‘My dad fell and I broke my arm, see? Is your mum sick?’
He shook his head. His tears increased. She considered giving him some of the sweets but decided not to. Her mother was walking slowly out from behind the flapping plastic doors like the ones at Butcher Joe’s only there were no upside-down animals hanging back there, only people in green with hankies tied over their mouths and old ladies and men with tubes and withered looks on their faces. Her mother said, ‘There’s no hope’, but Rien didn’t know what she meant and was glad to be leaving. The hospital smelt funny and the nurses made squishing noises in their special shoes, walking up and down the hall. She tried to copy them on her way out, sliding her feet in sandals across the green floor. But her shoes made a different sound, more like a screech, and her mother pulled her arm hard, saying ‘Stop that’.
The next day at school Miss Jones said she should make a card to take to the hospital. Janey, her second-best friend, drew a box with a stick-figure inside it and scribbled it out with black texta.
‘That’s what happens when you die,’ she told Rien. ‘I know because I saw my gran in a box and then she went through the ground to heaven.’ She cocked her head and told Rien how her younger sister sometimes said, ‘Let’s go and give Granny a great big hug,’ and that she would have to remind her, ‘No, silly, it’s too late, she’s already dead.’ Janey sighed telling the story, as if wearied by such naivety.
It was then Rien had painted the first picture on the card – a giant bee with a girl’s face and long sting fingers, making the stripes with brushstrokes of orange and black. Miss Jones looked at the beegirl and the stinging hands and said, ‘Oh shivers, oh goodness,’ then ‘Why not something nice like a flower for your daddy, or a big love heart?’ and so Rien had buried the bee beneath a painted heart. She had to use lots of red to stop the bee from showing through.
She pressed the card carefully in the centre of the gift Caroline had given her to mark her last day in the clinic. It was a bound book with smooth creamy pages for her to write her thoughts in.
If she had her father’s old brown coat she would have liked to shrug herself into it and feel it scratching her delicate skin.
She stirred as the bell rang for the final classes. Another lunchtime spent on her own. Sometimes she would wander through the library shelves and mentally reassemble the contents of her father’s study. At other times she filled in the blank pages of her book with bleak notes about life in the Home, cryptic with pain and longing. She stopped speaking in class, which went unnoticed until Ms Holmes decided it was an act of insolence and signed her up for rubbish duty. No more library lunches, she wandered the playground for a whole week. It was a cruel punishment for a girl who kept herself spotlessly clean – she handled each piece of trash with utter disdain, the slimed skins of bananas dangling from two pinched fingers, the rank mash of half-eaten meat pies held at arm’s length in a quick-walk to the bins that dotted the grounds. Each disgusting item produced a new squirm, a silent shivering retch within her. She binned the trash and raced to a tap to flush her fingers in the icy stream. By the day’s end her hands were rubbed raw and numb with cold. After the bell she washed them with soap in the hall toilets. It was only then that she could bring herself to lift her hands to her lips and warm them, sighing into the cupped flesh.
The Embellishment of an Intolerable Life
Dog Boy pushes his way through the people at the bar. Words buzz like flies overhead as he breaks through the bodies, ducks under spicy armpits and scoots around the chests of men. They seem like massive trunks of trees, so little do they shift as he nudges past. Finally he reaches the counter pocked with cigarette burns and ringed with beery sweat. He orders two schooners, and holds the liquid above his head as he passes back through the crowd, scanning the room till he finds them, easy to spot because of Lola, the sparkiest character there, he thinks. She wags her tail in an earnest frenzy, her eyes blinking over-quickly in the smoke.
‘So this is where you’ve been, no news for weeks and here I find you. The pub.’
Dog Boy turns, slopping beer down his grubby forearm, and sees her hollow cheeks, black hair pinned messily on her head, those haunted eyes and their plunging corners.
‘Rien Rien Rien,’ his face becomes entirely animated.
‘I’ll have one of those,’ she takes a schooner from his hand and gulps hungrily. He watches the foam shimmering above her lip, thinks it’s the first time he has seen signs of appetite in her. She used to push her food on journeys around the plates at the Home and would remain behind after the bell, staring listlessly at the congealed masses before her.
‘Thirsty, yeah? I’ll get you another, this is for …’ He jerks his elbow toward Salvatore and Lola, waiting at a table by the blacked-out window.
‘Oh, friends, Dog Boy! New friends. Not part of this,’ she waves at the crush, ‘rugby reunion or whatever it is?’
He shakes his head.
‘So,’ she sniffs, ‘you smell bloody awful, where have you been and what’s this about burning the old place down?’
‘I … yeah, that’s right,’ he lets out a bubbling chuckle, more sudden self-consciousness than amusement, he has forgotten her discomfiting manner, the way she can scrutinise and pronounce in a quick once-over.
‘I’ve been everywhere, Rien, saw the sea – yeah, that’s right, and I found … ah, this beautiful garden, like Eden, rats jumping over the sea wall and across the grass at night.’
‘Eden with rats! But what about this fire? You’re a wanted man, isn’t that right?’ Her fingers pluck bonily at his clothes as if searching for singe marks.
‘Mmm, yeah, I’ll save the story for later. So, you’re okay, you look …’
‘What? Come on, spit it out!’ Beneath the din he heard the guttural sound of something swallowed down her throat.
‘Er, different, I only meant … Mark here?’
‘I am different, Dog Boy.’ She says this importantly, turning to look at the bar. ‘He’s at home. He has projects. I suppose you’ll hear about them. He’s inventing some sort of machine to take him to Planet Indolent.’
Soon they are seated with Salvatore and the tail-thumping Lola. Rien realises she’s met the man before and explains about the bus, the picture of Antonio. Salvatore claps his hands together, feigning recollection; he gives out his pamphlets to so many people he hasn’t a clue who she is. Rien notices something different about the man, perhaps it is this new context, he looks shabbier than she remembered. He looks, she thinks, like one of the men permanently installed at the bar on the nights she spends drinking here after work.
‘Lovely Lola,’ Dog Boy says, patting the dog, ‘lovely, lovely Lola.’
Rien takes a sip of her second schooner. ‘Ah alcohol, an old family remedy. How does it go? “Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink …” ’ she says the phrase in a breathless chant.
Salvatore and Dog Boy laugh and drain the fluid quickly from their glasses.
Does she know, Dog Boy says, that years before they were there, St Mary’s housed orphans and stolen children. ‘Who?’ she asks, her brow in neat furrows. Ten thousand children from across the country. Some of them with no parents, some taken from their homes because they were mixed up, coloured.
‘Mixed,’ Salvatore says, ‘not mixed up! They were partly Aboriginal. Some were dark like me, see,’ he rubs his forearm, ‘and others pale.’
A look of surprise forms on Dog Boy’s face, warping his features. He asks, ‘Are you …?’
‘No, not me,’ Salvatore begins to laugh. ‘Italian,’ he says, spitting the word and laughing at some inscrutable thing.
Rien lets this information take slow shape in her head, remembering the way darker-skinned children at the Home were teased. Drink more milk, you might get whiter. And how when she first arrived, there were framed photographs in the hall foyer of young children, some dark, some light-skinned, in grainy black and white. The children were posed in bleak clusters, flanked by nuns in
dark cloth. These images soon disappeared. Perhaps they weren’t pilfered like all the other items that went missing from the Home, perhaps the teachers had taken them down.
The three sit silently. Dog Boy and Rien peer into the gold light in their glasses. Lola kicks a retaliatory paw from the livid snarl of a dream. Salvatore is very still, his head turned to the blackened window. Dog Boy begins to twitch and shift in the hot silence. Rien lifts a hand above her head where invisible forms are fluttering. As if the blighted spirit of each child that had passed through the Home was circling in a tormented flight above them. Soon the winged souls, not quite birds, not entirely bats, would flap and butt helplessly at the pub windows, the oblivious world passing, passing, beyond the darkened panes.
‘So, Salvatore,’ Rien says his name awkwardly, ‘any luck with your search so far, any luck with Antonio?’
Salvatore shakes his head slowly.
‘Hey, I have something to show you, I sort of slept on it, sorry,’ Dog Boy smooths a crumpled wad of newspaper from his pocket. ‘It kept me warm one night, that’s right and then it rained, yeah, so it’s a bit smudgy.’
He hands her a jagged article ripped from the newspaper – an interview with Dr Caroline Baker about her last days at St Mary’s. She had left in protest at the decision to hold an exhibit of the children’s artwork for the public. The show was called ‘The Embellishment of an Intolerable Life’, but the doctor called it embezzlement, and claimed such a public display was a breach of privacy and of the trust between the therapist and the children.
‘She made a speech, yeah, before she left. Something about the stolen kids, and how they should be teaching us.’ Dog Boy talks slowly, gathering the threads of the doctor’s speech.
‘Teaching us what?’ Rien looks up from the torn paper.
‘She is meaning the lessons from the past perhaps,’ Salvatore says and Rien glances at him, having forgotten for a moment that he is there.
‘Yeah, that’s right, about not stealing other people’s kids.’ Dog Boy remembers now. She had talked about families and how they should stay together. And he had listened, scratching all his trapped limbs. Her voice had increased the itch he had to flee the place, though it was not his family he would run to.
‘The lessons from the past, the children. No one has learnt a bloody thing.’ Salvatore’s voice is loud and bitter.
Rien wonders for a moment, but cannot work out if it’s Salvatore who’s drunk or her. She teeters on her stool. She feels awfully stranded. Was there any place in the world that wasn’t littered with the picked bones of the past? Though her time in the Home had been mostly dull and featureless, the measured way that things had proceeded was at least a kind of security. Now all that predictable discipline seemed a kind of neat deception.
She puts both hands on the beery slick of the bar table. They slither across as she leans in close to Dog Boy. He sees the cords of vein on her hands; two ropier strands plunge either side of her neck to the shelf of collarbone.
‘Did you see the art show?’ The timbre of her voice has altered. He nods and tips back on his stool, lifting the two front legs into the air as if riding the rump of a rearing animal. His fingers open and close on the emptiness where the reins should be. He keeps his eyes averted from the force of her expression.
‘So, what were the pictures of?’
Weird stuff, he says. He had been annoyed because they hadn’t displayed the volcano Mark and he made. Salvatore interrupts to ask about this project which Dog Boy calls sculpture. Rien notices relief pass over Dog Boy’s face; he enthuses for ten minutes about the shape of the mountain, its size and colour, about all the botanical details he had painted on its lumpen surface, finally describing the lava that shot like a fountain in a reddish spume. Rien leaves and returns with three more glasses; she sucks down the creamy top and waits for a pause.
‘What weird stuff, what pictures did they use?’ she asks, impatient in a schoolmarmish tone.
‘All the things were labelled with what you call it, diagnoses, because of Dr Shore, yeah, the new shrink who replaced Caroline. Joe Diego, schizophrenic, so and so borderline personality, blah blah sexual abuse. There were even pictures of people, yeah with big dicks sticking out!’ He laughs nervously and Salvatore claps his hands together as if signalling the end of the conversation. But Dog Boy continues.
‘Okay, there was a painting of yours without arms. And another sort of letter I took down before I lit the fire. I have it somewhere.’ He bends down to scrabble in his bag and giggles as if to pre-empt her response, but it is no use. A look of horror forms on Rien’s face, her hands shake, the skin of her cheeks and throat is a blotched palette of blood red.
She stands and grabs the sleeves of his shirt, his glass tips over and beer drips onto the sleeping Lola’s head. The dog wakes with a yelp and Salvatore bends to touch her. Dog Boy reaches across the table and rescues the newspaper. He crumples it quickly in his hand.
A rumbling voice emerges from the crowd, ‘Taxi!’
‘That’s crap. They fucking didn’t have my pictures there, who said?’ Rien pulls Dog Boy closer. She tastes his sweetish breath in her mouth. He stutters, a whiny thread weaving through each word.
‘They did, Rien, they only showed the work from kids who’d left. I saw your picture, your name was on the bottom, well the Rien bit, not the whole …’ He bends again to fish around in the clutter of his bag. ‘And yeah, Mark’s stuff was there too – that’s right, his diagrams and some of his wiry machines with string leads coming out of them.’
He hopes this detail will placate her, why should she be upset when her work was shown in such good company, at least her small acts of creation were deemed worthy of display. But he decides not to tell her about the other piece he’d souvenired, labelled clearly with her name. It had made him angry enough to see it, trapped behind the glass of the frame. He had run from the room after smashing the glass to release it, his right eye running with soundless tears.
She takes her hands from Dog Boy’s shirt and rubs them against her thighs, they feel like two bunches of sausages, each finger thick and heavy and cold.
‘And what was my diagnosis then?’ she asks gravely.
‘I don’t remember,’ Dog Boy lies. He knows the truth is not important now, those locked-up days are over for all of them. He pushes the beer-soaked news clipping into the back pocket of his pants, hoping she won’t notice, hoping tomorrow all of this will be forgotten.
‘I will go now,’ Salvatore mutters and gathers Lola’s lead in one hand. Dog Boy says a rueful goodbye, the flesh above his teeth is smarting. He pulls his lips hard against it while he speaks, as if communicating with a deaf man, his mouth over-articulating in the bluish light of the pub. He’ll be looking out for Antonio, he says, and taps the photo on Salvatore’s lapel – since his lie, words are now not proof enough. He watches the old man and his dog cross the room.
Rien doesn’t notice this departure. She leans on the table. The hard sculpture of her head rests on its forearm plinth. She squeezes the skin of her forehead, trying to stimulate some kind of order from this news, some logic to restore calm. When Dog Boy turns back she has gone. He sees the remnant of dark hair moving through the crush at the far end of the pub. She is running, or trying to, each step is hampered by a stranger. Soon she will be out the door and into the dark folds of the night.
Peas in a Pod
It was decided. Four months after Dad’s death. I was sent to Grandma and Pops’ to give Mum ‘a bit of peace’. The day Grandma arrived smelling of mint and cigarettes, I peered out my window, hiding behind the strawberry-covered curtains, and watched her walk across the front lawn. She was wearing sandals and I panicked because I knew the bees could get at the small flap of flesh that hung over the side of the soles. ‘Grandma,’ I said, ‘watch out for those bees,’ and I giggled but I felt sick at the same time and counted backwards hoping she’d get to the front door by ten or else she was definitely going to die.
I didn’t want Mum to have any peace. Peace was where Dad was, resting in it. It wasn’t something that the living ought to have as well, or else how could you tell between the two? I didn’t want to know anything about peace then. Busting with energy and a kind of grief, all I wanted was to force chaos into Mum’s recent silence. If you won’t make a noise, Mum, then I’ll make the roar of two.
‘Kiss your mother bye-bye.’
Mum touched the back of my neck and said, ‘Be good for Grandma and Pops.’ I said, ‘Rest in heavenly peace, Mum,’ and she made more tears – loud ones with the noise like she was running out of air and I ran into the backyard where it was getting dark and buried my face in the hedge. I had my eyes shut but Grandma found me and carried me out to the front lawn as I watched her feet squeezing out of the sandals.
‘Wasn’t so long ago you were just like one of these. Just a pea in a pod,’ Grandma said and showed me how to crack the crunchy skin and poke out the peas with a finger. Some of them were stubborn and didn’t want to come out.
‘Was I a stuck pea in my Mum’s tummy?’
‘No, you came a little early. ‘
I felt sorry for the little peas when I found them curled up in their pods. I didn’t want to push them out with my fingers so I made two piles:
One for empty pods.
One for pods with little peas still in them.
Daddy was Grandma’s pea in a pod and he was a big fat one when he popped out, she said. And then her tears fell into the saucepan with the dancing peas and the bubbles.
When Grandma said ‘peas’ it sounded like ‘peace’ and I asked her why Mum wanted to go there.
Machines for Feeling Page 12