New Animal

by Ella Baxter

  I shut myself in a cubicle and lean against the door, and the first image that comes to mind is my mother’s face. Heart-shaped and with high cheekbones, her eyelashes brown all the way to the tip. I try to remember her fully, but anytime I catch a small glimpse, it distorts. I can’t seem to assemble her and hold her all together. Already, only the smallest fragments remain. The thickness of her upper arm. A small mole on her chest. A thumbnail. There is another small pocket of comfort in the repetition of these facts.

  My feet are pulsing from the plane ride, and when I look down the veins running over my ankle look pumped up and swollen. How can I be full of moving blood, yet feel completely inert? I lean down and push one of the veins in and then let it go, watching as it springs back up again. I crouch over, pressing the vein in my ankle in and out, as if it’s a button I can use to reset myself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s dusk as Jack drives home to his property via the highway, and the car is like a motorised lighthouse moving along the road, illuminating everything whether it wants to be seen or not. Moths flap to the windscreen and other small things swarm. They cling to the duco on the hood of the car, close to their beloved light. We sit together in complete silence, which is fine, because there is the silence of someone who doesn’t want to speak to you, which isn’t this. The silence of a person confused or thinking. The silence when your ears are underwater. The silence of a thud in the night followed by listening. And then there’s the silence of two people in a car unable to talk about all the emotions spilling out of each of them.

  The sky has turned dark blue except for when it meets the tops of the trees, where it fuzzes into a gentle pink. Jack’s property begins with a wide wooden gate followed by a dirt track edged with wildflowers, which are now luminous in the car headlights. Hanging above the letterbox from two bronze chains is a stately sign reading Wyndhere. Jack drives slowly around a tight corner and the driveway narrows to accommodate the ragged edges of the forest.

  He pulls up outside the garage and we both sit in the dark for a moment looking at the five-bedroom house he inherited. It faces the river, and at night you can hear the churning and splashing of the water. The house seems to loom out of the landscape surrounding it. The hedge that grows either side of the front door has been flattened by the winds, and one of the front window shutters has come loose from its hinges. The whole house looks as though it has been sandblasted.

  We crunch across the gravel path towards the front door. Loose cobwebs on either side are coated in a thick, brown silt and the occasional hollow fly. Jack rummages around in his pocket for the keys then unlocks the door, using his shoulder to push it open. We step inside the cool entrance which, aside from an umbrella stand to one side of the staircase and a large potted monstera on the other, is empty. The Persian rug and floor lamp are gone, as is the large print of fishbones on a plate.

  ‘I’m more of a minimalist now, because I’m getting rid of anything that doesn’t serve me’ Jack says pre-emptively as he walks forward, switching on lights and fans.

  He’s moved most of the indoor plants to the low shelf near the windows, which has only made them crisp under the magnified sun. A peace lily has imploded into a mound of dried leaves and crinkled stems. A fern has calcified, and one lone orchid has drooped over the tiles, leaving a deposit of petals below.

  ‘What happened to all the plants?’ I ask.

  ‘Global warming, Lia—it’s a killer.’

  I can see through to the kitchen, which faces the water, and into his home office, where many files are kept in tight rows above the desk.

  ‘How’s the writing going?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s going, that’s for sure. Someday you and Simon might want to know what your father got up to.’

  It’s in moments like these that I can see he doesn’t know how much we adore Vincent. Growing up, it was Vincent who did the school runs and the worming tablets. He volunteered at the tuckshop at school and helped me pick my formal outfit. He bought me any magazine that had models with long noses on the cover, and he somehow coped with Simon between the ages of fourteen and twenty, weathering the political punk and sitting patiently through many hours of obscure anime. Jack might be my father, but Vincent is my daily dad. I took his surname when I was twelve because I loved him, and at that point Jack had stopped calling regularly. Vincent was moved to tears when I told him, and addressed me by my new full name whenever he could. I remember picking up a call from him and listening to his flustered excitement, Amelia Aurelia, Dad here, do we need butter at home? Even now when he says it, I can see how much it means to him.

  Jack took it terribly when I eventually told him. I remember he nodded to himself quietly for a moment and then looked me straight in the eyes and said, Love is alkaline and hate is acidic, and I will not be made into a cup of vinegar because of that man. In hindsight, it was unintentionally the cruellest thing that I could have done to Jack, as much as it was the most meaningful thing for Vincent.

  I step into the office and look at the top folder on the neatly stacked pile. It’s labelled: The Skinny on Growing up in the Seventies.

  ‘It’s not finished,’ Jack says, taking the folder from me quickly before I have a chance to open it.

  ‘How long have you been working on your book now?’

  He shrugs. ‘Ten years or so. But these things take time. I’m weaving through my own take on Stoic philosophy as I go, which is no easy feat; I clearly bit off more than I can chew.’

  All my early memories involve him writing, or trying to write. He used to wear a pencil behind his ear, and some days he would put it there in the morning and not touch it again until he took it out at night. Being a writer, in a way, was more of a lifestyle for him. Over the years he has let me read a few of his short stories, and they always seem to involve a decrepit alcoholic trying to make sense of his world. All of them have been unreasonably dark.

  When I came down a few summers ago, he had decided to make a real go of it. He was sure that being more organised was the key. We made a trip into town so that he could pick up some colour-coded folders for the study, and he ended up buying a fountain pen for eighty dollars as well. He spent the rest of my visit in his office, rearranging his bookshelf and printing out every document on his computer to file away systematically. He asked me to help him a couple of times, and gave strict instructions on what each colour of folder represented. Lemon was for poetry. Saffron for short stories and essays on life. Marigold for anything to do with The Book. A wall of piss, Simon said, when I told him about it.

  Jack ushers me from the office and gestures down the hall. ‘Why don’t you drop your bags in your room then come and help me with dinner?’

  I walk past the stairs and down the hall towards the bedroom that’s mine when I’m here, placing my case and handbag just inside the door. The bed has been made, and there is one of Jack’s spare terry-towelling robes folded on top of the cover. The room has a high ceiling, and one tall window which looks out onto a rotting love seat in the front yard. Whoever hung the wallpaper started at an odd angle, because the motif of a heron near a stream, followed by replicated tufts of bamboo, warps suddenly between the ensuite and the door. The room smells of my grandparents. Like brandy and camphor. It has always felt familiar, but not homely.

  I flick the switch on in the ensuite and run the tap, wiping some water over my eyes and chest. I sniff each armpit, decide they are fine for now, and then look in the mirror, feeling grief come up from the base of my spine to the middle of my forehead, right between my eyebrows. I search my reflection for her face, but I can’t see it. I turn away, and switch the light off.

  Jack has closed off parts of the house and now lives in only a few of the rooms. I’ve always felt as if the house deflates when Simon and I aren’t here to fill it up with wet bathers and eating. It must be hard to be a father of distant children. To have been there at the birth as their mother is stitched back together, and to be holding a baby so small you
don’t know where they begin and the afterbirth ends. I like to imagine Jack weeping at the profoundness of fatherhood when I was born, but I suspect the main feeling that lurched inside him would have been a desire to get dangerously drunk. And when we all came home from the hospital, Simon in his Batman cape and me still mottled pink, I believe he felt a bit breathless. Like his family were taking up too much room. Like he was slowly and effortlessly being pushed into the outer, to look in on our happy house, on our warm bed, on our shared meal. And I bet he wondered if he was right in the head, to be jealous of his own kids. Having a wife and children didn’t suit him, but neither did divorce. He was equally devastated by both, and I bet if you pushed him to remember a time when he wasn’t destroyed by anything, he would stand in front of you with his hands on his hips looking at the ground for a long time, just thinking.

  I kick off my shoes near the bed and walk barefoot over the ancient carpet all the way back to the kitchen. In the corridor, the house creaks around me like the hull of a ship.

  As I approach the kitchen, I can hear various preparations taking place. Jack moves self-consciously around the space: fingers hovering above the knife rack as he agonises over the correct blade; spending several minutes over the choice of two chopping boards from the stack near the toaster. He slices a red onion into thin semicircles, leaning back from the knife and squinting as if doing it for the first time. He puts the knife down and moves into the pantry, grabs a box of taco shells and places it on the bench. He picks up the knife and then puts it down again as if remembering something. He crosses to the radio on the windowsill and searches through the stations until jazz fills the house, and then he’s back at the chopping board, slicing again.

  ‘Don’t be surprised if the birds wake you up in the morning,’ he says. ‘A flock of lorikeets think they own the golden cane palm next to your room.’

  ‘If it’s bad I could always sleep in the back bedroom.’

  He scrunches up his nose and shakes his head. ‘No, I wouldn’t: there’s a rat living in your aunt’s old dance costumes—I can hear it slipping around in the lycra.’

  I sit on a bar stool and watch as he moves between the stovetop and the sink. On the drying rack there are three dishes turned upside down. One coffee mug, a small plate and a pot. He probably wakes up each morning and has one piece of toast and coffee from that plate and cup, before cycling them through the washing and drying process again. I wonder if he eats out of the pot, staring through the double glass doors, until the sky becomes so dark that he is reflected back to himself, enclosed and alone in his big, old home. My grief transfers to him.

  ‘I liked the picture of the nest that you sent me.’

  ‘Wasn’t sure if you got it.’

  He opens a drawer, pulls out some bone-handled knives and forks and passes them to me. I move to the table and set it, then sit facing the large window looking out to the Derwent, waiting for food to appear.

  ‘Did you read that article in yesterday’s paper?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I was working.’

  I slide the biscuit tin that sits in the middle of the dining table towards me.

  ‘It was about how, when you die, scientists can freeze your head. Cryogenics or something …’ He trails off.

  ‘What about it?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, they can defrost you in the future and cure you,’ he explains. ‘And this expert was saying that people often think cryogenics is removing the head, that’s the way it’s talked about, but actually’—he turns to face me—‘they remove the body.’ He swishes a spatula through the air while looking at me intently, as if wanting me to engage with this conversation on a level I’m not quite sure I’m getting.

  I take a cream biscuit out of the tin and bite into it, tasting the stale sweet orange.

  ‘The head is the important part, not the body,’ he repeats in awe.

  I chew through the thick paste and brush crumbs from my lap while Jack watches me, waiting for a response. I reach for another powdery biscuit.

  ‘So your head gets cured and then that’s your existence?’ I say. ‘Just being a head in a jar? I would hate it.’

  He turns back to cooking, and I wonder if all my thoughts and feelings would be able to move around if they only had the space of a skull to exist in. I need the length of my whole body.

  I put the lid back on the biscuit tin and push it away. Enough. Under the table I grasp a roll of fat around my midsection. I poke it. I squeeze.

  ‘We spend all our time fussing about these things.’ He looks down at himself and laughs. ‘People pay to get massages, and run themselves ragged at the gym, and sit in front of computers for hours every day. It’s like looking after a big dog or something, having a body; it’s kind of more than you need.’

  I blink at him. I’m really not sure where this conversation is going to or coming from. I give my flesh one final squeeze before letting go, and then reach for the biscuit tin again.

  ‘And I was thinking that this is why you and I should start doing transcendental meditation,’ Jack tells me. ‘There’s an app I can get for our phones, and then we can just lie back and unplug from the matrix. What do you think?’ He adds: ‘Get the jump on science, and exist on a mental plane that is of our own creating.’

  ‘I might go for a walk,’ I say, pushing myself up from the table.

  Jack looks dejected at my lack of enthusiasm, so I lean over the counter and raise my hand to high-five him. It’s something I wouldn’t normally do, but I don’t want to upset him more than he is already. He smiles sadly and smacks his palm into mine, making the nerves in my hand spark, and I shake it out as I slide open the door to the deck.

  Jack has talked about erosion for years, and all the ways he’s noticed his land being absorbed slowly by the water. When Simon came home from a visit last year, he said that Tasmania seemed smaller. He said it was drier and there were more lizards, and I’m not sure if that’s the weather or not, but it does feel a little different. It’s smaller, and I’m bigger, and neither of us can remember the size the other was.

  I stand on the lawn and look back at the house, where I can see Jack standing at the stove stirring steadily. Either side of the house is dark for miles, which makes the tiny yellow square with my father in it all the more lonely.

  I remember my mother telling me that the ancient Aztecs would mark the end of the year by making everyone turn out their lanterns, until the village was completely black, then they would walk up a mountain together and watch their ruler kill someone by slicing open their chest and lighting a fire on their heart. Everyone would line up with their own small lantern, which they would relight from the sacrificed person’s heart-fire. I wonder if it was an honour to be chosen for the role, or if you would live in terror once they had decided on you. Would the king pick the people who seemed more flammable? The passionate ones, the ones who burned brightly before the hole was even cut into them? People like me? I could light this whole island up with my heart-fire. We would have light for weeks fuelled by the feelings that stick out of my chest like kindling.

  I keep walking along the edge of the property, touching my hand to my sternum, tracing the length of it all the way down to the top of my diaphragm. I imagine my chest like a bonfire, lighting up the glossy surface of the river. I poke my fingers along one side of my ribcage, distracted by the space between each one. I could set fire to them too, but the night gently pinches me home, sending a swarm of mosquitoes that bite at my ankles and wrists, and I return to the house with my back to the water.

  Inside, the only light is from the study, where I can hear Jack steadily clicking his computer mouse, his dinner next to him. He’s left a bowl of food for me on the bench, and the cling film sags with heavy drops of condensation. On my way to the bedroom, I peek into the study to see him peering at the screen, scrolling through rows of hand-painted ginger jars, and he’s shaking his head, as if disappointed by them all.

  In my room I keep the light off so I can see
the banksia outside, and think of all the beautiful things I would have incorporated into my mother’s funeral. All the intricate details I would have curated if I wasn’t so consumed by my own horrible feelings. I’m sure no one has any idea what poem to read out. She liked the one by E.E. Cummings, the one about carrying a heart around or something like that. They wouldn’t know what to dress her in either. Whatever they’ve picked, I’m sure it’s wrong, because it will be influenced by their own memories of her, not things she actually loved. She would have wanted to wear her cashmere jumper. She loved it so much that she moved differently when she wore it. She loved dahlias the size of soccer balls. And they should play Leonard Cohen—nothing too upbeat; she didn’t ever pretend to be upbeat when she wasn’t. Judy’s sausage rolls would be perfect for the wake, and she would have wanted a flowering plant as her headstone. She should be buried wearing her grandmother’s pinkie ring and her father’s watch. But I have left her with a bunch of people who know none of these facts. My mother loved funerals, and I have abandoned her and will have nothing to do with hers. She would never have done this to me. I’ve made a huge mistake, and it feels exactly how you’d think it would.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I sit on the bed and call Judy, but it goes straight to her voicemail.

  ‘Judy, it’s me. I don’t think this is the right choice. I should be there. Can you get dahlias? Orange ones. Big ones. She would have wanted to wear the watch—it’s upstairs in the wooden box near the sewing machine. And the pinkie ring. It will be on her side of the bed near the lamp and she needs to be wearing it. Leonard Cohen was her favourite; please make sure you play one of his songs. Can you call me back when you get this? I need to feel like she’s getting the right send-off. I need you to tell me again that I shouldn’t come back.’

  A few minutes later I get a text in reply.