by Sofie Laguna
‘Yes, Anne,’ answered Deirdre. ‘Then I get a tick on the chores and rewards board. Only seven more to a star.’ She stood in front of a poster filled with empty boxes going down.
‘You won’t get a tick if the food is cold,’ said Anne White. ‘Come on.’
Deirdre brought meat and pumpkin and chips and peas to the table and a jug for the gravy.
‘I hope you like roast lamb, Jim,’ said Anne White, smiling at me.
Deirdre put a glass of water near my plate. ‘I hope you like water,’ she said.
Anne White frowned at her. ‘Sometimes after kids stay with us for a while they call Jake Dad,’ she said. ‘You just take your time, Jim, and when you’re ready you can call him Dad too.’
‘Dad,’ said Liam putting a chip in his mouth.
Jake stopped eating his lamb. ‘You watch yourself,’ he said.
‘Oh, he’s alright, aren’t you, Liam?’ Anne White put her hand on Liam’s arm. ‘Did you show Jim the backyard?’
Liam nodded, his eyes on his plate.
‘I showed Jim where the strawberries will go,’ said Deirdre. She turned to me. ‘Anne White’s is the best foster home. I went to another one and you had to do jobs all the time like cleaning out the garage and that’s where the father went. He kept all the things he liked the most in there. He liked it in there more than the house even though there was no heater or fan. I didn’t stay there long, did I, Anne?’
‘No you didn’t, Deirdre. Would you like some more peas?’
‘No thanks, Anne. I’m leaving room for dessert.’
‘Good girl.’ Anne White turned to me. ‘Jim? Not hungry? At least try a chip.’ She turned my plate around so the chips were the closest. ‘Go on.’
I picked up a chip.
‘Good boy,’ said Anne. ‘Wasn’t so hard, was it?’
I turned the chip in half-circles. I kept both directions even, turn turn turn.
Jake looked over Anne White’s shoulder at the television playing in the other room as he ate. Liam didn’t say anything.
When the telephone rang Anne White got up from the table and answered it.
‘Hi, Rodney.’ She looked across at me and smiled. ‘He’s settling in fine. No problems at all.’ She held the telephone away from her. ‘It’s your Uncle Rodney,’ she said to me, then she spoke back into the receiver. ‘Oh, he’ll be really pleased when I tell him. In three weeks? How lovely. Well we’ve got him eating chips, so that’s a start. Yes . . . oh yes . . . I’ll tell him. Thanks, Rodney. Bye.’ Anne White hung up the telephone. ‘That was your uncle,’ she said to me. ‘He’s already planning a visit. Isn’t that lovely?’
Later I lay awake in the bottom bunk, under Liam. In the darkness I held my hand up to my face, then away from it, then close to it. I could only see the shadows of my fingers; my fingers were hardly there. Everybody else was asleep. The streetlamp outside communicated the only light. There wasn’t much, as if the source that supplied it was running low.
I got out of the bed and went to the cupboard. Liam rolled over in his bunk. As quietly as I could I pulled open the doors. On the top shelf I saw the dark outline of the red suitcase. I pulled the case to the ground and sat beside it. I felt the sides of the case with my fingers. Then I unzipped it and pulled back the lid. I got inside, making myself small. I reached outside the case, pulled the lid closed over me, and zipped up what I could. The zip squeezed against my skin. I touched all sides of the case. My head pressed against the end. The suitcase held me; I was contained within it. At last sleep infected me.
In the morning Liam unzipped me and the light came in. ‘Good morning, Matchbox Boy,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’
Rain fell from the sky the whole day. Anne got out the games from the cupboards. ‘For you boys,’ she said, taking Deirdre’s hand. ‘You can bake biscuits in the kitchen with me, Deirdre.’
Liam watched the television and didn’t play any of the games. I stood at the window and looked up to where the rain came from. I traced the pathway of a single drop. It was falling fast; I had to train my eyes. It didn’t touch any of the other drops on the way down. The water knew its direction; the instructions were inbuilt.
‘Jim?’ Anne White stood in front of me. ‘Jim? Earth to Jim?’ She shook the towel she held in her hands. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you had a bath? Come on, before dinner.’ She leaned down and held out her hand to me. ‘Come on. I don’t want to have to carry you – my back would break.’
I stood up. She took my hand and led me to the bathroom. She turned on the tap. ‘Here’s your towel, there’s the soap and there’s a face washer. I’ll leave you to it, okay?’
I nodded.
When she left the room I watched water running from the tap. The pipes led to a pool under the house. Moss and algae grew up the sides. It didn’t matter that Jake poured in bleach, the moss kept growing, turning the walls of the pool soft and dark. Green tentacles reached out, waving.
The bath was slowly filling, steam rising. I got in. There was nothing contained inside my skin. I had vision but I wasn’t made of solid material. I closed my eyes and rocked to the sound of the water falling into the bath. I felt her strong arms lifting me. My hand rested against her chest. She was there when I called. Sometimes I called just to see if she would come. She always did. When Robby was at school and Dad was at the refinery she put on Doris and danced with me across the carpet, space between our faces as she smiled and sang. I see your eyes in the starlight, I hear your laugh everywhere, I feel your touch in the sunlight, I know your voice in the air.
The water kept filling the bath. My shoes and jumper and trousers grew heavy. I lay back and let the water close over my face, hot enough to burn. I held my breath. I could hear knocking from under the surface. I began to spin, water rushed into the spaces, as if I was a ship full of holes out at sea. The water came higher and higher – it was going to sink me. I held my breath. I was on a pathway deep under the ocean, heading towards the light in the sheep’s eyes. ‘Mum! Mum!’ I called.
‘Jim? Jim? What on earth?’ It was Anne White pulling me from the water. Liam was behind her, sticking up his thumb at me, and Deirdre was staring from the corner of the bathroom, Melanie gripped to her chest.
‘Let’s get you out of these for heaven’s sake.’ Anne White started to take off my clothes. She didn’t know that it was my clothes holding me together, that beneath them was cold skin and the root and the hole under the root and beneath that, nothing at all. I twisted and struggled against Anne White.
‘Calm down, Jim. Calm down. You can’t take a bath with your clothes on.’
I opened my mouth to speak but there were no words, only water water water in a long hard stream into her face, blasting her to liquid mercury, hot with my temperature. ‘Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!’
I kicked her as hard as I could in her chin, then in her blue doll’s eye, then in her leg. I bucked and went as hard as a board and I bit at whatever was close to my mouth.
‘Jake! Jake!’ Anne called. ‘Help me! Jake! Deirdre, get Jake! Quickly!’
Jake came and held my arms beside me, and Anne White pulled off my clothes until I was only the skin. There was nothing binding me. I was in pieces, stripped. I vomited bathwater onto the floor at Anne White’s feet.
‘Help me get him into bed,’ she said.
Jake carried me. I let him. I didn’t belong to myself.
‘I’m sorry, Jim. There’s been a lot of change.’ She smoothed the sheet across my chest. ‘But you need to learn that no matter how hard things get, you have to treat others with care.’ She touched her chin where I had kicked. ‘It’s never acceptable to hurt someone.’ She got up and switched off the light.
•
I got out of the bottom bunk, pulled the suitcase from the cupboard and climbed inside. I zipped up what I could. The sides of the case held me in like a membrane. I could hear my own breathing in out in out as if I were the lungs.
In the morning Liam unzipped m
e. ‘Morning, Matchbox Boy.’
Anne White sent Deirdre, me and Liam into the yard to pick lemons. School was starting soon; these were our last days of leisure. Anne White told me that I would be in the same class as Liam.
‘Lucky you,’ said Liam, pulling off a green lemon.
‘They kept you back two years, didn’t they, Liam?’ said Deirdre.
‘Yep. Because I told the teacher to go fuck herself.’ He picked another green lemon and threw it on the grass.
‘What did she do?’ asked Deirdre.
‘She said “Where did you learn language like that?” and I said “From the fuck-off dictionary that my dad kept as a coaster for his beer glass.”’ Liam pulled off another green lemon and threw it at the fence. ‘The other kids laughed but the teacher said I couldn’t stay.’ He kicked at the bricks that were going to be the edge of the vegetable patch. ‘Nobody wants the older kids.’
‘It’s true,’ said Deirdre. ‘When I turn nine nobody will want me, but by then my nan will be back from her holiday and she’ll take me to live at her B & B.’
‘Bullshit and bullshit,’ said Liam. He picked up a loose brick from the top of the garden wall. ‘Put your finger under here, Flick.’
I didn’t move.
‘Don’t do it, Jimmy,’ said Deirdre.
‘Go on, put it under here,’ Liam said. He pointed.
‘Don’t do it, Jimmy – he’ll hurt you,’ Deirdre said.
‘Go on, Flick. Just because you can’t talk doesn’t mean you’re a chicken. This is what the kung-fu men do. It doesn’t hurt. You just think it won’t hurt and it won’t. Go on.’
I listened to the wind blowing the trees. It had come all the way from outerspace, generated by the tides when the moon turned its face.
Liam grabbed my fingers and he put them on the brick and he put the other brick down on my fingers and he pressed.
‘Stop, Liam, you’ll hurt him,’ said Deirdre.
Liam kept pressing down on the brick.
‘Don’t, Liam, don’t,’ Deirdre whined.
‘Don’t, Liam, don’t,’ Liam sang back. ‘It doesn’t hurt you, does it, Flick? You’re a kung-fu man, right? You can’t feel anything, can you, Flick?’
The wind from outer space first blew past the stars, gathering their dust and sending it in clumps to planet Earth. The end of my fingers tingled.
‘Stop, Liam!’ Deirdre shouted.
Liam’s smile tore open his face and I saw a red crack. Inside it was the gun that shot Mrs Connelly and the son doing mouth-to-mouth.
Liam pressed the brick down harder. Deirdre screamed and pulled my hand out from under it. My fingers were bleeding and scraped and squashed. The nail of one was pushed into the skin. Deirdre was crying.
‘Shut up, Dee Dee, crybaby,’ said Liam.
Deirdre cried louder. Then she picked up a handful of dirt and threw it at Liam’s face.
Liam rubbed the dirt from his eyes and mouth. ‘It’ll be you next,’ he said to her. ‘And it’ll be your head, not your fingers.’
Deirdre turned and ran up to the house.
Liam picked up my hand and inspected my fingers. Flames jumped from under the nails. ‘Kung-fu, man, aren’t you, Flick?’ he said, then he dropped my hand, pulled down his trousers and weed against the fence.
Anne White took me to the hospital with Deirdre while Jake took Liam to the football field to train him into consequences.
Emergency was underneath the other parts of the hospital. Children came and went, some with bruises under their eyes, some with trails of snot from their noses, some screaming. Deirdre played with Melanie, near the toy box. She sang to friends only she could see, her voice as soft as a butterfly. I sat and took in breaths. I could see the air; it had a vapour and travelled in currents around the room. Anne White read magazines and watched a television up in the corner too high to change the channels.
After a long time of waiting a doctor called John looked at my crushed fingers. He put them in a machine to take pictures of the bones. The bones are hollow. You could play music through them.
‘He doesn’t seem to be in too much pain,’ said the doctor.
‘But he should be in pain,’ Anne White said. ‘Shouldn’t he? Something’s not right if he can’t feel this.’
John cleaned my fingers and said, ‘We’ll put them in plaster; only one is broken and it’s a small break. You’re lucky, Jim.’
While a nurse wrapped my fingers in wet white sheet I looked down through the floor of Emergency and saw the cemetery where all the children that didn’t get fixed in the hospital lived. They were talking to each other. Everything is on its own, they said.
On the way home Anne White turned to me from the front seat.
‘Are you okay, Jim?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about Liam. He is a good boy, really, and I have to give him a chance. But I can see I’d better keep a closer eye on him – especially around you.’
‘What about around me?’ Deirdre asked, leaning forward from the back.
‘You do a good enough job of taking care of yourself,’ said Anne White, looking at Deirdre in the rear view mirror.
Deirdre slumped back against the seat, crinkling her nose.
‘Jim, please let me know if you are alright,’ Anne White said.
I was only Anne White’s foster, like Deirdre and Liam. We were all pretending. What was alright? My organs were pumping. I wasn’t in the cemetery. Was that what Anne White and John and Jan Watts and Uncle Rodney were all making sure didn’t happen? Was that what Emergency was for? To stop it? Why?
Liam slept in another room that night. ‘Just to give Jim a breather,’ Anne White said.
‘I’ll miss you, Matchbox Boy,’ Liam said, pulling his pyjamas from the shelf. ‘Who will unzip you in the morning?’
It was the first time I would be alone in the room for the night.
‘Sleep well, Jim,’ Anne White said from the doorway. ‘I hope your fingers don’t feel too bad.’ She was a painting wet at the edges, her pale colours dripping out of the frame.
When she left I closed the door and sat down on the bed. Liam’s bunk hung over me. I closed my eyes, holding myself very still. In the floating world the dust was the same colour as the yellow stripe of the bee. The rest was black. If I held my breath, refusing any oxygen or hydrogen, I could see the dust shining.
‘No, Liam, don’t! Don’t touch her!’
I opened my eyes when I heard Deirdre scream. The room was so light it made me blink. I looked at a poster stuck to the wall beside Liam’s bunk. A man on a motorbike with one big leg on the dirt, the other on the pedal, looked down at me. The man held his helmet under his arm ready to put on his head as soon as he started his engine. The poster had white creases across it, and the edges were curled, as if it had been stuck to a lot of walls. Underneath the poster was a small photograph of Liam standing beside a man in a wheelchair with his arm around him. Liam’s head was the same height as his dad’s head. The dad had been brought down by the wheelchair.
I went to the cupboard and pulled out the red suitcase. I opened the lid, touching the silky material inside. The suitcase’s stomach was empty and hungry after all the years of waiting in the cupboard for a change. I slid my fingers into the thin pockets under the lid, touching the cool edges. There was a smaller pocket, inside the big pocket, that I hadn’t found before. I slid my hand in, feeling slowly from one end to the other. I touched something hard and stiff, like cardboard. I pulled out a photograph.
There was my mother and father when they were young, before my mother had her miracles. She was wearing a long dress with frills around the sleeves. Her feet were bare and one of them was lifted. My father was holding her from the side. There were trees on the edges and grass underneath. The wind blew my mother’s hair up around her face. She was smiling as she tried to hold her hair back from her mouth and her eyes with her hand. Behind Mum and Dad was the cliff, and beyond that, the ocean. Mum used to read with her chair beside the cl
iff while Dad climbed down it and fished. He never forgot she was there, it didn’t matter how much the fish pulled and jumped. You could see Mum’s hand coming shyly round my dad’s other side. The photograph was faded from the darkness of time in the hidden pocket of the suitcase.
After a long time of looking at the picture I saw a line that ran from my mother’s fingers, curled up to my father’s hair, and twisted and knotted through the locks. Then it seemed to end. My skin prickled as I searched; I felt myself grow hot. Then at last I saw the line coming down from my dad’s hair, over his shoulder and joining up to my mum’s waist. My heart pounded. I wanted to be slipping and sliding up and down that line as if it was a ride at Luna Park and I was miniature and could fit, sliding from one to the other, mother to father, father to mother, forever.
Downstairs a door slammed, and I heard Deirdre and Liam shouting.
I turned the photograph over.
Point Paradise Caravan Park, Point Paradise
Gavin and Paula
It was my mother’s writing; I knew the round ups and the leaning downs, the i’s with hardly a dot, and the thin u’s. It was as if I was looking at a code from another country so far away you couldn’t find it on the atlas.
That night I didn’t zip myself into the suitcase. There wouldn’t be room for all the feelings coming from my pores. I needed space; I had glad, I had want, I had maybe, I had Mum and Dad.
I turned off the light and climbed into the bottom bunk holding the picture by the edges. I didn’t want my fingers to contaminate it. I tried to hold exactly one millimetre, balancing it between my bandaged hand and my unbandaged one. But what if I fell asleep and the photograph was squashed beneath my bulk? What if it slipped through a crack and no matter how much I searched, or Anne White searched, or Jake searched, or the police, or the army, the picture would be lost forever, never to be found, always missing without an answer? I got out of bed and turned on the light. I balanced the picture on the table beneath the photograph of Liam’s dad.