Ghost Child

by Caroline Overington

  She said, ‘Only if we can see the dog.’

  It took me a sec to figure out what she was on about, but then I got it. The dog on the tuckerbox, that’s what she wanted to see. Myself, I’d seen it plenty of times, and I warned her it wasn’t much: just a statue, and a poor one, of a dog sitting on a tuckerbox, ears up, alert, exactly five miles from Gundagai – I know, because I’ve clocked it, and it’s just like they say in the song. I took the turn-off, and we pulled up and looked at the statue for about five minutes, and she said, ‘Well, okay.’ And I said, ‘Told you it wasn’t much.’ And then I said, ‘I reckon we better get a motel.’ We got back in the car and headed into town. There were four motels, and three had those neon NO signs above the word vacancy, but at the fourth there was no sign, so I went in to check it out and they had one room. I told Lauren we’d have to share, and she said, ‘Yeah, let’s share,’ like it was something I was suggesting.

  I said, ‘When do you reckon we last slept under the same roof? Must have been twenty years ago?’

  She said, ‘Probably.’ And then she looked at me, with this very strange expression – not panicked, just very strange – and said, ‘Do you remember anything about the house in Barrett?’

  I said, ‘No.’

  She didn’t say, ‘Do you remember Jake?’ I figure she thought my first answer covered it. The truth is, I don’t remember Jake. How could I remember him? I was, like, three when he died. I know who he is, obviously, but remember him? No, I’d be lying if I said I did. Anyway, she looked for a second like she was going to say something else, but then she lit a cigarette and I thought, ‘Okay, whatever. It can wait.’

  We checked into the motel and it was soon clear to me that we weren’t goin’ to be gettin’ any sleep. Somehow, we got a second wind, and we sat up, talkin’ and eatin’ the pizza we had delivered. Like everybody, she wanted to know what happened to my hand and, actually, that felt super weird, lying beside her in the bed talking about it, because how many times had I done that with a chick? Gotten the business over, laid back for the post-coital ciggie, and then been asked, ‘What’s the story with your hand?’

  The story is this: I lost my right arm above the elbow when I was twenty. Technically, that makes me an ‘A2J’ – an above-the-second-joint, wrist and elbow amputee. Now, most people think that’s got to be the worst thing in the world, losing an arm, but I can tell you, it’s made precisely one difference to my life, and that is, I pull more chicks these days. No, it’s true. The ladies have been good to me since I lost the arm. It gives them something to talk about with me. I size ’em up, and decide what to say. Sometimes, I say I got attacked by a shark, which works better in Sydney than in Melbourne, where, frankly, there aren’t that many sharks. Other times, I launch myself into a story, one that’s gotten better over the years. I put on this low voice, and I say, ‘I was walkin’ in the bush when I got trapped in a ditch and a bear was comin’ up on me’ – you wouldn’t believe how many chicks don’t question that, since we have no bloody bears in Australia last time I checked – but they just look at you wide-eyed, and then I go on, ‘So I’m lying there, in the dark, with these big yellow eyes comin’ at me, with branches around me breakin’, and I feel this tuggin’… on my leg.’

  Then I pause, and they say, ‘Your leg?’

  And I say, ‘Yeah. It was pullin’ my leg. Like I’m pullin’ yours!’ And of course, right then, they hit me with a pillow, and before long we’re off again.

  The real story is, I fell under a train. Drunk as a lord I was, like I often am on a Friday night. I’d been in the pub and I’d had a few, and my idea was to walk home since I don’t drink and drive. But then I passed the railway station and decided to get the train. And I fell off the platform. That’s the unromantic truth. I fell off the platform and the train took the arm off, almost to the shoulder.

  The thing the chicks always want to know, when I finally fess up the truth, is, ‘Can you remember it?’ I always say, ‘Mate, it was a top night out. I was legless. And now, of course, I’m armless!’

  And once again, that usually gets us back to business.

  With Lauren that night, I actually told the truth. ‘Yeah, I remember it. The roar, I remember. The arm not being there, I remember that. Looking down and seeing this flesh, all ripped and torn and bloody, and thinking to myself: that skin, it looks like lace. That blood, it looks like wine. I remember that.’

  When I woke up after the surgery, I said to the doctor, ‘Mate, which arm?’ And he said, ‘Right,’ and that’s when I thought, ‘Oh okay, cool,’ because I’m a south-paw, always have been, so I just went off to sleep, thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. They can have the right.’

  They kept me in an induced coma for eighteen days, and when I came around, I saw that I wasn’t near the worst off on the ward. They had blokes who had come off motorbikes, who wouldn’t walk again. They had blokes who dived into creeks and hit their heads on rocks, and they wouldn’t walk again, either.

  What did I have? Mrs Palmer and her five daughters were gone, but like I say, I never made much use of the right, so it was no biggie, really.

  I had this cool nurse that helped me. Her name was Angelina, but straightaway, I started to call her Angel. She was just as a nurse should be, all big boobs and as old as me mum, and bustling around me. I actually told Mum, when I was still drowsy, ‘Mum, this woman, she’s not a nurse, she’s an angel. I met her in heaven, and she was wearing a halo, and I brought her back with me.’

  Angel was mocking me, saying, ‘You’re takin’ too much morphine, Harley. I ain’t got no halo. That was me hairnet you saw.’

  Angel was the one who told me, ‘You blokes who have lost a limb, you go one of two ways. Either you start thinking your life is over, or you just carry on like you’ve dropped a wallet or something. I want you to be the second kind.’

  She said, ‘Some people, they lose the soul with the limb. You don’t want to be one of those guys. When that happens, they don’t recover. They might survive, but not for long. They end up hooked on drugs, or wanting to kill themselves.’

  She told me, ‘If they left your soul on the railway tracks, Harley, things are gonna be bad, but I reckon they got it.’ She was quite a spiritual bird, Angel, and I totally understood where she was coming from, because I didn’t feel like I’d lost much at all. I felt like I feel after a night on the piss: I was groggy. I couldn’t move that well. But I didn’t think, ‘Oh, my life is over.’

  Later on, when I moved from the trauma ward to the rehab, I met blokes who were like Angel said: definitely not all there. I mean, obviously parts of their bodies were missin’, but there was something else missin’, too, like they’d lost – I dunno about the soul – but like they’d lost the plot.

  The other thing I understood from the get-go was there would be women. For a lot of amputees, and also the blokes who end up in wheelchairs, it’s like, who is gonna love a freak like me? But girls love the arm. It’s not grotesque, it’s just kind of missing, and once they see it’s not hideous they come flocking. So when the doctor comes around and says to me, ‘You may have difficulty relating to people, you may find that people find you some kind of object of fascination,’ I’m thinkin’, ‘You’re the one that’s lost the plot, mate, if you think that’s gonna be a problem.’ I’m happy to be an object of fascination. Bring it on.

  As for the day-to-day stuff, you do your best. There was pain at the start, fairly constant, and I’d be perspiring, and Mum would say, ‘What’s happening, Harley?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s my arm. It’s aching.’ I’ve heard people say, ‘It’s like pins and needles,’ but excuse me, it’s not like pins and needles, it’s like a red-hot poker going through your bone. I had a few practical problems: how do you do up a button with one arm? How do you put on a shirt? But that’s just practice and also, Mum, she’s good with that kind of stuff. She invented me a few things: a steel hook thing that I call the Ruby Button Threader, and a face washer that I can put over the stump,
so I can wash the other armpit.

  I had to give up working on roofs, obviously, but I didn’t mind too much. I kept the business, just hired more blokes to work for me, and the money kept coming in. I had to get the ute remodelled, so the gears were on the steering wheel, and then the rehab people wanted to know, ‘Are you gonna go for the claw, or for the prosthetic?’ I was pretty keen on the claw but I went for the prosthetic. It’s a silicon sleeve with a hand and fingers and, to be honest, I don’t wear it that much. I can’t see the point. It’s bloody heavy, and it’s not like you can use it. The thing just hangs there. I do, however, have some fun with it. When I take it off, it looks like something from the Halloween shop. Me and me mates dug it into the ground at the cemetery once, set it up like it was coming out of the ground near one of the graves, and then we sat around drinking, and watching to see the local teenagers come and scream.

  The thing wasn’t cheap and I suppose I should actually wear it as opposed to piss-fart around with it, but it’s not something I can actually hide, the fact that I’ve got one arm. I mean, people are gonna find out eventually, so why not up-front? Besides that, your arm, whether you know it or not, weighs about five kilos, and although it hangs off your shoulder, it’s got its own support. You try hangin’ five kilos of silicon off your shoulder, with no support. It’s not that comfortable.

  So that’s the story of my arm. I told Lauren all about it that night in the motel, and the only thing she really said was, ‘Did the lady who looked after you freak out when she found out?’ And I remember thinking, ‘Did who?’ Because those words – ‘The lady who looked after you’ – didn’t mean all that much to me. I didn’t get that she meant Mum. And that’s when I thought, ‘Yeah, we don’t have the same mum, not any more,’ and how weird is that? I find my sister, and then I find we haven’t got the same mum. Except we do, obviously. And that got me thinking, ‘I better give my mum – I mean, Rubes – a call. I better tell her I’m bringing Lauren.’ So I go to Lauren, ‘Mate, I’m just gonna pop out and get some ciggies.’ And she’s like, ‘Not for me, mate, I’m giving up.’ And I’m like, ‘Righto.’

  I collected up my keys and my wallet – I could see she was amused, the way I put my wallet in my mouth to open the door – and I was careful to slip my mobile into my pocket. I started up the ute – it stunk of McDonald’s and cigarettes, two of my favourite smells – and I drove down to where the Caltex was glowing on the freeway. I stopped out the front, flipped open the phone and thought to myself, ‘Come on, Harley. This is no biggie.’ I pressed the keys and the phone lit up. If anybody was gonna answer, it was gonna be Mum, and she did.

  I said, ‘Mum, it’s me, and I gotta tell you something and don’t freak out.’

  She goes, ‘It’s bad news.’

  I go, ‘No.’

  She goes, ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it, Harley?’

  I go, ‘It’s not, Mum. It’s not bad news, it’s not good news. It’s just news, news.’ And she goes, ‘Just tell me, Harley,’ so I laid it on her. I said, ‘I’ve got Lauren with me, Mum, and we’re making our way to Exford.’ Then I said, ‘I gotta go. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ Maybe she was speechless because she didn’t say much. I closed the phone and sat in the dark cab for a bit.

  I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I’ve had no more than two or three proper conversations about my birth mum with my proper mum. I always knew my birth mum was in jail. Nobody hid that from me. I remember when I was little, there was a bit of chat about whether Lauren should move from wherever she was living and come and live with us, but it never happened and then, when my birth mum died, I actually saw Lauren, because the social workers said we better have a meeting to talk about it. So we did, and Mum and me, we talked about that, but not much.

  Other than that, I can only remember one other time that we talked about my birth mum. It was out on the porch at Exford, and I was sitting with Mum – with Rubes, I mean – and it was about a year or so after I lost the arm, but before I’d moved up to New South Wales. Rubes had simmered a pot of mulled wine, with cloves and cinnamon and orange rind, and we were sitting around the pot-belly on the porch. The frogs were making a regular racket. She was settled into her favourite pozzie on the old Papysan chair, and she had the guitar out, like she does when she’s had a few. Maybe because it was all mellow, she said, ‘Do you know what I’m thinkin’ about, honey?’ – sometimes, she calls me honey – and I said, ‘No, honey, whatchoo thinkin’ about?’ She goes, ‘I was thinking of the day you came to us, Harley.’

  I’m like, ‘Musta been the best day of your life.’

  And then she goes, ‘I always knew you’d meet a beautiful girl and get married and raise a tribe of kids.’

  I’m like, ‘What choo talkin’ about, Mama?’ Remember that show, Diff’rent Strokes, how the little black kid used to say that? That’s what I say to her when she says something totally out of the blue. What choo talkin’ about, Mama? Because, frankly, marriage and kids? That was some way off. I had no regular lady friend.

  But Mum says, ‘I thought you might go off the rails a bit, when you had the accident – ’ which is one hundred per cent false, by the way, she knew perfectly well I was gonna be fine, and if anything, it was her that practically drove the staff on the ward mad, wobbling in with her walking stick, and the incense sticks and the wholegrain muffins that taste like cardboard, and getting her purple robes caught in the door – ‘but now I can see it. That accident was the best thing that ever happened to you.’

  And I was like, ‘Yeah, right on, honey, best thing that ever happened to me, to get hit by a train.’

  She said, ‘That’s right.’

  She didn’t spell it out any more than that. Look, I don’t get too philosophical but, obviously, I know what she meant. She meant that I carried the baggage about DeCastella Drive all the way to Exford with me, and I was never allowed to set it down, until I lost the arm. At school, I was always the ‘foster kid’ or else the ‘kid that Ruby Porter took in, and wouldn’t give back’.

  After the accident, well, things are different now. Wherever I go these days, I’m the guy with one arm. That’s what people see. It’s not: Harley, the kid from the Porter farm. It’s Harley, the guy with one arm. This might sound wanky and, like I said, I don’t ponder things too deeply, but looking at Lauren, I could see that she still had the baggage. She hadn’t been allowed to put it down.

  I reckon Mum would have been a bit freaked out about me picking up Lauren. I suppose she would have been thinking, ‘How did they find each other? Did he go looking for her?’ Which might have got her thinking, ‘Why would he go lookin’ for her?’ In actual fact, I don’t believe I’ve spent so much as one second thinking, ‘I must go lookin’ for my sisters.’ Maybe I had some curiosity about them. Maybe there would have come a day when I did start lookin’ for ’em, but I never had the feelin’ when I was a kid, or even after, that I needed to track them down and ask them what happened, or whatever.

  Anyway, I tried to keep the tyres from crunching in the gravel when I got back to the motel, in case Lauren had gotten off to sleep, but when I got inside I saw that she was just in bed with the sidelight on, pretending to be asleep. I said to her, ‘I’ll bunk down on the floor,’ but she goes, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And truth be told, there was no room on the floor. There was a double bed and it took up all of the floor space. So I messed around a bit more. There was one of those strips of paper with things you could order for breakfast, and I studied that for a bit. I said to Lauren, ‘What do you want to eat in the morning?’ But she was so sleepy, I don’t think it registered. I went into the bathroom, examined my face in the mirror for a while, expecting her to fall asleep any minute, which would make it easier for me to get into the bed with her, but I could hear her going through the channels with the remote, so I had a shower.

  Lauren’s eyes were closed when I came out of the bathroom, but she still wasn’t asleep. I said, ‘Go to sleep.’ I closed the pizza box, put it
outside the door, relieved myself in the toilet again, burped and brushed my teeth. I came out and stood, waiting. I had a feeling she was listening to me, through her eyelids.

  I said, ‘Hey, if you wake up in the night and see this, don’t get a fright.’

  She opened her eyes. I was holding the silicon arm in my good hand. I waved it at her and said, ‘Nighty night!’ She gave me this sleepy smile, and said, ‘Don’t let that thing grope me.’

  And then, with one swift movement, I got under the covers, pulled them right up to my chin. We tussled over the doona for a bit. I turned off the sidelight, and there was complete darkness in the room. I could feel the weight of her on the mattress beside me.

  I said, ‘Night,’ and then, ‘Night, sis,’ because I’d never said it before and it felt kinda cool.

  She said, ‘Night, Jake.’

  I wasn’t Jake, but I let it go.

  Lauren Cashman

  In the summer of the year I turned seventeen, I slipped out of my unit on the Barrett Caravan Park to meet up with a guy I’d met somewhere on the Barrett Estate. He’d arranged to pick me up from the carpark outside the railway station. I got into the passenger seat. The guy, whoever he was, waited for me to shut the door, did a U-turn, and started toward the Barrett weir. It was close to midnight and the way was lit only by streetlights, still, I saw a rabbit on the road ahead of us. I turned toward the man behind the steering wheel to share my delight, but he’d already seen it, and swerved toward it. I heard the whump as it disappeared under the wheels.

  ‘We got it,’ he said, pleased.

  We drove until we came off the bitumen, onto grass and mud, stopping, finally, on swampy land near the water’s edge. The weir was a popular place for Barrett’s kids to park and have sex, but there weren’t any other cars with fogged up windows that night. The guy killed the engine, turned off the headlights. He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer me one. ‘So, Lauren,’ he said, between drags. ‘You’re from that place on DeCastella Drive, right?’