Fine

by Michelle Wright

  Five minutes later, he’s running back towards Delia’s car, one hand behind his back and his smile so big his bottom teeth are showing. He climbs in through the driver’s-seat window and sits facing her cross-legged.

  ‘Spill,’ says Delia and Jay draws his chin up high.

  ‘Close your eyes and count to five,’ he says. He holds up the bag of lolly snakes, pulls on the plastic and eases the bag open. He holds it under Delia’s nose and says, ‘Now take a big breath in.’

  She breathes and opens her eyes and Jay plunges his hand into the bag to take out a snake. They’re still soft and oily sweet, even though the use-by date has well and truly passed. He gives the snake to Delia and takes one for himself.

  ‘Bet you twenty cents I can stretch mine longer than you,’ he says.

  Delia grasps her snake by the head and tail and slowly starts to pull. Jay holds his up parallel to hers and yanks until it breaks.

  ‘Loser,’ says Delia and chuckles. Jay unbuttons a pocket on the side of his shorts and pulls out two ten-cent pieces. He holds them out and Delia rubs her fingers together and takes them from his palm. ‘Easiest twenty cents I ever made,’ she says.

  As they sit in silence sucking on the rainbow-coloured snakes, another roll comes in from the west, thunder this time and with a wind that raises dust. Delia pulls her legs down from the dashboard, reaches back and pulls a picnic rug onto her lap. Jay holds up the bag of snakes and squints at the writing on the back.

  ‘What’s glucose?’ he asks.

  ‘Sugar,’ says Delia.

  ‘What’s artif …?’

  ‘Artificial,’ she says. ‘It means fake.’

  ‘What’s preservat …?’

  ‘Do I look like a bloody dictionary?’ says Delia. She pulls the picnic rug up to cover her chest. Jay brings his knees up under his chin and scratches at a swollen sandfly bite. Delia sucks and the tail of the snake disappears into her mouth.

  ‘If you’re so keen to learn words,’ she says, chewing, ‘then why don’t you go to school?’

  Jay folds down the top of the bag, slides it under the waistband of his shorts and climbs back out the driver’s window.

  ‘Maybe I will,’ he says and walks away.

  Delia pulls her feet in under the rug. ‘Maybe I will,’ she sneers.

  * * *

  There are some kids too young to be living alone, so they live together on the bus with the Fabers, who have four kids of their own. It started out just the Fabers on the bus and then they took in other kids and the bus became a sort of orphanage and a school during the day. The Fabers aren’t teachers, but Mrs Faber worked in a school, so she knows how they operate. They have some books for reading and there are bus timetables on the walls that they use for maths lessons.

  Jay went to the school when he was younger, but he dropped off coming regularly and then, about six months ago, he dropped to not at all. When he arrives this morning, there’s a new girl who used to live with her grandparents. Jay’s seen her around but he’s never said hello.

  ‘My grandfather is alone now since my grandmother died,’ says the girl. ‘She had that heart problem that she got from all the drinking.’

  Jay looks at her ruffled pink skirt and sparkly jumper and thinks she’s probably tougher than she looks. After school he invites her back to see his ute and shows her his bag of lolly snakes. Her name is Cherry like the fruit. They play the stretching game and she gets such a thrill from winning that it’s worth the twenty cents.

  * * *

  When heavy trains roll past and shake the ground under the yard, the giant excavator shudders and sheds great flakes of rust, like dead leaves from a tree. Jay collects them up and puts them in a big cardboard box in the back of the ute. Late one afternoon, when Delia’s had a few cans of rum and cola, he invites her over to the ute for the last of the lolly snakes. He tells her about his collection of rust and tells her he reckons that one day the whole excavator will have turned into crumbling leaves and will fit into his box. Delia says that everything will fit in a box if you wait long enough.

  ‘Give time enough time, and it’ll wear everything down,’ she says, ‘and all that’s left are the traces you forgot to wipe.’

  Jay bites the head off his snake and says, ‘How old are you, Delia?’

  ‘Cheeky bloody kid,’ she says. ‘None of your goddamn business.’

  He smiles, knowing she’s too mellow after the grog to mean it.

  ‘Are you afraid of getting old and dying and turning to dust?’ he asks.

  Delia chews on her snake and says, ‘Sixty isn’t old if you’re a tree.’

  Jay doesn’t know if that’s really an answer to his question, but he figures it’s a true enough fact.

  * * *

  Saturday afternoon Jay hunts out Cherry to show her a packet of highlighter pens he’s found in the glovebox of a fancy four-wheel drive that just came in. She tells him he’ll get a really good price for them, but he says he wants to keep them. They take them to the ute and she borrows the pink one to colour in her fingernails while he uses the others to draw pictures on the inside of the windscreen, like fluorescent stained-glass windows. The sun shines through and they catch the orange fish and green koalas on their palms and forearms.

  * * *

  On the school bus that Friday, Mrs Faber tells them about an artist called Picasso and the way he had of seeing people from the front and the side and the back all at once. She shows them a page from a calendar with a painting called The Weeping Woman with green skin and a blue hat, biting on a handkerchief. Jay studies it closely and then they all draw portraits of each other in the style of Picasso. When they’re done, Mrs Faber holds up Jay’s and says that Picasso would be proud. Jay signs his name and Mr Faber pegs it up with all the others on the yellow cord that you pull to stop the bus.

  * * *

  Sunday morning there’s been a bit of rain, and Jay is running races with the drops on the dust-covered windows of the station wagon. Delia opens a street directory to a torn-out page packed full of crisscrossing red streets with black railway lines running diagonally and a river weaving north to south. She puts the directory back on the dashboard and flattens the map out on the picnic rug on her lap. She places an index finger on a red train station at the top of the page and runs it down along the line to the bottom.

  ‘This is how I arrived,’ she says. ‘Took the train with just one cardboard suitcase, got off here and walked to my new house.’ She doesn’t look at Jay, just carries on as if she’s speaking to herself. ‘The first time I’d lived away from home. Nineteen years old.’

  Jay looks at Delia, but as long as he stares, he can’t conjure up her younger face.

  She starts talking about her time in the house by the railway line and Jay follows her finger with its thick yellow nail as it taps and circles on the map. She mentions playing the violin and passionfruit growing on a fence and a boy called Frankie, but Jay doesn’t follow. He’s reading all the street names and numbers lined up on the map.

  When she’s finished talking, Delia folds the page and slips it above the car’s sun visor.

  ‘So that was the best year of my life,’ she says, ‘and it’s all been a slow slide to Shitville since then.’

  Jay pulls the open street directory from the dashboard and down onto his lap. He places a finger on the map and traces the train line to where it ends at the edge of the missing page.

  ‘Did you swim in the river when it was hot?’ he asks.

  Delia reaches over and slaps the pages of the street directory shut.

  ‘If I wanted kids hanging around all the time, I woulda had some myself,’ she growls. ‘Now, nick off and go play with someone your own age.’

  Jay tucks the street directory under his arm, climbs out the window and runs off without turning back to see how mad she is. He stays in the ute drawing with his ballpoint till the sun has dried the ground out. He looks out towards the excavator and sees Cherry in a yellow dress and gumboo
ts squatting in its shadow. He walks over and, without speaking to her, swings himself up onto the conveyer and starts to climb.

  Cherry follows, but stops where the dirt slope runs up against the wheel. She holds on to the rim and leans back, looking up to where Jay is climbing. He’s hidden behind a metal arm, then emerges above it, his body small and his legs long and knobbly like a waterbird’s. Cherry rolls her hands into binoculars and holds them up to her eyes. Jay appears in her sights, silhouetted against the sun, then disappears over the top of the machine. She calls but he doesn’t answer and it’s only when she runs all the way around and sees him on the ground with his leg bending the wrong way that she knows he hasn’t climbed down but fallen. She runs to tell the Fabers and they say he’ll need to go to hospital in Port Augusta. Cherry wants to go too, but Jay says he’ll be fine and he needs her to stay in the yard to mind his stuff.

  When the transporter comes in the next afternoon, Delia goes over to meet it. She tells Cherry to be sure and do the gloveboxes on the cars so that mongrel Mungo doesn’t clean them out. The driver’s brought back news from Port Augusta that Jay’s just got a broken leg. He tells them the bloke who came with him when he drove Jay to the hospital was his stepfather. It’s the first Delia’s heard him mentioned and the Fabers seem surprised as well. The Middle Eastern lady says, ‘I knew that,’ and everyone just looks at her and nods. She says Jay’s got a mother too in Adelaide and the transporter driver says the stepfather was talking about taking him back there to live.

  Delia leaves the others talking and walks over to the ute. She opens the door and sits on the passenger seat. The sun is low and the shadow of the excavator has climbed the bonnet and is casting a cloud on the fluorescent animals. Cherry comes running over, one hand held out in front of her.

  ‘Look what was in one of the gloveboxes!’ she says, leaning in through the driver’s window, holding out a yellow disposable camera. ‘It’s brand-new,’ she says. ‘Should I put it in the toolbox?’

  ‘Hang on to it yourself,’ says Delia. ‘You can give it to Jay when he comes back.’

  A blowfly pings against the windscreen, fat and lethargic, not far from dropping dead.

  ‘Did you see Jay’s drawings?’ asks Cherry, pointing at the street directory, open on the driver’s seat. Delia leans over and pulls it onto her lap. In the section with the street names, Jay has been at work with his highlighters. On the page of streets that start with J, he’s highlighted Jay Street and Jay Court in green and drawn his portrait with a ballpoint in the margin. Delia holds it up close to her face. It’s not a bad resemblance for a kid’s drawing, she thinks. She flips to the D section and sees that Delia Street and Delia Road and Delia Crescent are marked in green as well. There’s a picture of a face in the margin, drawn with a ballpoint, but coloured in with highlighters. She figures it’s supposed to be her with her hat on her head, but she doesn’t think it looks anything like her. It’s too young-looking for one, with blue skin, and the eyes and mouth are out of whack.

  Cherry leans in and flips the pages over to C. ‘That’s me,’ she says.

  Delia holds it up. The portrait’s pretty well done and coloured in with fluorescent orange hair and yellow skin. All the Cherry and Cherry Tree and Cherry Blossom Crescents and Streets and Rises on the page are marked in pink. Delia lets the pages slap shut and lays the directory back down on the driver’s seat.

  ‘Okay, kid,’ she says. ‘Off you go and put that camera somewhere safe.’

  Cherry runs off past the excavator in the direction of the Fabers’ bus.

  Delia winds down the passenger window and lays her head on the sun-cracked vinyl sill. She’s got a headache coming on and her legs are stiff with sitting. She stretches them out on the driver’s seat and feels the blood flowing more easily, down through her calves and along the soles of her feet.

  From somewhere close there’s a low whistle like a train coming in, but she lifts her head and listens and realises it’s not. Just the sound of the wind pushing through the rusted holes in the body of the excavator. She’s never noticed it before and it sounds like an instrument her neighbour used to play when she was a kid. An oboe or a bassoon or something deep like that. She thinks that maybe she might move into the ute if the boy doesn’t come back, or maybe she’ll leave this place and keep going further west to Ceduna or north to Coober Pedy. On the dashboard, the blowfly lies on its back, wings whirring, its body spinning in a circle, and then it stops and lies there dead in the fluorescent-coloured shadows. Delia lifts her head and breathes in the mint-flavoured air seeping up from the far side of the yard. The evening passenger train rumbles past, the lights on in the carriages, lifting dirt and flakes of rust and dragging them all further east.

  [wərdz]

  In the first year of my applied linguistics course in Paris, I took a unit of articulatory phonetics. My father had passed his love of language on to me. He was a serious man; solemn, really. He was almost forty when I was born and I don’t remember him without grey hair. He was a speech therapist by profession, and after he took his early retirement at fifty-three, he did a PhD in Middle English literature, examining Chaucer’s use of alliteration. He used to read me extracts from The Canterbury Tales, explaining the differences in pronunciation between fourteenth-century English and ours, and examining the debates around the causes of the Great Vowel Shift. No one in the family really understood our shared passion, but it was a thing we’d had for years.

  When I moved to Paris to study, we kept our conversations up through letters. My father knew how to use email, but for our correspondence he preferred ‘the dead tree variety’, as he liked to say. His letters were typed on thick cream paper on an electric typewriter he’d had since the eighties, and they were striped with white corrector fluid. He addressed them to Ma fille chérie and signed them Papa, which I found corny but somewhat sweet all the same.

  One letter arrived about a week after he turned sixty and I turned twenty-one. I’d phoned him on the morning of his birthday and we’d had a disjointed conversation with me bellowing in a phone booth over the noise of a jackhammer on a line with a two-second delay. He must have written his letter that evening after a couple of glasses of the Scotch whisky he drank rarely, but always just a little too much of.

  You know, sweetheart, he wrote, your mother was very beautiful when I met her, but I had my doubts even back then that we’d have enough to share. Despite my best efforts over the years, she’s never let herself be wooed by the beauty of words. We talk, and our conversations are never dull, but the words aren’t what I need to hear. That’s why I’m glad I’ve got you, sweetheart. With you I can share the words that matter.

  It should have made me happy, this love letter from a father to his favourite child, but all I saw in his words were decades of quiet despondency and they made me want to cry. I put the letter away in a suitcase on top of my wardrobe between the jumpers I’d brought with me for when winter came.

  * * *

  In the first week of my course, I learned all the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet and used them to write secret notes to my French boyfriend during lectures. I was meticulous in my accuracy, even inserting the symbol for glottal stops, which made my boyfriend laugh and got us thrown out one day from a Discourse and Pragmatics tute.

  It was the names of the different categories of sounds we loved the most—glottal, uvular, velar, sibilant fricative. I had my favourites—the bilabials, [m] [b] [p]—made with both lips brought together, like preparing for a kiss. I loved the words they made. Bubble gum in English, and in French, barbe à papa. Daddy’s beard—their term for fairy floss.

  My boyfriend favoured [f] and [v]—the labiodentals. He talked of the ‘savage sensuality’ of the name. ‘Labiodental, labiodental,’ he liked to whisper in my ear when he used it as a code for going down on me. And the words these sounds produced seem to validate his theory. Fauve—wild beast in French—and in English fever, fervent and forever.

 
; We consumed words in the Métro, pressing our heads together behind second-hand paperbacks bought from the bouquinistes up on the banks of the Seine. Nabokov was in fashion and we read Lolita several times. Silently we mouthed the opening lines, leaning in close, watching each other’s tongues. The three syllables of her name tripping down our palates and tapping against our teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. My dad had told me that Nabokov was wrong about the phonetics of the name; that the English [t] was not a true dental. But the line gave us so much pleasure that I never told my boyfriend.

  * * *

  It’s the last Friday in May and I’ve just arrived home from a Semantics exam when I get the phone call from my Uncle Doug. He pays for my plane ticket and I land at Melbourne airport less than fifty hours later.

  They’d told me that my dad was in a critical condition after the stroke, but when I see him in intensive care, I know they’ve just been keeping him alive so I can say goodbye. The doctor explains that there’s been a massive bleed on the left side of his brain. Massive—that’s always the word they use. Like the French word masse—sledgehammer. That’s how I see it in my mind’s eye. Like a sledgehammer taken to his delicate brain. I understand enough about neurology to know that, if he does survive, his language centres will almost certainly be affected. I picture him in a nursing home, struggling with his one good arm to point to a symbol on a board to tell the nurse that he needs to shit. I can see myself staring into his lopsided face, still able to look out but not able to let the world see in. And all those words trapped within his brain, bashing around like flies in a jam jar, exhausting themselves in the effort to escape.