Milk Fever

by Lisa Reece-Lane

  ‘Hello?’

  My heart sinks as I recognise the fat woman’s voice.

  ‘I need to speak to Julia.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need help.’

  Her voice is very quiet. ‘She’s not here.’ In the background I can hear the murmur of a TV set.

  ‘Please,’ I say, dizziness tugging at my centre. I am no longer certain if I’m lying or sitting. I can see the smoke now. It’s not someone burning off. Flames are nibbling at the feet of the kitchen cabinets. ‘I really do need help.’ The wound in my thigh has reopened, pooling blood against my knee.

  Her voice drops further in volume. ‘I’m sure you do, Tom. But my daughter-in-law is not the one to give it to you.’

  Julia

  It is blood, as Julia expected, and it has filled the yoga hall with an unpleasant salty odour. She sets the bucket and scrubbing brush on the floor and begins to clean. Her bandaged hand softens and blisters in the water, and stings like murder. But Julia deserves this and she mops up with a grim penitence. She wrings out cloth after cloth, ignoring the pain, the blood turning her forearms pink, making the hair on her arms sticky.

  Who else would do this, except the butcher? Acting under the false belief that his wife was cheating. If she’d stopped to think, just taken a moment to calm down before rushing off to tell Charlie about the imagined affair, none of this would’ve happened.

  Although, let’s face it, it’s not entirely her fault. She certainly wouldn’t have made such an error of judgement if Bryant had told her the truth about Summer earlier.

  Dropping the scrubbing brush in the bucket of water, she sits back on her heels, inspecting the floor. Much better. From somewhere close by, she can hear an odd sound, like a muted war siren. How weird. She gets to her feet and slowly walks around the hall, trying to locate the source. When she realises that the sound is coming from the inside of her head, she hurries from the place with the hair on the back of her neck lifting.

  At home, she almost collides with Bryant who is running out the front door.

  ‘Fire,’ he yells, stomping into his yellow boots, holding his pager up in the air. It’s his first call out with the CFA. He looks both terrified and excited.

  ‘Be careful,’ she yells after him.

  He slams the door on the car and reverses out of the driveway with a screech.

  Barbara is on the couch still, staring numbly at one of the morning shows. She declines the offer of a cup of tea and Julia can sense that, for the moment at least, her motherin-law would prefer to be alone.

  Thankfully, the siren sound in Julia’s head has disappeared. But an uneasy, restless sensation has crept into her limbs. A sense of dread. She remembers this feeling from childhood. Ballet was the only thing to cure it. When she was dancing she felt in control of herself. But now what can she do? Clean the bathroom? For some reason that idea no longer appeals.

  She stands in the kitchen, almost shaking with confusion. It’s these damn feelings. That’s the problem. Anger, fear, apathy, sadness, confusion and a few others she can’t even name. When she thought Bryant was cheating on her these feelings were understandable. But her husband is faithful. Bryant is not cheating. She repeats the phrase emphatically in her head a few times, trying to erase the stuck emotions. What’s she got to be angry about? Or sad about now? It’s ridiculous.

  She wanders into the children’s room. The sight of their small clothes and innocent toys comforts her. Just the smell of them eases her breathing. She sits on Amber’s bed and is aware of a faint buzzing sound. This time, thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be coming from inside her head, but from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  She kneels down and starts to remove the clothes, toys and posters that have been dumped into the wardrobe. At the very bottom of the pile she finds an old Cornflakes packet. It’s obviously been opened and closed many times because the flaps are ragged. She experiences a faint sense of unease as she takes the box from it shiding place. The plastic bag inside the box is folded over several times. This is what Oscar has been doing, she thinks, he’s been putting something in here.

  She opens the plastic and sits back on her heels.

  Oh, sweetheart.

  Thousands of dead flies. Little black bodies and transparent wings. One near the top, almost dead, is buzzing its own requiem.

  Tom

  Smoke burns the valley of my throat and sears the fields of my skin, blistering, blackening the inside of my brain. I am a bushfire. Consumed. But I’m still alive because I’m hurting all over, every splintering cell, every charring atom, throbbing with pain, and you only hurt when you’re alive, right?

  Right, Simon?

  He confirms nothing.

  Simon?

  ‘No, it’s me, mate. It’s Bryant. Lie still.’ He smoothes the hair away from my forehead and his words are sweet like the raspberry jelly you get when you’re too sick to swallow. ‘Hold still, buddy. We’re just going to put you on the stretcher.’

  I feel a lift, a shudder, someone swears, a lowering, as if I’m falling.

  Falling.

  Somewhere deep.

  And peaceful.

  Julia

  She hurries to Joe’s café for a quick coffee. She makes him tell her the stories again. How did your grandmother milk the goats? How many days did it take to press the grapes? Was the wine pink? Or red? Are Italian men really better lovers? But even here, in her sanctuary, something isn’t right. Although her body is sat still, on the stool at the counter, watching the beloved espresso machine pour out lines of caramel coloured velvet into a waiting glass, listening to Joe talk, there is a wild force inside her, running. And weird sounds are starting to fill up her head — chiming, ringing, hissing.

  ‘Tell me another story about your village,’ she says, and rubs at her right ear.

  He passes her a coffee. Then he folds his arms on the counter and leans towards her a little, smiling. ‘I’ve told them all, Bella,’ he says.

  ‘And even made up a few for good measure.’

  ‘I don’t mind hearing them again.’ She takes a sip of her coffee, but even that tastes wrong, bland somehow. Her inner woman runs faster. Her breath grows shallow in her chest.

  ‘Speaking of Italy,’ he says, carefully. ‘Did you notice the sign on the window?’

  ‘What sign?’ She didn’t see a sign. But then she never looks out the window, does she? That would mean seeing the mall, and the locals, her life. She looks over at the window now and sees a large yellow rectangle of paper. The words face the street so she can’t read them.

  ‘What does it say?’ her voice is wobbly. It won’t be good news, of that she’s certain. She lifts her glass, carefully, with both hands, and sips the coffee.

  ‘Open your eyes, Bella. Look at me.’

  She takes a chance. She opens her eyes and looks at him. He smiles. He’s a good man, she thinks; probably twenty years her senior, but handsome still, wise and gentle. He’d make a sensitive lover. He’d respect her body, worship her curves even. He’d be discreet. This is who she should have chosen as a lover. Not Tom. Not wild, crazy, atom splitting Tom.

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘I’m closing the café, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘I have to go home for a while.’

  The words don’t make sense at first, or perhaps they do, she just doesn’t want to acknowledge them. ‘Here’s home.’

  ‘No. Well, yes, here too. But my mother is not well. I want to go back to Italy to see her.’

  She should feel sorry, she should offer her sympathy, understand, express concern, but the crazy woman is dancing flat out and doing pirouettes inside her chest and she can’t breathe, and her ears are filled with noise, and she can’t imagine life without this café. ‘I’m sorry about your mother, Joe,’ she says.

  He nods. He knows she’s not sorry. But he smiles his sweet, handsome Italian smile and forgives her for it. ‘I’ll tell you a new story now, Bella, while you drink your coffee.’

  And he
tells her the story of a beautiful, platinum-haired Australian girl and how she talked a love-struck Italian boy into moving to the other end of the earth, to a town wrongly named, to start up a café that no one but fools came to, then left him for a banker, a diamond ring and a harbourside townhouse in Sydney. And yet he has no regrets.

  ‘Cosi è la vita,’ he says. That’s the way life is.

  Tom

  When you die, you dissolve, and the feeling of merging back into everything is really quite blissful. This is the connection I’ve always craved, and to have it permanently, is beyond my highest dreams. Light and sound caress my broken body and lift me upwards.

  — You’ve still got things to sort out.

  I tell him to shut up, to leave me alone, but Simon won’t be ignored.

  — Tom, get back down there and sort things out.

  ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.’

  That’s not the kind of thing to say to an older brother, especially not a dead one, and his disapproval is as palpable as the white room around me.

  Julia

  She is a crazy woman. She takes the kids to the park and runs eight times around the oval, no longer embarrassed if anyone sees her clumsy jogging. It’s the only way to tame the manic running inside her. The sounds in her head are expanding, like an orchestra tuning up, and her heart lumbers fearfully out of time.

  She spins around too fast on the nauseating whirly machine, she takes her turn sliding down the slide that will barely accommodate her adult bottom, and she holds Amber’s body up to the monkey bars so her daughter can pretend to get from one side to the other on her own. How will she survive without the café? Then, while Amber is showing another girl a hole in a tree where a possum might live, she takes Oscar onto her lap.

  ‘I want to go on the climbing frame.’ His body is stiff and difficult to hold.

  ‘Wait, Mummy just wants to talk to you for a minute.’

  ‘How come Amber doesn’t have to talk to you? And how come you’re shouting.’

  ‘Am I? Sorry.’

  ‘Let me go!’

  Here it comes, Julia thinks. But she won’t back down, despite the imminent tantrum and the stares of curiosity from the other kids. Despite the irritation that is beginning to peak inside her.

  ‘Five minutes, Oscar, that’s all. Then you can go and play.’

  ‘Two minutes.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘No, one minute.’

  ‘All right.’

  He relaxes a little and Julia puts her arms around his little waist while he stares at the other kids.

  The right words are important here. ‘Now, sweetheart, I’m not telling you off, okay? I promise, but I need to talk to you about the flies.’

  Before she can stop him he is off her lap, scowling. ‘You better not have thrown them out.’

  Anger flares unexpectedly inside her chest. Why is this kid so bloody difficult? She considers running again to stop the feeling of pressure building up against the inside of her skin. She takes a deep breath instead.

  Oscar blinks at her, waiting for an answer. She can see he’s trying to act tough but his chin is trembling. She feels ashamed then and softens her tone. ‘I left your flies in the box, sweetheart. But you can’t keep them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Yes, Julia, why not? She runs through the arguments in her mind.

  Flies are dirty.

  But they won’t hurt anyone.

  Flies carry germs.

  But what harm can they do if he just looks at them.

  Flies will be difficult to explain if anyone else finds them.

  But Oscar has so little in his life at the moment that makes him smile.

  Shit.

  She tries a different approach. ‘Why do you want to keep them? You know they’ll only rot away eventually.’

  ‘But they’re my friends.’ He’s blinking rapidly. ‘You won’t let me have a puppy and I don’t have anyone else to play with. Kane said he doesn’t like me anymore. And he told the other kids not to like me anymore and they made fun of me because I accidentally peed my pants that time, remember? But it was only one time, not like Matilda who did it three times already.’

  ‘Oscar.’ She scoops him up and holds him firm, like he’s just been born, her heart contracting in the same deep way it did when the midwife first laid him on her stomach and said, Congratulations, Mrs Heath, it’s a boy. And she wonders how a love so pure can hurt so much.

  Tom

  They fuss over me; they stitch me up; they give me injections and liquid in my arm, and a horrible white medicine; they tell me how lucky I am. The hospital smells of soup and ointments and, although I can’t remember for sure, now that the doorways in my memory have been tampered with, I have a crawling sense of déjà vu about this building.

  I pull myself out of bed and try to straighten my legs; it feels as though the muscles and tendons have shrunk and don’t want me to walk upright anymore. Bloody Simon. In the little bathroom, I inspect my face in the mirror, expecting the skin to be charred off my skull. But I look normal, the same as ever. It seems wrong, somehow, that my outer form doesn’t reveal my inner sins. I feel deceitful. I should wear a sign on my chest or a tattoo on my forehead to warn other people away.

  ‘What are you doing up?’

  ‘I want my father,’ I tell the nurse in the doorway. ‘He’s here too.’

  She leads me back to the bed. ‘What name? Do you know what ward?’ She pulls the sheet around my chest and pats down the covers. ‘Don’t move.’ She goes away and promises to return. In the meantime I fall asleep.

  Another nurse comes to take my temperature. A lady asks me to fill out a form about what I want for breakfast tomorrow. An old man with kind eyes and a birthmark on his nose and right cheek wants to know if I want TV, but I have to pay for it. I tell them all what I told the first, I want my father.

  The first nurse returns. ‘I’m about to go off duty,’ she says, carrying a cardigan and handbag over her arm. ‘Your father was released this morning.’

  ‘He’s better then.’ My joyful heart lifts me out of bed. I swing my feet around onto the cold linoleum.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get back in there,’ she says. ‘You’re not going anywhere until Dr Menzies says so. He’s got a few questions for you, like how you got all those injuries.’

  I remove the silly nightie thing they put on me and ease my stiff legs into my jeans. ‘I fell over,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, right and I play centre forward for the Sydney Swans.’ She frowns at the huge hole in my jeans. ‘You can’t wear those. Look at them.’

  The denim gapes and shows my bandaged thigh and knee. It’s still covered in dried blood. My T-shirt is also ripped and covered in blood and smells sour with sweat.

  ‘Who’s going to collect you?’

  ‘No one. I’m walking.’

  ‘Like hell you are.’ She presses my shoulder and forces me back on the bed. ‘Wait there, you’ll need to sign a release form.’ She returns with a couple of forms. I sign here, and here, and here, like she tells me to and then follow her outside. I go to walk towards the farm but she calls me over. ‘Come on, you bloody sausage. My car’s this way.’

  We get into her mini and I realise, as soon as she starts driving and questioning me about the accident, that I don’t really feel like talking. So I tell her that I live on Main Street, where she lets me out. She pats my knee softly and makes me promise to return the next day to my GP. ‘To change the bandages and check the wounds. And go to the chemist and get that script for antibiotics filled.’

  I agree to everything and watch her drive away before heading home. When I am halfway up Droop Hill a car pulls up beside me.

  ‘You still alive then?’

  It’s Wilson. He’s shaved his face and is wearing a shirt that I’ve never seen before. Even the junk in his ute has been arranged into a messy kind of order. ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

 
I don’t mind driving with Wilson, he’s a man of meagre words.

  I can’t help but stare at him though. The change is amazing. ‘How come you quit working?’ I ask.

  He taps a cigarette out of the box, steering with his knees. ‘I wanted to get a fucking life, mate. I got a job at that new place.’

  ‘The new supermarket?’

  ‘Yep. Pays a lot better than your old man.’ He holds the lighter to the tip of the cigarette, puffing quickly. Then he exhales, opens the window a couple of inches. ‘Plus,’ he says, pausing with a big stupid grin on his face, ‘I’m going to be a father.’

  ‘I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know,’ he says, and I can’t disagree with that. ‘I’ll let you out here.’ He pulls up a few metres before our driveway, the engine revving.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘And good luck with —’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘Now fuck off outta my car before anyone sees us.’

  Mother has been expecting me. Her fingernails make a quick rhythm on the wood; her face is pale with anger. The riding crop lies on the small section of unburnt table, next to a pink envelope.

  ‘Is that for me?’ I ask, pointing to the letter. From here, it looks like my name on the front.

  She leans towards me. ‘What have you done to my kitchen?’

  ‘I don’t know how it happened.’ Truth is, I suspect Bryant’s carelessly tossed aside cigarette is responsible for the fire, but I dare not tell Mother that.

  ‘Do you think we need this right now? With your father ill from the chemotherapy, with the dairy falling to pieces and Wilson quitting his job? Do you think we need you to burn the house down too?’

  ‘But Dad’s better; they told me at the hospital.’

  She snorts through her nose. With the end of the riding crop she indicates the blackened metal that was once a stove. ‘Come here, Tom. Palms up on the table.’ Her voice is serious and quiet. ‘And I don’t want a single noise out of you, because if your father wakes up …’

  I hear a weak scuffle in the hallway and we both stare at each other and hold our breath. After a moment, he stands in the doorway, one hand against the wall. The ghost that was once my father. My heart is screwed up tight and painful at the sight of him. He’s not better at all, in fact he looks worse than ever.