I told her what I thought of her. Michael wouldn’t have liked me to be so cruel. He loved her the way a child loves a rodent or a bird, some mauled thing you retrieve from a pulpy nest to watch it die slowly in a shoebox. But I had outgrown the idea of rescue. I knew hers came at the cost of her kids. When she was nourished she fluttered away to bring the next predator into their life. How she tracked them I just don’t know: she had radar. When she was smacked-up once again she crawled into the corner of the kids’ room and expected to be pitied, although by the stage her beatings were dished out the boys had already lived through weeks of their own. I thought she should have been put out of her misery long ago.
The funeral director must have sized her up anyway. It didn’t take too much convincing to get him to hand over Michael to me instead. I paid: Michael’s mother had told the guy she’d need welfare assistance to cover it. He had a mass of forms filled out in glitter pen, her printing loopy and babyish with oooo’s and aaaaa’s. But I put it down in cash, everything we had saved. Sometimes when Michael and I got somewhere in our savings we’d talked of a kind of future, of things we could use the money to try to set right. Mostly we’d talk of taking Smudge from his mother, of trying to keep him safe. We had thought it probably wouldn’t be hard to make her cave in and leave him for good; she wasn’t much interested, except in the welfare, and sometimes we had Smudge camped out for weeks, while she was AWOL, toasted or ‘in love’.
When I tipped the money onto the desk at the funeral home I thought about that. I thought maybe I should be using it to take home the living son, not the dead one.
It might have been the thought of that that made me so angry when I got Michael’s canister that I kicked it under the back seat and just kept driving, shortcuts I’d never taken before but which I knew were headed somehow out through the hills to the caravan he’d killed himself in, and picking up a hitchhiker I was planning to fuck before I had even pulled into the gravel, because the simplest way to hurt Michael was to act like his mother, and show him that now he had done what he’d done I could easily settle into her life, sink into her dress, put on her red shoes and get myself a man who’d make my nose bleed, my hips black, my heart too blurred to see straight back into the past.
I swallowed some of the food the old lady had left me and lay in the caravan trying to come round, clean up. But I had trouble. That caravan was as good as a dark room. And the images were cleaner then, so distinct they moved along my skin and through my insides. There were images of Michael that would not leave me, unlike the real thing. He met me at a service station where I was pumping gas, and he had just pulled his wagon in from the nearby beach he’d been surfing at. He only had boardies on, crusted with sand, knotted with a shoelace where the hair spiralled down on his belly. He’d cut his leg on the fin of his board and it was bleeding. He limped off to wash it at the tap on the concrete blocks at the end of the pumps. But he turned to stare back at me while he did it, looking hard at me while blood diluted under the long rub of his hand, streaked down his foot and dripped from it, joining the slick of petrol that belched from his car when it reached full. I didn’t know then how precious that was, that stare. I didn’t know then how his usual look was past you, into the space beyond the left side of your head, as if your angel, your double, stood there, a trace of a past self that hung around or a future one, a shadow you hadn’t quite stepped into. When he came closer, the day we met, I said, I’m so sorry for spilling the gas, and he looked right at me, right in the face for a while, before his gaze slid away to the side, where I would learn it would mostly stay in our years together, eerie, cute, off-putting. It was long enough for so much damage to be done: in a single look I’d already learned him, especially the eyes with their troubles and stains and translucence rippling ring through ring, the pillar of bone up the middle of his chest, the thinned blood still drizzling down his ankle, the bud of joint there very white amidst the dark hair wrinkled darker with water. Forget it: those were the first words he said to me. I kept saying Sorry.
No way, forget it, he kept repeating. He wore a necklace like a dog tag on his chest, and on its bright metal there was still a single suspended fleck of the sea. He went on saying Hey, forget it: I went on staring at that drop, that clarity. I should have known then that Michael had brought me a terrible gift, of images that wouldn’t leave.
In the caravan I thought, if I choose to follow Michael, that fleck of salt water glinting from his necklace might be the last thing that I see.
But I also lay and thought about that water, that tiny circle shining and irrelevant … and thought I saw everything reflected in it. So much beauty left behind in something so useless. A nothingness and a shrine, at once, a waste and a universe. Like the cell he may have left behind in me.
I couldn’t stay in the caravan thinking that. To think it was to watch all the questions, everything beginning with if, coming into focus like the ghost of Michael’s fingers brushing words onto the glass for me. Waiting for my breath.
I crashed out the caravan so hard I startled the old woman who was in the garden. She was pushing a spinning blade on a stick along the concrete rim of the flower beds. It droned and squeaked, opened a dark scar of dirt. Her mouth opened in a smile as dark and dry.
I said nothing, because I couldn’t. I walked straight ahead, through the weeds she had neatly stacked onto polythene, through loops of her washing, the wilted singlets as thin as webs strung across the light, not clothing but apparitions of thread. She clucked but she didn’t bother staring at me. I heard the whining of her garden tool go on, the gritty sound of it chipping at the concrete.
I got to the beach and stayed there a long time. There weren’t many people down there: a couple of grommets wagging school to surf, a few brisk, pastel-toned women in plastic sun-visors with handbag-sized dogs. A guy clicked by in jandals and a cap, a red-brown paunch jogging over his speedos and a cigarette pack tucked down above his arse. He stared at me through wraparound shades and slid his tongue in and out so I heard saliva jostling. But when I ignored him he just shrugged and squeaked past. Out to sea the light was so thick it looked like someone had spilled sand along the horizon, and a triangle of shimmers too painful to focus on poured down. The waves moved in like a diagram of themselves, measured and rustling. I thought about tipping Michael in with them, but every time I looked black tangles of debris were dragged to the same place in each wave, as if the sea kept spitting up the same junk, unable to leave it. So I lay down then and closed my eyes, and the sound of the waves became a dream, the sound of Michael trying to fix his secondhand finds, taping their pages at one place while their spines just cracked straight open at the next one, until he gave up and plucked them, pinned them up round the flat. And we’d lie there on the bed under those strings of thinking and watch them, flicking yellow kites, and I’d forget how flimsy, how limited those theories seemed mingling on our wall when Michael climbed onto me and peeled my pelvis and his out of the basics of underwear and joined us, gently and wetly, into the one glazed body we were meant to share.
When I woke I thought about fucking the hitchhiker there on the same stretch of beach. Stumbling the dunes the hitchhiker had tried to talk, to add a dimension to the screwing, but once we reached the hard sand I’d pulled up my skirt and taken his fingers and shoved them under fabric, wedged them as far as I could get them in one jolt into me. As earnest as he was, he had gasped and unbuttoned. But he wasn’t happy without his ideals for long. When we were done he went on talking, about himself when he found he couldn’t learn about me. He told me about his project back at art school, an installation, cross-referencing cyberspace and God, he said. He blended things like chat room threads with religious texts; he was going to call it Cannot Find Server. He was hitching this way to look through junk shops and dumps; he wanted old circuit boards, valves and cylinders, anything that looked mechanical yet obsolete. He was going for a look of intricate components, technological complexity, yet ultimate emptiness,
a vast systemic void. He was planning to splice other objects in, odd defunct icons from routine existence, and an active current would run through to randomly light up words he had taken from the bible or the net: No New Messages, Unable to Establish a Connection, Click Here for a List of Errors. I told him I could give him a great piece; I told him to come back to the car with me. I still don’t know if I would have gone through with it. I heard my voice talking as if it was a voice on tape. ‘Put it under Deleted Items,’ I said. I got as far as unlocking the car, brushing under the seat for the canister. It spun and slithered away from my hands, but I got a hold of it and turned and offered it to him. I wasn’t sure if it was shame or pity in the hitchhiker’s face, but it was not neutral. He twitched as he was talking, nothing but shocked platitudes. ‘But I thought we were talking about the postmodern,’ I said. I held Michael out. ‘He didn’t leave a reason. So it was like all of the things you just said, pointless, disconnected, drained of value, arbitrary. All of the fucking clever things you just said. An uncommitted suicide,’ I said. ‘Ha, an uncommitted suicide.’
When the hitchhiker left it was what I wanted. I let myself into the caravan alone. I still had Michael in my hands, and the residue of the hitchhiker trickling inside me. If and when I had to face the baby as definite at least I could pretend its source was unclear, and a child that potentially had nothing to do with Michael would be easier to dispose of. But, really, I knew that line of thought was irrelevant. I knew it all broke down to just us three: me in the caravan, Michael in his chrome, the possible baby cooped inside me. One dead, one alive, the third one somewhere in the middle, undecided.
Uncommitted. Perhaps Michael had not let himself know either, had not been certain, until the very end, which way his decision, or indecision, would go, where it would take him. Perhaps he had been keeping his secret the way I had been keeping mine, even from myself. Perhaps when he came here he did not drive the distance head on, fixed on his suicide, but only felt the suggestion of death wavering along the outskirts of the strange road, a wayside of hazy possibilities, hissing as lightly as the fenceline crosses or the ferns. Perhaps he could lie down in the caravan and trick himself, dozily, pill by sip. Perhaps no capsule or gulp seemed terminal, not even the small knife he steered down his forearm, docking it finally in the deep mess of his wrist. He only cut one—maybe he still was irresolute, playing at that slash, unfocused. Maybe he was fooling himself. The same way I could walk back there from the beach and trick myself that my body was empty, except for an accidental rivulet of no one special’s sperm.
Any way you stared at it, that caravan looked like death’s door. When I walked back towards it after my short crash on the beach, the sun was shooting off it in all directions. I suppose my eyes were done in with more than just glare, but at first I didn’t see the old girl was still outside. Only then, as I got across the section, I spotted her and I could tell she wasn’t herself, not picking or fussing or digging at anything, just kneeling, making little bursts of off-pitch, scrawny movement, trying to claw up, then swaying back as if the buffalo grass was too spongy for take-off.
We’d hardly spoken two words but the sight of her, withered like that, made me run.
Her breath was scratchy, so I made her sit back and stop clambering about for a moment. She was not an easy old bugger to boss, so I got down with her and propped her up from the back and told her off, gently. She snapped, Leave off, will you. But after another lurch or two, she came back against me. Fragile lengths of rib shimmered through her old frock as she wheezed, and I could feel her heartbeat, puckering oddly. I didn’t have to bully her still anymore, so we just crouched, watching the caravan.
Finally, when her torso was steadier, she tampered with the fingers I was holding her with and said, ‘Well, that was a bad business.’
‘What? Did you fall?’
‘No,’ she said, gruffly. ‘I meant what your fella did. That was a bad business. What he came here and went and done to himself.’
I owed her something in reply but the cold in my lungs was packed solid. No words were getting in or out.
She said, ‘Thought you’d keep mum about it, did you? I spotted you right away. It’s a giveaway, your face, did you know that, dearie? I was wondering when you were going to pipe up and say. Anyway, I don’t get that much call for the caravan. I only pin up that little note to rent it at the dairy and it’s not like we get lots of outsiders through here. And never back-to-back like the two of you’ve been. We’re the black stump out here, love. God’s last shovelful.’
She nodded at the caravan, light still sharp all over that hutch. It looked even more rancid, bent on its piles and the scruffy grass I’d flicked full of smoke butts.
‘We lived in that, you know. Me and Bert, when we first came here. He built the house later. Every last brick, he did. His back was a swine of a thing ever since,’ she chuckled. ‘I’ve never let it get run down to this state. Not in a month of blessed Sundays. But since your young man put his lights out in there I’ve felt too funny to get in and do it. The young cop gave it the once-over for me, but you know young blokes. So I bring the bucket and things out to get stuck in and give it a real good going-over. But I come over all unnecessary, I don’t mind saying. And that’s not something I’m used to, my girl.’
‘Not me,’ she tutted on. ‘Not ruddy likely. Tough as an old boot. Always have been. I tell myself, there’s worse things happen to old birds like you stuck on their own. There was one not so long ago. Bludgeoned, she was, in her bed, and the fella they caught for it was only a mite. So I’m a darn sight luckier than that poor duck. Nothing to stop your young fella being one of those. And how would I’ve known.’
She shifted, creakily, fastening herself, tapping away at sticking grasses. Her fingers were fibrous, a pinched blue at the joints.
‘I need to get into gear now,’ she said.
I stayed behind her, levering. I didn’t have to see her eyes from there. She took a few steps once we were upright, but they were curtailed, doddery. I told her I could taxi her to the doctors. Mad, her eyes were wide in their crinkle of skin and she looked like she fancied cuffing me.
‘Not ruddy likely,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right as rain. The way that doctor fluffs about gets me peeved. Good and proper.’
I hobbled her over to the house, her twitching me away, then relapsing, vexed, into my grip. In the long run she wasn’t going to be thwarted. She waved me down a side of the house I hadn’t been. Along the end wall was some kind of knocked-up cage or sun porch, just a frame stretched with tatters of black mesh.
I said, ‘Michael had … a rotten time. When he was a kid.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘You hear a lot of that talk these days.’
‘But Michael never would talk about it. He wouldn’t tell me anything. Not any details. But once I had to drive his mother to the hospital and she jabbered out a whole load of stuff. I think she was sorry for a flash, but really only for herself. Anyway, she told me that once a guy she’d moved in with had lived at an old zoo park. He was closing it down, and he’d sold off most of the animals, and just had the leftover birds hanging round. He’d open the cages from time to time, but they couldn’t get the picture. You know what they say, the cliché, too used to being locked up. So one night, when Michael does something, or nothing, like little kids do, to piss this guy off, he drags him out and chucks him into one of those cages. She said some of the birds went crazy, him being in there, screaming like you can imagine. But it was the dead ones that bothered him the most. There were some that were dying cos the guy couldn’t be bothered feeding them.’
‘Sounds like a nasty piece of work.’
‘She had a stack of them. His mother.’
She said, ‘Well, I expected something like that when I never heard from the family. You’d think that someone’d be out to ask me about it, if he’d come from a decent bunch.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘As things go, dear, you seem decent
enough.’
I watched her from a pace behind as she shuffled to the back door, holding back the streaks of vinyl that flagged away the flies. She jimmied off her boots and worked her feet into wizened velvet slippers. Holes were sawed into the tips to leave room for her corns.
She turned and said, ‘If you ask me, mothers like that want being taken out and whipped. I can’t fathom them. I would’ve gone to any length, for a kiddie. But Bert and me were never blessed. Not for want of trying, mind you. That’s why Bert started work on the house, y’know, even though we only had the dough to get going slowly, to put it up brick by brick. He said it’d come to him that while we were stopping in the caravan a little soul would think we didn’t have the room to take it in. It sounds like an odd idea for a man to get, but it turned out that it really worried him. He couldn’t rest easy in the old crate fretting that our little chap might be out there, in the ether or I-don’t-know-where, looking down on us but feeling we weren’t making the space to squeeze it in.’
There was a silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said finally. ‘About it all. You having to find him. I don’t know what … else to tell you. Do you—you know—need me for anything?’
‘I’ll be right as rain. Like I said. You get used to being alone. I don’t think I could stomach anyone now. Couldn’t put up with it.’
I didn’t think I should walk off but she clutched at the doorframe, wiry, not to be crossed.
As I moved back the cat sidled up to her, croaking. She nudged a saucer, speckled with congealed meat, towards it, talking back to it in coarse little yowls.
‘Oh, and this is Widow,’ she said across the lawn to me. ‘When I was telling one of my pals down at cardio club she thought I said Pussy Widow, not Pussy Willow, you see. Silly old duffer. Then Widow just stuck. Just thought I’d tell you in case she tries to take over that caravan.’
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