Sign

by Colin Dray

  The itch on Sam’s leg began to sting. His skin was pink from scratching, so he pinched either side of the most irritated area and squeezed. The flesh dimpled white beneath his fingers.

  Sam preferred the beach. The warmth of the sand. Feeling his body held aloft by the chill salt water. Tumbling about in the foamy wash of the waves. But now, since the operation, he wasn’t allowed to submerge his neck in water at all. Just having a shower was problematic. So even if he wanted to go swimming with his father now, he couldn’t.

  ‘What about you, Katie? Can you think of anything?’

  Katie’s elbows flapped as she pushed the pillows harder onto her face.

  ‘Your father, dear?’ Dettie turned. ‘You must have stories. Birthdays? Holidays?’

  There was no answer from the back seat.

  ‘Come on. Sammy had one,’ Dettie sang. ‘There must be plenty of things to talk about. I know. Do you remember, there was a time at one of Sam’s soccer games—’

  Katie squealed and threw a pillow against the opposite window. She lay rigid across the back seat, glaring at the ceiling. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. Her voice sounded strange. Deeper. ‘I don’t care.’

  The pillow had startled Dettie. She blinked and wiped her mouth. ‘Oh, settle down,’ she scolded, then turned back to the road and stopped talking.

  30

  First things first. The two of you are the most important part of my life. You always will be. His father had typed the letter for them at work. So I don’t want you to think that you did anything wrong, or that any of this is your fault. He’d printed it on office paper with the company letterhead. Sam had to read it five times before the words began to sink in.

  Your mum and I have come to a decision that it would be for the best if I lived somewhere else. Because sometimes, even when people love each other very much, it’s still not enough reason for them to stay together.

  Katie had sobbed, asking Sam what each sentence meant, asking him to stop and read each part over again.

  Other things can get in the way. Sometimes it’s big things. Sometimes lots and lots of little things. But your mum and I still love each other and we always will. We just want to be fair…

  But Sam couldn’t remember the next part. We just want to be fair…Your mum and I still love…We just want to be fair…

  Fair to ourselves?

  Fair to you?

  Once, he could have recited the whole thing. Now, he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to block out Dettie’s whistling. She was scratching through her box of cassette tapes. There were rattles and squeaks of plastic. Plenty of people live apart, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still a family.

  The itch on his leg was stinging…watching you grow up…The familiar throb of sunburn…knowing it’s the right thing for us all…

  The rest slipped out of his memory.

  Your eyes…I saw your eyes among the shadows of my dreams… The blonde woman had said it as the zombie leader crawled across her car. The zombie’s teeth were red triangles.

  His father’s letter. He tried to picture the words, to trace over the lines of them in his head. Dear Sam and Katie, I love you both. The company logo was a charging bull.

  The radio squealed as Dettie gave up on the tapes and skimmed the local stations. Sam tried to block his ear with his shoulder. Other things can get in the way. Sometimes it’s big things. No, he knew that part.

  My boyfriend. Tim! You killed him! You and your unholy horde… Yellow, bulging eyes, and those teeth.

  A sputter, and the twang of a country guitar filled the car. Sam squirmed further away from the noise. Dettie was tapping again on the steering wheel.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Sammy, did you want to get some sleep?’ she asked.

  He kept his eyes closed, and in a moment the music was lowered.

  Sometimes lots and lots of little things.

  Its fingernails were tearing into the metal.

  Suddenly, for some reason, vividly, the memory of his watch being scratched resurfaced in his mind. He’d been walking through the house. Balancing something. Was it soup? Then something happened. Then the scratch. He remembered rubbing his watch face afterwards, failing to get the mark off, while Dettie cleaned his grazed knee.

  He tried to concentrate on the memory of the letter again, but it was too late. He could almost smell the tomato soup; feel the warm bowl slipping through his fingers, the burn. Katie’s shoe beneath his foot. He had been walking out to them. Dettie and his mother. They were out on the veranda. The washing line was full and tipped slightly in the breeze.

  It was a week until the operation. He had been yelling at Katie for using his favourite spoon. She’d sulked off to her room. Slammed the door. The whispering from outside was getting clearer. Soup lapped at the rim of the bowl. He’d gotten used to everyone whispering around him. About him. He could hear his mother’s voice. She was holding a handful of hospital papers.

  ‘He’s going through something terrible, Dettie. Maybe he needs you to talk to him.’

  Why would Dettie need to talk to him? And why was his mother being so negative? Usually when she talked about the operation she would get sad, her voice would tremble, but she would smile and promise him that everything was going to be all right in the end.

  Dettie had been clutching the handrail, clicking her ring on the metal. ‘I wouldn’t even know how to talk to him,’ she said, and sniffed.

  The hospital forms rustled. ‘You’re acting like he’s dead or something.’

  Sam’s ankle bent over Katie’s shoe.

  ‘He may as well be dead,’ Dettie hissed.

  The bowl left his fingers. There was concrete. Soup.

  A newsreader had come on the radio. Her thin, nasal voice hummed past Sam, almost lost in the vibration of the car, ‘…speculating that the fires may have been deliberately lit. Residents of the Koolyanobbing and Bullfinch regions are being warned that a westerly change may be set to draw the fires in their direction in the coming hours.’

  Dettie’s fingers were poised above the volume control. Sam watched her long nails quivering above the knob from the corner of his eye. He thought about what she’d said. He may as well be dead. Her neck was stretched, one ear tilted towards the speakers.

  ‘…his appreciation from the West Australian Premier.’ The newsreader cleared her throat. ‘In other news, police are on the lookout—’

  Dettie snapped off the radio and fussed with the rear-vision mirror. ‘Sammy, are you still awake?’ she said. ‘Katie? Do you want to stretch your legs a minute?’

  Through his eyelashes, Sam could see a small service station approaching. Dettie slowed the car, turned off, and parked not by the pumps, but in front of a fruit stand in the car park. The doors creaked open and the sand everywhere glowed white on the ground.

  In the shade of the building, the fruit stand was little more than a makeshift roadside stall—a card table loaded with stone fruits spilling out of the back of an old station wagon discoloured with rust. The elderly man watching over it sat slumped in a foldaway canvas chair, fanning himself with a racing form. The blue heeler at his feet lay sleeping on its paws, opening its eyes occasionally to follow passers-by with a hazy indifference. Katie, at first drawn by the sight of the dog, was soon nosing at the fruit, wondering aloud what a mango was and excitedly running her hand across each fat pastel globe.

  Watching Katie’s face intently, Dettie insisted that they try some. She loaded up a plastic bag with several, along with a few slightly withered apricots. The salesman rose from his chair and kept smiling at Dettie, holding her gaze too long, and leaning in to show off particular fruits he said were ‘ripe for the eating’. As she paid, he kept slicking back the side of his hair with one hand and counting out her change with the other, knocking off a couple of dollars because he ‘liked her face’ and popping in a nectarine for free. He kept running his eyes up and down her. Wandering over to a clearing of yellowed grass, Dettie stopped beside a t
ilted corrugated rubbish bin and tossed the nectarine in with a thud.

  They folded up some blankets from the car to cover the weeds. Dettie and Katie sat, both leaning back against a couple of short wooden posts that marked out the edge of the car park. Dettie lit a cigarette and let it hang on her lips as she began fishing through the contents of the plastic bag, sharing it out. The worst of the burns on Sam’s skin had faded slightly and were gradually bronzing over, but he still felt the sting of the sun gnawing away at him. The day was wearing into the afternoon, so he stood back, trying to position as much of himself as he could in the pool of shade being cast by the petrol station sign.

  Dettie was looking down at the mango in her hands. Her wrinkled fingers encircled its firm, blushed flesh, her cigarette seething away at its side. ‘Katie—sweetie, you’ve got happy memories of your father, don’t you?’

  Katie’s legs were stretched out in front of her across the blanket. She shrugged.

  Somewhere nearby, overhead, a bird shook out a long, guttural caw. Like the old man’s dog, it seemed too stupefied to put much effort in.

  ‘Aren’t there any special things that you and your daddy used to do that you remember?’ Dettie’s voice was softer now, tentative. She swayed a little as she spoke. ‘Sammy remembers going to watch football with your dad. You must have had something just the two of you used to do as well.’

  Sam didn’t actually remember going to the football with his father—but the point seemed irrelevant. He just chewed a bite of apricot around in his mouth, enjoying the flavour. A little dry, perhaps, but tasty.

  ‘Did you play any sports together?’

  Katie was turning her mango over in her hands, trying to discern how best to start in on it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Soccer was Sam’s thing.’

  ‘What about your school plays? Your gymnastics?’

  Katie picked at the stem. She sniffed the fruit deeply and shrugged again.

  ‘He took you to the pool too, didn’t he? Taught you to swim?’ Dettie waggled her cigarette thoughtfully, the smoke leaving a feather of white punctuation in the air. ‘You and he and Sam?’

  Katie was trying to bite through the mango’s skin, gnawing at it with the side of her mouth, spittle glistening on its surface. ‘That was just Sam,’ she said, not really paying attention. She held it up, rubbing her teeth with her tongue. ‘Do you have to peel it?’

  Something in Dettie collapsed a little. Her arms slumped, her chest deflated. Her forehead was knotted in thought. ‘Did you—did you go to the zoo?’ she said, more quietly this time. Almost to herself.

  Katie was digging into the fruit with no success, using all her fingers. Crushing the flesh but still making no incision. ‘We went to the Show one time.’

  Sam knew. Even before she went on, he already knew—

  ‘The Easter Show?’ Dettie said, perking up again.

  ‘Yeah.’ Finally, clawing at it with her fingertips, Katie broke through, exposing the fierce orange beneath. Juice ran down her wrists. ‘We got showbags,’ she said. ‘Two showbags each. We watched the animal parade.’ She sucked and lapped at the run-off. ‘And he took me on the Octopus. Even though I wasn’t supposed to be big enough for the Octopus.’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ Dettie said, and sighed. She sat back, happily resettling the hem of her dress over her ankles. ‘The two of you. Out and about. Thick as thieves.’ She was staring off somewhere. Imagining. ‘Oh, and Sammy too,’ she said quickly, and offered him a smile. Sam could already tell what was coming, though, and he tried to look like he wasn’t listening, focusing instead on the last of his apricot. ‘I bet you were exhausted after a long day like that,’ she said.

  Katie was busy slurping, trying to chew through the wreckage in her hands, determined. Her face was soaked, her chin speckled with juice and pulp. For a moment, while he hoped Dettie would get off the topic, Sam watched his sister savouring her snack, licking her lips and ducking back in for another bite. It reminded him of the image of the comic-book zombie, gnawing at the doomed boyfriend Tim’s brain. Hunched over, slurping and growling. Its face a mottled green, spattered red. The thought was so idiotic, and such a weird contrast to the sunny, yellow sight of his sister before him, that he almost tried to laugh.

  Dettie ran her thumbnail along the side of the mango she was cradling, drawing a divot down its length, likewise struggling to rupture the skin. ‘Might need a knife for this.’

  ‘No,’ Katie said, looking up, and Sam flinched. He knew. ‘No, that was Uncle Brian. I forgot. Daddy wasn’t there. Uncle Brian took us.’

  Uncle Brian. Their mother’s brother. Who had taken them to the Show twice, two years in a row, when he was visiting. Who loved the taste of corn dogs and tomato sauce, and who, for some reason, always insisted that they look through all of the arts and craft exhibitions—even the boring landscape paintings.

  Dettie hummed. She gave up trying to cut into the fruit and tapped her fingers on its base. ‘Brian,’ she said, her eyes lowered. She was staring at the ground ahead of them. At the wilted blades of grass, tipped over in the sun, the lawn pockmarked with patches of cracked earth. At the ants scuttling around beneath the rubbish bin. She glared, her lower jaw rising and falling rhythmically, as though she were sucking on something sour. Her cigarette smouldered between her knuckles, a trail of ash that eventually petered out. She flicked the butt into the distance.

  Minutes passed. Sam rolled the dry apricot kernel around in his hand, shaking it like a die. Katie went on eating until, eventually, what she held in her hands was a soggy, gnarled mess. Strips of skin and chewed fuzz, matted to a centre that, to Sam, still looked too large to be a seed. She turned it, looking for more purchase, when it slipped, rolled from her hands and plopped in the dirt. Like in his comic. Like a wet, fluorescent heart.

  ‘For goodness sake, girl!’ Dettie snapped. ‘Be careful! Don’t be so wasteful.’

  Katie had been smiling, her grin slick with juice, but now she was frozen, her hands still extended, flinching.

  Dettie looked her over. ‘What in the blazes?’ she said, scowling. ‘Just look at you! Look at the state of you! What a mess!’

  Wide-eyed, Katie moved to regather what she had dropped.

  ‘No, don’t touch it!’ Dettie waved her away. ‘You’re already bad enough.’ She exhaled loudly. Shaking her head, she dropped her own uneaten mango back in the plastic bag and spun it shut. ‘All right. That’s it! That’s the last of that. No more.’

  ‘No—’ Katie said quietly. She slumped back against the post.

  ‘Don’t give me that rot. You’re completely filthy. Just look. You’ve been eating like an animal and now your clothes, your face, all of you—in total disarray.’ Dettie groaned and levered herself up, taking the bag with her. Glaring, she waved her finger. ‘We’ve got to get back on the road, and there is no way you can travel like that.’

  Katie, still sitting in place, was focused on the remains of her mango, staring at where it lay, rolled in a crust of filth. Sam moved over to help her up, his back to his aunt. As he gathered their blankets and shook them out, he tried to offer his sister a sly smile, to catch her eye—to show her, somehow, that it didn’t matter. That Dettie was being ridiculous. That he was there for her. But Katie was quiet, downcast. She looked baffled more than anything. Her hands were upturned, still sticky with juice.

  Muttering to herself, Dettie sent them both off to wash up while she drove the car the short distance to the pumps, filled it with petrol, and paid. Katie took longer than Sam in the bathroom, so while he waited he filled their water bottles at a tap beside a stand of motor oils. When the toilet door finally swung open, its rusted hinges wailing like a baby, Katie was clean, her dress dampened with water, her eyes reddened and puffy. She stomped past him, out over to the road, to stand peering at where it snaked around a bend in the distance and disappeared.

  Sam watched her, slowly screwing on each bottle lid, until Dettie stepped back out into the sun, shoving a book of
crosswords and what looked like a screwdriver into her handbag. She dropped her bag into the car, tied back her hair, and found a squeegee by the pump to wash the dust from the windscreen. When she’d finished, she lifted a watering can from beside the pump and called them back to her.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she said, flapping a hand at them both. A dribble of water trailed from the nozzle bobbing at her hip.

  Sam ambled over. When he was close enough she grabbed his shoulder and squeezed, pulling him closer. He wilted, staring at her shoes. Katie was tossing rocks at a give-way sign. She waited until Dettie called again, threw a final stone, and finally strolled over, taking her time to read the advertisements for ice and cola, kicking the dirt.

  ‘All right now. All right. Stop being silly,’ Dettie said when Katie was finally slouching in front of her. ‘I know we’re all hot and tired and cranky. So far it’s been a long trip.’ She exhaled heavily. ‘A lousy trip. And I’m sorry I got cross.’ The water inside the watering can slopped around. ‘But we’ve still got a long way to go, and a long time before we get there. So if we’re going to be stuck together, maybe we should all agree to start afresh. Can we do that?’

  Katie rolled her eyes back in her head. Sam pushed a rock around with his shoe. When no one spoke, he nodded.

  ‘Good. That’s good.’ Dettie smiled. ‘Because I know we’ve all said things we wish we hadn’t. And we’re all sorry about the way we’ve behaved. Aren’t we, Katie?’

  That bird, cawing again, seemed to flood the air with a sad rattle.

  Dettie splashed water on her hand and wiped it over her face, sighing.

  ‘Anyway, I thought some water might get rid of this sticky feeling. Cool off all our heads a little,’ she said, flicking her fingers dry. The bandaid beside her ring was loose, and its end had curled. ‘Sammy, do you want to go first?’