The Children
Page 15
There is a loud knock at the front door.
As Stephen reaches the hallway he can see the shape of someone unfamiliar behind the frosted glass. When he opens the door a short, balding man is standing on the verandah. He’s about forty, wearing a grubby white sports shirt and faintly shining turquoise tracksuit pants.
‘Hullo,’ Stephen says. The man seems about to ask directions, or some neighbourly favour. He nods with a businesslike smile and glances past Stephen into the house. Then he leans forward and says in a low, conspiratorial voice: ‘You heard of that number six-six-six round here?’
Stephen rears back, stops himself barking out a laugh.
‘Yeah, mate.’ He puts a hand out to the screen door, beginning to draw it towards him, smiling. ‘Not interested though, sorry.’
The man looks glum. ‘Huh,’ he says. But he appears to change his mind about something, and he puts his hand out too, to grip the edge of the screen door before it closes. ‘Well,’ he says, in a challenging tone, staring at Stephen. ‘It’s the Mark of the Beast.’
Stephen nods, waiting for the man to continue.
The man smiles now, satisfied. ‘So.’
But with that he seems to have played his trump card. And when Stephen gives no response the man’s expression turns gloomy again, and he looks down to the doormat, nudging it with the toe of his large white sandshoe. He looks back up at Stephen and exhales a long, dejected breath through his nose. He turns away, saying no more, and trudges off down the front stairs.
Stephen watches him leave and then clicks the door shut, hooting with laughter.
The others are washing up in the kitchen while he leans in the doorway and tells them about the Mark of the Beast. Even Mandy smiles.
And for a second then, standing next to her, Stephen recalls some distant teenage fondness, some possibility of playfulness between them. ‘Give us a look under your fringe, Mand,’ he says, and lunges at her. She ducks away—lurching in surprise, and then chortling ‘Fuck off,’ in a low voice, glancing through the laundry door to make sure their mother can’t hear from the washing machine. Stephen says again, ‘It’s the Mark of the Beast, y’know’ and they all snicker, Mandy as she wipes a baking dish with a tea towel, and Chris snorting into the washing-up water. Cathy laughs a high, relieved hoot as she reaches down to put a saucepan away.
Margaret, bent peering into the washing machine, hears her almost middle-aged children, shiacking and jostling in the kitchen behind her, bickering like cheerful teenagers. Perhaps they are still teenagers, she thinks suddenly, staring at the tangle of coloured clothes wound around the machine’s pedestal, her hand gripping the opened lid. Perhaps there is something not properly grownup about them. Perhaps this is why none of them has children.
This is a question that has sometimes kept her awake at night. Geoff will not hear about it, saying only don’t be stupid; but sometimes lying there in the dark Margaret has been troubled by the suspicion that they—she—has done something terribly wrong. With Mandy, especially.
She lets the lid of the washing machine drop with its little hollow boom, and pulls out the dial to start the water pouring in. She turns to the kitchen and notices, perhaps for the first time in a year, some old postcards from Mandy, greased and filmed with dust, pinned to the noticeboard by the door. Three or four postcards sent over the same number of years, from places in the world Margaret had never heard of. All scrawled with single witty sentences, Mandy’s large signature and small, solitary x.
The Mark of the Beast. Margaret recalls, from decades ago, a woman they had seen once when Mandy was a girl. The woman was crossing the road in town; a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman like herself. She wore a pale green skirt and a neat white cardigan, and carried a string shopping bag. And one entire side of her ordinary middle-aged face was a shocking dark blotchy purple. The birthmark, if that is what you could call it, covered her neck and head, visible on her scalp through her mousy hair. And in the middle of this dreadful, violent colour, a two-inch patch of her face—part of her cheek, and lip, and chin—was covered in a thick tuft of long, white hair. The shock of it had made Margaret gulp. The hair, and the neat square shape of the woman’s face, reminded Margaret of nothing so much as the face of a terrier dog.
Margaret had gripped Mandy’s hand and looked at the ground as they passed her. She had no time to say don’t stare without the woman hearing, and so Mandy, five years old, stared right into the woman’s terrible face, twisting her head to keep watching her, as she passed. Once across the road Margaret hissed, too late, ‘Don’t stare, Mandy,’ and dropped her hand.
When Mandy had asked why, too loudly, Margaret could not answer. But she saw a seriousness over come Mandy, watching the gravel path moving beneath her feet in silence as they walked. And Margaret knew then that something in the world had changed for her daughter that day; that Mandy had learnt both the existence of misery and the obligation not to speak of it.
But that evening in the muggy kitchen at home, listening to the children’s routine quarrelling and Geoff’s volley of scolding, a storm of gratitude swept through Margaret. For she could believe that Mandy had forgotten the woman’s dreadful face, and so she could grant herself permission too, to fold away that fearful, lonely knowledge and forget it.
You bring your children up to escape sorrow. You spend your best years trying to stop them from witnessing it—on television, in you, in your neighbours’ faces. Then you realise, slowly, that there is no escape, that they must steer their own way through life’s cruelties.
But when your first, your brightest, seeks it out, steeps herself in violence. When she fuses herself to this brutal intimacy with suffering, what then?
IN THE bathroom Mandy switches on Geoff’s old clock radio for the local news as she brushes her teeth. The newsreader speaks about the drought, a light plane crash near Gunnedah, a high school principal retiring. There is nothing about a gun shot, nor any arrests, nor reports of the noise. A single shot in the dark streets of a country town goes unnoticed, and has disappeared.
She rinses her toothbrush, drops it into the slot at the end of the rack with the others, next to Chris’s. She picks up his toothbrush and looks at it, running her thumbnail down its handle’s plastic ridges. They have not spoken since last night, but their movements around each other in the bedroom, in the kitchen, have been respectful, accommodating. He poured her a cup of coffee; she buttered his toast; there is in these small gestures the air of a truce. When this is over, he had said in the street. Which means, Mandy realises now for the first time, when Geoff is dead.
She stares at the toothbrush in her hand, and puts it back into the rack beside the others. She thinks of her father’s teeth, of his stale breath now, of the ulcers that might be forming in his dry, unswallowing mouth. He is alive and not alive, a corpse and not a corpse. Yet the notion of his death, being dead—that her father might end— is a catastrophic disorder of logic. She slams the idea shut.
THE HOSPITAL ward is unchanged. Geoff is unchanged. Mandy and Stephen sit on either side of the bed, chins in their hands. The ward shrugs now and then with movement: a nurse comes to Geoff’s bed to perform some ritual—check the monitor, pat the tape over his face, write something down and then sling the clipboard with its notes back on the hooks at the end of the bed as she walks away.
Mandy has asked about his mouth this morning, whether he might have a painful mouth. Could the tube cut into his gums? Might he feel pain? But the nurse said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ and then the doctor shook his head before her questions were even complete, and changed the subject to morphine dosages and today’s scan, which is to take place at eleven.
Mandy watches Stephen bent over his kite book, across the bed. He is looking at a diagram of a diamond kite.
‘Dad’s were a lot more complicated than that,’ she says.
Stephen looks up. ‘I know.’ He bends back to the diagram.
She says, ‘Do you want any help?’
‘No thanks,’ he says evenly, and returns to the book.
Mandy sighs. She thinks she might scream if she has to stay here, like this, for much longer. She says, ‘Remember Mum wants to take us out for dinner tonight, at the RSL restaurant.’
Stephen nods, not looking up.
‘It’s called Ciphers,’ she says. Stephen smiles into his book, but still does not look up.
Mandy counts to fifty, then backwards. She gets up, walks down the corridors to the volunteers’ kiosk, where the woman from the Red Cross is trapped inside her little cave of magazines and lollies. She buys a magazine, carries it rolled in her hands back to the ward, where she sits again, for another silent hour. Eventually someone comes and they roll Geoff away for the new scan, leaving Stephen and Mandy sitting across from one another, their arms folded, the white space where the bed has been between them. Geoff is eventually brought back, the ventilator switched over from its battery and plugged into the wall once again. Stephen and Mandy stand on either side of his bed, leaning in, trying to remember if his face looks any different. He breathes the same mechanical breath. He has new tape over the tube near his left ear. They lift the blanket and lower it, straighten the sheet.
There is nothing they can do but lift the blanket, straighten the sheet, lift their father’s heavy hands and put them down again.
‘I’m going,’ says Stephen then. He lifts a bag up from the floor. ‘Pick you up after.’
He walks past the nurses’ station, along the alley between the beds, presses the button at the hydraulic door. Mandy watches the door opening, pssshh.
Then she hears the voice, and Tony appears out in the corridor, talking to a nurse. As the nurse walks off he looks straight through the open doorway to Mandy, and grins. Fear lurches in her: she stiffens, wants to call Stephen back. But then as Stephen passes him Tony stops. ‘Whaddya got there?’ she hears him asking, jerking his chin at Stephen’s book and leaning back with his hands in his blue pockets. Stephen replies, saying something she can’t hear, and then the door closes with its slow hiss, leaving them both in the corridor. And she hears Tony’s loud, stupid voice sinking away.
Mandy exhales with relief, returns to the magazine on her lap. Something in Tony’s blank, dumb face has spun her mind back to an axolotl in a glass tank that she’d had to baby-sit once, in a house she’d stayed in in London. The tank was empty but for the murky water, a thick layer of pebbles, and the fat, pale, fishy thing with legs and six horrible ears. A greasy, spotted, hairless dog with a cuttlefish tail and fronds for toes. It had a face with a wide, stupid grin, and the whole creature was furred with slime. She wondered its body did not rot away. She had sat staring at it in horror. Sometimes it stood up on its front legs and slid about, but mostly it either lay motionless on the filthy floor of the tank, as if dead, or paddled slowly back and forth on its skinny legs, bumping into the glass walls when it reached the end: paddle, paddle, paddle, bump. Its pointy ear things—three on each side—flicked up now and then, wafting in the grimy water. The backs of its ears were furred like anemones.
A note from the owners of the house said the axolotl was blind and deaf, and quite aggressive, and she had to hand-feed it with pellets—of beef heart—from the freezer. She was almost physically sick at the idea; there was no way she was putting her hand in that water.
The first time she lifted the lid of the tank the thing nearly had a heart attack, plunging and sloshing about, so the filthy water splashed up at her. Don’t fucking jump out, she had prayed. But it was just frightened. She found a wooden skewer in the kitchen and used it to lower the tile of jellied meat slowly into the tank. The thing was motionless there in the water, even as she moved the skewer closer and closer. Then she nudged it, and the creature suddenly leapt and seized at the meat, snapping at the skewer. Mandy splashed water over herself with the fright of it. She dropped the glass lid down with a crack. The tank water was littered with little dark morsels of slimy, slowly rotting meat, or was it shit? She had wanted to vomit. She hated the axolotl, was surprised at how she could hate a thing so much.
She watched its slow-motion crawl, paddle paddle bump. Then it nestled back on its legs, more cow than fish, settling into stillness among the filthy pebbles.
AT LUNCH-TIME Mandy walks out through the sliding glass doors of the entrance into the bright car park, scanning the cars for Stephen’s ute. A white van catches her eye. Two men in red monogrammed shirts stand talking to one another beside the vehicle.
The van explodes. Spinning metal, droplets of wet.
The van has not exploded. She breathes, looks at it again, shining white in the ordinary daylight. The first man turns his back on his friend for a moment, cupping his hands to light a cigarette away from the breeze. The air turns bloody again, spinning and powdery in Baghdad, and then clunks back again into the Rundle morning. And Mandy is suddenly sick to death of the memories. What is the neurological point of these insistent bursts, the exhausting appearances and disappearances, the same images, unchanged every time—the boy in the morgue, the lather turning pink; the old woman watching her son convulsing on the ground? All the years of images: the nurse’s shaking hands, the boot with the bone sticking out, the head-height axe notches in a church doorway, the white tilt of a car where it slid down the embankment.
A car down the embankment.
Oh God, her own hands gripping a fire hose, and Tony’s thick fingers over her wrist, and then the car down the embankment.
You’ll remember.
She stands staring at the ground, seeing nothing but what she now remembers.
At eighteen she had sat in the Rundle Examiner office, its blinds closed against the heat, and typed that a man was found burned to death in his car on the old Menindee Road.
She typed that police believed the car had driven off the unsealed road, and down an embankment, some time between four pm and midnight, that it probably caught fire in the early hours of the morning, and was found by the driver of a bushfire brigade truck returning to town at 7.50 am. She transcribed what she had seen typewritten on the blue form at the police station, when she’d stood there with Mike Hake, the pimply twenty-year-old reporter from 2RX. She had scribbled her schoolgirl notes on pieces of paper held together with a bulldog clip.
Back at the office she typed out the story of the fire preceding this discovery, the story she herself had watched develop. She typed out the numbers: how many volunteers attended, how far the fire moved, how many hectares had been lost, and what time it went out of control, burning out towards Gilgardie. She did not type that a young man in a boiler suit had shouted at her Are you gunna fucken get up here and help?, and that, too embarrassed for protestations about ‘reporting’, or ‘media’, she had braced her knees as she stood on the back of the jostling truck, too shy to ask where she should direct the hose, but had wetted the grass in the general direction the man had pointed, and then the man put his hands over and under hers on the hose, showing her to lift it, where to point it. When she first arrived in the mid-afternoon the fire had looked pitiful to her, a few patches of grass burning towards the truck. There was no roaring or threat—until later, in the early evening after the lazy flames of their few paddocks had been extinguished, when she realised what the men knew all along: theirs was only a little spot fire; the main front was approaching from the east. They heard it coming even though it was still miles away, and standing on the road in the dark—all the cars packed and ready to bolt—they watched the orange line roaring across the distant ridge, speechless, staring, willing the predicted wind change to arrive. And then, like clockwork, it did: the line stopped moving, the sound seemed to drop, and the men and their wives leaned on the bonnets of their cars, straining their eyes with watching, not breathing lest it start again. Over the next hours the mood gradually began to ease; slow conversations began again, and finally somebody snapped open a can of beer.
I
t was nine o’clock; she was exhausted. There was nothing keeping her there but politeness—she’d taken all the photographs she could, none of them very good. She’d helped wash the dishes in the hall where the women had made sandwiches for the volunteers. She felt her own tired muteness the whole time, but smiled and nodded when they talked to her. Then she had left them calling with relief to one another across the cars and ute-trays, the fire fading for certain now, and she had climbed into the newspaper’s pale yellow Renault and driven home. Along the Menindee Road.
Then, the next day, on the blue paper of the police form, a body in a burned car. The fire had changed direction again in the night, and burned along the road she had safely driven a few hours before.
There in the police station, Mandy was swept with a sickening, confused guilt.
Had she seen a car, or a person, through the trees?
She was tired, it was deep night. As she rounded a bend on the dark road she might have registered, through the tree trunks and the light smoke haze in the swipe of her headlights, the tilt of a car down an embankment. She might have. And then a movement—something—may have made her glance into the rear-vision mirror. But she had been tired, she wanted nothing to appear back there in the hazy dark, and she glanced ahead again and kept on driving through the night.
Mandy said nothing to anyone. She typed the story. The young guy from the back of the fire truck had found the burned corpse, called the police, the ambulance. But when the editor made Mandy telephone him he’d said, in his slow, friendly voice, Lucky it wasn’t you.
She had said, What?, and he said, You went on the Menindee Road, I watched ya. And she had frozen in the stifling office, her pen in her hand, the only sound the clicks and hisses of the telephone line. And then Tony said, again, Lucky it wasn’t you. He had paused, and then out of the silence he said, I found him ’cos of you. She could only breathe her panic, in and out. Then he said, You and me’re the same.