by A. S. Patric
‘Are you sleepy?’
‘I can’t keep my eyes open.’
‘We’ll have to sleep soon.’
‘Before, when you were talking about the natural habitat of the human animal—we’re creatures of the forest, aren’t we, like apes and monkeys. Or do I mean the jungle?’
‘The caves really. I think we came out and did our hunting, but we needed a place to keep our fire. I don’t know if you’ve seen those cave paintings, but I mean they’re all over the place—on the European continent, Africa, the outback. In our ancestral caves back in Europe, there are these amazing paintings. I mean, really incredible. As much imbued with genius as anything you’ll see anywhere. When Picasso saw them, he said we haven’t learned anything for the last ten thousand years. So many caves filled with these paintings. Which must have taken days, weeks, months to paint, and been part of a tradition that went on for generations. Those caves were our first homes. Everyone you knew around a perpetual fire, tended day and night, yawning and farting, laughing with wide-open mouths, eating together from the same bone of meat, sleeping together, body to body, murmuring and dreaming together, breathing each other’s breaths. Talking in the darkness of that cave with its painted walls. For hundreds of generations. Thousands of years. Talking in the darkness until the world began to thaw out.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You’ve fallen asleep?’
‘Mmm … maybe.’
‘The sky’s starting to glow.’
‘Murmur something into my ear.’
‘Murmur what?’
‘Just murmur. It doesn’t matter what you say.’
THE MANX HEART
It’s a pleasant evening and I should go for a nice stroll. Instead, I poison my neighbour’s dog. I open a chilled bottle of beer afterwards. My mouth prefers malt and my stomach wants the warm milk to go along with it—the usual getting-ready-for-bed ritual. It is a full moon and I would normally have trouble sleeping. Russell would’ve been barking all night. Well, I lift my beer glass to the moon beyond my small backyard window, and howl low and mean. Happy birthday to me, I toast, and swallow the cold beer as if it’s medicine.
In the morning I find a yellow notification card in the letterbox. It tells me something is waiting for me at the post office. It’s a head-sized box and it’s addressed to me: From Ruby Manx to John Manx. I shove the box back to the idiot behind the counter. I explain that this is some kind of joke. And in poor taste. No, he tells me. This box is addressed to John Manx and there’s no going back into the post once a parcel has found its intended target.
I place it on my kitchen table and decide to make tea. While I’m spooning the leaves into the pot I can feel the parcel behind me as though it were a bomb. It’s ticking like a pulse in my neck as I click on the stovetop. I curse myself for bringing the package home. The name on the back of the box made it difficult to dump. Ruby has been dead for almost eight years, so it is a ridiculous hoax. A lovely lie all the same. If I open it, then the miracle of the box reaching me will be revealed as some trivial commonplace.
I carry my mug of tea to the kitchen table and place it beside the package. I sit down slowly. My tea is cold before I manage a sip. I finally move my arms and pick up the box. I close my eyes and give it a shake. A dull, heavy weight within. I can’t imagine what the head-sized box contains.
I own a newsagency. It’s a business passed down from my grandfather. I can barely look at newspapers anymore. The crude paper and the smell of that crisis ink. I don’t want to see another glossy women’s magazine with the latest beauty gazing up at me as if she’s going to last forever.
I can’t bear to see another scratchie unveiled with a grimy twenty-cent piece. That small, dirty hope in a customer’s eyes falling apart into grey rubbings on my counter top. The way it sticks to the edge of my hand when I swipe it off the counter. The way those pieces cling.
I pick up the ringing phone. Pearl calls me every few months. My heart does a flip every time. A cruel little toss that leaves me flattened for minutes after that first hello over the telephone wire. Sometimes that trampled feeling lasts for days. I always do my best to sound happy to hear from her again. Pearl and Ruby were twins. There is always the briefest moment where I think it’s Ruby on the phone and not the identical voice of her sister.
‘Hello, John. Happy birthday.’
‘Hello, Pearl. It’s not my birthday.’
‘Well, belated birthday wishes. I’ve been calling, John. Either you’ve been busy or you don’t pick up the phone anymore. I had to call you at the newsagency, for God’s sake.’ I don’t respond, so she continues, ‘Well, did you get any nice pressies?’
‘A few things. Thanks for sending that … the present, Pearl.’
Pearl has been making toys for decades and she loves to send them around as gifts. I’ve a got a dutiful collection of her handiwork on display in Ruby’s sewing room at home. Ruby also loved to make things. In her case, she made useful things. Dresses, coats and slippers. Ruby even sold them at the weekend market on St Kilda Esplanade. Pearl’s creations were always alien creatures that would scare little children and would equally bewilder adults. While Pearl wanted to call them art, I wasn’t sure what to call them.
‘Did you get anything special?’ she asks.
‘Who would send me something special?’
‘I was thinking … maybe it’s time you found someone to share your life with now. It’s been long enough.’
‘Has it? What’s long enough?’
‘It’s been almost a decade. You must be lonely.’
‘I’m doing fine, Pearl. Thanks for calling.’ I hang up the phone. That voice is unbearable.
The package from ‘Ruby Manx’ is still sitting in my kitchen. Packed away in the freezer, unopened. I have dreams about it. Sometimes it’s a skull. Sometimes a bomb.
Initially, I’d been satisfied to know it was there. Even though it couldn’t be from my wife, there was the break in routine knowing that this object was in my house.
There is a new ritual in the morning, as the kettle on my stovetop gets ready to whistle, of opening the freezer door and peeking in on it. And another getting-ready-for-bed ritual. As I warm my milk, I pour two teaspoons of malt into the handle-less mug Ruby bought me for a birthday present—I’m not sure which year. I broke the handle off a few months ago while washing dishes. I open the freezer to contemplate the skull-sized box. Ice steam rising around it with menace and promise. The last few nights I’ve burned my milk.
A few days later I carry home a big juicy bone. It has the frayed ends of ligaments dangling from a cow’s ball joint. These days butchers expect to get paid for bones. It still amazes me how little charity there is in the world. Where are the tokens of civility? My neighbours don’t have trouble believing in that principle when I offer their new German Shepherd the bone.
Deborah says, ‘It’s too big, though, for a puppy. I’m not sure he’ll be able to get his jaws around it.’
‘Might surprise you, I reckon. That little fella is going to be a handful when he gets bigger.’
My next-door neighbour smiles at me and then asks if I’d enjoy occasionally taking Russell for a walk.
‘Russell? Wasn’t that what your last dog was called?’
‘Yes. This is Russell the Third.’ He tugs at the bone in my hand, his puppy teeth getting a hold of those dangling ligaments. Seems as ready to be fed by me as the last two Russells.
‘Well, this is a turn up!’ Dale Manx says as though I’ve arrived a few hours late to his birthday party. We haven’t seen each other for thirteen years. I know I should have visited him sooner. We were never close to begin with and prison rarely brings a family together. He’d killed his wife. His beloved had been Ruby’s best friend and I was the matchmaker.
‘Thought I’d come see my little brother. Anything wrong with that?’ I look at my wristwatch, and then at him, wishing he hadn’t noticed. ‘Time flies,’ I say.
‘Time crawls,
mate, like a dog with a busted back and fleas. Time drags its arse across the fucken concrete. Never known it to fly,’ he says with a smile. I push him a pack of cigarettes. ‘Nah, mate, I gave that shit up.’
‘What? Why?’ I ask.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, you were just saying time crawls.’
‘Crawls even worse when you can’t breathe.’ Dale leans back in his chair and then forward again. I saw him do that a lot when were young enough to think chess was an exciting way to spend an hour or two. Sometimes he’d rock back and forth a few times before moving his piece. It’d usually mean a catastrophe for me.
‘What now?’ I ask.
‘How’s that feel?’
‘How’s it feel? What?’
‘Barely breathing,’ he says.
‘What are you talking about? I’ve never smoked.’
‘Of course not. Can’t imagine you smoking. But I’m talking about your birthday. Magic number, right? Fifty-seven years old. Feeling a little tight in the chest, big brother?’
‘D’you send me anything in the mail for my birthday, you bastard?’
‘Mate, anything we’ve got in here, you don’t want.’
‘Did you send me a skull?’
Dale’s laughter doesn’t stop until I leave. Even then I can hear it behind the door, echoing down through the windowless rooms and hallways as I walk away. Dale was always the one to laugh easily. Always the one to forgive and forget, playing it fast and loose. He killed his wife the first time he ever laid an angry hand on her.
Russell III barks his head off when he sees me. Deborah’s mother is in her front garden, pruning. Shiralee comes chasing after me when I pass by. She’s a sprightly woman for her age. A few years older than me and someone my neighbours have been trying to pair me up with for at least five years. She wears an adult nappy.
‘I got you something for your birthday, Johnny,’ she tells me.
‘Thanks, Shiralee,’ I say, as I take her carefully wrapped present. ‘By the way, no-one has called me Johnny since I was in short pants. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she tells me.
‘It doesn’t matter?’ I ask. ‘Shouldn’t I be deciding on whether it matters?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says again, her radiant smile undeterred. ‘Has anyone sung you “Happy Birthday” this year?’ she asks me.
I shake my head, moving my birthday present from one hand to the other. We are standing out on the footpath and I want to get inside my house and be done with packages and birthdays and anything to do with Shiralee. The present looks like a wrapped-up mug and I unwrap it to discover, surprise, surprise, a mug. It’s porcelain and personalised with the name Johnny placed within a heart. She sings the ‘Happy Birthday’ song. Russell III joins in from behind his gate with some barking. I thank her and pat her on the shoulder.
‘Hip-hip …’ she calls out. I don’t say anything. ‘Hip-hip …’ she calls again as she takes my hand in hers and jiggles my arm.
‘Hooray,’ I say.
‘Hip-hip …’
I open the freezer. I remove the package and place it on the kitchen table. There’s a letter from Ruby within it explaining that she knows she has cancer. She’s writing to say she hopes to survive it. Her sister will deliver me this gift on my fifty-seventh birthday if she doesn’t live. Ruby knows I’ve dreaded it my whole life. The men in my family often die in their fifty-seventh year, as though our hearts have reliable expiry dates.
I recognise her handwriting and I run the side of my hand across the paper to feel the grooves of her letters. I put my ear to the paper as though I’m listening to the careful scratching of a ballpoint pen.
I shake my head as I unwrap the gift. A genuine gypsy crystal ball. Ruby’s letter told me to stare into its mysterious depths. I can hear her laughing. I listen to that sound coming from somewhere near. She was about to walk into the room so we could share the joke together. I turn around but she doesn’t walk through the empty doorway.
I look into the glass as instructed and find within the smoky mirrors only images of myself in our kitchen, multiplied by ten, small and frail, some of them upside down, with large, old fingers like long cables reaching around to bind me to the sphere. When I move back, a large bluebottle fly lands on the crystal ball, dusts off its legs and winks at me.
Russell III strains at his leash. Traffic rushes by with the noise of an endless avalanche and yet it seems the puppy wants release from this world. He is growling and pulling to be let loose, for a fatal plunge into the rolling rush of metal and hard rubber.
My hand slides down the leash and my thumb finds the latch. No-one will question me. His family has barely grown attached. His barking at full moons or falling leaves or passing shadows is as incessant as predecessors I and II. I turn my hand and pat his stupid little head and tug back on his leash and shoosh him. He quietens down. He’s not so bad at night if he’s been walked. The avalanche of metal keeps rolling by, and we stand together, watching. A passing driver beeps his horn and Russell III starts barking furiously and I find myself laughing amidst all of this noise. I’d gone from killer of dogs—to dog walker. I don’t know if anyone would have seen that even in Ruby’s crystal ball.
THE BRONZE COW
Mrs Faber wasn’t a cruel teacher, she just had a bad memory. Punishment in those days was considered an important duty. It was what gave children character. The Romans understood these things and we all loved the Romans. The principal would have worn a toga but it was too draughty and cold in our stone boarding school. Mrs Faber was his daughter and she’d been brought up to understand the need for an occasional decimation.
That wasn’t what happened with Calder, though it was well known he was about the worst boy around. There was a special punishment in the basement no-one had used since before Emperor Hadrian. Mostly it had been forgotten down there. It was a bronze cow. It was double life-sized, with a hatch on the side. Calder was asked to get in and Mrs Faber locked it.
She wasn’t planning on leaving him in there as long as she did but it was the basement, after all, and we needed to learn about mathematics and missile manufacture. Calder sat in the bronze cow for weeks, and then months. The poor boy couldn’t die because the cow wouldn’t stop eating the mould that grew profusely down in that sultry basement.
When she finally remembered him, Mrs Faber rushed down and let him out immediately. She apologised and kissed his sweaty head. She told him he wasn’t a bad boy anymore and she brought him up to class despite the fact that his teeth had gone green and he smelt like he’d been dragged from the river Styx.
For a few days we were happy to see Calder again and we treated him well. Some of us felt guilty because we hadn’t forgotten him at all. We just did not want to remind Mrs Faber. Calder seemed alright for a while. The smell went away, though his teeth remained mouldy and moss green.
It seemed miraculous. But then we noticed that he needed us to continually stroke his head and kiss his cheeks, otherwise he would start screaming. The sound his voice could make must have been something he learned in the belly of the bronze cow because we couldn’t stand it. It made all of us jump out of our seats like spiders dropped into hot sulphur.
We caressed his head and kissed him and were forced to tell him we loved him and valued him, when it was obvious to everyone that this really wasn’t true. It could’ve gone on like that until it was the end of the year and we could all be sent back to our real homes, but it got worse.
In the end Calder wouldn’t stop crying no matter what we did, so we had to walk him down to the basement again. We put him in the bronze cow and the sound it made on quiet evenings that autumn was quite pleasant. Mrs Faber explained that this was because the massive head of the cow had a system of pipes and stops that resembled a compressed French horn and would convert even the most grievous noises of agony into lovely lullabies.
SUNLIGHT
> He walks along the canal and stops. The rain has been falling all day, but as he sits on a bench the clouds clear and sunlight illuminates the drops of water drifting down into the meadow. The shades of green range up from blades to leaves and still the illuminated rain sifts through the air.
He closes his eyes to feel the break in the clouds. There’s a way that the sun can seem so ordinary. More commonplace than a tarnished five-cent piece found in the mud. But as he feels it, seated on that bench by the Elwood canal, he becomes aware that there is an incredible explosion (beyond his imagination how vast in intensity and time) and yet he can sit there and feel this burning star rolling with waves of the released energy of the cosmos, furiously ablaze just above his head, gently lapping against his closed eyelids—washing across his cheeks and lips and ears and nose and forehead, as though it were not remarkable.
He is sitting on a park bench by a canal. He opens his eyes and watches those raindrops illuminated by the sunlight as the heavy clouds of an overcast Melbourne day roll over towards a dreary afternoon in winter.
THE ETERNAL CITY
It was a long flight from Melbourne and by the time Veronica got to Rome she was feeling ill. When she arrived at the hotel on Piazza della Minerva she was too sick to do much more than crawl into bed and wait for Evan to find her. She had told him he needn’t meet her at the airport but she had hoped he would be waiting for her in the hotel. She’d been up for 48 hours yet it was still difficult to fall asleep in a strange bed with the eternal clamour of Rome outside her windows.
Evan arrived drunk on absinthe, hours later. He was a rush of words falling into bed with her. A rhapsody of secrets revealing themselves in his mind as he spoke—of the cosmos and its inevitable glory and the rampant perfection of every living thing within the vibrating membrane of existence. His hands moved over her body, fingertips tracing her out as though she was a map of home. She curled up and told him she was too ill to allow his fingers to do more than reminisce. He didn’t want to catch her bug so he stayed away from her lips. Evan went on talking for hours and Veronica felt herself drift off again. Where previously it had been a fitful sleep, her legs filled with an unpleasant current of energy, this time the comforting voice of her fiancé led her to a deep pool of pure oblivion.