The Eye of the Sheep

by Sofie Laguna

  When Dad came home that night he didn’t go to the sitting room and drink beers. He sat at the kitchen table while Mum got the lasagne ready and he spoke about a man called Marv who was too old to work but couldn’t afford to stop. He talked about Marv’s wife Julie and how she put him under pressure, though he could understand why, and how Marv didn’t want to retire anyway. He said Marv used to be a fighter but he’d given up.

  Mum nodded and said, ‘Hmmm,’ and, ‘Oh,’ and, ‘Really?’

  Dad kept talking. He liked Marv and he didn’t like Marv, he was angry with Marv and Marv made him sad. He understood Julie and he didn’t. He talked about pay and hours and break rates and output. At last Dad’s valves were unblocked and the words flowed as easily as oil through the pipes.

  As we ate the lasagne and drank our juice I looked at my Dad in the fading yellow of our kitchen and I saw how brown and bright he was. In the place of the red in his eyes were waves rolling over and foam bubbling up white and shining.

  ‘It was good to see Rod again,’ Dad said, putting lasagne on his fork.

  ‘How is he without Shirl? Is he doing okay?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Better off. Shirl was always on his back about something or other. He’s a free man now.’ Dad took a long sip of his juice.

  ‘A free man! Is that what you’d like to be?’

  ‘Only love sets you truly free,’ said my dad, putting his hand over my mother’s.

  ‘You know all the right things to say, don’t you, love?’

  ‘Old silver-tongue.’ Dad turned to me. ‘Did I ever tell you when I first met your mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Mum’s told me,’ I answered. ‘Point Paradise.’

  Mum smiled. ‘You’ve got a good memory, Jim.’

  ‘There she was,’ said Dad, looking back at Mum. ‘Sitting outside her little caravan reading a book. The wind was blowing her hair and lifting the pages. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The only time she moved was to turn the page.’

  Mum looked at Dad. ‘I was on a reading holiday. All I brought were books. Two weeks away from work with nothing to do but read.’

  ‘And I was on a fishing holiday. All I brought was bait.’

  ‘You smelled like fish.’

  ‘You didn’t mind.’

  ‘I didn’t mind a bit.’

  ‘Point Paradise.’ Dad shook his head. ‘The most beautiful place on earth. When I die that’s where I want to be buried.’

  Mum looked at him and rolled her eyes. ‘That’s a long way off, love, if I’ve got any say in it.’

  ‘A long way off!’ I repeated. ‘A long way off, Dad!’

  Later, when Merle Haggard sang ‘Holding Things Together’, Dad took Mum in his arms and spun her around the kitchen. A chair fell as they twirled and Mum shrieked but Dad didn’t stop to let her pick up the chair. Though he was small he could still get around her, as if his arms went on after they were finished. They wrapped her up tight as they danced so that every part of her was held, the parts I had never seen before and the parts I had. She was held so strong and so tight by my dad she could never come apart. I smacked my hands together and every finger had a partner to hit and the sound that came out was in time to Mum and Dad’s feet as they danced over the lino squares – black white black white black white holding things together.

  Three weeks after the holiday Dad came home and said some blokes were going to be laid off because of low productivity. He said, ‘They could’ve given us bloody notice. I’ve been there for years.’ When he spoke I heard all the days of rust caught in his vocals.

  Mum crossed the kitchen towards him. ‘But it won’t be you, love. Maybe some of the men who are near retirement. Some of the older boys, but not you.’

  ‘No one is safe. Not me, not any of us.’ Dad moved away, opening the fridge door and pulling out a beer. He cracked the top and tipped it over his open mouth. If Dad was made of glass you would have seen the beer rushing through his network; beer through the tunnels of his legs, to his toes, along his arms, all the way to his fingertips, around his heart valves, into his breathing tubes and alveoli, up his neck and into his head until every part of him was flooded. What happened at the refinery that day would be drowned.

  ‘Oh, love,’ said Mum. She went to him, her face sorry, as if it was she who was going to lay him off, she who would tell him he wasn’t wanted and had no place.

  Dad walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting room. He turned on M*A*S*H. From against the door I heard Klinger say, ‘You could let me try that nail polish,’ but Dad didn’t even laugh.

  When Dad went to work the next morning he didn’t kiss Mum and he didn’t look at me and say, Pass the juice, Bruce, or, Milk for your tea, squire? He drank his coffee standing at the island. When Mum handed him his thermos he didn’t say, Thanks, love. He just took it.

  ‘It won’t be you, love. You’ll be fine,’ Mum said as he opened the front door.

  ‘I’m not worried about it,’ Dad snapped back, as if there was one wrong thing to say in this world and Mum had just said it.

  After Dad left it was as if everything in the kitchen had been thrown into the air and settled back down in the wrong places. It was unbalanced. There was only one person who could bring back the balance and that was Dad.

  We went to the shops, we swept the floors, we went to Mum’s work for the lunch shift, we sat in the sun and ate Lemon Softies and Mum drank tea but what we were really doing was waiting for Dad to come home, to see how he would be, what he would do.

  I wished Robby was here. When I was on the holiday just with Dad I didn’t miss Robby as much. He was there, but it didn’t hurt. But now, without him, there weren’t enough people to absorb the static; the rooms filled with it, buzzing and vibrating. I missed Robby so much my chest ached. When it was almost six o’clock Mum began to look at her watch. She looked at it many times. She checked her face in the mirror, she put on lipstick, she moved quickly across the kitchen in the same pathways over and over, then back to look at her face in the mirror, as if she wasn’t sure about what she saw the first time.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table setting up bridges to later smash when Dad came through the door. I could tell he was carrying the air from the refinery and it needed time to dispel. Mum went to him too quickly; ‘Oh, love,’ she said. ‘How was it?’ Her lipstick had a scent that reached his nostrils when she spoke and mixed with the vapours of the refinery still trapped in his head, and made him dizzy. I wanted to warn her, Stand back, Mum. Don’t speak. But it was too late.

  I followed the line around the kitchen, seeing it connect my dad’s ears to his head that led to his hair which led to the fluorescent bar of light via the cord that hung down from the blind. Then into the quiet pocket of our waiting, I spoke. ‘Are The Good Times Really Over?’ Merle Haggard’s song leapt from between my teeth without warning. Dad looked at me in the land between anger and laughter. A land like a horizon; if you put a foot too heavily on either side it tipped. There was a gap, then he laughed. Mum did too.

  Dad took a beer from the fridge, smiling as he swigged. ‘Are the good times really over?’ he asked the bottle.

  Dad didn’t talk about Marv or Julie at dinner. Mum made shepherd’s pie. When she cut through the potato roof, all the things the shepherd loved – carrots, potatoes, peas – rolled out onto the plate, steaming and soft, floating in brown sauce. When she brought the dinner to the table Dad didn’t say, Smells good, sweetheart, or, You know the way to a man’s heart, Paula. He sat without speaking, sticking forkfuls of the pie into his mouth and sipping from his beer. It was as if Mum and me weren’t there.

  That night I was lying in bed when I heard the muffled voices of Mum and Dad. I got out of bed, crossed the hall and stood just outside their door. ‘They say half of us are going to go,’ I heard Dad say.

  ‘But you won’t be in that half, love.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘You’ve got to have a bit of faith, Gav.’

&n
bsp; ‘That’s bullshit, Paula. I’m facing things.’

  ‘Well, okay, if the worst does happen, we’ll be right.’

  ‘Living on what you bring in?’

  There was a pause. The cells in my system began to spin. I felt tiny pins pricking the skin down my arms.

  ‘When will you find out?’

  ‘They’ll start firing the end of next week.’

  ‘It will be okay, Gav. We’ll deal with it when we get there.’ There was a small space and then she asked, ‘Things have been good lately, haven’t they?’

  Dad didn’t answer her. He didn’t say anything. It was a gap that nobody reached the other side of. There was the rustle of clothes, the flick of the light switch, the pull of blankets. Then nothing. Mum and Dad lay suspended over the gap.

  The tiny prickings in my skin reached my back and shoulders.

  I went back to my room and got in bed. I took a breath and waited for a sheep. The house was different without even the chance of Robby. I closed my eyes and made a picture of him out at sea with his team. Where was his boat? I wanted to send a message to him along the line that travelled between waves. Half, I would say. Half, Robby, half! The message would rise and fall along the line with the waves beneath it until it reached his boat. One of the team would see its small red light flashing on the dark sea and the message would be pulled up on a rope and delivered to my brother in the cockpit, and he would hear it and come home.

  Dad drank beer every night of that week. On Friday I crawled through the fence into the wetlands. I sat on the Lady Free, the grass now so high around her sides you could hardly see her. I closed my eyes and threw out my line and hoped that it might touch Robby’s underwater. When I opened my eyes I looked across to the refinery. For the first time there was no flame from the pipe. It had gone out. Productivity was too low to supply it. With no flame would there still be refining and rust for my dad?

  •

  That night Dad said, ‘I’ll eat in here, Paula.’ In here was the sitting room. Redness washed across Mum’s face. It was blood transmitting the stored feelings. Mum brought him steak and onion and corn on the cob on a tray into the sitting room, then she came back into the kitchen and ate bread and jam standing at the sink. She curled the bread over and the piece was gone in two bites. Her eyes were blank without a single story to tell. After he finished dinner Dad came in, and, graceful as a dancer, reached up to the high cupboard, pushed past the vitamin C and the Panadol, and took down the bottle of Cutty Sark. The boat on the bottle sailed down into our kitchen, dropping anchor on the bench while Dad took the ice out of the freezer.

  That night I was dreaming the room had a skin and I was the heart inside it, when I woke to the sound of glass smashing. In my dream I didn’t know what kept me beating. The time between my beats was always different; the pattern was broken. I didn’t know if I would make it to the next beat. I heard Mum say ‘No, Gav!’ I heard something crash. There was a scream but I don’t know which side of the skin it came from. The bed filled with warm water. It was the Indian Ocean making a visit, absorbed through the epidermis. On the other side of the skin the rest of the house began to sink. Beatbeat beat . . . beat. I kept my eyes tightly closed.

  The next day Dad came home and told Mum that he’d been fired. ‘No bloody loyalty,’ he said. ‘I’m a dollar sign and that’s it.’

  When he crossed the yard to go into his shed I saw that the water was gone from his body. Smoke drifted from his chest. He was dried up like a desert. I wanted Mum to hose him the way she did the succulents.

  I ran outside after him. Mum called me back. ‘Stay away from your father, Jimmy. He’s had bad news, okay? You stay away.’

  ‘What happened, Mum?’ I asked her. ‘What happened? Why is Dad home?’ It was only two o’clock. Dad didn’t come home until six o’clock. ‘Why did they fire him?’

  ‘Shhh, Jimmy, take it easy. Just do something else.’

  ‘What, Mum? What?’

  ‘What about your manuals? Your blocks?’

  ‘What about your manuals?’ I copied her voice, rising in the middle, breathy.

  ‘Jimmy!’ she snapped. ‘Don’t!’ Tiny currents of electricity left behind from the firing zigzagged through the kitchen.

  Mum made me sit in the sewing room with my manuals while she worked. I learned how the needle automatically threads and stitches. The levers at the base connect to the cotton and its all systems go. When Mum left to answer the telephone I went out into the yard. I turned an empty plant bucket upside down, and put it underneath Dad’s high shed window. Then I stood on it.

  Dad was staring into his open fridge. He was the centre and the light from the fridge came out in rays around him. All of the rest of the shed was in shadow. Soon he closed the fridge without taking anything out. He stood up and leaned against his workbench, his back to me. Everything in the shed radiated from him. The spanner, the saw, the rope, the car parts, the posters on the wall, even the dust particles, all joined to him by lines.

  Dad slammed his fists down onto the workbench. ‘Fuck!’ he said.

  I was ticking like a clock after too many windings. I gripped the ledge tightly, the bucket shaky beneath my feet. Dad sagged against the bench, putting his face into the bowl of his shadowy hands. Suddenly he lifted his head as if somebody had whispered to him that I was there. He swung around and saw me through the dusty glass. Though our vision was obstructed by dirt and cobweb and stain, his eyes held me suspended. Even if the bucket fell I would have hung there. I wanted to call out, but my throat was locked and wouldn’t release the sounds.

  When at last he turned away, shaking his head as if he could refuse me, I jumped off my bucket and ran inside.

  Later I saw him coming up to the house. Just before dinner when I walked past the sitting room I saw the dark of my dad’s head in his black recliner bobbing up and down to Merle, who sang ‘The Fightin’ Side of Me.’ I saw his hand pour beer into his throat. The table in front of him was full of empty bottles. His ashtray was on the ground beside the recliner. It overflowed with butts. Two were on the carpet, like white slugs.

  I went into the kitchen where Mum was making dinner. She put chops, carrots, green beans and potato on a plate with a white roll on the side and carried it in to Dad. She knew that after he ate he wasn’t as drunk. Food particles battled the whisky and food, due to the heaviness, always won.

  I heard Dad shouting from the sitting room, ‘What the hell would you know about it?’

  My heart beat faster. My hands kept getting in each other’s way, knocking against each other. The Saxa fell from the table, leaving a spill of salt across the floor.

  ‘You and that bloody kid! He drives to me to it. You both do. Leave me alone!’

  I got up from the table and walked to the sitting room. The dinner Mum had brought for Dad was on the floor. Beans made a path across the carpet that led to Mum and Dad where they stood facing each other.

  Why was my mother in there? She knew not to stay when Dad was drinking.

  ‘You leave him out of this. It’s not his fault you lost your job.’ Her face was red. There was chop gravy on her dress. Her hair flew round her face as if it was electric.

  Dad stepped towards her. ‘If he’d been normal we could’ve moved to Albany. I could’ve got the job on the rigs.’

  ‘Oh, the bloody job on the rigs. Bloody Albany! You tried to get the job on the rigs and they said you weren’t big enough or some rubbish. It had nothing to do with our son!’ Her voice exploded from her.

  I clung to the doorframe and watched sparks shoot from her mouth.

  ‘Our son!’ Dad shouted. ‘He’s not my bloody son! You must’a done some other poor bastard to get a son like that!’

  Mum made the sound of an animal trying to escape. Then she came at him with the full strength of her body – with her arms that hung the washing and swept and vacuumed, with her legs that pushed the trolley of cans and packets all the way up the hill every Saturday, with her stomac
h where she put her dinners, and with the weight of her bottom that made a chair for her to sit on after another day done. Her hair now bright with currents that flicked into the air above, she pushed herself into him and he fell back against the coffee table.

  ‘Stupid bloody woman.’ Dad dragged a low growl up from under the carpet beneath his feet, pulling it past the fibres and giving it hard to my mother. He shoved her in the chest. I wished she was wearing a jacket made of knives and guns, all the knives tied together and the guns aimed and ready. I wished she was wearing it under her dress, but she wasn’t. All she had was the bra and the cream petticoat I’d seen her put on that morning before she pulled her stripe and dot dress over her head.

  Mum screamed and Dad hit her in the eyes. He was blinding her! He was blinding my mum! Who would see me if not her?

  The sparks that shot from Mum’s mouth ignited a trail that snaked across the carpet and set my feet alight. I ran with an unstoppable force into the room and hit Dad in the legs. He felt hard under my fists, as if there were metal fillings beneath his skin. I hit him in the stomach then he hit me back. Dad had never hit me before; it was only ever Mum. I felt the bones of my chest splinter from the weight of his hand. He grabbed my arm and pulled it and snapped it like a matchstick.

  I swung at him with my other arm. ‘No, Dad! No! No!’ I shouted.

  And then he shoved me hard against the wall. Merle Haggard sang ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ as I fell. I looked up and saw brown beer bottles filled with light as if a candle was burning inside each one. The carpet was wet with the ocean that flooded out of me.

  Through the glass I saw Mum catch fire. Flames leapt from her body. She whipped at Dad with her burning branches, until he was crushed against the wall, hands over his face to protect himself from the heat. He dropped into his chair and let her burn him.