by Cate Kennedy
And then they expected him to sing. Sing that fatuous retread of a song. By the waters, the waters of the Franklin, we lay down and wept ...
‘Is it that fagus you’re taking?’
‘Yeah, fagus and moss.’
‘That’s like that postcard we saw in the visitor’s centre.’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘Nothing like it. A totally different light and configuration.’
Holding up that banner and the bulldozer straining its huge transmission to get purchase on the bank, and Rich, still numb, catching the eye of someone else in his affinity group and stepping forward with arms linked into its path.
The HEC guys giving him the fish-eyed look of blokes sick and tired of such a bunch of posers. The police giving it a minute or two then stepping up and arresting them so formally and unemotionally — a hand on the shoulder, you’re arrested, a dead-stern face reciting the lines earnestly — that it all seemed unreal. Another role-play.
He’d lost the faith. He knew it in the yard at Risdon, when the protestors had got together to rehearse what they’d all say in court, and when someone suggested a sharing he’d felt a scalding, mortified horror at the thought of being hugged, back here in the real world. Stuttering and repeating himself in front of the magistrate like an idiot. Back to Melbourne after he’d been released and retrieved all his gear from the campaign office in Hobart, he’d screwed the lens back on and tested the shutter action again. Terrible. When he held it to his ear and tried to wind on the film, he heard a series of small dull snaps inside as the teeth tore through the swollen, stuck roll, so that without even wasting his time with hoping, he pulled the whole mess out of the canister and threw it into the bin.
‘I had a great camera once,’ he began to tell people when they admired his photos of the beggar children in Kathmandu, ‘but it fell into the Franklin River, while I was on the Blockade, and got damaged.’
He’d leave it at that, so they’d imagine a skirmish, a clash with police, the camera torn from his hand and thrown furiously over the edge by an ugly redneck local or vindictive copper. After a while, the odd thing was he could almost see it happening that way himself, like a ghostly double exposure.
Sophie sat on the rock, watching Rich as he knelt over the tripod, then shifted around to the other side and knelt over it again, focusing through his camera, adjusting the tripod minutely, squinting up at the sky.
She thought of all the hours of her childhood she’d spent imagining her father, every time Father’s Day rolled around and the hardware stores started advertising power tools and leaf blowers for Dad, she’d imagine him, grinning with delight at an electric drill. Or she’d be on stage in a school production, swishing her dragon tail behind her or running into the spotlight being a forest sprite, and she’d see other fathers in the audience and think about Rich, whether he’d be a videoing father or one who just sat there, hands tucked between his knees holding a rolled program, following her every move. She wasn’t the only one. There weren’t many fathers around amongst her circle of friends. Their mothers would get together on Friday nights after school and sit drinking beer with their feet in someone’s dam, while the kids raced around and paddled, and it seemed to Sophie the conversations would always follow the same kind of worn track — husbands and boyfriends absent, potential boyfriends on the horizon, the limitations and weaknesses of the old ones and the possible star qualities of the new ones. The mothers would let the kids cover themselves with mud and dry out in the late afternoon sun like lazing crocodiles. Sometimes, they’d plaster themselves with mud too, or yoghurt and honey face packs, or they would henna their hair and sit with their heads stiff with red sludge, combing each others’ right to the ends and winding it on top of their heads to warm it up in the sun and make their hair even redder. The afternoons stretching into a long dazzle of sunburned indolence and circular talk.
‘Don’t worry about wearing swimmers!’ they would call to the kids, but Sophie always wore swimmers. They were allowed, on Fridays, to have hot chips from the fish and chip shop — proper food, the kids privately agreed; crisp and salty and fried, the big white piece of wrapping paper flapping on the grass as they sat and devoured them, licking their fingers.
The mothers would wade into the dam and rinse the henna from their hair, rubbing in herbal conditioner, admiring the colour in the late fading light, and she always thought how similar their bodies seemed — soft and faded brown and starting to look worn-out, broad across the hips and thighs, swathed in Indian dresses and stonewashed jeans that came off when they splashed into the water.
That’s what having babies did to your body. Wrecked it. Gave you a body like theirs — like balloons that had been stretched to the limit of their endurance then left to gradually deflate again, the skin silvered with stretch marks and softly puckered like overripe fruit.
Not for her. She had already decided. Whatever she did, she would never let herself get like that. Just like her mother, the other women didn’t even try to disguise it, all that disgusting loose and dimpled flesh, the rolls of fat bulging over the top of their jeans. They had no shame. It was as if they were actually proud of it.
She remembered the time they had arranged for all the girls to participate in a ritual womanhood ceremony with them, when she was about twelve.
‘Celebrate the cusp of what you’re on!’ Sandy exhorted her when she said she didn’t feel like joining in. ‘Your body’s old enough to bear a child now. Feel that power!’
Totally embarrassing. She hardly knew where to look. Their mothers drank mulled wine and painted their faces with ochre, danced with tambourines and clapsticks around a fire they’d built and fuelled with symbolic items. The dance was meant to be a Native American ritual of cleansing and rebirth. An absolute crock.
‘Burn something you reject!’ Sandy had cried, wild and elated. ‘Something from childhood you’re leaving behind, or something negative that you have no more use for, that’s been holding you back.’
She had burned her Strawberry Shortcake diary, the one with the dinky little lock that she was sure Sandy had snooped in while she was at school. When she saw her mother’s face, she knew she’d hoped to see, instead, the metal box of postcards from Rich. That hadn’t even occurred to her, to torch the sparse record of shorthand correspondence from him.
Your father, Sandy used to call him, up until Sophie was about eight. Your father’s sent you another postcard — that was generous of him, wasn’t it? A voice dangerous with contained bitterness, acid-edged, uncontestable.
Then she stopped that, and he became that guy. Like he’d run out of credit on his paternity account. Missed his last opportunity. ‘I tell you, that guy,’ Sandy would say, shaking her head. ‘Don’t get me started. What a dud he turned out to be. What a total waste of space.’
And once, just once, Sophie had said, unguardedly, ‘He’s still my father.’
And her mother had said, ‘I want you to understand: he was never your father. He was your sperm donor.’
Now she watched him, that stranger. That guy. Her polaroid father. A ponytail, same as in the photo. A camera round his neck, and his hands resting on it, ready, same as then. Every other detail was revealed now as stuff she’d painstakingly invented. There he went, climbing over rocks towards the small tree with the orange leaves, and pulling some off. Back to his camera and tripod, and Sophie watched him lift his hand and scatter those leaves onto the moss. Then pick them all off except for one. Then add one more, and squint through the viewfinder again, then reach down and arrange the two leaves against the bed of moss with his finger. Crazy man. If you saw him with a baseball hat on, hiding his greying hair, and just in his jeans and t-shirt, you’d never know he was middle-aged. And he was still pretty good-looking too, in an older-guy way, if he’d just lose the ponytail. He’d be hunted to extinction in Ayresville, that was for sure. One night at the pub and they’d be lining up to see if he was on the market, all the single mothers tired of sleeping alone and cho
pping their own kindling. He’d do the rounds, over the months, shifting from one to the next, wrecking old friendships and shrugging it all off with a helpless grin, leaving a trail of chaos in his wake as he stumbled into the next pair of arms — the same thing she’d seen happen tons of times. He’d be just like any of those guys, just the same. Nothing special.
She reached for her iPod, pushed the comforting headphones into her ears, and scrolled down till she found the Dogland track she wanted. Out here it filled her head like a soundtrack to a film so familiar in atmosphere she didn’t have to pay attention to it; it just underscored whatever her eyes landed on. A movie you made up as you went along.
My anguish hides, came the lead singer’s voice. Rise up with her sacred dagger, there can be no disguise, my anguish hides.
Sophie’s head nodded slightly in time as she stared out over the patterns of light and shade on the ridges, shifting and sliding as the clouds moved. ‘Thorns engulf me,’ she sang along softly, ‘and I turn against the flame. I will not see my captor, I will not say his name. ’
Fourteen
What was in those painkillers? Rich was having a bad night; a night of syrupy, chattery, trippy dreams; a night of restless, garbled dozing as he shifted himself painfully on his sleeping mat in the hut, the cold seeping into the woodenly stiff muscles of his neck and seizing up the flaring hot tendons in his leg. He was back in his parents’ lounge room, half listening to his mother talk about the boxes of junk they had stored in the shed, allowing himself to tune out her fretful circular monologue. Then she’d said, ‘The sooner your father gets those boxes out of there the better, because I can hear them at night, going through them, picking over all our things.’
He’d glanced up. ‘Who, Mum?’ he’d said, and she’d looked wretched with anxiety.
‘Well, you know. They come and go through it. Take things out and sell them. I can tell, when I go out to check. Everything’s been opened up and re-taped down again, so they don’t raise the alarm.’
He turned to his father, who was sitting stolidly in front of the football. ‘Dad?’ he said softly. But his father had only glanced quickly at him and looked away again, his face an expressionless mask. Rich had looked back to his mother’s hands, twisting in her lap with agitation.
‘All my good china,’ she was saying now. ‘They think I don’t know, but I do. I hear them.’
‘I think maybe you’re hearing mice or possums, Mum,’ Rich said. He felt a heavy, encumbering sense of inevitable obligation descending as he spoke; he longed to turn now, like his father, back to the numbing boredom of the last quarter being played out on the TV screen.
‘They open them, you see. The cartons. They have a key, because I lock the garage door, but it doesn’t do any good.’
He had tackled it with his father, when she’d gone out to make tea. ‘How long’s this been going on?’
‘She’s dreaming. There’s nothing there.’
‘I’m not talking about the bloody boxes. I’m talking about her — getting so caught up in this delusion.’
His father grunted. ‘You know your mother. It’s been so long I barely register now.’
He’d stared hard at his father, willing him to turn around and face him. ‘She seems very distressed by it — have you spoken to her doctor?’
Now his father had swung round like he’d been barely restraining his grievance.
‘Listen, mate, any time you want to come and take a bit of responsibility for your mother and take her down to the doctor, you’re bloody welcome to. Meanwhile, just leave it.’
She came back in. Teapot but no cups. Then cups but no milk.
‘Let me give you a hand,’ he had said, feeling heavy dread dragging itself over him, the cold awareness of what was starting to happen.
He watched her set up the cups, position the strainer, lift the pot, and pause.
‘How do you have yours again?’ she said.
‘Milk with no sugar, Mum.’
‘Yes. And what about your father?’
Rich twitched through his sleep, turned himself painfully onto his side. His mind felt ephedrine-bright, scoured with the pills, running manic with weariness. A dreaming slide like a wash of water, and he was upside-down, pitched off a surfboard into a dragging undertow, air crushed from him in churning solid seawater, conscious, as he dangled there choking, of a pinching resistance keeping him hobbled.
Ankle strap. The board up there on the surface, and his ankle clamped by a strap. It clamped him, wrenched, shook him back and forth. Twisted the chafed and burning tendons of his heel. All he had to do was rouse himself, bend his body around and climb that connecting rope. Hand over hand, up to the precious air.
Then he was dry again, back in a chair, straight-backed as if it was a job interview. He knew where he was, though. With his father, at the specialist’s. He’d sat there listening to the talk about cortical and subcortical dementia, holding brochures about neurological and cognitive warning signs, sat there, his father stony-faced beside him, as the doctor listed on his fingers everything Rich had already seen. ‘Loss of memory, loss of intellectual skills, difficulty with personal and social interactions, withdrawal,’ he’d said smoothly, ticking them off, and Rich heard the jargon, and bought into it with instant, eager relief. Wading straight in and wielding it like a pro, like a man finding his true calling. Hedging delicately over ‘custodial care’ and ‘comorbidity’, galloping smoothly through ‘assisted living’.
Then the doctor had scratched his head and hesitated, and Rich could feel them both stiffen, sitting there. Father and son, bracing themselves for it, attuned to avoidance.
‘One consideration,’ said the doctor, ‘is that alcohol can worsen the behavioural and neurological changes people experience in these early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Long-term alcohol dependence leads to much higher cognitive impairment’, and Rich had said with total neutrality, ‘Oh yes?’
Oh, it was a neutrality that surely would make his father proud, neutrality so perfectly learned and mastered, and over such a long apprenticeship.
‘It’s important to be clear,’ the doctor went on diplomatically, ‘because if we know there is a history of alcohol dependence or abuse that would certainly change the types of treatment we would use. Some medications actually create more problems — stomach and intestinal problems, for example, or complications with delusions. We’d be cautious about prescribing a number of drugs if there was an alcohol problem.’
In the silence that followed he heard his father exhale beside him, and clear his throat.
‘Nothing like that,’ he said decisively, ‘she’s just always been a nervous person’, and Rich felt himself nodding slowly in agreement, sealing his mother’s fate in this tacit collusion, this sudden one-off piece of cowardly teamwork that showed him, once and for all, that he was his father’s son. The moment suspended, outstretched in a little pool still as a mirror. Defining him.
‘No, nothing like that,’ he’d heard himself echo. Smiling his reassuring charmer’s smile, wheeling his mother out before him like a human shield, full of all the deflections in the world.
He pulled his rustling sleeping bag round his shoulders, not awake exactly but not asleep either, seeing himself signing pages, his pen an ominous slippery weight between his fingers. Custodial care agreements, power-of-attorney agreements, all the signing that was required now to keep the lie humming along, the regretful conversations with neighbours and friends, the immoveable unrelenting silence of his father touring through the ‘care facility’, all the fuel that was needed to push into the lie’s maw and feed its growing appetite.
He’d walked away and left her there, he thought as he ached and twisted and turned, some slippage occurring in his dream.
Left her there, crying. Off to somewhere. Borneo. Latin America. Somewhere he couldn’t be contacted again for a good long while. All the best intentions in the world of visiting, of reassessing, of reinventing, but still leaving. Easy
lies. Spinning himself some bullshit story, all the while backing away, feeling for the car keys, desperate to be free of it. That adroit stepping backwards, saving himself.
He opened his eyes, blinking until the dark lines in front of him resolved themselves into the wooden slats of the bunk above. Tasmania. The bloody wilderness walk. Still three days from a hot shower, his ankle banging now like a warning drum proclaiming imminent war, and four hours walking ahead of him this morning.
He’d be alright, he thought hazily, if only he didn’t have so much to carry.
If only the load on his back didn’t feel so much like the clinging, goading arms and legs of some other person riding him, a ruthless and oblivious deadweight wrapped around his neck and hips.
Rich ran a hand over his face, as if erasing it. He licked his lips and tasted salt.
Sandy had meant just to lie on her bed for a short break and read another chapter of spirit-guide questions. She’d meant, a few minutes later, just to close her eyes for a moment and ruminate on those questions. Then it occurred to her guidance might come in the form of a visualisation, or a dream, so nobody would mind if she allowed herself to keep sinking.
She was trying to get passport photos taken, but somehow at the moment the flash went off she’d slip awkwardly on her seat, or jump in surprise. Each polaroid page rolled out of the camera at $12.50 a pop and she’d watch them darken and develop with a sinking heart. There she was, slipping out of the frame, her eyes widened like a lunatic. And there, a blur of head you could count on to move at just the wrong moment. Worst of all was when the last page got ejected from the camera and she stood waving it, waiting to see the image form, the passport office clerk watching the clock, so she knew she was being a monumental nuisance. Waving that sheet and peeling back the protective layer, to find she wasn’t even there. She’d disappeared entirely. She hopped urgently from foot to foot, crying with frustration. She needed that passport, or the plane would go without her. Take off while she faded, blurred into nothing, fell off her chair, missed her chance. She could hear it, actually, overhead, winging its way through the air with her empty seat inside, leaving her behind.