She turns to the back wall where the gold light wavers and small black words are tremoring, projected onto the wood. Her eyes follow the letters – Prayer for all who are missing or missed. And then to the lines beneath.
Come home!
Come home!
Come home!
The rhythmic thud inside her chest misses its beat. Recollection flowers within her – the fruited smell of the dappled garden, the dry papery scent of bark, and of paper itself, the citrus tang of the secret lemon ink. Again she reads and recalls writing those lines, the desperate request of a child alone. Waiting. For her sweet- or sour-breathed mother to enter the house. For her father to appear, sudden as a genie swirling up beside her. She had long ago seared those words to her diary pages in the bitter juice of lemon.
The code of her words broken and brought to bright purpose in the damp, cobwebby womb of the shed. Now the memories come sidling in, how she waited, longing for her mother’s return, for her father to enter the negative space that remained behind, like a figure reclaiming its shadow, or a man filling the chalk-marked shape traced onto earth after death. She sees the child that she once was – dividing herself now so that she might feel something for the girl, pressed against yellow grasses and the peppery smell of her father’s jacket; or the twig of a girl throwing herself toward the earth, handstand after handstand as she waited and the dusk crept along the fence. She sees the light in the face of the child, waiting, waiting – a flame gutted by the wind or rain that soaked the shelterless yard.
She hears shuffling in the far corner of the shed, then sighs. She takes the small globe from where it illuminates twelve shapes of glass strung around the wheel and holds it aloft and forward, the flex coiling around her arm.
‘You cracked the lemon code,’ she says to the dim shape crouched there. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’
‘I hoped you’d come,’ the words glide evenly, though the sound tears up his throat.
‘I must have thought it was some great big secret. But it was just two harmless little words. Sad though. They look better like that.’
She remembers their first moment of intimacy, the story about secrets that had forced them closer. He has become the keeper of her old secret and released it, like a whisper. He stands, feeling lightning streaks of pain in his hamstrings and thighs. He has crouched and sat cross-legged for a long, numb time.
‘He’s not coming back.’ He forces the hard words out.
‘No. Were you waiting?’ She moves closer to where he is, stooped and scuffing one foot in the dust.
‘When he left I was angry. I thought perhaps …’ His voice trails off, in fact he had not thought, only acted to cease his mind’s ruinous turning.
‘It’s not your fault, wherever he has gone.’ She sounds tentative when she wants to convince. ‘Do you remember the day we went to the beach without him? You lifted up your shirt to show. The sunburn. It was vicious. You peeled later, your whole back came right off in my hands. Remember? And you let him touch it and he said, “You brought the sun home for me”. Remember? He called St Mary’s home. The sun’s heat came pouring off you.’
Mark holds one hand out, his fingers furled around something, then opens it to expose the terrible evidence in his palm. The seashell they had given Dog Boy, the one he wore around his neck.
Rien takes a fast breath and steps backward, stunned. The globe is still clenched in her hand. Her arm drops to her side so the high shadows on the walls of the shed swing down like the accelerated path of the moon along the earth, the light now low and glimmering. He is quiet, and still.
She looks again at the proof in his palm. They stand, a minute, maybe an hour, in the absolute silence that comes of desolation, or of peace. Mark breaks the stillness, sliding the ghoulish souvenir into his pocket. Rien looks over to the glassy wheel. She sees the structure clearly now and the graceful curve of the multi-coloured nest.
‘You made these beautiful things?’
He sniffs as if they are trifles, whipped together in a spare second. She clings to this small sound though, because it bridges the terrible gap. Then steps back a little, aware of his reticence. Perhaps she has finally done it, with her own wilful neglect, all his love chased away. Or drained weeks back. She hopes his hands will soon reach out but knows they will not, they hang now at his sides like the emptied palms of the drunk who had watched her fall. No solace, nothing left.
‘Does it spin?’ she asks, as if coaxing a stubborn child. She sees each wedge of glass has words behind it, small black print for projection. ‘Show me.’ She lets the pleading note be there in her voice, because she is wretched and has made him the same, and now will never forgive herself unless things can be repaired. She takes his wrist in her hand, feeling the cotton sleeve of his shirt, and is briefly relieved that she has not yet touched his flesh. Perhaps it will be cold as her own and resistant. She drags his arm toward the bright machine and replaces the globe so it sits encased and ready, in the centre of the wheel.
Time slows and the moist air thickens. She reminds herself to breathe but must force the air from where it is suspended in her chest. Her ribs strain with the effort. She waits, gripping the bones in his arm.
Then he bends to the wheel and spins it, sending colours across the panels of wood in the shed. He has lately imagined his structure as a wheel of fortune, but one where the spinner cannot lose. He had placed each phrase behind the glass with tender care. And now the twelve short appeals are flung through the bleak light of mourning, the silty particles that might yet reveal small traces of his friend.
He had practised writing the tiny prayers in his final days in the emptied squat, rehearsing them on the page, then burning all the paper versions in the fireplace. What remained after his drafts was the simplest of phrases and he repeated this twelve times around the wheel. Come home!
He carried the lot to the shed and erected the spinning structure, then set about weaving the coloured nest, emptying Rien’s pillow of its feathers and tipping them inside. The smell of her, leached from her sleeping head, rose up suddenly, to occupy the shed. He had thought of home then, his face buried in her hair, his hands seeking the warmth she carried, the cool bursts of her breath on his skin.
His prayer made a request to the world, but also revealed a part of himself. Those twelve human pleas were spinning now in the gloom. Words wrought from malleable doubt, and wonder. And though despair and grief had gathered as he composed the words, they could not staunch the hope that tremored in him still – for moments that might occur despite past consequence. For the possibility of exquisite, future things.
Acknowledgements
The family, friends and colleagues whose wisdom, insights and support have contributed to the writing of this work are too numerous to mention here. But without their input this book would not exist, and all have my wholehearted gratitude.
I am extremely grateful for the generous encouragement and advice I received from Cassandra Pybus on many aspects of the writing. Blake Ayshford deserves a special mention for his ongoing advice, support and love. Christine Evans has been there at every turn with sensitive support; and fellow writing group members George Alexander, Noëlle Janaczewska, Nemira Schick and Fiona Winning have all contributed much to the writing and redrafting.
I am very fortunate to have had the benefit of Rosie Fitzgibbon’s astute perceptions and delicate hand in the shaping and editing of this manuscript. I am very grateful for the continuing encouragement of my parents, Roger and Madeleine Juchau, and especially for Madeleine’s help with proofreading. Many thanks are also due for the perceptive and practical advice I have received from Yvette Vignando, Michael Easton and Lyn Mouser. The following people have also been generous with their time and insights: Simon Stanton, Douglas Glover, Peter Bishop, Anna Gibbs and Ross Gibson.
I would like to acknowledge the following accounts, some of which I have loosely drawn on in my research and writing. I was intrigued and moved by Bruno Bettelheim�
�s descriptions of Joey, a young autistic child who believed he was a machine that must be wired up, plugged in and connected in order to live in The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. I was also struck by the autobiographies of several autistic people, particularly Birger Sellin’s I don’t want to be inside me anymore, as well as Oliver Sacks’ descriptions of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who cannot endure to be embraced unless it is by the ‘squeeze machine’ she builds after seeing a cattle chute (An Anthropologist on Mars). I have also been greatly informed by the essays and artwork in Hans Prinzhorn’s Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis: Works from the Prinzhorn Collection.
Extracts from earlier versions of Machines for Feeling have been published in journals as follows: ‘The Dog Before the World’ in Siglo (Issue 12, ‘Dialogues’, Summer 2000); ‘The Falling Game’ in Certifiable Truths: Stories of Love and Madness, ed. Jane Messer (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998); ‘Salt’ in Picador New Writing 4, eds Beth Yahp and Nicholas Jose (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1997).
Machines for Feeling was partially assisted by an Australian Postgraduate Research Award from the University of Western Sydney, Nepean.
Quotations from the following appear as epigraphs throughout the novel: Carolyn Forché ‘The Recording Angel’, (X) from The Angel of History, HarperCollins, New York, 1994; René Char in Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Louis Jouvet in Paul Virilio, ‘The Game of Love and Chance’, Grand Street 52, vol. 13, no. 4, 1995: 12–17; Montri Umavijani in Alphonso Lingis, Deathbound Subjectivity, Bloomington and Illinois: Indiana University Press, 1989. Pablo Neruda’s ‘Only Death’ appears within the text courtesy of translator Clayton Eshleman from Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (eds), Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
First published 2001 by University of Queensland Press
This edition published 2016
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© Mireille Juchau 2001, 2016
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