Creepy and Maud

by Dianne Touchell

  It’s about an hour later, and Limo-Li is taking a swing at my dad. I am upstairs watching Maud, who has removed her belt and unbuttoned her funeral dress. The little gold apple charm is fastened to her bellybutton ring, shiny and secure against her white belly.

  SEVENTEEN

  Buds-that-Do-Not-Grow

  Nan-na-was-my-friend. She had been sick for a long time. She did not even know who I was anymore. She had become this tiny thing, with skin like crepe paper, as translucent as an insect wing. She did not speak, she just spent her days curling in on herself, getting smaller and smaller, until she looked like some sort of in-utero thing. A kidney bean with little buds that would never again grow to be arms and legs, but would rather wither away until she would fit inside my doll’s house. I was fascinated, and repulsed, by this transformation. I hated going to see her.

  I know I should be feeling something and I feel bad because I do not. I feel the same way I did when I had to do the readings in chapel. Everyone is looking at me, everyone expects something from me, but my voice is no longer my own. It is being suctioned out of me and dissipates immediately, so the only thing that is real is the returning echo. But it is a Chinese whisper, this echo. It spins around the Nanna-void and is forced back inside me, carrying the weight of everyone else’s breath. It is not me anymore. I have become a kidney bean myself. Creepy laughed at the Nanna-void. Perhaps that is the only right thing to do.

  I saw him at the cemetery. I wondered if I looked nice. Mum picked out the dress for me to wear. It was too big. It did not really match the hat. I stood there feeling clammy and all poured out and something else I did not recognise at first. I felt aware. Aware that my dress was too big and my hat did not match. Aware of my shoes sinking into the grass. Aware that to Creepy, in that moment, I must look just like the big hole in the ground they were going to put Nanna in forever. I tried to imagine being in that hole. I tried to imagine I was a be-ing-in-the-hole. With dirt in my hair and my mouth, my arms pinned to my sides by earth as heavy and cold as Mum’s funeral face. But all I wanted to do was get back to my safe space, the space between the windows, where Creepy would suck me into his big binoculars and I could leave my bloodied fingerprints inside his head. A lot of people turned up at Nanna’s funeral. I thought they were Mum and Dad’s friends, but it turns out they were Nanna’s. Mum couldn’t wait to get them out of the house. I heard her telling Dad that all their mourning was making the place look untidy. She said it with a tight smile and Dad rubbed her back, but I think she really meant it. It is as if emotions, anyone’s emotions, make her feel vulnerable. She put food out for Nanna’s friends. That was the day Creepy gave me the little gold apple. I wear it on my bellybutton ring. And that was the day we touched for the first time. Just our fingers over the fence, and just a little bit, but it sent a funny feeling down my spine. It was not excitement. It was keener than that. It was hope. A small helix of trust twanged my spine and made it shiver with expectancy. I recognised the sensation immediately. It was the same feeling I get when I pull. Comfort, anticipation, and even more than that: optimism. I thought: he could be my friend.

  It is not often that my dad and Creepy’s dad actually hit each other. I like it when they do. It removes the focus from me for hours, sometimes days. I also like that these fights are not like fights in the movies or on telly. There is never that satisfying cracking sound of reciprocal punches hitting bone. And no one ever stays on their feet. The two of them just roll about on the lawn together, making noises as if they were in love. That is what it looks like, anyway.

  I watch them. They don’t actually connect with one another much. Fists flail about, but it all descends pretty quickly into a mixture of salsa dancing and wrestling. They do girl things to each other, too, like hair pulling and slapping. I am pretty sure someone has been bitten. Creepy’s mum shadows the action, throwing her arms around and screaming. That dog of theirs with the strange name is almost rabid with excitement. It is all going perfectly until I notice my mum. She is crying.

  She just sits on the front step and cries. I have never seen her cry before. It scares me. And it is not just a cry, it is a bawl. Her face is as fractured and raw as a freshly peeled walnut. It puts a damper on things pretty quickly. One by one, everyone notices the crying lady. Creepy’s dad tells that dog to shut up. Creepy’s mum goes back inside. My dad sits on the lawn for a bit before getting up and going in. He walks straight past my mum.

  I feel scared and I hate her for it. I sit on the front step next to her and it is as if she does not see me at all. When I put my hand out, as tentative as the insect wing my Nanna had become, and rest it on her arm, she slaps it away. She goes inside then. And I see I have blood under my fingernails.

  She did not even cry when she found out her mother was dead.

  Coda: When I put out my hand, I feel scared and I hate her for it.

  EIGHTEEN

  I think you are wrong to want a heart.

  It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it,

  you are in luck not to have a heart.

  —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

  I’ve always wanted to believe in religion. It all seems so nice. The idea of life having a formula, a recipe, is really quite comforting. Do this and this, add this, mix with this, live three score and ten, and come out cooked. And you go to Heaven. Capital H. A real place. Then there’s Jesus, of course. So even if you miss a few steps of the recipe along the way, Jesus is a sort of prescription to cover up the mistakes—the cornflour in the gravy, the crushed pineapple in the chilli, the bicarb in the toffee pudding. (I took cooking at school because the alternatives were fencing or synchronised swimming.)

  I could never get all in, though. I was sort of embarrassed about struggling to accept something so unreasonable. I still like the idea of it. Maybe I should go with one of those religions with a living prophet. One of those groups that dress like pioneers. (Maud would look good in a bonnet.) Do they get updated revelation? Maybe there have been doctrinal advances that the rest of us haven’t heard about. Those groups would probably keep that kind of information close to their chest. You’d have to be on the inside to hear what God was saying to his people these days.

  My mum has got religion. She picked it up at the supermarket. There were these young, attractive people handing out pamphlets and salvation one day when she was popping in for some sausages and stewing meat. She always goes to church. Not just at Christmas and Easter, but always. She talks about her religion and Dad has a go at her and she feels persecuted and that seems to please her. My understanding is you’re supposed to feel persecuted if you’re saved. Something about being closer to God through suffering. And Mum does suffer. There are days Dad would gladly nail her to the back fence.

  Mum used to take me to church with her for a while, when I was still young enough to be dressed in clothes that would otherwise get me beaten up. I liked it. The building was cool and dark and old, and all the wood was polished. There was always singing and it didn’t matter how badly you sang; it always seemed to sound good. Before the sermon started, I would be taken out the back to a big hall, where all of us kids were told stories and got to colour in pictures of saints. It was the day some lady told us that animals don’t have souls that the whole thing started sounding a bit iffy to me. I remember my crayon stopping in mid-stroke while I considered this new information. They were those awful wax crayons that never give good coverage. The ones where you have to press really hard and end up getting colourer’s cramp. Anyway, I was quite cross. I remember thinking two things: how the hell would she know whether animals have souls, and why wouldn’t anyone spring for some decent coloured pencils or textas for us?

  On the way home in the car, I asked my mum about animals and souls. It was before I knew that parents are really the last people you go to with real questions. The only questions you should ever ask parents are the ones that begin with ‘Can I have’ and ‘Can I go’ and that’s only because those
questions usually involve the need for cash. But you only find that out through trial and error (mostly error on their part), so I asked her, ‘Do animals have souls?’

  My mum didn’t answer me straight away. But that was okay. The Sunday school ladies never answered straight away, either. I was never bothered by these pauses when it came to church questions. Church questions require pauses. It gives the answers, when you get them, a certain authority. My mum was pretty then, too, and information from attractive people is much more believable. When she told me, with all the authoritative weight of pauses and prettiness behind her, that animals don’t have immortal souls because they don’t have proper hearts, I cried all the way home.

  Years later, when I put the same question to her while she was nursing a fresh puncture wound from Dobie Squires, she was less sure. All she said was: ‘I fucking hope not.’

  Mum didn’t know the answer, really, but felt obliged to make something up that sounded at least partially consistent with the negligible amount of doctrine she had managed to absorb. Good on her for having a go. But I can date my resistance to church pants and church attendance from the processing of that information. Animals don’t have souls. I suppose that’s why we can eat them with impunity. I never looked at my guinea pig the same way again, though. And I was angry with God for withholding a real heart from Chuckles.

  All this is how I’ve ended up in a religious school. Dad went along with it because he thinks I’ll get a better education at a private school. I know this because he often says from the head of the dinner table, ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school,’ and Mum wraps both hands around her tumbler of red and nods like a sage. This is supposed to be the panacea. After every problem at school or with school, Dad will intone: ‘A person will always get a better education at a private school.’ Not that any of the problems at school involve me. But any and all problems, from uniform violations to girls drawing dirty pictures, inspire the production of one of those expensively produced parent flyers and guarantee Dad’s dinner-table mantra. (A recent flyer revealed that better education is not the only thing you get at a private school—apparently, a better grade of weed is available in private school toilets.)

  Religion seems all too fragile and easily offended to me. It’s not that there are more rules in religion than in other things. It’s that it doesn’t cope well when the rules are broken. It sends flyers and has meetings and rewards guilt and exclusivity. And then, before you know it, it’s bombing buildings. If you ask me, God seems awfully sensitive. Maybe he is a girl!

  I got to thinking about religion again after Maud’s nanna died. Especially when my mum baked one of her famous sausage curries (with sultanas in the sauce) and took it next door. She looked really happy when she came back from delivering it. Within a week, though, she was bitching about the fact that they hadn’t returned the casserole dish. She even asked Dad to go get it. He refused. It soon occurred to me that Mum didn’t really want the dish back. She could build years of acrimony from that ‘stolen’ casserole. The casserole dish, and what was in it, was a symbol of Mum’s agenda. Every now and then, during a wee nip, I’d hear her muttering, ‘I even put sultanas in the sauce.’

  The casserole dish became a prisoner in a holy war. Maybe Li deliberately kept it. Maybe it was just forgotten. Either way, Mum loved being able to hate the theft of it. Over a very short period of time, that casserole dish grew in size and importance. It had a five—no, ten—litre capacity. It was the only casserole dish Mum ever had with a true fitting lid. It was the most expensive casserole dish Mum had ever bought—an investment. No, it was a wedding present, irreplaceable and with great sentimental value.

  Did you know that the word religion comes from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’? I read that somewhere. Probably in my Collins Australian Internet-Linked Dictionary (with CD-ROM). To bind. And since we are more bound by things we despise than by things we love, I reckon that makes our agendas our religion. God’s just along for the ride.

  NINETEEN

  Just because everything is different

  doesn’t mean that anything has changed.

  — Irene Peter

  I like dead languages. They’re predictable, static, unchanging. It takes death to do that. That’s why I like history. It’s locked in. Change gets a lot of undeserved positive attention. Change is good. Change is necessary. Change is growth. No one stops to question this. Darwin has a lot to answer for.

  The French teacher at school is an alcoholic. Or a vampire, depending on who you ask. Mr Thornton used to teach Maths but was switched to the French Department mid-year. (Our regular French teacher took the rest of the year off to recuperate after her boyfriend set fire to himself on her front lawn.) The vampire theory came into play because he looks like one. No fangs, just all the other accoutrements of a bad diet: pasty skin, bloodshot eyes, and a web of translucent blue-grey veins mottling his neck and face. Makes him look like his head is being held in place by a macramé pot-holder. He shakes and sweats a lot, too. The shaking and sweating seemed to get worse after his transfer from the Maths Department. I think maths suited Mr Thornton. There are absolutes in a discipline like maths that you just never find in a living language. And being able to speak French doesn’t mean you’re able to teach it.

  I am in his French class. So is Maud. We never speak to each other, of course. I’ve studied French for half a year and as a result know the date of Bastille Day, how to make crepes and how to count to ten. I also know how to say some words like table, chair, bed, pencil and trumpet. These skills are not going to be of use to me. I just might be able to go into a shop in Paris and say ‘I want a trumpet,’ but considering I don’t want a trumpet and am a bit foggy on the whole transitive verb thing, I’m just as likely to walk in and announce, ‘I am a trumpet.’

  It is a beautiful day; the sun is warmer than it’s been for a while. Because it’s nice and sunny, Mr Thornton suggests that those in the class who are working on their translations of The Little Prince go and do so out on the verandah. I am not one of those working on a translation of The Little Prince. I might be able to pick out the words table, chair, bed, pencil and trumpet, but other than that I’m screwed. So the rest of us, including Maud, stay in the classroom to work on our conversational French with Mr Thornton.

  Conversational French involves Mr Thornton asking a student a question in French and waiting for the correct response in French in return. He is shakier than usual today and keeps wringing his hands and wiping his palms on his trousers. You can tell the kids he doesn’t like by the length of the question he asks them. He really doesn’t like Maud, so I’m not surprised when he stands in front of her desk, looks her in the eye and proceeds to pitch a volley of rapid-fire French stuff at her. I only know it’s a question from the inflection of his voice at the end. There is a long pause. Usually, if someone is struggling, Mr Thornton repeats the question more slowly, or writes it on the board, but he doesn’t do that this time. What he does is fidget and tremble and sweat. Then he flattens his palms on her desktop, leans towards her face and says, ‘Hmmm?’

  Maud keeps his eye throughout. And then she says, ‘Est-ce que vous êtes un vampire ou un alcoolique?’

  What happens next takes place in seconds. Mr Thornton snaps upright as if he’s been slapped. When he stops shaking enough to stagger out of the room, he runs smack into Stephanie Morcombe. These sorts of collisions between staff and students are not uncommon, especially between periods, when everyone is hightailing it to their next class. This collision is a bit different, however, because Stephanie Morcombe has hoisted herself up onto the top of the balcony balustrade to best take advantage of that beautiful warm sun. I am still struggling with the whole idea that Maud speaks French when the first scream starts ricocheting down the corridors. You see, when Mr Thornton clobbers into Stephanie Morcombe on his way past, the force of his weight literally throws her off the edge of the balcony. There are, therefore, two screams: one
is cut short pretty quickly (it’s not that far to the bottom if you’re in freefall); the other scream is longer.

  Someone eventually leads Mr Thornton away and someone calls an ambulance and a knot of do-gooders form around Stephanie Morcombe’s prone body. I realise I’ve never understood the meaning of the word stricken before when I see Mr Thornton’s face. Not just pain, not just fear—Thornton is absolutely incapacitated. People are asking him what happened and he can’t speak. All he can do is hold himself and make these strange mewling noises. And he won’t open his eyes. His face is kind of coiled in on itself and he’s gasping for breath and I think someone should go get the poor bastard a drink.

  Maud is leaning against the balustrade railing, looking over and down. Stephanie Morcombe is being put on a stretcher. The ambos are talking to her, so I know she isn’t dead. There’s blood on the pavement and some of it has seeped into the grass. It’s when I look at Maud that I realise she is stricken, too. One of her hands is white-knuckling the railing. The other is frenetically snaking hair between fingers. Maud never pulls in public. It is her private thing, like me. But she’s pulling now. Teachers have started directing kids back into classrooms. A small group of the Pandora bracelet set are clinched together, dry-sobbing with just enough counterfeit hysteria to ensure they are able to redirect a modicum of attention back their way without ruining their make-up. And Maud is pulling and staccato breathing, her eyes shut fast.