The End of the World

by Paddy O'Reilly

  ‘Hi Mum,’ my brothers say, glancing at me before trotting off to their rooms. At their age they can read the density of the air, the muscular depth buoying up my mother’s light remark. And my mother and father are left alone in the room with the child that is the offspring of the wife but not the husband, a half-sister sprung from my mother’s adult education class in Northern European cooking, the fruit of my mother and her Swedish teacher’s passion for salty gravlax and sour cream.

  ‘Are you going to leave me?’ my mother says to my father, still standing at the door in her best tweed suit with her overnight bag slung over one shoulder and her Nordic baby cupped in one arm.

  ‘Would you rather I was the laughing stock of the neighbourhood?’ my father answers, his eyes still closed. ‘Would you rather I raise the cuckoo in my nest?’

  My mother hesitates, unsure of whether the question is rhetorical or not.

  ‘We could say my grandmother’s family was Swedish,’ she says finally. ‘The child is a throwback. Recessive genes.’

  My father does not answer. My mother takes this as encouragement.

  ‘Like the Sinclairs, who had that child with the disease that skips generations,’ she goes on hurriedly, adding almost as an afterthought, ‘I love you, Jack. I want us to be together. I made a mistake.’

  My father starts to weep. And my mother knows she has won. The cuckoo can stay. She lays her hand on my head, covering the hair that is not white, not gold, but in between, a hybrid colour. My father looks at her in all her glamour, straight from the hospital but still sleek and wicked as a fox, and he covers his face with his hands. He could never leave her.

  Of all the stories Jacinta told me, this was the easiest to believe. Its ugliness rang true to me. When she first started to tell me the stories, she preferred exotic, thrilling tales. I was thirteen when she told me my great-grandfather was a champion Nordic skier who died tragically during a mountain rescue of orphaned children. At fourteen I almost fell for the tale of the Finnish sealer who was swept out to sea on a freak current and seduced the daughter of the Scottish captain who rescued him.

  ‘Of course she had to marry quickly to hide the pregnancy, so her father chose a suitor from the French aristocracy, your maternal great-grandfather. Your true heritage is a secret passed down by the women of this family.’

  When I was sixteen, she whispered to me that my father was not my real father, that she had fallen in love with a German tennis player and had a short passionate affair while he was here for the Australian Open.

  The sordid Swedish story suited me better. I remembered my parents’ difficult communication, my father’s reticence, his hours smoking cigarettes on the verandah in the dark. The story explained the coolness my father had shown toward me.

  When I turned eighteen I started my research.

  ‘What cooking class? What are you talking about?’ Jacinta said.

  ‘Where you met my father, the Swedish cook. You know, the affair.’

  ‘Oh, that! That’s a story for you and me. Imagine if your brothers knew, or your auntie. That’s our little secret. No more about that now.’

  ‘But where did you do the cooking class?’

  ‘Darling, I really don’t remember. Some adult education college, I suppose.’

  I nursed the dream of a reunion with my real father who would cry out with joy when he saw his face reflected in mine. I didn’t care that he wasn’t a hero or a prince. Ordinariness made him more likely to welcome me.

  I finally tracked down the man who had taught Swedish cooking at the Centre for Adult Education twenty years before. He worked in the restaurant of a large hotel in the city.

  I was the only person in the restaurant on a Tuesday night. The waitress led me to a corner of the room and shook out my damask napkin before placing it on my lap. After I ordered she stood with her arms folded at the door of the kitchen, where my Swedish father’s accented voice shouted Australian curses at the saucepans, the stove, the fish that refused to lie flat in the pan.

  I ate my fish, paid my bill then sidled up to the kitchen door, pushed it open and spoke the Swedish greeting I had rehearsed a hundred times with my language tape. As the words came out of my dry mouth I noticed his hair, pale like mine but thin and bristly over an angry pink scalp.

  ‘What are you saying?’ my Swedish father shouted at me. ‘What do you want? The dining room is outside!’

  My legs tensed. This was the sensation I had first felt as a child–the need to run like a wolf. Wolves run all day. They cover vast distances in a steady lope. Do Swedes run? I wondered.

  ‘You took a class in Swedish cooking in 1972 and you had an affair with my mother. I think you are my father.’

  His face turned bright red. He stared at me, his mouth open. The waitress sat on a stool in the corner, nibbling on a carrot. She looked away to the side as she chewed, as if she was trying to pretend she wasn’t there.

  ‘Good God,’ he said, and laughed. It was an odd, braying laugh. ‘Good God, I am homosexual. You have made a mistake.’

  I retched all night as my body tried to purge his sour food.

  I am usually a careful person. I have chosen an isolated life: working at my job, jogging and training, a quick daytime movie as I move from workplace to workplace. I am cautious with strangers. But Lindsay didn’t care about caution or containment. I met him on my rounds, travelling from town to town filling orders for computers and fixing software problems. Lindsay told me he waited for my arrival each month. One night he convinced me to come out for a drink, and in a dark velvety corner of the bar he butted me gently with his head and licked my throat. His hot breath melted me. I forgot all my fears.

  I drove to his town each month and we leapt on each other. A month ago he asked me to marry him. A panic overtook me. I said things I didn’t mean. I swapped my service area with another employee. I took off, not realising I had Lindsay’s offspring growing in me. But I cannot have a child. A child needs a father and I cannot provide one. After years with a father who disappeared to the verandah and the rest of my life without one, I can hardly imagine what a father might be. My mother is the one with the imagination.

  After the Wednesday morning walk we always have tea in the café with the red checked tablecloths. Jacinta orders Devonshire tea. Today I order black tea. We sit by the window watching the red and blue rosellas line up on the balcony rail.

  ‘No coffee?’ Jacinta asks. ‘Look at those birds. They shouldn’t feed them. Wild things aren’t pets.’

  ‘Felt like tea,’ I say.

  She stares at me. My pale face. Trembling hands.

  ‘You’re not?’

  I take another hesitant sip of tea.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ she says. She takes a scone from the plate, tears it in half and smothers the pieces in strawberry jam and cream. Watching makes my stomach heave.

  ‘Does the man know?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Don’t tell him. He doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. You would have introduced me. Wait till you find the right man.’

  ‘The right man?’

  ‘A real father for your children.’

  ‘I don’t know if I want children,’ I tell her.

  She pretends to be looking through the window but I can see she is examining her reflection in the glass. Behind her reflected face, the rosellas nudge each other back and forth along the balcony rail, ducking their heads and preening their feathers as they wait to be fed.

  My mother tucks her glossy red hair behind her ear, then reaches over to touch my hand.

  ‘Before I met your father—’ she begins but I hold up my hand like a stop sign.

  ‘No more stories,’ I say.

  ‘You need to know about—’ she protests, and again I hold my hand up. She lifts a scone to her mouth
, leaves a rim of cream around her lips. She shrugs.

  ‘You could have it, I suppose. Of course it would ruin your life.’

  ‘I could go back to the father.’

  She laughs. ‘It would still ruin your life. Fathers are no help.’

  I breathe deeply. My stomach is finally settling.

  ‘Maybe I don’t need a man if I have a baby.’

  ‘Darling, you have no idea. Children aren’t like that.’

  Jacinta pushes the last of the scone into her mouth. She wipes the cream from her whiskers with a napkin. She opens her mouth and I think she is going to tell me another story. Perhaps it will be the one about her career in theatre, the career cut short by marrying my father. They threw roses on the stage! A department store heir asked me to marry him! I remember at school when I first learned about the exclamation mark, I knew it belonged to my mother.

  The café owner goes outside with a tray of bird seed and the rosellas burst into the air. They settle on her shoulders and arms but fly up again when she puts the tray down on a table covered in bird shit. They twitter and squabble over the food, flinging seed across the balcony.

  ‘See? They can’t survive on their own now. They’re totally dependent on humans,’ Jacinta says.

  ‘My father was really my father, wasn’t he?’

  Her eyes widen.

  ‘Of course he was,’ she says as if all her stories, all her dreams never existed.

  My muscles are twitching because I have missed my morning run. I shift uncomfortably on the chair.

  ‘Did you wish you hadn’t had me?’ This is the question I’ve wanted to ask all along.

  ‘We didn’t have any choice in those days.’

  I had always thought the stories were for me. That she told me the stories so I would interpret them some way, a way I never understood. I kept trying, though. I kept thinking about them, hoping for a way in. What was she really trying to tell me?

  ‘Mum, do you wish you hadn’t had me?’

  This is my mother sitting opposite me. Of that I am certain. She is cunning and lustrous. A fox who gave birth to a wolf. Her bright eyes, usually darting around the room, look straight at me.

  ‘You were a surprise. So late. Your father was already like an old man. I raised you on my own. I felt more for you than I ever felt for your brothers. I wanted to protect you.’

  I think that is all I need. Jacinta takes a deep breath. I can see she is about to start another story. Each story contradicts the last, but they are not lies because she never tries to be consistent. What does it matter if the stories are only for her? And I wonder what stories I would tell a child of my own.

  ‘Have the baby,’ she says. ‘Why not? After all, you were a wild thing and you turned out all right.’

  Her fingers press the scone plate, picking up the last crumbs, and her small pink tongue licks them from her fingertips. I can see the beginnings of grey in her hair. I want to reach over and run my hand across her soft cheek.

  The Litter

  I never understood why so many animals found their way under our house to give birth. If it was the neighbour’s dog or cat we gave the litter back, but it was usually strays that crept into the dry dark corners under the floor. I’d hear snuffles and squeaks in the quiet of the night and I’d sneak outside with a torch and squeeze under the house. When I picked up the newborns and sniffed their silky curled-up bodies the mother would hiss or growl, its eyes glinting yellow in the flash of the torch beam. The animals smelt of blood.

  Gran said animals were dirty, filthy things. She often said ‘certain people’ were dirty too, but animals were worse. If she found animals around the house, she would send Pop after them with the hessian bag that she kept in the boot of their old Humber. Sometimes he left empty-handed, winking at us on the way out the door, and saying, ‘That one was too fast for me.’ Other days he would carry the wriggling hessian bag at arm’s length through the house and out to the car boot.

  Even though I knew that Pop drowned the animals, my fourteen-year-old brother Gary was trying to convince us kids that Gran killed them with a hammer. Gary was waging war against Gran. His usual strategy was to tell scary stories about her. She was a witch who put children through the clothes wringer and gave them back to their parents with all their guts squeezed out. Then she ate their brains and liver and kidneys for breakfast.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I used to say to him, then turn to the other kids. ‘He’s just making it up. He’s just being stupid.’

  Gary would tell us how Gran made Pop wrap the animals in old rags so that their limbs were strapped tight to their bodies. Then Gran would lay each bundle down on the concrete under the apricot tree and smash in the animal’s head. When Gary described a cat bound up like a mummy on the concrete, struggling inside its bandage and looking up at Gran with its pupils round and black, I could picture the cat’s face, its open mouth with the lips drawn back, tiny white teeth and the burred tongue peeping out, the tremor of its throat fur as it made a deep, rumbling sound of fear. I could even smell the apricots, the ones that had fallen and rotted on the concrete in the hot sun. And see Gran, afterwards, rinsing the blood off the hammer in the gully trap.

  Now Gran was due to arrive and there were two litters of kittens under the house.

  ‘We’ll put one litter in a box in the oven where she won’t hear them, and we’ll shut the rest in the toilet,’ Mum said.

  ‘But what if she wants to cook something? They’ll die!’ I shrieked. ‘She cooked scones once, remember? And she always inspects the toilet.’

  Every Sunday afternoon Gran and Pop dropped over to help Mum around the house, which meant we spent every Sunday morning cleaning and tidying so the house was spotless when they arrived. It was the worst day of the week. Mum couldn’t relax until Gran had pulled away in the car.

  ‘Well,’ Mum said, ‘she’ll just hear them anyway. Horrible, mewling things. She’ll take them away and drown them and then we won’t have to worry any more.’

  ‘I’ll put them back under the house. I’ll cover the box in a blanket so they don’t make noise,’ I said, and I ran down the hallway to the verandah where one litter of six kittens, still blind, was huddling in a cardboard box and making squeaky sounds.

  ‘Pauline, grab the other kittens,’ I called to my older sister, who was sitting on her bunk trying to comb knots out of her long, fine hair in time for the visit.

  ‘Grab ’em yourself!’ she hissed.

  I raced back into the bedroom, put down the box of kittens, punched Pauline in the stomach, and dragged one of the blankets off the top bunk.

  ‘You’ll have to fix up that bed when you get back. I’m not making it again,’ she shouted at my back.

  The Humber arrived as I was throwing the blanket over the box. The kittens’ noises sounded like the far-off cries of babies, like a distant orphanage, but when I crawled out from under the house I couldn’t hear them anymore.

  My clothes were smeared with dirt and cobwebs were hanging from my hair. I rushed to the laundry, pulled off my cardigan, combed my fingers through my hair, and tried to brush the dirt off my skirt. I realised I had no shoes on. Gran would be furious. She said we would catch worms if we didn’t wear shoes. She said there was a kind of worm that had a hook instead of a mouth, and it used the hook to attach itself in between your toes and burrow inside your foot. The worm would travel around your body, making more and more worms until you were infested. Then the worms would come out in your poo.

  Under the ironing board I found an odd pair of thongs, way too small for my feet, and put them on.

  I crept into the kitchen and joined my place in the inspection line. Gary was next to me. He only came to Gran’s Sunday inspection because of Mum.

  ‘If you’re not all here,’ she said, ‘your grandmother will think I let you run wi
ld. And you know what that means–more visits.’

  First thing when Gran and Pop arrived, Gran would call the kids to inspection. The seven of us lined up with our chests puffed out and our shoulders thrown back like soldiers standing to attention, and Gran walked along the line, poking us with her finger. Grubby collars, scabby knees, biro marks, all got a poke. Sometimes she would poke us for no reason at all. She’d say, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done wrong this week, but I know none of you is perfect.’

  This day she poked me three times, hard.

  ‘You look like something the cat dragged in,’ she said.

  I watched through lowered eyes as Mum’s feet did a two-step at the mention of the word cat. Her varicose veins flexed underneath her stockings like muscles.

  Gran poked her way to the other end of the line.

  ‘Where are the other kittens?’ I whispered to Gary.

  ‘In a drawer in Mum’s wardrobe,’ he whispered back. ‘Gran never goes into Mum’s room.’

  Pop passed by the side window, carrying a ladder. He was going to fix the laundry roof. Three days before, Willy had been sitting up there reading a book. He climbed up to the laundry roof to read books because he knew that no one would follow him there and disturb him. Not that we didn’t all climb on the roof, but the others preferred the roof of the house–steeper and higher, much more slippery.

  Willy had been catching up on the grade-four school reader when Seana threw a rock at him to tell him to come down to dinner. She said she meant to hit the roof beside him, but the rock cracked him on the head and he overbalanced and slid down the roof to the edge. As he was about to fall he lunged for the guttering, caught it, and rode it down to the ground as it tore away from the wall.

  Three of us went out after dinner and tried to bend it back into place, but the metal had twisted too badly, and we left it hanging in mid-air like a knuckleduster. That night, when Gary was sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet some of his mates, he walked straight into it and nearly sliced off his eyebrow. Mum told Pop that possums had been at the house again.