‘Everything might end tomorrow,’ he whispered to me, ‘so what would you do today?’
I told Anton that I would hold him tight and close my eyes until the ten-storey wave engulfed us.
Another eighty kilometres down the road and I still can’t break away from Anton. He’s right, we’re a road train. He’s hooked onto me and my Holden is loaded down with reminders of his bad taste. Like this dashboard dog with its idiot nodding head. Nod, nod, yes, yes, it says happily–until I fling it out the window. The birthday jumper flies like a flag from my outstretched arm. When I let go, it takes off like a bright green bird in the headlights of Anton’s car. His brakes screech as he swerves. With one hand on the steering wheel, I drag a box over to the front seat and grab handfuls of crap and toss them out. Clocks and gloves and books and photo frames. Anton weaves all over the road like he’s in a dodgem car. Like he’s the old me.
Nothing in this car has any value to me. The blender shatters into golden splinters of glass. My T-shirts wrap themselves around the branches of trees like washing. The cardboard box flips in the wake of the Holden and lands on Anton’s bonnet.
He slams on the brakes and hits the gravel. His spinning car is a whirligig in the rear-vision mirror. When his lights cut out, all I can see is the white line of the road ahead.
Armadillo
He wrote he was coming back and my skin tightened. I am tough now, I thought. I am wearing armour, like an armadillo.
Armadillos are not found in Australia. They amble across highways in southern California, one clawed foot in front of the other, armed with horny plates held in place by a leathery skin.
The armadillo can roll into an impenetrable ball. Its armoury is so solid that it has limited vision–its head is wound on too tight to turn. It can only roll its eyes. So it meanders over that highway–not even knowing what a highway is, not looking left or right–in the path of cars powering along the blacktop at a hundred miles an hour. The armadillo feels the car coming, feels the vibrations through the tarmac, and rolls into a startled ball of horned plate. When the car runs over the armadillo, the plate gets chewed up with a grinding, thunking sound, and spat out in shreds at the back.
I still have the first essay I wrote about California when I was ten years old and soft as a baby’s fingernail.
‘California is America’s third largest state. California is the most populous state in America. Sir Francis Drake visited in 1579. It was colonised by Spain in 1769. It had a gold rush in the 1850s.’
This was the beginning of my essay on What I Did on My Holidays. The teacher asked if I’d visited the United States.
‘No, but my dad is there,’ I said proudly.
Right now, at 2:00 am Californian time, if you looked up into the sky above Los Angeles, and if you could see beyond the neon-reflecting smog, you would find the Lion, the Great Bear, the Little Bear, the Dragon, and the Water Serpent. Rising over the horizon would be Sirius, the eye of the Dog, brightest star in the sky.
Picture yourself lying flat on your back in the mountains out past Pasadena. Behind you is the Mojave Desert. In front, a swathe of glittering lights stretches across to the coast like patches of phosphorescence floating on the surface of the sea. Look up at the sky again. The Twins are gazing down at you. Mysterious lights blink down indecipherable signals. Your hand brushes against a few fallen leaves and another leaf drifts down in the breeze and comes to rest on your shoulder. Up in the sky you recognise Perseus and Orion.
In one of the early letters he sent me, my father described the night sky and the deserts and the horny armadillos clumping slowly along dirt tracks where he went bushwalking. Trailwalking, he called it. When I was ten years old, my father went to America on a business trip that so far has lasted nineteen years.
My mother used to tell me that he had been seduced by America, as if he was just another adventurer lured by the promise of Californian gold. Now I realise she was afraid to say he was seduced by an American.
He married an American woman, started a new family. All the time he kept writing to me, sending photos and postcards and gifts. ‘I want you to know, honey, that I love you.’ Before he left he never said, ‘I love you.’ He had no need to say it. I knew then, without being told. But Americans leave nothing unsaid. ‘You’re my first born and always will be, sweetheart.’ My father has become an American, with three perfect American children–Brad, Suzie and Travis.
When he wrote last month to say he was coming back, I pulled out my old postcards and letters, school atlases and road maps. I saw names that were as familiar to me as Sydney. Palm Springs. Anaheim. Oakland. Sacramento. I thought about the TV programs I’d watched, the books I’d read, the films I’d seen as I crammed salty cardboard popcorn into my mouth.
A hungover PI brushes the lingering hand of his female client, a faded film star, off the lapels of his creased suit. ‘Take it easy, lady,’ he says, ‘I gotta job to do.’
On the maps my finger traced a wandering route through the deserts of California. I built all kinds of fantasies around my father after he went away. At first, I pictured him in a sleek, fat Cadillac, his arm hanging from the window, a cigarette drooping from his lips, his sunglasses reflecting the glare of desert heat. In this vision he had no wife, no children. He might have been an older James Dean, or Marlon Brando. But in another, later, vision he sat jammed behind the wheel of a ridiculously long station wagon with imitation wood panelling along the side. In the station wagon vision, he was living a National Lampoon Vacation nightmare. Sweat trickled down the chafing collar of his checked Sunday shirt, the wife complained, the children bickered in the back seat. Now I would take that vision a little further. The kids settle down and the wife falls asleep. My dad sighs and takes a swig of Pepsi, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. He crests a hill and the car shudders with a weird grinding sound before stuttering to a halt. Behind the car lie chunks of horny plate.
The photos he sent showed nothing like these visions. In his snapshots, the desert was far away. Instead, my half brothers and sister gawked at the camera in front of identical houses in rows, chrome and glass public buildings, churches bigger than shopping centres. I had seen it all before on TV. Now I had pictures of America with my father in the foreground. That made America even more real.
Corvette. Chevrolet. Cadillac. Beretta. Colt. Smith and Wesson. Winchester. I knew it all. At thirteen I listened to rap and thrash metal till my mother couldn’t stand it anymore. She unwound the tapes and used the cassette ribbon to decorate the Christmas tree. I memorised the fifty states. I cheered the launch of every space shuttle–Columbia, Discovery, Atlantis–and cried for Challenger. I believed in UFOs and alien abduction.
But these are lists, like row after row of parched trees in a Californian orange grove. There is another story, a real story, of alien abduction.
For a year after Dad left I would ask Mum when he was coming back.
‘I’m not sure, Judy, we’ll have to see,’ she’d say, then try to distract me with an offer of food or some late night television.
His postcards kept coming, one each month. I made a special box lined with tissue and stored the postcards in order of their arrival. The first showed a scene in Pasadena–lonely palm trees buffeted by the wind and lashing their fronds against stark white stuccoed walls. ‘Miss you, Judy girl,’ the postcard said.
Later I started watching The Streets of San Francisco on TV. Every week I would say to Mum, ‘Dad was there. Do you remember the postcard?’
‘Yes,’ she’d answer. I’d offer to show her the postcard, in case she didn’t have it committed to memory like I did.
‘No, that’s all right,’ she’d say. ‘I remember.’
‘Look at that guy’s smashed-up nose,’ I’d say, pointing at Karl Malden.
‘Don’t say guy. Say man,’ she always corrected me.
The PI leans against his silver and chrome Buick. He drags slowly on a cigarette and stares through the lit window of the motel at a woman in a white slip fanning herself and sipping bourbon on the rocks in the summer heat of Fresno. Photographs are spread out on the bed. ‘That broad is trouble,’ he mutters. ‘Easy on the eye, but trouble.’
At school I drew American scenes in art class.
‘What’s this?’ Mrs Ziller, the art teacher, asked as she pointed her scarlet fingernail at my charcoal sketch. I’d drawn the northern sky as my father described it in his letter. Clusters of stars in the shape of a bear and a dog. Abstract dot pictures for words I didn’t recognise, like Orion.
‘This is a view of the Californian night,’ I said. ‘Where my father is.’
In California, you can take a silver Greyhound bus out through the desert on a White Palm Tour. After three hours in the bus, you arrive at the last roadhouse before Death Valley. You fill up with hamburger and ketchup and coke and a side order of fries, then you climb back into the bus for the final leg to the edge of Death Valley. When I was almost sixteen and my father’s letters had slowed to a trickle–birthday and Christmas and his summer holidays–I got the letter describing the Death Valley trip he had made years before. Like all of his letters, it was long and detailed, a diary entry talking about intimate moments in a life a million miles away from mine.
The tour group left the bus and we walked in a straggly line to the edge of the precipice. There we were, lined up like pins in a bowling alley, looking out at one of the most alien scenes on this earth–Death Valley. I don’t mind telling you, honey, that I was frightened. I’d never seen anything like those endless mounds of sand, the curves of some giant stretching off to the horizon. The guide told us that some plants and animals can live there, but if they were there, I sure couldn’t see them. Not that I didn’t try.
I leaned forward on the tips of my toes and peered out into that bleak, heat-hazed landscape until my eyes started to ache. Something was happening to me, I can’t exactly describe it, but it was like some kind of epiphany. I closed my eyes and a feeling of wellbeing washed over me and I thought, I love this country. Then the strangest thing, and you’ve got to believe me, it was spooky, the woman standing next to me slipped her hand into mine and whispered, ‘Something’s changed inside me.’ That woman was Carol, and I guess that’s why I married her. I know it must have hurt you when you heard, but I hope you can understand. I’m longing for the day you come to us and bring our whole beautiful family together.
For a long time I too was seduced by America. My father’s letters grew more and more American each year and I read them like instructions from a higher power. Around me at school, the other kids almost outdid me in Americanness without trying. We spent playtime and lunchtime talking about American TV shows, we read Mad magazine. I nagged my mother to buy a pumpkin at Halloween time.
‘They’re out of season,’ she told me. But in winter we were already eating Californian oranges and Florida grapefruit.
‘Can’t we buy an imported pumpkin at the fruit store?’ I whined.
‘Don’t say store, say shop,’ Mum said.
The click of her high heels echoes along the corridor to his office. He slides the bourbon bottle into the desk drawer, wets his hands under the faucet and slicks back his hair.
She steps inside the office, nudging the door shut with the toe of her crocodile-skin shoe.
After that letter from my father, everything began to change. The day it arrived, I showed the letter to Mum.
‘Dad wants us to go to America!’ I said. ‘He says he’s longing to have us all together.’
Mum smiled with her lips shut and put her hands on her hips. In the years after Dad left she lost weight. She’d taken to wearing harsh red lipstick that wore off and left a grimy ring around her mouth by the end of the day.
‘No, sweetie, he wants you to go to America,’ she said.
‘Then can I? Please?’ I pressed.
Mum leaned back against the kitchen bench, staring at me as though she couldn’t believe what I was saying. ‘You want to go to your father?’ she said, standing quite still.
‘Just visiting,’ I said. ‘For a couple of years or something. The States are so cool! Can I, Mum?’
‘It’s up to you, Judy,’ she said sharply, then turned to leave the room. ‘All I want to know,’ she muttered on her way out, ‘is why he’s never bothered to come and see you.’
I hadn’t really been listening. The next morning I woke up from a dream of deserts and Chevy trucks and I understood that my mother was unwelcome in America. When she had said the night before, ‘He wants you to go to America,’ she wanted me to understand that ‘our whole beautiful family’ excluded her.
I went back and reread my father’s letters. My mother was never mentioned, as though she had ceased to exist when he left her. The letters were pages and pages long, full of words. He had so much to say. Mostly words about himself, confessions, how he’d found himself, how he’d rediscovered life. Sometimes how he missed me. And yet he’d never visited. He’d never even telephoned in all those years.
The last letter made clear that what my father had said about longing for me was words without meaning, scribbles on paper. He used words as tacky presents to be strewn around and easily discarded. He was engorged with adjectives. Like America, I thought. Nice days, grand canyons, great lakes. Cheap American words. ‘I want you to know how much I care about you.’ ‘You’re special to me, honey.’ After listening to an American for too long, your skin grows hard so the words roll off.
The next month I turned sixteen, and when my mother told me I was sweet sixteen I said, ‘Don’t say that, it’s an Americanism.’
Since I heard about his visit, I can’t stop thinking of my father drifting away on a precipice above Death Valley. Abducted by aliens and, like Patty Hearst, seduced by his abductors–denouncing his family to please them.
My father is coming back to meet his daughter in a country he left behind. He will find the country has changed. We pretend to hate America but we have become it. And me, I thought I had matured. My horny plates were rigid and tight. I was curled up on the tarmac, waiting to destroy the axle of the car coming to mow me down. But it hasn’t even arrived and I’m in shreds.
She bends over to pick up her handbag. ‘Nice ass,’ he remarks through the cloud of cigarette smoke. As she walks out the door he calls after her, ‘Hey, lady, how do I know you won’t double cross me?’ ‘You don’t,’ she says over her shoulder.
FutureGirl®
I didn’t know when I was twelve, but by fifteen I had started to guess. By seventeen, everyone had realised. When I turned twenty-one there were few people in the world who had not seen me stretched out in my most famous pose, lazing like a lion on a couch. I wore a skin bikini and two men fawned over me. My arms outstretched, my legs draped over the end of the couch. One man’s hands massaged my feet, my great long feet with bony toes almost the size of his fingers. My red painted toenails peeked out between his hands. The other man cradled my massive head in his arms. Locks of brown hair twined around his biceps and snaked all the way around his chest.
The producers called me ‘the tallest girl in the
world’. I have a large photographic print taken from the stills of the television program with that title. I remember the shoot. Outside the rain had begun and inside the hot, sharply lit studio we laughed and shouted as we listened to the drumming on the roof. It was the first rain in over a year. But the rain kept falling and falling until the streets were slick with a coating of faint luminescent mould. And now we have rain every day, a fine drizzle that drifts across the world, never stopping, never favouring one place over another.
The background of my studio photo shows no rain. A herd of digitally reproduced elephants thunders in a cloud of dust across an African landscape. The sun is orang
e, a great ball of orange fire hung so low in the sky I seem, with my head tipped back and my lips parted, as if I am about to swallow it like an egg yolk. If you look closely there are huts in the background, small thatched huts clustered in a valley below my left shoulder. I can picture the African women inside there, bending their long necks to pass through the low doorways, crouching in the semi-darkness over cooking fires and crawling on their hands and knees between the sleeping mat and the hearth. Because Africa too had its own giant girls, although few people knew.
My face and body were splashed across the billboards of the world–videoscreens in Tokyo, hoardings in Indonesia, pocket televisions in France. I earnt money for making appearances. When I walked into the venue, heads turned and the nudging and
whispering began. The loud whispers said ‘oh my god’ and ‘she’s magnificent’. The undercurrent hissed ‘freak’ and ‘hideous’ and ‘I think I’m going to be sick’. I lifted my head and stared in the direction of the mutterers. Slowly the hissing would cease.
There were placards sometimes. I remember one that said ‘Biology is Destiny’. And another, ‘Aberration’. Did they think I didn’t know these things? FutureGirl® clubs turned up at some locations and cheered. They were made up of sci-fi fans, and Big People who were actually fat, and crazies who sent letters asking me to pass on messages to God. Perhaps they thought my size made me someone who could sit next to a deity.
At twenty-five I had everything. Fame, money. I was laughing and soaking up the rays of attention and swigging back the French bubbly at each toast to the FutureGirl. At night my joints ached and I felt the motel beds, pushed together to fit my length and weight, creak under me as I turned over to ease the pain. I thought I was tired from all my work of racing around to shopping malls and fashion shows and film premieres. I thought the swelling in my knees and ankles came from drinking too much champagne. I thought my manager Roy loved me and that when he fucked me and screamed as he came, froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth and his tiny body bucking on top of me, he wanted to tell me how much he cared.
The End of the World Page 5