Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  ‘When I went to the House of Prayer, they turned me away.’ Jesus is so close to Anna she can feel his damp breath against her cheek. She’s holding her own breath, trying not to take in the reek from his open mouth with its fleshy lips and stumps of blackened teeth.

  ‘They turned away their saviour.’

  Jesus rolls his eyes toward the roof of the tram.

  ‘Cunts,’ he says.

  A shock jolts her. He said the word like it was any old word. Sometimes she whispers it to herself, in her bedroom. It’s an incredible word for her. A word like a fist.

  Once her father said it in front of her mother.

  ‘Don’t you ever say that word in the presence of our daughter,’ she hissed, and spit flew out of her mouth. Anna ran upstairs and shut her bedroom door and muttered it all night.

  ‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.’ She put her hands between her legs and said it under the bedclothes. ‘Marco loves my cunt.’

  The tram’s now so crowded that there’s nowhere to go. She’d rather walk than sit next to stinky Jesus. She lifts herself half off the seat to pull the cord but Jesus takes hold of her other arm and pulls her back down.

  ‘Are you getting off?’

  She nods. She doesn’t feel afraid but she still can’t speak. She doesn’t have any words for this situation. She doesn’t even know what to think.

  ‘Will you take me with you?’

  She shakes her head. The lady opposite has music buds in her ears and is gazing at an advertisement for holidays on pink and orange tropical islands. Anna reaches down for her schoolbag tucked between her feet. She edges past Jesus and threads her way through the crowd to the door, where she stands so close that her breath makes rapid patterns on the glass. Her house is still a long way away so she’ll walk a stop or two and get on the next tram. A tram without a stinking Jesus.

  It’s only when she’s crossed from the median strip to the footpath that she realises Jesus has followed her off the tram. Cars honk as he stumbles across the road against the red light.

  ‘Hey, sister,’ he calls. He moves fast for a man with flapping shoes. It’s five o’clock, dusk, cold. The lights are glowing in the strange bright way they do at twilight. Soon her mobile will ring and her mother will whine at her. ‘Why aren’t you home? Are you out with that boy?’

  ‘Sister!’

  ‘I’m going home now,’ she shouts back at him. ‘My parents are waiting for me,’

  ‘I was walking to the mount,’ Jesus calls. His voice is burred with phlegm. ‘A crowd gathered to hear me speak. Are you listening to me, girl?’ He coughs then shouts again. ‘I have things to teach you!’

  Another tram sways past, glowing with light. Anna breaks into a trot. Behind her she can hear Jesus’ laboured breathing and the slap slap of his broken shoe hitting the footpath. The cars on the road brake at the intersection up ahead and their red tail-lights are like alarm signals. His stink has got into her nostrils – she can smell it with each in-breath.

  She could try to get into one of the cars, but there might be a murderer or a rapist inside. Her mother imagines Anna’s brutal murder on a daily basis. She talks about all the ways Anna could be lured away by a stranger and killed as if all those TV shows she watches with murders and rapes and twisted plots are real.

  Jesus is grunting with the effort of keeping up. He calls in a breathy voice, ‘Sister, can you give me a dollar?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Of course, he wants money. Jesus catches up with her and waits as she drops her heavy schoolbag onto the ground and bends to search for her purse inside.

  ‘You are the Samaritan,’ he says. He touches her head with his hand and she wants to shake it off but she keeps on rummaging through the schoolbag. The smell of bruised banana drifts up from the open bag. Her books are lying on the footpath. Jesus leans close to her. What she at first thinks is a drop of rain drips onto her cheek, then she realises it is dribble from Jesus’ mouth. Tears sting her eyes.

  ‘Sorry, sister, sorry.’ The hard skin of his hand scrapes once across her cheek, trying to brush away his spit.

  A car pulls up beside them. A woman gets out of the passenger side. She leans back in and kisses the driver on the cheek, locks the door button and slams the door. As the car drives away she waves and adjusts her handbag on her shoulder. When she turns around Anna calls to her.

  ‘Excuse me, I …’

  The woman stares. Anna looks across at Jesus standing on the other side of her schoolbag and thinks of children at assembly.

  ‘Are you okay?’ the woman says.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘I am the Lord Jesus Christ,’ Jesus roars.

  ‘Yeah, sure you are, mate,’ the woman says. She is older than Anna first thought. ‘Come and walk with me, love.’ She stretches out her hand.

  Anna stands there with Jesus making soft grunting sounds beside her and her books scattered on the footpath and all she can hear banging on in her head is her mother’s voice. ‘It’s not that I think people who call you “love” are common, like my mother used to say.’ And her father commenting from the lounge room chair as usual. ‘That’s your mother, the champagne socialist. As long as they’re not in her backyard.’

  She rubs her face with both hands trying to wipe the images of home from her mind. As if he has been waiting for her eyes to be covered, Jesus clamps his hand around her arm, crushing her school blazer with whatever he has on his filthy hands.

  ‘Begone, Satan!’ he shouts at the woman and breaks into a coughing fit. His hand stays welded to Anna’s arm. His whole body shakes from the coughing and Anna begins to shake too.

  ‘Oh shit,’ the woman says. Cars stop and start in a jerky stream behind her as the intersection lights change.

  ‘I was going to give him a dollar,’ Anna whispers, even though Jesus can hear everything.

  The woman nods. ‘Listen,’ she says in a gentle voice to Jesus. ‘I’ve got ten dollars.’

  ‘Thy money perish with thee!’ Jesus thunders, his other hand grasping the air as if he’s trying to pull down the sky. ‘The gift of God cannot be purchased with money.’

  Anna’s notebook has blown open and Jesus’ foot is grinding into the page where she’s written her night’s homework. She needs to go to the toilet. It’s dark and the three of them stand in a pool of yellow light from the streetlight above. Spit glistens on Jesus’ lips.

  In the distance the windows of another tram appear like a magic lantern. Jesus bends down and pulls the chemistry textbook from her bag. He brandishes the fat book at the woman before he lets go of Anna’s arm and throws back his head.

  ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ he wails to the sky.

  He draws back his arm and hurls the book into the traffic. It slams onto the road in front of a taxi, which brakes and skids. The car behind honks long and loud until both accelerate away, the one behind still honking and the sound receding like a siren. Jesus begins to mutter what sound like verses from the Bible.

  She remembers the E in her blazer pocket and wishes she’d taken it before. It would be kicking in now. She’d be feeling warmer, and her teeth would be starting to clench with that delicious sensation of tightness. The gold of the lights would be more golden. A wash of happiness would spread through her body. If the E had already warmed her body, she would reach over and take Jesus’ hand and say, ‘It’s all right, Jesus. We care about you.’ She would love this woman who’s stopped to help her, and she would love Jesus, even though he stinks. She would twirl around on the black footpath and sniff a great breath of the sour night air like it was scented with summer jasmine.

  ‘Come on,’ the woman says.

  Anna bends down to push her books back into her schoolbag. On the roadway the chemistry textbook has been torn apart under car wheels. A few pages of formulae drift along the footpath in the wake of passing cars.
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  ‘Leave the books,’ the woman says.

  But she can’t. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to pay for your schooling and the uniform and the books?’ her mother says whenever she complains about school. ‘Just thank your lucky stars we didn’t send you to the local high school.’

  She scoops the books into the bag. Tucked inside is her Hello Kitty purse. Before she lifts the bag, she empties the coins from the purse and holds them out to Jesus on the flat of her palm.

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ he calls, his arms wide, waiting to embrace her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She slips the coins into his pocket, then steps back and heaves the schoolbag to her shoulder.

  The tram rocks toward them with its familiar whine.

  ‘Go! Catch this one,’ the woman says. She gives a push and Anna takes off at a run, pounding along the footpath, her bag banging against her back. She makes the next stop just in time to swing up on the tram and looks back to see the woman walking quickly away. The Lord Jesus Christ stands alone, arms at his sides, hair hanging over his face, greatcoat trailing on the ground. He lifts his hand to her one last time and she presses her palm against the glass in reply.

  When she gets home her mother follows her up the stairs, demanding to know why she’s late. Anna slams the bedroom door behind her and hides the E for tomorrow night. Marco’s sent her a text but she doesn’t want to read it yet. She plugs her music player into the speakers with the volume as loud as it can go, and she lies flat on her back on the bed, still in her school uniform. Her breathing is shallow and her heart skips fast, then slow, then fast. Music roars around her like a hurricane. There might be some sounds outside her door, a mother shouting or a phone ringing, but that doesn’t matter.

  ‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt,’ she shouts, flying with the music. ‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.’

  One Good Thing

  ‘If you were my sister,’ I asked Klara Fuchs, ‘do you think we’d still be best friends?’

  ‘Oh, Natalie, of course we would,’ she said, and I believed her.

  We were in love, the way that primary-school girls fall in love with each other. When I look back now I realise that Klara was thin and brittle like a bunch of sticks held together with cloth. But at the time I thought she was perfect. She wore bright striped dresses that her mother had made, and matching single-colour cardigans. She wore long white socks every day. She smelled different from everyone else, tart and spicy like an exotic fruit. The first night I stayed for tea at her house and they served me sauerkraut I recognised the smell. Sometimes, in school, we held hands under the desk. I remember the sensation of her hot sticky fingers entwined in mine.

  I was an only child. Klara had a sister and a brother. Her sister was nine years older than us, almost an adult. She only ever spoke to us to point out how annoying we were. Klara’s brother, Dieter, was thirteen. As much as I wished Klara was my sister and could live with me at my house, I wished Dieter was not her brother and that I had never met him.

  If Dieter found a drawing we had done, he ripped up the paper. If he caught us playing in the mud, he smeared the mud over our faces. If he caught us at the swimming pool, he tried to hold us under. He might always be around a corner, so we had to speak softly. He might find the spell we had written to ward him off, so we ate the paper.

  When I sat opposite him at the dinner table, smiling politely as I tried to chew my serve of sour cabbage and meaty sausage, Dieter watched me. He stared until my throat tightened and I couldn’t swallow. He seemed to hate me for no other reason than sitting opposite him at the dining table and catching his eye. Klara sat next to me at the table, hardly letting anything pass her lips, as if Dieter was controlling her food intake. She carried herself in a hunch, and she shivered easily. The temperature only had to be slightly cool and Klara would start shivering. Or if her brother was nearby. Then she shivered too.

  The times Dieter was around were the only times I wondered if I could keep on being Klara’s best friend.

  One Sunday Klara’s mother and father took us on a trip to the Caribbean Gardens in a suburb a long drive away. Klara, me, Dieter and his friend from school. Fibreglass statues of animals rose out of dry garden beds like we were in a museum, and the sun beat down over acres of brown dirt and colourless rides and stalls selling hot jam doughnuts and sausages in batter. The parents set up at a picnic table with a tablecloth. They brought baskets out of the car boot filled with bottles of beer for them and cordial for us, stuffed cabbage rolls and thick, heavy cake smelling of honey. At the table Klara’s father shook out a newspaper and held it in front of his face. Her mother stripped down to a pair of bathers, lay her towel on the dirt and settled down with a book and a sunhat.

  ‘Why don’t you go for a swim,’ she said to us, nodding in the direction of the muddy lake a few hundred yards away. A paddle steamer ploughed through the water on the far side. Klara and I wandered around the statues of elephants and giraffes and crocodiles. Further along the shore a replica submarine rose out of the dust like a grey dinosaur. Dieter was on the deck, trying to climb the periscope. Klara saw what I was looking at and she tugged me in the opposite direction.

  ‘Let’s play over there,’ she said, pointing at a bare patch of earth further along the shore. I followed her and she picked up a big stick and started sketching something out on the ground.

  ‘What are we playing?’ I said.

  Klara looked over my shoulder and whispered, ‘Nothing.’ She dropped the stick. She whispered again, ‘Let’s go and play over there,’ and she pointed even further away, out into the field where even her parents couldn’t see us.

  ‘Are we allowed?’ I asked. My parents would never let me wander that far. I glanced behind and saw Dieter coming toward us with his friend, red-faced and crying, staggering behind him.

  ‘Okay,’ I said to Klara and we started to walk quickly away.

  ‘Hey,’ Dieter shouted.

  We bolted like startled deer, running till our breath was ragged and our chests sore. We ran past cages of monkeys and stands of poplar trees and enclosures of emus in the sun until finally Dieter gave up following us and we found ourselves in a small copse of eucalypts somewhere in the back of the Caribbean Gardens. We sat on the ground, cool earth covered in a dry carpet of leaves. I felt as if I had travelled through some barrier to reach a place in another time or another dimension. The trees had seemed small in the distance but now they were huge above us. I lay back on the fragrant leaves and looked up through the branches at the distant pale sky.

  ‘Have we lost him?’ Klara gasped, almost sobbing trying to get oxygen into her skinny body. ‘Is he behind us?’

  I sat up. She was still doubled over, still sucking in air.

  ‘I can’t see him,’ I said. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  He was there one day at their house when I rounded the corner, looking for Klara. He and another friend of his. His friends were always small boys, while he was big, solid, fleshy. His small friend was holding a dartboard and Dieter had a dart in his hand aimed at the dartboard covering the friend’s stomach. They were in shorts, both of them, bare-chested. I wore a pink spotted dress and my best sandals because Klara and I were going to practise walking with books on our heads.

  I never saw the dart leave Dieter’s hand, never saw it fly through the air. I was watching the board to see where the dart would land before I made a break for it and ran across their line of vision on my way to the back door. When the tip of the dart flew straight into the boy’s chest, above the right nipple, and hung there, I was as silent and astonished as both of them. We all watched the dart standing straight out from the boy’s chest as if it had hit a tree trunk or a pole. Four feathers, vanes quivering. A brass collar holding the dart tip to the shaft.

  A trickle of blood emerged from where the tip had penetrated the boy’s chest, and dri
bbled down toward the dartboard he was still holding against his belly. All of us silent, waiting for the dart to fall out. Dieter let out a sharp bark, a laugh of sorts, and his friend’s eyes widened as though he had only just realised that this dart was embedded in his own chest. The boy shrieked. Long and high like a rabbit.

  Dieter won’t like that, I thought, my stomach starting to spin. The shriek went on and on. Dieter’s mother came pelting out of the house. Klara’s narrow, frightened face appeared at her bedroom window.

  ‘He moved,’ Dieter called to his mother as she flew past. ‘He shouldn’t have moved.’

  When she reached the boy, Dieter’s mother took hold of the dartboard he was still pressing against himself like a target and flung it to the ground. The boy kept staring at the missile standing out from his breastbone. He pushed Klara’s mother away when she reached for the dart. His mouth was wide open but no more sound came out. She stepped forward, grasped the dart, pulled, then covered the place it had come from with her hand.

  A few weeks later I came to Klara’s house and the boy was there with Dieter again. They were tying red crackers together and lighting the fuse before they threw the bundle into an empty oil drum in the vacant lot beside the house. The crackers hammered around the drum like a machine gun. Dieter laughed and laughed, and the boy with a hole in his breastbone stood behind him and giggled and glanced around nervously, as though the danger might come from somewhere else, not right in front of him.

  ‘Go and get the Catherine wheels,’ Dieter said.

  ‘Okay,’ the boy answered breathlessly, and as he raced past me to the house I wondered how Dieter could keep these people coming back.