First published in 2016
Copyright © Michelle Wright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 9781760292454
eISBN 9781952534355
Cover design: Alissa Dinallo
Cover image: Getty Images
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
For my father, David Wright
Contents
Moon Shiny Night
Water Hours
Maggot
Down
Breakdown
Family Block
Blur
Taken
Late Change
Paperboy
Last Man Standing
Keeping Tabs
Hundreds and Thousands
Stupid
Blurred Edges
Precautions
Sweet
Moving Men
Rot
Look Down
In Quiet Moments
Praying Aunt Fud Outta the House
For the Life of Me
Great Moments in Earth-Moving History
[wərdz]
West of Stile, South of Clay
Long Thin Strip
Prey
Photographs of the Missing
Blow
Summertime
Last Rites
Fine
Moon Shiny Night
Good Friday morning. The streets are calm as cats. And the salt-soaked mist, creeping up from the beach. We leave the sliding door open at night and through the flywire it feels its way like braille. Before dawn it hangs from the balcony rails and now it’s just a shiver in the hairs on our bare arms.
By early afternoon the sky is a cracked crust out past the glimmer of the roofs. Too hot for April. We recline on banana lounges like Lolita and smoke. When the sun angles in from the west it flashes against the water tank and stings our eyes. The summer seaweed on the stairs and in the laundry trough has dried out; its edges sharp, smelling of old blood.
In the next-door house, there’s an ancient old bloke. We watch him up on a platform on his garage roof looking at the sky. At first we think he’s an old perv, taking photos of us in our bikinis. But he calls us over to sit with him and shows us his cloud photo albums and teaches us the names—cirrus, cumulus, stratus, nimbus.
His name’s Taffy and his eyes are shot from cataracts, so when he looks up now, everything is blurs and halos. That’s why he takes photos. He looks at them on his big computer screen with a magnifying glass. I say it’s like with all the looking up, the clouds have drifted in. He nods and says, ‘Well put.’
Back home in the evening we lie with our knees touching and listen to the geckos clicking from their lookouts on the greasy kitchen walls. When we get up to eat, sweat-damp hollows, like wet sand, stay behind us on the sheets.
* * *
In the morning it’s raining, so we stay in and play Scrabble and paint our nails. At lunchtime we cook chicken nuggets and chips and run over to Taffy’s with a towel over our heads. The inside of his house is full of pot plants and it’s damp and rainforest cool. He introduces us to his cat. He calls him Ernest because he’s a Hemingway cat with seven toes on his front paws.
He tells us about his life. His marriage and divorce. He had a roof tiling business and a boy fell off a house and died. Taffy did two years in jail for manslaughter. That’s where he got his passion for clouds. He drew them with charcoal.
‘Clouds are the great equalisers,’ he says. That’s because you can see them out the windows of palaces and prisons. He still draws them now but his drawings aren’t as real. He shows us his huge book—The International Cloud Atlas of the World Meteorological Organization. He tells us there’s a big battle going on over a new type of cloud. Undulatus asperatus. Taffy says there’s been no new clouds classified in over fifty years. He hopes it’ll happen before he dies, but he doesn’t want to get his hopes up.
We go online and there’s a Cloud Spotters page on Facebook. We send some of his rare cloud photos in. We make Taffy a Facebook page and one for Ernest too with a photo of his seven toes. Taffy doesn’t really get it but he laughs and laughs like it’s the best thing he’s done for ages.
When it stops raining and the sun dries up the puddles, we go up on the roof and take some more photos. Taffy says you can only look so long at a sky without clouds before you yearn for something more. He tells us about Constable, the artist. He was so mad on clouds that for two years, that’s all he painted.
‘You haven’t seen Constable’s cloud paintings in the National Gallery?’ he says, all pretend serious. ‘You must go at once!’
We stay up on the roof till sunset, just smoking and drinking red wine. The sky goes dark and there’s a full moon. We sit and stare at the silent sky and then Taffy starts to sing.
Taffy was born
On a Moon Shiny Night,
His Head in the Pipkin,
His Heels upright.
I say, ‘What the hell’s a pipkin?’ and Taffy says, ‘Buggered if I know,’ and we all piss ourselves laughing. We drink some more wine and he lets us plait his beard and when he falls asleep we paint his horny toenails midnight blue.
* * *
This morning we’re asleep and a policewoman comes and knocks on our door. Taffy fell off the ladder coming down from the roof early morning. He’s got a couple of broken bones in his arm and wrist, but he didn’t hit his head, so otherwise he’s okay. She asks us if he has any family. ‘Just a cat,’ we say. We say we’ll go visit him in hospital if that’s alright.
When we see Taffy lying in his hospital bed, he looks about a hundred years old. They’ve undone the plaits from his beard, but we look under the sheets and his toenails are still blue. I show him the Cloud Spotters page on Facebook on my phone. They’ve posted his photos and he’s got seventy-six likes. We have to explain what that means and when we do he says he feels pretty famous.
When we leave, Taffy starts to cry. Not much. Just a little tear out the corner of each eye. We kiss his cheeks and tell him we’ll come back tomorrow. We drive back to the house and spend the afternoon just smoking and drinking on the banana lounges. After tea we go over to Taffy’s and climb up on the roof and take some photos of the sunset for him. Purple and pale orange on the tops of the strato-cumulus down low. The moon comes up bright behind the trees. We feed Ernest and water all the plants, but we don’t know who’s going to do it when we go back home on Monday.
Water Hours
In ancient times, the Sinhalese had a unique system for measuring time. It involved a small coconut shell pierced through with a tiny hole. When placed in a larger water-filled vessel, little by little the shell would fill. And then, its time having come, it would silently slip below the surface.
And the time that it took for the shell to fill was exactly twenty-four minutes. And that was one ancient Sin
halese hour. Not sixty minutes, but twenty-four. And their day was put together with these water hours. Sixty water hours in a day. Sixty times twenty-four. Same day. Just a different way of considering it, another path for taking it in hand and making it theirs.
She can’t quite recall where she’d learned this piece of information. She thinks it was on a class trip to a museum in Koggala. In any case, that is precisely what she’d been thinking about on that Sunday morning, the day after Christmas.
It was a Poya day and she was staying with her big sister in Galle and waiting with her five-year-old niece at the bus station. Her sister had gone to buy a bottle of water, but she was taking too long and they wouldn’t get a seat on the bus if she didn’t come back soon. And for some reason, she doesn’t know why, she was thinking about that ancient system of water hours and the small coconut shell pierced through with a tiny hole just as the first wave arrived at ten past ten. She knew that’s when it was. She’d been looking up at the clock tower, holding her niece’s hand, and cursing her sister and saying, ‘Ten past ten.’ Then there was a commotion down below that she didn’t really hear, but out of the corner of her eye there was running and waving arms. She turned around and it was coming from all directions. It hit her behind the knees.
And suddenly all was brown and bashing her about the head and back, and salt water thumping up her nose and flushing down her throat. She was lifting and twisting and, after a long time, she was delivered up above and clinging on to the edge of a roof and her heart was heaving. The water had pulled her skirt off and her eyes wouldn’t focus and they blinked and cried with blood and sand. Floating buses crushing walls and the people in between. A man with arms flapping and a tuk-tuk turning over. And wood and plastic and metal reeling and brutalised. Sheets of slick black slapping like crow wings.
Her mind was stuffed with rushing, tumbling, pushing and the tearing down of walls. And people were pulled past. An old woman with her sari like a peacock’s tail, and a child reaching out like a statue. A weeping teenage boy and a lottery-ticket seller gripping on to his board of tickets quivering like blue and orange fish scales. Something breaking and crashing down.
She was turning her head left and right, left and right, searching for something she’d let go of. And it was on the tip of her tongue. Like dream images dissolving on waking.
And then she saw a small girl hugging a blue plastic washing tub, caught under a beam of the bus shelter, and she knew that’s what it was. But the pressure of the roof against her ribs was crushing her breath. The little girl stared at her, mouthing something she couldn’t hear. And she wanted to help, but her head was so heavy, and the noise was up so close and deep. Then, when she thought she would have to scream, or give up and let go, all went quiet and still and she was cold and alone there, looking at the girl’s arms like leather straps and her little fingers holding on. Her mouth lifted towards the sky, humming something soft in her mind and trying to stop counting the seconds between each aching breath. And when she looked back later, the blue plastic tub was still there, but lower now, and she watched a while as slowly, slowly it filled with water and then it slipped below the surface. Her head turned away and she could see the white hands on the black clock face clicking calmly on, as if nothing had happened. And she saw that, although it had seemed like seconds, or maybe hours, it had in fact been twenty-four minutes.
And that’s when she remembered the water hours, and the tiny hole. And she knew she should be thinking something else. But the only thought that came was—one.
Maggot
The bell for the end of recess hasn’t gone and Geoffrey’s wilting ginger hair is already glued to his sweaty cheeks. His face is smeared with freckles and the remains of yesterday’s ink.
He spots Jenelle and beckons her over to the back of the bike shed. He props up a rotting pear that he’s impaled on a broken compass and uses a stick to carve beady eyes and a scowl on it. With the thick black texta he carries in the front pocket of his shorts, he inscribes Mr Dixon above it on the bike shed wall. When he looks up, Jenelle is smiling. ‘Good one, Geoffrey,’ she says, and licks a trickle of sweat from his neck.
* * *
Heat radiates off the cream-coloured cladding of the portable as the students line up for English. Carmel blinks at the black stain in her eyelids and realises she’s been staring at the sun. She shuffles forward into the shade. The toe of her school shoe bumps up against the heel of the girl in front. Jenelle flicks her head around, raises her plucked-thin eyebrows and breathes slowly in through her nostrils. ‘You know who you look like?’ She frowns. Carmel holds her breath. ‘Tina Turner.’ She clicks her head back. Carmel blinks again. The black stain is fading and she can make out the split ends of Jenelle’s blonde-streaked hair.
The air in the classroom crackles with dry heat. Carmel slides forward in her seat and wipes the sweat from behind her knees with the backs of both hands.
‘Hey, Kamahl. Give us your compass,’ says Geoffrey.
Carmel passes the compass across the aisle and watches him start working on a hole in the wooden lid of his desk. Her gaze wanders to the clock above the loudspeaker. Miss McKendry is late. She sees Jenelle and Sharon standing by the windows. Sharon looks over at Carmel and lifts her chin level with Jenelle’s ear. She whispers and smiles. Jenelle nods and pulls a knot out of the ends of her hair with a wooden ruler. When Carmel turns around, Geoffrey is using the compass to pick the last of a scab off his knee.
The door slides open and Miss McKendry enters with her arm around the stooped shoulders of a Fat Weird-Looking New Girl.
‘Form 1E, I’d like you to welcome your new classmate.’
Geoffrey burps from his seat near Carmel in the back row. Even from here, she notes the new girl’s oddly white skin, puffy jowls and chubby neck. Her hair is albino white. Her uniform is stretched taut across a swollen paunch, and one long white sock is pulled up higher than the other. She shuffles self-consciously, looking like she needs to pee.
‘Boys and girls, this is Margot Goetz.’
The class observes her in silence.
‘Guts?’ Geoffrey snickers under his breath.
Miss McKendry knows they can all imagine it’s not easy for Margot to arrive in a new school in the third week of term one, when the rest of them have settled in and made friends. Miss McKendry guides Margot to the only desk with an empty seat. Carmel, she knows, will be kind enough to share her desk with Margot. She’ll take care of her at lunchtime; show her where everything is. She gently squeezes Carmel’s shoulder. And look out for her until she settles in.
Margot Goetz slides in beside Carmel, turns her head and grins excitedly. The pallid skin is clammy, with oozing pores. An odour of blood-soaked sanitary pad wafts upwards. One nostril is completely blocked with snot. Carmel wonders if she’s a bit retarded. Margot Goetz lets a small nervous fart escape. Carmel fixes her gaze on the brown braid on the hem of Miss McKendry’s dress as she walks back to the blackboard. She sits dead still and tries not to hear the whispering.
* * *
When the bell rings for the start of lunchtime, Carmel stumbles out the door and pushes her way along the corridor wall. She arrives at her locker, grabs her lunch bag and checks its contents. Curry sandwiches again. She turns to see Margot thudding breathlessly up.
‘Almost lost you,’ she pants, snot starting to form a crust along the rim of her nostril.
Carmel peers down the corridor. No one is looking.
‘Are you an Aborigine?’ asks Margot.
Carmel frowns and looks up at Margot’s pale grey eyes. ‘My mum’s Indian,’ she replies.
Margot nods slowly and smiles, waiting.
‘I’ll show you where the canteen is,’ offers Carmel.
Margot plods behind Carmel in the shadow of the science block. They pause and squint as they emerge into the sun. The asphalt is already turning tacky. Carmel gestures in the general direction of the form one lunch area and the girls’ toilets as she navig
ates the least public route to the canteen.
‘That’s the window where you drop off your lunch order, and that’s where you line up to buy lollies and stuff.’
Margot bites her bottom lip and nods.
‘Okay, I’ve gotta go to the loo. You right to find your way back after lunch?’
Margot shrugs as Carmel turns and heads for the toilets.
She locks herself in the last cubicle, draws her feet up onto the closed toilet lid and takes a bite of her sandwich. She hears laughter and holds her breath. Voices pause by the sink, then move on.
Carmel unfolds her legs and lowers her feet to the ground. She slides around on the seat and reads the plaque riveted to the metal flap in the back wall of the cubicle.
SANITARY NAPKIN INCINERATOR
DO NOT INSERT ORANGE PEEL, CIGARETTES,
ALUMINIUM FOIL ETC.
TO OPERATE
OPEN DOOR, INSERT NAPKIN, CLOSE DOOR.
WARNING! DO NOT INSERT HAND
Carmel pulls on the stainless-steel handle. She places the sandwich on the rust-brown tray and lets the door spring shut. She swallows the piece of half-chewed curry still in her mouth and presses the heels of her palms hard into her eyeballs. She takes a Mintie from the pocket of her dress, inserts it into the space between her gum and her right cheek and leaves the cubicle.
* * *
Geoffrey drifts down to the shadeless sloping banks at the far end of the cricket oval and discovers a decomposing possum carcass. Its half-eaten face exposes glimpses of white skull, and sun-seared gizzards spill from the torn abdomen. The cavity is packed with a writhing mound of maggots. Geoffrey smiles and licks at the crusty remains of a meat pie in the corner of his lips. He pushes the squirming mass into an empty can with a dusty icy-pole stick and heads off to present his find to Jenelle.
* * *
Carmel rounds the corner of the bike shed and squints into the shadows.
‘Hey, Kamahl. Where’s the new girl?’ yells Ricky.
‘I dunno.’ Carmel blushes.
‘Tell her we’ve found her family. Check it out!’ he blurts, snatching the maggot-filled can from Geoffrey.
Fine Page 1