Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  ‘You ate it all yesterday.’ Adrian shut the window and turned to me. ‘Or maybe she rubbed it over herself. Soon she’ll stink so badly I won’t be able to stand in the same room as her. What happened to our daughter? Can’t you get her to take a shower?’

  ‘Can’t you?’ The words burst out of me. I wanted to suck them back in. I didn’t want a fight. I hate to fight.

  I didn’t dare tell him about the turd, or the cat’s tail with scraps of pink flesh still hanging from it, or the rutting. She’s a teenager, I told myself the night I heard her grunting and barking in the backyard with the boy who looks like a dingo, all pale bristly hair and pointy face. She’s had her implant so she won’t get pregnant. But the turd. The little exclamation mark of dried-up poo I found nestled behind her bedroom door. How could I explain that?

  ‘At least she’s here for breakfast. She’ll turn out all right, you’ll see. You know most of them grow out of it.’ I felt my face wrinkle into an appeasing smile.

  ‘That’s if we still want her.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Dad.’ Sienna had slunk inside and was crouched on her haunches in the corner of the room, beside the door to the lounge.

  ‘You know I don’t mean it.’ He was smiling at her. He reached down to tousle her hair but she cringed further into the corner.

  ‘Darling, come and sit at the table,’ I said. ‘I’ll cook you sausages.’

  She sneezed and scratched behind her ear. The soft curls of her strawberry blonde hair bounced as she scratched. Her foot thumped the floor. I could hear the packs of Dogteens gathering out in the streets, whooping and baying and shrieking as they did every weekend on their way to the local compound.

  ‘Forget it.’ She rose to her feet in a fluid movement that took her out the back door in three long paces. ‘I’ll see you later. I’m in the traces today.’

  As soon as she’d gone I sat down heavily on the kitchen chair.

  ‘She’s been bitten,’ I said to Adrian. ‘Did you see her neck? And she’s going to be hauling that dog!’

  ‘She’s been bitten, all right. Some boy giving her a love bite.’

  ‘No, no. I think it’s one of those dog bites where they pass on the virus.’

  Adrian held his fork mid-air, balancing a triangle of toast topped with a wobbly pyramid of scrambled egg. For a moment he did nothing, then he guided the food to his mouth and chewed slowly and swallowed.

  ‘I want to take her to the doctor.’ I heard the crack in my voice.

  He put down his cutlery, edged his chair close to mine, and hugged me. I hadn’t noticed that my husband had got plump like me until then, when his belly moulded over my left arm. His double chin rested on my shoulder. His arms could barely encircle my torso. We were two Humpty dolls. I began to laugh. He held me tighter. He thought I was crying.

  ‘That TV show is complete rubbish. You know that,’ he murmured into my hair.

  ‘I know,’ I said, between giggles.

  He let go. I took his hand in mine, pressed his palm against my cheek. My giggles had subsided. A strange despair crept over me.

  ‘How did we get so old?’

  Every Sunday afternoon the leader of the dogs, the packmaster, is towed on a float around the centre of town by thirteen Dogteens in harness. The remaining Dogteens, perhaps three or four hundred in this city, run alongside the float with the dog pack, laughing and shouting in that guttural canine tongue few adults have ever mastered, banging on drums and blowing whistles and doing cartwheels and funny dances.

  Adrian and I take the tram into town, and we settle at a cafe’s outdoor table. The young woman serving us, perhaps in her early twenties, is wearing a pair of clip-on dog ears. A fake fur tail hangs from the seat of her jeans. The cafe is called Dogster.

  ‘Here for the parade?’ she asks as she takes our orders.

  The city mutters in an expectant, festive conversation. There is an occasional rumble of distant thunder and the light is a yellowy purple. Whiffs of stale oil and rotten garbage and the leftover rank smell of Saturday night in the city swirl through the air.

  ‘If we had a normal daughter, this would be a netball final or a school concert. You’d better be right about her growing out of it soon.’ Adrian blows on his coffee and takes a hesitant sip.

  He’s not ready for this. He spends too much time away, a life behind glass in cars and planes and offices. He’s only just realised his daughter stinks. She’s not simply our daughter anymore. She’s a Dogteen. An independent wild thing who will do whatever she wants.

  I can hear the procession coming down the next street. The drums and tambourines bang out unevenly and tin whistles are playing tunes, but most of all it’s the barking and growling and yapping that echoes off the walls of the tall city buildings. Some comes from the dogs, some is recognisably human.

  Sunday shoppers are heaving their bags through the streets and a few people line the footpath, waiting for the parade to pass. In the electronics shop next to the cafe, I can see a telecast of the float coming down Collins Street. The packmaster, a bizarre red-dreadlocked cross between a Hungarian Puli and a Kelpie, sits on a massive purple satin cushion on the float, flanked on each side by identical Pekingese trotting along the road like an undulating carpet. This week they’re escorting a float in the shape of a giant bone. That’s what we never expected – the sense of humour, the practical jokes, the sheer joy of life the dogs bring to every event. That’s how they seduce our children.

  The second they round the corner, tears spring to my eyes. I don’t know whether I’m proud or ashamed. Sienna is the lead child in the harness. The chosen one. Leather straps criss-cross her chest, wrinkling the worn fabric of her shirt and carving a crevasse between her bud breasts. The harness and the float are strung with bells and medallions, ribbons and tattered pieces of coloured cloth.

  As she strains to pull the float, her jaw clenches and the ropes of muscle vibrate in her throat. I want to run over and strip her out of that harness, take her home, wash her in a hip bath. I’d dress her in a clean pair of flannelette pyjamas and feed her mashed vegetables and read to her from a girls’ adventure book as she drifted off to sleep in the soft light of her bedroom.

  Sienna lifts her arms, and the children in the harness rear back and finally stop. The packmaster stands. There’s an exchange between him and Sienna, yelping and barking, a growl. The packmaster circles three times and curls up on the cushion while Sienna talks to the children in harness behind her. As we’re waiting to find out what this means, a Pug leaves the procession, trots across the road to me and sits at my feet, grinning up at me with its wrinkled face.

  ‘Pugsley?’ I don’t know what to do. They don’t like to be petted anymore.

  Pugsley rises to his feet, backs off and yaps three times at us before turning and haring into the group of dogs, his squat hindquarters pumping like pneumatic cushions.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I place my hand on Adrian’s arm, but he’s staring at Sienna.

  The procession has quietened down. Sienna gazes straight at me and nods. After I have smiled and waved she tilts her head back, exposing her bony white throat, and begins a howl, a low moan that rises fast into an aria of leaping and bones and shitting and wild scents and twitching dreams all braiding into a brutal joyous crescendo of freedom. When she finishes, the whole city is silent. She turns her head to us again. The bells on her harness tinkle. Below her furs and checked cotton shorts, the long tense muscles of her thighs tremble. Adrian is watching with his mouth open.

  The packmaster barks once, and Sienna and the other children in the traces leap forward, wrenching against the leather like I remember Pugsley doing years ago on his first walk outside the yard.

  A child behind Sienna trips and claws at Sienna’s furs to steady herself. Sienna turns and snarls. Her braces glint like metal jewellery. A light rain is starting to drift across the stre
et.

  ‘I hope she’s not wearing those trainers with the hole,’ I say. ‘I told her to throw them out.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  I look where he is looking. A young girl at the rear of the parade is squatting. A shiny stream of piss winds its way along the black road in front of her. She leaps up, her skirt falls against her thighs, and she races to her spot behind the float, fur jacket bouncing against her torso in time with her jumps and pirouettes. Three boys press into the spot where she has pissed and lean in to sniff. One of them barks, the other two fall back, and he unzips his fly and covers her puddle with his own frothy yellow stream.

  Adrian has knocked over his coffee cup with his elbow and the spill is creeping across the table. I use a napkin to dam the flow. The drummers ramp up the beat and the procession moves on.

  When our waitress brings a sponge to the table she has to ask Adrian to lift his elbow. He turns and stares at her as though he can’t understand a single word she has said.

  ‘Sorry, it’s all a bit much for him.’ I tug a few more napkins from the dispenser and press them against Adrian’s damp jacket sleeve as the waitress pulls a dishcloth from her apron pocket.

  ‘I know.’ She rubs the table briskly and sets the salt and pepper shakers in their basket. ‘I mean, they’re kind of cute in a way, I suppose. But filthy. And weird, you know.’

  Her words break through Adrian’s catatonic stare. He frowns, as if to himself. I wait with my hands clenched around the damp napkins, hoping that this is the moment I have been waiting for all these years. Claim her, I am urging him silently. Claim your daughter.

  The tail end of the procession is dancing away from us. Adrian sighs. He turns and gives me a disappointed look, as if it’s all my fault.

  The City Circle

  I live in a suburb where no politician lives and therefore the trams run infrequently, often late and without proper brakes. Two, three times a month, when the driver applies a little pressure to the pedal, we are all sent hurtling to the front of the tram like atoms in a particle accelerator, ready to smash against a plate and separate into our constituent parts. Last month, in a particularly violent trajectory toward the wall, two of us tumbled to the floor. The woman next to me apologised in accented English for falling. A man in a smart suit rushed to her aid.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he whispered. She nodded.

  ‘And you?’ the man said to me.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said.

  The man handed a business card to the woman, who was looking thin and alarmed. He handed another to me, who, on the other hand, was looking large and robust, with only my clothes and my composure askew. I knelt, then stood, shrugging my suit jacket and throttling my tie back into position.

  I read the business card as the lawyer pressed the woman.

  ‘Are you on your way to work? Are you a permanent resident? Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  The tram driver eased the vehicle to a halt at the tram stop. He came down to help the woman. When he asked if she was able to get up, the lawyer thrust out his arm to prevent the tram driver from touching her.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said to the driver, ‘call an ambulance.’

  ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘I okay. I have to go work now. Please.’

  ‘You don’t have to go to work. Everything is going to be all right. The ambulance is coming.’

  I knew this scenario from American cop shows. Layers of mystery would unfold from this woman’s unexceptional tumble on a tram. Forty-two television minutes later, drug busts would ensue, or a paedophile ring would be smashed and the cleric would hang himself.

  ‘No ambulance,’ the woman said. She used the lawyer’s arm to haul herself up, straightened her dress, and then waved him away. End of crime-show plot.

  ‘Folks, I’m going to have to report a brake fault,’ the driver called out. ‘Might take a few minutes for the engineers to get back to me.’

  Up the other end of the tram another cluster of atoms was forming, atoms who were going to be late for work and who couldn’t decide who to blame – the tram driver, the lawyer, me, the woman who’d fallen to the floor, the transport corporation, the government. So they got off the tram. I followed. We trooped down the road to the next intersection, where the tracks of an alternative route snaked in twin wires toward town.

  Ten minutes later we set off on another tram, padded shoulder jammed against breast pocket. My arm pressed against the woman beside me. The back of my arm was gently riding her ribs, up and down, like I was playing a musical instrument with frets every few centimetres. One fret higher and my elbow would meet her breast. I couldn’t help imagining its curved bell shape moulding against my arm. I glanced surreptitiously at her face and saw that she was gaunt and beautiful and so heavily made up it was impossible to tell what colour her real skin might be. Her lips were a startling purple.

  Compared to the woman who had fallen, I was tall, but standing next to this commuter I was medium-sized. A medium-sized commuter on my way to a medium-sized job in a medium-sized city that I know too well.

  I thought about how if I stayed in this city long enough I would run into the long angular woman at a party. I would spend some time wondering how I knew her face. She might do the same. We’d smile at each other in an I-know-you-from-somewhere kind of way and we might banter with a few jokes and offer to get another drink and move on to a few words about how we happened to know the person who was hosting the party and then we would inch a little closer, laugh a little louder, touch a little more often until it was late enough for us to slip away. Or we might each go off and find someone else to talk to, or we might stand together uncomfortably for a while and then separately decide we were tired after a week of work and it was time to go home. But we wouldn’t take a tram. She would call a taxi or hail one on the main street near the party, and I would walk on, pretending I was a big man, not afraid of the dark and the desperate drug addicts lurking inside shadows, but further down the road I’d hail a different taxi, one driven by a man from Somalia who would ask whether I knew the capital of Somalia and when I answered correctly wouldn’t have anything else to say.

  Tonight, with a storm thrumming on the window of the cafe and commuters bowing into the rain as they hurry along the street, another tram story begins – with someone my friend knows. Sometimes, after work, I meet my friend who works in a government department writing policy on the punctuality and frequency of public transport, and we drink white wine and eat bowls of hot chips and talk. When we first sat down, the story she had told me was this: a man had begun to act strangely in her office. He wore gaudy ties to important meetings.

  ‘Great wide lurid things with smiley faces and ducks and fluorescent stop signs.’ My friend shook her head.

  I said I wished someone wore ties that interesting to meetings I attended.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s inappropriate. And he wears brown shoes with black suits, and he has greasy hair.’

  When she mentioned the man’s greasy hair, I wondered how long it was since I had washed my own. Before I could stop it, my hand had reached up to my head.

  ‘Your hair’s looking good,’ she said, seeing me tentatively fingering strands, checking the grease factor. ‘Have you had it trimmed?’

  I remembered a man with greasy hair on my tram the other week. Strings of greasy hair. Greasy hair with a rancid smell, greasy hair with months of body oil and polluted rain and the fatty residue of meals brushed from the fingers – unintentionally of course – and thick flakes of dandruff embedded near the scalp. He was standing beside me and the stench was overwhelming. I moved away. After a few minutes all the other passengers had drifted away too and he stood in a vacant space, a tiny chapel on the tram. He was praying, loudly.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus, Jesus.’

  The space in his tram
chapel expanded. He wasn’t holding on to the handgrip and as the tram swayed and sashayed along the tracks he teetered backward and forward, the whole chapel moving as the other passengers edged away to avoid him like a raggedy chorus line. I realised I had seen him several times before on this line. Another of my intimate strangers on the tram.

  ‘Have you got a fucking ticket?’ he shouted. He took a step in my direction and I stepped back, onto the foot of someone behind me. She yelped. I apologised. Again. How often have I fallen, stumbled, tripped while on the tram? How many times have I have crashed into people, struck them accidentally with my flailing hand or pushed my briefcase against them as I juddered forward, propelled by the motion of the tram? How often have I cracked a shin against the sharp corner of a seat, jarred my elbow on the ticket machine, been speared by the tip of another passenger’s umbrella? How many passengers falling in what seems like slow motion have reached out and grabbed items of my clothing – sleeves, jackets, scarves – to break their fall? I have been dragged down and I have scrabbled on the floor. How much of my life have I spent struggling to get up?

  The greasy-haired man was pointing at me as these questions crowded my head. I may have been muttering, or at least my lips may have been moving. The tram crowd edged away from me too. Greasy man and I were two magnetic poles and the commuters iron shavings being repelled by both.

  At the next stop, greasy man turned his head when the doors opened. Three people hurried off under his gaze, shoulders hunched, their feet taking anxious baby steps. He looked at me once more with loathing.

  ‘I am the great inspector,’ he roared, and hurled himself off the tram just as the door was sliding shut.

  The iron shavings rotated when he was gone. I was the only repellent left. Their bodies rotated away from me and I was left in my own lonely chapel on the tram. At least I still have a job, I thought. I might be mad, but I still have a job.

  In the cafe with my friend, I dropped my hand from my hair and tried to focus on the conversation.