido's unique interpretation of the miracles in the bible. I kept pausing so that he would take over and be brilliant and charismatic the way he had been with me, but he just spooned up his ice-cream, chasing the last strawberry around his plate with total concentration.

  'Fascinating,' Dad said, squeezing my shoulder.

  'You must miss your life back in Italy,' said Mum.

  'No,' said Guido.

  'Well, then,' said Dad, 'what about the politics? Pretty interesting times, as the Chinese say, eh? I hear you were active in the student movement back in Italy—'

  'Where you hear this?' Guido looked up sharply.

  'From Rachel, of course—'

  'Ah yes, well, was all a long time ago.'

  After coffee and six liqueur chocolates, Guido got up to leave. I felt desperate – now there would be no time to retrieve the night. I'd been hoping for that alchemical change that can happen in a room when people connect and the world shift s for a moment, for the better. 'You're going already?' I protested, hanging on to his sleeve.

  Guido grinned and took my sticky hand, kissing it with an old-fashioned flourish. 'Don worry to drive me, I get a taxi. Thank you for dinner, was very good.'

  He kissed the air next to my mother's cheeks, light and dry. 'Do come again,' she murmured half-heartedly, then went to ring the taxi.

  Dad and I came to see Guido out. We stood on the porch in the warm evening, a feathery breeze bringing scents of jasmine and frangipani. Below, the lawn shone with circles of gold falling softly from the kerosene lamps on the low stone walls. 'It's pretty, isn't it?' I ventured.

  As we stepped down into the garden, a dark shape winged overhead. 'Ecco!' Guido pointed, his face alight. 'Is pippistrello, no? You don see that in Italy!' We looked up at the sky and another inky smudge swept past the trees.

  'Fruit bats, yes!' I cried, feeling grateful to those little mammals, with their doggy faces and upside-down mothering. But even as they disappeared something pale and luminous rose up in their place. It hovered above the earth, above our lawn. It wasn't flying away. A ghostly creature was threading the air into a small human form.

  'What the—' my father gasped. He took a step forward. The ghost shimmered, expanded, thickened, and shrank again. We stood transfixed, staring up at the shape of a small boy. He was floating on layers of darkness, his arms stretched out toward us, legs trailing on the wind. For a moment his face grew sharper, his mouth open in some kind of pain and his arms seemed to grow longer and thinner and emptier in the shuddering breeze.

  A cry from my father made me turn and I saw him pass a hand over his eyes. When I looked back at that space above the lawn, there was only the lemon light of the lamp glinting in the trees.

  'What was that?' whispered my father. He turned to Guido, his chin trembling. 'How did you do that?'

  'Magic,' Guido smiled, his finger to his lips.

  Dad tried to smile back, but couldn't manage it.

  A loud toot sounded at the end of the drive, making us jump.

  'My taxi! Buona notte,' Guido turned to shake hands with Dad, kiss my forehead and he was gone, whooshed away with the sound of tyres on gravel.

  'He didn't mean to give you a shock,' I said to my father as we came back in. 'It must have been some kind of optical illusion.' Mum blinked at me when I explained about the ghost-boy. Dad was still speechless. He sat down whumpff on the sofa as if his legs had collapsed beneath him. 'Well, what I mean is, he thought you'd find it exotic, you know, how you said you were interested in magic tricks and all. See, if an object is lit and reflected in a concave mirror, you can get that kind of effect. Maybe he used the statue . . . '

  Dad patted my head. 'It's all right, love.' He closed his eyes for a moment. 'I'm a bit tired. I think I'll go and lie down, watch the cricket.'

  As Mum and I washed up, my cheeks felt hot. 'Guido is just, you know, a private sort of person,' I began. 'He likes to show his magic, rather than talk about it. Magicians are like that.'

  'Hmm,' said Mum, handing me a plate to dry.

  'But, you know, he's so well-educated, he wouldn't show off about his classical background but really, he knows so much history, you wouldn't believe . . .' I trailed off , my voice dribbling into the grey washing-up water.

  Mum sighed. 'Well, sweetheart, it's hard to get a grip on who he is, what with his English being so scanty. I'm sure we'll have lots of full-bodied conversations when he's got his vocabulary going.' But she looked disapproving.

  Later, as I came out of the bathroom and into the hallway, I heard my parents talking. 'You can see she's smitten,' my mother said, 'but you can't tell how he feels about anything. Except food.'

  'No,' my father agreed. 'That was so strange out on the porch. You should have seen it, Deb. This little boy all alone, floating out there, his face twisted up, reaching out for . . . Made me think of—'

  'I can imagine,' my mother said brusquely. 'Don't think about it now.'

  'But I wonder how he did it. Gave me the creeps.'

  My mother made an irritated sound with her tongue. 'How a grown man can spend his life playing schoolboy tricks I don't know.'

  'Now that's not fair. It was really quite extraordinary. No, he's talented all right. What worries me is he's got no roots, he's a traveller – you get the feeling he's never made a commitment in his life.'

  'I know. But there's no point in saying anything. She's too far gone.' And there was a loud sigh, probably my mother's.

  I tiptoed to my bedroom, not wanting to hear any more. I dug around in the back of my wardrobe for my old comfort doll, Sasha. Lumpy, homemade and almost bald, she could still soothe me, tucked into my chest under the sheets. I tried to think of nothing as I closed my eyes, not Guido disappeari
ng down our path, nor my mother's sigh or my own swamp of disappointment. I turned on my side, stroking Sasha's tummy, but what floated into my mind and stayed there was the ghost-boy Guido had conjured, and my father's terrible broken cry when he'd looked up into the sky.

  *

  Before his accident, I had never seen my father cry. Afterwards, I thought he'd never stop. Only when the doctor announced that his hip was finally healed, although he'd always walk with a limp, and the police invalid pension came through, did the leaking begin to abate. Some weeks, I noticed, there was only one outbreak, maybe two. I loved it how my father stashed his slippers away in the cupboard and wore shoes again. When it rained for a week he even wore galoshes and went outside to unblock the drain and clear the gutters.

  I was so relieved that my father was going to live. But I knew the shooting had changed him. It was the cause of his departure from the police force and the sudden passion for community work with the Youth Refuge. The truth, which I would never have told anyone in a million years, was that I hated my father's new job almost as much as I'd hated his leaking disease.

  Dad wasn't paid very much to work part time at the boys' refuge. Due to lack of government funding, there were only nineteen beds and often, as Dad complained, twice that number of kids needed assistance in any given week.

  'How can we turn them away?' Dad would ask Mum in the kitchen, his eyes tearing up. Although he was paid for only fifteen hours a week, Dad worked thirty-five. He was never too tired to listen or talk, and once prevented a suicide at three o'clock one Saturday morning. Our resident angel his coworkers called him affectionately. I saw him bristle at that. He always turned away, shrugging off the name like something dirty. He said to Mum, 'I know what I am.'

  Johnnie Walker, as he called himself, was the first boy Dad brought home to stay. 'Just for the weekend,' Dad told us, 'to give the boy a break. On Monday there'll be a bed.' There was no bed, though, until Friday, and by then Mum and I understood the damage that Johnnie had suffered in his family home.

  Johnnie arrived at the refuge with a broken arm and two cracked ribs. His father had come home drunk and been annoyed by a shoe that Johnnie had left in the hallway. Since the age of two, Johnnie had been visiting the emergency room at the hospital. He'd had a broken shoulder from 'falling out of his cot', a cracked cheekbone from 'running into a door', a concussion from 'jumping off the roof '.

  At thirteen, when Dad met him, his arm plastered and a bandage around his chest, Johnnie sat on the torn vinyl seat at the refuge and cried. I remember Dad coming home, describing how Johnnie had sobbed for forty minutes, choking on his words. Dad had patted the shoulder that wasn't hurt, saying, 'It's okay, you're safe now, it wasn't your fault.'

  Johnnie slept on our couch that first week, as did many of the boys who came later. Eventually, Dad fixed up the built-in verandah at the back of our house and I moved into that. By then I didn't mind, because I liked being the one furthest away from the crying.

  That was what Johnnie mainly did, like my father before him. Johnnie's main sin at our house was leaving mounds of snotty tissues on the floor under the couch. So I don't know why I felt so angry and abandoned. I hated the way I felt, and I tried like anything not to show it. The more Johnnie cried, the more hopeful my father seemed. 'It's good for him to get it out, tell someone,' Dad whispered to me. 'It will make him feel better.'

  I made Johnnie cups of tea when I got home from school. On the first afternoon I talked to him about basketball. I really liked the game, I told him, but I hadn't been picked for the A or B grade. My friend Joanna Mulgrade got into the A team, though, and her father was a judge. Johnnie wasn't interested in basketball or Joanna's impressive father, but he did say thank you for the tea. The cup sat on the little table next to the couch, growing cold. I sat on, watching Johnnie. He stared at the picture of hydrangeas above the mantelpiece. Everyone said it was a fine painting, but I was unable to look at it without thinking of the artist who'd created it. He'd used his feet because his poor arms and fingers had been crippled in a car accident, or some other horrific disaster I didn't like to remember. My mother had carefully explained it all to me, how he'd gripped the brush between his toes.

  As I looked at Jonny, a cold point expanded inside my stomach, filling me with dread. I switched my gaze to the cup because it was rude to stare. I thought about my collection of dolls and how they might be transformed into mermaids, with sequinned tails.

  The ping of the clock on the wall and the whirr of the fridge became suffocating. I watched tears tracking time down Johnnie's cheeks, slow as snail trails. The air in the living room seemed to eat my words. Certainly Johnnie didn't hear them. He stared right through me as if I didn't exist. Secretly, I began to pinch my thigh under my dress, just to make sure I was there.

  But in comparison with most of the boys who came later, Johnnie was an angel. And I could see how much Johnnie needed my father. He followed Dad around everywhere, waiting patiently outside the bathroom with his half-finished sentences, and when Dad came out, he took up where he'd left off . The boy was so desperate, and his arm hurt and he had no mother or father. It was mean and selfish for me to wish he would disappear like mist in the sun, and let me have my father back. But in my black heart that was what I wanted.

  Dad's expression of sad forgiveness only deepened with the queue of boys. Older tougher boys with shaved heads, tattoos and swearwords for parts of the body I'd never even heard of triggered Dad's most regretful smile and tear-filled eyes. I learnt to take my clothes into the bathroom for my shower, even my shoes, so that I could tiptoe back to my bedroom without one inch of private flesh showing. I became an expert at early morning waking, which gave me time to creep past the sofa and get my breakfast, shower and read in my room without having to say anything to anyone. The mornings were precious echoes of life before.

  The terrible truth was I loathed the boys. Every single one of them. I knew they'd suffered – they had been abused, neglected, brutalised, hurt themselves with drugs and knives and fights. But I couldn't bear them.

  'When's he going?' I asked my mother about Joe, Brian, Nick, Johnnie. I repeated the question as often as other children ask, 'Are we there yet?' driving towards a holiday.

  'Ssh,' Deborah would whisper, glancing at Dad. 'Can't you see the boys are good for your father?'

  Once, the question just leapt out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  'When's he going?' I piped out, looking at Nick, who was hogging the heater, standing so close you'd think the backs of his calves would catch fire.

  Dad looked down at the carpet and coughed loudly. I saw my stream of words linger in the silence like a speech bubble in a cartoon. The words were so familiar in my mind, they just tumbled out naturally into the air.

  I didn't say the sentence aloud any more after that, but I thought about it constantly. I asked my dolls, who all shook their heads and agreed sympathetically, No time soon, honey!

  Nick and Sam guff awed at my dolls, Tom stole my scissors, and Donald drew vaginal lips in red marker on Sasha.

  I retreated into my mermaid world. I liked the way mermaids were neither one thing nor the other, neither fish nor human, and they had no vaginal lips as far as I could see. I transferred all my sewing materials into the velvet hat I'd won at the Easter show. Mermaids kept their precious belongings in their hats, I'd read, all their treasure and mirrors and sewing. If a person tried to steal the hat, he would die by drowning.

  When Mum gave me a summer nightie to cut up, I was both excited and alarmed. 'This is silk, Mum,' I protested. 'Why don't you want it any more?' Deborah said it was too flimsy, and anyway she felt silly in it, as if she ought to be getting into bed at the Ritz Carlton. She snorted as she handed it to me, and we exchanged a sad smile that held so many unsaid words it grew heavy on our faces like a package we had to put down.

  I would have liked a lock on my door, but Mum said that the family was trying to foster an open environment, and a locked doo
r signalled exclusion and hierarchy. I became very quiet at home. Words were signposts to my inner world and I didn't want anyone finding their way in.

  For me, the orphan boys were like something burning on the stove. It was only a matter of time before one of them exploded and the family caught fire. They smelled dangerous, with their hormones and sweat cooking in their socks.

  At night I sat on my bed, sewing my mermaids. I could hear Nick or Brian or Finn talking to my father. Dad didn't sit on my bed any more and talk to me. Through the new gyprock wall, Dad's calm voice flowed in. A boy's laugh, a sudden shout perhaps, and my insides would flinch back from my skin. I imagined myself as the fish frying in the kitchen, the flesh hunching away from the silver skin as it curled up in the pan.

  Often I lay with my palms facing upwards on the sheets, seeing how long I could hold my breath. Eyes closed, I swam down inside myself. Here there were no boys or smells or swearwords. I hovered at a level that was almost comfortable, imagining Sasha and me floating in an endless sea. But it wasn't always safe in there. Below the comfort there was an empty place, cold and grey like one of those stainless steel chamber pots that Dad had used at the hospital. Achieving stillness meant not joggling my insides. Any movement could set off an avalanche and I'd spill over, down past the quiet and familiar, into the empty grey pit forever.

  Sometimes Mum flung open the door, her apron flapping. 'What are you doing, lazing about? Why don't you come and help me peg out the washing, heaven knows there's a mountain of it.'

  After the boys arrived, my mother changed. She hadn't time to dissect the television news, she was too busy clearing up after dinner. She didn't bother recommending improving books about women in trades or how to make your own radio. There was a new fold between her brows and she took up smoking again. When I got out of bed late one night to go to the toilet, my mother was standing out in the garden in her dressing-gown, her feet bare, puffing on a Peter Stuyvesant.

  Deborah no longer rose early in the morning to vacuum or clean the bathroom. 'It'll just get dirty again tomorrow,' she said, 'so why bother?' She lay in bed as long as she could, the sheets up to her chin. Sometimes they covered her head like a dead person. When she did that I lingered at the door, watching to make sure the sheet rose up and down with her breath. Now and then a book lay open on her chest, but mostly she seemed to be muttering to herself.